Materialism and Logic, mtually exclusive?

[Z]

The programmer merely specifies the logic, he doesn't execute it.


At no point does the programmer logically argue his way through all the situations that occur in the day-to-day running of the machine. That's why he designed it - to save humans the labour of having to do this.


They do infer because that's all inference is. Computers, in fact, prove that logical inference is purely mechanical. Not that anyone has needed proof for hundreds of years now.

Bingo.
Humans build machines. They arrange the matter in such a way that the matter has a system for doing logic. Humans design it - so humans build the underlying logical system. Then machines do the logic.

Now step back a level - where did the human get this logical system? It was built into them via education. Each person who does logic was taught to do so by a prior person.

Yet at some points, a few had to figure it out on their own from trial and error.

The initial beginnings of logic occured when the first protolife figured out how to tend to its basic needs... or, more to the point, when the first protolife survived because its automatic mechanistic behaviors acted as a purely accidental logic-gate, allowing it to gain what it needed and survive.

Over billions of years, these accidental combinations of logic-gates have combined and recombined, and resulted in a myriad of life on earth. But unlike deliberately built and designed logic machines, these are much more random and inconsistant in their design. They often run a single signal down multiple paths.

Consider the visual signal. The eye captures light and movement information, and sends it down bundles of nerves, through the amydgala (sp?) (allowing us to become afraid of something before we even 'see' it), into the visual cortex, then around into the prefrontal lobes (where awareness first occurs). All this, along dozens of pathways - some redundant. Some information is lost. Some is inserted from the memory core. Some information goes other places, from time to time. And all of this information travel occurs along pathways that have formed in slipshod patterns over extensive times.

It's like taking circuits and transistors and stuff, and randomly sticking them into boards again and again, and keeping the ones that let electricity go somewhere. After a while, you'll probably get a computer out of it. But it may not seem a very logical computer. You might get it to say that 2+2=4, or 11, or 9.112, or green, or Norkkwess. You might have to teach it about 2+2 and its resulting quadrology. You might have an autistic computer who insists 2+2=blue, no matter what.

I'm 100% certain we will make intelligent, cognitive, conscious artificial life... unless we die off first. And believe me, that life - will definitely 'do logic'.

After all, we already have created artificial proto-life that does logic...

 

[President Bush]

You are a conceit yet you want to be taken seriously. Do you really think that is possible?

FWIW, I have to withdraw my accusation that you are a sock puppet. You wouldn't likely use such a sock to engage in a philosophical discussion in what seems like a possible attempt to be taken seriously. I'm not going to engage you because I doubt your sincerity for obvious reasons. Your silly response to piggy when he called you a troll is reason enough to justify such doubt.

You made your own bed.

What, should I thank you for not actually pointing out the fundamental error and sophistry you claim I have committed in this thread? Likewise, the st-tut-ter, the math blunders, or that nasty tumble down the basement stairs last Wednesday. Along with anything else that did not really happen.

Why not put me on ignore rather than derail a perfectly fine thread? Personally, I believe you have a free choice in the matter.

 

[RandFan]

Why not put me on ignore rather than derail a perfectly fine thread? Personally, I believe you have a free choice in the matter.

Thanks for the advice. You are right. It is a good thread. My appologies to the thread starter.

 

[President Bush]

You are right.

You mean you think you have a free choice in the matter... oops, never mind. That's a different thread.

 

[RandFan]

Bingo.
Humans build machines. They arrange the matter in such a way that the matter has a system for doing logic. Humans design it - so humans build the underlying logical system. Then machines do the logic.

Now step back a level - where did the human get this logical system? It was built into them via education. Each person who does logic was taught to do so by a prior person.

Yet at some points, a few had to figure it out on their own from trial and error.

The initial beginnings of logic occured when the first protolife figured out how to tend to its basic needs... or, more to the point, when the first protolife survived because its automatic mechanistic behaviors acted as a purely accidental logic-gate, allowing it to gain what it needed and survive.

Over billions of years, these accidental combinations of logic-gates have combined and recombined, and resulted in a myriad of life on earth. But unlike deliberately built and designed logic machines, these are much more random and inconsistant in their design. They often run a single signal down multiple paths.

Consider the visual signal. The eye captures light and movement information, and sends it down bundles of nerves, through the amydgala (sp?) (allowing us to become afraid of something before we even 'see' it), into the visual cortex, then around into the prefrontal lobes (where awareness first occurs). All this, along dozens of pathways - some redundant. Some information is lost. Some is inserted from the memory core. Some information goes other places, from time to time. And all of this information travel occurs along pathways that have formed in slipshod patterns over extensive times.

