Hacker News Comments on
The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World
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All the comments and stories posted to Hacker News that reference this book.I prefer David Deutsch's optimistic approach to our problems: use science to find solutions. Rebellion is beyond the pale. We don't need rebels; we need scientists and more good science."The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World" by David Deutsch
https://www.amazon.com/Beginning-Infinity-Explanations-Trans...?
> why do you believe whatever makes us smart cannot be replicated by a computer program?Turing's Universality of Computation actually guarantees that whatever is feasible in the physical world can be replicated as a computation in bits. However, I don't share the belief that AI research is anywhere close to achieving this in the most general sense of intelligence. Most AI researchers seem to agree: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9109140
Did you have a chance to look at David Deutsch's work on this topic?
http://aeon.co/magazine/technology/david-deutsch-artificial-...
http://www.ted.com/talks/david_deutsch_a_new_way_to_explain_...
http://www.amazon.com/The-Beginning-Infinity-Explanations-Tr...
Although Deutsch is not as charismatic a speaker as Kurzweil or as lucid a writer as Bostrom, his arguments make the most sense to me, given my limited experience doing AI research at Stanford. It would be interesting to know your thoughts on Deutsch's theory that the ability to create 'good' explanations is what separates human intelligence from the rest. (maybe through another blog post?)
P.S. Since I have your attention here, I took CS183B last quarter and it was really fun. Thanks!
Conceiving the universe as the "output of a computer program" seems like an empty idea, as computation depends on a physical substrate (its laws of physics). It leads to an infinite regress: What laws of physics govern that physical substrate? David Deutsch (mentioned in the WP article) has a discussion of this (and many other related deep topics!) in his excellent "The Beginning of Infinity" http://www.amazon.com/The-Beginning-Infinity-Explanations-Tr...