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.)
Tag: Robert J. Marks
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.
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?
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.
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!
At Mind Matters News: 1. Why Infinity Does Not Exist in Reality
Robert J. Marks: In a series of five posts, I explain the difference between what infinity means — and doesn’t mean — as a concept.
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…
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 Read More…
At Mind Matters News: Can higher dimensions help us understand biblical miracles?
Some Biblical miracles are better understood if we assume four spatial dimensions. Robert J.Marks thinks that the short novel Flatland (1884) helps us understand.
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.
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.
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.
At Mind Matters News: How do we know Lincoln contained more information than his bust?
Egnor: Life forms strive to be more of what they are. Grains of sand don’t. You need more information to strive than to just exist.
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?
At Mind Matters News: Does creativity just mean Bigger Data? Or something else?
The problem with getting AI to understand causation, as opposed to mere correlation, has led to many spurious correlations in data driven papers.