Yours in distress, Alan
lettersofnote.com
lettersofnote.com
"Alan M. Turing thought about criteria to settle the question of whether Machines Can Think, a question of which we now know that it is about as relevant as the question of whether Submarines Can Swim."
(http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD08xx/EW...)
Let's not fall prey to the temptation of thinking:
Turing believes machines think
Society acted terribly towards Turing
Therefore machines do think.
Turing thought they think
And he suffered terribly
Therefore they do think Turing was a machine
Turing could think
Therefore machines can think
The Church-Turing-Deutsch Principle seems pretty uncontroversial when we ignore quantum mechanics (and remains questionable when it is considered). Add to this the lack of any evidence for any irreducible quantum requirements in the mind anyway and it seems pretty damn likely that the mind is algorithmic.
Even if the CTD Principle does not hold for whatever reason, that still does not put the mind and machines on different levels. It would merely imply that machines more powerful than Turing machines can be built (the mind being an example of such a machine). Not even Roger Penrose disputes a materialistic mind.
Now ask yourself: how on Earth did the author consider the information about Turing's persecution relevant to the subject at hand?
Turing considered the question of whether machines could think as being "too meaningless to deserve discussion".
http://books.google.com/books?id=CEMYUU_HFMAC&pg=PA317&lpg=P...
Also
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/turing-test/
Sorry this links quote Turing, I couldn't find the original source.
The article acknowledges that a lookup table could pass the Turing test--the author even uses this argument for his own ends. At the same time, clearly he doesn't think we should presume the lookup table sentient. The only passage which might be interpreted as an "objective distinction" is this one:
Personally, I find this response to Searle extremely interesting—since if correct, it suggests that the distinction between polynomial and exponential complexity has metaphysical significance. According to this response, an exponential-sized lookup table that passed the Turing Test would not be sentient (or conscious, intelligent, self-aware, etc.), but a polynomially-bounded program with exactly the same input/output behavior would be sentient. Furthermore, the latter program would be sentient because it was polynomially-bounded.
And yet in the next paragraph the author says he's reluctant to stand behind such thesis.
Do you, unlike Scott Aaronson, want to adopt this amended postulate--i.e., do you believe all computer programs which can pass the Turing test should be granted personhood as long as they scale polynomially with the length of the conversation?
Recall that in information theory, being a bit sloppy but essentially accurate with the terms, the amount of information something has can be expressed as the smallest possible encoding of something. The entire Mandelbrot set, as gloriously complicated as it may look, actually contains virtually no information, a mere handful of bits, because it's all the result of a very simple equation. No matter how gloriously complicated your enormous hash table may look, if it was generated with some humanly-feasible program and nigh-infinite amounts of time, the information content of the entire table, no matter how large, is nothing more than the size of the program and perhaps a specification of how long you let it run.
Basically, the whole "big lookup table" has to have some sort of characteristic to it. Either it was created by a program, in which case the program itself could pass the Turing test, or it is somehow irreducible to a program's output, in which case in your zealous effort to swat a fly you vaporized the entire Earth; you can't agree to the possibility a machine might pass the test (or be sentient or whatever) but you can agree to the existence of an exponentially complicated source of information? That's only a gnat's whisker away from asking "Well, what if I use magic to create a philosophical zombie," (I'm referencing the specific concept of a philosophical zombie here, you can look it up if you like) "that looks like it's passing the test but it really isn't, what then?" Well, I don't know, when you're willing to invoke magic in your defense I'll concede I haven't got much of a response, but you probably shouldn't call that a victory.
The lookup table argument only makes sense nonconstructively, if you merely assert its existence but then don't allow anyone to ask any question about where it came from, or what properties it has.
If we were having this debate in the XVIII-th century, you could equally as well assert that any machine capable of playing chess should be considered a person. The motivation is exactly the same as with the Turing test: so far only humans can play chess, humans are sentient, QED.
Say someone said, "But what if a machine used a minimax algorithm." To which you could respond, armed with your knowledge of XVIIIth century technology, "Such thing cannot exist therefore it's an irrelevant question."
As for the creation of such a table, not that I consider that question particularly relevant, but here it is: Say a crazy scientist in the future created a program that actually simulated a human brain, then ran it (on future super-fast hardware) on every possible input (once again, the size of the input is bounded by the maximum length of a conversation a human can have), and stored the results on future super-large hard drives. Then he deleted the human brain simulation program, and gave you just the lookup table. The act of deleting the original program we may very well consider murder. But what about the generated lookup table?
