Deep image prior 'learns' on just one image

A simulation of digestion, does not digest pizza.

> Either a computer can perfectly imitate digestion, or it can't.

Yeah, it cant.

What you seem to think is that "imitation in form" means being the same as. A photograph of me is imitation in the form of me, it isnt me. It doenst have a pulse.

The universe is not an idealised abstract world of Forms, and so anything with the same abstract pattern is equivalent.

Abstract patterns exist only form our point of view. They are our way of describing things.

To say a computer imitates anything is only to say that when we look at it, we can use it to inform ourselves. Simulating digestion is a means of learning about digestion because we design it to correlate across systems.

Without a point-of-view to impose correspondence, the two systems are a like in no respect. "Being a simulation of" is like Beauty. Its not a process in the universe, its not a property of objects.

A piece of silicon with an oscillating electric field across it remains the same regardless of whether it is running the "digestion simulation" or the "consciousness simulation". It is only a matter of electrical frequencies and amplitudes.

This acquires meaning to us when we look at them. In the case of digestion one 01010 pattern means "too acidic", in the case of a lifelike chat bot "01010" means "hi!".

The cinema screen is not a train. It's a movie. Its just light hitting a canvas. It wont hurt you. 01010 isnt acid. It isnt thought. It's just a voltage fluctuation, it cant talk to you.

> When I watch a movie, I don't care if the camera was pointed at real events, or if it was CGI.

We call something conscious because it actually thinks, not because it can fool human beings into believing it does.

The foolishness of a human audience is not the measure of all things. Whether neo exists or not matters.

We have moral obligations to thinking things, we have none to non-thinking things. etc. We have none to fictional things.

They are not "running a biological program". Acid melting metal isn't a "program" it's a chemical reaction.

Consciousness is what I am doing. That's my definition of the term. It's incoherent to say "what's my evidence for it".

> In terms of external behavior, you're admitting this machine could match a human?

No. I am only saying that a stupid human being using only stupid human faculties of speaking to something might be fooled, by their stupidity, into thinking they were speaking to something as equally stupid as their are.

A dog which observes a toy dog walking around may bark at it as-if it were another dog. But that toy dog isnt. it doesnt think, it has no emotion, experiences no pain. has no goals, no interests, no skills, etc.

No piece of silicon will every amount to more than a toy dog. Neuroscientists will not be fooled by it. Incraesingly sophisticated tests of cognition and goal-directed behaviour won't be fooled by it.

People on the street might be. But their foolishness is no guide to the temperature of the sun, the cause of the tides, nor whether the toy dog thinks.,

Does simulating a gold bar turn the simulation into gold?

I feel im going round in circles here. A description of a system, even if that description is "active" (ie., it evolves over time)... is not the same as the system.

I can take a photograph of a mountain. My hand has no mountain in it, but a photograph.

I can describe any system with mathematics. I can give every atom in your body a number for all of its properties, and a location with respect to the centre of the earth and then append all those numbers together to form a massive number X.

Over time because your position and properties change the number which describes you X2 differs from X.

If I start by writing X down, then X2, then X3, etc. then the ink on the page describes you as a changing system.

The ink isnt you. It isnt alive. It's ink.

That is all a machine is. We have replaced ink with electricity and paper with silicon, but it is only correlated with a changing number.

WE perform the translation from this number to something else in the world. The person who reads the ink on the paper is the person who knows what X becoming X2 means as it pertains to you. The paper and ink do not mean anything alone, they are not you and share none of your properties.

When a chat bot says "hi" it is just a change to an LCD screen caused by an electrical fluctuation caused by a prior electrical fluctuation. It is just a new line of ink on the page.

There is nothing thinking, saying, speaking, understanding, "hi". It is just a change to some liquid crystal which fools you as you read it. YOU impart meaning on it when you look at it. It isnt a person, it's just ink.

The most ambitious we can be about machines is that they fool people into thinking they are having a conversation with someone. Ie., that paper shreds with ink phrases on them tumble out of a folder in just-the-right-order as-if a conversation was happening. But it's a tumbling of electric, there is no conversation.

There are tests to distinguish gold from silicon. And so there will be for however your machine works. I cannot say now what those test will be, any more than you can make such a machine.

Something not being the thing it is simulating entails there will be tests to distinguish it.

The tests cannot be "cognative" because there is no cognition going on.

A simulation of an animal does not live in the world, experience and understand it -- nor render the world intelligible to itself and others. A simulation of an animal is just a current flowing around a wire.

I would guess the tests will always, actually, be quite simple -- perhaps not expressible as a single conversation -- because somehow like a chess game it has every infinite sequence of conversations available to it.

Perhaps, in a novel social situation adapting to evolving minds as they respond to each other. Suppose this is recorded today: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=99IitWYZ0aU#t=60s

and your machine is sat in the audience.

The question is then: "What does Kenneth think about the audience's laughter?"