BadThink6655321

Only because "actual understanding" is ambiguously defined. Meaning is an association of A with B. Our brains have a large associative array with the symbols for the sound "dog" is associated with the image of "dog' which is associated with the behavior of "dog" which is associated with the feel of "dog", ... We associate the symbols for the word "hamburger" with the symbols for the taste of "hamburger", with ... We undersand something when our past associations match current inputs and can predict furture inputs.

Wnat about Gödel incompleteness? Comptuers aren't formal systems. Turing machines have no notion of truth. Their programs may. So a program can have M > N axioms in which case one of the N+1 axioms recognizes the truth that G ≡ ¬ Prov_S(⌜ G ⌝) because it was constructed to be true. Alternatively, construct a system that generates "truth" statements, subject to further verification. After all, some humans think that "Apollo never put men on the moon" is a true statement.

As for intentionality, programs have intentionality.

A ridiculous argument. Turing machines don't know anything about the program they are executing. In fact, Turing machines don't "know" anything. Turing machines don't know how to fly a plane, translate a language, or play chess. The program does. And Searle puts the man in the room in the place of the Turing machine.

I don't remember when I first started using BBEdit. Perhaps not long after the demise of MPW. I still use it for everything but Lisp development.

Does the testimony of the adults who were negatively affected by it, both as adults and as children, count?

Just recently a black child, who was born at home with jaundice, was taken from the parents to be given care in a hospital, because a doctor didn’t think the parents would provide effective treatment.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/temecia-rodney-mila-jackson-ret...

Earlier today I came across this on Scott Aaronson's site:

"Also, are the ultimate equations that govern the universe “real,” while tables and chairs are “unreal” (in the sense of being no more than fuzzy approximate descriptions of certain solutions to the equations)? Or are the tables and chairs “real,” while the equations are “unreal” (in the sense of being tools invented by humans to predict the behavior of tables and chairs and whatever else, while extraterrestrials might use other tools)? Which level of reality do you care about / want to load with positive affect, and which level do you want to denigrate?"

https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=3628

Edward Feser published a review of Koon's book ([0], [1]). I was struck by the number of times Feser argued that a "common sense" view of QM is the one that is "basically correct." Given the documented failures of common sense in mathematics and physics (see especially Feynman's comments in the first 15 minutes of [2]), why should anyone think common sense is a reliable metric to how things are?

[0] https://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2023/01/86512/

[1] https://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2023/01/koons-on-aristotle-...

[2]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=41Jc75tQcB0

They also "broke" the ability to set/remove a bookmark by double-tapping the page. The more Books degrades to become like Kindle, the less incentive I have to buy books from the Apple store.

I'm a theist. His writings wouldn't have converted me, either.

The lock analogy fails. First, the viewer was given the data. Second, obfuscation is not a lock.

Should I be bothered that "=" is (((x•x)•(y•y))•(x•y)) so if he's going to write his axiom in terms of NAND, he needs to write all of it using NAND?

No: https://respectfulinsolence.com/2020/02/10/medical-error-thi...

While I see a lot of discussion about the contents of the article (politics, engineering, etc...) I want to comment on the article itself. Very well done. A delightful read during lunch. Bravo!

It’s the same complaint made against the ending of Ron Moore’s Battlestar Galáctica.

All this has happened before and all this will happen again.

Thanks!

What do we do with a theory that conforms to every measurement ever made, but whose predictions aren’t testable? After all, we’re already there. We’ll never measure the interior of a black hole, for example. I think our theory selection criteria needs work.

See the <a href=“ https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_drop_experiment”>Millika... Oil Drop Experiment</a>, particularly the section “ Millikan's experiment as an example of psychological effects in scientific methodology”

Ah, memories. I wrote a proposed multiprocessing extension for Genesis, et. al. which Apple didn’t adopt. Instead they went in different direction for the multiprocessing library.

David Sowell was an extremely smart engineer who did some incredible work.

DayStar had some great people and those were fun times.

Until you get information from the measurement, it didn’t happen.

Excellence is privilege.

Not a darn thing. Don’t like them, don’t need them, don’t want to need them. I understand this (luxury) might not apply to everyone.

Isn’t the ultimate answer always “we don’t know”, “because”, or “42”? It has to be deeply unsatisfying because we don’t know what the ultimate question is, do we? We can’t stop asking.

“The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas” is a great short story. It won a Hugo in 1974.

Should the person whose content is blocked be able to face their accuser, know precisely what line they crossed over, and have recourse against arbitrary, malicious, incompetent ... moderation? As it now stands, one entity is judge, jury, and executioner, which is a recipe for abuse of power.

Not anymore. My wife and I now get more spam calls than real calls.

You are confusing theory with practice. Back then, computers were expensive and rare. The general student population at my university had two choices: the CDC 6400, or an HP time-sharing system that ran BASIC. A friend and I actually wrote a complete toolset in BASIC that allowed students to learn HP-2100 assembly language. (I did the editor and assembler, he did the emulator and debugger). But writing a PASCAL cross-compiler in BASIC, that output a paper tape of COMPASS, or binary? No way. Or FORTRAN, SNOBOL, Algol, ...

Supercomputers need compilers, et. al. And now I need to go back and revisit the Pascal compiler for those machines...

Of all the nails that could be used to seal Pascal’s coffin, the one I use is that I can’t write ‘writeln’ in Pascal. Other than that, it was great in it’s time (mid 70’s for me).

The Reference Frame also discussed this[1] and showed why the paper is wrong.

[1] https://motls.blogspot.com/2018/04/frauchiger-renner-trivial...