Computational Theory of Mind

[SamBridge]

We probably can't predict behavior by peoples genes. Stuart Hammerhoff makes a good point in his lecture and I think that he's right. "[Microtubules are the containers of knowledge]," and then he backs up his point by giving an example of a single celled organism performing complex tasks (such as having a sex life, learning, and navigating its environment). From my experience (computationally), if you want to be able to predict the output of any computational mechanism you're going to need access to a few things. 1. in the simplest scenario, you need to know that there is ABSOLUTELY no alternative input that the mechanism is receiving because if there was, then the system is exactly twice as complex as you anticipated, 2. You need to know how the mechanism is organized, 3. you need to know the fundamental units that are associated with knowledge (commonly called "units", "units of knowledge", "bits of information", etc.) and you need to know the boundaries between these units. Currently, we don't have a single mechanism that can measure even the simplest known central system that is required for output (algorithmically) in any known organism, and that's not even to mention what the input may be. I see that one day we will have this type of tool, but it needs to be extremely precise and it needs to know how to distinguish noise from the actual thing that we are measuring. A common complaint about neuroscience is that the brain is just too noisy and that our systems aren't able to bypass that yet. It's getting better thanks to pattern recognition and Bayesian/statistical inference, but I think that we are still years away from measuring accurately and recognizably anything remotely as complex as our analytical system, and particularly language (which is BY FAR the most complex thing that any of us can achieve).

Ok, and another point: Look to your left, and then to your right. Were you in either of those positions when you saw them? How do you know? The answer is "no" and you know that because you viewed them from different position, otherwise you wouldn't have been able to view the physical space between them. If one can view determinism from an external frame, they logically cannot occupy that deterministic frame, i.e. we know people and reality can't be completely deterministic because we know what complete determinism would look like from an outside view and can thus identify differences, which you just explained.

Edited April 21, 2014 by SamBridge

[Popcorn Sutton]

Determinism is an absolute necessity for a computational theory of mind, there's no sidestepping that. If you have any interest in AI then you wouldn't even be concerned with that question. Your argument was fallacious because it was like 2+2=5000.

 

So what you're saying is that because you are not someone else, things are inherently random and determinism is false. That makes absolutely no sense to me. I can predict what I'm going to say next, I'm going to say hi. Hi

[SamBridge]

Determinism is an absolute necessity for a computational theory of mind, there's no sidestepping that. If you have any interest in AI then you wouldn't even be concerned with that question. Your argument was fallacious because it was like 2+2=5000.

 

So what you're saying is that because you are not someone else, things are inherently random and determinism is false. That makes absolutely no sense to me. I can predict what I'm going to say next, I'm going to say hi. Hi

Then obviously the situation isn't isolated just AIs. My argument is a basic property of relativity, not of arithmetic, so your analogy does not follow. For instance, you'd know you're not a Christian because you could view Christianity from a different view other than theirs and thus identify differences between your belief system and the Christian belief system, and a Christian could do the same thing with you for whatever non-Christian belief system you have, and you'd both be right about each other.

 

And if you believed in computational theory of the mind to its full extent, it would already be determined of the illusion you'd think you know that you know that you yourself can't think your going to say "hi" and that you don't actually have any control, the result would already be determined and is simply the result of stuff moving around in a pre-determined way.

Edited April 22, 2014 by SamBridge

[Popcorn Sutton]

It's all absolutely determined. I'm going to speak English here not some alien language that uses the gaps between their toes to speak with. I have a mouth and lungs not breaks in between my toes. If determinism was false I could travel to the moon and back in -5 seconds.

 

There is no example I could conject that would be sufficient as an argument against determinism. Seriously, I don't know why anyone even ponders the idea of free will. It's incoherent.

[SamBridge]

If determinism was false I could travel to the moon and back in -5 seconds.

Does not follow.

 

There is no example I could conject that would be sufficient as an argument against determinism. Seriously, I don't know why anyone even ponders the idea of free will. It's incoherent.

How bout the mountains of observable evidence we have that there is no way to predict the exact location of a particle and that they are quantized meaning there cannot be indefinitely smaller constituent particles that constitute their actions on the larger scale?

Edited April 22, 2014 by SamBridge

[Popcorn Sutton]

It could be the DNA in all actuality

[SamBridge]

It could be the DNA in all actuality

If you ignore evidence and logic, anything is possible, they even have a special forum for that addresses that http://www.scienceforums.net/topic/78802-if-i-can-imagine-it-it-is-possible/

We simply don't have evidence that we can predict every outcome and furthermore we can claim with numerous confirmations from other observers to consciously distinguish what complete determinism would be from what we consciously measure happening, therefore there must be a difference between the two, no matter how small it is.

