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Wow, I am totally in awe. This is the most incredible example of fluid robotic movement I have ever seen. Sadly they don't say much about how they did it, but I'm still very impressed.
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You should check out the Fravashi in David Zindell's A Requiem for Homo Sapiens trilogy. They teach you how to let go of all systems of thought, and at one point the protagonist points out that this would also imply letting go of the Fravashi philosophy.
Philosophy - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 1 |
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Shooting people is not elegant enough. The real meaning of life is to cause mass carnage with a pair of lightsabers. Shooting people is too messy anyway.
Philosophy - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 0 |
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*Stops time before the bullet hits and exchanges places with Jen*
Philosophy - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 0 |
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The last one-third of Paul Graham's Why Nerds are Unpopular contains some musings on the same topic. And he also points out how earlier societies used to make active use of teenagers, rather than lock them up in a school all day long.
Cognitive Science - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 3 |
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Finally, a wise use of French books.
Philosophy - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 0 |
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In fact, ask adults and even they will acknowledge, that their kids know much more about certain stuff then they themselves.
Deep down I always knew I was "intellectually superior" to most adults when I was 16...And I know many other teenagers just like me.
Amen to that.
But does being stronger in the Force qualify you to be a Jedi Master by default?
Cognitive Science - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 5 |
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Thanks.
Cognitive Science - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 0 |
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In my opinion, the biggest issue here is the network topology. NN training merely adjusts the weights between links, but the pattern of nodes and links needs to be chosen beforehand - unless you're using a less popular variant like cascade correlation, which only generates structures of a particular type anyway.
We're actually born with a huge neural network to begin with. In somewhat more interpretive terms, that means we have a fair bit of a priori knowledge and inbuilt tendencies preinstalled, before we even start training the network.
On top of that, the brain is by no means a standard neural network. We don't have a single set of input nodes, outputs are all over the place, the training mechanism is probably more complex and subtle than our approximations (which are more motivated by mathematics than any fidelity to the actual brain), we have both supervised and unsupervised learning going on (the visual cortex is an example of an unsupervised learning system using self-organizing maps) and there is a certain degree of functional specialization, lots of which can be replicated elsewhere in the event of damage.
Cognitive Science - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 3 |
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Frankly, I don't think even neural networks are flexible enough for more complex AIs. I have a feeling that the entire motivation for neural networks is based on copying superficial(though essential) features of brain structure, and the real action is going on at a higher level of abstraction. It's possible that the neural networks are just a convenient biological substrate.
I have this vision of some medieval alchemists magically finding a functioning computer, and trying to figure out how it works. By looking inside, they figure out that the stuff which does all the important stuff is made of silicon. And then they begin exploring the properties of silicon and its compounds, figuring that the 'magic' of computation is in the material. But it's not the material that matters - it's the configurations and interactions that are the truly significant features. I think the same thing might be happening with NNs, just bumped up several levels of abstraction.
By thinking that neural networks will produce intelligence, we might be doing little more than studying the paint on a building to learn architecture.
Cognitive Science - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 1 |
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Hehehe - I don't think it'll be all that hard. But then, a couple of years of practice for algorithm contests tends to change your opinion of 'hard to program'.
Still, it looks like fairly simple stuff, compared to how bad things could be.
Cognitive Science - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 1 |
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You could use an NN too, but it would probably take a lot longer to train. And we don't really have billion-node NNs, though we certainly need to, if we're trying to mimic the brain.
I remember reading in some paper that they have versions of SVMs that do online training, so they can go on training as they run. That's the essence of adapting to noise, anyway. I've never seen an experimental comparison between SVMs and NNs, so I'll reserve judgment on which one is more flexible for now.
Incidentally, it might not really matter as far as machine learning goes - Wolpert's No Free Lunch theorems point out that there will be things at which NNs suck, and even do worse than randomly choosing a classification. Ditto for SVMs. Over all possible inputs, all machine learning algorithms have the same average performance. Scary, what?
But don't believe all I say about it. The paper on that was densely mathematical, and I was jet lagged when I started reading it, and then I gave up and went to sleep. I'm not sure I remember it correctly, so take it with a pinch of salt. Besides, whenever someone says something about No Free Lunch, Wolpert turns up and denounces them for being idiots who don't understand it. For all I know, I'm one of those idiots who doesn't get it.
Cognitive Science - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 2 |
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Well, it's officially 7th June where I am now. Happy Birthday Yue!
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Yep, that's it.
Cognitive Science - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 1 |
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How to know if someone is an enlightened being: try to make them angry.
Reminds me of the Amtal Rule in Dune: "To know a thing well, know its limits. Only when pushed beyond its tolerances will true nature be seen."
I'm inclined to look upon this philosophy favorably, but I don't take a mystical view of these things. As far as I'm concerned, it's a very useful form of mental discipline. And I'm certainly not going to drag economics into the mix.
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Actually, it should be a simple matte rof using an evolutionary algorythm to figure out which sub-sonic sounds correspond to phonemes, and then running that through a text to speech processor.
You don't even need that. This was done back in the eighties with a neural net. You don't even need to appeal to evolutionary algorithms, though I suppose you could.
Cognitive Science - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 2 |
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Well if we are talking about the worst case of incongruity between the Book and the Movie I definately have to nominate Starship Trropers.
I second that. I read the book long after I saw the movie, and I was struck by how much better it was. The film was mostly just a big fat excuse to depict humans and bugs killing each other.
Movies and Film - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 3 |
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Took me a while to remember what that project was called. Here it is: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NETtalk_(artificial_neural_network)
Cognitive Science - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 1 |
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Isn't that for reading, not understanding?
I thought you only wanted the neural net to read stuff out to you. Natural language understanding is a much bigger problem (we barely know how we understand language ), and using neural nets for it is extremely uncommon. I've seen a fair bit of stuff with support vector machines, and something called maximum entropy learning, but neural nets are few and far between in this field. There's a great deal of knowledge that a system needs before it can even come close to faking an understanding of language, let alone do the real thing.
My own personal take on this is that neural nets are far too simple for this sort of thing. The biggest ones have only a few hundred nodes, which probably isn't enough. And there's the issue of memory which is slightly iffy when it comes to neural nets, but will be extremely essential to any automated attempt to understand language.
Cognitive Science - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 3 |
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Movies and Film - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 1 |
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Sorry, I didn't mean natural language processing. We can use a specialized command vocabulary and wikipedia for performing the searches. I was talking about interpreting the command vocabularies from the movements of the larynx.
This could probably be done, though I'd back support vector machines over NNs for this.
Cognitive Science - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 1 |
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I haven't really looked into them in any detail (I probably should - odds are I'll have to use one sooner or later) but I'll give you a sort of vague idea.
Machine learning is usually modeled in terms of classification problems. You have a lot of data, and each data point can be placed in one of several classes. So in this context, you train your learner (the SVM) by giving it a bunch of points along with the classes into which they fall. That's just normal supervised learning - it learns by looking at examples with the answers provided. Once it has enough training, it will be able to classify new data points you give it.
Now, each data point represents an instance of the problem you're solving. You model the problem by picking features that the learner will use. You encode each feature as a number, so a problem with n features will have instances represented by a set of n points. You can actually plot these points in an n-dimensional feature space. It's just like those little graphs you have to draw in school, except you can't really visualize things once you cross n = 3.
Suppose you only have two classes. Classification is really just a matter of drawing a line which has all the class 1 points on one side, and the class 2 points on the other. Except you're now in n dimensions, so it's really a hyperplane instead of a line. Think of it in the simpler case of n = 2 - you have your normal X and Y axes, and there are some points clumped in the upper left side of the 1st quadrant (class 1), and others clumped in the lower right side. Then your classifier is just a line that goes between the two groups, like y=x. One one side you have all the class 1 points, and on the other side are all the class 2 points. If you've chosen your features well, your classifier will work with newer points, in that they will all fall on the appropriate side of the line.
One last issue - the distance between the edges of the two classes (basically the two closest points, one in each class) is called the margin of classification. We want to maximize this margin, in that our classifying line should pass straight through the center of the space between the two classes. That way if you have a bit of noise that moves something from one class closer to the other, the chances of it being misclassified are reduced. This wouldn't be the case if you chose a classifier that was practically sticking to class 1, since a slight bit of noise would toss it over the line, and get a wrong classification.
The 'support vectors' are basically the hyperplanes that define the borders of the classes. The margin is equal to the distance between them.
And that's basically what SVMs do. They're very good, and they can handle literally millions of features, which makes them very handy for natural language, which is a pretty complex beast. A neural network that could handle a million features would be HUGE, take forever to train, and be extremely slow to run on top of that. An SVM is basically one little equation, and you just plug your instance into that, and you'll get an answer. Much faster to run, eh?
Cognitive Science - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 3 |
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Er, I'm not sure if that was remotely close to 'layman's terms', but since this is Ati we're talking about, it should be fine.
Cognitive Science - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 3 |
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That terrible version of Dune they made in 1984. That really sucked.
Movies and Film - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 5 |
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I like French because you can just say stuff like "Ble-ay-uh" in a throaty voice, and it goes with the sound of it all.
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Um, Poss - that link is about taking derivatives of inverse functions. Not quite the same thing.
Mathematics - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 1 |
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There's a great deal of research on it, but the current fad in the field is unsupervised statistical methods with very shallow language modeling, so that's what most of the work these days focuses on. I don't think there's anything out there that has the level of sophistication that this system would need. Miles to go before we sleep and all that...
There are a bunch of pattern matching systems that would work for some types of questions, but they're usually pretty specialized, in that they're specific to certain domains. Nothing particularly general out there.
I think what we need for this is some kind of knowledge representation architecture that can easily be queried. If the Semantic Web works out, we'll be able to query the underlying ontologies (hopefully ) and see a fair bit of improvement. Mind you, that means people have to describe their content using the ontology languages the SW community has developed, and that's not going to be easy - and very likely most people won't bother. We'll probably need high levels of natural language processing to automate this process, in which case it turns into a vicious circle.
Cognitive Science - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 3 |
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How about the pronunciations? Anyone who isn't American is used to laughing at the way they pronounce everything wrong. I've had some very stimulating and amusing conversations with labmates where I get them to try and pronounce sounds which don't exist in English (or they do when you speak, but native speakers can't distinguish them). Most of the time, it's no use because they can't hear the difference from whichever phoneme is close enough in their native tongue.
I've got a lot of material to use on them, since Hindi/Urdu has aspirated and unaspirated versions of most consonants, which is known to be the biggest stumbling block for people learning the language. Unless they're children, of course.
They tried to turn the tables on me with the Spanish 'r' and 'rr', but I left them in the dust by hitting them both perfectly.
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My Chinese friends are the only people who effectively turn the tables on me, by making what sounds to me like the same sound five times and pointing out that the tones are all different. Needless to say, in Chinese, the meanings are also different.
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Meh, in the worst case, Chuck could just wait until the slinky rusts or something. Remember - this is the man who counted to infinity.
Twice.
Epic Hero Battles! - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 1 |
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I just watched this Bollywood movie called Boom. Fucking weird. The writer was almost certainly high when he wrote the screenplay.
Entheogens - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 1 |
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Hey, guess what I found!
It's a bottle of that Ol' Janx Spirit!
*Brings out the glasses, and starts pouring*
Books/Reading - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 1 |
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Well, far be it from to defend an opponent of Chuck Norris, but anyone who could put up even a token fight with him is certainly not going to be stopped by the sudden negation of their reason for existence.
Chuck has standards, after all.
Epic Hero Battles! - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 3 |
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I was once on a bus with a friend of mine, back in India, when he suddenly got a call on his cellphone. It's rather interesting that Indian cellphone providers call up people on other cellphone networks and try to convince them to switch.
So anyway, he gets the call, and it's a long boring bus ride, so he decided to have some fun. He started inquiring into every aspect of the service he could think of. Then he spent 10 minutes asking why he couldn't get a discount on top of the discount that they were already offering. After that he actually decided to haggle over the text message rate, which left the guy totally dazed, since he probably never ran into someone who thought that was negotiable.
And after doing this for half an hour, he finally said "Well, my stop is coming up. It was nice chatting with you. Thanks for helping me pass the time."
I think the telemarketer nearly lost consciousness.
Maybe you should do something weird like that. Better still, why don't you try to sell her something? Or get really outrageous. Tell her that you're only willing to deal with her company if they can discreetly dispose of the bodies buried in your backyard. Ask for a controlling interest in the company, or tell them to pay you $100000 if they want you to consider dealing with them. Say it's a one-time transaction service fee or some such thing.
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Like this. RRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR!
The Russian R is fun too, but not particularly subtle. It's the French R that takes the prize for that.
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satelight phone
Is this some special kind of phone that flashes a light when you're sated?
It's fun to be a spelling Nazi.
Cognitive Science - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 3 |
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Against Chuck Norris, there's no such thing as a fair fight.
Epic Hero Battles! - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 1 |
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Use Eddie Izzard's idea of forcibly getting all those useless French sentences they teach you in school into a normal conversation.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x1sQkEfAdfY
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Or ask her if they can outsource this call to India.
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The issue that's bothering me is that there is usually an unbounded element in most models of computation, like registers of infinite capacity, or an infinitely long tape on a Turing machine. These aren't assumptions that are physically realizable, but in practice you're hardly likely to go beyond some very very large bound, and you can work around it. I'm not entirely certain how this will interact with an extra bit. Like I said before, it won't be able to do anything that the previous system couldn't - it's merely a question of how fast it does it, and what resources it uses. Fundamentally, all sufficiently powerful computers are identical in terms of what they can do. It's just a question of how easy it is to do some things as opposed to other ones. Consequently, I don't know exactly how an extra bit will affect things.
I'm being shamelessly theoretical here, which probably explains why we're talking past each other. Computation can be done in some astonishingly weird ways, so I'm not talking through my hat when I say that there may be a kernel of truth to Ati's statement. What's got me right now is that computability theory is quite unconcerned about the implementation of the fundamental operations that drive their model, and this extra bit might do weird things there. I don't even know if I'm looking at this the right way yet, mostly because I'm not a computability theorist, just someone with a graduate course on it beneath his belt.
There are ways to do computation with just a pair of stacks. There's another one where the entire state of the system is just one single number, and the programs are a bunch of rules that transform the number based on multiplication, division, and finding remainders. These aren't just toy models - they're as powerful as the laptop I'm writing this on. There are dozens of equally weird models, and I can't intuitively say anything about the power of one bit, especially because of the theoretical-practical divide. On top of that, this is quantum computation, which is a very weird beast indeed. Turing-equivalence is remarkably easy - in fact, it's often said that it's difficult to build a computing system that isn't Turing-equivalent.
In summary, you really need to be careful about judging the impact of adding one bit. It isn't wise to dismiss the impact as trivial. And since the term 'power' hasn't been defined, you cannot at all be certain if some performance attribute isn't being doubled, or at least significantly increased. In some context, that particular attribute might actually be a good measurement of power, in some sense.
As for the orgasm inducers, do you mean the blonde, or the two brunettes? Or perhaps the feisty redhead?
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You have 5 GB of RAM?! I'm jealous!
*Puts P0ss's name on list of people to assassinate*
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Dammit Poss, I'm still used to the old spelling of your handle!
Well, there's another reason to assassinate you.
*Starts cleaning the sniper rifle, whistling...*
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Yeah, I know what you're talking about - those are cases. We have them in Hindi and Urdu too. I didn't even know we did until my advisor (who has a degree in linguistics) happened to tell me.
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As for the 5Gb, its actually 2GB most of the time, but vista lets you turn any thumbdrive or ram ipod into extra system ram. Very handy.
Oh, is that all? Right, you're safe...for now.
I thought you had one of those 5 GB Macs or something. On the other hand, since Fibs complains about the computer so much (I'm assuming it's the same one), I should have realized that it had to be a Windows box.
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W00t - this looks really nice. Especially that part where some Jedi is jumping from one flying vehicle to another and kicking ass. This is the sort of crazy stuff that only Jedi can do with style.
Anybody know where I can watch the original Tartakovsky series? I remember that it was out about a year and a half ago in India (at least), but I didn't get around to seeing it then.
Star Wars Lovers - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 0 |
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@QuantumBeep:
Hehe, no problem.
@Zenmonk:
Here you go.
*Passes the redhead*
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It's an interesting idea, but it would need some pretty nifty natural language processing to do knowledge extraction of the sophistication that you're mentioning.
I'm still working on that.
Cognitive Science - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 4 |
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Wouldn't you need extended exposure and a strong lense to achieve the kind of results they were achieving in their photographs?
It doesn't matter. The pictures were taken in the daytime. Stars are just as invisible during the day on the Moon as they are on Earth.
Photography - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 3 |
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Frankly, I don't have enough faith in my government to be able to pull off something like that.
Photography - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 3 |
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Well, if you were a native speaker of French, you'd just feel that cars are female. That's how it works in my head when I speak Hindi or Urdu, which also have gendered nouns. It's probably just a result of hearing people refer to it in a certain way so much that it becomes natural.
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My favorite part is when he explains that the major problem with time travel isn't altering history or killing your grandfather, or some such thing. It's getting your tenses right.
Books/Reading - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 2 |
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You assume a linear progression. Certainly, on silicon processors or their equivalents, something substiantially larger than the universe is requires to simulate it, but non-linear systems are another story all together. Quantum computers double in power with every Quibit added, so it would take a QC substantially smaller than the observable universe to simulate it on scales substantially faster than real time.
Crap, I remembered it all wrong. I went back and looked it up, and what he said was that a simulation of the universe on a quantum computer is indistinguishable from the universe itself. Apparently he was trying to make a more subtle point, in that the universe itself is doing quantum computation, and the two computations are identical.
Ati: "Quantum computers double in power with every Quibit added"
Zenmonk: That's astounding! Citation please?
Er, you don't need a citation for that. Normal computers also double in power if you add another bit. A binary number with n bits can store numbers in a range of size 2^n. (n+1) bits makes it 2^(n+1), which is twice as big.
But Ati's statement is still a little too broad, in that he doesn't mention what power means in this context. If you're talking about how much more information you can manipulate, then you can say that adding a bit doubles your power, but I strongly suspect that this depends on the model of computation being used.
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Maybe this is just a Windows-specific problem. I'm running FF 2 on Ubuntu Linux, and at the moment it's only taking about 75 MB of RAM. I do remember that it feels pretty bloated on Windows, though.
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Or maybe Windows has useless memory management algorithms. Given the amount of backwards compatibility and legacy code they have in there, I wouldn't be surprised.
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Wait... no, normal computers don't "double in power" (a notably indistict term) with every bit added. Adding a bit to a data channel simply doubles the possible permutations of a single clocked data transfer.
Precisely my point - 'power' here is a pretty broad term. However, there are highly stripped-down models of computation that are Turing-complete, and I suspect one of them might double its speed or storage, or something, if you increase one bit somewhere.
In any event, as long as it's Turing-complete, it's only a question of speed or efficiency - all Turing-equivalent computational systems can do the same thing - it's only a question of how fast they do them. So as far as computational strength goes, increasing one bit doesn't affect it at all.
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As long as it doesn't offend Chuck Norris, we don't need to worry about offending anyone else.
Epic Hero Battles! - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 1 |
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Meh, who needs all these tools and things? If you only knew the power of the Dark Side...
Military Strategies and War - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 0 |
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Yeah, plus you could just push them around, or fling heavy objects at them. In a city full of zombies, property damage is the least of your worries.
Military Strategies and War - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 0 |
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Yeah! And you can probably make some money by broadcasting a live feed of your stylish takedowns to parts of the world that are zombie free.
Adding a lightsaber will probably triple your viewers, but it'll pale after a while, since you'll just be slaughtering a bunch of mostly slow-moving creatures who don't even shoot you with blasters so you could fry them with their own deflected bolts.
Military Strategies and War - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 2 |
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@CamouflageNoise:
I think it's mostly a matter of style, though they do have differences like the Latino use of vos instead of tu, which is nonexistent in European Spanish. That's all I remember off the top of my head.
I just found this, though: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_dialects_and_varieties#Conjugation_of_the_second_person
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Well, if you did figure out how to model quantum 'randomness' (which is by no means impossible) then I see no reason why we couldn't build Laplace demon given a powerful enough quantum computer.
As I recall, the only way to actually build Laplace's Demon is to build the universe itself. In other words, you can predict what will happen in the universe by building an identical one and running it.
I haven't fully assimilated Seth Lloyd's Programming the Universe(that's where I got this idea from) yet, but I like this idea. It would be interesting if the universe were a computational system that cannot be perfectly emulated faster or with fewer resources on any substrate. This has overtones of some kind of 'ground state', or a line of least resistance, or some such thing. Still, I don't know enough QM, so I'm just working on aesthetic principles and computer science intuition.
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Also, there was that funky massively-multiplayer-telepathic woman from Gaia, who may or may not have been a robot.
As I recall, in Foundation and Earth, Daneel confirms that the Gaians aren't robots, but their minds are heavily influenced by the Laws of Robotics.
The other thing I liked was when Bliss points out that if she happens to be a robot that is indistinguishable from a human in all particulars, and is programmed to believe that she is human, then she is essentially human. Something about the semi-audacious quality of that statement appeals to me.
And of course, there were Salvor Hardin's amazing one-liners, like "Never let your sense of morality prevent you from doing what is right!"
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What does it do? Anything novel enough to merit a mention?
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I've always wondered exactly what one's will is supposed to be free from.
I think the concept of free will originates from a subconscious opposition to the idea that we are just very advanced machines. And that opposition is most likely a result of cultural convictions rooted in some sort of mystical worldview, mixed with normal human chauvinism.
File me in the spiritual realm, because I cannot believe that mind and free will through a single choice cannot alter the future.
But your choice is also a result of physical processes taking place in your brain. It isn't some extraphysical thing that influences the universe from outside. And I think it's a bad idea to think about how choice changes the future. The future doesn't exist yet, by definition. Certainly our choices have an impact on the future, insofar as they're part of the computation (if you want to look at it that way) that creates it.
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Count me in too. And now excuse me while I have a Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster.
Books/Reading - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 3 |
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Er, I think you mean "Hear hear".
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They're different enough to qualify as separate dialects. Hell, sometimes they even speak English with different accents.
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Great series though . I particularly love God's Final Message to his Creation.
"We apologize for the inconvenience."
I suspect that message is the only true act of divinely inspired prophecy in human history. Makes a lot more sense than all the other alleged prophecies. And Douglas Adams was funnier than all the prophets who ever lived put together.
Books/Reading - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 3 |
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Well, I'm generalizing based on what I know of my advisor's accent (authentic Spanish) and a girl in my lab (Cuban Spanish). She also says that his speech patterns are rather classical sounding. We don't know if that's because he's a classical sort of person, or that's just the sort of Spanish that older Spaniards use.
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Hehe, good choice.
Q: When Jesus and Buddha fight, who wins?
A: Chuck Norris!
Epic Hero Battles! - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 2 |
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I grew up surrounded by family who spoke Urdu and English with equal facility, so I can do that, though my Urdu skills have atrophied a fair bit from disuse.
I had to learn Hindi and Marathi in school (yeah, we had to do a second and a third language ). Hindi wasn't a problem, since the language is virtually identical to Urdu, just with another script and a different source of fancy words. I can sort of vaguely read Urdu, but at a snail's pace, and I usually get stuck because of the ridiculous calligraphic Persian script. Obviously, writing it is totally out of the question for me.
So we have the weird situation where I can barely read Urdu while I can read Hindi with no difficulty at all, but when I speak I use the more posh pronunciation patterns of Urdu rather than Hindi. To confuse matters even further, my more cerebral terms are much more likely to come from Sanskrit, since that's where the Hindi fancy words originate. Fancy Urdu is based on Persian and Arabic roots, and I know little more than the bare minimum of that aspect of the language. It's a pity - on the whole they sound much cooler than their Hindi equivalents.
Er, I can also read Arabic, if you put the vowels in, which is never done in actual usage, so that's kinda pointless. And I can just read the script, I don't really know the language, which is a total pain anyway.
I know enough Marathi to get most things done, and three of my roommates are native speakers of it to boot, so I hear a lot of that. Plus I grew up in Bombay, so I've had 22 years of total immersion in it already.
