Posted on 07/02/2005 6:18:31 PM PDT by zeugma
My thoughts exactly. Any excuse to..excuse homo behavior.. will first be furthered by liberal scientists.
I didnt find it to be all that great. Good, but not great.
Now as for Fallout or Vampire: the Masquerade..THOSE are GREAT games. Graphics doth not a great game make...or something.
I'm still having a blast with Halo 2 on the Xbox. There's so many secrets and tricks that hardly anyone knows about -and some still to discover.
Not kidding. I did a lot of the original theoretical work on it, so I have a rather close perspective of it. It is a very potent technology.
Is Killborn your family name? That is a relativley unusual surname, particularly depending on spelling, with some distinguished members. While revealing the exact spelling used by my ancestors would reveal my identity, I have American super-patriots with distinguished histories in my direct bloodline with variations of that name.
Yes. By figuring out this magical number all of life's mystery will be solved such as "Is there God?", "Where did my socks go/Why are my socks multiplying?", "Who is Keyser Soze?", "Why are they waiting for Godot?", "Why can't liberals ever shut up?", and "Who does Nancy Pelosi's facelifts and how far can it go before she has no skin left?".
Wow, that's awesome! It could lead to a cure to Alzheimer's (sp) or help erase bad memories and preserve the good ones. Also cures for mental illnesses. Maybe even liberalism!
KB is a name I came up with while playing CounterStrike. I have no clue how I deduced that name but it's cool so I kept it for all First Person shooters.
Re: your last name - Are you, by any chance, Leader of the Free World? ;)
Dark Energy = Heaven and Hell. As more people pass on, bigger it gets.
Just a thought, have a good 4th all.
1. What Is the Universe Made Of?
Ideally, chocolate chip cookie dough.
2. What is the Biological Basis of Consciousness?
Insufficient quantities of beer.
3. Why Do Humans Have So Few Genes?
They're very expensive - See GAP for reference.
4. To What Extent Are Genetic Variation and Personal Health Linked?
Closely - See Darwin Awards.
5. Can the Laws of Physics Be Unified?
They already are - we just haven't figured out how just yet.
6. How Much Can Human Life Span Be Extended?
By not drinking, smoking, carousing, eating meat, staying up late, etc. but why bother living such a boring life?
7. What Controls Organ Regeneration?
Aspirin and coffee (I got half that answer from the guy in the desk next to me) ;-)
8. How Can a Skin Cell Become a Nerve Cell?
Apply bunsen burner.
9. How Does a Single Somatic Cell Become a Whole Plant?
Wait a sec - move jerk! a little more ... Uh there. Ask God!
10. How Does Earth's Interior Work?
Down in the middle where its really hot? Ask Satan,
11. Are We Alone in the Universe?
Yes. Wanna go out?
12. How and Where Did Life on Earth Arise?
Everyone was bored until this little amoeba put a lampshade on his head and became the life of the party - its still going on as we speak.
13. What Determines Species Diversity?
They look different.
14. What Genetic Changes Made Us Uniquely Human?
The female can say no.
15. How Are Memories Stored and Retrieved?
Your wife remembers everything for you - even if you don't want to know she'll "retrieve" the memory for you. See nagging for reference. ;-)
16. How Did Cooperative Behavior Evolve?
Its hard to make beer by yourself.
17. How Will Big Pictures Emerge from a Sea of Biological Data?
On a surfboard. See Endless Summer, dude.
18. How Far Can We Push Chemical Self-Assembly?
How should I know? I came assembled. Ask me about toys on Christmas Eve, that I know.
19. What Are the Limits of Conventional Computing?
Just a sec - ah! Depends on your credit limit.
20. Can We Selectively Shut Off Immune Responses?
Yes but don't tell your boss.
21. Do Deeper Principles Underlie Quantum Uncertainty and Nonlocality?
Just a sec ... Uh the answer is "Pass" - I think.
22. Is an Effective HIV Vaccine Feasible?
Who cares?
23. How Hot Will the Greenhouse World Be?
It can't get hotter or more humid than it is here in Florida. No worries. ;-)
24. What Can Replace Cheap Oil -- and When?
So where EXACTLY is this cheap oil? I'll be there tomorrow.
25. Will Malthus Continue to Be Wrong?
Hasn't he always been? What's going to change tomorrow"
Man! That was a snap. Glad I didn't bother to study! ;-)
yeah, sure.
Time to double your prescription.
I notice that your link does not mention Julian Jaynes. A reasonable treatise dealing with what consciousness amounts to has to.
Ignoring the egregious but unsurprising lack of content in your post, the fundamental mathematics surrounding this is an area of expertise, though for reasons unrelated to the questions here. There has been a crazy amount of progress in this area and we've had a really good mathematical description for almost five years now. Anyone who has half a clue about the fundamental theoretical research in this area would know about this, and there has been a heated race to flesh out the details in implementation.
There are already real companies that can prove a solution in implementation in a very impressive fashion. One does not need be a member of the Silicon Valley venture community to know that such a thing is at least plausible. It is guaranteed to make this next boom cycle very interesting.
But whatever. It is no fun arguing with the patently clueless.
In addition, your original post is long on promise, short on everything else.
What is the Biological Basis of Consciousness?
we've had a really good mathematical description for almost five years now
What is the Biological Basis of Consciousness?
there has been a heated race to flesh out the details in implementation
What is the Biological Basis of Consciousness?
There are already real companies that can prove a solution in implementation in a very impressive fashion.
What is the Biological Basis of Consciousness?
