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Author Topic: PHILOSOPHY! Of the Mind. I hope.  (Read 1924 times)

Glowcat

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Re: PHILOSOPHY! Of the Mind. I hope.
« Reply #30 on: May 05, 2011, 10:45:33 pm »

I'm not sure my mastery of English (or any language) is sufficient to communicate the ideas better than I have in my last post. My point about Identity as an abstract wasn't that abstracts weren't based in objective reality, but rather than they sometimes fail to truly capture that reality and don't literally exist. I made an analogy to biological species because sometimes a lifeform doesn't easily fit into "group of organisms capable of producing fertile off-spring with themselves" as we like to imagine, and Identity may be another one of those areas where we'll never have an entirely reality-based definition of the word.
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Totally a weretrain. Very much trains!
I'm going to steamroll this house.

Bauglir

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Re: PHILOSOPHY! Of the Mind. I hope.
« Reply #31 on: May 05, 2011, 11:03:43 pm »

Ah, okay, I can't argue with that. The concept of a species being murky is a similar thing, yeah. It's one of those things where it's easy to define a ton of examples of "This is not what it is", but much harder to really put forth a satisfactory, "This is totally what it is, though". Can draw all sorts of analogies, too, but those aren't the same thing. I can say my self is the system of neural connections in my brain, but I can't describe its properties satisfactorily beyond that, only argue against some properties I see ascribed to it that I don't think make sense.
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In the days when Sussman was a novice, Minsky once came to him as he sat hacking at the PDP-6.
“What are you doing?”, asked Minsky. “I am training a randomly wired neural net to play Tic-Tac-Toe” Sussman replied. “Why is the net wired randomly?”, asked Minsky. “I do not want it to have any preconceptions of how to play”, Sussman said.
Minsky then shut his eyes. “Why do you close your eyes?”, Sussman asked his teacher.
“So that the room will be empty.”
At that moment, Sussman was enlightened.
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