Edited April 22, 2014 by SamBridge

[Popcorn Sutton]

I must have an entirely different idea of quantum mechanics. When I'm talking about quantum mechanics in this context I make a few assumptions. Here they are

 

Spooky action at a distance == Prompting all equal points of interest (relating to attention).

 

Life is indistinguishable from death and therefor my car is both dead and alive, as I am as well.

 

Organization (determinism) is necessary and sufficient for replication purposes.

 

All that happens between prompting is indistinguishable from nothing, and, for that reason, there is no need to speculate about Newtonian mechanics and chemical interactions in the brain because you are dealing with knowledge, which is like a consistent and simultaneous bubbling of equal bits so that they are recognizable.

 

Organization is CRUCIAL and it needs to be perfect for the best results.

[SamBridge]

Spooky action at a distance == Prompting all equal points of interest (relating to attention).

Spooky action at a distance refers to quantum entanglement which is inherently not deterministic. Einstein's famous "glove in a box" argument was eventually defeated by experimental evidence that showed entanglement is non-local which eliminated hidden variables.

 

Life is indistinguishable from death and therefor my car is both dead and alive, as I am as well.

Based on what the community of biologists define as the standards for being alive, a common car is not alive, and a living organism is not dead. Btw Shrodinger's thought experiment was just that, a "thought" experiment, not a physical experiment.

 

Organization (determinism) is necessary and sufficient for replication purposes.

Let's see you replicate being dead and alive at the same time and replicate predicting every future action.

 

All that happens between prompting is indistinguishable from nothing, and, for that reason, there is no need to speculate about Newtonian mechanics and chemical interactions in the brain because you are dealing with knowledge, which is like a consistent and simultaneous bubbling of equal bits so that they are recognizable.

Sorry, but reality is not some computer that you can program.

Edited April 22, 2014 by SamBridge

[Popcorn Sutton]

How would you ever know?

[SamBridge]

How would you ever know?

Because there are inherent random (no way to base the exact future results off of past results, meaning the future results are not causally connected like with the super position of matter and light, uncertainty principal, vacuum fluctuations, results of entanglement, ect) and non-local properties (elimination of hidden variables) of the phenomena along with quantinization of matter and energy (gets rid of the "infinitely smaller particles determining everything on the next largest scale" argument), but, in a purely mathematically a-physical model, computers are 100% deterministic, so we know the universe cannot be modeled as what we think of as a true computer because that computer model doesn't match the results we see. I can see how this is a big bummer for someone who spends a lot of time studying computers, so you can hate science, or you can move forward and work on quantum computers.

Edited April 22, 2014 by SamBridge

[Popcorn Sutton]

False dilemma noted in that last sentence. The amount of complexity in a computational system is directly proportional to the streams of input. From what we know, we have 5 senses at least, so let's just take that as an example. Let's just say that each sense has recognized 10 things. That makes the amount of knowledge for that moment 10^5. That's 1,000,000 connections between bits that need to be computed for any output from those particular modules. With this in mind, you may want to throw in the towel and call it quits. I don't do that because I know how useful this type of technology is and I have a very good idea of how to organize it so it can be useful. I'm not a physicist, and I will never claim to be one, but I do consider myself an expert in computational mind. You probably will not find anyone else who is willing to spend as much time on this particular sub component of AI. My boss told me that he's hired other programmers before me and none of them seem to have a clue of what actually needs to be done. I know what needs to be done and I'll be happy to do it. Given enough time and storage, I can make something epic. Understand though, pattern recognition (the heart of computational mind) is the ability to DETERMINE the statistical IMPRACTICALITY of randomness. Go ahead and assume that things are random, but if you're assuming freedom in any way you're just plain wrong.

http://youtu.be/NlIdqH24mpI

[SamBridge]

I don't doubt that you can build a good computer, I just doubt determinism can universally exist because of scientific experiments. If there are inherently random properties of the universe, you can never have 100% certainty that anything is physically deterministic, including AIs and biological systems. Thus, we can never determine with 100% accuracy what all future results will be to prove there is 0 degree of freedom, or in other words, that every position of all matter and energy long every axis at any given point in time can be modeled as a function, generating only one possible set of outputs for every single set of inputs with a 1:1 correlation. Good luck making a deterministic equation of the universe.

