http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v443/n7111/full/443502a.html

Quote :

" ... The stubborn persistence of these perplexing phenomena defies classical economics, founded as it is on two assumptions about human nature: that we are rational and that we are selfish. When confronted with a variety of options, traditional economists expect us to evaluate the possibilities (rationality) and choose whichever best matches our personal preferences (selfishness). Their mathematical models require this predictable behaviour. What the eighteenth-century economist Adam Smith called the "invisible hand" of the marketplace is just the collective result of lots of reasonable people going about the business of trying to maximize their own advantage. Such pure rationality is disconcertingly rare, however. Neuroeconomists want to explain why, and their research promises to affect everything from what cola we drink to how we save for retirement. ..."

There's an interesting article there on Nature about some researchers doing some economics work, from a neuroscience point of view. Personally, i've always been a little bit skeptical about economic theory, because they seem to ignore the obvious irrationality that people often have. It's good to see someone doing something about it, and I think if the ideas from this, and other psychological studies, were incorporated in to economic models, they would end up better off.

10/9/2006 9:43:29 AM

This may prove useful, but most economic theory works out in practice because people are, on average, quite rational.

Any individual person may be irrational about a few specific decisions, but there really isn't widespread irrationality when you look at an entire group of people. This is where terms in economics like "The Wisdom of the Crowds" come in. Even when people do things to their own detriment, it is generally because they've followed a course of what they feel is rational behavior and this is the best choice at the time. Economics talks about this a lot too (see: "The Madness of the Crowds").

I think truly irrational decisions are rare. Even the choice to pollute the globe can be a rational choice based on selfishness. Not saying it means it is a good choice, but it can be rational without being right.

10/9/2006 9:55:09 AM

The article and this article about that article ( http://arstechnica.com/journals/science.ars/2006/10/9/5541 ) seems to imply though that the classical economic models are often wrong:

Quote :

" As these researchers see it, current economic theory has a significant gap between its predictions and the measured data. These gaps are at every scale you care to measure, from the day to day economic decisions made by individuals, through to the macroscopic performance of the world's largest economies. They believe that many of the problems come from a key faulty assumption—that people act with rational self interest."

I accept this assertion because of the clearest example in the stock market. I've yet to find someone who can explain "why" it works, or is it that the people who have this knowledge keep it to themselves?

10/9/2006 10:16:42 AM

I call "So what?"

Even if people are ridiculously irrational all the time, it doesn't change much of anything: telling people they are irrational is not going to make them act any differently. And depriving them of the right to make their own decisions will not fix the problem either: the decisions are still being made by demonstrably irrational people.

10/9/2006 10:43:54 AM

It's not that the people react irrationally, on the contrary, they act very rationally. What economics does is simplifies the situation. It's obvious that it is an imprecise science of guessing, much like meteorology or statistics. What these sciences do is attempt to accurately model a very complex environment in very simple measure.
What we have is a situation where people do not neccesarily act in their own advantage, but they tend to. Economics simply assumes we always do. What is actually taking place here is that we have billions of people all interacting with each other and everything around them each of these interactions effecting what later decisions they will make. As one would imagine this is nearly impossible to count and quantify individually, this is why we have economics, so we can make some kind of guess on how this system functions, and how it might function later, but it is still a guess, and often, not a good one.

10/9/2006 12:24:17 PM

Quote :

"I call "So what?" Even if people are ridiculously irrational all the time, it doesn't change much of anything: telling people they are irrational is not going to make them act any differently. And depriving them of the right to make their own decisions will not fix the problem either: the decisions are still being made by demonstrably irrational people"

I don't think that's the point or the issue here.

If we can better determine how people act, then we can better create models based on that, instead of having to rely on loose approximations.

10/9/2006 1:02:24 PM

Things like this are the reasons why I'm hesitant to use much game theory in my work as a business and strategy consultant; it often makes too many assumptions that competing companies or "opponents" will act intelligently and arrive at the same conclusions as the game theoretical model. Even if people act rationally, they quite often are stupid.

10/9/2006 1:30:08 PM

Actually game theory has a pretty good level of predicting power.

I do agree with most of what both Kris and Loneshark are saying.

moron, its kind of impossible to make the predictions any better if the only thing you're adding to the equation is "well people act irrationally, so you can't predict their behavior"

This will only serve to add a measurable uncertainty in the predictions.

If you say they act irrationally, but predictably, the you may have something there. Unfortunately we can't say that for people in most situations.

