Thread: My Ghost Story
View Single Post
Old 21st November 2015, 01:25 AM   #584
Jodie
Philosopher
 
Jodie's Avatar
 
Join Date: May 2012
Posts: 6,231
Originally Posted by JayUtah View Post
Bump for Jodie. She's complaining here and elsewhere that she's not being properly addressed. Specifically that people are simply telling her she's wrong without explaining how she is wrong. And since she's clearly referring back to this thread, it seems we should resurrect it.

Previously in this thread, thoughtful (and often lengthy) explanations were provided to expound Jodie's various misconceptions and simplifications. (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12.) Jodie dismissed much of what her critics said as a "posting tantrum." As she did in this thread, so in the above-referenced thread she has continued to dismiss criticism as somehow compromised by the alleged emotional immaturity of the critics.
You and a select few others were having emotional tantrums without explanation at the time that was said.

Quote:
Clearly Jodie disagrees with her critics regarding what constitutes a meaningful response. This raises a legitimate question. When proposals are simply ignorant of the relevant sciences, to what extent and to what depth is a detailed, expostulatory rebuttal merited? If someone walks into a concert hall who has never played a note of music and tells the conductor he's doing it wrong for various naive reasons, is that person entitled to a full expounding of musicology from the conductor? If someone walks into a fourth-year medical school classroom bragging about how all diseases can be cured by dietary supplements, is the only viable rebuttal a replay of the entire medical education the audience has obtained?
You don't need to understand music theory or play an instrument to know when the music has no harmony.

Quote:
Fringe claimants often seem to have this inflated sense of entitlement. Despite often admitted shortcomings in their own knowledge and experience, they seem to presume their claims "somehow" still have enough merit to warrant careful consideration and (if necessary) a detailed rebuttal. And when they don't get it, they complain that they're being "ignored." Well, in a certain sense they have been -- and rightly so. There are gatekeeper criteria to serious consideration, and in meeting them a claimant must demonstrate to a sufficient degree that he understands the fundamentals on which the claim is predicated. In short, a claimant doesn't get to presume that his uninformed, speculative claim is not patently dismissable.
In most books, theoretical physics for example, the physicist goes to great lengths to explain what the math for the theories indicate. I might be wrong in assuming that they know what they're talking about but many of you here are assuming others know what they are talking about when you quote their research. I don't see a fundamental difference in those two situations.

Quote:
But amid the harshness of the real world, Jodie has had the luxury of serious consideration and thoughtful rebuttal, even though her claims don't meet the gatekeeper criteria. All except her latest proposal, which has been correctly dismissed as caricature.
Who is the gatekeeper?

Quote:
So let's look at your latest offering, Jodie. I've highlighted and labeled each of the instances of vague handwaving.


Quote:
By the numbers, then:

1. Application vs. model.
Applications are commercial products, generally trivial ones to solve well-phrased problems and having a certain degree of reliability. You may think this doesn't matter for your proposal. But instead of an "application," what you should be looking for is a model. You're purporting to do science, not bake cookies or plan treatment for obstetrics patients. That's not to say the latter is easy. But it's a deterministic problem with well-studied procedures and decision points. Hence it can have an "application."
OK, I can see that.

Quote:
2. Suitability is not a given.
Here you just assume that similarity is appropriate. Expert systems for medical diagnosis and treatment are elementary implementations of the rete algorithm or some other production-rule system. Now these can be arbitrarily large and arbitrarily complex. But one thing they must be is deterministic. One thing they cannot be is probabilistic in the sense required by the only formal model of consciousness you cite: Tegmark.


That makes sense.

Quote:
You've been told numerous times how you misunderstand and misinterpret Tegmark. Even assuming Tegmark's definition of consciousness is suitable, he doesn't formulate consciousness; he formulates matter. That is, he creates the limiting case, not a predictive or descriptive model. Alongside this, he doesn't model conscious matter; he just models matter. He does so in the most general way, using Hilbert spaces defined over the complex abstractions used to define quantum fields. His finding is that his formulation of the phenomenology of consciousness is not precluded by investigable properties of matter. That doesn't mean all matter is conscious. It doesn't mean he knows what consciousness is. It doesn't mean he knows how to make conscious matter. It means there is no behavior inferred from his definition of consciousness that cannot be produced by some ordinary manifestation of matter.
He is modeling consciousness as a state of matter. He's pretty clear about what his equations mean. I don;t think there is much room for misunderstanding.

Quote:
This is your first fatal flaw -- i.e., that the math you've alluded to previously in this thread is testable in the way you've proposed. We could stop here, as your theory cannot recover from this.
This is a perfect example of what I'm talking about. It's not testable.

