Real Deletion, Time, and Possibility

Abstract: Does anything ever really “go away,” completely? This paper is a search for “real deletion,” and the metaphysics that must accompany real deletion. Why is that important? In artificial intelligence studies, researchers have offered a moving target for when artificial intelligence has been achieved. It began with the Turing test and has evolved through a thousand arguments (e.g., Dreyfuss’ What Computers Can’t Do, through Kurzweil’s “singularity” and into a hundred other criteria and thousands of discussions about what intelligence is and what it would mean to simulate or, as I favor, emulate it). This whole discussion is still just sorting through analogies to human intelligence, not approaching the thing itself, but good analogies must approach much more than analogous function: they must approach real indiscernibility. My arguments here will therefore be largely in the field of metaphysics and ontology, which is how I understand the word “real” in the phrase “real deletion.” I do not think that current researchers have rightly understood time and how it bears upon the criterion or. criteria of artificial intelligence. Hence, I offer “real deletion,” in the sense to be described, as the criterion. The AI argument has implications for all of metaphysics as it relates to the fundamental character of time.