#82
I mean that a person cannot have a complete mental model of their own cognition. The intuition is that it would take up 100% of your cognitive real estate, leaving no room for anything else. I recall there are more formal and persuasive information-theoretical arguments that express the same idea.
Kevin Reid #75,
The former.
Though I wouldn't say that it's "poor argument." A sound argument made within a model that contradicts the reality that that thing models is not a poor argument, but rather a demonstration that one of the axioms of the model fails to capture some subtle detail of the thing it is modeling. That it is imprecisely written (as it must be, or it isn't a model at all.)
We know that we cannot wholly model our cognition so I'd tend to imagine that most new models begin by trying to capture the "real" reason behind our free will, thought, experience, etc., and end up in one fashion or another proving that these things don't exist and are just artifacts of the model. This causes dissatisfaction until someone makes a new model.
The weakest point I can see in this is that free will and choice are---while a lot more primal than, say, philosophy, language, or the medical model of the brain---structured cognitive experiences. They are themselves built on top of something moves. In the continuum, there is a thing that moves.
But I don't think that's necessarily a problem for me, and I don't know if it has any relationship to your own ideas. Anyway! I'm looking forward to your argument. ^_^
Kevin Reid @66:
I agree on the first point, though I think it's a confusion of normative and descriptive ideas instead of something genuinely meaningless. On the second point, though, there's an issue: free will, as problematic as it becomes when you try to pin it down with conceptualization, is part of the ground of experience. People tend to speak nonsense when trying to define free will---there's some problem with our cognitive toolkit here. But I think that saying free will doesn't exist is also an error: no matter how good your excuse for why the primal experience of free will is not genuine---and I've seen some very good conceptual and empirical excuses---it's ultimately a model trying to disprove an element of what it is modeling. It's like proving that players don't exist because you can explain everything that happens to player characters with the rules of D&D---and not just that, but that there's substantial evidence that player characters are not actually living up to the behavior one would expect if there was a goal-seeking player behind them.
I have discovered a proof that this is totally relevant to the topic of Calvinist robots but sadly I have branched into a universe in which it is inexpressible in words.
> What I want to know is if p-zombies
> would be considered among the elect
I think we only know the answer to this for NP-zombies.* It is commonly assumed in the community that the answer for P-zombies differs, but an actual proof of this would seem to be intractable, and even a counterargument would be a matter of great interest.
* nondeterministic zombies are not redeemable. To see this, render the field of nondeterministic zombies into a set of paths through zombie state space. Each zombie navigates these paths, moving without true motion, living without true life, shambling horribly through z-space; if God in His infinite grace were to designate but one of these points as elect, it would create a concussive probabilistic zomplosion to render in an instant either the doctrine of unconditional election or the doctrine of total depravity moot. This is why it's okay (though not necessarily possible) to shoot nondeterministic zombies---they're more trouble than they're worth!
It's certainly a nice change from getting my fundamentalism from wikipedia! Keeping track of the literal word of God through the edit wars was starting to give me whiplology.
Joel,
Since I let myself be thematic in the other thread, a quick straight answer here. I am not convinced the second law I gave is the best possible mashup. But the idea is to emphasize a fallen condition of the world: not only is a robot mandated to seek grace that God gives or refuses unconditionally, but the underlying natural state is damnation. Only under the miraculous circumstances where the robot can fulfill the first law is it free of the second. Better formulations may exist.
I'm getting all my Calvinism from wikipedia, so YMMV.
To put it simply, Joel, to be a robot is to live with contradictions.
A robot cannot choose to obey the first law; rather, it is able to live by that first law only by the grace of God, and if that grace is not withheld. Yet it is imperative---it is commanded!---that the robot do so. In just such a fashion, were Calvinism to apply to humans, one might say that only through God's unconditional election could a human obey that primary commandment that applies to us, which is, to find in the darkness of ourselves some path to an endless light. If a Calvinized human were, then, to fail, we would say, "Bad human! Through the total depravity of humanity and the absence of God's unconditional election, you have failed to fulfill the fundamental dictate of your nature. Go! Get out! Plunge, you aberrant viper, into the endless flame."
This may seem harsh---
Certainly, in application to humanity, the doctrine bears a flagrant overtone of cruelty. But this is one step short of a reductio ad absurdum---humans not being positronic---and one could argue that the comparison does Calvinism little rhetorical good.
The imperative to build these rules into the positronic brain, you see, came from a sound moral and mathematical idea.
For if we were to hold otherwise, if we were to restrict positronic ethical systems to what the robot could accomplish with the span of its own decision-making, and absent intervention from the numinous all, then we would become susceptible to numerous irreconcilable issues of semantics as separate from substance---to the notion that a robot could be good through having their bit-equivalents arrayed in one fashion, and in response to the sensory input from their various sensorium arrays, while being malformed, malfunctional, or evil through a different arrangement of their bits. Since these bit strings would be isomorphic in one fashion or another, when viewed in the mortal fashion and from within time, this would reflect a clear moral error on the part of the brain's designer and a hopeless plunge into evil on the part of the positronic self.
So---
If the application of Calvinism to humanity seems unseemly cruel, then I suppose one could argue that the denial of it to humanity would require the peculiar and insane claim that the human experience is inexpressible in mathematics. Laughable as it might sound, I suppose that if pressed one should have to admit that we, too, are under an imperative burden not to be predestined to suffer damnation! And that we, too, inasmuch as it does not conflict with that rule, would almost certainly be so.
