leroy-is-here

A lot of people in Colorado go outside on a regular basis to hike or ski or ride bikes.

How do you mean?

I agree with what you say, but do not think it is true for humans. I think this may be true for thinking machines like ChatGPT which do not think, do not observe, unless we give it something to think about. E.g. the thinking machine is just a program which runs its program with our input. In the future, seeing machines will not see unless we give it something to look at.

Perhaps you are right, it is we who create time to observe.

I'm not sure what you mean exactly by this, but I think I understand a little. The reason why the study of health is separate than the being of health is that the being requires time and experience. I cannot convey how I feel when I eat clean, lift well, read a lot, and socialize often, but I can say that I feel "happy" or "good" and give you a list of steps to achieve that state.

This essence of "lossy transmission" is simply our reality.

Observation is inherently a process with time. Without time, observation cannot be done. I’m not sure how observation without time could even be done, with the goal of observation being the measure from one state to another.

Do you have any reading for me?

I am addressing the original argument. The original premise was mere amusement that such a chemical could exist which could alter the mind. What I’m saying is that there is more than just chemicals which can change your mind.

If you say it is obvious that everything you ingest affects you, then what about time? Both of us are clearly ingesting time, it is simply another one of our inputs. And, of course, it is obvious that time affects our mind and body.

I think we have both problems, actually. We definitely have names that are good, like New York, Justice, Earth, Peace, Aphex Twin’s Windowlicker.

But we also have names of things which are bad, because they are false. These the are names which are you talking about.

No, it doesn’t. Because the study of health and the being of health are separate topics entirely.

Well, the answer is literally that everything you ingest affects you. It affects your body and the body affects the mind. From the food you eat to the words you hear, your body and mind is affected.

Words, transmitted by sound _absolutely_, without a single doubt, can affect the thoughts of an individual. And, of course, horns and loud sounds and noises will also affect the thoughts.

The science of keeping humans healthy is fairly well researched and can also be explained, but that same science cannot convey the experience of being healthy.

If tiny chemicals can do that to you, because you ingested them, what about all of the other things you ingest, including sound, which cause chemicals in your brain to make reactions?

I don’t understand the why anymore. More than 2000 years ago, we understood that we must be a sum of parts and that kind of idea yielded the atom. We applied the atom to many kinds of structures to discern their nature. Now, atom means some scientific particle.

We simply have more things to name, but still constantly run into things we cannot name yet. We think this will end but it will not. If our universe is ever expanding, how can it?

I read the Wikipedia page I linked to in my article on Turing Machines. This was my mistake, I didn’t realize how poorly the Wikipedia article was written, and how much is incorrect. I encourage you to read “On Computable Numbers” by Turing.

The description of a Turing Machine as a “tape machine” is merely an illustration and not meant to be taken literally. Turing Machines are merely mathematical models which define state-based transitions, usually in tabular form.

This link from Stanford is a much better description: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/turing-machine/

Many people think of Turing Machines and see only the abstraction. But what Alan Turing created was a _process_, a method, for creating what we call Turing Machines. The process, the abstraction, is not a Turing Machine (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Treachery_of_Images). The machines created by the process are Turing Machines.

The process of creating these machines is the crucial part because if a singular process can create infinitely many machines, then those machines must bear some sort of commonality. This is what computer science is hoping to study, but we constantly get distracted by studying details of individual machines, individual numbers. And often, we confuse ourselves into thinking we haven't found any commonality at all -- that our machines _aren't_ Turing machines! But of course, this is incorrect.

When Turing was creating the machine to counter the Enigma Machine, do you think he just thought of it as a "computer"? or did he think of it as a machine created by his process, a Turing Machine? (though he probably wouldn't have used that term)

Edit: a concrete refutation of your claim that computers are not Turing Machines would then be to create a machine that solves the Halting Problem. Turing Machines cannot solve the Halting Problem so if our computers are not Turing Machines then they must be able.

We arrived at the Halting Problem because of our study of Turing Machines as a class of machines and our computers are within that class.

I really like the notion that a heartbeat creates time. We have all felt the notion that time has "sped up" in many scenarios in our lives. What did we notice physically? That our heart rate has increased.

I see that I need to explain this differently. By being on Hacker News, I assume you can program. Have you not ever made an abstraction? The Turing Machine is just an abstraction. It is the Class and individual real machines are the Objects. I’m not sure why people are even hung up on using theory to understand something.

The problem is not that I don’t think we can, but that we will and then we will enslave those machines. Free will isn’t ours to deny.

The Turing Machine is just an idea with which to argue. The numbers are infinite, but if I am holding two peaches, I am holding two.

I’m addressing your points in the order they appeared:

Why isn’t your computer a Turing Machine?

What if feelings are just your body’s thoughts?

I didn’t say that a machine could never do this, I said no machine in this lifetime can. When I say “this lifetime”, I mean up until our current present moment. Our life together, now.

Edit: On Turing Machines, Turing literally devised a method of producing individual machines with an individual name, a number. Do you not think your individual machine has a number that can be arrived at from a mathematical process, the process that Turing created? Any addition of RAM, for instance, simply creates a new number.

I understand this completely, I was merely arguing against the claim in the article that “We are Gods”. The article seems to be arguing against giving free will to machines.

Anyway, thanks for the compliments :) My wife helped me design it

This article makes the same mistake that Turing made: assuming that by creating a thinking machine one is creating a mind. We are not gods, we have simply made a machine. We haven’t externalized intelligence either. Intelligence isn’t determined by our thoughts alone, but through our actions, our will.

I critique many of these false assumptions in an article of mine:

https://leroy.works/articles/a-critique-of-alan-turings-conc...

It’s possible to design an algorithm which branches and is also constant time. If, for all inputs, the instruction length (# of instructions executed) is the same even for different branch paths, then they must all run in the same time. This, of course, isn’t accounting for different (microscopic) execution times of individual instructions, but constant time isn’t really a measure of clock time anyway.

Do you have a vested interest in Booking.com? Interesting that you vehemently defend a common negative experience that booking through third parties is garbage, but you only seem to be defending this particular website.

Maybe it's that being married and having children helped them be successful.

Empathy is knowing the mental feelings of someone because you’ve known them. Sympathy is knowing the physical symptoms of someone because you’ve felt them. Compassion is a way of acting when knowing empathy and sympathy.

I'm asking you to stop arguing inside "simple linguistic ontology".

When I say “we”, I mean each of us. You control your thoughts. You are the doing because you choose the thought to act on.

I’m trying to show you something miraculous. It simply involves understanding that you are not your thoughts.