5 ms·
"More than 2000 years of European philosophy dealt with the distinction between body and soul. The Great Programmer does not care. ... From the view of the Grea
by lend000 10y ago
"More than 2000 years of European philosophy dealt with
the distinction between body and soul. The Great Programmer does not care.
...
From the view of the Great Programmer, though, such bitstring subpatterns may be entirely irrelevant. There is no need for Him to load them with “meaning”."
Interesting points, especially to follow up the recent 'is matter conscious?' article on HN.
Schmidhuber often seems to be more of a philosopher who happens to have made significant practical contributions to machine learning. The 'Great Programmer' is intentionally tongue-and-cheek, but for the agnostics out there, it's worth considering that regardless of what creator/process/fundamental mathematical requirement (if any) is responsible for the existence of our universe, it is unlikely that life on Earth (or perhaps in general) is relevant to It.
- adjkant 10y agoI find all of this really hard to take seriously when we work on the assumption that the design of the universe could be understood by a human. Why would something so small relative to the whole assume that its thoughts were high enough to comprehend the entire universe? I love philosophy, but let's actually spend our time and energy asking questions that do have meaning, because any small meaning to us is more important than trying to do a task we are likely so ill equipped for that has no meaning to us. I can't help but read titles like this piece and link it back to the anti-political and "above it all" attitudes that technical folk often take, believing that if they just eliminate meaning, emotion, all things that humans complicate pure logic with, and apply logic in the right way that somehow it will do some good. It doesn't matter if any of this is right or wrong - it has no relevant meaning to humans. Without meaning, it's a truly pointless task.
- adrianN 10y agoSo far we're doing a decent job of understanding the design of the universe. Most things you interact with follow the rules we figured out so well that you'd be really hard pressed to find an experiment to find a difference between prediction and reality. That makes many people confident that we can figure out the missing pieces as well.
- goatlover 10y agoSuch as experiments in economics and sociology?
- simonh 10y agoIt depends on whether you think economics and sociology are fundamental to the physics of the universe or merely emergent phenomena. It's quite possible to understand all the fundamental rules of a system while having great difficulty working out all the consequences of those rules at a macroscopic level.
- ThomPete 10y agodesign requires intent.
- adrianN 10y agoYou're technically correct. s/design/structure/?
- ThomPete 10y agoIf there is no intetnt there is no purpose of structure.
- adrianN 10y agoNot every structure needs a purpose though.
- ThomPete 10y agoWhat structure doesent?
- optimuspaul 10y agojust a stab in the dark... a rock? It has structure, but what is it's purpose?
- marcosdumay 10y ago> Why would something so small relative to the whole assume that its thoughts were high enough to comprehend the entire universe? Completely unintuitive, isn't it? Empirically, we happen to be very good on it.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- tempodox 10y ago> it is unlikely that life on Earth (or perhaps in general) is relevant to It. Agreed. However, should there be an afterlife, then it had better not be found lest it suffer my eternal wrath.