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Robert J. Marks

Robert J. Marks: Some infinities are bigger than others but there’s no biggest one

In Marks’s view, infinity is a beautiful — and provable — theory in math that can’t exist in reality without ludicrous consequences. (Thus the immaterial human mind is capable of creating things that don’t exist in material reality.) Read More ›

Robert J. Marks on “machines with minds” vs. the real-life dweebs in his evolutionary programming:

A machine mind didn’t “just evolve” in this experiment; it was programmed in — even if its output was a surprise. The same is likely true of the human mind. Read More ›

Robert J. Marks: 4. How Almost All Numbers Can Encode the Library of Congress

Re math: Almost every number between zero and one, randomly chosen by coin flipping, will at some point contain the binary encoding of the Library of Congress. That’s why infinity is a concept in math but not in the real world. Note: You should ask, how do we come to have concepts that are not part of the real world? Read More ›

At Mind Matters News: 2. Infinity illustrates that the universe has a beginning

The absurdities that an infinite past time would create, while not a definitive mathematical proof, are solid evidence that our universe had a beginning. Read More ›

At Mind Matters News: The Software of the Gaps: An excerpt from Non-Computable You

Robert J. Marks reminds us of the tale of the boy who dug through a pile of manure because he was sure that … underneath all that poop, there MUST surely be a pony! Read More ›

At Mind Matters News: Computer prof: You are not computable and here’s why not

Dr. Robert J. Marks’s new book, Non-Computable You: What You Do That Artificial Intelligence Never Will (Discovery Institute Press, 2022), comes out just as Google has placed an engineer on leave for claiming an AI chatbot he tends is a real person… Read More ›

At Mind Matters News: New AI learns to simulate common sense

The GPT-3 program can get through grammatical issues on which others stumble, says Robert J. Marks. It is a simulation because the AI can perform the task but does not “understand” what the concepts mean: The classic test for AI common sense is resolution of Winograd schema. Winograd schema contain vague, ambiguous pronouns. Common sense resolves the ambiguity. An example is: “John is afraid to get in a fight with Bob because he is so tall, muscular and ill-tempered.” Does the vague pronoun “he” refer to John or Bob? Common sense says Bob is the tough guy and John is the scared dude. Another Winograd schema example is “John did not ask Bob to join him in prayer because he Read More ›

Computer engineers look at design tradeoffs in the human body

Sam Haug: When designing a human being or any incredibly complex system, there are some design trade-offs. You can design a human being to be able to resist the effects of eating hemlock, for example, but the cost for doing that may be large. Read More ›

At Mind Matters News: How even random numbers show evidence of design

Marks: In fact, I have a student right now who is looking at training a neural network to forecast random numbers. If these random numbers are being generated by a deterministic algorithm, then we should be able to discover what the deterministic algorithm is. Read More ›

At Mind Matters News: Can wholly random processes produce information?

Marks: We showed that in all cases, that yes, [design] was required, and that there’s mathematics behind it. The mathematics is based on the No Free Lunch Theorem, which was popularized in the IEEE transactions on evolutionary computing in 1997. There, David Wolpert and W. G. Macready showed something which astonished the area of genetic programming and evolutionary programming. Read More ›

At Mind Matters News: Does Mt Rushmore contain no more information than Mt Fuji?

As Jeffrey Shallit claims? That is, does intelligent intervention increase information? Is that intervention detectable by science methods? Read More ›