[NKS disproves intelligent design] - A New Kind of Science: The NKS ForumA New Kind of Science: The NKS Forum
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NKS disproves intelligent design
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Posted by: Eric Schechter
NKS can be used as evidence against at least one formulation of the dogma of "intelligent design." I have posted a brief web page about this, at
http://www.math.vanderbilt.edu/~sch...es/wolfram.html
I invite anyone's comments, either on this form or directly by email. I probably will make some small alterations in the web page in the next few days or weeks.
I wrote the web page as a reaction to hearing news about the trial going on in Pennsylvania -- see
http://www.aclu.org/evolution/
I'm not any sort of expert on NKS, evolution, or law, but I thought my observation was a fairly obvious one, just using common sense. Still, I didn't hear it being mentioned in the news. I just wish I'd thought of this sooner; by now it's probably too late for my observation to have any effect on the trial.
- Eric Schechter
Posted by: Vasily Shirin
How can one theory be used as evidence against another theory? Certainly, you use the term "evidence" is some non-conventional meaning.
I read your blog, and found a couple of standard misconceptions there.
1) you equate ID and theology (please re-read your own post and make sure this is really the case). In fact, they are not the same, I have a hard evidence for this: it's my own existence. I'm not religious, but I still can imagine that this world was designed before being implemented, there's nothing wrong about it, I do the same every day while writing computer programs.
2) you believe the science is based on absolutely rational platform, which is not true. For example, darwinists believe evolution is driven by RANDOM mutations. (Take away RANDOM from here - and you virtually destroy the whole construction of scientific worldview). Do you have any evidence proving randomness? You certainly don't, it would require direct observations of mutations (zillions of them), running statistical tests, etc. -no one ever done this (moreover, elementary math suggests this can't be the case). So, based on what scientific data do darwinists believe in random mutations? It's a kind of religious belief, no more plausible (at least for me) than tale of Adam and Eve.
Posted by: Eric Schechter
Vasily -
I'm not sure whether I've understood you correctly; I
will respond to what I think you meant.
(1) When you write a computer program, certainly you
are using your intelligence to design it. The computer
program did not come into existence by accident -- at
least, not directly. But where did your intelligence
come from? How could something as complicated as your
intelligence have arisen accidentally from something as
simple as inanimate matter? Well, NKS does not show
all the details of the evolutionary process, but NKS
does show that very complicated things *can* arise
spontaneously from very simple things. This does not
prove that there were no supernatural interventions,
but it shows that both explanations -- accidental or
intelligent design -- are plausible. Most people will
prefer whichever explanation they consider simpler.
(2) I'm sure that biologists have experimental evidence
for the presence of random mutations. But I also would
offer a philosophical explanation.
Actually, whether or not there are random mutations
depends partly on your view of the world. If you take
the view that "nothing in this world ever happens by
accident," then there is a guiding hand in every
random-seeming brownian movement of every microscopic
particle, and no mountain of evidence will ever
convince you otherwise. When you met that special
someone, it was not merely an accident -- it was fate;
and when you and that special somone broke up, that was
also meant to happen. And your uncle died at exactly
the date and time that he should have died.
Scientists do not contradict this attitude, but they do
not concern themselves much with this sort of hidden
design, which is of little use for making predictions.
Science is concerned with finding the parts of the
design that are *not* hidden, the parts that we can
detect and measure. That's what science is about, so
that's what should be taught in our science classes.
Any theory of hidden design should be taught in
some other sort of classes.
Purely as a convenience of terminology, let us call
"random" the absence of discernible pattern. This is
not just a measurement of what is happening, but also a
measurement of what we have learned to discern. Once
you accept this terminology, it should be evident that
plenty of random errors do occur. No system for
encoding and transmitting information is immune to
error. Any system -- DNA, USB, Wi-Fi, or what have
you -- is occasionally going to have errors, due to
things like gamma rays, solar flares, mutagenic
toxins, quantum reactions, brownian motion; etc. We
don't see much of that in our everyday experience,
because our bodies are built to see the macroscopic
level where most of the fluctuations average out.
Eric
Posted by: Vasily Shirin
Eric,
you are using mostly hand-waving arguments. Like: mutations are random because we know no discernible pattern. From here, you conclude they are really random, and that ID should not be taught at school. And you are mistaken if you assume that biologists really ran statistical tests to prove randomness. You are of too high opinion about evolutional biologists - they would never do that, even if they could.
In fact, I cannot imagine more dogmatic curriculum than current one. It teaches frozen, dead theories. Every live theory is full of doubt, it's never complete, it's always in the process of denying itself; no one is ever sure that ANY notion used by a theory will survive in long term. School takes away life from every disipline it tries to teach.
I could understand why any shadow of doubt was eliminated from curriculum in USSR: 1) they needed good soldiers to obey orders without asking questions 2) they were afraid that if they cast doubt on any theory, someone would extend it to marxism, and their system will immediately collapse (which proved to be a correct analysis).
BTW, there was no debate there as to what to teach and how to teach. Debates were prohibited either, which is quite logical if your are afraid of seeding doubt in the heads of citizens.
Posted by: Eric Schechter
Actually, different school districts have different curricula; our society as a whole merely has general trends about this. And whether the subject seems frozen, dead, and dogmatic probably depends more on the individual instructor than on the local school district's curriculum, anyway.
But I think I may have to drop out of this discussion -- I'm just a mathematician; I don't have a lot of expertise on biology or school curricula or philosophical debates. (Perhaps someone with such expertise can step into this discussion.) Evidently I need to do more reading on those subjects. I think I may start with the book published earlier this year by philosopher Harry G. Frankfurt.
Posted by: Philip Ronald Dutton
To argue against intelligent design requires the acknowledgement of the possibility (quite obviously).
What about the possibility that an intelligent "being" (who is all powerful, etc, etc, etc) could create a universe for which its inhabitants could find some random true (according to that particular universe's rules) proof that intelligent design never happened, could not exist, etc., etc., etc.. The existence of that proof is due to that universe's rules but its existence does not seem to be able to breach beyound the bounds of that particular universe. It has no effect on the intelligent designer who is now sitting back watching this universe and sipping starbucks coffee.
I have just proved that it is not possible to disprove intelligent design.... (just kidding!)
Posted by: Eric Schechter
Philip -
I agree with you that the existence of an intelligent designer cannot actually be disproved. I find it plausible that there was a creator who intentionally (for reasons of his own that we cannot guess) set things up in such a fashion as to make his own existence uncertain to us. He might, indeed, be sitting in a coffee shop somewhere and watching us all, chuckling about our debates over his nature. (I am now adding something about this to my web page.)
However, at least some of the advocates of intelligent design have made a stronger claim, one which I am countering. They claim that the existence of the intelligent designer is not just plausible, but certain. They base this assertion on the notion that the ordered complexity that we see around us could not have arisen accidentally.
My response is that this "proof" of theirs is mathematically just plain wrong. Simple systems can and sometimes do generate complex ones; this is demonstrated clearly by the examples in NKS.
I also find it plausible that someday we will become certain of the existence of an intelligent designer, because someday someone will find a proof. But as far as I can see, they haven't found it yet.
Posted by: Vasily Shirin
Eric,
You mentioned a principle of simplicity in your blog. Really, why do we
believe that, other things being equal, simple theory is better than complex
one? Why scientists are always looking for elegant theories, not for ugly ones?
For, objectively, there's no difference. For computer, the equation with 25
parameters is not better or worse than with 2.
In general, when we are talking about simplicity, we are using HUMAN language.
Simple means: easy to understand. When Wolfram says: simple programs lead to
complex behaviour, this translates to (apparently, contrary to his intentions):
programs that are easy to understand lead to behaviour that is hard to
understand. But wait: if nature has no intelligent designer (or: designers)
behind it, why does it care about our ability to understand it. Remove human
being from the picture - and there's no difference between "simple" and
"complex", these notions don't have "objective meaning". True, he could use the
term "short" instead of "simple", but what would he use instead of "complex"? [
BTW, formula "short program can lead to complex behaviour" would be in
contradiction with Kolmogorov's definition of complexity, but this fact doesn't
matter much in the context of this discussion - let's forget about it for now]
Be it "simple", or "short", why would it matter in objective world having no
intelligent observer? Why there's so much excitement about rule 110? What
difference would it make if the minimal universal rule had 1000 digits in it
instead of 3? And only one out of 10 million rules would be universal? From
computers's viewpoint, this difference wouldn't make any difference.
The point is that all science, including math, has some background belief behind
it - belief that the "rules" of this world are simple and beautiful, AS IF (!)
they were constructed by intelligent being. Wolfram, as a mathematician, shares
this view, no matter if he is aware of it or not. In this context, rule 110
really matters: it's BEAUTIFUL, there's no other value in it, but this is the
absolutely the most important value mathematical result can have. Somehow, I
suspect that Wolfram didn't fully realize what he really discovered; or, maybe,
he realized, became overly excited, and in this excitement, produced a number of
statements that reduce this sense of beauty to absolute ugliness of universe
driven by cellular automation. (Critics overlooked this beauty, too. What's
the difference between rule with 5 neighbours and 3 colors, and 2 neighbours and
2 colors? There's a difference, I would say. Infinitely big difference in
beauty).
So, what's wrong if people make this background belief more explicit? It's
USEFUL. It leads to things like Newtonian laws, relativity, Euler's identity,
etc,... - and, among other things, modest rule 110, which is not that bad
either. On what grounds should anyone administratively prohibit this idea?
What an irony: official science is engaged in a struggle with the fundamental
idea of science: the belief in beauty.
Posted by: Lawrence J. Thaden
Vasily wrote:
What's the difference between rule with 5 neighbours and 3 colors, and 2 neighbours and 2 colors? There's a difference, I would say. Infinitely big difference in beauty).
