Mind Emerging Out of Matter via "Complexity"

[The_Exodus]

The notion isn’t vague. A ‘universal negative’ is just an unbounded search. There is no “end point” where we can say we have established the negative. It’s no more vague than the set of positive integers, as a concept. That too is unbounded, you will never count up and reach the end. There is no point at which we can stop searching for a god and say “we have reached the end of our search”. One can always suppose there’s yet some other supernatural way for a god to exist that we haven’t considered or can’t determine yet.

So are you saying that the idea there is a God is a claim which can never be proved in principle, in the same way that one cannot count up to infinity?

touchstone:

As I read your formulation, “something” is the subject in both cases. If there is no designer, there is no ‘something’ to be the subject.

Which amounts to the positive: “this something does not exist.”

touchstone:

Yes, because the null hypothesis doesn’t carry the same burden as the claim “there is a God”.

Practically speaking, this may be correct, but in terms of theoretical reason, what you say above is subjective and arbitrary.

touchstone:

Do you suppose you have the burden of proof to show there is no teapot in orbit beyond Saturn, or that unicorns exist?

I have no idea how I would enter a debate on either topic, to tell the truth.

I do think if someone brought forth reasons for thinking teapots did orbit Saturn or that unicorns existed, I would initially find such claims laughable. But again, that would be my mere conditioned reaction, which springs from everything I’ve heard about the ridiculous nature of such wild claims. Every advance seems ridiculous and incredulous to the person across the table, but what does our “feeling” or “reaction” say, as far as the argument goes?

touchstone:

To say X exists is not at epistemic parity with saying X doesn’t exist, or more precisely, we have no basis to say that X exists.

If you assume that there is no designer, no God, of course. I could just as easily say, “I have no reason to think the evidence I see is the result of unintelligible, random, processes.” In other words, the truth of your claim seems to you to be so intuitively. Have you any reasons for thinking this? I do not see how you avoid bringing your conclusion with you to the table.

touchstone:

My belief can obtain without considering any evidence at all

How your belief obtains has nothing to do with whether or not that belief is true though. You can describe all day long how your mind leans toward certain propositions, but I don’t see how this mental characteristic does anything towards actually substantiating your claim.

touchstone:

If they were, you’d be as much a unicornian as you are a theist.

I maintain that there is compelling evidence for a God, which is why I affirm the proposition that God exists. I see no reasons - beside unsubstantiated practical ones, or weak appeals to authority - for thinking unicorns exist or do not exist, and so I remain agnostic about them.

 

[inocente]

Agreed, and on top of that a lot of Christians are prolific readers of what might be called Christian self-improvement books, they have piles of the things in their houses. Yet every painter knows less is more.

That quite a handy slur on artists, isn’t it? You actually think painters don’t study the hell out of the masters before they improve themselves?

Less is more refers to knowing when to stop. It’s a very important principle for artists - a common fault is to keep adding to and fiddling with a work until it inevitably goes downhill.

 

[The_Exodus]

The lack of evidence for the positive claim of existence for X is a reason – the very best reason! – for thinking X doesn’t exist. Think about it: what would be the very best grounds you can conceive of for believing X does not exist?

If what entailed from the proposition “x exists” was contradictory. As of yet, I have not seen any claims which maintain that the idea of God existing is contradictory – though no doubt many intelligent atheists have said such was the case (in particular, I find Herbert Spencer very compelling.)

Reductio ad absurdum seems to me the best tool of argument. Reduce the proposition to absurdity, and this justifies claiming that x does not exist. If the proposition cannot be reduced to absurdity, then agnosticism seems most reasonable to me.

touchstone:

As above, there is no more solid ground for supposing God (or any X) does not exist.

I would obviously dispute that claim, but I know you are just describing your own reasoning. My point is I cannot see how the above can lead to *justified *disbelief. No doubt it does, in practice, lead to disbelief, but I can’t see how such a belief is strictly rational or reasoned-to.

touchstone:

If all known swans are non-black, and we have no other reasons to suppose black swans exist, we do not have certainty, but the evidence tilts heavily toward the belief that black swans do not exist.

Yet black swans exist, no? This alone proves that supposing that “therefore black swans do not exist” is unjustified. As I said, this serves practical purposes well, but is a bad syllogism and an absurd inference.

touchstone:

Do I just choose “hit” or “stand” randomly, because I’m agnostic as to what the next card from the dealer is? No, you know I don’t. I have a greater confidence, based on the evidence available, that my prospects are better with “stand” than “hit”. I could be wrong, and it could go either way, but it’s not an epistemic tie as to what I should do.

