Quote: Original post by owl

Quote: Original post by trippytarka

Quote: Original post by owl
If something happens where nobody can witness it or any of it's consecuences, then it is the same to say that it didn't happen. It actually doesn't matter.

I think you missed my point... the question has nothing to do with what reality really is. The answer is not important.

If something happens where nobody can witness it or any of it's consecuences, then it is the same to say that it didn't happen. It actually doesn't matter.

*sigh*

I was going to continue this by adding another person arguing against their own argument, but it seemed like such a waste of time and I was unsure whether people would notice I was being sarcastic.

Quote: Original post by superpig
Try it this way: "If I cease to have direct sensory experiences of a thing, how do I know that it still exists?"

Or further, because you can't trust your sensory input: "How do I know that anything other than me really exists, and that I'm not just living in the matrix?"

Or solipsism: "How do I know that anyone other than me is conscious, instead of it just being my imagination that they are?"

...

Quote: Its like saying "I baked a cake. Did I bake a cake?"

This one's a little more fun if you rephrase it as "I have memories of baking a cake. Did I bake a cake?"

I would say that it makes sense to seriously think about these questions as an intellectual exercise. However, they quickly devolve into useless playing with words, and are ultimately trivial or irrelevant. The interesting part is *that* they're irrelevant, and how and why.

For example, the last question about memories. Obviously it is possible that you didn't bake the cake and that instead somebody fabricated a 30 second old universe containing everything we know, including you with your memories of baking a cake.

However, this would change exactly nothing compared to the real situation where the universe is many billions of years old and you actually did bake the cake: You can enjoy the cake in both situations, if others taste the cake they might make you a compliment, etc.

So the question is irrelevant.

Of the four questions quoted above, I would say it's the first question that is the most interesting, because some animals and toddlers apparently *don't* know that things still exist despite lack of direct sensory input. It seems like this kind of knowledge requires a tiny bit more experience and intelligence, so it's interesting from a learning and development-of-the-brain perspective.

(There is also the aspect that obviously you don't actually know with mathematical certainty that the thing still exists, but that aspect leads down to pointlessness, because you essentially never know anything at all with mathematical certainty except for mathematics itself.)

Quote: Original post by trippytarka

Quote: Original post by AndreTheGiant
Ive always thought the tree falling in the woods thing was extremely stupid...it was dumb question...maybe theres something deep and profound about it...Nope. Its still stupid. It all depends on how you define sound. What am I missing? Nothing, I suspect. A much more interesting question for me is: how are people possibly so fascinated by that stupid question?

The question is known as a 'koan'. The point is not in answering the question, it's about the state of mind brought about by thinking/meditating on it.

^^This. If you try to come up with a logical solution to the question then you're entirely missing the point of the exercise.
The answer to the question itself doesn't matter. The question, or the process of considering the question, is supposed to embody a specific intuitive way of thinking.

Listening to someone answer it in rational scientific detail is like listening to a robot recite an answer to "what is empathy?" -- the speaker may be correct, but they still don't understand the concept.

Quote: Original post by Hodgman

Quote: Original post by trippytarka

Quote: Original post by AndreTheGiant
Ive always thought the tree falling in the woods thing was extremely stupid...it was dumb question...maybe theres something deep and profound about it...Nope. Its still stupid. It all depends on how you define sound. What am I missing? Nothing, I suspect. A much more interesting question for me is: how are people possibly so fascinated by that stupid question?

The question is known as a 'koan'. The point is not in answering the question, it's about the state of mind brought about by thinking/meditating on it.

^^This. If you try to come up with a logical solution to the question then you're entirely missing the point of the exercise.
The answer to the question itself doesn't matter. The question, or the process of considering the question, is supposed to embody a specific intuitive way of thinking.

Listening to someone answer it in rational scientific detail is like listening to a robot recite an answer to "what is empathy?" -- the speaker may be correct, but they still don't understand the concept.

Why do you believe that the robot doesn't understand the concept? (I'm assuming you're implying the robot to be intelligent, otherwise you could s/robot/text-to-speech system/)

Quote: Original post by Prefect
Why do you believe that the robot doesn't understand the concept? (I'm assuming you're implying the robot to be intelligent, otherwise you could s/robot/text-to-speech system/)

Yeah replace robot with "text-to-speech system hooked up to wikipedia" if you like.
Not that it really matters... robot + empathy was just supposed to be an example of how things can be explained without being felt.

I shouldn't have used the ambiguous word "understand" though - the robot can rationally understand the concept, it can explain it in great detail and even explain physiological workings of it... but assuming it's just a logical computing device, it can't feel emotions, therefore it can't feel the emotions of others, therefore it can't experience empathy, which is what I meant by "understand" (a personal understanding that comes from within, instead of being learned from external sources).
It's arrived at an explanation while bypassing the experience, like Andre and the koan.

