hal@rain.org wrote:
>
> Eliezer S. Yudkowsky, <sentience@pobox.com>, writes:
> > I entirely disagree. These things aren't limits. Laws, maybe, but not
> > limits. This century's history has been the history of people realizing
> > that so-called "limits" had been obviously bankrupt from the beginning.
> > 100 years CRNS (current-rate no-Singularity) from now, everyone will be
> > laughing at us for believing in the lightspeed limit when there was
> > General Relativity, wormholes, Warp-Tardis Drive...
>
> I am confused here whether you consider lightspeed to be a limit or a law.
> Is it something that we will transcend, or a law which we will use as
> a tool?
I consider it to be part of the structure of reality, but not necessarily a limit. Will anyone ever step on the gas and go faster than "C"? Not without magic. But that doesn't mean you can't get to Alpha Centauri in less than four years; you can compress space, warp space, go to your destination in 4.3 years and then loop around a Tipler cylinder, etc. etc. Special Relativity imposes an absolute lightspeed limit on instantaneous velocity relative to immediate space, but when you consider actual travel, on a global scale, then you start dealing with General Relativity - the speed of light is also relative.
> > As for the uncertainty principle, despite the name, it isn't a limit on
> > knowledge. Not at all. It describes a very specific process known as
> > state-vector reduction which randomizes certain quantities at a certain
> > point in time. This process, in turn, has all kinds of interesting
> > potential - including an apparent FTL propagation, come to think of it.
> > Calling it a "limit" is abusing the term, if you ask me. I say it's a tool.
>
> I can see that such things as quantum uncertainty, or conservation
> of energy, or the law of gravity can be seen either as limits that
> constrain what we do, or as tools that we can exploit to accomplish
> our aims. It is a bit harder to see how FTL limitations can be used
> as a tool, but perhaps once we are able to bump up against them things
> will look different. Black hole engineering, for example, is intimately
> intertwined with the FTL limits and may be an important tool someday.
Precisely. I don't think the term "physical limit" is appropriate for anything on which a paper has been published showing a loophole. Then it's a "practical limit", and we know what happens to those...
> > Actually, my position that all laws are malleable isn't based on an
> > Extropian morality; it's based on my ontological belief that "laws" are
> > actually "stuff". Anything real can be modified; if laws are real, they
> > can be modified. A rigid, Turing-like distinction between "program" and
> > "content", or "rules" and "cells", starts getting you into the same
> > paradoxes that made me a noncomputationalist in the first place.
>
> This is an interesting speculation, but it is not really a philosophically
> defensible derivation IMO. You need to analyze the meaning of "real"
> very carefully. I suspect that when you do, you find that when you say
> "anything real can be modified" you mean one thing, and when you say that
> "laws are real" you mean something else by "real".
That is *exactly* what I mean the same thing by, as it were. I don't believe in Platonic laws. All laws are stuff.
> When you say that you are a noncomputationalist, do you mean that it will
> be impossible to construct a working AI which is conscious?
I mean it'll take special hardware for old-fashioned qualia - probably not very difficult hardware, either, since an ordinary brain can hack it. Almost certainly, human-equivalent intelligence won't take any special hardware.
> Or do you
Yes. Turing machines can be intelligent, but "intelligence" is an
observer-relative property; there's no absolute property test for
"intelligence". I think that having any sort of absolute property test
obviously requires an absolute test for "instantiation", a concept which
has no mathematical definition. In fact, my attempts to construct a
definition led me to think that instantiation is fundamentally
observer-relative. Since I believe in an absolute test for "reality"
and "consciousness", ergo reality and consciousness are noncomputable.
But I don't believe in an absolute test for "intelligence", and so I see
no reason why I can't construct a transhuman AI.
> mean that computational worlds holding intelligent entities may exist,
> but that our own particular world is not computational, because of certain
> specific characteristics that may not be shared with other worlds?
I don't believe that "2 + 2 = 4" is a fundamental law, and I don't believe that "2 + 2 = 4" is real. I can't define "instantiation" and I don't believe it can be defined; either everything Turing-computable is real, or nothing Turing-computable is real, and I believe "nothing". "2 + 2 = 4" is Turing computable, so it's not real. Arithmetic is an abstracted property, a derivative of underlying reality, that is "proved" by induction and that I use because it's convenient. Maybe the Turing laws and mathematics can be derived from the underlying laws in some way; even so, it's still just an abstraction - and I don't believe that abstractions are objectively real.
--
sentience@pobox.com Eliezer S. Yudkowsky
http://pobox.com/~sentience/tmol-faq/meaningoflife.html
Running on BeOS Typing in Dvorak Programming with Patterns
Voting for Libertarians Heading for Singularity There Is A Better Way