Thursday, May 06, 2004
In the Matrix?
At the Tucson conference on Consciousness last month (party pictures here, don't look near the end), one of the plenary speakers cancelled at the last minute. So the man behind the conference, Dave Chalmers (and a friend since we met, years ago, on his last day at Oxford), gave a lecture on the "Metaphysics of the Matrix". That's right, a philosophical discussion of whether the situation that the human characters of the Matrix films find themselves in is really one of "delusion", of having a "radically false" set of beliefs. Chalmers, quite daringly, argued no, since the fundamental nature of any postulated "real" world might itself be a computer simulation. In fact, orthodox interpretations of quantum physics do indeed see computation and information processing as the fundamental basis of reality. I tried to argue against Dave: surely we can make a distinction between the real world and the world of the Matrix, since the latter only exists because of the former, but not vice versa. Dave granted this asymmetry, but denied that it made the world of the Matrix any less real than the world which implements it. I wasn't convinced. (Dave is a contributor to Philosophy and The Matrix, a book and website).
It was revealed that the talk was being filmed for inclusion in a 10 DVD box set of the Matrix films, to be released in time for Christmas 2004. I wondered if my question to Dave was also filmed, and might be included. Wouldn't that be cool. Perhaps, but not as cool as having an entire lecture filmed and included in the set. I felt a twinge of envy.
Then came an email today from the producers of the box set. Andy Clark had given them my name (good old Andy; this isn't the first time he's passed my name on like this), and would I like to be interviewed for possible inclusion in the box set? Of course!
On first reflection, I suppose I could talk about: 1) Why Penrose gives us no reason to believe machines won't take over the earth, as he claims he does; 2) Why robots might end up resembling people, just like in the films; 3) How AI can learn from theology, since God faced the same paradoxes AI creators do (Adam was the first artificial intelligence).
Possible problem: They finish interviewing in the UK on May 17th, and I am in Sweden until the evening of the 16th... Stay tuned.
From the University of Skövde
At the Tucson conference on Consciousness last month (party pictures here, don't look near the end), one of the plenary speakers cancelled at the last minute. So the man behind the conference, Dave Chalmers (and a friend since we met, years ago, on his last day at Oxford), gave a lecture on the "Metaphysics of the Matrix". That's right, a philosophical discussion of whether the situation that the human characters of the Matrix films find themselves in is really one of "delusion", of having a "radically false" set of beliefs. Chalmers, quite daringly, argued no, since the fundamental nature of any postulated "real" world might itself be a computer simulation. In fact, orthodox interpretations of quantum physics do indeed see computation and information processing as the fundamental basis of reality. I tried to argue against Dave: surely we can make a distinction between the real world and the world of the Matrix, since the latter only exists because of the former, but not vice versa. Dave granted this asymmetry, but denied that it made the world of the Matrix any less real than the world which implements it. I wasn't convinced. (Dave is a contributor to Philosophy and The Matrix, a book and website).
It was revealed that the talk was being filmed for inclusion in a 10 DVD box set of the Matrix films, to be released in time for Christmas 2004. I wondered if my question to Dave was also filmed, and might be included. Wouldn't that be cool. Perhaps, but not as cool as having an entire lecture filmed and included in the set. I felt a twinge of envy.
Then came an email today from the producers of the box set. Andy Clark had given them my name (good old Andy; this isn't the first time he's passed my name on like this), and would I like to be interviewed for possible inclusion in the box set? Of course!
On first reflection, I suppose I could talk about: 1) Why Penrose gives us no reason to believe machines won't take over the earth, as he claims he does; 2) Why robots might end up resembling people, just like in the films; 3) How AI can learn from theology, since God faced the same paradoxes AI creators do (Adam was the first artificial intelligence).
Possible problem: They finish interviewing in the UK on May 17th, and I am in Sweden until the evening of the 16th... Stay tuned.
From the University of Skövde