I taught myself a fair bit of Spanish when I was 16 or so, off the internet. I'm thinking of starting again, since I live in Florida, and Spanish speakers are everywhere.
At one point I knew quite a bit of Vulcan and High Elvish (Quenya, for you LOTR fans). Shamefully, I now remember almost nothing of those two languages.
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Whoa, this is amazing! I actually turned my head when the door slammed.
Virtual/Augmented Reality - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 1 |
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Ah, I remember the days when I was first reading the Foundation novels. Those were some pretty cool books. So much so that when I first saw Coruscant in Star Wars, I thought "Hey, that's just like Trantor!"
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You guys are never going to believe this, but I independantly arrived at the 'many universes' interpretation of quantum mechanics when I was 8.
I did this too, except I was 11. Then I read about it somewhere and I was like "HEY! That's my bloody idea!" Not that I had more than a qualitative understanding of QM, but it was just a cool idea.
In general, this sort of thing happens fairly often - far more frequently than we expect. I didn't realize just how common it was until I was trying to find a topic for the final paper in my Natural Language Processing course last semester. I just kept on generating ideas, and every single one of them had been done before - even the bad ones.
There's a friend of mine trying to find a dissertation topic, and he has the same issues. It feels like every smart idea you have was someone else's brainwave years ago.
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Noooooo, I missed Fibs' birthday!
Well, happy birthday anyway, o most recursively enumerable one.
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Lets look at a completely different example: the double slit experiment. Individual photons fired at a screen with two slits in it, you know the rest.... For the first photon fired, there is equal probability that it will go through the left or right slit. Overall, the distribution of photons is more or less even, but as more photons go through the left slit, the probability rises that the next photon will go through the right slit, but the photons don't always take the most probable course, demonstrating randomness. Do the photons have free will?
Er, if you don't have a detector set up at one of the slits (i.e., you're only making your measurement after the photons have passed through, like on a photographic plate on the other side), then every photon will go through both slits at the same time.
Yeah, I know it's weird, but it's quantum mechanics. I'm pretty certain that's right, though my days as a physics geek are over.
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JAVA is really poor at maths
Eh? Why?
Java Programming - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 0 |
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*Redirects J3nnif3r's stab towards Ati, and somersaults away to a safe distance using Force Speed*
BOOM!
Philosophy - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 0 |
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*Blocks the bullet using the power of the Force, then pulls the pistol away*
You underestimate the power of the dark side.
Philosophy - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 0 |
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*Absorbs Force Lightning and redirects it back at Ati*
@Poss:
I'm a Gray Jedi.
Philosophy - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 0 |
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Ah, so you must have special needs then?
Philosophy - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 0 |
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Ack, my spelling in that last post is apalling.
Ati, have you been taking irony lessons?
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Er, I think you guys have gotten rather mixed up. You've even gotten the definitions turned around.
First off, there's a premise that's common to both of them, namely: A --> B (A logically implies B).
Now modus ponens says, if A is true, then so is B.
Modus tollens says, if B is false, then A must be false too.
This just comes naturally out of the equivalent form of the premise: ~A V B (Not A or B)
PS: Crap, I can't get the LaTeX to render properly, so I'll have to inflict silly looking ASCII logical notation on you guys.
Modus Tollens is what we usually call proof by contradiction.
Epic Hero Battles! - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 1 |
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I don't see how it leaves the door open to other things. Modus Tollens usually turns up in the common scientific activity of trying to disprove a hypothesis, where you basically throw everything you can at it and see if it breaks. Essentially you say, hypothesis X predicts that Y will happen under so-and-so conditions. I set up those conditions and Y didn't happen. Therefore X is false.
end up with much more interesting proofs that possibly lead to bigger discoveries. Correct me if im wrong, but for something to be true it must fully be in agreement with the preceding point, thus it is more difficult to find something to be true as a result of point 'a'. Now, something can be considered false if it only minutely includes the point made in 'a'.
You're right about this part, if I'm interpreting you correctly. In the real world, it's a lot easier to disprove things than prove them. Using modus ponens is difficult (outside of mathematics), because there is always the chance of some extraneous condition being the causal factor, rather than whatever you're trying to prove.
I'll have to think about this a bit, because when you're trying to prove a hypothesis, you really want to prove the implication A --> B. Both modus ponens and tollens start with A --> B, and make statements about A or B, given the truth-value of B or A respectively. In an experiment, you're aiming to verify the implication, so you're only using MP and MT as a sort of behavioral characterization of logical implication. They're not being used as rules of inference, which is their intended purpose.
Epic Hero Battles! - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 1 |
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Of course, we do use proof by contradiction a lot in mathematics itself. There is, however, an interesting movement called intuitionistic logic which denies the validity of proof by contradiction, and declares that only constructive proofs (modus ponens) should be used in mathematics.
Epic Hero Battles! - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 0 |
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and just think, we are also very unlucky to not be supergeniuses or people who have sex with anyone they want to, because they can
Speak for yourself, Rath.
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Epic Hero Battles! - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 0 |
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*Wanders away, whistling carelessly...*
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Nah, it's actually a special style of lightsaber combat.
Epic Hero Battles! - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 0 |
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I just drown myself in work.
Well, that's not too precise - I don't work much harder than before. It's mostly that I use the work as a way to not think about whatever it was that caused the dung-beetle feeling. This is usually punctuated with short periods of brooding. I typically only need about two or three of these before I've moved on.
Of course, I've never been dumped, so perhaps I don't know what it feels like to be depressed.
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Oh wonderful - turns out embedding is disabled.
Mathematics - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 0 |
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Rob - that's uncanny! The exact same thing happened to me last night!
Nocturnals - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 2 |
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I've read the Wired article that claims geeks have high functioning forms of Asperger's - they base this on the fact that the number of autistic children is pretty high in the Silicon Valley area. From that they come to the conclusion that the place is full of mild autistics who don't have too much trouble with everyday life. But when they start marrying each other, their children wind up with two sets of weird genes, producing full-blown autism instead.
I don't know if that last conclusion is totally warranted, but I read the article a long time ago, so I don't remember all that well.
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This discussion is not progressing, but I can live with your thinking that abortion, except under exceptional circumstances, is immoral, as long as it remains legally available. Whomever thinks that it's immoral doesn't have avail herself of the option.
I think the major problem here is that the anti-abortion bunch don't want it to be legally available. In their eyes, it's like legalizing murder.
In fact, I have the impression that the real hardliners that are religiously motivated seem to adhere to the simplistic view that the availability of abortion encourages sexual immorality and debauchery, and so they don't want it available to their children. For them it's all about avoiding temptation.
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Btw, I was interested in knowing how it sounded to someone without any mathematical background, and I finally found a friend of mine who checked it out. He said "it was just geek jargon", and tuned out the moment they said the word 'finite'.
Mathematics - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 1 |
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Rob, what kind of forgiving deity are you, man?! Your public wants to see some good old fashioned smiting!
@Jawad:
Looks like you guys have been keeping yourselves busy. Nice.
Suggest Shuzak! - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 2 |
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The fetus is quite irrelevant to the argument. The bottom line is that the only way to produce a child involves a female body, over which that particular female has absolute rights. If she doesn't want to use her body for growing a baby (with all the extreme inconvenience that entails) then nobody has the right to stand in her way.
When we have the technology to mimic the womb artificially, we can extract unwanted embryos and let them grow without female involvement, in which case your adoption idea is fine. Presumably you'd have volunteers who'd be willing to care for those kids too, until they were adopted. But we don't have that technology yet, and so I fail to see the point of forcing a woman to endure the danger, pain, and inconvenience of going through an unwanted pregnancy.
I strongly fear that anti-abortion arguments are derived from some archaic notion of souls, centering around the idea that the souls of the aborted fetuses have lost their chance to have a life. But as far as we know, none of us have these full-grown 'ghosts in the machine' in us, so the fetus isn't losing anything, because this soul/self/person/whatever who is being deprived of life doesn't exist at the time of abortion.
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Wow, I've never been compared to Walter Raleigh before. I suppose it helps that I have a semi-English accent.
I can be rather courteous if I try - though I often don't. Like Ati, I tend to miss a whole bunch of non-verbal cues, but more often than not it's because I'm not really paying attention. If I actively concentrate, I can figure out loads of stuff.
I'm a bit of a spelling and grammar nazi, and my vocabulary is fairly large.
And for some strange reason, I need to stare off into space when I talk. Apparently my visual system is involved in speech formation, because the habit is totally unconscious. My mom used to pester me about why I didn't look straight at people when I spoke to them, so I fixed that by looking at them and defocusing my eyes a bit. I still forget this on a regular basis, so that dents the illusion of politeness a bit.
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I think this is it. I was laughing like crazy throughout the whole thing - it's amazing!
Mathematics - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 0 |
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Might as well embed it here.
Mathematics - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 1 |
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Actually, my mom once worried about why I didn't make eye contact - she thought there might have been self-esteem issues or something. I considered that a rather remote possibility, probably because of my unjustifiably high opinion of myself. When I eventually looked into it, I noticed that it felt like I was somehow diverting my attention to looking rather than speaking, and that sometimes had odd effects.
I still don't get just why my eyes are tied up with speaking. It's like my speech centers are routed through my visual cortex or something. Perhaps it has to do with the fact that I started reading English a couple of years before I more or less wound up speaking it all the time. Since I was around four years old when they found out I could read (something I rapidly became obsessive about), it is conceivable that it might have had an impact somehow.
A couple of weeks ago, I had a discussion with a few labmates about weird cognitive abilities, and my strange power to locate spelling mistakes with a single glance (no conscious reading required) turned up. I also have a remarkably strong memory for pieces of text I find interesting, and I've allegedly quoted entire extracts to people almost word-for-word. One possibility we figured out had to do with the fact that my vision started to go bad around the same time, It was discovered that I needed glasses around the age of 5 or so, but who knows how long I hadn't been able to see clearly before that? A kid doesn't realize that he can't see normally - presumably he thinks that it's the normal state of affairs. So the theory was that I wound up reading a lot, because things were much clearer (I'm near-sighted). Add a developing brain to the mix, and voila!
Of course, this might just be total nonsense, and the real explanation could be that my brain wiring is probably weird by accident or long practice or something.
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Well, I grew up in India, and we rarely drag terms like Asperger's and autism and ADHD into normal discourse. Out here in the US people make it sound like it's a major issue for educators.
Like Ati said, self-diagnosis is highly unreliable, so I won't bother to see if I fall into some group of high-functioning autistics.
Still, I wonder sometimes. While I don't have problems with reading emotional cues, I sometimes suddenly realize that I'm in the middle of something that feels like a strangely orchestrated social ritual, which everyone seems to understand instinctively except me. When I was growing up, on several occasions when I was reproached for something I did (or failed to do), I'd yell about how I was never told that so-and-so was wrong, or that I should do such-and-such thing. The usual reaction from other people (usually my parents, for obvious reasons) was one of near-incredulity that I needed to be told something that was so obvious.
For instance, loads of things that people considered common courtesy were things that I neither noticed nor practiced, simply because they seemed like useless noise to me when I was growing up, and I wound up filtering them out. People don't realize how arbitrary and pointless a lot of these things are. But it turns out some people think they're necessary, so I wound up adopting them as I got older. Occasionally the old me surfaces, though.
There's an interesting incident that comes to mind. Years ago, an uncle of mine brought me these two little books - they were basically some dude taking old ideas from Islamic mythology and trying to relate them to the present day. Among other things, he somehow created a religious explanation for UFOs and brought in Gog and Magog, and other ludicrous things.
Being me, I read them both in about an hour, and they completely failed to impress me. My uncle asked me what I thought, and I told him how the guy clearly knew nothing, he was building castles in the air on foundations made of clouds, jumping to conclusions with literally zero evidence, etc, etc, etc. I thought I made my point pretty well, and quite politely, and I didn't even come across as being irreligious (I was only an incipient atheist then).
So you can imagine my confusion when my mom took me aside and gave me a stern speech about how impolite I had been and all that sort of thing. It took me by complete surprise, since I hadn't expected anything like that at all. That particular reaction astonished my mom. She said that I should have noticed the look on my uncle's face while I was talking. Funny - he had looked normal to me, but then I wasn't paying attention.
I can intellectually appreciate why that could have been construed as impolite. It was probably because he went to the trouble of getting me those books. But I'll never forget the astonishment I felt when I realized that people were actually concerned about this fact, which I instinctively considered totally irrelevant. It was seemingly obvious to me that the only important fact was that the author of the books was some kind of village idiot and didn't have the faintest idea about proper reasoning. It was just strange to find that people didn't share that opinion. I was talking about the books, so I couldn't see how I was offending the other people in the conversation, who obviously had nothing to do with it! Different priorities, I guess...
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Thank you Nadeem, that was a refreshing perspective.
Thanks. I was suddenly reminded of Joseph's old argument about why you are you and not someone else. Something about the fundamental meaninglessness of that question seemed related to this issue, and so I brought it up.
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I'm half-joking, but how can we say that the embryo has its own DNA? It steals half from either parent, after all.
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I'd teach them to bear in mind that extraordinary beliefs demand extraordinary evidence.
Walk a day in another person's shoes before you pass judgement.
I agree. That way, when you finally do pass judgment, you're miles away and you have their shoes.
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Hey, now it looks like I replied to P0ss for no reason.
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Artificial Intelligence - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: |
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Whoops, just spotted a minor bug in that code. The last line of checkPerf() should be "return sum == 2*num;"
*Kicks self for not paying attention and writing code on pure instinct*
*Also kicks everyone else for not noticing earlier*
Artificial Intelligence - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 0 |
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Biglew, you're completely blowing this out of proportion. If minor swearing incidents like that were regarded as contract infringement, every social network and forum would have gone down ages ago. This is not what those laws are about, and any hosting company who tried to take a site down for occasional swearing in a debate would be laughed out of business. The bottom line in the long term is a much bigger motivator than a line in a contract that is always open to interpretation.
Gringo is Shuzak's very own angry young man , so expecting him not to lose it once in a while is rather silly. You ought to be allowed to shoot your mouth off once a while in your late teens.
P0ss rarely ever loses it - in that respect he's usually one of the sanest people (sorry P0ss ) around here. So the magnitude of his anger in that post you censored is a pretty clear indicator of very strong feelings about the subject, as well as personal experience. It sounds to me like he was rather annoyed by the combination of that weird climate incident and the tone of smugness (no offense, just calling 'em as I see 'em ) in your somewhat simplistically reasoned posts. My 2 cents - no offense meant again - your posts would have a lot more impact and sound less trivial if they were couched in slightly better english than what you usually use.
There's a little more to the scientific method and life than overly simplistic reasoning. Just a thought.
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Put them in zoos? What the heck is this - the 17th century?
I'll draw the line at genocide (or xenocide, I should say). If they're causing that much trouble, wipe out their military, set them back a few centuries, take away their ability to cause trouble again - but kill the whole bloody lot?! That's insane and a terrible offence against all intelligent life.
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I'm gonna do this quick, because I need to do a bit of brainstorming to make up for my thoroughly wasted day.
You can certainly manage to catch some cases - human programmers do it all the time. It's just that you can never do it in all cases.
*Runs off to think very hard.*
Artificial Intelligence - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 0 |
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*Sits around twiddling thumbs, waiting for Biglew to solve the problem and win the Turing award*
Artificial Intelligence - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 0 |
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P0ss! Get a hold of yourself, man!
*Pours a bucket of hail...er, cold water, on P0ss's head to calm him down.*
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the thing about mathematics is that it works. it actually does describe what we see, and how things work. keep in mind that if we come up with some mathematical principle or theorem that is inconsistent with observation or existing theory, somebody is wrong. period.
Jared - you're describing physics, not mathematics. Physics has to use mathematics that is faithful to reality, but mathematics itself is far wider.
Physics has two constraints - consistency with reality, and internal self-consistency. Mathematics only has to have internal self-consistency. It isn't about reality - it's about all possible self-consistent systems, built up from axioms that may or may not have anything to do with reality.
@Biglew:
What's the big deal about proving 1+1=2?
Okay, there's a minor subtlety there. See, 2 is actually defined as the number that comes after 1, and 1 is defined as the number that comes after 0. 0 itself is axiomatic - it's part of the Peano axioms.
PS: Wikipedia is using Peano's original formulation that starts from 1 - these days we usually do it from 0 instead.
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I absolutely know what you mean when you say that's physics and not mathematics, but I have a personal conviction that mathematics does, on some level, have a natural basis. physics is, as you mentioned, mathematics with constraints.
i like to say that mathematics is the language of nature, and physics is the grammar.
I like this analogy.
I'm still not certain how all mathematics has a natural basis, or even if it should. I did start reading Penrose's new book recently, and he makes an interesting argument there to the effect that mathematical truth does correspond to reality - it's just that you need to expand your definition of 'real' a bit. He seems to have a point there, though I haven't thought about it in much detail yet.
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Doing things in groups of 10 won't make any difference. Amounts to exactly the same thing, really, because you're not making use of any shared subproblems within the group of 10. Consequently, solving them together or separately will not make any difference worth noticing. There isn't any file access involved, and it really makes no difference whether you handle clearing of memory or leave it to the garbage collector.
You'll still never be able to figure out when, if ever, that loop will terminate, because doing so would require you to figure out whether odd perfect numbers exist or not, and we don't know how to do that yet.
Performance isn't the issue here - it's about figuring out whether a program halts or not, which you can't do in the general case.
They've already got nice little classes that do arbitrary precision integer arithmetic - such as BigInteger. Quite a few of them use fairly non-trivial mathematics to optimize their performance too. The reason they're not as fast as normal integer arithmetic is because processors have specialized hardware for managing additions on primitive data types, with a fair degree of parallelism. You can't exploit that sort of parallelism using an arbitrary precision integer class.
Artificial Intelligence - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 0 |
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Even if evolution were true, at most all it can do is concern itself with the progression of matter; it can neither explain the existence of the matter, nor how it became alive
What do you mean 'became alive'?
A very insightful comment I heard a few days ago was that the distinction between 'living' and 'non-living' hasn't been biologically meaningful since the time of Louis Pasteur.
Think about it. What is the difference between living and non-living matter? Living matter is just a bunch of chemicals in a complex equilibrium carrying out various interesting processes, but it's fundamentally no different from non-living matter, as far as we can tell.
It's a little difficult to avoid one's prejudices, but it's an important part of understanding the world. Subjective notions about differences between living and non-living need to be carefully examined before you can use them as premises in an argument.
What Is A Geek? - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 1 |
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I'm very, very short-sighted. Been wearing glasses since I was 5.
Can't even switch to contacts that easily - I barely have any memories that don't involve me wearing glasses.
Spectacles - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 1 |
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@Brilala:
I didn't really believe in aliens until I saw Contact and then read the Carl Sagan novel. It really made me think, and was also the start of me realizing religion was just a pack of lies.
Hehe - I had the same experience with Contact. Hated the movie(probably because I read the book first), but the book is one of my all time favorites.
Maybe Carl Sagan was an alien...or God.
I think it would be incredibly hard not to worship a being that was orders of magnitude more sentient than us. It would be like a potent mix of the stockholm syndrome and unintentional hero worship
I'd certainly be smitten by a being capable of caressing every crevase of my mind.
Yeah, but would it give a damn about your worship? I seriously doubt it.
Unless of course, it needs the worship to maintain power and existence, like the 'small gods' of Terry Pratchett...
Here's a thought: should there be a Turing test for God? How do you determine a VIB (very impressive being) is God, if your only evidence is the being's insistence?
God in what sense? Highly powerful amazingly smart thing, or Creator of the Universe?
I have reservations about the Turing test, primarily because I know a few humans who probably wouldn't pass it.
Okay, more seriously, it's more like a test of deception than true intelligence(whatever the hell that is). How would you ever trust the proof a god-candidate gave you? Anything with that much power should be eminently capable of fooling you in a billion different ways.
I strongly suspect that it is impossible to come up with a convincing proof that such-and-such entity is God, under any circumstances. Anything that gets powerful enough could fake being God without actually being the real deal.
Of course, if you're immensely powerful and wise ourselves, it becomes marginally easier to judge, since you're perhaps less easy to fool. On the other hand, it might just be the other way around, since your expanded mind could probably be fooled by an even more powerful being in ways that a human mind couldn't even comprehend.
In any event, I think I'll go off and achieve godhood and see if that answers the question.
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However, don't hesitate to say them in a profound tone of voice.
Social Sciences - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 1 |
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Hehe - I've been repeatedly told that I have great eyes, if only I'd take my glasses off.
Nadeem's 1st law: For every person on Shuzak with a random attribute, there exists another person on Shuzak with an equal and opposite attribute.
Spectacles - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 0 |
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Well, in the words of Salvor Hardin from the Foundation saga, "Nothing has to be true, but everything should look true."
Or something like that.
Social Sciences - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 0 |
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Ah yes, there's one more useful skill.
Always twist people's words.
Social Sciences - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 0 |
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Depends on what language you're doing strings in - Java strings are notoriously slow, especially at stuff like concatenation, because they're immutable.
Besides, if you want to memoize a function with a string input, you need to use a map, which can get kinda slow at times. On the other hand, you can just use the corresponding number as an index into an array. That's a HUGE optimization - gives you constant-time access instead of logarithmic at best for the string version.
Programmers - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 0 |
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definately not an infinite loop and by the way i would use last number stored in a global variable at the end of the loop and let the computer do 10 at a time, for this i would use a for loop which is much more controllable and simply operate on a set of rules for processing from the last number onwards, this would save on file access and would ensure no crashes on the pc as using a for loop you would be able to clear memory addresses at the end of the loop. btw that code is gibberish and would never compile
Eh? Of course it wouldn't compile - it's pseudocode.
The principle is sound, however. Checking if something is a perfect number is fairly easy - just factorize it, sum up the factors, and see if you get the number again.
Let's see how this works out, shall we?
[code=cpp]
boolean checkPerf(int num)
{
int sum = 0;
for(int i = 1; i*i <= num; i++)
if(num % i == 0)
sum += i + (i*i == num ? 0 : (num/i));
return sum == num;
}
boolean detectThis()
{
for(int i = 3; ; i+=2)
if(checkPerf(i))
return true;
return false;
}[/code]
Er, forgive the concision - I'm a programming contest veteran after all.
Right - so assuming arbitrary length integers(which can always be implemented - witness Java's BigInteger library), how are you going to figure out if detectThis() will ever terminate?
Figuring it out would involve figuring out whether odd prime numbers exist or not, something which human mathematicians have been unable to figure out so far. And even if they do figure it out, how are you going to get a computer to do this? There are an infinite number of such problems.
As I've mentioned before, it is impossible to write a general program that you can use to figure out if a given program is going to halt on a given input. I'm not using impossible as a subjective judgment here - this is the Halting Problem, and it is provably uncomputable. It doesn't matter what you do, you'll never be able to write something that will cover all possible cases.
The best you can get is a semi-decision procedure, which in this case means that you just run the program and wait. If it halts, then it halts and you know that the program won't go into an infinite loop. If it doesn't, then you don't know anything, because it might be on the verge of halting, or it might take a million years to finish, or it might never stop at all.
Of course, this is a real computer, so it'll only have a finite amount of memory, which means it's gotta stop(by crashing) at some point. But in general, this could take an arbitrary amount of time.
Btw, I'd like to see the code you were gonna use to solve this, so see if you can get the post to show up.
Artificial Intelligence - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 0 |
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Yeah. I guess someone's gotta get it right, or society would be so screwed.
Programmers - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 0 |
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Wow - this is amazing: Wikipedia's article on the Halting Problem uses the same problem I picked out - existence of odd perfect numbers!
I guess the guy who wrote the article just opened up wikipedia's list of unsolved math problems and picked one which was fairly simple and yet managed to illustrate the point - which was what I did.
Artificial Intelligence - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 0 |
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Er, this doesn't have a list of special moves or any such thing - the idea is to learn patterns that frequently occur and see how to use them to evaluate the board state. What that amounts to is that you can pick moves that give you a better chance of long-term rewards - victory, in this case.
