tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5956838.post575634263093049826..comments2023-11-22T01:14:54.298-08:00Comments on amor mundi: Relevant Expertise in the Critique of RobocultismDale Carricohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02811055279887722298noreply@blogger.comBlogger73125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5956838.post-69010715055651566722016-02-11T08:01:40.362-08:002016-02-11T08:01:40.362-08:00> Gareth Nelson said...
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> I have to adm...> Gareth Nelson said...<br />><br />> I have to admit, IBM 360 consoles are downright sexy.<br /><br />Indeed. A guy named John Savard has documented the<br />front panels HTML, not photorealistic) of the entire<br />IBM 360 line. (I admire obsessives who stay **focused** ;-> ):<br />http://www.quadibloc.com/comp/pan04.htm<br />And other famous machines:<br />http://www.quadibloc.com/comp/panint.htm<br /><br />Apropos the DEC PDP-1 & 4, Mr. Savard comments:<br /><br />"[I]nstead of being rectangular, like most computer front panels, the edges<br />were angled so as to produce a teardrop-like distorted hexagon. . .<br />a shape that would not have been out of place on a<br />flying saucer in an old science-fiction movie. . .<br />[T]he idea that a computer should. . . look futuristic,<br />as befits something at the peak of current technology,<br />was part of the culture<br />at DEC."<br /><br />Nevertheless, while a picture of a computer certainly isn't<br />a computer, neither is a computer simulation of a computer<br />(though it is certainly a computer) always what you're<br />looking for.<br /><br />A poignant thread on the SimH mailing list<br />alludes to this:<br /><br />http://mailman.trailing-edge.com/pipermail/simh/2016-February/014588.html<br />----------------<br />SIMH and physical hardware<br />Zachary Kline<br />Wed Feb 10 2016<br /><br />. . .<br /><br />[For] a newbie. . ., all SIMH machines are very similar. . .<br />[T]he “feel,” of the original hardware. . . [isn't]<br />there. Simh can emulate tons of hardware from different<br />manufacturers, but. . . [won't] tell me what it was like to actually<br />use the devices in a physical sense.<br /><br />As a blind user, I’m doubly interested in this kind of physicality because<br />I experience the world through touch and sound. . .<br />[T]hese notional machines. . . are all reduced to. . .<br />abstractions at a console prompt. It’s hard to imagine<br />a thing I was far too young to experience. . .<br /><br />---<br /><br />David Gesswein<br />Wed Feb 10 2016<br /><br />. . .[No e]mulator could match. . . [the] feel of<br />typing on a teletype. . . [Or] the warm oil smell<br />they give off.<br /><br />---<br /><br />lists at openmailbox.org<br />Wed Feb 10 2016<br /><br />I felt a twinge of sorrow reading your post. . .<br /><br />. . .many people who used these machines back<br />in the day never saw the machine or came near it. . .<br />[U]niversities and businesses. . . kept [machines] in [a machine]<br />room. . . with air conditioning and cabling. . . under<br />[a] raised floor. . . [U]sers and programmers sat in<br />terminal rooms or at their desks. . . and<br />typically never saw the blinkenlights or. . . felt the disk drives<br />shaking the floor. . .<br /><br />A lot of PDP gear was in small labs where most students didn't go. . .<br /><br />[I]n big companies that used mainframes [t]he programmers. . .<br />were not allowed in the machine room. The doors had combination<br />locks and only authorized personnel. . . were allowed in there.<br />Slipping into the machine room with an operator<br />buddy was grounds for dismissal. . . Some data centers. . <br />did have glass walls onto the floor. But most did not.<br /><br />The main way that we get the sense today of "wow this is great" is seeing<br />the terminal displays with the same layouts and prompts as we did in the old<br />days. . .<br /><br />---<br /><br />Bob Supnik<br />Wed Feb 10 EST 2016<br /><br />The original article on restoration vs simulation <br />(http://www.hpl.hp.com/hpjournal/dtj/vol8num3/vol8num3art2.pdf) still <br />provides good insights into what's achievable by restoring old systems <br />vs simulating them. Co-author Max Burnet's collection of working DEC <br />gear provides a far better aural, and tactile recreation of using old <br />DEC systems than SimH. Unfortunately, it's a lot more difficult to access.<br /><br />The Living Computer Museum in Seattle has many working systems. . .<br />and is renovating more. The Computer History Museum in [Mountain View, CA]<br />has some working exhibits. . . too. . .<br />====<br /><br />Smell of warm oil, indeed.<br /><br />But they are crazy hard to get (and keep) working.<br /><br />Debugging the 1959 IBM 1401 Computer at the Computer History Musesum<br />https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PwftXqJu8hs<br /><br />Rhode Island Computer Museum DEC PDP-9 Restoration<br />http://www.ricomputermuseum.org/Home/equipment/dec-pdp-9/pdp-9-restoration<br />jimfhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04975754342950063440noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5956838.post-84311159501499664062015-12-05T15:18:25.730-08:002015-12-05T15:18:25.730-08:00> Jim, I'm going to turn those last three M...> Jim, I'm going to turn those last three Moot-gems into<br />> a guest post tomorrow if you don't object.<br /><br />Sure, that's fine with me.<br /><br />> Even back in 93 I was hate-reading Extropians. . .<br /><br />Well, I was a late-comer (as usual ;-> ). As I'm sure I've mentioned<br />before, I found out about the whole on-line >Hist scene in<br />the summer of '97 (about 6 months after I first got the Web<br />at home via WebTV) when, Alta-Vista'ing Iain Banks' "Culture"<br />(which I'd just come across a reference to while thumbing<br />through a sci-fi magazine at one of the local Barnes & Nobles)<br />I crashed into Eliezer Yudkowsky's "Staring into the Singularity".<br />And thence to the Extropians. (I missed the 'zine era with them.)