...has finally been published.
Contents:
- Uziel Awret - Introduction
- Susan Blackmore - She Won’t Be Me
- Damien Broderick - Terrible Angels: The Singularity and Science Fiction
- Barry Dainton - On Singularities and Simulations
- Daniel Dennett - The Mystery of David Chalmers
- Ben Goertzel - Should Humanity Build a Global AI Nanny to Delay the Singularity Until It’s Better Understood?
- Susan Greenfield - The Singularity: Commentary on David Chalmers
- Robin Hanson - Meet the New Conflict, Same as the Old Conflict
- Francis Heylighen - Brain in a Vat Cannot Break Out
- Marcus Hutter - Can Intelligence Explode?
- Drew McDermott - Response to ‘The Singularity’ by David Chalmers [this link is a McDermott-corrected version, and therefore preferred to the version that was published in JCS]
- Jurgen Schmidhuber - Philosophers & Futurists, Catch Up!
- Frank Tipler - Inevitable Existence and Inevitable Goodness of the Singularity
- Roman Yampolskiy - Leakproofing the Singularity: Artificial Intelligence Confinement Problem
The issue consists of responses to Chalmers (2010). Future volumes will contain additional articles from Shulman & Bostrom, Igor Aleksander, Richard Brown, Ray Kurzweil, Pamela McCorduck, Chris Nunn, Arkady Plotnitsky, Jesse Prinz, Susan Schneider, Murray Shanahan, Burt Voorhees, and a response from Chalmers.
McDermott's chapter should be supplemented with this, which he says he didn't have space for in his JCS article.
Tipler paper
Wow, that's all kinds of crazy. I'm not sure how much as I'm not a mathematical physicist - MWI and quantum mechanics implied by Newton? Really? - but one big flag for me is pg187-188 where he doggedly insists that the universe is closed, although as far as I know the current cosmological consensus is the opposite, and I trust them a heck of a lot more than a fellow who tries to prove his Christianity with his physics.
(This is actually convenient for me: a few weeks ago I was wondering on IRC what the current status of Tipler's theories were, given that he had clearly stated they were valid only if the universe were closed and if the Higgs boson was within certain values, IIRC, but I was feeling too lazy to look it all up.)
And the extraction of a transcendent system of ethics from a Feynman quote...
This is just too wrong for words. This is like saying that looking both ways before crossing the street is obviously a part of rational street-crossing - a moment's thought will convince the reader (Dark Arts) - and so we can collapse Hume's fork and promote looking both ways to a universal meta-ethical principal that future AIs will obey!
Show me this morality in the AIXI equation or GTFO!
A map from range to domain, a proof in propositional logic, or a series of lambda equations and reductions all come to mind...
One man's modus ponens is another man's modus tollens. That the 'honestly' requires other entities is proof that this cannot be an ethical system which encompasses all rational beings.
Any argument that rests on a series of rhetorical questions is untrustworthy. Specifically, sure, I can in 5 seconds come up with a reason they would not preserve us: there are X mind-states we can be in while still maintaining identity or continuity; there are Y (Y < X) that we would like or would value; with infinite computing power, we will exhaust all Y. At that point, by definition, we could choose to not be preserved. Hence, I have proven we will inevitably choose to die even if uploaded to Tipler's Singularity.
(Correct and true? Dunno. But let's say this shows Tipler is massively overreaching...)
What a terrible paper altogether. This was a peer-reviewed journal, right?
Hi, Gwern. You asked, "... MWI and quantum mechanics implied by Newton? Really?" Yes, the Hamilton-Jacobi Equation, which is the most powerful formulation of Newtonian mechanics, is, like the Schrödinger Equation, a multiverse equation. Quantum Mechanics is the unique specialization of the Hamilton-Jacobi Equation with the specification imposed that determinism is maintained: since the Hamilton-Jacobi Equation is indeterministic, because when particle trajectories cross paths a singularity is produced (i.e., the values in the equations become inf... (read more)