[ExI] Strong AI Hypothesis: logically flawed

[John Clark]

On Tue, Sep 30, 2014 at 4:26 PM, Dan <danust2012 at gmail.com> wrote:

> The problem is not with the definition though. Just as atomism was the
> thesis that all things are made of atoms, physicalism means all things are
> made ultimately of physical stuff.
>

No physicist thinks atoms are the ultimate foundation of matter, just the
foundation for the elements. I do think that matter is one of 2 pillars
that forms the foundation of all nouns (the other being information) but
not everything is a noun; I don't think John K Clark is a noun but a
adjective, the way matter atoms behave when they are organized in a
johnkclarkian way.


> > Even your offer of "Bosons and Fermions" seems to be a variety of
> physicalism and would depend on what was meant by those terms.
>

Bosons have integer spin, Fermions have half integer spin, that would seem
to me about as clear and unambiguous as definitions get.

>> I love philosophy but philosophers no longer do philosophy, scientists
>> and mathematicians do.
>>
>
> > I think people in general, scientists and mathematicians too (of the
> latter I think I can speak with some expertise because that's where my
> degree is), often do poor philosophy, just as most non-experts in any field
> do poorly in that field.
>

What major discovery in the field of philosophy have philosophers made in
the last 300 years? I can't think of one, but Darwin made a HUGE
philosophical discovery as did Watson and Crick. Cantor found that some
infinities are larger than others and Godel found that if a system of
thought  is self consistent then there are true statements it can never
know, and Turing proved that you can't predict what a machine will do next
even if it is 100% deterministic. Einstein found that time and space could
not be separated and that mass told spacetime how to bend and spacetime
told mass how to move. Heisenberg found that not only is the future
indeterminate but to some degree the past is too. And astronomers found
that the universe is expanding, and accelerating, and is 13.8 billion years
old. So what have philosophers got to stack up against these gargantuan
philosophical discoveries made by non-philosophers?  Searle and his
imbecilic Chinese Room.

>> I think the ancient Greeks got more credit than they deserved for coming
>> up with atomism, after all substances are either infinitely divisible or
>> they aren't, Democritus said they aren't and Aristotle said they are. One
>> said things were continuous and one said things were not, one of them had
>> to be right although neither had a scrap of experimental evidence to
>> support his guess.
>>
>
> > They relied on observation and argument.
>

Observation? Aristotle was a OK biologist but in my opinion he was the
worst physicist who ever lived.  As Bertrand Russell said:

"Aristotle maintained that women have fewer teeth than men; although he was
twice married, it never occurred to him to verify this statement by
examining his wives' mouths."

And Aristotle was supposed to be a master of logic but when he applied it
to physics the result was a complete muddle. Aristotle's physical theories
could have been easily refuted even in his own day;  take his theory that
heavy things fall faster than lighter ones, even if he was too lazy to
perform the experiment he should have been able to figure out from pure
logic alone that it can't be right because it leads to self contradiction.
If you take a heavy rock and tie it to a slightly lighter rock with some
string that has some slack in it and drop them then both rocks would fall
slower than the big rock alone because the slower moving lighter rock would
bog it down, but the tied together object would fall faster than the heavy
rock because the new object is heavier than the heavy rock alone.

> the strong AI hypothesis most proponents of AI hold seems to imply
> physicalism -- in the sense that what human intelligence relies on is how
> brains physically work -- what goes on in them in terms of electrical and
> chemical reactions and not on some notion of, say, that there's a mental
> realm separate from all physical moorings
>

We know with certainty, or at least as much certainty as we know anything
in science, that human intelligence relies on electrical and chemical
reactions. How do we know this? The same way we know that any 2 things in
science are related; change X and we observe that Y always changes and
change Y and we observe that X always changes.

>  there's also a multiple realizability thesis tucked in with this. This
> is just that intelligence supervenes on processes that can happen in a
> substrate other than a physical brain.
>

And we've already seen objects that work by electronics rather than
chemistry that show unmistakable signs of intelligence, and they're getting
smarter at a exponential rate.

  John K Clark
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