10/9/2006 3:06:25 PM

<n/m>

[Edited on October 9, 2006 at 3:10 PM. Reason : .,.]

10/9/2006 3:09:33 PM

These guys, and there kind of thinking, are the first steps to adding more than "people will act irrationally."

Personally, I think we will have AI computing someday (kind of like what you see in Star Trek), and one component of this is figuring out why people do the things they do. This type of research will eventually lead some scientist somewhere to be able to develop a program to mimic our irrationality/decision making progress. If more people think along these lines, it could be possible to develop models more advanced than the Bayesian stuff they probably use now (i'm guessing).

10/9/2006 3:11:28 PM

Moron, Wow. In short, No. The reason we do not currently AI as in StarTrek is purely technical; our computers are purely deterministic, so they cannot know or do anything we do not program them how to do.

Until we start making computers out of neural networks, whenever you hold a conversation with a computer you are really talking to the programmer, just through an intermediary.

When we do start using neural networks then the cleverness of the programmer will fade to be replaced by the personality of the computer, sure enough. But the computer will just be a retarded human hooked up to a vast memory bank. It will be impressive to us, but try teaching it to play a game it has never heard of before.

It won't be until we can build neural networks with a similar density to human brain tissue that we'll start to see fast thinking brilliant machines. It has nothing to do with simulating irrational thought patterns because merely simulating intelligence is not A.I., when we truely invent A.I. we will not need to have it simulate irrationality, it will be irrational all by itself at start-up.

[Edited on October 9, 2006 at 4:21 PM. Reason : .,.]

10/9/2006 4:15:14 PM

You notice I did say "someday" it would take for more than a single post to fully expand on the issue of AI.

But, we have to have some good software to go along with that neural net hardware. Especially if we want to bypass the N-year learning process of a human.

[Edited on October 9, 2006 at 4:37 PM. Reason : ]

10/9/2006 4:37:09 PM

Quote :

"our computers are purely deterministic"

And what exactly makes you think that we humans aren't?
Are we magical and function differently from every other system we've discovered?

Quote :

"Until we start making computers out of neural networks, whenever you hold a conversation with a computer you are really talking to the programmer, just through an intermediary."

Essentially a neural network is the same AI he's talking about. And when you are talking to a computer, you can get a good deal more than just what the programmer wrote. Take google for example. When you do a search, a page of results is pulled up. Now within those miliseconds do you think someone was there hardcoding that page of results for you? No, the computer generated that page itself, it did it from a list of database entries. Now did some programmer go through and add all of those entries himself? No agian, the computer added entries by itself. Software is way more than just an "intermediary" between you and the person who made it.

Quote :

"But the computer will just be a retarded human hooked up to a vast memory bank."

That's essentially what a computer is now, maybe better described as autistic or something, very good at repetitive tasks that can be translated to binary operations, but kind of awkward at everything else.

10/9/2006 4:41:10 PM

I'm pretty sure humans are probabalistic. Our biology is chemical and chemistry is quantum-physics based, and quantum physics is probability-based (everything has some amount of probability, no matter how small).

But, probabalistic systems can be reasonably well modeled, it's just that with something like our brain, it's chaotic, which is how our computers are limited. The easiest way past this (and likely the only way) is some vast neural-net of processors modelling each probabalistic process. But, if you take notice, computers are becoming increasinly more vectorized (look at Sun's Niagra, or the Cell, or Intel's recent 500-core prototype (or some ridiculous number)). A big problem I forsee them having is interconnect bandwidth and communications algorithms, but even this isn't a insurmountable barrier. There was recent news of "teleportation" which was quantum teleportation, which could pave the way for very fast interconnect technology. And Intel also has their laser-on-a-chip which is a good intermediary interconnect until we figure out quantum. All this stuff might not happen until we're all dead, but the piece are in place for it to find fruition maybe in the next 100 years.

10/9/2006 4:50:05 PM

Moron, when I say today's computers are deterministic what I mean is always. Never, not ever, will you sit down to type an E-Mail and the computer will say "I'm in a bad mood, not now" (barring human error in design and manufacture).

As for Kris and Google, think about it for a second. What is the computer doing? It is taking a mountain of data and analysing it to produce results. It is impressive, it is very clever, but it was programmed to do that. If I keep the data the same then every single time I run the search I will get the exact same results according to the Google formula. The Google formula has variables that change and it is very data dependent. But the people at Google did not say "Good morning G-Engine, use the best search algorithm you can come up with, use your judgement." Hell no, it was programmed by a very clever human to apply a given algorithm based upon a complex array of fixed conditionals.

