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[bradrn]

Au contraire, the Computer is a Being of unfathomable Cunning, large and complicated far beyond our Ken, whose Function we can only ascertain in very small Parts at a Time, by offering it divers Incantations and interpreting its Responses with very careful Understanding.

Well, that is certainly the goal for many in the tech industry and one I have consistently opposed.

You have completely missed the irony in alice's post - a trait they are famous for in these quarters.

I dunno… feels like a perfectly accurate description quite a lot of the time…

(cf. XKCDs 1316, 1760, 2259, and no doubt many others)

(Hint: irony has nothing to do with metals, nor with laundry care.)

“I see the bridge has got through another night without being stolen, sergeant. Well done.”

“You can’t be too careful, I always say.”

“I’m sure we citizens can sleep safely in one another’s beds knowing that no one can make off with a five-thousand-ton bridge overnight,” said Windle.

Unlike Modo the dwarf, Sergeant Colon did know the meaning of the word “irony.” He thought it meant “sort of like iron.”

—Terry Pratchett, Reaper Man

[malloc]

You have completely missed the irony in alice's post - a trait they are famous for in these quarters. (Hint: irony has nothing to do with metals, nor with laundry care.)

No, I understood the irony. I meant that there are people trying to make her statement literal rather an ironic by creating AGI capable of acting and thinking independently of human intervention.

I dunno… feels like a perfectly accurate description quite a lot of the time…

(cf. XKCDs 1316, 1760, 2259, and no doubt many others)

It often does feel like the machines at my workplace are haunted. They've been messing up all week, making it impossible for me to achieve the output my boss demands.

[WeepingElf]

You have completely missed the irony in alice's post - a trait they are famous for in these quarters. (Hint: irony has nothing to do with metals, nor with laundry care.)

No, I understood the irony. I meant that there are people trying to make her statement literal rather an ironic by creating AGI capable of acting and thinking independently of human intervention.

I dunno… feels like a perfectly accurate description quite a lot of the time…

(cf. XKCDs 1316, 1760, 2259, and no doubt many others)

It often does feel like the machines at my workplace are haunted. They've been messing up all week, making it impossible for me to achieve the output my boss demands.

I understand. Computer systems are very complex, and therefore their behaviour is often unpredictable, and I understand why people mystify them like this. People tend to mystify what they don't understand. In the Middle Ages, most people were illiterate, and many thought that letters had magical powers. It is similar with computers today.

[Torco]

Again, sure it can. Did you know programs can be hand-emulated, using pen and paper? The program doesn't know that it's laboriously hand-modeled. You could do it writing on toast with butter.

lmao fair enough on waves, but not on toast or notepaper, i think: in the notebook example, it's you who is "running" the program, though with the paper supplementing your memory. guy-with-toast is a valid substrate for doom, but not toast alone.

Torco, what do you think about numbers and math? The same number can exist as thoughts in my head, as Arabic numerals in ink on paper, as Roman numerals in chalk on asphalt, as positions of beads on an abacus, as electrical charges and currents in a computer, etc. yet it has one mathematical identity despite all these different physical substates. If I am getting your view right, there is no such thing as an abstract, ideal identity independent of physical media, so how can numbers have such?

for my money the solution is that form is a predicate and not a subject. like, there is no thing-that-is-six out there in the land of math, there are certain subsets of the universe that, if you reckon them in a certain way, have six of whatever you're counting. the "if you reckon them in a certain way" part is not trivial: people have four legs or they have two depending on what, exactly, you mean by leg. this applies to numbers but also to other forms, for example a chair is really nothing other than a bunch of wood arranged in a certain way, to wit, with four legs and all the rest of it: there's no thing-that-is-chairness that somehow impinges on the chair, and the wood that makes it up kinda doesn't care if it's arranged chairwise or tablewise. when you count how many chairs there are in a room, and you count one but i count zero, it could be that there's no fact about the room that we disagree on but, rather, that we disagree on what exactly qualifies as a chair. is a beanbag a chair? a stool? a stump carved to have a back? ñeeeeee, you know?

