To take a clearer example than the gravity one, go back to Game of Life,
or any other cellular automaton. If someone said that they wanted an
"explanation" of where the regularities came from (the actual zoo of
creatures observed in GoL), would it be acceptible to put the rules in
front of them, then switch on the simulation, then say "The rules plus
the simulation are your 'explanation'!"? I think that in this case,
someone would protest that this was not an explanation at all. In the
gravity case, though, if someone slapped down the rules of gravity, then
showed you a simulation that exhibited ring-braiding, this would count as
an explanation of sorts.
How is a listing of the rules of life plus an animal from the zoo different
from a listing of the theory/rule of gravity plus an example of
ring-braiding?
They look like identical cases to me -- and neither is a full exposition of
the potential stable behavior of the system (which is probably a better
encoding of what you're attempting to mean by "explanation").
I really, really think that you need to lose the word explanation rather
than trying to work around it.
Could I have been clearer? Yes, and from now on I will take into
account this possible confusion. What I will have to do is to develop
some more structure in the explanation of what explanation is! No rest
for the wicked.
Bad idea. Stop insisting on using the word explanation. Find something
better rather than being stubborn. You're just making it more difficult for
your ideas to be accepted. :-)
= = = = = = = = =
Intelligent systems, unlike gravitational systems, have so a
superabundance of nastiness and tangledness in their mechanisms that it
would be the most astonishing event in the universe if they turned out,
after all, to have no complexity in their overall behavior.
1. Is it a necessity that intelligent systems have such a super-abundance
of nastiness and tangledness or is this just an artifact of the
spaghetti-coding of nature? (see genetics ;-)
2. Isn't it possible that the appearance of a superabundance of complexity
might go away if we understood the systems of intelligence well enough to be
able to add intermediate levels that would dramatically reduce it? (see
explaining why a cell works)
-------------------------------------------
agi
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