HDTenEightyP/NetNews huggingface dataset:
From: e343mh@tamuts.tamu.edu (Michael Hand)
Subject: Re: Dualism
Organization: Texas A&M University, College Station
Date: Fri, 11 Sep 1992 17:49:17 GMT

In article <1992Sep11.013212.4413@math.ucla.edu> Barry Merriman writes:
   > Its pretty reasonable to assume the 'mind' is a biological entity, 
   > not a philosophical one. 

Not a "philosophical entity"?  Here's a wee bit of advice: spend
more than a tenth of a second thinking about what you're gonna write
in your postings, or you'll continue saying what even you can recognize 
as nonsense.
If you need me to, I'll explain what's wrong with your claim, but
I'm hoping it won't be necessary.
B-o} Michael
_______________________________________________________________________
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Michael Hand                     phone (409)845-5660, fax (409)845-0458
Dept of Philosophy, Texas A&M Univ, College Station TX 77843-4237 U.S.A.
Newsgroups: sci.philosophy.tech
From: daryl@oracorp.com (Daryl McCullough)
Subject: Re: Dualism
Organization: ORA Corporation
Date: Tue, 15 Sep 1992 04:27:53 GMT

In article <1992Sep13.201005.23853@galois.mit.edu>,
tycchow@riesz.mit.edu (Timothy Y. Chow) writes:

>Evan Hunt seems to believe that a machine that can pass the Turing
>test is conscious if and only if human beings are conscious.  But most
>of us have some intuition (even if some of us squelch it as incorrect)
>that the giant lookup table is not conscious.  By introducing the
>lookup table I hoped to awaken this intuition to show how one might
>argue that consciousness is a further fact beyond the facts that are
>accessible to us by means of tests.

Not that this contradicts your point (you did say "most of us"), but I
*do* think that the giant lookup table is conscious. Only most of its
thinking is done at compile-time, rather than run-time.

Daryl McCullough
ORA Corp.
Ithaca, NY
From: mccolm@darwin.math.usf.edu. (Gregory McColm)
Newsgroups: sci.philosophy.tech
Subject: Re: Hidden Variables
Date: 5 Sep 92 19:15:20 GMT
Organization: Univ. of South Florida, Math Department

In article <1992Aug24.085622.28313@math.ucla.edu> barry@arnold.math.ucla.edu (Barry Merriman) writes:
>In article <snodgras.714198449@crash> snodgras@crash.cts.com (John Snodgrass)  
>writes:
>>       I frequently encounter philosophically (or historically) naive
>> scientists, who seem to overlook the most obvious 
>> philosophical contradictions

>Hmm, thats interesting.  I have a rather different experience.
>I _never_ encounter philosophers that have made any useful contribution
>to our understanding of the physical universe. Are there any?
>
>Perhaps the modern definition of a philosopher of science is one
>who cannot actually make any contribution to science, but still likes
>to talk about it.
>

There was a big fight over whether or not metaphysics 
made any sense (Kant, Kierkegaard, Schopenhauer, etc), 
and the result has been a sort of evisceration of 
philosophy (not mentioning any names ...).  Much 
academic philosophy consists of pointless word games.  
(The same is true of a lot of academia, even mathematics.)

Some of the Vienna Circle people (eg, Frege and Mach) and 
friends (eg, Ramsey and Russell) had definite impact on 
science.  People like Herzl and Wittgenstein were influential 
but in occasionally weird ways.  But that was long ago;  
today, "philosophy of science" is a full-fledged field of 
its own.  Its hard to say if people like Michael Polanyi 
and Marjorie Grene have had any impact.  Probably not 
much.  Academia is now like the Holy Roman Empire, fragmented 
into thousands of fiefdoms.  Why should high energy physicists 
listen to philosophers of science?  They don't even listen 
to low energy physicists.  Group theorists and Differential 
Geometers live in adjacent offices and don't share anything 
for years on end.  Perhaps the real question is:  why is it 
that turn of the century Vienna had people making major 
contributions to areas outside of their major fields to an 
extent not true since?

-----Greg McColm
Newsgroups: sci.philosophy.tech
From: chalmers@bronze.ucs.indiana.edu (David Chalmers)
Subject: Re: Dualism
Organization: Indiana University
Date: Mon, 14 Sep 1992 22:19:30 GMT

In article <1992Sep14.005454.16209@sco.com> evanh@sco.COM (Evan Hunt) writes:

>No, Mr. Chalmers, that is not what is in question.  What I've been
>trying to establish is that your "probably correct" syllogistic
>proof of dualism is circular, because it requires the prior
>assumption that dualism is true.  The fact that I personally
>believe physicalism to be true is irrelevant to the discussion;
>I'm well aware that my belief is unprovable.

