What is the most absurd claim you believe? Tuesday, Mar 21 2006
philosophy 7:29 pm
Marginal Revolution’s Tyler Cowen, a professor of economics at George Mason University, asks, “What is the most absurd claim you believe?” Mine, of course, is that Artificial General Intelligence with access to its own source code will recursively self-improve so fast as to achieve near-total control of local physical reality after a modest duration of time. “Absurd claims” by others and some of my responses:
John Searle is substantially correct on all his important claims about the possibility of Turing Machines having intelligence.
Searle’s claims have been extensively refuted by Ray Kurzweil, among others. There’s a deep urge to believe that humans have a certain “special sauce” that gives us genuine creative intelligence. We look for this special sauce in biology, psychology, philosophy, you name it. It isn’t there. Humans are casual functionalist systems just like anything else.
Mathematical Platonism.
See the cognitive science of mathematics, i.e., “Where Does Mathematics Come From?” by George Lakoff and Rafael E. Núñez. I too believed in mathematical platonism until recently. The showstopping argument is that, in fact, there are different maths based on different forms of set theory, but we never use them, and that our particular mathematics is nothing special, but developed because its structure was most amenable to the way our homonid brains worked. Particular branches of mathematics like algebra, geometry, etc., were invented because they correspond nicely to our kinesthetic image schemas (ways of thinking rooted in observations about our own bodies).
That what we perceive to be the Universe and everything that’s in it is really a simulation on a computer.
It’s funny, because as I scroll down from here, the ‘absurd beliefs’ seem to lean more and more towards the transhumanistic – on an economics professors’ blog that has nothing to do with transhumanism and rarely mentions it! We’re taking over, I tell you. Regarding the above – sure the Universe could be a simulation! But it might not be. What we think is “evidence” in favor of everything being a simulation; the cap on maximum velocity, for example, or quantum uncertainty, could simply be a natural phenomenon. And vice versa. Unless we actually bust out and start communicating with the people running the simulation, who confirm its existence, we can never know for sure.
People like Daniel Radetsky will pop up at this point and say, “how can you reject mathematical Platonism and accept computational realism!?!” The question is, how can pieces of mathematics running on a computer constitute real people, consciousness, an external environment worthy of the name “real”, and so on? Well, ultimately, persons running on a computer wouldn’t really be “pieces of math” – they’d be dynamic self-aware information systems whose intentionality (philosophical blabber for “will”) operates on configurations of logic gates rather than atoms. The “necessary conditions” for consciousness may turn out being somewhat restrictive, but what we know about the brain strongly suggests these conditions are causal in nature (fulfilled by virtue of a certain configuration) rather than biological (fulfilled by virtue of being embodied in proteins).
That organized religion will atrophy in my lifetime.
Hurrah!
Kids have an incredible capacity for learning. If all children received talented instruction starting at a young age, then everyone’s intellectual potential would be essentially unlimited.
I agree that children should be taught (in a way that’s fun) more extensively, at an earlier age, when possible. But unlimited intellectual potential? That’s the blank slate fallacy at its finest, right there.
Abolish the death penalty and instead make killers and rapists do slave labor. That would really create an incentive not to kill…
Unfortunately studies have shown that incentives along these lines only go so far… some humans (if not all) are built to evil under the right (wrong) circumstances. :-( This one was even written by a woman – I had hoped that women were less inclined to build slave labor camps than men, when given dictatorial powers.
I’m not superstitious, because it brings bad luck.
This made me lol.
I believe that left-wing politicians should be paid the minimum wage to show their solidarity with the poor.
Intriguing… unfortunately, politicians with ripped clothes probably wouldn’t be very effective at raising money for programs that benefit the poor. As an aside: Arnold has opted out of receiving a salary, as governor of California. Not that this matters, as he’s practically a billionaire, but still.
That at a deeply fundamental level, the universe makes no “sense”. Or rather that the ability to accurately scale, measure, quantify, or even explain the universe has an eventual limit.
Hm. Maybe. Maybe we’ll have to invest exponential amounts of resources to get linear returns in physics. It’s true that the universe doesn’t care about us, and that it may resist quantification forever.
Then comes the flood of immortalists:
I believe that there is a decent chance that I will live for several hundred years.
If you can make it through the next 10-30 years, you’ll be able to live for as long as you want to.
I will also cite myself for believing some version of potential human immortality.
I have to chime in on the side of the immortals. I believe that I am a member of either the first generation to live forever, or the last to die.