<br />I had heard of the Singularity before that -- I'd already read<br />Vinge's _Across Realtime_ by then.<br /><br />> I was a bit transhumanish at age eleven or so. . .<br /><br />Oh, me too. I read Arthur C. Clarke's _Profiles of the Future_<br />soon as it appeared on the supermarket paperback rack in --<br />what, '62, '63? I remember freaking out my 6th-grade homeroom<br />teacher, in a free-for-all late-afternoon discussion, by mentioning<br />Clarke's views on the prospects for human immortality.<br /><br />And my favorite original _The Outer Limits_ episode was "The Sixth<br />Finger", which aired just a few weeks before Kennedy was assassinated.<br />I didn't find out 'til many years later that parts of<br />David McCallum's speech at the end was lifted practically verbatim<br />from Shaw's _Back to Methuselah_ (which was, of course, on the<br />Extropians' recommended reading list).<br /><br />> . . .the L5 Society and Durk Pearson and Sandy Shaw. . .<br /><br />I had a hardcover copy of Pearson & Shaw's _Life Extension_<br />back in the summer of '82. The summer when The Human League's<br />"Don't You Want Me?" was playing incessantly on the radio. ;-><br /><br />I knew folks interested in the L5 society, but for some reason<br />I was never that much of a space geek. I loved _Star Trek_,<br />of course, but I was less enthralled by the real-live space<br />program. It just didn't live up to the TV version. ;-><br />jimfhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04975754342950063440noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5956838.post-58738553236363849182015-12-05T14:47:17.109-08:002015-12-05T14:47:17.109-08:00Jim, I'm going to turn those last three Moot-g...Jim, I'm going to turn those last three Moot-gems into a guest post tomorrow if you don't object.Dale Carricohttps://www.blogger.com/profile/02811055279887722298noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5956838.post-90393357897604289452015-12-05T14:43:06.188-08:002015-12-05T14:43:06.188-08:00Even back in 93 I was hate-reading Extropians -- I...Even back in 93 I was hate-reading Extropians -- I once thought/hoped James Hughes socialist strong reading of transhumanism might yield a useful technoprogressivism, but boy was I wrong to hold out that hope! I will admit that as an avid sf reader with a glimpse of the proto-transhumanoid sub(cult)ure via the L5 Society and Durk Pearson and Sandy Shaw I was a bit transhumanish at age eleven or so -- with a woolly sense that longevity medicine and nano/femto-superabundance should be the next step after the Space Age. The least acquaintance with consensus science disabused me of that nonsense. It's a bit like the way first contact, pretty much in my first term away from home in college, with comparative religion made me a cheerful atheist and confrontation with an actually diverse world made the parochial pieties of market ideologies instantly hilarious.Dale Carricohttps://www.blogger.com/profile/02811055279887722298noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5956838.post-18058153302903128872015-12-05T14:24:51.449-08:002015-12-05T14:24:51.449-08:00Dale still dismisses this, saying that a "mod...<i>Dale still dismisses this, saying that a "model" of a human mind is not the same as a human mind, just as a picture of you is not you.</i><br /><br />You may be right that I am a bit more skeptical than you are on this second question -- I am not sure, your formulation seems pretty congenial after a first read -- all I would say is that the context for all this was the futurological conceit of uploading in particular, and I do indeed still regard that notion as too incoherent in principle to draw any comfort from the points you are making. <br /><br />Even if, as Gareth seems to be implying, there is a "weak" uploading project in which good-enough simulations can replace people for an (insensitive enough?) audience apart from a "strong" uploading project in which some sort of info-souls are somehow translated/migrated and thus, again somehow, immortalized digitally, I think both notions are bedeviled by conceptual and rhetorical and political nonsense rendering them unworthy of serious consideration (except as sfnal conceits doing literary kinds of work). I am not sure anybody but Gareth actually maintains this strong/weak distinction quite the way he seems to do, and I'm not sure his endorsement of the weak version doesn't drift into the strong version in any case in its assumptions and aspirations.Dale Carricohttps://www.blogger.com/profile/02811055279887722298noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5956838.post-10564241139569033542015-12-05T14:14:21.558-08:002015-12-05T14:14:21.558-08:003. Attitudes toward the whole Transhumanist/Singu...3. Attitudes toward the whole Transhumanist/Singularitarian<br />mishegas. What Richard L. Jones once called the "belief package"<br />( http://www.softmachines.org/wordpress/?p=1607 ), or what<br />Dale commonly refers to as the three "omni-predicates" of >Hist<br />discourse: omniscience=superintelligence; omnipotence=super-enhancements<br />(including super-longevity); omnibenevolence=superabundance.<br />http://amormundi.blogspot.com/2007/10/superlative-schema.html<br /><br />This is a very large topic indeed. It has to do with politics,<br />mainly the politics of libertarianism (Paulina Boorsook,<br />_Cyberselfish_, Barbrook & Cameron, _The Californian Ideology_),<br />religious yearnings (the "Rapture of the Nerds"),<br />cult formation (especially sci-fi tinged cults, such as<br />Ayn Rand's [or Nathaniel Branden's, if you prefer] "Objectivism",<br />L. Ron Hubbard's "Scientology", or even Joseph Smith's Mormonism!),<br />psychology (including narcissism and psychopathy/sociopathy),<br />and other general subjects. Very broad indeed!<br /><br />Forgive me for putting it this insultingly, but I fear Gareth<br />may still be savoring the Kool-Aid here.