2012/5/29 Colin Geoffrey Hales <[email protected]> > Here's a story I just wrote. I'll get it published in due course. > Just posted it to the FoR list, thought you might appreciate the > sentiments.... > > ======================================================== > It's 100,000 BCE. You are a politically correct caveperson. You want > dinner. The cooling body of the dead thing at your feet seems to be your > option. You have fire back at camp. That'll make it palatable. The fire is > kept alive by the fire-warden of your tribe. None of you have a clue what > it is, but it makes the food edible and you don't care. > > It's 1700ish AD. You are a French scientist called Lavoisier. You have > just worked out that burning adds oxygen to the fuel. You have killed off > an eternity of dogma involving a non-existent substance called phlogiston. > You will not be popular, but the facts speak for you. You are happy with > your day's work. You go to the kitchen and cook your fine pheasant meal. > You realise that oxidation never had to figure in your understanding of how > to make dinner. Food for thought is your dessert. > > It is 2005 and you are designing a furnace. You use COMSOL Multiphysics on > your supercomputer. You modify the gas jet configuration and the flames > finally get the dead pocket in the corner up to temperature. The toilet > bowls will be well cooked here, you think to yourself. If you suggested to > your project leader that the project was finished she would think you are > insane. Later, in commissioning your furnace, a red hot toilet bowl is the > target of your optical pyrometer. The fierceness of the furnace is palpable > and you're glad you're not the toilet bowl. The computation of the physics > of fire and the physics of fire are, thankfully, not the same thing - that > fact has made your job a lot easier, but you cannot compute yourself a > toilet bowl. A fact made more real shortly afterwards in the bathroom. > > It is the early 20th century and you are a 'Wright Brother'. You think you > can make a contraption fly. Your inspiration is birds. You experiment with > shaped wood, paper and canvas in a makeshift wind tunnel. You figure out > that certain shapes seems to drag less and lift more. Eventually you flew a > few feet. And you have absolutely no clue about the microscopic physics of > flight. > > It is a hundred years later and you are a trainee pilot doing 'touch and > go' landings in a simulator. The physics of flight is in the massive > computer system running the simulator. Just for fun you stall your jetliner > and crash it into a local shopping mall. Today you have flown 146, 341 km. > As you leave the simulator, you remind yourself that the physics of flight > in the computer and flight itself are not the same thing, and that nobody > died today. > > No-one ever needed a theory of combustion prior to cooking dinner with it. > We cooked dinner and then we eventually learned a theory of combustion. > > No-one needed the deep details of flight physics to work out how to fly. > We few, then we figured out how the physics of flight worked. > > This is the story of the growth of scientific knowledge of the natural > world. It has been this way for thousands of years. Any one of us could > think of a hundred examples of exactly this kind of process. In a modern > world of computing and physics, never before have we had more power to > examine in detail, whatever are the objects of our study. And in each and > every case, if anyone told you that a computed model of the natural world > and the natural world are literally the same thing, you'd brand them daft > or deluded and probably not entertain their contribution as having any > value. > > Well almost. There's one special place where not only is that very > delusion practised on a massive scale, if you question the behaviour, you > are suddenly confronted with a generationally backed systematic raft of > unjustified excuses, perhaps 'policies'?, handed from mentor to novice with > such unquestioning faith that entire scientific disciplines are enrolled in > the delusion. > > Q. What scientific discipline could this be? > > A. The 'science' of artificial intelligence. > > It is something to behold. Here, for the first time in history, you find > people that look at the only example of natural general intelligence - you, > the human reading this - accept a model of a brain, put it in a computer > and then expect the result to be a brain. This is done without a shred of > known physical law, in spite of thousands of years of contrary experience, > and despite decades of abject failure to achieve the sacred goal of an > artificial intelligence like us. > > This belief system is truly bizarre. It is exactly like the cave person > drawing a picture of a flame on a rock and then expecting it to cook > dinner. It is exactly like getting into a flight simulator, flying it to > Paris and then expecting to get out and have dinner on the banks of the > Seine.
You always put that level confusion on the table. You could expect to have dinner in a virtual paris if you were in a virtual world. If you want an computational AI to interact with you, it must be able to control real world appendices that permits it to *interact* or likewise if it was in a virtual world, you should use a interface with this virtual world for you to interact. You can't expect level to be mixed without an interface and I don't see any problem with that. Quentin > It is exactly like expecting your computer simulated furnace roasting you > a toilet bowl. > > Think about it. If there was no difference between a computed physics > model of fire and fire, then why doesn't the computer burst into flames? If > there was no difference between a computed model of flight and flight, then > why doesn't the computer leap up and fly? These things don't happen! Not > only that, any computer scientist would say you were nuts to believe it to > be a possibility. Then that same computer scientist will then got back to > their desk, sit down and believe that their computer program can be brain > physics. > > Now I am all about creating real artificial general intelligence. Call me > crazy, but I find I am unique in the entire world. I am set about literally > building artificial inorganic brain tissue. Like the Wright Bros built > artificial flight. Like the caveperson built artificial fire. I will build > artificial cognition. There will be no computing. There will be the physics > of cognition. > > Ay now here's the rub. > > When I go about my business of organising and researching my artificial > brain tissue I get questioned about my weird approach. I find that I am the > one that has to justify my position! For the first time in history a > completely systemic delusion about the relation between reality and > computing is assumed by legions of scientists without question, and who > fail constantly to achieve the goal for clearly obvious reasons..... _and I > am the one that has to justify my approach_? If I have to listen to another > deferral to the Church-Turing Thesis (100% right and 100% irrelevant) I > will SCREAM! Aaaaiiiiieeeeeiiiiuuuuaaaaaaarrrrgggggh! > > I am not saying artificial general intelligence is impossible or even > hard. I am simply suggesting that maybe the route toward it is through > (shock horror) using the physics of cognition (brain material). Somebody > out there..... please? Can there please be someone out there who sees this > half century of computer science weirdness in 100,000 years of sanity? > Please? Anyone? > ================================================================== > > By Colin Hales > > Natural physics is a computation. Fine. > > But a computed natural physics model is NOT the natural physics....it is > the natural physics of a computer. > > > > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "Everything List" group. > To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. > To unsubscribe from this group, send email to > [email protected]. > For more options, visit this group at > http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. > > -- All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
