31–40 of 59 posts
I just wrote something on this subject on facebook... suppose this would be a good place for it. TL;DR though - we aren't ready to try to answer such questions directly yet. --------- We are self programmable Turing machines: the core problems (and frustrations!) of both AI and understanding the human brain are encoded in that statement. Frustrations, because it's an infuriatingly simple statement that's obviously tr…
You take "determinism" too hard. In fact brains are stochastic and local noise can and do influence it all the time. It's meaningless to think about deterministic brains. Even if the brain were physically deterministic, it still includes too much noise in it's internal processing (as a regularization process) to be easy to predict. I think meaning comes from survival, treated as a game theory problem - agent, world,…
Isn't he just really claiming that there's no room for free will? Is ever a state where the next immediate thing to happen is not determined by that state.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, there is no difference between human survival/replication and purpose. That's the recurrence, the reentrant loop that bootstraps humans. Of course individual humans might make their own values and act on them, but they only exist as a byproduct of the survival/reproduction process, and are formed by this process.
You're the one talking about purpose. The rest of us are talking about mechanism. You're handwaving away the problem, but that doesn't mean there still isn't a problem there we don't understand yet.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You take "determinism" too hard. In fact brains are stochastic and local noise can and do influence it all the time. It's meaningless to think about deterministic brains. Even if the brain were physically deterministic, it still includes too much noise in it's internal processing (as a regularization process) to be easy to predict. I think meaning comes from survival, treated as a game theory problem - agent, world,…
> You take "determinism" too hard. Isn't he just really claiming that there's no room for free will? Is ever a state where the next immediate thing to happen is not determined by that state.
The problem of free will is mostly just how to define it in a way that makes any sense at all. But to the degree that it does make sense I would say we clearly have it.
What else does it mean for something to have the ability to decide?
I just wrote something on this subject on facebook... suppose this would be a good place for it. TL;DR though - we aren't ready to try to answer such questions directly yet. --------- We are self programmable Turing machines: the core problems (and frustrations!) of both AI and understanding the human brain are encoded in that statement. Frustrations, because it's an infuriatingly simple statement that's obviously tr…
If we are Turing machines, we are Turing machines with noise and errors. (Proof: do large mathematical calculations by hand.) This explains the lack of determinism.
The remainder of your essay seems to argue that our nondeterminism is "deep", but I don't understand the distinction. You state there's a big difference between random numbers from a cryptographic PRNG (which is in fact deterministic) and generating a proof that primes are infinite. But I don't see why computers can't generate "deep" nondeterminism, whatever that is.
Mindless mathematical laws encode all kinds of patterns.
Our brains also encode patterns in them. These patterns mirror the outside world.
Once your brain models "the state of the world" it can also model the configuration space of the world: the ways things could be.
An aim or intention is an ordering in that configuration space. "I could have many things for breakfast; what I'd prefer is X" is an ordering on your internal representation of breakfast-space.
The theme seems weirdly phrased. It's like asking "How can a tree give rise to the color green?" Their attempt to clarify didn't really clarify. They're looking for a causal relationship between physical law and thought process (because "aims and intention" are thoughts ). Perhaps causality itself is the wrong tool to apply here. Thanks to various readings over the past year, I'm starting to believe causality as an a…
> various readings over the past year Yes, what were these? I tend to agree with you about causality. The attempts to understand how the classical world arises from quantum laws seem particularly boneheaded to me. I guess people (scientists) don't want to let go of causality because who knows what chaos and mayhem will befall the world if we give up on this. And the philosophers have a term "causal closure" which see…
What classical world do you refer to? Newtonian physics? That's well understood, the general area of study is called thermal physics.
Are you talking about how the brain works? The biologists understand the meso-scale structures and the microscale structures, and the wiring. What they lack is a certified, detailed diagram, which is admittedly hard, but it's hard like understanding the wiring diagram of an ARM chip is hard.
Apart from that. Why optimal behaviour arises should not be a question. :-)
Why there are goals in itself is probably also governed by entropic forces about the flow of information. Read on empowerment by Polani et al. Or study the robots from Ralf Der.
I just wrote something on this subject on facebook... suppose this would be a good place for it. TL;DR though - we aren't ready to try to answer such questions directly yet. --------- We are self programmable Turing machines: the core problems (and frustrations!) of both AI and understanding the human brain are encoded in that statement. Frustrations, because it's an infuriatingly simple statement that's obviously tr…