Re[2]: Preventing AI Breakout [was Genetics, nannotechnology, and , programming]

From: Matt Gingell (mjg223@is7.nyu.edu)
Date: Mon Oct 25 1999 - 08:44:26 MDT

>> 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?
>
> 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.

This is very well put. I had the same objection and you've captured it
perfectly.

I think the original remark misses the depth of Church-Turing. It's
not just talking about what you can do with a computer, it's talking
about what you can do with _any conceivable_ formal system. If you can
find expressible regularities in the universe which can't be described
under the lambda calculus then you've disproven the conjecture.

-matt

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