Re: Sandia Team Develops Cognitive Machines

"Bill Modlin" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote in message news:<[EMAIL PROTECTED]>...
> If this is an example of the fuzzy thinking planned for your paper, you
> may wish to save yourself the embarrassment of publishing it anywhere.
> 
> Anthony had it right, your criticism is of a nonsensical misreading.
> And while we cannot "really compute" the kolmogorov complexity of an
> arbitrary program (which means essentially that we have no formal
> algorithm for determining the minimal expression of a program) that is
> irrelevant to the claim.  For any finite program the length of its
> current specification provides an upper bound on its complexity, and
> what Anthony was pointing out is that for an arbitrary program of
> bounded complexity it is possible to determine whether it will halt,
> though it will in general require a program of greater complexity to do
> so.

I'm not sure if you followed the discussion thoroughly. Please read
the later exchanges between Anthony and me.

I still think the sentence "It's only in the limit as
complexity->infinity that halting becomes undecidable." might be a
little misleading. As I said, it sounded like he had the right idea
but the expression seems to be meaning something else. His way of
putting it is: there is an agent A thinking about an agent B, and what
if agent B's complexity -> infinite?! I am saying just consider an
agent A thinking about the universe... Do you see the distinction?

T3 had said something like inconsistency followed from incompleness
which wasn't right. The truth is consistency is assumed in first
incompleteness theorem, but the question of consistency itself is
undecidable (second incompleteness thm)... That started the
discussion, and I think it was good for us to have to remember it :)
(And many thanks to Anthony for pointing out the great mistake I did
when I said consistency doesn't follow from first incompleteness
theorem. That was quite misleading.)

About digital philosophy, I am not sure if you see the same
implications that I do, but by 'wonderfully surprising and possibly
irritating' I wanted to mean it might look a little speculative in a
nice way. I want to simply apply the ideas to philosophy of mind, and
see what we get. Whether it really is a unification of many ideas I
don't know, but it's worth exploring.

Regards,

__
Eray Ozkural