Posted on 10/25/2002 12:14:19 AM PDT by jennyp
I have read a number of disparaging reviews of both Penrose's Emporer's New Mind and Wolfram's A New Kind of Science.
Admittedly I have discounted all of them simply because - on closer inspection - every author of such reviews, which I read, had a vested interest to the contrary.
As an example, when a few Geologists observed that the erosion on the Sphinx was such that it would predate history attributed by Egyptologists - the reaction was swift, vigorous and indignate. We see the same kind of reaction when evolution is challenged by Intellectual Design. As Shakespeare might have said “methinks they protest too much” and thus some of us on the outside wonder why.
Inquiry is not a threat to truth; therefore, objection to inquiry is prima facie cause for such inquiry.
You are a very smart girl! :-)
In truth, when I was writing that post (and disparaging books in general ;-) I started to consider what books related to the subject that I actually owned on my bookshelf. It turns out that I only have two books on my bookshelf even vaguely related to AI: The GEB book and the Li/Vitanyi book on Kolmogorov Complexity. Everything else I have amounts to a handful of obscure papers. Since the Li/Vitanyi book is esoteric and not directly related to AI (though the mathematics is extremely important), I opted for the Hofstadter book which I haven't read in years. I have an excellent memory and often work beyond the published edges of the fields I dabble in, so I find that a large library does not get used very often and opt to only keep a few texts that still have value to me.
My handle actually comes from a number of sources, and has been in use here and other places for a very long time. I used to have a carved stone tortoise in my office (since shattered in an accident) which I adopted as a handle. The tortoise is also a powerful metaphor in many cultures around the world, and has good symbolism. Lastly, it was indeed a subtle nod to Hofstadter for writing a book that inspired me many, many years ago. As an added bonus, it is a handle that apparently is not generally used by other people, so it is almost always available when I create accounts at various sites.
Regards!
To me, it always bringz Zeno's paradox to mind. That, and "turtles all the way down."
Thank you for your post and thank you for the kudos! (blushing...)
Sadly, my appetite for books exceeds both my budget and my time. But I am particularly fond of the genre we are discussing here!
As a curiosity, did you choose your field after you read Hofstadter?
And this to me is what's important, and why I liked general_re's description so much.
beckett, it's interesting that Gould chose to distinguish between reason (i.e., science in his view) and the spiritual dimension, and then to characterize them as "non-overlapping magisteria," such that "Truth" (science) and "Meaning" (faith) are entirely discrete. People may tell you Gould is correct in this; but nobody actually lives as if he believed it. So there must be something fundamentally wrong with this formulation.
Gould himself seems to have unfailing faith in science. At a very deep level, he seems to betray his own formulation. More superficially, his relegation of faith/meaning to the "shallow end" of the spectrum of truth should perhaps be seen for what it may very well be: a desire to rid science of any sort of "rival" or effective "competition" that could place his preferred world view at risk. But the point is, to my way of thinking, the two are not "rivals," but equally valid approaches to Truth that necessarily work in different spheres (i.e., time orders).
general_re's insight into matters "orthogonal," and stuartcr's wondering what the hail that could be all about, brought to mind an image that, to my way of thinking, is the symbol sine qua non of a crucial fact of the human condition: That man lives at the intersection of two orders of time.
That image is the Cross. Its "X" axis, to my mind, stands for Eternity, the realm of Spirit, the timeless, of the Eternal Now. The "Y" axis stands for the unilinear, serial time that is the time sense in which human beings directly experience their existence in the world: i.e., in terms of past-present-future. The time sense of the "X" axis can be accessed only indirectly, through meditation, contemplation, prayer.
It seems to me that science can only deal with the "Y" axis. It has no tool or method to deal with "X".
Yet at the end of the day, the "Y" axis is folded into "X." It's difficult sometimes to find the language to express the content of a graphical image. So I don't know how much sense the above will make to the reader.
Any time you want something from me, you need but ask. I consider your archives to be world treasures, for which we all ought to feel indebted.
On previous threads you have spoken with authority and clarity on the principles which support Artificial Intelligence and therefore I consider you an expert!
Amusingly enough, I hail from the Stanford/Berkeley nexus that produced so much of AI, and was eagerly immersed in the stuff when I was a sprout, I am one of the numerous disaffected engineers who have grown rather impatient with the "discipline".
Although we have garnered some useful and decorative tools from AI, notably the programming_language/formal_math LISP (wherein data and code are treated identically) and such mainstays of database search as tree pruning and LISPish associative array processors, many of us consider it an advanced exercise in unreadable, undebuggable coding practices ensrined as design principles--so I have been disconnected from the field for a very long time now.
Nothing like familiarity to breed contempt, I guess. In that regard, one is tempted to point to the closing remarks of Russell, Whitehead, and Hilbert, after spending lifetimes trying to fruitlessly resuscitate the grand crystal palace of a hopeful 17th century clockwork-universe project of establishing complete, perfect, formal mathematical closure.
