Darwin's Dangerous Idea - Evolution and the Meaning of Life

450 THE EMPEROR'S NEW MIND, AND OTHER FABLES
experts no doubt has some weaknesses that Rumpelstiltskin could exploit,
given enough information about their brains. Von Neumann and Morgenstern
invented game theory to deal with the particular class of complicated
problems that life throws at us when there are other agents around to compete
with us. You are always wise to shield your brain from such competitors,
whether you are a human being or a computer. The reason a competitive
agent makes a difference in this instance is that the space of all mathematical
truths is Vast, the space of Diophantine Equation solutions is a Vast but
Vanishing subspace within it, and the odds of hitting upon a truth at random
that would "break" or "beat" our machine is truly negligible, whereas an
intelligent search through that space, guided by knowledge of the particular
style of the opponent and its limitations, would be likely to find the needle in
the haystack: a crushing countermove.
Rolf Wasen raised another interesting point in Abisko. The class of interesting
algorithms no doubt includes many that are not humanly accessible.
To put it dramatically, there are programs out there in the Library of Toshiba
that would not just run on my Toshiba, but be valued by me for the won
derful work they would do for me, but that no human programmers, or any of
their artifacts (program-writing programs already exist), will ever be able to
create! How can this be? None of these wonderful programs is more than a
megabyte long, and there are plenty of actual programs much bigger than
that already. Once again, we must remind ourselves just how Vast the space
of such possible programs is. Like the space of possible five-hundred-page
novels, or fifty-minute symphonies, or five-thousand-line poems, the space
of megabyte-long programs will only ever get occupied by the slenderest
threads of actuality, no matter how hard we work.
There are short novels nobody could write that would not just be bestsellers;
they would be instantly recognized as classics. The keystrokes required
to type them are all available on any word-processor, and the total
number of keystrokes in any such book is trivial, but they still lie beyond the
horizon of human creativity. Each particular creator, each novelist or composer
or computer programmer, is sped along through Design Space by a
particular idiosyncratic set of habits known as a style ( Hofstadter 1985, sec.
Ill). It is style that both constrains and enables us, giving a positive direction
to our explorations but only by rendering otherwise neighboring regions off
limits to us—and if off limits to us in particular, then probably off limits to
everyone forever. Individual styles are truly unique, the product of untold
billions of serendipitous encounters over the ages, encounters that produced
first a unique genome, and then a unique upbringing, and finally a unique set
of life experiences. Proust never got a chance to write any novels about the
Vietnam War, and no one else could ever write them—the novels recounting
that epoch in his manner. We are stuck, by our actuality and finitude, in a
negligible corner of the total space of possibilities, but what a
The Phantom Quantum-Gravity Computer 451
fine actuality is still accessible to us, thanks to the R-and-D work of all our
predecessors! We might as well make the most of what we have, thereby
leaving rather more for our descendants to work with.
It is time to turn the burden of proof around, the way Darwin did when he
challenged his critics to describe some other way—other than natural
selection__in which all the wonders of nature could have arisen. Those who
think the human mind is nonalgorithmic should consider the hubris presuopposed
by that conviction. If Darwin's dangerous idea is right, an algorithmic
process is powerful enough to design a nightingale and a tree.
Should it be that much harder for an algorithmic process to write an ode to a
nightingale or a poem as lovely as a tree? Surely Orgel's Second Rule is
correct: Evolution is cleverer than you are.
CHAPTER 15: Gödel's Theorem does not cast doubt on the possibility of AI
after all- In fact, once we appreciate how an algorithmic process can escape
the clutches of Gödel's Theorem, we see more clearly than ever how Design
Space is uniSed by Darwin's dangerous idea.
CHAPTER 16: What, then, about morality? Did morality evolve, too? Sociobiologists
from Thomas Hobbes to the present have offered Just So Stories
about the evolution of morality, but, according to some philosophers, any
such attempt commits the "naturalistic fallacy": the mistake of looking to
Acts about the way the world is in order to ground—or reduce—ethical
conclusions about how tilings ought to be. This "fallacy" is better seen as a
charge of greedy reductionism, a charge which is often justified. But then we
shall just have to be less greedy in our reductionism.