Holmes

Please delete my account, this is quite ridiculous. This is how Tom Swanson conducts himself in public, apparently Prof. Brian Cox if full of XXXX http://blogs.scienceforums.net/swansont/archives/11081 Just scroll down to see Cox's own responses to Swanson's waffle, e.g.

But you cannot undertake science without belief for the very simple reason that science and scientific theories rest on beliefs, assumptions, things we choose to accept as true but cannot prove to be true. We all do this, I do this, assuming truths is entirely reasonable and rational but we should never make the mistake of claiming we have no beliefs.

The difficulty is that machines like computers are merely state machines, whether it be a calculator or supercomputer they are all just state machines. I see no scope for anything like "self awareness". If there is such a thing as self-awareness within a machine then what would be the criteria? Some believe too that the human brain, mind is wholly mechanistic but that's just a belief.

That's a philosophical statement right there.

What differences? what responses? If we don't know what self aware means, what material differences exist between self-aware and non-self-aware machines then we can't scientifically answer the OP's question.

Not answerable unless you can tell me what the difference is between a non-self-aware machine and a self-aware machine.

You don't know the first thing about science.

I'm done with this thread, the naivety and juvenility shown by some is quite ridiculous, claiming to know so much about science yet attacking a person or a person's integrity when he raises hard questions or forces you to explain your beliefs. This is not science it is militant scientism.

Not a quote in sight, just foot stamping and emotional outbursts. Did I undermine science? quote me. Did I propose anything mythical? quote me. Did I post "claptrap"? quote me. You post a quote like that yet I bet you cannot even begin to define what "understand" means can you?

Stop being so ignorant. Measuring something is to make a claim about reality it is not reality. More ignorance! everything you say or do begins in the mind, the mind is real. Oh, so we're quote mining now are we? I don't think you do know, not at all, everything you say betrays ignorance. Science is rooted in unprovable beliefs if you do not understand that then you do not understand science and the limitations it has, so stop with the feigned erudition. If you truly knew anything about science (and this extends to several other ignorant people here like IDontKNow) then you'd have the ability and confidence to attack what is said rather than who has said it. And so it goes on, the incessant attack upon the person not what the person says, you do know that this is how potentially good discussions descend into mindless bickering? of course you, but you don't care do you. My responses are in red.

Well back to the facts at hand, I don't actually post in forums like this for petty bickering and name calling as is the case with iDontKNow - sorry - INow, that person delights in avoiding objective arguments because its too much of a stretch for him. So, Turing. Note what that Wikipedia article on computability said: But the paper cites no source as you can see and I'm not personally convinced this is true, at least in the sense that I'd expect such a claim to be true. A state machine (FSM or FA) is a fascinating and powerful way to solve certain problems, they are easy to understand but with a large set of states can be hard to fully embrace. A Turing machine is a finite state machine with a hypothetical infinite memory ("tape") in fact the prefix "finite" is redundant, all real state machines have a finite set of states, so "finite" is implied. Now the article on Nondeterministic state machines says: Which begs the question - in my mind anyway - is the NFA then really not already, inherently a DFA? To do that we must look at the "subset construction algorithm" which I admit to know nothing about. In that article we read: So, they are saying - it seems - that an NFA cannot do anything that a DFA can't do, so why is it even there? what can a NFA do that a DFA cannot? that's the interesting question for me. As I read these articles I am forming the impression that the term "nondeterministic" in their names, is not what I think of as non-deterministic. I read this too: Now that there, that description does not seem to incorporate an element of unpredictability or randomness, it is an algorithm, creating the conceptual "clones" each of which is in one of these "alternate" states is not indeterminate so far as I can see. I think we have misleading language, here, non-determinism to me, means there is no rule that tells us the output for a given input, here in the definitions of NFA it seems it is just the presence of alternative states at a given transition that is used to name it non-deterministic. My position here is this - if some "thing" we call a NFA is logically always equivalent to some other DFA then it really is a DFA just expressed differently. What these guys are calling a NFA seems to be just a way to implement a DFA that has a large number of states.

The phrase "you were asked to proved" betrays a poor grasp of English grammar. I'm unwilling, as already stated the request indicates ignorance on the part of Ghideon, and of course you too for perpetuating it. As I explained (not that I'd expect you to be able to follow along without pencil and paper) only through ignorance would someone ever demand a peer reviewed paper to prove that 1 + 3 = 76.9 is false, an error. The Wikipedia article appears to be in error, that's my position.

Another vacuous post from the local ignoramous I see.

If I said that I question the claim: 1 +3 = 76.9 you would not ask for a "peer reviewed paper" so this is a case where something that's obvious to me is beyond your knowledge, it is your ignorance (I'm allowed to say this apparently) that is the real issue for you.

