[ExI] Mindless Thought Experiments

Lee Corbin lcorbin at rawbw.com
Sat Mar 1 17:46:51 UTC 2008


John Clark writes


> About a week ago I sent the following to Jaron Lanier, I did not receive a
> reply:
> 
> =========
> 
> I read your article "Mindless Thought Experiments" at:
> http://www.jaronlanier.com/aichapter.html
> 
> I have a few comments.
> ...
>> so is the rainstorm conscious?

We have hashed that out so many times years and so many years
ago. I suppose I'm proud to have been on the cutting edge
so very long ago. Jason's comments and questions are really
very, very old stuff here.

As far as I know, the Extropian list, and then later Wei Dai's list and
SL4, were the first forums in which all this was debated at length and
at a very high level.

>> AI proponents usually seize on some specific stage
>> in my reducto [sic] ad absurdum to locate the point
>> where I've gone too far.

Yeah, right.  "His" reductio. (Does he use a spell-checker
for his published articles?)   He's just now getting around
to reading Moravec?  Well, perhaps not, I don't know.
But it sounds that way.

> I believe if you're going to attempt a reducto ad absurdum proof care must
> be taken to ensure that your conclusion is contradictory and not just odd.
> Einstein also came up with a thought experiment, he thought it proved that
> Quantum Mechanics must be wrong because otherwise things would be odd;
> not illogical, not contradictory, just odd. In the last few years this
> thought experiment (Bell's Inequality) was actually performed and now we
> know that things are indeed odd.

Well put.

Now, of course, this is not to mean to say that all these very complex
questions have been totally resolved.  They haven't, and they won't be
for a long time. Someday, even if it were thousands of years from now,
barring catastrophe or collapse, uploaded entities who run however
many copies of themselves whenever they want, and who have long
ago left biological substrates, will no doubt consider these questions
resolved.  Meanwhile, what we have done is to practice thinking about
what their answers will be.

Lee




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