31–40 of 41 posts
I always thought that cosmologists have been trying to correct the popular notion that the Big Bang also describes what happened before the universe was created.
Isn't time, somehow, a human abstraction? I mean, what really exists is movement. Earth spins over itself and we call it a day, Earth circles the Sun and we call it a year, a few quartz electronic pulses are called a second, etc. We use these events to measure time. Before Big Bang there was no movement, therefore, there was nothing to measure time with. If there's nothing to measure time with, there's no time.
True but if I travel away from a clock at light speed, time doesn't move anymore but I'm still moving. Personally I like the idea that the big bang is a cyclical event - the universe expands until some point, then it collapses again. At some indeterminate point it expands again. Whether or not Earth gets recreated is for someone else to ponder.
Isn't time, somehow, a human abstraction? I mean, what really exists is movement. Earth spins over itself and we call it a day, Earth circles the Sun and we call it a year, a few quartz electronic pulses are called a second, etc. We use these events to measure time. Before Big Bang there was no movement, therefore, there was nothing to measure time with. If there's nothing to measure time with, there's no time.
> Before Big Bang there was no movement Prove it. It's possible there were other universes. > there was nothing to measure time with There was nothing inside the universe to measure time with.
Isn't time, somehow, a human abstraction? I mean, what really exists is movement. Earth spins over itself and we call it a day, Earth circles the Sun and we call it a year, a few quartz electronic pulses are called a second, etc. We use these events to measure time. Before Big Bang there was no movement, therefore, there was nothing to measure time with. If there's nothing to measure time with, there's no time.
How was the Big Bang triggered then?
Penrose would be a safer bet if he hadn't written "The Emperor's New Mind". Having completely flamed out on a subject I consider myself competent enough to judge him on, I'm much less willing to bet he's right in an area where I am less confident and knowledgeable.
I have never read "The Emperor's New Mind". What are its flaws?
Isn't time, somehow, a human abstraction? I mean, what really exists is movement. Earth spins over itself and we call it a day, Earth circles the Sun and we call it a year, a few quartz electronic pulses are called a second, etc. We use these events to measure time. Before Big Bang there was no movement, therefore, there was nothing to measure time with. If there's nothing to measure time with, there's no time.
Before Big Bang there was no movement How was the Big Bang triggered then?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have never read "The Emperor's New Mind". What are its flaws?
as another poster mentioned, Aaronson has done a great job of covering this -- waay better than I ever could. But the TL/DR is that Penrose believes there's something quasi-magical about thinking that can't be done with Turing machines, and therefore needs all kinds of special physics to get going. It' just so patently naive and absurd to a working computer scientist that it makes me suspect his ego/judgment ratio is…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's been a while, but if I recall Penrose basically attacks the notion of "stong AI". Others, e.g. Scott Aaronson, have ripped his argument to shreds. But not to dismiss Penrose's argument too quickly, Aaronson did devote an entire university course to presenting the counter argument http://www.scottaaronson.com/democritus/ . I think there is a case to be made against strong AI along the lines of "just because a pos…
I don't think it's fair to say that Aaronson's course was devoted to debunking Penrose. It just happens that Penrose is very good at explaining these concepts, so his (wrong) book on consciousness (which contains a lot of physics) was used as the "textbook".
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's been a while, but if I recall Penrose basically attacks the notion of "stong AI". Others, e.g. Scott Aaronson, have ripped his argument to shreds. But not to dismiss Penrose's argument too quickly, Aaronson did devote an entire university course to presenting the counter argument http://www.scottaaronson.com/democritus/ . I think there is a case to be made against strong AI along the lines of "just because a pos…
I'm always suspicious of phrases such as "ripped his arguments to shreds" especially in such a young and contested field as AI and doubly when dealing with the difficult issues of sentience and Strong AI... I'm not accusing you of anything, but as a general comment, without necessarily supporting them, the response to his arguments on this issue often seem to involve overly emotive language.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
as another poster mentioned, Aaronson has done a great job of covering this -- waay better than I ever could. But the TL/DR is that Penrose believes there's something quasi-magical about thinking that can't be done with Turing machines, and therefore needs all kinds of special physics to get going. It' just so patently naive and absurd to a working computer scientist that it makes me suspect his ego/judgment ratio is…
Is your claim that we understand consciousness and thus we are certain that it can be implemented algorithmically or that it can be implemented algorithmically no matter what or something else entirely?
Intuitively, I don't see any vital need to introduce special types of computation to explain consciousness. It seems very likely to be a phenomenon that emerges from the right kind of information processing, regardless of the physical nature of the computation.