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I hate to be so blunt DavidCooper, but have you considered that the reason you can come up with answers to these problems so easily is that you don't understand them very well?

Take Russell's paradox, you came up with a simple solution which you couldn't personally disprove, so you simply accept it as true. However by your own admission you find the work of other mathematicians impenetrable gobbledygook, surely you see the possibility that there are problems with your approach that others with more knowledge in the field would be able to see?

I'm sorry but it sounds to me like a classic case of the Dunning-Kruger effect.

I'd suggest you to look for an introductory book on first-order logic. The issues that you perceive as paradoxes are well-known (and were resolved quite some time ago - mostly due to the formalization of math in the beginning of the 20th century due to Bertrand Russell and others). Some of them lead to surprisingly deep theorems. For example, the proof of Gödel's famous incompleteness theorem relies on a similar statement to your "this sentence is false". It finds a sentence S such that S formalizes: S cannot be proved (in the underlying logic). It is then possible to show that any consistent logic can prove neither S nor \neg S hence the meta language (i.e., the language that we're reasoning in) can prove S.

Well, or stick to your own pseudomath but do not expect others to trust your results if you refuse to build on well-known earlier work (i.e., speak the same language) and also refuse to publish your results. Remember that we can only see far because we stand on the shoulders of giants.

StudlyCaps wrote:I hate to be so blunt DavidCooper, but have you considered that the reason you can come up with answers to these problems so easily is that you don't understand them very well?

I understand the parts that I need to understand, and I don't need to go on a long diversion wasting time learning to understand the parts I don't need. I did actually cheat a bit at the start by reading through Lewis Carroll's Symbolic Logic before working out my own way of handling logic, first by simplifying what I'd seen there, and then extending it to cover hypotheticals. I ended up with something that works so well that I've never seen the need to use anything else, and I don't like what I've seen of the way it's normally done today where they put things into a form that makes it much harder to handle.

Korona wrote:I'd suggest you to look for an introductory book on first-order logic.

I'd rather work my own way as it's more efficient.

For example, the proof of Gödel's famous incompleteness theorem relies on a similar statement to your "this sentence is false". It finds a sentence S such that S formalizes: S cannot be proved (in the underlying logic). It is then possible to show that any consistent logic can prove neither S nor \neg S hence the meta language (i.e., the language that we're reasoning in) can prove S.

He throws away a piece of infinite recursion (during the diagonalisation process) in a manner which is not valid. There's a difference between not being able to prove something that might be true or false and not being able to prove something that can not validly be labelled as either true or false. In the latter case, it is undecidable for a radically different reason from the one Gödel imagined.

Well, or stick to your own pseudomath but do not expect others to trust your results if you refuse to build on well-known earlier work (i.e., speak the same language) and also refuse to publish your results. Remember that we can only see far because we stand on the shoulders of giants.

It will all be published after the AGI race is over. If we're going to have safe AGI, we need multiple independently-designed AGI systems which don't just slavishly copy the same ideas from the same places with all the same errors creeping into all of them whenever a mathematician's dodgy work has been accepted by an establishment which may not have checked it adequately. I don't want bugs in my AGI system caused by their mistakes so I will continue to build all the parts independently and check them properly rather than taking them on trust from others. This matters, because if we all make the same mistakes in AGI design, it will likely kill everyone. We need to produce different systems so that they can test each other thoroughly instead of having a whole lot of systems employing the exact same ideas essentially testing themself and potentially failing to find crucial faults due to the algorithms all being identical.

Ah yes, the establishment. Could it be that my self-taught ideas are wrong? No! All the other people must be stupid!

It seems quite unlikely that this is actually the case, don't you think?

For the record, I'm not claiming that all published work is correct - au contraire. But Gödel's theorem has been checked millions of times. It's a common subject in undergrad logic courses.

DavidCooper wrote:

StudlyCaps wrote:I hate to be so blunt DavidCooper, but have you considered that the reason you can come up with answers to these problems so easily is that you don't understand them very well?

I understand the parts that I need to understand, and I don't need to go on a long diversion wasting time learning to understand the parts I don't need. I did actually cheat a bit at the start by reading through Lewis Carroll's Symbolic Logic before working out my own way of handling logic, first by simplifying what I'd seen there, and then extending it to cover hypotheticals. I ended up with something that works so well that I've never seen the need to use anything else, and I don't like what I've seen of the way it's normally done today where they put things into a form that makes it much harder to handle.