<br /><br />Dale and I are long past this phase, though we once both<br />participated on the Extropians' mailing list, around or<br />before the turn of the century. When we get snotty<br />(sometimes reflexively so ;-> ), it's the taste of the Kool-Aid<br />we're reacting to, which we no longer enjoy, I'm afraid.<br />jimfhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04975754342950063440noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5956838.post-73494915635146405592015-12-05T13:59:41.469-08:002015-12-05T13:59:41.469-08:002. The notion that, even if we jettison the funct...2. The notion that, even if we jettison the functionalist/cognitivist/symbol-manipulation<br />approach of GOFAI, we still might **simulate** the low-level dynamic messiness of a<br />biological brain and get to AI from the bottom up instead of the top down.<br />Like Gerald Edelman's series of "Darwin" robots or, at an even lower and putatively<br />more biologically-accurate level, Henry Markram's "Blue Brain" project.<br /><br />Gareth seems to be on-board with this approach as well, and says somewhere<br />above that he thinks a hybrid of the biological-simulation<br />approach **and** the GOFAI approach might be the ticket to AI<br />(or AGI, as Ben Goertzel prefers to call it).<br /><br />Dale still dismisses this, saying that a "model" of a human mind is not<br />the same as a human mind, just as a picture of you is not you.<br /><br />I am less willing to dismiss this on purely philosophical grounds. I am<br />willing to concede that **if** there were digital computers fast enough<br />and with enough storage to simulate biological mechanisms **at whatever<br />level of detail turned out to be necessary** (which is something we don't<br />know yet) **and** if this sufficiently-detailed digital simulation could<br />be connected either to a living body with equally-miraculously (by today's<br />standards) fine-grained sensors and transducers, **or** to a (sufficiently<br />fine-grained) simulation of a human body immersed in a (sufficiently<br />fine-grained) simulation of the real word -- we're stacking technological<br />miracle upon technological miracle here! -- then yes, this hybrid entity<br />with a human body and a digitally-simulated brain,<br />I am willing to grant, might be a good-enough approximation<br />of a human being (though hardly "indistinguishable" from an ordinary<br />human being, and the poor guy would certainly find verself<br />playing a very odd role indeed in human society, if ve were the first one).<br />I'm even willing to concede (piling more miracles on top of<br />miracles by granting the existence of those super-duper-nanobots)<br />the possibility of "uploading" a particular human personality,<br />with memories intact, using something like the<br />Moravec transfer (though again, the "upload" would find verself in<br />extremely different circumstances from the original, immediately<br />upon awakening). This is still not "modelling" in any ordinary<br />sense of the word in which it occurs in contemporary scientific<br />practice! It's an as-yet-unrealized (except in the fictional realm<br />of the SF novel) **substitution** of a digitally-simulated<br />phenomenon for the phenomenon itself (currently<br />unrealized, that is, except in the comparatively trivial case<br />in which the phenomenon is an abstract description of another<br />digital computer).<br /><br />**However**, I am unpersuaded, Moravec and Kurzweil and their<br />fellow-travellers notwithstanding, that Moore's Law and the "acceleration of<br />technology" are going to make this a sure thing by 2045. I am not<br />even persuaded that we know enough to be able to predict<br />that such a thing might happen by 20450, or 204500, whether by<br />means of digital computers or any other technology, assuming a<br />technological civilization still exists on this planet by then.<br /><br />The physicist Richard C. Feynman, credited as one of the inventors<br />of the idea of "nanotechnology", is quoted as having said "There's<br />plenty of room at the bottom." Maybe there is. Hugo de Garis<br />thinks we'll be computing using subatomic particles in the not<br />too distant future! If they're right, then -- sure, maybe all<br />of the above science-fictional scenarios are plausible. But others<br />have suggested that maybe, just maybe, life itself is as close to<br />the bottom as our universe permits when it comes to, well, life-like<br />systems (including biologically-based intelligence). If that's<br />so, then maybe we're stuck with systems that look more-or-less<br />like naturally-evolved biochemistry.jimfhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04975754342950063440noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5956838.post-25242465529274181862015-12-05T13:57:15.523-08:002015-12-05T13:57:15.523-08:00It strikes me that this conversation (/disagreemen...It strikes me that this conversation (/disagreement) has<br />been proceeding along three different fronts (with, perhaps,<br />three different viewpoints) that have not yet been clearly<br />distinguished:<br /><br />1. Belief in/doubts about GOFAI ("Good Old-Fashioned AI") -- the<br />50's/60's Allen Newell/Herbert Simon/Seymour Papert/John McCarthy/Marvin Minsky<br />et al. project to replicate an abstract human "mind" (or salient aspects<br />of one, such as natural-language understanding) by performing syntactical<br />manipulations of symbolic representations of the world using<br />digital computers. The hope initially attached to this approach<br />to AI has been fading for decades. Almost a quarter of a century<br />ago, in the second edition of his book, Hubert Dreyfus called<br />GOFAI a "degenerating research program". It's still degenerating,<br />as far as I know.