The truth or otherwise of physicalism is precisely what this thread
is all about -- see the subject header.  So far, we've more or less
agreed that the truth of dualism stands or falls with the logical
possibility of a zombie replica of me.  Charges of "circularity"
aside, it would seem that the way to proceed would be to think
about how to establish or disestablish that logical possibility,
by means other than a prior assumption of physicalism or dualism.

>To recapitulate the entire discussion:  You presented an argument
>for dualism which you said was "probably correct", and its first
>premise was that a nonconscious exact duplicate of your body could
>be constructed.  I pointed out that such a duplicate could only
>be nonconscious if physicalism is false--which means that you had
>been silently assuming dualism to be true before you started.

Actually, I never said that a nonconscious exact duplicate of my
body could be constructed -- in fact, that's almost certainly
false.  I simply said that the idea is coherent (which is all
that the argument needs).

>Perhaps you're using one of those slippery definitions of "possibility"
>that we were discussing the other day.  If you mean something by
>"logical possibility" that I don't, then this whole discussion's
>been pointless.  The way I see it, a zombie replica is only possible
>if dualism is true, and impossible if physicalism is; in either case
>you can't prove anything about the world by asserting one or the
>other.

By "logical possibility" I mean, straightforwardly, logical possibility,
or conceptual coherence, or whatever you like to call it.  What I
*don't* mean is empirical possibility.  On the face of it, the notion
of the zombie replica of me seems entirely coherent, regardless of
its empirical plausibility.  Somebody such as yourself who wishes
to deny its logical possibility had best provide some kind of argument
showing how the facts about consciousness might be logically entailed
by the physical/functional facts, in the same way that the facts about
life, or learning, or tables, can easily be seen to be the kinds of
things that could be entailed by the physical/functional facts.  Every
suggestion that I've ever seen seems hopelessly inadequate, generally
relying on some kind of implicit verificationism or eliminativism.
Perhaps you can do better.

-- 
Dave Chalmers                            (dave@cogsci.indiana.edu)      
Center for Research on Concepts and Cognition, Indiana University.
"It is not the least charm of a theory that it is refutable."
From: chalmers@bronze.ucs.indiana.edu (David Chalmers)
Subject: Re: Dualism
Organization: Indiana University
Date: Fri, 11 Sep 1992 19:07:27 GMT

In article <7511@skye.ed.ac.uk> jeff@aiai.ed.ac.uk (Jeff Dalton) writes:

>Is this "substance dualism" `a la Descartes, or "property dualism"
>(there are some nonreducible mental properties) or both or neither?

Certainly property dualism.  I prefer not to talk in terms of
"reduction" here, though, as it's arguable that all sorts of
things, such as the economy, aren't reducible to physical
properties.  Nevertheless, most of those things don't pose
any trouble for materialism, as e.g. it's logically impossible that
one could have all the physical facts in the world the same, but
the economic facts different.  i.e. the facts about the economy
are more or less conceptually necessitated by the physical facts.
Not so for consciousness, which seems to be independent, a further
fact about the way the world is.

Certainly all current evidence suggests that the physical world
is causally closed, which would take the bite out of most forms
of substance dualism.

-- 
Dave Chalmers                            (dave@cogsci.indiana.edu)      
Center for Research on Concepts and Cognition, Indiana University.
"It is not the least charm of a theory that it is refutable."
Newsgroups: sci.philosophy.tech
From: barry@arnold.math.ucla.edu (Barry Merriman)
Newsgroups: sci.philosophy.tech
Subject: Re: Dualism
Date: 12 Sep 92 03:22:39 GMT
Organization: UCLA, Mathematics Department

In article <1992Sep11.231731.7954@galois.mit.edu> tycchow@riesz.mit.edu  
(Timothy Y. Chow) writes:
> By the way, Mr. Merriman, it seems that you adhere to some sort of
> supervenience theory---that all facts about your mind rest ultimately on
> physical facts. 

I'd bet on that, sure. 

> Since this is a view held by many philosophers, perhaps
> they are not all as stupid as you seem to think.

I don't think they are stupid---I think their methodology for 
examing the _physical universe_ is flawed, dysfunctional.

You can be totally brilliant, but trapped inside a dysfunctional
way of looking at things that prevents you from making great
achievements. 

My claim has been that the scientific approach has proven its self
to be the vastly more fruitful, as far as understanding the physical 
universe. 

As for understanding complex,  human-derivative social 
entities such as ethics, justice, etc, science is not very helpful,
so far, and a philosophical approach may be fine. Though I still 
think any approach benefits from incorporating empirical information
over `thought experiments` whenever possible.

