fishfry

Max Tegmark says there are no infinities in the world. He explicitly says that the infinities that come up in multiverse theory are breakdowns in our ...

I've done a little web research on the subject of physical infinity. I have come to a definitive conclusion on the matter, definitive in the sense tha...

You mean an unbounded tape. Your ignorance is showing. Again. No amount of erudition can compensate for your bad manners. And as in our previous convo...

The way this started IIRC is that you accused me of being a dualist and have then proceeded to make a dualist argument for the past several posts. I a...

Then we are fundamentally in agreement. Of course. I hope you don't think I'm dismissive of the amazing achievements of weak AI these days. From chess...

Yes but this guy had a British accent. And a beard. I really think so but if you look at the multiverse thread on this forum or in many other online c...

I oppose that notion every chance I get. It's not possible that I expressed such an opinion. Two possibilities: * You misunderstood something I wrote;...

Now that you mention it, I can narrow down my claim. There are really two issues here: What I think about mind; and what I think Searle thinks about m...

Are you starting to come around to my point of view? Or not? I can't square those two statements. I'm going to look into this question. What the physi...

That's my understanding of Searle's position as well. The mechanism remains to be discovered.

Oh I quite agree with that. I can take a pencil and paper and step through a program. It's a common debugging technique. And you're right, that doesn'...

So I've heard. I just watched a Youtube video last night in which the speaker made that exact same point, that black holes have infinite density. By t...

So you are making the point that a NN somehow implements semantics? That's wrong. We'll have to agree to disagree here. And once again you have an ins...

If you ever had general anesthesia you'd have personal experience that sleep is a much higher state of consciousness than anesthesia. When you're asle...

Then you must have a substantive response to my point that if mind is an informational function of a neural net executing in the brain, then it can be...

I'd love to chat with you without the snark. This isn't fun. I'm going to withdraw. Suggest you investigate the relationship between neural nets and T...

Oh I totally agree. Set-theoretical physics is absurd till we discover it's not. I know that. When professor so-and-so from Helsinki counts the points...

@Ian How many different exchanges are you on? It seems that for each coin, you have to sign up on some obscure exchange that wants your ID and persona...

As I'm fond of pointing out, if the universe instantiates actual infinity, then set theory becomes an experimental science. Physics postdocs would app...

Much of your argument centers around your belief that neural networks are a different mode of computation than Turing machines. I do not believe you a...

Weak AI systems are an artifact of modern technology, like cars and flatscreen tv's. On what basis would one ask if AI is our purpose? Perhaps God put...

Objectifies chairs.

How do you know the purpose of life isn't to create automobiles or flat screen tv's?

Is chili soup?

Zero. They did a study. The US government does whatever it wants regardless of voter sentiment. Multivariate analysis indicates that economic elites a...

G is not provable but it's true. But I'm not really an expert on the fine points so I probably shouldn't have jumped in earlier.

No.

Yeah but where'd the sphere come from? If you're on the surface it looks like you can go in all directions forever. But if you are outside the sphere,...

Agreed. Of course nothing of the sort is true, but I see where you're going in the next couple of paragraphs so this is not a crucial point. What's tr...

Yes that's pretty much what's going to happen. The current phase is going to crash terribly and a lot of people are going to get hurt. It's not just t...

Yes and No!! Yes, numbers are a human invention. But accidental? No. They don't seem that way. Archimedes wasn't hallucinating. There's some mathemati...

According to the solipsists over in another thread, @apokrisis is a figment of my imagination. In that vein I'll take a shot at responding. I said no ...

Have you converted your holdings back into cash and successfully moved it back into your bank account? You might be surprised at how difficult that is...

When an anesthesiologist wants to knock you out he gives you an IV (intravenous drip) in the hand. What do you say about that?

Faith. Isn't that how it works? Belief that requires evidence is science. Belief that does not require evidence is religion. If you require evidence, ...

That's a speculative idea, not physics. And besides, he's also suggested a stricter idea of the computable universe. If the universe is a computation,...

The physical world. The object of study of physicists.

The current refugee crisis is Europe is caused by America's endless wars in the Middle East. You can't separate the migration problem from US foreign ...

Ah. Interesting point, sort of a category mismatch. When you say Euclidean you mean Euclid's axioms of geometry. When I say Euclidean I mean modern Eu...

Do you suppose that the axiom of choice is true in such a space? Then the Banach-Tarski paradox is true as well. Then matter could be created, contrar...

I clicked on your Wittgy link and read the yellow highlighted part and I confess I didn't understand at all how that has anything to do with solipsism...

It might be true. But it's nihilistic. We should dismiss it because it's boring. Why did the sun rise today? My vat programmers did it. Why didn't the...

You can't logically refute solipsism but it's pointless. It doesn't give you insight into anything. The world's a mess because that's how my sadistic ...

That's a wild assumption with very little evidence for it, and considerable physical evidence against it. Ditto. But surely you are not making the cla...

Yes but there is no such thing as a circle in the world. The circle whose circumference divided by its diameter is exactly pi is not any object that c...

Right to suicide, yes. Requirement that the State must assist? No. Based on the State I'm most familiar with, they'd be all too eager to help. They mi...

It's just an Internet forum, not the proceedings of the Royal Society. Then again when Newton was the president of the Royal Society, he ordered the d...

So then your argument is circular. "Things that change require a variable. Why? Because a variable is something subject to change." Circular, right? B...

Yes good point. The Nazis were the lawful government of Germany but they were not moral. Legitimacy is a technical term and I'm not using it correctly...

You're taking my remark completely out of context. @bahaman said and I merely pointed out that variables are human constructs, and relatively recent o...