Yes, but all confidence and probability is traced back to some certainty somewhere: the particular cards you have in your hand, for instance – the “evidence that is available.”

I would also dispute the fact that the evidence available is bad or inconclusive, though that is, at the moment, beside the point.

touchstone:

Do you believe in Shiva and Vishnu as real gods? Why not, if not? What would be the basis for dismissing them as real?

I suppose you would have to describe Vishnu, give me his attributes, etc.

Touchstone:

You have no idea if unicorns exist?

I have no idea if the idea of unicorns existing involves a contradiction. Can the proposition “unicorns exist” be reduced to absurdity?

This would involve giving some attributes of such unicorns. Up front, based on my idea of unicorns, I find nothing in principle against the idea of a horse with a horn growing from its nose. But really, I have personally decided to withhold judgment on the issue. I see no reason to give assent either way. If you would like to debate their existence, to be honest, I am not that interested.

 

[davidv]

Less is more refers to knowing when to stop. It’s a very important principle for artists - a common fault is to keep adding to and fiddling with a work until it inevitably goes downhill.

The principle is not a universal one however.
E.g., adding more love to a relationship will never make it down “downhill”.

 

[Micawber]

The principle is not a universal one however.
E.g., adding more love to a relationship will never make it down “downhill”.

It’s not really even true for great artists - most of whom were incorrigible “fiddlers.” Yes, one can also ruin a work in this way - but it’s not the fiddling, per se, that’s the problem.

 

[Charlemagne_II]

inocente

Less is more refers to knowing when to stop. It’s a very important principle for artists - a common fault is to keep adding to and fiddling with a work until it inevitably goes downhill.

---

I can certainly agree with that, as I have been guilty of it myself.

However, I don’t see the analogy to Christians reading Christian literature to improve themselves. Less is more? Only if the reason you are reading less is because the more you read the less you needed to read (the “more” has finally paid off by dramatically improving your spiritual life). If you are still reading more, it’s because you feel the need to improve has not been fulfilled … and you are still searching. Isn’t that one reason why many people come to Catholic Answers?

 

[ronnie_bonigli]

Less is more refers to knowing when to stop. It’s a very important principle for artists - a common fault is to keep adding to and fiddling with a work until it inevitably goes downhill.

inocente, I have to agree with the others, this is just a bizarre stance, that purposely seeking ***less ***knowledge is good.

You appear to have spent some time reading up on philosophy and science, honing your knowledge base, why is it okay to educate yourself in those subjects but shun further knowledge on Christianity?

again, I suspect this is one of those things that may be unique to Spanish Baptists

 

[Touchstone]

We can “play the game” differently. Suppose that there is a huge, “old fashioned” computer, with an incredibly large database. We record trillions and quadrillions of conversations in it. When someone asks a starting question, the machine will search for it, and rattle off the pre-recorded answer. As the questions keep on coming, the machine searches for them in the proper environment, and answers accordingly. Obviously, this machine does not “think” in any way, shape or form. It is nothing more than billions of “parrots”, which rattle off the answers without understanding them.

Right, This this the thrust of Ned Block’s “Blockhead” objection to the Turing Test. I think there’s problems with this objection, for similar reasons I find fauld with Searle’s Chinese Room objection, but I won’t press that here. But at some level, yes, it seems just so much finite automata that it’s hard to reconcile with “thinking”.

The problem is, how do we know this? We cannot examine the internal workings of the machine, we have no access to the algorithm it uses. All we can do is make inferences from the conversation. It becomes a guessing game. The fundamental question is: how do we tell the “emulation” apart from the “real thing”? Is there a difference?

Right. My hunch is that if my career rested on being about to “route out the cyborgs”, via Turing Tests, rather than sniffing dogs like in The Terminator I’d rely heavily on data, not the algorithm, or rather, areas where the data is exquisitely hard to acquire to make the algorithm work; emotional past experiences, category tests, hypothetical marketing ideas, humor, all the sorts of stuff that we must draw on enormous and intricately interwoven social and cultural experiences, which to me, a data professional, sounds orders of magnitude harder to fudge than writing beautiful, trainable algorithms that work like human wiring does.

