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Nominull comments on Rationality Quotes: April 2011 - Less Wrong
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No, I was not trying to think along those lines. I must say, I worried in advance that discussing philosophy with people here would be fruitless, but I was lured over by a link, and it seems worse than I feared. In case it isn't clear, I'm perfectly aware what a Turing machine is; incidentally, while I'm not a computer scientist, I am a professional mathematical physicist with a strong interest in computation, so I'm not sitting around saying "OH NOES" while being ignorant of the terms I'm using. I'm trying to highlight one aspect of an issue that appears in many cases: if consciousness (meaning whatever we mean when we say that humans have consciousness) is possible for Turing machines, what are the implications if we do any of the obvious things? (replaying, turning off, etc...) I haven't yet seen any reasonable answer, other than 1) this is too hard for us to work out, but someday perhaps we will understand it (the original answer, and I think a good one in its acknowledgment of ignorance, always a valid answer and a good guide that someone might have thought about things) and 2) some pointless and wrong mocking (your answer, and I think a bad one). edit to add: forgot, of course, to put my current guess as to most likely answer, 3) that consciousness isn't possible for Turing machines.
If you think 1 is the correct answer, you should be aware that this website is for people who do not wait patiently for a someday where we might have an understanding. One of the key teachings of this website is to reach out and grab an understanding with your own two hands. And you might add a 4 to that list, "death threats", which does not strike me as the play either.
You should be aware that in many cases, the sensible way to proceed is to be aware of the limits of your knowledge. Since the website preaches rationality, it's worth not assigning probabilities of 0% or 100% to things which you really don't know to be true or false. (btw, I didn't say 1) is the right answer, I think it's reasonable, but I think it's 3) )
And sometimes you do have to wait for an answer. For a lesson from math, consider that Fermat had flat out no hope of proving his "last theorem", and it required a couple hundred years of apparently unrelated developments to get there....one could easily give a few hundred examples of that sort of thing in any hard science which has a long enough history.
Uh I believe you will find that Fermat in fact had a truly marvelous proof of his last theorem? The only thing he was waiting on was the invention of a wider margin.
Little-known non-fact: there were wider margins available at the time, but it was not considered socially acceptable to use them for accurate proofs, or more generally for true statements at all; they were merely wide margins for error.
I wonder how much the fame of Fermat's Last Theorem is due to the fact that, (a) he claimed to have found a proof, and (b) nobody was able to prove it. Had he merely stated it as a conjecture without claiming that he had proven it, would anywhere near the same effort have been put into proving it?
Almost certainly not. A lot of the historical interest came precisely because he claimed to have a proof. In fact, there were a fair number of occasions where he claimed to have a proof and a decent chunk of number theory in the 1700s and early 1800s was finding proofs for the statements that Fermat had said he had a proof for. It was called "Fermat's Last Theorem" because it was the last one standing of all his claims.