h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Hi Dmitri and Chris! Language is the thing indeed. I'm trying to keep things plain, simple and unambiguous ... but there are necessarily serious gaps between what I say and what I mean 'in my head'. But that's why I also try to communicate through my art!

Anyways, I can only drop in here a couple of times a week, and can’t really devote much time and energy to this, so … how about we keep it casual? We can just share some ideas and respond to each other’s points as far as we’re able.

My own position: I am an artist by vocation, but I’ve studied science and philosophy at university. I’m very interested in the deep questions of life.

So … the ‘scientific optimism’ I’ve spoken of, is non-negotiable. It’s true that it can’t be proven. There might indeed be things in the universe that are intrinsically inexplicable. But we can’t actually know which ones are, unless we’ve given our all to trying to explain as much as possible. And we need to try to explain them, with the expectation that we could indeed explain them. This is my approach to mind: I expect success, because without this expectation, we can’t achieve any success. So I’ll see how far I can get with providing possible explanations. My intuition right now is that mind can indeed be scientifically explained. This is part of a conviction that we can understand the universe that we’re living in to a great degree, and that everything happens according to universal rules – some of which we know, and some of which we still have to learn.

As I see it, right now science knows very little about mind as a phenomenon. So, it’s not a case of, if minds are actually explicable by science, we would already have been able to create artificial minds. I’ll try sometime to write up a piece about why science has a hard time dealing with even the concept of mind. To me it looks like there’s a big hole in our understanding, when it comes to our own minds. Minds are perhaps the most complex phenomena in the universe, so it’s no surprise if they’re not yet within our abilities to deal with scientifically.

Let me just say a thing about duality. You spoke about the matter/energy duality, not seeing it as such. The thing is, Einstein’s equation says mass corresponds to energy … and indeed in physics, fundamentally mass IS energy. Even though they’re apparently two different things! Mass is characterised as: 1) resistance to being accelerated and 2) the ability to ‘bend’ spacetime giving rise to the supposed force of gravity. Energy is: 1) work performed (force multiplied by distance) or 2) the capacity to perform work. Mass seems to be a concrete, physical property of objects, while energy seems to be something more abstract. Yet, deep down they’re the same thing! Particles like protons or neutrons – physical objects, which have mass – can turn into pure energy, losing all their mass. Nuclear bombs work by turning a very small amount of matter into energy. The bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki each turned only about a single gram of matter into energy – that was enough to wreak the destruction they did! The most efficient means of turning matter into energy, is by having matter meet with anti-matter. If one gram of matter meets one gram of anti-matter, both pieces – two grams in total – are completely turned into energy, exactly according to Einstein’s formula. And no matter is left – all the mass is turned into energy, carried off mostly by photons (particles of light with no rest mass).

So in physics, the apparent duality is: mass (concrete) equals energy (abstract); in quantum physics, particles (concrete objects) equal waves (rather more abstract, diffuse phenomena); I propose that there’s another duality – matter (concrete) equals mind (abstract). Of course there’s a long, long process of reasoning in order to get all the way there!

I can try setting forth my arguments … the trouble is, will either you or Dmitri sit still for them? There’s not yet any complete proof, but there’s a slew of circumstantial evidence …

Willem,

You say that mind cannot be epiphenomenal, but the philosophical arguments for consciousness (rather than mind) being epiphenomenal seem to me to be quite hard, though not impossible to counter. So I was wondering what brings you to the position you hold on this? Just to be clear, consciousness could still afford us experience of the phenomenal world and still be causally epiphenomenal in the sense that conscious experience would have no causal properties.

You also seem to suggest that information might be conserved in some way, so I was wondering how you might reconcile that position with the second law of thermodynamics? I don't see much reason to suppose that information is conserved, or that consciousness is separable from working brains, apart from that it might be comforting of course. But that's not necessarily an epistemically responsible reason is it?

I'm interested in your views on these points.

Psi has posed a couple of interesting questions there so I will give Willem time to answer them and look forward to reading his response.

