Chance is just another way to quantify probability.
You have a 1 in 2 chance of getting heads in a coin toss for example. — m-theory

That is just going round in circles. You could just as easily have written:

"Probability is just another way to quantify chance. You have 0.5 probability of getting heads in a coin toss.."

But of course, probability and chance has nothing to do with physics of the coin toss - it is a fully deterministic process.

That the laws of nature are not deterministic and exact predictions are never going to be possible. — m-theory

Really? There has only ever been one stochastic physical theory - quantum mechanics in it's mid-20th century state-vector-collapse form.

Panpsychists essentially say the dualism dissolves in the fact that matter is experiential. — schopenhauer1

If matter has subjectivity, then why don't animals have it?

I'm not trying to separate philosophy and science per se, merely point out that there seems to be more than one method of understanding the world. — darthbarracuda

But science and philosophy are different because their methods are different. Specifically, philosophy is not falsifiable. Hasn't this all been settled, and can't we just move on?

In other words, what I'm trying to access here is a systematic understanding of how we come to understand the world in the first place. — darthbarracuda

The method by which we reach our understanding of the world has been fully analyzed. Popper has a lot to say about this.

I've always understood the use of "chance" when talking about evolution as meaning the same thing as "random", as in mutations occur randomly. But "chance" and "random" are simply a reflection of a gap in our knowledge of how the mutations actually occurred. — Harry Hindu

I've pointed out on more than one occasion that Neo-Darwinism does not require ill-defined or imaginary processes to support its thesis. It requires neither chance nor randomness, whatever you might think you mean by those concepts.

What is required is this: The Central Dogma of Molecular Biology

The mechanism of variation is irrelevant, so long as the DOGMA is respected.

A biological explanation - but at the cost of the devaluing of reason. — Wayfarer

Actually No! The modern theory of evolution is not biological. Replicators subject to variation and selection can is not a biology-specific theory.

Reason no longer determines the guiding principles of our own lives, but is subordinated to the ends it can achieve. In other words, reason is instumentalized. — Wayfarer

Reason does not determine anything. Reason consists of how ideas are treated, not how they are determined or justified.

In traditional theology and metaphysics, the natural was largely conceived as the evil, and the spiritual or supernatural as the good. — Wayfarer

And you are complaining about the status of reason??!!

But one of the things that 'Darwinism' did, was cast doubt on the idea of reason in that classical sense, — Wayfarer

I find that a very odd point of view. What Darwinism has actually done is provide an explanation where there was none. The reason for biodiversity has been discovered!

But I notice the phrase "armed suspect" and wonder what makes an armed person into a suspect in the circumstance where being armed is not itself suspicious? — unenlightened

Perhaps when they have a weapon in their hand and are pointing it at you?

This is uncomfortable viewing:

Mind is only found in living organic matter therefor only living organic matter can have a mind.
That is an unasailable argument in that it defines the term mind to the exclusion of inorganic matter.
But that this definition is by necessity the only valid theory of the mind is not simply a resolved matter in philosophy. — m-theory

But it is the sort of "unasailable" argument that will be forgotten when we create an artificial mind.

If you are wondering how we can know that we have created a mind, we will know because we will have understood the mind well enough to program it in the first place.

It does seem like I would tend to do that in this example..
. — m-theory

Why not do it then. Derive a "tends-to" from a "does". You will be famous!

I was thinking something more like "tends to" as in "does more so than does not." — m-theory

All you need to do is derive a "tends-to" from a "does". Go ahead!

True. We do have to face the fact that in reality some things are more likely to happen than other things. And it may be that is by design but knowing why that is the design is no simple matter to prove if that is what you believe. — m-theory

You can't derive an ought from an is. You can't derive a "tends-to" from a "does".

Or it could be a nice example of a poorly constructed artifact.
But I will assume the fault lies with me...and hope you can forgive that. — m-theory

You are completely missing the point. It is impossible to transfer knowledge from one mind to another. Minds construct new knowledge from artefacts, problem-situations, background knowledge, by a fundamentally creative ability.

So, the creator of the artefact, and the interpreter of the artefact, are engaged in an inter-subjective dialogue. Each person is conjecturing theories about what each other means or interprets. Perfection and justification are impossible.

Notice that subjectivity has already appeared! AlphaGo has no subjectivity.

It could be that the brains software became more efficient to and that it is not strictly a hardware leap. — m-theory

AlphaGo can be as efficient as it likes. It will always fail the Chinese Room. It cannot create the knowledge that it is playing Go!

If we had a thinking machine that interacted with humans there is no reason to assume it would not be able to communicate with the conventions humans use. — m-theory

Nice example of misunderstanding a cultural aretfact.