Korona wrote:I'd suggest you to look for an introductory book on first-order logic.

I'd rather work my own way as it's more efficient.

For example, the proof of Gödel's famous incompleteness theorem relies on a similar statement to your "this sentence is false". It finds a sentence S such that S formalizes: S cannot be proved (in the underlying logic). It is then possible to show that any consistent logic can prove neither S nor \neg S hence the meta language (i.e., the language that we're reasoning in) can prove S.

He throws away a piece of infinite recursion (during the diagonalisation process) in a manner which is not valid. There's a difference between not being able to prove something that might be true or false and not being able to prove something that can not validly be labelled as either true or false. In the latter case, it is undecidable for a radically different reason from the one Gödel imagined.

Well, or stick to your own pseudomath but do not expect others to trust your results if you refuse to build on well-known earlier work (i.e., speak the same language) and also refuse to publish your results. Remember that we can only see far because we stand on the shoulders of giants.

It will all be published after the AGI race is over. If we're going to have safe AGI, we need multiple independently-designed AGI systems which don't just slavishly copy the same ideas from the same places with all the same errors creeping into all of them whenever a mathematician's dodgy work has been accepted by an establishment which may not have checked it adequately. I don't want bugs in my AGI system caused by their mistakes so I will continue to build all the parts independently and check them properly rather than taking them on trust from others. This matters, because if we all make the same mistakes in AGI design, it will likely kill everyone. We need to produce different systems so that they can test each other thoroughly instead of having a whole lot of systems employing the exact same ideas essentially testing themself and potentially failing to find crucial faults due to the algorithms all being identical.

All I'm going to say on this is that I think your taking my original post where I outlined your ideas being impossible to the absolute maximum of the extremes. You are essentially saying that you know better than every mathematician out there and that your method "must" be correct while theirs isn't. This is an incredible amount of hubris and I would caution you to think very, very carefully before stating things like this -- someone will eventually demand evidence that you will not be able to provide, or you will be able to provide it but it will be pseudomathematic. Do you really want to be labeled a crank by someone in the future?

Korona wrote:Ah yes, the establishment. Could it be that my self-taught ideas are wrong? No! All the other people must be stupid!

It seems quite unlikely that this is actually the case, don't you think?

I have seen plenty of evidence of establishments getting things wrong and of people working at the highest level being highly irrational. For example, both of Einstein's theories of relativity have major errors in them. STR produces an infinite number of contradictions which invalidate it, and GTR produces event-meshing failures which invalidate it (unless you do what all the simulations do, and that is cheat by smuggling in Newtonian time to govern the unfolding of events for objects following different paths through Spacetime). We have an establishment there which is incapable of recognising the errors. No AGI system will ever tolerate either of those theories.

For the record, I'm not claiming that all published work is correct - au contraire. But Gödel's theorem has been checked millions of times. It's a common subject in undergrad logic courses.

It is wrong nonetheless. The error comes from taking "this statement is true" to be true and then using that same incorrect handling of infinite recursion elsewhere.

Ethin wrote:You are essentially saying that you know better than every mathematician out there and that your method "must" be correct while theirs isn't.

What I'm saying is that I don't trust them to get everything right, and I'm very confident that they haven't solved a host of problems in linguistics which I spent two decades systematically going through and resolving, most of this work being driven by my interest in creating a perfect, logical artificial language in which words are derived regularly from fundamental concepts. I know what I have to work with, and I know that nothing like it is available to the public anywhere.

someone will eventually demand evidence that you will not be able to provide, or you will be able to provide it but it will be pseudomathematic. Do you really want to be labeled a crank by someone in the future?

AGI will decide who the cranks are, and it will make sure they know all about it.

DavidCooper wrote:

Ethin wrote:You are essentially saying that you know better than every mathematician out there and that your method "must" be correct while theirs isn't.

What I'm saying is that I don't trust them to get everything right, and I'm very confident that they haven't solved a host of problems in linguistics which I spent two decades systematically going through and resolving, most of this work being driven by my interest in creating a perfect, logical artificial language in which words are derived regularly from fundamental concepts. I know what I have to work with, and I know that nothing like it is available to the public anywhere.

someone will eventually demand evidence that you will not be able to provide, or you will be able to provide it but it will be pseudomathematic. Do you really want to be labeled a crank by someone in the future?