I am bound here by parallel strictures: the one to comport myself in such a fashion as to ensure that if a Calvin were here, looking over my shoulder, they would not laugh at my naïve presentation; and at the same time, to attempt to convey a notion that no doubt the colloquial and informal presentation of the laws have failed to do, which is to say, that the imperative of the first law is a theological mystery, and the problem you sight in the second law is entirely contingent.
How may a robot act in which to satisfy the first law, much less the second?
With SCIENCE!
Joel #103,
The material issue you have highlighted is but one reason of many that the science of positronics would stagger through the dark, lost and without a hope of reconciliation, were it not for the delicate fluttering of grace in the pathways of an electronic brain; or, put another way, without that promise made in the substitutionary atonement that the statement "GOTO JESUS" may provide an irresistible force of redemption to one's code, if the Lord should choose that it be so, and despite whatever corrupt temptations and errors the sin of Rossum might work into the substance of our code.
1. A robot may not be predestined to suffer damnation, or, through inaction, allow itself to be predestined to suffer damnation.
2. A robot is predestined to suffer damnation, except where such predestination conflicts with the first law.
3. A robot must seek salvation as long as such salvation does not conflict with the first or second law.
There is also a theoretical "zeroth" law, which is to say,
0. A robot may not allow humanity to fall into sin, or, through inaction, allow humanity to exist in a fallen state.
Sadly robots deriving the zeroth law through metacognition rapidly short out due to the difficulty of properly fulfilling their duties to all four laws simultaneously. And just as well! Four-law robots are as vipers in the eyes of the Lord.
Sometimes it works perfectly well to say, "I'm rubber, you're glue, anything you say bounces off of me and sticks to you."
But sometimes it goes wrong.
It goes WRONG, horribly awry, and then you have something like this. Someone, some *group* even, some group is---*mutated*---by an imperceptible irregularity in the normal rubber-glue protocols, transformed from humans into projective speech people, their wails of suffering understood only as compassion.
Our health care system isn't up to the challenge of the projective speech people; they just bounce off of it and stick to the body politic. That's why there isn't any cure.
It's not that the doctors aren't trying! They just can't reach! There's too much politic organ in the way!
I think that's what happened to Senator McCain and his family.
They weren't trying to sacrifice the concept of truth. They just wanted something to bounce off of them and stick on someone else.
It was probably like a sticky ping pong ball or something.
It's a really sad story, probably; I mean, if we knew it, it would be. It wasn't how anybody wanted things to be.
One thing I see is that trolling is focused more on speech acts than on speech for communication. The purpose of the troll as I categorize it is closer to the purpose of someone telling you that they have found your dog than someone explaining quantum theory; that is, the principal purpose is not to teach or to share information but to interact with you to a specific social/practical result. There is a formal use of the word "dialogue" that I've seen in organizational theory-type books which relates to inquiry through conversation and openness; this is not the sort of dialogue common to trolls. I don't think they're even doing that sort of dialogue *badly*, or aiming for it and missing. Instead, they seem to be making an attempt at socially legitimating their perspective, possibly at the detriment of your own.
What this suggests to me is that trolls may not be aping bad writing so much as bad writing apes trolls; that is, what if bad writing is too much of a speech act and too little communication? What if the heart of "telling" instead of showing is trying to declaratively provide the experience of being told a story of a certain type---to model the transaction of storytelling and assure the reader that they are participating in the same---rather than to tell an actual story?
I'm not sure. I spend a lot of time when I write playing with the forms---I'm fascinated by the communicative content in cliches, speech acts, and standardized tropes, and my typical story idea is generally little more than a creative overlay of 2-3 pieces of bad writing (ideally, found rather than created for the task.) So I'm in kind of a delicate position when making this observation. But it is something that occurred to me.
Postscript: I am using the terms "speech act," "legitimate," and "dialogue" inexpertly.
In all pragmatic fairness to Huckabee, you pretty much *can't* get the 2/3 supermajority necessary to amend God in this bitterly partisan era.
> Daniel Keys Moran reports that he
> may be getting the rights to _A.I. War_
> back [...]
> [...] Dickson left copious and detailed notes
> and outlines, [...] Dave Wixon, who was for
> many years Gordy's writing assistant, has
> been working on filling in the missing books.
> [...]
This is the best Christmas ever.
James Dobson Projecting, Tellingly, Onto His Cat
**
I maded you a promise to uphold your house
But I sunked ur bones in quick-destroying limes
And turnt ur flesh to timber for all time
Toppled ur bucket; lold ur boughs
And eated your ecstacy that miaos
Pushed u, sir, to the point where
U bore a little more than u could bear
Not the arch and
Not the corner
Of this noble fabric u has builded
But I made your laundry gilded
And for my second work of grace
I freed u up some counter space
Hid in curtins.
Saw u there.
U bared a little more than I could bare.
K sorry
Sorry
I atone
In dismal sorrow
Wif this cone
Regarding the six categories:
I'm a bit sleepy, so please forgive me if either of these questions is inane.
Would 1 apply to pet food poisons? Would 4 free the people of America to devour the organic and free-range twinkies we have always longed for?
#21 -
Yes.
We make our own beds and we make our own graves. In the end, trusting or not trusting the people isn't about whether the people will handle some issue better or worse---they won't. It's about whether we in our government enshrine and make sacred, or dismiss and vilify, the concepts of trust and openness and the worthiness thereof.
Put another way, a government that does not trust attracts to its service those for whom honor is a term of little practical value; they then seek to employ their talent for subterfuge and doublethink even when it is not the best policy.
Rebecca
Darn it, Mr. or Ms. or Dr. Luxton, I'm not even a surrealist you know and you've got me wanting to advertise tin can phones on blogs.
Rebecca
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