Metaphysics, intelligence, God

[MrRubix]

Re: Metaphysics, intelligence, God

When you mentioned robots->viruses, I couldn't help but remember, and now mention that computer viruses might potentially become as deadly as real viruses.

As Michio Kaku said, maybe we should fear AI once it gains the intelligence of a monkey.

That's a far ways off, and I have no idea what will happen.

I find it annoying when people post specific dates for when the big bang happened. I've heard 16.5 billion, 15 billion, 14 billion, 18 billion (all from credible scientists, not lunatics), a heck load of numbers, and in reality, they're huge gaps apart from eachother. I got no idea what to think of it.

M-theory, although in its infancy, might have to potential to explain the big bang. This is what they've got so far: strings (which are theoretical themselves) can stretch to perhaps even the size of our universe. Maybe our universe is a 3 dimensional membrane floating in a higher dimensional surface. Perhaps a collision with another membrane is what has cause the big bang.

Of course, this is all speculative. As Steven Weinberg has said, "M-theory could prove to be a tragic failure, but I can't imagine why nature would waste all that mathematical elegance."

Axioms annoy me actually, if anybody knows, please clarify how they proved 1+1=2.

I find English, in a sense, to be a failed language. The sense that I'm talking about, is that it fails to truly define things. I mean like, shoot for example, define: consciousness. Define: Existance. Define: Purpose. We really can't pin anything down, rather, I think we should make classifications.

Reasoning is really all ad hoc, but at least it's decent.

Who the hell is quoting numbers like that? The age of the universe is around 13.75 billion years old. It doesn't venture far from this.

"Axioms annoy me actually, if anybody knows, please clarify how they proved 1+1=2."
Luckily for us, mathematics is a language that we, as humans, have fully defined. 1+1=2 because we say it is.

BTW I can define consciousness and purpose pretty easily. Existence is a bit tougher. Language doesn't break down here.

The English language only really breaks down when we approach things like quantum mechanics, for instance. This is why we use math to describe quantum physics to a greater degree of precision. The wave/particle duality doesn't really exist. But it doesn't make sense for us to call things "wavicles," either. We call some things particles on the macro scale because they exhibit particle-like qualities and some things waves on the macro scale because they exhibit wave-like qualities. But it doesn't make sense when we try to extrapolate this to the quantum levels, where things make take some properties of one category and other properties of another, etc. Thankfully, math is a sort of language that has much use to us.

[ledwix]

Re: Metaphysics, intelligence, God

It's strange that an animal on Earth has such curiosity. Never before has anything like this happened, as far as we know. Then again, we don't know that much regarding races that populate the universe in general. A race of primitive hunters and gatherers evolves to develop complex languages, wonder about the nature of reality, develop models, both qualitative and mathematical, alleging some sort of inductive truths greater than the truth's known in the life of the individual, create technologies and economies that promote longer and more convenient lifestyles for billions of people, many of whom are able to communicate instantly with one another across an invisible, barely existent, yet massively powerful network of information, discover the true shape of the planet, and even look for and find other places like our own home planet, all because we dared to think about things beyond our own personal sustenance and also imagine the world as an objective reality guided by a programmed set of laws ready to be discovered.

As curious humans, we think we can know everything. The fact that we exist in between the very small and very large shows that we likely can't. It seems natural that we take conjecture and belief as closer to fact than would be logically justified. Well, it's at least fun to speculate and think something is true. It gives security sometimes.

[Vests]

Re: Metaphysics, intelligence, God

They aren't easy questions. But we can only know if we have evidence for it. It may be possible that some things are unknowable or ungraspable. We can certainly ask questions and investigate to the best of our ability.

"Actually the science of true AI is relatively complex. Theoretically with unlimited connection to outside sources, it could manipulate itself in to a virus"

These are pretty big claims that aren't saying much. What does it mean to have "unlimited connection to outside sources"? "Manipulate itself into a virus"? The complexity and resources required for these kind of events to occur is stupendous.

It would be more productive to talk about the subject at hand. We could start a AI thread if you'd like to continue that conversation there.