Dunno about Bob, but I believe that *my* Mom loved me, evidenced by the way she behaved towards me throughout her 93 years. Not scientific proof, but probabilistic determination, based on observation.
The foundations of science are testable insofar as conclusions drawn using them have themselves been tested and found consistent. Axioms aren't much use if they don't fit the known facts. However, they are not immutable, unlike the axioms that religious believers are expected to accept.
What acquaintance?
Where was the all-powerful, compassionate, loving God during the Black Death, Native American relocation, the WWI trenches, the Stalinist purges, the Nazi abomination, the GULAG, the Great Leap Forward, the Cambodian killing fields, the Rwandan genocide, Bosnian ethnic cleansing?
(I think I know what you're going to say.)
--
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence
over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled."
(Richard Feynman)
Hey, just as I know "charitable conservatives," I definitely know "charitable employers" too.
It's a fair point, certainly; I expect the book John Larkin occasionally mentions does a far better job trying to analyze this seemingly non-intuitive connection than I would.
I'm pretty sure you can skew those results significantly one way or the other depending on how you phrase your survey questions...
Good grief! Employment has nothing to do with charity!
It's only non-intuitive because you've been brainwashed, all your life, by the left.
Sorry, those are the numbers from virtually every survey; 40% right, 20%left, and 40% "duh, you twalkin' to me?". ;-) I do note that few on the left will admit that they are. That's why they keep changing their name.
Check again sir. It has made even liberal newspapers that Obummer's (Pelosi's) health care thing actually does indeed require Catholic church owned medical care organizations to supply abortifacients. Of course = they are bragging about it. And really check the other claims of distortion more carefully. I suspect you will get some more surprises.
I will third that. In many senses i learned that from my fathers father.
provided
that
is
Not being so locked up by socially acceptable i had to become an ethical person. Takes rather more thought; and is subject to continual = rechecking and hopefully improvement.
More like 10,000 per cell and the number of pathways and loops grows exponentially so emergent behaviour is very likely once you cross a certain boundary in complexity. One of those emergent behaviours is self awareness. Very young children do not have it from birth but they do learn fairly quickly that the person in the mirror is them.
Most birds never seem to get it and will fight their reflection.
We can simulate quantum mechanics on a computer too so it would just require more computing power to do it that way iff it were absolutely necessary. The guy who wants to model the brain starting with neurons from the molecular level and working upwards is inclined this way.
I reckon that it is worth trying the abstract connection model first with imperfect behaviour but the right network complexity and hoping that the phase transition to self organising memory is merely delayed or requires a slightly larger network before it arises.
Actually Conway's game of life is a near perfect example of emergent behaviour. It was unexpected that it could be proved computationally Turing complete. Gosper's glider gun completed the proof.
I ran into another even prettier Turing complete CA from 1987 called wireworld whilst looking for some ARM data on Cortex CPUs. Again very simple rules but this time fairly compact and very pretty.
I reckon most electronic engineers will appreciate its beauty...
formatting link
Better version with more detail of computational elements
formatting link
But is that redefinition just to avoid conceding a point to the machines? If a black box looks intelligent by the metric you originally proposed it is cheating to move the goal posts just when that target is actually achieved. Chess was apparently too easy though.
I reckon when a computer is the world Go champion we will have machines with wider pattern matching skills that go beyond human abilities. This may well be disconcerting if it isn't a one trick pony for playing Go.
States of each node. It is an over estimate though since any block of same side pieces must have at least one vacant square adjacent or die (be removed from the board). The actual value of legal positions on a 19 board is about 1% of the rough estimate above.
My own view is that it is a curious form of fast pattern matching - at least that is what it feels like playing chess anyway. GMs can remember legal chess positions and move sequences with extremely high accuracy, but when asked to remember an illegal random position they are as dodgy as an ordinary person at putting the pieces back in the right place.
We already have some simulated intelligence in expert systems where the explanation of why a decision was made is incomprehensible even to the experts who provided it with the underlying rule base. A handful of innovative computer proofs have even been creative after a fashion.
