depth first search

A talk on why beauty is such a good selection criteria for discovering correct physical law. A quote:

Life can emerge from physics and chemistry plus a lot of accidents.

I will say that mathematical beauty is in part self fulfilling, since theories which are beautiful (simple) are more likely to be discovered before grossly complex ones. Are we at the stage where the only remaining theories in physics are grossly complex?

I’ve been reading a lot of Searle recently. Searle bashing seems to be a popular pastime among young graduate students in AI, but I admit to a certain sympathy with his argument. I recently read about analogue computing in The New Turing Omnibus which reminded me of one of Searle’s central claims, that the locus of computation matters.

To Searle, a program doesn’t produce artificial intelligence, a program running somewhere produces artificial intelligence. Not only that, but a program running in the wrong place won’t actually produce intelligence, but maybe only the simulation of intelligence, or worse, a bunch of noise (image a computer constructed from beer cans).

To me the argument divides into two parts:

1. How universal is computation?
2. How universal is intelligence?

Searle claims that intelligence is less universal than computation. You can construct a Turing machine out of beer cans, but you can’t construct a thinking machine out of beer cans (but maybe you can construct a machine that simulates thinking out of beer cans). I believe the Church-Turing thesis, but I’m not yet convinced that intelligence is quite so universal.