Hi,

Any summery available?

 

Having read Roger Penrose's arguments about the invalidity of the Chinese Room and the Virtual Mind, and his discussion of quantum effects as the basis of the neural conscious mind, I've decide that he's too old and not up to the game any more.

 

Having read Roger Penrose's arguments about the invalidity of the Chinese Room and the Virtual Mind, and his discussion of quantum effects as the basis of the neural conscious mind, I've decide that he's too old and not up to the game any more.

Because just his age or the actual arguments?

 

Having read Roger Penrose's arguments about the invalidity of the Chinese Room and the Virtual Mind, and his discussion of quantum effects as the basis of the neural conscious mind, I've decide that he's too old and not up to the game any more.

Hi,

As they get older they seem to tend to believe in themselves more and more because they are right almost all the time due to high intelligence. That might be when they start to hopscotch over the facts a little, missing important details.

I guess part of what you are talking about involves Searle’s idea of understanding. My take on this may or may not be the right view, but equality seems to be at the heart of it, and in many disciplines, we accept equality as a measure of what is not only accurate, but also what is considered 'good enough', in the sense that there is no experiment we can do to disprove the equality.
For example, for a TOE (theory of everything) we may not have to come up with the absolute reasoning behind everything, just a workable solution that can explain literally every experiment we can possibly come up with, ever. This brings us to a question of equality:
TOE=Really the theory of everything ?
In practice this may be very, very hard to prove, but if it was somehow proven, does that mean we are really done with it. This is where we end up trying to deal with what is real and not real yet again. It could be even harder to prove that:
TOE version 1.04 = Real
Does it matter if TOE version 1.05 also looks real?

Now back to the question of understanding...
If a computer can reply to every question or just a conversation in a normal way, does that mean that it 'understands' as in comprehension.
If a time comes when it can look exactly like it, it may look so much like comprehension that in every experiment we can perform its output is always the same as some human who truly comprehends what is being said, and then it will be hard to say that it does not comprehend. Ok, so we might be able to say it, but it's always going to be exactly like comprehension so now the question becomes, is there any real difference.
If we calculate in our minds:
5=2+3
or we use a calculator:
2+3 <enter> output: 5
is there any difference.
The difference is that when we did it, we had a purpose for doing it. The calculator had no purpose, but what about a more advanced calculator (like maybe what we now call 'ai') could that have a purpose programmed into it.

These questions get pretty hairy and it's going to take some time to hash it all out I think, along with improvements in technology. I think it might be impossible to predict what is going to come out of all this. Without joking (unfortunately) my guess is that our civilization will be destroyed by some natural event and so it probably won't matter. There are literally millions of space rocks out there banging into each other and being sent off in so many directions that it's almost certain that one day we will get hit by one big enough to cause mass extinctions. The only way around this is with improvements in anti-asteroid technology, but then what else is out there. The universe is a nasty, dangerous place to live, with huge pockets of energy that can literally eat up whole solar systems.

When these ideas come up there are also other things to think about too. One that came to mind recently was after watching a movie where one person had died. The idea was that we live between two eternities: one before we are born, and another after we die. Before we are born there could have been an eternity before that, and after we die there could be another eternity. The age of the 'universe' for each one of us is only as long as our individual lives last.
That's the real reality of it all, and that gives rise to the ultimate conflict in physics I think.

 

Hi,

Any summery available?

He's stating that the principle of equivalence (the core axiom of GR) is irreconcilable with the (QM) principle of superposition. Yet each is respectively supported by hard evidence, so its a paradox. I know much more about GR than I do about QM though, so these things pique my curiosity but I'm not equipped to deeply understand his argument.

 

He's stating that the principle of equivalence (the core axiom of GR) is irreconcilable with the (QM) principle of superposition. Yet each is respectively supported by hard evidence, so its a paradox. I know much more about GR than I do about QM though, so these things pique my curiosity but I'm not equipped to deeply understand his argument.

Sounds interesting enough that maybe I should watch it.
If I find anything out that's interesting enough I'll post it here.

 

Because just his age or the actual arguments?

I'm not age-ist. I'm too old for that!

 

I think we are today, knee deep, utterly swamped, drowning in information, but knowledge seems scarcer today than it ever was.

