Explanation not necessary. I took it exactly as you intended (probably since I use that statement myself, when "wow" is the more socially accepted word).

Hello, DrZ and Hallings,

I would like to address a bunch of issues which you have raised in your various entries since the reply to my doubt about computers having volitional consciousness.

I find this format inadequate for the kind of exploration that a group could have sitting around a table. As a consequence, this is going to be long. I will try to organize this in a series of smaller points up to discussion and at least to the extent that I might be able to do it, go from more fundamental to consequential. Of course, all these are just my opinions subject to improvements on the bases of your responses, provided that I accept them as valid ;-) (or LOL whichever you prefer).

The most basic thing is that humans are product of very long evolution of life on this planet. On how life started, there was recently on another blog here a posting about a hypothesis basing the incipient DNA on thermodynamics and the entropy drive. I read the original paper behind the article and found it believable. Warning: I am not truly qualified to evaluate that paper. For our purposes here, let’s accept that life started naturally somehow, no supernatural powers, please.

There are some basic properties in all living things. Drive to survive and, since all life is mortal, the drive to reproduce and replicate. I call these two things life drive. I fully subscribe to Darwin’s evolution theory. That means that the fittest are likeliest to survive and propagate. It also, we now know, is based on mutations. Let me define mutations as unintended changes in the inheritable genetic material, which by definition are transmitted to the next generation. So, I describe evolution as a humongous trial and error progress. Progress toward what? Toward less difficult life. What is difficult? Anything that makes survival less likely and thus survival rate lesser, i.e. resistance to life drive. All this in an environment that is constantly changing, because of solar system accidents and the continuous aging and cooling of our planet. (Let’s keep global warming out of this!)

After huge numbers of failures among all those mutations, out of the order of Primates emerged the genus Homo and, finally, Homo sapiens, i.e. humans. I think that we carry in ourselves huge heritage from all that evolutionary background. Since we are sexually dimorphic, we have families. (If you have not yet, you should read: David C. Geary’s “Male, Female; The Evolution of Human Sex Differences, 2nd edition, 2010). You will understand the connection between sexual selection and natural selection.

Many animals have some consciousness, i.e. an awareness of the environment and of self. But, we inherited and, I believe, evolved a consciousness endowed with unsurpassed, cognitive ability. In my opinion even the dumbest human has much better cognitive ability than any other species. So, I propose a definition of our consciousness as “human consciousness cognitively capable of volitional logical reasoning”. There are some duplications in this definition, but please try to live with it for the moment.

I propose that free will is the “ability to rationally choose actions”. As you pointed out, actions include thinking. My dog and cat have free wills. No doubt. But their abilities to choose rationally are awfully limited. So, what distinguishes us from every other living thing is an enormous cognitive ability. I actually think that this is very well known, even if denied by some.

I object to the statement that plants communicate knowledge. I know that my 5 spruces do not warn each other that deer are approaching. Their life experience will have some echo in the genes in their seeds. That is also communication of knowledge, stretching definitions of terms quite a bit. One plant might affect the chemical composition of its immediate environment and thus communicate something to another plant close bye. But to call that communication of knowledge, to me sounds like abuse of the language.

That artificial intelligence could have any property that its designer did not build in, is just not true. From where would life drive and free will come to these computers?

I spent two decades in what I consider the most successful engineering organization in the world at that time, roughly early sixties to early eighties. I did and later managed some development engineering work. We launched the prototype in mid-seventies and the product is still the best in the world today. I learned a lot in those years. On many levels and on many subjects. One of these things became an axiom for me. Industrial manufacturing enterprise is a trial and error process. Another thing I learned (just read it said) is that engineering is the art of things that work. By the way, ancient Greek for art is τέχνη, techne, "art, skill, cunning of hand". That is the root concept of technique and technology. Designing a product is a process of improving what already exists and works. You cannot “calculate” the new design. Trial and error comes from testing the effect of changes you consider. But you cannot test for the expected duration of the product’s life. So you accelerate the tests, with all the complications that this brings. So, you make judgment after judgment and inevitably express yourself throughout all that. You take judicious risks and hedge your bets. Many tests disappoint and you try again, with a tweak. If you are very good and lucky, you end up with a new and better product. What is better? Cheaper to make, faster, stronger, more reliable, more appealing to the customers (keeping in mind their current and future needs, to the extent you know them). In the long run, continuous improvement. A lot of what I call creative problem solving. In my view making something almost always requires some creative work. Inventing something is a different concept to me. Invent something that is the first instance of serving a need in the market never served before and you may get very rich. Invent something that serves a need in a different way. The question becomes how different. I would never wish to be patent office examiner. I heard it said very seriously that, in certain situations, it is better not to try to obtain a patent. The first arrival on the market wins the race for good. I don’t know enough about that.
I think that we here severely suffer from very common imprecise definitions of many concepts which we are discussing. For instance: “cognitive thinking”, as I saw someone say here, to me is nonsensical. Can thinking be non-cognitive? I don’t think that many people would deny a consciousness in certain animals and thus some cognitive ability. I challenge you to get your chimp to write a poem, sing a song, sculpt a statue of her baby and compute a square root of 4. He chimp will not do better. (To show that I am not a sexist!)

