5 ms·

Cells are machines, (our) minds are running on cells, therefore minds run on machines. It doesn't have to be more complicated than that. Unless you are making a

by Udo 7y ago

Cells are machines, (our) minds are running on cells, therefore minds run on machines. It doesn't have to be more complicated than that. Unless you are making an argument for supernatural influences. It's debatable whether minds are machines, at least in a sense that satisfies us, but that's another subject. > "Therefore the machine cannot produce the corresponding formula as being true. But we can see* that the Gödelian formula is true."* Essentially, the other side's argument boils down to the idea that minds can reason in a way that machines cannot - they can intuitively look behind the Gödelian curtain so to speak. However, this contest between "mind" and "machine" only works as long as you tie the machine's hands behind its back while letting the mind roam freely: a mind forced to operate within the same formal system would come to the same conclusion as the machine, and conversely there is no reason to assume that a machine allowed to apply intuitive reasoning would not come to the same realization as the mind. This entire argument is a philosophical parlor trick that only works as long as you don't pay too close attention to the unequal restrictions imposed on the two participants.

sgt101 7y ago
You are confusing brains and minds. Our minds extend beyond our brains into our bodies; people reason and act because of hunger and thirst. Our minds extend beyond our bodies, we act on the basis of our friends and society.
- klrr 7y ago
  Thanks to I/O with the body and knowledge about friends and society saved in our memory.
- AllegedAlec 7y ago
  That conciousness is partially outsourced doesn't mean that it isn't operating on a physical medium though.
- Udo 7y ago
  > You are confusing brains and minds. That's a baseless assertion. In fact, I made it extra clear to distinguish between minds and the hardware they run on. By necessity, we need to talk about the "interface" between both though. > Our minds extend beyond our bodies, we act on the basis of our friends and society. How does that counter the argument that minds (already) run on machines?
  - phorkyas82 7y ago
    An "interface" like Descartes' pineal gland? Or would you prefer something RESTful? While technical metaphors applied to the good ol' philosophical mind body problem look so modern they are also totally inept. There is no archticture or VM to port your consciousness to, nor can you upload it to AWS. To get more accurate metaphors on consciousness, maybe it's better to start with the biologic basis like Plessner did: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helmuth_Plessner https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helmuth_Plessner
- Koshkin 7y ago
  Indeed. Very few realize to what extent the individual mind merely resonates to a universal tune.
stult 7y ago
I definitely agree that much of this argument boils down to a set of poorly fleshed out definitions. Though I would argue that you’ve misrepresented the article’s definitions a bit. The article is asking whether the formal system in question can fully explain human intelligence. Which we all agree it can’t. It’s not arguing that no machine in the sense you or I would understand that word can explain human intelligence, the author just assumes implicitly that any machine will consist of a formal symbolic system of the type Gödel studied. Obviously if you challenge that assumption, the argument loses its potency. But in defense of the OP, if we discard the perhaps unhelpful term “machine,” the argument does raise an interesting question: what distinguishes the formal, mechanistic logic of pure mathematics from what you describe as “intuitive reasoning?” I think a worse flaw in the argument is the assumption that formal symbolic completeness is somehow required for human intelligence. I’d say the opposite if anything is true. If modern psychological research has provided anything of value, it’s pretty convincing evidence that human brains don’t require any sort of logical completeness or even internal consistency to function.
- pdonis 7y ago
  > The article is asking whether the formal system in question can fully explain human intelligence. No, it's asking whether any formal system whatever can fully explain human intelligence. And it gives the wrong answer; see below. > Which we all agree it can’t. No, we don't, because the article misrepresents what "fully explain" means. The article assumes that, for a formal system to "fully explain" something, it must produce proofs of all sentences that that something could produce. But that condition is too strong. All the formal system needs to do is produce, by hook or by crook, the same outputs as the something (a human, or whatever) does. It doesn't have to produce proofs of all those outputs as theorems. Humans certainly don't produce formal proofs of all the things we claim we can intuitively see are true.
- pdonis 7y ago
