If you agree that God wouldn’t have a human-like personality and human-like needs and ambitions, you end up with a God who is indistinguishable from the sum of the laws of physics.
Scott Adams arguing that “that human personalities are nothing but weaknesses and defects that we romanticize” and that God would have no weaknesses and therefore no personality.
Since the local idea of a superintelligence implies that a foomed AGI would have no human weaknesses (and likely a goal system that is so incomprehensible to humans as to be indistinguishable from no goal system at all), this would imply that we would not notice a superintelligence if it were staring us in the face, provided it decided to keep humans around. There are some obvious flaws in his speculation, however. But the post is still well worth reading.
goal system that is so incomprehensible to humans as to be indistinguishable from no goal system at all
No, “incomprehensible” doesn’t imply “invisible”. That’s like saying that impersonal laws of physics are indistinguishable from having no laws of physics at all. Gravity is impersonal, yet it is personally observable.
In a similar way, we could observe an appearance of mountains of paperclips, even if we had no clue about why the AGI is doing that (assuming we would still exist and had an access to the AGI’s code and data).
we would not notice a superintelligence if it were staring us in the face, provided it decided to keep humans around
Provided it decided to keep humans around in their original environment. Otherwise we would notice a change in the environment, even if we couldn’t discover its cause.
Science of Mind hypothesizes a god with no personality. While this god goes much less far beyond the laws of physics, it goes a bit beyond them in that the hypothesis is of an infinite intelligence underlying the universe, of which human intelligences are a part or manifestation, like a drop of water in the ocean. For me, this leads me to the idea that there may be laws of consciousness that are part of the laws of physics, but which we just haven’t figured out yet, just as radiation and quarks and so on were all there long before they were investigated well enough to have their laws categorized. When I attended such a “church,” I referred to it as my atheist church. The pastor seemed a little uncomfortable with this, but contained himself.
The idea that personality is weaknesses and defects, I think is wrong. It seems more like a mental illness than a hypothesis to me. But there seems some useful content. Personality is part of how we manage a very finite model of a very large world. We need to do this to be effective because our minds are finite. And so Adams is right that an infinite intelligence, an intelligence whose horsepower had not run out before it comprehended the entire universe, would not need a model of the universe which was less complex than the universe itself.
WHen I attended this “church,” I conceived the Universe as a gigantic intelligence, running a simulation of the universe. In fact it seems that it must be conceived this way, or rather that it can be. How does the electric field KNOW to evolve the way it does? The universe in some sense has been built to produce that result, just as we might build a specialized computer to simulate the electric field if we wanted a very fast highly detailed simulation. The universe has been built exactly as complex as it needs to be to simulate all the laws of physics, but no more complex. And all it does is simulate them. We are Hanson’s ems, except it is not only our minds that are emulated, it is everything about us.
Scott Adams arguing that “that human personalities are nothing but weaknesses and defects that we romanticize” and that God would have no weaknesses and therefore no personality.
Since the local idea of a superintelligence implies that a foomed AGI would have no human weaknesses (and likely a goal system that is so incomprehensible to humans as to be indistinguishable from no goal system at all), this would imply that we would not notice a superintelligence if it were staring us in the face, provided it decided to keep humans around. There are some obvious flaws in his speculation, however. But the post is still well worth reading.
No, “incomprehensible” doesn’t imply “invisible”. That’s like saying that impersonal laws of physics are indistinguishable from having no laws of physics at all. Gravity is impersonal, yet it is personally observable.
In a similar way, we could observe an appearance of mountains of paperclips, even if we had no clue about why the AGI is doing that (assuming we would still exist and had an access to the AGI’s code and data).
Provided it decided to keep humans around in their original environment. Otherwise we would notice a change in the environment, even if we couldn’t discover its cause.
Science of Mind hypothesizes a god with no personality. While this god goes much less far beyond the laws of physics, it goes a bit beyond them in that the hypothesis is of an infinite intelligence underlying the universe, of which human intelligences are a part or manifestation, like a drop of water in the ocean. For me, this leads me to the idea that there may be laws of consciousness that are part of the laws of physics, but which we just haven’t figured out yet, just as radiation and quarks and so on were all there long before they were investigated well enough to have their laws categorized. When I attended such a “church,” I referred to it as my atheist church. The pastor seemed a little uncomfortable with this, but contained himself.
The idea that personality is weaknesses and defects, I think is wrong. It seems more like a mental illness than a hypothesis to me. But there seems some useful content. Personality is part of how we manage a very finite model of a very large world. We need to do this to be effective because our minds are finite. And so Adams is right that an infinite intelligence, an intelligence whose horsepower had not run out before it comprehended the entire universe, would not need a model of the universe which was less complex than the universe itself.
WHen I attended this “church,” I conceived the Universe as a gigantic intelligence, running a simulation of the universe. In fact it seems that it must be conceived this way, or rather that it can be. How does the electric field KNOW to evolve the way it does? The universe in some sense has been built to produce that result, just as we might build a specialized computer to simulate the electric field if we wanted a very fast highly detailed simulation. The universe has been built exactly as complex as it needs to be to simulate all the laws of physics, but no more complex. And all it does is simulate them. We are Hanson’s ems, except it is not only our minds that are emulated, it is everything about us.