Comment by mjburgess | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mjburgess | Hacker News Reader

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Does gold have an 'ineffable' quality that hydrogen does not? Do cells, after 1bn years of evolution have a quality that gold does not? Does reality work one way, and not another? Are not all things unequal?

A "machine" is what, exactly? Do we take it to be an abstraction? Or is it an electrical field oscillating over silicon? Either way, you're in trouble. Abstractions have no physical properties, and electrified sand seems hardly to possess any interesting properties.

The ability for animals to adapt to their environments, by growing into them, by establishing plastic causal connections in their very bodies, grown by their environemtns... able to almost instantly move from protein expression in 1trn 1-bn-yr cellular supercomputers in each of our bodies to macro sensory-motor representation --- and back again

Is this ineffable?

Or is this extremely effable. Is rather, not the superstitious view that "everything is anything" ?

All extant, knowing, studied intelligent systems have organic properties; and radically so. Insofar as this is "ineffable" you should take that up with the animal kingdom.

I find the contrary supersitious, magical, religious, ineffable... that mere abstract patterns in arbiatrily chosen aspects of our bodies are necessary and sufficient conditions for anything at all. This would be the only case in all science. The only physical property instantiated by mere arrangement at any level. Upload our consciousness? Make it out of wood why not!

Nonesense. When I am hungry, I dream of food, when I dream of food I plan to get some, and I am angry without it. This will not be made out of sand.

Given that you need some pretty complex elements to be able to make life in the first place (not to mention complex molecules made out of those elements) I'd say yes, there is definitely an 'ineffable' quality that life has that Hydrogen does not (to short circuit your chain of reasoning), but intelligence isn't necessarily made of a particular kind of matter and that's where the analogy breaks down.

The soul, likewise, is immaterial.

Who now trades in superstition?

Everything is corporeal.

Downvoted for saying reality has physical properties? Where else but hackernews? Sorry to disappoint, but all the algorithms of CS, which do anything at all, have devices in them. ie., their critical steps are impure, and cannot be specified mathematically.

There is nothing abstract in the world, everything is concrete. Discrete mathematics is not some divine realm which is where the Mind really occurs, and the Soul is really kept.

No graph traversal algorithm cares, nor will ever. Science is the study of reality, not computer "science". There are no computational "properties". All interesting properties are of objects extended in space, and in time.

The world is physical, as described by physics; not abstract, as describe by mathematics. And so, not computable.

The proposition of artificial intelligence, whether at human-level or not, is that a suitably-programmed computing device (as opposed to an immaterial algorithm) could manifest the properties which we have chosen to call "intelligence" when we observe them in biological agents, and similarly for consciousness.

Particularly with your comment "no graph traversal algorithm cares, nor will ever", you appear to be trying to impute that the concept of artificial intelligence is predicated on a category error. If so, then this is a fairly common argument, but is itself predicated on a category error.

My mind has abstractions in it. Are you saying that mental formations are not real, not in the universe?

>Where else but hackernews?

I have seen this sentiment on every single platform I have participated in. Where else? Everywhere that humans go.

Find a more appropriate (or at least original) lamentation.

What about platonic forms

The laws of physics are corporeal?

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