It's like taking circuits and transistors and stuff, and randomly sticking them into boards again and again, and keeping the ones that let electricity go somewhere. After a while, you'll probably get a computer out of it. But it may not seem a very logical computer. You might get it to say that 2+2=4, or 11, or 9.112, or green, or Norkkwess. You might have to teach it about 2+2 and its resulting quadrology. You might have an autistic computer who insists 2+2=blue, no matter what.

I'm 100% certain we will make intelligent, cognitive, conscious artificial life... unless we die off first. And believe me, that life - will definitely 'do logic'.

After all, we already have created artificial proto-life that does logic...

Good post. After years of arguing against AI I have no doubt about either.

 

[RandFan]

You mean you think you have a free choice in the matter... oops, never mind. That's a different thread.

You are right. It is a different thread. Besides, your post is fallacy and is an example of your sophistry. You are trying to appeal to my intution as though that were an argument, it's not. Many truths are counter intuitive such as Realitivity and Quantum Mechanics. We accept them because logic compells us to accept them. Besides, we are not really discussing free will at the moment but materialism. Besides, your response is a non-sequitur, saying "your right" doesn't obviate determinism or materialsim. In any event I accept Dennett's take on free-will but that IS another thread.

 

[President Bush]

Many truths are counter intuitive such as Realitivity and Quantum Mechanics. We accept them because logic compells us to accept them.

Quantum mechanics is a truth? According to Niels Bohr the idea of an objective reality outside human experience has to be surrendered in order to predict the outcomes of experiments.

Do you have further examples of logic compelling us to embrace a loss of objective truth?

 

[RandFan]

Quantum mechanics is a truth? According to Niels Bohr the idea of an objective reality outside human experience has to be surrendered in order to predict the outcomes of experiments.

Do you have further examples of logic compelling us to embrace a loss of objective truth?

See, there's no argument there. This is a prime example of sophistry. You are making the same argument as many ID proponent. You pick a statement by a prominent and important authority and suppose that it means something. The math and logic of quantum mechanics is no more a controversy among scientists than evolution is. It's true that we don't understand everything we would like to about quantum mechanics and we as yet are unable to unify relativity and quantum mechanics.

Oh, let me make your next argument, Einstein called quantum mechanics "spooky action at a distance".

So, are the words of prominent scientists like Einstein and Bohr really enough to oveturn the math, logic and empirical tests behind the science?

 

[stillthinkin]

We have replaced a human operator with a computer. The human operator, we both agree, was carrying out logical inferences. After we replace him with the computer, where are these logical inferences now being carried out? There are three possibilities:

1) The computer now carries out the logical inferences.
2) No logical inferences are now being carried out, even though the task is being performed exactly the same as before.
3) The programmer carried out all the logical inferences in one go when he wrote the program.

You are ruling out (1) and I guess you would reject (2). But (3) is ridiculous. The programmer clearly never actually carries out all the many thousand or millions of logical inferences that will have to be made over the years of operation of the machine. The programmer merely specifies the logic, he doesn't execute it.

Both (2) and (3) are correct. No logical inferences are done by the machine, it has been designed to do what it does by a human being, deterministically and causally. Any inferences are done at the time the machine is designed.

Remember the following situation:

If machines can do logic, but cant make mistakes - what would we mean by a "bug"?

A failure of a specific, physical machine to correctly perform in accordance with its specification. The machine just does what it does, what it has to do according to the laws of physics. But it's not doing what what we (wrongly) expected it to do. The mistake is ours.

If we make a mistake while making a machine, but the mistake remains ours... then how is it that when dont make a mistake, the behaviour of the mechanism becomes its own? If the mistake is ours and not the machines, then how is the logic we put into the machine an activity of the machine? Machines do what they have to do, according to the laws of physics - they dont make logical inferences any more than they make mistakes.

Just as "the mistake is ours", as you say, so is the logic ours. Any attempt to say that the machine does logic, but cant make mistakes, is special pleading. Even if the machine make the same mistake a million times, because of one line of wrong code - the mistake is that of the programmer, and it is only one mistake.

 

[stillthinkin]

Ok, assuming that you haven't would you ever use the term "corrupt data file"? If yes, why?

ETA: When you need to rebuild the index of a data file that will no longer work as you want do you refer to the file as corrupt?

Of course we can speak that way, but it is an anthropomorphic projection to do so. This is the same as saying "the car needs gas", by which we really mean to say "we need to put gas in the car to make use of it". Material things dont make mistakes, material things dont have needs, material things are always only exactly as they have to be.

 

[President Bush]

See, there's no argument there. This is a prime example of sophistry. You are making the same argument as many ID proponent. You pick a statement by a prominent and important authority and suppose that it means something. The math and logic of quantum mechanics is no more a controversy among scientists than evolution is. It's true that we don't understand everything we would like to about quantum mechanics and we as yet are unable to unify relativity and quantum mechanics.

