rlm@31: #+title: The Singularity might be Understandable after all.
rlm@31: #+author: Robert McIntyre
rlm@31: #+email: rlm@mit.edu
rlm@31: #+description: 
rlm@31: #+keywords: 
rlm@31: #+SETUPFILE: ../../aurellem/org/setup.org
rlm@31: #+INCLUDE: ../../aurellem/org/level-0.org
rlm@31: 
rlm@31: 
rlm@31: People like Ray Kurzeweil think that eventually, it will become
rlm@31: impossible to understand what the entities of the future will be
rlm@31: thinking, and their actions will be inscrutable, since their minds are
rlm@31: so much more complicated than ours. The idea is that the Minds of the
rlm@31: future will be to us as we are to ants.
rlm@31: 
rlm@31: But if you search through the space of all possible programs with the
rlm@31: goal of coming up with one that describes something in the world, you
rlm@31: will find some common patterns no matter what type of mind you
rlm@31: have. Things like addition, concatentation, recursion, and induction
rlm@31: are all easy and immediate to find, and you will find them almost no
rlm@31: matter what way you search through program-space. In the world of
rlm@31: stories and language, these translate to simple patterns like revenge,
rlm@31: phyrric victory, success, failure, etc. The pricinple of simplicity
rlm@31: must be a driving, universal aesthetic force, since without it Minds
rlm@31: wouldn't be able to manange their own hardware and software, and would
rlm@31: not be able to grow.
rlm@31: 
rlm@31: So, far in the future, when synthetic life rules the stars, it is
rlm@31: likely that their behavour will still be describable in the simplistic
rlm@66: terms of the human stories of old.