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Why philosophers should care about computational complexity (2011)
- photochemsyn 5y agoQuestion: "How many computable numbers could a computer compute if a computer could compute all computable numbers?" Woodchucks are curious about this.
- jazzyjackson 5y agoI wanted to incorporate this question with an Arduino lesson plan based around key breaking, basically demonstrating that 10,000 combinations might seem like a lot when you're doing it by hand, but a computer can brute force it in no time, so how big does a number have to be before it starts taking serious time for a computer to count to it? That's when I learned compilers will look at your for loops and just predict the result of incrementing a number a million times and skip to the end condition. Was quite a shock to find out the program I write is not the program that runs. I think I added something simple to the loop, like flipping a bit on a digital output to force the loop to actually run.
- tsimionescu 5y agoThe best way to achieve this without changing the code would be to modify the variable to be `volatile`. That way you tell the compiler that you actually care about it reading/writing it from/to memory every time it is read/written.
- kamray23 5y ago-O0 turns off optimizations on most reasonable C compilers.
- lordnacho 5y agoStick random() in there somewhere for each iteration, print it out? Then the optimizer won't be able to just jump to the end.
- jazzyjackson 5y agoActually yes I think that was what we went with, instead of counting from 0 to MAX_INTEGER we generated random numbers that many times, brute forced integer "keys" just fine.
- sumtechguy 5y agoYou owe the oracle 32GB of RAM. His game rig is low on memory and hungry.
- tshaddox 5y agoCountably many!
- mensetmanusman 5y agoThe Chinese Room has been on my mind lately after recently learning about it: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room Highly recommend trying to grasp the argument, because in a sense it connects complexity to ‘time to compute’. If it takes a room of robots following simple instructions a billion years to act as an AI that reads Chinese, are those robots a collective intelligence? Can it be scaled up to consciousness?
- karpierz 5y agoWhere does computational complexity factor into the Chinese room? Whether the Chinese room responds quickly or slowly doesn't really factor into whether the room understands Chinese.
- Strilanc 5y agoThe linked article discusses this.
- skulk 5y agoWhy stop at a computer, why not extend the argument to a full simulation of a human brain? What if I sat in my room for 3 million years simulating 3 seconds of a human body including the brain? Assuming that my simulation is faithful, who's to say that my simulation doesn't have some form of consciousness or subjective experience?
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y agoYou can go even deeper: given that your simulation follows a set of known rules from an initial state, what does actually performing those steps even matter? Is the consciousness given existence because you perform calculations on paper, or does it exist already within the fabric of reality and you're merely exposing it?
- 3np 5y agoI think a common mistake is to conflate “consciousness” with “intelligence” or at least “thought”. Just because we don’t tend to recognize one without the other doesn’t mean they necessarily have a causative relationship.
- dang 5y agoPast threads: Why Philosophers Should Care About Computational Complexity (2011) [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17573142 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17573142 - July 2018 (22 comments) Why Philosophers Should Care About Computational Complexity (2011) [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11913825 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11913825 - June 2016 (54 comments) Why Philosophers Should Care About Computational Complexity [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9061744 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9061744 - Feb 2015 (43 comments) Why Philosophers Should Care About Computational Complexity - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2897277 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2897277 - Aug 2011 (10 comments) Why Philosophers Should Care About Computational Complexity - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2861825 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2861825 - Aug 2011 (36 comments)
- nathias 5y agoWe should and do, but Chineese room is a philosophically unsound analogy.
- beepbooptheory 5y agoThis is only redeeming to me really because generally its the philosophers that are presumptuous enough to tell other fields what they should do or think. Nice to see the tables turned on them!
- bakuninsbart 5y agoThat's not my experience at all, rather I see a lot of philosophers giving good pointers where their field borders on others, and then being shot down or ignored. I'd actually be interested in an example of this, as I don't think I've encountered it so far, although I'm admittedly not that engaged either. By far the worst offenders of presumptuousness must be old physicists though, followed by old computer scientists. Thinking of Michio Kaku talk about philosophy still makes me physically cringe.
