[extropy-chat] RE: Re: Intelligent Designand IrriducibleComplexity

Kevin Freels megaquark at hotmail.com
Mon Oct 4 13:29:50 UTC 2004


The problem with a computer simulation is that the model will not accurately
predict anything. Much of natural selection rests on blind chance. If not
for a big rock smacking the Earth 65 mya, things would be very different
right now. Such random events contribute even more as the scale gets
smaller. Small events such as land slides, volcanos, floods, earthquakes,
etc that lead to isolation of groups can lead to speciation and divergence.
Unless you could accurately predict all of these types of random events over
hundreds of millions of years, it would be totally worthless. If you could
do such a thing, it would be fairly simple to know the weather in
Albuquerque, NM at 2:29pm on November 5, 453,686 CE. As it is, we can;t even
predict a hurricane's landfall until a couple of days before.



----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Spike" <spike66 at comcast.net>
To: "'ExI chat list'" <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org>
Sent: Monday, October 04, 2004 1:16 AM
Subject: RE: [extropy-chat] RE: Re: Intelligent Designand
IrriducibleComplexity


> > Eliezer Yudkowsky
> >
> > Spike wrote:
> > >
> > > If that is the case, then we have an example of
> > > natural selection working at the group level...
> >
> > Group selection may be the wrong word for this, since it's
> > usually taken to imply a conflict between individual-level selection
> and
> > group-level selection with the group selection pressure winning.  What
>
> > you're talking about is an isolated subpopulation undergoing genetic
> drift...
> > -- 
> > Eliezer S. Yudkowsky...
>
> What we will eventually need to really understand this
> is a good computer simulation of evolution.  Without
> the simulation, we are merely armchair philosophers,
> Greeks arguing over the number of teeth in the horse.
>
> I had a professor in college who worked on the problem
> of Prandtl-Meyer flow, which is used to explain why
> the exhaust plumes of jet engines display the characteristic
> diamond patterns when the pilot gets hard on the gas:
>
> http://www.visi.com/~jweeks/aircraft/mig100.gif
>
> In those days, the NASTRAN models didn't predict the
> diamond patterns.  He got his PhD by tweaking up the
> computer flow models until they correctly predicted the
> diamonds, angles, conditions under which they would
> appear, etc.
>
> I have a notion that we will understand group selection
> vs individual survival selection only when we can develop
> the software to simulate evolution, and get it at least
> as good as the diamond pattern predicting compressible
> flow computer models.  The biologists have done their
> thing.  Now for evolutionary theory to move forward,
> the computer guys need to step up to the plate.
>
> As an aside, a sufficiently sophisticated simulation
> of evolution, running on a sufficiently powerful
> computer or cluster of computers, should be able
> to predict a singularity.  Perhaps it will answer
> some singularity questions I have been puzzling over
> for years: is the Yudkowsky hard-takeoff model
> the only possible singularity?  What would happen if
> humanity somehow discovered the software needed to
> create AI, in an alternate universe where there were
> only 100 computers in the world?  What if there were
> a billion slow computers, such as 286 vintage machines?
> Or an M-brain, a quadrillion pentium class processors
> separated by an average spacing of about a meter?
> Are there other scenarios that make sense, such as
> a saturated-feedback-loop response-damped singularity?
> How about an unknown mechanism kicking in, somehow causing
> an anti-singularity?  Could we have an oscillating AI
> software battle for control going on inside the machines,
> of which computer users would be completely unaware?
> Would it matter if we somehow discovered uploading
> before the singularity?  Would a sufficiently sophisticated
> simulation of evolution actually cause a singularity?
>
> Perhaps the work of Eliezer and the SAIA can be
> viewed as a kind of evolution simulator that starts
> in the present and moves forward in time.
>
> spike
>
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