My comment:
One might argue that the rule with 5 neighbors and 3 colors is more complex than the 2 neighbor, 2 color rule based on the number of components and the number of possible arrangements. One might also find two NKS students who agree on this point but differ on which is more beautiful. The reason is because beauty is in the eye of the beholder.
Simplicity is a property proper to the study of math and science. But is beauty?
I would even go so far as to say that those looking for a designer are casting an eye beyond the pale. That seems an endeavor proper to metaphysics and theology. It muddies the water of scientific research.
Posted by: Vasily Shirin
By the same token, one can argue that Wolfram's statement "simple rules lead to complex behaviour" is devoid of rigorous mathematical meaning and belongs to
metaphysics and theology. And muddies the water of scientific research, as you put it. So what - this water is muddied enough already by Einstein, Bohr, Poincare and virtually every great physicist and mathematician. Notion of beauty is central for mathematical research. Highest praise for mathematical result is when somebody calls it "beautiful".
Posted by: Lawrence J. Thaden
Great! So if virtually every major scientist and mathematician muddies the water, we should follow suit and jump in too?
Where's the progress unless it means drawing the line?
Also, I should like to hear that argument that places Wolframs claim about simple rules among the postulates of metaphysics just because it does not have mathematical rigor.
My understanding is that proofs proceed from “by examples” to “by description” to “by explanation”. And explanations are most often mathematically or logically rigorous.
So if Wolframs NKS is still in the descriptive stage, it only means more work is to be done. It does not follow that it has to be dumped into metaphysics.
Posted by: Val Smith
Intelligent design is a euphemism for Universe created by an extrauniversal supreme being or God.
God may be invisible but evil is not. We may not be able to prove or disprove God with logic and reason, but we can prove an Anti-God by the existence of illogic and insane evil, and the illogical black magic of numbers like 911 or 666 that make some paranoid who try to make sense of it. Spiritual reality at least the dark side has no human logic nor reason at all in it. Who can explain why "Jesus saves us on his cross"? Isn't it more logical or reasonable to take the role of an engineer and debug and fix the CA which runs the cosmos?
(And occasionally walk on water or turn it into wine or heal blind, lepers) Yet the spirit, which is what life has and death does not, and of which we have no science to resurrect ourselves (nor explain how our selves do know "we are here"), required the peculiar action. You can measure evil by distance from paradise. So, why is the devil working so hard against God if there is no God? If there's no creator why is there a destroyer?
Revelation 9:11 "They have a king named Destroyer" (a spirit that inspires destruction?)
Posted by: Vasily Shirin
I don't understand a thing in your post, so I cannot tell whether it makes sense or not. I can just argue against the first paragraph, which says:
> Intelligent design is a euphemism for Universe created by an extrauniversal supreme being or God.
I disagree with this statement. I find the idea of ID quite plausible, but I don't see any reason to believe in a lone designer. There can be a whole think-tank stuffed with designers of varying qualifications over there. As a programmer, I know that as soon as we define a class, instances of this class start proliferating. In nature, we can hardly find an example of singleton. Whatever entity you consider, even the President of US - there're many instances having this title at different times, not to mention that even a current President has a host of advisors, deputies, speechwriters, etc. So, as soon as we introduce the notion of Designer, we have to accept the fact that there're probably many of them, plus their assistants, employees etc.
And who knows, maybe we are also their employees or assistants of some kind.
I have even a more radical idea that we are (at least part-time) Designers ourselves, but I can't elaborate on this idea at this moment.
Posted by: Val Smith
I have made my own programming language by myself. I programmed a video game by myself. I designed it's "world" by myself. It's rules do not include player rank, nor currency, nor politics, nor anything implying a "team". Players may build things without knowledge of how the world was designed.
I am the only [my language] programmer in the world.
I am the only one who programmed the game alone.
The game may be copied by new players but it is still the same game. The game could be hacked so that it's rules could be broken but then it would be corrupt.
And I have not cloned myself so there is only one me. I have written all my programs, hundreds of them, alone.
And programming is not the only thing I do by myself. I paint landscape art, make music, garden, make sculptures, ...
So I guess I'm a singular Intelligent Designer, but I didn't make The Universe;
the one who did is called God, and apparently God created me in the image of a creator.
As a programmer, you may understand that my language is a RISC VM, which may have 16 or less instructions, and I have never written a program larger than 16KB. All of my complete programs are "single files" (or I may say: This or That program is a 4096 digit integer).
The idea of defining a class with proliferating instances is foreign to me and only helps to explain why operating systems have insatiable appetites for memory and are susceptible to viruses, and why I can't write a windows program in one hour or even one year.
Posted by: Vasily Shirin
You can design your game all by yourself, or together with a friend, or as an employee of a company, or even within open-source project having 100 other participants completely unknown to you. How can you be sure which of those possibilities really materialized in our Universe? Even in your post, you mention other entities somehow involved in the process. Other sources also mention angels, which look very much like Designer's employees to me.
Most importantly, do we care how many designers were really involved? The very fact of design is something that matters. That's the idea of ID, as I understand it. Going into details is a pure speculation.
Posted by: Eric Schechter
Vasily -- Sorry I didn't have time to respond sooner. Your message of Oct 3 included some interesting points. In fact, I even partially agree with some of them.
Originally posted by Vasily Shirin
In general, when we are talking about simplicity, we are using HUMAN language. Simple means: easy to understand. When Wolfram says: simple programs lead to complex behaviour, this translates to (apparently, contrary to his intentions): programs that are easy to understand lead to behaviour that is hard to understand. ... Remove human being from the picture - and there's no difference between "simple" and "complex", these notions don't have "objective meaning".
However, I would disagree slightly with your interpretation of Wolfram's results. I think it would be more accurate to say that Wolfram's insights make it easier for us to understand some behavior that formerly was harder to understand. Or, to put it another way, Wolfram's insights reveal underlying simplicity in what we formerly thought was more complex.
Posted by: Vasily Shirin
The very idea that simple rules
(of whatever kind) constitute the basis of Universe - has religious overtones. For many
(if not all) great scientists this was an undisputable idea. In this light, it's the more so strange to see a hot debate about ID in American press. I don't understand what's wrong with ID
if Newton believed in it, and Einstein believed in it, and Godel, and ... virtually everybody. And Wolfram, essentially, wrote a 1000-page book on it (ironically, at least on the surface, his intention was to do just the opposite). Do you agree with this?
Posted by: dan wills
I do not agree.
What's wrong with the whole idea of ID is that it is circular - it tries to put one of the emergent properties of physical evolution (ie intelligence) there as the cause of all of them.
ID does not give you any idea how a system can start from meaningless information (purely semantic - no symbols), and develop into states where parts of the system have a relationship with other parts that you could call 'reference' (one part now 'means' something to another). NKS (and Process Physics also in my opinion) show clearly how this transition can occur without any kind of external guidance or setup whatsoever.
I think that what Wolfram has shown is that the physics of information alone is sufficient to give rise to all the kinds of dynamics we see in the universe. (I have also been strongly influenced by Reg Cahill's Process Physics in this point of view, which I think provides a good bridge between the concepts in NKS and how automata can lead to reality )
Examples like 1D automata rule 30 make a compelling case for this fact; It does not take any kind of leap of faith (or imply any 'religious overtone', as you put it) to know that any amount of complexity in the universe could be generated from the equivalent of a single bit of information, even when the rules are not chosen intelligently.
Clearly there is no need for the idea of directed 'design' in systems as simple as this. In any case if you think it takes intelligence to think up rules this simple, then you have a close-to-meaningless concept of what it means for something to be intelligent.
I would argue that the kinds of rules we are talking about here are also almost completely free of syntax - there is nothing you need to know in order to identify states or compute outcomes, there is nothing intelligent about the rules at all!
Wolfram shows how rules with no intelligence can lead to the structures of reality. I agree with Eric, though I would hesitate to say it has 'Disproved' - rather, this is a much /better/ theory than the Theory of Intelligent Design.
Posted by: ChiefWiggum
I think that the question posed by Homer Simpson:
"How come you can go to the moon, but you can't make my shoes smell good ?"
is of more interest to reputable scientists.
I think you are guilty of "preaching the controversy", where none exists.
Posted by: Vasily Shirin
What do you mean by that? That Newton is not a reputable scientist? Then who is?
My question is: why is it easier for you to believe that
Universe is based on simple rules than on complicated ones? Just because simple rules CAN lead to complicated behaviour? But complicated rules can lead to complicated behaviour, too!
Posted by: Eric Schechter
Originally posted by Vasily Shirin... My question is: why is it easier for you to believe that Universe is based on simple rules than on complicated ones?
I think that "prefer," rather than "believe," is the right term to use in science. Science generally does not rule out plausible explanations; it merely gives preference and greater attention to those explanations that are more insightful. "Complicated rules are the basis of the universe" is plausible, and not ruled out. But simpler rules are preferable to most scientists because simpler rules are easier for us to understand and to use. The goal of science is to understand the universe -- and perhaps to get technological and medical byproducts of our understanding -- not just to admire the universe and be awed by it. But that doesn't rule out awe. Indeed, I think that most of us admire the universe *more* when we understand it better. Religion, on the other hand, has awe as a principal goal; thus religion might be better served by focusing on the complexity and incomprehensibility of the universe. I would not call this an invalid goal -- just a different one.
Posted by: Jason Cawley
Although I've intentionally stayed out of this, and I've posted before my own opinions on the whole subject, I thought I would address some of the points raised so far in this thread about specific relations to NKS, and general points about philosophy and science.
