This is fine and interesting, but hasn't anybody yet read Kauffman's
Reinventing the Sacred (publ this year)? The entire book is devoted to this
theme and treats it globally, ranging from this kind of emergence in
physics, to emergence/evolution of natural species, to emergence/deliberate
creativity in the economy and human thinking. Kauffman systematically - and
correctly - argues that the entire, current mechanistic worldview of science
is quite inadequate to dealing with and explaining creativity in every form
throughout the world and at every level of evolution. Kauffman also
explicitly deals with the kind of problems AGI must solve if it is to be
AGI.
In fact, everything is interrelated here. Ben argues:
"we are not trying to understand some natural system, we are trying to
**engineer** systems "
Well, yes, but how you get emergent physical properties of matter, and how
you get species evolving from each other with "creative," scientifically
unpredictable new organs and features , can be *treated* as
design/engineering problems (even though, of course, nature was the
"designer").
In fact, AGI *should* be doing this - should be understanding how its
particular problem of getting a machine to be creative, fits in with the
science-wide problem of understanding creativity in all its forms. The two
are mutually enriching, (indeed mandatory when it comes to a) the human and
animal brain's creativity and an AGI's and b) the evolution of the brain
and the evolutionary path of AGI's).
Richard:>
Perhaps now that there are other physicists (besides myself) making these
claims, people in the AGI community will start to take more seriously the
implications for their own field ....
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20026764.100
For those who do not have a New Scientist subscription, the full article
refers to a paper at http://www.arxiv.org/abs/0809.0151.
Mile Gu et al looked at the possibility of explaining emergent properties
of Ising glasses and managed to prove that those properties are not
reducible.
Myself, I do not need the full force of Gu's proof, since I only claim
that emergent properties can be *practically* impossible to work with.
It is worth noting that his chosen target systems (Ising glasses) are very
closely linked to some approaches to AGI, since these have been proposed
by some neural net people as the fundamental core of their approach.
I am sure that I can quote a short extract from the full NS article
without treading on the New Scientist copyright. It is illuminating
because what Gu et al refer to is the problem of calculating the lowest
energy state of the system, which approximately corresponds to the state
of maximum "understanding" in the class of systems that I am most
interested in:
BEGIN QUOTE:
Using the model, the team focused on whether the pattern that the atoms
adopt under various scenarios, such as a state of lowest energy, could be
calculated from knowledge of those forces. They found that in some
scenarios, the pattern of atoms could not be calculated from knowledge of
the forces - even given unlimited computing power. In mathematical terms,
the system is considered "formally undecidable".
"We were able to find a number of properties that were simply decoupled
from the fundamental interactions," says Gu. Even some really simple
properties of the model, such as the fraction of atoms oriented in one
direction, cannot be computed.
This result, says Gu, shows that some of the models scientists use to
simulate physical systems may actually have properties that cannot be
linked to the behaviour of their parts (www.arxiv.org/abs/0809.0151).
This, in turn, may help explain why our description of nature operates at
many levels, rather than working from just one. "A 'theory of everything'
might not explain all natural phenomena," says Gu. "Real understanding may
require further experiments and intuition at every level."
Some physicists think the work offers a promising scientific boost for the
delicate issue of emergence, which tends to get swamped with philosophical
arguments. John Barrow at the University of Cambridge calls the results
"really interesting", but thinks one element of the proof needs further
study. He points out that Gu and colleagues derived their result by
studying an infinite system, rather than one of large but finite size,
like most natural systems. "So it's not entirely clear what their results
mean for actual finite systems," says Barrow.
Gu agrees, but points out that this was not the team's goal. He also
argues that the idealised mathematical laws that scientists routinely use
to describe the world often refer to infinite systems. "Our results
suggest that some of these laws probably cannot be derived from first
principles," he says.
END QUOTE.
I particularly liked his choice of words when he said: "We were able to
find a number of properties that were simply decoupled from the
fundamental interactions..."
Now where have I heard that before, I wonder?
Richard Loosemore
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agi
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