I agree that Koch is runing around with a hammer and seeing everything as a nail. And I'm not interested in the strong AI problem, merely trying to partition the solution space into feasible and infeasible areas so that we don't waste our time refighting old battles.
In another forum I recently wrote: One of the things I've come to realize is that a lot of the discussions in the philosophy of mind could be simplified if we first had a good account of much simpler questions. Imagine if we could agree how to talk about the relationship between, say, a bacterium and the molecules from which it is composed. What's nomological, what's emergent, the causal relationships, the role of evolution.... If we could get that lot straight, including the science and the metascience involved, I venture to suggest that minds and consciousness would be relatively trivial.
If neurons were composed of liquid helium... no, seriously, how do you propose that quantum effects introduce detectable cellular changes in just those atoms that make up neurons. And in any case, how would a quantum flipping and [INSERT WEIRD BUT PRESUMABLY NOMOLOGICAL EXPLANATION] thereby changing the behaviour of a neuron lead to me having more free will than before? Did I cause the quantum event? If not, am I not just as much at the mercy of inexorable (albeit unconventional) physical forces?
The problem is that most people don't understand both quantum chromodynamics and mind-stuff. And the people like Chris Koch who are working on the neural correlates of consciousness don't need no stinkin' quantum stuff.
Descartes invented epiphenomenalism (non-causally effective consciousness) to get around the conservation of energy. Penrose wants to solve it with quantum stuff. He can't.
And no, my degree is from Essex University, post-grad at Newcastle-on-Tyne.
Sorry, but unless you're going to give up on causation you're going to have to live with determinism, The good news is that (1) things are complex enough that humans can't understand and predict everything, so it looks relatively indeterminate, (2) natural selection installed the Free Will user illusion many thousands of years ago, probably because having a sense of personal control and responsibility meant that the social stuff worked better. But that doesn't affect the underlying science.
Having taken a Phil of Mind course with Dennett, I can't say that he was unfair to Penrose. And Dennett isn't alone - try Colin McGinn, for example. The problem is that Penrose is a True Believer in free will: without free, unpredetermined human choices he believes that there is no autonomous self, so no consciousness, no responsibility. So he needs a source of indeterminacy to defeat the inexorable forces of determinism. The trouble is, quantum effects can't give you that kind of inteterminacy at the neuorological and mental level - if they did, all of the other emergent laws of matter and chemistry and biology would fall apart. Ordinary everyday physics relies on quantum effects being smoothed out statistically. You can't have it both ways - smoothed out at the atomic level and re-emerging at the neurological level (or even higher - shudder).
No, that wasn't the problem. The problem was, quite simply, how to validate conformance. Given that written specifications are, inevitably, subject to interpretation, and after the ghastly experience with Microsoft (which was about changng the semantics of core JDK classes), Sun came to the conclusion that specs needed to be backed up with reference implementations and conformance tests. So Sun asked ECMA what its policies were towards these things, and how implementations could be certified, and so forth, and there was a deafening silence. Most standards bodies don't understand that stuff (yet). Maybe that's the challenge: to create a body that can handle both the IP and the certification process.
A few things that can be done to improve on java. Make the standard a standard housed with an officially recognized standards body which does not allow patented features to be accepted into standards.
So I guess you're unaware of the ECMA saga, when Sun made a good-faith attempt to do exactly this. And when they asked ECMA, "so what happens if someone breaks the rules, by say shipping a JDK with a non-conforming java.* class?", there was an embarrassed silence, and Sun decided that this would be incompatible with the lawsuit against MS.
Work out the consensus first, then figure out the standards structure. Right now java is in sun's hands and nobody has a say in the standard but sun.
Hmmm.. you don't spend too much time reading the proceedings at jcp.org, do you?
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I agree that Koch is runing around with a hammer and seeing everything as a nail. And I'm not interested in the strong AI problem, merely trying to partition the solution space into feasible and infeasible areas so that we don't waste our time refighting old battles.
In another forum I recently wrote: One of the things I've come to realize is that a lot of the discussions in the philosophy of mind could be simplified if we first had a good account of much simpler questions. Imagine if we could agree how to talk about the relationship between, say, a bacterium and the molecules from which it is composed. What's nomological, what's emergent, the causal relationships, the role of evolution.... If we could get that lot straight, including the science and the metascience involved, I venture to suggest that minds and consciousness would be relatively trivial.
If neurons were composed of liquid helium... no, seriously, how do you propose that quantum effects introduce detectable cellular changes in just those atoms that make up neurons. And in any case, how would a quantum flipping and [INSERT WEIRD BUT PRESUMABLY NOMOLOGICAL EXPLANATION] thereby changing the behaviour of a neuron lead to me having more free will than before? Did I cause the quantum event? If not, am I not just as much at the mercy of inexorable (albeit unconventional) physical forces? The problem is that most people don't understand both quantum chromodynamics and mind-stuff. And the people like Chris Koch who are working on the neural correlates of consciousness don't need no stinkin' quantum stuff. Descartes invented epiphenomenalism (non-causally effective consciousness) to get around the conservation of energy. Penrose wants to solve it with quantum stuff. He can't. And no, my degree is from Essex University, post-grad at Newcastle-on-Tyne.
Sorry, but unless you're going to give up on causation you're going to have to live with determinism, The good news is that (1) things are complex enough that humans can't understand and predict everything, so it looks relatively indeterminate, (2) natural selection installed the Free Will user illusion many thousands of years ago, probably because having a sense of personal control and responsibility meant that the social stuff worked better. But that doesn't affect the underlying science.
Having taken a Phil of Mind course with Dennett, I can't say that he was unfair to Penrose. And Dennett isn't alone - try Colin McGinn, for example. The problem is that Penrose is a True Believer in free will: without free, unpredetermined human choices he believes that there is no autonomous self, so no consciousness, no responsibility. So he needs a source of indeterminacy to defeat the inexorable forces of determinism. The trouble is, quantum effects can't give you that kind of inteterminacy at the neuorological and mental level - if they did, all of the other emergent laws of matter and chemistry and biology would fall apart. Ordinary everyday physics relies on quantum effects being smoothed out statistically. You can't have it both ways - smoothed out at the atomic level and re-emerging at the neurological level (or even higher - shudder).
However I also don't think sun legitimately had any right to stop it.
Just a contract. Nothing complicated....
No, that wasn't the problem. The problem was, quite simply, how to validate conformance. Given that written specifications are, inevitably, subject to interpretation, and after the ghastly experience with Microsoft (which was about changng the semantics of core JDK classes), Sun came to the conclusion that specs needed to be backed up with reference implementations and conformance tests. So Sun asked ECMA what its policies were towards these things, and how implementations could be certified, and so forth, and there was a deafening silence. Most standards bodies don't understand that stuff (yet). Maybe that's the challenge: to create a body that can handle both the IP and the certification process.
A few things that can be done to improve on java. Make the standard a standard housed with an officially recognized standards body which does not allow patented features to be accepted into standards.
So I guess you're unaware of the ECMA saga, when Sun made a good-faith attempt to do exactly this. And when they asked ECMA, "so what happens if someone breaks the rules, by say shipping a JDK with a non-conforming java.* class?", there was an embarrassed silence, and Sun decided that this would be incompatible with the lawsuit against MS.
Work out the consensus first, then figure out the standards structure.
Right now java is in sun's hands and nobody has a say in the standard but sun.
Hmmm.. you don't spend too much time reading the proceedings at jcp.org, do you?