TheVat

I think there's a basic problem I alas can't seem to get at with your leveraging underdetermination into impossibility. I will reexamine your paper and try to revisit this later. I respect the work you are doing even if I'm uncertain about your conclusions. Well some algorithms are evolutionary, such as those found in metaheuristics. I think it's worthwhile to be acquainted with genetic algorithms. Not all machine states, even at our present primitive level of tech, are simple execution of a line of code. IOW they do not originate from what IT folks call expert rule systems. (I think Searle was quite right to dismiss such ERS coding as incapable of sentience) https://www.turing.com/kb/genetic-algorithm-applications-in-ml Also, the general structure of an argument against algorithmic paths to conscious cognition seems, again, susceptible to the reductio of: It ultimately disallows the coded signals between living neurons to ever emerge as a conscious process. I.e an absurd position. I keep pointing to this vulnerability in AI consciousness is impossible arguments because I think it's a serious one.

In the old days, ETs were made of Mars-ipan. @Moontanman Good one. Boebert apparently has a different version of events. I sense that her basic life goal is to get as much Bad Girl attention as possible. Probably all started with a distant father whose attention she craved. Or maybe she's just an idiot. One shouldn't underestimate the power of innate stupidity, especially if it likes prancing around with an AK-47.

In an attempt to understand a British definition of unbearable, I looked up average July daily high temperatures for Sheffield UK (it seemed sort of in the middle) and then the US plains town I lived in for most of my childhood. The temps were 70 and 92, respectively. As you may imagine, pool halls or snooker halls without AC were as common as unicorns in Kansas. 😀

The Hard Problem seems more about epistemic limits. Many scientific theories are underdetermined but we still accept that they work. Conscious experience, however, can only be directly known from the "inside" (qualia, subjectivity), so a skeptical stance may always be taken as regards any other being's consciousness - you, the King of England, a sophisticated android that claims to be conscious. There is no scientific determination that a being engineered by natural selection (I'm using design broadly, in the sense that a design, a functional pattern, doesn't have to have a conscious designer but may arise by chance) is conscious, so we won't get that with an artificial consciousness either. Bernoulli's principle is NOT underdetermined, because when we design a wing using it we can witness the plane actually flies (to use @mistermack s example). Any principle of the causal nature of a conscious mind, its volitional states, its intentionality, is likely to be underdetermined. But that isn't equivalent to saying it is impossible for such states to develop in an artificial being. I can't really see that we can reject volition developing in a machine because the designers solely possess volition. We humans, after all, as children develop the ability to form conscious intentions to do things by learning from parents and adults around us. Our wetware is loaded with a software package. We don't then dismiss all our later decisions in life as just software programs installed by them. We don't say I am just executing parental programs and have no agency myself. All volition rests with Mom and Dad. This presupposes that machines can never be developed with cortical architecture, plasticity and heuristics modeled on natural systems and thus be able to innovate and possibly improve their own design. The designed becomes the designer - wasn't this argued earlier in the thread and sort of passed over? Second, again you still seem to deny volition by fiat, as if it is a process that simply cannot be transferred. I think you aren't proving this. Why can't an android "baby" be made, which interacts with its environment and develops desires and volitions regarding its world? IOW, not every state in an advanced AI must be assumed to be programmed. That assumption just creates a strawman version of AI, resting on the thin ice of our present level of technology.

Off top of head... Earth tubes Reflective coatings on roofs IR reflecting films on window glass Shifting home activities and sleeping to basements (I know basements are less common in SoCal and the Southwest due to caliche and similar soil issues) geothermal heat pumps Ceiling fans set to run counterclockwise prepare cold meals to avoid stove usage etc.

And, being a process, is emergent rather than intrinsic. If so, then there is no complete model of a conscious process that would decide against it happening in a sophisticated artificial neural network. When you assert the incomplete nature of models, you reject your own OP thesis. It seems that way to me too.

Supplemental reading on how we are straining our biosphere. https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adh2458 The planetary boundaries framework (1, 2) draws upon Earth system science (3). It identifies nine processes that are critical for maintaining the stability and resilience of Earth system as a whole. All are presently heavily perturbed by human activities. The framework aims to delineate and quantify levels of anthropogenic perturbation that, if respected, would allow Earth to remain in a “Holocene-like” interglacial state. In such a state, global environmental functions and life-support systems remain similar to those experienced over the past ~10,000 years rather than changing into a state without analog in human history. This Holocene period, which began with the end of the last ice age and during which agriculture and modern civilizations evolved, was characterized by relatively stable and warm planetary conditions. Human activities have now brought Earth outside of the Holocene’s window of environmental variability, giving rise to the proposed Anthropocene epoch (4, 5). Planetary-scale environmental forcing by humans continues and individual Earth system components are, to an increasing extent, in disequilibrium in relation to the changing conditions. As a consequence, the post-Holocene Earth is still evolving, and ultimate global environmental conditions remain uncertain. .... Summary, with less technical terminology.... https://apnews.com/article/earth-climate-change-biodiversity-environment-pollution-c8582c3ae0344b5a88cc38cd8e725702

A rather strange turn this thread has taken. I am hoping that toilet seats cannot ever be conscious. Anyway it seems like an argument against emergentism is being made... and its unintended consequence is that humans cannot possess agency, intentionality, or consciousness. 1. Consciousness cannot be accounted for by physical particles obeying mindless equations in accordance with natural laws. (such particle interactions are just machinery, like toilet seats or carburetors or thermostats) 2. Human beings seem to be made up of physical particles. 3. To the best of our knowledge, those particles obey mindless equations, without exception, and without a causal role for higher-order operations. (no downward causation) 4. Therefore, consciousness does not exist. We are all zombies.