Of course, I don't know if non-Engineers can understand what I am talking about. How adept at computer programming are the two of you, Moron and Kris?

A sentient creature is non-deterministic, in programming jargon it means our brains violate state while executing. In other-words, executing instructions (living in our case) does more than change the values in memory, it changes the processor. Your brain no longer responds to stimuli the same way it did an hour ago, it may never respond the same way again. In an hour you may give a completely different answer to the same question. True AI will act the same way whenever it is developed. This is because we are all learning machines, we were not programmed, at best we programmed ourselves and will continue doing so until we suffer brain damage.

This makes it very difficult for others to program us, they have no idea how their code will decompose or what code we will interject ourselves later (to continue pushing the computer analogy way too far, neural networks work nothing like our PCs).

[Edited on October 9, 2006 at 9:31 PM. Reason : .,.]

10/9/2006 9:23:08 PM

Quote :

"I'm pretty sure humans are probabalistic. Our biology is chemical and chemistry is quantum-physics based, and quantum physics is probability-based (everything has some amount of probability, no matter how small)."

To say we or quantum physics is "probablistic" or "random" implies that there is some system at work that we can never understand. It's extremely difficult to prove that we can never understand something, and it's akin to saying "god exists because god exists".

Quote :

"As for Kris and Google, think about it for a second. What is the computer doing? It is taking a mountain of data and analysing it to produce results."

It's doing more than just that, it's actually actively crawling the web and adding more data. It's learning more and more by the second.

Quote :

"If I keep the data the same then every single time I run the search I will get the exact same results according to the Google formula."

Not neccesarily, the system is dynamic. It could add sites or reorder the listing when it gets new sites or when more other users searching similar terms use that link.

Quote :

"Hell no, it was programmed by a very clever human to apply a given algorithm based upon a complex array of fixed conditionals."

I'd say our own intellegence works in a similar way. Just like google looks at the web around it and "learns" these sites which it can later use, we look around us and learn what we see which we can later use. If you give either of us no input, we will produce almost no output.

Quote :

"How adept at computer programming are the two of you, Moron and Kris?"

I'm pretty sure I know more than enough to keep up.
I don't think you understand program synthesis. Programs can learn and grow, yes it is in a rather definable way, but our's is much the same, simply more complex.

Quote :

"A sentient creature is non-deterministic"

You can't prove that.

Quote :

"Your brain no longer responds to stimuli the same way it did an hour ago, it may never respond the same way again. In an hour you may give a completely different answer to the same question."

Software can do this too. You seem to only have a light grasp on algorithms. Don't you know what higher order programming does?

Quote :

"neural networks work nothing like our PCs"

There have been many pieces of software that operate in neural networks, you simply know nothing about AI.

10/9/2006 10:31:29 PM

Quote :

"To say we or quantum physics is "probablistic" or "random" implies that there is some system at work that we can never understand. It's extremely difficult to prove that we can never understand something"

It does not imply any such thing. The Universe might just be probabilistic, or simply random. While it is possible that what we see as randomness might simply be an unseen variable, such as multiple dimensions, or whatever, it is also possible that it is simply random. Hell, in either case it may simply be that the human race never learns the secret in a million years.

Quote :

"It's doing more than just that, it's actually actively crawling the web and adding more data."

Yes, like I said, the programmer was very clever; but it is still just more gears in the clockwork. Did adding a musical chime to a grandfather clock bring it closer to sentience? Nope, it made it more complex without altering the fundamental deterministic workings of the system.

Quote :

"I'm pretty sure I know more than enough to keep up. I don't think you understand program synthesis. Programs can learn and grow, yes it is in a rather definable way, but ours is much the same, simply more complex."

This is the disagreement between us. It is your contention that my pet dog is just as sentient as I am, simply dumber. You look at the Google Spider and willingly compare it to the human mind. I call this idiocy, Google did not choose to be a search engine, it was programmed to do all it is doing. I look at Google and see the clockwork of the computer driven by the brilliance of the programmer. You look at a human and see no brilliance whatsoever, to you a human is just clockwork, indistinguishable from Google except for degrees of complexity.

Well, fine, for you Artificial Intelligence was invented in 1822 by Charles Babbage with his plans for a steam powered calculating device which, like the Google Spider, takes raw data and in accordance with its design produces results.

