Maes-Garreau law

2 thoughts on “Maes-Garreau law”

1. Hah.

   I don’t have this problem because I believe in reincarnation, based on a preponderance of evidence.

   The great time travel singularity cannot happen for quite some time, and although that horizon shifts due to editing, there must be a path and it must make sense. None of us are gifted enough to understand what our distant descendants could tell us, so it isn’t a shortcut to simply appear and start granting prayers and healing people. We have a galaxy to conquer, and that won’t happen in our lifetimes!

   AI singularity is sometime after we get past the vast litigation that will result from a variety of professionals using their copilot, bard, or whatever to do their thinking for them, and a building collapses. Folks like Elon will leap to suggest that more buildings collapse due to human error than AI error, and off we’ll go to the many circuits of our frocked wonders of legal interpretation. Regulations and taxes will stave off any singularity for quite some time to come.

   You’ve got to have customers to make it make sense. AI teaching and guides are going to excel, even to the point of suggesting and analyzing new ideas like the old expert systems… still not consciousness. Still not unfathomably brilliant results, even if the methods and analysis are not.

   I loved Godel Escher Bach, but I side with Penrose from the old days. Consciousness will require specific hardware, and will not be found in a simulation of a brain. It will be a brain, with limbs, eyes, etc. And whether or not those inputs be those real or simulated, the brain part will be real, existing in one time, one space. Asynchronous quantum computing could make that a pretty big space (using photonics), but it will still be a closed loop, not a distributed algorithm subject to direct external interference and monitoring.

   That machine is a long way away. Not in my lifetime, no way. Maybe for my grandkids, but I still doubt that. Working in zero g, 3K would certainly simplify some aspects, and that will definitely get cooking in our lifetime. But only in it’s infancy.

   There. I wrote a lot of words for you!

   1. I’ve thought about this comment a bit. It reminds me when I first encountered philosophical skepticism. I was taking a seminar on it, and I had the hardest time, just reading and rereading Descartes Meditations, each time in light of some modern philosophical arguments, and the point of it was to say there is no real answer to the demon hypothesis, that it could be true.

      But, being a practical man, I asked: How is the belief that I know nothing useful? Ultimately, I have to function in the world, and whether I am being deceived by a demon, brain in a vat simulation, uploaded consciousness or some other possibility, I still needed to function as if this world was real. I have to make some assumption. Finally, at the end of the class, at the professor’s home, I asked this question, and he said: “The point is to have intellectual humility, that you could be wrong about everything, and likely are.”

      Which brings us to the Anthropic Principle. It’s seems to be a belief like Schrodinger’s cat, where the fact that there is intelligent life, an observer. collapses the wave function to a fact from a probability. There are many flavors of the belief, but for simplicity, let’s call them a weak, strong and anthropocentric anthropic principles.

      Weak is a variation of evolution. At of a random universe, life sprang from sheer chance.

      Strong implies that the order was imposed, which implies a God or some advanced civilization.

      Anthropocentric seems to be suggesting that humanity is God, or evolves maybe from pure chance into taking the driver’s seat and imposing an order that is good for life, or at least human beings.

      From the last, I take the idea is that if humanity attains a kind of Godhood, and time is like space, which can be accessed, much like you can take a train from New York to Seattle, you could take some conveyance from Godhood time to now and times previous. Presumably, Godhood humanity might want to redeem its predecessors, which brings us to a kind of afterlife, in a form to be determined.

      So, there is a deductive element to the argument. We’re hear to observe, and therefore there are certain implications. From there, you have belief – humanity’s Godhood and later redemption. Being in the future, and no way to access the future in our time beyond waiting, this is a largely untestable idea. Plausible from a first principles perspective, but it’s still a kind of speculation in the end.

      Suppose we accept all of the above as true. I find myself asking the same question as I had when I heard about philosophical skepticism. How does this belief help me to live my life? What is it’s utility in the Now? I can see it might be a source of hope. But, is there more to it that I am missing?

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