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Even with a source of randomness the software for a computer has a formal syntax and this formal syntax must correspond to a logical formalism. Even if you incl

Even with a source of randomness the software for a computer has a formal syntax and this formal syntax must correspond to a logical formalism. Even if you include syntax for randomness it still corresponds to a proof because there are categorical semantics for stochastic systems, e.g. https://www.epatters.org/wiki/stats-ml/categorical-probability-theory https://www.epatters.org/wiki/stats-ml/categorical-probabili....

skissane 2y ago
> Even with a source of randomness the software for a computer has a formal syntax and this formal syntax must correspond to a logical formalism. Real world computer software doesn't have a formal syntax. Formal syntax is a model which exists in human minds, and is used by humans to model certain aspects of reality. Real world computer software is a bunch of electrical signals (or stored charges or magnetic domains or whatever) in an electronic system. The electrical signals/charges/etc don't have a "formal syntax". Rather, formal syntax is a tool human minds use to analyse them. By the same argument, atoms have a "formal syntax", since we analyse them with theories of physics (the Standard Model/etc), which is expressed in mathematical notation, for which a formal syntax can be provided. If your argument succeeds in proving that computer programs can't have intentionality, an essentially similar line of argument can be used to prove that human brains can't have intentionality either.
- soloist11 2y ago
  > If your argument succeeds in proving that computer programs can't have intentionality, an essentially similar line of argument can be used to prove that human brains can't have intentionality either. I don't see why that's true. There is no formal theory for biology, the complexity exceeds our capacity for modeling it with formal language but that's not true for computers. The formal theory of computation is why it is possible to have a sequence of operations for making the parts of a computer. It wouldn't be possible to build computers if that was not the case because there would be no way to build a chip fabrication plant without a formal theory. This is not the case for brains and biology in general. There is an irreducible complexity to life and the biosphere.
  - skissane 2y ago
    > There is no formal theory for biology, the complexity exceeds our capacity for modeling it with formal language but that's not true for computers. We don’t know to what extent that’s an inherent property of biology or whether that’s a limitation of current human knowledge. Obviously there are a still an enormous number of facts about biology which we could know but we don’t. Suppose human technological and scientific progress continues indefinitely - in principle, after many millennia (maybe even millions of years), we might get to the point where we know all we ever could know about biology. Can we be sure at that point we might not have a “formal theory” for it? The brain is composed of neurons. Even supposing we knew everything we ever possibly could about the biology of each individual neuron, there still might be many facts about how they interact in an overall neural network which we didn’t know. Similarly, with current artificial networks, we often have a very clear understanding of how the individual computational components work - we can analyse them with those formal theories of which you are fond - but when it comes to what the model weights do, “the complexity exceeds our capacity for modeling” (if the point of the model is to actually explain how the results are produced as opposed to just reproducing them). > There is an irreducible complexity to life and the biosphere. We don’t know that life is irreducibly complex and we don’t know that certain aspects of computers aren’t. Model weights may well be irreducibly complex in that they are too complex for us to explain that they work and how they work even though they obviously do. Conversely, the individual computational elements in the model lack irreducible complexity, but the same is true for individual biological components - the idea that we might one day (even if centuries from now) have a complete understanding at the level of an individual neuron is not inherently implausible, but that wouldn’t mean we’d be anywhere close to a complete understanding of how a network of billions of them works in concert. The latter might indeed be inherently beyond our understanding (“irreducibly complex”) in a way in which the former isn’t
    - soloist11 2y ago
      There are lots of things we don't know and that's why there is no good reason to attribute intentionality to computers and algorithms. That's been my argument the entire time. Unless there is a good argument and proof of intentionality in digital circuits it doesn't make sense to attribute to them properties possessed by living organisms. The people who think they will achieve super human intelligence with computers and software are free to pursue their objective but I am certain it is a futile effort because the ontology and metaphysics which justifies the destruction of the biosphere in order to build more computers is extremely confused about the ultimate meaning of life, in fact, such questions/statements are not even possible to express in a computational ontology and metaphysics. But I'm not a computationalist so someone else can correct my misunderstanding by providing a computational proof of the counter-argument.