Oh, let me make your next argument, Einstein called quantum mechanics "spooky action at a distance".

So, are the words of prominent scientists like Einstein and Bohr really enough to oveturn the math, logic and empirical tests behind the science?

I have no idea what you think I was arguing for.

Just found it funny that you represented quantum mechanics as a truth. Think about it.

 

[stillthinkin]

But I see: either we should take materialism seriously as a theory and pursue deeper understanding by fleshing out its implications... or we simply have to take it on faith as a religion, and ask one of the priests of materialism when we feel like thinking a thought and arent sure if it is a heretical one. I am afraid I only accept materialism as a hypothesis, not as "truth or reality". It seems to me to be a weak hypothesis, and a worse religion.

??? This is just more rhetoric. It doesn't establish a proposition and it doesn't advance an argument. I would prefer to skip the rhetoric. Leave that to the sophists like PB.

Let me clarify what point I was trying to make -- perhaps I was overreacting, but hear me out please. When you said "I used to be focused on the "implications" of materialism. There is no need. We only need to understand. We can't change the truth or reality of what is." this sounded to me like a claim to inside information about truth and reality, as though you had some quasi-religious knowledge that the rest of us do not share. Some in this thread might agree with your position, and some might not - but it sounded to me like you were setting yourself and your past up as some kind of standard. I think we do need to pursue the implications of materialism, not just rely on it as a given article of faith. Again, perhaps I misunderstood you and overreacted based on my misunderstanding.

Regarding PB, you have told us both that we have committed a "fundamental error" somewhere. I would like to know what that is.

That is good. I hope this means we will avoid appealing to "complicated" and "complexity" as an explanation of how things work.

? I have never appealed simply to complexity. However it took humans hundreds of years from the time of Da Vinci to work out flight. It could not be reduced to a simple explanation. Neither could relativity or quantum mechanics. Sustained self powered flight is a complex thing that the genius Da Vinci couldn't work out. Hell, the Wright Brothers didn't fully understand aerodynamics at their death.

The issue is not whether you have "appealed simply to complexity" (another pun ). My point is that complexity does not reside in material things. Complexity is experienced in the act of consideration. People perplex about things and when a subject matter gets too involved for a person, he attributes it to the complexity of something outside of himself - but this is another anthropomorphic projection. Complexity is nothing more than projected perplexity.

A simple transistor is insufficient to send images from a Mars explorer to earth. Such a feat requires complex electronics and physics.

Again, my point is that complexity is in the eye of the beholder. When you refer to "a simple transistor", what are you saying about the amazingly complex material science involved in designing a transistor? Solid state physics is no less complicated than aerodynamics, and I think it is no less complicated than the radio science involved in sending and receiving images. Sending and receiving images is a relatively simple bit of electronics. We can build an AM radio receiver with some wire and a diode... I dont find television complicated, whether over a hundred miles or a hundred million miles. But that is because I understand how it works.

 

[stillthinkin]

You mean you think you have a free choice in the matter... oops, never mind. That's a different thread.

A belated but hearty "welcome aboard our thread" Mr. President!

I am not entirely sure that the subjects of "free will" and "intellectual integrity" are that different. This thread is about the broader subject of whether materialism can accommodate the intellectual reality of logical inference, or whether logic must join free will on the dustheap. Materialists seem quite ready to abandon free will as an illusion, but they certainly hesitate to abandon logic. It seems inconsistent to me. If we can scrap free will, we can scrap meaningful intellection as well.

That said, no, lets not talk about free will here!

 

[nescafe]

The issue is not whether you have "appealed simply to complexity" (another pun ). My point is that complexity does not reside in material things.

True -- complexity lies (roughly) in the way those material things are configured .

Complexity is experienced in the act of consideration. People perplex about things and when a subject matter gets too involved for a person, he attributes it to the complexity of something outside of himself - but this is another anthropomorphic projection. Complexity is nothing more than projected perplexity.

You seem to be implying that complexity is a subjective quality -- this is not entirely true. In algorithmic information theory^WP, we can describe how complex systems are (by modelling them as programs being executed in some arbitrary programming language) using such measures as Kolmogorov complexity^WP.

 

[RandFan]

I have no idea what you think I was arguing for.

Just found it funny that you represented quantum mechanics as a truth. Think about it.

I stand by what I said.

The "truth" is that quantum mechanics allows us to make accurate and precise descriptions for many phenomenon that Newtonian and electromagnetism could not explain at the atomic and subatomic levels.

Do you or do you not agree?

Look, I get your point. I understand the implications of quantum mechanics and the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. However the uncertainty principle doesn't obviate the fact that the math and logic behind quantum mechanics are understood and can be used to help us explore and understand the world at atomic and subatomic levels.

