Xref: utzoo talk.philosophy.misc:1814 comp.ai:3059 sci.psychology:1328
Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!ames!mailrus!cornell!uw-beaver!uoregon!stevev
From: stevev@uoregon.uoregon.edu (Steve VanDevender)
Newsgroups: talk.philosophy.misc,comp.ai,sci.psychology
Subject: Re: Artificial Intelligence and Intelligence (long)
Message-ID: <3498@uoregon.uoregon.edu>
Date: 12 Jan 89 00:25:38 GMT
References: <564@soleil.UUCP>
Reply-To: stevev@drizzle.UUCP (Steve VanDevender)
Organization: University of Oregon, Computer Science, Eugene OR
Lines: 87

In article <564@soleil.UUCP> peru@soleil.UUCP (Dave Peru) writes:
>I think alot of people have been a little hard on Guillen.  This guy has
>some really neat things to say.  Consider from his essay "Irrational Thinking"
>from his book "Bridges to Infinity" (p.38-39):
>
>"Despite this preeminence of rational numbers, science does need irrational
> numbers.  For well over a century, scientists have been taking note of a
> growing inventory of special quantities whose appearance in nearly every
> scientific theory signifies their import in the modern description of
> space-time.  These natural constants can be seen as nature's vital statistics,
> and right now it looks as though every one of them is an irrational number.
> For example, one of these constants, the speed of light, has been measured
> out to nine decimal places, and the digits have yet to show any pattern.
> (Expressed in millions of meters per second, our best measurement of the
> speed of light is the number .299792458.)  Another constant is one that is
> descriptive of dynamic behavior at the atomic level.  It is called the
> fine-structure constant, and there is no pattern to its digits even when
> measured out to ten decimal places.  (Our best measurement of the fine-
> structure constant, which is a dimensionless quantity, is .0072973502.) In
> physics alone there are more than a dozen of these constants, which have
> been measured out to anywhere from a few to eleven decimal places, and not
> one of them has a pattern to its digits."
>
>When I read this I was astonished.  Of course, some of these constants may
>not be irrational numbers.  But what would be really awesome is to come up
>with some physics that would predict these irrational numbers.
>
>Anyway, some more fluff for the pile.
>

This is definitely fluff.  It is ridiculous to try to read meaning into
the digits of the number for the speed of light in meters per second.
Meters and seconds are entirely arbitrary measurements of space and time
and it's not surprising that physical constants are going to show no
patterns when expressed in base ten and when measured in metric units.

You should know that in many physics problems, measurements are normalized
so that, say, c is 1.  The values of the constants themselves are not
important.  The relationships between the values of physical constants are.

It is slightly more interesting to consider dimensionless constants
like the fine structure constant, which are independent of any
measuring system.  However, who is to say that there is no pattern to
its digits when we only have ten decimal places and uncertainty to
work with, and we're looking at it in base ten anyway?  When the Planck
length is on the order of 10^-23 meters, is ten or eleven decimal digits
of a constant enough to make a pronouncement on?

Guillen's title "Irrational Thinking" may apply to more than just his
essay.  To claim that numbers we can only measure to finite precision
and which involve uncertainty are therefore irrational is, well,
irrational.  Rational numbers are perfectly adequate for representing
the physical constants he talks about.

From what I've seen of Guillen so far, I can see why people are hard
on him.  He may have fascinating mystic insights but his attempts to
justify them in scientific or mathematical terms don't work.  The best
I can say about his attempt to make an analogy between creating a
continuum of numbers out of the null set and the ability of the mind
to produce unpredictable thoughts is that the analogy is strained.
Does he show that the mind produces some insights out of nothing?  No.
Can he know that it does?  I think not.  It is just as tenable to say
that a mind produces insights via processes that are not accessible to
that mind's own consciousness, from information it already has.  This
also counters the justification that sensory deprivation somehow shows
that the mind makes something out of nothing.  People who climb into a
tank have memories, and when they start to hallucinate their minds
presumably aren't creating visions out of nothing--they're creating
hallucinations out of what is already in their minds.  Would a mind
that is completely blank, with no prior experiences, and that is
deprived of all input hallucinate?  Is this experiment possible?
Probably not.  Guillen isn't talking about this experiment, anyway,
but it's what he really should be talking about if he wants to claim
that a mind can generate something from nothing like Conway's theory
can generate numbers from the null set.

I think the reductionism/holism argument boils down to what I think is
a pair of clearer questions:  Is the universe explainable by rules?
Can those rules be derived by observing the universe?  Science assumes that
the answer to both of those questions is "yes."  My understanding of
holism leads me to think that it would answer "no" to one or both of those
questions.
-- 
Steve VanDevender 	stevev@drizzle.cs.uoregon.edu
"Bipedalism--an unrecognized disease affecting over 99% of the population.
Symptoms include lack of traffic sense, slow rate of travel, and the
classic, easily recognized behavior known as walking."