Seems more that he didn't want to argue about definitions, but wanted to phrase it in such a way that anyone denying it would be no different than a solipsist: I think, therefore I am, but I don't know about the rest of you guys.
There are problems with the test (possibly like the very large lookup table argument), but it was a good approach overall.
Turing believes machines think / Turing lies with men / Therefore machines do not think
Society can be sometimes wonderful, and sometimes so incredibly terrible.
You have to make conscious choices; ones that not only altruistic for you but also a bit dangerous for you; in order to attain some kind of wonderfulless.
Once the society settled on "grab all" or "protect all good from all bad", it degrades into a pile of terrible.
RIP AT. everthing i've read suggests he was a really nice man.
http://www.rightmove.co.uk/property-for-sale/property-383496...
(source: you can see the plaque in the first picture, I attended the unveiling at this house)
Delusional? Probably.
In a recent poll by Pew last month, 41% of the country now believes people are born gay. 8% believe it is the result of upbringing and 42% believe it is a choice.
Source: http://www.people-press.org/files/legacy-pdf/06-06-13%20LGBT...
To those that believe it's a choice, the natural question is, "When did you choose to be straight?" For me, I knew I was attracted to the opposite sex as early as 5 or 6. I didn't make a choice. Nobody makes a choice. You're attracted to who you're attracted to. If anyone says that is not the case, ask them at what age they chose their sexual orientation.
The entire series of lectures is excellent if you thought this was insightful.
First I have to say that I'm unaware of a "gay gene". It may exist, it may not. There are plenty of mechanisms that could lead to being born gay without a gay gene.
As one possibility, refer to:
>Temperature-dependent sex determination (TSD) is a type of environmental sex determination in which the temperatures experienced during embryonic development determine the sex of the offspring.[1] It is most prevalent and common among amniote vertebrates that are classified under the reptile class,
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temperature-dependent_sex_deter...
Sure, this doesn't pertain to humans but it would not be surprising to me that other non-gene influencers might cause someone to be gay before birth.
Having gotten that out of the way, I would be against any kind of testing for anything but the most critical gene defects. Anyone that thinks we should test for all gene defects should check out www.23andme.com. You'll discover (like I did) that the average person has several gene defects that can shorten their life and be passed on to their offspring. Trying to breed these out of humans would mean most people alive today wouldn't be alive today.
Returning to the original point. The question about pre-natal gene testing does not seem to be about actually doing it routinely.
Suppose that we devised a genetic test that can determine if a fertilized egg will grow into a gay adult if brought to maturity. If such a test works, it would mean that ones genes carries sufficient information to deterimine if one is gay. Wheater or not we actually use this on a given person does not change the fact that their genes are still sufficient.
It was once not uncommon for big thinkers to believe that animals can't suffer. They had lots of intellectual justifications for that. But people who have a dog know they can. To most of us it seems silly to suggest they cannot. But it's easy to fall for the nonsense if you don't ever spend time with animals.
As more people know people that they know are gay (they've always known gay people), they will just see how obvious it is that it's a choice. I think this is a viral effect, put loosely. The more acceptance there is, the more acceptance there will be. And a tipping point, if you can pick a precise time, I believe happened earlier this year (at least in the US).
Why should it matter? Was I born a programmer or did I choose to become one? I was born physically (to satisfy the gender-sensitive) male. I was born human. I was born with blue eyes.
Beyond the physically obvious, if you're OK with persecuting people for a choice that does not affect you (e.g. "that guy is a blue-eyed human, and that's fine, but he CHOSE to be a PROGRAMMER, and that's just wrong!"), then you are making things worse.
"It's not a choice" doesn't make it more or less right or wrong. It's how people are. The failure to accept that (or at least ignore and tolerate it) is the problem, and it will not be answered by "well it's genetic."
[edit: Full disclosure: This post was made while listening to Queen, but I didn't CHOOSE to do that, the restaurant did that to me; please judge appropriately.]
Whether it's a choice or not should be irrelevant. However, used as it is in the modern political context of "gay harassment issues", I believe we're actually doing a great disservice to the gay community by using "they didn't have the choice" as an excuse.
