From: Eliezer S. Yudkowsky (sentience@pobox.com)
Date: Fri Feb 07 2003 - 10:01:14 MST
Stirling Westrup wrote:
>
>>It makes you wonder if life can suddenly come into spontaneous existence from
>>the computations that is taking place on the net. I cannot see why not.
>>Shurely it cannot be a worse medium than atoms in water. Unless it is too
>>deterministic.
>
> Its way too SMALL so far. Atoms in water are MASSIVELY parallel. We're many
> orders of magnitude away from an Internet of sufficient size that you can
> expect that sort of thing to happen spontaneously. (And thats not even
> counting the fact that in many ways the internet is a more hostile place than
> the ancient seas were.)
Doesn't happen, ever, unless some form of order-creating process emerges
within the parallel interactions. The last time this happened, with
evolution as a source of order for chemistry, the order-creating process
was quite extremely slow and used a ridiculous amount of memory. If
things happen any faster on the Internet (i.e., if anything interesting
happens at all) it will be because humans deliberately organized the
Internet, not because the Internet self-organized.
It's not the size of the parallelism. It's the complex order of the
computation the parallelism is performing. If anything in evolution or
humans looks "spontaneous" it means you don't understand its causes.
-- Eliezer S. Yudkowsky http://singinst.org/ Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence
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