I suggest reading some Roger Penrose and looking into Kurt Gödel, and also catch up on some of the atheism/god discussions in the politics forum while you're at it.
2nd Law of Thermo
All such irrational and unjustified fears are inconsistent with the trend of maximization of entropy guaranteed by the Second Law of Thermodynamics which governs our universe. Such fears include erroneous Malthusian apocalyptic predictions of overpopulation, man-made (anthropogenic) global warming, peak energy, and other resource scarcity delusions of the masses. Entropy is the level of independent possibilities, i.e. diversity. During the 1800s, the Luddites thought technology and mass production would replace all human work, because they couldn't foresee the new independent possibilities of knowledge work that employ us now.
It can be argued that the universe, within which the 2nd law of thermodynamics applies, is just a subset within our whole existence. Reasonable arguments can be put forward that we can operate beyond the rules of our physical reality, and that's what gives rise to things like free will and creativity.
Re: Algorithms=/=Entropy
However, the speed of the computing hardware and the sophistication of the software has no relevance because creativity can't be expressed in an algorithm. Every possible model of the brain will lack the fundamental cause of human creativity— every human brain is unique. Thus each of billions of brains is able to contemplate possibilities and scenarios differently enough so that it is more likely at least one brain will contemplate some unique idea that fits each set of possibilities at each point in time.
His reasoning for "a cause of creativity" is illogical and does not follow from his otherwise sensible intuition that an algorithm surely doesn't cause it.
For a start, the word creativity is self-explanatory: it refers to an
act of creation. Nothing comes
before creativity in order to somehow cause it, because then
that would be the real creative source instead. He could argue that creativity is not real, just an illusion. However, that would just reaffirm what I said earlier: we act upon and alter our illusion of reality, and thus we operate outside of it.
His theorising further down is interesting, but still relies on the same causal premise.
For example, we could think of DNA like an extremely advanced, organic
von Neumann universal constructor. A
Turing-complete state machine that operates within the physical laws of its substrate: various chemical interactions and so on. It replicates, evolves, has error correction for self-repair. Then we skip a few steps and say that complex organisms evolved from this DNA and formed brains.
Then we make a big (MOAFU) assumption: brains and networks of brains seem creative and extremely complex, therefore it must be all that complexity and variation that
causes creativity. No, it's a bit like that Russian joke where the world seems upside down. Stuff doesn't
cause creativity.
Creativity causes
stuff. I would suggest that maybe it's an ongoing process of creativity that allows complexity to arise in the first place. It may seem ridiculous, but I would also speculate that creative choices might occur at all levels in nature, resulting in what appears, in hindsight, to be the second law of thermodynamics.