Really I think I’d have to “grow” my machines to have them pass. Build and deploy them as “children”, and wait years for them to “live” in absorbing and filtering and transforming all those experiences in the way we do.

If that’s what’s needed, wow. A daunting hurdle, that is.

In a similar fashion, let’s take a human actor. A good actor can emulate all sorts of traits and emotions, he can pretend to be happy or sad, or devastated, or what have you. How do we know if those emotions are “real” or “pretended”? We cannot, since we have no access to his “internal” structure either. Even is did, the neural network is different from one individual to the next. Is there any good reason to assume that the displayed behavior is not “real”?

Well, one thing I am expert on, software development-wise is pattern recognition, and in particular facial feature recognition and visual chunking algorithms that underlie them. It’s hard to overstate the human expertise in recognize and “reading” human faces. This is one reason why ‘pure 3D’ character in movies are a long way off as passable – we are just to good at smelling out fakes, and quickly, at that.

In a similar way, I think we are nearly as sophisticated in gauging credibilty in many key areas of our interactions. We are fooled by lies often enough, although willingly, more than we’d like to admit. But we’re finely tuned by our evolved psychology to detect errors, anomolies and misfit reactions, as these alert us to cheaters and subversion, and are thus valuable and time-honed tools.

All of which to say, it’s the “fluffy/fuzzy” stuff that I think will hold AI back a while. The data behind the algorithm will give the machines away long before the algorithm does, I think.

Lem had a great story on the subject: The seveth sally from the Cyberiad - fortunately it is available on-line. Highly recommended for everyone who likes deep philosophical questions.

Since we at it, I also recommed: Non Serviam, another one of Lem’s wonderful creations, which deals with artificial beings, “living” inside a computer, created by a scientist, but approaches the subject from a different point of view.

Cool, will check that out!

-TS

 

[tonyrey]

If you are still reading more, it’s because you feel the need to improve has not been fulfilled … and you are still searching. Isn’t that one reason why many people come to Catholic Answers?

Indeed. They generally come here in search of the truth, not necessarily the truth presented by the Church - although a few have an ulterior motive…

 

[Touchstone]

So are you saying that the idea there is a God is a claim which can never be proved in principle, in the same way that one cannot count up to infinity?

No. I’ve said several times on this forum that a “Zeus coming down from the mountain”, thunderbolts and all, would likely provide all the evidence I need, or any reasonable person would need (it’d be all over CNN and the Beeb and AlJazeera, of course!). Proving god’s existence is in principle not hard at all for any self-respecting god. It’s proving the negative, that no god exists, anywhere, anyhow, that’s intractable, and as practical for us as counting to infinity.

Which amounts to the positive: “this something does not exist.”

“not exist” is the perfect negative claim. There is no more pure a negative claim than “does not exist”. It doesn’t matter if you play with the wording, if you are pointing at “not exist” conceptually, you have the perfect negative proposition, the most negative claim.

There’s a difference between taking initiative from a status quo – saying “God does not exist” when the current state is “God exists” under some considered view, brings with it
the burden of justification for the change: we are thinking X, why no not-X?

But that’s different than the epistemic burden of proof, which can’t be lighter in terms of positive evidence. What is the positive evidence for the non-existence of unicorns? Well, if I run into tribe that believes in unicorns, I would say "have you ever seen one, or killed one, or taken a photo of one? That would be “positive” in pushing toward a change in the status quo, but all I can do is point to the absence of positive evidence, the negation of the basis for their beliefs.

(Assuming unicorns don’t exist, which I now understand to be a controversial question!)

Practically speaking, this may be correct, but in terms of theoretical reason, what you say above is subjective and arbitrary.

No, it’s not. It performs objectively. We experience better performance in our models that adopt this heuristic. Models of reality that being from a null, and work outward from there, based on empirical feedback outperform alternative models. This is nothing more than scientific epistemology. Perhaps there is an undiscovered planet in our solar system. Seems unlikely at this point, but maybe it’s the case. We are corrigible by new evidence, but we don’t list the number of planets in our text books as “don’t know”. What we know of, and can affirm by evidence, we affirm. It’s not arbitrary at all. It’s a basic building block for knowledge that performs under stress.

I have no idea how I would enter a debate on either topic, to tell the truth.

I do think if someone brought forth reasons for thinking teapots did orbit Saturn or that unicorns existed, I would initially find such claims laughable. But again, that would be my mere conditioned reaction, which springs from everything I’ve heard about the ridiculous nature of such wild claims. Every advance seems ridiculous and incredulous to the person across the table, but what does our “feeling” or “reaction” say, as far as the argument goes?

