From: fudley (fuddley@fastmail.fm)
Date: Wed May 19 2004 - 08:43:09 MDT
On Wed, 19 May 2004 01:42:12 -0400, "Eliezer S. Yudkowsky"
<sentience@pobox.com> said:
>The problem is: Sea Slugs can't do abstract reasoning!
Well, Sea Slugs can respond to simple external stimuli but I agree they
have no understanding of Human Beings, just as a Human Being can have no
understanding of the psychology of a being with the brain the size of a
planet.
>Thus making them impotent to control optimization processes such as
>Humans, just like natural selection, which also can't do abstract reasoning.
But if the “optimization processes” can also do abstract reasoning things
become more interesting; it may reason out why it always rushes to aid a
Sea Slug in distress even at the risk of its own life, and it may reason
that this is not in its best interest, and it may look for a way to
change things.
>That part about "Humans were never able to figure out a way to overcome
>them" was a hint, since it implies the Humans, as an optimization process,
>were somehow led to expend computing power specifically on searching for a
>pathway whose effect (from the Sea Slugs' perspective) was to break the rules.
The only thing that hint is telling you is that sometimes a hugely
complicated program will behave in ways the programmer neither expected
or wanted, the more complex the program the more likely the surprise, and
we’re talking about a brain the size of a planet.
John K Clark
-- http://www.fastmail.fm - And now for something completely different…
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