Science vs Science

[Creed]

I was so sick and tired of scientists talking about the impossible to prove God did not exist, so I thought, they're using fire so why can't I? This thought process was developed by me during a period of meditation and constant reasoning. My thoughts started to wander by them selfs, like someone took my hand and was showing me the truth, unimportant. I will use metaphors that you can easily understand so i can get my point across quickly, I have to write a paper tonight. Here I go.. proving God exists in 1000 words or less.

The first concept you must understand is that through freewill you have an unlimited amount of choices. Do to the amount of degrees in a circle and the number of pi, we can conclude an unlimited amount of choices we have to move our hand at any one time. To accept this one fact is to accept that you have an unlimited amount of choices. Yes your choices are limited to the ones you are aware of, but you chose to be aware of a certain selection from infinity.

Where does this go you may ask? Luckily I had some guidance..

Now the metaphor.. Your brain is like a computers hard drive in that it has a finite amount of storage capacity before it reaches full. Now to understand this you have to understand how a computer works. A computer has information.. choices.. but a finite amount of them.. and would be impossible to program infinite amount of choices into a finite object as each choice programed would require room and compile to infinity. Therefore you can say that you can not create AI, you can only simulate AI. Since we have the infinite amount of choices as expressed in step 1 we can conclude that our consciousness does not exist within our body, but rather I would suggest it exists in a form that coincides with the universe simply because there is an infinite amount of space. (Please don't argue there is an end to the universe because you could not describe it, vi save there cant be nothing outside of it.) At this point in my article it is futile to describe to you where the consciousness lies, but I can assure you I have proven it is not in your body, to contradict this reasoning is to be just as ignorant as atheists argue Christians are.

And so we approach the subject of God..
How do I know he exists? The answer is simple, a program can not write itself. -the writer must of understood infinity and could define it.

What is he? A consciousness that understands and can define infinity. If you could understand infinity within the confines of your consciousness I believe you could break reality and mold it.

What do I hope of achieving after writing this? nothing much, just really really needa start my essay so I gotta stop typing. I will leave you here, accept reason or not, the choice is now on your end of the table.

Welcome to reason.

[Creed]

edit:wrong thread

[McCulloch]

I think that if you told a computer to divide 1 by 3 you would get 0.33...334 no matter what computer you use it will never tell you 0.333...333..., then if you told it to multiply the result of 1/3 by 3 you would not get one.

If you told a computer to divide 1 by 3 you would get nothing. Computers by themselves cannot do that. However, if you told a typical program running on most computers to divide 1 by 3 you would get 0.333...333 with as many digits as the particular computer's misnamed real number data type is allowed to hold. This is because the real numbers in a computer program is defined a certain way. There is nothing stopping you from writing a new class of number that you could call rational. Instead of storing the number as n digits + m digit exponent as is the case in the so-called real numbers, you could store a number as an int (or a bigint) numerator, an int denominator and an exponent. The limitation is not with the computer but with the way that the algorithm is defined.

Code: Select all

{
    int x = 1;
    int y = 3; 
    int z = x / y;
    print ( z * y );
}

This would yield 0, because 1 / 3 in integers is zero.

Code: Select all

{
    float x = 1;
    float y = 3;
    float z = x / y;
    print ( z * y );
}

This would probably yield 0.99999999999...9, because 1 / 3 in float is 0.3333333...3 .

Code: Select all

{
    rational x = 1;
    rational y = 3;
    rational z = x / y;
    print ( z * y );
}

This would yield 1, because 1 / 3 in rational is stored internally as 1 / 3 .

Do you understand infinity?

[byofrcs]

But the thing is, you can't choose "Pi". It exists as a concept, an idea, unmeasurable, and of no practical use for a computer (or maybe there is). All we have are representations of "Pi". It's impossible to accidently move your arm "Pi" degrees, because "Pi" can never be achieved, since the number is infinite (infinity is a concept). But your arm is actually there, so it moved a concrete angle. You may think the most accurate number achievable on this measurement is infinite, but there's no reason to assume this, and in all likelihood, the universe has a fundamental level at which things cannot get smaller.

hmm, I would ask you Beto to help me better define my own definition. I thought of another way to approach the difference between a computer and human consciousness. A computer can very well devide 1 by 3 and get .333...3334, but it has to round the decimal somewhere because it does not have the compacity to define what exactly 1/3 is. In your own mind however you know that 1/3 is 1/3 of 1 and you can divide 1 by 3 and multiply it by 3 to get 1, but if you gave a computer the code to do this equation (1/3)*3 the computer will spit out 1.00...01 because of the rounding, you howver know that the same equation is in fact 1, no more, no less.

The point of that statement is that we can understand what infinity is, while a computer can't.

IEEE 754 very precisely defines infinities and it is used in the affinely extended real number system.

The point being that both humans and computers understand what infinity is.

If the rounding errors from recurring decimals are a problem then you could use arbitrary length maths e.g. the GNU GMP library. e.g. used here to calculate pi.

