Inquire about purchasing the book | Table of Contents | Annotated Bibliography | Class on Nature of Mind
These are excerpts and elaborations from my book "The Nature of Consciousness"
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Life As Virtual Reality David Deutsch views the technology of virtual
reality (the ability of a computer to simulate a world) as the very technology
of life. Virtual reality is a
"physical embodiment of theories about an environment". So defined, virtual reality is an important
property of nature: it is life itself.
Genes embody knowledge about their ecological niche. An organism is merely the immediate
environment which copies the replicators (the organism's genes). The genes, on
the other hand, represent the survival of knowledge, knowledge about the environment. An organism is a virtual-reality rendering
of the genes. Therefore, living
processes and virtual-reality rendering are the same kind of process. Thus virtual reality is not only a property
of computers but a general property of nature, the very essence of life itself. Holism Science after the Cartesian
revolution has employed a reductionist paradigm. The strongest opposition to
the reductionist paradigm came from the Catholic Church, not from scientists.
Artificial Intelligence is one of the first scientific disciplines that has
been forced to resurrect the holistic methods to analyze problems and systems.
The heuristics of knowledge-based systems, the genetic algorithms and the
neural networks are all cases in which the whole is not analyzed as the sum of
its parts but as a whole. Reductionism assumes that
one can produce a mathematical model of the system, and that one can divide a
problem into subproblems in order to reduce its complexity. Artificial
Intelligence is, de facto, a philosophical alternative to the program of
reductionism There is no model of the system. The holistic methods (trial and
error, pattern recognition, etc) are model-free. The US system theorist Kirstie
Bellman ("New Architectures for Constructed Complex Systems", 1999) and
the US philosopher Stephen Kercel believe that holistic methods are more
suitable for "bizarre systems", i.e. systems that do not lend
themselves to a mathematical model (e.g., human language, medicine,
consciousness). Back to the beginning of the chapter "Machine Intelligence" | Back to the index of all chapters |
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