Date: Wed, 18 Apr 2012 15:12:50 +0100
From: Y J Erden
Subject: Request for Alan Turing expertise

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Dear all,

My colleagues and I at the AISB (Society for the Study of Artificial
Intelligence and the Simulation of Behaviour) are creating a short video
about Alan Turing. We are looking for people with expertise on Alan Turing,
and specifically about his life in relation to his work. There would be
very little work required of you and only a short amount of your time.

If you are interested in getting involved or know someone who might, please
contact me: erdenyj@smuc.ac.uk
Or my colleague: Kent McClymont K.McClymont@exeter.ac.uk

Please forward to anyone you think might be interested in this opportunity.

Thank you for your attention. Apologies for cross posting.

Best wishes,

Yasemin

–
Dr Yasemin J. Erden
-School Liason, Society for the Study of Artificial Intelligence and the
Simulation of Behaviour (AISB),
-Postdoctoral Research Fellow
Centre for Bioethics & Emerging Technologies
St Mary’s University College
Waldegrave Road
Twickenham, TW1 4SX
United Kingdom

+44 208 240 4250
http://www.smuc.ac.uk/cbet

Hopefully – depends if (and it would be a big ‘if’) someone wants it published somewhere. I’ll PM it to you anyway, because these things need to be Pm-ed.

Noah

Sorry, but I’d disagree with most of that. If there is any affinity with Turing and Kant, I’d argue that it exists only on the opposite level that you’re talking about, namely the fundamental unknowability of what an effective procedure will actually do. Unfortunately this reply is off the stinging end of a month writing about this very issue. So three things to bare in mind as a shortish summary;

1.) Universality in a Universal Turing Machine is not about universalising functions as such (although it’s often been interpreted in this way as some sort of convergent generalised machine, (a.k.a John von Neumann), but simply means the discovery of a machine which is maximally sophisticated in the ‘platform’ hardware sense. To this end, there are an infinite number of UTM’s existing in programming languages as well as Turing machines and cellular automata. ‘Universal’ in this instance, requires a proof of equivalence that two machines can execute the same effective procedure, but this only consists with appropriate input in the program in the first place, it’s not a totalising rational thing. It doesn’t really have anything to do with universalising reason, it’s still subject to the same level of undecidability as with all procedures, and not something akin to universal values of rational agency. There is no higher level of computability which Turing sufficiently demonstrated, and it isn’t universal.

2.) You say that Kant’s problem is nothing other than the hard problem of AI. No problems there as I understand Kant. The trouble is, I don’t think Turing was particularly preoccupied with AI in the first place. This is a controversial position admittedly considering the wealth of literature, but I do uphold that the Turing test you refer to, has little to do with understanding machines as thinking rational thoughts and mimicking rational agents. For a start, Turing called it an imitation game but he never actually specified what the criteria for imitating intelligence was (he actually thought the question ‘can machines think’ as “too meaningless to deserve attention”). His 1950 article came off the back of a report done for the NPL in 1948-49 whereby Turing speculated that intelligence in the computational sense was failing to decide on the outcome of a machine’s behaviour. This is why the imitation game was devised – it’s thoroughly consistent with his undecidable proof of 1936 – putting the interrogator on the level of the observer (all participants were of universal sophistication), who would be unable to decide on either outcome A or B. To be fair Turing never states this explicitly, but I’d argue pretty hard that it was there in the 1950 article.

3.) Furthermore I’d argue that part of your understanding of Turing comes from a common functionalist and formalist import (usually from Hilbert, but also from Laplace), which undermines what the continuity of undecidability constituted for Turing. Part of this comes from privileging the mental act of rational mental computation in the first place, which is strictly Hilbertian, that the remit of rational computability is indebted to reason despite who or what is executing it. But this preys fowl to the Hilbertian formalist distinction between ideal mind and physical matter (which has to be accounted for and not presupposed), the usual interpretation of which demands that one must generalise the discrete state machine model, having started from the so-called ‘ideal’ level of mathematics and logic.

The problem is that Turing’s 1936 paper transformed this Hilbertian paradigm by flipping discrete state machines and mathematics and logic the other way around, so that discrete machines became more important than Hilbert’s ideal rational reducible dream. The written symbols of the discrete state machine generated the mind and not the other way round. Same goes for the so-called ideal status of rational mathematics and logic, as demonstrated by Chaitin’s constant, then Wolfram’s research into the mass enumeration of computable axiom systems. Turing is pretty much the opposite of what you find interesting in Kant – rather Hilbert’s your man, considering he was the one who heralded the step-by-step construction of formal meaningless symbols of strings as the basic modus operandi of Mind and thinking itself.

I’m not exactly talking about “chatty” code -although there would inevitably have to be extra information in the UI over and above that needed for it’s function- but something that maps it’s own relationships and interactions as you use it, showing the breakdown of it’s logic and program flow as it works.

For example, imagine a program having a separate window containing a flow chart map that builds up as different parts of the program call each other, starting with the basics that are actually being called in startup and then expanding as you do various things, and having points of highlight that move as the program uses various libraries or UI components, giving you an idea of what the program is doing from use.

Interesting remarks. I think Turing and Godel are much more important for Chaitin than for Wolfram. Chaos theory is important here only as a contrast and foil. Wolfram is effectively toppling it. I think von Neumann is really the key precursor. Unfortunately, his key work is pretty much available if one has access to a good library. I find it unfortunate that Wolfram does not engage more so with von Neumann. But I have not read Wolfram’s first book except insofar as I have read select essays incorporated into it and made available elsewhere. So perhaps he attends to von N there.

The notes do provide context, but many readers I am guessing are already aware of that context. I did no find in the notes that Wolfram had any particular interesting takes on what he documents even if he demonstrates an ability to present things clearly and clearly has a grasp of most aspects of contemporary science and its history. There are also better texts on almost every subject he raises there.

Best,

Noah

You may not have heard of it before, mainly as it’s a criticism levelled from ‘software studies’ and it’s implications from a cultural perspective. Matt Fuller and David Berry are the usual critics.

I definitely agree with you about the straight forward writing style being easy to read. Wolfram should definitely be commended in approaching a more democratic non-obscure method of communication. However, it’s one thing reading it, but absorbing it’s implications are another and that takes time. I’d even argue that the diagrams warrant more of a consideration than the text! (only because I study aesthetics and computer art!) And furthermore, getting your hands and executing his findings on an actual mathematica program and messing about with the codes, also illuminates his arguments in a more pragmatic style than simply reading.

The only reason as to why I put a time of four months, is simply because of the notes. I disagree about the notes being illuminating, only because they provide invaluable context to the main text (which is odd as Wolfram’s main discovery is anti-context). As you say, it totally depends if you want to understand Wolfram’s work contextually in metamathematics, quantum theory, etc and find out about it’s place in relation to those disciplines. For me, I couldn’t entirely grasp the nature of Wolfram’s discoveries until I read more about Turing, Godel, and chaos theory.