In the meantime, as I think what we are doing here needs to be largely empirical rather than a purely logical or inductive exercise, I’ll add three links that I think provide useful evidence:
http://profmattstrassler.com/articles-and-posts/particle-physics-basics/mass-energy-matter-etc/matter-and-energy-a-false-dichotomy/
I assume Mark Solms is well-known in South Africa:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FZ4HsiavUCg


http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/11/noam-chomsky-on-where-artificial-intelligence-went-wrong/261637?single_page=true
This is quite a long but interesting interview with Chomsky – some problems: the interviewer constantly misusing *critique*, Chomsky’s inability to do mental arithmetic, and some bad transcribing from the audio. But there are a couple of significant passages that show some close parallel with Willem’s ideas.

Hi folks!

Chris: all right, that particular scientist has a problem with saying matter somehow equals energy. In my own case: I studied physics in the early nineteen nineties, and what we learnt supported the idea that there is understood to be an equivalence between mass and energy. I’ve been a bit careless with my language here, using ‘mass’ to stand in for ‘matter’. But basically: mass is a property of matter and sometimes used to mean matter – we’ll speak of ‘a mass’ instead of saying ‘a massive object’. So is matter mass, or is mass just a property of matter? But whatever the case, there is definitely an equivalence between mass and energy. My point was just that the two seem to mean quite different things, and yet deep down they’re the same. So I’m actually not arguing for a dichotomy, I’m saying there are these two different aspects that actually come down to the same thing.

All right. Now as to why I am against the idea of mind being an epiphenomenon. As I understand the idea of epiphenomenalism, it is that an entirely new phenomenon can arise out of some situation when it reaches a sufficient level of complexity. Thus: minds were there in no form, with nothing even approaching anything like it, and then suddenly a day came upon which some organism had a sufficiently complex nervous system to suddenly allow ‘mind’ to blossom into existence. There was no trace of mind before, and now suddenly there’s mind.

This is how I understand the idea – I might be wrong, and I’ll certainly do some more reading about the matter. But it doesn’t seem to me to fit the case of how mind works and of what mind *is*. As I see mind, it is basically a simple thing with a simple essence – and what’s more, an essence that somehow seems concrete. A real thing, a real phenomenon, with certain basic parameters. Mind is a realm as I see it, a sphere of existence, something like a ‘theatre’ in which things can happen. Mind needs to support experiences – experiences with definite natures, called ‘qualia’. Qualia are the ‘what-it’s-likeness’ of experiences. And I suspect we will find qualia wherever we find living things, even ones with what look to us simple nervous systems. Perhaps even in animals with no nervous systems at all – single-celled critters or bacteria. But anyways let’s take something with a good degree of complexity – an insect. I am fairly sure insects do have minds; I don’t think these minds are anywhere as intricate as our own, but I think an insect can feel, can experience, *something*. Say, a bee looks around the sky – it can perceive light, it can even tell when light is polarized, and it can see some ultraviolet light. So when a bee ‘sees’, a bee *experiences* what it sees as *something*. The bee doesn’t see the same things we see, but the *something* that the bee sees, corresponds to the basic elements of visual images we see. There will be a sense of light and dark, and probably a sense of colour – perhaps the bee also sees images in colour.

These images need to be somewhere. The images we see aren’t physical things ‘out there’, they’re constructions of our own minds … and so it must be for the bee as well. It must have a mind inside of which it can hold these images. And these images must have elements that are part of the construction of the mind of the bee.

Now, the thing is, we have so many different living things, each with its own kind of brain, nervous system – and as I see it, mind. But there need to be similarities between the minds of different kinds of creature. Basically, *mind is mind*. The mind of a different kind of critter might be different from ours in just how it manifests, but in manifesting, it has to have elements similar to our own minds.

It is these elements that interest me … they come down to being basic features of minds. And when we think of a vast diversity of different kinds of living things possessing a vast variety of different kinds of minds, and yet, all these different minds *are minds* … then we see that there has to exist (at least so I see it) a ‘realm of mind’ with certain necessary properties, and all things with minds have their minds part of this realm. The differences between different minds come down to how these different properties are ‘used’ in different ways and for different purposes, how more complex properties are constructed using simpler elements.

A big beef I have with epiphenomenalism is that it tends to be used to justify the belief that *human* minds are pretty much the only minds to matter … that mind arises pretty much only at the human level. Whereas I contend mind is much more general in nature. We have some of the most complex minds out there, but certainly not the *only* minds.

So basically my position is: mind is indeed a phenomenon that is intrinsically part of the universe; we find it wherever we find life, and we find it having properties of its own, allowing it to manifest in an orderly way according to the rules of the universe. It is a deep phenomenon, not a superficial one.