My experience with computers was early. Remember Heath kits and DOS? I built myself 3 of those copies of IBM’s PC and 2 of the 386s. But I always perceived the computer as a tool. Every computer I have ever used or owned in the 32 years or so since, never did any thinking. The only thing that is did is process digital codes by running a program designed to perform that process. Very frequently, garbage in, garbage out. Did you notice how many times the output contains numbers to 6, or even 8, significant figures for quantities that are barely measurable to 3 significant figures?

What is artificial intelligence? To me the computer that beat Kasparov in chess is not intelligent at all. It is a brute force combinatorial and probabilistic calculus performing machine. Unless they specifically programmed it to do it, it would not be able to tell me how much is 2 plus 2. Intelligence is not having a humongous amount of stored data. Intelligence is that creative problem solving, that inventing, that evaluation of risks and benefits simultaneously on multiple criteria of different kinds. It seems to me that I would explore whether we can use genetics to create humanoids who can do what we need. Mush cheaper to build, much simpler to maintain and readily replaceable.

About power and tribe. I think that drive for power stems from that life drive and its goal of less difficult life. As I said early, we are my sexually dimorphic. I do not remember reading an explanation why is that dimorphism preferably for so many species. I could speculate, of course. As I said, we inevitably have families. From family, to clan, to tribe, to ethnic nation, to state and territoriality in general. Why? In search of less difficult life and bigger genetic pool. With growth in size of the group, come more and more sophisticated divisions of labor. With that, need for leadership and management at different levels and different specialties. All this is happening in prehistory and produces a lot of learning.

Egyptian recorded history starts about 3000 BC, i.e. about 5000 years ago. We separated from Neanderthals somewhere between 50,000 and 80,000 years ago if I remember correctly. To think that average cognitive ability of Homo sapiens from than to now did not improve, through evolutionary mechanisms, sounds totally preposterous to me. On top of genetic improvements, we are gradually able to store and communicate vaster and vaster quantities of accumulated knowledge. And we are able, despite the teacher unions, to transmit that knowledge across generations, better and better. I might join those complaining that the quality of transmitted knowledge is deteriorating in present times. But, that is another subject.

From the needs of group leadership and benefits accruing to those positions, comes competition for those positions and the drive for power. Better women, better food, better shelter better everything. I think that people accuse others and their leaders of irrational drives to conquer. I think that almost always it the difference in assumptions and judgments. You cannot compute with certainty your war plan. And people in position of power over others are, in my opinion, more likely to have more pride. That pride will color their assumptions, their judgments and their decisions. In my opinion, few things in life are as simple as a chess game. In my experience, the most important source of irrationality are fear and, a bit less so, other emotions.

I would like someone to describe to me, in detail, please, what is a sentient electronic entity. I would like to say in advance that it very much sound to me like science fiction. Future is incredibly hard to predict. I like to say that only gods predict. Humans just speculate. How do you know that a cosmic ray particle will not go through your testicle, damage a gene, and that the particular gene will not be in that incredibly lucky spermatozoid that will fertilize the egg from which your son will be born with one of the syndromes or predilection for cancer of a certain kind or simply stillborn? I am asking you to tell me in grand outline how do you visualize the computers with skills, in general comparable to humans. Until you do, I will stick with my opinion: that is pure science fiction.

