From: Eliezer S. Yudkowsky (sentience@pobox.com)
Date: Mon Oct 25 1999 - 08:25:36 MDT
Anders Sandberg wrote:
>
> "Eliezer S. Yudkowsky" <sentience@pobox.com> writes:
>
> > > (a) whether an AI can discover it is running in a simulation?
> >
> > Almost certainly. If it really is smarter-than-human - say, twice as
> > smart as I am - then just the fact that it's running in a Turing
> > formalism should be enough for it to deduce that it's in a simulation.
>
> So if the Church-Turing thesis holds for the physical world, it is a
> simulation?
In one sense, yes. But (1) if the world I saw was Turing-computable, I
probably wouldn't see anything wrong with it - *I'm* not that smart. Or
perhaps I underestimate myself... but nonetheless, the only way I
learned how to reason about the subject was trying to explain phenomena
that weren't Turing-computable, i.e. qualia. And (2) if *this* world is
Turing-computable, then obviously all my reasoning is wrong and I don't
know a damn thing about the subject.
> If the AI runs on a Game of Life automaton, why should it believe the
> world is embedded in another world? The simplest consistent
> explanation involves just the automaton.
But the explanation isn't complete. Where did the automaton come from?
> > You really can't outwit something that's smarter than you are, no matter
> > how hard you try.
>
> Ever tried to rear children? Outwitting goes both ways.
Someone tried to rear me. Perhaps I flatter myself, but my experience
would tend to indicate that it only goes one way.
--
sentience@pobox.com Eliezer S. Yudkowsky
http://pobox.com/~sentience/tmol-faq/meaningoflife.html
Running on BeOS Typing in Dvorak Programming with Patterns
Voting for Libertarians Heading for Singularity There Is A Better Way
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