Now for how knowledge could survive the death of a brain which holds it. Well, *today* it should be easy to understand since we can indeed put knowledge into forms that are ‘outside’ the minds of individuals – I’m doing it right now! But basically, I see knowledge as being a property of the realm of mind I discussed above. And the realm of mind is not a material realm. All right I might seem to be getting spooky here. But: I see knowledge as being constituted from elements, again elements that are universal, not confined to any individual mind. A mind that attains knowledge, ‘arranges’ elements in the realm of mind into meaningful patterns. I simply think some of these patterns persist after the mind that first created them, is gone. This crucially depends on mind indeed being a cosmic phenomenon.

And … I believe that mind indeed is not bound by the second law of thermodynamics. That law has a restricted application in nature and may not even hold for all of the physical universe. The second law say that entropy always increases – things always get more disorderly. It’s like imagining a boulder rolling down a mountain: it can only roll down, not up. But how did it get up on top of the mountain in the first place? How is it the universe came into existence with such a low entropy – so to speak? If things only get more disorderly, where did the order come from in the first place? If the universe indeed originated from nothing … does it mean ‘nothing’ is even more orderly than the universe itself?

And the second law of thermodynamics only applies to closed systems. Maybe the universe is not a closed system. I personally believe there are many ‘universes’ that are somehow still connected but probably not in the physical realm – or at least not as we understand the physical realm.

But there are strange things afoot in this universe. Despite the second law saying things should become more disorderly, we actually see incredible order happening out there, and it looks for all intents and purposes as if indeed *order* is increasing in the universe at large. From the ‘fireball’ of the Big Bang we progressed through many new and orderly features coming into existence: protons, neutrons, electrons, atoms, elements, gassy clouds, stars, galaxies, planets … and on planets we are now seeing the emergence of an extremely complex phenomenon, *life*. It sounds to me like an increase in order.

Now this can be explained by saying order can increase *locally* but needs to decrease *globally*. The greater universe is winding down as in a few small places, order is increasing.

The question still is whether order needs to run down forever in all of the universe. And here I see is the strongest claim for life and mind … that it might be possible to find a way after all, to reverse entropy … to get the rock back on top of the mountain. In practical terms I think we might find a way of hanging on in the universe for practically forever, and we might also find ways of creating new universes … and *inhabiting them*. And as I see it, mind will be the key to this. So mind may ultimately determine the nature and the future of the cosmos. This will of course also go far towards proving my contention that mind is a cosmically significant phenomenon.

OK this is getting long so let me just post this … interested in more ideas/questions.

Willem, I found that beautifully succinct and easy to follow.

I hesitate to propose any ideas here, but could it be that an argument for the existence of 'mind' as you have described it is the fact that we can discuss these concepts at all? We in this thread, I mean?

We're probably all approaching the same set of phenomena from different disciplines, with different sets of vocabulary and different methodologies. But somehow, we're all looking at the same thing, even if we perceive different parts of the colour spectrum, like the bee.

Yeah, yeah, like the blind men and the elephant, but still...

Willem, thanks for that excellent post. I’m going to give an instant response and then come back with a more detailed reply as soon as I can write it.

As far as the matter/energy analogy goes, I suspect ordinary language is always going to make this debatable and, in the end, it is just an analogy rather than a useful explanation of how mind can be part of a physical system so I don’t think it’s worth worrying too much about it.

The phenomenon/epiphenomenon problem is much closer to the heart of this debate so I’m glad to see a much fuller explanation of your view. In paragraph 7 you seem to show something of an underlying political agenda supporting your position and I would like to come back to this in more detail later.

Then we come to the persistence of knowledge which, for me is the most difficult part and where I’m most aware of my lack of science education (fortunately my daughter graduated last year with a degree in Physics so I depend a lot on her advice!). This will take me a while to read and understand.