I asked Zapatos to stop the personal attacks, I did that in this post: You then posted this: I replied to that rather ignorant post with this: But then we have yet more ignorance, ignorance of the facts: So you are either blind, incompetent, ignorant or just rather dim, how you conned your way into being designated a moderator is a mystery. There are people hurling personal insults around, you are either dim or in fact secretly want them to say these things to me. Yes I KNOW THAT IS NOT THE POST I REPORTED but it is the post that you referred to when you defended Zapatos after he made three accusations against me. You are on record as actively defending posts that do not attack someone's argument but do attack their character and intelligence, so its fair game, you are ignorant and you want to see others insult me because you disagree with something I said somewhere. This is so obvious, you lack integrity, honesty, decency and are too cowardly to enforce a rather simple rule. Now go f**k yourself.

I do not see how: "You think that YOUR definition of a 'woman' is all that matters" "Unfortunately you are not the boss of the world" "You cannot dictate to others" Can be described as not a personal attack. None of these address my arguments or claims. I am leaving the forum at this point, I have no desire to deal with moderators who tolerate and encourage the posting of personal insults.

Please show me the post(s) where I said my definitions are the only ones that matter? where did I say or imply I was the "boss"? where have I "dictated"? Please stop attacking me, is that really asking too much?

It does but I suspect it needs to be corrected or questioned, for example it says this: The emphasized text bothers me because a deterministic system cannot behave non-deterministically so this looks like an error, a contradictory statement. An example is random number generation algorithms, these are actually called pseudo-random number generators because we cannot get randomness from non-random operations. Also the article does not speak of a non-deterministic PDA only of PDAs. I've designed and written PDAs they underpin the parsing of context free grammars seen in programming languages they are powerful in what they can parse but they are wholly deterministic. Well I suppose mathematics is a discipline that supports the formal concept of a proof, that is proposition's are either true or false (though we don't always have the proof) if a set of steps in a proof sometimes gave the result "true" but at other times gave the result "false" then the very term "proof" would become meaningless.

Yes I have, it is your tendency to act like a bully, I've seen it before, dealt with bullies before, this is what I see in your behavior. And if the criteria is to be a woman then that's the end of the matter, they cannot participate because they do not meet the criteria, this isn't hard.

Yet curiously the OP ends with "Like i said, the theory is still unproved; But I believed it was fun trying to examine this fascinating painting of reality". Let me dig out the volume and get back to you... When logic and erudition fail you the insults are never far behind, unable to argue your case using logic and science and reason you all too rapidly resort to your base instincts and emotions.

Well what a story! such is the modern world! Looking forward to seeing more from you, I highlighted what caught my eye, too often overlooked these days!

There are many sources, here's a Wikipedia article on computability: and Note, neither Turing machines, μ-recursive functions nor Lambda calculus are non-deterministic, so they obviously cannot be used to model a non-deterministic system, since they are used to model mathematics it follows that mathematics must be deterministic. Again, I'm not aware of any aspect mathematics, computability theory or algorithm design that supports a concept of non-determinism. Every computable function in mathematics yields the same result from the same input, all the time, every time. Exactly, quantum mechanics is regarded as wholly deterministic whereas observations of these systems are not, the same is true for chaos theory, fully deterministic. Yes, I'm aware of this but such algorithms do not play a role - to my knowledge - in computability theory, and a Turing Machine does not support non-determinism. So far as I can see all computations (as understood in mathematics) can be converted into algorithms. That article points out that a race condition in a concurrent software system can behave or perform non-deterministically, but I don't regard that as arising from the deterministic rules used for the code. Instead that behavior arises from the unpredictability of the code in the presence of other factors.

I may not have made myself clear. I did not say there are not models of non-deterministic systems there are. I said that mathematics and with it computability theory are wholly deterministic. A "computation" is by definition repeatable (every time we do the computation, calculation we get the same answer, different people doing the same computation get the same answer). Please show me an equation that gives different results for different people, can you do that? no. 1 + 1 = 2, today, next week, for me for you.

An observation is an act of perception, we perceive the face of the stopwatch. One cannot say the duration of the interval was 3.0 seconds without taking additional steps, for example is my clock keeping good time? the only way to establish that is to compare my perception with someone else's before the start of the observations. The point I'm driving at, perhaps not very well, is that we can never talk about science as being decoupled from personal experiences, we cannot claim that one person's experiences are "not real" and another persons are. If Newton were told "the time measured by this person moving at this speed relative to me, will measure ten seconds, whereas I measured fifteen seconds between the same events" he would (I suspect) react by saying that the moving persons time measurement was not real, the ten seconds was not "real" time. You can only "back it up" by recourse to someone else's perception. Don't misunderstand me, I'm not arguing against science here, all I'm arguing is that science cannot reveal reality to us, we construct reality based on our perceptions, our perceptions are conclusions we draw from our senses. The claim "science is about reality" for example, that's not a scientific claim, I think these epistemological limitations need to be kept in mind at all times. That's really all I've been doing, making claims about "reality" is outside the remit of science.

Indeed he did. Yes, observers in different Galilean frames perceive different intervals.