Eric Holloway

Senior Fellow, Walter Bradley Center for Natural & Artificial Intelligence

Eric Holloway is a Senior Fellow with the Walter Bradley Center for Natural & Artificial Intelligence, and holds a PhD in Electrical & Computer Engineering from Baylor University. A Captain in the United States Air Force, he served in the US and Afghanistan. He is the co-editor of Naturalism and Its Alternatives in Scientific Methodologies.

Archives

Is True Artificial Intelligence Possible? A Science Perspective

Many will conclude that true AI — AI that thinks like humans — must be possible because we hear so much about it from so many sources
Eric Holloway
September 24, 2024
Experiments like ARC–AGI have finally made true computer intelligence into a scientifically respectable theory, because AI can now be falsified.

How Ancient Philosophers Can Help Design Better Computers

The Kubernetes program, for example, steers groups of computers the way, in the ancient image, a navigator steers a ship
Eric Holloway
June 7, 2024
The program works a bit like our minds, creating information in the world around us by constant comparison, bringing order out of disorder.

Will Artificial Intelligence Revolutionize Math?

In an article in Nature, mathematician Thomas Fink makes the case that AI can rapidly falsify wrong conjectures. But what about its built-in limitations?
Eric Holloway
May 20, 2024
The limitations created by the nature of computing mean that a mathematician’s true job of discovering novel theorems is quite safe at present.

Applying the Theory of Intelligent Design

What are ID's implications for economics, metaphysics, and computer science?
Eric Holloway
May 9, 2024
As my PhD advisor Dr. Robert Marks likes to say: “You have to make the queen of the sciences get down and scrub the floors.” Intelligent design (ID) is a science, and so ID has to get down and scrub the floors. To further this goal, I’ve come up with a schema for the ways in which ID can be applied, and what it in fact means for ID to be applied. The upshot of this schema is not only to guide brainstorming, but it also demonstrates that ID is already applied in many areas, unbeknownst to all. As they say, the best way to get something done is to take credit for someone else’s work. First, let’s identify what ID is. ID is the theory that intelligent activity can be empirically distinguished from the results of chance and necessity. While commonly …

How Could Intelligent Design Help Us In a Conflict?

Well, what would happen if Daffy Duck teams up with Marvin the Martian?
Eric Holloway
April 10, 2024
In war, the goal is to eliminate a threat as quickly as possible, given available resources. We try to hit the center of a target with the fewest arrows. A key mathematical concept of intelligent design, active information, captures this dilemma. It also helps us understand the role of artificial intelligence might play in wartime. Active information Active information is the difference between two sources of information. Picture archers shooting at a target: 1. Endogenous information: What is the size of the target? And how difficult is the target to hit? It is the difference between hitting a squirrel and hitting the moon. 2. Exogenous information: How skilled the archer is who is firing the arrows? What difference does the archer’s skill make? Let’s say we have a …

How Is Intentionality Embedded in the Universe?

All efforts to extinguish intentionality and morality only serve to further establish their inescapable reality
Eric Holloway
March 11, 2024
The conclusion we must reach by examining our own intentionality carefully is that it has an ultimate origin from a conscious being outside of our world.

Could Our Minds Be Bigger Than Even a Multiverse?

The relationship between information, entropy, and probability suggests startling possibilities. If you find the math hard, a face-in-the-clouds illustration works too
Eric Holloway
February 28, 2024
This article has equal entropy to gibberish letters of the same length, yet it contains information and gibberish does not. Much follows from that fact.

Is Your Mind Bigger Than the Universe? Well, Look At It This Way…

Surprisingly, there is a way to measure the mind that shows it IS bigger than the universe — information
Eric Holloway
February 12, 2024
Imagine you’re sitting at home, relaxing in your favorite easy chair. Go on, kick your legs up. Feel your limbs releasing the stress of the day, starting from the extremities, and progressing up your core to your head. Now, let your mind expand. Let go of what is holding your mind down. Feel it become free, outside of everything around it. Let the feeling continue until your mind is bigger than the universe. Now consider the question: if your mind is bigger than the universe, can it be within the universe? If a ball is bigger than a bag, can it be contained by the bag? Of course not. If the mind is bigger than the universe, then it must be outside of the universe. Of course, a daydream in the easy chair is proof of nothing. Plus, how can we measure the mind? We can’t poke or …

Why Is Theology the Most Important Empirical Science?