I am not so sure.
It could be that the brains software became more efficient to and that it is not strictly a hardware leap. — m-theory

And again it seems. The leap to computational universality (the hardware problem) is fully understood. The leap to universal explainer (the software problem) is not understood.

That is the bottom up approach.
We are reverse engineering from the top down as you pointed out.
And I believe that somewhere in the middle is where the mind breakthrough will happen. — m-theory

So you hope to discover the software by examining the hardware? The trouble is, since we don't know what we're looking for, how could we recognise it?

Back to epistemology. If we want to create an AGI then the problem of how to create knowledge will have to be solved. You can't transfer knowledge from one mind to another. Instead one mind creates cultural artefacts, from which the other mind discerns something not contained within the artefact - its meaning. As Karl Popper said, "It is impossible to speak in such a way that you cannot be misunderstood. This by the way, dispenses with the Chinese Room.

It has been suggested that the human brain evolved the way it did in order to facilitate efficient knowledge transfer. Humans are unique (i.e. they are the last remaining species) in that they interpret meaning and intention - i.e. they create knowledge from artefacts and behaviours.

Now, here's the amazing thing if this account of our evolutionary history is true: once you can create knowledge, there is no stopping you. This is a leap to universality. Once you are an explainer you are automatically a universal explainer because the same mechanisms are involved.

Prior to the leap to universal explainer, there must have been another leap - the leap to computational universality in the human brain. This is a hardware problem, which we have long solved!

I am seeking to explore the philosophical implications of what it means if general purpose A.I. can learn to solve any problem a human might solve. — m-theory

I apologise if I didn't make my position abundantly clear: an Artificial General Intelligence would *be* a person. It could certainly be endowed with capabilities far beyond humans, but whether one of those is problem solving or "growth of knowledge" can't be understood until we humans solve that puzzle ourselves.

Take for the sake of argument that knowledge grows via the Popperian paradigm (if you'll pardon the phrase). i.e. Popper's epistemology is correct. There are two parts to this: the Logic of Scientific Discovery, and the mysterious "conjecture". I'm not convinced that the Logic can be performed by a non self-aware entity, if it could, then why has no one programmed it?

AlphaGo does something very interesting - it conjectures. However, the conjectures it makes are nothing more than random trials. There is no explanatory reason for them, in fact, there is no explanatory structure beyond the human-encoded fitness function. That is why it took 150,000 games to train it up to amateur standard and 3,000,000 other games to get it to beat the 2nd best human.

So if you were to create an actual artificial intelligence, how would you create the unconscious? How would you write a specification for it? 'The conscious mind' would be a big enough challenge, I suspect 'the unconscious' would be orders of magnitude larger, and impossible to specify, for obvious reasons, if you think about it. — Wayfarer

The unconscious is easy. We have most of what is necessary in place already - databases, super fast computers, and of course programs like AlphaGo which can be trained to become expert at anything, much like our cerebellum.

Humans have augmented their minds with unconscious tools e.g. pencils and paper, and as a matter of fact, our conscious mind has no idea how the mechanism of e.g. memory retrieval.

I think I gave a list earlier of some of the key attributes of a mind: consciousness, creativity, qualia, self-awareness. Consciousness, if you take that to mean what we lose when we are under anaesthetic, may be trivial. As for the rest, how can we possibly program them when we don't understand them?

My first instinct is to say that there is no barrier in principle to the creation of artificial persons, or agentive rational beings — jamalrob

You don't need instinct, you just need to point to the physical law that forbids the creation of artificial people - there isn't one!

However, the notion that after installing TensorFlow on your laptop, you have a person in there, is only slightly less hilarious than the idea that if you run it on multiple parallel processors, you have a society.

Simply calling undecidability nonphysical does not make that problem go away though, you are still left with the problem of whether or not the mind is decidable or undecidable. — m-theory

But all you need to do (on the 3rd time of asking) is to demonstrate that a physical theory is undecidable. How many opportunities do you need to present a counter-example?

The fact that the class of functions necessary for describing all of Reality is an infinitesimal subset of all possible functions, is not only amazing, but is a consequence of the laws of physics.

And again I will remind you that if you believe you can answer the question "do I have a mind/consciousness" correctly with a yes or no everytime you ask then at a fundamental level the consequence is that the mind/consciousness is something that is decidable. — m-theory

Thanks for the reminder. Since I have explained that no problem in physics is undecidable, and that I have detailed some of the properties expected from a mind, do you really think I would pretend the question of consciousness-or-not is undecidable?

To repeat: It is utterly improbable that, in trying to solve the computational problem "how to win at Go" will also solve the hard problem. Of course, it is possible that in trying to solve the problem "how to win at space-invaders" the problem of qualia is also solved, but what use is that? If we have solved the problem of qualia without an explanatory theory of qualia, then how could we ever learn of our inexplicable success?