 

I'll repeat it again for you to consider since you didn't seem to completely address it but rather gave logically inconsistent one-liners. A conscious entity can distinguish having no freedom from what they measure as their own conscious action of measuring in a state that is defined as having freedom or "choice", therefore there must be a difference between the two, otherwise logically they could not possibly be distinguishable and the appearance of having choice would be equal to actually having no choice. If on the other hand, it was proven that for any given conscious entity that it is impossible distinguish between how they measure their own conscious state as having a choice and a lack of an ability to do so, then it would imply there was no difference between what is measured as but in reality is only an illusion of choice and what is measured as no choice, which can coexist with a lack of determinism, but I don't think we've gotten to that point and I don't think we know if such a point can exist.

To put it frankly, we don't have the evidence to prove what is being suggested to its full extent and it may very well be improvable. And the theory in this discussion isn't even considering the epistemology of our measurements anyway.

In current physics, there's ways to mix and match the more Newtonian views of systems by saying certain events are more or less probable with certain parameters, so it's not like you'd be completely wrong or anything like that, there can still easily be rational and logical patterns, especially considering the fact that mathematical patterns themselves uphold the property of their correlation independently of time and space.

Edited April 23, 2014 by SamBridge

[Popcorn Sutton]

If it's alright to post my equation again, I'd like to.

 

It's pretty deterministic in the sense that it will provide relevant output, but it's statistical. I might add an extra component to determine parameters.

[SamBridge]

You can post any equation you want, but as with any mathematical model that is applied to the universe, it's just a matter of if whether or not or how big the difference between that equation and any given relevant physical observation and if it is 0 or greater, or an infinite amount of nines after 99%, thus proving they are the same, which as per your liking I suppose I can model with arithmetic: Expr1 - Expr2 = 0, ---> Expr1 = Expr2, or "the difference between expression one and expression two is zero, therefore expression one equals expression two."

But we still have further to go as I said, we'll always have further to go when we try and boil everything down to just functions as ordered pairs. As long as there is a lack of proof that someone can't tell a difference between having freedom and having no freedom, computational theory of the mind will never have a chance of being fully accurate. If you have statistics, that's getting better, it's getting closer to reality, you might be able to accurately model probability with 99% accuracy in a closed system,

Edited April 23, 2014 by SamBridge

[Popcorn Sutton]

That is wayyy too informal though. What do you do when you get this- "that cow is white with black spots" and "there are back spots on that white cow".

[SamBridge]

That is wayyy too informal though. What do you do when you get this- "that cow is white with black spots" and "there are back spots on that white cow".

You get that a cow will has an unknown amount of x square units of a material that reflects a combination of all frequencies of optical light and an unknown amount of y square units of material that reflects of no optical frequency of light. Though spots on a cow and many natural structures are more accurate modeled by fractals. It's not informal in the strictest sense, it's just that you probably don't have any psychology tests lined up and this forum isn't a real laboratory.

Edited April 23, 2014 by SamBridge

[Popcorn Sutton]

It may be formal enough for recognition but past that you need externalization and that part hasn't been formalized beyond my hypothesis. Recognize patterns, prompt all relative units within knowledge and a statistical ratio (parameter), output = gen[n(u)] > n + 1(u)

[SamBridge]

Just as a sort of random tangent I was curious about, what if someone recognized that their recognition was based on that formula? Is there ever some type of infinite loop in psychological mathematics comparable to putting two mirrors next to each other?

Also, it seems like the formula is based on a recurring automation, but you say its statistical?

Edited April 23, 2014 by SamBridge

[Popcorn Sutton]

It is recursive at points and whether the process halts or not is criticism. The one bit that never halts is the one that is waiting for input, the other ones are embedded within the system and from what I know, there are 3 other recursive processes that happen after input is received.

[SamBridge]

So with respect to biological computation, and assuming the other three recursive components are very accurate, how does that show there isn't a case of freedom in an event that someone recognizes a difference between their ability to analyze their conscious state, and a process that was "predetermined" to happen (which is a purposely incoherent sentence)? If there is a set outcome, or even statistical set outcomes that is a guarantee of a system, a conscious mind would never agree that they measured that component of the system as having control over it because it would appear to a given observer like a "subconscious" reaction that they had no control over, so where are you eliminating the difference between someone saying they measured themselves as having control vs no actual control for any given equation you come up with?

Computational theory does claim that the accounts for cognitive processes are computational which can be very consistent with measurements, but that theory is also based on directly causality and a mathematical form of determinism, and, without the advocates of the theory considering the epistemology of applying their own system to the way they themselves measure the results to try and validate their system while ironically computational theory can show that semantic values affect the judgement for what is considered rational. Or in other words, everyone is going to have to compromise on how close we can model a mind as a mathematical computer. There's some truth to the idea, and there's some falsehoods to the assumptions.