(and at the boundary between physics and social activities---i.e.
biological phenomena---there is still a struggle, but science seems
to be making steady progress.)






--
Barry Merriman
UCLA Dept. of Math
UCLA Inst. for Fusion and Plasma Research
barry@math.ucla.edu (Internet; NeXTMail is welcome)
Newsgroups: sci.philosophy.tech
From: rickert@mp.cs.niu.edu (Neil Rickert)
Subject: Re: Dualism
Organization: Northern Illinois University
Date: Sat, 12 Sep 1992 02:22:36 GMT

In article <BILL.92Sep11162437@ca3.nsma.arizona.edu> bill@nsma.arizona.edu (Bill Skaggs) writes:
>chalmers@bronze.ucs.indiana.edu (David Chalmers) writes:
>                                                         If "The
>physical world is causally closed" is a scientifically meaningful
>hypothesis, then it must be falsifiable, and presumably the kind of
>thing that would falsify it would be an uncaused event -- an event
>that happens for no physical reason.

Agreed.

>                                      But life is full of apparently
>uncaused events; they may even be the majority.

Sorry, but "apparently uncaused" is not good enough.  They must be
demonstrably uncaused to falsify.

>                                                  We simply ignore
>this evidence, either because of a faith that the universe is lawful
>in spite of appearances, or because we are forced to assume lawfulness
>in order to do science.

This does not appear to make sense.  If lawfulness were merely an
assumption to allow us to do science, we would quickly discover that
science didn't work.  It is the demonstrated effectiveness of science
which encourages us to believe in causality.

Newsgroups: sci.philosophy.tech
Newsgroups: sci.philosophy.tech
Subject: Re: Science vs Philosophy of  
From: Hakki_Kocabas@kcbbs.gen.nz (Hakki Kocabas)
Date: 7 Sep 92 11:18:59 GMT
Organization: Kappa Crucis Unix BBS, Auckland, New Zealand

  
> I for one would be happy to keep a few philosophers around if only to  
> counterbalance this consumerist rubbish.  
  
Do you know how many philosophers were hanging around in an ancient  
greek city state practising republican-democracy, to keep it working ?  
  
Tell me who do you think took their place in your civilized :-> LA ?   
Policemen/politicians/lawyers/scientists/scientologists/Guru-Maharajas/  
yuppies/UFO-people/TV-reporters/EP-hunters/Muckty-Mucks/Mitt-men ?   
who ? WHO ?  
  
Do you think that you are more civilized than they were with your a  
few shied-away philosophers ?   
Look Man ! It is NOT that you don't need philosophers, or philosophizing,   
but because they will keep on reminding you that you are barbarians,   
and you wouldn't like to hear that :->:->.  
  
BTW, philosophers are like bug-biters, humming-birds; maintaining language  
to keep it in ship-shape in service, if you can't bear their hummings then  
it is most likely that you'll end up with a dead-log :-> word, and when  
your trees start dropping dead hepless, your forest :-> language get   
threatened and without a forest to harvest, what are your scientists  
going to harvest ? Fish on a poplar ?! or perhaps they start looking for  
ghosts in the atom :->:->.   
  
> Peace,  
  
no peace for barbarians  
   
> Joe N.  
Newsgroups: sci.philosophy.tech
From: tycchow@riesz.mit.edu (Timothy Y. Chow)
Subject: Re: Dualism
Organization: None.  This saves me from writing a disclaimer.
Date: Mon, 14 Sep 92 01:18:25 GMT

In article <1992Sep13.215142.25567@mp.cs.niu.edu> rickert@mp.cs.niu.edu (Neil Rickert) writes:
>Some of us have the intuition that the lookup table could not pass the
>Turing test.  What does this do to your argument?

Can you be more explicit about this intuition?  Perhaps I should point out
that my sample of the lookup table was a bit misleading.  The lookup table
would contain all possible sequences of inputs that could be fed to it over
the course of say, seventy years.  Otherwise, things like memory and
learning could not possibly be simulated.  A better picture of the structure
might be:

case (1st input)
  "Hi":	output("Hi")
	case (2nd input)
	  "What's up?": output("Not much.")
			case (3rd input)
			...
	  "How's it going?": ...
	  ...
  "Are you conscious?": output("What do you think?")
  ...