Despite the complete absence of a theory of why a computer program is conscious, you wish me to provide a refutation of a non-existent theory. By the way, there is no orbiting invisible teapot.

Undecidability is an important discovery about mathematics and mechanical systems. — m-theory

The reason you cannot give an example of an undecidable problem in physics is because there aren't any. The reason for that, is that only the class of computable functions (and computable numbers) is required to express any physical law, or any problem in physics. No physical process relies on the the unphysical aspects of undecidability, which either involve the liar paradox or infinity.

It just so happens that the famous Bekenstien Bound guarantees that Reality is a finite-state machine. Every calculation which you have carried out, every calculation any computer has carried out, and any calculation that any finite-state machine ever will carry out is expressible in Presburger arithmetic.

I believe the deepmind system does posses qualia, creativity and free will, and even some level of consciousness. — m-theory

As for your fantasy that any current computer program experiences qualia etc, well you had better be wrong. If you are not, then what exists is an artificial person who can suffer and who should be protected by rights like the rest of us.

Fortunately, you have just been taken in by the hype, florid language and some software jargon.

The halting problem has no mechanical or physical solution.
It cannot be decided by any physical means.
Here is a list of more. — m-theory

There are no physics problems in your list. The undecidable problems of mathematics are irrelevant to physics, as are the non-computable functions and non-computable numbers. None is required to describe reality.

Deepmind experiences things and forms a concept of its own existence as an acting agent within an environment that responds to the actions that deepmind performs. — m-theory

That is simply a fantasy. But you seem to have decided the undecidable problem nevertheless.

Yes there is.
Perhaps you failed to understand.
Algorithms are mechanical physical things.
They are not just mere abstractions...many problems exist for which there is no mechanical solution and can be no mechanical solution or algorithm.
This statement is very uninformed.
Any undecidable problem is literally a physically undecidable problem. — m-theory

So, it should be no problem for you to give a few examples of these undecidable problems in physics?

I believe the deepmind system does posses qualia, creativity and free will, and even some level of consciousness. — m-theory

Why do you believe the computer program possesses qualia?

The question is whether the mind is an algorithm, meaning the human mind, which m-theory is suggesting might be one of the philosophical implications. — jamalrob

What else could a mind possibly be? The mind is software.

Either we can decide what a mind is or the question of what a mind actually is will be an undecidable problem. — m-theory

But there is no such thing as an undecidable problem in physics. It is inconceivable that a "mind" could be programmed by accident i.e. that's not going to happen until we understand what constitutes a mind.

Properties that the artificial mind will possess include consciousness, qualia, creativity, and dare I say it, free will. AlphaGo possesses none of these. It is not a mind.

The computational theory of mind is one philosophical view among many, and has been heavily critized. If it's your position then cool, but don't pretend it's not a philosophical issue. — jamalrob

The program running on the laptop or the supercomputer is an algorithm. Not only are "program" and "algorithm" synonymous, but it cannot be anything but an algorithm!

The interesting thing to me is that this breakthrough was possible because the mind was modeled as though it were an algorithm. — m-theory

It's certainly an algorithm (what else could it be?) but to call the algorithm a "mind" is not very helpful, because it isn't one.

Claiming that non-conscious objects have a purpose is, in English, an abuse of language. For Aristotle you can get away with it, since "purpose" can be conflated with "cause" and for Aristotle's first three causes the dumb effects of pure deterministic effects came into play. For his fourth cause you get a telos, which has to include a conscious purpose (unless you believe in god - then every thing and all cause is purposeful). — charleton

Sure, but if you are going to abuse the language in that way, you are compelled to admit that the non-conscious entity also possesses the means to achieve that purpose. Knowledge is central to those means.

You might claim that there is no purpose to a genome, or you might abuse the language and claim that the purpose of a genome is replication. I'm not sure which one of those statements is closer to the truth. The genome certainly possesses the attribute that, in the appropriate environment, it will cause itself to be copied. Furthermore, if the genome is better at copying itself in its niche than variants of it, it will cause itself to become dominant.

If you accept the Popperian conception of knowledge, that it is a type of information that, once instantiated on an appropriate environment, causes itself to remain so, then the genome certainly possesses knowledge if not purpose.

I was just emphasizing the point that it is not nonsense to talk about non-conscious things behaving purposefully, and therefore intentionally. — Metaphysician Undercover

If non-conscious entities behave purposefully, then they must also possess the knowledge of how to achieve their purpose.

Nothing is caused by abstract entities. — TheWillowOfDarkness

Speaks the arch-reductionist! This is patently false. People are abstractions and we cause lots of things. We alter physical reality to comply with our cultural preferences. You cannot explain why a collection of copper atoms sit in Trafalgar square without reference to Winston Churchill, his cultural significance, historical events such as war and causes of war, and that in our society we like to make bronze statues of important people.

