Colin Hales wrote:
>
>
> Brent Meeker wrote:
>> Colin Hales wrote:
>>
>>> Man this is a tin of worms! I have just done a 30 page detailed
>>> refutation of computationalism.
>>> It's going through peer review at the moment.
>>>
>>> The basic problem that most people fall foul of is the conflation of
>>> 'physics-as-computation' with the type of computation that is being
>>> carried out in a Turing machine (a standard computer). In the paper I
>>> drew an artificial distinction between them. I called the former NATURAL
>>> COMPUTATION (NC) and the latter ARTIFICIAL COMPUTATION (AC). The idea is
>>> that if COMP is true then there is no distinction between AC and NC. The
>>> distinction should fail.
>>>
>>> I found one an one only situation/place where AC and NC part company.
>>> Call this situation X.
>>>
>>> If COMP is false in this one place X it is false as a general claim. I
>>> also found 02 downstream (consequential) failures that ultimately get
>>> their truth-basis from X, so they are a little weaker as formal
>>> arguments against COMP.
>>>
>>> *FACT*: Humans make propositions that are fundamentally of an informal
>>> nature. That is, the utterances of a human can be inconsistent and form
>>> an fundamentally incomplete set (we don't 'know everything'). The
>>> quintessential definition of a scientist is a 'correctable liar'. When a
>>> hypothesis is uttered it has the status indistinguishable of a lie.
>>> Humans can participate in the universe in ways which can (apparently)
>>> violate any law of nature. Humans must be able to 'violate' laws of
>>> nature in the process of accessing new/novel formal systems to describe
>>> the unknown natural world. Look at the world. It is not hard to see how
>>> humans exemplify an informal system. All over the world are quite normal
>>> (non-pathologically affected) humans with the same sensory systems and
>>> mental capacities. Yet all manner of ignorance and fervently held
>>> contradictory belief systems are ‘rationally’ adopted.
>>> ===================
>>> COMP fails when:
>>> a) You assume COMP is true and build an artificial (AC/computer)
>>> scientist <Sa> and expect <Sa> to be able to carry out authentic
>>> original science on the a-priori unknown....identically to humans. To do
>>> this you use a human-originated formal model (law of nature) ts to do
>>> this.... your computer 'computes ts, you EMBODY the computer in a
>>> suitable robotic form and then expect it to do science like humans. If
>>> COMP is true then the human scientist and the robot scientist should be
>>> indistinguishable.
>>>
>>> b) You then discover that it is a fundamental impossibility that <Sa> be
>>> able to debate/propose that COMP is a law of nature.
>>>
>>> c) Humans can debate/propose that COMP is a law of nature.
>>>
>>> BECAUSE: (b) <> (c) they are distinguishable. NC and AC are different
>>> THEREFORE: ts cannot be the 'law of nature' for a scientist.
>>> THEREFORE: COMP is false in the special case of (b)
>>> THEREFORE: COMP is false as a general claim.
>>>
>>> (b) is not a claim of truth or falsehood. It is a claim that the very
>>> idea of <Sa> ever proposing COMP (= doubting that COMP is true) is
>>> impossible. This is because it is a formal system trying, with a fixed,
>>> formal set of rules (even self modifying according to yet more rules) to
>>> construct statements that are the product of an informal system (a human
>>> scientist). The very idea of this is a contradiction in terms.
>>>
>>
>> I don't see it. I can write a simple computer program that constructs statements which
>> are a subset of those produced by humans (or any other system). Bruno's UD produces *all*
>> such statements. So where's the contradiction?
>>
>>
> Yes you can generate all such statements. /But then what*/*so what?
> /*
> *Please re-read the scenario....This situation is very very specific:
>
> 1) Embodied situated robot scientist <Sa> is doing science on the
> 'natural world'.
>
> 2) As a COMP artificial scientist <Sa>, you are software. A formal
> system *ts* computes you.
>
> 3) All you ever do is categorise patterns and cross-correlate patterns
> in massive streams of numbers that arrive from your '/robot scientist
> suit/'.
>
> 4) <Sa> is a SCIENTIST. The entirety of the existence of <Sa> involves
> dealing with streams of numbers that are the result of an encounter with
> the radically unknown, which <Sa> is trying to find a 'universal
> abstraction' for = 'a law of nature'.
>
> 5) There is no 'out there in an environment' for <Sa>. There is only an
> abstraction (a category called) "out there". You cannot project any kind
> of human 'experience' into <Sa>. REASON: If COMP is true, then
> computation (of abstract symbol manipulation of formal *ts*) is all COMP
> <Sa> needs to be a scientist. <Sa> can only be imagined as operating 'in
> the dark'.(I spent a whole section on ensuring this spurious projection
> does not occur in the reader of my paper!)
>
> 6) *ts* has been assumed possible by assuming COMP is true.
>
> 7) The paper is a reductio ad absurdum proof that COMP is false.
>
> 8) The contradiction that I use is that the human and the COMP scientist
> are different (when if COMP is true they should be the same). The
> difference is that a human can postulate COMP is true and be WRONG. _The
> COMP-Sa cannot do this_....because it can never know when it is wrong!
> Humans are an INFORMAL system. Informal systems can break rules.
>
> Broken rules do NOT come labeled as broken.
> Faked authentic rules do not come labeled as forgeries.
>
> <Sa> cannot cope with either. The aberrant behaviour of <Sa> is not that
> it can't in-principle deal with it. _It's that there is not way of <sa>
> knowing that it is a possibility_. If you try and 'fix it' by
> pre-programming what all forgeries or broken rule look like....well you
> can see that is just plain never gonna work.
>
> Get it?
Nope. It's just an assertion that informal systems can do something formal systems can't
- which as lawyers say is a fact not in evidence.
Brent
>
> cheers
> colin
>
>
>
>
>
> >
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Received on Thu Aug 06 2009 - 21:15:29 PDT