| > Many of Dreyfuss' and other similar arguments reduce do dualism when you start digging into them. I don't have the time to dig into the specific article, but here's some immediate questions: To me it sounds dualist if intelligence is disembodied. If the substrate doesn't matter, only the functionality, then that sounds like there's something additional to the world than just the physical constintuents. But of course, embodied versions of intelligence need to answer the sort of questions you posed. It should be noticed that Dreyfuss wrote his objections in the 50s and 60s during the period of classical AI. I don't know whether he addressed the question of robot children, or simulated childhoods. We don't have the sort of thing even today, and we also don't have AGI. Some of his objections still stand, although machine learning and robotics research has made inroads. > Math? Me, I'm a formalist. It's all a game that we've made up the rules to. So why is physics so heavily reliant on mathematics? Quite a few physicists think the world has a mathematical structure. > For example, "...there is always consciousness, information and math...": without a tight, and very technical, definition of consciousness, that seems to be assuming the conclusion. Qualia would be the philosophical term for subjective experiences of color, sound, pain, etc. Reducing those to their material correlations has been notoriously difficult, and there is still no agreement on what that entails. As for information, some scientists have been exploring the idea that chemical space leads to the emergence of information as an additional thing to physics which needs to be incorporated into our scientific understanding of the world. That we can't really explain biology without it. |
"To me it sounds dualist if intelligence is disembodied. If the substrate doesn't matter, only the functionality, then that sounds like there's something additional to the world than just the physical constintuents."
Off the top of my head, what the substrate is doesn't matter, but that there is a substrate does. Intelligence is the behavior of the physical constituents.
"So why is physics so heavily reliant on mathematics? Quite a few physicists think the world has a mathematical structure."
Because humans are very good at defining the rules when we need them? Because alternate rules are nothing but a curiosity even to mathematicians unless there is a use---such as a physical process---for them?
One of the problems with qualia, as a topic of discussion, is that I can never be entirely sure that you have it. I can assume you do, and rocks don't, but that is about as far as I can get.