Marvin Minsky/Things Not Material

29 Dec 2022 - 05 Nov 2024
Open in Logseq
    • it's hard to know what to do with the word "exist"
      • because in CS we know how to build simulated worlds.
    • you can't ever know that you exist, you might be a simulation.
      • Maybe we are an unexecuted program, the computer hasn't been turned on, but since the logical structure is the same...that is Tegmarkian (see Mathematical Universe ). Or a posible program that hasn't even been thought of yet (Platonism?). See simulation hypothesis
    • its the [computational] process itself that is the real thing , it doesn't have to exist in any ordinary sense. "
    • I wouldn't use the word real at all, I think it's obsolete and unnecessary...to say that this button is real in this universe make sense, to ask if the universe itself is real makes no sense at all.
      • I've had that exact thought in WS contexts. a comment at Nura course (not accessible unless you are registered)
        • I also think I am a bit of an anti-realist – not that I don't believe in reality, but I think that the concept of "the Real" is useless, especially if anything you can think of is real. If that's the case, the word draws no useful distinctions and should be avoided. Unless you split it up, maybe: my desk is real, Beauty is real, and my imaginary dragon friend are all real, but they are not real in the same ways and we need to understand how those different modes work, and how they relate to each other. Perhaps they are all aspects of the one real Real, which we cannot grasp directly.
    • Interviewer asks if nonmaterial things in this universe can be real, like spiritual things (7:35). Minsky dodges that and describes how an abstract process like evolution is real.
    • The Theorem of Evolution (vs the Theory) – that any mathematical system that supports selection and variation will evolve complexity.