RE: On naturalism and consciousness
September 1, 2014 at 12:15 pm
(This post was last modified: September 1, 2014 at 12:25 pm by bennyboy.)
@Rhythm
To long to respond in kind, so let me make a couple brief observations.
1) There are a lot of value statements: robust, useful, reliable, complexity, and so on. But the universe is robust and complex, usefulness is an imposition by an existing consciousness (us) as is reliable. But I think the simplest definition of a gate is any mechanism which has inputs, and which is capable of subsequently triggering other mechanisms in a deterministic way.
If something must seem robust, useful and reliable TO US to be said to have mind, then we are gods, and whatever we observe to be mindful is imbued with this quality only by us-- generating a who made who infinite regression, and taking us into theology.
2) "The 'erratic' behavior at the level of QM doesn't facilitate this sort of operation. It's the difference between deterministic and probabilistic operation."
--It doesn't, or it's not knowable (and therefore not robust, useful, etc.) to us?
___
Maybe you should describe exactly (or again?) what you mean by a gate. I take it to mean only that a given input should produce the same output every time. To me, this includes simple logic switches (OR, XOR, etc.), but also could include mappings: 0--> 0, 1-->10, 2-->3, etc., something perfectly possible with a simple ANN.
But given a deterministic universe, any given system must necessarily produce the same output every time it has the same input. Now, the possibility of that actually happening is infinitesimal, since all non-macro systems are dynamic, and no input is ever perfectly repeatable (except maybe in careful, and very simple, lab experiments). But still, I'd argue that EVERY subdivision of matter must be a gate in the sense I just described, and that the choice of specific systems is still a matter of our arbitrary conceptualizations, rather than a description of any existential reality.
To long to respond in kind, so let me make a couple brief observations.
1) There are a lot of value statements: robust, useful, reliable, complexity, and so on. But the universe is robust and complex, usefulness is an imposition by an existing consciousness (us) as is reliable. But I think the simplest definition of a gate is any mechanism which has inputs, and which is capable of subsequently triggering other mechanisms in a deterministic way.
If something must seem robust, useful and reliable TO US to be said to have mind, then we are gods, and whatever we observe to be mindful is imbued with this quality only by us-- generating a who made who infinite regression, and taking us into theology.
2) "The 'erratic' behavior at the level of QM doesn't facilitate this sort of operation. It's the difference between deterministic and probabilistic operation."
--It doesn't, or it's not knowable (and therefore not robust, useful, etc.) to us?
___
Maybe you should describe exactly (or again?) what you mean by a gate. I take it to mean only that a given input should produce the same output every time. To me, this includes simple logic switches (OR, XOR, etc.), but also could include mappings: 0--> 0, 1-->10, 2-->3, etc., something perfectly possible with a simple ANN.
But given a deterministic universe, any given system must necessarily produce the same output every time it has the same input. Now, the possibility of that actually happening is infinitesimal, since all non-macro systems are dynamic, and no input is ever perfectly repeatable (except maybe in careful, and very simple, lab experiments). But still, I'd argue that EVERY subdivision of matter must be a gate in the sense I just described, and that the choice of specific systems is still a matter of our arbitrary conceptualizations, rather than a description of any existential reality.
