For me, the key insight came from the following quote regarding Searle’s Chinese Room argument [1]:<p>*> And while it was true, the critics went on, that a giant lookup table wouldn’t “truly understand” its responses, that point is also irrelevant. For the giant lookup table is a philosophical fiction anyway: something that can’t even fit in the observable universe! If we instead imagine a compact, efficient computer program passing the Turing Test, then the situation changes drastically. For now, in order to explain how the program can be so compact and efficient, we’ll need to posit that the program includes representations of abstract concepts, capacities for learning and reasoning, and all sorts of other internal furniture that we would expect to find in a mind. Personally, I find this response to Searle extremely interesting—since if correct, it suggests that the distinction between polynomial and exponential complexity has metaphysical significance.<p>This captures what I had intuitively thought regarding the link between computation and consciousness: consciousness is some sort of sophisticated, elegant computation embodied in human physiology.<p>[1]: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room</a>
This is my favorite Scott Aaronson piece! It has been submitted to HN before, though quite some time ago. The discussion on that one is worth referencing here as well:<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2861825" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2861825</a>
It is like saying "Philosophers should care about biology or about some other domain X". If you look at the history of "Philosophy of sciences", most of them came from the object-level domains. In other words, many philosophers of sciences came trained from domains such as physics, etc.<p>Pierre Duhem was a physicist. But he also contributed to philsophy of scineces: check the famoous Duhem-Quine thesis. Same thing happend to "philosophy of biology". If you look at the journal "philosphy of biology", most of the early contributors came from biology.<p>I think, Scott Aaronson is aware of the controversy between Oded Goldreich and Neal Koblitz. This controversy could have been formulated better if people in theoretical computer scince had mastered "philosophy of sciences.<p>People in Artificial Intelligence (esp of CS variety) make wild claims like AI annihilating the human race. And these voices have strong backing from people like Bill Gates. However, these voices don't look at what philosophers have writtern about AI, and the kind of nonsense AI folks spew. Yes, AI can solve particular tasks (a chess game, autonomous driving): but can it replace humans? Yes, say the AI group; No, say the philosopher Hubert Dreyfus. Check the latter's book: What computers can't do, a critique of artificial reason.
I love when computing mixes with philosophy, despite being unable to grasp most of it.<p>Take for instance Rich Hickey's <i>Are We There Yet?</i>[1], the Alfred North Whitehead quotes are great food for thought: you <i>dive</i> into it just as much you are able to <i>swim</i>.<p>[1]: <a href="http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Are-We-There-Yet-Rich-Hickey" rel="nofollow">http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Are-We-There-Yet-Rich-Hic...</a>
Can someone explain to me the zero-knowledge proof example problem discussed on page 37, given two graphs G and H, prove that they are NOT isomorphic?<p>"But as noticed by Goldreich, Micali, and Wigderson [65], there is something Merlin can do instead: he can let Arthur challenge him. Merlin can say:"<p>Arthur, send me a new graph K, which you obtained either by randomly permuting the vertices of G, or randomly permuting the vertices of H. Then I guarantee that I will tell you, without fail, whether K ∼= G or K ∼= H.<p>I don't understand what it means for a graph to be isomorphic to another graph, and I do not understand how Merlin's challenging answer can provide a (zero-knowledge) proof to the given problem either.
Scott just gave a fantastic Nautil.us interview! Just placing here for completions sake: HN link [1] and direct link [2]<p>[1]: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9074033" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9074033</a>
[2]: <a href="http://nautil.us/issue/21/information/ingenious-scott-aaronson" rel="nofollow">http://nautil.us/issue/21/information/ingenious-scott-aarons...</a>
> <i>The purpose of this essay was to illustrate how philosophy could be enriched by taking compu-
tational complexity theory into account, much as it was enriched almost a century ago by taking
computability theory into account. In particular, I argued
that computational complexity provides
new insights into the explanatory content of Darwinism, the
nature of mathematical knowledge and
proof, computationalism, syntax versus semantics, the problem of logical omniscience, debates sur-
rounding the Turing Test and Chinese Room, the problem of induction, the foundations of quantum
mechanics, closed timelike curves, and economic rationality. </i><p>O.M.G. Yet another natural scientist trying to coerce philosophy to his 'way of thinking'.