Oh, I don’t know about that. Some of them surely walk about from time to time. But one thing’s for certain, they typically won’t get caught saying things like, “For me there is an objective universe…”.
Maybe not but they do use words like “qua.”
And what your cited quote means is that my probablility marker is close to one on there being an objective universe outside me. You can continue searching for the ultimate truth about everything without ever checking your findings against the operations an outside universe if you choose. I will continue to act as if there is such a universe and will trust the group consensus of those who also act on that assumption.
I accept the view of British mathematician W.K. Clifford who wrote that truth is “not that which we can ideally contemplate without error. but that which we may act upon without fear.”
Sounds too fancy. I like Arthur Eddington better: “Something unknown is doing we don’t know what.”
Abe
Correction:
Above, I meant to say, One plus one cannot even equal two withOUT the benefit of five axioms.
Sentient, matt, sorry for the late reply; I got slammed with a three-day/all-day work project this weekend and I’m literally posting on breaks.
Sentient, I’m trying to understand how a computation can be random… I truly don’t get it.
When I multiply two numbers with my spreadsheet, or with a pencil and paper, is it random? What qualifies as a non-random computation? What qualifies as a random computation?
(A thought occurs to me: are you saying that every arrangement of particles is a computation?).
Here it seems like you’re saying that what makes a computation a computation is that they’re the outputs of a computer. But that doesn’t answer the question, it just bumps it up a level: what makes a computer a computer?
If I gave you a few glass spheres and asked you to list their physical properties, you’d just rattle off the list. You wouldn’t respond by saying “Well, that depends. Will you be arranging these glass spheres to form a triangle or a square?”
You seem to be conflating “arrangement” and “scale”. “Arrangement” (in this discussion) is an arrangement of particles. “Scale” is an arrangement of arrangements.
All glass spheres have specific physical properties; that’s what makes them “glass spheres”. They also must be in some kind of arrangement, but that arrangement is non-specific, it’s arbitrary. No matter how you arrange them, they’re still “glass spheres”. A particle’s physical properties include a specific mass, density, etc… not a specific “arrangement”.
By the same token, an abacus is an abacus. Its physical properties remain the same regardless of how the beads are arranged. Sure, we can arbitrarily call one arrangement of beads a “calculation”, but that doesn’t change the physical properties of the abacus, any more than re-arranging those beads would change their physical properties; it would merely change their arrangement.
Would you elaborate this, flesh it out a bit? As it stands it seems like “memories”, “sensory”, and even “arbitrating device” are also be arbitrary labels.
matt, you raise some interesting points, and I’ll try to address them at my next break.
Let me suggest a minor addition. One plus one equaling two is not made possible by axioms. It is made the single and exclusive answer by them. We don’t need axioms to allow a particular truth to be called true, we need them to prevent everything from being both true and false and whatever else willy-nilly. Without axioms, you cannot have any more grounds to deny that one plus one equals two than I would have to claim it does.
Actually, I think you’ve made a good point. Otherwise, we could say that you can reduce 16/64 by cancelling out the 6s.
A random number generating program is a computation, yes?
I’d say an unpredictable output can be called a ‘random’ computation.
Hold on - you’re running way off down the path again. I’m genuinely trying to get you off the roundabout you have been stuck on for months here. Let us start from particles and see which forward steps we both agree on. But yes, insofar as a computation is a temporal arrangement of particles, every temporal arrangement of particles could, I suppose, be characterised as a computation of a sort. Is a chemical reaction really so different from the trillions of flips of a chip as a program is run?
Again, I suggest you stop looking at the roundabout and start looking for the exits. You are arrowing straight back to linguistic referents here.
I see no fundamental difference here. I could list physical properties which didn’t depend on their number and configuration, and could list others which did.
You may make this distinction if it makes you happy, of course. I consider it trivial.
But those properties depend upon the arrangement of more fundamental particles. It is arbitrary to say that ‘glass’ or ‘spheres’ are what they are but ‘a triangle of glass spheres’ is not.
Read this again, carefully. You are only considering certain physical properties and arbitrarily discounting others, such as its centre of gravity, which do depend on the arrangement.
