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Organisms are mechanistic, there's nothing "not mechanistic" about the mind. Its insane to suppose that somatosensory representation building, which requires o

Organisms are mechanistic, there's nothing "not mechanistic" about the mind. Its insane to suppose that somatosensory representation building, which requires organic neruoplasticity to be connected to the organically adaptive neuromotor system, etc. etc. etc. can just be instantiated in a bit of sand. This is deeply mystical, pseudoscience. You're credulously throwing away any kind of empirical analysis of the world in terms of it's properties and their mechanisms for the deeply mystical view that, unique in amongst all properties of the world, consciousness needs no empirical analysis of the properties of the systems which have it. Of gold we ask: what makes it shine; of fire: what makes it hot.. and so on for everything empirical in the world. But with the mind we must stop! No! No! do not do any science! please that might mean we can't be scammed by a VC out of our investment money; i cannot babble endlessly about scifi star treck episodes! no no! please do not rob me of my scifi religion! please please, do not ruin commander data for me! Well there is no commander data. And the properties of gold are not those of sand, nor those of animals. And just as no bit of silicon will be trasumted into gold by the running of an NN on its electric field; likewise, no bit of silicon will desire or wish or conceive of anything. We are biological organisms; we do not have souls, even if in your religion, the soul is "a pattern". Your consciousness will not be uploaded; commander data will never visit; and your local VC shyster is on a stock manipulation grift to bamboozle you out of money.

FrustratedMonky 3y ago
Really. I'm not sure what you are getting at. I think from your last few sentences. We actually agree, and maybe just miss-understanding. I'm agreeing, to the mechanistic nature. Nothing Mystical. Just physical world. No souls. I was trying to get you to see the mechanistic nature of mind, then you tell me to stop being Mystical? You think that generating a mind from sand is 'mystical'. "just be instantiated in a bit of sand?" But don't seem to realize Carbon, is also just a basic element. So why is any reasoning based from Carbon, Non-mystical? But Silicon is? Then some other sentences seem to be </sarcasm>. But in these discussions it is hard to tell when someone is being sarcastic or making a point. Like this sentence:: "We are biological organisms; we do not have souls, even if in your religion, the soul is "a pattern". Your consciousness will not be uploaded; commander data will never visit; and your local VC shyster is on a stock manipulation grift to bamboozle you out of money." I totally agree, no soul, it is a pattern. That does not mean we can't create a 'mind' from silicon, that is based on a pattern, and be equivalent in functionality. I also agree, we will never be uploaded. I don't think we'll ever be able to measure the human neurons to a degree to allow this. But that doesn't mean we'll never build a NN with as many connections as a human brain has, and that it wont also be able to have a 'pattern' of self. And, there is a lot of VC Shysters out there, doesn't mean a lot of real progress is not being made.
- mjburgess 3y ago
  You think that reality is a pattern, and that properties obtain from configurations. Eg., that, of course, we can transmute gold into lead. Alchemy. The problem with this is that the patterns have semantics, a pattern of wood does not have the same properties as a pattern of lead. The pattern isnt the important bit. If you want to turn hydrogen into lead you first have to fire up a star and wait a very very long time, and as protons and electrons bundle up in every more complex configurations interactions between them come to dominate their properties... so that lead is nothing at all like hydrogen. What is the only known element that enables "weak polymerisation", ie., adaptive self-replication at the molecular level: carbon. What are the properties of all intelligent systems known to science? They're organic. Why? This is no coincidence. In order to think, you have to grow -- self-replicate at every level from the cellular to organs, tissues... the material placitity of the machine that holds your thoughts has to itself adapt its structure to that of your body (the device which explores the world). Now, should we expect hydrogen to do that? No. Silicon? No. Why would we? Ah, only because we loath the idea of being apes, and of oozing.. our biological disgust instincts tell us to run far away from it. How more beautiful if, like in genesis, we can fashion man out of clay and breath in life. but alas, we arent clay; nor will clay ever think or desire or want.. clay cannot take impressions of the world without becoming an impression. It cannot adapt.
  - FrustratedMonky 3y ago
    "The pattern isn't the important bit." I was taking pattern as the electrical impulses in the brain. Which I would say is everything when it comes to thought and thinking. Human Neurons are just Calcium Voltage potentials. Just like weights in a NN. Yes. The human brain neurons are far more complicated than that. There is a lot of chemical soup of hormones and modulators that factor into the voltage potentials. What you eat can impact gut, that impacts how many neurotransmitters are produced, that impact when a neuron fires, that is experienced as a mood, etc.... SO yes, the human brain cannot be separated from the body. There is some entity, brain+body. And it so happens that it is made from Carbon . And we call things based on Carbon to be 'organic' and it can re-produce so we call it 'alive'. These are just definitions, that we have assigned to things. Just like a CPU can't be removed from it's power supply and keep working. There is a 'system' and it has 'parts'. That doesn't mean, we can't model a brain to a degree close enough that you couldn't tell an AI and Human apart. I'm just saying, that when we do reach that point, then we'll be forced to realize the AI also has an internal subject experience, and is 'conscious', or we'll have to acknowledge that humans do not. It will be either/or. Humans and AI are both conscious, have internal subjective experience. or Neither do. And if neither do, then humans really are just hallucinating their inner experience, but not in control. Humans are also deterministic. Nothing special. I see from your other posts, that you seem to be putting a lot of faith in Chaos Theory or Quantum Mechanics as some underlying explanation. To give humans the special sauce. I'd just say, introducing randomness, does not make a system un-determined. That there is a lot of randomness in our 'chaotic' body, does not imbue it with agency. Randomness != Agency. Edit: I like the clay example. I'd say that is like the NN that goes through training, then released, but the model is static. Doesn't get updated. Eventually these AI's will learn as they go and be continually updating.
naasking 3y ago
> Its insane to suppose that somatosensory representation building, which requires organic neruoplasticity to be connected to the organically adaptive neuromotor system, etc. etc. etc. can just be instantiated in a bit of sand. Why? That's just an assertion, not an argument. All of those big words and sophisticated concepts you used all reduce to field interactions that we've mostly captured mathematically. Unless you're imbuing these things with some magical essence that can't be observed, but then who's doing the pseudoscience?
- mjburgess 3y ago
  I'm just driven mad by how people thinking physical objects with specific properties is "magic", but reducing reality down to abstract platonic mathematical forms is "science". This is the opposite. Gold isnt lead. Lead isnt wood. Cells are not bits of metal. Bits of metal do not polymerise. Bits of sand do not form weak covalent bonds... It's kinda exhausting that this mathematical superstition is so prevalent in people who otherwise believe they are somehow anti magical thinking. There is no more magical thinking in supposing that you can ignore reality, describe it in a formula, reinterpet that formula against some other reality, and it'll all work out. As if, "2 + 2 = 4" means the same thing when it's "2 drivers + 2 drivers = 4 deaths" vs. "2 cookies + 2 cookies = 4 happy children" The idea that reality is essentially mathematical and not essentially physical is pythagorean magical thinking. Science says the opposite. All the mathematics in explanatory scientific laws are just paraphrases of descriptions of the physical properties of systems. None of it is actually mathematics. Physics does not study "2". It studies there being earth and the sun and a force between them, summarised as "2 masses" etc.
  - naasking 3y ago
    > Gold isnt lead. Lead isnt wood. Cells are not bits of metal. Bits of metal do not polymerise. Bits of sand do not form weak covalent bonds... That's not the argument. Both gold and lead are aggregates of fields. They don't have the same macroscopic properties but they do have the same microscopic properties (or attoscopic if you want to nitpick). > The idea that reality is essentially mathematical and not essentially physical is pythagorean magical thinking. Science says the opposite. Science says no such thing, and nobody is saying that reality is not physical. Those who adopt a mathematical universe hypothesis, or the like, say that reality is physical but that the physical is a subset of the mathematical. > Physics does not study "2". It studies there being earth and the sun and a force between them, summarised as "2 masses" etc. Mathematics is the study of structure. Physics is studying the structure of reality. There is therefore an obvious and inescapable link between mathematics and physics that you are simply not going to refute by repeatedly asserting that mathematical structures have nothing to do with physics. Of course any structures that have a formal correspondence have important equivalences, because that's literally what formal correspondence means.