I'm surprised that you say learning is very difficult to do for anything other than string manipulation - machine learning is a fairly big field. For instance, the world's best backgammon player is a machine, not a human, and all it did to learn was play against itself all day. When they added in a few features that backgammon players usually look at, it got so good that it invented strategies that hadn't been seen before, and that have since become standard.
Rule-based AI is old and out of fashion at the moment. Writing down your own rules will just drive you nuts. The only kind that are really being researched seriously these days are systems that learn rules and strategies on their own with minimal human intervention.
Artificial Intelligence - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 1 |
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Religious people are dumber?
Well, sometimes it feels like that , but I'd be a little wary of making sweeping statements about people's intelligence like that, primarily because it's such a multidimensional thing. IQ tests are a pretty simplistic way to measure intelligence. (And no, I don't score badly on them - overwhelmingly the opposite situation, in fact . So it's not some kind of personal vendetta or anything.)
If I'm not mistaken, there is an established correlation between education and atheism - apparently atheists tend to be concentrated near the upper end of the spectrum there, as well as in the hard sciences.
Maybe college is Satan's playground or something.
What Is A Geek? - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 2 |
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I've never encountered them carrying out their usual shenanigans at the door, though I wish I had, so I could say "Sorry, would you mind coming back in about an hour - we've got this little ceremony going, we've just got the virgins ready, and we don't want the pentagram drawn in blood to dry before we start..."
Religious Theory - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 2 |
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W00t - this Ignosticism stuff is exactly what I've said dozens of times on various forums, not just Shuzak. I've often complained that the god hypothesis was sterile, but for some reason, I never thought to use that as an argument for its meaninglessness.
I hereby officially declare myself an igtheist, on the grounds that god is a meaningless and useless concept. Interestingly enough, you can apply the same idea to the soul, which is equally undefined and intellectually sterile.
What Is A Geek? - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 0 |
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I'm currently working on a little AI that plays Go. It's a pretty hard problem - much harder than playing chess, where you can brute force your way to victory, even against a grandmaster. In contrast, the best Go playing AIs have their asses kicked by a human of only moderate skill.
I suppose it's not really AI - it's more Machine Learning than general-purpose AI. Still, it's loads of fun to do. We're using Temporal Difference learning to get it to learn how to evaluate boards, and that evaluation function is basically a convolutional neural network. It's been done before using normal neural networks, but never with convolutional networks, as far as we can tell. Hopefully their ability to recognize super-patterns out of smaller ones will help a bit.
Artificial Intelligence - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 1 |
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as for detecting an infinite loop, if you are dealing with mathematical or boolean operations simply having a global array of the past 10 actions can easily detect an infinite loop
Eh? I doubt it. The general problem is undecidable, so you can't write a program to solve it.
Take for instance, this:
[code=cpp]
while(1)
{
if((2n+1) is a perfect number)
break;
n++;
}[/code]
Now, how will you figure out if that's an infinite loop or not? Nobody knows whether there are any odd perfect numbers.
Technically, you can always figure out if you've hit a loop, because a computer only has a finite number of states. If you could somehow keep track of the entire state of the computer, then you could wait until it cycled, and declare that you'd found an infinite loop. Unfortunately, there are billions upon billions of such states, so it's virtually impossible to do this.
Artificial Intelligence - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 0 |
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Holy crap, I actually did write 'thousands'. Looks like I simultaneously overdosed on sugar and the power of my previous argument. My apologies - I don't usually exaggerate that much.
Clearly I've been working too hard and need to take a long vacation involving lazing around while surrounded by lots of beautiful women.
It looks like I was thinking more about useless and poorly designed body parts, rather than just the useless ones. In retrospect, I'd be very surprised if we had thousands of useless body parts, except maybe if you counted things all the way down to the cellular level or something.
In any event, aside from several useless body parts, there's the issue of the terrible engineering involved, which doesn't particularly become a perfect Designer. If we count badly engineered body parts, the numbers start going up again, and the probability of some perfect creator behind it all falls. It's not at all surprising in an evolutionary context, however.
I suppose I find evolution easy to digest because I think of it as a sort of search algorithm, though one that lacks a clearly defined goal. The 'goal', as it were, is a moving target, since the environment has a role to play, as do all the other organisms that are also subject to evolution. So you have a lot of freedom to explore, massive levels of interactions between various parts of your system, and a vague sort of idea that it's good to live and have lots of children who can do the same thing.
Given geological timescales, variety and change in environments, and a means of storing blueprints to build solutions(DNA), complex biochemical mechanisms that map information to bodies, with a significant random component allowing the possibility of mutation, the development of a diverse array of life forms seems almost inevitable.
What Is A Geek? - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 0 |
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The problem with it is, there is no fish that can survive on land - as the saying goes, "like a fish out of water..." If it were the case, why does it not still occur?
Most evolutionary niches have been occupied now. Going from sea to land won't improve your chances of survival any more, because the seaside ecosystem has already been populated. Sure, you still have fish that slowly evolve the ability to breathe in air for short periods of time, but natural selection weeds them out because there are far superior versions out there now. Minor mutations of the kind that drive evolution won't help an organism to steal enough energy from a ecosystem which is already filled with specimens that are far more efficient at doing it. So they die out, even though they might be repeating the same mutation that happened a billion years ago and created land-based life for the first time. Because now we have land-based life, and they're very good at what they do. Amateurs have their asses kicked.
The reason there was such explosive evolution then, in comparison to what we see right now, is because the domains where life existed were rather limited. The earth was full of opportunities for an enterprising mutant to find a nice unexploited spot and set up their own species, as it were.
Besides, complaining that you can't see evolution is silly, because it usually happens over timescales that the Biblical Methuselah would have found terrifyingly long. Of course, it's more likely that any candidate for Methuselah would have died at the age of 30, rather than 900, or whatever.
The fossil record is a liberal education.
There are over 400 muscles in our bodies, and not one of them does not possess a use, nor is there one not perfectly suited to it's task. The hinges of our arms and legs are completely fitted to their function - hinge joints mid-arm and mid-leg, ball and socket joints at their juncture with our trunk. Imagine they were the other way around, hinge at the trunk, ball and socket mid-limb; our limbs would be useless. And not one thing came into being not perfectly fitted for it's use? If it were random, we would have all manner of useless parts. Yet neither we, nor any of the other species, do. Even the appendix, if we never discover its use, would be the exception that proves the rule.
On the contrary, there are thousands of body parts that are thoroughly and completely useless. Worse than that, there are parts of us that could do with some serious improvement, and which a designer God should have done, but which will naturally be overlooked by evolution, since it isn't concerned with minor conveniences that won't improve survival.
Check this out. There was another website I used to have bookmarked, which had a huge list of little (and not so little) useless cruft that we've accumulated over our evolutionary history, but which still stick around because they don't do any harm to a species that is, on the whole, essentially invincible in the context of most problems that other species face.
What Is A Geek? - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 1 |
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I just thought about it, and frankly, the front page is a lot better than the interesting topics page, at least as first impressions go. The interesting topics page is a little too bland.
Shuzak Current Affairs - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 1 |
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Ah, the scariest animal of all - the one you can't run from.
Mammals, Reptiles, Fish, Birds - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 0 |
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Resident procrastinating graduate student reporting in.
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Meh, you guys are just amateurs. When you get really good at procrastinating, that's when you go to grad school.
Grad student procrastination is a whole new mode of being. Like Paul Graham once said, "Never underestimate the incredible amounts of energy released by a procrastinating grad student."
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What I think is ridiculous is that you refuse to even acknowledge god as a possibility, and attack my character instead of my argument.
It certainly wasn't my intention to impugn your character, and I'm fully aware of the fallacy of ad hominem attacks anyway. As Ati pointed out, it's your argument that I refuted. Your character is not relevant to what I said.
In fact, I find it ridiculous that you conveniently ignore what I'm saying, and accuse me of personal attacks rather than trying to refute my argument.
Oh, btw, I'm prepared to acknowledge god as a possibility - but then the Great Celestial Teapot and the Flying Spaghetti Monster are equally possible. The fact that they're funny caricatured gods doesn't do anything to make them less probable than any other gods.
It comes down to the rational viewpoint of being concerned with verifiable truths. I cannot verify whether God exists, and indeed if he does, it looks like he doesn't do anything, which is equivalent to not existing. There are too many avenues for physical explanations for me to look at. Why should I look for an explanation that can't be tested, is more questionable than the phenomenon it purports to explain, and has zero predictive power? It's totally sterile and a complete waste of time and mindspace.
Supernatural - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 2 |
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I second Ati's idea. Try it and see if it helps a bit. You might even try experimenting with removing the front page for a bit and see if it gets us more people.
That's just a rough heuristic though - I've noticed that Shuzak seems to get a tiny trickle of new users most of the time, followed by a torrential invasion, then back to the trickle...and so on, ad infinitum. You ideally need to test this stuff out when we're in the trickle phase.
Shuzak Current Affairs - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 1 |
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Nadeem, those carricature gods are not as likely because less people believe in them. There has been less effort imbued into them, like in terry pratchett's "small gods".
LOL! I loved that book!
I also disagree that looking for God is a waste of time, I mean, what if someone found him. The concept of a God is so massive that it requires that we search for one on the off chance there is one somewhere.
I'd hate to think there was a benevolent creator who spoke english and we missed him because we weren't looking.
I think the trick is to go ahead and look for natural explanations everywhere, and if god is some kind of force that makes a difference in the universe, we'll run into him sometime. If not, so be it.
PS: If he's benevolent, then I don't think it matters whether we find him or not. It's the evil gods we have to worry about, like the ones who think it's okay to punish someone for not believing in them.
Supernatural - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 0 |
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You got to a point where you couldn't explain what you observed and so you decided to simply stop inquiring as opposed to face god as a slightly more likely possibility than the other explanations.
No, that isn't it. I recognized the fact that the God hypothesis cuts off further inquiry, while natural ones do not. I can test natural explanations and make predictions based on them. I can't do this for God, as far as we can see. Therefore, I must dismiss the hypothesis as sterile and useless.
I'll say it again - how can you explain something you don't understand by means of something you have no evidence for? It's like building castles in the air. The foundation sucks.
And I don't see why god is even slightly more likely than other explanations. I'm inclined to assign it a lower probability simply because creation and design are notions that are born of human prejudice, and I think it's arrogant to think that the universe required something like us(even remotely similar) to come into being.
Supernatural - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 2 |
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Man, you guys are all junkies!
The only drug I might be accused of using is caffeine, and I'm not sure it has a significant effect on me. I just like the taste of coffee with lots of sugar dunked in it.
I'm a little wary of trying any sort of drug, because I have a terrifyingly obsessive personality. Usually that just means I get lots of work done, or read books from cover to cover in one sitting, or spend an insane amount of time indulging some interest. But I'd rather not risk mixing it with a potentially addictive substance.
I figured I'd try alcohol once, to see what it was like, though I had this slightly scary vision of myself lying passed out with a bottle in my hand.
Then I tried it out, and I've realized there's absolutely no way I'm going to get addicted to something that tastes that disgusting. If there's one principle that I live by, it's that I don't eat stuff that tastes bad unless it's medicine.
Entheogens - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 2 |
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It seems unlikely to me that the mind and thinking capacity we have come from a purely physical point. Apes have similar brain sizes and similar brains, in fact we are a 98% DNA match, but the only apes that ever got into space were the ones we sent. With no major physical differences there is still a huge mental difference which leads me to believe that it isn't purely physical.
RyeGye, that is the biggest jump to a conclusion I have ever seen.
It just dawned on me how completely ridiculous that position is, and I'll explain why.
What you basically say, shorn of all the fancy words and equivocation, is essentially "I can't figure out why we're smarter than all the other animals. Therefore, I shall stop inquiring into this issue and declare that it was all the result of some 'non-physical' forces and entities."
How on earth can you start attributing human intelligence to the non-physical when we've barely understood anything about the possibilities of the physical?
The non-physical? What the heck is that? How do you know that there is such a thing as the non-physical? If you have no basis for knowing that it exists, you have no business concluding that it caused anything - not unless you've exhausted all the possibilities involving things that are known to exist.
Once you've eliminated all the natural possibilites, then you can consider going on to the supernatural. Just jumping straight to supernatural agencies means you're shutting down your critical faculties and making up an answer. Don't fall into that trap.
Supernatural - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 2 |
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As far as I can tell atheism is popular with geeks simply because of their inability to understand religion. They think they understand but in fact they don't. They think they are smarter than the average person, but they're not.
People who think they're smart really annoy those of us who are.
FYI, some of us actually understand religion. And we're still atheists. I have no idea why people find that so surprising. It's not like there are actually good reasons to believe or anything.
What Is A Geek? - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 1 |
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Amen..er, I mean, Awomen to that, brother.
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Ok, why does the universe exist in the first place?
Yeah - why does it?
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Nadeem, if you are claiming that there is a possibility of there being no gravity before the big bang, or a chance that there were no laws of physics, then where did those come from?
How should I know? I haven't figured out quantum gravity yet - nor am I likely to, since I'm a computer scientist.
And what kept all the mass together if there was no gravity.
I'm not sure if the idea of 'keeping mass together' makes any sense before the universe got started. We can't make any statements about what happened then because our physics breaks down.
That just doesn't make sense.
Pardon me for pointing out that this 'sense' you keep talking about doesn't make any sense. I don't see how it is reasonable to make up explanations with zero evidence. Leave it hanging!
And no matter what you say, why means why. There is always a why, whether it just because of a statistical anomaly or the laws of physics.
No there isn't. I've explained the differences between the why that you mean and the other why you're confusing it with. There is a distinction between intentionality and purpose (which are what you seem to mean) and causation. Stop saying 'there is always a why' - that's an unjustified assertion. Where the heck are you getting this stuff from?
Supernatural - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 0 |
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Gringo, RyeGye has a point. There really are religious moderates out there. The fact that they are moderate doesn't change the fact that their beliefs are unjustified, but it's not like they're a bunch of immoral hypocrites. The distribution of hypocrites among the religious is identical to the distribution of hypocrites everywhere else. It's just that religion gives them one particular avenue they can exploit, that's all.
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People need to give God a little more credit.
Not really. Give credit where credit is due.
I think the reason that most geeks are atheists is because they lack respect, not religion.
And here I was thinking that it was because the idea of god lacked convincing proof. Well, you learn something new every day. ..
There are good things in community, tradition, and faith, but they are not easily seen through the lenses of the lazy and selfish.
Community and tradition, definitely. Faith? Nope. What good can come of believing things without proof? And what evil can come of holding high standards of proof and rejecting propositions that don't live up to them?
As for the part about being lazy and selfish, forgive me for pointing out that that accusation seems to stem from a pretty religious self-righteousness, not an objective evaluation.
What Is A Geek? - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 2 |
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OK, So I suppose you're unqualified to answer these questions, but qualified to say that God and the soul don't exist.
In fact, all of you seem to be saying that. You admit that you don't have the answers, yet you staunchly persist that God couldn't possibly be it.
Well, we can definitely say that God and the soul are unlikely to exist, for the obvious reason that we don't need them to explain things. You don't need the soul because intelligence could just as well be a product of physical interactions in the brain. You don't need god because if god doesn't require a creator, then the universe doesn't either.
Supernatural - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 0 |
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Charles Darwin: lazy and selfish.
Albert Einstein: lazy and selfish.
Thomas Edison: lazy and selfish.
Richard Feynman: lazy and selfish.
Bill Gates: lazy and selfish.
James Watson: lazy and selfish.
Richard Dawkins: lazy and selfish.
You have got to be kidding me. If being lazy and selfish makes you one of these guys, then it's obviously the way to go.
What Is A Geek? - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 1 |
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Just popping in for a bit - I'll come back and read the rest of this later.
Fact: Mass does not just start existing (Law of conservation of mass)
Fact: There is mass in the universe
Question: Where did it come from?
My Answer: An upper dimensional power. Key word there being power. Energy can be converted to mass. Who's to say that this energy didn't convert to the mass we now have.
Er, one more fact: Energy is conserved too - just like mass.
Supernatural - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 0 |
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How do you explain (and I don't mean this religiously) haw people have morals when no other animal does?
Er, who says animals don't have morals? Every act an animal performs is moral.
Plants suck moisture from the soil and air - that's moral, and in accordance with their nature. They spread their seeds far and wide, by whatever means their evolutionary history has endowed them with. That's also moral - it's keeps their species going.
Herbivores eat plants - and that's a moral act too. That's how they ensure that their genes are passed onto the next generation.
Carnivores kill herbivores and eat them. Guess what - that's actually a moral act for them. It ensures that they will continue to live and breed, in accordance with their nature.
The only difference between us and them in this respect is that our societies are significantly more complex(though they still bear a remarkable resemblance to other primate societies ), and we've invented means to keep transferring knowledge and ideas from generation to generation. It's still down to the same thing - morality is still driven by the twin questions of how to survive and breed. It's just that there's much more complexity involved because of the added elements of culture and intelligence.
Somewhere along the way, we've wound up evolving instincts that manifest as something we identify as a moral sense. These are a pretty complex mix of strategies that kept our ancestors alive long enough to produce us. It doesn't sound as nice as the mystical explanations, but it makes the most sense.
The reason you feel compassion is because it improved some tribe's chance of surviving half a million years ago. You find babies cute because the prehumans who didn't find them cute didn't take enough care of their own, compared to those ancestors of yours who did. That's also why most people find the sound of a baby crying terribly annoying, and feel like soothing the kid, even if it's someone else's child.
The reason why sex is such an issue in human societies is because that's where it finally comes down to the issue of your genes vs everyone else's.
The reason why women have been semi-deified or subjugated is because they're the means by which the human race reproduces.
The reason why people have such strong reactions to sexual infidelity is, to put it poetically, because of the anguished screams of their genes at being duped out of their chance to spread. The reason why it still goes on is because people's genes want to mix with better material, so to speak.
The reason people always find reasons to discriminate against other people is because tribes that were hostile to others were less likely to be assimilated into others.
The reason our species is so goddamned aggressive and ready to kill is because the tribe that wiped out others was the one that survived.
The reason we stick to irrational beliefs to the point of insane violence is because it helped us to be aggressive towards others and protective of our own.
There you are - that's the essence of human morality for you. It's not perfect by any means, but it's the way we are. Loads of it is ancient cruft that has very little use to modern humans, but we can't break the old patterns, because they're what define our species. They include lots of things that we can (and should) take care of on our own, now that we're sapient creatures, but it's not always possible for the developments of a few hundred thousand years to fight off the accumulated instincts of several billion years.
Ugly? Depressing? Live with it. It may not be a pretty legacy, but it's our own. And life can be pretty nice, anyway.
Supernatural - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 1 |
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The big bang is non-testable, non-repeatable, and no force in the universe is great enough to account for it. In the beginning of the universe all of the mass was in the single point, all of the gravity was in a single point. What force in the universe could possible overcome this immense resistance? Even black holes with a relatively low gravitational pull compared to what this must have been, light can't even escape. Unlike these other, probably fake, "supernatural" events, the big bang cannot be explained away unless you are ready to explain away the entire universe.
Meh - knowing that the big bang happened doesn't mean you can say anything about what caused it, if anything.
The fundamental liberty that the Rennaissance left us was the freedom to look at some phenomenon and not have an explanation of it right away. That's an overwhelmingly important point - you don't have to make stuff up if you don't have an explanation. Leave it hanging and go figure stuff out. Don't insult the memory of the martyrs who were burned for heresy because they had the guts to say that the people in power were taking made-up stories and calling them explanations.
I believe that the big bang does have a scientific explanation though, and this explanation is an energy or a force powerful enough, and capable of overcoming all the gravity in the universe. Obviously this must have existed or otherwise there would have been no big bang. I call this force, God, and to explain where this force was, and where it went, I say into an upper dimension.
Um, I'm not entirely sure gravity existed before the big bang. That might very well be like asking where the big bang took place, or what existed before it - time and space are pretty meaningless before the start of the universe. We'll probably have to wait for some form of quantum gravity before we can make any clear statement about it, though.
Secondly, given the fact that gravity is the weakest force out of the fundamental four, and the others so ridiculously outmatch it at subatomic scales, I don't think that gravity was the major issue a creating power would have to deal with.
Of course, to say that with real certainty, I'd need a theory of quantum gravity again.
In other words, like I said before, leave it hanging and go work on quantum gravity.
Supernatural - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 0 |
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One thing that has been bugging me alot is this hate of the question "why". "Why" is the drive for every bit of science there is. Why do gases change to liquids change to solids? Why do atoms form bonds? Why is the question science is trying to answer, and in this case, you seem to simply be avoiding the question because you don't like the most logical answer, justifying it with, "we just don't know yet"
You're confusing two different meanings of the word 'why'.
Asking why substances change from one phase of matter to another, or why atoms form bonds - those are questions about the behavior of nature, and those are indeed fair game for scientific inquiry.
However, the 'why' you're implying, and the one that religion uses, is a question about the purpose of these things. That requires an a priori assumption that a purpose exists.
But this idea of purpose is a very human thing. We do things for a reason, we build stuff for a specific purpose, blah blah...But how can you generalize from what we do to the behavior of the universe? Isn't that incredibly arrogant? Why should something like us(in the sense of being conscious) have to be behind it all? Why should this very human idea be manifested in the universe at large?
Supernatural - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 0 |
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As the Mentats of Dune would say, "Forget the answers - concentrate on the questions!"
So here are some for you, RyeGye - where did this power in the higher dimension come from? Is it exempt from having a cause? If it can be uncaused, why not the universe? If natural laws don't apply to it, how do you know anything about it?
How can you make the claim that the universe must have a cause? How many universes have you seen to make that generalization? A sample space of one is about as small as it gets. Except the part where you assume god, which involves a sample space of zero.
Supernatural - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 1 |
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Oh wait - the sample space for making claims about the origin of the universe is also zero, since all we've looked at are things within the universe. We don't really have any basis on which to generalize about the origin of the universe, since we've never seen universes coming into being, and cannot preclude the possibility that it is something completely different.
Supernatural - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 0 |
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I think what Joseph means is that Ati at t=blah, and Ati at t=blah+20 still think they're the same Ati, because they remember(sort of) being all the Atis at smaller t.
This 'perception' thing is turning into a loaded word, with every man and his brother having their own interpretation of it.
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Why bother to set up the entire situation in the first place then? Why let the unfortunate friend be born in the first place? Why not just send him to heaven directly?
Hell, why not be a little nicer and never create all the unfortunate people who you're sending to hell? I still don't know what's worse - creating people with the intention of condemning them to eternal suffering, or making them think that they are somehow responsible for it.
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You seem to think that out of nothing the universe just popped into existence, or that the laws of physics suddenly just started existing so that the mechanical process of crating the universe could start. But before there was matter, or when it was compressed into a single point before the big bang, where were all these rules and potential stored? In fact where is it stored now? I seem to remember that you yourself Ati argued against the universe being conscious or having memory (I might be mistaking you for someone else though) so how do all the atoms "know" how to react.
The correct answer to that question is "We don't know". Making the unsubstantiated assumption that some kind of conscious entity is behind it is going too far.
Nadeem the laws of physics are about as immaterial as it gets, they're nothing more than a concept, however not only do they react with material object, they completely govern how they react in any situation at all. Even situations that have not yet happened in the history of the universe, it is already defined how it will end, and, if recreated it will happen the same way again.
The laws of physics don't govern anything - they're descriptions of how things work. Obviously they apply to everything - that's why we use them. I've had issues with calling them laws for a long time anyway.
In any event, that has nothing to do with what I said - it's an unrelated concept. If there is a spiritual side to the universe, there has to be a connection to the material side, or else it's totally useless, and can't affect material objects.
And now comes the taboo question in this thread: Why?
A major point that Ati and I have been trying to get across is that asking the question why is going too far, because it assumes intentionality where there may not be any. You can't make an assumption as far-fetched as that without at least one of two things: evidence that your assumption is justified, or verifiable predictions that you can make on the basis of that assumption. But the point is that you don't have either of these - there is no evidence to justify the existence of some conscious entity creating the universe, and assuming that there is doesn't tell you anything - it's a totally sterile hypothesis.