of course, this isn't without problems: for example, what do we mean when we say things like "two is prime and also even" ? in general talking about relations between forms is, by definition, abstract. "squares cover a plane better than circles", for example, is a formal relationship: if you take bills and try to line a box with them, you'll cover the whole box in a single layer, but if you try to do it with coins, you won't, it's just how it turns out that it happens in reality. talking about being prime is even more inconvenient, so we come up with shortcuts.

but ultimately, these seemingly transcendental logical facts about forms still have something to do with the substance onto which the "laws of logic" are about, right? for example, when we say "you can have parallel lines" in the realm of abstract math, that's going to depend on whether we're imagining the lines on an imaginary plane or on an imaginary ball. if we mean it in the realm of reality, then it'll be true or not depending on the actual geometry of actual space, which may be different from the mathematical models we're using: if the universe is round then it'll turn out that no lines can, in fact, be parallel: that parallelism is not a form, in other words, that elements in this material reality can adopt. impossible formal relationships are as common as possible or necessary formal relationships.

[Travis B.]

The key thing is that math is an abstraction divorced from any particular thing in the physical world. One can express math countless different ways in the physical substrate, yet the math remains the same regardless. By your logic, math itself is inseparable from the physical world, and hence the rules of math should change depending on whether you are drawing equations in sand or doing computations on a computer.

[alice]

Au contraire, the Computer is a Being of unfathomable Cunning, large and complicated far beyond our Ken, whose Function we can only ascertain in very small Parts at a Time, by offering it divers Incantations and interpreting its Responses with very careful Understanding.

Well, that is certainly the goal for many in the tech industry and one I have consistently opposed.

You have completely missed the irony in alice's post - a trait they are famous for in these quarters. (Hint: irony has nothing to do with metals, nor with laundry care.)

Actually, I was aiming for sarcasm. How did I miss so badly?

[zompist]

Again, sure it can. Did you know programs can be hand-emulated, using pen and paper? The program doesn't know that it's laboriously hand-modeled. You could do it writing on toast with butter.

lmao fair enough on waves, but not on toast or notepaper, i think: in the notebook example, it's you who is "running" the program, though with the paper supplementing your memory. guy-with-toast is a valid substrate for doom, but not toast alone.

I'll grant you this quibble, but not the general point that a computer can't be made of toast. It happens that you can compute using silicon, or vacuum tubes, or brains, or punch cards and tinker toys. If you can make a NAND gate you can make any computational device. Some substrates would be unutterably slow or clumsy, but that's an engineering problem, not a philosophical obstacle.

for my money the solution is that form is a predicate and not a subject. like, there is no thing-that-is-six out there in the land of math, there are certain subsets of the universe that, if you reckon them in a certain way, have six of whatever you're counting. the "if you reckon them in a certain way" part is not trivial: people have four legs or they have two depending on what, exactly, you mean by leg. this applies to numbers but also to other forms, for example a chair is really nothing other than a bunch of wood arranged in a certain way, to wit, with four legs and all the rest of it: there's no thing-that-is-chairness that somehow impinges on the chair, and the wood that makes it up kinda doesn't care if it's arranged chairwise or tablewise. when you count how many chairs there are in a room, and you count one but i count zero, it could be that there's no fact about the room that we disagree on but, rather, that we disagree on what exactly qualifies as a chair. is a beanbag a chair? a stool? a stump carved to have a back?

Sure, human things are "things" based on convention, which can be arbitrary or incoherent. You can certainly argue that any actual heap of sand doesn't have a precisely measurable size or number of grains.

But elementary particles are quantized. If you got one proton it's hydrogen, if you got two it's helium— there's no such thing as an element with 1/2 or 1.455 or π protons. An electron can only be in an integral energy state— 0, 1, 2, etc. It can only have 1/2 or -1/2 spin. If there are aliens in Andromeda they would come up with the same observations. (Not that there aren't conventions— they could call the spins +1 and -1— but they can't decide that there are really three spins or zero.)

(There are other ways where quantum mechanics disturbs or outrages the philosopher, or common sense. But that's also part of my point. Trying to make philosophical points based on human language is not going to tell you a lot about things that are not human or not language.)

