That was sly of me because it's a trick question used in grad school philosophy--i.e., it is a question to determine if you think that every action is the consequent of antecedent causes, meaning you perceive biological (living) reality (not "machine" reality, which deals only with quantifiable functions and processes) to be wholly linear, like A, B, C, etc...

Another question is: what human activities, no matter how discrete, are not determined but are in fact outside the loop of conditioned and genetically/culturally programmed factors.

Thens there's the issue of intelligence manifesting that is not the product of the rational part of the mind and that is in fact too fast for the rational mind to compute and produce--like a jazz soloist playing at light speed.

But some folks believe creativity is itself determined, or the fruit of programming, meaning a machine can and will do every human task in time. That's basically transferring the all or nothing thinking of religious fanatics onto science, and science is not life itself and never can be.

Why do you think they call it "artificial" intelligence? Because it deals only in probabilities--high and small--indispensible for practical living, useless for answering, or even addressing, the really big questions.

Artificial Intelligence (together with the theory of computation) has done more for philosophy of mind than philosophers have managed in a couple thousand years, and it's done it in about half a century.

Well, for one thing it's obviously not serial hardware. But I think you're trying to make a broader assertion than that---namely that the actions of a brain can't even be simulated by a serial Turing machine, because it is fundamentally not describable as information processing or computation?

Can a digital computer, operating from a human based program show creativity independent of any creativity already inherent in the program? This might be an interesting question, but I don't know the answer. I guess I would say, if I saw a digital computer that could select interrelated 'interesting' conjectures from an infinite range of possibilities, focus on proving the self selected 'interesting' conjectures, then in turn develop more advanced conjectures based on it's earlier work, and in this way evolve a (more or less) unified body of uniquely structured 'computer-interest' generated mathematics, then I would say that the computer had been creative. I not sure if this is just a matter of degree, but I doubt it.

But why do you doubt it?

And why set the bar so high for "real" creativity? Are you sure you're not just going to move it higher and higher as machines get more and more creative?

Human mathematics is much more than theorem proving.

That's true. But I don't know very many math guys who think theorem proving doesn't require creativity....

I recently read about a tribe in the Amazon that had a culture with absolutely no concept of number.

According to Steven Pinker, despite (many) historical claims of the above sort by deluded anthropologists, all languages have words for numbers. (At the least, for "one", "two", and "more than two".)

Anyway, what's your source for that? I'd like to look into it.

The researcher who lived with them tried for months to teach a small group to count to 20. He had no success. They just weren't interested. You see, I seriously doubt the brains of these tribesman are much different from mine. But their 'mind', that is their basic experience of the world, is to some extent fundamentally different from mine.

No way. Just because you don't have a word for a concept doesn't mean that you can't understand the concept.

If the above anecdote is even remotely accurate, perhaps the "small group" just didn't feel like learning about counting, or understand why they were being asked to do it. There are tons of amusing anecdotes in the history of anthropology where anthropologists have misinterpreted lack of cooperation (or even deliberate mischief-making) for fundamental differences in culture (or even fundamental differences in the way people think).

English doesn't have a word for a number-with-exactly-three-prime-factors, but that doesn't mean we can't reason about such numbers, if we want to.

I don't know what 'serial' hardware is, but my point was not that some actions of the brain cannot be simulated by a Turing machine (I know what a Turing machine is - I could even give a precise definition and maybe prove theorems about them- but I have no idea what a 'serial' Turing machine is).

My point is that, even in mathematics, which is one of the most precisely logical disciplines there is, carrying out algorithms seems to be a very small, perhaps even rather unimportant part of the thought process that goes on. This is an 'observation' I am making from having worked in the field for more than 20 years.

Ask any working research mathematician how they think about and solve problems, and hardly a single one of them will say they work from algorithms, except perhaps in a very few special cases.

What I am saying is it seems to me to what I'm calling 'creativity' involves a different level of thinking and I don't see any reason to doubt that. Maybe you can give me one?

There's no doubt that the way human beings discover proofs seems remarkably creative. Downright amazing. Even in the simplest things they sometimes see remarkable connections. How does that happen? I would love to know. Do you know the story/legend about Gauss as a child and the sum of all integers to 100? If you don't, ask me, because it's a beautiful illustration of this.

Anthropolists are deluded, but Steven Pinker isn't? Hmmmm....,

It's kind of ironic the attitude about anthropologists. If their experiences run counter some 'theory' about way people think, then those experiences must be delusions.

If I look at the sky, see the planet Mars and know that it's whirling anout the sun in (roughly) an elliptical orbit that can be mathematical deduced, via calculus, from Newton's simple law of gravity, is my 'experience' of what I see, different, in some fundamental way, from the 'experience' of people of, say, in some remote indigenous tribe that look up and see points of light that mean .... (fill in the blank).

by the way I put "anthropologist counting Amazon Brazil New scientist" into google and got like 90,000 hits. The tribe is the called th Piraha. Try googling and read away. In fact:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pirah%C3%A3_people

Now that is the most remarkable and to me ridiculous statement in this whole thread--despite you bringing up some fantastic points elsewhere.