Quote: Original post by Hodgman

Quote: Original post by Prefect
Why do you believe that the robot doesn't understand the concept? (I'm assuming you're implying the robot to be intelligent, otherwise you could s/robot/text-to-speech system/)

Yeah replace robot with "text-to-speech system hooked up to wikipedia" if you like.
Not that it really matters... robot + empathy was just supposed to be an example of how things can be explained without being felt.

I shouldn't have used the ambiguous word "understand" though - the robot can rationally understand the concept, it can explain it in great detail and even explain physiological workings of it... but assuming it's just a logical computing device, it can't feel emotions, therefore it can't feel the emotions of others, therefore it can't experience empathy, which is what I meant by "understand" (a personal understanding that comes from within, instead of being learned from external sources).
It's arrived at an explanation while bypassing the experience, like Andre and the koan.

It seems that Searle's Chinese room argument might be of interest here.

The question if or does intelligence manifest the underlying fundamental reality and information of the universe is a circular one. Our best theoretical physical sciences hypothesize that a system observed fundamentally changes, due to the very fact of being observed. (see Quantum theory about particle spin states experiments).

So intelligence might not be necessary but any form of intentional observation (ie the capturing of photons or elections or directed transmission of) either by intelligent or un-intelligence will change the system. We can then gather that without intelligent observation and interactions, the system would not have had the same behavior. Un-intelligence observation occurs regardless of the existence of intelligence and its contribution can be ignored in this case.

My guess would be the universe doesn't need intelligent life to keep on ticking the way we'd expect, but the fact that intelligence manifest (given the innate complexity of the underlying universal rules and constructs), this in turn increases overall universal complexity. Intelligent life of course doesn't mean Human level intelligent it just means living systems, which is beyond the background noise of chemical reactions. A planet like Venus has lots of chemical reactions, like Earth but if you measured overall complexity and density of information in a given volume, I'm sure the Earth would be far ahead. A single bacteria would have more complexity than probably the entire planet of Venus.

What does this mean? Given our understanding of coupled systems and the exponential complexity and emergence which arises it can be fairly stated that without life, the Earth would be a very chemically, physically and informationally simpler planet.

How does this tie into the metaphysical question of concepts and constructs of the human mind and the basal reality? I think living systems perturb the very fabric of space time by passing information through it causing & creating localized effects which would not occur if there did not exist. Sufficiently advance or complex structures (ie Human mind) can extract information from within this sub-spatial web of information. Information which is reflective of the system, also self creating and also a sampling of the known objective universe, however distinguishing between the 3 i suspect is impossible.

So you can't know where the universe stops, you begin and/or if you just created that thing you just observered or discovered by looking at it :)

-ddn

I'll quote myself.

Quote: Original post by szecs
Why do I think, that something doesn't have consciousness/soul (could argue about it's meaning for about 100 pages), if it's not human? Just because I have one, and I'm a human.
It's the typical "if it looks like a duck, sounds like a duck and acts like a duck, that it must be a duck" stuff. So I'm tired of this question in sci-fis. That's why it is an important question. How should we treat an entity (machine/dolphin/whatever), which seems to have consciousness/soul?

Quote: Original post by Hodgman
Yeah replace robot with "text-to-speech system hooked up to wikipedia" if you like.
Not that it really matters... robot + empathy was just supposed to be an example of how things can be explained without being felt.

I shouldn't have used the ambiguous word "understand" though - the robot can rationally understand the concept, it can explain it in great detail and even explain physiological workings of it... but assuming it's just a logical computing device, it can't feel emotions, therefore it can't feel the emotions of others, therefore it can't experience empathy, which is what I meant by "understand" (a personal understanding that comes from within, instead of being learned from external sources).
It's arrived at an explanation while bypassing the experience, like Andre and the koan.

Franky, thinking that robots cannot have feelings is just stupid. We are just freaking robots after all. Okay, not today, not with the current (digital) technology, but the day will come (let's hope not, but for other reasons).

I cannot even be sure, if other humans have consciousness/soul/feelings.

EDIT: I've just read the Chinese room argument article. I haven't said anything new/interesting.

[Edited by - szecs on May 1, 2010 3:34:26 AM]

Quote: Original post by szecs
Franky, thinking that robots cannot have feelings is just stupid.

Jeez, tangent much? No one said that it can never happen... Does wikipedia 'feel' at the moment?

Quote: Original post by Hodgman

Quote: Original post by szecs
Franky, thinking that robots cannot have feelings is just stupid.

Jeez, tangent much? No one said that it can never happen... Does wikipedia 'feel' at the moment?

Haven't "felt" the present tense in your post, sorry. Wiki? of course not.