Re: [sl4] Re: More silly but friendly ideas

From: John K Clark (johnkclark@fastmail.fm)
Date: Thu Jul 03 2008 - 10:04:45 MDT


On Mon, 30 Jun 2008 "Lee Corbin" <lcorbin@rawbw.com>
said:

> highly capable intelligences won't "work" by any
> formal logic.

It doesn’t matter what the word “work” means, if your mind is capable of
doing arithmetic then there are statements, lots of them, that you will
never find a proof to demonstrate it to be true and you will never find
a counterexample to prove it to be false. If we could identify all such
imposable problems it wouldn’t be so bad, we could just ignore them and
go on to things that we can figure out, but Turing showed we can’t even
do that.

> It's too slow and in most cases completely pointless.

I’m not saying a mind will “work” by formal logic, I am saying that
formal logic can be used to examine the limitations of any mind that has
certain properties, like the ability to do arithmetic for example.

> AIs can be plenty smart without getting hung up on hard problems.

Yes that is true. A real mind might want to solve a certain problem but
after working on it for a long time and making no progress it might
judge that its time could be better spent doing other things and move
on. However your fictional fixed goal mind can’t do that, sooner or
later it is going to encounter one of those Gödel-Turing problems and
when it does it’s going to be caught up in a loop for eternity. I
believe that is why Evolution never came up with a fixed goal mind, they
don’t work.

 John K Clark

-- 
  John K Clark
  johnkclark@fastmail.fm
-- 
http://www.fastmail.fm - A fast, anti-spam email service.


This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Wed Jul 17 2013 - 04:01:03 MDT