<br /><br />This Dreyfus quote is also from the 7-year-old comment thread at<br />http://amormundi.blogspot.com/2008/03/giulio-demands-clarifications-and-i.html :<br /><br />-----------<br />Almost half a century ago [as of 1992] computer pioneer<br />Alan Turing suggested that a high-speed digital<br />computer, programmed with rules and facts, might exhibit<br />intelligent behavior. Thus was born the field later<br />called artificial intelligence (AI). After fifty<br />years of effort [make it 70, now], however, it is now clear<br />to all but a few diehards that this attempt to produce artificial<br />intelligence has failed. This failure does not mean<br />this sort of AI is impossible; no one has been able<br />to come up with a negative proof. Rather, it has<br />turned out that, for the time being at least, the<br />research program based on the assumption that human<br />beings produce intelligence using facts and rules<br />has reached a dead end, and there is no reason to<br />think it could ever succeed. Indeed, what John<br />Haugeland has called Good Old-Fashioned AI (GOFAI)<br />is a paradigm case of what philosophers of science<br />call a degenerating research program.<br /><br />A degenerating research program, as defined by Imre<br />Lakatos, is a scientific enterprise that starts out<br />with great promise, offering a new approach that<br />leads to impressive results in a limited domain.<br />Almost inevitably researchers will want to try to apply<br />the approach more broadly, starting with problems<br />that are in some way similar to the original one.<br />As long as it succeeds, the research program expands<br />and attracts followers. If, however, researchers<br />start encountering unexpected but important phenomena<br />that consistently resist the new techniques, the<br />program will stagnate, and researchers will abandon<br />it as soon as a progressive alternative approach<br />becomes available.<br />====<br /><br />Dale and I agree in our skepticism about this one.<br />Gareth Nelson, it would seem (and many if not most >Hists, I expect)<br />still holds out hope here. I think it's a common<br />failing of computer programmers. Too close to their<br />own toys, as I said before. ;->jimfhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04975754342950063440noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5956838.post-42136482534269337162015-12-05T12:42:30.020-08:002015-12-05T12:42:30.020-08:00> Gerald M. Edelman, _Bright Air, Brilliant Fir...> Gerald M. Edelman, _Bright Air, Brilliant Fire_,<br />> Chapter 2, "Putting the Mind Back into Nature".<br />> --------------<br />> . . .<br />> I cannot overemphasize the degree to which these ideas or their<br />> variants pervade modern science. They are global and endemic. . .<br />> ====<br /><br />From the comment thread at<br />http://amormundi.blogspot.com/2008/03/giulio-demands-clarifications-and-i.html<br />-----------------<br />In a book I mentioned 7 [now 14!] years ago (my God!) on the Extropians' list<br />[ http://extropians.weidai.com/extropians.2Q01/1578.html ],<br />_Going Inside: A Tour Round a Single Moment of Consciousness_<br />by John McCrone, 1999; Chapter 12 "Getting It Backwards",<br />the author remarks:<br /><br />"[P]ersonally speaking, the biggest change for me<br />was not how much new needed to be learnt, but how much that was<br />old and deeply buried needed to be unlearnt. I thought my<br />roundabout route into the subject would leave me well prepared.<br />I spent most of the 1980s dividing my time between computer<br />science and anthropology. Following at first-hand the attempts<br />of technologists to build intelligent machines would be a good<br />way of seeing where cognitive psychology fell short of the mark,<br />while taking in the bigger picture -- looking at what is known<br />about the human evolutionary story -- ought to highlight the<br />purposes for which brains are really designed. It would be a<br />pincer movement that should result in the known facts about the<br />brain making more sense.<br /><br />Yet it took many years, many conversations, and many false starts<br />to discover that the real problem was not mastering a mass of<br />detail but making the right shift in viewpoint. Despite<br />everything, a standard reductionist and computational outlook on<br />life had taken deep root in my thinking, shaping what I expected<br />to see and making it hard to appreciate anything or anyone who<br />was not coming from the same direction. Getting the fundamental<br />of what dynamic systems were all about was easy enough, but then<br />moving on from there to find some sort of balance between<br />computational and dynamic thinking was extraordinarily difficult.<br />Getting used to the idea of plastic structure or guided<br />competitions needed plenty of mental gymnastics...<br /><br />[A]s I began to feel more at home with this more organic way of<br />thinking, it also became plain how many others were groping their<br />way to the same sort of accommodation -- psychologists and brain<br />researchers who, because of the lack of an established vocabulary<br />or stock of metaphors, had often sounded as if they were all<br />talking about completely different things when, in fact, the same<br />basic insights were driving their work."<br />====<br />jimfhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04975754342950063440noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5956838.post-53798678346667741712015-12-04T20:24:12.517-08:002015-12-04T20:24:12.517-08:00Can I add my own endorsement of Gerald M. Edelman&...Can I add my own endorsement of Gerald M. Edelman's beautiful and brilliant book, Bright Air, Brilliant Fire? It has to be well over a decade since I first read this book -- I hardly recommend it as the last word on these topics, nor as a text with which I agree on every word, but it is so sensible and forceful it really does seem to me quite indispensable.Dale Carricohttps://www.blogger.com/profile/02811055279887722298noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5956838.post-28014324607886536592015-12-04T20:14:25.095-08:002015-12-04T20:14:25.095-08:00I cannot overemphasize the degree to which these i...I cannot overemphasize the degree to which these ideas or their<br />variants pervade modern science. They are global and endemic. But I<br />must also add that the cognitivist enterprise rests on a set of<br />unexamined assumptions. One of its most curious deficiencies is<br />that it makes only marginal reference to the biological foundations<br />that underlie the mechanisms it purports to explain. The result is<br />a scientific deviation as great as that of the behaviorism it has<br />attempted to supplant. The critical errors underlying this deviation<br />are as unperceived by most cognitive scientists as relativity<br />was before Einstein and heliocentrism was before Copernicus.