Agree.
As I mentioned before, science was used to be seen as the pursuing of
"truth", and its theories aimed at describing the aspects of world "as
it is". Now it has been taken as a wrong view. Science is organized
human experience, which is fundamentally based on human cognitive
capability and human experience, so its description of the world never
perfectly matches the world itself.
Actually this is what makes science an everlasting enterprise.
Otherwise there will be a day when science really tells us everything
about the world --- as a Turing Machine or not --- then it will stop
there. Now we know that it will never happen. There will always be
phenomena that no existing theory can explain or predict --- this is
the "insufficient knowledge and resources" situation at the level of
whole human society.
Obviously many people working in science still hold the old
("classical"?) view of science, which usually does not cause too big a
difference in what they do in their research. However, if the subject
of the research is science itself or the human cognition process, then
the old view is not even good enough as an approximation or
idealization.
For people who think the above is just my personal bias, I recommend
the following readings:
*. any textbook in philosophy of science, as far as it include Kuhn and Lakatos
*. Philosophy in the Flesh : The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to
Western Thought,
by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson
*. Why We See What We Do: An Empirical Theory of Vision, by Dale
Purves and R. Beau Lotto
Pei
On Thu, Oct 30, 2008 at 5:35 PM, Ben Goertzel <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>
> I note that physicists have frequently, throughout the last few hundred
> years, expressed confidence in their understanding of the whole universe ...
> and then been proven wrong by later generations of physicists...
>
> Personally I find it highly unlikely that the current physical understanding
> of the universe as a whole is going to survive the next century ...
> especially with the Singularity looming and all that. Most likely,
> superintelligent AGIs will tell us why our current physics ideas are very
> limited.
>
> Fortunately, we don't seem to need to understand the physical universe very
> completely in order to build AGIs at the human level and beyond.
>
> -- Ben G
>
> On Thu, Oct 30, 2008 at 5:29 PM, Pei Wang <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>>
>> On Thu, Oct 30, 2008 at 5:18 PM, Matt Mahoney <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>> wrote:
>> > --- On Thu, 10/30/08, Pei Wang <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>> >> So there are physicists who think in principle the stock
>> >> market can be
>> >> accurately predicated from quantum theory alone? I'd
>> >> like to get a
>> >> reference on that. ;-)
>> >
>> > If you had a Turing machine, yes.
>> >
>> > It also assumes you know which of the possible 2^(2^409) possible states
>> > the universe is in. (2^409 ~ 2.9 x 10^122 bits = entropy of the universe).
>> > So don't expect any experimental verification.
>>
>> Matt,
>>
>> Even if all of our models of the universe can be put into a Turing
>> Machine, your conclusion still doesn't follow, because you need to
>> further assume the model is perfect, that is, it describes the
>> universe *as it is*. This is another conclusion that conflict with the
>> current understanding of science.
>>
>> Pei
>>
>>
>> -------------------------------------------
>> agi
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>
>
>
> --
> Ben Goertzel, PhD
> CEO, Novamente LLC and Biomind LLC
> Director of Research, SIAI
> [EMAIL PROTECTED]
>
> "A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher
> a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts,
> build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders,
> cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure,
> program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly.
> Specialization is for insects." -- Robert Heinlein
>
>
> ________________________________
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