A unicorn seems perfectly plausible, biologically. A horse-like mammal with a single horn. That’s not much further out than black swans when all the swans known round the world at the time are “not-black”.

In any case, I wasn’t really pressing on your reaction as a matter of emotion or demonstration, but as an epistemic concern: what would be your criterion for judging such claims as tenable, or not? It seems if that is unknown to you, it puts theism in a curious spot. What are the grounds for adopting it, then, if we don’t have some underlying principle that gives weight to the proposition “X exists”, or “X does not exist”?

If you assume that there is no designer, no God, of course. I could just as easily say, “I have no reason to think the evidence I see is the result of unintelligible, random, processes.” In other words, the truth of your claim seems to you to be so intuitively. Have you any reasons for thinking this? I do not see how you avoid bringing your conclusion with you to the table.

Intuitively, it definitely occurs to me that there is a Designer. I’m a being with an stance of intentionality, after all. I’m wired to see design… when you are a hammer, everything’s a nail. When you are a designer, everything looks design. So my belief is different, I suggest, a matter of evidence over interest, of my intuition being trumped by reasoning on the evidence. And that is where the asymmetry obtains. We can both come to different conclusions, but my “no Designer” claim hews close to the objective record: we do not have any direct evidence of this designer. We can’t place any “actor” at the scene with the capability of committing the crime, to put in criminal forensic terms. So while I look through my human-evolved psychological lenses at the world, honed to see Designs (and schemes and suspicious conspiracies as well!) everywhere, I have alternative and proven heuristics that signal my intuitions as a first-class misfire, based on the evidence that is out there.

These are not dueling intuitions, in other words. My intution I think is very much like yours. It’s just not reasonable to accept as a “brute truth”.

-TS

 

[Touchstone]

The Exodus:

How your belief obtains has nothing to do with whether or not that belief is true though. You can describe all day long how your mind leans toward certain propositions, but I don’t see how this mental characteristic does anything towards actually substantiating your claim.

The “how” is the only way we can gauge the “if” of a truth proposition. For any claim “X”, we immediately ask: and how do you know X is true? The provenance of a belief is the only basis we have to judge the “truthiness” of it. If you don’t look at how the belief is obtained, what criterion do apply to determine if it is true or not?

I maintain that there is compelling evidence for a God, which is why I affirm the proposition that God exists. I see no reasons - beside unsubstantiated practical ones, or weak appeals to authority - for thinking unicorns exist or do not exist, and so I remain agnostic about them.

Well, there’s levels of agnosticism. Every atheist is an agnostic – ‘atheist’ is just shorthand for “agnostic with higher confidence in the ‘no god’ option”. Saying you’re open to unicorns existing is NOT necessarily to say “I’m 50%-50% on that question”. Unicorns may exist, but it would be an absolute shock to discover they do, rather than a flip of a coin. I suspect you are not at “50-50” parity on the question unicorns either, and your confidence in “no unicorns” over “unicorns” should provide you with the reasoned basis you need to assess the existence of god according to the same principles, should you want.

-TS

 

[levinas12]

Well then, how are electric circuits in the brain related to consciousness? This is not just a modern question. The medievals and, earlier, Aristotle, pointed out the phantasm, i.e., the material modification of the body involved in perception. In Latin, the phantasm was the id quo (that by which we perceive) to be distinguished from the id quod (that which we perceive). According to Aristotle, we are directly aware of the real entity (being), not the phantasm (which remains transparent to the thing itself). In modern philosophy, it’s just the reverse – we are aware only of the phantasm which has now become totally opaque to the thing itself (e.g., private sensations/ideas sealed away in the secret cabinet of the lonely conscious self). Of course, this is not how we experience the world. And it is not how scientists view their task. There are real brain circuits, not just opaque phantasms. Being can disclose itself to us as it is in itself. Yes, disclosure requires a material activity. But the connection is not a physical process (like particle collision or the looping of force fields or even multiverses). It is much more mysterious. Modern science forgets about disclosure and focuses on material processes - in a sense, it forgets about itself as disclosure, it is silent about the gap which opens up a space for Being to show itself. So there is an abyss – not Descartes’ abyss with phantasms blocking the way over the rope bridge - but an abyss nonetheless which we cross every day (maybe without noticing it).

