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points

by dtj11237 hours ago |

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by gizajob6 hours ago|

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Aren’t, right now, not can’t.

by dtj11236 hours ago|

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Can you explain why you think that matters?

by gizajob4 hours ago|

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I’m enough of an empiricist to want to deal with reality it is. Thought experiments about things we “could” be doing or “could” implement and then already know the result of because we can rationalise out the consequences of the thought experiment don’t really interest me until they’re done in reality.

Like for example the China Brain - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_brain. We could in theory organise that and it should in theory be a functional representation of the brain and should in theory prove a functionalist metaphysic of consciousness, just this overlooks the fact that trying to organise that kind of experiment in our reality with a real 1.4 billion people is impractical to the point of impossibility, so in reality it proves nothing.

Or take the hoverboard from back to the future - this seems like a fairly plausible device and is easy to think about, and I could be writing speculative papers about our hoverboard future and what it means for transportation, but when it boils down to it implementing the thing in the way we all believe it should work, like a kind of gravitationally repulsive force field, doesn’t seem like it’s part of physics. I’d want to wait until the day until science delivered an actual good-enough hoverboard that works the same as the one in Back to the Future.

by dtj11233 hours ago|

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Empiricism doesn't mean that you refuse to accept the existence of something until you witness it. It means that beliefs have at their root direct observations, which in conjunction with a logical argument support that belief.

According your definition of empiricism, you wouldn't accept that next years processors will any more powerful than this years until they've been built and you've run a benchmark, which would be a little dumb.

Instead, I'm assuming you combine your knowledge of scaling laws, the basic physics of computation, and your direct observation of the power of modern processors, and infer correctly that next years yet-to-exist machines will be more powerful than those available today.

Re the China brain: its a thought experiment designed to illustrate substrate independence, it is indeed unfortunate that we can't run the experiment. You could absolutely get a small group of individuals together and teach them to reproduce the behaviour of an individual neuron. That would then be enough to demonstrate that a whole brain is possible.

Re the hoverboard: anyone with a basic knowledge of physics knows that this is not possible. Since you have the capacity to reason and access to evidence, you don't have to wait, you can say confidently that it cannot happen unless our physical theories are profoundly wrong.

by gizajob1 hours ago|

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Well I said I’m “enough of” an empiricist, not that I was denying what you lay out. But in the case of such thought experiments that can be begun with a small empirical circumstance such as a small group of individuals and then logically extended, a lot of the time I’d still want to say “I don’t believe that the logic is a simple as you suggest to extrapolate”. While I’m not in favour of radical skepticism, I find a healthy skepticism in the face experiments which could theoretically be run to test their validity - in this case the skepticism shows that “no, you can’t actually organise a China brain, ever, because we can’t corral 1.4 billion people or even get them on board with such an idea” so I’d find the logic faulty that says there’s a proof for functionalism regardless within the thought experiment.

A basic knowledge of today’s physics would say the hoverboard is not possible. An advanced knowledge of physics five-hundred years hence might show a way of doing it. It “wasn’t possible” to build a thinking, talking machine five hundred years ago and look at us now.