221–224 of 224 posts
As someone with really bad dyslexia and dyscalculia I can't say I'm particularly surprised. I've done a lot of research on what neurologic differences are present and they're fairly interesting: http://www.neuroanatomy.wisc.edu/selflearn/Dyslexia.htm https://www.brainfacts.org/archives/2011/dyslexia-and-the-br...
Somehow this is not surprising for me, I have heard about experiments related to free-will wherein the brain already made a decision even before the conscious mind became aware of it. Thus putting doubts on our conscious experience of free-will. Also, in terms of problem solving, there are experiments which show that the brain calculates the answers and "presents" the answers later on to the consciousness. It's not l…
But it's your brain that's making decisions based on your experiences, desires, and goals. Obviously your conscious mind can't do everything, it's there for the new and hard stuff. All the rest is pushed down to lower layers, but it's all still you.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Your description of abstract things sounds like a dressed-up version of something fairly mundane. (This isn't to say that your description is deficient, but rather that the concept is ultimately fairly mundane.) So I gathered three essential features of instrinsic intentionality: (1) does not exist independently, (2) exist in the intellect, (3) exist in the things that instantiate them. Given this definition there ar…
You're trying to reduce abstraction to statistical pattern classification, but that doesn't work because statistical measures are inherently bounded in generality, indeterminate and ambiguous while my concept of, say, triangularity is universal, determinate and exact. Say I give you an image of a black isosceles triangle. Nothing in that image will tell you how to group those features. There is no single interpretati…
A substrate with a statistical description can still have determinate behavior. The brain, for example is made up of neurons that have a statistical description. But it makes determinate decisions, and presumably can grasp concepts exactly. Thresholding functions, for example, are a mechanism that can transform a statistical process into a determinate outcome.
>doesn't mean it's grasped essentially what it means to be a member of that class.
I don't know what this means aside from the ability to correctly identify members of that class. But there's no reason to think an ML algorithm cannot do this.
Regarding Feser and Searle, there is a lot to say. I think they are demonstrably wrong about computation being observer relative and whether computation is indeterminate[1]. Regarding computations being observer relative, it's helpful to get clear on what computation is. Then it easily follows that a computation is an objective fact of a process.
A computer is at its most fundamental an information processing device. This means that the input state has mutual information with something in the world, the computer undergoes some physical process that transforms the input to some output, and this output has further mutual information with something in the world. The input information is transformed by the computer to some different information, thus a computation is revelatory: it has the power to tell you something you didn't know previously. This is why a computer can tell me the inverse of a matrix, while my wall cannot, for example. My wall is inherently non-revelatory no matter how I look at it. This definition is at odds with Searle's definition of a computer as a symbol processing device, but my definition more accurately captures what people mean when they use the term computer and compute.
This understanding of a computer is important because the concept of mutual information is mind-independent. There is a fact of the matter whether one system has mutual information with another system. Thus, a computer that is fundamentally a device for meaningfully transforming mutual information is mind independent.
[1]https://www.reddit.com/r/askphilosophy/comments/bviafb/what_...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
How would you define a “concept” then? How do concepts themselves intrinsically have meaning that symbols don’t?
In this context, these symbols are conventional signs taken to refer to meanings that are not themselves. Concepts are apprehensions of form, or we might say "meanings", the what-it-is-to-be of the given thing. When I write "123", that series of characters obviously is not itself the number 123. A human interpreter in possession of a mental dictionary can read that series of squiggles to arrive mentally at the concep…