In my efforts to specify several different developmental and architectural paths for general intelligence I pointed out that a defining problem for epistemology (computational epistemology perhaps) and computer science is to determine if and when a program/organism has the cognitive capacity to "do physics", to decode its very own environment, as we humans think we are doing with our universe. It is a recurring feeling in human history that we have nearly completed the physics project, including recent Theories of Everything, while my intuition is rather the opposite, that it is probably impossible to decode the physical world and we are just children building sandcastles. The intractability of these problems is usually exploited by dualists that maintain that some "magic sauce" from another dimension is needed to keep the intellect reverse engineering the world, while strangely my intuition is more in the non-dualist direction (please note that physics is epistemologically and practically different from general problem-solving intelligence, but probably AGI-complete in its own right).
With this out of the way, I realized we do not need to keep speculating about non-dualism, we can attempt to create the non-dualist, Advaita Artificial Intelligence. The idea is to build software that attempts to decode the physics of its virtual or otherwise world, while being embodied in it. A variation would be to try to "understand" computer languages which of course are much more like physics than natural languages. As I have claimed repeatedly, creating AGI will give rise to its twin and nearly intractable problem of translating from an alien language with very few clues. Perhaps we would have to depend on visual confirmations of a successful AdvaitaAI, where the measure of success would be to observe simulations inside the virtual world that correctly predict the outcome of virtual experiments again and again - a dream within a dream! And we would be well advised to include surprising physical laws that are only rarely in effect, but the initial challenge would be to get any virtual physics decoded at all by an embodied agent. It could turn out that very simple systems are undecodable, for example an "organism" in the Game of Life may not be able to simulate any other pattern "internally" because of the absence of light information in the game, the pattern would have to be inferred by edge interactions which may be impossible or destructive (please note that such virtual experiments in common parlance would take place outside the organism, but from a philosophical and computational point of view the virtual experiment whether it takes place in the "head" of the virtual organism or not is more of coupled system - I am not sure if this is related to the weirdness of the "observer" in quantum physics or not). The Game of Life was of course mainly supposed to resemble physical multicellular growth patterns, perhaps an obvious extension would be to equip it with a faster light signal (every generation that simply influences the neighboring cell could also weakly interact with something 10 or 100 cells away too). Strangely I can see the benefits of our own light's physics emerging, for example probabilistic interaction with cells could allow the signal to travel very far, and changing the speed of the "light" depending on density gives information that otherwise would be very difficult to acquire. Interesting! AT ------------------------------------------- AGI Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/21088071-f452e424 Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=21088071&id_secret=21088071-58d57657 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
