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70 Are the Androids Dreaming Yet?
something from the signals it receives. This is similar to our engineer
probing the terminals of the circuit of a black box. How can we know our
experience of the world is real?
Understanding the World
The French philosopher Descartes gave us an explanation for this
paradox. He spent a long time looking skeptically at everything we
perceive. For example, when we poke a stick into a pond, the surface of
the water bends light and the stick appears to have a kink in it. Our eyes
tell us the stick is bent, but our brain ‘knows’ the stick is straight: it’s an
illusion. Descartes wondered if something so simple could be an illusion,
perhaps the whole of our experience is too.
His eventual solution underpins much of modern philosophy - ‘T
think therefore I am, cogito ergo sum. Even if we doubt everything else,
we cannot doubt we are thinking about this doubt. At least we can rely
upon the existence of this ‘thought’ as some reality. Descartes built up
from this bedrock the real world we live in. We can be sure we experience
things and can apply logic and use thought. We can use this intellectual
faculty to tell a great deal about our Universe.
True Understanding
In the QED lecture series, The Strange Thing about Light and Matter,
Richard Feynman relates the story of the ancient Mayan astronomers.
3000 years ago they were able to predict the motion of Venus in the sky
using only pebbles. They had a simple system that could predict when
the planet would rise over the horizon. Put a stone in the jar every day,
take out a stone once a week, add a stone at every new moon. If the
number of stones in the jar is divisible by 23, Venus will rise. ’m making
up the details but you see the idea... It’s a very simple algorithm. What
should we conclude if the Mayans had perfected their calculations to
predict the motion of Venus and it proved reliable over a whole century?
Would this constitute understanding?
Feynman would say no: the Mayan understanding was not
complete. It was only black box equivalent to our modern understanding
over a limited period. We known that once the Sun begins to run out
of fuel it will swell to a red giant and explode, destroying Venus and
the Earth. Their model could not predict this catastrophic failure. Our
modern deeper understanding of the workings of the solar system allows
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