[Richard W]

there is no thing-that-is-six out there in the land of math,

I think there is:

Code: Select all

0 = {}
1 = {0}
2 = {0, 1}
3 = {0, 1, 2}
4 = {0, 1, 2, 3}
5 = {0, 1, 2, 3, 4}
6 = {0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5}

[rotting bones]

The key thing is that math is an abstraction divorced from any particular thing in the physical world. One can express math countless different ways in the physical substrate, yet the math remains the same regardless. By your logic, math itself is inseparable from the physical world, and hence the rules of math should change depending on whether you are drawing equations in sand or doing computations on a computer.

https://snapshotsofthelabyrinth.photo.b ... imulation/

[Torco]

The key thing is that math is an abstraction divorced from any particular thing in the physical world. One can express math countless different ways in the physical substrate, yet the math remains the same regardless. By your logic, math itself is inseparable from the physical world, and hence the rules of math should change depending on whether you are drawing equations in sand or doing computations on a computer.

mmm... but already this happens from time to time, as with the case of parallel lines. we could say that they're different mathematical entities, parallel-lines-in-a-plane and parallel-lines-in-a-sphere, but that wasn't apparent till it was: i don't think there's any transcendental math for there to be objetively different mathematical entities beyond language and thoughts that humans utter and think and so, from that perspective, the rules of math can and do change all the time: we used to think the square root of minus one was a silly notion, and now we know better. we used to think zero was silly, now we know better.

but of course not all changes in material reality should be expected to affect the math of material entities either: the hipotenuse of a square triangle with sides 3 and 4 in fact is 5 whether the triangle is made of wood or stone or bone, cause that mathematical relation is not a predicate that applies to like different materials, but i don't know, to space itself or something. as with parallels, maybe in different spaces the famous theorem doesn't obtain. maybe it doesn't obtain in spheres or negative curvature spaces or sth i honestly dunno.

I'll grant you this quibble, but not the general point that a computer can't be made of toast. It happens that you can compute using silicon, or vacuum tubes, or brains, or punch cards and tinker toys. If you can make a NAND gate you can make any computational device. Some substrates would be unutterably slow or clumsy, but that's an engineering problem, not a philosophical obstacle.

i meean, sure, you could glue toast in this or that way to make a sort of Babbage machine buuuut, at that point would we even say we're running doom on toast? i'd say we're running it on a mechanical computer that's made *of* toast, and a lot of PVA, and what'd you use for bearings? steel probably. we're running doom on toast at this point only technically, but i'm on board with the general idea that a computer can, in principle, be made of whatever materials.

Sure, human things are "things" based on convention, which can be arbitrary or incoherent. You can certainly argue that any actual heap of sand doesn't have a precisely measurable size or number of grains....

sure but this all boils down to facts about material reality: it turns out that there's objective ways to reckon certain things, cause it turns out there's actually quantized stuff in material-reality-as-such. or at least so say our best models, sure, but you don't need to come up with an entire new class of entities, actually-existing-transcendental-ideal-things for that. The andromedans would arrive at many of the same mathematical conclusions as we have, in essence, but that's because they have a lot of things in common with us: material, real, observable things, like light, protons, space, fields, etcetera. we share the same material reality, and we're both clever thingamabobs, so we arrive a similar observations, we'd expect this.

I think there is:

More: show

Code: Select all

0 = {}
1 = {0}
2 = {0, 1}
3 = {0, 1, 2}
4 = {0, 1, 2, 3}
5 = {0, 1, 2, 3, 4}
6 = {0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5}

i don't think i get it. we can all write things down, that doesn't mean those things are actually existing things in reality, does it?

I guess this may be more of a yellow dress / purple dress kind of thing. I get where mathematical realism comes from, the fact that math works is remarkable and wonderful but, then again, you'd expect smart apes to figure out some regularities in the material reality they find themselves in, wouldn't you? that's kinda what being smart is all about. the effectiveness of it all doesn't entail or suggest, i don't think, the existence of a transcendental realm of math, or a transcendental god who created said realm, or any of it... or at least, i honestly don't see how it does.

