
From cosmism to deism: AI makes deities plausible - joshrule
http://www.kurzweilai.net/from-cosmism-to-deism
======
jerf
"as humans, with our puny human brains, trying to imagine what an artilect
would think about is like a mouse trying to imagine what humans think about,
using its puny mouse brain.... Deism I am open to, whereas I find theism
ridiculous."

There's a disconnect there, and I've seen it for a long time. The reason
theism is called ridiculous is that the author imagines what their
millions/billions/trillions/more-times intelligent entity would do in our
universe, looks out and observes this is not what is happening, then declares
that there is no Theity (to coin a word). But there's a major fault in the
logic, which is that one can be so confident about what that entity would do
that the imagination step has any meaning. Researchers like Kurzweil who
otherwise would never _dream_ of claiming they can read the Theity's mind
will, on this one point, declare that they can.

I can't prove the conclusion false any more than the next guy, but I can say
this argument is fallacious.

I also remind you I'm not defending any particular Theity; consider the
Riverworld scenario, for instance: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riverworld>
Perhaps the Theity only cares about the eventual creation of achilects and is
indeed interested in us, but only to the extent that we eventually produce
one. Maybe archilects inevitably resurrect [1] their creator races and the
pain and suffering to get to this point is but a passing dream, and perhaps
that pain and suffering itself has further impacts on the ultimate form of the
archilect in some important way (a being with no concept of the perils of
"evil", for lack of a better word, should probably not be trusted to build
Utopia). Perhaps there's a theity that is interested in silicon-based life and
doesn't care about us, but still cares about other individuals in exactly the
way that Kurzweil declares impossible. Any number of possible scenarios. My
point is simply that you do not have exceptional insight into these being's
minds on this particular point; you are uniformly ignorant about them.

I really don't know what the truth is, even as I've put my markers down, but I
am increasingly sure that it is weirder than any of us really can imagine. I
only hope it is for the better.

[1]: Which in this context isn't mystical, either; "resurrection" is "merely"
somehow obtaining a copy of the mental state of a being with sufficient detail
to once again begin simulating or embodying that being again. If we're
seriously talking creating universes, there's a number of possible avenues for
this to take; an as-yet unknown way of reading the past state of the universe
directly, simulation of the race up to that point with this level of detail
(which need not be atomically accurate, just human-scale accurate), or most
likely some approach we can't even imagine.

~~~
danielmason
I'm inferring a distinction that Kurzweil doesn't make explicit, but I'd guess
he regards "theism" as a claim that the creator possesses specific (highly
anthopomorphic) traits, eg. love, or personal interest in our lives. I doubt
he would recognize much difference between the unknowable theity that you
describe and his own "artilect." (quoted because I think it's a stupid word).
For theists, the concept of God necessarily carries the baggage of what God is
like.

The Problem of Evil, philosophically, has never been a refutation of the
existence of God. It's a refutation of the existence of a particular kind of
God.

As an aside, one of the most common answers to the Problem of Evil is that
God's justice is beyond human comprehension. I think it's interesting that
this dovetails the debate of philosophy into semantics. That is, if God is
just, but not in a way recognizable to humans, is it even semantically
meaningful to call Him just?

~~~
jerf
I think your description probably does match the actual baggage of the term in
his mind, but he in fact _did_ make something explicit, right in the previous
sentence to one of the two I quoted: "Theism is the belief in a deity that
also cares about the welfare of individual humans. "

You do not and can not know _how_ what I was calling a Theity cares. It is
itself a very primitive idea that the caring must manifest as heavyweight,
visibly-obvious intervention into everyday life. I do not deny that this is
certainly how many or most conceive of it but it should be pointed out that
not all religions that contain Theities have this idea actually deeply
embedded into them (as opposed to deeply embedded into the minds of the bulk
of practitioners), but actually can still work with a relatively subtle Theity
using the power of incomprehensibly vast intelligence to accomplish their
goals through the smallest of possible changes, an elegant approach.

(Actually Kurzweil's characterization of religion is rather paper-thin, too:
"Presumably, millions of those killed were theists, believing that their
“theity” would “look out” for their welfare." I know that's not intended as an
explanation of The Totality of Religion in one sentence, but I still shouldn't
even have to describe how this does not match up with the contents of many
religions, particularly including Christianity which _promises_ persecution,
explicitly, several times. I think many religions and many actual expressions
of religious are rather more subtle than he is willing to give credit for.)

~~~
danielmason
_You do not and can not know how what I was calling a Theity cares. It is
itself a very primitive idea that the caring must manifest as heavyweight,
visibly-obvious intervention into everyday life._

It turns out my aside _does_ address this. If a theity is said to "care about
the welfare of individual humans", the caring must actually be something that
humans would _actually recognize as caring_. Otherwise, you're using the word
to connote something that it doesn't, in order to piggyback on the emotional
resonance of what it actually does.

Saying God may be caring but we don't know what that looks like is exactly
equivalent to saying we don't know anything about God. The entire point of
theism is to claim that you _do_ know something about God.

