John L. Casti
THE INSIDE STORY AN SYSTEMS, MINDS AND MECHANISMS
Do the laws governing a system differ when you're inside the system from
those you see when you look at the system from the outside? This is the central
question of what's come to be termed, "endophysics." Here we examine this
question for the case when the system is the human mind. More specifically, we
consider the problem of "strong" AI, which asks if a computing machine can
duplicate the cognitive capacity of the human mind - at least, in principle.
Looked at from the outside, this question reduces to the familiar Turing test
for a thinking machine. But from the endophysics point of view, the matter
becomes far more problematical, leading to some of the strongest critiques
against strong AI.
Following
consideration of the strong AI problem, the paper concludes with a discussion
of the issue of a system observing itself. Endophysically speaking, this
situation leads immediately to all the familiar problems associated with self
reference, tangled loops and paradox, both logical and geometric. Our final
conclusion is that the only way to break out of these loops is to think
endophysically, which means explicitly recognizing that, in general, the laws
of nature do look different when you stand inside the system than when you're
looking at it from the outside.