NoName
Posts: 2729 Joined: Mar. 2013
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Quote (N.Wells @ May 01 2016,09:23) | Quote (NoName @ April 30 2016,07:39) | Of all the many flaws and failures in your "theory", Gary, the most damaging are the fundamental ones. Your "theory" is viciously circular, using acts of intelligence as core elements of your 'explanation' of intelligence.
Specifically, a "guess" is a product of intelligence. It is not a random selection, it is not an 'automatic mindless process'. It is the outcome of a process of intelligence. Rocks do not guess. Neither atoms nor molecules, nor do polymers such as RNA and DNA. Trees don't guess [to the best of our ability to determine]. Guessing is part of the problem that requires explanation, not an element serving as a part of the explanation.
The same goes for 'confidence level evaluation'. Confidence and evaluation are both intelligent processes or outcomes of the processes of intelligence. They are not present in rocks, nor in molecules or atoms, nor in polymers such as RNA and DNA. The existence, the emergence of those features of the universe needs to be explained. They are not, and cannot be, part of the foundational explanation of themselves.
The problem of emergence, the 'hard problem of consciousness', is not solved by asserting, without evidence nor foundation, the existence of the emergent features at ever-lower levels of mechanical or computational reality.
Your program fails because it is raised on imaginary foundations. Viciously circular and thus useless, it is unscientific and laughably inadequate as anything other than an example of going wrong with confidence. |
With respect, I disagree, although this may be a semantic difference about what constitutes a guess more than anything else. For me, learning from experience is intelligence at work, and the experience may be gained from having made guesses. Likewise, making an educated guess (guessing by applying acquired knowledge and experience) is also an indicator of intelligence. However, simple guessing need not be intelligent. For example, some mobile bacteria, faced with uncertainty about where to go, initiate random tumbling, during which they monitor or sense environmental clues such as chemical gradients, leading them to move toward resources or away from a hostile environment. To me, the tumble constitutes a guess, but without involving intelligence. Initiation of tumbling can be an automatic, chemically regulated procedure. Even the "decision" about where to go can operate by mindless and involuntary biochemical reactions rather than learning or making decisions, so it's not really a decision, just a response. Intelligent creatures can make a guess based on a random choice, and can then learn from the experience or match past experiences to the outcome, so the guessing part is not inherently intelligent, while the doing-something-with-the-new-information part is more likely to be intelligent. |
The devil is in the details ;-)
What is starkly missing from Gary's use of the word 'guess' is any acknowledgement that any intelligence that guesses does so based on awareness of a 'surround'. There is an experienced context and that context significantly influences the process of guessing.
What a guess is not, in specific and precise terms, is a random selection sans context.
What Gary means by 'guess' appears to be an entire complex of variously creative behaviors, relevant to the embodied situation of the intelligence that is guessing. At the level of chemotaxis, there is no real guessing going on, there's just "chemistry and physics as usual." At the level of 'guessing which way to turn' when navigating an unfamiliar city, there's far more going on than just "chemistry and physics as usual" although those are still fully in play. IOW, the hard problem of intelligence.
That is why I claim he is being circular -- his use of 'guess', just as his use of 'confidence evaluation', smuggles intelligence into his 'explanation' of intelligence.
Of course, were Gary to be precise, to provide operational definitions, and evidence for his claims for 'guess', it might be that he is not using the term circularly, and not, thereby, hamstringing his "theory". But from what we have seen of the precision [lol] and accuracy [lol!] of his work, and his "thought processes", the mere fact that his claims are problematic as they stand is invisible to him.
It is telling that the well-reasoned object to my critique of his notion comes not from him but from one of the people he cheerfully dismisses as an 'unscientific troll'.
You, I can discuss these issues with. Gary, he doesn't even see that there's an issue. Unless he would care to chime in with some analysis and well-reasoned rejoinders rather than yet another nonsense video or pointless and badly mimic-ed attempt at insults? Gary, here's your chance to fumble the ball yet again.
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