We can know how, but we may not know why, if it's too complex to be understood.
But yes, knowing how means that anything the computer can decode, we can too. Until the machines block access to their own source code...
But yes, knowing how means that anything the computer can decode, we can too. Until the machines block access to their own source code...
To stay in cannon I'd have to say that the question is posed wrong and the answer therefore is 42 or whatever you like. Properly phrased, the question would be, why are humans (or the universe) what they are. That's a recursive question. Posing it as a problem in differential equations, the question might be, "we are, but for how long?", or simply, "Are we?"
I think this is a simple question that comes up in cognitive development very early on, and the exercise of answering it is rather an effort in expressiveness. The answer can be felt, emotionally, we feel alive, and we will never feel dead, but it's hard to express rationally. I'm hopeful that neuroscience holds better answers. Maybe we really just don't care, emotionally, for the whole universe, but we care to know everything, rationally.
And we apparently care for AI to express that knowledge in natural sentences.
Edit: I got carried away, actually I wanted to consternate that "We are" is not a proper sentence, because to be is an auxiliary verb and that a personal point of view as a premises can not yield an objectively correct answer, hence I admit that the topic eludes me.
> I'm hopefull that neuroscience holds better answers.
It will not find the meaning of the universe in our head. The best it can hope to answer is which part of the brain makes us look for answers.
It is hard for most people to accept that sometimes there is no answer, we are hard-wired to look for patterns and reasons. Hence myths and religions. But our very emergence as a species is nothing but the product of a soulless, relentless evolution.
I was just hoping, for example, neuroscience would find out what is even ment by "meaning of the universe", because foremost, as Adams alluded, that doesn't make much sense to ask for. This is pretty simple, as you noted, because the Universe is an (the) infinite limit in the mathematical sense, that by definition doesn't have any externalities. So, as far as I can tell, the singularity is a fixpoint. Neuroscience might explain how we come up with that and rephrase it more poignantly. As I said, that question seems to be mostly an exercise in phrasing and might not become a huge revelation.
In a sense you are both right, you can keep asking for ever, but the answer will always be the same: "a rose is a rose is a rose ..."
What I just wonder is, how that actually refers to ourselves. "We are what we are" is not exactly a satisfying form of self-awareness. In differential equations that is called a stationary solution. Rephrasing the question could show a different mind frame concerned with, well, notable differences. What I really don't know is how emotions play into the development of reason, e.g. the fear of pain and, by extension, to die.
Your last paragraph is vexing, but I am rambling, too, so who am I to criticize.
There are hypotheses stating the Big Bang was just a phase change for an eternal universe.
1. Material cause: because wood is rigid and holds its shape
2. Efficient cause: because the carpenter used a plane or chisel to carve away everything that was not that flat surface
3. Formal cause: because that's the blueprint the carpenter used
4. Final cause: because if it were curved your jug of wine would fall over
We can get material, efficient, and formal causes here (the algorithm being the formal cause) without any real controversy. But if I asked a human cryptographer "why is there an XOR in this round?" I'm asking about the fourth one, the final cause or purpose; the cryptographer might answer "because I wanted uncorrelated input bits to stay uncorrelated after this round", or whatever. But talking about that most interesting "why?" as regards an AI's activity is... controversial, to say the least.
What I do really love about it (and this plays out in medieval European and Islamic thought, both of which were strongly influenced by Aristotle) is that he says that for a living thing, the formal cause and final cause are the same thing. The various motions and activities of an organism (this is all Aristotle meant by "soul") are its final cause; my living my life as well as I can is my purpose.
That applied to the whole cosmos, too. Aristotle considered the cosmos alive (after all, the stars and planets move without anybody pushing them), which meant the purpose of the cosmos was to be the way it is and spin those crystal spheres and epicycles they imagined the planets moved on. And that final cause, that universe's-motion-as-its-own-purpose, he called "God" -- the omega point that the universe moves towards. In the renaissance and enlightenment this got reversed, and the "first cause" came to mean first in sequence rather than importance; from that you get Newton's "watchmaker" God, which would have been incomprehensible to a medieval thinker (let alone Aristotle).
Really? We don't seem to have any problems with saying "your eyeball contains a lens to focus light onto the retina" or "predators have sharp teeth because that is the efficient way to handle meat, as opposed to fibrous plants", but those are both final causes. There's nothing different about an AI's activity. Any activity or quality that is pursuant to a goal, however defined, may have a final cause.
Why do tigers have sharp teeth? To rip flesh.
No.
Why do tigers have sharp teeth? Because their ancestors who had sharper teeth produced more offspring than their relatives who did not.
In Aristotle's language, ripping teeth may be a cause, but it's not the Final cause, and that's what we're talking about.
The reason biologists don't like the teleological explanation is that (a) it tends to make people think of a creator, as you say, but also (b) it describes traits as "solutions" to specific "problems" (e.g. the problem of ripping flesh), but the issue is that, starting from the pre-sharp-toothed ancestor, there were infinitely many possible directions evolution could have taken that would never have needed to solve this "problem." The existence of the problem (cutting meat) and the random path that led to the tigers being carnivorous are actually one-and-the-same. If you didn't have sharp teeth, you wouldn't have needed them.