Could Deep Blue play a smarter AI ?

[warpus]

Sure, agreeing is nice! And you're basically right, even though there is actually no 'probability wave'. If you think in terms of a wave function, the probability is given by its square, which neglects the phase. Usually it is more convenient to just see it as a state in Hilbert space.

Hmm.. Can you recommend a good book on the subject (even if it's math intensive) ?

 

[jar2574]

The burden of proof lies with the person who claims that souls exist.

I did not claim that souls exist.

If you claim that souls have something to do with intelligence - the burden of proof lies with you.

True. I never claimed that souls have something to do with intelligence. No one has proven that souls do not have something to do with intelligence.

If I claim that natural processes can create intelligence - the burden of proof lies with me.. not to prove that souls don't exist - but to prove what i'm claiming - namely that natural processes can produce intelligence.

Agreed.

But brighteye was attempting to prove that the existence of souls was irrelevant to intelligence via a thought experiment. His thought experiment did not accomplish that.

 

[warpus]

Agreed.

But brighteye was attempting to prove that the existence of souls was irrelevant to intelligence via a thought experiment. His thought experiment did not accomplish that.

Ahh, I see. To be honest I didn't really read that part of the thread all the way through.

IMO souls might very well be relevant to the question of sentience and intelligence.

However, the burden of proof will lie with the person making the claim that they are; not with the person working under other assumptions that have already been proved.

 

[5cats]

This is because if they are part of the physical world they follow the principle (that applies in the real world) that identical objects will behave in the same way, and this includes either having free will or not.

Given that I had postulated an identical object, any comments about development are irrelevant, because it's .... IDENTICAL. Have I said that enough times yet? It's a thought experiment, and the practicality of making these identical objects is also not relevant.

I added the bold to make a small point in your otherwise excellent message #332.
Identical objects do not behave in the same identical way! Two Plutonium masses (assume tiny masses that won't explode) will deteriorate at the same rate but not at identical times! Sure over a give time span they'll emit the same amount of radiation, but the particles will be emmitted at (as far as we know) random intervals. Random or not, for sure they'll be different.

It is true enough, for this thought experiment the process isn't relevant.

 

[5cats]

I did not claim that souls exist.

True. I never claimed that souls have something to do with intelligence. No one has proven that souls do not have something to do with intelligence.

That would be me claiming that souls exist.

It has to do with sentience which is different than 'intelligence'. I equate sentience with self-awareness.

While some things are alive, they are not sentient, like bacteria, moss, or a fruit fly. Other things are alive and self-aware, like a human, or a cat.
It's my contention that the information carried in DNA is not sufficient to explain how sentience exists. Roughly the same amount of DNA is used to make both humans and fruit flys (at least I think that's the case). Therefor even if we copy that DNA and/or 'build' a brain-like thing, it still won't be sentient because that key ingredient is missing.
Or I could be wrong, and a 'soul' will enter the thing and it will achieve sentience.

Hee hee, in that dream I keep mentioning, God tells the dwarf robot that is what he meant by "made man in His own image" that the purpose of all sentient life is to create new sentient life. I paraphrase heavily, of course, or it'd be as long as this thread

 

[Brighteye]

Then your thought experiment did not prove anything about intelligence, the topic of discussion in the thread.
I thought you were trying to say that souls did not exist, because I thought you were trying to say that your thought experiment would prove that souls have nothing to do with intelligence.

No one has proven that human intelligence is solely a product of the physical world. No one has proven that souls do not exist. So under your thought experiment souls could exist and have no effect on the physical world, but have an effect on intelligence. That's why your conclusion that a replica of a human brain would have to be intelligent is not necessarily true. Your conclusion is only true if we assume that souls do not exist. That's why I assumed that you were saying that souls do not exist.

If souls have an effect on intelligence then they have an effect on the physical world. Thus what you say can only be true if something within the physical world (the soul's effect) does not follow its laws (cause and effect; in identical situations the same cause will have the same effect).
No-one has proven that intelligence is solely part of the physical world. We can say that having intelligence/free will has an effect on the physical world, through those things in which it is manifest. If physical laws hold, then if one of two identical objects has intelligence then the other must also, or it will behave differently, against the laws of nature. This applies even if one object is created by technology and the other by normal reproduction.

