From: Yash (yashk2000@yahoo.com)
Date: Thu Jan 10 2002 - 16:06:55 MST
You can also see this kind of information in Douglas Hofstadter's Pulitzer
Award-winning work, "Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid".
All in all a very wonderful and deep book, although I find the tortoise
dialogues to be lingering on thoughout too much, but the concepts in the
book are far too important to be marred by just this little piece of
obviously subjective perception.
Especially interesting to me are Gödel's Theorem and the way to see things
holistically and reductively. Personally, I find both important. A Cellular
Automata System in which a cell represents a tree can model a forest fire
quite closely but there are no algorithms describing the inner working of
the tree itself. However, studying the finer details of a tree can also be
important for other reasons and research.
Gödel's Theorem is especially interesting when viewing the foundations of
mathematics and the basis on which it lays may turn out to be nothing byt
relying on faith/common sense. I read on Gödel's Theorem while studying the
research on Artificial Intelligence and Atificial Life, as it is used, most
notably by Roger Pensrose in "The Emperor's New Mind", to try to debunk the
notion that one day we could build an artificial machine capable of
equalling or surpassing our own ways of thinking. Penrose postulates Quantum
effects to be important in the way the mind functions. Of course, everybody
expectsan artifical lifeform to be tried through the Turing Test.
I do not subscribe to Penrose's pov. IMHO,
1. we can evolve things instead of trying to conceive them and come to a
complexity and emergent behaviour which are beyond our capacity to build
directly,
2. we are probably already part of a new kind of intelligent meta-organism
(Margulis and Lovelock's Gaďa Hypothesis, or Joël de Rosnay's Cybionte,
etc...).
I rather liked Dennett's "Consciousness Explained" which relies heavily on
Dawkins' notion of memes to describes how the mind works. This model lends
itself rather well to simulation or implementation in a computer.
Perhaps to me the greatest shortcoming of Dawkins is not taking a step back
to say "listen, it dawns upon me that what it really happening with both
memes and genes, is the evolution of information systems".
It would be easier to come to that conclusion using systems thinking, and
probably the eminently useful and amazing Meta-System Transition Theory of
Joslyn and Turchin.
The Universe, It Computes...
Hofstadter - http://www.psych.indiana.edu/people/homepages/hofstadter.html
Gödel -
Penrose - http://www.friesian.com/penrose.htm
Lovelock, Margulis - http://www.magna.com.au/~prfbrown/gaia_jim.html
de Rosnay - http://www.gymnase-morges.ch/docs/HommeSym.HTML,
http://csiweb2.cite-sciences.fr/derosnay/articles/livjr.html
Turing - http://cogsci.ucsd.edu/~asaygin/tt/ttest.html,
http://www.turing.org.uk/turing/scrapbook/test.html
Dennet - http://www.tufts.edu/~ddennett/,
http://www.trinity.edu/cbrown/mind/dennett_theses.html
Dawkins - http://www.world-of-dawkins.com/
Information Theory -
http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/mackay/info-theory/course.html
Joslyn, Turchin - http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/MSTT.html
Misc - http://www-personal.umich.edu/~jlawler/geb.html
Yash.
-----Original Message-----
From: owner-virus@lucifer.com [mailto:owner-virus@lucifer.com]On Behalf
Of Walter Watts
The Epimenides Paradox
Consider Statement A.
Statement A: "Statement A is not true."
Is Statement A true?
Statement A is not true. Argument 1 explains why.
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