Hi again folks! Dmitri, thanks, I’m glad you liked that. Personally I’m a bit torn … I want to keep things clear and simple, so as not to alienate readers with long and involved arguments … but at the same time, the issue is so important that I feel it deserves rigorous proofs and attempted proofs. For now, here, I hope everyone reading understands I’m not actually proving anything here, I’m just offering some things to think about. Heck, I don’t believe all of this with 100% conviction myself …

Chris, well yes, when we get to the matter of mind, there’s no way to avoid political implications. And they’re all tangled up with the science. Consider for instance what will happen if we actually do create an artificial intelligence comparable to a human mind. Will we recognize it as human – or as good as human? If not, then why not? Do we hold it legally and morally accountable for any wrong it does – or do we penalize its maker/programmer for its wrongdoings? Do we give it legal rights? And – as potential creators of a human-level artificial intelligence – do we make it mortal? There seems to be no reason why an artificial intelligence that’s based on computer chips and electronics should ever die. Imagine we make it so that it necessarily dies after say, eighty or ninety years. Isn’t that murder? But what the heck are we unleashing on the world if we make such an intelligence potentially immortal?

Personally I’m quite sure that we will, eventually, be able to make artificially intelligent beings – with actual minds. But before we can do that, I’m convinced we need to understand the phenomenon of mind much better. We’re shooting ourselves in the foot if we’re only looking at human minds – the most complicated kind – instead of starting with something simpler, that’s already there – the minds of animals. But we’ll have to be very, very respectful in investigating their minds … and acknowledging that they have minds, and facing the implications of that, is going to be a huge step.


I haven't yet read the whole Noam Chomsky piece ... please give me time for that, I'm sure it's very relevant.

Sorry, Willem, post 46 was written in a hurry and I failed to make my point clearly. What I meant was that modern science has been so successful because it dispensed with the teleological method of Aristotelian attempts to formulate knowledge. It weakens any argument you present if you already have a strong bias towards a particular outcome. So, yes, any result of this debate will be political but the objective science has to come first.

Willem,

Thanks for your response. I do think it is important to define terms to avoid talking past each other.

By 'epiphenomenalism' I mean something like the concept articulated here:
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/epiphenomenalism/

The following quote from the above might help:
"Epiphenomenalism is the view that mental events are caused by physical events in the brain, but have no effects upon any physical events."

Your use of the term seems to me to be more like what I know as 'emergent phenomena'. On this view, a sufficiently complex system of the required kind gives rise to a mind. However there is nothing in this concept to warrant your use of 'suddenly', since as you yourself point out in considering insects, mind can be a matter of degree.

You then develop your idea of mind as having a simple essence, your characterization of which is very similar to Daniel Dennett's concept of the Cartesian Theatre- an idea he criticises in his book Consciousness Explained. The philosopher David Hume proposed the 'bundle theory' of self as a counter to the idea that consciousness is a unitary phenomenon. Hume's ideas have had recent support from psychologists like Bruce Hood in his book The Self Illusion. In summary, there seem to me to be good reasons to doubt that mind is unitary and that it is like a theatre.

Where you say "A big beef I have with epiphenomenalism is that it tends to be used to justify the belief that *human* minds are pretty much the only minds to matter...", I have not encountered this as a consequence of considering minds to be emergent phenomena. Could you give some examples?

On knowledge surviving brains, I agree that humans have done this via culture, language, writing and other more recent forms of information storage and retrieval. I don't find that problematic at all. Where I am more skeptical is in postulating some kind of principle of conservation of information, or that information carried by minds persists unless it is deliberately stored in some way, for example by writing it down. I don't see evidence for either, nor for mind inhabiting some kind of non-physical realm. To me this is substance dualism, which has serious philosophical problems.

Current cosmological models do indeed predict the universe will wind down into a 'heat death' after a few trillion years. In that case, it seems to me that all information will eventually be lost. Your speculation that other universes will somehow save ours from this fate by suplying energy, or that some posthuman agents will intervene to fix it somehow, just seems like wishful thinking to me.

I look forward to your thoughts.

Hi Chris! OK so what objective science do you want? Anyways, I'm not afraid of being wrong ... but I'd rather not be timidly wrong! But as far as I'm concerned ... I'm still an artist and philosopher more than a scientist. And in wanting to understand my own mind, there's not much that objective science can tell me.

Hi Psiomniac! All right - I will read that bit about epiphenomenalism, gimme some time please.