- btilly 5y agoCan you provide examples of your "good pointers"? My experience is that the feedback provided by philosophers sounds good to the philosophers, but is actually useless to practitioners. And in technical subjects, like math, computer science and physics, it is important to develop a really good BS filter. That said, I am also sympathetic to http://www.paulgraham.com/philosophy.html http://www.paulgraham.com/philosophy.html, so must admit some hostility to the current practice of philosophy.
- wizzwizz4 5y ago> Few were sufficiently correct that people have forgotten who discovered what they discovered. This is laughable. Most of our culture was once philosophy, and I sure don't know whose. If you define philosophy as “that which has not escaped the realm of theoretical philosophy”, then sure. But we use practical philosophy every day!
- lmm 5y agoAll fields were once "philosophy", that's a naming artifact not an insight. What's being claimed is something like: when "natural philosophy" and "philosophy" diverged into distinct fields, "natural philosophy" got the good stuff.
- hristov 5y agoSo they can get better jobs? Rimshot.
- guerrilla 5y agoThey do [1][2]*. 1. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/computational-complexity/ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/computational-complexity/ 2. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/computability/ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/computability/ * Note that the OP is even cited there.
- jimhefferon 5y agoI approached people in the Phil Dept where I work, and they expressed only polite interest (i.e., disinterest). So from my (very limited) survey, there may be folks willing to write entries, but, that I can tell, there is not broad interest.
- krisoft 5y agoThe way I understand philosophy is that it is a very wide subject with lots of subtopics. It wouldn’t surprise me if polite disinterest were the most likely outcome of pairing any random philosopher with any random topic.
- spindle 5y agoExactly.
- guerrilla 5y agoPhilosophy is very broad, so philosophers specialize, especially analytic philosophers who harved up the subject into hundreds. Most aren't going to be interested in whatever random topic you bring up.
- sharker8 5y agoAre we talking continental or analytic philosophers?
- slaymaker1907 5y agoI find that computational complexity provides a reasonable way to define capitalism as to distinguish it from other economic models. Only under capitalism is it possible for wealth to grow exponentially (which will exceed almost any other possible growth function with respect to time) since you can make wealth by virtue of already having wealth. It also helps explain the origins of wealth inequality since when growth is determined solely by current value, it is not bound in the same way that one's labor is. Some people assume that capitalism is simply supply/demand or the presence of markets, but I think that ignores the fact that markets have seemingly existed for far longer than capitalism.
- betwixthewires 5y agoSome of my favorite insights have come from realizing how concepts overlap disciplines. I remember the first time I recognized an overlap, and it led to a realization that the rules by which the universe operate crop up in every aspect of the experience of existing as part of it. Since then so many insights about so many things have come from similar understandings, such as how thermodynamics applies to informational organization, and even ways to think of problems come from such insights that can change your view of the world.
- ganzuul 5y agoI am beginning to be of the sentiment that human brains are usually functionally approximated by pushdown automatons, while our emotional life better approximates hypercomputation. The commonly assumed view that minds are Turing machines no longer fits me. The argument against consciousness, for survival-machines seems strong. To find an ecological niché for consciousness requires more creativity than survival ever would... and so an evolution of consciousness may have happened in program space instead of hot and wet mechanistic nature.
- b0rsuk 5y agoI feel that Karl Popper's "falsifiability principle" already deals with this adequately: "In the philosophy of science, a theory is falsifiable (or refutable) if it is contradicted by an observation statement that has a conventional empirical interpretation, i.e., is potentially observable with existing technologies. For example, "All swans are white" is falsifiable, because "Here is a black swan" contradicts it and this is observable." Note the phrase 'existing technologies'. More from Wikipedia: "He opposed falsifiability to the intuitively similar concept of verifiability. Verifying the claim "All swans are white" would require observing all swans, which is not technologically possible. In contrast, the observation of a single black swan is technologically reasonable and sufficient to logically falsify the claim. " ---------- In a nutshell: if a theory can't be reasonably proven false if it actually IS false, then it's not falsifiable and not really a scientific theory. He also wanted humanities to follow this principle and focus on developing knowledge that is falsifiable.