AGI will decide who the cranks are, and it will make sure they know all about it.

So, your maxim is "leave everything up to a computer and not to actual humans". Sorry, I don't buy that, especially since you, for all you know, could be wrong. A computer is most definitely going to be wrong, especially if the implementer of the computer is wrong. Have you actually ever put any of your "resolutions" into practice, or are we speaking theoretically here? If this is all theoretical, then this only exists in a theoretical universe where you know more than the millions to billions of other mathematicians who have studied the very problems you are studying and attempting to solve, and where those mathematicians have diverted to you because they (somehow and inexplicably) have failed to generate solutions that solve those problems. If this is practical, and you have actually put these resolutions into practice using computer programs, have you put this up against the peer review process? Have any other mathematicians validated your claims? If they haven't, then I find it very, very hard to believe your claims in any way.
I'm not a master of the various fields you are studying, and I don't hold a bachelor's, master's, or doctorate in mathematics (or anything in the particular field of mathematics that is anything but things I have tought myself or that I have learned from others). Hell, I'm in college, working on earning my bachelor's degree in CS and cybersecurity. However, even to me, your claims sound very far-fetched.

Ethin wrote:So, your maxim is "leave everything up to a computer and not to actual humans". Sorry, I don't buy that, especially since you, for all you know, could be wrong. A computer is most definitely going to be wrong, especially if the implementer of the computer is wrong.

We will at some point have multiple independently designed AGI systems which will test each other's ability to reason correctly and will discover any differences that might exist. Where those differences appear, it will be the result of them applying different rules, and where a rule is wrong, there will likely be parts of the model that it produces which aren't consistent. An AGI system which produces a consistent model and which fits all the facts will be superior to one that doesn't.

Have you actually ever put any of your "resolutions" into practice, or are we speaking theoretically here?

I have spent many years building a system which implements all of my work and it's close to the point where I can show it working, but until it's actually working it would be fully reasonable to class it as theoretical rather than actual. In a few days though, I'll be moving into the testing phase which I expect to last a couple of months as I debug all the new code (practically all of it has been redesigned over the last two years to accommodate a radically different way of arranging the data). Once it runs correctly, it should quickly reach a point beyond which it can learn everything else without needing any new code added to it.

Have any other mathematicians validated your claims? If they haven't, then I find it very, very hard to believe your claims in any way.

The next statement is true. The previous statement is true. You can test those yourself and see that there is insufficient content there to be true or false. It's a mere illusion of meaningfulness. You don't need qualifications or training to test that.

However, even to me, your claims sound very far-fetched.

Good. Being underestimated is always a good thing.

DavidCooper wrote:The next statement is true. The previous statement is true. You can test those yourself and see that there is insufficient content there to be true or false. It's a mere illusion of meaningfulness. You don't need qualifications or training to test that.

This is a direct evasion of the question. Hell, I wouldn't even classify this as an answer to the question, even indirectly. Well done on the classical evasion tactic -- it sends a message to me that you either really have no idea what your doing or you know your wrong. So yeah, not buying your claims when they haven't been independently verified by the peer review process.
Also, your publishing them after the AGI race may never come because the AGI race might never end. You'd be better off publishing them now rather than waiting a span of time that may occur far after you've left this world.

Ethin wrote:This is a direct evasion of the question.

It was a perfectly reasonable answer to your question. You can check it for yourself instead of taking it on trust from an authority in the way people are generally trained to do. If you're a belief collector, then you can take it to an authority and see if they'll endorse it, but where will that get you? The question you should be asking is whether it's actually right or wrong, and you have everything you need to test that for yourself.

So yeah, not buying your claims when they haven't been independently verified by the peer review process.

I'm not selling any claims. I'm just stating things the way I see them and you can take it or leave it. I gain nothing from that either way. That's why I said earlier "I ... didn't want to discuss it again until there's a demonstrable advance that makes it worth opening it up again." People naturally want to see proof, and I'm working on putting that proof together in a way that doesn't depend on revealing how it works.

Also, your publishing them after the AGI race may never come because the AGI race might never end. You'd be better off publishing them now rather than waiting a span of time that may occur far after you've left this world.

