Observed Changes Observer?

ecall a fictional whale and petunias flashing into existence high in the atmosphere of a planet?

Lives briefly ensued, ending at the surface. During the plummet the whale discovered itself and deduced the universe. The petunias simply remarked "Oh no, not again!".

Generous Mother, Kind Father

I already miss Douglas, as if I knew him well.

Douglas Adams provided a marvelous joke for you to toss at those curly questions on the meaning of life. His most-powerful computer in the Universe calculated the answer to "What is the meaning of life and everything" to be "Forty-two", which has become - apart from a throwaway line - an almost proxy intellectual gateway to the unknowable. Or at least a waiting lane in the drive through of takeaway knowledge.

You have two options as the power of artificial intelligence grows.

These options are basic to your efforts advancing AI, and relate to the overriding design and underlying philosophical questions: apart from the probability you will ever define "thought", how will you truly know when your AI thinks?

Do you simply work at the technological limits and treat AI's development as an engineering problem, while awaiting the ghost in the machine to appear (if ever)? Or risk bogging down in the intellectual quagmire invoked by philosophers trying to understand and explain theories of intelligence and understanding, the tortured output becoming applied science (or applied philosophy, the ultimate oxymoron :-})?

Can a thinking life form create a thinking machine, an AI? From where you stand in this 21st century all seems possible. But you work in the ultimate virtual world, that of thought, more ephemeral than the cyberverses in computers.

In this absolute, nonphysical universe might you discover, too late, the observed changing the observer - an ironic inversion to your cursed physical perfect observer!

Can you ever explain what it means for an artificial intelligence to ask a question? What could be the meaning of a coded system (the coding beyond complexity) asking a question, truth being sought - not merely quantity or state?

Will all questions ultimately lead to "Why?"

All but the rarest intellects balk at the complexity. Students, the source of most inspiration, will typically wrestle it till essay or exam, and then move on. Only a career philosopher of the most stubborn ilk will pursue it, probably for a lifetime.

Like all questions about questions, your human mind drowns in spin-offs and possibilities by the second iteration. An idiot-savant or a computer might track the threads of logic and meaning further, though neither is capable of determining choices. Should endless computational power continue the exponential process the inevitable result will probably be no more useful than 42, and certainly much larger.

Seeking such truths is a little like pondering all paradoxes. A subset of anything might simulate it's container but can never emulate it. Modeling the universe in a computer is surely a joke. After all, the universe is its own model. Anything less, an algorithm.

Heisenberg saw the shadows of his own mind in his concept of uncertainty.

You might say it is, or was, the closest look 'down into stuff' and the limit, where mind's understanding of a physical world grinds to a halt.

Comprehension, explaining the world in everyday terms, sits exhausted at the gates of understanding in your minds. There lies the the border; a "conscious you" can travel no further.

To proceed, leave your minds if you must, "astrally travel", attain nirvana, "send in" mathematical constructs (not the clowns), artificial intelligences, virtual von Neumann bots, and go ... where?

Simulation might yet become emulation in a 'cyberverse' - an instrument to cast beyond your conscious grasp of inner mind and outer limit.

A cyberverse is open-ended, "literally virtual" in every respect. Does the pattern of a flowering rose exist while only a bud? You know in your heart it does, and so all things - imaginable and not - exist, awaiting the physical to render their shimmering trace.

The math is horrendous - but you won't be doing it. Artificial minds will design AI to design AI till an 'omega' is reached. The virtual will spread before you, spawning virtuality unlimited - "literally virtual" space and time.

With precious irony the observed will transform the observer.

You will be blind and deaf Gods of your realm, unseeing and uncaring of your virtual charges - who will then curse you with their own free will.

As you once reproached your Lord.

I should explain to the casual reader what my revered parents, to whom these letters are directed, already understand that I usually address "you" as the 'natives', in a sort of mock (and mocking) lecture, as though I was sensei and 'you' the attentive students. I am not addressing my parents !