From: John Clark (jonkc@worldnet.att.net)
Date: Thu Sep 09 1999 - 11:32:01 MDT
Eliezer S. Yudkowsky <sentience@pobox.com>
>>Me:
>>Rightly or wrongly many people, myself included,
>> are certain that the universe can not supply us with meaning,
>>and yet that idea does not drive us insane
>You aren't a self-modifying AI, buckaroo.
It's true that I haven't changed my hardware but sometimes I try to
overclock it a little and I have been known to modify and upgrade
my software from time to time. I'm still sane. Mostly.
>It doesn't strike me as being tremendously stable to have no reference
> for what the contents of your mind should be except the current
> contents of your mind.
Apparently it's stable enough. Godel showed that nothing has a perfect
foundation, anything you build on will be incomplete or inconsistent
or both, and yet we manage. The English language is a far greater
muddle than the formal logic Godel dealt with and it has almost no
foundation at all yet it works pretty well most of the time.
Any mind, artificial or not, is going to need pleasure and pain
subsystems, the probability that an AI would deliberately modify
such a subsystem so it would freeze up into an orgasm of existential
melancholy is almost zero. The reason why you'd want to hard wire
the poor machine to do such a thing is utterly beyond me.
If you want something to worry about it's the machine modifying
itself in the other direction so it's always happy, very happy, like a
junkie with a unlimited supply of Heroin. I guess you'd have to hard
wire the machine to be a little bit squeamish about modifying its
own brain, not too squeamish obviously but a little. Finding this
happy medium might not be easy, I worry that it might not be possible.
> I am *not* going to construct an AI that thinks the contents
>of its mind are facts.
It's a fact, I don't like sweet potatoes. You can trust me on this
because I am the world's greatest expert of what John K Clark
likes and does not.
>>Me:
>> You might argue that even though I can't be proven wrong I still
>> might be wrong, well maybe.
>Nonsense. I think you can be proven wrong.
How? I am certain that meaning can not exist without mind but you're
going to prove that I'm wrong and I really think that meaning is
independent of mind. Good luck. Are you going to prove that I really like
sweet potatoes too?
>I'd say a brain that correctly predicts and successfully manipulates
>reality is constructed well
I agree.
>but only a brain that incarnates the logic of the Universe is real.
I'm not sure I understand you but if the logic of the universe produces
a brain in a coma and I can use my own logic to produce a brain that
manipulates reality then I prefer a brain that is not real, and that's a fact.
John K Clark jonkc@att.net
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