All of Lukas_P.'s Comments + Replies

@Elizier

"I think you are confusing knowing that a system will perform arithmetic, with the system actually performing arithmetic. The latter does happen sometimes, despite all fallible assumptions."

I think you didn't understand my argumentation; when you say that a physical system does perform arithmetic, then your theory of arithmetic is wrong as soon as you have a contradicting result.Therefore the system is not allowed to perform arithmetic sometimes, but it is required to do it always!

Let's consider this: I find a machine I don't know anythin... (read more)

"So reductionism is wrong - a thing can be more than the sum of it's parts (since "thing" includes action)."

The problem with this statement is that you don't define what you mean by sum. I for one cannot imagine what the term 'fingers + palm + thumb' is supposed to mean. Apparently by sum you don't mean arithmetic sum, but something different. Perhaps by 'sum' you mean something like 'put those ingredients into a beaker, shake it a little and then see what you get'.

And of course, if you defined 'sum', you'll need to define 'more' (and '... (read more)

"To be clear then, your objection is that any physical device that seems to add is doing something different from a "theoretical" device that doesn't actually get built."

As long as the domain on which they act is different, they are doing different things. If your theoretical device includes the whole universe as the domain on which it acts, then you generally cannot prove that they are doing different things (Halting problem).

But I do not say that you cannot create an AI that seems to act like a human, and I am not saying that it wouldn't be thinking like a human or that it wouldn't be conscious.

"Lukas, I don't understand your objection at all. How does disrupting the physical adding machine mid-process prove that it isn't doing addition? One can also disrupt electronic computers mid-process..."

I didn't say it doesn't do addition; I said that it doesn't do the same addition that the 'theoretical' adder is doing. That's what Elizier called 'artificial addition'.

All you can say is that the physical adder will most of the time do a 'physical addition' that corresponds to the 'theoretical addition'; but you need to make a lot of assumptions ... (read more)

"Here's a question from a layman: if untold trillions of new universes are being created all the time, where is all that energy coming from to create them?"

Well, you've got the same problem with a single world: Where did the energy for our 'single' Universe when 'it was created' came from?

The problem here is that you assume that universes are created which did not exist before; in this case you indeed need to take the energy from somewhere. But as I understand, they never did not exist (beware of double negation!). They already existed before the... (read more)