  > the author just assumes implicitly that any machine will consist of a formal symbolic system of the type Gödel studied. Obviously if you challenge that assumption, the argument loses its potency Daniel Dennett, in his refutation of Lucas' argument (which I think is in his book Brainstorms; I have not been able to find a version of it online), makes a point related to your point here in a very stark manner: by showing that, in fact, a physical realization of a formal system can produce a proof of that sytem's own Godel sentence! Dennett's argument makes use of a critical observation: in order to view any physical system as a realization of a formal system, we have to interpret the inputs and outputs of the physical system in a particular way. But there is nothing in the laws of physics that rules out the possibility of multiple interpretations of the same inputs and outputs. So it is perfectly possible for a given set of outputs of some physical system to have one interpretation as sentences of formal system A, but also another interpretation as sentences of formal system B, with the latter sentences including a proof of the Godel sentence of formal system A. Put abstractly this way, this seems unlikely, but in fact we experience this sort of thing all the time with computers. As I am typing these words, my computer is taking a series of inputs and producing a series of outputs which have multiple interpretations: as sequences of bytes, as machine instructions, as typed characters from the keyboard and displayed characters on the screen, as changes in voltage across transistors, etc. And there is nothing in principle that prevents, for example, writing a program that runs on my computer's CPU and proves the Godel sentence of that CPU, considered as a formal system. Or writing a program in, say, Python that proves the Godel sentence of the gcc compiler used to compile that instance of the Python interpreter, considered as a formal system. So in fact the author of this article is not just assuming that any machine will consist of a formal symbolic system, he is assuming that there is one unique interpretation of any physical machine as a formal symbolic system. And we now have abundant evidence that that assumption is false.
keiferski 7y ago
You just hand waved away the entire problem of whether materialism/physicalism is actually the correct position with regards to the mind. This is not the case; there are plenty of arguments against it. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/physicalism/#CasAgaPhyIQuaCon https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/physicalism/#CasAgaPhyIQu... > Cells are machines, (our) minds are running on cells, therefore minds run on machines. It doesn't have to be more complicated than that. I'd like to propose a new universal human law, which states that the materialists of any age always posit that reality just happens to be created in a manner similar to the most widespread or powerful technological metaphor of the time. In the 17th century, the world just happened to be similar to a watch, designed by an all-powerful watchmaker. In the 20th and 21st century, the world just happens to be similar to a computational machine. The truth is that reality and the mind is probably far more complex than we realize and reductive approaches are almost by-definition wrong and incomplete.
- Udo 7y ago
  > You just hand waved away the entire problem of whether materialism/physicalism is actually the correct position It's true that I don't lend credibility to supernatural hypotheses, which I'm sure isn't the most popular position to have, I understand that. However, given the fact that everything we can actually observe so far seems to follow natural laws, I posit that the burden of proof is on the dualists to show me something that cannot possibly work without supernatural intervention (or, preferrably, directly demonstrate such intervention). Which of course brings us to the reason why this article is written in this way and why it's being discussed here in the first place: because people use the Gödel argument as such a demonstration. However, the argument does not support the claims it generates. Am I right or wrong to assume a naturalistic default position on this? Whichever way you answer on this will most likely determine your position on the meaning of the Gödel thought experiment.
  - keiferski 7y ago
    > It's true that I don't lend credibility to supernatural hypotheses, which I'm sure isn't the most popular position to have, I understand that. However, given the fact that everything we can actually observe so far seems to follow natural laws, I posit that the burden of proof is on the dualists to show me something that cannot possibly work without supernatural invention (or, preferrably, directly demonstrate such intervention). I'm not sure what you are defining as 'supernatural' but 'everything that isn't observable' seems like an exceptionally poor definition. Throughout history there have been plenty of unobservable forces which nonetheless turned out to exist. Even today, our scientific knowledge is such a minuscule fraction of the universe; the number of unknown-unknowns is perhaps infinite. Even something like dark matter is still a known-unknown. To make broad statements like "reality/cells are just machines" based on this tiny portion of information seems pretty foolish. The flaws of your position are shown quite well in the "Blind men and the elephant" proverb. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blind_men_and_an_elephant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blind_men_and_an_elephant
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
mikorym 7y ago
> unless you are making an argument for supernatural influences You don't even have to call it supernatural. You can just call it "extracellular".
- Udo 7y ago
  > You can just call it "extracellular". That's an understatement, as I'm sure we both know. A more apt word would be "extrauniversal".

