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MIT professor Marvin Minsky wins $540,000 award

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Re: MIT professor Marvin Minsky wins $540,000 award

#91

Post by mikeash »

mikhael wrote: post #31
yc-kjh wrote: post #9

Idiocy: My thermostat has three possible beliefs: 1) It is too warm in here. 2) It is too cold in here. 3) It is just about right. Minsky is wrong about AI in the same way that McCarthy was wrong. McCarthy really "believed" that his thermostat had three possible beliefs, and that his thermostat really "believed" one of them at any given time. http://Books.Google.com/books?id=yNJN-_jznw4C&pg=PA30&lpg=PA... Searle debu…

if i understand you correctly, you seem to believe that qualia definitely affects physical reality. we don't know whether that's true or whether qualia is just a byproduct of physical reality, and given the probabilistic nature of what we can observe physically, we may never know.

It seems clear to me that qualia must affect physical reality. If it didn't, we wouldn't be talking about it. If it was just a byproduct with causality going only in one direction, then we'd never talk about it, because the behavior of a physical system with that byproduct would be identical to that same physical system without it. There has to be a causal chain from this discussion back to qualia, unless the discussion happened by coincidence, which is extremely unlikely.

I don't think this tells us anything about what qualia is or whether it is or isn't a material process, but I don't think it's tenable to say that it either doesn't exist entirely, or exists but doesn't affect anything.

Re: MIT professor Marvin Minsky wins $540,000 award

#92

Post by gnaritas »

ehsanu1 wrote: post #63
iamevil wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is this thing we call "meaning"? Can it be a point in a vast and complex "pattern space" and the meaning of that point is the structure of all the "paths" that map that point to other points in this same pattern space? Our act of arbitrary categorization of patterns into "syntax" and "semantics" just seems to obscure that fact that they are just two arbitrary encodings of patterns. How can we know that one patte…

> Can it be a point in a vast and complex "pattern space" and the meaning of that point is the structure of all the "paths" that map that point to other points in this same pattern space? That's the exact point of contention, whether semantics can be represented by syntax is unknown currently, though it must hold in a materialistic world. If it can't, as some believe, then it isn't an arbitrary categorization.

Until there's evidence to the contrary, the materialist world is the only world there is, you can simply call it the world as calling it the materialist world is redundant.

Materialism has ample evidence to support it; dualism has no good evidence, it is therefore dualism that is on trial, not materialism.

Re: MIT professor Marvin Minsky wins $540,000 award

#93

Post by gnaritas »

yc-kjh wrote: post #28
yongjik wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll take it as you don't have any evidence that human brain requires anything other than electromagnetism, then.

Au contraire. Since electromagnetism cannot cause intentions, or goals, and since the human obviously has both intentions and goals (teleology), it is clear that the human brain does encompass something in addition to electromagnetism. (The same statement applies to all of the chemical processes involved in the human brain.) Please read Nagle's work. Read Searle's work. Read all of the philosophical literature on "in…

> Since electromagnetism cannot cause intentions, or goals

Says who, where's the evidence of this? This is a bold claim and an unproven one. As it's your primary axiom, the discussion can go no further until this fantastic claim has some evidence.

Re: MIT professor Marvin Minsky wins $540,000 award

#94

Post by gnaritas »

yc-kjh wrote: post #13
ehsanu1 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What you wish to discuss is philosophical, rather than scientific in nature (for the time being), and there is nothing that can be said in the span of an HN comment that can substantially change anybody's mind, one way or the other.

The Ph.D. degree is all about philosophy, no matter what field it is in. There is nothing which is scientific (dealing with knowledge in general, according to the Latin roots of the word), which is not also philosophical (dealing with the love of wisdom, according to the Greek roots of the word). You are correct that I cannot change anybody's mind, one way or the other. I was only hoping to plant seeds.

> I was only hoping to plant seeds.

Considering you come off sounding like a quack, you're not the type to do any seed planting. You argue fallaciously with argument from authority, and then reference authorities that most here clearly consider laughable and debunked, and you want us to take you seriously. Really?

Re: MIT professor Marvin Minsky wins $540,000 award

#95

Post by Houshalter »

Double_Cast wrote: post #84
Houshalter wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But it does match a territory. It's just a random one

Let's suppose you're lost in the Amazon. Would you not prefer a professionally-drawn map of the Amazon over a "map" I whimsically scribbled while blindfolded? After all, my map might not correspond to the Amazon, but it must correspond to something .

