True. I would estimate that our universe resembles the parent universe with probability ~50%.

My point was that go and chess are not actually understood. We don't actually know how they're played. There are hacks that allow programs to get good at those games without actually understanding the patterns involved, but recognizing the patterns involved is what humans actually find interesting about the games.

To clarify, "understanding chess" is a interesting problem. It turns out that "writing a program to be very good at chess" isn't, because it can be solved by brute force in an uninteresting way.

Another example: suppose computer program X and computer program Y are both capable of writing great novels, and human reviewers can't tell the difference between X's novels, Y's novels, and a human's. However, X uses statistical analysis at the word and sentence level to fill in a hard-coded "novel template," whereas Y creates characters, simulates their personality and emotions, and simulates interactions between them. Both have solved the (uninteresting) problem of writing great novels, but Y has solved the (interesting) problem of understanding how people write novels.

(ETA: I suspect that program X wouldn't actually be able to write great novels, and I suspect that writing great novels is therefore actually an interesting problem, but I could be wrong. People used to think that about chess.)

What's happened in AI research is that Y (which is actually AI) is too difficult, so people successfully solve problems the way program X (which is not AI) does. But don't let this confuse you into thinking that AI has been successful.

The best one-sentence description I've read of how we think is "humans, if given the choice, would prefer to act as context specific pattern recognizers rather than attempting to calculate or optimize."

We're free to coast on simple pattern matching and automatic processing 90% of the time. Consciousness is only there because it's monitoring any deviation of action from intention. If something goes wrong and our learned rules and basic instincts aren't working, consciousness has to step in and try to cobble a solution together on the fly (usually badly).

Consciousness is a failure mode. He was trusted with root access, and he's spent the last hundred thousand years or so abusing it.

While people say this sometimes, I don't think this is accurate. Most of the "AI" advances, as far as I know, haven't shed a lot of light on intelligence. They may have solved problems traditionally classified as AI, but that doesn't make the solutions AI; it means we were actually wrong about what the problems required. I'm thinking specifically of statistical natural language processing, which is essentially based on finding algorithms to analyze a corpus, and then using the results on novel text. It's a useful hack, and it does give good results, but it just tells us that those problems are less interesting than we thought.

Another example is chess and Go computing, where chess programs have gotten very very good just based on pruning and brute-force computation; the advances in chess computer ability were brought on by computing power, not some kind of AI advance. It's looking like the same will be true of Go programs in the next 10 to 20 years, based on Monte Carlo techniques, but this just means that chess and Go are less interesting games than we thought. You can't brute-force a traditional "AI" problem with a really fast computer and say that you've achieved AI.

Whoever said that this conversation was about understanding consciousness?

Personally I think that that topic is a tarpit, which I prefer to ignore until we know how the brain works.

I think the brain is probably ultimately computable by a classical computer and yet quantum computing in the brain might be significant. Here are couple of the potential problems we'll have if the brain relies on quantum effects.

1) Difficulty in replacing bits of the brain functionally. If consciousness is some strange transitory gestalt quantum field; then you would need to to make a brain prosthesis that had the same electromagnetic properties as a neuron. Which might be quite hard.

2) A harder time simulating brains/doing AI: You might have to up the date you expect Whole Brain Emulations to become available (depending upon when we expect quantum computers to be useful).

Thanks for the interesting article.

and regulation of blood flow: all important, but mostly things only a biologist could love.

I'd argue that people who like designing computer architectures should be interested in this as well.

Ignoring glia seems to me to have been an (mis-)application of assuming the simplest explanation consistent with the facts, when people weren't in a position to fully explain the brain. I.e. people knew that you needed neurons to explain brain function, but because they couldn't predict how the brain functioned, they didn't know that a neural explanation was insufficient.

It is why I am hesitant to argue that there are no quantum effects of any sort in the brain (although the quantum effects people have suggested so far haven't been convincing).

I believe you are confused about what Dennett asserts. Quining Qualia would probably be the most obviously relevant essay easily located online, if you want to read him in his own words.

If you don't, the key point is that Dennett maintains that qualia, as commonly described, are necessarily:

1. ineffable
2. intrinsic
3. private
4. directly or immediately apprehensible in consciousness

...and that nothing actually exists with these properties. You see blue things, but there is no pure experience of blue behind your seeing blue things.

Edit: Allow me to emphasize that I do not consider the confusion to reflect poorly upon yourself - yours was a reasonable reading of Mitchell_Porter's characterization of Dennett's remarks. A better wording for the opening of my reply would be: "I think the quote doesn't reflect what Dennett believes."

You can do a Dennett and deny that anything is really blue.

I'd like to see what he'd do if presented with blue and a red balls and given a task: "Pick up the blue ball and you'll receive 3^^^3 dollars".

Even though many claim to be confused about these common words their actual behaviour betrays them. Which raises the question that what is the benefit of this wondering of "blueness"? What does it help anyone to actually do?

My understanding is that it's possible to have a uniform distribution over a finite set, or an interval of the reals, but not over all integers, or all reals, which is why I said in the sentence before the one you quotes, "suppose there is one possible world for each integer in the set of all integers."