We have on hand a framework for classifying the bases of belief in things that are at once weighty and unseen. Here, we apply the framework to belief in The Singularity, and conclude from this application, and the absence of both rationalist and empiricist evidence in support of this belief, that believers in the doctrine are fideists. While it’s true that fideists have been taken seriously in religion (e.g., Kierkegaard in the case of Christianity), even in that domain the likes of religious believers like Descartes, Pascal, and Leibniz find fideism to be little more than wishful, irrational thinking — and at any rate it’s rather doubtful that fideists should be taken seriously in the realm of science and engineering.
Even if Singularitarianism has no evidence base (which I’m not saying is the case), that’s not enough to show that Singularitarians are fideists. According to Wikipedia, “Fideism is an epistemological theory which maintains that faith is independent of reason, or that reason and faith are hostile to each other and faith is superior at arriving at particular truths...”
If Singularitarians believe that they have enough evidence to justify their position (most of the ones on here do believe that, as far as I can tell), then they aren’t fideists even if they’re wrong. A fideist would believe that ey didn’t have evidence and didn’t need it; most Singularitarians believe that they do need it and do have it. So they can’t be fideists; the worst they can be is wrong.
That is indeed evidence against his credibility, if not particularly strong evidence for me. I don’t know enough math to know directly that saying P=NP is a joke; I only believe it is because the math community says so.
Merely saying it wouldn’t be so bad, as long as there was some substance behind the assertion.
But basically his argument boils down to this:
“If you dunk two wooden boards with wires poked through them into soapy water and then lift them out, the soaps films between the wires are the solution to an NP-hard problem. But creating the boards and wires and dunking them can be done in polynomial time. So as long as physics is Turing computable, P = NP.”
This is a fantastically stupid argument, because you could easily create a simulation of the above process that appeared to be just as good at generating the answers to this problem as the real soap films. But if you gave it a somewhat difficult problem, what would happen is that it would quickly generate something which was nearly but not quite a solution, and there’s no reason to think that real soap films would do better.
The fact that Bringsjord got as far as formalising his argument in modal logic and writing it up, without even thinking of the above objection, is quite incredible.
So far as I understand your comment, Bringsjord loses a lot of credibility. Thanks for explaining his argument from behind the paywall in your link. Also I looked at more of his paper on Singularitarians being fideists, and he says in the paper that there are arguments for the Singularity and he’s going to “debunk” them. I’m starting to think he doesn’t know what the word “fideist” means.
(Note: this reply is not aimed at XiXiDu in particular.)
I agree with Normal_Anomaly’s sibling comment. If the Bringsjords are saying that “S is for these reasons probably false, so belief in S can only be fideistic”, then they should just give arguments against S.
But the fact hinted here that humans haven’t gotten to human level AI yet
a sharp toddler of today makes a mockery of any computing machine with designs on natural-language communication
does appear to be evidence that human-level intelligences are not good at AI theory, thus not good at fooming quickly.
The singularity as faith (extended abstract)
Selmer Bringsjord and Alexander Bringsjord, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
Link: singularityhypothesis.blogspot.com/2011/07/singularity-as-faith.html
Even if Singularitarianism has no evidence base (which I’m not saying is the case), that’s not enough to show that Singularitarians are fideists. According to Wikipedia, “Fideism is an epistemological theory which maintains that faith is independent of reason, or that reason and faith are hostile to each other and faith is superior at arriving at particular truths...”
If Singularitarians believe that they have enough evidence to justify their position (most of the ones on here do believe that, as far as I can tell), then they aren’t fideists even if they’re wrong. A fideist would believe that ey didn’t have evidence and didn’t need it; most Singularitarians believe that they do need it and do have it. So they can’t be fideists; the worst they can be is wrong.
Yeah well, it’s Selmer P = NP Bringsjord. He’s a complete joke!
That is indeed evidence against his credibility, if not particularly strong evidence for me. I don’t know enough math to know directly that saying P=NP is a joke; I only believe it is because the math community says so.
Merely saying it wouldn’t be so bad, as long as there was some substance behind the assertion.
But basically his argument boils down to this:
“If you dunk two wooden boards with wires poked through them into soapy water and then lift them out, the soaps films between the wires are the solution to an NP-hard problem. But creating the boards and wires and dunking them can be done in polynomial time. So as long as physics is Turing computable, P = NP.”
This is a fantastically stupid argument, because you could easily create a simulation of the above process that appeared to be just as good at generating the answers to this problem as the real soap films. But if you gave it a somewhat difficult problem, what would happen is that it would quickly generate something which was nearly but not quite a solution, and there’s no reason to think that real soap films would do better.
The fact that Bringsjord got as far as formalising his argument in modal logic and writing it up, without even thinking of the above objection, is quite incredible.
So far as I understand your comment, Bringsjord loses a lot of credibility. Thanks for explaining his argument from behind the paywall in your link. Also I looked at more of his paper on Singularitarians being fideists, and he says in the paper that there are arguments for the Singularity and he’s going to “debunk” them. I’m starting to think he doesn’t know what the word “fideist” means.
(Note: this reply is not aimed at XiXiDu in particular.)
I agree with Normal_Anomaly’s sibling comment. If the Bringsjords are saying that “S is for these reasons probably false, so belief in S can only be fideistic”, then they should just give arguments against S.
But the fact hinted here that humans haven’t gotten to human level AI yet
does appear to be evidence that human-level intelligences are not good at AI theory, thus not good at fooming quickly.