I love philosophy, but let's actually spend our time and energy asking questions that do have meaning, because any small meaning to us is more important than trying to do a task we are likely so ill equipped for that has no meaning to us.
I can't help but read titles like this piece and link it back to the anti-political and "above it all" attitudes that technical folk often take, believing that if they just eliminate meaning, emotion, all things that humans complicate pure logic with, and apply logic in the right way that somehow it will do some good. It doesn't matter if any of this is right or wrong - it has no relevant meaning to humans. Without meaning, it's a truly pointless task.
Completely unintuitive, isn't it? Empirically, we happen to be very good on it.
Agreed. However, should there be an afterlife, then it had better not be found lest it suffer my eternal wrath.
Interesting points, especially to follow up the recent 'is matter conscious?' article on HN.
Schmidhuber often seems to be more of a philosopher who happens to have made significant practical contributions to machine learning. The 'Great Programmer' is intentionally tongue-and-cheek, but for the agnostics out there, it's worth considering that regardless of what creator/process/fundamental mathematical requirement (if any) is responsible for the existence of our universe, it is unlikely that life on Earth (or perhaps in general) is relevant to It.