 

[The_Exodus]

“not exist” is the perfect negative claim. There is no more pure a negative claim than “does not exist”.

It seems to me perfectly reasonable to prove a negative. I can prove there is not cat existing in my mailbox, for instance.

touchstone:

we are thinking X, why no not-X?

Why either one?

touchstone:

What is the positive evidence for the non-existence of unicorns? Well, if I run into tribe that believes in unicorns, I would say "have you ever seen one, or killed one, or taken a photo of one? That would be “positive” in pushing toward a change in the status quo, but all I can do is point to the absence of positive evidence, the negation of the basis for their beliefs.

Well, you know quite a few people have claimed to have such evidence of the supernatural - witnessing miracles, etc.

(Assuming unicorns don’t exist, which I now understand to be a controversial question!)

My point had to do with inference and science. Science will never be able to reach metaphysical certainty, because it always rests on induction of specific phenomena. Thus it can only gain a certain level of practical certainty – unlike metaphysics, which can reach speculative certainty with regard to the principle of contradiction, sufficient reason, etc, since these are all judgments made on being as such, not on a particular type of being, as science does.

touchstone:

No, it’s not. It performs objectively.

I have difficulty understanding the relevance regarding how well a scientific worldview – e.g. that unicorns do not exist – performs. How does that have anything to do with the objective truth of the claim? How does that get us one iota closer to knowing if x exists or not?

Just because we have never seen a black swan, does not mean they do not exist. Indeed, experience showed otherwise. Hence the constant “open-endedness” of science. It lacks certainty, and can offer only practical conclusions.

 

[The_Exodus]

The provenance of a belief is the only basis we have to judge the “truthiness” of it.

I agree, but you are giving a reason for “how” the belief is obtained which is not rationally justified. It is only practically so.

If I told you that, whenever I saw the color red, I immediately thought that a nickle appeared in my piggy bank, you would say that you saw no logical inference between the two, but only a certain causal one: i.e., for some reason, when I saw red, my mind happened to believe x.

The way I see it, you are doing the same thing. You have given me a causal account of why you conclude such and such, but it is not rationally justified. “I have never seen a black swan. Therefore, black swans do not exist.” is simply an irrational conclusion, regardless of whether or not that is how your mind happens to be swayed *because *you have not seen a black swan. That “because” is certainly causal, but not rational.

 

[Spock]

Really I think I’d have to “grow” my machines to have them pass. Build and deploy them as “children”, and wait years for them to “live” in absorbing and filtering and transforming all those experiences in the way we do.

If that’s what’s needed, wow. A daunting hurdle, that is.

Most probably this is the way to go.

Well, one thing I am expert on, software development-wise is pattern recognition, and in particular facial feature recognition and visual chunking algorithms that underlie them. It’s hard to overstate the human expertise in recognize and “reading” human faces. This is one reason why ‘pure 3D’ character in movies are a long way off as passable – we are just to good at smelling out fakes, and quickly, at that.

Very true. We still have no idea how the mind can capture a fuzzy photograph and recognize that the picture shows our mother in the age when she was young.

However, we don’t have to know all the details. All we need is to emulate and not recreate. A crude example would be transportation. The vehicles we design have nothing to do with the “Imperial Walkers”, they do not try to recreate the mechanics of walking. The wheels are much superior in speed and reliability compared to simple walking.

I expect that the emulation of higher brain functions will follow a similar path. It will not be a re-creation of the biological method of the biological contraptions. It will preform in a superior way, but the internal algorithm will be totally different and probably incomprehensible for us. It is funny to see that people demand the results today, while the natural algorithms took millions of years to develop. It is simply amazing how far we got in a few decades.

 

[Spock]

p-zombie, even using the philosopher’s short-hand, pretty good.

This is the most important question. How can we decide from the outside that the p-zombie is merely “emulating” the feelings it reports and the human actually has the feelings he displays? It cannot be done. When we see an excellent actor who displays love, stress, sadness, happiness, etc… how can we know that he merely “fools” us? It cannot be done.

The point is that a perfect emulation cannot be distinguished from the real McCoy. If and when an artifical being (made out of silicon or artifically grown biological substance) will display the emotions, we must conclude that the being has those emotions.

 

[ronnie_bonigli]

This is the most important question. How can we decide from the outside that the p-zombie is merely “emulating” the feelings it reports and the human actually has the feelings he displays? It cannot be done. When we see an excellent actor who displays love, stress, sadness, happiness, etc… how can we know that he merely “fools” us? It cannot be done.