Quote:
3. Quantum mechanics is not discrete.
This is your fatal flaw. The paradox of quantum mechanics is that while it deals with discrete quanta, the values in the model are not -- and cannot be -- discretes. Because of uncertainty, they can only be expressed as probability distributions. Wrapping one's head around this dichotomy is the difficulty of understanding quantum mechanics at any useful level. Any model that purports to compute a quantum state of matter as a set of enumerable, delineated values is simply wrong from the start.


I understand what your are saying. Atoms are not solid balls rotating around a center like a miniature solar system. The best you can do when you represent an atom is to demonstrate the quantum state of it's existence at a specific point in time.

Quote:
This is your second fatal flaw. Regardless of previous deficiency, we could stop here without loss of rigor.
Quote:
4. Suitability is not a given, redux.
"Something like that" incorporates things that cannot be part of any workable quantum-state model, and explicitly excludes the essence of such a model. It is handwaving at its most evident. This is common in fringe thinking. You know about X, so you assume that if a problem Y bears some superficial resemblance to X, you can transfer all your knowledge of X to Y and this will be palatable to experts in Y. There is no kind way to say this: the world is not obligated to dumb itself down to fit your understanding.
Then why did you ask me in the first place?

Quote:
5. Define consciousness.
Because of the problems I outline above, you can't apply a deterministic methodology (i.e., pattern-matching, product-rule) if you plan to invoke the "multidimensional" aspects of quantum field theory. Not only is there no agreement what consciousness consists of, there is absolutely no justification for limiting any eventual definition to discrete, deterministic systems. You're trying to have your cake and eat it too.


This sounds like you are agreeing with me. Why would you limit your consciousness to your deterministic existence here on Earth if a multidimensional universe is a theoretical possibility? It wouldn't make sense that it would only exist in the 4 dimensions we have here.

Quote:
This is your third fatal flaw -- a fundamental, qualitative inconsistency in your approach.
Quote:
6. Neurological process is not algorithmic.
One of the most important distinctions between neuroscience and artificial intelligence is that they are not nearly as congruent as one might think. Because computers can be made to mimic some kinds of behavior that we associate with intelligence, it is tempting to believe that all aspects of intelligence (including perhaps consciousness) can be attained simply be scaling up existing algorithmic methods. I discussed this already at length. There is no such belief in computer science, although it is a common lay belief and an equally common science-fiction meme.

Conversely because we often discuss cognition using the language of computation, it is tempting to believe that cognition is simply biological computation. Again, neither computer scientists nor neuroscience believes this. "Taking ... into account" neurological processes sidesteps a number of open questions in both fields.
I don't disagree with this.

Quote:
7. Perception can be meaninglessly algorithmic.
Artificial automata perceive. That is, they take in sensory input, apply transformative processes (even paramaterized from stored memories), and evaluate them according to a set of rules. The outcomes of those rules affect behavior. That's classically defined perception, and the algorithms are well-defined after 30 years or so of practical research.

But of course it doesn't constitute all of what we mean by human perception. That's because humans have an uncanny ability to normalize sensory input, and because human perception embodies a non-deterministic inferential component affected by motivation, emotion, and other unknowables. So you're rather stuck. If you want deterministic perception, then it can be had for the price of a smartphone. But of course that no more captures the underlying mechanisms of consciousness than the elevator door when it decides not to close on you. Sensory neuroscience has no models for you to use here, and they wouldn't fit your bill anyway.
I don't disagree with this either, however, if you have interdimensional consciousness, yet you are only aware of here, then that is a partially independent and deterministic aspect of the whole.

Quote:
8. What is the model for 'levels' of consciousness?
The neurological model of levels of consciousness consider only phenomenology. They don't consider either mechanism or causation. Below you require just such a constitutive model (not a descriptive one), but not only does science not yet have one, the descriptive one ends at our known reality and doesn't consider whatever you might imagine by "higher" levels of consciousness such as those that would let you commune with the dead, permeate the threshold of death, travel through time, or any other fringe claim you're trying to support with this model.
I said this earlier in the thread. I used to visualize the dimensions as being like a layer cake. I don't anymore. If our first four dimensions are integrated to create what we are seeing here on Earth, then it follows that the other dimensions would also be integrated into our existence. If that is the case then our consciousness could exist in those other dimensions but we might not be aware of this.

Quote:
9. Modeling revisited.
I covered this at length previously. We can certainly model the observable behavior of systems as we observe them. The motion of the planets as seen from Earth, for example, can be modeled to a very high degree of accuracy using systems of harmonic equations, up to 300 terms each. But that's not the math that governs their motion. That's qualitatively Kepler and quantitatively Newton. And that's still not the mathematics that describes the mechanism for what makes planets move. We're still working on that, some hundreds of years after Kepler and Newton.