The only possible answer that saves your argument is to define intelligence as self-awareness or some other quality that may well not be necessary for decision making, and therefore with an influence on the world. The OED cxalls intelligence the faculty of comprehension. I would say that this is important for decision-making, and therefore has relevance to the real world.

The topic of this thread mutated into people claiming that AI is impossible because intelligence is only possible with a soul. If you define intelligence as having no influence on the world then this is not what people mean when they talk about AI, and instead of talking about souls you should be encouraging people to use a different term from AI. If intelligence does have relevance to the physical world then that part of it that has relevance must follow the laws of the physical world. Hence my thought experiment.
If you believe in free will the same applies. Free will clearly has relevance to this world, and if you regard it as a property of the brain then it is a property of every brain. If you regard it as a solely human property then your belief directly conflicts with the laws of science, since there is no scientific reason for supposing two identical objects to be different. I would take this a step further, and say that something sufficiently complex to appear to think like a human will also have as much free will as a human, even if it is actually a load of silicon chips.
Holding beliefs about things outside of the remit of science is acceptable, but believing things that contradict what science tells us is entirely different.
Therefore if you say intelligence has no effect on the physical world, and this is how you justify saying that my argument is irrelevant to the concept of intelligence, then I say that your concept of intelligence is irrelevant to the idea of AI.

 

[NapoléonPremier]

PK Dick was a great writer! He had several themes running through his books & stories, and a unique style all his own.

That's true, he was definitely as much a philosopher and a prophet as a sci-fi writer...

It's my understanding this was done from a distance. ie trial and error wasn't used, the spider figured out which was the correct rod much better than chance would allow. Spider intelligence is quite different from ours, we understand it even less than our own!

If this is the case, do we have any idea how the spider achieves that ? Some sort of "radar" wave, maybe ?

I guess I'll check in to the Nut-House too, since I think I'm a cat & all...

Yeah, yeah, hop on the bus, Gus, it'll be fun, we'll start a Civ MP game over there. I'm sure playing Civ under anti-psychotic drugs must be quite something...

 

[Brighteye]

Personally I'd like to try Civ4 while being psychotic, rather than on anti-psychotics. Or even neurotic. That'd be amusing too.

 

[NapoléonPremier]

Yeah, I can easily close my eyes, meditate for a bit, and then have a funny feeling in my stomach.. "Holy crap, my body is full of thetans!". Is that what you're talking about?.

No, that's not what I'm talking about... Because for that, you would have to pay a few hundred thousand dollars as well... (note : warpus was referring, I think, to $cientology). Btw, is Tom Cruise still in the closet ?

So? A large number of people believing something proves nothing, you agree with that. But now you're saying that if these people believe that something for thousands of years, then it DOES prove something? Bollocks!

If a billion people believed, for 10,000 years, that humans can fly of their own accord, it wouldn't make it any more true.

My point was to say that the richness of Indian culture and history deserves maybe a little bit more than "f*** it, it's just crap". But this seems to be a point of irreconcilible difference between two otherwise sensible human beings. I'm trying to tell you (and others) there IS knowledge to be gained in the study of eastern (among others) metaphysics (did you study them, btw, or is your judgement just a priori ?) But apparently, to you, the very possibility that it could be something else that pure complete bullfeathers for feeble minded people is just impossible. That's ok. This thread has been many things, but it's not a missionary thread.

 

[NapoléonPremier]

(Originally Posted by NapoléonPremier
But that's not an identical object. What we know is that the "soul" (assuming there is one, again) enters the WHOLE BODY at a certain point during conception/gestation. An identically grown brain is not the same object as a whole body. So even with your own concepts, there's no guarantee at all.)

Sure, good point. But if you're granting me the theoretical ability to make an identical brain, let me change my thought experiment and make an identical body to go with the brain. Make the whole thing that the soul inhabits. The point it demonstrates is the same.

Well then no, it's not exactly the same. It would depend how you'd obtain the whole body+brain. For instance, it seems clear that within a few years/decades, it will be possible to clone apes and human bodies. Then, I agree, it there are "souls" I don't see why they wouldn't enter a cloned human body. But then it's not AI at all. It's just cloning. However, if you built a human body+brain in another way than nature does, then it's impossible to say if a "soul" would enter it. It's a possibility, but we can't tell in advance, because it's a different equation. Hence we would have to wait and see the real thing, which means it can't work as a gedankexperiment.