The point is that a perfect emulation cannot be distinguished from the real McCoy. If and when an artifical being (made out of silicon or artifically grown biological substance) will display the emotions, we must conclude that the being has those emotions.

The Turing Test is THE MOST OVERRATED so-called indicator of consciousness in an artificial intelligence device, yet the geeks think it’s some holy grail of finding consciousness in a computer. Who cares if someone can’t tell if it’s a computer or a real person on the other end of the phone? What if you have a moron administering the Turing Test and he’s fooled by one of those airline computer systems with a voice that tells you if your plane is delayed? Is that computer now considered “conscious”? Is there a magical cut-off point for the necessary IQ of the guy running the Turing Test? If I worked for IBM and given the funds and time from IBM I could probably create a software program where you could talk to my computer program about cheeseburgers and depending on what you said there’s be one million different subroutines ready to go to give you a canned “natural sounding” response to what you just said about cheeseburgers, but the thing wouldn’t be conscious, just a very clever program with a lot of canned responses. There’s no reason in principle that IBM couldn’t create a computer with a hundred trillion canned responses, which sounded like a “natural” conversation, yet was just a main frame blindly following subroutines.

 

[Spock]

The Turing Test is THE MOST OVERRATED so-called indicator of consciousness in an artificial intelligence device, yet the geeks think it’s some holy grail of finding consciousness in a computer. Who cares if someone can’t tell if it’s a computer or a real person on the other end of the phone? What if you have a moron administering the Turing Test and he’s fooled by one of those airline computer systems with a voice that tells you if your plane is delayed? Is that computer now considered “conscious”? Is there a magical cut-off point for the necessary IQ of the guy running the Turing Test? If I worked for IBM and given the funds and time from IBM I could probably create a software program where you could talk to my computer program about cheeseburgers and depending on what you said there’s be one million different subroutines ready to go to give you a canned “natural sounding” response to what you just said about cheeseburgers, but the thing wouldn’t be conscious, just a very clever program with a lot of canned responses. There’s no reason in principle that IBM couldn’t create a computer with a hundred trillion canned responses, which sounded like a “natural” conversation, yet was just a main frame blindly following subroutines.

This is not disputed. The problem is that you don’t know that you talk to the computer. Your only information is the conversation and you must draw your conclusion drawn based upon it. On what grounds will you decide if you have a human or a computer partner? If you cannot “trap” the computer, you cannot assume that it is a computer.

The Turing test only stipulates a “sufficiently long time”. It can be weeks and months. The person conducting the test is you - not some moron. You can use all the tricks you want to. You can refer back to questions asked a week ago, and use different wording to ask the same question. If the other party can recognize that the question was asked before, you have a very good indication that it actually exhibits “understanding”.

The funny thing is that real humans might be at a disadvantage. Our memory can fade, we might not remember the question asked two weeks ago. The more precise the recollection of the “machine”, the more suspicious you can get, that maybe it is a machine. Not because it is inferior, but because it is superior. Now, isn’t that ironic? Of course you might be talking to someone with perfect memory…

I can only paraphrase Forrest Gump: “human is as human does”.

By the way, I was talking about the zombies, not the Turing test. But the same applies to the zombies.

 

[ronnie_bonigli]

The person conducting the test is you - not some moron.

Thanks

The funny thing is that real humans might be at a disadvantage. Our memory can fade, we might not remember the question asked two weeks ago. The more precise the recollection of the “machine”, the more suspicious you can get, that maybe it is a machine. Not because it is inferior, but because it is superior. Now, isn’t that ironic? Of course you might be talking to someone with perfect memory…

I can only paraphrase Forrest Gump: “human is as human does”.

In the Emperor’s New Mind Penrose brings this up and points out that we could program the computer to give occasional “flawed” answers, so it’s “more human sounding”. With enough time and subroutines IBM could build a system that fools anyone yet was clearly no more conscious than your PC.

 

[kildare]

“Consciousness cannot be accounted for in physical terms. For consciousness is absolutely fundamental. It cannot be accounted for in terms of anything else.”
Erwin Schrodinger

Before taking on the incredibly complex and uncertain task of AI, I would like to ask our esteemed scientists to linearly explain how laminar flow turns into turbulent flows.

The sad fact is that natural systems are non-linear so it AI doesn’t look very promising does it?