Just to throw this into the mix: I know the idea of consciousness being some kind of powerless observer attached to an otherwise computational brain is attractive, but it doesn't work. When you experience qualia, you're also able to make the observation that you're experiencing qualia i.e. knowledge of what qualia is and the fact that you're experiencing it, is accessible to the computational brain (where you're then able to think about it, talk about it, etc). So there has to be some bidirectional interaction between the two, rather than the consciousness just listening in on one-way traffic.

If there is no reason to favour sticking then ipso facto there is reason to favour switching. — Michael

I've noticed you express this sentiment a couple of times in the thread; could you elaborate further? I'm not sure how you're arriving at "A isn't favourable so B must be" - bypassing "neither A nor B is favourable."

If I were to borrow your logic, I could say that if given the choice between being shot in the head and having my head cut off, if I conclude that there's no advantage to having my head cut off, I must surely want to be shot in the head? :p

(Edited to actually add the quote)

25 pages of reading later...

I'm going to try to come at this from a different angle to try to break the stalemate. I'm in a curious position because I can somewhat see where both sides are coming from.

I think it would help to clarify one thing first: The rule that you could potentially win more than you risk losing holds true regardless of the amount in the envelope - so opening the chosen envelope is irrelevant because a) it doesn't physically change anything and b) you don't learn anything objectively significant that you don't already know.

So we can temporarily take opening the envelope and learning any amounts out of the equation. I include this provision because I think it helps dispel the illusions / the mental trickery / the human intuition, etc. that comes from thinking about fixed amounts of money (I'll elaborate on this later).

So having chosen envelope A, you could say that if envelope B contains twice the amount, you potentially gain more than you'd potentially lose by switching - but importantly, you can also say that if A contains twice the amount as B, you potentially gain more than you'd lose by staying. So logically/mathematically/statistically, there's no advantage to either strategy.

So I think the mistake here was only applying this logic to switching, without realising it applies to staying. Also, I think the promise of 2X a known amount creates the illusion and the desire to chase money that potentially doesn't even exist.

(You may also say that any statistical method that searches for an objectively superior strategy and depends on opening the envelope, must be inherently flawed - because as explained above, it's an insignificant step revealing objectively useless information - so if you're somehow making it significant, you're doing something wrong.)

Now to revisit the idea of knowing the amount in the envelope: I think using amounts like £5/10/20 is misleading because £5 intuitively feels like a throwaway amount that anyone would be happy to lose. Instead, what if your chosen envelope contained a cheque for £10 million? Would you throw away £5m chasing an additional £10m that may not even exist?

And here it gets interesting for me because... given a £10 envelope, I really would switch because a £5 loss is nothing. Given a £10m envelope, I'd stay. So I think there is an argument to be made that, on an individual basis, depending entirely on the circumstances surrounding the person (their financial situation, their priorities and such) and the amount of money on offer, in some cases they may choose to gamble away their known amount chasing a higher amount, accepting that this is a purely subjective decision and that it doesn't increase their chances of maximising their profit, it's not an inherently superior strategy, etc. It's purely, "In this instance, I'd be happy to lose £x in the pursuit of potentially winning £y."

... So I think another flaw here was this assumption/assertion that a gamble with a 2:1 payout and 50% chance of winning is always worth taking. Again, I would not bet £5m on the 50% chance of getting £10m back. You could in fact draw up many scenarios in which the gamble would be stupid (e.g. where the amount you're gambling away would be life-changing or where losing that money would be life-threatening, whereas the higher amount you could potentially win would have diminishing returns (again, I could have some fun with £5m, a lot of fun with £10m, but wouldn't even know what to do with £20m))

In summary:

I disagree that you can make the absolute claim that switching is always the better strategy, in the sense that it's either always in the person's best interests (which is subjective and may be wrong, such as in the personal example I gave) or on the basis that it is somehow statistically/logically/strategically superior (which isn't true at all). But I do agree that an individual in a real world situation may choose to gamble and it may be the "right" choice for them specifically.

