
Physicists Should Stop Saying Silly Things about Philosophy - witherk
http://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2014/06/23/physicists-should-stop-saying-silly-things-about-philosophy
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visarga
I support the last complaint:

> “Philosophers care too much about deep-sounding meta-questions, instead of
> sticking to what can be observed and calculated.”

Philosophers are so lost in their consciousness/mind/body debates they can't
appreciate the simple framework of reinforcement learning. RL would require
simpler initial premises - no need to define consciousness or mind vs matter -
just agent, playing in the environment, maximising rewards. All measurable and
testable in simulation. Using RL AI's even bested humans at go, learned to
walk and play complex computer games. But more importantly, RL covers all the
aspects of mind vs body and consciousness. RL has more precise terms and they
would benefit a lot from understanding this framework.

Among the philosophers of today I mostly align with Daniel Dennett and
Dawkins. So there are still a few with the right mindset.

~~~
MAXPOOL
We can simplify the problem consciousness/mind/body simulation much more than
what you think if we use your approach.

Give me two programs that produce "seeing red light" 200 ms in a loop and
"hearing 400 Hz pure sine wave" for 200 ms from the point of view of person
who is not thinking anything particular, accessing his/her memories or feeling
his body just at the moment.

Since all computers with limited memory can be reduced to finite-state
automaton, we don't even need complex models of computation like Turing
machine. Just bunch of states and state transitions is enough.

There is no need for machine learning or the ability to solve problems. Just
simple program that is being fully self aware and conscious experiencing
simple sensation for a very short time in a infinite loop is enough. Because
we can fully control the input, we can eliminate all states and state
transitions not visited during the loop.

These can't be very long or complicated programs.

