Anti-Proof of Artificial Intelligence & Accident

The goal of Strong Artificial Intelligence is to make a machine which while composed from simple unintelligent components, replicates the intelligence of human beings.

Intelligence is the quality of humans which scientists and researchers would use to create such an artificial system.

It therefore follows that a truely intelligent system would have the qualities required to discover and create itself, just as the human creators have done.

And if it has the qualities to understand and create itself, then it also has the capabilities to understand and create a human being intelligence.

We know that humans were not created by an intelligence but rather by natural unintelligent forces.

If the Artificial Intelligence has the capacity to create itself, and thereby the capacity to understand and create humans, then it also has the capacity to understand the unintelligent forces that created humans. It has to have an understanding of Natural forces also, not just of logic and intelligence subjects.

The loop is infinite. True Strong Artificial Intelligence requires a machine so vast that it can understand the forces that created the universe, and then its own creators and then itself. Such an Artificial System is neither artificial, nor a system - it is the universe.

If on the other hand we decide to take the path of intelligent design, our Artificial Intelligence must replicate the intelligence of God, it must become God. And God himself must have the intelligence thereby to understand and create himself, ad infinitum also.

This is a demonstration of a principal I wish to call "the inefficiency of self-reflexivity".

If you photograph a camera in a mirror, is the picture taken really the camera? Yes, but it is not identical because now you have a picture and the real camera. There is no system where the picture taken is identical with the picture taker, because if they were which came first - the picture taker or the picture? If the exist simultaneously where is the difference - aren't they just the same thing?

In computing this is the difference between "data" and "instruction code".

Another analogy is the proof that there is no best algorithm for compressing data. The minimum compression is the same as extraction the information from a system. Many systems have redundancy created by repetitions. This physical sentence has many repeating words and letters and can be enormously compressed to extract the information. So there is no algorithum to extract all the information from a system either. The proof is basically like this and is another example of the inefficiency of self-reflexivity:

Were such an algorithm to exist, it could be coded into a computer and then used to extract it's own information content. Such an program code would have to take an input, namely the code to be compressed. So we would have to code the algorithm with variables, and then to use it replace the variables with the code. But that code would need it's variables replaced and so on infinbitely. This is not the actual rigorous proof, but it illustrates the point.

Searching for a completely closure on understanding is an endless task. Research will only ever succeed by accident in discovering Artificial intelligence, in its simplest way by replicating the biological processes in childbirth.

Accident indeed has been the foundation of human progress from (apocryphally) Newton's apple to Alexander Fleming, and is the magical force which gives us the world around us. "Accident" cannot be owned, predicted, or understood - indeed it is the magical principal which blows apart the myth of Intelligence and Artificial Intelligence - the nearest actual thing to God.

The Importants & Unimportants of Ritual

Ritual is the trying to repeat something.

Things are repeated when they are considered good, we try not to repeat things that were bad.

In our lives we often have good experiences and then try to repeat those experiences when they are gone. In reality we can never repeat anything, so we are left with a ritual. [Explanation follows.]

Shopping is a good example. We may have experienced that feeling of buying something we really wanted. Much the same as when we got a present we really wanted as a child. Or we experienced some pleasure through something we bought.

Of course you can never buy something again the same way as you did the first time, because it is no longer the first time.

There is also a filter system as work. It is easier to find your way into a maze than to find your way out. The future is like walking out of a maze, the past is like walking into a maze. I will call this the "maze filter". Why? because our attention is brought to shopping as a source of happiness because occasionally it made us happy, but we never recall all the times it was too mediocre to remember. So looking into the past gives us the benefit of being at the end of the route and outside the maze and therefore looking in, but we forget that at the time we were inside the maze and were searching the way out. That feature of being "in the maze" is essential to each experience, and the recalling of an experience from outside the maze is a different type of experience, (it's a new type of maze). Unfortunately going back into the maze and refinding our way out is impossible, because time travel is impossible! Thus repeating things and rituals are impossible in reality.

Rituals, and repeating things, do find a place however. Our lives are governed by ritual - our morning, daytime and evening routeens (governed even by these three routeen time periods). What we expect from life is a routeen, birth, marriage and death all involve their routeen, rituals. Our social world infact is built upon routeen, without ritual there would be no identity and no social human life.

More philosophically this is obvious. The existence of repeating things in "nature" is what gives us our world. If things were always different, if we truely never met the same thing twice, there would be no meaning to the world because everything would be completely new. Identity depends upon repeats, meeting the same person twice enforces the notion of their identity.

The thing about the world is not that it is always different, because in a very radical way that would mean that is was the same - in that it is "always" different. The world is profoundly always different, because sometimes there is similarity and sometimes difference - a profound inexplicable admixture that itself defies classification as different or similar.

Society like anything is a profound admixture of similarity and difference, and rituals respond to that possibility for similarity. But, take them too seriously and they deny the inexplicable processes of difference and similarity which underlie the world.

A Serious Problem with Working

In a good economy there should be jobs for all.

This is because the distribution of goods is done by exchange. In the simplest barter system if you want something from some one you need to have something they want also with which to exchange. In a monetary system as long as anyone wants what you got, you get paid and then you can buy anything. Its an excellent system for many things.

Amongst non-exchange systems there are 2. Those done without the consent of the giver - that is theft, and those done with the consent of the giver, that is charity.

All three systems exist.

In the first (exchange) system you need to work in order to get money or goods to exchange, and that is why exchange economies are bound to provide jobs for all.

BUT, there are obvious problems with pure exchange economies. Some more apparent than others.

