I guess I'd say a Turing machine is my definition of a machine.
And I suppose the implication is that if we are machines, operating on a stream of input, does that make us deterministic?
EDIT: What I'm ultimately interested in is if we, as humans, are operating in a realm that logic cannot operate in. If that makes any sense? I'll probably have to define realm!
Turing machine is mathematical model for computation. Deterministic Turing machine (DTM) is computationally equivalent to Non-Deterministic Turing machine (NTM) but the time complexity may not be the same.
>What I'm ultimately interested in is if we, as humans, are operating in a realm that logic cannot operate in. If that makes any sense?
Any mix of logic and randomness is still a machine. You must assume something spiritual if you think there exist rational action without computation behind it. Randomness does not help there.
> You must assume something spiritual if you think there exist rational action without computation behind it.
I'm still uncertain i.e. spiritual. I'm finding, as I grow older, logic and reason fail to answer for my experiences. Whether that's a shortcoming in my own ability to comprehend logic and reason, or because logic and reason simply do not have all the answers, I do not know.
> Randomness does not help there.
The human condition, one might argue, emerged as a way to handle randomness. I suppose, at some level, if we were to remove all randomness from the universe, life would be pretty pointless (insomuch as life is not already pointless.)
Well, the future as a mystery, something to be discovered, not known in advance, depends on randomness. I would argue if life weren't random and we could see past, present, and future with perfect clarity, it would be a little pointless. Every action you took, you'd know the outcome before taking the action. It's boring.
There is no purpose of life, in my opinion. But with randomness it's a lot more intresting.
As always, being deterministic may make a system predictable in theory, through in practice there are to many variables for it to matter. To soften the existential dread.
You could argue that "man-made machines", "biological machines" (all of life, animal, vegetal and fungus) and "simple matter machines" (like stars are engines or telluric planets are combustion heaters), even the "surface natural ecosystem of Earth", are all different material implementations of machines: organized systems. Carbon-based, copper-based, hydrogen-based... you might map the whole periodic table of elements minus the rare column perhaps.
Ultimately you'd find a common unicity — like electrical charges, strong/weak force, arrangements of "gates" and "structure" etc. — but used in different ways (for instance iirc charged clouds of gas in space don't form new stars because gravity at close range is weaker than the charge that repels them, only strong enough at larger distances to hold them together; that's dramatically different from the use of charges in biological cells).
The cosmos itself is but a big machine. Who's to say we (I mean the whole planet, maybe star system, maybe galaxy itself) aren't actually just a single "cell" of the cosmos? That we are part of a much bigger machine, that we are like those processing units on dendrites in the article, if the universe is a big brain of sorts?[1]
These are all types of machines (X. process of information; Y. engines to convert energy; Z. structures that "restrict" "flow" like gates, transistors, cell membranes, dendrites; N...), which apparently may be expressed, materially implemented in different ways.
To take your question about logic.
If you mean the universal logic exposed above, I don't think so personally — merely because there's no evidence for it whatsoever, no observation; and there's also no need if we accept that from such "machinery" complexity may emerge complex systems (e.g. humans).
If you mean logic from within the human mind — and this begs the question of whether maths and physics are "invented" or "discovered" in the background — then we must assume a subjective answer, at best an aggregate of "non-disproved facts" that we can all agree on within normalcy (edge cases helping us understand said average norm).
"Logic" is but one of several operating modes. Are we more than that? Most certainly yes. That's the experience of all of us. Because perception is so centered on thought, we tend to overappreciate the importance of thinking in our lives, in our behaviors and even values; but the relative picture gradually revealed by biology and psychology and sociology and economics etc. is that we are mostly irrational, mostly automatic (trained habits, patterns recognition, educated intuition, etc), and actually very little in the way of "logical behaviors units".
I'll let you ponder the discrepancy from an absolutely (perhaps) low-level logical machine to the possibility of a chaotic non-logical emergent high-level behavior. What it means for life, for AI, and possibly much bigger or smaller things we consider "inert", for now.
> Because perception is so centered on thought, we tend to overappreciate the importance of thinking in our lives, in our behaviors and even values
Very true. Thought can become our master easily. As a programmer, I often find myself struggling to get out of 'logic' mode or 'thinking' mode.
> I'll let you ponder the discrepancy from an absolutely (perhaps) low-level logical machine to the possibility of a chaotic non-logical emergent high-level behavior. What it means for life, for AI, and possibly much bigger or smaller things we consider "inert", for now.
Wonderfully put! I think the ideas of emergent behaviours are a saving grace for the incessant desire of ours to reduce everything to its atomic (in the sense of an atomic operation, not an atom) components. The emergent behaviours, can't be predicted. They can't be algorithmized. Becuase to build algorithms one must go down to those atomic operations.
My wider concern is that we are currently obsessed with analytical thought and philosophy and that the continental philosophy has become a 2nd class citizen. I think this has happened becuase analytical thought lends itself to being algorithmized, whereas continental philosophy does not.
Sorry, that was a bit of a tangent!
Yes! Love the pictures! I have had the same thought/feeling when I first saw them too!
> I think the ideas of emergent behaviours are a saving grace for the incessant desire of ours to reduce everything to its atomic (in the sense of an atomic operation, not an atom) components.
Very well said! Humans think a lot in terms of dichotomies (here the micro/macro, or whichever scale you want to consider), but I've heard biologists and physicists explaining that the closest to fundamental functions is closer to e (natural log), sinus (and hyperbolic stuff), the notion of "binary polarity" is very specific and quite limited — look at the Standard Model, it's clearly more complicated.
I personally think that's how the dimension of time emerges in our perception (any perfect observer): periodicity in all phenomena (but with e.g. Fourier it gets extremely complex at emergent thresholds), the arrow of time (non-periodicity is basically high entropy, 'heat death'/homogeneity).
Cue any such human-driven dichotomy (I think this one is relatively easy: the deepest processing system is probably close to "emotions", and these at the lowest level work in terms of "rather good" and "rather bad" (different sub-regions of the brain) + some "general integration" (third region). And what do you know, we tend to be heavily polarized in general, it's like most people feel reassured (familiarity) when things are explained in terms of black and white, left and right, ones and zeros.
(Just my thoughts on it.)
> My wider concern is that we are currently obsessed with analytical thought and philosophy and that the continental philosophy has become a 2nd class citizen. I think this has happened becuase analytical thought lends itself to being algorithmized, whereas continental philosophy does not.
Strongly agreed. I think we're witnessing a kind of "revival" through many fields (some spiritual, some historical). Things are moving. I think dumb things like numbers also influence people, it's been ~20 years since the turn of the millenium and that's enough for 1 generation to weigh in and the others to accept change because "oh new era, obviously, new number!" — this plays at the subconscious level of very crude processing, me thinks.
I guess I'd say a Turing machine is my definition of a machine.
And I suppose the implication is that if we are machines, operating on a stream of input, does that make us deterministic?
EDIT: What I'm ultimately interested in is if we, as humans, are operating in a realm that logic cannot operate in. If that makes any sense? I'll probably have to define realm!