Modeling is not a mechanical translation of behavior into "some kind of algebra." You can't even decide on even the most basic features of any such model, much less tell us whether it's possible to create a model so faithful that it expresses not only behavior but mechanism.


I thought it was gravity

Quote:
This is your fourth fatal flaw. You cannot sweep model fidelity under the carpet. You propose to establish or falsify, with this method, the extradimensional properties of consciousness. You cannot reason about findings if you can't rule out that the model is unfaithful.
This is true and why I've stated that this is speculative from the start and not likely to be tested.

Quote:
10. 'Higher' dimensions are not a thing.
This just restates your biggest misconception, one which I covered at length here for your benefit. In the vector formulations for quantum mechanics, one dimension is not "higher" than another in any way. Values in quantum behavior are simply represented as vector quantities, expressing magnitudes along each of the conceptual dimensions. No one coordinate or dimension is "higher" than another. They don't describe separate realms of time and space that we can't see. In the context of four spatial dimensions and one temporal dimensions that we perceive, the remaining 7 dimensions (Einstein) or 19 dimensions (some multiverse formulations) are not "higher" in any way -- they're just the rest of the data for that particular space-time expression. They're no more conceptually "higher" or "lower" than each other than the numbers in your locker combination. They're just sets of values meant to be taken collectively.

You cannot escape the error of this equivocation no matter how vigorously you state it, how inaccurately you word it, or how often you repeat it. There is simply no concept in physics for "higher" dimensions as the fringe theory defines them.


I have not once referred to anything here as a higher dimension. I have called them "other dimensions" or referred to the universe as "multidimensional".

Quote:
This is your fifth and most egregious fatal flaw.
Quote:
11. Define the simulation model.
"Develop a simulation" is simply an appeal to magic. There's no kind way to say it. The mathematics from which you infer your multiple dimensions is not translatable to discrete simulation, if the goal is to predict the next state from some instant state. Many have tried, including some of the best people in the business (e.g., U.S. Dept. of Energy). Guess whose company built and programmed the computers they used to try? There's a klunky approximation. I think it's up to partially modeling some two dozen particles -- say, a handful of fluorine atoms. But it's not promising.
Then why did you insist that it could be done and ask me to try?

Quote:
12. Formulation.
You haven't the faintest idea what "equations for consciousness" are, or even what they could be. In your attempt to fog up the lens of science that's examining your vague attempts at formulation, you've proposed a hodge-podge of incompatible alternatives. You are entitled to no more elaborate explanation of your error than to note where it contradicts itself.
I simply borrowed the concept from a few others that tried to map the steps involved in receiving input and how processing and attention is focused. But you asked for it [quote]so I attempted.

Quote:
13. Constitutive relationships.
For any linear system to convolve with any other linear system, there must be a set of constitutive relationships between them. There must also be constitutive relationships among elements in the simulation domain. A simulation won't work at all unless the model and the inputs share some elemental constitution. Since you don't have a formulation for either the model or the environment, you have no clue whether such constitutive relationships are possible. It's never a given that they are.


Ok


Quote:
In fact, sometimes it's a given that they're not. Enter entanglement. This wonderful feature of quantum field theory ensures that you can't bound the relationships, which is an important part of the formulation. In theory, any element can affect any other element in a discrete simulation. But in practice the effect diminishes according to well-defined rules, and this decay is the only thing that makes systems with, say, 1012 unknowns tractable in polynomial time. That well-defined behavior doesn't apply to systems with nonlinear entanglement. Thus the constitutive relationship problem isn't governed by the number of dimensions in the model, but rather by the square of the number of elements in the model. I don't know of anyone in the field who even knows a method for approaching such intractable formulations.
Ten why did you ask me to do it?

Quote:
The number of fatal flaws in your proposal is staggering. Any one of them dooms it, no matter how strong the remainder. Four or five of them, explained here at length, should satisfy your desire for a complete refutation.
You've only proven what I've said all along, it isn't testable. It doesn't refute the idea.
__________________
"When I was a child I caught a fleeting glimpse out of the corner of my eye. I turned to look but it was gone, I cannot put my finger on it now. The child is grown, the dream is gone. I have become comfortably numb. " Pink Floyd

Last edited by Jodie; 21st November 2015 at 01:31 AM.
Jodie is offline   Quote this post in a PM   Nominate this post for this month's language award Copy a direct link to this post Reply With Quote Back to Top