And assuming that this entity actually cares about what humans do, and is planning to judge them at the end of their lives - that, of all things, is the most astonishing piece of arrogance that the human race has ever exhibited.
But more importantly: How?
Er, that's what physics is about, isn't it?
If, like me, you believe that these are held and maintained by a higher power in an upper dimension (note: I don't even say "being", merely "power") then everything seems to fit, not even in a sort of, "oh, this doesn't make sense, must be God" but makes logical sense.
And what about this power? Where does it come from? What holds and maintains it? You run the risk of falling into an infinite regress here, and if you're going to cut it off arbitrarily, then why do it at some mystical power in some other dimension? Minimize your unwarranted assumptions - if this power can exist without needing a creator, so can the universe. And the universe has the added benefit of actually being there, which is a claim you cannot make for this higher being.
Either that or you believe that the laws of physics are simply there.
They could be - and for all we know, they are. We've only seen one universe, so there is simply no basis for saying that it needs a creator, or even a creating force. That's just anthropomorphism at its worst.
And that sounds alot like the exact argument that you are trying to refute, chalking up something unexplained as "it simply is".
I'm not sure what you're referring to here, but if it's Joseph's idea of why we're ourselves and not someone else, then I think Ati and I have devoted more time to that question than it deserves. I've explained precisely why it's flawed, and even acknowledged, at least implicitly, that it's an easy fallacy to fall for.
I'll say it again - you can't ask why unless you have evidence that there is a reason involved. You cannot presume the existence of intentionality like this - it's just a manifestation of human prejudice.
Supernatural - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 3 |
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Er, I think we need to decide whether to count by native speakers or something else. If you count native speakers alone, then the Chinese beat everyone hands down.
This has some figures that are relevant to the discussion.
Besides, I seriously doubt that most of the people outside of China speak either English or Spanish. A significant number of people know some English, but in the vast majority of cases, it's barely enough to get by. There are plenty of other languages around the world too, you know.
Linguistics - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 1 |
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Atheism was invented to make people who were afraid of actually being morally obligated for what they did so they said "There is no higher power" and suddenly they aren't morally obligated to do anything because they're not going to ever be called on what they did in life.
You could just as easily say that it was invented for people who were courageous enough that they didn't feel the need for an invisible bogeyman to keep them moral.
The idea that atheism exists as an escape route for people who don't want to be moral might be comforting to theists, but it's ultimately wrong. The only valid reason for being an atheist is the recognition of the fact that there is no evidence that one or more gods exist, period. Morality does not enter into the picture, and is totally irrelevant to the discussion.
All in all most people agree that if the soul does exist its nature is one that it can not be proven either way.
If the soul does exist, there has to be a way to prove its existence. The fact that the soul is immaterial doesn't make any difference, because your body is material, and if your soul is what governs the actions of your body, then there has to be a link between the material and the spiritual, and we should be able to detect something there.
In short, if there is a spiritual side to things, it has to have some material component, otherwise it cannot interact with material objects, and consequently has no impact on the universe.
Supernatural - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 0 |
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Since when have souls provably been the source of the conscience?
Supernatural - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 1 |
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Since Spanish is the world's most widely spoken language, I am guessing Esperanto has elements of it in it?
Spanish comes in second - the most widely spoken language by number of speakers is Chinese.
Linguistics - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 0 |
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True. It does keep you sane, though.
Supernatural - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 0 |
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Your perceptions are one of the least sure things. Why assume that what you see and feel is real? What logical basis exists for that assumption?
Er, Ati - you have to proceed on the assumption that what you see and feel is real(barring the usual stuff about illusions and vagaries of sensory perception and what not...) because you can't really act on any other basis.
That said, you're right in noting that it's a non sequitur. Joseph's argument fails because it contains flawed reasoning. His perceptions have nothing to do with it.
It's not his perceptions that I disproved up there - it was his flawed chain of reasoning. You can't disprove someone's perceptions anyway - you can prove that they're perceiving something that doesn't exist, assuming that can be objectively demonstrated, but that doesn't mean they didn't perceive it. Schizophrenics hear voices all the time, after all - no one can honestly say that they don't perceive them.
So the issue isn't Joseph's perceptions. It's the unsupported conclusions he draws from them.
To the three year olds in here:
Now now, young Joseph...stop calling people names or you'll be grounded.
Supernatural - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 1 |
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Sometimes, I can find "commoners" with a better grasp of reality than those "philosophers" you speak of.
That's more common than most people think. There's a quote from Dune that sums it up neatly:
"Many things we do naturally become difficult only when we try to make them intellectual subjects. It is possible to know so much about a subject that you become totally ignorant."
What Is A Geek? - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 0 |
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Awomen, you mean.
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I have met a lot of very intelligent people, ones that are way more intelligent than me. But they lack philosophical insight.
This is true.
What Is A Geek? - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 0 |
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We aim to please, Fibs.
What Is A Geek? - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 0 |
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Being intelligent doesn't automatically imply intellectual profundity...So it's natural for intelligent people to be puzzled and demoralized by life. However, profound thinkers are less likely to succumb to long-term depression.
Am I being accused of intellectual profundity here? I'm about as far from depression as you can get, and I'm not particularly dumb either.
I know two kinds of thinkers: Intelligent and bitter thinkers, then there are intelligent and cynical thinkers.
What happened to the intelligent and happy thinkers? Why the hell are all us smart people supposed to be gloomy? What's with the whole gloomy tone of this thread anyway?
I strongly suggest that all intelligent people build up a bit of wisdom. I'm far wiser now than I was a couple of years ago, and much happier as a result. It's true that there's a bit of cynicism that you'll build up as a result, but there are enough redeeming features that you can be pretty happy, all things considered.
And yeah, that does involve a bit of intellectual profundity. Sorta comes with the territory.
My own view of happiness is as a sort of mental discipline. You do it for the same reason you exercise - because it's good for you. Sure, the world is fucked up, but why should you let that negatively affect your emotional state? What good does it do? Better to be happy instead, and use the other emotions where you need to.
This business of finding reasons to be happy is a total waste of time. The trick is to be unjustifiably happy, and jump on any reason you find while you're at it.
@Fibonacci's Wench:
Thats the other thing I have issues with, I don't fit into catergories. I tend to feel totally alienated most of the time.
There are two kinds of people in the world - those who can be classified into one of two kinds of people, and those who can't.
I don't know about falling into categories, but in my case, the real thing is fitting into groups. If I look back, all the groups that I've been in until recently have had this 'invisible wall' separating me from everyone else. As if everyone else had this one extra level of camaraderie that I was somehow unable to partake of...
I can relate to what you say about most of the personality you project being a facade. I've had the same issue for ages, and I used to be slightly depressed by that too.
This probably sounds really cliched, but the only way out of this is to stop holding yourself to standards other than your own, and making sure that your own standards reflect your innermost character.
Of course, this might all be a load of philosophical hogwash, and the only reason I'm happy is because I'm doing what I love to do, and the devil with anything else.
What Is A Geek? - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 0 |
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Anyone with a laptop.
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PS: On a desktop, I almost always use the keypad on the right for numbers of any length, coz I can use that flawlessly without thinking, while I usually mess up a digit or two if I use the ones on the top.
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You guys should do what I do. Ignore all the negative stuff and only focus on positive emotions. While it's not impossible to find happiness, I prefer to just cultivate the habit of being happy instead.
What Is A Geek? - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 0 |
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Did I end the argument that conclusively?
I guess I did.
Supernatural - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 0 |
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I think I qualify as a pretty happy person, at least in comparison to how I was over the last 10-12 years or so.
I tend to do a bit of brooding, but very very rarely. But if you look at it that way, I spend almost all my time in a mostly unemotional state. It's just that when I do feel something, it's usually happiness, or some such related emotion. On the whole, though, it's a null-emotional state.
I guess I never paid much attention to my emotional side for most of my life, so I've wound up being slightly detached. Predictably, I've encountered a few accusations that I'm unfeeling, but it's not really about not feeling. It's more like I ignore several feelings, on a mostly subconscious level.
What Is A Geek? - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 2 |
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I don't consider science and religion to be as similar as many people here seem to be saying. While religion tries to get at some of the same questions that science does, it's not the same thing as coming at it from a different direction. Religion comes at things with a different set of assumptions, most of which are unfounded and highly human-centric. The scientific approach is a lot less prejudiced because Occam's Razor constantly keeps turning up.
P0ss seems to be saying that science is mostly just another belief system, merely with higher levels of proof. I'm not entirely certain that interpretation is true, primarily because science just looks for different things. Belief systems are not interested in minimizing their assumptions, verifying their theories, and testing the predictive power of their hypotheses.
The whole point of science is to be true to reality. That's not what religion is about. As much as it claims to be about divine truth, religion is about giving people an escape hatch from the mind-numbing fear of a universe that doesn't seem to notice them.
In a way, religion is science. It's just very very bad science.
I have issues with the way people are using the word 'belief' here, with reference to science. When beliefs start being based on hard standards of evidence, they're not beliefs any longer.
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Red Bull gives you wings!
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Vista is one big fat bug disguised as an OS.
Windows Troubleshoot - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 3 |
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When we remember we are all mad, the mysteries disappear and life stands explained.
Mark Twain.
Philosophy - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 1 |
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I usually have loads of sugar in my coffee. Programmer's power source, after all.
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FAT16 or FAT32?
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I wasn't really scared of any animals until I read P0ss's post.
Now I'm scared of all of them.
Mammals, Reptiles, Fish, Birds - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 0 |
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Man, I'm kinda jealous of you guys. Scoring more than 100% on a test is unheard of in India. In fact, for the big board exams in year 10 and 12, some of the people who mark up the language exams pride themselves on never giving more than 8/10 for some particular question, no matter how good it is. I didn't believe this until I actually heard a couple of teachers discussing it among themselves.
I was rather fond of grade 9 English, though. The teacher had apparently never before seen the sort of stuff I wrote coming from a 9th grader, so I'd wind up scoring like 25 points more than the second highest scorer. It was insane.
What I found even funnier was that she was one of those people who have favorite students - and those were inevitably the people who scored well. She was never able to figure out why the hell I wasn't in that group of unfortunates, and why they weren't able to keep up with me.
Our maths exams were usually more sensible, so you could theoretically score 100%. In practice, they'd usually manage to take off a point or two somewhere, for reasons that are best described as childish.
No wonder I hated the exam system from the bottom of my heart. Hell, I hated it all the way through my undergrad years too. No wonder I enjoy grad school so much. After all the crap I put up with for over a decade, this is like paradise.
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You have died of indigestion at the ICPC World Finals, then. The IBM CyberCafe had a DDR machine that was constantly in use.
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Exactly. Now can you extrapolate the problems this would cause?
It would imply that a set "pattern" exclusively "belongs" to our perception.
I'm not entirely certain what you mean by that. Clarifications, please.
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We all have a "soul", either bound to the laws of this universe or to something beyond it.
That looks like an assumption to me.
Supernatural - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 0 |
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Recurrence formulae for the brain? Or differential equations, rather.
Reminds me of a line from Accelerando which I vaguely recall to be something like this: "Never try to match wits with a posthuman, because their mental model of you is better than your own."
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All right, I've got a few minutes to kill, so let's take this from the top.
We all have a "soul", either bound to the laws of this universe or to something beyond it.
So essentially, you see two possibilities:
1) The soul is your consciousness, and is a completely natural phenomenon, arising from complex neural phenomena. Strictly speaking, this is a nonstandard usage of the word 'soul', but that's fine.
2) This is the standard religious interpretation, involving zero or more gods and the souls being like a ghost in the machine that is your body.
Looks okay so far.
Your "soul" has been "thrown" into your time and place.
This is an unfounded assertion that is based on the assumption that (2) is correct. It is difficult to reconcile it with (1), where your soul is the product of several natural factors, including the time and place.
Stop and look around. Check the time. That is where you are.
This is merely rhetoric related to the previous unfounded assertion.
There are only two possibilities for how this situation happened. It was either through a natural selection process built into the very fabric of the universe or by Godly power. ie. natural vs supernatural.
This is rendered rather baseless since 'this situation' has been preassumed to be compatible with (2) and not (1). Most arguments that proceed from this point will contradict (1), simply because you assumed it wasn't true to begin with!
This is the fundamental error at the root of your chain of reasoning, and the reason why all that follows falls apart.
A selection process is necessary due to the subjectiveness of our "souls". Something had to cause it to be expressed or anchored to your body.
Once again, you're preassuming (2). In a world where (1) is true, the notion of anchoring the soul to the body is meaningless, since the soul is the result of processes taking place in the body.
Keep in mind that your body is not simply your body. It is your body for a reason.
On the contrary, your body is simply your body.
Well, maybe not that simply. The issue is that you cannot talk of 'your' body, since your identity and selfhood are inextricably bound up with your body. You don't own it - you are it. Your self is the consequence of your body, not something that it is attached to.
Let's explore the natural view of "souls".
Sure, but it's pointless since you've started by assuming what you want to prove.
The subjective nature of our "soul" does raise some interesting problems. Can we duplicate our perspective to see things from many sources? Can you imagine what it would be like to perceive places far away? Our brain may unique like our finger prints, but it is still theoretically possible to duplicate.
I presume this has something to do with what you said in the other thread about replicating yourself with a Star Trek style transporter. To expand on what I said there, if (1) is true, both of those copies will have identical copies of the perception of the original. They will still be separate individuals. Asking which one has the subjective perception of the original is meaningless. There is no more original, just two exactly identical copies. In a sense that kinda preassumes (2), the original is dead. However, his perception has been duplicated, so as far as the copies are concerned, they're him. And they both are.
Another problem is that our brain often changes. Yet, our perspective remains. Clearly this is evidence against the natural view of "souls".
I believe I've addressed this earlier. Like I said, the pattern remains, though the elements that compose it change. It's like continuously replacing components of your hardware with functionally equivalent copies. Your software isn't likely to undergo any significant change if you do it right.
Besides, people with brain trauma often suffer personality changes. This is clearly evidence against the supernatural view of souls. Their hardware has been altered in ways that aren't completely functionally equivalent at higher levels, making their software do different things.
This leads me to believe in the supernatural view, which points to the existence of a higher power(God) and there is probably an afterlife.
I humbly submit that your entire chain of reasoning was doomed from the start, since you really did assume what you started out to prove. It's an implicit assumption, so it's an understandable mistake. Hopefully I've done a good job of isolating the error.
Supernatural - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 3 |
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I have never noted, in memory, that my perception has ever been interrupted.
Even if it were, how would you know?
If, for the sake of argument, I interrupt your perception for a millisecond, and then restart it, how would you ever know? Unless you're in a gunfight and dodging bullets or some such thing, a millisecond out of your perception won't make any difference to you, in the sense that you won't notice any inconsistencies around you.
If the quantum of perception is much smaller than a millisecond, then you'll be left with an illusion of continuity, which is precisely what we have.
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Technically, the one defining characteristic of life is that it reproduces. As far as nature is concerned, that's exactly why we're here.
In other words, go get your loving!
Philosophy - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 2 |
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Hehe - xkcd strikes again!
That just about sums up my life, too.
Philosophy - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 1 |
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Hasn't Dance Dance Revolution come to the western world already?
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Important things can come in small packages. Size isn't always what counts.
*Walks by, muttering something about platitudes*
What Is A Geek? - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 1 |
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I meant, which body your perception would occupy.
If you replicate two bodies exactly, you will most likely wind up replicating perceptions as well.
In more mystical terms, you'll wind up cloning your soul.
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did you ever wake up, look at the clock, and find it says 7 o'clock, then you go back to sleep and have one of those endless dreams that seems to go on for hours, then you awake again to find only three or four minutes have passed while you slept.
Yeah, I've had those too. What's more common, though, are those days when your alarm goes off, you wake up and decide to just 'rest your eyes' for a few minutes, and the next thing you know, two hours have passed.
Btw, I still don't see why one should assume that one's subjective time perception would stretch out endlessly in the last moments of life.
Supernatural - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 0 |
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well it is only a theory, lets think up some tests and find out if it happens or not.
P0ss, if it's all the same to you, I'd rather not run any of those experiments on myself. I have this policy against experiments that involve me dying...
Supernatural - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 1 |
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If something like us made everything, then this universe is in deep shit.
Oh wait, that might explain a few things...
What Is A Geek? - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 2 |
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The only true faith is the worship of the Most Beneficent and Most Stoned Lord Towelie!
PS: We're affiliated to his Noodliness the FSM as well, and we don't mind a dual religion thingy either...
Flying Spaghetti Monsterism - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 1 |
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Just stop trying to answer. You are incapable of understanding.
*Yawns condescendingly*
Btw, P0ss - just where did you get this idea of time subjectively stretching out like that? I suppose it could happen, but I'm not sure why one would have any justification for believing that this is the case...
Supernatural - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 0 |
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Why is our perspective subjective?
No idea. Need more research into brain function and related stuff.
why are we this particular consciousness?
Meaningless question. If you weren't this particular consciousness, you wouldn't be asking that question.
It is meaningless for me to ask why I'm Nadeem and not Joseph - if I was Joseph, I'd be Joseph, and not Nadeem.
There is no way *you* can be any other consciousness. Your selfhood is your consciousness - if you are another consciousness, you're another person. You seem to be trying to separate consciousness from identity, which is impossible. If you suddenly became me, then the "I" that meant Joseph would suddenly be replaced by the "I" that means Nadeem.
Meh, I seriously need to invent mathematics to talk about this. Human language is useless at expressing such notions.
Supernatural - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 1 |
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Of course, they might not appreciate being secretly watched.
Supernatural - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 1 |
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That's true, which is why the third person would need to do two things:
a) Investigate their natural behavior, without letting them know, so they'll behave normally.
b) Find out if they have other motives, and how plausible those are in contrast to the simple explanation.
Supernatural - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 1 |
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Hah! Beat you to it, Ati!
Supernatural - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 0 |
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Er, why would we have anything to fear? IMO, theists have far more to fear from souls not existing. What difference would it make to an atheist? We aren't the ones with a large emotional investment in a set of unsubstantiated codependent myths.
Supernatural - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 1 |
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Dammit - now whenever I read any of his posts, I hear a French accent with Fozzie Bear's voice.
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I think Fozzie Bear is probably a better approximation to Rob.
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Paul, you made a typo. It should be:
What Is A Geek? - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 1 |
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Wonderful, Ati posted while I was busy typing.
Supernatural - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 0 |
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Darn, I missed all the action. But Ati did a great job speaking for me. Probably better than I would have done.
Yet, it can't. I have tried to think up scientific theories that would come close to explaining our subjectivity, but they all seem unreasonable. This is an odd area where science should succeed but fails, at least from my perspective.
Fails? We've only just begun to scientifically study the phenomenon of human consciousness recently. And while this might sound insulting, the fact that you can't think up theories that explain our subjectivity doesn't mean a damn thing. We've got lots of research to do before we can make informed judgments about the mechanisms underlying consciousness. If you're going to think souls exist based on this argument, then please forgive me for informing you that you're being silly. You're essentially saying, "I can't think of a natural explanation for subjectivity, therefore there must be a supernatural one." That's a cop out.
Ati, some truths cannot be proven scientifically. Like whether your friends and family love you.
You know they love you, but can you prove to everyone else that they love you? How about asking them for a public display of love? But would that make it scientific? What if they were just acting?
Of course you can't prove it on that basis. You need more evidence.
And yes, I'm entirely serious about that.
Sure, they could be acting. But since they seem to go on acting that way every day, the most reasonable explanation would seem to be that they aren't faking it.
Besides, their love for you is something that exists in their heads, and nowhere else. In principle, you can look at their brains when they think of you, and see whether they really love you or not.
An afterlife, and by extension, souls, are phenomena that you claim exist outside of our imaginations. You're trying to compare a subjective thing(emotion) with an (alleged) objective reality.
I frankly don't understand why people have problems with the idea that their deepest emotions are a consequence of physical phenomena in their brains. Doesn't that just make it more wonderful?
Supernatural - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 1 |
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Right, I'm off for the night. I still have a bloody long paper to read, and summarize in the morning, not to mention the other stuff I need to do before I rush off to Tokyo tomorrow night.
Supernatural - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 0 |
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Meh - I explained why it was meaningless in the following paragraph. Anyway, I'm out. Later, guys.
Supernatural - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 0 |
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And they can't change easily either - the one thing the British left us with was an idiotic amount of inefficient self-perpetuating bureaucracy. Add to that the incredibly large populations involved, and the amount of inertia in the system becomes nearly impossible to overcome.
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If you guys think you have to memorize loads of stuff, you clearly don't know how much we have to do. It's a bloody pain in the neck. Everything revolves around the exams, not the subject. The further along you go, the less they care about keeping up the pretence that they're really interested in anything but the exam. Eventually, if you ask a hard question, they tell you it won't be on the exam, so there's no need to worry. Eventually, the products of this system wind up becoming the teachers, and it just degenerates further.
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You guys really don't know how fucked up the Indian education system is, do you?
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Supplemental question. Just what does it mean for a thing to be alive?
PS: Did I tell you to read Schild's Ladder by Greg Egan? There's a really novel form of life there.
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"Imagine you're in your friend's house. And they're sleeping. And they're mugging you. So you get wrist control - and then pull out your gun."
Movies and Film - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 0 |
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Hahahahahahahaha! Man, I love that video!
Movies and Film - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 0 |
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Hey, does anyone here remember is one of the hitchikers guide to the galaxy books where they put Zaphod inside that machine that shows you the entirety of the universe, and then yourself beside it?
The Total Perspective Vortex! I love that.
My dad often used to tell me "Have a sense of proportion!" whenever I'd have one of those phases of obsessive focus on some things to the exclusion of nearly everything else. Eventually I got tired of hearing it and told him about the TPE, and how the one thing you cannot possibly afford to have in a universe this size, is a sense of proportion.
What Is A Geek? - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 3 |
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Or to sum up what Ati said in a nice little sound bite: "The reason you're not a banana is because if you were, you wouldn't be asking why you weren't a banana."
It's like the anthropic principle. Why is the universe well suited to our kind of life? Because if it weren't, we wouldn't be here to ask that question.
Supernatural - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 2 |
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Shhhh...keep the karma hijacking quiet.
What Is A Geek? - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 1 |
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Thanks. Occasionally I have some interesting insights.
PS: Can I be the Speaker of Cosmic Truth for the Church of Rob?
What Is A Geek? - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 0 |
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I don't even see where Ati insulted anyone.
Joseph, you need to be very careful with 'why' questions. Somewhat akin to how mathematicians usually prove that problems have solutions before actually finding them, you need to be certain that the questions you ask are actually meaningful. You cannot assume a priori that there is a reason for the subjectivity of human existence.
Let's assume the PC in front of you has a soul and is conscious. How come we ended up being us instead of the computer? From the natural POV, there had to be a "natural" cause or determinant.
You have got to be kidding me. That question is more meaningless than some Zen koans!
You're laboring under the misapprehension that naturalistic viewpoints claim that everything should have a cause. This is not strictly correct, since many phenomena arise out of sheer coincidence, or as unrelated side effects of a bunch of phenomena that happened to be simultaneously taking place.
Supernatural - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 3 |
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I think it has something to do with common personality traits giving rise to geekiness and atheism.
A great deal of religion's appeal is the sense of community it gives. Social bonds are something that people want, but the degree to which they want them varies greatly. In my experience (and this might be an invalid generalization), geeks aren't all that strongly drawn to them, since they generally seem to prefer the company of those who share their weird interests. Religious communities have no such homogeneity, other than shared belief, which doesn't draw geeks that strongly. So it boils down to differences in the reason that we enter social interactions.
Once you no longer identify with that community, peer pressure falls dramatically, and you can think a little more clearly.
There's another reason which strikes me as important, though. I think this might be far more important.
For all the astronomy geeks out there, you know that the reason you love the stars so much is that exhilarating feeling you get when you look up at the night sky brimming over with those billions of points of light. And then you can think about fusion, and stellar evolution, and black holes, and all those cool things that make it so much fun. It's all so fascinating. It's numinous.
