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I wonder if intuitionism's perspective sheds some light on this issue.
Singularity Institute for Machine Ethics.
Keep the old brand, add clarification about flavor of singularity.
Delenn: They will join with the souls of all our people. Melt one into another until they are born into the next generation of Minbari. Remove those souls and the whole suffers. We are diminished, each generation becomes less than the one before.
Soul Hunter: A quaint lie, pretty fantasy. The soul ends with death, unless we act to preserve it.
-- Babylon 5, "Soul Hunter"
It is not possible to derive exact information from a decayed state
That's true in the most general situation, when there is no prior information available. But a brain is not a random chunk of matter, it's a highly particular one, with certain patterns and regularities. So it's not implausible that a superintelligence could restore even a moderately damaged brain.
For a real example, think of image restoration of natural scenes. A photograph is not a random matrix of pixels, it belongs to a very small subset of all possible images, and that knowledge allows seemingly "impossible" tasks of focusing, enhacement and all that.
"We are selfish, base animals crawling across the earth. But because we got brains, if we try real hard, we may occasionally aspire to something that is less than pure evil."
-- Gregory House
Fullmetal Alchemist Brotherhood has (SPOILER):
an almost literally unboxed unfriendly "AI" as main bad guy. Made by pseudomagical ("alchemy") means, but still.
I've been curious to know what the "U.S." would be like today if the American Revolution had failed.
Code Geass :)
... perfect existence, huh?
Perfection does not exist in this world. It may seem like a cliche, but it's true. Obviously, mediocre fools will forever lust for perfection and seek it out.
However, what meaning is there in "perfection"? None. Not a bit. "Perfection" disgusts me. After "perfection" there exists nothing higher. Not even room for "creation", which means there is no room for wisdom or talent either.
Understand? To scientists like ourselves, "perfection" is "despair".
Even if something is created that is more magnificient than anything before it, it still however, will be far from perfect.
Scientists are constantly struggling with that antinomy. And furthermore, must become beings capable of drawing pleasure from such.
In short, the instant that absurd word, "perfection", came from your lips, you had already been defeated by me.
-- Kurotsuchi Mayuri
I eat a paleo diet, which has low levels of dietary carbohydrates. ... I much prefer the freedom to eat whenever I want.
I just wanted to add myself as another data point: I have been low-carb for three months and I can vouch for this. (I also lost 10 kg)
If only I had known this when I was a kid. So many mid-mornings at school, hungry (and suddenly sleepy) because of "healthy" breakast cereals!
Straight from the Caprica pilot.
To me, the low-carbohydrate approach to the obesity problem has been a real eye-opener. I recommend the book from Gary Taubes, "Good calories, bad calories".
Reading that book i got clear that medical authorities have a very hard time updating their beliefs in the light of evidence, and prefer to surpress/bend it to accommodate established dogma.
OK. So let'ts take a controller with an explicit (I hope you agree) model, the Smith predictor. The controller as a whole has a model, but the subsystem C(z) (in the wiki example) has not (in your terms).
Or better yet, a Model Reference Adaptive Control. The system as a whole IS predictive, uses models, etc.. but the "core" controller subsystem does "not".
Then I'd argue that in the simple PID case, the engineer does the job of the Model/Adjusting Mechanism, and it's a fundamental part of the implementation process (you don't just buy a PID and install it without tuning it first!)
So, in every control systems there is a model. It's only that when the plant is "simple enough" and invariant in the long term the model/adjusting subsystem is implemented in wetware, and only used during install.
This is just arguing semantics, though.
Very interesting article. Yes, the controller is not intelligent but you have to factor in the designer. (I think this is something like a response to the Chinese Room argument). Just a few comments:
It has no model of its surroundings.
It has, a very simple one: the sign of the gain of the plant (steady-state).
It has no model of itself.
No, but its maker does: the transfer function of the controller.
It makes no predictions.
As in the first point: implicit in the design of the system is that temperature goes up with +1 output. If you flip the sign you get positive feedback and the system does not work as intended.
It has no priors.
Its designer knows some a priori things, like the typical time constant of the temperature trajectory and its range.
It has no utility function.
Maybe not a formal one, but you could build one with things like integrated squared error.