Scott Aaronson on Philosophical Progress - Machine Intelligence Research Institute

Abstraction: How theoretical CS makes progress on big philosophical questions

Key points:

• Aaronson argues philosophical progress happens via "bait-and-switch": replace unanswerable riddle Q with precise scientific/mathematical question Q', then solve Q'
• PAC learning (Valiant, Turing Award) and VC dimension give formal proofs of why Occam's Razor works — philosophical induction problem sharpened by TCS
• Quantum computing clarifies the "do wavefunction branches exist?" question: QC shows exponential speedups require interference structure, not simple parallelism
• Kolmogorov complexity and Bell inequality violations enable "Einstein-certified" provably random numbers — a TCS answer to the philosophical randomness question
• Aaronson recommends broad undergrad study (math, CS, writing seminars) over specializing early; writing seminars particularly valuable
• Redefining failure as success: Levin delayed publishing NP-completeness because he failed to prove graph isomorphism was NP-complete

Connections: Scott Aaronson · Miri · Computational Complexity · Quantum Computing · Philosophy Of Mind

Source: http://intelligence.org/2013/12/13/aaronson/