If they are not arbitrary labels, how come other people call them other things (ie. other languages*) or don’t call them anything at all (eg. foraging people or early hominids)? A brain is a labelling device, which did not exist for 13.7 billion years. This is the roundabout exit you seek.
Sentient, it’s phrases like this that make it very hard for me to understand what you’re trying to say, let alone what you mean. If you’re really asking whether or not a random-number generating program is a computation, then well, yes, of course: programs are computations, but they’re not random computations; they execute their instructions precisely and predictably.
If you’re implying that the output of random-number generating programs are random, well, apparently they’re not; unless the computation can access an outside source to supply an element of randomness. If the output is random, it’s not because the computation is inherently random.
Hence my problem with your claim that a random arrangement of particles can also be a random calculation:
How can an inherently random arrangement of particles be a computation when computations aren’t inherently random?
OK, you’d say that a random computation is an output that cannot be predicted by… what? An abacus expert? A 7-month old? A random arrangement of particles?
Well… I thought I was starting from particles. What exactly are you suggesting as a first step forward (so I can agree or disagree)?
Can we nail this down? Your opinion is: Any and every given arrangement of particles is a computation. Is this correct?
You stated that “…computations are the outputs of a computer”, which gives me exactly as much information as telling me that sedation is a result of taking sedatives. Yet when I ask directly for a clarification (what makes a computer a computer?), I’m chided for getting hung up on linguistic referents. How am I to debate with you if you won’t tell me what your words mean?
Yes, but the calculation does not. This is why I think you may be confusing an arrangement of particles with an arrangement of arrangements. You could replace the wooden beads with glass beads, metal beads or old tires; it doesn’t matter. If you maneuver them into the same sequence of arrangements you end up with the identical calculation. Wooden beads have specific physical properties that are different than the properties of glass beads, which are different than the properties of tires, etc., but the calculation is the calculation regardless of it’s physical medium; it has no specific physical properties.
To quote one of your favorite authorities:
I seriously doubt that the failure to include fictional objects in my list of physical properties significantly weakens my argument.
Let me try again. Isn’t it arbitrary to label the brain a “labeling device”?
Bible is a book. Could you give us your guess as to what % of believers and “men and women of faith” have actually read the book themselves, as opposed to the rest who merely parrot what they have heard. What % believe and “have faith” for no reason other than trusting in what their parents inculcated into the child’s brain – as we witness in the red states and the Bible Belt.
Like the random elements of the toddler’s brain.
Some computations are, some aren’t. Hand me a computation, I’ll place it in one of my linguistic bins according to criteria we agree on, or ignore your disagreement and make up my own criteria.
Me, say. Or you, or whoever we agree on. If we disagree, I’ll just use my own criterion for what constitutes a predictor.
Computers are made of atoms. The computer comprising the abacus attached to the human brain is also made of atoms.
Well, I said this was getting way ahead of ourselves, but I’ll retract so universal a declaration. A computation is characterised by “input” configurations and “output” configurations. A static spatial object is one for which input=output. Is this a computation? I care little whether this trivial example falls in or out of my linguistic bin. Other temporal objects, such as a raincloud, have different input and output configurations. Is this a “computation”? Again, I suppose it could somehow be used as a computer, but I have no particular desire to shove it in my linguistic bin either. Here I am using words to tell you what entities fall into my word bins. Question these words and I will put more words on a screen for you to read, for you to question again. After three such revolutions of the same roundabout, I’d probably feel a little sick and politely leave via an exit.
And how am I to debate you if you don’t tell me what your position is? This Zeno-like “debate” of infinite regress in which I provide some words describing my bin-arbitration and you ask for more words describing the arbitration of those words becomes tiresome very quickly, but I’ll persevere.
Calculations do depend on the configuration of the calculating device, be that gears and logic gates in a mechanical computer, charge densities in an electronic computer or neural states in a biological computer. Put simply, if there is no calculating device (as there was not for 13.7 billion years), there is no calculation.
Well, now we’re switching the terms yet again back to that which resides in the human computer when using the word “calculation”. The calculation carried out by the computer without any human interaction is the temporal arrangement of gates (or marbles in some kind of automatic abacus). That is what it is, just as the melting is not identical to the ice cube or the storm identical to the raincloud.