First on disproof, I think the original poster had a point, not entirely appreciated by some of the responders. But to see it one needs to distinguish the idea of ID as a general speculative opinion, from the argument for ID from specified complexity. The latter claims to be about evidence, not speculative possibility. It has the logical form of a "for every" statement, about a class of observables, not a "maybe" statement about an unobservable. That brings with it the great virtue of being potentially refutable. Slightly undermined in this case by being actually refuted.
The argument from specified complexity says, any instance of specified complexity must have an intelligent cause i.e. specified complexity is a sufficient indicator of artificiality. This is not a claim about a possibility only, but an impossibility claim or equivalently, a necessity claim. It is not meant to be a tautology, with "specified" so amorphous one can shift around what counts until only artificial things make it through. Any non-artificial, non-designed instance of specified complexity is a counterexample to the claim.
Specified is meant to modify complexity only in a way meant to exclude pure randomness or entropy or noise. Rule 30 does not count as specified complexity - it is complex and random but does not fufill any exact blueprint that we can see. But rule 90 from simple initials is specified. It definitely fits a highly intricate pattern. In NKS we tend not to think of it as terribly complicated, because we are used to it. In other contexts, though, even rule 90 would count as complex.
And when one comes to something like the universality of 110, there is not much room left for wiggling. Universality meets all the requirements of a specified attribute. It is not mere randomness. It is a definite "target". Any system could easily "miss". And unlike say a universal TM, nobody designed rule 110 to have universality as an attribute. But it does have it. If you pick 3 color CAs at random, some portion will be class 4, able to emulate 110, and universal. Some portion of random CAs (even quite simple ones) therefore have specified complexity without being designed for it.
Someone might still try to maintain that real physical systems as opposed to abstract formal ones, are only universal if they have been designed to be. But NKS tells us quite the opposite. It tells us to expect universality all over, in practically all the places we see apparent complexity, without imputing any artificiality to e.g. fracture patterns or vortex streets or the variety of shapes of crystals. If one agrees with this assessment of real complexity then the argument from specified complexity simply fails.
One might leave the speculative "out", perhaps (alleging possibility not necessity) the whole computationally modeled universe is IDed, but that is now distinct from a claim about evidence or necessity. Moreover, the purely formal side of NKS is math-like or formal, and as such true in all possible worlds. The inference from computationally sophisticated to artificial is therefore not justified, on a purely formal level.
Complexity is not evidence of artificiality. And that was what the argument from specified complexity wanted to maintain. One can therefore indeed speak of "refutation". A does not imply B. Since A is admitted and there is evidence for it, saying that this does not refute B (as mere speculative possibility) rather misses the point. It undermines the claim that there is evidence for B. In fact, there is no such evidence, from specified complexity anyway.
Next, one poster brought up the speculative possibility of the hidden designer, one who erases his tracks scrupulously. It is an entertaining philosophical thought experiment. But it is immune to empirical refutation precisely because it lacks all empirical content. There is no state of the world one can imagine or find, such that it would be more likely or less. An idea without operational content can be entertaining, it might even be possibly true in some sufficiently abstract and objective sense. But you could never tell, nor could it ever make any difference for anything you could tell. (If it ever supposedly did, then a track hasn't been erased).
Personally, I'm all in favor of people having speculative philosophical opinions. I think we do, whether we like it or not, and it is better to be aware of them and consider several. I happen to prefer philosophical opinions with operational effects, whether for claimed truths about the world or claimed implications for human actions or choices. People can argue for their own and consider each other's. We should not, however, confused possibility with truth, or immunity to evidence with presence of evidence. The argument from specified complexity is not immune to evidence, which is a strength. It is also refuted by evidence, which is a rather considerable drawback. The hidden designer hypothesis is immune to evidence, which is a different drawback, one but quite sufficient to kick it out of the category "science".
Then there is the question why we prefer simple rules or explanations that appeal to simple rules or relations. Because science is the art of systematic oversimplification - meaning, the art of figuring out what we can omit and disregard, without operational consequence for whatever measure or subsystem we care about. We want to come to conclusions and make decisions. The principle of laziness tells us to ignore things that cannot affect our decision.
We also want to find causes, proximate ones and strong ones, that operate all the time or nearly so. Because we can tell whether a simple explanation is wrong, more readily than we can tell whether a complicated one is. Which matters because we are guessing and want to iterate our guesses, which in turn requires feedback about whether the previous one was any good. A guess that no feedback can tell us to toss, isn't useful, because we will get stuck in it even if it isn't true. It will block inquiry, and the first rule of reason is never to stop reasoning and (therefore) not to block additional inquiry.
In addition, we have excellent reason to think the universe operates according to some pretty simple rules, at least much of the time. We look around and find almost everything we can observe is composed of a tiny number of basic elements, just arranged in different ways. There are a small number of characteristic subassemblies that make up almost everything we interact with. The rules governing nearly all our interactions are amazingly uniform, with the great variety we experience apparently an emergent consequence of different sequences and amounts of these, spatially and temporally arranged.
There are certainly exceptions to this general picture, but it is the overwhelmingly general picture. (Almost everything we see is hydrogen. Almost all the rest is helium. Almost every interaction is governed by QED. etc). This need not have been the case. There might be a billion billion fundamental constituents of the universe acting according to a trillion different fundamental laws, each one of which was as complicated to follow as a million lines of buggy C code. But this is simply not what we see. The universe is vastly more ordered and regular than that.
And it is much more plausible that these simple components, acting according to a small number of basic laws, might generate the occasional exception and complex aspect of our experience, by repeated use of a modest number of simple arrangements, than by scads of different ones each so complicated that each instance was basically unique. We can imagine simple rules combining simple components readily. And we see that would already be sufficient to create things as complicated as anything we see. (With full universality, almost as complicated as anything we can imagine, or imagine constructing, anyway).
Last I want to briefly discuss the bearing of all of the above on readings of NKS and philosophic opinions. Personally I read NKS in a formal realist way. I think it shows how complexity can arise from a simple elemental base. I think it makes plausible, though it does not yet fully explain, how something like intelligence can arise from arrangements of components that are not themselves intelligent. As a philosophical realist, how thought arises in a realist world is one of the puzzles my philosophy has to explain, and NKS helps me do it.
But I know others who prefer to read NKS in an idealist way, because they are more disposed to philosophical idealism to begin with. They think the fundamental constituents of the universe are math-like or thought-like, and their preferred models refer things to thoughts or minds. They don't particularly need to explain thought-like-ness, it is a first principle. Instead they need to explain the regularities and simplicities of the world.
It seems to me formalism is a place these attitudes can meet. But I recognize some are coming to that meeting place from one direction and others are coming to it from a different one, philosophically speaking. I do not think anything I said above about evidence and ID is restricted to my realist view. I don't see any reason why philosophical idealists wouldn't agree with it. Idealism is not in the end based on a claim about evidence.
Nor is either position equivalent to any definite opinion on other speculative questions, like an origin of the visible universe in time, or theism. Every combinatorial box seems to me to be occupied (some people think A, not B, and not C, others A, not B and C, others A, B, and not C, etc). Nobody has to pretend they are settling such questions, when they aren't, and they clearly remain entirely open for philosophical speculation. Without that meaning they are pieces of science - they aren't. They are in the domain of philosophy, a perfectly respectable but distinct field.
Posted by: dan wills
wow thanks Jason - what an interesting and very well argued post !
You're knowledge of the topic is much deeper than mine at the moment (I've only just learned about NKS) but I follow what you are saying.
Thanks for the pointer about rules 30, 90 and 110 - I almost forgot universality when I was posting and it provides a much clearer refutation of ID from specified complexity.
I think I lean slightly towards the philosophical idealism that you describe, but I reckon I'm somewhere in the middle.. I do think that the constituents of the universe are "math-like" (as much as storage-free bits could be math-like), but I think that "thought-like" goes a bit far. For the same reason that I put in my earlier post - thought is one of the emergent results of physical evolution, so how could it be what everything is made of?
Formalism is a great place to meet on these issues, so... see you there! :D
thanks again for your thoughts
Posted by: Vasily Shirin
Archaeologist finds an axe in the cave and concludes that this axe is really an axe, which was made by human being. Critics attack his conclusion on the grounds that the axe
could emerge by itself, as a result of rule 110 running in Universe, and there's no need to explain the origin of this axe by introducing
much more complex notion of human being, rule 110 alone will suffice, because, being universal, it will sooner or later create all the shapes and figures.
DNA consists of 1 billion bases? No problem - emerged by chance. Because.. rule 110... sooner or later...
The whole ideology of neo-darwinism is based on this "sooner or later" argument.
Jason, your example of rule 110 misses the point. The probability of rule being universal, according to Wolfram's findings, is very high (BTW, even without Wolfram, this was pretty obvious, because Turing machines with small number of states are pretty well known; Wolfram just found that probability of rule being universal is even higher that one could suspect). So, even though no one designed rule 110 to be universal, it has very good chance to be universal by virtue of statistics. This situation is very different from, say, DNA.
Random combination of nucleotides has very low probability to "program" viable organism. It's the same situation as with an axe, only worse (I don't
even mention that DNA should be processed by very complicated biological computer, which has to be built beforehand)
The way how you build your "counterexample" is very typical for supporters of darwinism; the main characteristic of their arguments is careful avoidance of any calculations. If someone comes up with an idea that life emerged as a result of random events, he should provide calculations supporting his theory. Instead, these people are saying: prove that we are wrong! And each time when someone comes after them with calculations,
the effort is made to belittle the value of these calculations, ridicule them, and reduce the discussion back to hand-waving arguments and accusations in religious obscurantism.
Based on this observation, I devised a test that can help you determine whether you are really a hardcore atheist (whoever is not, should be treated as secret collaborator of ID camp) Suppose some researcher discovers that some fragment of human DNA contains, of all things, note-by-note record of 9-th symphony of Beethoven. Will this discovery shake your world outlook? If yes, you are not an atheist. As atheist, you should suppress any temptation of invoking a notion of probability. 9-th symphony? OK, why not?