[malloc]

I understand. Computer systems are very complex, and therefore their behaviour is often unpredictable, and I understand why people mystify them like this. People tend to mystify what they don't understand. In the Middle Ages, most people were illiterate, and many thought that letters had magical powers. It is similar with computers today.

Well, my point was that my job is hard because the equipment itself sucks and keeps messing up weird ways that the maintenance people cannot figure out how to fix. This greatly jeopardizes my employment since I have missed the demanded output several times over the past two weeks.

Also the walls of my apartment are paper thin and I'm plagued by noise from neighboring units. It sounds like there's a dog whimpering over and over again although I cannot be sure.

[zompist]

ure but this all boils down to facts about material reality: it turns out that there's objective ways to reckon certain things, cause it turns out there's actually quantized stuff in material-reality-as-such. or at least so say our best models, sure, but you don't need to come up with an entire new class of entities, actually-existing-transcendental-ideal-things for that. The andromedans would arrive at many of the same mathematical conclusions as we have, in essence, but that's because they have a lot of things in common with us: material, real, observable things, like light, protons, space, fields, etcetera. we share the same material reality, and we're both clever thingamabobs, so we arrive a similar observations, we'd expect this.

[...] i don't think i get it. we can all write things down, that doesn't mean those things are actually existing things in reality, does it?

I guess this may be more of a yellow dress / purple dress kind of thing. I get where mathematical realism comes from, the fact that math works is remarkable and wonderful but, then again, you'd expect smart apes to figure out some regularities in the material reality they find themselves in, wouldn't you? that's kinda what being smart is all about. the effectiveness of it all doesn't entail or suggest, i don't think, the existence of a transcendental realm of math, or a transcendental god who created said realm, or any of it... or at least, i honestly don't see how it does.

You're using a lot of heavy words here-- "objective", "reality", "actually existing", "transcendental realm"-- without any apparent definition, or any recognition that these are philosophical minefields. It feels like you're saying something but you're really not. At least, looking at your words, the only sense I can make of them is that you are asserting that numbers are not made of atoms, which is true enough but surely you don't think that's a bold philosophical position. It is bold to suggest that mathematics is only something observed by smart apes and Andromedans... if there were no sentient creatures, would there be no mathematical (or other) truths? Would it not be true in such a world that 2 + 2 = 4?

It can clarify things to use an idea of C.S. Lewis's. He said it was not useful to ask if something is "real"; the better question is "It's a real what?" E.g. Sherlock Holmes is not a real human being, but he's a real literary character. A forged painting is not a real Picasso but it's a real painting. Money is not a real property of matter but it is a real cultural phenomenon. "It's not real" is not itself a meaningful proposition, except as shorthand for a better explanation of what the thing is.

You seem to want to restrict "actually existing" to, I dunno, matter and energy, it's unclear. That does allow you to declare that numbers aren't "real", but no one said numbers are made of matter and energy. They're a real what? They're certainly not a hallucination. They're not a cultural artefact (though we shouldn't sneer at cultural artefacts). They're not just "mental concepts"; as I noted, electrons will be in integral energy states and one of two spins even if you declare that integers only live in brains. So what are they?

[Torco]

You're using a lot of heavy words here-- "objective", "reality", "actually existing", "transcendental realm"-- without any apparent definition, or any recognition that these are philosophical minefields. It feels like you're saying something but you're really not. At least, looking at your words, the only sense I can make of them is that you are asserting that numbers are not made of atoms, which is true enough but surely you don't think that's a bold philosophical position. It is bold to suggest that mathematics is only something observed by smart apes and Andromedans...

I know they're philosophical minefields, but that's cause mathematical realism really does step into all sorts of philosophical minefields, i'm just pointing that out. to clarify, i am not saying that mathematics is something only observed by us and andromedans: i don't think it's something we observe at all, i think it's something we do. and that andromedans probably do something quite similar.

if there were no sentient creatures, would there be no mathematical (or other) truths? Would it not be true in such a world that 2 + 2 = 4?

here i gotta bite the bullet: as i've said i think truth is a characteristic of things we say, not a thing out there in the realm of forms or whatever. so yeah, in a universe where no one says anything -or thinks anything etc- then there are no things that are or can be true. or false. just like there are no things that are, say, illegal. cause there's no laws, cause there are no people writing down laws. just like in a mindless universe there would be no things that are according-to-regulation. or things that are holy.

