tom

All you need to do is derive a "tends-to" from a "does". Go ahead!

You can't derive an ought from an is. You can't derive a "tends-to" from a "does".

You are completely missing the point. It is impossible to transfer knowledge from one mind to another. Minds construct new knowledge from artefacts, p...

Nice example of misunderstanding a cultural aretfact. And again it seems. The leap to computational universality (the hardware problem) is fully under...

So you hope to discover the software by examining the hardware? The trouble is, since we don't know what we're looking for, how could we recognise it?...

I apologise if I didn't make my position abundantly clear: an Artificial General Intelligence would *be* a person. It could certainly be endowed with ...

The unconscious is easy. We have most of what is necessary in place already - databases, super fast computers, and of course programs like AlphaGo whi...

You don't need instinct, you just need to point to the physical law that forbids the creation of artificial people - there isn't one! However, the not...

But all you need to do (on the 3rd time of asking) is to demonstrate that a physical theory is undecidable. How many opportunities do you need to pres...

The reason you cannot give an example of an undecidable problem in physics is because there aren't any. The reason for that, is that only the class of...

There are no physics problems in your list. The undecidable problems of mathematics are irrelevant to physics, as are the non-computable functions and...

So, it should be no problem for you to give a few examples of these undecidable problems in physics? Why do you believe the computer program possesses...

What else could a mind possibly be? The mind is software.

But there is no such thing as an undecidable problem in physics. It is inconceivable that a "mind" could be programmed by accident i.e. that's not goi...

The program running on the laptop or the supercomputer is an algorithm. Not only are "program" and "algorithm" synonymous, but it cannot be anything b...

It's certainly an algorithm (what else could it be?) but to call the algorithm a "mind" is not very helpful, because it isn't one.

Sure, but if you are going to abuse the language in that way, you are compelled to admit that the non-conscious entity also possesses the means to ach...

If non-conscious entities behave purposefully, then they must also possess the knowledge of how to achieve their purpose.

Speaks the arch-reductionist! This is patently false. People are abstractions and we cause lots of things. We alter physical reality to comply with ou...

This seems like a Straw Man to me. I have never encountered a physicalist (normally in the guise of a scientist) who denies the existence and causal p...

Clearly you are wrong about this as black-holes demonstrate. Also, @"apokrisis" pointed out, the final state of the universe may indeed be a perfectly...

They clearly don't. What's your point?

Sure, that's why experiments like this work https://medium.com/the-physics-arxiv-blog/quantum-experiment-shows-how-time-emerges-from-entanglement-d5d3...

You could start with this book: The Physical Basis of the Direction of Time If you don't want to read the whole thing: http://www.time-direction.de/

As I said, planets and stars and other "gravitational clumping" in Reality have more entropy than an evenly distributed gas.

I suggest you are therefore sceptical of terms such as "negentropic eddies".

No, black-holes are not an exception. Black-holes have vastly more entropy than the matter that created them, be that a perfectly spherically distribu...

But in reality when "things clump together" e.g. a gas cloud forms a star or planet due to mutual gravitation, the entropy goes up not down.

Then why do the most symmetrical objects in the universe have the highest entropy i.e. black-holes?

Quite! The fact that information from the environment (which for the genome includes the organism) cannot be transferred to the genome is so important...

For a refutation of Jablonka et. al. see http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10539-006-9033-y I challenge you to find a single case in which an ...

There exists no mechanism by which the environment can program the genome. Neither the organism that the genome encodes, nor the wider environment, co...

According to neo-Darwinism, whatever physical process brings about variation, there is no mechanism by which that physical process can be systematical...

Michael Nielsen wrote the standard book on quantum computing. Here's his take on computability. http://michaelnielsen.org/blog/interesting-problems-th...

It has been PROVED that quantum mechanics is computable - read the paper! As a hint, only the computable functions are required to express quantum mec...

As I mentioned already, causality does not fit very well with any physical law, because they are time symmetric. According to physical law, the future...

General Relativity is a theory of space-time. It is a fully deterministic theory. Reality is a static block-universe. This is incompatible with a theo...

Apart from the fact that there is no force of gravity in GR. Instead objects follow geodesics in space-time in the *absence* of a force. Also, if you ...

But neo-Darwinism does not require "randomness" or "chance", but simply that there is no mechanism for systematically feeding back to the genome. It i...

Can't have been a sheepdog then, or any normal dog who knows how to sit, stay, fetch etc.

1000+ words is more than sufficient to ask many questions. In all animal "studies" of language acquisition, despite the most fervent bias among resear...

Neo-Darwinism requires the mechanism of variation to be non-systematic. So, no there can be no "causes yet undiscovered" only particular historical ac...

Epigenetics aside, because there is a huge amount of confusion and misunderstanding associated with it. Neo-Darwinism may indeed have evolved a mechan...

Under neo-Darwinism, the requirement is that there is no systematic mechanism of variation. That is all "chance" and "randomness" mean in this case. I...

Lamarck (and Darwin by the way) assumed that traits acquired by parents were transmitted to their young. Epigenetics aside, we know that isn't true. B...

What would it even mean for a physical law to be non-computable? Classical mechanics takes a good stab at it, achieving non-computability-in-practice....

Well, as I mentioned, you have Unitarity, which is an especially restrictive form of determinism. Even black-holes cannot destroy information! There i...

Does causality exist in any fundamental physical theory, or is an abstraction used by humans to tell stories? Fundamental theories are time-symmetric ...

It might be illuminating to discover what you think this deep connection might be, because on the face of it, there doesn't appear to be one. Gödel's ...

Yes, the paper is called "Imitation as behaviour parsing" for a reason. Behaviours are transmitted between apes without understanding or intentionalit...