(I may yet change my mind on all of this after I've wrapped my head around it a bit more)

AI is something I invest a lot of time in, but I didn't pursue it formally precisely because the whole field is so unappealing in its current state.

A big problem (which isn't quite so severe these days, but still persists) is the insistence on breaking everything down into individual parts, with no appreciation of the whole. An example of this is spatial perception; there was so much emphasis on the eyes, before everyone had the epiphany that maybe the brain's understanding of space comes from having a human body that interacts within it - a realisation my teenage self already had many years previously.

Now there's this obsession with "machine learning" that is just throwing more hardware and optimisations at bad solutions to one particular problem. There's this idea that if we just give today's machine learning algorithms a powerful enough supercomputer on which to run, Skynet will naturally happen as a result. It won't.

As for why it's like this... perhaps because of the same issues that plague all of science, but it's more pronounced in AI because it's an issue of invention more than exploration.

Regarding some other points made in the thread:

It's possible/probable that characteristics of the "architecture" of the brain (parallel processing and such) are significant. I imagine AI of the future being implemented in hardware; it just happens that software is easier to implement and change, whereas experimental hardware would be costly and slow to produce. At least if a given supercomputer fails at AI, they can repurpose it; a failed $250m self-evolving synthetic brain would just end up in a hazmat bin.

I got called a white supremacist for pointing out the simple historic fact that white slavery was a thing. You're probably wasting your time here. :P

In the example I gave, the algorithm (let's say) would be identical on both computers, but one computer would have a hardware limitation (slower CPU or whatever) that makes it run slower.

This wouldn't apply to humans in a competitive scenario. We'd always call the faster person more intelligent, even if all the procedural steps were the same. — Nils Loc

The question is whether we'd be right to do so. I would disagree.

The question was sincere and I was ready to follow up on either outcome; I just wanted to know what kind of discussion we were having. I can see why it might have felt like a trap, though.

In any case, I now realise this thread isn't for me. All the best.

Just to quickly check: Do you believe that the mind is a result of physical processes in the brain - or do you believe we have supernatural souls of some sort? If you do believe in souls, do you believe them to be intelligent or play any role in the intelligence process?

Oh boy....the "whites were slaves, too" narrative so popular among White supremacists. — Thanatos Sand

I've been rumbled.

Fun fact: I once had an 11 hour debate on this very topic.

To clarify first of all, I'll speak of "problem solving" here as a broad term for anything that an intelligence may set out to achieve i.e. invent a machine, create a piece of music, paint a portrait, etc "An intelligence" being a computer, person, whatever.

Between a computer that can solve any problem given enough time and a computer that can only solve some problems relatively quickly, which is the most intelligent?

I would argue that the slower computer is more intelligent; the faster computer is perhaps just more practical. YMMV.

I would then say that a metric by which to compare intelligence is either a) how many "problems" fall into the domain of what a given intelligence can solve or b) how much better at solving any given problem is one particular intelligence.

For example, imagine two computers (A and B) that can be given one question (let's call it question X) and will arrive at an answer. If their hardware is identical and they arrive at the same answer in the same number of steps, they're equally intelligent. If the hardware is identical but one suffers a power cut mid-execution and has to start over again, they're still equally intelligent. If one computer runs slower than the other but again takes the same number of steps, they're still equally intelligent. If one requires less steps to arrive at an answer, you could then say it is more intelligent.

To expand further, if computer A can solve problem X faster than B, but B can solve problem Y which computer A can't solve at all, which is more intelligent?

This is breaking down a lot of real-world examples into more abstract analogies. You could take real-world analogues of the same things described above by asking which is more intelligent between a chess AI and a human being. Surely you immediately realise the nuance: The chess AI is better at chess; the human is better at literally everything else.

I'll leave it here for now.

I won't actively participate in this thread, but I wanted to throw this into the mix: There has been historic slavery of white people. For some reason this gets ignored in favour of a narrative where white people are always and only the oppressors. Anyway, it's something for you to Google.