Hmm, I’m not sure you’re making an argument - rather you’re questioning mine. But I’m curious why you say the centre of gravity is fictional but, say, the density is not. The whole point of Dennett’s heterophenomenological method is that we treat all “mental” entities as fictions.
YES. ALL linguistic referents are arbitrary. I could label it a “schmee” and you could ask what other entities I placed within that bin, and I could tell you, and you could say “that’s arbitrary”, and I would agree and ask you what wasn’t, and you could say “scmoodles”, and I could ask you what other entities you placed within that bin, and you would tell me and I would say “that’s arbitrary”. Eventually, we might realise that we were picking a semantic nit as trivial and insubstantial as our pronunciation of the word “tomato”.
Again, all I can ask you to do is imagine that mindless (and, I’ll be prepared to admit, computationless if we restrict “computations” to those processes characterised by a working memory) universe, with all its physical processes such as “life” and “weather” which don’t have those physical properties you are restricting the discussion to for some reason. Why must a process have mass, temperature or these other specifications in order to be considered physical? Surely the gravitational force between two rocks, the process of attraction, is as physical as the rocks themselves? Surely the life of a organism in a mindless universe is as physical as the cells it is made of? If so, is the computation, the temporal arrangement of the charges and switches, not as physical as the computer?
Also, dragging this thread back to some vestige of relevance to the OP, some biologists disagree on precisely which entities enter the bin called “life”. This is entirely expected (and even inevitable), but is trivially irrelevant to our understanding and explanation of life. To suggest otherwise, no pun intended, is rather a Creationist trick.
Sentient, I’m trying to keep our debate from sprouting even more tentacles, so before I respond to the rest of your post, I’d like a response from you on this:
Now I feel like I’m on a roundabout: you’ve brought us full circle. While I think your statement is more than a little speculative, it’s not so speculative that I can’t work with it.
Let me start by quickly recapping the scenario: I ask grandpa to multiply two large numbers on his abacus. He scoots the beads into different arrangements and when they reach a particular arrangement, he stops and tells me the correct answer. He then walks over and hands the abacus to his 7-month old grandson, who starts playing with the beads and, through sheer coincidence, scoots the beads back and forth through the same arrangements, then simply looks bored and hands the abacus back to Grandpa.
You’re suggesting that as the toddler plays, a part of the toddler’s brain could be running a non-random program that accesses random elements from other parts of the toddler’s brain to output (via the tot’s motor pathways) truly random arrangements of beads on the abacus. I can accept this. But to the toddler’s brain, that arrangement is not the computed result of multiplying two large numbers. For the toddler’s brain, the arrangements, the output has nothing to do with numbers or multiplying: the output is random.
However, to the programs in the grandfather’s brain the toddler’s output is a computation multiplying two large numbers.
I’ll willingly agree that in both cases, the arrangements are the result of a computation.
Would you agree that for the tot’s brain, grandpa’s arrangement is random (and so is the tot’s), and for grandpa’s brain the tot’s arrangement is not random (and neither is the grandpa’s)?
Yes - like I said in the first response to your scenario:
That memory element of the grandfather’s computation is, I think, the crucial distinction you want to hear me make: I hereby do so. Memory, the replication of configurations, is how nonrandom computations emerge from random ones, how output configurations can be different from input configurations in a way which human computers can predict.
And, to probe the deeper meaning of the scenario: the toddler’s “calculation” and the grandfater’s calculation are functionally equivalent. The fundamental difference, I’d suggest, is only apparent when we ask the two to perform a similar calculation again and again. Grandfather’s consistent outputs would stand in stark contrast to junior’s unpredictable outputs, demonstrating that the computer comprising (grandfather + abacus) can be characterised by memory access, whereas the computer comprising (junior + abacus), like the raincloud, cannot.
Yes. Excellent. That’s the piece that was missing for me. I didn’t understand what you were saying in that first post, but I do now. While I noodle on my newfound understanding, let’s see if we can put in place a “forward step we can both agree on”.
You’re a card-carrying physicalist, yet some of your views seem subtly different than other physicalists I’ve spoken with. This tends to trip me up, so I’d like to get a clear understanding of what it means, for you, for something to be physical (i.e., If I’m wondering whether or not something is physical, how can I find out? What is the test/criteria?).