The materialist reductionist is only dealing with the hangover of the immaterialist reductionist. Their inability to take consciousness seriously is because they've brought with them the idea of "the cause outside nature." The reason they deny consciousness is becasue they think it's impossible for a cause of consciousness to be within nature. In there minds, they have to exclude consciousness for material causality to make any sense. Like the immaterialist, they are too busy caught up in the worship of the order "consciousness is outside the material" to understand the world that's in front of them. — TheWillowOfDarkness

This seems like a Straw Man to me. I have never encountered a physicalist (normally in the guise of a scientist) who denies the existence and causal power of abstractions. At the foundation of biology there is a theory of replicators, variation and selection, all of which are abstract. Information theory is explicitly counterfactual and computation is all about abstractions.

It is unsurprising therefore that physicalists believe that since life is caused by abstract entities, then so is consciousness. i.e. consciousness (whatever you mean by that) is a software feature.

Therefore physicalists are forced to conclude that artificial life is possible as are artificial minds, which would, of course, be artificial people. It seems rare to have a testable metaphysics, which seems a compelling reason to adopt it if only for methodological reasons.

Reductionism has been an extremely successful methodology in physics, but few physicists actually commit the error of believing that only explanations in terms of the laws of physics can be fundamental.

The more I think about it, it seems to me that asymmetry and entropy are the same. — John

Clearly you are wrong about this as black-holes demonstrate. Also, @apokrisis pointed out, the final state of the universe may indeed be a perfectly symmetrical photon sea and the state of ultimate entropy.

Since you claimed that planets and stars "have more entropy than an evenly distributed gas", and that
" the most symmetrical objects have the highest entropy", it would seem that you would be committed to the claim that planets and stars possess more symmetry than " an evenly distributed gas". — John

It is a well known physical fact that gravitational clumping is associated with an increase in entropy, and a loss of symmetry. So, disorder must be increasing as stars and planets form. Ar this matter is accreted into a black hole, disorder again increases, but this time the symmetry increases.

Asymmetry and entropy don't appear to be the same.

Why should "planets and stars and other "gravitational clumping"" be thought to possess more symmetry than "an evenly distributed gas". — John

They clearly don't. What's your point?

Yes, the title of the book, betrays the problem I referred to, assuming that time has a physical basis. — Metaphysician Undercover

Sure, that's why experiments like this work

https://medium.com/the-physics-arxiv-blog/quantum-experiment-shows-how-time-emerges-from-entanglement-d5d3dc850933#.uty0d36wp

Modern science really has no understanding of time, and other non-physical, or immaterial things — Metaphysician Undercover

You could start with this book:

The Physical Basis of the Direction of Time

If you don't want to read the whole thing:

http://www.time-direction.de/

If you mean to say that I still don't really grasp how order necessarily evolves out of chaos, and am therefore somewhat skeptical of the idea, then yeah... — John

As I said, planets and stars and other "gravitational clumping" in Reality have more entropy than an evenly distributed gas.

I don't know, you've stumped me there, I don't have the math or the physics background: I'm just kicking a few ideas around... — John

I suggest you are therefore sceptical of terms such as "negentropic eddies".

They are the exceptions that prove the rule? — John

No, black-holes are not an exception. Black-holes have vastly more entropy than the matter that created them, be that a perfectly spherically distributed ideal gas or a solar system. Every state on the way to creating a black hole has greater entropy than the previous state.

The most basic answer is that asymmetry means that things will clump together in ways that will accelerate more clumping - hence the formation of local negentropic eddies. — StreetlightX

But in reality when "things clump together" e.g. a gas cloud forms a star or planet due to mutual gravitation, the entropy goes up not down.

What I am trying to get at is that it seems to me that without asymmetry there is no entropy and without entropy there is no asymmetry. Asymmetry seems to be the frozen image of entropy and entropy the moving image of asymmetry. — John

Then why do the most symmetrical objects in the universe have the highest entropy i.e. black-holes?

It's absurd to suggest that this radiation-induced damage or copy-failure occurs intentionally, as if DNA and electromagnetism have a will and want this to happen. Mystical nonsense. — Michael

Quite! The fact that information from the environment (which for the genome includes the organism) cannot be transferred to the genome is so important that it has it's own name:

THE CENTRAL DOGMA OF MOLECULAR BIOLOGY

Now watch, someone is going to complain that it is a "dogma". Sure, and the Standard Model of Particle Physics is only a "model". Sorry, but in reality, information flows in one direction only:

DNA -> RNA -> Proteins. And there is no mechanism for the reverse.

But actually the truth is even more fundamental. Von Neumann showed that an accurate self-reproducer must consist of a replicator and a vehicle.