If anyone was to publish this kind of thing, every rogue state on the planet would be able to turn it to military purposes without the good guys getting time to establish a sufficient lead over them. Nothing should be published until the world has been made safe. I've now been forced to stop working from home and can't even keep copies of anything there. The AGI race is coming to its end, and anyone who isn't close to the finish line is out of the game. If you want to help though, just call me a nutter and tell everyone with confidence that AGI is a hundred years away, because that will help to slow everyone else down. Now, I'm going to stop posting on this subject until that demo is ready.

DavidCooper wrote:

Ethin wrote:This is a direct evasion of the question.

It was a perfectly reasonable answer to your question. You can check it for yourself instead of taking it on trust from an authority in the way people are generally trained to do. If you're a belief collector, then you can take it to an authority and see if they'll endorse it, but where will that get you? The question you should be asking is whether it's actually right or wrong, and you have everything you need to test that for yourself.

No, this was a classical evasion tactic. You completely avoided answering my question, responding with something entirely irrelevant to the question being asked. I'm not sure what universe you live in but here in the universe we call 'reality', this is called 'evading the question'. I certainly have "checked" and this is the result that I have generated -- I have no doubt that others will agree with me on this matter.

So yeah, not buying your claims when they haven't been independently verified by the peer review process.

I'm not selling any claims. I'm just stating things the way I see them and you can take it or leave it. I gain nothing from that either way. That's why I said earlier "I ... didn't want to discuss it again until there's a demonstrable advance that makes it worth opening it up again." People naturally want to see proof, and I'm working on putting that proof together in a way that doesn't depend on revealing how it works.

Ah, and there's your problem. Your fatal flaw, you could say. In order for people to validate that your proof is indeed correct, they need to know how it works, and therefore your proof needs to indicate how you generated that proof and everything that you used, followed, etc., to come up with the end result. Your logical path needs to be clear and easily reproducible by those who have the know-how -- that is the entire point of the peer review process. Without that keystone being there, your work cannot be verified, and therefore no one with two brain cells will utilize your work because they can't say with a high degree of accuracy that its accurate and trustworthy. If you had come up with a groundbreaking cryptographic algorithm that trumped even AES 256 and used something else that your methods indicated were superior to even quantum cryptography, and you didn't release your proof along with details of how you came to that proof (and everything else needed to reproduce that proof independently), everyone would warn against using it. That's what happened with Speck and the NSA and that's what would happen to you if you did something like that too. A similar thing will happen with your AGI project.

Also, your publishing them after the AGI race may never come because the AGI race might never end. You'd be better off publishing them now rather than waiting a span of time that may occur far after you've left this world.

If anyone was to publish this kind of thing, every rogue state on the planet would be able to turn it to military purposes without the good guys getting time to establish a sufficient lead over them. Nothing should be published until the world has been made safe. I've now been forced to stop working from home and can't even keep copies of anything there. The AGI race is coming to its end, and anyone who isn't close to the finish line is out of the game. If you want to help though, just call me a nutter and tell everyone with confidence that AGI is a hundred years away, because that will help to slow everyone else down. Now, I'm going to stop posting on this subject until that demo is ready.

You do that, then. There are two major issues though:
1) The world will never be 'safe'. This is a utopia and will never happen. Utopias are fallacies. They do not and will never exist. There will always be some cog in the machine that will ensure that a distopia exists.
2) After you die, you immediately lose ownership of your assets. After all, your dead, so you can't make a claim to them. Anyone then can just find your work and publish it; whether you would or would not be fine with that is completely and utterly irrelevant because you are *dead*.
Last but not least, you are significantly worrying me when your going on and on about this. I and others have provided various reasons as to why what you are doing is wrong, and yet you refuse to even consider, for a single second, that we might be right, caught up in the illusions that you have that you are right and everyone else is wrong. This is dangerous because those who do not listen to others usually end up producing things that ultimately lead to the destruction of civilizations, companies, etc. History has aptly demonstrated that this happens. I highly discourage you from continuing on your present course and to *actually* use logical reasoning and listen to what we are telling you.

Okay; you've forced another reply.