Also, you had suggested “Computers are made of atoms” and “The computer comprising the abacus attached to the human brain is also made of atoms” as things we might agree on. I can agree with the first statement, although I’d greatly prefer a less ambiguous wording (with the current wording, I can wonder if you also mean “An individual atom computes” or “Molecules cannot be computers”, etc.). My version of that first statement would be “Matter is necessary for computation”, but that may not be acceptable to you… can we find a compromise? The second statement I simply don’t understand. I keep picturing attaching things with thumbtacks. Could you say that statement a different way?
Also, also:
In the tot/abacus system the computation functions as a random number generator, but in the grandpa/abacus system, the computation does not function as a random number generator. I’m not getting how they’re functionally equivalent.
I’m afraid the only way to do so is to ask yourself. If you suffer from an utter lack of imagination, you might answer ‘no’, just as those Creationists who could not see that life is physical answered.
That is acceptable to me, as would the statement “Matter is necessary for life”.
Just as an arrangement of matter is all that is necessary for life, so an arrangement of matter (be it silicon or carbon based) is **all[b/] that is necessary for computation.
How do you know, if you only consider the single ‘throw’? You only get to find out that the tot is random but the grandfather isn’t with multiple throws. For a single one, they are not different at all.
Sentient, the context for that question could not have been clearer. I’m asking about your test/criteria. I need to understand what it means, to you, for something to be physical. You’ve repeatedly asked me to take a position, either agree or disagree with your physicalist stance, but to do that I’ll need to know what I’m agreeing or disagreeing with.
Well, damn. Our first press release.
SM and OW agree that:
- Matter is necessary for computation.
Hey, I thought you said baby steps. I can neither agree nor disagree with this statement. I can (obviously) agree that an arrangement of matter is necessary for computation, but stating that it’s both necessary and sufficient has yet to be established (although that might very well be the case).
I don’t know with a single throw, but then, I’m outside the system. Even if the grandfather had never performed that particular calculation before, he doesn’t have to perform multiple throws to know his computation was non-random. Are you saying that the litmus test for functionality must always be outside the system?
“Comprising fundamental particles in spacetime” (including equivalent waves and forces).
We start by agreeing that there are some physical things, which I have never once heard you deny. We then see which steps we can make from there. I am utterly bemused by your inability to leave the roundabout by declaring that , yes, gravity is as physical as rocks and the whole host of similar statements I keep asking for your comment on but receiving only questions about definitions in return. That is not debating, that is mithering, like a “why?”-repeating toddler.
About life? You cling to an elan vital which is separate from the mere temproal arrangement of cells comprising an organism? Then you transport yourself back to the 19th century and I am not sure we can usefully converse much longer.
OK. Think of the silicon computer, whirring away with no humans around. It is only switches, gates and charges, yes? Those switches, gates and charges are what the computer is, yes?
Please, you have now moved onto the epistemology of “how the grandfather knows things”, which is yet another separate issue entirely (and yet again I would point to memory elements which comprise ‘knowledge’).
We are different computers to grandfather. If we were inside the computer called grandfather, we would be grandfather. All we can receive is the outputs which the grandfather computer, somehow, directs at us (which themselves are fictional accounts). This is the very heart of verificationism, which every good cognitive scientist must follow.
Read through this thread again, other-wise. You will see me desperately trying to provide answers to every single one of your questions, while occasionally throwing in some of my own. You will notice that you have ignored every single one of my questions and instead continued to fire more at me about your pet scenario. Would it be possible for us to take a timeout in which I put some questions to you, do you think? (And if all of your answers are “I don’t know” or “I have no opinion” or some such, could you understand my reticence in ever engaging you again?)
There may be times when one loses his or her life in saving that of another, but in so doing we are not hurting the species,we call those people heros because they did what they could for the betterment of others.(saving the species).
Some one touching me does not damage my psyche, If another harms me it diminishes them. I may be hurt physically but I am not diminished. If I feed some one else (and I have), it helps them to understand kindness, anf If I save their life with the food,they can live to do good for others, and in my experiance they have helped me out at times when I have needed it No one in their right mind would find touching some one un appropriately edifying. I doubt that even the most hardened rapist feels edified by harming anyone.
Monavis