Universal rule 110 sooner or later will create this combination of notes anyway, so what?
In principle, there can be a way to explain the emergence of DNA without the notion of design. If we accept "many worlds" interpretation of QM, anything that can happen really happens. In particular, events having arbitrarily small probability - also happen pretty quickly. For some reason, this interpretation was not embraced by materialistic school yet. I think it's because these people, like Soviet ideologists, are afraid that if you touch one small piece of the doctrine, the whole thing will collapse. In case of Soviet system, this proved to be a correct analysis.
Posted by: dan wills
but there /is/ something pretty amazing that happens 'sooner or later', on this much we seem to agree?! :) ... ( otherwise I guess neither of us would be writing to wolframscience forums! ) And I really don't agree that maths and logic is going to crumble like a political reigime if one piece of our understanding of it changes... Its pretty stable stuff imho, especially NKS.
So surely you must agree that /some/ things /can/ become complicated (and self-organize, etc) through natural processes like rule 110 and other rules ?
If so, then your issue really becomes more of a question of how far can you go with simple rules? You seem to have decided that there is a limit to the complexity that simple rules can generate. What makes you think there is a limit here? Where is the evidence?
It seems to me that you're saying that because the complexity of some systems is irreducible, it cannot have been generated by simple rules, but the converse of this is exactly one of Wolframs' results! - even simple rules can produce irreducible complexity.
I'm not sure I follow what you mean by calculations? Does processing an automata count as calculation? If so, Wolfram has already done a lot of this for us, which I think can be validly referred to in this discussion - there's really not much need for a repeat experiment of wolfram's work is there? since those rules always run the same way. Could you elaborate on what kind of calculations you think might make the argument better?
As for the axe example, I can see what you're getting at but it only really highlights the fact that the construction of some objects in the universe (for example those that are constructed by biological organisms) have an irreducible part to the explanation of their construction, because in order to properly explain the axe, you must also explain the axe-maker, the explanation of which is fairly irreducible.
The metaphorical 'axe' could also be created by an animal or some other complex process, for example a good explanation of how a honeycomb is constructed would need a thorough explanation of the fairly irreducible bee to go along with it. This means that unless ID can come up with a thorough irreducible explanation of god, it is doing worse than either case you describe - it doesn't say the human OR rule 110 made the axe, it says 'something we can't describe wants an axe', which I think is a bit much given that there is so much we can describe about how axes (and axemakers) come into being these days.
If you humour me for a moment and imagine that you might be able to get a simple-rule based description of this kind of embedded-complexity construction - that explains how an already complex thing (eg human, bee) can create something else in the universe (simple or complex), then you also cannot absolutely rule out the possibility of some massive, god-like complex processes in the universe, (even conscious like ones) that may not yet be obvious to us, but these bizzare entities would nonetheless still be physical developmental results of evolution, not the cause of it as ID would have us believe.
ID does not try to explain the axe maker, so to me, that means it should not be thought of as a science (because it stops explanation rather than giving you a way to find it).
There are some arguments about science and ID here:
http://www.aclu.org/ReligiousLibert...?ID=17204&c=139
Which has some FAQs about some of the things we're talking about.
Posted by: Jason Cawley
VS, no I am not saying since 110 is universal, eventually everything will happen. Nor am I a many-world QMer, you can find my arguments against it in threads on Tegmark ("do many world QMers buy lottery tickets?") and others on the anthropic principle.
But 110 disproves the argument from specified complexity as it has actually been proposed. That argument does not say "life was not created by chance", it does not even say "life could not have been created by chance", it says "every instance of specified complexity is artificial". It then tries to deduce the other statements from the last. But the last is false, and that purely formal things (like rule 110s universality) are sufficient to show.
If you found an elementary CA which exactly reproduced the famous pascal's triangle, just reduced mod 2, why isn't that as thrilling as Beethoven? Good reasons might be given for such a distinction, but the argument from specified complexity does not distinguish them. Pascal's triangle in perfect detail is specified complexity, and rule 90 makes it easily without having been designed to do so.
One might try to draw the line between things like rule 90 and things like Beethoven by requiring an irreducible calculation. But CAs more complicated than 90 are already irreducible. If you don't want this to count as specified complexity -
http://tones.wolfram.com/id/Goq6HdE...rlelXGC7ohDvSsk
- then you have to draw the line again, rather closer to Beethoven. Which admittedly that is not. But it is specified complexity. SC simply isn't nearly special enough. To get links in the reasoning to go through easily, the proposers of the argument from SC made it easy on themselves and set the bar low. And it fails on that basis - there are gobs of instances readily presentable on the "not designed" side of the origin question, that are on the SC side of the outcome question.
Then there is the ever present state space confusion, which consists in imagining all elements are independent and noticing that possible combinations are very large, without asking what rule or process creates what configurations or instances out of that merely imagined possibility space. I make a 2-color CA evolution 100 steps wide for 100 steps. There are 2^10000 possible patterns of 0s and 1s that large. But there are only 2^100 initials and CAs are deterministic.
Moreover, I might start from seeds of only 1-2 1s in a field of zeros, a space of initials only 100 or 9900 possibles large. (And only 1 or 99 if I treat rotations as equivalent). I might restrict myself to a dozen interesting simple CAs, resulting in a mere 1000 to 100000 possible patterns. But they will be just as intricate as the space of patterns from all the initials, and no simple measure will distinguish them from the whole space (i.e. some are as random, some have simple patterns of various kinds, etc). If I don't know the process and hide the first 50 lines, am I supposed to be able to tell this smaller possibility space from the imaginary "all cells independent" one, which is more than astronomically larger? If I see one of the patterns from that small space, am I supposed to conclude those exact cells had to be independently flipped by an artist? The real possibilities (constrained by the actual dynamics) are log of the imagined ones (all possible configurations in the data field).
Then for DNA in particular there is the fact that most details in most pairs don't matter at all. There are tons of "don't cares", acting not as programs for a different function but as filler and spacing, indifferently, with the only functional bits being these few sites and the separations between them. Because the corresponding proteins fold into the same shapes. So the "targets" aren't sequences, they are sets of sequences. Meanwhile the real critters on the origin side aren't duplicates, they are clouds of similars in sequence-space (containing plenty of internal variation, etc).
But all of that is minutae about DNA, which is definitely highly complex. No such complexity appears necessary for life-like-ness. It characterizes us, life as it has happened here, certainly. Making arguments about the second statement above ("could not have", as distinct from "was not") you have to be willing to settle for less than the known actual. Otherwise you try to argue "could not in principle" and only aim at "could not hit every one of these irrelevant details".
Then there is the axe. I love that one, because I doubt very much the favorite axes were actually axes. They were artifacts though, probably sling stones. An older philosopher's favorite example was perfect geometric shapes, like a hexagon pattern on a beach (I am thinking of Kant). Something always comes along and hits one of these, and then it moves. (Mud flats make hexagons from convection cells related to cooling). Details of history do allow us to recognize humanly useful tools, but those details of history are nothing like as general as specified complexity. And indeed, most artifacts stand out for their simplicity, not their complexity. They need to have predictable properties to fufill their functional roles.
Nobody has made life from soup so nobody needs to believe life can arise from soup, as any dictate of reasonableness. But anyone facing theorems about universality with loose categories like specified complexity doesn't know what he is up against. You can't say "can't" about universal systems with much assurance. Might not have, you can crow about until you are blue, no problem. But "can't" is a harder story, and when one tries to take that position, the likely result is you get refuted outright. That is what has happened with the specific argument from SC.
Posted by: Lea Stef
Damn i love this site! everything i need is on it, keep it going !
Posted by: Vasily Shirin
Definition of complexity: The minimum number of bits into which a string can be compressed without losing information. This is defined with respect to a fixed, but universal decompression scheme, given by a universal Turing machine.
Wolfram never defines the exact meaning of complexity in NKS. But it's certainly different from the above Kolmogorov's definition. Simple (i.e., SHORT) programs cannot generate complex strings: complexity of these strings will be equal to the size of the program, which is SHORT, as we established above. Strictly speaking, rule 110 as it is doesn't compute any particular string (it never stops), but we can expand definition by saying "run rule 110 for N cycles, then read the content of K cells starting from cell X". I don't want to go in details here, but within a lifetime of Universe, it will not generate anything complex at all - at least nothing compared with average complexity of a string of 1 billion bits (DNA).
So, I don't understand how it can be used to disprove any argument based on complexity.
Posted by: Jason Cawley
The measure of complexity as the shortest program that can produce a given output is based on the erroneous intuition that only complicated rules produce complicated behavior. This is simply not true, in general. You do not reach more complicated behaviors by using more involved programs. You get to universality, and then you are done. It is a threshold, not a continual measure.
The space of computations reached by short programs is the same as the space reached by complicated (but finitely specifiable) ones - the computables. Neither reaches the reals, but then the reals are un-name-able with probability 1, as Chaitin likes to put it. To finite nature types or those who agree with Church's thesis, the imagined greater complexity of reals is irrelevant to actual processes in our universe.
The rule to behavior gap is in general computationally irreducible - the only way to know what behavior a given simple but universal rule gives is to run it and see. You can't readily go backwards from some behavior and ask which initials for which universal system gives that behavior. The forward computational work cannot be short-cut, so you can't tell whether some initial "hits" a given "target" until you have tried it.
Which computations occur early in some enumeration of possible computations of a universal system is specific to that enumeration, and can be arbitrarily reordered by some other universal system or encoding scheme. What is a "short initial" for UTM X is not the same as what is a short initial for rule 110, or Life, or combinators, or a universal diophantine equation, etc.