Maybe it's just me, but every time someone argues that we should accept gay people because they didn't have a choice, I can't stop myself thinking: "So if they had a choice, would it be okay to harass them? Would it be okay to ask them to change?". The problem is not that gay people can't _change_. The problem is that it's f*cking wrong to ask them to change. Even if they could _change_ (whatever people mean by that), it's absolutely nonsensical to ask them to.
As a society, we ask murderers to change, criminals, people generally harmful to others. But gays? Since when is it okay to criticize the choice of someone that affects nobody but this someone?
I like pizza. If that bothers anyone, should I just say: "There's nothing I can do about it, I was born this way?"
If you gave me a pill to turn straight, I wouldn't take it.
I like being gay and wouldn't change it. That's why we have fucking great big parades and talk about 'pride' and all that. That other people are assholes and bigots ain't my damn problem.
This is true, but "it's not a choice" is a stepping stone to more general acceptance.
You're certainly correct that it's wrong to persecute anyone for making a choice that does not affect others. However, people who believe homosexuality and gay marriage is wrong tend to also believe that it somehow does affect them in an indirect way - that it means fewer children will be raised in a good home, or that it contributes to a decline in civilized society or something. Remember that we also regulate other things that affect us in indirect ways, eg. hard drug use and sales, prostitution, etc. so it is not out of the question to regulate a choice that has indirect negative effects on society. Now we could (and I have) argued with such people until the cows came home about whether or not this is truly the case, but if we establish that it is not a choice, we can sidestep this argument entirely.
Because if it's not a choice, it's a physical trait, like race or height. And we have established pretty well as a nation that we definitely cannot legally regulate people's behavior based on their physical traits, even if it does affect us. For example, think of the Americans with Disabilities Act - having to put in wheelchair ramps directly affects the owner of the building negatively (she has to pay for the ramps). However, we don't question this law because being physically disabled isn't a choice.
TL;DR I agree with you that even if it were a choice, it is not one that affects me and therefore cannot be regulated. But if we can get more people to understand that it is not a choice, we can skip the entire debate about whether or not it's a choice that affects others and just treat each other equally under the law.
(I know, radical suggestion. What possible benefit could listening to actual real-life experience bring to this discussion? Debates about whether or not I ought to have equal rights are so much more enjoyable when they are about the interpretation of passages of ancient books I don't believe in.)
Memories are volatile, sure. But I never thought during my youth "yeah, you know what, I'd rather be in a persecuted minority and be made fun of by my peers, that sounds like an absolute blast, sign me up". If it were a choice, it wouldn't have taken so fucking long to come to terms with it. If it were a choice, my teenage years would have been quite different than they were.
The "it's a choice" thing requires a pathologising or criminalising—or just stupefying—explanation for the cause of that choice. Pathologising was the usual way: we're mentally ill, therefore we chose to be gay. Then there was the criminalising: we were "recruited" into the "gay lifestyle" by some devious gay elder to boost numbers, a sort of queer pyramid scheme where if you recruit 50 newbies to the gang, you get a new car. Or, as I said, stupefying: the idea that teenage boys would willingly subject themselves to the humiliating taunts of their peers for being gay in a small micro-society (schools) that aren't big fans of people being gay.
May homophobes strongly believe "sexual preference is a choice" because they have first hand daily experience with choosing not to act on their own self-loathing repressed homosexual urges, so there is no way you can convince them otherwise, because they are extremely invested in homosexuality being a choice, otherwise they must confront their own homosexual tendencies.
The argument that it should not matter if it's a choice or not should appeal to any true conservatives or libertarians who truly believe in freedom and don't think the government should be legislating personal choice. But those people are extremely rare, just like true Christians who have actually read the bible and believe what it says, instead of cherry picking the convenient parts and characterizing what they learned by going to Sunday School and watching animated christmas specials, and know what the dogma of their religious institutions actually dictates that they should believe.
For example, many "true" Catholics will patronizingly explain to you that the idea of eating Christ's flesh and drinking his blood is only a metaphor, when it most certainly is NOT: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transsubstantiation
The "it should not matter if sexual preference is a choice" argument allows you to question if they are a true conservative / libertarian or not, in a way that you can't get through to repressed self loathing repressed homosexuals with the "homosexuality is a choice" argument.
Of course anyone who thinks they're an expert in the answer to the question of whether or not sexual preference is a choice, whose own personal opinion overrides the scientific consensus, is obviously speaking from the personal experience of choosing to suppress and not act on their own homosexual feelings, so there is no way to get through to them with that logical argument.