FrustratedMonky 3y ago

Really. I'm not sure what you are getting at. I think from your last few sentences. We actually agree, and maybe just miss-understanding. I'm agreeing, to the mechanistic nature. Nothing Mystical. Just physical world. No souls. I was trying to get you to see the mechanistic nature of mind, then you tell me to stop being Mystical? You think that generating a mind from sand is 'mystical'. "just be instantiated in a bit of sand?" But don't seem to realize Carbon, is also just a basic element. So why is any reasoning based from Carbon, Non-mystical? But Silicon is? Then some other sentences seem to be </sarcasm>. But in these discussions it is hard to tell when someone is being sarcastic or making a point. Like this sentence:: "We are biological organisms; we do not have souls, even if in your religion, the soul is "a pattern". Your consciousness will not be uploaded; commander data will never visit; and your local VC shyster is on a stock manipulation grift to bamboozle you out of money." I totally agree, no soul, it is a pattern. That does not mean we can't create a 'mind' from silicon, that is based on a pattern, and be equivalent in functionality. I also agree, we will never be uploaded. I don't think we'll ever be able to measure the human neurons to a degree to allow this. But that doesn't mean we'll never build a NN with as many connections as a human brain has, and that it wont also be able to have a 'pattern' of self. And, there is a lot of VC Shysters out there, doesn't mean a lot of real progress is not being made.