skissane 2y ago

> Even with a source of randomness the software for a computer has a formal syntax and this formal syntax must correspond to a logical formalism. Real world computer software doesn't have a formal syntax. Formal syntax is a model which exists in human minds, and is used by humans to model certain aspects of reality. Real world computer software is a bunch of electrical signals (or stored charges or magnetic domains or whatever) in an electronic system. The electrical signals/charges/etc don't have a "formal syntax". Rather, formal syntax is a tool human minds use to analyse them. By the same argument, atoms have a "formal syntax", since we analyse them with theories of physics (the Standard Model/etc), which is expressed in mathematical notation, for which a formal syntax can be provided. If your argument succeeds in proving that computer programs can't have intentionality, an essentially similar line of argument can be used to prove that human brains can't have intentionality either.

soloist11 2y ago
> If your argument succeeds in proving that computer programs can't have intentionality, an essentially similar line of argument can be used to prove that human brains can't have intentionality either. I don't see why that's true. There is no formal theory for biology, the complexity exceeds our capacity for modeling it with formal language but that's not true for computers. The formal theory of computation is why it is possible to have a sequence of operations for making the parts of a computer. It wouldn't be possible to build computers if that was not the case because there would be no way to build a chip fabrication plant without a formal theory. This is not the case for brains and biology in general. There is an irreducible complexity to life and the biosphere.
- skissane 2y ago
  > There is no formal theory for biology, the complexity exceeds our capacity for modeling it with formal language but that's not true for computers. We don’t know to what extent that’s an inherent property of biology or whether that’s a limitation of current human knowledge. Obviously there are a still an enormous number of facts about biology which we could know but we don’t. Suppose human technological and scientific progress continues indefinitely - in principle, after many millennia (maybe even millions of years), we might get to the point where we know all we ever could know about biology. Can we be sure at that point we might not have a “formal theory” for it? The brain is composed of neurons. Even supposing we knew everything we ever possibly could about the biology of each individual neuron, there still might be many facts about how they interact in an overall neural network which we didn’t know. Similarly, with current artificial networks, we often have a very clear understanding of how the individual computational components work - we can analyse them with those formal theories of which you are fond - but when it comes to what the model weights do, “the complexity exceeds our capacity for modeling” (if the point of the model is to actually explain how the results are produced as opposed to just reproducing them). > There is an irreducible complexity to life and the biosphere. We don’t know that life is irreducibly complex and we don’t know that certain aspects of computers aren’t. Model weights may well be irreducibly complex in that they are too complex for us to explain that they work and how they work even though they obviously do. Conversely, the individual computational elements in the model lack irreducible complexity, but the same is true for individual biological components - the idea that we might one day (even if centuries from now) have a complete understanding at the level of an individual neuron is not inherently implausible, but that wouldn’t mean we’d be anywhere close to a complete understanding of how a network of billions of them works in concert. The latter might indeed be inherently beyond our understanding (“irreducibly complex”) in a way in which the former isn’t
  - soloist11 2y ago
    There are lots of things we don't know and that's why there is no good reason to attribute intentionality to computers and algorithms. That's been my argument the entire time. Unless there is a good argument and proof of intentionality in digital circuits it doesn't make sense to attribute to them properties possessed by living organisms. The people who think they will achieve super human intelligence with computers and software are free to pursue their objective but I am certain it is a futile effort because the ontology and metaphysics which justifies the destruction of the biosphere in order to build more computers is extremely confused about the ultimate meaning of life, in fact, such questions/statements are not even possible to express in a computational ontology and metaphysics. But I'm not a computationalist so someone else can correct my misunderstanding by providing a computational proof of the counter-argument.