<br /><br />What is it these scholars are missing, and why is it critical?<br />They are missing the idea that a description of the mind cannot<br />proceed "liberally" -- that is, in the absence of a detailed<br />biological description of the brain. They are disregarding a large<br />body of evidence that undermines the view that the brain is a<br />kind of computer. They are ignoring evidence showing that the way<br />in which the categorization of objects and events occurs in animals<br />and in humans does not at all resemble logic or computation.<br />And they are confusing the formal powers of physics as created by<br />human observers with the presumption that the ideas of physics<br />can deal with biological systems that have evolved in historical<br />ways.<br /><br />I claim that the entire structure on which the cognitivist enterprise<br />is based is incoherent and not borne out by the facts. I do not attempt<br />to support this strong claim in the text of this book; to do so<br />would require ranging over many disciplines with many unshared<br />assumptions before arriving at my main thesis. For this reason, I<br />have put my arguments against the forms of pure cognitivism into<br />a Critical Postscript placed at the end of this book. . .<br /><br />This essay addresses what I believe to be a series of category mistakes.<br />The first is the proposal that the solution to the problems of<br />consciousness will come from the resolution of some dilemmas of<br />physics. The second is the suggestion that computation and<br />artificial intelligence will yield the answers. Third, and most<br />egregious, is the notion that the whole enterprise can proceed by<br />studying behavior, mental performance and competence, and language<br />under the assumptions of functionalism without first understanding<br />the underlying biology. . .<br /><br />The principle I will follow is this: There must be ways to put<br />the mind back into nature that are concordant with how it got<br />there in the first place. These ways must heed what we have<br />learned from the theory of evolution. In the course of evolution,<br />bodies came to have minds. But it is not enough to say that the<br />mind is embodied; one must say how. To do that we have to take<br />a look at the brain and the nervous system and at the<br />structural and functional problems they present.<br />====jimfhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04975754342950063440noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5956838.post-22618260314775671612015-12-04T20:13:51.335-08:002015-12-04T20:13:51.335-08:00> Please don't tell me you think cognitive ...> Please don't tell me you think cognitive psychology is<br />> somehow invalid. It would explain a lot though.....<br /><br />I was referring to this, for what it's worth:<br /><br />Gerald M. Edelman, _Bright Air, Brilliant Fire_,<br />Chapter 2, "Putting the Mind Back into Nature".<br />--------------<br />In the last few decades, practitioners in the field of cognitive science<br />have made serious and extensive attempts to transcend the limitations<br />of behaviorism. Cognitive science is an interdisciplinary effort<br />drawing on psychology, computer science and artificial intelligence,<br />aspects of neurobiology and linguistics, and philosophy. Emboldened by<br />an apparent convergence of interests, some scientists in these fields<br />have chosen not to reject mental functions out of hand as the<br />behaviorists did. Instead, they have relied on the concept of<br />mental representations and on a set of assumptions collectively called<br />the functionalist position. From this viewpoint, people behave<br />according to knowledge made up of symbolic mental representations.<br />Cognition consists of the manipulation of these symbols. Psychological<br />phenomena are described in terms of functional processes. The efficacy<br />of such processes resides in the possibility of interpreting items<br />as symbols in an abstract and well-defined way, according to a set<br />of unequivocal rules. Such a set of rules constitutes what is<br />known as a syntax.<br /><br />The exercise of these syntactical rules is a form of computation. . .<br />Computation is assumed to be largely independent of the structure and<br />the mode of development of the nervous system, just as a piece of<br />computer software can run on different machines with different<br />architectures and is thus "independent" of them. A related idea<br />is the notion that the brain (or more correctly, the mind) is like<br />a computer and the world is like a piece of computer tape, and that<br />for the most part the world is so ordered that signals received can<br />be "read" in terms of logical thought.<br /><br />Such well-defined functional processes, it is said, constitute semantic<br />representations, by which it is meant that they unequivocally specify<br />what their symbols represent in the world. In its strongest form,<br />this view proposes that the substrate of all mental activity is in<br />fact a language of thought -- a language that has been called "mentalese". . .<br /><br />This point of view -- called cognitivism by some -- has had a great vogue<br />and has prompted a burst of psychological work of great interest<br />and value. Accompanying it have been a set of remarkable ideas.<br />One is that human beings are born with a language acquisition device<br />containing the rules for syntax and constituting a universal grammar.<br />Another is the idea, called objectivism, that an unequivocal description<br />of reality can be given by science (most ideally by physics).