Maybe I did lose track of the point... it's easy to do in 20 or so pages.

Yeah, I agree, that's why rabbis and lawyers are so devilish in arguments, 'cause they can almost always make you forget by the end of the discussion what you were talking about to begin with...

Sorry! Yes, I was a bit ebullient. But then again, calling one line of thought stupid is a little different from calling a person stupid. Everyone makes mistakes/slips up/ doesn't concentrate from time to time.

I know, that's why I didn't take it bad, but you were the one making the point how attacking somebody's logic was dangerously close from attacking the person themselves...

 

[NapoléonPremier]

Hmm.. Can you recommend a good book on the subject (even if it's math intensive) ?

Sure : "Buddhism, Souls and ESP in Hilbert Space"

 

[NapoléonPremier]

Personally I'd like to try Civ4 while being psychotic, rather than on anti-psychotics. Or even neurotic. That'd be amusing too.

Don't worry, with your obscure "thoughtexperiments" that only you understand, you're almost there...

 

[NapoléonPremier]

If a billion people believed, for 10,000 years, that humans can fly of their own accord, it wouldn't make it any more true.

Btw, in all that line of discussion I was not so much talking about "beliefs", which are indeed subject to caution (why should I believe this more than that ?), than actual evidence anybody can get for himself with a little effort, such as observing faraway places from outside your body or precisely describing places you've never been in this life under hypnotic regression - all of which can be verified, maybe not for scientific publication, but at least for yourself.
But I'll stop there, or Zombie is going to try and have me committed again...

 

[Brighteye]

Don't worry, with your obscure "thoughtexperiments" that only you understand, you're almost there...

After all this debate I ran it by the guys in the lab, and they saw what I was driving at. Perhaps we should turn the lab into a loony bin. It wouldn't change that much.

 

[5cats]

That's true, he was definitely as much a philosopher and a prophet as a sci-fi writer...

If this is the case, do we have any idea how the spider achieves that ? Some sort of "radar" wave, maybe ?

Yeah, yeah, hop on the bus, Gus, it'll be fun, we'll start a Civ MP game over there. I'm sure playing Civ under anti-psychotic drugs must be quite something...

Yup! With Scanner Darkly comming out, people will see just how accurate some of his ideas were/are.

I think the spiders just looked at the rods, figured it out and climbed the correct one. I'm guessing that the experimenters wanted to see if the spiders could learn to solve a multi-step problem after several tries, but the spiders kept getting in right the first time!

Yup, it sure is!

 

[jar2574]

If souls have an effect on intelligence then they have an effect on the physical world...We can say that having intelligence/free will has an effect on the physical world, through those things in which it is manifest.

No one has proven that intelligence is solely the result of the physical world.

No one has proven that souls do not exist.

Under your thought experiment souls may exist outside the laws of the physical world. Those souls create human intelligence/self-awareness. The humans then affect the physical world. This is possible under your thought experiment. It did not prove that souls are irrelevant to all forms of intelligence.

No-one has proven that intelligence is solely part of the physical world. If physical laws hold, then if one of two identical objects has intelligence then the other must also, or it will behave differently, against the laws of nature.

No one has proven that intelligence is solely the part of the physical world, or that souls do not exist. So in your thought experiment we cannot assume that physical laws must hold. Physically identical objects could behave differently because one had a soul and one did not.

The only possible answer that saves your argument is to define intelligence as self-awareness or some other quality that may well not be necessary for decision making, and therefore with an influence on the world. The OED cxalls intelligence the faculty of comprehension. I would say that this is important for decision-making, and therefore has relevance to the real world..

I would not define intelligence solely as self-awareness. But human intelligence includes the concept of self-awareness. Since your thought experiment dealt with the human brain, it was dealing with the concept of self-awareness. Your thought experiment is doomed because it dealt with the human brain and not simply two "intelligent" machines which do not have self-awareness.