The main problem lies with the limitations of the input and output: it's
hard to simulate holding a bottle to someone's nose to smell, for instance.
But in a certain limited context, namely that of typed input and output, it
seems to me that the lookup table could pass the Turing test.  With these
clarifications, do you still disagree?
-- 
Tim Chow     tycchow@math.mit.edu
Where a calculator on the ENIAC is equipped with 18,000 vacuum tubes and weighs
30 tons, computers in the future may have only 1,000 vacuum tubes and weigh
only 1 1/2 tons.                               ---Popular Mechanics, March 1949
Newsgroups: sci.philosophy.tech
From: snodgras@crash.cts.com (John Snodgrass)
Newsgroups: sci.philosophy.tech
Subject: Re: nano-replicator assumptions
Date: 4 Sep 92 17:34:33 GMT

In <1992Sep3.034526.24971@unixg.ubc.ca> ramsay@unixg.ubc.ca (Keith Ramsay) writes:

>>	 Can you even give the broadest outlines of how Von Neumann
>>proved this?  I think not.

>Why not?

      Because it cannot be done, IMO. This is not a _difficult_ task,
like copying the Encyclopedia Britanica onto the head of a pin. This
is impossible, because it involves infinite regression. That's the
argument, anyway.

>I think Conway's "Life" post-dated von Neumann. It was other people
>who found a way to implement the idea in a "life" cellular automaton.
>The basic idea is quite simple. The machine has certain equipment for
>producing other machines from a "blueprint". In the case of living
>things, this includes the cellular "machinery" for translating DNA
>into proteins; in the "life" cellular automata, it involves sequences
>of gliders being collided so as to give rise to other automata.

      Arguing about this in terms of "gliders" and suchlike is
fruitless. The addition of so many variables and assumptions
(what IS a glider, exactly) that the basic question becomes obscured.
Also, we're talking programs again, not machines.

>The machine is then instructed to manufacture a machine according to a
>blueprint, and then copy the blueprint into a designated "blueprint
>slot" in the other machine. The machine is then equipped with a
>blueprint of itself (aside from the blueprint). This side-steps the
>need for an infinite regression of blueprints.

      1. If the two blueprints are the same, why does it need two? If they
are not the same, then the machine has not copied itself. Or do I
misunderstand?

      2. Obviously, a simple machine cannot do this. If a complex machine
can do this, what is the complexity threshhold? What defines the point
at which its complexity is sufficient to copy itself? Keep in mind that
the more complex the machine is, the more difficult the task of copying
itself. So where does the advantage of complexity overtake the
disadvantage?

      3. If the problem had been solved, it would be equivalent to a
major cosmological statement, not some obscure result stuffed away in
someone's desk somewhere.

>It is a popular pastime of programmers to write programs which
>generate their own source code, by essentially this method.

      Programs which modify their own source code have an underlying
structure which is not subject to change, i.e. the algorithm for
modifying itself. And programs don't count anyway. The universe hasn't
been shown to be an execution matrix for real systems.

>Keith Ramsay
>ramsay@unixg.ubc.ca


      John E. Snodgrass
      -----------------
      snodgras@crash.cts.com
From: burt@aupair.cs.athabascau.ca (Burt Voorhees)
Newsgroups: sci.philosophy.tech
Subject: Re: invention of time
Date: 31 Aug 92 21:31:04 GMT


  I'd like to suggest that one can rant against a theory easily if one
has not taken the time to study it carefully and understand it.  How
many curvature tensors has snodgrass computed?  Has he ever solved a
geodesic equation?  Or is he just spouting hot air?
Newsgroups: sci.philosophy.tech
From: chalmers@bronze.ucs.indiana.edu (David Chalmers)
Subject: Re: Dualism
Organization: Indiana University
Date: Sun, 13 Sep 1992 17:47:12 GMT

In article <1992Sep12.224753.2719@sco.com> evanh@sco.COM (Evan Hunt) writes:

>Here's the argument as I see it:
>
>   Assumption: Physicalism is true.
>
>1) Consciousness arises wholly from the physical structure of the
>   brain combined with its present dynamic neurochemical state.
>   [This is a restatement of the assumption.]
>2) You possess consciousness.
>3) An exact copy of you would have the same brain structure and the
>   same neurochemical state as you do.
>4) Therefore, an exact copy of you would possess consciousness.

Obviously, if you include the truth of physicalism is a *premise*,
you can get your conclusion.  However, physicalism is precisely
what's in question.  I asked for a reason to believe that the
facts about consciousness are logically necessitated by the
physical facts, *independent* of that assumption.  On the face
of it, the notion of a zombie replica of me certainly seems to
a logical possibility.  Why isn't it?