The difference between geeks and everyone else is that we've actually perceived the numinous first hand - that's why we love the crazy stuff we do so much. Most other people live their whole lives seeing only glimpses of it here and there. Religion is a nice convenient way to experience the numinous, though. A nice, simple(well...sometimes), institutionalized way.
But if you've seen the numinous first hand, the religious version loses all its flavor. It's a poor shadow of the real thing.
Back when I believed, I used to be a HUGE astronomy and physics geek. A while ago, I thought back to those days, and realized that all the time I'd spent reading and thinking about these cool things, I never once thought "Wow, God is cool, creating all these things!" The divine just never entered into it.
That's also why I think of my belief back then as a kind of forced self-deception - that sure as hell is what it felt like. It took me ages before I had the courage to actually look at the religious view of the world and think "Man, what a simplistic way of looking at things!"
So that probably has something to do with it. Also ties in somehow with your comfort level at being an incidental byproduct of the universe, rather than the reason it was created. And the courage to say "I don't know" when you don't, instead of thinking that someone millennia ago had it all figured out.
Ooh - that's another thing. Appeal to authority - I don't know about you guys, but I'm rather against accepting stuff from authority figures who go "because I said so".
What Is A Geek? - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 7 |
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The Matrix Releaded? Is that like the Matrix Unleaded?
Movies and Film - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 1 |
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Let's assume the PC in front of you has a soul and is conscious. How come we ended up being us instead of the computer?
You ended up being you because you ended up being you. Other people ended up being other people because they ended up being other people. The computer ended up being the computer because it ended up being the computer.
Ask a meaningless question...
Supernatural - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 1 |
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Well, that answer is actually the truth - it's just somewhat subtle. Let me rephrase a bit.
You are you because if you were anyone else, you could still ask the same question.
Hmmm - somehow that still seems unclear.
Well, it all boils down to the fact that the question isn't a meaningful one. Like the mathematician in the example I gave earlier, you have to prove that a reason exists before you can ask what that reason is. We don't do this under normal circumstances because (a) We're not asking a 'why' question, or (b) The existence of a reason is evident.
There are probably circumstances in which we might assume a reason exists, and then proceed on that assumption. In such cases, we need to keep in mind the fact that we're basing all our reasoning on an assumption. If we then find ourselves able to make predictions that we can independently confirm (without the assumption), and we don't run into contradictions, then we can be fairly certain that the assumption was somewhat justified.
Of course, we still need to keep our eyes open for situations where that assumption may not apply. Much of science is concerned with reevaluating old assumptions based on newer data.
Now your assumption that there is a reason that we are ourselves and not the computer, is totally sterile. It makes no predictions and can never be tested. To use it as a basis for concluding that the supernatural exists is just silly.
Supernatural - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 1 |
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No it doesn't.
Supernatural - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 1 |
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I never see any ads. Messed around with /etc/hosts a long time ago, and most of them never appear.
Supernatural - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 0 |
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Dammit, Ati! You just made us all lose it again!
I oughta...wait, hang on a sec.
Did I just post? After complaining about people posting here...
Shit.
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Yay! So I was right, and the majority of people in the world are weird, not me.
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I know. Why else would I have posted in this thread otherwise?
C programming - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 0 |
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Another problem is that our brain often changes. Yet, our perspective remains. Clearly this is evidence against the natural view of "souls".
Meh - what is this supposed to mean? The molecules of your brain certainly change, but they retain the same pattern. That pattern is you, not the particular substrate in which it is expressed.
This book makes this point very well, using computers as an example. Computation isn't something that requires silicon - you can do it with lots of paper and a pencil, a machine built out of Lego bricks, a large steam-driven engine, or a bunch of circuits etched into silicon.
The substrate is quite irrelevant to the computation itself. Unless computers have souls, of course, but somehow no one seems to think that...
Supernatural - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 3 |
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Try doing that with "Topographic Receptive Fields and Patterned Lateral Interaction in a Self-Organizing Model of The Primary Visual Cortex"
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All I can say is that you need to conform to modern standards.
[code=cpp]
#include <stdio.h>
int main()
{
printf("Darn all you old fogies!\n");
printf("*wink*\n");
return 0;
}[/code]
C programming - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 3 |
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I think we should stone Rob for crimes against the taste buds of humanity.
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It's too bad you're not using Java, otherwise you could use Jython, which is an implementation of Python that runs on the Java Virtual Machine. Everything is integrated, so you can call back and forth between the languages with ease.
The coolest part was building a UI from Jython using Java's UI libraries. You can do it straight from the interpreter, and if you display the window at the beginning, you can actually see things added to it as you type the relevant code. Perfect combination of the l33tness of command line hacking and the ease of visual methods!
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I can be a real bastard at times.
C programming - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 1 |
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Lacey - that's exactly it! Happens to me all the time too.
I've found my identical Dream Habits Twin! Now we just have to go to Vegas and clean up...
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Hehe - my final year project as an undergrad was writing an IDE for Jython, since there weren't any around back then. Now Eclipse has a plugin for it, and there are probably other things out there. Truth be told, I'm slightly ashamed of the way we hacked it up now. Still, given the crap everyone else turned out, it was like some kind of masterpiece.
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I had a series of weird dreams last night and woke up after only 4 hours of sleep. For some reason I had the strange idea that it was time to wake up, so I was trying to convince my body to comply. Then I happened to glance at the clock and realized that I could probably stay in bed for another 3 hours.
So I did, with a sense of great satisfaction.
What's weird is that I promptly started dreaming again. My REM cycles must be screwed.
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I've only had a lucid dream once, and I used telekinesis to flip the switch that turned on the fan in my room. That was such an exhilarating thing that I got up instantly and tried to do it for real.
I just realized that we're having a discussion on dreams without anyone talking about the strange phenomenon of how your memory of a dream fades away so quickly. It's like your brain deprioritizes them or something. In extremis, we have people like EvilJawdy who barely ever remember their dreams.
Btw, I've heard many people complaining that they don't sleep well when they dream, even when they aren't having nightmares. I find this really strange, since I almost always wake up very relaxed after dreams. Is this a common thing?
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What languages do you guys dream in? I almost always dream in English, and very rarely in Hindi/Urdu. I did have this strange experience in the months leading up to my 10th grade exams, when I was studying Marathi very intensively, and I started having dreams in it. They promptly stopped once the exam was done.
Interestingly, it coincided with a sudden spike in my ability to use the language, which kinda went down the drain afterwards. I can still understand the language perfectly(hell, you hear it every day in Mumbai, and even now I have 3 Marathi-speaking roommates), though I've never really used it outside of class.
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That means you lost it.
Damn, people should stop posting in this thread. Anyone who has posted in here loses whenever there's a post here, because it turns up in the "Someone Replied to Me" box...
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I rarely use C, and on the occasions I do have to, I usually go with C++ and STL, and toss in whatever C I need, giving thanks to backwards compatibility.
C programming - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 0 |
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What's go geeky about doing a PhD at 22? Loads of people do it that way now, since the US doesn't enforce the requirement for a Masters degree. The most geeky thing about me is that I'm listening to a Chinese song over and over, even though I don't understand a word of the language.
On the other hand, I might be biased, seeing as how I'm surrounded by other people of the same kind.
Nope no singing... Doctural Thesis presentations... Done to music... *evil grin*
WOW! I'm hooked already. Not sure the old fogies on the dissertation committees would approve, though. Maybe my Machine Learning professor - he turns up in class wearing shorts and carrying a backpack, and is frequently mistaken for a student.
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Depends on what scale you're looking at. To the universe at large, none of us might ever make a difference(unless Ati and I succeed at that godhood thing) and whatever we've done will get attenuated by various factors, down to the point of non-existence.
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I've always loved Arthur C Clarke's definition of an intellectual - someone who has been educated beyond the limits of their mental capabilities.
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In one of my dreams, I was fighting large spiders that wanted to get into my mouth. I woke up with a strange taste of metal in my mouth. The analogy that popped into my head was 'eating paper clips', which is just weird.
I've always had this sneaking fear that maybe in real life, I actually did eat something....
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Well, they're all really aspects of my true identity. I usually think of these partials using this image of a sort of selective filter/amplifier that attenuates certain personality traits and strengthens others. So in effect, they're just parts of me that I throw together in interesting combinations.
Now if only I could switch off boredom...
Philosophy - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 2 |
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Interestingly, I have discovered that (although they may not make sense in relation to reality), all of my dreams are internally self-consistant. Has anyone else noticed this?
Meh, my dreams are totally insane. Logic, self-consistency - everything goes for a toss.
I once had this crazy dream where I was sneaking around near the door of a room, clearly lying in wait for someone. Sure enough, the door bursts open, and a ninja leaps into the room and comes straight at me with his sword. I narrowly dodge it and run through the door. Then I do the weirdest thing imaginable - I turn around and toss a grenade into the room.
I don't hear it go off immediately, so I go a bit closer to the door, and then there's an explosion and the 'screen' goes kinda red, like when you get hit in an FPS. Still, I'm alive, so I creep towards the door, wondering what I'll find.
And then the blasted ninja comes flying through the door and slices me in half.
There's another one I once had in which I was surfing(which I've never done in real life), except that I was 50 feet above a beach, rather than the ocean. And when I came crashing down (with all the right kinesthetic sensations, I might add), I magically kept my balance, and the board sort of went sliding backwards on the sand until it bumped into something. I look behind, and I see the cupboard from my parents' room.
Another time, I swam across an ocean, but I did it wearing a karate outfit. There was also a hot chick involved, which made the dream very enjoyable, though extremely surprising.
I had a bunch of crazy dreams less than an hour ago, but now I can't remember what they were.
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Here's my personal favorite crazy dream. It happened a few years ago, after I'd been doing some really crazy mathematics for several days on end, very very intensively.
So in my dream, I go to McDonalds. And I sit down at a table, and a waiter turns up (WTF?).
Waiter: "What will you have?"
Me: "What do you recommend?"
Waiter: "The Cheese Binomial Theorem."
I woke up laughing my ass off, and couldn't stop for five minutes - and this was at 4 AM. My sister threw a pillow at me from across the room to shut me up.
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You mean like that crazy "WWJD"(What would Jesus Do?) stuff?
I always prefer to think "What would Jackie Chan do?" It is important to note that most problems in life can be easily solved with swift application of stylized martial arts violence, especially if they involve daring acrobatics and crazy stunts with objects that happen to be lying around.
Violence is the answer.
Philosophy - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 1 |
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Good for you!
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You know COBOL?! Who inflicted such a horrible fate upon you, man?
Quick, put him in stasis until 2999! Then he can fix Y3K.
Shuzak's Collaborative Program - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 2 |
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Did I miss all the fun again?
Shuzak Current Affairs - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 1 |
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Bleh, I usually use several crazy pseudo-personalities that look at things from different angles. I've got democrats and republicans, aristocratic nobility, a couple of ancient sages, a happy little kid, a crazy computer nerd, a nutty mathematician, even a hopeless romantic.
They're very useful to have around.
Philosophy - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 3 |
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*Shoots Lacey with a phaser*
*Then uses the Force to transport her to Tatooine*
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Discounts at Costco and Walmart? I'm in.
The holy church of Rob - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 1 |
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Er, Balti means bucket. The question is, bucket of what?
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That isn't a Southern thing - in India we've been selling them on the streets for ages.
Now I'm suddenly hungry.
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Nah, it's just an easy region.
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Nice. Out here in the Southeast, it's almost always UCF, with Georgia Tech coming in once in a while, in which case we come in second and wind up going as a wildcard entry. We've competed 25 times, and gone to the finals 25 times.
So either we're really good, or everyone else really sucks.
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Yeah, that is a pretty strong region. Plus I'm familiar with the skills of some of the dudes on the MIT team, since they compete on a few websites that I frequent. Doing well in the regionals against them is a pretty good accomplishment.
Besides, the Chinese and Russians and Poles just make mincemeat out of all the American teams anyway.
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I vote for TNG over all the others. TOS was always interesting, even though the graphics look really crappy now.
I haven't seen much of DS9, but it's always given me the impression of being pretty interesting.
Voyager was okay, but not all that great. Half-Klingon females aren't supposed to be able to beat the crap out of a full Vulcan in Pon Farr!
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WPI? I don't remember seeing them on the ACM World Finals list, and I'm going to them this year.
Then again, their region probably has a lot of competition. It's easy for us to win because our only real competition is Georgia Tech(though Mercer's getting better - they came in second after us this year). With the exception of about 10 teams, most others in the southeast region kinda suck.
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Hey, it says here that you blokes down under have them - over in Queensland. Go have some - Gringo is right, you guys are seriously missing out.
Now I suddenly feel like eating roasted corn on the cob like we get back home. This American sweet corn is terrible! Whose idea was it to make corn sweet anyway?
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Okay, this talk of food is really making me miss home cooking. Tandoori chicken and biryani, anyone?
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Forget that, I'll just send over my private jet.
Ah, the joys of wishful thinking...
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Great. When I get one of those places, you're invited over. Bring some of that Netflix stuff along for the TV.
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Picard rocks. When Kirk found himself stranded on a planet with an alien captain, he shot him with an improvised gun. Picard decoded "Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra".
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Reminds me of that old aphorism "Military Intelligence is a contradiction in terms".
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How could I forget the big screen TV? *Kicks self*
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I agree with P0ss, except I also want lots of money, high speed net access, lots of computational power, a huge library, and a large cottage next to a lake, with woods and a beach and rolling plains and mountains. Also a nice subtropical climate with no extreme weather phenomena. Probably a few deer roaming about. And no people for miles around, unless I want 'em there.
Just a little more.
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Sure, will do.
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Hehe - instructors are all over the place - it's just that I don't have the time. I'm being pushed to my intellectual limits, and every time I reach them, they just move further away. This may or may not be a good thing. At any rate, I'm left with very little time to do anything else, at least this semester.
Unfortunately for the meeting plan, I'll probably be elsewhere in May. My family's coming to visit, and we'll most likely be up north in Maryland or New Jersey with more relatives.
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I wish I were doing that.
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Hail coffee!
It is by will alone that I set my mind in motion,
It is by the beans of Java that thoughts acquire speed,
The hands acquire shaking, the shaking becomes a warning,
It is by will alone I set my mind in motion.
Okay, except for the two lines in the middle, it's mostly true. For some reason, I don't get much of a kick out of coffee - I just love the taste. Tea sucks that way.
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Am I the only one who'll be sitting in a computer chair?
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Let me see...20 + 1 + 2 = 23.
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Ultimately, no matter what we do, our lives pretty much amount to nothing at the cosmic scale.
Hey, speak for yourself!
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I do research on Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning - or at any rate, I will in a couple of months, once I've finished building up enough background knowledge, and fooled around with stuff a bit.
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Computer Science - Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing.
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I'm mostly thinking of doing what Cappy said. Though I've recently begun to develop a weird ambitious streak, so maybe I'd really like to get me a deadly startup, make millions, and then spend the rest of my life happily indulging my interests.
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@Rob:
I can certainly see the potential, but aside from having to work out several bugs, there's also the issue of overhyping, which seems to happen quite a lot - it's happened in AI so often(expert systems, neural networks, genetic algorithms - each one has been touted as the one-shot solution to everything at some point) and it's likely the case with quantum computing as well.
Here's Umesh Vazirani on this again:
Most egregious is your assertion that quantum computers can solve NP-complete problems in “one shot” by exploring exponentially many solutions at once. This mistaken view was put to rest in the infancy of quantum computation over a decade ago … For unstructured search problems like the NP-complete problems this means that there is no exponential speed up but rather at most a quadratic speed up
And I was one of the dumb people thinking quantum computers would be good at solving exponential problems too. In my defense, I had my suspicions, but didn't bother to follow them up in the absence of any knowledge about quantum computing.
@Ati:
This technology is really coming at a good time. Moore's law is starting to hit the breaking point, where you really can't make the transistors and smaller (as you said). It'll be intersting to see what the corporate world does with this. Aside from the obvious corporate data processing, I wonder what the small, more amateur corporations could do. Heck- I wonder how hard it would be to build one of these things in my garage...
My gut feeling is that it'll take a little while longer. Even if we hit the limits of Moore's law tomorrow, we'll still use the same methods - just parallelize more, optimize power consumption, and what not. In a few years, your home computer might have 30 processors in it.
the physical world - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 0 |
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Reminds me of the Python Challenge.
This one was done by a friend of mine.
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If we're looking at quantum computing, what do you guys think of D-Wave's announcement that they've built a practically useful quantum computer? There's been a great deal of controversy about it, and a whole bunch of journalists are running around shooting their mouths off about how the new quantum computer will be able to solve NP-complete problems in polynomial time. There was a huge uproar from people who really know about this sort of thing, with Scott Aaronson blasting this kind of shoddy reasoning, followed by the heavyweights like Umesh Vazirani.
the physical world - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 1 |
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Five smooth stones.
Philosophy - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 1 |
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At least he didn't sell you the bridge over the river Kwai.
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I hear there are some major issues with scaling up that technology, but quantum computing isn't something I know much about.
the physical world - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 0 |
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I'm not a physicist - I'm going to grad school in Computer Science, so I suppose that makes me one of *them* , but I came pretty close to going into physics. Sadly I fell in love with CS, so I haven't really messed with physics for almost 4 years now.
Personally, I think you guys really need to do some ass-kicking around Shuzak. People seem to have the weirdest ideas about physics, and it's always useful to have an authentic physicist who can tell them to bugger off.
the physical world - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 1 |
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Yeah, that was the guy.
Man, I need to get hold of that book again. Been hung up reading Aristoi for the second time.
Virtual/Augmented Reality - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 0 |
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The problem with these temporary memories is they don't allow for the kind of original thought that breeds intelligence, if i don't remember information, how can i forge the kind of logical links required for higher reasoning?
This is true. What I've been doing for the last semester(and the current one) in grad school is to read enough stuff that I can have some real context. Getting hold of that is the key.
I'm always surprised by how little people seem to know about anything. In the Information Age, to use a terrible cliche, people don't seem to have much information.
Maybe that's why someone once called me "Discovery Channel".
People are wasting their mental potential now more than ever before, simply because you can do much more without having to be a world-class genius. It's like having these special shoes that turn you into an incredible dancer, and then refusing to wear them in favor of some battered old sneakers.
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I doubt that would work. I remember reading somewhere that the input neurons for the visual cortex are directly connected to the optic nerve. Tactile sensations never get there.
Virtual/Augmented Reality - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 1 |
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Er, I hope it was in that book. I remember him doing this thing at a trial, where some guy wants him to commit suicide for the 'public good', or some such thing. And he goes "Your good be damned, sir, if it requires the destruction of men like me!"
The sheer audacity and arrogance of that statement really appeals to me on some level. It's like he's taking the guy and rubbing his nose in the dirt, without even laying a finger on him.
Virtual/Augmented Reality - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 0 |
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And for those of you who say that 'all those rednecks' don't have much impact on society, have a good long look at our current president and his voter base.
Ah, how true. I'd forgotten.
The thing is though that even though its true that people with low IQ's tend to have more children, its also true that they tend to stay in the same areas. The result is that they over-populate, inbreed, and the population is kept under control by genetic defects and inadvertant suicide.
That seems a little iffy to me. Genetic defects and what not - that sort of thing doesn't have as significant an impact as you seem to imply. In the short term, limited inbreeding can actually produce some pretty remarkable individuals. It's after several centuries that defects begin to get serious enough to cause trouble. Some of what the Western world might term inbreeding is fairly common in Asia - people marrying cousins is no big deal in much of South or East Asia. There are several instances in my own family, in the previous two generations - in fact, there's even one in this one - of first cousins getting married.
I don't know of any major birth defects in my own line aside from bad eyesight, and intelligence and education levels are generally pretty high. Hell, there are a couple of us who seem to have benefited, like me and my dad - we put on weight very, very slowly. Really annoys my mom. And, er...I'm not too dumb.
That said, you ask me to marry a cousin and I'll probably fall over laughing.
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Notice how those rednecks never seem to have much of an impact on anything, either(except perhaps the local squirrel population).
I sometimes wonder how it would be if you actually built a society where a person's social power and influence was strictly proportional to intelligence, skill and knowledge.
It would probably be like dancing along the edge of a sword. The society would probably manage to do some amazing things, but on the flip side, the damage that could be done would be correspondingly greater. A madman in charge is old hat, but a really smart madman...
Then there's the social structure from Aristoi. Something analogous to it might be pretty useful.
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I prefer the style of the Solid State Entity from David Zindell's Requiem for Homo Sapiens trilogy. Millions of planetary size computational devices spread out over thousands of cubic light years, communicating in unknown ways. Even the underlying topological structure of space is fundamentally different.
Imagine trying to destroy that.
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Found it on Wikipedia:
"Excession is particularly popular because of its copious detail concerning the Ships and Minds of the Culture, its great AIs: their outrageous names, their dangerous senses of humour. Is this what gods would actually be like?"
Banks: "If we're lucky."
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There's an interview where Banks is asked about the Minds(the super AIs that run the utopian human civilization known as The Culture), which goes something like:
Interviewer: "Is this what gods will be like? Crazy creatures with wacky senses of humor, strange tastes, incredible abilities, phenomenal intelligence...."
Banks: "If we're lucky."
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Just wondering how your IQ is rising. Usually it decreases with age, given that you have to divide by your physical age.
I'm not a big fan of IQ as a measure of intelligence. Trying to reduce a multifaceted ability like intelligence to a single number is an extreme oversimplification. Even as a heuristic, it isn't all that useful, except when you're distinguishing between people with an extremely large IQ difference.
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Ever read Ilium and Olympos by Dan Simmons? The greek gods turn up in a posthuman setting, and you find out just how they inspired the greek heros - with nanotech and force fields.
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In my mind, the singularity has three primary aspects:
mental, nanotech, and digital.
Putting nanotech with the other two gives me a kind of cognitive disonnance. A more suitable term would probably be physical. Nanotech is a little too specialized to rank among the other two, highly abstract terms. It might just be that nanotech isn't what changes it all - it might be something else altogether. Remember, when they asked people in the early 20th century about what they thought future travel would be like, they imagined fleets of blimps crossing the Atlantic. Airplanes were conspicuously absent. Nanotech might turn out the same way.
Advanced Tech - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 0 |
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I've used them a bit, but never really had to do anything particularly complex in it, so I don't know any of the more advanced stuff.
There's an interesting tutorial of them here. The APIs they describe are the Java and C++ ones, and the context is algorithm programming contests, but you only need to pay attention to the basic fundamentals - character classes, quantifiers and what not - since that's pretty much language independent. Once you know that, I think you'll be pretty well placed to specialize what you know for whatever language you're interested in. Even PHP, which I have no clue about.
The article also has a bunch of links at the end which you might find interesting.
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Thanks. I'm not ruling out the possibility of a Singularity, though - merely pushing the date back a bit.
And of course, there's always the danger that we'll blow ourselves back into the Stone Age before that happens.
Advanced Tech - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 1 |
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Our friend the dot has a point. The people working on nanotech have far more fundamental problems to solve than figuring out how to get nanobots to shave someone. It's going to be a LONG time before nanotech gets to the point that people will use it so casually.
As for the AI, as someone getting into the field, I can certainly say that it's going to be a really long time before we see something of the sort Kurzweil is talking about. Besides, I'm rooting for augmented human intelligence, rather than completely independent AIs. The problem of strong AI is far more difficult than Kurzweil implies. There's far too much work to be done in understanding how the brain works, the emergence of complex behavior from large, highly interconnected collections of simple systems. There's an insane amount of theoretical and experimental work to be done. Worse than that, there's a HUGE need for synthesis among all the different approaches, and there isn't that much of it happening.
Of course, seeing how human beings are usually useless at predicting the future, what will probably happen is that things will turn out very differently from what we imagine.
Advanced Tech - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 1 |
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My long term goal is to become a god (not as implausible as it sounds).
Wow, that's precisely what my long-term goal is too. Looks like I'll have company in the post-deification era.
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Nah, nothing planned for that particular day, at least. Assuming nothing comes up, I'll be there.
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Have fun! One of my favourite scenes turns up somewhere in the first book(I think) - when Phaethon is on trial. Involves an amazingly scathing retort.