Anything that can do universal computations behaves in ways as complicated as anything realizable in our universe. That is one formulation of Wolfram's principle of computational equivalence or PCE. Saying one of them "can't" do X is just going to be wrong, if X ever actually happens.
What do we mean by a complex outcome, since shortest program is an inadequate distinguisher once the systems under consideration are already across the universality threshold? Can standard methods of analysis crush the system's behavior, short cut it? Can you give a formula involving far fewer logical operations, for the outcome at some later stage? Rudy Rucker likes to formulate it as a "no log speed ups" test.
You can measure entropy, length of minimum boolean expressions in a single canonical form, how compressible the output is by standard data compression schemes like run-length encoding. They might differ on details but they will agree overall. Universal rules readily create complex behaviors even from short initials. If you add, "specified" and rule out simple entropy, you might hive off some 3s (at least, until someone proves they are universal too), but plenty of examples will remain.
The thesis that more complicated programs can do more than simple ones, is simply false. Empirically, and theoretically. It is an old intuition from engineering that simply is not borne out by the facts about computation. If and to the extent people have built their arguments on that intuition, those arguments fail.
It is of course still possible in any given empirical case, that the program or causal relations producing a given piece of apparent complexity, are long and involved. Getting up close and personal with the system, you may find it actually uses a million lines of C code or the equivalent. But this is not necessary to any given formal behavior (that is actually realizable etc). And it not being necessary, you can't infer from characteristics of the behavior alone (as opposed to actually seeing it in the causal details), that the rules must be a million lines long.
That is why Wolfram conjectures things like, the equivalent of four lines of Mathematica might be sufficient to emulate fundamental physics. Big structures of elaborately involved code are not necessary. They might make subcases clearer to us, they might in some system arise naturally from the real causal dynamics. But they are not formally necessary for distinguishable outcome X or Y. Otherwise put, if recoding freedom and full compilers were thrown at them, some other way of getting the same operational result would be possible using much less in the way of underlying formal resources.
That is why Wolfram calls it a fundamentally new intuition, to view things in a computational way. To ask of everything, what sort of computation is it performing? And to see all of these computations, beyond the simplest, as different in details and what they do fast, sure, but basically equivalent in their sophistication and the space of behaviors they can reach. That is also why we can expect to find general results about them. Formally, they have a lot more in common than their assorted details might seem to imply.
I've explained my views on the subject and what I think NKS has to say in this existing debate, and I should now let it go. Expecting everyone to agree on such questions is not realistic, they are too charged.
Posted by: Tony Smith
A month old book, The Plausibility of Life: Resolving Darwin's Dilemma by Marc W. Kirschner et al appears to provide a useful update from the increasingly active trenches of evolutionary biology where purported gaps in the vast story of evolution are rapidly being bridged.
According to the first, and at time of posting only, customer review at Amazon, an explanation is given that is consistent with expectations Wolfram expounded in NKS.(The authors) point to 'exploratory behavior' as being one that has the capacity to generate a large number of outcome states. Some of these outputs can then be selected and retained, then becoming stable. The unselected states remain nonfunctional but may be selected in the future. The authors believe that exploratory processes answer the "complexity" objections to evolution, in that they explain how new anatomical structures can arise and how these new structures or systems can repair damage.
Posted by: Vasily Shirin
You cannot argue against mathematical definition. You can complain that "complexity" in Kolmogorov theory doesn't match your intuitive idea of complexity, but this doesn't make any effect on the theory. It's the same as complaining that real numbers used in calculus are not real at all. Or that complex numbers are not really that complex.
However, if some or other term in math invokes offensive emotional associations, it can be always replaced by a more agreeable term to everybody's satisfaction - all the theorems will hold anyway. So, I propose, for the sake of argument, to replace the name
"Kolmogorov complexity theory" by "K-theory", and in every place where this theory uses the term "complexity" - to use "K-value" instead. I.e., we will define K-value of a string as the minimum number of bits into which this string can be compressed ... and so on. Because ID arguments are using complexity in the above sense, we have to also replace "complexity" by K-values there. Therefore, we have a number of texts where the word "complexity" is never used, but K-values are used throughout.
On the other hand, since "complexity" in NKS doesn't mean Kolmogorov complexity, we have to leave this term in NKS intact. Now my question is: how NKS can disprove arguments based on K-values, if the term K-value is never even used in NKS, and the term "complexity", after the above substitution of words is made, is never used in any ID arguments? It seems your argument is based on a terminological confusion, which has something to do with the fact that meaning of "complexity" in NKS is not defined. Kolmogorov studied complexity (OK, K-values) of strings - Wolfram talks about "complex behaviour", which, in NKS, doesn't have a numeric measure at all. Kolmogorov never claimed that long programs can "do" more than short ones (in his theory, program never "does" anything except computing a string), except that longer programs REALLY can generate strings with greater K-values. Note, this goes BY DEFINITION, not because someone wants to belittle the virtues of short programs.
In your post, you provided some arguments to the effect that Kolmogorov theory is not a good theory at all, because different definitions of universal machines or rules of encoding can lead to different K-values for the same string. This is true, but theory considers this, and it's not hard to demonstrate that all K-values measured based on one machine, will change no more than by constant when your switch to another machine. This is a pretty deep and quite consistent theory. [ I encourage everyone to go to Wikipedia and read the biography of Kolmogorov, he was a great mathematician and a great man ]
Similar confusion arises around the use of words "can" and "cannot". In everyday language, expression "event E cannot happen" really means: probability of this event is so low that we shoudn't seriously consider this event as possible, and should behave as if we are sure that it will never happen". This is what we REALLY mean when we say "cannot". We use "cannot" only for brevity (except in math, where "can" and "cannot" have more rigorous meaning). Can it be the while flipping a coin I will get 1000 heads in a row today? In principle, it can happen, why not? But it's very unlikely, and I say:it can't. Same holds for any nonsence: green dragon CAN come and eat me up, or I CAN be kidpanned by extraterrestrials, or whatever. Quantum fluctuation. You never know. And if you ever used expression "can't" in your life, I bet it meant a low probability event, not a claim that you can theoretically prove with absolute confidence.
Not that I like ID arguments very much, and find them 100% convincing. However, some of them make sense to me - at least, they are not 100% nonsense (compared to neo-darwinist's claims, which are).
Jason, now I have a question to you.
Let's assume the Universe is a computer (cellular automation, Turing machine - doesn't matter). But we know that people are busy right now creating quantum computer. They believe this is possible; Wolfram mentions on page 1147 that he was one of the pioneers of this idea. As you know, Shor algorithm was proposed for factoring big numbers - Wolfram mentions this algorithm on same page, and doesn't deny the possibility of it being feasible. However, in a computerized Universe of NKS, there's no indeterminacy, so we have to assume that "inside" quantum computer, there's some "conventional" computation going on behind the scenes, unbeknownst to us. So, it seems that from here we can immediately deduce that factorization is a problem of polynomial complexity
(again, because REAL computation behind quantum computer is done by a Turing machine,
CA or their equivalent). Therefore, when we claim that Universe is a computer, we
implicitly claim RIGHT AWAY that factorization is a problem of polynomial complexity. Isn't it too much to be taken for granted?
I know how hardcore darwinist would respond to this - along the following lines:
Whenever we select a number for factorization, we are not really free to select ANY number. Free will is just an illusion. Even when we believe we selected it freely, in fact it's a result of deterministic process. This process results in numbers that really can be factored in polynomial time. How did we acquire this ability to select these, and only these, numbers? Well, it's a result of evolution. So, although in general we don't know whether any number can be factored in polynomial time, this is certainly true for the numbers we are able to select.
What's your take on this?
Posted by: Jason Cawley
AIT is fine at characterizing complexity for less than universal systems. Things on the non-random side of AIT's divide are just also more complicated than one might expect.
If you fix a family of systems - say CAs, TM would also do if you like - you can ask for the smallest that produces a given sequence, and you will get a meaningful progression as you go from constant to period 1 to period 2 simplicities and the like. The NKS book shows such an analysis on page 1186. But fixing the system is the essential step in this case. Again, the issue is the general computational irreducibility of trying to go backwards from any behavior - string in your terms - to a simple universal system that creates it, without any underlying system fixed. Wolfram discusses this in the note on page 1067. The most relevant section reads -
"even though one knows that almost all long sequences must be algorithmically random, it turns out to be undecidable in general whether any particular sequence is algorithmically random. For in general one can give no upper limit to how much computational effort one might have to expend in order to find out whether any given short program--after any number of steps--will generate the sequence one wants."
There is no reason to privilege any one universal system as a supposed benchmark. And one does not know whether string X appears early or late in the enumeration from short to long initials in system A. Since the test is, is the initial less than the length of X, this sort of matters. Differing by a constant is still differing. When one wants to know how a formal problem scales with number of elements, say, that is not important.
But when the question is, is there any (universal) system and initial for it shorter than X that produces X, the shorter than X part is sensitive to differences of a constant, and the answer thus turns on the (universal) system that produces X most readily. It is in general formally undecidable whether a system-initial pair with initials less than length X produces X. One can't simply plow through all the cases because the system is not fixed, and there are a countable infinity of them. In addition, you have the running time difficulty Wolfram refers to above. (The 4th initial condition produces the string after running for thirty billion eons).
Suppose I make the following test. I give you 100 strings each 1000 bits long. Some of them I will get from decoded artificial sources, say from ordinary language texts, musical scores, and the like. Each encoded to 0-1 bit streams in some perhaps different way from the previous. Others I will generate by a variety of universal systems - perhaps including simple transforms of them, like fixed subsets of their steps or locations etc. A wide variety of them, but each from an initial less than 1000 bits long in its own native formalism. You might get every third step in a stripe at position 351 from steps 2431 through 5431 of a range 2 3 color CA from a 872 bit initial condition, with 2s treated as 0s. And another few score like that but each different, but in every case from an initial less than 1000 bits long.
