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Could you clarify what you mean when you say "That's borrowed from an old theological argument"?

by xamuel 6y ago

Johnjonjoan 6y ago
I think a variation of the argument is: You couldn't simulate the universe in the universe because you would need at least as many resources as the universe has but are limited to resources within the universe (unless you want to get hacky). I assume they are implying that this thought process may not apply.
- xamuel 6y ago
  One of the neat things about the argument in my paper is that it doesn't involve the parent AGI actually running the child AGI. It merely involves the parent writing source-code and knowing that IF it had enough resources to run the source-code, then the result would be a truthful AGI child.
Animats 6y ago
Sigh. Here, from a creationist site.[1] There's an argument that the second law of thermodynamics prevents evolution, because evolution decreases entropy. Having a star around to power things helps beat that problem. [1] https://christiananswers.net/q-eden/edn-thermodynamics.html https://christiananswers.net/q-eden/edn-thermodynamics.html
- xamuel 6y ago
  The only similarity between that and my argument is that both involve a measure decreasing. Are you saying that one fallacious argument involving a decreasing measure invalidates all arguments ever that involve (completely unrelated) decreasing measures? As is so often the case in academia, the basic idea is hidden by all the academic jargon. The basic idea is quite simple. Suppose you roll up your sleeves, get to work, and announce to the world: "Turing machine #57835 is an AGI with truthful knowledge". Then, without even needing to run Turing machine #57835 (which might be prohibitively expensive), just as a purely logical consequence of your announcement, you can conclude that the following ordinal number A is a computable ordinal: "The supremum of all ordinals B such that B has some code k such that Turing machine #57835 knows that k is a code of a computable ordinal". By construction, this ordinal A, for which you concretely know a code, is larger than any ordinal for which Turing machine #57835 knows a code. So in at least one extremely specific technical sense (the sense of knowing codes for large ordinals), you are more intelligent than Turing machine #57835. Which part of this argument is unclear?
- wolfhumble 6y ago
  You answer the question, but why the sigh? Shouldn't relevant clarifications be encouraged?

Could you clarify what you mean when you say "That's borrowed from an old theological argument"?

by xamuel 6y ago

Could you clarify what you mean when you say "That's borrowed from an old theological argument"?

I think a variation of the argument is: You couldn't simulate the universe in the universe because you would need at least as many resources as the universe has but are limited to resources within the universe (unless you want to get hacky). I assume they are implying that this thought process may not apply.

xamuel 6y ago
One of the neat things about the argument in my paper is that it doesn't involve the parent AGI actually running the child AGI. It merely involves the parent writing source-code and knowing that IF it had enough resources to run the source-code, then the result would be a truthful AGI child.

Animats 6y ago

Sigh. Here, from a creationist site.[1] There's an argument that the second law of thermodynamics prevents evolution, because evolution decreases entropy. Having a star around to power things helps beat that problem. [1] https://christiananswers.net/q-eden/edn-thermodynamics.html https://christiananswers.net/q-eden/edn-thermodynamics.html

xamuel 6y ago
The only similarity between that and my argument is that both involve a measure decreasing. Are you saying that one fallacious argument involving a decreasing measure invalidates all arguments ever that involve (completely unrelated) decreasing measures? As is so often the case in academia, the basic idea is hidden by all the academic jargon. The basic idea is quite simple. Suppose you roll up your sleeves, get to work, and announce to the world: "Turing machine #57835 is an AGI with truthful knowledge". Then, without even needing to run Turing machine #57835 (which might be prohibitively expensive), just as a purely logical consequence of your announcement, you can conclude that the following ordinal number A is a computable ordinal: "The supremum of all ordinals B such that B has some code k such that Turing machine #57835 knows that k is a code of a computable ordinal". By construction, this ordinal A, for which you concretely know a code, is larger than any ordinal for which Turing machine #57835 knows a code. So in at least one extremely specific technical sense (the sense of knowing codes for large ordinals), you are more intelligent than Turing machine #57835. Which part of this argument is unclear?
wolfhumble 6y ago
You answer the question, but why the sigh? Shouldn't relevant clarifications be encouraged?