Richard Loosemore:> I do not laugh at your misunderstanding, I laugh at the general > complacency; the attitude that a problem denied is a problem solved. I > laugh at the tragicomedic waste of effort. I'm not sure I have ever seen anybody successfully rephrase your complexity argument back at you; since nobody understands what you mean it's not surprising that people are complacent about it. I was going to wait for some more blog posts to have a go at rephrasing it myself but my (probably wrong effort) would go like this: 1. Many things we want to build have desired properties that are described at a different level than the things we build them out of. "Flying" is emergent in this sense from rivets and sheet metal, for example. Thinking is emergent from neurons, for another example. 2. Some such things are "complex" in that the emergent properties cannot be predicted from the lower-level details. 3. "Flying" as above is not complex in this way. In fact, all of engineering is the study of how to build things that are increasingly complicated but NOT complex. We do not want airplanes to have complex behavior and the engineering methodology is expressly for squeezing complexity out. 4. "Thinking" must be complex. [my understanding of why this must be true is lacking. Something like: otherwise we'd be able to predict the behavior of an AGI which would make it useless?] 5. Therefore we have no methods for building thinking machines, since engineering discipline does not address how to build complex devices. Building them as if they are not complex will result in poor behavior; squeezing out the complexity will squeeze out the thinking, and leaving it in makes traditional engineering impossible. Not quite right I suppose, but I'll keep working at it.
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