Willem, in post 18 you write that you believe “that mind is fully integrated in the world of matter” and in post 41 you say that it is your belief that “mind can indeed be scientifically explained”, so I’m slightly puzzled when you ask “so what objective science do you want?” If the purpose of this conversation is to investigate the nature of mind with a view to understanding why artificial intelligence has proved so difficult then a scientific answer would be the only viable one. As I pointed out in my initial post, philosophy needs to help scientists understand the question but the answer needs to come through science. As is also implied in that post, that may well involve an expansion of science to fit the evidence in the same way that it expanded to fit relativity but the underlying rules of science can’t be changed.

Science works very well when it is examining a physical object but, as we’re all agreed, the subject is a much more difficult problem; the putative solutions to this include the simplistic idea that your mind is not my mind therefore I can study you as an object (the social science view I criticize in post 17), Spinoza’s extremely subtle supposedly “pantheistic” view which sounds to me very similar to yours although it is essentially deterministic (the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: “Spinoza, in effect, denies that the human being is a union of two different *substances*. The human mind and the human body are two different expressions - under Thought and under Extension – of one and the same thing: the person. And because there is no causal interaction between the mind and the body, the so-called mind-body problem does not, technically speaking, arise.”), and any number of variations in between.

As far as I can see, none of those views has produced any useful body of predictive laws so far and I struggle to see how purely inductive reasoning would ever do that. That’s why I mention Mark Solms in post 43; his approach in combining neuro science and psychiatry looks like it could produce real results, whether in mind in general or in your own individual mind.
In Post 41 (in answer to my post 33) you write “it’s not a case of, if minds are actually explicable by science, we would already have been able to create artificial minds” but that science has not had time to formulate a successful theory. However, I was making a basic logical point that, if mind is an essential phenomenon we would not be struggling with the question of how to create artificial intelligence but with the question of how we come to be separate individuals with different minds.

Hi Chris! I merely meant - seeing as you want that we should start with objective science, what kind of objective scientific angle do you think we should start with? Then we can look at that and see whether it says anything good, and we can see where to go to from there.

When I say 'objective science' to me it means physics, basically. The problem *right now* is that physics can't yet say much, because it can't see minds as minds. But we can get into somewhat 'less objective' science in disciplines like psychology. We can add philosophy to this. I still believe introspection is very valuable and we can learn by listening to each other's introspective journeys and investigations. We can use technology like MRI scans and stuff like that, showing brain activity, that can roughly give us some ideas ... for me especially intriguing is that we might be able to tell if someone is lying and perhaps even if someone is deceiving him or herself! We can look at how nerves and brains work, in humans as well as in animals. We can ponder the effects of substances on the brain and on minds, as researched in pharmacology. These are all methods, at least as far as I am concerned, that are not quite 'objective science' or 'hard science' - they're soft sciences, and the answers they give are not as clear and firm as answers given by hard sciences, but they're answers we can use all the same.


I do think that we might at some time have physics sophisticated enough to look at and into minds and see what's actually there on the mind-level. This development is likely to happen through the augmentation of human mental abilities through implants that communicate directly to the nerves. This, taken far enough, would give us functional telepathy.

But anyways, I do think we need to try to figure out why we are separate individuals with different minds!

Oh ... as for artificial intelligence, or artificial minds - we have to start with artificial *minds* first, in my view, not necessarily *intelligent* minds; we need to have our AI's being able to feel and experience things like pain, happiness, sadness, fascination, fear, love, curiosity, and 'elements' of sensory experiences like colours, light and dark, the discernment of musical tones and harmonies, smells, feelings like heat and coldness, and so forth. I do think we're going to get there, but we need to figure out what kind of 'situation' is required for the above sort of things to be able to exist. Maybe I'm optimistic, since I think we're going to get there soon enough (decades, perhaps). But we need to think about the kind of 'substrate' a mind needs to be based on. I personally think it will turn out to be something describable in the terms of physics, using the kinds of things we know to exist, but 'adding' some properties to them that for now, we still know very little about.

I do not really have an established idea on this, but I have been following. At some point true AI has to be able to make the link from established facts to a unique idea that goes beyond known fact. I will offer my Entry A87758185 Could a computer ever make a leap from the established data to form a new theory that might devise could be caused by viruses or bacteria. Could they ever conceive that a simple misquote or rat could be the carrier? Many of the greatest scientific breakthroughs came from studying something that appeared to be out of left field.

