Created Already In Motion

I think this just begs the question:

Dynamic: When the belief pool contains "X is fuzzle", send X to the action system.

Dynamic 2: When the belief pool contains "X is fuzzle", and there is a dynamic saying "When the belief pool contains 'X is fuzzle', send X to the action system", then send X to the action system.

Or, to put it another way:

Dynamic 2: When the belief pool contains "X is fuzzle", run Dynamic 1.

Of course, then one needs Dynamic 3 to tell you to run Dynamic 2, ad infinitum -- and we're back to the original problem.

I think the real point of the dialogue is that you can't use rules of inference to derive rules of inference -- even if you add them as axioms! In some sense, then, rules of inference are even more fundamental than axioms: they're the machines that you feed the axioms into. Then one naturally starts to ask questions about how you can "program" the machines by feeding in certain kinds of axioms, and what happens if you try to feed a program's description to itself, various paradoxes of self-reference, etc. This is where the connection to Gödel and Turing comes in -- and probably why Hofstadter included this fable.

Cheers, Ari

Ari, dynamics don't say things; they do things.

The phrase that once came into my mind to describe this requirement, is that a mind must be created already in motion. There is no argument so compelling that it will give dynamics to a static thing. There is no computer program so persuasive that you can run it on a rock.

A non-universal Turing machine can't simulate a universal Turing machine. (If it could, it would be universal after all -- a contradiction.) In other words, there are computers that can self-program and those that can't, and no amount of programming can change the latter into the former.

Cheers, Ari

Well, at least I can't be accused of belaboring a point so obvious that no one could possibly get it wrong.

Within our anything can influence anything'' (more or less) physics, the distinction between communicating the proposition and just physicallysetting in motion'' is not clear-cut. Programmable mind can assume the dynamics that is encoded in some weak signals, a rock can also assume different dynamics, but you'll have to build a machine from it first, applying more than weak signals.

I think the moral is that you shouldn't try to write software for which you don't have the hardware to run on, not even if the code could run itself by emulating the hardware. A rock runs on physics, Euclid's rules don't. We have morality to run on our brains, and... isn't FAI about porting it to physics?

So shouldn't we distinguish between the symbols physics::dynamic and human_brain::dynamic? (In a way, me reading the word "dynamic" uses more computing power than running any Java applet could on current computers...)

This is why it's always seemed to silly to me to try to axiomitize logic. Either you already "implement" logic, in which case it's unneccessary, or you don't, in which case you're a rock and there's no point in dealing with you.

I think this also has deeper implications for the philosophy of math -- the desire to fully axiomitize is still deeply ingrained despite Goedel, but in some ways this seems like a more fundamental challenge. You can write down as many rules as you want for string manipulation, but the realization of those rules in actual manipulation remains ineffable on paper.

Isn't a silicon chip technically a rock?

Also, I take it that this means you don't believe in the whole, "if a program implements consciousness, then it must be conscious while sitting passively on the hard disk" thing. I remember this came up before in the quantum series and it seemed to me absurd, sort of for the reasons you say.

Also, I take it that this means you don't believe in the whole, "if a program implements consciousness, then it must be conscious while sitting passively on the hard disk" thing. I remember this came up before in the quantum series and it seemed to me absurd, sort of for the reasons you say.

I used that as an argument against timeless physics: If you could have consciousness in a timeless universe, than this means that you could simulate a conscious being without actually running the simulation, you could just put the data on the hard drive. I'm still waiting out for an answer on that one!

IL, isn't the difference the presence or absence of causality?

"And even if you have a mind that does carry out modus ponens, it is futile for it to have such beliefs as... (A) If a toddler is on the train tracks, then pulling them off is fuzzle. (B) There is a toddler on the train tracks. ...unless the mind also implements: Dynamic: When the belief pool contains "X is fuzzle", send X to the action system."

It seems to me that much of the frustration in my life prior to a few years ago has been due to thinking that all other human minds necessarily and consistently implement modus ponens and the Dynamic: "When the belief pool contains "X is right/desired/maximizing-my-utility-function/good", send X to action system"

These days my thoughts are largely occupied with considering what causal dynamic could cause modus poens and the above Dynamic to be implemented in a human mind.

IL: Timeless physics retains causality. Change some of the data on the hard drive and the other data won't change as an inferential result. There are unsolved issues in this domain, but probably not easy ones. The process of creating the data on the hard drive might be necessarily conscious, for instance, or might not. I think that this was discussed earlier when we discussed giant look-up tables.

You can fully describe the mind/brain in terms of dynamics without reference to logic or data. But you can't do the reverse. I maintain that the dynamics are all that matters and the rest is just folk theory tarted up with a bad analogy (computationalism).

"Fuzzle" = "Morally right."

Only in terms of how this actually gets into a human mind, there is a dynamic first: before anyone has any idea of fuzzleness, things are already being sent to the action system. Then we say, "Oh, these are things are fuzzle!", i.e. these are the type of things that get sent to the action system. Then someone else tells us that something else is fuzzle, and right away it gets sent to the action system too.

"Fuzzle" = "Morally right."

Hm... As described, "fuzzle" = "chosen course of action", or, "I choose". Things labelled "fuzzle" are sent to the action system - this is all we're told about "fuzzle". But anything and everything that a system decides, chooses, sets out, to do, are sent to the action system. Not just moral things.

If we want to distinguish moral things from actions in general, we need to say more.

I just want to note that back in 2008, even though I had already read this dialogue and thought I understood it, this was one of Eliezer's posts that made me go: "Holy shit, I didn't realize it was possible to think this clearly."

Going down to the bottom of the post for the TL;DR, I was pleasantly surprised to having the need to go back up again.

Minor note- When trying to prove Strong Foundationalism (on which I have since given up), I came up with the idea of founding logic not on something anybody must accept but something that must be true in any possible universe. (E.g 1+1=2 according to traditional logic, reductionism if I understand Elizier correctly). This gets around the tortoise's problem and reestablishes logic.

Of course, this isn't so relevant because the tortoise can in response suggest the possibility Achilles is insane either in his reasoning or his memory (or both, but that's superflous) being so far off-track that he can't trust them to perform proper reasoning.