Quote :

"There have been many pieces of software that operate in neural networks, you simply know nothing about AI."

Ha ha, very funny, idiot. You can train a neural network to do lots of things, anything from recognizing a soda can to making decisions using fuzzy-logic, running software would be a new one. Perhaps you meant to say "software has been used to simulate neural networks" which is perfectly true; a computer can simulate anything you can make into a deterministic model, something we may not ever be able to do perfectly accurately for a single biological neuron.

10/10/2006 12:28:57 AM

Quote :

"Never, not ever, will you sit down to type an E-Mail and the computer will say "I'm in a bad mood, not now" (barring human error in design and manufacture). "

That's why I said "like in Star Trek."

There are 2 main kinds of AI, there's the kind that will flip out and kill us (maybe), like in The Matrix, then there's the "autistic" kind that we interact with as humans, and they do our bidding, but they have no true "sentience."

Quote :

"To say we or quantum physics is "probablistic" or "random" implies that there is some system at work that we can never understand. It's extremely difficult to prove that we can never understand something, and it's akin to saying "god exists because god exists". "

It does not imply that there is a system we can't understand. It's almost the exact opposite. It's the whole basis of how interferometers work, or how various other quantum physical phenomena happens. We may know that 99% of the time a neuron will transmit a signal properly, but 1% is screws up resulting in an "emergent" behavior. This 1% would be a function of the quantum physical laws that govern atomic interactions, not due to lack of understanding. I would wager its a combination of this fudge factor and also the extraordinarily complex arrangement of the brain that results in human ingenuity and creativity, which would be necessary for a "true" AI. This has nothing to do with not understanding a system fully. It has nothing to do with god.

10/10/2006 1:34:50 AM

Quote :

"While it is possible that what we see as randomness might simply be an unseen variable, such as multiple dimensions, or whatever, it is also possible that it is simply random"

An'd I'll readily admit that. But the problem here is that people have assumed that it actually is simply because we can't explain the system right now. They have also ignored the numerous instances (namely almost all science) that we have found something seemingly unexplainable has a definite system behind it. So is it possible? Yes, is it likely? I wouldn't think so.

Quote :

"Yes, like I said, the programmer was very clever; but it is still just more gears in the clockwork. Did adding a musical chime to a grandfather clock bring it closer to sentience?"

The difference here is that the clock added it's own chime. Surely this isn't a difficult concept for you. Google actively crawls the web and records user actions to shape it's own process (searching). I as creator give the system the ability to grow indefinitely. It makes itself better than I could have made it and that I initially made it.

Quote :

"It is your contention that my pet dog is just as sentient as I am, simply dumber."

I think that's obvious, unless you somehow believe that there is some sort of magic that you have that a dog has. Did magic somehow get created through evolution or did god put this magic in us as a species but deny it to all of it's other creatures? What about retards, did they miss out on the magic?

Quote :

"You look at the Google Spider and willingly compare it to the human mind. I call this idiocy"

I recognize the similarities. Surely you know who Alan Turing is, and I'd guess you'd have to consider him an idiot as well.

Quote :

"Google did not choose to be a search engine, it was programmed to do all it is doing."

Did you chose to be a human? Aren't you doing exactly what you have been programmed to do? If not, then what exactly are you doing? Where did those instructions come from?

Quote :

"Perhaps you meant to say "software has been used to simulate neural networks""

No, I said what I meant. Who said it had to refer to a biological system?

Quote :

"e may know that 99% of the time a neuron will transmit a signal properly, but 1% is screws up resulting in an "emergent" behavior."

And this could be reproduced.

10/10/2006 2:05:57 AM

Quote :

"The difference here is that the clock added it's own chime. Surely this isn't a difficult concept for you. Google actively crawls the web and records user actions to shape it's own process"

No, Kris, damn it. The Google Spider did not teach itself to crawl the web, it was programmed to do it. Look, I can't imagine how this is hard for you to understand. The Google Spider is doing to the web what Google Desktop does to your hard-drive. Is Google Desktop another form of AI to you? Like I keep saying, to humans it is very impressive, but computers have had the ability to search external storage devices for fifty years and the Internet is not fundamentally different from a giant hard-drive, only the interface is different. One uses a NIC and the other uses an IDE controller.

Quote :

"No, I said what I meant. Who said it had to refer to a biological system?"

No one, still doesn't change the fact that neural networks do not execute programs, so your statement above is still false.

