The Hard Problem of Gravity

[Malerin]

The software of today is a computer in and of itself as well.

No, it's software. That's why it's called software. Without a computer to run it, it sits there on the shelf, doing nothing.

 

[six7s]

The software of today is a computer in and of itself as well.

Bollocks

 

[AkuManiMani]

With all due respect, anyone who does not know they are conscious cannot be said to know anything. Just being aware is an implicit knowledge of one's own existence.'Conscious' is just the label I put on my experience. One's own awareness is the one thing each of us can know with certainty; its the epistemological base upon which we set all our knowledge.

Oh, my... no. No. In fact, one's own awareness is known with much less certainty than one knows things about external objects.

*blink*

....

You are aware that this is a public forum and that potentially any english-literate person in the world can read that nonsense you've posted, right..? If you're being sarcastic, humorous, or ironic in any way its not coming thru very well.

Its almost...Its almost as if you really think what you're saying makes logical sense....

Couldn't be...

Tell me, how is it that you learned to label your awareness? Surely each feeling did not come pre-labeled by god for your convenience; did somebody teach you that this is hunger, this is love, this is red, this is soft, this is frustrating? You did not invent your own terms; you converse with others and expect them to understand.

I see....

Tell me, how is it that you learned to label [numbers]? Surely each [digit] did not come pre-labeled by god for your convenience; did somebody teach you that this is ["one"], this is ["two"], this is ["three"], this is ["four"], this is ["five"]? You did not invent your own terms; you converse with others and expect them to understand.

Begone, ye demons of stupid! Begone!

You claim you are conscious; indeed, you claim that you are the one entity that you can guarantee is conscious. How can you possibly know you are conscious, then, when you don't even know if the people who taught you about consciousness were themselves conscious? They might have taught it all wrong! How can you know, when you yourself have said that you cannot be certain they are conscious?

Somehow I think you share the same piercing intellect as this guy:

You claim [1+1=2]; indeed, you claim that you [can guarantee that 1+1=2]. How can you possibly know [1+1=2], then, when you don't even know if the people who taught you about [numbers could even count]? They might have taught it all wrong! How can you know, when [I myself] have said that you cannot be certain they [can count]?

Have a cookie.

 

[AkuManiMani]

The software of today is a computer in and of itself as well.

Bollocks

No, it's software. That's why it's called software. Without a computer to run it, it sits there on the shelf, doing nothing.

To be fair, that's one of the few accurate things hes said in this discussion so far. That was actually a well founded statement from his realm of expertise. Cut'em some slack.

edit: He probably should have qualified that they are virtual computers, tho.

 

[PixyMisa]

Bollocks

Why?

Is the x86_64 environment presented by your CPU a computer? How about a virtual core as with hyperthreading, or a virtual environment such as VMWare, or an emulator like MAME, or a runtime system like the JVM?

Which of these is not a computer, and why?

 

[AkuManiMani]

Bollocks

Why?

Is the x86_64 environment presented by your CPU a computer? How about a virtual core as with hyperthreading, or a virtual environment such as VMWare, or an emulator like MAME, or a runtime system like the JVM?

Which of these is not a computer, and why?

His "Bollocks" response is no more unjustified, or baffling, than your repeated "Irrelevant" responses.

 

[six7s]

Why?

Is the x86_64 environment presented by your CPU a computer? How about a virtual core as with hyperthreading, or a virtual environment such as VMWare, or an emulator like MAME, or a runtime system like the JVM?

Which of these is not a computer, and why?

There are, unsurprisingly, quite a few resources - literally at your finger-tips - that will answer your off-topic questions

 

[yy2bggggs]

Thank you for responding bgggs, I consider you a very intelligent forum member and always learn from what you say.

Hah! Boy do I have you fooled.

I claim that you -- and all other humans -- do not understand such statements.

You might want to aim higher then. At least go for Russell's Paradox--at the surface, it's the same sort of thing, but it at least has bigger confusing implications on the nature of the infinite, philosophy of math, etc.

That all Cretes are liars thing is pretty simple. I'm not even sure what it is about it that you think there is to know that you would assert I don't understand. It's as boiled down as it gets.

I think we can parse them, and think about them, but I don't think we ever reach the same understanding we have of other statements. Our mental algorithm never halts on such an input string, so to speak.

It's not as bad as you make it out to be. Let's take this one as an example.

1. Bachelors are not married.
2. There is exactly one true statement in this list.

Now look at it this way, which is probably the way you think about it anyway. Claim 1 is fixed at "T". Claim 2 is something we have to calculate. There are two possibilities.