Virtual/Augmented Reality - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 1 |
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Okay, but I suggest leaving a hidden overself in place to make sure we don't do anything stupid.
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I don't remember exactly where it turns up, though. And I won't say what the retort is...spoilers aren't fun when you're actually reading the book.
It's this retort which is almost like something out of Ayn Rand. If that doesn't give it away when it turns up, I'll tell you when you're done.
Virtual/Augmented Reality - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 1 |
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Well, we have two millennia. If I'm still around, and I'm not a rough approximation to a god, I'd be ashamed of myself.
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Yeah, same here. What's the point of being a god if you can't do all these arbitrary things anyway?
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Nah, I wouldn't want to kill them just to test a theory.
Now I'll shut up, before Rob delivers a spinning kick to the side of my head.
Philosophy - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 0 |
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*Holds up Jim Jones*
Fire away, Rob.
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*Drops Jim like a hot potato*
*Runs off to decontamination unit*
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*Lying in a crumpled heap on the floor*..."I just know this is going to work out for the best somehow"...*collapses*
Philosophy - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 1 |
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I'd like to answer, but I'm too busy trying to get my legs to work.
Philosophy - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 1 |
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Well put, Fibo's Wench. Karma++ for you!
@Jim Jones:
That wasn't built in your honor. The Polynesians were attempting to offer you something you didn't have.
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Happy birthday, Paul! Have a blast!
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Yeah, the trailer looks pretty interesting too, but I can't find it on Netflix.
Movies and Film - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 0 |
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The thing that gives me hope is this weird habit the universe has developed over the last year or so, of being really nice to me. It's almost definitely just my imagination, but random events seem to work in my favor more often than not, and things just seem to work out for the best.
But hey, it gives me hope, which is always a good thing.
Philosophy - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 1 |
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Don't worry, your just on a probability streak. Even if the universe doesn't conserve probablity, it won't last long.
I've been thinking the same thing for ages, but this streak refuses to end!
Philosophy - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 0 |
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I usually find Warcraft's "Yesh Milord" much funnier.
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Wow, that's a lot of work. A little too public for my tastes, but praiseworthy nonetheless. Hopefully she'll be floored.
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I've tried and failed.
Philosophy - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 0 |
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Guess I'm just going to have to resign myself to my fate.
Philosophy - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 0 |
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Hey, what about all us nice people?
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YA im a good guy. I dont have wrong intentions + im hard to get cause im worth so much!!!!
Nobody would give you karma for saying that. In this context, actions speak louder than words. Just claiming outright that you're a nice guy(in a rather crass way, I might add) is probably proof that you aren't. At least it can be construed in that way.
Btw, begging for karma is a sure way to turn off everyone. What do you want so much karma for anyway? Better to just rack up some nice, original posts, and the karma will take care of itself.
If it doesn't, then it's probably because people think you're Not Important.
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If he learns Java, the C# learning curve is virtually non-existent.
Java Programming - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 1 |
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Actually, no matter what weapon you're using, I'd recommend having one of these on hand.
Military Strategies and War - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 3 |
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Not to mention because you don't want someone doing it to you.
Philosophy - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 3 |
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Yeah, I have. I recommended it to someone else on some thread around here.
Virtual/Augmented Reality - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 1 |
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I'd certainly try, but I'm a bit of an ornery critter. I'm not sure whether it would be good literature, though. How does a writer do justice to a non-human mode of thought?
Virtual/Augmented Reality - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 1 |
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Darn, I was going to mention katanas yesterday! Oh well, at least someone gets to have some fun.
Ah, the thrill of sending zombie body parts flying in a high-speed flurry of slashes and stabs.
Military Strategies and War - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 1 |
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I never said that all professors are dumb or incompetent - it's just that mine were.
The ones at grad school are amazing, though.
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Actually, I find it slightly odd when people debate whether or not they should go to college. Probably just because I'm Indian - I can't imagine not going to college.
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What the heck is AIDs? The word is AIDS. The last S stands for Syndrome, it isn't a pluralization or anything.
Jim, you weren't trying to be subtle and drag in some crazy unknown acronym, were you? Coz if you were, read this.
Shuzak Current Affairs - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 0 |
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Glad to be of service.
Programmers - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 0 |
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@CamouflageNoise:
That sounds like an interesting book, though I'm not sure whether the author has the right idea. I guess I'll have to read it to find out. Until then, I'll refrain from voicing several objections that come to mind.
Religious Theory - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 0 |
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*grin* In theory... You are right... In practicality... Well I don't want to have to create DB reports using Assembly Language! *grin*
LOL - it could be worse, you might have to use actual Machine Language!
Or the only thing that could possibly be worse than the meaningless numerical codes of machine language - COBOL!
@Rathmaster:
Are you sure you're not confusing Java and Javascript? The two are completely different things.
Java Programming - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 2 |
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I dunno. How would we test for this?
Philosophy - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 1 |
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The bedsheet is not bending in a different dimension, the bend is gravity. infact, to be more acurate, the bedsheet is not bending at all, the aparent bend is a visual explaination of the effect and shape of gravity.
The bend isn't gravity - gravity is just what we call the curvature of space-time. The bedsheet is bending, and therefore affecting things on it. Everything is still traveling in a straight line, it's just that straight lines have suddenly been rendered curved.
Mathematics - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 1 |
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This may or may not serve as a hint, but I'd like to point out that binary numbers are only about 3.32 times longer than the corresponding decimal representation. Add to that the fact that dealing with base 10 is harder technologically, and precisely equivalent mathematically, and binary suddenly looks 65536 times more attractive.
Programmers - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 1 |
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I'm beginning to see what's throwing you off here. It's the same fundamental principle that confused a cousin of mine. He once told me that analog computers would always be 'better' than digital computers. His reasoning apparently was that an analog signal could take, say a thousand different values(well, technically it's an infinite number, but practically you're never gonna use that ), while a digital signal can do just two.
I feel Socratic, so I have to ask - do you see the flaw in his reasoning here?
Programmers - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 1 |
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Programmers - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: |
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10 directional logical gates would increase computing power exponentially.
They wouldn't increase it significantly at all, and exponential increase simply by switching fundamental operations to base 10 is never going to cause an exponential improvement.
Er, 9 isn't 000000001. it's 1001. Where did you pull that crazy number from?
Programmers - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 0 |
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Nice post, P0ss, but I'm afraid I have to take issue with what you're saying. The first world isn't living in affluence because of the money being wrung from the poor starving nations. They certainly have done their share of damage, but to be embarassingly blunt - they aren't the cause, nor are they really obligated to help out the poor countries, except out of compassion and human fellowship.
It's not that the developed nations have a disproportionate share of the world's wealth - it's that they produce a disproportionately high share of it. If you distributed all the world's wealth equally to everyone on the planet, then a year later, the poor countries would be impoverished again, and the rich ones would be rich once more. The undeveloped countries are exactly that - undeveloped. Their problem isn't that they lack wealth - it's that they lack the capacity to produce it. Conversely, the richer ones do have that capacity, and it feeds on itself.
You know those underpaid people working in pitiful conditions you mentioned? Their lives suck, and their future prospects aren't too hot, but what's the alternative? Go back to the Stone Age? The only thing they can do is interact with the rest of the world economy in the only way they can - cheap labour, which is typically in abundance in underdeveloped countries, and lacking in the affluent ones. There's nothing else we can do to help them - giving them money will only buy them temporary respite, and the rest of the world doesn't produce enough money to sustain this for any length of time. Third world countries have to help themselves - the most we can do is make it slightly easier for them, but short of a sudden Singularity, I don't see any other way to improve things.
the physical world - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 0 |
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I wouldn't know about inherent westerner superiority - I'm not a westerner myself, and I've met some pretty dumb specimens.
There's a lot of stuff that went into making the western world what it is today. Much of it is historical accident. The Industrial Revolution just happened to take place in the West, and the environment was just about right to allow things to take off, motivated both by greed and curiousity, and the newfound intellectual freedom brought by the scientific method. They got that and the rest of the world missed out, and that had the single biggest impact.
Of course, they went colonial at the same point - and yes, they stole a huge amount of wealth from other countries,(including mine - the Brits still have the Peacock Throne, and one of the Crown Jewels is Indian!), enslaved a lot of people, and so forth.
Unfortunately, what's done is done, and you can't punish people for what their great-great-grandfathers did. And like I said before, it's not wealth that does it, it's the capacity to produce it. For most of human history, there just wasn't any way to get rich without taking it from someone else. Now there is - you come up with something that is of value to enough people, and they'll voluntarily pay you for it. It's fundamentally better, in most ways.
the physical world - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 0 |
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As such, it seems that the creators of the original universe would probably put intentional laws or blocks in place to prevent simulated civilizations from becoming posthuman.
This short story actually addresses this, Ati. Check it out. Might not have that much to do with it, but it's fun to read.
Virtual/Augmented Reality - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 1 |
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Yeah, it's a real classic. But I especially like their idea of merging with AI. Fits in neatly with what I want, anyway.
Virtual/Augmented Reality - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 0 |
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Ironically, I have to present a paper to my Machine Learning class next week, the major premise of which is the opposite - the author complains that the principle of Occam's Razor is being terribly misused in machine learning and knowledge discovery systems, and produces theoretical arguments and empirical evidence proving his point pretty convincingly.
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Have you read the Golden Age trilogy? They actually have collectives that run that way, but people tend not to like it much.
Interestingly, all the AIs on the planet support a higher-level consciousness called the Earthmind, who they cannot comprehend, even though they generate it. And once every 1000 years, all the intelligence in the solar system(Earthmind, Lunamind, and all the others, including the posthumans themselves) joins together to create one mind so fucking powerful it defies description. This event is called the Golden Transcendence, and usually sets the tone for what humanity will do for the next millennium.
The description in book 3 is breathtaking - enough to give you an intellectual orgasm or something.
What I find really amusing, though, is that this mega-mind only thinks about the course of humanity's next millennium for a tiny interval of its brief existence. The rest of it is all devoted to stuff that lower minds can't comprehend.
Virtual/Augmented Reality - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 2 |
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Bleh - wannabes are a dime a dozen. I'm the real thing.
Military Strategies and War - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 1 |
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Well, it might just be that my college sucked, which is probably true. There were just dozens of people who knew how to parrot textbooks perfectly, but couldn't write code for anything reasonable, and didn't really care about what they were doing - most of them were simply in CS because they scored well enough in the 12th grade board exams to make it. And the subject was big, given India's booming IT industry. Add to that the fact that there's no money in teaching, and you can imagine my state of mind when I woke up one fine day, halfway through the third year, and realized that my teachers were necessarily dumb and/or incompetent, and most of the people around me were no better.
I'm having the time of my life in grad school, though. More overworked than I've ever been, and I'm actually happy!
Or maybe I'm just an intellectual masochist.
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Fighting, programming...they're fundamentally similar things, aren't they?
Okay, I'm biased. Competitive programming is something I'm hopelessly addicted to, solely because of TopCoder. Maybe that's why I like the battle analogy.
Java Programming - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 5 |
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Damn you, Chadrack - you just made me lose it too!
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College mostly sucks. Grad school rocks, though.
Kinda paradoxical, eh?
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I don't need a Zombie Survival Plan. Who do you think is going to be creating the zombies, eh?
And yes, I know all the cliched endings of bad SF movies, so I can plan for them, thus rendering myself impossible to stop.
Military Strategies and War - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 2 |
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IMHO, it would have little effect on the pace of progress, because finding it wouldn't help people to practice radical thought. So things would go on exactly the same way as before, with the same proportion of people thinking radical things.
On a slightly related note, I've been wondering about the role of simplicity and elegance in science and math in general. This was mostly catalyzed by my having to read a bunch of CS papers over the last couple of weeks. I've noticed that a lot of the really good ideas, ranging from the ones that cause paradigm shifts and create new fields to the ones that merely open up a new avenue in some discipline that will remain mostly unknown to the rest of the world forever, are astonishingly simple and direct. I don't know if this is some kind of hindsight effect, or those ideas really are simple and were somehow missed before.
And naturally, I'm trying to figure out how to detect such ideas, or learn how to come up with them myself.
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The biggest advantage I see in learning C++ is that you have to learn how to handle all those little details, and keep from shooting yourself in the foot. When you're programming something useful, you don't want to deal with that, but when you're learning, it's perfect. It's like those guys in DragonballZ who train with weighted clothing. By learning to live normally with all those constraints, you automatically learn to kick ass when you remove them.
No mental pain, no gain.
Java Programming - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 7 |
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Quicker? Not usually, but there's no point in trying to compare execution speeds of a VM language with a non-VM language. It's really like comparing apples and oranges.
I'd actually recommend learning C++ first and getting the suffering over beforehand. Probably builds character or something. After that, hitting most other languages is a piece of cake - not only because they're almost all uniformly easier than C++, but because C++ hit a lot of good metaphors, and you'll usually find those in most other languages.
Java Programming - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 4 |
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Depends on what you mean by observation, I guess. I remember reading that even a camera can collapse a wavefunction - consciousness on the part of the observer is apparently optional.
Philosophy - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 2 |
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Well, technically, all Turing-complete languages are exactly equivalent. The difference is how hard or difficult they make it to do certain things.
Java Programming - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 3 |
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Um, actually, the brain really is essentially binary. Neurons only have an on and off state, that's it.
There is one difference, though - brain signals aren't discrete with respect to time, so they can fire at varying intervals. That aspect of brain function isn't digital - it's analog.
Virtual/Augmented Reality - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 1 |
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Bleh, this is quicker:
[code=cpp]
int binToDec(String bin)
{
int ret = 0, n = bin.length();
for(int i = 0; i < n; i++)
ret += (bin.charAt(i) - '0') << (n-1-i);
return ret;
}[/code]
Of course, if I really wanted to do this, I'd probably just go:
[code=cpp]
return Integer.parseInt(bitString, 2);[/code]
And for the reverse:
[code=cpp]
return Integer.toBinaryString(num);[/code]
And that's how the pros do it.
Programmers - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 1 |
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Well, there's this quote I once read which goes: "The brain isn't a computer, the brain is the brain."
That said, I don't think I know enough about brain function to know how significantly it differs from neural networks.
Shamefully enough, I haven't really looked into neural networks much - but that's something I should be remedying in the coming weeks, for this project I'm doing for my Machine Learning course. The idea we've got so far is to use a convolutional neural network to learn opening strategies for Go, using the temporal difference algorithm.
Virtual/Augmented Reality - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 0 |
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@Not Important:
Depends on the graphics library you're using. I'm pretty certain there's a circle function in any remotely good one.
Er, what's a c-programmer tool, anyway?
Programmers - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 0 |
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@P0ss:
Physical limitations? I'd much rather build computers using binary, thank you very much. Base 10 would just involve too much unnecessary complexity.
Not that it really matters. You could build a computer in base 23 if you wanted. Bit of a pain in the neck, though. Makes sense to start as low as you can go without hitting unary.
Programmers - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 0 |
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Um, devils reincarnated in the form of cats are standard cats. The other ones aren't being true to their feline nature.
Insomniacs Unite - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 2 |
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You're telling me! I've been trying to be 'productive' for all of last week, and look where it's got me. I managed to ignore Orkut almost completely, but Shuzak is a different kind of horse altogether...
Here's to wasted productivity!
Shuzak Current Affairs - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 1 |
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The word is 'misspell'. 'Mispell' is the act of failing to pell correctly.
This concludes our daily dose of wisdom from the Pedant Who Illustrates His Points By Telling Lame Jokes.
Shuzak Current Affairs - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 2 |
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Yes, but some jokes are lamer than others, as are some jokers.
Shuzak Current Affairs - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 0 |
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Wow - and I don't suppose there were any mitigating circumstances? Like her being from a little unknown tribe from the Amazon rainforest or something?
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Meh - trivial series expansion for Pi. I actually knew that years before I knew anything about calculus. Read it in Contact.
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For those who still wanna know, use the series expansion for the inverse tangent function arctan(x), and set x to 1. That gives you Pi/4.
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Well, you know, it's not like he's important or anything. That makes him easy to ignore.
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Somehow that doesn't feel very usable, though. On the other hand, we are a bunch of smart people...
Suggest Shuzak! - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 1 |
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I thought of that too, but the issue is that you might not finish reading the thread, or maybe lose your connection halfway through, or something like that. Maybe if we put a link right at the end that returns you to your profile and marks the thread as read. Plus another one that just returns you without marking it.
Suggest Shuzak! - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 1 |
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Actually, I just had this interesting idea for a science fiction story a couple of hours ago.
It's like this: while human intelligence appears to be a local phenomenon, it's actually a global effect that exists due to some weird interaction of billions of minds. So then these guys send out the first manned interstellar ship, and somewhere around Jupiter or so, they start going nuts and acting like complete idiots, because now they're really just a bunch of large apes with fancy equipment. Bring them back, and they return to normal, with no memory of their brief regression to drooling idiocy.
That also explains why we haven't met aliens yet. No one can leave their own solar system without going all dumb.
Quantum Mechanics - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 2 |
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I agree. And in Soviet Russia, the ads click on YOU!
Couldn't resist. Reading too many papers has left me drained.
Suggest Shuzak! - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 1 |
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I'd just like to say that I'm significantly less obsessed with the Wii then everyone on Shuzak. Probably because I don't have one, and I'm not getting one, because I'm terrified of the effect it'll have on my sporadic bursts of productivity.
Hey, it had to be said!
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You know, if the subject being tested really is sentient, it might not appreciate being dissected.
Virtual/Augmented Reality - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 1 |
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Yes, well, just one question.
How do you know that what you saw is your aura and not your eyes playing tricks on you?
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Maybe just a little marker indicating that a thread contains unread messages - that ought to do the trick. Then you don't even need to delete them, just ignore the ones that aren't marked new.
Suggest Shuzak! - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 0 |
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P0ss, looks like you're not going to get a w00t unless you decide to go ahead and have that sex change operation.
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Afterimages are different colours too. You mentioned them earlier - that part about staring at a light bulb.
It's interesting that you can do it in the dark, though. Tell me, when you do it in the dark, do you see one colour more often than others?
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I just tried it out. Those are afterimages all right.
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Er, it looks like all you're doing is inducing afterimages voluntarily. And I don't see why you're so convinced it's an aura. Clearly a simpler explanation is that you're screwing around with your eyes, and all the action is in your head.
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I wouldn't particularly mind if my life was a VR and I did know of it. As long as I can control it in crazy ways, of course. Kinda useless to be in VR and not indulge your every whim harmlessly.
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That has the added side-effect of keeping the most recently visited ones visible, which you may or may not want.
Suggest Shuzak! - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 0 |
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How do you know I'm an NPC? I might be an actual player from the reality that's simulating this one.
Virtual/Augmented Reality - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 1 |
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Yeah - the players are more likely to be little white mice anyway.
Virtual/Augmented Reality - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 1 |
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Actually, it looks okay to me, but then I have a history of thinking like Google.
Suggest Shuzak! - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 0 |
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It helps that my mind automatically filters out all ads too.
Suggest Shuzak! - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 1 |
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That still raises an interesting question. What's the highest rated post on Shuzak?
Suggest Shuzak! - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 0 |
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That's what my cousin calls me! It's good to know that it's exalted.
Unless the meaning is different in England and Australia, of course.
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I sometimes worry about the validity of the Turing test. I know people who probably wouldn't be able to pass it.
Virtual/Augmented Reality - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 0 |
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Well put. In sound-bite form , the whole doesn't necessarily have the properties of its parts.
Quantum Mechanics - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 2 |
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Er, RyeGye - conscience and conscious are two entirely distinct concepts.
Sorry, I have a bit of a pedantic streak.
Quantum Mechanics - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 2 |
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@ Matt:
Thanks - but that line isn't original. Got it from one of David Zindell's Requiem for Homo Sapiens novels.
Advanced Tech - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 0 |
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Lastly, if what you're saying is right, it is gravity that produces acceleration and not the other way around. But, I think what Einstein said about them is that "they can be though about as being the same".
If I'm not mistaken, that's known in relativity as the principle of equivalence. In the absence of other data, the effects of gravitation and acceleration are indistinguishable from each other.
Imagine that you're standing in a closed room, with no contact with the outside world. Things are falling at 9.81 m/s^2 and all is well with the world. Except for the fact that you can't tell whether this is because this room is on the surface of the Earth, or in a spaceship accelerating at one gee in the direction of the ceiling.
Mathematics - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 1 |
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* PET PEEVE ALERT - EVERYONE GET CLEAR *
Sigh...why does everyone misuse the word 'energy' so much? People have too many false mental images associated with it. The only sensible meaning in this context is the term as used in physics, not that vague New Age silliness that is inevitably the intent.
As for science I think that any respectable scientist will say that there is definatley a greater "somthing" out there ect..
Not necessarily, I'm afraid. Who ever gave you that idea? Where do these blasted cliches come from?
Let's get this straight. Respectable scientists don't go around making baseless claims about the existence of a 'greater something'. I don't know how this happens, but everywhere you look, someone is going "Science has proven...", "all respectable scientists believe...", "It is a scientific fact that...", and then following it up with some sort of unscientific tripe. It's disgusting!
And then, to top it all off, anyone who senses the disonnance and protests is denounced as ignorant. Sheesh.
*RANT WINDING DOWN NOW*
Whew - felt good to get that off my chest. Sorry about that Larissa - nothing personal, I just needed to mouth off about this thing - it's been bothering me for years...
Of course, what I said is still true.
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It is difficult, i know, just like the missuse of the word "love", it is a placeholder word, used to describe the indescribable and basterdised to describe the trite.
Killer line, dude.
I prefer not to believe non-trivial assertions of the kind you just made('collective objective perspective of the whole universe...') without very strong evidence, though.
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I didn't know we were that scary.
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I'm still reeling in surprise from her extreme overreaction.
On the bright side, at least she didn't threaten to 'smoke us out' or something.
Just because you may have a higher IQ than most does not mean that you can fuck everyone else over with your pretentious large worded pusssss!
Excuse me while I return to my nefarious plot to take over the world.
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Quite trying to classify yourselves fools.
I love the irony of this statement.
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Yeah - those emoticons are tons more expressive than the Einstein ones. I vote for switching to normal spacing with those ones.
Suggest Shuzak! - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 1 |
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I was actually going to post here earlier, but I came down with the flu yesterday and had two deadlines to meet at the same time.
Then I wound up reading the Sam Harris vs Andrew Sullivan debate, and in one of them, Sam said almost exaclty what I'd been thinking of writing. The man is a bloody mind-reader.
The thing I was going to say is that ideally, the only beliefs we should have are the ones that are forced upon us by the nature of reality. Like gravity. It's a bit hard to disbelieve in it, unless you're insane, or one of the most sadly deluded individuals humanity has ever produced. Or maybe the Earth just sucks.
In any event, these things aren't really beliefs at all - they're simply things you cannot reasonably deny.
Now the problem, of course, is that this isn't exactly an ideal world, since the human ability to process information and reason is rather limited. Thus there is another sense in which we need to have beliefs - though perhaps trust would be a better word for this sort of thing. There's a certain innate optimism that almost all people have, probably wired into us by evolution, which makes us have slightly unrealistic expectations about the world. That's part of the reason why people always hear about bad things happening to others, but are without fail surprised when something bad happens to them. Besides, given our limited processing capacity and time, we can't really waste it all on considering the effects of all our knowledge on all our other knowledge - at the most we can integrate a little bit of the sum total of what we know, but we do that slowly.
Another reason might be a subconscious defense mechanism keeping us from having adverse emotional reactions. Maybe the people who're depressed are actually seeing things more clearly than the rest of us.
So we formulate a bunch of assumptions that we use when reasoning about most things, as a sort of first-order approximation to reality. These run the whole gamut of human experience - you assume that you won't have an accident on your way home, your spouse won't cheat on you, a bolt of lightning won't kill the President(though you wish it might). You go on assuming that when you wake up the next day, the sun will still have risen in the east, gravity still operates, and a host of other increasingly minor assumptions. You have to make these assumptions, merely because you can't handle the complexity of thinking about all of them, and if some of them fail, then you're royally screwed anyway.