I think a lot of this change of heart in the past year can be attributed to Aubrey’s media explosion.
That vengence and vendetta are perfectly acceptable alternatives to courts of law, and that individuals who practice each should be lauded, not prosecuted, by government authorities.
…no.
That if all illegal recreational drugs were legalized in America, it would make little or no difference in rates of addiction or rates at which teen-agers experiment with drugs.
Agreed.
That the hot chick who hostesses at the Italian place down the street has a thing for me.
Heh.
Given whatever the natural limitation of human intelligence is, people are fundamentally as smart as they want to be.
No. :-(
Telling children that they can be whatever they want to be is bad advice.
Nurture, all the way.
We want control so bad. But we forget that we only exist as a machine to propagate DNA. We exist because DNA needed us to procreate, not the other way around.
I believe that if such a thing as real artificial sentience ever comes into being, that we as a society and its engineers as its engenderers need to raise, treat, and love individuals possessing it just like any others of our children.
Well-meaning, but anthropomorphic. You can build an AI any way you want, if you have the theory and the programmers. Some AIs could be programmed to maul your face if you show them love. Others could be nice people no matter how you treat them. The moving parts between stimulus and response are pre-configured in humans, but not in Artificial Intelligence.
Psychiatry is in no way valid medicine, indeed not even valid science, and has done far more harm than good over the history of humanity.
No comment.
I believe that consciousness is primary reality not a derived phenomenon, everything else we see is the contents of Consciousness.
Perhaps!
That I went to college, worked incredibly hard, graduated (econ), and did it all to only end up as a clerk.
:-(
Math is somehow not as timeless and unattached to human contingency as it’s lauded to be.
Here, here!
That nanotechnology is as likely to kill us all as to make us live forever (and that both likelihoods are high).
More transhumanist craziness.
That’s all that catches my eye. Now for a piece of technology news:
Samsung is releasing a 32GB flash drive for mobile applications in the “not too distant future” (presumably this year). The drive is light (15g), noiseless, and uses around 5% of the power of current hard drives. (According to the article, “a typical mobile hard drive consumes somewhere between 1W and 2W of power in seek, read and write processes and between 0.2W and 0.8W when idle.”) Because the hard drive only consumes about 10%-20% of the power in a typical laptop, this translates into extended battery life of around 20 – 40 minutes, which isn’t bad, especially in light of the fact that it seems technologically easier to reduce power consumption than boost battery power. Flash drives are ideal for applications in future embedded and wearable computing technologies because of their low power consumption and noise. (Via Slashdot.)
“‘I believe that if such a thing as real artificial sentience ever comes into being, that we as a society and its engineers as its engenderers need to raise, treat, and love individuals possessing it just like any others of our children.’
Well-meaning, but anthropomorphic. ”
I’m not sure that this correctly expresses the meaning of the term “need” as used by the poster, But I do agree that we probably //should// anthropomorphize machine intelligence in certain ways. Not in the sense of making the error of assuming an MI is human in ways it isn’t, but that it would be a better for us to design MI to resemble humans as closely as practiceable before departing from our familiar base example of sapience and capability. For safety’s sake.
“I believe that consciousness is primary reality not a derived phenomenon, everything else we see is the contents of Consciousness.”
This is pure philosophical Idealism, and not exactly new or radical. Burke et al. believed it in the 18th Century, and used it to solve the subject-object duality problem (the other solution is materialism). However, if everything is just ideas, then “ideas” become a meaningless layer painted onto reality. You can have everything made of atoms, or everything made of ideas of atoms. Slash! Occam’s vorpal blade goes snickety-snack.
“The showstopping argument is that, in fact, there are different maths based on different forms of set theory, but we never use them”
This argument is not even close to showstopping. Does it show that platonism is wrong or that the platonic heavens are bigger than we thought? Underdetermination strikes again!
“John Searle is substantially correct on all his important claims about the possibility of Turing Machines having intelligence.”
The question is whether they can be conscious. AIXI shows that, in theory, they can be intelligent. But Searle shows that, in theory, then cannot be conscious (unless silicon chips have the special sauce).
“I’m not superstitious, because it brings bad luck.”
The funniest thing about this is that it’s probably true.
“That organized religion will atrophy in my lifetime.”
And this one is almost certainly false. Religion exists and survives because humans, as a side effect of our eagerness and need to assign causality to our environment, are increidibly good at being irrational.
Maybe I should take you up on the whole guest blogging thing. We can be a transhumanist Hannity & Colmes.
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