As if in one voice, they acknowledged that it probably couldn't be done, and that was before Godel ever hit center stage. Even without Godel, the problems of type conflict ( for example, the set of all sets contains itself, which constitutes a type conflict), undetermination, and under-determination had already undermined the project hopelessly.
Except that you have to prove it to yourself. Otherwise, you could just chalk it up to tequila.
Prove it to yourself. hmmm. vs. (I guess) prove it to the world....Well, ok, if you want to claim the word "prove" has an alternate meaning which is subjective in nature, I can't stop you. The primary definition of proof, however, seems to suggest that proof is something one can offer to others as a definitive form of persuasion, that has something of an objective, and therefore mutually sharable nature, even in the face of skepticism.
I wonder though if it is that science lacks the tools and methods to deal with the "X" or if scientists are more often determined not to deal with.
Harvard Genetics Professor Richard Lewontin according to The Unraveling of Scientific Materialism
Your background in the subject assures me that I was correct in figuring you as an A.I. expert. IMHO, people who have been on the ground floor of new theory or technology have much to contribute; having that perspective seems to help us laypeople understand the concepts without having to wade through the detail. Your clarity rather proves the point!
Again, thank you so much for all the information! Hugs!
In my humble opinion, much of the unsatisfactory vagueness that always seems to hover about ontological discussions on this subject is alleviated by sharply differentiating these three worlds, as Popper did in his fairly famous 3-worlds paper, which I recommend.
It is, I submit, the tendency to implicitly resolve the middle world (accurate imagination) with either the physical world (raising type conflicts for the formal crowd) or with the purely imaginary world (thereby unfairly yielding the tar brush to banish it from objective existence) that leads these discussions into infertile territory.
I've had a sudden impulse of delight which has led me to suggest a modified platonist position: as a new & improved modern platonist, I subscribe to the theory that world-1 objectively exists, world-3 subjectively exists and world-2 plows a middle ground we have not named, and which is neither entirely objective nor subjective. I'm going to call it "conditionally exists" or interjective. The condition being, of course, that world-1 behavior is close enough to world-2 descriptions to qualify as existing, for whatever purposes we have to hand. Something that cannot be guaranteed to be permanent or completely reliable. As an example--Ptolomaic astronomy is an interjective (world-2) reality of less reliable existence than Einsteinian astronomy. Nobody really thinks epicycles are an essentially explanatory orbital description, even though they accurately describe orbits. And nobody knows if Einsteinian astronomy is the final story. So there's an intractibly subjective element to world-2, even though it is objective in intent.
I call it the toe-in-the water school of platonism.
Well done, donh! And thank you for the heads up!
Interesting. I haven't read Popper. Of his three "worlds":
1) the physical worldI humbly suggest that only world one exists. I suppose now we need a definition of what it means "to exist." I think it means that it has objective existence -- external to our private conceptions of what's out there. Worlds two and three are the same thing -- abstractions in our minds, and they "exist" (so to speak) only subjectively. The difference between worlds two and three is that world two is a reasonably accurate conception of world one, and world three is fantasyland, as can be determined by reference to the reality of world one.
2) the imaginary world that tries accurately to describe relationships in the real world and
3) the imaginary world that does not try to be an accurate reflection of the physical world.
I believe in reality. Maybe an even better way to put it would be -- what is the distinction between reality and consciousness? For instance, the color green is a property of our consciousness, while in reality there is only light of a certain wavelength. The same probably holds true for numbers. If there were no conscious beings in the universe would qualia like the color green, or numbers exist?
And I would agree with you, 100 percent, Alamo-Girl. Thank you so much for writing.
No. For example, the sun would still have the same planets it has now, nine of them, presumably. But there would be no "nine," just the objects themselves. With no conscious entity to number them.
Alamo-Girl, this is probably the most aggravating "expert public pronouncement" that I have ever had to endure in my lifetime so far.
IMHO, invert it, and you get a better grasp on Reality. The statement would then go: "Once you 'kill God', then -- and only then -- can you believe in anything."
I gather God, you see, in Beck's view, could never be classified as "liberal." Therefore it follows -- O heaven forfend!!! -- if the Judeo-Christian God reigns, then man is constrained. And putative "liberals" and "progressives" and otherwise "enlightened" intelligentsia are "forbidden" to even "go there"....
Yet it seems to me -- as a contingent, finite creature who owes a lot to others -- that we human beings live within constraints.
So it wouldn't seem to be so much a matter of acknowledging this insight, as it would be a matter of figuring out how best for human beings to live "within the limits" of their collective natural and spiritual environment.
FWIW.
Some ivory tower dude makes some statement, and it's really that bad for you? Come on, BB. He's no threat at all. Any day of the week, Hillary can probably say ten things that bother me more. She's dangerous!
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