Now, what happens is that we mentally elevate our assumptions to the status of facts, despite the fact that not all of them are necessarily so. We do this because we HATE uncertainty, and often prefer false certainty to real uncertainty. The reason the scientific method caused such a big uproar when it first appeared was that it began to produce people who were comfortable with doubt - at least consciously. Still, deep down, the same old preferences persist.
So what is God? Given the current state of human knowledge, there are no objectively convincing reasons to believe in God, though subjective interpretations may differ, of course. In any event, here's an interesting definition of God, that seems rather descriptive:
God is, quite literally, the apotheosis of our false certainty.
No wonder people with faith will proclaim it from the rooftops that their belief needs no rational justification. Because it isn't truly rational. But it is, just as truly, a part of being human. If we really saw the world exactly as it was, I don't think we'd get out of bed the next day.
We don't have to be completely rational, nor can we expect to be while we remain carbon-substrate humans - and possibly not even after that. But we should at least have the courage to pay attention to the myriad tricks our minds play on us, and correct our behaviour accordingly, when desirable.
Sadly, this requires a level of self-knowledge and intellect that is not very common in our species, though it might be present in greater quantities on Shuzak.
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But is the Singularity a good or bad thing?
Is the oak tree a crime against an acorn?
Actually, I find both the dystopian and utopian views of this rather unconvincing. While I disagree with Kurzweil on his idea that the Singularity will hit in about 50 years, I still think it'll hit real soon, perhaps within a century, and almost definitely within two - unless we blow ourselves to kingdom come, of course. For all we know the universe is full of has-been civilizations who nearly reached the Singularity and couldn't handle it. Godhood isn't for the faint of heart.
Besides, I'm beginning to suspect that the superhuman intelligences to appear won't be artifical, but probably technologically augmented humans. Somehow that possibility doesn't fill me with that much hope. Unless I can be one of them, of course.
There is one slightly odd possibility, of course. I have this crazy image of the first AI being turned on, whereupon it mutters something about the 'true nature of the universe', and proceeds to vanish in a flash of light.
Advanced Tech - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 3 |
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You could just add one extra option allowing us to manually remove one of the threads until someone else posts in there.
Suggest Shuzak! - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 0 |
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Congrats - looks like Shuzak is well on its way now.
I agree with the general sentiment - if Google can't come up with well targeted ads, there's little chance anyone else can. Anyone who does will get bought and/or hired.
Actually, I think the major issue with compensating people is the huge finance management and legal issues that threaten to crop up. We're a bunch of people from all over the world - I'm not entirely certain how you'll handle the problem of getting the money to everyone.
Suggest Shuzak! - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 2 |
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I would eventually like to implement our own advertising system. I told the Google representative about it and her reply was "hummmm...I guess that's a good strategy too" I hope she's not reading.
Good luck trying.
But seriously, these guys have some of the world's finest tech minds working on the problem of targeted advertising. So unless you can somehow steal AdSense...hehehehehehehe.
Suggest Shuzak! - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 1 |
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I know, I've actually read more of Dawkins, and seen a few videos as well. I've been thinking of getting The God Delusion, but a glance at the TOC keeps showing me stuff I already know.
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Ouch. Well, feel free to use some of the money you seem to think we all deserve to forget them.
Hell, feel free to use just my share.
Suggest Shuzak! - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 0 |
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Actually, the major reason people spend so long trying to sleep is that they weren't really sleepy in the first place. I never hit the sack until I feel sleepy.
Also, if you force yourself to get up at the same time everyday(really annoying alarm clock too far to reach ), then pretty soon you'll start feeling sleepy at the optimal time, too. There might be a bit of disorientation at the beginning, but that should pass fairly quickly.
Insomniacs Unite - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 0 |
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I wonder why all the successful people out there are such optimists.
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What about the guys who are successful at getting it?
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I'm willing - once I'm seventy.
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No problem. Books are good. Free books are better.
Conspiracy Theories - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 1 |
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A slightly weirder version is depicted in Accelerando, by Charles Stross. It seems that the fate of all organic life(even highly enhanced organic life) is to be outcompeted by sentient economic instruments who dominate the market, using something called Economics 2.0, which is so darn advanced that humans can't understand it and remain human.
Quote from the book: (Note that singularity here refers to a technological singularity, not that thing you find in black holes)
The Matrioshka brains – it's a standard part of the stellar life cycle. Life begets intelligence, intelligence begets smart matter and a singularity. I've been doing some thinking about it. I figure the singularity stays close to home in most cases, because bandwidth and latency time put anyone who leaves at a profound disadvantage. In effect, the flip side of having such huge resources close to home is that the travel time to other star systems becomes much more daunting. So they restructure the entire mass of their star system into a free-flying shell of nanocomputers, then more of them, Dyson spheres, shells within shells, like a Russian doll: a Matrioshka brain. Then Economics 2.0 or one of its successors comes along and wipes out the creators. But. Some of them survive. Some of them escape that fate: the enormous collection in the halo around M-31, and maybe whoever built the routers. Somewhere out there we will find the transcendent intelligences, the ones that survived their own economic engines of redistribution – engines that redistribute entropy if their economic efficiency outstrips their imaginative power, their ability to invent new wealth.
It's a great story, and it's a free ebook now, too: http://www.accelerando.org/book/
Conspiracy Theories - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 2 |
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Beautiful geek joke, Patrick.
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Well said, RyeGye. After all, extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence, and the burden of proof is on the person making the claim.
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The Kurzweil/Transhumanist viewpoint of the future world is somewhat apocalyptic.
Eh? How so?
Conspiracy Theories - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 1 |
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Maybe you could try predicting someone's mood based on the color of their aura, or something.
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Well then, if he can't see auras through walls, and we can't come up with any test that will show that he really is doing something other than fooling himself(no offense, Hx10) or screwing with his eyes, then we're hardly obligated to believe that he really is seeing auras.
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We are islands of consciousness since we are not telepathic - but the universe is a sea of consiousness instantaneously thinking and feeling everything that every conscious entity is thinking and feeling...
Then it seems we're merely disagreeing over semantics - you're saying exactly the same thing Jared and I were, except you implicitly refer to the collective consciousnesses of everything as the consciousness of the universe. But all you've really done is define the consciousness of the universe as the collected thoughts of everything, so there's nothing particularly different from the standard viewpoint there. Words, nothing more.
Quantum Mechanics - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 2 |
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Bleh, I seriously doubt it. I think all that will happen is that the distinctions between organic and artificial will be irrevocably blurred - that's all.
If you can't beat 'em, join 'em.
Conspiracy Theories - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 1 |
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I'm mildly interested in the language, and I'll be going to Tokyo for about a week in March. Maybe I should learn some quick Japanese. But who has the time?
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AHA! More xkcd fans! I knew this was where the geeks hung out, but now it turns out that it attracts people with good taste too.
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Red Hat won't be able to help you when you write crappy code.
Invention, Ideas - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 0 |
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LOL - yeah, I remember that. Excuse me while I go laugh for the next 20 minutes.
Invention, Ideas - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 0 |
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I don't have 2 hours to devote to listening to Kent Hovind, of all people - not when there are 200 pages of my Machine Learning textbook remaining to be read. I've watched about 10 minutes so far, and he's already lying! He claims that he's run out of opponents to debate, while he's been refusing real scientific debates for years. Yeesh.
Evolution was invented by Satan...rrrrrright. And here he is talking about Adam and Eve like they really existed.
I've read his arguments online before - hell, even the most extreme Young-Earth Creationists think he's crazy, and they aren't exactly paragons of scientific adequacy either.
But a coyote or wolf could DEFINITELY not come from a stone!
I haven't seen whatever made you say this, but if this pathetic conception of evolution is what Hovind and others are trying to refute, then it's no wonder they're convincing people. The straw man fallacy is the oldest in the book, and very easy to use on the untrained.
I'm sorry if it doesn't match your beliefs, Abhishek, but the fact of the matter is that there is no scientific reason for believing that the universe was created by a god, and plenty for believing that evolution takes place, the earth is 4.5 billion years old, and that the universe is more interesting than the simplistic, contradictory, and simply bad movie that the Bible makes it out to be. You're welcome to believe the claims of the creationists, but please don't call it science - it's just religion in disguise.
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That's true, but the fact that there is no evidence against god is not evidence for it. It simply means that we can't make a reasonable declaration that one or more gods don't exist, though we can be almost completely certain that a god like the horrifying one depicted in parts of the Bible(or worse - the Old Testament ) is impossible, and rather undesirable, come to think of it.
Btw, I did notice that Hovind and other supporters of creationism seem to think that bashing evolution somehow proves the creation myth of Genesis. Weird. Who's to say that the true story of creation isn't that it was sneezed out of the nose of the Great Green Arkleseizure, and will be destroyed by the Coming of the Great White Handkerchief?
Nice to see a smart religious person. You know they're out there - it's just that the nuts get better publicity. Sensationalism sells.
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I think that effect is also due to the fact that different people can pick up on the same cues unconsciously. My sister and I often wound up humming the same song at virtually the same instant, even though neither of us could tell what set it off.
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Then you're more vulnerable than anyone. You can't learn anything at all, for fear of the fatal consequences. All I have to do is mention some innocuous fact and your mind power increases by 1, wraps around to Integer.MIN_VALUE, and leaves you a drooling moron.
And no, you don't rock. Rock is dead. Long live paper and scissors!
Invention, Ideas - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 0 |
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You will notice that my conspiracy theory explains this just as well.
Conspiracy Theories - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 3 |
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So where's your opposite?
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Wouldn't you be among the first casualties of such a war?
Invention, Ideas - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 0 |
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Well, we know that a computer can pick up a full world-view starting from nearly nothing (every human child does it in about the first 0 - 10 years of life).
That's the issue - the human brain doesn't seem to start from nearly nothing. The tabula rasa idea is sadly mistaken. The brain starts with a staggering amount of initial complexity. Language, for instance - a great deal of it is innate, if Steven Pinker and others are to be believed, and they make a pretty convincing case.
There's also the issue of how much of our intelligence is really a result of being embodied. Intelligence might very well be the result of complex biological systems interacting with the physical world. Software might not be all there is to it.
Artificial Intelligence - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 2 |
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That's one of the reasons they need to do something like WordNet. The machine can't pick things up for itself unless it already has a great deal of previous knowledge. It's the ultimate bootstrapping problem.
Artificial Intelligence - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 2 |
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I have a rather genteel conspiracy theory, as conspiracy theories go. Actually, it isn't really a conspiracy theory, because the major premise is that stupid people seem to reproduce more than the smart ones, and consequently, our planet is doomed to being overrun by a bunch of morons.
Some say this has already happened.
Conspiracy Theories - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 2 |
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Check this out.
Virtual/Augmented Reality - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 3 |
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Cyc is fundamentally a good idea, simply because human intelligence is tied up with common-sense knowledge so deeply that we cannot have one without the other. However, the execution is somewhat flawed. The amount of facts they will need is simply staggering, and the estimate keeps on rising every year. It's too darn slow to put those facts in by hand, and there are great difficulties with automatic knowledge acquisition. Cyc might simply have bitten off more than it can chew. WordNet is far less ambitious, but the amount of research done using that is much greater than the research based on Cyc.
Artificial Intelligence - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 1 |
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Well, that would be 'top-down' AI (where the AI is created with pre-programmed responses to every possible set of circumstances), which is almost impossible to make unless you have a large number of bored people with a couple of lifetimes to spare writing down common sense...
That's precisely what the Cyc project is about.
Artificial Intelligence - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 1 |
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I learned a fair bit using Bruce Eckel's books. I used the tutorial in the Java documentation mostly for learning Swing and that sort of thing. For the simple stuff, Google is your friend.
Java Programming - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 3 |
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No problem. I can see how that would throw people.
Mathematics - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 0 |
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How do you plan to enumerate all possible behaviors?
Artificial Intelligence - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 0 |
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Assuming you actually write a program that can alter itself 'randomly' without coring, infinite looping, or just being annoying to the other processes, all you'd have to worry about is killing all the millions of lousy mutants you're going to get.
I'm afraid there's no general way to check if a program is going into an infinite loop - it's an uncomputable problem. Actually, it's the canonical example of uncomputability - it's called the Halting Problem.
So the best you can do is to set an arbitrary cutoff and kill all programs that haven't terminated by then. And even then you'll run the risk of killing off that one program that was on the right track, and would have terminated one second later anyway.
Ati's idea seems to amount to an event-driven genetic algorithm. Essentially the successful rules survive and reproduce, with mutations to maintain diversity. It doesn't even use crossover, and given the crazy thing we're trying to make, I'm not sure it would be a good idea to stick to mutation alone. In any event, crossover can be incorporated into the system, though I'm not certain how you might slice up and recombine two distinct rules. It'll depend hugely on the formalism you're using to represent rules.
Artificial Intelligence - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 4 |
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Hey, when did I reach 200? I'm still at a measly 84.1.
Of course, if you want me to cross 200 that badly, feel free to karma up this post.
How the hell did I wind up with so much karma anyway? I've only been here a short while, and my prolonged absences haven't helped any.
Suggest Shuzak! - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 1 |
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Artificial Intelligence - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: |
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Also, while the brain does have a great deal of complexity, a good deal of it is not described genetically, but seems to be randomly generated (as I recall, the amount of DNA explicitly describing overall brain structure could be written to fit into a file the size of MS word (the program itself, not the files))
The amount of information there means little - the relevant DNA might be doing nothing more than triggering commands for building complex structures, not describing the structures themselves. In other words, the information content isn't just in the DNA, but also in the process that uses the DNA to build a brain. But I'll agree that there is probably a significant random component to it.
While the complex environment need not be the physical world, we hardly have a provably better one for research purposes. It's the only one we know that actually seems to have produced intelligence.
Artificial Intelligence - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 1 |
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True, but it could be argued that an innate understanding of language functions are an innate part of the way the basic processer functions are set up, like understanding certain programming languages are an innate part of standard computers.
Yes, and that's why we need to figure out just which innate functions we need as a prerequisite for intelligence.
Artificial Intelligence - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 1 |
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Do you design a new unit using technology borrowed from existing PDA's - or do you go out, buy a palm pilot, open the case and reverse engineer the circuitry, hack the software, tape an antenna to the side, and then hope the things works?
This may not be a valid comparison, but that's how it seems to me.
Ah, but in our case, we can probably figure out how to mess with the palm pilot. As for the smartphone, we can't go ahead and build it, since we have only the vaguest idea how the palm pilot itself works.
Artificial Intelligence - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 1 |
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How about using Brain as a Black box?
Who cares whether the signals are getting scrambled.
You sound like a willing volunteer.
Artificial Intelligence - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 0 |
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Hehe - I used to be tall back home. In India, being 6 feet tall is pretty good. Out here in the US, not a day goes by without me seeing someone six inches taller. It's like everyone is a pro basketball player or something.
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The problem of setting up some kind of interface with the human brain seems somewhat easier than actually creating a brain from scratch. Besides, they might come up with something non-invasive.
Artificial Intelligence - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 0 |
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I've never really been put down or insulted either. Maybe it helps to be taller than the opposition.
Weirdly enough, I seem to have intimidated a rather large bunch of people back when I was an undergrad. I didn't even know about it until a friend of mine told me a while ago.
The ignorant masses often fear the gods, you see.
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Besides, I always remember the Two Laws of Philosophy:
First Law:
For each philosopher, there is an equal and opposite philosopher.
Second Law:
They're both wrong.
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@Hx10:
Nah, I just dabble here and there. I'd be outta my league if I tried to go up against the professionals.
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Would computer programs want to date high school kids anyway?
I think there's a good chance that we'll see mentally augmented humans before strong AI turns up. Hell, maybe it's a problem we just can't solve at our current level of intelligence.
Artificial Intelligence - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 0 |
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I'm originally from India, though I'm currently a CS grad student in the US. I'm obsessed with computer science, mathematics, a bit of philosophy, competitive programming, etc, etc, etc.
I was gonna say "I'm Nadeem", but then it occurred to me that my name would turn up in the title anyway, and it felt too redundant to leave in there.
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I've only just started grad school, but I'm doing AI - though at the moment I'm kinda undecided about exactly what I wanna do. I've fooled around a bit with genetic algorithms, and I coded up an Augmented Transition Network to parse pretty complex natural language sentences for my Advanced AI class last semester. Plus I have to do some kind of Machine Learning project this semester as well, and some kind of paper for Natural Language Processing, so that might lead to something too.
In other words, I have a tiny bit of experience, and that's gonna grow very quickly over the next few months. It also means that I'm gonna find out if Nietzsche was right when he said "That which does not kill me makes me stronger."
Artificial Intelligence - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 4 |
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The Emperor Constantine might have had something to do with it.
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I suspect it was probably because Constantine recognized the advantages in incorporating a young, vigorous, and violent religion into his empire. The cult of Venus would probably have been too genteel to stand against Christian rebels.
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It's kinda weird how everyone seems to be doing web programming these days. I usually stick to Java, C++ and Python. I did start learning Ruby once, and wound up getting sidetracked. Learned a lot more of Lisp, but I've never used that for anything substantial. SQL too, at one point, but my skills have atrophied from lack of use. Ditto for HTML and Javascript, but HTML is trivial enough that you can't really forget it, and Javascript doesn't seem hard anymore.
I'm really more of an algorithms person, so I guess I view languages from a slightly different perspective. It does seem to speed up learning, though.
Designers Den - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 2 |
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You know what they say, the geek shall inherit the earth.
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I'm running Ubuntu 6.06 on my laptop. It's actually a dual-boot with Windows XP, but predictably, I only use XP for playing games, which is precious little these days.
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I used to believe the same thing, but after seeing exactly how things are going with the field right now, I'm increasingly inclining toward the possibility that it's going to take significantly longer.
What we will definitely see are increasingly intelligent systems scoped to specific domains, but it'll probably be a couple of lifetimes before we have a general purpose intelligence similar to humans. The major issue that bothers me was neatly summed up by Minsky. He says that AI has fragmented to a huge extent, with a whole bunch of different paradigms working in relative isolation, and each one convinced that they're the answer. What we need is synthesis - you're not going to be able to get there using only the logicist paradigm, or only neural networks, or only genetic algorithms, or just natural language understanding. And there are no signs of that synthesis yet.
There's more than that - there's the question of just how much initial knowledge we need to put into the system, and what kind of initial architecture we need to set up. There's a great deal of stuff that humans are simply born with - a highly innate ability to learn, use, and even create language, various instincts and drives that shape much of our behavior, social instincts, patterns of interaction with the world that are implicit in our body plans...the list is endless.
You've got people like Rodney Brooks of MIT, who argues that intelligence is actually an epiphenomenon of the interaction between highly complex systems and the world. In his view, you need to build bodies for your AIs, because intelligence might be impossible without them.
So you see, things aren't as cut and dried as some people might think. Still, that just makes it even more exciting - more problems to solve, after all!
Artificial Intelligence - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 5 |
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Like this: 5*10^2 + 76*10^1 - 2*10^0 = 1258.
Definitions are usually a good place to go when you're confused.
Mathematics - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 0 |
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Besides, if we're all here to help other people, then what are the other people for?
the physical world - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 0 |
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The scientists involved in the Manhattan Project are criminals.
I don't think that's true. The real criminals were the people who gave the order to bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The men building the bomb were mostly doing so because they were afraid that Hitler would do it first.
the physical world - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 1 |
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If this sort of thing actually existed, then surely someone would have won the Million Dollar Challenge by now. Surprising how they either refuse to try, or fail the preliminary tests...
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That is sort of what I meant. Electron and Positron are anti-particles. So if you manage to co-create 1/2 kg of Electrons and 1/2 kg of Positrons, the overall energy is still conserved. The two will, of course, annihilate each other unless they are taken apart.
You're not conserving overall energy unless you use energy already present in the universe to make those electrons and positrons. If you magically bring in 1 kg of electrons and positrons, you're violating the conservation of energy.
oh btw, Photos have no rest mass. So yeah, both of you are wrong
I don't remember them having mass at all, at rest or otherwise. How do you think they can travel at the speed of light without becoming infinitely massive?
Oh wait, I see you were referring to photos. Yeah, photographs don't have any rest mass - especially those passport-sized ones that vanish at the slightest provocation.
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Amen to that, brother. Verily, the Lord's Noodly Appendage shall soon smite these unbelievers.
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The problem that inevitably affects such governments is neatly expressed by the old saying Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?: Who will watch the watchers?
Frankly, I think it's unrealistic to expect that a strong central government of the kind that some of guys are arguing for will remain free of corruption. That sort of power will attract the corruptible like moths to a flame.
I really think a Democratic Socialism is the ideal government. Unfortunately, it requires the populace to want to help their fellow countryman.
People are usually willing to help out their neighbors or friends, and even strangers - but on a personal level. Things that might be more worthwhile but somewhat removed from the common man - these aren't likely to receive much money from people, as Shura pointed out. Once again, it isn't human nature to care all that much about others, or exhibit that much foresight.
It also requires an efficient government with little waste or corruption. If we had an honest, efficient government that funded worthwhile programs, good people would be willing to pay higher taxes.
Ah, but how long would this government remain that way? Power attracts the corruptible.
Actually, I have a slightly impractical solution to that problem. Keep the government under 24 hour surveillance. It's a little difficult to be corrupt if you're watched all the time. There might even be a market for that kind of reality TV.
The problem of governing human beings doesn't seem to be amenable to a perfect solution. The most we can hope for is the least of several evils.
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I've got a laptop too - Dell Inspiron 6400 - Intel® Core Duo T2050 1.6 GHz, 1 GB RAM, and a 120 GB SATA hard drive. My graphics card is an ATI Mobility Radeon X1300. I'm almost feeling ashamed of it, given some of the scary gamer configs out here.
I've got Ubuntu and Windows on dual-boot. Windows barely sees any use these days, because I'm too darn busy to play Half Life 2 or Counter Strike.
@Victoria:
Does everyone have a DS except me?
All the biggest geeks I know have one. I've been considering buying one, but there's no way I could handle the distraction. I spend enough time online as it is.
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Hmm, interesting. First Victoria says:
Oh I love my DS. And Anyone who plays mine, goes and gets one too.
True fact.
Then RyeGye says:
GET A DS!!!
Sometime ago I said: "I've been considering buying one, but there's no way I could handle the distraction."
I rest my case. Clearly this thing is way too addictive for an obsessive bloke like me.
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But they don't cancel each other out - they annihilate to produce an equivalent amount of energy. That IS the physics scenario.
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It is another undeniable truth that the universe is conscious in a 'higher' sense than the consiousness that we exhibit, since it must be simulateously conscious of every thought of every conscious being in the universe (on our planet and others (if any)). So it can think and feel at least 6 billion things simulateously (and more if you count the consciousness of animals).
This is hardly an 'undeniable' truth. What is this 'it' that is conscious of the thoughts of all conscious beings? At the moment, there is nothing to indicate that we are more than islands of consciousness in a sea of unconsciousness, with no connections between them to form any sort of 'higher' consciousness.
Quantum Mechanics - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 2 |
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But (and correct me if i"m wrong because i probably am) the whole adding one electron and one positron doesn"t make sense to me because the positron isn"t taking away the energy the electron is bringing in.
That's true. That was exactly the point I was making.
Looks like Jared already said whatever else I was going to say.
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And in case you mean auras as seen using Kirlian photography, that's the result of a cool phenomenon known as a coronal discharge.
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We can blame Hiroshima on the pilots or we can blame the American government for it.
I'm all for blaming the government. I think governments should be blamed, as a matter of principle.
The fact is, anyone involved in building or using lethal weapons is committing a crime.
When you're at war with a bunch of fanatic nuts intent on genocide and world domination, not building lethal weapons to resist them is a crime. Not building the most dangerous weapon ever unleashed when the enemy is definitely trying isn't just a crime - it's stupidity.
the physical world - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 3 |
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Having said that, I'll probably still wind up buying one in a few months, once I don't have twenty different things to deal with.
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Here, have some more.
Suggest Shuzak! - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 3 |
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Darn, I seem to have confused Greg Egan with Greg Bear in my last post. Yeesh.
