Are organisms only algorithms?

So you believe Muslims didn't make a personal decision to be muslim and instead are just taught since birth to believe and have it ingrained into their identity?

You mean humans don't make individual decisions and are instead just hardware with software programmed into it?

What about choice? Freedom of religion? etc

How do you decide if it is "Freedom" to have been born and raised into a cult? What about the ones who turn 18 and still decide to stay in it?

Isn't that "FREEDOM".

>only

All the physical laws we discover are a way of saying "we can predict some stuff based on other stuff". None of it describes anything about the nature of the stuff besides those relationships or why there should be stuff at all.

Moreover, everything about your understanding of this stuff is based on your mental life. It increasingly looks (unlike what implies) like your mental life corresponds with some rigid conformity to what the stuff in your brain is doing. If I poke the right part of your brain, you get hot. Another part, cool. Etc.

When we can write laws that say "stuff in this pattern results in X experiences", we'll have another whole set of principles to go with "When stuff does X at time A it will do Y at time B."

We currently have no reason to believe that either equations of space-time correspondence or space-mind correspondence will tell us anything about why the energy field we call the universe exists at all.

>Computers don't analyze information this way. Algorithms don't compute this way.

You can write an artificial neural network program so it can learn things without you explicitly instructing it about them. Google's image recognition system and translation services make use of this method.

The fact that the algorithms written in DNA are vastly different than the ones humans have written during the few pitiful decades we've even had a theory of computation isn't that compelling. We have every reason to believe that neuroscience and computation will mutually advance until we have a theory of computation that encompasses the structure of DNA.

to be fair

This type of machine learning and it's success is "new" enough that average person shouldn't be expected to know it.

It's very common for people to be unaware of it.

Also the question arises do you really want the public or low IQ monkey people to know what is happening?

>This type of machine learning and it's success is "new" enough that average person shouldn't be expected to know it.

I guess. It seems kind of obvious to me as something everyone would independently discover eventually if they thought long enough about how to accomplish AI, but I also happen to write programs involving ANN for my job so I'm probably not a good unbiased source of opinion on this topic. It's really just the basic idea of abandoning the direct instructions approach and instead letting nodes with weighted connections solve optimization problems to minimize differences between known training set answers vs. the answers the network comes up with.

It's like teaching someone to play a song on the piano without actually giving them the sheet music and instead hitting their hand with a ruler each time they press the wrong key. Eventually they would play the song correctly based purely on the knowledge of which random keys they pressed weren't the right ones.

"It is important to realize that in physics today, we have no knowledge of what energy is."
Richard Feynman

Don't underestimate the full gravity of what this means. All physical descriptions are self-referential "units" of energy. Physics is the math and word game of talking about how some energy becomes other energy and under what circumstances. But all of the terms are defined only in terms of each other.

I absolutely agree with you. However, an individual brain will never be constructed in a silicon apparatus. Only general behaviors may be able to be reconstructed in a silicon based apparatus. Computers will eventually out-"think" humans, but I predict that the "singularity" is going to take a whole lot longer than we anticipate, based on the limitations of the materials we use.

I disagree with you but I think we're both in pure intuition land.

yes its fun

>dude it's just equations and experimental fit lamo
fuark off, experimental predictions based on supposing the existence of virtual particles accurate in 1 part to a billion don't just happen to be right by accident

Artificial neural networks have made it into popular fiction, appearing on shows such as HBO's Silicon Valley. It can be expected that a reasonable number of people have been exposed to the concept.

Life is inarguably just data processing. It exists as a way to facilitate the increase of entropy and catalyze the eventual heat death of the universe.

If you want to get down to the nitty gritty of things, reality is just simple algorithms under the umbrella of chaos. There are things and stuff that behave in very specific ways, there are just so many things and so much stuff that it's very difficult to predict everything.

What? I didn't say or imply that it was by accident. Clearly the universe has a nature. Science tells us certain rules about how this nature behaves. But that's all it tells us. It doesn't tell us *why* the rules are that way instead of some other way.

You are implying it's by accident. You're telling us the rules we guessed for calculating the fine structure of the hydrogen atoms just happen to fall right.

The reality is we inferred those rules from specific suppositions about how the world actually is. What you're telling us is the laws resulting from that are THAT correct just by random chance.

dude i read the wikipedia page, hydrogen atom stuff is math, not science

>hydrogen atom stuff is math, not science
...
It's all been confirmed by experiment.

