Better than blind skepticism is starting with epistemology, or the nature of knowledge, with a special emphasis on how knowledge is created and transmitted. Like many I've been influenced by "The Beginning of Infinity" by David Deutsch in this regard.

https://www.amazon.com/Beginning-Infinity-Explanations-Trans...

Examining one's personal epistemology is a significant task because it is the input to one's "mind set," defined in the below podcast with Dr. Alia Crum, Associate Professor of Psychology at Stanford, as "a mental frame or lens that selectively organizes and encodes information."

https://podcastnotes.org/huberman-lab/episode-56-dr-alia-cru...

With regards to The Scientific Method (and other ideas mentioned), I found some of David Deutsch's work thought-provoking. Namely, the idea that deductive reasoning is more effective than inductive when seeking new hypotheses. The Beginning of Infinity is a decent starting place [0]. Also related to some of Nassim Taleb's work.

[0] https://www.amazon.com/dp/0143121359

I prefer David Deutsch's optimistic approach to our problems: use science to find solutions. Rebellion is beyond the pale. We don't need rebels; we need scientists and more good science.

"The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World" by David Deutsch

https://www.amazon.com/Beginning-Infinity-Explanations-Trans...?

The physicist David Deutsch wrote a superb book about the kinds of ideas that lead to progress and those that lead to regress. It's called The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations that Transform the World (2011). https://www.amazon.com/dp/B005DXR5ZC

> why do you believe whatever makes us smart cannot be replicated by a computer program?

Turing's Universality of Computation actually guarantees that whatever is feasible in the physical world can be replicated as a computation in bits. However, I don't share the belief that AI research is anywhere close to achieving this in the most general sense of intelligence. Most AI researchers seem to agree: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9109140

Did you have a chance to look at David Deutsch's work on this topic?

http://aeon.co/magazine/technology/david-deutsch-artificial-...

http://www.ted.com/talks/david_deutsch_a_new_way_to_explain_...

http://www.amazon.com/The-Beginning-Infinity-Explanations-Tr...

Although Deutsch is not as charismatic a speaker as Kurzweil or as lucid a writer as Bostrom, his arguments make the most sense to me, given my limited experience doing AI research at Stanford. It would be interesting to know your thoughts on Deutsch's theory that the ability to create 'good' explanations is what separates human intelligence from the rest. (maybe through another blog post?)

P.S. Since I have your attention here, I took CS183B last quarter and it was really fun. Thanks!

Conceiving the universe as the "output of a computer program" seems like an empty idea, as computation depends on a physical substrate (its laws of physics). It leads to an infinite regress: What laws of physics govern that physical substrate? David Deutsch (mentioned in the WP article) has a discussion of this (and many other related deep topics!) in his excellent "The Beginning of Infinity" http://www.amazon.com/The-Beginning-Infinity-Explanations-Tr...