Quantum Mechanics - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 2 |
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Yeah, but that doesn't give them mass.
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Like what this thread was about, for one thing.
Artificial Intelligence - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 2 |
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Aren't photons massless?
In any event, matter and antimatter both have positive mass. I'm not sure where Jawad came up with this weird idea of adding 1 kg to the universe without any trouble.
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Hehe, your English seems mostly okay to me - it's certainly good enough to get your point across without any trouble.
I'm not sure how particles would keep track of their previous motion. I think there might probably be restrictions on the information content of the universe, but I'm not a physicist, so I couldn't say.
Greg Egan has a couple of interesting novels(Darwin's Radio and Darwin's Children) where he considers the totality of life on Earth to be analogous to a neural network(or a bunch of cooperating/competing neural nets), though he does say that the kind of computation they do need not even be complex to give rise to consciousness by our standards. There is, however, a mysterious presence that starts turning up near the end of the second book, and is experienced only by one character. He left it hanging, though, so it could have been anything.
I actually like this view, but that's probably just the computer scientist in me enjoying the metaphor. Complex networked systems, the similarity of evolution to a large-scale parallelized search algorithm, and the idea that it underlies all life - how can I resist?
In any event, I suppose you could extend this concept to the entire universe. Admittedly far-fetched, but it's science fiction after all.
Makes you wonder, though - what the heck is the universe computing, then?
Quantum Mechanics - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 2 |
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This doesn't follow - electrons and positrons have the same mass. There's no such thing as negative mass, as far as I know. You'll wind up with a net gain of 1 kg. You're actually violating the conservation of mass-energy.
What you can do is start with a bit of energy and convert that into a particle-antiparticle pair. You'll wind up with the same amount of mass-energy - it's just that some energy has been replaced by an equivalent amount of mass. Bring those two particles into contact, and they'll annihilate each other, releasing an equivalent amount of energy.
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Am I missing something here?
Artificial Intelligence - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 1 |
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And while we're waxing poetic, why stop at memory? Why not consciousness? You could probably get a whole science fiction trilogy out of that idea alone.
Besides, mathematics is poetry.
Quantum Mechanics - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 4 |
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Clearly I'm missing the point here, if there happens to be one...
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I'd like to see some links to those journals, if you can find them. I think we should verify just how credible those guys are. There's a paper referenced from Wikipedia which shows a positive correlation between better statistical methodologies and increasing chances that results are due to the placebo effect.
I don't see how chemistry or physics needs to advance to explain anything about homeopathy. Once you dilute something 10^50 times, you're unlikely to find even a single molecule of whatever curative substance you're using, and this idea that the water you used somehow retains the memory of that substance sounds like hogwash to me. So you're basically just getting a large dose of water and sugar, and nothing else. It makes sense to be skeptical of such claims. If there really were something to it, physicists would have been all over it by now. Unknown phenomenon and all that, after all.
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Daniel, I can't understand what you're saying! It doesn't make any sense to me. Mind clarifying a bit?
Quantum Mechanics - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 2 |
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As I recall, the major problem is that it's predictions apply to such high energy levels that we don't have the ability to test them yet.
Not sure if I remember right, though - my days as a physics geek are long over.
Quantum Mechanics - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 0 |
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But I do agree with you about the other thing, that it is possible that there are qualities of the universe that are beyond our comprehension...however, I don't think that means that we should stop trying to understand them
That goes without saying. After all, how are we going to prove that we can't comprehend them unless we find out what they are?
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Quantum Mechanics - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: |
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It seems the Universe conserves probability in a similar manner. If the coin were to fall tails three times, then there would be a better chance that the next time it would fall heads up.
WHAT?!
Um, I'm probably misunderstanding what you're referring to here, but the probability of it falling heads is no different from what it was before. The events are independent. 50% chance of heads, same as always.
Quantum Mechanics - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 4 |
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I'm not particularly certain that Homeopathy is really medicine. Given that it makes nonsense of fundamental principles of chemistry and physics, I'm inclined to think that it's mostly the result of mistaking the placebo effect for a cure.
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It'll probably find a way to make money off that event...
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Sounds more like Albert Epicurus, if you ask me.
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Er, I wasn't talking about 'fundamental' questions at all - merely voicing some concern over the possibility that there might be aspects of the universe that might be beyond human comprehension. I'm not talking about God or spirits or other such nonsense - merely fundamental limits on the abilities of the human mind.
I admit to being slightly influenced by my recent forays into computability theory - in particular, the existence of undecidable problems(or uncomputable functions)...Those exist because of fundamental limits upon computation.
If the human mind is merely a souped up computer, then we have the same issues, of course. So if the universe winds up doing something uncomputable, we're screwed.
I should point out that I'm not entirely certain the universe can do something uncomputable. Still, the universe is a strange place - and therefore a fun place.
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No no, then some chap like Einstein will come along and prove me wrong in extreme cases!
Suggest Shuzak! - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 0 |
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Hehe - this idea is actually used in a series of science fiction books by James Wittenbach. The government of the planet Sapphire is a randomocracy, where anyone educated enough is at risk of being randomly selected to be in their Parliament, which they call 'The Thing'. On top of that, every law automatically expires after 10 years and needs to be passed again. This keeps the guys in charge so busy repassing the old laws that they never have time to make any new ones and figure out ways to further their own interests.
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Hammaad, are you sure you're not taking this goat thing a little too far? First a goat as a DP, now you're thinking of eating random stuff...
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Also, do others if you would have them do you.
Suggest Shuzak! - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 0 |
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I vote for Hammaad's moderate interpretation.
Suggest Shuzak! - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 1 |
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I think communism and socialism are the kind of thing that seem fine in theory, but fail miserably in practice because of the vagaries of human nature. As long as you have an economy of scarcity, greed will inevitably turn up, and people with power will hijack government for their own purposes. All for the good of the state, of course.
Another issue I have with both socialism and communism is that they elevate the State, which is a mere abstraction, above the individuals in it. Sacrifice isn't all that bad, if it produces some results, but I'd rather not have the government deciding what I should sacrifice 'for the good of all'.
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If you do onto others as you would've want them do to you, your karma will increase.
Is the bad grammar targeted at Paris Hilton too? Just wondering...
Suggest Shuzak! - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 3 |
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This article is pretty interesting. I suspect Joseph would classify this guy as anti-Christian or something, but he cites his sources. The statistics are not kind to the religious, and are not as easy to dismiss.
It's almost depressing. Even I had no idea it was this bad.
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I have this perennial fear at the back of my mind that we might be about to hit something that is either:
a) Simply beyond human understanding, no matter how hard we try.
b) Something fundamentally and totally random. No patterns at all. No way to make any predictions.
It's probably slightly irrational, but until the new disciplines studying complexity come to maturity, it'll probably be impossible to answer the question of whether (b) is actually physically possible.
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Your website isn't credible. It doesn't offer any sources on where they got the statistics. Not just that, it's also one of the Christianity bashing sites.
Er, it does - those results were released by the Federal Bureau of Prisons in 1997.
There's nothing you can say about Christianity bashing sites - any site that puts up this sort of stuff is hardly going to be considered impartial, but the statistics speak for themselves.
In any event, Karl's contribution is probably the most valid. Humans have a history of turning to religion and/or spirituality under certain circumstances - including being in prison.
Still, my point continues to stand. Morality is not the sole preserve of religion. You can be perfectly moral without having to worship an invisible man.
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Besides, what kind of candy-assed reason for dismissing evolution is that, anyway? It's hardly logically valid, is it?
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If evolution is true, what is the purpose of Life?
Well, technically, the purpose of life is to reproduce. That's what every single species on the planet does. Kinda like a defining characteristic of life, wouldn't you say?
If you're talking about some kind of divine purpose, then I don't think there is any such thing. You're free to come up with your own. Hell, you should. Makes life more interesting.
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Okay, this discussion is obviously going nowhere, as Jawad pointed out. I think we should call it quits. Nobody's gonna convince anyone else here.
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This simply isn't true. But I am sure atheists will support this statement even if they commit crimes all the time.
Actually, this interesting piece of information came from the Federal Bureau of Prisons. See the results here.
I was rather surprised myself when I saw it. I'd always assumed the rates would be about the same.
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Amen to that, brother.
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Someone who goes around lying because they know they won't be punished for it, already demonstrates an un-Godly mindset. Their faith is probably dead and they will probably end up getting punished with hell if it doesn't improve.
And someone who doesn't lie only out of fear of punishment - that's true morality, is it? Sounds like saving your ass to me.
Also, you don't know Christian morals so don't speak of them. Inquisition was not a result of Christian morals. It was against Christian morals. It is what happens when the people in society are decieved by lies. That is why honesty and integrity are so important.
Christian morals don't make a damn difference. Morality goes out the window when power and religion mix. Imagined divine mandates will do that sort of thing. The road to hell is paved with good intentions, after all. Whatever it's intended purpose, religion can be used as a tool to manipulate large numbers of people, and therefore it is nearly inevitable that it will be used as such.
Honesty and integrity are also important in science. Haven't you ever wondered why Christian Europe was able to advance so far in science?
I'll quote John Stuart Mill: 'The world would be astonished if it knew how great a proportion of its brightest ornaments, of those most distinguished even in popular estimation for wisdom and virtue, are complete sceptics in religion.'
If religion was necessary for honesty and integrity, it's odd that he was able to say this in the nineteenth century. I wonder why 93% of the National Academy of Sciences are nonbelievers. Hell, I wonder why atheists commit fewer crimes than believers.
Science is about hard work and honesty. When these are threatened, science is threatened. Macroevolution not being taught at school doesn't threaten the advancement of science.
No? Don't biologists go to school when they're young?
Please see the big picture. Macroevolution is just a small insignificant theory that barely has any practical use. And its barely a science.
Er, it's the unifying framework for all of modern biology. Without it, the entire discipline is reduced to glorified stamp collecting.
And if you think it's so insignificant anyway, why not let it be taught, eh? It's not like biologists are demanding equal time for it in churches and Sunday schools.
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You have quite an imagination if you think Christianity and creationism will put us in the dark ages.
So do you, if you think that evolution will destroy the idea of God and endanger the spiritual well-being of humanity.
In any event, it's a matter of truth, not spirituality. Who cares if it threatens someone's worldview anyway? Religion doesn't belong in science classrooms.
My verdict still stands. Macroevolution relies on quasi-experiments like social science, political science, or other soft sciences.
No it doesn't. It relies on fossils, genetics, molecular biology, DNA, physics, chemistry...These are hardly soft sciences.
Are you just randomly pulling terms from that article on quasi-experiments?
And how in the seven circles of hell did political science get in there?! WTF, dude!
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Why would we want to go back to the dark age?
You might not want it, but that's what inevitably happens when religions wind up with political power. Separation of church and state was written into the American constitution for a reason, you know.
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There's hardly any alternative, given the timescales we're looking at. Secondly, while false correlations can be a problem, they grow increasingly less likely as you increase the amount of data you look at.
Besides, creationism doesn't have any evidence at all. Some evidence beats the crap out of none at all.
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If the evidence isn't good enough, it really doesn't matter how much of it you have. You can never know which is correct for certain, but I'm just gonna put my faith in creationism. It's my choice.
That's true - it is your choice. As long as it isn't snuck into schools in the guise of science, and people don't try to stop the teaching of evolution, I have no issues with personal beliefs.
And lets be serious. Separation of church and state was created to protect religious freedom and for having an impartial government. Also, religion having political power doesn't automatically lead to a dark age. In reality it is far more complex and there are many factors involved.
I strongly suspect that all it takes is time, and very little else. Religion and politics don't mix very well. There's an inherent us-vs-them component to religion which has the potential to bring out the worst excesses of human nature. Sure, you have to be stupid to fall for those interpretations, but then the average person isn't exactly Einstein. And there are more of them than the smart ones. Give them a little power, and it's a recipe for disaster.
Worse, it can easily co-opt well-meaning people. The men who ran the Spanish Inquisition honestly believed they were saving the souls of those they brutally tortured and killed. They thought they were doing God's work. That's the problem - morality goes straight out the window if you think you have a divine mandate.
In any event, I think we're drifting from the major topic on this thread. We seem to have reached a stalemate.
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Just saw this - still haven't stopped laughing: George Carlin on Religion.
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Just had an interesting attack of synchronicity. I'm reading Greg Bear's science fiction novel Darwin's Radio, and this is a slightly abridged excerpt that sounds like it has some bearing on our discussion:
“Used to be one or two or three people would come up with a brilliant, world-shaking idea or invention. Darwin and Wallace. Einstein. Now, there’s a hundred geniuses for every challenge, a thousand people competing to topple the castle walls. If it’s that bad in the sciences, up in the stratosphere, what’s it like down in the trenches? Endless nasty competition. Too much to learn. Too much bandwidth crowding the channels of communication. We can’t listen fast enough. We’re left standing on our tiptoes all the time.”
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1) Where are the trillions of fossils of such true transitional forms?
Critics of creationism often say that creationism is simply religion, whereas evolutionism is based on science. The Bible says in Genesis 1 that all creatures reproduce "after their kind" (no change to another kind, i.e., no transitional forms). So the complete absence of transitional forms in the fossil record supports creationism.
Complete absence, eh? Perhaps you should read this.
Er, since when has the bible been evidence of anything, anyway? There's no reason to accept anything in it unless you accept several unfounded premises - or you have faith.
(2) Is this scientific evidence for creationism, or isn't it?
Since my link shows that there are transitional fossils, I'm afraid it just blows creationism to smithereens. Unless God placed those fossils there to test our faith...
(3)Where did all the 90-plus elements come from (iron, barium, calcium, silver, nickel, neon, chlorine, etc)?
This is physics, not evolution. In any event, if you're interested, they were formed due to a phenomenon known as nucleosynthesis.
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4) How do you explain the precision in the design of the elements, with increasing numbers of electrons in orbit around the nucleus?
This so-called precision is a terribly subjective characteristic. I can justifiably claim that the design of the elements is no sufficiently precise, because my notion of precision involves prime numbers.
The order you see in the universe is a consequence of the laws of physics playing themselves out on all possible scales. There is little point in asking why the universe behaves like this. If you want to ask a 'why' question of this nature, you first need to be able to prove that a reason actually exists. Not being able to prove this doesn't prohibit you from asking the question, but it renders useless any conclusions you might wish to draw based on it.
(5) Where did the thousands of compounds we find in the world come from: carbon dioxide, sodium chloride, calcium hydroxide, hydrochloric acid, oxalic acid, chlorophyll, sucrose, hydrogen sulfide, benzene, aluminum silicate, mercaptans, propane, silicon dioxide, boric acid, etc.?
How was it determined how many bonds each element would have for combining with other elements? When did these compounds develop from the elements (before the big bang, during the big bang, after the big bang)?
More physics and chemistry. Not particularly amenable to evolution. Go complain to Einstein.
When evolutionists use the term "matter", which of the thousands of compounds are included? When evolutionists use the term "primordial soup", which of the elements and compounds are included? Why do books on evolution, including grade-school, high-school and college textbooks not include such important, basic information?
They do, if the creationists would ever bother looking into them.
Evolutionists are masters of speculation.
On behalf of evolutionists, I regretfully decline the title. With respect, we submit that this honor belongs to the millions of prophets, messengers and other holy men throughout human history, who have been making up fanciful stories since the first scoundrel met the first gullible follower and started a religion.
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Why don't they speculate about this?
We prefer to label our speculations as such. And this is hardly something a religious person should talk about. Religions are the ultimate masters of speculation about reality. Not only do they have no evidence for their stories, they delight in the fact, and revel in their faith, shouting it from the rooftops.
(6) How did life develop from non-life?
We don't know. Neither do you. Evolution isn't about the origin of life - it's about the formation of more complex forms from simpler ones. I claim that we're more honest about our lack of knowledge. At least we don't postulate simplistic Iron Age myths about them and call them the truth without a smidgen of evidence.
(7) Where did the human emotions, such as love, hate, and jealousy come from?
Brains are hardly exempt from mutation, what? Besides, they have their uses. It's a lot easier to kill if you hate someone, or to protect someone you love. In the rather cutthroat environment where most species on earth evolved, this is a pretty beneficial characteristic if you're only concerned with survival.
The prehumans who didn't have those emotions died out. Probably had their asses kicked by those who did have them.
Likewise for jealousy. Sexual jealousy is useful if you want your genes to be passed on to the next generation. Unless you'd rather be cuckolded.
Yeah, I know it's cynical and slightly undignified, but the guys back then didn't have the benefit of thousands of years of culture to maintain their social structures. Sorry guys - it was a dog-eat-dog world then. In some places, it still is.
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What are the odds that of the millions of species of animals, birds, fish, and insects, a male of each species developed at the same time and in the same place as a female of the same species, so that the species could propagate?
Ah, sexual reproduction - this is a very interesting phenomenon to consider, because at first sight, it looks like the asexual reproducers have all the might of natural selection on their side. They don't have to go through all the hassle of finding and courting a mate. Should be easier to outbreed anyone else, eh?
I'm gonna rant on this a bit, mostly because I can.
This topic is particularly interesting to me, because I have a couple of friends who work on Artificial Life - studying how complex behaviour emerges from very simple software organisms that evolve and breed and what not.
There was an interesting experiment involving pitting a bunch of asexual organisms against the sexual reproducers to see what would happen. Sure enough, in the first few generations, the asexual guys created a near monopoly on the useful energy of the system, producing more offspring and claiming more territory than the hapless sexual creatures, who were struggling to survive and gather enough energy to live long enough to reproduce. It looked like they were going to have their asses handed to them real soon.
And then along came the parasites, and the asexual reproducers had their asses handed to them.
Asexual reproduction doesn't really produce much change in the organism. It's mostly just the parent with a few random mutations due to copying errors here and there. So once the parasites had settled on a particular genotype, those guys were royally screwed unless some critter produced offspring with some kind of mutation that broke their hold.
The sexual guys had a ball(all that sex, after all ) because of the high speeds at which they could change, since offspring only had half the DNA of either parent.
Cool, eh? It's still a pretty puzzle among evolutionary biologists, but it's amazing how solutions to this sort of thing appeared in a stripped down simulation, of all things. Evolution apparently goes a lot deeper than we think.
In any event, sexual reproduction has been around since the first eukaryotic lifeforms. Might have been around even earlier than that, for all we know. In any event, once it developed in something that simple and proved itself to be a hugely useful characteristic, it's kinda obvious that the most successful offspring would be the ones that inherited it.
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10) Why are there 2 sexes anyhow? This is not foreordained in the evolutionary framework. Is there some sort of plan here?
Eh? Is this supposed to mean something?
If the first generation of mating species didn't have parents, how did the mating pair get to that point anyhow? Isn't evolution supposed to progress when an offspring of a mating pair has a beneficial mutation?
Er, evolution can occur even when a unicellular organism undergoes mitosis. DNA copying messes up once in a while. That's a necessary condition - if it copied perfectly every time, there wouldn't be any evolution at all.
This is why making mistakes can be a good thing.
(12) How did the heart, lungs, brain, stomach, veins, blood, kidneys, etc. develop in the first animal by slow, minute steps and and the animal survive while these changes were occurring?
What's the issue here? We're talking millions of years here. Plenty of time to try an infinity of possibilities and still have even more left over.
Consider an eye. Half an eye isn't much use, but a little spot with a slight amount of light sensitivity is much better than being blind. Give it a couple million years, and you'll have rod and cone cells and optic nerves and what not.
The earth is a pretty big place, and lots of creatures live here. The dynamics of evolution with all these interacting factors are unbelievably complex. You've got so many different factors coming into play - competition for resources, cooperation and symbiosis, the predator-prey relationship and the ensuing dynamics, parasitism...natural factors - sunlight, wind, lightning, radioactivity - the list is endless. It's a huge and beautiful system with plenty of energy being pumped into it from various quarters.
Ah, life. One of the most interesting computations the universe has ever performed. This sort of stuff never fails to make me happy to be alive.
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The Piltman hoax happened in 1912. How much better are forgery techniques a century later?
Detection techniques haven't exactly remained stuck in the early 20th century either, Joseph.
From Wikipedia:
In 1953, the exposure of the Piltdown forgery by workers at the British Museum and other institutions was greeted in many academic quarters with relief. Piltdown man had for some time become regarded as an aberration that was entirely inconsistent with the mainstream thrust of human evolution as demonstrated by fossil hominids found elsewhere. Piltdown Man was shown to be a composite forgery, part-ape and part-man. It consisted of a human skull of medieval age, the 500-year-old lower jaw of a Sarawak orangutan and chimpanzee fossil teeth. The appearance of age had been created by staining the bones with an iron solution and chromic acid.
See what I meant about having to be honest in the interests of self-defence?
I'm not denying that scientists are human, and prey to the weaknesses of the flesh. The issue is that the scientific method protects its own integrity very zealously, because at the heart of the entire enterprise is the simple desire to know the truth. The desire to know how it all really happened, how things work, why things are the way they are - c'mon Joseph, don't you feel the fire of curiousity burning within your soul?
Fear of God has never been much of a deterrent to immoral behaviour. Those who are going to be immoral will do it with or without religion. Religion really has very little to do with morality. It provides a convenient platform to base the premises of our morality on, but it shouldn't be taken as anything more than that.
Curiousity keeps you honest. If you really want to know something, you're not going to want to fool yourself. If you want to fool others, you can try, but it'll fail miserably, because there's always someone who really wants to know, and science has always loved its whistle blowers. One of the easiest ways to make your career is to conclusively destroy an old theory.
Evolutionary Paleontologists spend their whole life searching for fossils that will support their macroevolution theory. This gives them great incentive to lie when they do not find favourable results.
Perhaps, but nothing prevents their work from being scrutinized carefully for discrepancies. Peer review exists for a reason, you know.
On the other hand, most creationists probably believe that they will be punished by God for lying so they have motivation to be honest.
Right, and I'm the Queen of Sheba.
In reality, there are many cases when paleontologists have created fake bones or heavily interpretted results in their theory's favour.
Creating fake bones is nearly impossible today. There are enough reliable dating to conclusively determine the age of bones. So unless you really have ancient bones, it's kinda difficult to create them. Presumably God could do it, though.
From our perspective, it is the supporters of macroevolution that seem to have a master plan against God and the spiritual well being of humanity.
Isn't it weird how perspective changes things? From the other side of the fence, the creationists seem to have a master plan to return us to the Dark Ages, strip us of our greatest achievements and all that we have learned, and impose their unsubstantiated and certainly primitive ideas on humanity.
Er, you guys don't really have that in mind, do you?
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To all religious people out here - my apologies if I sounded somewhat anti-religion in those last few posts. I'm not against religion per se, but I wish people would refrain from trying to bastardize science for the sake of a bunch of ancient stories. I'll never understand why someone would knowingly deny the sheer beauty and complexity of this incredible universe of ours, in favor of a tiny and primitive place created for the sole benefit of a bunch of hairless apes on a tiny planet in a middling star system, so they could sing the praises of a rather egoistic creator who doesn't need it anyway.
I can't prove that God doesn't exist anymore than anyone can prove he does, but I can say this - if he does exist, he will be nothing like our conception of him. Nothing at all.
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Wow, I'd forgotten all about Civics. Makes me remember the old days in school.
Family planning is very widespread in India. People keep planning to make more children.
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Of course,the major one is population...many reforms are planned and executed,but they hardly cover the entire population in various parts...
They're planned all right. It's the quality of the execution that is royally screwed.
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Is there some inside string theory joke that I should know of?
It's really just a front for a bunch of physicists to explore the properties of g-strings - or those wearing them.
Quantum Mechanics - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 3 |
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Is String Theory even science if it cannot be proven through observable means?
Depends on what you're trying to observe.
If you go looking for parallel universes, you're probably not gonna find them. But if you look for more accessible predictions made by string theory, and you find you can confirm enough of those, then go ahead and accept the theory.
Quantum Mechanics - Posted By Nadeem - Karma received: 2 |
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What difference would teaching them hexadecimal make? It's functionally no different from any other base.
Maybe we should extend existing languages by adding words to express feelings more accurately. Unfortunately, these are subjective things, and I don't |