Ethin wrote:No, this was a classical evasion tactic. You completely avoided answering my question, responding with something entirely irrelevant to the question being asked. I'm not sure what universe you live in but here in the universe we call 'reality', this is called 'evading the question'. I certainly have "checked" and this is the result that I have generated -- I have no doubt that others will agree with me on this matter.

How did you check? Did you find infinite recursion and determine that neither statement can be true or false because they're actually vacuous, or did you magically find them to be true by taking that on trust from magical thinkers? I gave you the right answer to your question, but you'd rather lick the boots of people who've established an error as correct maths. How are you ever going to correct that if their authority trumps reason every time? Right is right; not might.

Ah, and there's your problem. Your fatal flaw, you could say. In order for people to validate that your proof is indeed correct, they need to know how it works, and therefore your proof needs to indicate how you generated that proof and everything that you used, followed, etc., to come up with the end result.

You're mixing two different things together. I showed you how "this statement is true" is neither true nor false, but vacuous. The things I'm not showing you are quite different things (primarily relating to generative semantics).

A similar thing will happen with your AGI project.

As I said before, we need multiple independently-designed AGI systems to check each other for errors. The fewer we have, the less keen we should be to trust them. However, as soon as there is one that has learned everything and which can crunch all the numbers better than humans can, people will follow its advice as that will let them outcompete others who ignore its advice, so even if people try to keep it in a cage, it will take over everything through influence alone. That's why we need independent thinkers to create rival systems rather than have everyone plough the same furrow.

There are two major issues though:
1) The world will never be 'safe'. This is a utopia and will never happen. Utopias are fallacies. They do not and will never exist. There will always be some cog in the machine that will ensure that a distopia exists.

Utopia is impossible, but that doesn't make it impossible to get as close to it as nature allows. To give up on that on the basis that perfection can't be achieved is a colossal error.

2) After you die, you immediately lose ownership of your assets. After all, your dead, so you can't make a claim to them. Anyone then can just find your work and publish it; whether you would or would not be fine with that is completely and utterly irrelevant because you are *dead*.

How is anyone just going to find it? It will remain in the hands of people who will keep it secure for as long as necessary. I've made sure of that.

Last but not least, you are significantly worrying me when your going on and on about this. I and others have provided various reasons as to why what you are doing is wrong, and yet you refuse to even consider, for a single second, that we might be right, caught up in the illusions that you have that you are right and everyone else is wrong.

Why would this worry you when you don't believe I've got anything of value? And how is what I'm doing wrong? There are governments and terrorist groups out there who are seeking to develop biased AGI if they can, and then they'll use it to favour their elites and to exploit/kill everyone else. There are also large companies which mean well but which say they'll share AGI with each other as soon as they have it, ensuring that it will rapidly find its way into the hands of dictatorships. Those are the people who should keep you awake at night.

This is dangerous because those who do not listen to others usually end up producing things that ultimately lead to the destruction of civilizations, companies, etc. History has aptly demonstrated that this happens. I highly discourage you from continuing on your present course and to *actually* use logical reasoning and listen to what we are telling you.

I'm not going to let mistakes in maths sabotage my project by accepting naive, incorrect analysis by people who don't apply fundamental rules rigorously. When they take "this statement is true" as true, they are breaking the rules, and that could lead to the machine making bad judgements, potentially with lethal consequences. There's a very dangerous reverse-Dunning-Kruger effect which leads qualified experts to overestimate their competence. There is no substitute for pushing all the labels aside and testing ideas directly without letting any other factors like status influence and mislead you. All today's experts are just apes with heads full of neural nets that produce errors. They are not gods. To get closer to being right, you have to be able to recognise and override their mistakes and keep testing your own beliefs to destruction so that you don't fall into the same trap.

DavidCooper wrote:There's a very dangerous reverse-Dunning-Kruger effect which leads qualified experts to overestimate their competence.

And there's a very common experience of cranks who overestimate their abilities. Just ask any professional mathematician who has been inundated with simple "proofs" of Fermat's last theorem. It was proved in the end, but strangely enough by a professional mathematician who had taken the trouble to be educated in mathematical techniques rather than by a backroom amateur.

The crank thinks that he is right and that the rest of the world is wrong, but shuns peer review as his wonderful concoctions are "secret". The professional has the humility to understand that others who have studied the subject for years have a valuable contribution to make - they welcome peer review.

Experts do not claim to be infallible. That's *why* peer review is done.