One does not need be a member of the Silicon Valley venture community to know that such a thing is at least plausible.
One only has to think about the question to see it as science reducing knowledge outside its area to something that fits within its limits - and losing meaning in the process.
thanks for your reply.
This is not a different question. The biology can actually be predicted from the mathematics. Or to put it another way, the mathematics predicts that our brains must have consciousness and many other features in rigorous terms.
This is the key point with respect to "what is different this time around?", which is a legitimate question. There was no trying to shoe-horn a bad idea into the mathematics -- throwing random crap at the wall and seeing what sticks. The model was developed from whole mathematical cloth in a series of interesting new proofs and theorems in very fundamental area of mathematics. The mathematics arrived at the biological solution independent of actually having any type of biological model or even being interested in consciousness.
A lot of touted theories have been easily criticised because there was no fundamental reasons behind them that suggested they would work. The entire 20th century of AI research was completely baseless in that no single model was derived from any kind of first principles, and so they were easily attacked as being nothing more than some fellow's intuition.
This one is very different in that it was developed and proven from mathematics and just happen to converge on a really elegant and novel model that is qualitatively different than all prior models. Which is also why there is a sudden lack of disagreement on theoretical bases; it is one thing to argue about differences in intuition, but quite another to suggest that all mathematics is fundamental wrong and this model can be very cleanly derived from fundamental mathematics and nothing else. It also provides really good answers to every open question of relevance regarding the cognitive function of mind and strongly suggests a better description of real biological function than the neurophysiologists and other brain fetishists have provided.
You are imagining Yet Another Ridiculous Theory Of Mind, which you are right to be wary of, but what I am referring to is something very, very different. No one has seen anything like it, and its descriptive powers are uncanny and surprisingly thorough.
Interestingly, in the late 1990s, it was conjectured (and later proven) that intelligence and consciousness revolved around a single esoteric but very important mathematical property that to be expressed in the system. What raised a lot of eyebrows was that in the entire history of AI, no design or model every possessed this property. It made a very good measure by which models could be judged. Furthermore, the theoretical computer science equivalent of this property was a known Very Hard Problem that had never been successfully attacked. In short, it reduced the abstract problem of mind to one of the problem of solving one of the tougher long-unsolved fundamental problems in theoretical computer science. That concrete theoretical engineering problem became the gatekeeper, which suddenly spurred a lot of interest in attacking that old problem.
Solutions to the gatekeeper problem now exist, and I've personally seen implementations validated against the theory. Note that solving that problem makes all sorts of other things possible in computer science that we effectively take for granted are impossible as a practical matter -- it is a lot broader than the topic of intelligence and consciousness. In fact, the initial application probably will not be AI for ventures who hold this technology -- there are lower hanging and very juicy fruit. I happen to know the math and have long been familiar with the Hard Problem in question. Seeing a verifiably functioning implementation is a damn good sell for getting investor dollars.
Hall of Fame Reductionism; Honorable Mention in the Museum of Scientism.
Sorry, gonna have to call bullshit on this one, tortoise. Turing is turning over in his grave for ya; Godel is giggling.
A couple of thoughts: "What is consciousness?" "Are all human experiences completely reducible to equations?"
Give me a strict mathematical refutation. The mathematics in question have been thoroughly peer reviewed. I've reviewed the math myself and it is a straight-forward derivation. It is not prudent to disavow mathematics, even if you do not like the results -- the communists learned that the hard way.
Godel is giggling.
You need to study your mathematics more carefully. Most of Godel's contribution to mathematics (notably the Incompleteness theorem in discussions like this) require specific assumptions to be valid for them to be applicable. Kind of like the Halting Problem, another limitation applied far beyond its mathematical scope by many people. In short, almost all current models (including some models that are quite broken) do not fall under the auspices of Godel because the assumptions Godel required are not valid for modern models of things like consciousness, intelligence, and qualia. Non-axiomatic term logics do that to a lot of classic theorems, which implicitly only have applicability to axiomatic systems.
This was the major failing of Penrose in his theories of AI. He built this elaborate strawman based on axiomatic formalisms and then quite correctly took it apart using Godel et al. Unfortunately for him, no one actually uses models to which his argument could be applied, and he was sharply criticized for it by the mathematics community; I guess he strayed too far from his area of expertise.
Making arguments from theorems with implicit limitations to axiomatic systems is probably one of the two most common flaws when people attempt to attack modern models of consciousness and similar. The other major flaw is being ignorant of the full scope and nature of algorithmic information theory.
A couple of thoughts: "What is consciousness?" "Are all human experiences completely reducible to equations?"
Hrmm... How much computational information theory do you actually know? I'm guessing not a hell of a lot. You clearly have a perspective that can be trivially invalidated with some rather fundamental theorems in mathematics. And the attack on your perspective is more fundamental than the questions you are actually asking.
Here are a couple more thoughts: Is it possible for a person to experience/perceive anything in finite time that does not have a finite description? What is the fundamental mathematical meaning of uncertainty and bias, and what is implied by them? What are the functional properties of a system that is not algorithmically finite?
If you grok the answers to even two of these questions, no sane person would retain your current perspective.
The mathematics in question have been thoroughly peer reviewed.
Link please? Exactly what mathematics are you referring to that answers the question: What is the biological basis of consciousness?
Ahhhh numbah twooooo is asked again .......:o)
LOST OF LAUGHS!!!
Yow. Without getting into specifics, do you believe a Vingean singularity is possible, and if so, likely in the next few decades?
Objection: Compound question.
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