For the people who took issue with it, I'll try to give a more moderate version of what Rich might have been touching on.

First of all, there's money in science. University bosses can pull in as much as £700k per year in the UK. Individual scientists will earn themselves or their universities/employers money through articles (bought by journals), books (bought by everyone), being on advisory boards or sponsorships/grants from companies/governments, etc. Universities pull in funding from donations, selling/leasing intellectual property, tutoring fees pay by (or on behalf of) students, etc. We're at a point now where ordinary people buy science books and magazines, which is more money for the universities and publishers, etc. There's also TV, radio and movies which will work on the same principles.

There's also very obvious salesmanship in science. Brian Cox, Neil deGrasse Tyson, etc. They're in the public eye constantly promoting science - never really saying anything particularly profound, but discussing science at a GCSE level so the general public can keep up with it. These people have almost a religious following - whole legions of people who think these science popularizers are the smartest people on the planet, regardless of the fact that each of them have said some unbelievably stupid things, are considered average at best amongst their peers in the scientific community, etc.

Then you hear about things like one example anecdote I read a while ago about an experimental physicist who (I'm struggling to recall the details, but it was something like) made a discovery that would cause some problems for quantum physics - and as a result, he was apparently censored and fired. Did it happen? Who knows, but if it did, it's terrifying - and considering quantum physics is THE big thing at the moment, it's not unreasonable that the institution wouldn't so easily let their best selling product be called into question.

A personal favourite of mine is quantum computing. I'll predict it now: It will never happen. A lot of the theory behind quantum computing is founded on misunderstandings of quantum physics. Even MIT's #1 expert on quantum computing is skeptical. The "quantum computers" that exist today are only "quantum" on a technicality; they don't do any of the fancy stuff quantum computers are supposed to be able to do. But it's a project that will keep pulling in the funding from people who want it to happen - and as long as they can make a convincing case for it, they'll keep peddling it. The beauty of the system being that, at the end, they don't have to return all the funding or all the money made from book sales and magazine articles just because they never succeeded.

I had to omit so much from this to keep it from getting even more absurdly long so it may come across worse than I'd intended. To clarify: I'm not saying that all scientists are willing scam artists; just making a case that money is involved in science - and we all know what money can do to people.

I'm a certified roll-out checker. — Mongrel

Where did you study? I was working on my rolloutcheckology PhD at Oxbridge, but I took some time out to travel Europe and just couldn't get back into it.

...

I was just wondering if I could change the future of the universe itself by simply blinking an eye. — TheMadFool

Maybe. The point is that you can't decide exactly what happens as a result of blinking your eye.

Numbers, arithmetic and such are just systems for labeling, counting or otherwise describing things. Quantities can be one of those things.

the universe cannot exist without having numbers. — A Son of Rosenthal

What about just one?

Seems you're confusing numbers and quantities. There's also a lot more nuance to both of those things.

To give you something else to think about: Until now, nowhere in the universe was anyone keeping count of how many rainbow-coloured chocolate sheep there are living on a gas giant made of unicorn farts. Does that mean a quantity (albeit 0) of extraterrestrial rainbow sheep has always existed in some form? Or does it make more sense that we just use the number 0 to describe the absence of something?

There may be a possibility that wearing a certain shirt will have some impact on the game (e.g. you wear blue, someone who knows one of the players sees it while they pass you in the hallway and it puts them in a good mood, they then go and more convincingly encourage the team) but you don't know for sure what impact it will have or whether the impact will definitely be in your favour - and when you do know those things it's no longer superstition, but science/experience/whatever.

So. "Small things can lead to big changes so me wearing a blue T shirt to make my team win is basically science" doesn't really work. It would be more like, "Maybe me wearing a blue T shirt will make my team win, but it could also make the other team win and a rattlesnake bite my ankle. I mean, every time I've worn it, my team has won, so maybe it works, but I can't prove anything."