 

I think we are today, knee deep, utterly swamped, drowning in information, but knowledge seems scarcer today than it ever was.

Hi again,

I watched a small part of the movie and remembered the equivalence idea I learned about in the early 1980's I think it was.
After I thought about it, I realized my own personal 'equivalence' idea or theory or whatever you want to call it...

If the Earth did not have any gravity like we think it does today, if the radius of the Earth was expanding at the rate of 9.8m/s^2, we would still feel the same effect as what we call gravity today. The implication is that everything is expanding at that rate, including the space between planets, and everyday objects, and I guess that also means particles.

There may be a problem with that actually being a real thing, but it is interesting to think about. It also fits in with an idea in a particular analogy that links classical mechanics with electric circuits, I think it was the Force/Current analogy. In this analogy a mass is represented as a capacitance, and in a mechanical system we can have two masses connected together with springs. In the analogy we have to have two capacitors connected in series linked with springs. What happens is that one of the masses has to have constant acceleration in order to end up with the right math result. That means one of the capacitors voltages would have to be constantly increasing. We know this is not physically possible because the speed would be increasing forever, but the math works out aside from that.

I'll have to watch more of the video.

 

Hi again,

I watched a small part of the movie and remembered the equivalence idea I learned about in the early 1980's I think it was.
After I thought about it, I realized my own personal 'equivalence' idea or theory or whatever you want to call it...

If the Earth did not have any gravity like we think it does today, if the radius of the Earth was expanding at the rate of 9.8m/s^2, we would still feel the same effect as what we call gravity today. The implication is that everything is expanding at that rate, including the space between planets, and everyday objects, and I guess that also means particles.

There may be a problem with that actually being a real thing, but it is interesting to think about. It also fits in with an idea in a particular analogy that links classical mechanics with electric circuits, I think it was the Force/Current analogy. In this analogy a mass is represented as a capacitance, and in a mechanical system we can have two masses connected together with springs. In the analogy we have to have two capacitors connected in series linked with springs. What happens is that one of the masses has to have constant acceleration in order to end up with the right math result. That means one of the capacitors voltages would have to be constantly increasing. We know this is not physically possible because the speed would be increasing forever, but the math works out aside from that.

I'll have to watch more of the video.

Yes, but that's just a restatement of the principle of equivalence, one cannot locally do an experiment to distinguish between acceleration and being at rest under gravitation, the underlying laws must therefore be the same in each case. That was Einstein's insight, that the equations describing both situations, must be the same, that there is no actual "force" of gravity at all.

 

Yes, but that's just a restatement of the principle of equivalence, one cannot locally do an experiment to distinguish between acceleration and being at rest under gravitation, the underlying laws must therefore be the same in each case. That was Einstein's insight, that the equations describing both situations, must be the same, that there is no actual "force" of gravity at all.

Yes, but I thought it was kind of curious to think about the Earth expanding like that, constantly. I don't think that is really happening, just something kind of odd. So it's really just a personal insight more than anything too new. It's another 'demonstration' in thought about the equivalence.
It's the same with the Force/Current analogy, where if we have a moving platform accelerating, we can mimic gravity so we don't have to have both capacitors 'grounded'.

In real life, we'd have to be out in deep space somewhere to try it, with a large sphere that was constantly enlarging while we stood on it or just measured the acceleration.

I also kind of like the analogy where we have a large circular donut-like enclosure out in deep space that is rotating about the major axis. People walking on the inside outer surface would experience 9.8m/s^2 gravity if the rotation speed was right. This would also be a demonstration of the principle.

These kinds of thought experiments are interesting I think because they demonstrate both the 'equivalence' and the 'non-equivalence' at the same time. I think the 'equivalence' only works for one object, alone in a place unaffected by anything else that might have what we call 'gravity'.
The examples help to point this out I think, even though we don't ignore the 'equivalence' always.

It's also interesting that we have to speak in terms of 'local' and 'global' effects. I wonder if more thought about this would shed more light on all of this. Does the 'equivalence' principle really help us if it only applies to one body.

This is interesting because this is one of the underpinnings of relativity theory, yet it is described in terms of a 'local' region. How can we expect an equivalence between theories for the entire universe if we have little theories that only work locally.
This is just something to think about if you have the time, it's probably too complicated to figure out quickly.