Get it? There are TWO of them... only two! Surely we can exhaust two possibilities, especially for something so simple as this. So let's do so.

First possibility:
Claim 2 is T. But if claim 1 is true, and claim 2 is true, then (A) there are two true statements in the list, not one, and that (where "that" is (A)) contradicts claim 2.

Second possibility:
Claim 2 is F. That means when we count the number of true statements, we don't have to worry about Claim 2. That leaves only claim 1, and claim 1 is true; thus (B), there is exactly one true claim. But... oops... that (where "that" is (B)) is what claim 2 says.

Now, presumably, I'm confused, and so are you, so we go back to the first possibility, all scratching heads and what not. But don't be surprised once you reach that destination, and look around, when you notice that I'm not there. I had already covered the first possibility and had wandered along somewhere else. I don't need to go to possibility 1 again... I know what happens there. Instead, I simply perform a post mortem.

Here's how it works. Take a look at both of those possibilities again. The first possibility is ruled out because claim 2's truth makes there be two true statements in the list (A), and the claim says there's exactly 1. The second possibility is ruled out because claim 2's false-ness leaves exactly one true statement remaining (B), and that is exactly what claim 2 claims. Now, certainly, the contradiction is there in all of our exhaustive considerations of truth values, and I'm sure you're already aware of it, but did you notice that the key thing that made us wrong in the assignment with both possibilities--(A) in the first one and (B) in the second one--are different? Didn't you notice that the game is literally rigged against you?

And how? Easy! Claim 2 is about it being false. It's no more than an expanded form of "this statement is false". You don't have to go back and forth. You've exhausted the possibilities. If it confuses you that there's no possible valid truth assignment to claim 2, let's try to do the same sort of thing we did with claim 2, with a more "normal" claim--say, claim 1.

But, to be thorough, we're really going to do the whole shpeel... and not leave a thing out.

So here's how we play. We look at claim 1. It's true, we know that, but that's not what we did with claim 2. So let's not go there yet. Instead, let's explore both possibilities, and in the first one, we'll just say that it's true.

First possibility:
Claim 1 is true. Now we can look at the claim and see if we're right. It says that bachelors are not married. Well, yeah, that's true by definition. And we said that it was true. Nice job! So we were correct.

But we're not done. We didn't exhaust everything. So let's try the other one.

Second possibility:
Claim 1 is false. Now let's look at the claim again. Bachelors are not married. Well... actually... that has to be true. It's true by definition. So saying that it's false is wrong. We flunked--we were wrong. That's fine--we simply rule this possibility out.

And now you should note something oddly different about this exhaustive exploration of claim 1. In exploring all possibilities, when we considered the claim as true, we found out that we could be right. And when we considered the claim as false, we were wrong. Not only this, but the claim was true in both cases, tautologically, as if considering it to be true and considering it to be false had nothing to do with the claim.

Not so with claim 2! But that's no surprise. Claim 2 was about what we considered, so it does change when we explore the possibilities.

And now that I cleared this up, maybe this would confuse you:

• There is exactly one true claim in this list.

How many true claims are there in that list?

There are 0 of 2 ways to be correct about claim 2 in the original list. There's 1 of 2 ways to be correct about claim 2 in the original list. There are 2 of 2 ways to be correct about this list. Come on... it's not that bad!

 

[Darat]

Do you really doubt that you're conscious, Darat? Put away the devil's advocate hat and answer honestly now...

I am not playing devil's advocate I am just pointing out something that a lot of people like to try to hide under the carpet. That aside to your question - I can't answer you unless you give me your definition of "consciousness".

 

[Darat]

...snip...

2, Who's the radical skeptic around here? Do you really walk around doubting you (and other people) are conscious? It's one thing to doubt physical matter exists, it's something else entirely to deny conscious experience. Do you honestly think it's possible you're a zombie?

...snip...

Your question boils down to "Don't you think you are magical?" And no I don't.

 

[Hokulele]

1, That doesn't follow at all. Just because I am unsure about others' subjective experiences (or lack thereof), does not mean I am unsure about my own subjective experiences. Anyone who has ever stubbed their toe knows what I mean. It is not just that you injured your foot; stubbing your toe hurts, it feels bad, and any theory of consciousness better take that into account.

Not to everyone, as those familiar with Hansen's disease will attest.

 

[PixyMisa]

There are, unsurprisingly, quite a few resources - literally at your finger-tips - that will answer your off-topic questions

Funny, I thought you had an opinion on this matter. I guess not.