That's just my failure to clean up after myself; there used to be code in those blocks.

I think it can be done with no loops at all. — noAxioms

Challenge accepted.

It's purely a pisstake. ;) I'm aware it doesn't necessarily run more efficiently than the other implementations.

As has been vaguely covered already, there's nothing wrong with nested loops when they're doing their job; it's just usually more efficient to avoid them when possible.

It's also not as straight-forward as that either. Take caching for example; code runs faster from the cache and smaller routines (in terms of machine instructions) are more cache-friendly - so depending on the platform and the specifics of the algorithm, shorter code that appears to be less efficient on paper might actually run faster.

In practice, you test and benchmark for these things, rather than adhering to generalised rules.

Anyway. After you guys were talking about writing the 10001st prime code without nested loops, I just couldn't resist. This code is mortifying (I got bored/tired by the time I got it working) and completely impractical, but satisfies the condition of having 'just one loop'. :P

PS. If you're more interested in writing shorter code than efficient code, there is code golf.

Edit: I forgot to explain (for what it's worth) that the code works by using a sieve to find the prime numbers up to an assumed number and continues to increase that number until enough primes have been found e.g. it'll find the primes between 0 and 50,000, then between 50,000 and 100,000, etc.

I've had quite a bit of fun with HackerRank in the past; it covers a good range of subjects and difficulty levels. I wrote about one of my solutions here.

I have a lot of objections to the linked essay, but I assume it's given here more for illustration and not as a focal point for us to critique specifically.

This topic inevitably devolves into getting deadlocked by the hard problem of consciousness, questions about dualism, etc. To state that the brain could be a computer, you need to establish that a computer is capable of everything that a brain is - and while we know a computer would be capable of what we would accept as intelligent behaviour, we can't say so certainly whether a computer would be capable of experiencing qualia, for example.

I'm familiar with the mathematics. Cantor's diagonal argument does not make any assertions about the quantity, nature or relationships of infinity. It's one thing to say that there exist two infinite sets for which there is no one-to-one correspondence; it's another beast entirely to claim that one is 'bigger' than the other.

If you're basing this on set theory, there may be an argument that one infinity can be bigger than another. The argument may have been explored more thoroughly than I'm aware within the field of meta/mathematics, but I'm not personally 100% convinced; it takes some liberties with the characteristics of infinity.

Set theory isn't the only way to think of numbers, though. Another approach is to say that, numbers don't exist per se, but there are an agreed set of rules and methods for developing relationships (what you might call "arithmetic") between a finite set of symbols (what you might call "digits") - and these symbols can potentially be arranged in an infinite number of combinations (what you might call "numbers").

So with a base 10 numeral system and the rules of arithmetic with which we're already familiar, it's not granted that the numbers 0, 0.5 and 1 'exist'. Rather, the process of dividing 1 by 2 produces the arrangement of symbols, '0.5'.

My point being, it's naive to build a whole world view around one arbitrary concept - and therefore, greater questions about infinity aren't so easily answered by set theory alone.

(I rushed this post because my food was delivered half way through; I hope it makes any sense at all)

I just finished "remastering" an old comic strip I drew a while ago - and I remembered seeing this thread before. I thought some of you might appreciate this one: "An Aquarium" (you'll probably have to click the image to expand it to full size)

As stated in the description, the strip isn't intended to push any particular agenda; it's just a bit of fun.

If you're talking about the idea that this existence is a simulation, I've always thought it's just the God of the gaps wrapped up in technobabble and brought into the modern age.

What are your own thoughts and theories?

For my own personal interest, could you elaborate on the part about astrophysics? I ask because I ultimately agree (regarding other areas of science and mathematics), but astrophysics is a subject I've never looked into so I've not seen any occurrences of this myself. I'd just be interested to know.

The solution can be used where "win and lose" conditions can be defined, where a random choice is possible and where there are no negative consequences of making a random choice.