Do you claim you possess any systematic procedure that will identify the "artificial", "designed" strings (the texts and musical scores - in principle those might also be generated by finite grammars but let them stand for "designed") and the algorithmically generated ones, such that the first are "random" and the second are "simple"? There is no such procedure. The strings you'd like to call "simple" are as complicated as anything in our universe, for all you can tell. Possessing a universal machine will not help you. Testing its behavior from its simplest 1000 bits of initials will not help you, even if you could, which you can't. If you knew the target system then yes you could program your universal machine to evaluate it. You'd still have 1000 bits of initials to plow through which you'd never finish, but you could start. Some of those evolutions you might leave running forever without knowing whether this one will "hit" sometime later. But you don't know the system, and detecting the simplest one - the universal system that in fact can make it from an initial of 872 bits in 5341 steps - is formally undecidable.
Running forward knowing the rule governing the actual dynamics is more than log faster than trying to infer back from string to initial. When the system is fixed you can try its initials in order, from the first to the 2^1000th, if your computer lives that long. When it isn't, you simply can't solve it. If you therefore confidently conclude, my computer in the (say) 2^50 initials I was able to run through before my memory ran out or it died, did not produce this string, and my computer is universal, and differs from each given other by at most a constant, ergo it cannot have been produced by a simple system less than 1000 bits - then I simply pull my hand away and show you the CA evolution, which my universal computer was able to evaluate in "laptop time".
You can call the program simple because its rule is almost trivial (just quite specific within a very large space of trivials) and its initial is shorter than the test string. Where did I get my initial 872 bits from though, aren't they artificial? No, I got them from rule 30 via Random in Mathematica. My rule number too. I can easily stay under the size limit with several such generators "above" the main system. Can one say such behavior could not arise randomly, then? Well, it did.
Now pick any natural system whose supposed artificiality is to follow from its SC, and place a 0,1 signal from it in the batch. Distinguish it from any of the others, please.
The argument from SC was eminently more sensible than that, and did not make such claims. It claimed something much easier to test - that a sequence satisfy some elaborate constraint or exact formal property, while not being purely random in a naive entropy-measure sense, not an AIT sense. This is actually testable, and it is false. I gave some examples, they are all over. Sierpinski gaskets are SC, satisfy an elaborate constraint, and are not pure entropy. But they can be generated without anyone having designed the generator, or asked rule 90 to have that property. The 90th 2 color range 1 CA is very early in an enumeration of CAs, much smaller than the full sequence specifying the gasket.
On QC, multi-way speed up is quite likely to be possible, and it is what I'd expect from what NKS suggests. But multiway speed-up is not countable speed up, let alone continuum infinity (CI) speed up. QC proponents promise lots of things, let's see what they actually deliver. If they did deliver identifiably CI speed up that would be strong evidence against any finite nature position, certainly. It would support QC computational universe types like David Deutsch (it from qubit, rather than it from bit, runs the shorthand). He is also a many-world Wheeler-style QMer, though, which I for one am not.
Then there is the prevalent idea that anything polynomial is easy and doable and anything exponential is impossibly hard. Well, that depends on the powers and coefficients of the polynomial, doesn't it? If the first term is to the hundred billioneth power times googleplex factorial, it being a polynomial will be small comfort. It is a practical engineer's rule of thumb, based on extremely small expected problem sizes. There is no assurance a discrete generator for fundamental physics, if there is one and we manage to find it, won't look like the nasty "polynomial" above.
As for your last paragraph about an imagined argument, it certainly isn't mine, so I wouldn't know where to begin to comment. I don't construct arguments like that.
Getting back to potentially nasty polynomials and their connection to the intractable backward inference problem, in a way they are connected. One of the main points of NKS is that lots of things various past measures have considered easy are not easy at all, and lots of entirely finite things with entirely simple generators are on the output side as complicated as anything anyone will ever solve. You know, in theoretical game theory one occasionally sees "theorems" like, if it is finite it is solved, because you just tree out all the possible games and then prune from the end-states. Well, no. Try playing Go that way. Tying it back to the main topic, saying "cannot" about universal systems, even entirely finite ones with entirely realizable (forward!) computational resources, is almost always going to be wrong. We can't limit their behavior easily like that, it is too rich even as entirely finite and supposedly AIT "simple", etc.
On Kolmogorov, of course he did nice work, and I learned math from his texts, among others. I never got to meet him. Chaitin also helped develop AIT. You can read his recent books (e.g. MetaMath) for his take on NKS, which he has followed with interest. I met him at the first NKS conference. Solomonoff was also involved in developing AIT. I met him at the recent NKS Midwest conference in Indiana. He is working on machine learning.
Chaitin's homepage is here, incidentally -
http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/CDMTCS/chaitin/)
I hope this helps.
Posted by: Vasily Shirin
I'm glad that we finally agreed on something: namely, if
quantum computer is ever built and its ability to factor big numbers
is demonstrated, then Universe is not a computer. You still make
some reservations concerning polynomial algorithms with
big coefficients, which may, in general, make exponential
algorithm superior for small values - it absolutely doesn't matter
in the context of our discussion. For, complexity (damn it, complexity
again! and again different meaning!) of Shor algorithm
is known to be O((log n)^2), and coefficients are not big at all.
And if it really factors numbers with performance like this,
you can counter only by providing conventional algorithm
having THE SAME computational complexity K*(log n)^2.
This is going to be really hard. If you find such algorithm
(no matter how big the value of K is), it will be the single most
important discovery in math.
It looks like NKS has a strong opponent. It's not ID, not religion,
not even Kolmogorov theory. It's QM. It's very easy to fight ID - everybody
is beating these poor guys anyway. Why aren't you fighting QM instead,
for this is a REAL enemy.
I, for one, share your skepticism about the possibility of creating
quantum computer. But I had the same kind of skepticism about
quantum cryptography (it's based on fishy and politically incorrect notion of
entanglement) - and people now are already selling commercial
systems for it. It's dangerous to bet against QM guys these
days - they have already beaten so many opponents. So, maybe -
just maybe - they will be right in this particular instance, too?
Note that quantum computer may deal a major blow not only to NKS,
but to the whole materialistic ideology, which, till this day,
remains based on mechanistic ideas of total determinism.
What's curious is that QM is known for at least 80 years,
but the mainstream "scientific" ideology basically ignores it till this day.
Many people continue to cherish the hope that somehow, inside
quantum, some kind of COMPUTATION is going on - wheels are rotating,
buttons get pushed, zeros get XORed with ones...
The possibility of quantum computer running Shor algorithm is a
major intellectual challenge for deterministic school.
My question is: is this school preparing a plan of defense? Is
there any discussion on this issue? Do they really understand all
ramifications of Shor algorithm?
Posted by: Jason Cawley
Who wants a defense? If the truth is over that-a-way, that-a-way we go. My proviso about QC, though, was that multiway speed up is evidence for non-classicality but not for non-determinism. Real continuum infinities are quite different from sampling 4 or 16 ways an event could happen. The latter would be perfectly compatible with an underlying finite generator for QM. If that finite generator is involved enough and operates on a small enough scale compared to our observables, it might support plenty of QC effects not expected classically, without the full integration over an infinity of possible paths expected by our existing QM formalism. But NKS is not wedded to classicality; on the contrary.
Wolfram would like to recover determinism if possible, but perhaps by giving up things like locality. Personally, I'm not wedded to determinism. It is a good epistemological principle and I think we should make determinist guesses and see if they can be made to hold up. Wolfram thinks it is more fundamental to science than that and does expect it can be recovered with the right underlying discrete generator for QM. I think it'd be great if he is right but don't pretend to know.
Incidentally, I don't know why materialism comes in. Computational ideas are about purely formal relationships, it doesn't matter what is being related. That is what I meant earlier when I spoke of formal thinking as a place realist and idealist thought can meet. Materialism may be a popular form of realism but it does not exhaust it. An objective reality out there whose formal relations govern events is quite sufficient. NKS isn't wedded even to that, it has few philosophic commitments (it might be interpreted as being about what we can know not what is, e.g.). Various NKS researchers undoubtedly have more, including Wolfram, but philosophic additions are optional extras for our intuition and our noodling about big questions, not essential to doing the science.
Posted by: Vasily Shirin
<Quote>If that finite generator is involved enough and operates on a small enough scale compared to our observables, it might support plenty of QC effects not expected classically, without the full integration over an infinity of possible paths expected by our existing QM formalism</Quote>
If I understand you correctly, you hypotesise that some invisible bee flies from one qubit to another collecting honey from each of them, and that it somehow visits all 2^N states; all this happens in a frozen observable time, and behaviour of a bee can be described by some algorithm?
This is a reasonable idea, Einstein was one of the people who was looking in this direction, but unfortunately neither he nor anybody else could suggest any intelligible model for this. People familiar with the subject (including Feinman) eventually lost any hope such model is possible. Do you have any update on the state of the art? For, I believe, this is a central problem of all modern science; I read many popular (and less popular) books on the subject, understood nothing, and feel highly intrigued. I even tried to think about it myself, but all my efforts so far produced nothing but terrible headache.
Posted by: Vasily Shirin
In this post I want to provide arguments supporting the following statement: "Intelligent Design is a premise of NKS". Please note that I don't want to prove that either of those theories is correct, just that the latter is based on the former.
Here goes the argument.
Observe that NKS makes 2 basic claims:
A) Simple programs can lead to complex behaviour (in more explicit terms, short programs can be universal)
B) our Universe is a computer.