Edited April 24, 2014 by SamBridge

[Popcorn Sutton]

A purposely incoherent sentence is only used within a particular context. In this context, I could provide you with the sentence "and but or if" which is acceptable because it's making a point. All recursive functions are deterministic but they're not conscious. The part that is conscious is the knowledge. Knowledge gets prompted because of it's proximity to the point of interest. Here's an example.

 

Unit = 'hello'

'Hello' is recognized and the correlating bit is accessed instantaneously.

Then, depending on significance, it gets a parameter.

'Hello' prompts all equal bits.

The connections which are in succession to the point of interest get prompted.

Depending on the significance of those units, add the one that is most probable before being parametrized to generation.

Skim through every unit in generation and put only those that are more significant than the previous unit into output.

 

The result is that the output is actually pretty grammatical.

[SamBridge]

A purposely incoherent sentence is only used within a particular context. In this context, I could provide you with the sentence "and but or if" which is acceptable because it's making a point.

And the context was relating the equation to the original topic which overall was meant to show if whether or not it could validate the theory.

 

All recursive functions are deterministic but they're not conscious. The part that is conscious is the knowledge. Knowledge gets prompted because of it's proximity to the point of interest. Here's an example.

Unit = 'hello'
'Hello' is recognized and the correlating bit is accessed instantaneously.
Then, depending on significance, it gets a parameter.
'Hello' prompts all equal bits.
The connections which are in succession to the point of interest get prompted.
Depending on the significance of those units, add the one that is most probable before being parametrized to generation.
Skim through every unit in generation and put only those that are more significant than the previous unit into output.

The result is that the output is actually pretty grammatical.

You don't seem to really define knowledge, but what you're saying seems rational that you surmise that consciousness is rather the process of the succession of prompts, which does coincide with some looser biological analysis that try to derive consciousness is being dependent on progression of time as well as the less "physical" aspects in which consciousness can be modeled as a "collection of patterns", which, can mathematically be transported via quantum teleportion or into computerized objects, which I think they made a few movies about by now.

 

But, there's still a few problems.

As you said, the functions are deterministic, whereas reality, especially on the very small scale, is not 100% deterministic, which means the deterministic functions at best only have the capacity to indefinitely approximate the patterns based on how complex you want to keep making the algorithms. This contrasts with fundamental pillar of computational mind theory (or CMT for short) that all thinking and reasoning must be purely causally deterministic processes much like the old Newtonian view of the universe, which, QM shows cannot physically be the case. Though, it seems like you tried to incorporate a more probabilistic model near the end, but then again, to admit something is inherently random is to admit you can never derive a perfectly accurate model of future results.

 

A given synaptic process is not necessarily universally able to be translated into the same semantic symbol across multiple organisms, i.e. even something as simple as "hello" doesn't have the same distribution of "significance" nor is it necessarily going to be represented with the same context from person to person which makes it difficult to prove a given algorithm with set parameters can work, seeing as how you'd have to coincidentally find the right person for it to perfectly work. If everyone shares the same culture, then its closer to the same context from person to person, but everyone grows up differently, has different physical structures and weigh social interactions differently. But, this still leaves some room that, instead of surmising the ability to think as being a physical causation itself, is rather the pattern that the synaptic processes form, and that all semantic symbols can be tracked as some type of synaptic pattern, supposedly even if happens to be a purely random process though off the top of my head I can't think of a way to confirm how. Whether or not this is fully done is up for some debate, but it's been done to some extent and neurologists have made progress on that front.

 

A main goal of computational mind theory was to explain thinking without the possibility of anything intangible or "super-natural." or just plain to in terms of what can be physically observed. But, rational judgement as a series of semantic symbols must itself abide by the principals of the theory according to the theory itself, and therefore, the recognition that the theory is current creates the paradox that the theory is only appears correct because it was pre-determined in a mental process to be interpreted as correct, not that is mathematically proven correct, and this adds to the epistemology of the situation that anything that any interpretation of logicality is only the forced result of deterministic processes, and therefore, what is understood as logical is not necessary indicative of what is actually logical, which applies to CMT itself. Or in other words, according to the logical application of CMT, CMT shows that it, in of itself, may not be accurate.

 

And with this algorithm, I still don't see the difference necessary to express the action of a conscious entity not being able to distinguish between when it confirms that it has choice and when it confirms it does not.

 

So, there's a few holes to work out. I'd leave it as that it's not fair to say a mind can be physically modeled as a mathematical computer, but it's not fair to say everything about it is completely random and completely unpredictable. As I said, I think its best to settle on a compromise and take a more open minded approach and admit there's a few things we don't understand.

Edited April 24, 2014 by SamBridge

[Popcorn Sutton]

Agreed. Nice post btw

[SamBridge]

Thanks. Glad the topic was resolved in a civilized way.