It can clarify things to use an idea of C.S. Lewis's. He said it was not useful to ask if something is "real"; the better question is "It's a real what?"

I like that! going with it i think that mathematical statements are real dicta, and that what people call mathematical truths are real dicta that are true. this doesn't solve the whole thing, what do we mean by true? epistemology is a whole thing, but this approach has the distinct advantage that it doesn't posit a whole nother type of substance and so on.

if the question is more like "the thing that makes math universally true, that's a real what?" then i don't know cause i don't know the whole of math, but fas as i can see geometry seems true by virtue of facts about physical space. some other mathematics is probably true by virtue of the meaning of the terms as in, it's circular: married bachelors don't exist because we mean unmarried when we say bachelor, and something similar is happening when we say that 2 =! 3.

[Travis B.]

Math is an abstraction which has an identity and rules independent of the physical substrate; things like 2 + 2 = 4 are not tied to any particular physical representation, whether it is electric charges and currents or grains of sand or thoughts in our heads.

[rotting bones]

Math is an abstraction which has an identity and rules independent of the physical substrate; things like 2 + 2 = 4 are not tied to any particular physical representation, whether it is electric charges and currents or grains of sand or thoughts in our heads.

Generalizations over physical laws apply to some realities and don't apply to others. For example, 2+2=4 applies to apples but not to an uncountably turbulent surface of a fluid.

[Travis B.]

Math is an abstraction which has an identity and rules independent of the physical substrate; things like 2 + 2 = 4 are not tied to any particular physical representation, whether it is electric charges and currents or grains of sand or thoughts in our heads.

Generalizations over physical laws apply to some realities and don't apply to others. For example, 2+2=4 applies to apples but not to an uncountably turbulent surface of a fluid.

This is different from physical substates for math as an abstraction -- I was referring to doing math with a computer, by drawing in sand, or in one's head.

[rotting bones]

Math is an abstraction which has an identity and rules independent of the physical substrate; things like 2 + 2 = 4 are not tied to any particular physical representation, whether it is electric charges and currents or grains of sand or thoughts in our heads.

Generalizations over physical laws apply to some realities and don't apply to others. For example, 2+2=4 applies to apples but not to an uncountably turbulent surface of a fluid.

This is different from physical substates for math as an abstraction -- I was referring to doing math with a computer, by drawing in sand, or in one's head.

The same simulation can execute on multiple, mutually incompatible substrates. The same pattern surfaces when you ignore low level details. See my post if you haven't yet: https://snapshotsofthelabyrinth.photo.b ... imulation/ Any Turing-complete system can execute the Game of Life. This would work even if a low level system implements the Game of Life directly.

Amusingly, it's possible to simulate electronics using gears: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QrkiJZKJfpY

[Travis B.]

The same simulation can execute on multiple, mutually incompatible substrates. The same pattern surfaces when you ignore low level details. See my post if you haven't yet: https://snapshotsofthelabyrinth.photo.b ... imulation/ Any Turing-complete system can execute the Game of Life. This would work even if a low level system implements the Game of Life directly.

Amusingly, it's possible to simulate electronics using gears: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QrkiJZKJfpY

In that case we are effectively saying the same thing.

[rotting bones]

The same simulation can execute on multiple, mutually incompatible substrates. The same pattern surfaces when you ignore low level details. See my post if you haven't yet: https://snapshotsofthelabyrinth.photo.b ... imulation/ Any Turing-complete system can execute the Game of Life. This would work even if a low level system implements the Game of Life directly.

Amusingly, it's possible to simulate electronics using gears: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QrkiJZKJfpY

In that case we are effectively saying the same thing.

My impression is that you are arguing for dualism of matter and math. I'm arguing for monism in terms of matching computations emerging from physical laws. Maybe I misunderstood your point or my post is unclear as written.

[rotting bones]

Personally, I'm tempted to posit a dualism of matter and the laws of transformation that operate on it.