People who are unable to work are considered disabled and must rely upon charity, that is people giving them support which they cannot repay. Children are another example of people, not considered unusually disabled but temporarily unable to repay. Whether Childhood is something we should repay is an undecided issue for many. If we fall critically ill early in life and do not have enough savings we require charity also.

Many projects deemed worthy but unable to directly support themselves are also in need of charity. Government and defence are enormous charities. They argue that they do an important job, but they don't have anything directly to exchange and there is no choice whether we buy them or not. That is the system of tax - a protection racket really.

Arts and Science some might argue are an equally important systems of charity. Only technological sciences make money, we don't buy the research that tells us the universe is 13 billions years old. Likewise not enough people buy seats at performances to support the extreme cost of such endeavours, so like disabled people, science and the military they have a charity status.

Freemarket is not everything obviously, but despite this we do need to work to earn a living.


There is a much graver problem with exchange economies.

If you take an economy which is supporting its population in employment and then some efficiency is made, especially some machine is bought which increases efficiency that leads to redundancy.

So where do these people go? The economy must expand to create new jobs, and that means that new markets need to be found to sell the products of the news jobs.

This suits capitalists because it creates an endless source of places to invest.

But efficiency driving economic expansion to make places for investment and to keep displaced people in employment has one bad draw back.

The environment has to constantly provide more and more raw materials to fuel the economic expansion.

There must be a limit somewhere. Either people will be unable to consume any more - their time will be so pressed buying all the things they need to in order to provide the markets for the huge economy, OR the planet will simply be unable to supply more resources.

An escape route might be to redirect the growing economy into virtual worlds and products. People leave manufacturing to work in arts and music, or in the internet. As a song or animated film changes hands for lots of money on the internet then there is no increased pressure on the environment (as long as energy problems are solved maybe by nuclear fusion). That way the ecology could just support an endlessly growing economy.

Another way of looking at it is much simpler and more in line with old projections. Wasn't the point of labour saving devices to save us time? It's not just to fuel efficiency and profits but to give human's a break from work.

Lazy they call it. But if we are lazy we are not consuming the worlds resources. We are not causing problems.

It didn't used to be called lazy. The aristocrats and bourgeoise of yesteryear enjoyed freedom from work as a symbol of their higher life. That freetime is what birthed the sciences and the great discoveries of the Renaissance and European Enlightenment. We owe our current world to that freetime.

The free time created by Athen's early wealth the power house behind the philosophy and maths of the ancient world. That same freetime the powerhouse behind the philosophies and wealth of culture in all ancient societies.

Far from it, not laziness at all, but the essential space required to become educated and become a higher human being.

So the modern world has made itself a problem. By insisting upon an efficient exchange system built for capitalist investment we have shackled ourselves into a world where we have less and less time, are enslaved to markets - through both consumerism and working - and where the future of the Earth is under an endlessly increasing threat.

Some day the system will have to reorientate - that is not a request that is a necessity. Someday we will not be able to invest our money with big returns because the economic growth has slowed. Some day there will not be jobs available. Someday we wil have to find other things to do with our time than working and shopping.

Its a great challenge for the modern world as it drives into a cul-de-sac. If we have not eradicated education by then in favour of exchangable vocation, we will still remember the ancient worlds and there solution to just this problem. Human life is boundless and immaterial, the spirit abides in peace at all times and has no need for worldly entertainments and endeavour.

Amazing to compare that simple truth with the ruckus that dominates contemporary debate. The irrelevant issues of failing states, of terrorists, of economics - issues that are only interesting to the states that invent their own governance.

The grass grows whatever the politics, although we are working so hard these days that one day the grass and crops might no longer be able to grow.

Mankind into Ecological debt today

Its obvious if you think about it that the world is a limited place. Yet mankind seems to have unlimited demands. Increasing population combined with increasing living standards are obviously destined to one day "use up" the world and then we are doomed.

It was obvious to me as a child, it must be obvious. Yet for some reason it isn't really thought about much. Today a UK think tank places October the 9th 2006 as the day that we started to go into the ecological red. But there is nowhere that can bail us out!

http://news.independent.co.uk/environment/article1822171.ece

It's an arbitrary date. I figured we were already long into the red years ago. The endless removal of vast swaithes of forest, pollution, endless urban development and economic growth signalled a hundred years ago that this was a road to unsustainable destruction.

Mankind will destroy itself, but only because we are stupid. An irony for the organism that considers itself in its mental dream world the best organism, the best often only because it has this mental dream world.

Smith, Keynes and the great philanthropist economists did great works and reinvented the systems of prosperity and wealth, but they gave us a bomb with which to explode ourselves. A bomb much more dangerous than Oppenheimers.

I do not have the skills to change the minds of great men. It is the shoulders of great men that must carry the responsibility and burden of their thoughts and actions. Pity all those who rise to positions of such responsibility! for the future has their name upon it, and their name will be on the tomb stone of mankind.

In a petri dish in a laboratory we see the rise and fall of nations of bacteria. Composed from replicating units barely a 1000th of a millimeter across, growing exponentially until all resources are hoarded in their walls and they are starved, dying and spilling their contents out for the scavengers. And each cycle the energy is lost until only a barren wasteland is left.

On the Earth we see the rise and fall of nations of huamns. Composed from replicating units 2 meters across, growing exponentially until all resources are hoarded in their walls and they are starved, dying and spilling their contents out for the scavengers. And each cycle the energy is lost until only a barren wasteland is left.

Remarkable how the large and most arrogant organisms bear so striking a similarity to the smallest and most important.