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GrahamJ

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In: Infinity  — view comment
Some here might like finitism or ultrafinitism. Wikipedia has a page, and there's a more technical intro here: nlab. The following is about an extreme...
February 10, 2024 at 12:47
You might like Max Tegmark's idea that "All possible mathematical structures have a physical existence, and collectively, give a multiverse that subsu...
January 09, 2024 at 13:29
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie, This seems to me to be the `real' zombie argument, about another world, or another universe. ...
October 27, 2023 at 15:38
No, I do not mean physicalism. I'm saying that all behaviour, including language, can be predicted from physics. That is compatible with physicalism, ...
October 27, 2023 at 11:28
'...physics' was short for physics, chemistry, abiogenesis, biology, evolution, and so on. There are scientific theories of how language developed in ...
October 27, 2023 at 10:33
I wouldn't put it like that. I see it as a thought experiment which can clarify how much science someone accepts. It hasn't worked with @"Patterner" y...
October 27, 2023 at 08:26
Do you believe the 'something else' affects behaviour in a way that disagrees with predictions from physics? If so, why haven't scientists noticed any...
October 26, 2023 at 19:49
Here are some definitions inspired by reinforcement learning (an approach to AI). Pleasure is the rewards that you receive from time to time from the ...
October 26, 2023 at 09:07
Scientists like Sean Carroll believe that consciousness is weakly emergent, and you only seem to have an argument from incredulity against them. https...
October 25, 2023 at 13:57
A couple of things you may be missing. First, evolution is more than natural selection. A neutral trait may go to fixation in a population by genetic ...
October 24, 2023 at 13:13
Mitchell and Webb: Does God Exist? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EUbjpwyesk0
October 23, 2023 at 14:40
Alleles (variants of DNA sequences) can go to fixation (every individual in a population gets the same allele) in various ways. 1. Genetic drift. This...
August 03, 2023 at 20:33
Thanks. I was expecting a philosophical not a biological answer (eg a definition of what memory means to some philosophers). I knew about the enteric ...
May 10, 2023 at 17:43
Yes please.
May 08, 2023 at 07:56
It might reduce or increase the number of computations required - that would depend on many details. Perhaps it doesn't matter to you that the computa...
March 23, 2023 at 19:36
Mathematician here. I think you're getting into trouble (in an interesting way). If the model is a discrete time Markov chain determined by a matrix P...
March 23, 2023 at 13:13
But experience is subjective. Natural selection can only act on morphology and behaviour. ("Natural selection can hear you scream but it cannot feel y...
February 24, 2023 at 16:03
How can natural selection act on experience?
February 24, 2023 at 15:51
Thank you for the reference to the article. They manage to describe in a few pages what Thompson fails to decribe in many. The enactive approach still...
January 21, 2023 at 12:17
I am a mathematician, and have worked in machine learning and (the maths of) evolutionary biology. From a distance, an enactivist approach seems attra...
January 19, 2023 at 19:15
I agree with you that we have to give meaning to machines. But not at the level you suggest (assigning 0 or a 1 to a voltage range), because it wouldn...
December 06, 2021 at 20:54
This is basically an answer to your first question, which maybe makes an answer to the second uninteresting. I am a mathematician and programmer. I've...
December 05, 2021 at 18:48
For me, the hard problem of consciousness is about feelings. Feelings are physical pains and pleasures, and emotions, though when I say emotions, I on...
December 04, 2021 at 13:09