<br />This description helps justify the relations between syntactical<br />processes or rules and things or events -- the relations that consitute<br />semantic representations. Yet another idea is that the brain orders<br />objects in the "real" world according to classical categories,<br />which are categories defined by sets of singly necessary and jointly<br />sufficient conditions.jimfhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04975754342950063440noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5956838.post-6952807582964331082015-12-04T13:33:50.228-08:002015-12-04T13:33:50.228-08:00The human mind is not immune from scientific inves...<i>The human mind is not immune from scientific investigation and understanding, and neither is the brain (the physical implementation of the mind). That should be a fairly uncontroversial viewpoint. I simply go one further and say that human brains are not immune from simulation, and simulating a brain would automatically get you a mind.</i><br /><br />No one has denied that intelligence can be studied and better understood. I wonder whether your parenthetic description of the brain as "the physical implementation of the mind" already sets the stage for your desired scene of an interested agent implementing an intelligence when there is actually no reason to assume such a thing where the biologically incarnated mind is concerned. When you say "you simply go one further" in turning to the claim that simulating a brain automatically gets you a mind I disagree that there is anything "simple" about that leap, or that it is any sense a logical elaboration of similar character to the preceding (as you insinuate by the word "further"). Not only does simulating a brain not obviously or necessarily "automatically" get you a mind, it quite obviously does not, and necessarily not get you the mind so simulated. To say otherwise is not materialist, but immaterialist -- but worse it is palpably insane. You are not a picture of you, and a picture of brain is not a brain, and a moving picture of a mind's operation in some respects is not the mind's operation. You may be stupid and insensitive enough not to see the difference between a romantic partner and a fuck doll got up to look like that romantic partner, but you should not necessarily expect others to be so dull if you bring your doll to meet the family or hope to elude prosecution for murdering your partner when the police come calling.Dale Carricohttps://www.blogger.com/profile/02811055279887722298noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5956838.post-83108518752309860732015-12-04T13:33:34.941-08:002015-12-04T13:33:34.941-08:00In response to your (repeated) declaration that &q...In response to your (repeated) declaration that "the internal [by which you mean the actually-existing material] implementation [of intelligence] does not matter" I quipped: Some materialist you turned out to be." You reacted, with robotic predictability:<br /><br /><i>Bit of a non sequitur that. I say the internal implementation does not matter so long as the external behaviour still yields intelligence, in what way does that contradict materialism? If anything, claiming that it matters whether there's neurons or silicon chips implementing intelligent behaviour is claiming there's something important about neurons that goes beyond their material behaviour.</i><br /><br />An actual materialist would grasp that the actually-existing material incarnation of minds, like the actually-existing material carrier of information, is non-negligible to the mind, to the information. The glib treatment of material differences as matters of utter indifference, as perfectly inter-translatable without loss, as cheerfully dispensable is hardly the attitude of a materialist. <br /><br />Once again, you airily refer to "silicon chips implementing intelligent behavior" when that has never once happened and looks nothing like something about to happen and the very possibility of which is central to the present dispute. However invigorating the image of this AI is in your mind -- it is not real, nor is it a falsifiable thought-experiment, nor is it a destiny, nor is it a burning bush, nor is it writing on a wall, and those of us who fail to be moved as you are by it are not denying reality, its stipulated properties are not facts in evidence. You will deny that you are claiming AI is real or would be "easy" -- but time after time after time you conjure up these fancies and attribute properties to them with which skeptics presumably have to deal, just because you want them to be true so fervently. Just as well argue how many angels can dance on a pin head. <br /><br />And then, too, once again, you insinuate the recognition that such real-world intelligence that actually exists all happens to be materialized in biological organization amounts to positing something magical or supernatural about brains. No, Gareth: the intelligence that exists is biological and the artificial intelligence to which you attribute all sorts of properties does not exist. To entertain the logical possibility that phenomena legible to us as intelligent might be materialized otherwise does not mean that they are, that we can engineer them, or that we know enough about the intelligence we materially encounter to be of any help were we to want to engineer intelligence otherwise. None of that is implied in the realization that there is no reason to treat intelligence of somehow supernatural. <br /><br />Materialism about mind demands recognition that the materialization of such minds as are in evidence is biological. That intelligence could be materialized otherwise is possible, but not necessarily plausible, affordable, or even useful. Maybe it would be, maybe not. Faith-based techno-transcendental investment of AI with wish-fulfillment fantasies of an overcoming of the scary force of contingency in life, an arrival at omnicompetence no longer bedeviled by the humiliations of error or miscommunication, the driving of engines of superabundance delivering treasure beyond the dreams of avarice, or offering up digital immortalization of an "info-soul" in better-than-real virtuality may make AI seem so desirable that you want to pretend we know enough to know how do build it when we do not has nothing to do with science or materialism. Your attitude is common or garden variety religiosity of the most blatant kind. Even if you wear a labcoat rather than a priest's vestments, it's not like we can't see it's still from Party City.Dale Carricohttps://www.blogger.com/profile/02811055279887722298noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5956838.post-37594094576920883442015-12-04T03:56:28.565-08:002015-12-04T03:56:28.565-08:00"the internal implementation does not matter