Quote :

"Did you chose to be a human? Aren't you doing exactly what you have been programmed to do? If not, then what exactly are you doing? Where did those instructions come from?"

Once again, neural networks, both biological AND technological, do not execute code. There is no such thing as an "instruction" in the human brain. Have you been around babies much? They are born as largely blank slates. A human brain (the frontal lobe that is) is nothing in the beginning. We become human via experimentation with our physical selves. A humans brain becomes human because it grew up in a human body and possesses sufficient neurons to develop a sense of self.

But once again, your problem on this issue is not that you think the Google Spider has attained artificial intelligence. It is that you see no intelligence in humans, just more clockwork. You think I am sitting here executing my programming, just as the Google Spider executes its programming. Therefore, if we all call me a form of intelligence then obviously the Google Spider is also a form of intelligence. And that is quite sad.

[Edited on October 10, 2006 at 9:47 AM. Reason : .,.]

10/10/2006 9:45:54 AM

psst, you're arguing with a starry eyed commu-socialist

10/10/2006 11:36:38 AM

I really wish I knew more about computer programming so I could get in on this debate. Sucks hard to have a debate about economics where I can't get a word in because I don't know what I'm talking about.

I could always troll it I guess.

10/10/2006 11:40:03 AM

Quote :

"The Google Spider did not teach itself to crawl the web, it was programmed to do it."

You didn't teach yourself how to learn, you just knew how to do it.

Quote :

"but computers have had the ability to search external storage devices for fifty years and the Internet is not fundamentally different from a giant hard-drive, only the interface is different"

You still don't understand and I think you're purposely trying not to. Seriously, learn some lisp and synthetic programming. Computer software can learn things and this can change how they function. It's the exact same way a human works.

Quote :

"still doesn't change the fact that neural networks do not execute programs"

It has nothing to do with excuting programs, it's a networked system of interaction, whether it be cells in a body objects in a program, or anything else.

Quote :

"There is no such thing as an "instruction" in the human brain."

Then whatever it is or you want to call it, it had to come from somewhere. Things don't just happen. Stuff doesn't come from nothing.

Quote :

"Have you been around babies much? They are born as largely blank slates. A human brain (the frontal lobe that is) is nothing in the beginning. We become human via experimentation with our physical selves."

This is the exact same way a program can function. If I write a learning program, it begins knowing very little. As it learns more from what is around it, it becomes more and more functional.

Quote :

"It is that you see no intelligence in humans, just more clockwork."

I see intellegence in humans, and I see it in a lot of other things. A rat is able to learn his way down a maze, surely that requires intellegence. Routers are able to dynamically reconstruct their understanding of the network around them, this takes intellegence. Whether it be these things or a human, they all have intellegence, just to different degrees.

Quote :

"I really wish I knew more about computer programming so I could get in on this debate. Sucks hard to have a debate about economics where I can't get a word in because I don't know what I'm talking about."

This is more of a philosophy type thing now.

10/10/2006 12:15:32 PM

Right right, I know, but without the analogies to computer programming, I really can't even compete philosophically on this.

10/10/2006 12:18:25 PM

Quote :

"I see intellegence in humans, and I see it in a lot of other things. A rat is able to learn his way down a maze, surely that requires intellegence. Routers are able to dynamically reconstruct their understanding of the network around them, this takes intellegence. Whether it be these things or a human, they all have intellegence, just to different degrees."

Right, so there is no point discussing artificial intelligence with you since you believe it was invented in 1822 with the design of the first machine capable of handling information, as I said above. You see only a difference of degrees between a human being and an alarm clock.

Have a nice day.

10/10/2006 1:51:20 PM

Quote :

"Right, so there is no point discussing artificial intelligence with you since you believe it was invented in 1822 with the design of the first machine capable of handling information, as I said above. You see only a difference of degrees between a human being and an alarm clock."

Don't dodge the question. If we are different, why? What is it that makes us incomparable to everything else.

Don't bail just because you don't understand modern dynamic programming techniques. I'm actually reseaching a kind of learning system right now. We are developing a system of priviledge messaging which combines fine and coarse granular techniques to reducing unwanted email. Filters don't differentiate and blacklisting can lead to false positives. Our system learns who to block, and when based on some criteria it develops itself. It does far more than I could specifically lay out. It still operates with it's design, but so do humans.

Quote :

"Right right, I know, but without the analogies to computer programming, I really can't even compete philosophically on this."