That's why it's important to use both approaches together.
Many people have odd sexual fetishes (ranging from mildly odd to somewhat terrifying). Most would probably agree those fetishes aren't choices, but I've never heard the argument made that those sources of sexual arousal are somehow innate.
Given the prevalence of identical twins where only one is gay, it seems clear that, at the very least, sexual orientation is determined by a variety of factors. I'm not sure what is the point of conducting a poll that asks people off the street which they think is the dominant factor...
The question of weather or not being gay is a choice is a significantly different question, as we do not choice are upbringing. If I recall research I did about a year ago, starting at about 7 (again, I am going off of memory, but I am pretty confident the age is far prebusenent), researchers have found significant corralations between behavior and the eventual sexual orientation of the child.
The other problem with using the 'not a choice' argument is that it (ought to be) completely irrelevant. People can argue that sociopaths, pedophiles, ETC are not a choice. This does not mean we allow their actions, because we still believe they are harmful. The reason that homosexuality stopped being considered a disease was that there was no correlation found between homosexuality and negative symptoms. Irrespective of if one made a choice, was born gay, or became gay through some other mechanism is irrelevent, because being gay is not a problem.
Being born gay doesn't necessarily mean it's genetic. As I stated in another comment, there are species that determine sex by the temperature experienced during embryonic development. If a pre-birth factor like temperature can control the sex of a lizard then it stands to reason that other pre-birth environmental factors could cause someone to be gay or straight in humans. Or it could be genes... as you said, nobody knows. But I am convinced that almost all (if not all) gay people are just gay; they don't choose to be gay at some point in their life.
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temperature-dependent_sex_deter...
As for it "ought to be irrelevant" - of course it should be irrelevant. But it's not. Turing was sterilized for participating in deviant sexual intercourse which strongly implies the society of the day accused of him of choosing to be the way he was.
The one gay person whose story I know well enough to retell probably started adolescent life as straight-leaning bi, but due to horribly misguided religious environmental pressures became gay. So, no, he didn't choose to be gay, but he could have gone in a different direction in a different environment.
I can barely grasp the fact that there are people who even friggin' care.
It is interesting how much of the anti-gay rhetoric basically boils down to homosexuality being the more attractive option, but one which we must refuse (and outlaw) for the good of humanity.
The latter is a choice, but evidence appears to be that the former is not. The phrase "is gay" generally refers to the former, although obviously it can be hard to determine if a person is really good at hiding it.
Edit: Specifically, it makes no sense to me that people are "born" being attracted to a certain group of people.
If you're equally attracted to men and women but only have sexual relations with members of one group, you are bi.
There certainly is a continuum from straight to gay. Plenty of people have tried to "cure" gays, including some unhappy with their own orientation. These efforts are failing, suggesting where we are born on this continuum is not in our control to change.
If you feel like you are able to change your orientation, it may be that you fall closer to the middle of the spectrum than most. Do you believe it was a choice or your environment that most shaped your orientation?
Now it's certainly the case that these three words do not describe everything completely, since for instance you can have a bisexual person who is mostly attracted to females and occasionally attracted to males. That doesn't mean that the terms are useless. The terms 'alive' and 'dead' have the same problem: there is a grey area between them. Doesn't mean that those concepts are useless.
Nutters who leave nail bombs in gay bars are still going to do so regardless of whether I choose to have sex or not. If I have a non-sexual romantic relationship with someone, and we walk through the park holding hands, I still have to worry about some crazy person coming along and being a shitbag about it. If I disclose my sexual orientation, I still have to worry about discrimination in the workplace and housing provision and so on. The issues don't go away just because one is not actively having sex.
Okay, so you are straight and I'm gay. I can give you a very practical situation: I want to meet someone to have a relationship or just some casual sex with. So I go to a gay bar. Okay, not everyone there will be to my taste, some won't be attractive to me, others won't find me attractive. But we're all on the same page about the wanting-to-have-sex-with-other-dudes thing (except, of course, the straight dudes who go to gay bars to seduce the women who go to gay bars because they aren't filled with douchebags, except they now are because word got out... oh god, kill me now). Without that shared property, any potential sexual or romantic endeavour would be rather fruitless. That's a fairly practical situation which a shared concept of sexual orientation rather helps with.