..."the internal implementation does not matter<br /><br />Some materialist you turned out to be."<br /><br />Bit of a non sequitur that. I say the internal implementation does not matter so long as the external behaviour still yields intelligence, in what way does that contradict materialism? If anything, claiming that it matters whether there's neurons or silicon chips implementing intelligent behaviour is claiming there's something important about neurons that goes beyond their material behaviour.<br /><br />"Presumably you're not suggesting a simple one-neuron-to-<br />one-transistor mapping here. That does remind me, however,<br />of a harrumph that came from somebody on the Extropians'<br />list back in the day (back in my day ca. 15 years ago, that is) who<br />thought it likely that a single-transistor-to-single-neuron<br />mapping ought indeed to be quite sufficient, thank you<br />very much, to corral a brain's functionality."<br /><br />That would indeed be very silly, what I was saying is that neurons are the primitive units of brains in a similar way to how transistors are the primitive unit of digital computers.<br /><br />"Hence the "cognitive psychology" that Gerald Edelman was reacting against a decade or two later."<br /><br />Please don't tell me you think cognitive psychology is somehow invalid. It would explain a lot though.....<br /><br />The human mind is not immune from scientific investigation and understanding, and neither is the brain (the physical implementation of the mind). That should be a fairly uncontroversial viewpoint.<br /><br />I simply go one further and say that human brains are not immune from simulation, and simulating a brain would automatically get you a mind.Anonymoushttps://www.blogger.com/profile/12153630599998560848noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5956838.post-82659499278478684002015-12-03T14:53:40.822-08:002015-12-03T14:53:40.822-08:00"The laughed at the Wright Brothers too!"..."The laughed at the Wright Brothers too!"<br /><br />"For heaven's sake take your thumb out of your mouth."Dale Carricohttps://www.blogger.com/profile/02811055279887722298noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5956838.post-90243478142624561602015-12-03T14:09:25.784-08:002015-12-03T14:09:25.784-08:00> There do exist transistor-level simulations o...> There do exist transistor-level simulations of CPU designs. . .<br /><br />Well, in the case of brains, we don't even know what the<br />"transistors" might turn out to be.<br /><br />> which is. . . kind of equivalent to neuron-level brain<br />> simulations.<br /><br />Presumably you're not suggesting a simple one-neuron-to-<br />one-transistor mapping here. That does remind me, however,<br />of a harrumph that came from somebody on the Extropians'<br />list back in the day (back in my day ca. 15 years ago, that is) who<br />thought it likely that a single-transistor-to-single-neuron<br />mapping ought indeed to be quite sufficient, thank you<br />very much, to corral a brain's functionality.<br /><br />But back on the "just gimme the mind, never mind the<br />brain simulation" front: 40-50 years ago, some psychologists<br />escaping from the straitjacket of behaviorism looked to<br />computer science (encouraged, no doubt, by the hopes of the<br />practitioners of what came to be known as Good Old-Fashioned AI)<br />to find an "information-processing" basis for the human mind<br />(leaving the messy and difficult brain to the biologists). Hence<br />the "cognitive psychology" that Gerald Edelman was reacting<br />against a decade or two later.<br /><br />Edelman (and others who shared his views, such as<br />George Lakoff) was unpersuaded that traditional top-down<br />AI will ever be able to produce general-purpose machines able<br />to deal intelligently with the messiness and unpredictability of the<br />world, while at the same time avoiding a correspondingly complex<br />(and expensive) messiness in their own innards. Edelman cites<br />three maxims that summarize his position in this regard:<br /><br />1. "Being comes first, describing second... [N]ot only is<br />it impossible to generate being by mere describing, but,<br />in the proper order of things, being precedes<br />describing both ontologically and chronologically"<br /><br />2. "Doing... precedes understanding... [A]nimals can solve<br />problems that they certainly do not understand logically... [W]e<br />[humans] choose the right strategy before we understand why...<br />[W]e use a [grammatical] rule before we understand what it is;<br />and, finally... we learn how to speak before we know anything<br />about syntax"<br /><br />3. "Selectionism precedes logic." "Logic is... a<br />human activity of great power and subtlety... [but] [l]ogic is<br />not necessary for the emergence of animal bodies and brains, as<br />it obviously is to the construction and operation of a<br />computer... [S]electionist principles apply to brains<br />and... logical ones are learned later by individuals with brains"<br /><br />-- Edelman and Giulio Tonono, _A Universe of Consciousness_,<br />pp. 15-16.