-- 
Dave Chalmers                            (dave@cogsci.indiana.edu)      
Center for Research on Concepts and Cognition, Indiana University.
"It is not the least charm of a theory that it is refutable."
From: torkel@sics.se (Torkel Franzen)
Subject: Re: God's and Zorn's existence.
Organization: Swedish Institute of Computer Science, Kista
Date: Sun, 13 Sep 1992 03:38:23 GMT

In article <1992Sep12.190822.90079@vaxc.cc.monash.edu.au> kevin@vaxc.cc.
mon ash.edu.au writes:

   >There are no non-trivial a-priori statements that can be made about the 
   >real world.
   >Here, a-priori and trivial are a bit vague, but I'll take a-priori as
   >intuitively understood by a philospher, and trivial as understood by a 
   >mathematician.
    ....
   >It seems (though I may be wrong) that a few people disagree. Surely,
   >in order to maintain credibility, such a person must produce an example.

   OK, I'll take it upon myself to hold that there are very many highly
non-trivial apriori statements that can be made about the real world.
For example: there exist infinitely many Martians.
Newsgroups: sci.philosophy.tech
From: rickert@mp.cs.niu.edu (Neil Rickert)
Subject: Re: Dualism
Organization: Northern Illinois University
Date: Tue, 15 Sep 1992 18:47:35 GMT

In article <1992Sep15.164552.12331@galois.mit.edu> tycchow@riesz.mit.edu (Timothy Y. Chow) writes:
>Superintelligent aliens land on earth and, suppressing snickers,

Now how can they be considered superintelligent if they suppress snickers?
Don't they believe in freedom of candy bar choice :-) ?

>                                                                 present
>mankind with a black box that takes typewritten input and outputs
>typewritten messages.  The aliens ask us to try to figure out whether or
>not the black box is conscious.  So the world's cleverest people come and
>try asking the box different questions and offering various typewritten
>messages to feed it.

The black box is marked TOP SECRET, and only military types ever see it.
Nobody intelligent enough to do adequate testing is even allowed close
to the thing.

>Humans: Well, if it wasn't just a black box, we'd swear there was a human
>...
>                     It certainly passes the Turing test.  We're inclined
>        to say that it's conscious.
>Aliens (guffawing): Oh, really?  Well, as a matter of fact, the black box is
>        just a lookup table!  What do you think of THAT?

See what I mean about the military approach.  Apparently these guys
didn't even test for secret information channels into the box, such as
would be needed to constantly update the tables.  Either that, or their
questioning was so inept as to not discover the inability of the device
to keep tolerably abreast of current affairs.

>How might we respond?
>
>1. Well, who cares if it's a lookup table?  It passes the Turing test, so
>   for all intents and purposes it's conscious.

Anybody jumping so quickly to this conclusion could probably be fooled
today by a stage magician equipped with suitable radio transceivers to
install in the black box and a cadre of remote assistants to actually
participate in the TT dialogue.

Any decent scientist would want to know much more about what was really
happening inside the box before rushing to judgment.

Newsgroups: sci.philosophy.tech
From: tycchow@riesz.mit.edu (Timothy Y. Chow)
Subject: Re: Proof of God's Existence
Organization: None.  This saves me from writing a disclaimer.
Date: Tue, 8 Sep 92 21:27:52 GMT

In article <1992Sep5.014018.4415@galois.mit.edu> I wrote:
>Call a nonempty partially ordered set S _causal_ if
>1. Every totally ordered subset has a lower bound; and
>2. For any x and y in S, there exists z in S such that z<x and z<y.
>
>Theorem.  Every causal set has a unique minimal element.
>Proof. Nonempty + property 1 + Zorn's lemma => minimal element exists;
>property 2 => uniqueness.

Has anyone read the paper to see if this is essentially the argument given?
If so, then I have two comments.

1. Property 1 seems highly artificial to me.  For example, the real numbers,
the rational numbers, and the strictly positive real numbers don't satisfy
it.  (Someone else has already complained about this premise, I think.)  It
seems to be inserted just to make the argument work, and not because it's a
plausible assumption about causality.

2. Since the theorem is presumably only going to be applied to one
particular set (the actual set of all events---let's call it E), the full
power of Zorn's lemma isn't really needed.  We just need enough choice to
deal with a set with the cardinality of E.  So trumpeting the role of Zorn's
lemma is somewhat misleading.  If E is finite or countable, a much weaker
axiom of choice is all that is required.
-- 
Tim Chow     tycchow@math.mit.edu
Where a calculator on the ENIAC is equipped with 18,000 vacuum tubes and weighs
30 tons, computers in the future may have only 1,000 vacuum tubes and weigh
only 1 1/2 tons.                               ---Popular Mechanics, March 1949
Newsgroups: sci.philosophy.tech