Tag: Probability

Once again, Wilson reverses and rewires every mental polarity with a illuminated blog post from the date UNIX 1073865600, the good ole’ days.

UNIX Date 1073865600

“Maybe” is a thin reed to hang your life on but it’s all we’ve got.
–Woody Allen

This may not seem startling to gamers, but it sure woke me up; I learned about it on Law and Order last Sunday.

A type of program called a “bot ” can play a computer game “just like a human” and in the style of any chosen human, given enough skill on the part of the bot-maker.

It seems to me this surpasses virtual reality and approaches electronic cloning. After all, the bot can go on playing after the human has “died.”

A bot can also exist which, like an art forgery, seems to have the style and habits of a certain human but actually emerged from the brain of a clever faker.

This seems to me like virtual virtual reality and electronic immortality of a sort. If a bot plays chess like Alekhine, in what sense can we call Alekhine totally “dead”?

More: computer tech in general as brought us to the stage where producing a photo of a crime or even a moving picture of it does not prove a damned thing anymore. “I saw it with my own eyes” has become a bad joke.

I begin to feel that Maybe Logic will soon replace the Aristotelian either/or, not because of my books or Korzybski’s or von Neumann’s. but because virtual reality and artificial intelligence have destroyed certitude and left us with only degrees of probability.

BTW, do you feel absolutely sure “Robert Anton Wilson” wrote this and not some gol-danged bot?