I'm not sure if you are responding the the right comment or if you understood what I said. The point is when you initialize weights randomly, you aren't starting with a blank map and then adding stuff to it. You are starting with a random map and then trying to correct it. Random bias is still bias.

Re: MIT professor Marvin Minsky wins $540,000 award

#96

Post by judk »

kylebrown wrote: post #80
bermanoid wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you seriously bringing up Searle's Chinese Room as an argument against AI research? According to Wikipedia, "The Chinese room argument is primarily an argument in the philosophy of mind, and both major computer scientists and artificial intelligence researchers consider it irrelevant to their fields." Right on. First off, philosophy of mind is 100% irrelevant to modern AI research, which is more concerned with cr…

I like this deconstruction of Searle's Chinese Room, by Scott Aaronson. He calls Searle's argument a "non-insight": http://www.scottaaronson.com/democritus/lec4.html

Searle's primary contribution to philosophy is that he forces every CS student to ponder this important question: "Is this famous philosopher correct, that AI is impossible, or does a nobody like me actually understand the concept of emergence better than he does?

Re: MIT professor Marvin Minsky wins $540,000 award

#97

Post by judk »

vidarh wrote: post #42
yc-kjh wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You apparently don't understand how computers work. There is no "meaning" associated with any variable or its value, and there cannot be.

> You apparently don't understand how computers work. You appears to like to jump to conclusions. > There is no "meaning" associated with any variable or its value, and there cannot be. Please give me a definition of "meaning" that can be applied to a human brain and not to a computer. And what is the evidence that it can not be applied to a computer? You are also jumping to the conclusion that, if as you claim, the…

I remember when I was a kid, imagining how the inventor of English taught everyone else... "'Dog' means-- wait. 'Means' means-- uh-oh."

Re: MIT professor Marvin Minsky wins $540,000 award

#98

Post by judk »

slacka wrote: post #52
anateus wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I applaud your clever replacement of the now trite "paradigm shift" with "Kuhnian". I haven't read the latest from Nagel so can't speak to that, but Searle's arguments work against only the most simplistic approaches to symbolic AI (which is no longer a very common framework) and his continued willful misunderstanding of how people in the field tend to think about cognition betray a lot of essentialism on the topic.…

> but no one cares that "Watson doesn't know it won". I care, especially that Watson doesn't know when it lost or learn from its mistakes, because it doesn't actually understand anything. Watson's fragile intelligence relies on the programmers tweaking its algorithms for every particular subject. It's a glorified search engine, as opposed to a true advance in general AI.

Yes, the classic definition of "general AI" is "whatever computers can't do". That is definition is thoroughly out of fashion now.

Re: MIT professor Marvin Minsky wins $540,000 award

#99

Post by kylebrown »

demallien wrote: post #85
kylebrown wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like this deconstruction of Searle's Chinese Room, by Scott Aaronson. He calls Searle's argument a "non-insight": http://www.scottaaronson.com/democritus/lec4.html

That link was the most interesting thing I've read on HN all day. Thank you! My favorite quote: "As a historical remark, it's interesting that the possibility of thinking machines isn't something that occurred to people gradually, after they'd already been using computers for decades. Instead it occurred to them immediately, the minute they started talking about computers themselves. People like Leibniz and Babbage a…

Sure thing. I should have mentioned that you don't need to read the whole thing (Searle's Chinese room argument is dicussed in only one section of the linked lecture).

You'll probably enjoy his other material. Scott Aaronson is a prolific expositor, he's been blogging for nearly a decade (since before he was hired by MIT's CS dept).

Re: MIT professor Marvin Minsky wins $540,000 award

#100

Post by mikhael »

mikeash wrote: post #91
mikhael wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

if i understand you correctly, you seem to believe that qualia definitely affects physical reality. we don't know whether that's true or whether qualia is just a byproduct of physical reality, and given the probabilistic nature of what we can observe physically, we may never know.

It seems clear to me that qualia must affect physical reality. If it didn't, we wouldn't be talking about it. If it was just a byproduct with causality going only in one direction, then we'd never talk about it, because the behavior of a physical system with that byproduct would be identical to that same physical system without it. There has to be a causal chain from this discussion back to qualia, unless the discuss…

i'll admit that that's a convincing argument, but there are ways in which apparent causality can be shown to be illusory. one thought experiment i remember from school involves someone watching a movie in which one character punches another character, and the punched character falls backward. suppose the watcher knows absolutely nothing about how movies are recorded, or re-played, and sees only the lifelike images; then there would be clear, apparent causality of the second character falling over as an effect of being punched by the first. in reality, the only causality is that set up by the mechanics of the movie projector.
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