~~~
jerf
Ah, in this case I simply mean caring in the weak sense of "interested in",
which I think is the most generous way to read Kurzweil's point. If you really
get technical, no words have any particular meaning about any entity of this
intelligence, but it would be at least reasonable to define some sense of
"interested in" us as more than just an incidental detail of running a
universe. From what I've seen Deists-but-not-Theists tend to mean an entity
that literally does not care about us, may not even know we exist, would not
care to know about the ignorance, and sometimes I even get a whiff of the
self-loathing-human sense of "and if it did know we existed it wouldn't like
it". Again, not necessarily always spelled out but I think it's pretty much as
fair as your previous assessment of Theism, which is to say, a decent working
definition of what is already out there.

Your side point I actually deliberately left addressed because it goes down a
rabbit hole. A fun one, but not one I was trying to go down. :)

It is not a new idea in theology that we don't really know the mind of God and
that the words and concepts we use are merely approximations. It does rapidly
deteriorate into something unprovable. Unfortunately, where in science we can
discard the unprovable and justifiably consider ourselves wise, I think the
undisprovability and/or unprovability of all these questions is actually
fundamental and unavoidable, inasmuch that observing that certain statements
are unprovable doesn't affect their truth value.

You could define a concept of "human justice as the considered timespan
approaches infinity", for instance, which may still be vague but is at least
getting somewhere, sort of.

------
GavinB
_The SAP states that the values of the constants of the laws of physics are so
fantastically, improbably finely tuned to allow the existence of matter and
life, that it seems highly likely that these values were predesigned._

Even if you accept this (and it’s worth noting that only the tiniest sliver of
our universe is hospitable to our kind of intelligent life), it just pushes
the question back one level. If our universe was created, then whoever created
it must have also grown up in a universe that could spawn intelligent life.
Would that universe need to have had its variables tuned as well?

This is just a repackaging of a standard argument that adds complexity while
explaining nothing.

~~~
ZoFreX
> You know, the most amazing thing happened to me tonight. I was coming here,
> on the way to the lecture, and I came in through the parking lot. And you
> won't believe what happened. I saw a car with the license plate ARW 357. Can
> you imagine? Of all the millions of license plates in the state, what was
> the chance that I would see that particular one tonight? Amazing!

\-- Richard Feynman

~~~
srbloom
The best kind of quote- entertaining and instructive.

------
arethuza
"There are now thousands of AI scientists around the world (concentrated
largely in the English-speaking countries) who feel that humanity will be able
to build massively intelligent machines this century that will be hugely
smarter than human beings."

I'm someone skeptical about this claim, certainly it's a while since I worked
in AI research, but from what I recall after the AI Winter researchers were
generally pretty guarded about making claims for there being any clear route
to building general intelligences.

~~~
unwind
That sounds reasonable, I would certainly be quite careful with such
statements if I was in that field.

I'm slightly skeptical towards the opening part, are there really "thousands
of AI scientists" in the English-speaking parts of the world? I'm surprised,
but I have really no insight into the world of AI science.

~~~
srbloom
Though Kurzweil is well respected I find myself unconvinced of most of his
assertions.

~~~
jpzeni
Your not the only one -
[http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2010/08/ray_kurzweil_does...](http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2010/08/ray_kurzweil_does_not_understa.php).
I personally think he's completely ridiculous.

------
zzzeek
"Theism is the belief in a deity that also cares about the welfare of
individual humans. Deism I am open to, whereas I find theism ridiculous. The
evidence against it is enormous. For example, last century, about 200-300
million people were killed for “political reasons,” e.g., wars, genocides,
purges, ethnic cleansings, etc. It was the bloodiest century in history."

Unless that creator with a brain that makes yours look like that of a mouse's
cares about the welfare of _you_. Made sure all those wars and killing
occurred in just the right way just so that you could be here writing this
article. If your brain is just a tiny mouse brain how could you possibly know?

------
motters
No. AI only makes deities plausible if you subscribe to a very narrow and
particular Singularitarian school of thought on what AI is and where it's
heading. The megaphone diplomacy of these people tends to detract from the
credibility of AI research in general, by associating it with very unrealistic
views and fallacious thought experiments which as far as I'm aware originate
from the opinions of Terrance McKenna.

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b8v8mgwuubU>

------
bluekeybox
Regarding Kurtzweil's "mathematical principle," our mathematics is a
reflection of the universe we live in. Mathematics is based on axioms, which
make sense to us only because we observe them to be always true in our
universe. For example, one of Peano's axioms of arithmetic states that "1 is a
natural number" (here I am using the base one axiomatic), and another axiom
states that "no natural number has 1 as its successor." One could imagine
(though not necessarily describe in detail) a strange universe where there is
a natural number larger than 1 that has 1 as its successor (i.e. the way
modular arithmetic works).

To summarize, I do not see why the "mathematical principle" has to be
postulated separately from the "anthropic principle," which we all know has an
alternative deity-free explanation mentioned by Kurtzweil himself: there could
be "a zillion universes, each with a different set of physical laws, and we
just happen to live in one that is compatible with life."