There is no logical requirement that a universe without a god must also have no afterlife. One could disbelieve in a god but still believe in some information structure of spacetime, or connectedness throughout a biosphere, which gives continuity to personal consciousness. Or one could believe that personal consciousness is an illusion and all consciousness is connected but not through a deity. There are literally thousands of metaphysical belief systems which require no deity.

I cannot be conscious. In act of human agency, my parents got together and started a bioware program which oversaw the metabolizing of air, hydrocarbons and trace minerals to feed the growth of a self-assembling neural network. The neural net has a sophisticated system of heuristic and self-programming algorithms running in a massively parallel cortical stack architecture with both digital and analog aspects of neural signaling. This assembly is guided by a blind and nonsentient evolutionary process of several billion years duration, and there is clearly no principle which would introduce consciousness or agency into the development process. Further evidence of my lack of consciousness is my constant repetition of primitive survival programs, reproductive programs (even when completely useless towards procreation), and notable lack of novel strategies for obtaining dinner or maintaining wakefulness when input stimuli drop below a critical threshold. I do not possess intrinsic impetus. All my behaviors are programmed by a blind process. My consciousness would be impossible, as my design precludes it!

One thing I liked about Arrival was that the aliens, "heptapods," were not remotely humanoid, or even terrestrial looking.

Not real. I saw a news article on this... https://apnews.com/article/extraterrestrials-ufo-mexico-congress-af7d54fabf3278ef83c39d899c457c76 In 2017, Maussan made similar claims in Peru, and a report by the country’s prosecutor’s office found that the bodies were actually “recently manufactured dolls, which have been covered with a mixture of paper and synthetic glue to simulate the presence of skin.”

Yes, my scenario is unlikely. My point was that unexpected shifts can happen when constitutional guard rails are dismantled. In the West, we see many reports of Modi inflaming anti Muslim sentiment. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/feb/08/narendra-modi-anti-muslim-strongman-global-leader-india-bbc

There is a lot of pop psychology where one is asked to consider one's life, and one's self, as a narrative. This can be useful sometimes, but I think there is also value in not doing this. Some situations require us to observe carefully, not reference past experience or any narrative, adapting and improvising. (easier said than done, I know) Some moments lie outside of narrative. Will try to revisit this later, as this post is a bit vague. (will adapt to this vagueness by... fixing breakfast!)

The difference is less in the religion, more in what is that nation's form of government. Anywhere you have a theocracy, you might have loudspeaker or other methods of making the State religion as dominant and all-encompassing as possible. Nowadays, the most visible theocracies are Islamic so we are more aware of the compulsion there. There are almost no Christian theocracies left, so we aren't as aware what that would be like. Mohdi would like India to be more Hindu, so it could happen that he or someone like him in the Right Wing party could push India towards theocracy and try to suppress Islam and other faiths.

There is also assisted migration (using artificial reef foundations like dropping terra cotta tiles on the bottom) toward a little deeper water where there is more protection from heat. My impression is that this shorter migration might allow some coral species more generational time to adapt to warming and then slowly work their way back towards the original reefs. Some countries don't span enough degrees latitude to develop N/S migration, so the deeper water approach might help.

Agree. Just trying to retrieve valid points from Macks post and lean toward assuming that hyperbole is part of his style. If he really thinks Likud group is worse than Hitler, then I will revise my no-DV policy. I do think Israel government could chart a better course in engaging with neighbors and not condemning everyone as a terrorist. Yes. The gap in democracy lies in the occupied territories where Palestinians have no right to vote, yet their lives are controlled by Israeli government. The US has this problem (though less fraught) with Puerto Rico.

My post, though joking, was a hint. So was Genadys reply. Watch the video very closely.

I have no idea why you were neg voted on this. Before someone neg reps me for asking this, let's consider Mack's assertions. Israel is indeed run by a far right coalition. The Likud Party is a RW populist and Zionist party. This is public record. And billions of dollars in US support do indeed provide some check on the party's more radical proposals. And they do indeed want to compromise the supreme courts independence from the executive and power to render decisions through a plan thinly veiled as "reform." And they have, by almost any standards, promoted a fascist shift in government and continued herding Palestinian Arabs off of their lands, shoving them into narrow and crowded strips of land and depriving them of freedoms, fundamental rights and economic access. TWIMC: Maybe knock off the neg reps and just debate the facts?

It is sleepy.

Might do better switching to to the Penrose process, which is much more efficient conversion than proton-proton chain. First, you get a properly sized black hole... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penrose_process

This may be a shortcut?

I have passed your unique mythology of numbers on to Mr Von Daniken. Though most believe it was Cardano who first proposed complex numbers, there is evidence that ancient alien astronauts may have shown them to Ezekiel.

As I recall in the novel Callisto and Ganymede develop mild terrestrial climates which makes human colonization easier. Europa has sentient aquatic life, so the monolith makers ban humans from going there. I have never factchecked the science for all this, but Clarke was pretty good about that, so it may be possible to terraform some Jovian moons if Jupiter becomes a star-like primary.