Bottom line: The rigorously proven No Free Lunch theorem shows that physicists will always be needed to determine the correct questions. No computer will do all our thinking for us.
Tag: Eric Holloway
Eric Holloway: To what extent does life simply invent itself as it goes along?
Eric Holloway argues that the evidence does not really support common descent, not the way Talk Origins believes and we were taught in school.
Putting Richard Dawkins’s evolution claims to a computer science test
Eric Holloway: When we apply Dawkins’s “blind evolution” explanation of the abilities exhibited by insects to the real world engineering, all we get is fancy knob twiddlers.
Eric Holloway: An experiment can test the idea that there is an infinite number of universes
An essential part of the process of discovering the truth will be the disintegration ray gun… Read the fine print.
Eric Holloway: Why engineering can’t be reduced to the laws of physics
He argues that the problem how to account for innovation cannot be solved by anything built upon the laws of physics.
Eric Holloway: Why Bell’s theorem matters
Especially to conservation of information theory: This brings us to a more general result known as the conservation of information. Design theorists William Dembski and Robert J. Marks defined the law of conservation of information in their 2009 paper “Conservation of Information in Search” and then proved the result in their follow-on 2010 paper “The Read More…
Eric Holloway: Why your computer will never talk to you
As a jokester recently demonstrated, even “shirts without stripes” is a fundamental, unsolvable problem for computers.
Eric Holloway: A scientific test for true intelligence
A scientific test should identify precisely what humans can do that computers cannot, avoiding subjective opinion: The “broken checkerboard” is not the ultimate scientific test for intelligence that we need. But it is a truly scientific test in the sense that it is capable of falsifying the theory that the mind is reducible to computation. Read More…
Eric Holloway: What’s hard for computers is easy for humans
We often hear that what’s hard for humans is easy for computers. But it turns out that many kinds of problems are exceedingly hard for computers to solve. This class of problems, known as NP-Complete (NPC), was independently discovered by Stephen Cook and Leonid Levin.
Eric Holloway: The Turing test is unscientific
Holloway: This test for intelligence, the Turing Test, was invented by and named after the mid-twentieth century computer pioneer Alan Turing. It is a subjective test in that it depends on whether an artificial intelligence is capable of convincing human testers that it is a human. But fooling humans, while impressive, is not really the same thing as actually possessing human-level intelligence.
Eric Holloway: Math shows why the mind can’t be reduced to a formula
Holloway: The fundamental implication is that nothing within math, science, and technology can create information. Yet information is all around us. This problem arises in many areas: evolution, artificial intelligence, economics, and physics.
Eric Holloway: A philosopher explains why thinking matter is impossible
Holloway: Richard Johns’s’ argument is deeper version of Captain Kirk’s scheme to defeat enemy robots in I, Mudd, a 1967 episode of Star Trek. Kirk posed a paradox that led to circuit meltdown.
Eric Holloway: Scanning my brain, playing Tetris, shows true AI is impossible
He bought a brain wave scanning kit and tested it on physical signs of his abstract thought, playing a game.
Eric Holloway’s latest short story: Mindtrap
Also, Adam Nieri’s review of Sprites – an AI replacement for actors?
ID-themed science fiction explores mind-matter collision
ID-friendly philosopher Eric Holloway wrote ID As A Bridge Between Francis Bacon And Thomas Aquinas here, which garnered a lot of attention. But in science fiction, he turns his attention to the consequences of a materialist vs. a non-materialist interpretation of the human mind.