Category: Philosophy

In the first part of Roger Penrose’s book The Road to Reality (which I have not yet finished) Penrose argues that mathematics has an objective reality. It’s not entirely clear to me what he means by this, but I suspect that he is wrong. He points out that everybody who studies math comes to the…

I’ve always felt that the ontological proof of the existence of God was one of the more compelling and interesting arguments about God. The proof, which was originally composed by Saint Anselm, amounts to a simple syllogism: 1) God is, by definition, the most perfect entity. 2) Something which exists is more perfect than something…

The theory of quantum mechanics poses a well-known problem: at the atomic level, particles must be described as waveforms, but at the macroscopic level, they must be described as particles. The well-known double-slit experiment shows that if we, at the macroscopic level, remain ignorant of the location of the particle, it acts as a wave.…

Artificial Intelligence has always been concerned with search. One of the earliest AI programs, Newell and Simon’s so-called General Problem Solver from 1960, can now be seen as a straightforward hill-climbing search program. We might now say that most of the intelligence shown by the program was in the information setup and description. But then,…

How much should we care about future generations? We take many actions which will dramatically affect future generations. For example, we are in the process of burning most of the oil on the planet. We are changing the atmosphere and the weather. We are in the process of massive deforestation. Et cetera. Some people argue…