TheBlueNebula

"Is it possible for something to be true but not understandable?"

"But what if it were possible to create discoveries that no human being can ever understand?"

A lot of epistemological smoke and mirrors are strewn about in this Slate article. If I get what's going on here, the point of this piece is to suggest that some physical laws or scientific facts that are fundamentally incomprehensible to human minds may be known or knowable by computers.

Didn't we more-or-less get past this with the Critique of Pure Reason? Yes, I see that picture of Karl Popper next to the lede, but he's just there to illustrate a minor point about scientific proof--one that would apply equally to artificial and human minds.

I'm answering No to the first question, based not on my sanguine esteem for the human intellect, but merely on the fact that nobody (not even the hypothetical hyper-intelligent artificial brain) will be able to make sense of what he means by "true" in that sentence. This is one of those Dinge an sich "trues" that won't stand up to scrutiny.

I'm going to answer No to the second one, too. Oh yes, it's possible that some distant race of intelligent aliens might be able to "discover" something about themselves that humans will never be able to know because we will never encounter them. That's a reasonable use of "discover." But for "discover" to make sense in any non-special-secret way, the discovery would have to be comprehensible to the human mind if it were exposed to it.

Nah, I'm going to say that I need a much better account of what a "discovery" might be like that can only be recognized and appreciated by an artificial mind.

The author of this article hides that difficult concept behind the familiar word "discovery" as if it should not be a problem. It is. A machine's iterative processes may detect patterns or relationships within massive amounts of data that no human individual would have the time or capacity to study. Is this a discovery? How would I (or anyone else, including another machine) know?

Explain It to Me Again, Computer

In this gem of a blog entry, Sabine Hossenfelder takes on the so-called simulation hypothesis (the idea that Reality is a digital simulation). She finds it just little bit too coincidental that such an idea would emerge now that we share a popular understanding of computer simulation.

"People today ponder the idea that reality is a computer simulation in the same way that post-Newtonian intellectuals thought of the universe as a clockwork." 

"Popular culture creates hypotheses, and present culture is a collective limit to our imagination."

Based on these observations, I am expecting that proponents of the simulation hypothesis will soon be telling us that we should stop worrying about someone kicking the plug on the box running our universe. Surely Reality will have been moved into the "Cloud" by now. And before long we'll all have a new TOS to sign so they can re-implement Reality as a Web services-based subscription model.

 The simulation hypothesis and other things I don't believe  

Twenty years ago the science fiction TV series Babylon 5 premiered. Despite numerous setbacks, the creative team produced some outstanding television. Here's an overview article from io9.

 The Strange, Secret Evolution of Babylon 5   

I finished this remarkable novel in August 2012. It's a bit overwrought and suffers from some unnecessary obscurity in the climax, but overall it feels well-researched and it rewards the attentive reader. It covers some thematic territory that Science Fiction has always been very well-suited to, including the nature of the mind, identity, consciousness, and perception, but is set within an alien-first-contact plot that keeps things moving at a lively pace. Published under a Creative Commons license, Blindsight is a reader's bargain. 

 Blindsight by Peter Watts     

Originally posted 24 Aug 2012 on Google+

Their tales of acquiring the publishing rights to these genre properties might be more "amazing" than the Science Fiction stories themselves.

Singularity & Co.

Site Recommendation 

"Big Think is an evolving roadmap to the best thinking on the planet — the ideas that can help you think flexibly and act decisively in a multivariate world."

Big Think

Vintage drive-in movie intermission films were not just dancing candy bars and smiling soft drinks. Among the helpful public service announcements:

"Periodic X-Ray examinations are important to the health of you and your family."

Intermission ads: an abandoned art form