Sci-Ence! Justice Leak!

All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy, all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy, all work…

This series of posts has become rather longer than the very short thing I was originally going to write, but we’re heading into the home stretch now. (Parts one, two and three for latecomers.)

This post is the part that inspired the overall title for this mini-series, and is probably going to be the least convincing. But I find it the most convincing.

You see, in large part I agree with the Singulatarians, and that’s precisely why I disagree with them.

Let me explain.

Belief in the Singularity is part of what we might call a ‘paradigm’ or ‘meme-plex’ (depending on precisely what species of wanker we are), or a world-view. It’s one that, in its broadest outlines, I share, and it is that the universe can be regarded as pure information.

People arrive at this position – a sort of scientific neo-Platonism – from a variety of scientific sources, but you can get to it from proper computer science (see Scott Aaronson’s wonderful series of lectures on Quantum Computing Since Democritus), information theory, cybernetics, quantum theory via either the Copenhagen or Many-Worlds interpretations, Bayes’ theorem, Solomonoff induction or probably a dozen other ways. Almost all these fields, incidentally, come originally from work by John von Neumann…

In brief, this world-view could be summarised as:

If you want a book explaining this viewpoint in great detail, I recommend David Deutsch’s The Fabric Of Reality (which I reviewed here )

Now, most of this is stuff which is fairly sensible, and with which I (and I suspect most people) could agree. And it leads to the belief that both the universe and the human mind can be thought of in some sense as computer programs, or as mathematical formalisms.

(Those of you who know a little of the history of philosophy will now get why I referred to the attitude of Singulatarians as Panglossian in the last post – Doctor Pangloss in Candide being of course a satire of Leibniz, whose ideas are very much a 17th century precursor to this worldview).

At one extreme, this belief that the universe can be modelled as a computer program simply leads to things like Steve Yegge’s argument that we should treat questions like ‘what’s outside the universe?’ the same way we should treat an undef in programming. At the other, it leads to the ideas of mathematical physicist Max Tegmark, who argues that all mathematical formal systems have an objective reality in exactly the same way our universe does.

This worldview does impact on the Singulatarians, in a variety of ways, from shaping their view of the end result of the Singularity, to their thoughts on how it should be created (a lot of the discussions around the Singularity Institute involve people trying to come up with a rigorous decision theory, based on Bayesian probabilities, that would work in a quantum multiverse, because they believe this to be necessary for the creation of an artificial intelligence that won’t harm humanity).

But while this worldview is probably the closest we’ve got to a ‘correct understanding of the universe’ so far, it is only a model. And I think going from that model to statements that the mind ‘is’ a computer program, or that the universe ‘is’, is a step too far – confusing the map with the territory. Our models – our worldviews – are metaphors. They’re ways of understanding the universe. They’re not the actual universe itself, any more than Burns’ love really was a red red rose.

Every other model we’ve had of the universe so far – the Aristotelean worldview, the clockwork universe of Newton and so on – has proved incorrect. Those models all worked for a restricted domain – those cases that could be understood and measured at the time, and that people had bothered to check. But it was the edge cases – those areas in which those worldviews were stretched to their limits – that caused those models to fall down.

And every time, while the predictions made for things that were already known stayed the same (Aristotle, Newton and Einstein all predict that things will fall to the ground), the underlying view of the universe changed immeasurably, along with the predictions for the unknown.

Our knowledge of science is immeasurably better now than, say, a hundred years ago, but it’s not yet complete. It may never be, but no matter what, things like a quantum theory of gravity, if we ever find one, *will* bring with them new ways of looking at the world, and I have no doubt that saying the universe is a computer program, or that the human mind is one, will look as ridiculous as saying that things move towards their natural place based on how much earth, air, fire or water they contain.

The Singularity is, pretty much by definition, the place where our current thinking breaks down, even if you accept all the arguments for it. Now, either we’ve managed to get everything exactly right for the first time in history, and what’s more that getting everything exactly right will lead to immortality just before Ray Kurzweil would otherwise die, followed by the creation of heaven on Earth, or there’s a mistake in our current scientific thinking.

I’d like to believe the former, but I’m not putting money on it…