To expand on the "win and lose" point: You're taking the original problem - which is how to reach a decision - and hiding it behind this idea of there being an objective to achieve. That is to say, rather than solving the problem of how the donkey decides between two identical piles of grass, you've changed the problem into, how does the donkey take a course of action that keeps it alive. The original problem goes unsolved.

If you have or know of an alternative, I'd be interested to (eventually) hear it. At first I wondered if this was a homework assignment, but now I suspect you may already have some thoughts and just wanted to see others?

I don't think paradox was ever intended to be taken so seriously to begin with, but at its heart lies this question about rationality.

Forget the ass. Forget the grass. Forget life and death. When presented with two options and the outcome of either choice would be equally beneficial and equally harmful - i.e. there is no clear reason to choose one over the other - how does a decision get made?

I don't intend to eventually push any particular opinion; I just think there's more interesting ground to be covered if you can look beyond the donkey.

If you're making the assumptions that a) there is an overall objective to the choice (such as your life vs death dichotomy) and b) that you can just happily add randomness into the decision making process, maybe the solution will work.

But say instead that the ass isn't driven to survive, but is instead motivated purely by a desire to eat. What then?

This is the trap I was hoping to avoid by abstracting away the problem. We're now talking very specifically about a donkey that we have decided has a desire to live and is capable of tossing a coin. Everything about the essence of the problem has just been left behind.

You missed out the part that minds must create knowledge. Also, it might be helpful here to clarify what you mean by 'knowledge'.

I didn't! See my first reply. ;)

You've made two statements here. First, that minds must create knowledge. Second, that animals don't create knowledge. Can you support either of those claims?

The implication is that either a) the essence of the colour (the qualia, if you will) is stored in X (which I would personally disagree with) or b) some property of X is perceived as red by S. It feels like the first option is the one intended by the author.

Just out of curiosity, could I ask why you wish to do this?

I'm only loosely familiar with first-order logic so I could be mistaken here, but my first guess would be:

If we approach this from the perspective that:

- There are "sense data" belonging to X, which we will call set A.
- There are "sense data" that S is capable of perceiving, which we call set B.

Then we could say:

∃x ∈ A ∈ B

Which translates roughly to, "There exists some property x which belongs to A (i.e. is a sense-datum of X) and belongs to B (i.e. can be sensed by S)."

It may be appropriate to replace B with a formula, but this may just be a matter of preference.

Again, I would urge you to check this with someone else before basing any life decisions on it.

As for the dress: The colour information stored in the image file is that of white and gold. Some people claim that their brains choose to reinterpret this as blue and black - and the originator claims that the dress was in fact blue and black.

I sent Nick Bostrom his consolation prize right around the time Elon Musk was the one who started getting praised as a genius for the simulation idea, despite Bostrom having been writing about it a decade or so earlier - and Bostrom himself having borrowed the idea from earlier philosophers.

Sorry to disappoint you if you thought you had blown my world wide open by mentioning this arcane philosophy that I would have surely never heard of. I have heard of it - 10 years ago - and no, I don't buy it.

Your grandiloquent speech also does nothing to fix the gaping holes in the argument detailed in the OP.

Wosret, clearly the meaning of the term "identical" in this instance is that, as far as the ass's needs are concerned, neither pile of grass has a property more or less important or interesting than the other. Both are the same colour, same nutritional value, same quantity, etc.

If you want to be pedantic, you could start arguing that there's no such thing as a "pile of grass" and maybe even throw in some Sorites paradox for added awkwardness. Maybe throw in some Buddhist koans about how the ass doesn't eat the grass, but the grass does in fact eat the ass.

This is partly also why it's beneficial to abstract away the problem. Keep the focus on what is important so that you don't get distracted by things that are ultimately irrelevant.

You could also make the point that those who argue against animal minds do so merely out of a desire to be superior - or even something so simple as not wanting to feel guilty every time they eat a bacon sandwich.

To get back to the original topic: As has already been pointed out, there's no real connection between all this talk of odds and lottery and disproving anything. It just leaps from one place to another without basis.