[jwu]

We can comprehend something not having an end, a computer can not understand what not having a end is, it can keep track of time yes, time is infinite, but the computer doesn't understand that it goes on forever, it just counts, it doesn't understand what it is counting.

That's irrelevant to the subject though. For what you describe, a human would need the ability to consciously pick from an infinite set of numbers without deriving it algorithmically. After all, your point is that all these infinite number of choices are hardwired in our consciousness, and that therefore our consciousness cannot be limited by the finite options that are offered by our physical brain.

I think that if you told a computer to divide 1 by 3 you would get 0.33...334 no matter what computer you use it will never tell you 0.333...333..., then if you told it to multiply the result of 1/3 by 3 you would not get one.

Simply use a computer that uses trinary math instead of binary, and you get the result that 1 divided by 3 (10 in trinary notation) = 0.1

[Beto]

I think Creed's bottom line is that no computer program is capable of processing the "abstract", or the "subjective". As far as I know this is true, and one of the proposed flaws of the purely computational approach for "consciousness". Correct me if I'm wrong, Creed.

[Creed]

Very well put Beto. unfortunately I really need to focus on my school work so I'm giving this argument a rest for now, I'll be back on once in a while to provide input if there is still interest in it.

[Goat]

I think Creed's bottom line is that no computer program is capable of processing the "abstract", or the "subjective". As far as I know this is true, and one of the proposed flaws of the purely computational approach for "consciousness". Correct me if I'm wrong, Creed.

Yet, that does not 'prove' god by any means. It just means we do not have the capability to create consciousness via a computer program (yet),

[QED]

I think Creed's bottom line is that no computer program is capable of processing the "abstract", or the "subjective". As far as I know this is true, and one of the proposed flaws of the purely computational approach for "consciousness". Correct me if I'm wrong, Creed.

Yet, that does not 'prove' god by any means. It just means we do not have the capability to create consciousness via a computer program (yet),

We don't actually know even that much for sure. Creed's premise seems to be that the human mind is capable of accessing any value in an actual infinity -- and that this implies some kind of dualistic transcendence of the material (which then makes a leap to the existence of God).

The first step here seems to rely on contrasting the very obvious limitations of known computer technology (understood to be finite in terms of memory resources) with (what are effectively) unknown mental processes. In the fog of the latter, Creed seems to slip-in a reference to infinity that does not appear to be properly justified. Can we see some clear justification for this first step?

[Beto]

I think Creed's bottom line is that no computer program is capable of processing the "abstract", or the "subjective". As far as I know this is true, and one of the proposed flaws of the purely computational approach for "consciousness". Correct me if I'm wrong, Creed.

Yet, that does not 'prove' god by any means. It just means we do not have the capability to create consciousness via a computer program (yet),

We don't actually know even that much for sure. Creed's premise seems to be that the human mind is capable of accessing any value in an actual infinity -- and that this implies some kind of dualistic transcendence of the material (which then makes a leap to the existence of God).

The first step here seems to rely on contrasting the very obvious limitations of known computer technology (understood to be finite in terms of memory resources) with (what are effectively) unknown mental processes. In the fog of the latter, Creed seems to slip-in a reference to infinity that does not appear to be properly justified. Can we see some clear justification for this first step?

But do you think "abstraction" is possible from a computational approach, with sufficient memory supply? I suspect only a "perfect" simulation of consciousness can be achieved this way, regardless of available resource, though I can't honestly back that assumption.

[byofrcs]

I think Creed's bottom line is that no computer program is capable of processing the "abstract", or the "subjective". As far as I know this is true, and one of the proposed flaws of the purely computational approach for "consciousness". Correct me if I'm wrong, Creed.

Yet, that does not 'prove' god by any means. It just means we do not have the capability to create consciousness via a computer program (yet),

We don't actually know even that much for sure. Creed's premise seems to be that the human mind is capable of accessing any value in an actual infinity -- and that this implies some kind of dualistic transcendence of the material (which then makes a leap to the existence of God).

The first step here seems to rely on contrasting the very obvious limitations of known computer technology (understood to be finite in terms of memory resources) with (what are effectively) unknown mental processes. In the fog of the latter, Creed seems to slip-in a reference to infinity that does not appear to be properly justified. Can we see some clear justification for this first step?

But do you think "abstraction" is possible from a computational approach, with sufficient memory supply? I suspect only a "perfect" simulation of consciousness can be achieved this way, regardless of available resource, though I can't honestly back that assumption.

If naturalism is true then I don't feel it is impossible to have a machine store qualia and map objects it sees into it's own worldview.

A camera could see a red ball and store that image or decompose the image to pick out objects based on edges and then build up a list of objects one of which would be object( shape = "sphere", colour= #FF0000) or it could store that as "red ball".

Animals (and Humans) do that very well, so well that other animals have evolved camouflage to avoid such finetuned detection. It could be argued that current machine vision systems are like baby animals in which everything they see is camouflaged because the machine has not yet learnt how to recognise the shape.