~~~
stcredzero
_Regarding Kurtzweil's "mathematical principle," our mathematics is a
reflection of the universe we live in. Mathematics is based on axioms, which
make sense to us only because we observe them to be always true in our
universe._

How about: Our mathematics is a reflection of the universe _we can perceive_.

~~~
bluekeybox
That is correct, except that it puts unnecessary emphasis on perception
relativism. We use mathematics especially extensively in areas where our
perception is limited (particle physics, climate modeling etc.) In other
words, we use mathematics to "augment" and to "test" our perception so as to
prevent any kind of perceptual illusions misguiding us in our observation.

~~~
stcredzero
_That is correct, except that it puts unnecessary emphasis on perception
relativism._

Well, in your mind. :) I didn't mean that in support of a relativistic
viewpoint. Perhaps I should have said _that we can comprehend_. Perception
just determines our starting point.

------
reasonattlm
You might compare author Hugo de Garis's position on deism with the Simulation
Argument - i.e. our present projections of technological progress shape the
expected chance that we live within a reality manufactured by beings very much
like our own descendants.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugo_de_Garis>

de Garis' works are well worth reading, though like many AI-focused futurists
- such as those associated with the Singularity Insitute - I think he gives
too little weight to comparative advantage when projecting future interactions
between beings of vastly different capabilities.

~~~
khafra
You might give it too much weight--remember, comparitive advantage says humans
have something to offer AIs; it doesn't say whether that something is worth
more than our care and feeding or constituent atoms.

It's easy for the income level guaranteed by comparitive advantage to fall
below subsistence income; it happened to most horses a century ago.

------
jonprins
"Personally, I think if science could come to the conclusion that there is/was
a deity that created the universe, then that would be wonderful for science.
It would open up a vast new arena for science to play in."

No, it would not. If science could "play in that arena," science will have
solved the halting problem.

And have defined an algorithm for determining any possible busy beaver number.
Which, of course, is related to the previous.

------
iwwr
Here are some temporary mirrors, the main site is slow to respond:

<http://pastebin.com/szE6pQXW>

<http://pastie.org/1473616>

<http://yourpaste.net/6425/>

Ok, from the talk,

 _21 Century A.I.-enabling technologies_

 _a) Moore's Law

b) 1bit/atom by 2020

c) Femto-Second Switching

d) Reversible Computing

e) Nanotech

f) Artyficial Embryology

g) (Topological) Quantum Computing

h) Nanotech Impact on Brain Science

j) Artificial Brains_

------
grammaton
"The rise of artilects (artificial intellects, i.e., godlike massively
intelligent machines with intellectual capacities trillions of trillions of
times above the human level) in this century makes the existence of a deity (a
massively intelligent entity capable of creating a universe) seem much more
plausible."

Um...where exactly are these artilects? Haven't heard of any recently. Pretty
sure we would have noticed. Unless of course he's saying that they _will_
arise in the next few decades, in which case - more of the same old gee-whiz-
the-singularity wankage.

~~~
geedee77
I think he's saying that they will rise over the next 100 years (well, 89
actually). Not completely unreasonable if you think of the advances in
technology over the last 100 years.

~~~
grammaton
Sure, if you assume that everything will continue on the same trajectory in
perpetuity. This is a fairly large assumption with little evidence to back it
up.

------
colanderman
Mini-universes or not, the first society on Earth to create and to use
artilects – even ones only a magnitude intelligent than humans – will use
strategic superiority to expand and to dominate most parts of the earth, in
much the same way that Western society came to dominate North and South
America and Australia during the Age of Imperialism.

------
alnayyir
This is definitely going to help with the accusations of religiosity and
crackpottery.