by Udo 7y ago

sgt101 7y ago

You are confusing brains and minds. Our minds extend beyond our brains into our bodies; people reason and act because of hunger and thirst. Our minds extend beyond our bodies, we act on the basis of our friends and society.

klrr 7y ago
Thanks to I/O with the body and knowledge about friends and society saved in our memory.
AllegedAlec 7y ago
That conciousness is partially outsourced doesn't mean that it isn't operating on a physical medium though.
Udo 7y ago
> You are confusing brains and minds. That's a baseless assertion. In fact, I made it extra clear to distinguish between minds and the hardware they run on. By necessity, we need to talk about the "interface" between both though. > Our minds extend beyond our bodies, we act on the basis of our friends and society. How does that counter the argument that minds (already) run on machines?
- phorkyas82 7y ago
  An "interface" like Descartes' pineal gland? Or would you prefer something RESTful? While technical metaphors applied to the good ol' philosophical mind body problem look so modern they are also totally inept. There is no archticture or VM to port your consciousness to, nor can you upload it to AWS. To get more accurate metaphors on consciousness, maybe it's better to start with the biologic basis like Plessner did: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helmuth_Plessner https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helmuth_Plessner
Koshkin 7y ago
Indeed. Very few realize to what extent the individual mind merely resonates to a universal tune.

stult 7y ago

I definitely agree that much of this argument boils down to a set of poorly fleshed out definitions. Though I would argue that you’ve misrepresented the article’s definitions a bit. The article is asking whether the formal system in question can fully explain human intelligence. Which we all agree it can’t. It’s not arguing that no machine in the sense you or I would understand that word can explain human intelligence, the author just assumes implicitly that any machine will consist of a formal symbolic system of the type Gödel studied. Obviously if you challenge that assumption, the argument loses its potency. But in defense of the OP, if we discard the perhaps unhelpful term “machine,” the argument does raise an interesting question: what distinguishes the formal, mechanistic logic of pure mathematics from what you describe as “intuitive reasoning?” I think a worse flaw in the argument is the assumption that formal symbolic completeness is somehow required for human intelligence. I’d say the opposite if anything is true. If modern psychological research has provided anything of value, it’s pretty convincing evidence that human brains don’t require any sort of logical completeness or even internal consistency to function.

