Lethean
Posts: 292 Joined: Jan. 2014
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Quote (CeilingCat @ June 17 2018,01:20) | For a rather bizzare thread, check out Bill Dembski on artificial intelligence's homunculus problem.
First, it marks the return of Dr. Dr. William Dembski to his old stomping grounds at Uncommon Descent. After being shit-canned from the Discovery Institute, he had announced that he was switching to solving the problems of education and devising a new digital currency.
Unfortunately, Doc Doc's qualifications in education consisted of being a college student for ever and ever and then getting his teaching butt shit-canned from a respectable college AND a religious college. Plus publishing the names, home addresses, private email addresses and residential phone numbers of the entire Baylor Board of Regents. Because he thought it would help his cause. Think JoeG calling random Baylor Reagants and giving them his unique perspective on the case. Yeah.
Not too surprisingly, the offers to teach have not come flooding in. Worse, the bottom has dropped out of Bitcoin, whose sky-high run-up in prices seems to have been the result of market manipulation. This has taken a lot of the shine off the whole digital currency field. Worse still, the digital currency field seems to be filled with people who actually know what they're doing - things like how to program a high end video card to mine bitcoins hundreds of times faster that the most powerful microprocessors can. Curiously, this is a form of mathematical searching so you'd think that Dr. Dr. Search would take to it like a duck to water, but apparently not.
Well, at least there's still good ol' Uncommon Descent, which Doc Doc D actually started back in those heady days when ID Was the Future and where he will always be respected as the Blog's founder . . . and then Batshit77 comes out against him!
I'm not going to paste BS77's "arguments" because they mostly reduce to his usual mind-numbing blather, including generous use of the word "quantum", but check this snark: Quote | If humans do not have the capacity of “looking under the hood (lifting the tops of their skulls?) and therewith identifying their own Goedel sentence”, then please prey tell how Dr. Dembski (and others) were able to identify the fallacy of the Homunculus argument in the first place? | and Quote | It would seem that Dr. Dembski’s appeal to the Homunculus argument itself directly refutes his claim that humans don’t have the capability of, so to speak, looking under the hood (lifting the tops of their skulls?) and therewith identifying their own Goedel sentence. |
Adding salt to the wound, BS77 then does the absolute public service of exhuming one of Michael Egnor's choicest bits of Tard. I'm actually grateful for this because I'm sure I never would have seen it otherwise. This section is well worth quoting: Quote | I would also like to note that the Homunculus argument is very friendly to Dr. Michael Egnor’s (Theistic) contention (via Aristotle) that “Perception at a distance is no more inconceivable than action at a distance.”
Perception and the Cartesian Theater – Michael Egnor – December 8, 2015 Excerpt: Perception at a distance is no more inconceivable than action at a distance. The notion that a perception of the moon occurs at the moon is “bizarre” (Torley’s word) only if one presumes that perception is constrained by distance and local conditions — perhaps perception would get tired if it had to go to the moon or it wouldn’t be able to go because it’s too cold there. Yet surely the view that the perception of a rose held up to my eye was located at the rose wouldn’t be deemed nearly as bizarre. At what distance does perception of an object at the object become inconceivable? http://www.evolutionnews.org/2.....0....71.html
It should be noted that Dr. Torley strongly objected to Dr. Egnor’s argument for ‘perception at a distance’.
Specifically, Dr. Torley held that perception cannot possibly be at a Supernova which “ceased to exist nearly 200 millennia ago, long before the dawn of human history.”
The Squid and the Supernova: A Reply to Professor Egnor – December 9, 2015 – vjtorley Excerpt: In February 1987, a supernova appeared in the Southern skies, and remained visible for several months. ,,, The problem is that the object itself ceased to exist nearly 200 millennia ago, long before the dawn of human history. Even if the squid that witnessed the explosion were capable of having perceptions which are located in intergalactic space, as Egnor contends, they are surely incapable of having perceptions which go back in time. ,,,perception is a bodily event, and that an event involving my body cannot take place at a point which is separate from my body. An event involving my body may occur inside my body, or at the surface of my body, but never separately from it. Thus it simply makes no sense to assert that I am here, at point X, but that my perceptions – or for that matter, my actions – are located at an external point Y. [URL=https://uncommondescent.com/intelligent-design/the-squid-and-the-supernova-a-reply-to-professor-egnor/ | And then he throws in another quantum to seal the deal Quote | Besides the Homunculus argument undermining Dr. Torley’s claim that perception cannot possibly be at a distance, advances in Quantum Mechanics now also, empirically, undermines Dr. Torley’s claim: | BS kind of peters out there, no doubt nursing severely strained cut-n-paste fingers, but out of nowhere and for no discernable reason, johnnyb, whose secret identity is the Blyth Institute, chimes in: Quote | 5 johnnyb June 15, 2018 at 4:05 pm
Also related is an old video I did about “Solving Engineering Problems Using Theology”:
[URL=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yVeWBM1J-NE |
Check it out. |
What all you fools are overlooking is the fact that god created the perception of that supernova already in transit 6,000 years ago.
[/jasonlisle]
-------------- "So I'm a pretty unusual guy and it's not stupidity that has gotten me where I am. It's brilliance."
"My brain is one of the very few independent thinking brains that you've ever met. And that's a thing of wonder to you and since you don't understand it you criticize it."
~Dave Hawkins~
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