Observe further that claim B is somehow deduced from A. I.e., Wolfram not just so asserts that Universe is a computer because he likes it to be that way, but BECAUSE earlier he discovered the said property of short programs.
I've given a considerable amount of thought to this deduction. At the first glance, there's no obvious connection between two statements. How shortness of universal programs can help here? And what would happen if it universality could be achieved only by long programs? Let's say, the first rule that enjoyed the property of universality would be not 110, but 314159264? Would it make claim B look less likely? Something is definitely missing here; my task was to reconstruct these missing links. After a couple of sleepless nights, I was able to come up with some reasonable theory as detailed below.
First, we should answer the question: what is the advantage of short programs over long ones? I can think of only one advantage: when we write a program, there's no point of writing a long program where short one can do the job. This is one of the main principles of software design. Of course, there're exceptions, and short cryptic program can be less maintainable, but, if you avoid extremes, this is a general rule. Similar rule holds in science and any kind of engineering. Really, why bother working hard?
On the other hand, what would happen if we can't find a simple solution? Maybe, we have to implement a complicated one? It depends. Sometimes we do, but no one is happy with it: high expenses, low maintainability and very big risks are guaranteed. And experience shows that eventually, project may very well fail completely due to complexity. Every manager knows: if things become complicated, it makes sense to reconsider requirements, drop some of them, and implement just whatever is simple enough to be practical. The moral of the story is: short program is definitely a good thing, whereas long program is certainly a bad thing. And had we had a need of creating Universe ourselves, we would probably use the same design principle.
What we established so far is: if (note that IF!) program is designed by intelligent agent, it has very good chance to be as simple as possible (and no simpler). And because the only requirement Wolfram has to Universe consists in its ability to support universal computations, then Universe SHOULD be a simple (!) program running on simple(!) computer. And Wolfram proves that such simple program and such simple computer really exist!
Therefore, in order to deduce B) from A), we need 2 additional axioms:
1) Universe was designed by some agent who, in his work, applies the same engineering principles as we do
2) hadn't sufficiently simple universal programs been found, it wouldn't make sense to bother creating the Universe at all due to associated risks and costs, as outlined above.
This completes the proof.
REJECTED ALTERNATIVES
---------------------
Other ways of deducing B) from A) were also considered. In particular, I examined the idea of connecting these two statements by ways not involving the notion of design. My plan was to try to demonstrate that small program can emerge by itself (e.g., as a result of quantum fluctuation or other inexplicable phenomenon), whereas same event resulting in longer programs would be increasingly unlikely. This plan was eventually abandoned upon realization that the difference between no program at all and the simplest of programs is much bigger than the difference between simple program and complicated one; to make things worse, I couldn't explain where the hardware came from - and if we factor in the hardware, the whole setup doesn't look that simple. Also, if we allow software and hardware to emerge from nowhere, it's not obvious that simple things are more likely than complicated ones, unless our ability to understand what's going on is taken into consideration as one of design goals, but then we are again talking about design in contradiction with our premise.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
----------------
I want to thank contributors of this thread who provided the basic idea of possible connection between principles of technical design and foundations of NKS.
Posted by: Jason Cawley
Mathematica isn't written in Rule 110. It is a million lines of code. The premise about designed systems being simple is false.
Moreover, a major point of NKS is that the loose association of "computers" with "artificial, designed" is in fact false. It is an artifact of the historical sequence in which we became aware of the phenomenon of computation. We became aware of it through engineered, artificial systems first. But NKS shows us that nature has been computing all along.
It didn't need Turing to explain what universal computation was. We did, to notice it was possible. After we got familiar with the phenomenon in engineering contexts for a few decades, we noticed similar things happening in nature. And finally realize all our engineering merely exploits formal facts equally true of the natural world, and already exploited within it. The association, "computer" - "artificial" formally does not follow. It is a habit formed from an historical process of discovery.
Any idealist can cheer that formal realities lie behind the equivalence. Being purely formal or math-like, the facts about computation are true in all possible worlds. They are therefore not evidence about anything proper to the empirical one, exclusively.
Anyone who for entirely distinct reasons, and independent of supposedly necessary deductions from evidence, likes the idea of designed universes, can speculate all he likes about it, and can notice it is compatible with a universe that computes. He might miss part of the point of NKS if he does not see how general its formal discoveries are, but that is up to him. But if he claims NKS is evidence for this, he overstates the case. It is nothing of the kind. Nor does it depend in any link in its argument on any such idea.
Posted by: Vasily Shirin
What's your definition of intelligence then? As it follows from your posts, just everything we know could be generated by a program (including, but not limited to, 9-th symphony). Therefore, intelligence cannot be defined in any consistent way, we cannot even be sure it exists at all.
But when we are looking for extraterrestrial intelligence (e.g. SETI project), we are ready to use some criteria to identify it. My point is: no matter what criteria we use, it can be applied to whatever we see in nature (e.g. DNA), and conclude it satisfies the same criteria. Please comment on this.
Posted by: Jason Cawley
Wolfram addresses the subject starting on page 822. He thinks in the end general definitions of intelligence based on some single specific set of criteria (and in particular a capacity for sophisticated computation) will not work, and "any workable definition of what we normally think of as intelligence will end up having to be tied to all sorts of seemingly rather specific details of human intelligence."
Computational ability is yet another feature that we might have thought special to humans that in the end simply isn't, and that is shared by all sorts of other systems we would not normally regard as intelligent. And the actual marks by which we pick out what we do regard as the separate category "intelligence", in the end go back to particular details of our history. Which probably need not have been as they were, to result in some approximation to intelligence as we recognize it. This is likely to make SETI recognition fundamentally difficult, far more difficult than naive early SETI enthusiasts thought. That is the upshot of that section of the book.
Personally, I consider intelligence something of a mixture, of computational sophistication shared with many other systems I would not call "intelligent", and consciousness shared with a much narrower range of other animals, that I doubt are all that computationally sophisticated - certainly compared to us. I like to call the first "cleverness" and the second "consciousness", and then I think about intelligence as lying in their intersection. Deep Blue plays chess so well I have no doubt whatever that it is clever. Other mammals are to me quite obviously conscious (how low in the orders that goes might be debated, but that is happens well "before" us I think is obvious - consider dogs e.g.), but some of them are probably pretty dumb by our standards (and pretty predictable as a result, in specific enough situations at least) - though perhaps clever enough by those of the rest of the biological world.
Others in the cybernetic tradition like to define intelligence in terms of goal directed behavior and adaptation. A thing is intelligent if it changes how it behaves in order to get what it wants or needs, runs one formulation. Dennett offers a hierarchy of categories in terms of our usual assessments, purposefully staying subjective about them, so as not to beg questions about what is objectively necessary or sufficient for each of them. Some systems we explain basically mechanically, others we ascribe internal states to in order to explain apparent variation in behavior with different inputs, and last some we explain by ascribing changes in their internal states or opinions, altering not just their specific responses but patterns of those. Effectively this is sensitivity analysis on system behavior, but viewed as a subjective modeling problem.
Whether our intuitions in such matters are justified he treats as an open question. Certainly in practice we make use of teleological explanation in such cases, and it is hard to imagine e.g. trying to explain a trading floor (to pick a typical economic example) without reference to the specific intentions of its various actors.
When we have lots of common history with the agents, it is clear enough how this works. We can mimic their internal states sympathetically, and thereby get important guidance about what they are doing and will do. The old positivist-behaviorist attitude that all explanation should be reducable to objective description is clearly just false, in practice, in such cases. In NKS terms, we should not expect the calculations involved to be readily reduced, and should expect we will have to emulate the underlying system step by step to figure out how it will behave - with its internal process of calculation critical and arbitrarily complex.
Wolfram thinks most systems capable of sophisticated computation have common properties we are used to from intelligent examples. He is less sympathetic than I am to the idea some extra specific ingredient is involved (my "consciousness" above e.g.). You can read that as seeing intelligence everywhere. You can also read it as saying intelligence naturally occurs because it simply isn't that hard to achieve, or is less of an "accomplishment" than many suppose.
Posted by: Vasily Shirin
That's what I expected to hear: intelligence cannot be defined in
computational terms. This notion is so blurred that we better
eliminate it from our reasonings about the nature of Universe.
(And, by the same token, we should eliminate
such phenomena as consciousness, emotions, sensations, etc. -
we can't provide computational definitions for them,
and don't even care - because all of the above correspond
to some combinations of bits and don't bring any ADDED VALUE
into discussion, they only obfuscate it). By eliminating
these notions, we, among other things, can avoid unpleasant
questions like: does program executing in my computer FEELS
anything? Why universal rule running in Universe leads
to configurations of cells that feel pain, and same rule
running on PC doesn't? Etc. Etc. - all this questions are
meaningless: no matter whether it feels or not, its
behaviour for outside observer will remain absolutely the same,
as it can be described totally in terms of zeros and ones)
This is a viewpoint of NKS. I know, your personal views can
be different, you mentioned it, but this is primarily a discussion
of NKS; your views are not known to me in their entirety, so it
wouldn't be appropriate for me to argue against something I don't know.
Upon reading NKS, I had a feeling that things don't quite add up
there. I'm talking about philosophical concept, not about mathematical
content (there's a number of nice results there, but it's not for
me to judge how important they are). Eventually, I was able to
formulate the point. NKS is all about short programs and their
wonderful properties. There's no doubt about this. The main
philosophical conclusion of the book is that short programs are
so powerful that we don't need to look for any other mathematical
apparatus to describe the world, and even more than that: our world
IS a program (Wolfram goes on to predict the "code" of this program will be
found shortly). Interestingly, Wolfram uses expression "simple" programs
whenever he talks about short programs, and expression "simple programs
lead to complex behaviour" is reiterated in different forms a great many times
in the Book. And I asked myself: why is this emphasis on simple (short)
programs; what's so special about them that justifies so far-reaching
philosophical conclusions?