F S

Florida Sailor, this is a very interesting point and one, coincidentally, that I’ve been thinking about for a few days myself. I’m very much in awe of Willem’s artistic creativity partly because when I left school I spent an unhappy year and a half at art college, training to be a commercial artist. It took me that long to admit to myself that I had absolutely no creative ability at all; my mind seems to be wired up in a way that suits philosophy – a plodding affair that takes already existing knowledge and carefully arranges or rearranges it in a rational framework. Now, if people decide that creativity is the benchmark of true intelligence I am inclined to panic as I wonder how they will distinguish me from machines; in fact, I wonder how I will distinguish myself from machines. But, putting aside my personal feelings, I would agree that creativity is an important element of the human mind.

Going back to Willem’s post 53, it’s not a case of my wanting to start with objective science and deciding what direction to take; machine intelligence will be a physical object so it will be physics that must provide the solution and, although scientists quite often start with an imaginative vision of some possibility, they must follow the evidence even if it shows that vision to be wrong.

Great idea, Florida Sailor! Again, this is not something many humans can actually do ... or prove! But something cool to think about.

Chris, there are many kinds of intelligence, of course! Creativity is a thing I consider very important, but there are people who are naturally very creative, and others who aren't. Me, I often would love being more creative ... but I try my best!

Anyways: about science showing a vision to be 'wrong' ... it has happened over and over in human history that things were accomplished in spite of scientists saying it was impossible: intercontinental radio communication, heavier-than-air flying machines, rocket flight and more. So ... basically I think that if we want to achieve thinking machines, then we should go ahead and try. If it is actually done, then it's proved possible! That would be a kind of existence theorem ...

Hello all,

I hope you don't mind me responding to a couple of points while Willem is considering his reply.

Florida Sailor, are you asking whether AI could make the kind of inferences involved in the development of the concept that micro-organisms cause diseases? If so, I am not sure why AI would be challenged by this kind of inference any more than by any inferences from patterns in data, something which AI already does.

Chris, I watched the Youtube on Neuropsychoanalysis, very interesting!

Willem, I wonder whether we need to distinguish between how the scientific method operates and what individual scientists might say? I am not aware of the examples you quote about scientists denying the possibility of heavier than air flight or transatlantic communication, it would be helpful if you could give some references, but science doesn't proceed by statements like 'x is impossible' anyway.

For example, you could have said something like 'scientists said that transatlantic steam ship crossing was impossible'. In fact Dionysius Lardner said that such a ship couldn't possibly carry enough coal, before the SS Great Britain designed by Brunel successfully made the trip (Berry & Pollard, 2008). What this shows is that some scientists make mistakes, but the scientific method and technological development proceed anyway. So I agree with you that, even if some individual scientists might say conscious machines, or creative AI is impossible, they might be mistaken. Where I would be cautious is in making any predictions involving phenomena a long way beyond current scientific understanding.

Finally, how do you know that some people are 'naturally' very creative? Or perhaps a better question is: what do you mean by 'naturally'?

Berry, M., & Pollard, B. (2008). The Physical Tourist. Physics in Perspective (PIP), 10(4), 468-481.

What a thread! If I ever wonder sometimes if its worth all the effort of keeping h2g2 alive then it is this kind of conversation that convinces me that it is. I have a talk to do to 100 Global Law Firm partners about AI in a few weeks time and will spend some serious time with this thread as I write it. Maybe I am just looking for a cause, but I do feel that the relationship between human judgement and machine judgement is a defining issue for this era. I have just read ( at my son's urging) Robert Heinlein's "The Moon is a Cruel Mistress" about an AI becoming sentient. Interesting that Heinlein put humour and a desire to understand what was 'funny' at the heart of the emerging awareness. And the other day I started a talk with a clip from the movie of Deep Thought and the answer. - humour and AI indeed!

To further explain my point. The Entry I linked is based on a very real scientific article published by a doctor in the 1837 US Naval Magazine. In the 21st century it is obvious that these facts would be in the data base. My real question is if asked a question, What is the cause of XXX (I hesitate to pose an actual problem to avoid off- topic opinions) could the AI go beyond what is 'established scientific fact' and make a connection that has not been considered before? Make a 'leap of faith' that brings forward a new theory that goes far beyond the 'knowledge' in its data bank. Perhaps out other data that was never considered to be a part of the problem in a new light?

As to why this problem might be asked, Imagine an AI computer being asked in 1890 'How can we prevent Yellow Fever so we can build the canal?'

F S