You claimed that two identical brains would have to act identically.
Human brains belong to self-aware creatures.
Human actions are influenced by self-awareness.
The first human brain would have been self-aware.
You claimed that the second human brain would have acted identically.
So you were claiming that souls are irrelevant to self-awareness/human intelligence.

Now it seems that you want to back off that claim and admit that the second-brain would not necessarily behave identically.

 

[Pawel]

Hmm.. Can you recommend a good book on the subject (even if it's math intensive) ?

This is a tricky question, since what constitutes a good book very much depends on the background of the reader. In general, books that discuss the philosphical aspects rarely have much detail, while textbooks tend to focus on how things work rather than what they mean. Also, many books meant to give you an introduction to the topic cut out concepts that become important later on. A textbook that is a little older, but reasonably easy to digest and which covers a very wide range of topics is Quantum Mechanics, 3rd ed. by Leonard I. Schiff from 1968. It starts out with the very first ideas and takes you all the way to 2nd quantization (where particles are created and destroyed). In the beginning you get familiar with how wave functions work, and later the matrix concepts are introduced together with Dirac's bra-ket notation. Then you will see how the time evolution of a state works in both the Schrodinger and Heisenberg pictures. More modern textbooks (like Sakurai) usually put more emphasis on group theory, but I think that is not as important from a philosophical point of view.

 

[dbergan]

The burden of proof lies with the person who claims that souls exist.

From Post #106... which may have been forgotten.

My point is that there is obvious proof that we are part supernatural ourselves. What's the evidence?

1) We have free will. We punish criminals and decorate heros. We thank friends for being helpful and Mr. Zombie made it abundantly clear that he chooses not to talk to me.

If we have free will then that means that we are some kind of entity outside of the interlocking cause-and-effect structure of the material universe. Only something supernatural could possibly have free will because everything natural follows natural laws and cannot escape them. It also means we have intelligence (which at the beginning I showed that an etymology shows to be "choose between").

2) We have awareness. An universe of only matter and energy would never know it existed... because awareness is neither matter nor energy. Awareness is something that humans and higher animals have that no other matter does. "It is impossible that our rational part should be other than spiritual; and if any one maintain that we are simply matter, this would far more exclude us from the knowledge of things, there being nothing so inconceivable as to say that matter knows itself. It is impossible to imagine how it should know itself."

3) We have a standard of logic. Outside of every brain exists this standard that we all use to judge logical reasons from illogical reasons. This standard is also neither matter nor energy, but we know it exists... to deny it is the most illogical thing ever.

For these three reasons, I submit that it is impossible to say that humans are only material (or natural)... made up of matter and energy and nothing more. And because there is a part of us that is supernatural... a part that chooses, reasons, and is self-aware... then there has to be some element of our birth where this supernatural part of us is tied, injected, or quickened to the corpse.

To say that there is no scientific evidence is obvious. Science cannot study the supernatural. Science is a tool used for specific kinds of truth... empirical truths about nature. And just like you can't paint a wall with a hammer, you can't use science on questions about free will.

Saying you don't believe in free will because there is no scientific evidence for it is like saying, "This wall can't be painted, because my hammer won't do it."

As much as I have caught up on this thread (was gone all weekend), I haven't seen that the side denying souls has proposed a decent explanation for any of these 3.



And from post #85

To quote the famous early 20th-century evolutionist J. B. S. Haldane, "If my mental processes are determined wholly by the motions of atoms in my brain, I have no reason to suppose my beliefs are true ...and hence I have no reason for supposing my brain to be composed of atoms."

 

[MxxPwr]

If this is the case, do we have any idea how the spider achieves that ? Some sort of "radar" wave, maybe ?

In that particular article/episode the researchers claimed it was the multi-eye system (excellent distance and spatial judgment) and the rather compilcated nervous system (for a bug) needed to run it that allowed for the problem solving.

 

[MxxPwr]

It depends. I guess they can help you get a job at Penthouse...

I wonder if you can add to your resume the posts you make on this forum. AI, quantum physics, free will, logic, metaphysics, come on, that has to count for something...

I can just imagine the bibliography in my letters now.

1) Mxxpwr - http://forums.civfanatics.com/findpost2338395739650290402.

And one of you guys saying. Ah yes, 2338395739650290402, I know that post well!