matt1
-12
10
matt1 has not written any posts yet.
thanks. my point exactly.
You should be aware that in many cases, the sensible way to proceed is to be aware of the limits of your knowledge. Since the website preaches rationality, it's worth not assigning probabilities of 0% or 100% to things which you really don't know to be true or false. (btw, I didn't say 1) is the right answer, I think it's reasonable, but I think it's 3) )
And sometimes you do have to wait for an answer. For a lesson from math, consider that Fermat had flat out no hope of proving his "last theorem", and it required a couple hundred years of apparently unrelated developments to get there....one could easily give a few hundred examples of that sort of thing in any hard science which has a long enough history.
You wrote: "This is the part where you're going astray, actually. We have no reason to think that human beings are NOT Turing-computable. In other words, human beings almost certainly are Turing machines."
at this stage, you've just assumed the conclusion. you've just assumed what you want to prove.
"Therefore, consciousness -- whatever we mean when we say that -- is indeed possible for Turing machines."
having assumed that A is true, it is easy to prove that A is true. You haven't given an argument.
"To refute this proposition, you'd need to present evidence of a human being performing an operation that can't be done by a Turing machine."
It's not my job to refute the proposition. Currently, as far as I can tell, the question is open. If I did refute it, then my (and several other people's) conjecture would be proven. But if I don't refute it, that doesn't mean your proposition is true, it just means that it hasn't yet been proven false. Those are quite different things, you know.
sorry, not familiar with that. can it be summarized?
btw, I'm fully aware that I'm not asking original questions or having any truly new thoughts about this problem. I just hoped maybe someone would try to answer these old questions given that they had such confidence in their beliefs.
btw, I'm fully aware that I'm not asking original questions or having any truly new thoughts about this problem. I just hoped maybe someone would try to answer these old questions given that they had such confidence in their beliefs.
No, I was not trying to think along those lines. I must say, I worried in advance that discussing philosophy with people here would be fruitless, but I was lured over by a link, and it seems worse than I feared. In case it isn't clear, I'm perfectly aware what a Turing machine is; incidentally, while I'm not a computer scientist, I am a professional mathematical physicist with a strong interest in computation, so I'm not sitting around saying "OH NOES" while being ignorant of the terms I'm using. I'm trying to highlight one aspect of an issue that appears in many cases: if consciousness (meaning whatever we mean... (read more)
This is a fair answer. I disagree with it, but it is fair in the sense that it admits ignorance. The two distinct points of view are that (mine) there is something about human consciousness that cannot be explained within the language of Turing machines and (yours) there is something about human consciousness that we are not currently able to explain in terms of Turing machines. Both people at least admit that consciousness has no explanation currently, and absent future discoveries I don't think there is a sure way to tell which one is right.
I find it hard to fully develop a theory of morality consistent with your... (read more)
Of course, my original comment had nothing to do with god. It had to do with "souls", for lack of a better term as that was the term that was used in the original discussion (suggest reading the original post if you want to know more---basically, as I understand the intent it simply referred to some hypothetical quality that is associated with consciousness that lies outside the realm of what is simulable on a Turing machine). If you think that humans are nothing but Turing machines, why is it morally wrong to kill a person but not morally wrong to turn off a computer? Please give a real answer...either... (read more)
"at this stage, you've just assumed the conclusion. you've just assumed what you want to prove.
No - what I'm pointing out is that the question "what are the ethical implications for turing machines" is the same question as "what are the ethical implications for human beings" in that case."
Yeah, look, I'm not stupid. If someone assumes A and then actually bothers to write out the modus ponens A->B (when A->B is an obvious statement) so therefore B, and then wants to point out, 'hey look, I didn't assume B, I proved it!', that really doesn't mean that they proved anything deep. They still just assumed the conclusion they want since... (read more)