pdonis 7y ago
> The article is asking whether the formal system in question can fully explain human intelligence. No, it's asking whether any formal system whatever can fully explain human intelligence. And it gives the wrong answer; see below. > Which we all agree it can’t. No, we don't, because the article misrepresents what "fully explain" means. The article assumes that, for a formal system to "fully explain" something, it must produce proofs of all sentences that that something could produce. But that condition is too strong. All the formal system needs to do is produce, by hook or by crook, the same outputs as the something (a human, or whatever) does. It doesn't have to produce proofs of all those outputs as theorems. Humans certainly don't produce formal proofs of all the things we claim we can intuitively see are true.
pdonis 7y ago
> the author just assumes implicitly that any machine will consist of a formal symbolic system of the type Gödel studied. Obviously if you challenge that assumption, the argument loses its potency Daniel Dennett, in his refutation of Lucas' argument (which I think is in his book Brainstorms; I have not been able to find a version of it online), makes a point related to your point here in a very stark manner: by showing that, in fact, a physical realization of a formal system can produce a proof of that sytem's own Godel sentence! Dennett's argument makes use of a critical observation: in order to view any physical system as a realization of a formal system, we have to interpret the inputs and outputs of the physical system in a particular way. But there is nothing in the laws of physics that rules out the possibility of multiple interpretations of the same inputs and outputs. So it is perfectly possible for a given set of outputs of some physical system to have one interpretation as sentences of formal system A, but also another interpretation as sentences of formal system B, with the latter sentences including a proof of the Godel sentence of formal system A. Put abstractly this way, this seems unlikely, but in fact we experience this sort of thing all the time with computers. As I am typing these words, my computer is taking a series of inputs and producing a series of outputs which have multiple interpretations: as sequences of bytes, as machine instructions, as typed characters from the keyboard and displayed characters on the screen, as changes in voltage across transistors, etc. And there is nothing in principle that prevents, for example, writing a program that runs on my computer's CPU and proves the Godel sentence of that CPU, considered as a formal system. Or writing a program in, say, Python that proves the Godel sentence of the gcc compiler used to compile that instance of the Python interpreter, considered as a formal system. So in fact the author of this article is not just assuming that any machine will consist of a formal symbolic system, he is assuming that there is one unique interpretation of any physical machine as a formal symbolic system. And we now have abundant evidence that that assumption is false.

keiferski 7y ago

You just hand waved away the entire problem of whether materialism/physicalism is actually the correct position with regards to the mind. This is not the case; there are plenty of arguments against it. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/physicalism/#CasAgaPhyIQuaCon https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/physicalism/#CasAgaPhyIQu... > Cells are machines, (our) minds are running on cells, therefore minds run on machines. It doesn't have to be more complicated than that. I'd like to propose a new universal human law, which states that the materialists of any age always posit that reality just happens to be created in a manner similar to the most widespread or powerful technological metaphor of the time. In the 17th century, the world just happened to be similar to a watch, designed by an all-powerful watchmaker. In the 20th and 21st century, the world just happens to be similar to a computational machine. The truth is that reality and the mind is probably far more complex than we realize and reductive approaches are almost by-definition wrong and incomplete.

Udo 7y ago
> You just hand waved away the entire problem of whether materialism/physicalism is actually the correct position It's true that I don't lend credibility to supernatural hypotheses, which I'm sure isn't the most popular position to have, I understand that. However, given the fact that everything we can actually observe so far seems to follow natural laws, I posit that the burden of proof is on the dualists to show me something that cannot possibly work without supernatural intervention (or, preferrably, directly demonstrate such intervention). Which of course brings us to the reason why this article is written in this way and why it's being discussed here in the first place: because people use the Gödel argument as such a demonstration. However, the argument does not support the claims it generates. Am I right or wrong to assume a naturalistic default position on this? Whichever way you answer on this will most likely determine your position on the meaning of the Gödel thought experiment.
- keiferski 7y ago
  > It's true that I don't lend credibility to supernatural hypotheses, which I'm sure isn't the most popular position to have, I understand that. However, given the fact that everything we can actually observe so far seems to follow natural laws, I posit that the burden of proof is on the dualists to show me something that cannot possibly work without supernatural invention (or, preferrably, directly demonstrate such intervention). I'm not sure what you are defining as 'supernatural' but 'everything that isn't observable' seems like an exceptionally poor definition. Throughout history there have been plenty of unobservable forces which nonetheless turned out to exist. Even today, our scientific knowledge is such a minuscule fraction of the universe; the number of unknown-unknowns is perhaps infinite. Even something like dark matter is still a known-unknown. To make broad statements like "reality/cells are just machines" based on this tiny portion of information seems pretty foolish. The flaws of your position are shown quite well in the "Blind men and the elephant" proverb. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blind_men_and_an_elephant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blind_men_and_an_elephant

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

mikorym 7y ago

> unless you are making an argument for supernatural influences You don't even have to call it supernatural. You can just call it "extracellular".

Udo 7y ago
> You can just call it "extracellular". That's an understatement, as I'm sure we both know. A more apt word would be "extrauniversal".