> > >Lee: No, the important claims that Bruno makes go far beyond. > He attempts > > > to derive physics from the theory of computation (i.e., recursive > > > functions, effective computability, incompleteness, and > > > unsolvability). > > > His is also one set of the claims, hypotheses, and > conjectures that > > > attempt to reduce physics to a completely timeless abstract world. > > > Julian Barbour, in The End of Time, gave, as you probably > know, one > > > of the most brilliant presentations from this perspective. > > > >Jonathan: Sure; but I was just addressing the observation by Bruno that a > > description of a ball can bruise you (if you are also a > description). > > That observation is not unique to Bruno's Comp; it applies to any > > theory that accepts the premise of Strong AI. > > I'm astonished to hear this; I thought that "strong AI" > referred merely to the claim that fully human or beyond > intelligence might be achieved by automatic machinery even if > the programs only push bits around one at a time. In other > words, what distinguished the strong AI camp from the weak AI > camp was that the latter believed that more is needed somehow > or other: perhaps parallel processing; perhaps biological > program instantiation; perhaps quantum gravity tubules or... > something.
No, the conventional meanings of strong vs. weak AI are merely: Weak AI: machines can be made to act *as if* they were intelligent (conscious, etc). Strong AI: machines that act intelligently have real, conscious minds (actually experience the world, qualia etc). A claim that a description of an object (a simulated billiard ball for instance) can bruise me (cause me pain etc) if I am a simulation, requires strong AI, such that my simulation is conscious. Otherwise, under weak AI, my simulation can only act *as if* it were bruised or in pain, since it is not actually conscious. > As far as believing that a billiard-ball *machine* or a > hydraulic machine might instantiate me (as a running > program), I for one *do* believe that. So in my understanding > of the terms, as I said above, then it follows that I myself > am in the strong AI camp (ontologically). But Strong AI usually presumes substrate independance; so if you don't believe that a mechanical ping pong ball machine for instance could instantiate an intelligence, you would not be classed as in the Strong AI camp. > But I (and I know I speak for others) don't think that I'm > only a description; we believe that we must be processes > running during some time interval on some kind of hardware in > some physical reality. > So we are as yet unmoved :-) by Bruno's descriptions. The usual reply is that this begs the question as to what a "process" is. If we accept the block universe, time is a 1st person phenomenon anyway, so how do differentiate between what is a description and what is a process? Jonathan Colvin
