ABSTRACT
Is what we know what we compute? If so, everything we have seen so far says we do not know very much — our place in the Universe is indeed a lowly one! No wonder human affairs are in such a mess.
On the other hand, the experience of AI tells us something different. Pure computing machines turn out to be very bad at thinking as we do. Only when we ask our machines to engage with the real world in an adaptive nonconvergent way do we see even the most basic human skills replicated. Our great aptitude is copying, that is, computing at best like an oracle Turing machine, and copying something that is not itself purely mechanical. Our minds seem to reflect — to be a microcosm of — the apparent complexity of the Universe.
