Ok, ok, Joe. You've passed the Turing Test; I don't think you're a bot anymore. I will try to take a look at your essay very soon. I will be on vacation for the next week, so my FQXi community engagement might be low, but I will check it out soon.

Thanks,

Jon

Thanks for your thoughts, Satyavarapu (aka SNP.Gupta)

I will be on vacation for the next week, so getting some time to read FQXi essays may be difficult. But I will try to check out your essay at some point soon.

But in the meantime, I'll just ask: What is "dynamic" in your "Dynamic Universe Model"? Are the laws of of nature dynamic? I believe most models of the universe are implicitly "dynamic", in the sense that they evolve and change over time.

Oh, and check out Digital Physics(the movie)!

Thanks,

Jon

4 days later

Hi Jon,

A short, concise essay that is well-written. I share your views that things like free-will are illusions that have underlying them processes that are largely deterministic. However, there is a role for spontaneously occurring events without a cause and this when mixed with the largely deterministic processes may convey the impressions of free-will, etc.

All the best in the competition.

Regards,

Akinbo

    I think I better rate your essay right away. Enjoy your vacation!

    Dear Jonathan Khanlian,

    This question is right

    "How did physical systems that pursue the goal of reproduction arise from an abiological world?".

    Your thought that

    "Humans are more like information systems than physical systems. After all, our cells turn over so we aren't made of the same stuff we were just a short time ago. Our design is encoded in our DNA, and our epigenetic environment compiles ourselves into existence. From this point of view, "biological" and "a-biological" things are made of the same stuff...possibly information, but at the very least, particles. The line between an agent and its environment is blurred." is something great.

    To achieve this something great, I think, there something is missed, which will occur after a unification of fundamental interactions, while discovering their exact mechanisms.

    Ch.Bayarsaikhan

      Hi Jon,

      Hoped the vacation was super.

      I liked the programming metaphor (low level languages & high level languages) combined with top down agents and bottom up minions. A possible fertile ground for emergence.

      Technologically we are trying to push for this emergence .....will we get true AI or just more augmentation?

      Thanks for your original essay. Do take a look at my essay (it has a short run time, no compiler required.)

      Don Limuti

        Hi Akinbo,

        I remember you from the last essay contest; I think we shared some thoughts on issues with infinity, if I remember correctly. Thanks for reading my short, non-technical essay. The non-causal events in a largely deterministic model reminds me of unitary evolution with a random "collapse" of an observable property...(not that I really know what I'm talking aboutJ I'll try to get over to read and rate your essay soon.

        Thanks again,

        Jon

        Thanks for reading my essay! I'll try to see what ideas you have written in yours, and see if I can understand them. Maybe you'll have some insight into those exact mechanisms we're all in search of.

        Jon

        Don,

        The vacation was great! Thanks for asking. Now I'm back to the future... in good ol' 1985.

        "Emergence" always sounds like a fuzzy/magical word to me, so I would guess that any engineering that leads to an AI that passes some benchmark, such as the Turing Test, will have aspects of "intelligence" that we could describe as "emergent" in some high-level abstract sense, but it will really be the logical consequence of a system with explicit rules (including statistical inference neural net models) and environmental training data that should be credited with this achievement... not some "emergent" inexplicable magical transformation. So I think we will get true AI, however you define it... and I think we will augment our own intelligence by merging with these technologies.

        I'll swing by and read your essay as soon as I get the chance. I love short essays!! (I'm a slow reader)

        Jon

        7 days later

        Dear Jonathan Khanlian,

        You can down load whole book from viXra, it was my first book. Thank you for your post, on my essay....

        Thank you for your post Jonathan. Dont say it is advt. I would love to see that movie. Can you please give some web address reference?

        Best Wishes to your essay....

        Best Regards

        =snp

        Jon,

        Thanks for your support! It is on my queue to watch "Digital Physics" ....You do know my website is www.digitalwavetheory.com....This could be interesting!

        One of your key words is augmentation.....Perchance are you acquainted with Doug Engelbart?

        Will give you a review of video,

        Don Limuti

        Dear Sirs!

        Physics of Descartes, which existed prior to the physics of Newton returned as the New Cartesian Physic and promises to be a theory of everything. To tell you this good news I use spam.

        New Cartesian Physic based on the identity of space and matter. It showed that the formula of mass-energy equivalence comes from the pressure of the Universe, the flow of force which on the corpuscle is equal to the product of Planck's constant to the speed of light.

        New Cartesian Physic has great potential for understanding the world. To show it, I ventured to give "materialistic explanations of the paranormal and supernatural" is the title of my essay.

        Visit my essay, you will find there the New Cartesian Physic and make a short entry: "I believe that space is a matter" I will answer you in return. Can put me 1.

        Sincerely,

        Dizhechko Boris

        Jon,

        What a treat: The Mother of all Demos youtube was awesome! A better title would be The Demo that Started it All.

        Even more awesome was the eulogy given by Ted Nelson (inventor of hypertext) for Doug Engelbart: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yMjPqr1s-cg

        I worked for Doug for a year or two after that 1968 Demo ......He was the real deal!

        Doug at SRI was loggerheads with John Mccarthy at Stanford, Augmentation vs. AI .... No contest in my humble opinion. Anytime I hear the term AI bantered around, I know it is BS, augmentation is king!

        Thanks very much,

        Don Limuti

        PS: The YouTube of the cat breathing fire was very good. I was able to find the Trailer for Digital Physics but could not find the movie. Could you send the URL?

        9 months later

        Jon,

        I only now read your essay and would say that I mostly agree with your points. If I'm interpreting it correctly, it sounds like you have a fairly physicalistic/naturalistic (everything that exists is physical) point of view? That's my viewpoint, so maybe i'm reading my views into yours. Saying that there are things like consciousness, laws of quantum physics/logic, mathematical constructs, or other non-physical things that no one can see except in our minds is similar to saying God created everything. It's possible, but is more a matter of faith than science because it can't be seen or tested by others. When you said that humans are more like information systems than physical systems, my view on that is that "information" seems to be one of those things like the laws of physics or mathematical constructs. Physicists say the universe may be based on it; but what is it? To me, information is just a description in a mind of the properties, processes/interactions and relationships of physical things. It exists in the mind but is not fundamental. For humans, it's a process that physical things go through that leads to their self-replication and that allows new molecules to fit into the existing template of the old molecules.

        I tried clicking on the Digital physics image at the bottom of your essay but it didn't lead anywhere. Was it supposed to? But, if by digital physics, you mean that the universe may be a cellular automata-like thing based on a few very simple rules, I totally agree. Back around 2000, I was more active in a google group about digital physics, but haven't been there in a long time.

        For my answer to the issue at the end about "Why is there something rather than nothing?", I've got more at

        https://sites.google.com/site/whydoesanythingexist/

        In response to the last question about Kolmogorov complexity, I had to look that up, but now that I know what it is, I think it's extremely low in that the entire universe may come from the presence of a single existent entity that has a couple of properties. My reason for why that entity may exist in the first place is at the above link. Using the properties of that entity to build a very simple and crude cellular automata-like model of the universe is at:

        https://sites.google.com/site/ralphthewebsite/filecabinet/why-is-there-something-rather-than-nothing

        in the section called Use of the Proposed Solution to Build a Model of the Universe. This second website is just a longer, more philosophical jargon-filled version of the first site but also contains the possible model.

        I'm going to try and find your video and other writings by googling because I think this essay is well written and insightful. Thanks!

        Roger

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