mjburgess 3y ago
You think that reality is a pattern, and that properties obtain from configurations. Eg., that, of course, we can transmute gold into lead. Alchemy. The problem with this is that the patterns have semantics, a pattern of wood does not have the same properties as a pattern of lead. The pattern isnt the important bit. If you want to turn hydrogen into lead you first have to fire up a star and wait a very very long time, and as protons and electrons bundle up in every more complex configurations interactions between them come to dominate their properties... so that lead is nothing at all like hydrogen. What is the only known element that enables "weak polymerisation", ie., adaptive self-replication at the molecular level: carbon. What are the properties of all intelligent systems known to science? They're organic. Why? This is no coincidence. In order to think, you have to grow -- self-replicate at every level from the cellular to organs, tissues... the material placitity of the machine that holds your thoughts has to itself adapt its structure to that of your body (the device which explores the world). Now, should we expect hydrogen to do that? No. Silicon? No. Why would we? Ah, only because we loath the idea of being apes, and of oozing.. our biological disgust instincts tell us to run far away from it. How more beautiful if, like in genesis, we can fashion man out of clay and breath in life. but alas, we arent clay; nor will clay ever think or desire or want.. clay cannot take impressions of the world without becoming an impression. It cannot adapt.
- FrustratedMonky 3y ago
  "The pattern isn't the important bit." I was taking pattern as the electrical impulses in the brain. Which I would say is everything when it comes to thought and thinking. Human Neurons are just Calcium Voltage potentials. Just like weights in a NN. Yes. The human brain neurons are far more complicated than that. There is a lot of chemical soup of hormones and modulators that factor into the voltage potentials. What you eat can impact gut, that impacts how many neurotransmitters are produced, that impact when a neuron fires, that is experienced as a mood, etc.... SO yes, the human brain cannot be separated from the body. There is some entity, brain+body. And it so happens that it is made from Carbon . And we call things based on Carbon to be 'organic' and it can re-produce so we call it 'alive'. These are just definitions, that we have assigned to things. Just like a CPU can't be removed from it's power supply and keep working. There is a 'system' and it has 'parts'. That doesn't mean, we can't model a brain to a degree close enough that you couldn't tell an AI and Human apart. I'm just saying, that when we do reach that point, then we'll be forced to realize the AI also has an internal subject experience, and is 'conscious', or we'll have to acknowledge that humans do not. It will be either/or. Humans and AI are both conscious, have internal subjective experience. or Neither do. And if neither do, then humans really are just hallucinating their inner experience, but not in control. Humans are also deterministic. Nothing special. I see from your other posts, that you seem to be putting a lot of faith in Chaos Theory or Quantum Mechanics as some underlying explanation. To give humans the special sauce. I'd just say, introducing randomness, does not make a system un-determined. That there is a lot of randomness in our 'chaotic' body, does not imbue it with agency. Randomness != Agency. Edit: I like the clay example. I'd say that is like the NN that goes through training, then released, but the model is static. Doesn't get updated. Eventually these AI's will learn as they go and be continually updating.

naasking 3y ago

> Its insane to suppose that somatosensory representation building, which requires organic neruoplasticity to be connected to the organically adaptive neuromotor system, etc. etc. etc. can just be instantiated in a bit of sand. Why? That's just an assertion, not an argument. All of those big words and sophisticated concepts you used all reduce to field interactions that we've mostly captured mathematically. Unless you're imbuing these things with some magical essence that can't be observed, but then who's doing the pseudoscience?

mjburgess 3y ago
I'm just driven mad by how people thinking physical objects with specific properties is "magic", but reducing reality down to abstract platonic mathematical forms is "science". This is the opposite. Gold isnt lead. Lead isnt wood. Cells are not bits of metal. Bits of metal do not polymerise. Bits of sand do not form weak covalent bonds... It's kinda exhausting that this mathematical superstition is so prevalent in people who otherwise believe they are somehow anti magical thinking. There is no more magical thinking in supposing that you can ignore reality, describe it in a formula, reinterpet that formula against some other reality, and it'll all work out. As if, "2 + 2 = 4" means the same thing when it's "2 drivers + 2 drivers = 4 deaths" vs. "2 cookies + 2 cookies = 4 happy children" The idea that reality is essentially mathematical and not essentially physical is pythagorean magical thinking. Science says the opposite. All the mathematics in explanatory scientific laws are just paraphrases of descriptions of the physical properties of systems. None of it is actually mathematics. Physics does not study "2". It studies there being earth and the sun and a force between them, summarised as "2 masses" etc.
- naasking 3y ago
  > Gold isnt lead. Lead isnt wood. Cells are not bits of metal. Bits of metal do not polymerise. Bits of sand do not form weak covalent bonds... That's not the argument. Both gold and lead are aggregates of fields. They don't have the same macroscopic properties but they do have the same microscopic properties (or attoscopic if you want to nitpick). > The idea that reality is essentially mathematical and not essentially physical is pythagorean magical thinking. Science says the opposite. Science says no such thing, and nobody is saying that reality is not physical. Those who adopt a mathematical universe hypothesis, or the like, say that reality is physical but that the physical is a subset of the mathematical. > Physics does not study "2". It studies there being earth and the sun and a force between them, summarised as "2 masses" etc. Mathematics is the study of structure. Physics is studying the structure of reality. There is therefore an obvious and inescapable link between mathematics and physics that you are simply not going to refute by repeatedly asserting that mathematical structures have nothing to do with physics. Of course any structures that have a formal correspondence have important equivalences, because that's literally what formal correspondence means.