Arguing pro or con about the existence of God has resulted in many successful and/or widely accepted theories in science
Eric Holloway
February 4, 2024
If generating testable theories in empirical science is the standard of success, theology has certainly succeeded, as the record will show.

Can AI Really Start Doing Evil Stuff All By Itself?

We need to first talk to the man in the mirror before we go around blaming transistor circuit boards for what’s wrong in the world
Eric Holloway
January 25, 2024
Far from being independent superintellects, AIs — without human input — are subject to Model Collapse, where they start reprocessing information into nonsense.

Can There Really Be an Ultimate Happiness Machine?

Technology can do so much. Can it really provide an answer to the eternal human quest for happiness?
Eric Holloway
January 14, 2024
What if we had a machine that could access and manipulate the internals of the human mind? It would fall victim to the halting problem.

AI and the Chinese Room Argument

We still haven't cracked the mystery of human intelligence
Eric Holloway
December 13, 2023
80 years later, we are using the same paradigm, with much faster computers and vast data but we still haven't cracked the mystery of human intelligence.

Ancient Greek Philosophy and Modern Blockbuster Graphics

The amazing computer-generated effects you see in almost every blockbuster today are only possible thanks to ideas proposed over 2300 years ago.
Eric Holloway
October 9, 2023
Ancient philosophy can be extremely useful, and entertaining, even when contrary to modern science! See it in the movies!

Life According to the Turing Machine

Is there more to the world than just data and digits?
Eric Holloway
September 18, 2023
"Virtually just like real life!" as advertisements proclaimed. All it did was give John a headache, and feeling he'd just wasted a couple of hours of his life.

Does ChatGPT Pass the Creativity Test?

What does ChatGPT have to do in order to be considered creative?
Eric Holloway
July 12, 2023
What is creativity? Where does it come from? Why are some things humans do considered creative, while other things mundane? Can AI be creative? To answer these questions, let’s come up with a definition. Creativity at least means something new has been done. No work that copies what has come before is considered creative.  A Creativity Criteria Just doing something new is not enough either. If it were, then I can easily be creative by flipping a coin 100 times. That specific sequence of coin flips will only occur once in the entire history of humanity. But no one would say I was creative when I flipped a coin. This means creativity has to generate a new insight. However, these two criteria are not adequate, either. I could flip a …

Can AI Create its Own Information?

The simple answer is "no," but why? Eric Holloway explains
Eric Holloway
June 21, 2023
AI is amazing. It is all the rage these days. Companies everywhere are jumping on the AI bandwagon. No one wants to be left behind when true believers are raptured to the mainframe in the sky.What makes the AI work?The AI works because of information it gained from a human generated dataset. Let’s label the dataset D.We can measure the information in the dataset with Shannon entropy. Represent the information with H(D).When we train an AI with this data, we are applying a mathematical function to the dataset. This function is the training algorithm. Labelling the training algorithm T, then we represent training as T(D).The outcome of training is a new AI model. The model generates new data. We represent the generator function as G. When we apply G to T(D), then this is a new …

Say What? AI Doesn’t Understand Anything 

Is that supposed to be a cat, Mr. AI?
Eric Holloway
June 7, 2023
Whenever I look at AI generated content, whether it be pictures or text, they all have the same flaw. The AI cannot comprehend what it is making.  Let me explain.  When we humans draw a picture, we are drawing a concept. We are drawing something like “cat climbs a tree” or “cowboy riding into the sunset”. It seems like this is what is happening with a picture drawing AI. We give it a prompt, and it draws an associated picture.  On second thought, maybe not…  When AI draws the picture, what is really going on is it is finding individual-colored pixels that correlate with the letters we typed in its massive database stored in the neural network. Very different than how we draw. We sketch a scene, draw general shapes, then fill in the …