Don't be daunted, you could catch up with loanshark quickly. I'd be surprised if he has a full grasp of how object orientation works.

10/10/2006 5:16:29 PM

^^There's no point in discussing it with him because he has a viewpoint that is different than yours?

10/10/2006 5:19:29 PM

Quote :

"What is it that makes us incomparable to everything else."

Our own experienced subjective reality. This makes us very different than computers.

10/10/2006 11:42:51 PM

you're not a computer, how can you say that at a complex enough level their perception of reality would not be subjective?

10/11/2006 12:00:59 AM

Bakunin, right, because I prefer to debate facts, and Kris is chock full of false facts that I enjoy catching him on. I have enough trouble convincing Kris on subjects where abject truth exists and I have the data to prove it. But this topic is pure opinion, it is an article of faith no matter which way you swing. One cannot prove that humans are fundamentally different from toaster ovens. So why should I bother trying?

10/11/2006 9:01:25 AM

Quote :

"ou're not a computer, how can you say that at a complex enough level their perception of reality would not be subjective?"

I can't. But we have to define what it is we're reconstructing here, and as of yet, that hasn't been done.

10/11/2006 11:06:36 AM

But your definition is kind of hard to determine. Honestly, I can't tell if another person has a subjective reality, much less a computer. If that is your definition, then the only person that we can definately define as human is ourselves individually.

10/11/2006 11:33:00 AM

If you can define what makes your own subjective reality, we'd be in business.

The biggest problem is, it's the closest thing to our existence but the furthest away as far as definition is concerned.

10/11/2006 11:34:45 AM

I have a subjective reality, it's the only thing I can truely be certain of. However no one else can ever really be certain of it.

10/11/2006 12:31:39 PM

You're right. But until you figure out how it works, what exactly causes it to be (what makes "you" where you are, and not where I am?), it makes little sense to compare us to computers and try to recreate ourselves on them.

I mean, how the fuck do you engineer something when you're ignorant of the requirements?

10/11/2006 12:38:31 PM

I'm saying those aren't the requirements. We can't even consider other people intellegent by those requirements. I am able to say that some person other than myself is intellgent, correct? Yet I am not able to say that they have a subjective reality, so this cannot be the requirement for intellegence.

10/11/2006 1:51:35 PM

I wasn't so much addressing this thread as your ridiculous, tacit assumption that human = computer, and really really complex computers will suddenly become like us.

There's more to it than that. I'm not claiming it's some non-physical soul (I don't believe this), but cognitive science researchers who take your approach to the problem are the reason why we're not going to arrive at a true piece of artificial intelligence for a long, long time.

10/13/2006 5:20:42 PM

Who cares if the computer experiences a subjective reality? If its function approximates intelligence within my subjective reality, then I will consider it AI. It'd be better if it didn't really, then we wouldn't feel so bad for treating it as property. Why's the damn thing got to have a soul?

It's not like human intelligence was engineered, it is the result of billions of years of chaotic selection. The lessons that could be learned by treating DNA as an algorithm to emulate would be uselessly complex.

I do not think it is possible for humans to fully understand their own cognition and I do not think it is necessary for humans to emulate it.

[Edited on October 13, 2006 at 6:18 PM. Reason : *]

10/13/2006 6:07:19 PM

^ Well uh, otherwise "AI" is just a fancy pants name for "computer science." Intelligence really suggests that the machine is experiencing the same sorts of things we are, not just behaving the same way.

10/13/2006 7:31:59 PM

the only reality you can percieve is your own, there is no way to know anyone else percieves what they claim to percieve, etc etc

so in that respect you can't differentiate within the system, between functional equivalence and perceptual equivalence

damn I'm tripping balls yo

10/14/2006 9:30:24 PM

Quote :

"the only reality you can percieve is your own, there is no way to know anyone else percieves what they claim to percieve, etc etc"

There's also no way to know that the outside world exists, but we make the reasonable inference that it does. This is the same with other peoples' subjective realities.

Quote :

"so in that respect you can't differentiate within the system, between functional equivalence and perceptual equivalence"

No, but focusing on the behaviors is "missing the point." The cool thing about intelligence is that we all have one, and so a study of the internal, untestable components goes no further than our own mind.

[Edited on October 14, 2006 at 9:42 PM. Reason : .]

10/14/2006 9:39:50 PM

*

[Edited on October 14, 2006 at 9:47 PM. Reason : *]

10/14/2006 9:46:44 PM