That is why your statement is sophistry. It focuses on a small part of the theory to paint an inaccurate picture of the whole. Quantum mechanics does in fact reveal truth. To be certain it paints a more accurate picture than classic mechanics ever could for certain phenomenon.

So do you now see the problem with wisecracking one-liners as it relates to the discussion?

 

[RandFan]

We can't change the truth or reality of what is." this sounded to me like a claim to inside information about truth and reality...

This is truly beyond me how you would come to such a conclusion. No. Let me make it as simple as can be. Thinking pigs can fly unaided, as they are now to the nearest star system tomorrow won't make it happen. That's it. No need to read anything mysterious, spiritual or religious. At the risk of making a tautology, what is, is. Neither our argument or our beliefs will change reality. We just need to figure out the logic and accept the consequences of that logic provisionally until and if their is new evidence to overturn our understanding.

Regarding PB, you have told us both that we have committed a "fundamental error" somewhere. I would like to know what that is.

I was as clear as I could be. You are assuming that since you suppose that since materialists can't account for words like "problem" or "utility" that it proves something. It doesn't.

The issue is not whether you have "appealed simply to complexity" (another pun ). My point is that complexity does not reside in material things. Complexity is experienced in the act of consideration. People perplex about things and when a subject matter gets too involved for a person, he attributes it to the complexity of something outside of himself - but this is another anthropomorphic projection. Complexity is nothing more than projected perplexity.

This is simply asserted and does not follow from any premise. It certainly isn't an axiom held by science that I know of. The human brain is more complex than the brain of an ant. If I were to reduce the complexity of your brain by scrambling parts of your brain I could reduce your capability to think. In fact we can precisely take away your ability to use nouns or verbs or feel emotion.

Again, my point is that complexity is in the eye of the beholder. When you refer to "a simple transistor", what are you saying about the amazingly complex material science involved in designing a transistor? Solid state physics is no less complicated than aerodynamics, and I think it is no less complicated than the radio science involved in sending and receiving images. Sending and receiving images is a relatively simple bit of electronics. We can build an AM radio receiver with some wire and a diode... I dont find television complicated, whether over a hundred miles or a hundred million miles. But that is because I understand how it works.

This doesn't fit my definition of complexity. I'm not talking about the difficulty to understand a thing. Though to be sure the more complex a thing is the more difficult it is to understand.

1. You want am radio you need a few different things (I've built one from scratch BTW).
2. You want FM you need a lot more things and you need different types of things with more connections.
3. You want FM stereo you need even more things and more different types of things with even more connections.
4. You want pictures with that sound you need even more things and more different types of things with even more connections.
5. Now, you want high definition images and CD quality sound you will need even more things and more different types of things with even more connections.

Each increase in capacity requires an increase in the number of elements and connections. We have a word to describe this increase in the number of elements and connections. It's called "complexity". It's a good word. It has utility. It conveys an accurate mental image.

More complexity, more capacity.

 

[President Bush]

Quantum mechanics does in fact reveal truth.

Only if truth is the image of prediction-making. In quantum mechanics it seems we must give up the idea of an objective reality (outside human experience) in order to make these predictions.

Or so said Bohr.

 

[RandFan]

Of course we can speak that way, but it is an anthropomorphic projection to do so.

Could you answer my question?

Would you ever use the term "corrupt data file"? If yes, why?

No, not really This is the same as saying "the car needs gas", by which we really mean to say "we need to put gas in the car to make use of it".

Actually no, this was allready dealt with earlier.

No. Statement 1 is a shortened version of "The car needs gas (in order to keep running)."

Such a statement is logically valid. It is not anthropomorphic.

Material things dont make mistakes, material things dont have needs, material things are always only exactly as they have to be.

And humans are always only exactly as they have to be.

Machines don't make mistakes and humans don't make mistakes. This has been explained to you many times now. You are arguing ad nauseam. This has been dealt with.

 

[RandFan]

Only if truth is the image of prediction-making.

I'll say it again, quantum physics allows us to make accurate and precise descriptions for many phenomenon that Newtonian and electromagnetism could not explain at the atomic and subatomic levels.

Do you agree or not?

 

[President Bush]

Only if truth is the image of prediction-making. In quantum mechanics it seems we must give up the idea of an objective reality (outside human experience) in order to make these predictions.

I'll say it again, quantum physics allows us to make accurate and precise descriptions for many phenomenon that Newtonian and electromagnetism could not explain at the atomic and subatomic levels.

Do you agree or not?

Sure, why not. You're substituting "descriptions" in your quote for "predictions" in mine.

Truth is, generally, defined as the true or actual state of something. Bohr indicated that it seems we must give up on the idea of knowing such a thing to make the predictions/descriptions which you call truth.

This does not seem controversial to me.