Note that there is a political dimension to this. Mathematician Gregory Chaitin has been pretty vocal about the neglect of computability and its implications. This has been a serious problem in mathematics since 1931 when Kurt Godel published his paper on the limitations of formal logic. Chaitin doesn’t identify the political reason but after becoming acquainted with Austrian economics, I realized what the political reason for this resistance is. Computability theory (of which AIT is a sub-field) places limits on what can be known and what can be calculated. It tells us that there can be no Theory of Everything in mathematics, let alone physics or economics. In other words, it is an irrefutable devastation of all Utopias.
I would agree with R. Penrose, actually, who is more radical in the sense of noncomputability, than G. Chaitin, who wrote somewhere (I browsed his books in our library) that he believes a real AI can be created by conventional methods.
In the near future, actually, I predict rather a more pressing problem in conventional computing, is multi-core construction (which is done basically to avoid requiring non-mainstream heat dissipation methods) might actually impede some calculations that we actually can do, due to the impossibility of efficiently breaking and recombining certain tasks.
Yup, I’m aware of this stuff. It kind of boggled my mind at first. But then I realized that since we are limited beings, how would we be able to know everything there is to know? (which includes things we are incapable of knowing)
You just blew my mind. That man’s work may have been the most important work of the 20th century, and if it got swept under the rug, we all have just lost the chance to learn the most humbling and useful lesson mankind ever needed to learn.
The most amazing thing is that the traditional Christians were ahead of us, going back to the days of the oldest Christian scholars, in explaining that all formal logic and scientific reasoning is limited. http://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/2007/04/01/dead-monkeys-and-the-living-god/ Perhaps the ultimate blame lies in the 17th century “revolution” in thinking of many people that they could eventually create a rational scientific utopia with billions of enlightened mortals with infinite power of reasoning.
Taleb has a new book coming out within the next month and he has some great thoughts on TED TV
Again, as fancy pants as economists like to be with their maths, their ignorance of chaos theory is telling.
Agreed, even some pop-knowledge of nonlinear dynamics would prevent great men like W. Block from saying bonehead things like “the government is responsible for us not being able to predict the weather”
It kind of boggled my mind at first. But then I realized that since we are limited beings, how would we be able to know everything there is to know? (which includes things we are incapable of knowing)