Respectfully,
Maritimus

P.S. I warned you that it will be long. I don't think I will ever again this big variety of subjects.

Dr.Z: just in case you might have taken my previous response in the wrong way, it was intended as my serious interest in your statement.

I recall a video of a crow that was faced with a dilemma of getting food out of a tall glass where her beak could not reach. The crow took a piece of wire and bent the end into a hook and removed the food with the tool. Cognitive thinking?

Use the reasoning. How many Einsteins in the whole country? I would bet about the same ratio among the aborted embryos.

I promise that I will make a serious effort to make it happen. Looking forward to it already.

I assumed that she meant "if he were born in the Middle Ages, with his inventive talent". Though, don't forget that he said: "It is 99% sweat and 1 % talent, (with his usual bombastic style).

Dr.Z:
Gosh Doc, that's heavy shit...
I'll have to check this out.

This is one of the reasons that science is loosing its reputation. Of course, there are still many excellent, impeccably honest scientists. The "news" is dominated by bad apples. Many times, only scandal is "news". I blame the public for swallowing the "news" unthinkingly and generalizing.

Maritimus:
Any time.
Give me a few days heads up.
The fall is a great time- no snow birds yet!

I agree with you.

My point was, accepting some humans are only imitators, i.e. posses only "static knowledge", it is that they do not will themselves to think rationally about issues involved and evade instead. It is not having the "static knowledge" in itself that precludes them their rational thinking. Just the usual nit picker point.

I enjoy discussing with you too.

If we can arrange our schedules, I would be trilled, perhaps sometimes in the fall, to make the trip to Palm Beach and enjoy some lively chats with you guys along with the cigars.

Oh! I should have guessed that.
I was a "denier" from the start. In fact, I resigned my decades old membership in the American Chemical Society when they started loudly disparaging "deniers". I know a Nobel laureate in physics who resigned from the American Physical Society for the same reason. Not that I am of the same caliber as he is.

Good observation! The study of how we humans work, and why we're at the top of the food chain is astonishingly rudimentary. One recently determined element of human information processing that blew my mind was about visual information. We've learned that from the time an image is received on the retina and is completely serially processed via the optic nerve and the brain's visual processing neural center, 1/10th of a second has elapsed. In other words, we should be theoretically permanently condemned to live one tenth of a second in the past, but we aren't. What happens is that the brain makes logical projections about what is going to happen in the next tenth of a second, and its projection is so near perfect that any mistakes are so incredibly infrequent that we only recently figured out what's going on.

The next question is how far ahead might an intelligence (human or not) be able to predict reliably enough "into the future".

Inevitably this argument of purposeful exclusion leads to arguments over abortion - i.e., how many Einsteins have been flushed down the drain at an abortion clinic? How do we class the practice of extensive abortion? To Sanger, the founder of what is now called Planned Parenthood, it was elitism at its finest, since her intent was to reduce the growth of the population of the "inferior races." Now that the growth of the practice has spread across the ethnic spectrum, I suppose it could be termed egalitarian.

Jlc: Right now -Palm Beach, FL
Anytime- you are welcome!

Maritimus: Come right on!!!!
Bring the Ashtons!

Maritimus: maybe I misunderstood Khalling's comment, "If an Edison was 'plopped' into the Middle Ages..."
Wouldn't that be a different period for him than that of his birth? I could be interpreting it incorrectly.

I am in an airport on a business trip. Good thing I don't know where you are or I might just trade flights...!

Jan, but no cigar

Maritimus:
Not so sure we are not discussing the same thing just getting lost in syntax.
In 'imitating', like small children do and like a particular breed of primates have been documented doing, this 'imitating' an action without understanding the basis of the action and without the logic required to reason through how to improve or create a better method.
That is why I called it "static" -imitation without understanding the process and therefore impossible to improve upon.

I enjoy your comments.

When you loose scientific integrity and submit to being a political toy...no one thinks you represent the truth anymore. You become a lab-coated priest of a beaker religion.

Jan

Anthropomorphic Global Warming - man made global warming.

Can I join? I will contribute any number that is needed of Ashton Prime Ministers.

Jlc: a Brunello di Montalcino accompanied by hunks of parmigiano and Italian black olives under oil. I don't know if you like cigars but I have some good ones...

Forgive me, please, DB. What is AGW?