<br /><br />"It is selection -- natural and somatic<br />-- that gave rise to language and to metaphor, and it is<br />selection, not logic, that underlies pattern recognition and<br />thinking in metaphorical terms. Thought is thus ultimately based<br />on our bodily interactions and structure, and its powers are<br />therefore limited in some degree. Our capacity for pattern<br />recognition may nevertheless exceed the power to prove<br />propositions by logical means... This realization does not, of<br />course, imply that selection can take the place of logic, nor<br />does it deny the enormous power of logical operations. In the<br />realm of either organisms or of the synthetic artifacts that we<br />may someday build, we conjecture that there are only two<br />fundamental kinds -- Turing machines and selectional systems.<br />Inasmuch as the latter preceded the emergence of the former in<br />evolution, we conclude that selection is biologically the more<br />fundamental process." (_UoC_ p. 214).<br /><br />Ever-hopeful transhumanists will retort at this point that,<br />after all, it wasn't necessary to make a detailed simulation<br />of a bird in order to get to the passenger jet. Hope springs<br />eternal. Stay tuned.jimfhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04975754342950063440noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5956838.post-56400619463767676742015-12-03T13:16:10.198-08:002015-12-03T13:16:10.198-08:00kind of equivalent to neuron-level brain simulatio...<i>kind of equivalent to neuron-level brain simulations</i><br /><br />Science!<br /><br /><i>the internal implementation does not matter</i><br /><br />Some materialist you turned out to be.<br /><br />Pray however you want, but keep it in church.Dale Carricohttps://www.blogger.com/profile/02811055279887722298noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5956838.post-79405843582365859002015-12-03T02:19:53.514-08:002015-12-03T02:19:53.514-08:00I have to admit, IBM 360 consoles are downright se...I have to admit, IBM 360 consoles are downright sexy.<br /><br />Back on topic....<br /><br />There do exist transistor-level simulations of CPU designs, which is the kind of equivalent to neuron-level brain simulations. My point with the emulator analogy is that ultimately the internal implementation does not matter, only the end results.Anonymoushttps://www.blogger.com/profile/12153630599998560848noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5956838.post-5703872430754918982015-12-02T18:19:23.728-08:002015-12-02T18:19:23.728-08:00> You are totally flirting, aren't you.
P...> You are totally flirting, aren't you. <br /><br />Pwned! :-0<br />jimfhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04975754342950063440noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5956838.post-12711678599153278412015-12-02T17:19:48.011-08:002015-12-02T17:19:48.011-08:00You are totally flirting, aren't you.You are totally flirting, aren't you.Dale Carricohttps://www.blogger.com/profile/02811055279887722298noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5956838.post-48354153571843845632015-12-02T17:13:07.737-08:002015-12-02T17:13:07.737-08:00Apropos both the IBM 360 and AI (as in Artificial ...Apropos both the IBM 360 and AI (as in Artificial Intelligence ;-> ),<br />there's a terrific SF novel I first read many years ago called<br />_The Adolescence of P-1_ by one Thomas J. Ryan:<br />http://www.amazon.com/Adolescence-P-1-T-Ryan/dp/0020248806/<br />https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Adolescence_of_P-1<br /><br />Set in the early 70's, the novel describes the accidental<br />unleashing of artificial intelligence by an idiot-savant<br />college kid. In the 360-370 mainframe era no less, which<br />adds a layer of camp by today's standards. It's a real<br />hoot, but it's also quite decent SF. There are tense<br />scenes in computer rooms, and lots of IBM lingo like<br />"IPL" and "Sysres". ;-><br /><br />Highly recommended.<br />jimfhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04975754342950063440noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5956838.post-8668493287043997552015-12-02T15:05:53.311-08:002015-12-02T15:05:53.311-08:00> as a geek I must ask: do you have info on tha...> as a geek I must ask: do you have info on that microcode implementation?<br /><br />Yes, the guy's name is Lawrence Wilkinson, and all the info is<br />here:<br />http://www.ljw.me.uk/ibm360/vhdl/<br />There are links there to everything you need to recreate<br />his IBM 2030 CPU implementation.<br /><br />There's also a link to his 2011 OSHUG presentation:<br />https://skillsmatter.com/skillscasts/2115-computer-conservation-with-fpgas<br /><br />And he has a YouTube channel (as "ibm2030") with a demo<br />of his simulator:<br />https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=walWU2MQ2OM<br /><br />There's another demo video at:<br />IBM SYSTEM/360 Recreation at Silicon Dreams 2013<br />https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HffTSo9zpYI<br /><br />And it turns out (something I didn't know until just<br />now) that there's **another** microcode-level 360<br />simulation, this time for a 360/65, by one Camiel Venderhoeven,<br />who uses his to operate a real 360/65 front panel<br />(not just a video representation of one):<br />IBM 360 emulator counting up <br />https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fv6WK5QiG1Q<br /><br />Cool stuff.jimfhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04975754342950063440noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5956838.post-38847860299199363372015-12-02T14:33:25.327-08:002015-12-02T14:33:25.327-08:00All this endless talking, talking, talking is keep...All this endless talking, talking, talking is keeping you from coding your Robot God you know. Get to work or you'll never prove us deathist luddites wrong.Dale Carricohttps://www.blogger.com/profile/02811055279887722298noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5956838.post-30049603094784252722015-12-02T01:08:18.653-08:002015-12-02T01:08:18.653-08:00I'll respond properly later, but as a geek I m...I'll respond properly later, but as a geek I must ask: do you have info on that microcode implementation?<br /><br />I love retro computing.Anonymoushttps://www.blogger.com/profile/12153630599998560848noreply@blogger.com