Most, if they're honest, probably will say "I dunno".

Well, depends what you mean by "a different level of thinking". Here's the best I can do to plant seeds of doubt: if you cannot articulate quite clearly what makes it different, and how it would possibly work, just maybe it's not really any different (in a fundamental way) despite appearances. The other seed is what I mentioned earlier: don't give too much trust to how things "seem" to you.

A cool story; but it is worth mentioning that an (unconscious) digital machine wouldn't have any trouble quickly summing the integers using a brute force method.... Gauss's method more accurately demonstrates a limitation of our consiousness, not a feature---we simply didn't evolve to do massive number-crunching consciously.

That's not what I'm saying at all. I'm saying that people make mistakes, and anthropology is no exception. It just seems so cool to believe that Hopi don't think about time the way we do, or to think that some tribe in location X doesn't have words for numbers---this is probably why it's so tempting. But science doesn't operate based merely on what seems cool.

Only time for a couple of things. Maybe I'll look back again on Monday.



OK, I'll admit it. How about you?

Wait a minute. What else can we trust? In everything we do we, if we want to take action, we are forced to trust what seems to be true. Unless you maybe want to yield to an authority, you cannot escape that. I mean, what else are gonna do: trust what seems to be false?

Of course it's simple to find problems, even involving just a few hundred objects, where the 'brute force' method yields many more possibilities to check than atoms in the universe. Thus a binary supercomputer could not possibly check the answer by massive number crunching.

OK, let me put it this way. In practical terms. Computers are great at executing algorithms. Big deal. Too bad I can't find any use for them when I gotta do the kind thinking I gotta do when I do mathematics.

Yet I get the feeling that you're insisting that they show me how I think when I do mathematics. I'm saying I'm less than convinced.

Actually, I don't to even have to go to anthropology to find examples of people who lack basic concepts. I just have to look at the incoming freshman in the university. Maybe with all this expertise on the human mind and how it works, you AI guys can give us something like a practical guide to programming college freshman. Cause I can tell you, for the most part, the high schools just ain't working.

Or do you think humans are capable of something supernatural?

Are you sugewsting we need a machine to measure and tell us what is "right." And what's your take on objective experience? The raw witness state (once stabalized) is not subjective in the normal sense of the word because it has no bias or preference and is all inclusive.

But more interesting to me is how the virtual (thought) realms are capable of time traveling (remembering and imagining) which can pull the corporeal (present) backward and forward and change to whole fabric of our lives.

Just a question, and I guess its to yanqui. Its seems like to much technology is causing alot of psychological distress such as anxiety and depression. Alot of kids I know(13 to 21) seem to have problems where the intellectual and developmental roads are suppose to meet. I mean I know alot of kids who have a hard time reading and cant even complete a sentence that can get on a computer and do whatever they need, stuff I cant even figure out (granted I'm know expert). But it just seems like they need something else to make the commitment and do the "thinking" for them. And cell phones as handy as they are, I know my daughter is a touch away when I'm worried about her, but don't you think because they have instant access to a decision by us(the parents) that that to may some how cause people to not have to think and account for anything?
I'm not downing the computer age or stereotyping anyone but it just seems the more we remove ourselves from solving everyday problems the more anxiety and depression seem to be an issue. I mean how many kids do you know who are ADD or just completely off the wall and on some kind of horse tranquilizer. Just a question and I don't mean to get off track but I couldn't think of a better bunch of people to ask.

Tristan, what would be the point in debating at all if you're hoping to change some else's mind? That's impossible!

Discussion is only useful for checking whether or not you should be changing your own mind. And it's only when you stop checking your own beliefs that they become unreliable.

I don't understand what any of that means. Maybe you could explain it using a concrete example?

First, a thought is a representation of some thing or agency or phenonenon, etc.
[..]
Now say you are driving to Yosemite to climb Half Dome. You have workd up a whole slew of mental thoughts and notions about the Dome, all representations drawn from imagination or reading or friends etc. The virtual Dome in your head is not the actual granite article itself, but the thoughts and desires you have, triggered by your vitrual or cognitive take on the Dome can greatly influence your present actions in terms of driving to climb the thing or turing around and going home.

The great breakthrough is when you can separate your mind from the past and the future and be totally present with what your life actually is, as opposed to a conditioned or virtual representation of it, or an accreation of associations you normally bring to it.

Lastly, of course you perceptions are grounded in reality. But for most, said perceptions are experienced through a conditioned skrim of conditioned evaluations and so forth, meaning reality is not experienced neat, but with a whole lot of mixer.

JL