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 Post subject: Agreed so far?
Post #1 Posted: Sat Apr 15, 2017 3:15 pm 
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[quote="Mike Novack http://lifein19x19.com/viewtopic.php?f= ... 6&start=60"][color=#00


Last edited by djhbrown on Tue May 02, 2017 12:12 am, edited 1 time in total.
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 Post subject: Re: Agreed so far?
Post #2 Posted: Sun Apr 16, 2017 4:42 am 
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djhbrown wrote:
I am not sure you want to go there, raise the issue of "think" and "consciousness".
oh, but i do! between 1976 and 1978 it was my life's work until i had to do a proper job for a living, and didnt pick it up again until 2010 whence i became one of many ethnically cleansed boat-people sociopolitical refugees and had to find another pasttime to amuse myself, which is when i took up golf again./quote]

OK, you say you want to go there. And then you ducked the question (elsewhere in this forum) by giving an example of a one celled organism, convinced that we would see that as simple mechnism, not "thinking" or "consciousness". And you'd be right about that, BUT (a very big but) you perhaps think that settles the matter.

What I say is that we would be hard pressed to define some hard/fast boundary between "thinking" and "consciousness" and not. That is going to be a matter of degree and not kind. For example, would you say that a bonobo "thinks" and is "conscious"? How about a gorilla? Then how about a gibbon or an orangutan? How about a capuchin monkey? Let's leave the primates and ask the question, a dog, a cat? And so on. Where do we expect to be able to draw a firm line?.

Suppose you are faced with an "intelligence" that is unable or unwilling to communicate with you. All you can observe is its behavior solving problems. How do you propoese to determine whether it is "thinking", whether it is "conscious"?

How do you determine even for yourself? Let's use go for an example. And common L&D situations. The beginning player needs to think about these, read them out, but with experience the common patterns are "learned", the experienced player simply "knows" the answer. If ASKED to explain, yes, can go back and demonstrate by a rational process, but that is NOT the same thing as having made the real time decision by that process. I have the sense that you feel that it is, in which case, explain WHY you think so.

We do lots (make lots of decisions) using fast "learned" bypass calculators. As a social animal, you might just know/pick up on "that person doesn't like me" but be hard pressed to explain with reasons << if asked, you might be able to come up with some, but isn't that after thought? Why are you sure those reasons were used in some rational process to make the initial determination? >>

Maybe think again about go. The advanced player "sees" a move and then confirms "works" or "doesn't work" by reading. Why do feel that a rational process was necessarily involved in that "seeing"?

PS: The Turing machine (or equivalent Wang, which I will use as the concrete example) does not need an infinite memory in advance. Just an UNBOUNDED memory. The Wang, for example, needs stacks that cannot overflow. But all that means is that if/when the current limit is reached, more can be added. At any time, the size is still finite.

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 Post subject: Re: Agreed so far?
Post #3 Posted: Sun Apr 16, 2017 7:26 am 
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Mike Novack wrote:
Suppose you are faced with an "intelligence" that is unable or unwilling to communicate with you. All you can observe is its behavior solving problems. How do you propose to determine whether it is "thinking", whether it is "conscious"?


Rats, when they come to a T intersection in a maze, may stop and look back and forth to the left and right before making the turn. Even behaviorists called that "vicarious trial and error". :)

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