No I'm not. I'll try to explain once more.
The universe has some nature. One way we learn about the nature of the universe through science. We guess rules, and then if the rules *do* have some relationship to the nature of the universe, they don't falsify very easily. Newton guesses that gravity works a certain way. He's pretty close. Close enough that his answers are almost never wrong. But sometimes they ARE wrong. And it's because he's wrong. Classic physics is wrong. Not as wrong as Greek mythology, but more wrong than QM and GR. Science is better, *the closer it matches reality*. This isn't random, it's a real thing.

However, imagine we get the answer to physics. Imagine we just have a perfect set of equations that always work. Hat is essentially solving science. But nothing suggests that that equation with make it clear why that equation runs the universe. And it won't explain why when the equation creates my brain, I know about it.

You are literally repeating the position that you pretend I'm misrepresenting. Your idea is just that "dude broh lol we just happen to have pretty close equations lmao" when what motivates those equations isn't that we threw random shit at the wall until it stuck (yes Dirac did it but that was long ago), they are derived from actual statements about the nature of reality

What you're doing is plugging your ears and completely ignoring that last part, affirming that it's just random chance those suppositions about reality happen to give us predictions that are incredibly right. More accurate than ANY other measurement in physics.

That's what science is for, you fuckwit. If there are problems that possess objective answers, then science will someday solve them.

>>> Veeky Forums is that way. They like metaphysical philosophical bullshit there.

What is it that you think is going on when you're doing science?

Like, what is the scientific method? Is it not to make a hypothesis and then test whether that's how it works?

And I'm not sure how you can keep thinking that a *reason* is the same as random. A reason is the opposite of random. Science doesn't work randomly. It works because it contains knowledge.

>humans are special
>souls exist in advanced lifeforms only, better yet, make it only cute looking ones
>emotions are not computable
>machines can't love

I bet some of you never thought these opinions make you a naive egoistic faggot, yet they do.

what else must happen that all these pseudo-spiritual retards will realize that our mortal self is not the pinnacle and will stop putting humans with their rotting, dirty, weak bodies on a pedestal

>It exists as a way to facilitate the increase of entropy and catalyze the eventual heat death of the universe.

What are you even rambling on about?

>It works because it contains knowledge.
Well yeah, it does. But for some reason you accept the knowledge of the law but refuse the predicates that support those laws.

I dont know
For me, everything are systems and events, so life is.

>are living bodies only an algorithm?
>do human being have a soul?
>why can't we have both?

The way I see it the human body and human soul/mind are two separate entities each with it's own separate algorithm. The key difference being the human mind/soul can change and mold it's algorithm almost any way it desires, while the human body retains the same algorithm from the day it's born to the day it dies. It's almost poetic, one that's always changing and shifting. The other permanently the same. Like polar opposites, or yin and yang.

>The answer's B by the way.
He's free to choose A.

No.
And no.
What you are describing is computing.
Computing is intangible, and it doesn't exist in, or correlate to reality.

>Computing is intangible, and it doesn't exist in, or correlate to reality.

What about [spoiler]computers[/spoiler]?

Computers, what about them.
Good question!

A computer is a practical instrument for the process of computing. -The means is not the end.
Computing itself is intangible.
Computing doesn't exist in physical reality as such, as it has no substance.
Computing requires and relies on reality, but reality doesn't require or rely on computing.
Computing is a process. - That is something we make up, something we imagine. It requres a fixed system, and it requires something to interpret it.
There are no fixed systems in reality but in the imagination.
Reality doesn't require us to interpret it, it is there, no matter what you try to imagine about it, and it will be there even after you are dead.

Reality doesn't directly depend on computing.
Computing is a process consisting of a system of steps with an end.
reality is immediate, and has no end.

That is the question of p=np

*tips*

Humans are separate from nature. Free will is necessary otherwise G-d is evil.

>Computing is a process consisting of a system of steps with an end.

You seem confused, look up the Halting Problem.

I'm not confused.
I could have used different wording though.
What I mean by end, is a purpose, extremity, limit or boundary.
reality has no extremity, as it is infinite. It has no boundaries

computing has a boundary. It only works within a fixed system.

what's funny about these types of people is that because they are so logical and algorithmic themselves, they want no one to "transcend" their perfected logical view of things and so smugly deny anything short of "fact"

this was a great read, thanks user

life is like a virus in the universe processing program. Its replicate itself and destroy everything what's nearby

You are welcome

>life is like a virus in the universe processing program.
The universe is neither a process nor a program.