Let's approach the issue from another direction: if it weren't for
"simplicity" of these programs - would NKS ever be written? For example,
Wolfram would make the same investigation and found that all first
10 million rules lead to repeating patterns or blank screens, and
only then would he find something non-trivial - say, in rule
314159264. And proved this rule is, in a sense, universal (considerable
efforts are still required to map this universality to universality of
Turing machine, but let's not focus on this right now). Unfortunately,
this discovery wouldn't impress anybody (universal Turing machines
are known all along), and more importantly, it wouldn't impress
Wolfram himself enough to justify further quest.
In other words, what was the ADDED VALUE brought by NKS?
Certainly, it has something to do with SHORT (SIMPLE) programs.
Wolfram doesn't say: based on results on Turing, I concluded
that Universe is a computer. NO! He says: based on MY RESULTS!
There's certainly something in short programs that is absent in long
ones, and this "something" is exactly what leads Wolfram to his
conclusions.
And what is this magical property of short programs that is missing
from long ones, and makes them a subject of 1000-pages' book?
I provided my arguments connecting this "something" with Wolfram's
unconscious (or maybe, very conscious? who knows?) belief in intelligent
design, and it will be redundant to repeat them here.
And what was your response, Jason? In vain was I looking for
your version of explanation as to what makes simple (short programs)
so special for Wolfram (this was my main question)
Instead, you built a straw man argument, arguing against some
point I never made on behalf of myself - I just tried to reconstruct
WOLFRAM's logic that lead him from short programs to Universe-as-computer
concept (you could easily notice grains of irony embedded in this "reasoning")
And yes, it comes out a bit naive, a bit circular, etc - but
what else would you expect from reasoning that was never EXPLICITLY
MADE by Wolfram? Again, it's my theory of Wolfram's unconscious
motivations. This theory is based on observation that notion of simple
(or short) program make difference only in connection with intelligence.
However, according to your last post, the notion of intelligence is blurred
and cannot serve as a basis of philosophic arguments about Universe at all.
You don't like my theory?
Fine, propose your own way of concluding that universe is a computer
based on statement "simple programs lead to complex behaviour".
And note: your reasoning should UTILIZE the FACT OF SIMPLICITY of these
programs. Propose something that is true for short programs, and not
true for longer ones.
I think I made a strong case. Had we had to present our arguments
before the jury, I think I would have a good chance to win.
(You can verify this statement by letting some of your friends
read my last 3 posts. I just beg you: no biologists should be involved,
these people are lacking any logic and common sense)
Posted by: Jason Cawley
Now you are just making things up.
On pain etc, it is obviously distinct from intelligence, or from computation, and involves dedicated systems like nerves and such, very much a part of our particular history. It is clearly present in various animals not renown for their mental power. If you want to regard consciousness as distinctive of animals you are perfectly free to do so, but computation is something distinct from it, and goes on in plenty of systems that do not share those other features. It amounts to a loose association.
Does my computer feel jazzed when it crunches numbers? No, it doesn't have any nerves or endorphins or... It is a silly question.
You don't explain such features of living things by abstracting from their biology, when those features are clearly caused by that biology. My computer does however get the right answer, in the same way anyone decent at math might. The latter is computation. If you want to understand how the other systems (pain, feeling etc) work you have to look directly at them.
As for what simplicity brings, it is entirely plausible that simple enough interrelations will arise without any design involved. If you shake up a modest sample (100s, 1000s) each of 3 things that can each stick together 3 ways, you will hit all of them. That is not true of much more complicated rules.
If programs that produce arbitrarily complex behavior are reasonably common among the simplest allowed relationships, number of elements, etc, then it is entirely plausible natural systems will just happen to fall into such relations, that they will "hit" some complex rules out of the space of possibles without any extraneous explanation (selection effects or whatever) required. If you had to go out to the hundred trillioneth or 10^60th, it would be much less plausible that an instance just falls out that way.
On the discovery and methodology side, we can enumerate classes of programs this simple, and just try all of them and see what they typically do. We cannot readily examine all possibles out of program spaces in the 10^600 range, so we won't ever find one that behaves in target way X just by looking for one. And we will expect complex phenomena to be common, even in systems lacking other supposed prerequisites for complexity - in turbulent fluids, vaccum breakdown, drainage, the growth of crystals, etc. Well below the threshold of selection, let alone of artificiality.
I've been very patient with you, but by now you are making up arguments other than mine you'd rather talk about, and pretending to put words in other people's mouths about NKS. I'm about done.
Posted by: Latyshev
hmm...
Maybe bring discussion back to the topic a bit...
You cant prove existance of ID.
You cant disprove existance of ID.
Hence i claim that ID doesnt exist.
PS Your discussion is great guys, but it looks like you went to far in the air, loosing ground beneath your feet.
Posted by: Vasily Shirin
Hey, Latyshev,
your post reminds me the beginning of Bulgakov's "Master and Margarita". It would be refreshing for you and other contributors to this forum to re-read the novel. It's impossible to discuss this issue without bringing up some literary associations.
Posted by: Vasily Shirin
OK, back to discussion:
<Quote>As for what simplicity brings, it is entirely plausible that simple enough interrelations will arise without any design involved. If you shake up a modest sample (100s, 1000s) each of 3 things that can each stick together 3 ways, you will hit all of them. That is not true of much more complicated rules </Quote>
According to Wolfram, Universe is a computer running some rule. This initial rule is a concrete rule, right,
like 110 or 12345? Do you really mean that this initial rule was produced by shaking something up? And if
yes, why the shaker was limited by just 3 attempts? OK, there was no shaker, it was shaking itself
(not clear how: this would require another program, but we already agreed that we are talking about
initial program). Still, unclear why only 3 or so attempts were possible. why not 10^80? Why not 10^(10^80)?
And hardware, what about hardware? For, even the simplest of programs wants some hardware for execution.
Was it also produced by shaking? Then WOW. (By the way, how simple is really the hardware required for
execution of simplest program? How many bits we need to describe this hardware? And what device will execute this description to really produce this hardware?). All those are hard questions, Jason, there's
clearly a problem of bootstrapping here.
So, neither I, nor, as I believe, other readers of this forum can accept your explanation.
I made things up, so what? I clearly stated I'm making them up, and challenged you to provide a better
explanation to some phenomena. Now, following your protests, I'm temporarily withdrawing my made-up
story. I promise to tear it to pieces as soon as I receive a satisfactory explanation about role of SIMPLE programs in a process of bootstrapping. I'm looking for this explanation for my entire life, and I will be
really grateful if you provide one.
How does all this relate to ID? Well, you can look on ID as attempt to explain bootstrapping. I can even imagine that there exist some supporters of ID that are ready to believe in "Universe as computer" idea,
and they implicate Designer only to explain the origin of Computer and its Program.
As for my question about pain - it's not silly at all. Actually, this is the #2 question in my personal
list of transcendent questions. Endorphins? Well, apparently, Wolfram doesn't share your views. Although,
I'm afraid you will again accuse me in making things up, so let Wolfram speak for himself:
<Quote>
[ page 1100] From looking at the brain one might guess that parallel or other non-standard hardware might
be required to achieve efficient human-like thinking. But I rather suspect that - much as in the analogy
between birds and airplanes - it will in the end be possible to set up algorithms that achieve the same basic functions but work satisfactorily even on standard sequential-processing computers
[ page 825 ] But just as in case of intelligence, I believe that no reasonable definition [ of life ]
can actually be given. Indeed, following the discoveries in this book I have come to conclusion that
almost any general feature one may think of as characterizing life will actually occur even in many systems
with very simple rules.
</Quote>
There're great many places in the book where Wolfram expresses similar ideas (look up, for example, "artificial intelligence" for more) So, what about
emotions - aren't they part of our thinking? I started to look for explanation of emotions in NKS,
and found none. Probably, they are not important for either life or intelligence or thinking. I tried to
search other words: feeling, sensation, consciousness - found nothing. In one place, Wolfram promises
to discuss consciousness, but apparently this plan was not implemented. It's hard to believe, but this
monumental book, which can compare in its scope only with Encyclopedia Britanica, never mentions these notions.
On the other hand, some keywords are used extensively:
simple - 1360 occurences
complex - 300 occurences
simple rule - 344
behavior - 745
complex behavior - 188
And no feelings, sensations, emotions - nothing. No consciousness either. Just BEHAVIOR.
So, let's conduct a thought experiment: suppose Wolfram's dreams came true, and AI is created in a regular
computer. And this computer simulation creates some individual that takes part in our forum. And
suppose this individual writes:
"I've been very patient with you, but by now you are making up arguments other than mine you'd rather talk about, and pretending to put words in other people's mouths about NKS. I'm about done"
How should I feel about it? Should I feel sorry for making somebody so angry? But if I deal with
computer simultaion, it cannot be angry, Jason assured me some endorphines are needed for this,
so I shouldn't feel sorry, it would even be stupid to feel sorry... On the other hand, according to
Wolfram, I'm a computer simulation myself, so ... things are getting really complicated here.
Can one really think without emotions, feelings, consciousness, and demonstrate the same BEHAVIOR?
Can we still call it LIFE, as Wolfram suggests? Doesn't LIFE imply that we should FEEL something?
And can anything be achieved intellectually without feeling? For example, could NKS be written
by a computer? Well, I don't know. There's really almost no emotions expressed there. Except one:
PRIDE. But maybe - just maybe - no book would ever be written without some dose of it?
This is is issue even Intelligent Design can't explain.
Posted by: Vasily Shirin
"The best lesson life has taught me is that the idiots in many cases are right" -W. Churchill
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