Hell, if someone made an app that led you voluntarily share your sexual orientation via Google Glass so that others could see you marked as straight or gay or bi... killer app right there. ;)
None of them are good reasons to treat me differently in the workplace or under the law. Nothing about the unreasonableness of such discrimination changes if being gay were a choice.
"Gee, you know... I think I will choose to be something that a large portion of the world hates, thinks is somehow wrong, or think is disgusting. That sounds like fun!"
It's not like being gay is some fad that one decides would be cool one day while idling at the pool.
The homophobic self loathing repressed closet cases always try to define "gay" as "acting on being gay" so that they can rationalize their feelings that they have to work so hard to repress.
The actual definition of "being gay" revolves around having those feelings, not acting on them. Otherwise there would be no such thing as a gay virgin, or a straight virgin for that matter. If "being gay" or "being straight" had to do with behavior, not feelings, then you couldn't be straight without first having had straight sex.
I think the driving force is actual growing gender equality. There is no longer the assumption that "husband" and "wife" are inherently different roles, nor that women are the property of men. When relationships are presumed to be between equals, it no longer matters whether society can easily sort one half of the relationship from the other.
That's a pretty disingenuous question because if someone answers you "I was 10, I thought about it, and decided I prefer the opposite gender because that way I can have children."
You'll probably tell him "Oh, you're Bisexual."
So it's not a real question. No matter which way they answer you, you'll construe it in your favor.
The phrase "in your favor" seems to suggest an adversarial stance where none is necessary. Besides, the point of a rhetorical question is to make a statement, regardless of the answer.
Receiving the hypothetical answer you gave as an example serves to demonstrate that there is a spectrum of orientation on multiple axes, ranging from knew for sure and had first crush in preschool, to no interest in either gender and everything in between.
I'm not sure that it is the case that sudden realisation of the etiology of sexual orientation is the cause of increasing tolerance.
I think it is far more likely that acceptance and tolerance has come from the fact that lots of people have come out (and partly because of pop culture). Wind back to Turing's time and nobody knew that they knew a gay person. Gay people were kept in the shadows of society, and myths, rumours and slanders spread with no check on them.
Now, precisely because so many people have come out, when I tell someone I'm gay, they don't immediately think "well, he must be some kind of sick, child abusing, creepy pervert who does unspeakable things in the bedroom". Reasonable people will simply conclude "okay, he likes dudes" because it fits with their experience of other gay people.
The malicious stereotypes fail to live up to reality. In Britain, the official statistics say that 1 in 16 people are lesbian, gay or bi. Most people know more than 16 people, therefore most people know an LGB person. When the vast majority of them don't turn out to be immoral creepy sex abusing pervert freaks, it becomes rather more difficult for crazy people to keep the stereotypes going.
Figuratively speaking.
Geek does not forget.
"Chemical castration is the administration of medication
designed to reduce libido and sexual activity. Unlike
surgical castration, where the testicles or ovaries are
removed through an incision in the body, chemical
castration does not actually castrate the person, nor is
it a form of sterilization."
"Chemical castration is generally considered reversible
when treatment is discontinued, although permanent
effects in body chemistry can sometimes be seen, as in
the case of bone density loss increasing with length of
use of Depo Provera. Chemical castration has, from
time to time, been used as an instrument of public
and/or judicial policy despite concerns over human
rights and possible side effects."
"In the United Kingdom, computer scientist Alan Turing,
famous for his contributions to mathematics and computer
science, was a homosexual who chose to undergo chemical
castration in order to avoid imprisonment in 1952. At
the time, homosexuality was still illegal and
considered to be a mental illness that could be treated
with chemical castration. Turing experienced side
effects such as breast enlargement and bloating of the
physique. He died two years later, with the inquest
returning a verdict of suicide, although recent
research has cast doubt on this result. In 2009, the
then British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, issued a
public apology for the British government's "appalling"
actions, after an online petition seeking the same
gained 30,000 signatures and international recognition."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chemical_castration#Europe
"Alan Turing, the British mathematical genius and
codebreaker born 100 years ago on 23 June, may not have
committed suicide, as is widely believed.
Turing expert Prof Jack Copeland has questioned the
evidence that was presented at the 1954 inquest.
He believes the evidence would not today be accepted as
sufficient to establish a suicide verdict."
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-18561092?print...
Edit: Added last portion.