🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <Dec.10.11.48.06.1989.2717@elbereth.rutgers.edu>
harnad@elbereth.rutgers.edu (Stevan Harnad) writes:
>
> ... Virtual worlds are not real worlds, and what goes on inside a
> simulation is just meaningless symbol crunching. The only way to
> ground symbols is in the real world.

Real world?  You have no way of proving that there is a "real world",
that there is only one, or that we are not living inside a simulation.
Intelligence is intelligence, no matter if it is accepting patterns in
{a,b}* or operating a fork lift on planet earth.  It is only a matter of
degree.

> ... a "virtual world" ... will never lead to what -- for a
> psychobiologist, at any rate -- is the real goal: A robot that passes
> the Total Turing Test.

Does a "Total" Turing Test differ from a Turing Test in that
psychobiologists will, when confronted with a robot that passes the test
to the satisfaction of everyone else, insist upon running the tests out
to infinity?  It has been proven that equivalence testing programs with
that level of generality can not exist.

> ... Virtual worlds cannot embody all the contingencies of the real
> world, they can only capture as many of them symbolically as we can
> anticipate.

Let's say we have creatures living in the universe of {a,b}*.  They have
gotten pretty smart, in terms of language recognition, and have started
to simulate their universe, which consists of patterns of 'a's and 'b's
coming through a channel.  It is true that they don't have a prayer;
because the number a patterns, subsets of {a,b}*, is not only infinite,
it is not even enumerable.  Standing on the other end of the channel,
the god of the ab-creatures can send any pattern it wants and always
keep the creations guessing.

Now consider that the god of the ab-creatures is itself an ab-creature
being fed patterns from yet a higher level.  At each level, as gods,
they have total knowledge of the universe of the creatures immediately
below them; and, as creations, find their own universe incomprehensibly
complex and unknowable.  Even when the levels of simulation are carried
out to infinity, there is no qualitative difference in the intelligence
of the occupants or their "virtual" reality between the successive
levels of simulation.  Thus the inhabitants can not prove at what level
they are or even that they themselves exist within a simulation.
--
John E Van Deusen III, PO Box 9283, Boise, ID  83707, (208) 343-1865

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