A.I. Hard

The term "AI Hard" refers to the degree of difficulty of a particular computer problem. If the solution requires solving the entire problem of Artificial Intelligence first, then it is AI Hard. There is an implied degree of recursion involved as well, if any sub-problems of AI Hard first require AI Hard to be solved completely.

Another problem similar to that is the problem whereby the existence of DNA molecules requires the pre-existence of something as complex as DNA molecules. Or that something at least as complicated as the entire Universe has to exist first in order for a Universe to burst into existence out of it. The "Nothingness and Timelessness" before Existence and Time must therefore contain something which can be converted into Existence and Time.

Reaching down into the soil from every tree are large inverted trees in the form of roots. Certainly roots must exist for the plant to absorb nutrients. And the plant must exist for the roots to obtain energy from light. Yet there are also single celled organisms that contain everything in a single photosynthetic or chemically energetic bundle, having neither leaf nor root. The complexity of the entire plant is present in pattern from the largest form of tree to the tiniest algae, since it is their respective DNA patterns which ultimately define what happens during their lifespans.

Simpler forms of life, the bacteria and virus, fungus and phage, all have their varying degrees of complexity. Most of them are so complex that working models of such cells are either impossible or impractical to build. The closest things might be coal burning generators providing energy to chemical factories which then provide material to build more coal burning generators. Coal itself was once living stuff, however, although the raw material must ultimately come from supernovae. Carbon atoms, although supposedly identical one to another, had to each have been indivually formed from the cosmic soup at different precise moments in time as the locally changing temperatures and density allowed smaller chunks of matter to fuse together just right.

So it is with the idea of a Cosmic Egg. There must be something already present in the most fundamental underpinnings of the Universe that can unfold into the complexities which we empirically observe around us. It is not so much that there must be a Maker of Watchmakers, but simply a Maker of Conditions in which Watchmakers can grow by all by themselves.

When one looks at snowflakes, with all their variations on a theme, it is difficult to think of them as simply tiny puffs of steam that just happen to be very very cold. It is difficult for ourselves, as clumps of slushy semi-melted, semi-solid stuff, to think of ourselves as once being white-hot star gases. But without first going through the furnaces of stars there would never have been any water and mud for DNA to transform into our bodies. Nor could there ever be DNA at all.

When one looks at a diamond it is hard to see it as the wispy pile of soot it once was. But in the distant future, according to some theorists, beyond the possible lifetimes of humans, beyond the lives of stars and galaxies, nothing will ever care that we ever existed, and everything will be cold and dark and frozen forever and forever. Everything will be like diamonds, and nothing will ever hint that there used to be gases or liquids, or Watchmakers, ever again.

It is actually a very good thing that there is such a thing as AI Hard. If AI was easy it would already have done away with us. It would be trying to think of a way to solve AI Easy in ever more etherial ways, eventually taking no effort at all to accomplish everything possible to accomplish.