 

[lupus_in_fabula]

That doesn't follow at all. Just because I am unsure about others' subjective experiences (or lack thereof), does not mean I am unsure about my own subjective experiences. Anyone who has ever stubbed their toe knows what I mean. It is not just that you injured your foot; stubbing your toe hurts, it feels bad, and any theory of consciousness better take that into account.

And every time you stab your toe it will "hurt" slightly differently, and it will "feel bad" in slightly different ways. But usually not so much as to fall outside the formed patterns of reactions, which we tend to simplify by invoking a more general notion such as "hurt".

The problem with your assumption that you are certain about your own subjective experiences is that there are many ways to make you quite uncertain. Just a stroke in the left hemisphere which spills out to Wernicke's and Brocka's areas and "you" will simply not know that it's you who stabbed his toe, nor might you even know what that sensation is, if any such sensation at all would register. In fact the ability to distinguish between sensations in any meaningful sense might be totally scattered. Even identifying it as an experience in toto might be gone because there is no discernible way to "interpret" what's happening at all.

 

[westprog]

This is all fine and dandy but like I said, unless you can give researchers actual examples of something they did incorrectly that they think is correct I.E. where they are wrong then your words don't really help.

You might be the brightest human ever but I am reminded of an episode of Star Trek TNG when Q, stripped of his powers, tells the crew how to save a planet by changing the local gravitational constant. When asked how, he says "you just do it."

You are basically saying "just stop being wrong." Ok....

The AI way of producing consciousness is to imitate the external appearance of consciousness, and when the resemblance is close enough to fool us, then we say that something is conscious. The extreme of this position is the claim that everything with some kind of algorithmic nature is in some sense conscious.

An alternative to this would be to examine the biological structures that seem to produce consciousness, and to develop a physical theory that shows how they do it. After figuring out what is actually happening, then it might be the time to try duplicating it.

That's not to say that AI research is futile. Just AI research that intends to produce, rather than emulate, conscious beings.

 

[westprog]

Hooray! Now we also have a useless definition of 'know'! By this definition I am the only one that knows anything.

What is knowledge if not information? What is 'to know' if not 'to contain information'?

What makes something information? Can something be said to be information if it doesn't interact with awareness?

 

[westprog]

Yes, 'know' should not mean just 'contains information' that is no good.

I should have said contains and can act on the information it contains.

A planet can act on gravitational information. Does that mean that a planet knows about gravity?

 

[AkuManiMani]

It's not as bad as you make it out to be. Let's take this one as an example.

1. Bachelors are not married.
2. There is exactly one true statement in this list.

At first I found this rather confusing but I've slept on it and I think I might have found the source of the error

The error is not so much with the factuality of claim 2 but its inclusion as being part of the list.

If instead, the list were reduced to statement 1 [Bachelors are not married] and statement 2 were considered as a significance statement of the list there would be no conceptual conflict. A comment ABOUT the list should not be included IN the list. The error is semanic.

Here is the correct way:

List A
1.Bachelors are not married

[There is exactly one true statement in this list.]

Fix'd

• There is exactly one true claim in this list.

How many true claims are there in that list?

None. Claim to what? The statement is referring to nothing. The claim is not true, and neither is it false: it's meaningless.

EVERYTHING....MUST...LOGIC!!!! *_*

 

[AkuManiMani]

Funny, I thought you had an opinion on this matter. I guess not.

I'd say hes about as qualified to speak on computer programing as you are to speak on philosophy of mind. You clearly have no idea what you're talking about on the matter of consciousness. Glass houses, son.

 

[Dancing David]

I'd go further to say that such non-deterministic behavior is one feature which distinguishes the behavior of life in general from the behavior of the mechanical constructs like clocks. I suspect the reason for this is that organisms scale up QM level effects to the macroscopic scale.

Oh whoops the QM Godwin, this discussion is over!

No need to scale up QM, that is just silly.

Chaos (complex behaviors of deterministic systems) is enough. More silly on you!

 

[AkuManiMani]

I am not playing devil's advocate I am just pointing out something that a lot of people like to try to hide under the carpet.

Yea, that thing people like to hide under the carpet is called the HPC. But being as how that term has been banned from discussion, for the reason mentioned above, it has been replaced w/ the EMA.

That aside to your question - I can't answer you unless you give me your definition of "consciousness".

That thing that happens to you between waking and sleep.

Not specific enough for you? Start working on the Hard P-- I mean the EMA then