The brain doesn't consciously do brute force but subconsciously we don't really know what it does or how much brute force is being used. My money is on using visual pattern matching to cut corners. GMs typically look at a position and only consider a couple of moves based on their past experience and they are usually right to do so.
Our big advantage over classical computers is that we have a rather large if imperfect content addressable file store in the brain that we call memory. It is so tightly integrated to how we think and use language that we don't normally give it a second thought.
There once was a time when CAFS was tried on mainframes by ICL but it fell out of favour as CPU speeds rapidly outstripped disk subsystems. Its time may come again in future AI simulations.
I've never seen a shred of evidence that quantum effects have anything to do with neuronal behavior, other than being part of the background noise. This all seems to have started with Penrose, based on sheer speculation. It seems whenever a Hot New Idea comes along, people want to apply it to the current hot topic, based on nothing more than gross similarity of attributes.
For example, when holography was the latest thing, there was a stir about the brain being "just like a hologram" because it could recognize the letter 'A' whether it was large or small, just like you can extract the whole image from any portion of a hologram. And nobody could find the exact place where the letter 'A' was stored in the brain, so the storage must be distributed... just like a hologram.
Penrose seems to have made a similar leap with quantum effects. He is a Really Smart Fella, so a lot of folks lept onto the bandwagon. (Especially folks who were as clueless about neuroscience as Penrose, but also some who really should have known better.)
I suggest everyone go back and read "The Emperor's New Mind" again, only this time don't assume Penrose knows any more about the brain than you do. Every chapter is a straw man or a red herring, having nothing to do with the point he is trying to prove. FInally, after about 10 of these chapters he admits that he hasn't accomplished his goal, but he feels sure he is right anyway.
Along the way, he (like so many others) grapples with "free will"... a term like "intelligence" or "consciousness" that has never been clearly defined. But that doesn't stop people from ploughing ahead full steam with metaphysics palmed off as science.
Here his mathematical background seems to be his downfall. He spends a lot of time with computability and Turing machines, and worries that if our brains were mechanistic then it would be possible to compute what we would do next... hence the end of free will. Somehow, he claims, quantum consciousness will save us from that horrible fate.
Except he conveniently forgets that quantum effects give us
*random noise*. Since neurons work via summation of inputs to reach a firing threshold, and there is a certain amount of randomess in every step of the process, all neural behavior is stochastic to varying degrees. There is no way to make this deterministic. No need for quantum woo-woo, just down-and-dirty random noise, and determinism is out the window.
But Penrose's thesis was that a machine could never behave like a human brain because it would necessarily be deterministic. So, throw in some random number generators! Even if we use pseudo-random generators, it is pretty easy to give them milllion-year repeat cycles.
To reduce this to absurdity: Suppose a person (or machine) is totally determinstic. If repeatedly presented with exactly the same stimuli (impossible, if he has a memory, but taken as a given here), and he only reacts exactly the same way once every million years, how could we tell this from "non-deterministic"?
The really hilarious thing about Penrose's book is that it was so widely accepted without criticism. Seems like everybody was too in awe of Emperor Penrose to point out that he was naked!
Best regards,
Bob Masta DAQARTA v6.02 Data AcQuisition And Real-Time Analysis
formatting link
Scope, Spectrum, Spectrogram, Sound Level Meter Frequency Counter, FREE Signal Generator Pitch Track, Pitch-to-MIDI Science with your sound card!
He certainly popularised this quantum consciousness conjecture.
It also shows its age rather nicely. His example of the blocked position chess puzzle that "no computer will ever understand" is typically solved by modern engines in well under a second. Adrian Berry inaccurately plagarises Penroses book in his column "Baffled Computers"
formatting link
Deep Thought actually beat David Levy in 1989 - a very long way short of beating Kasparov which required Deep Blue in 1996. The latter had blocked pawn structure analysis hardware although no-one can recall if that feature was enabled for the actual matches with Kasparov.
A bit of thermal noise on the signals is more than enough to break any mechanistic determinacy. Short of living at absolute zero and very very slowly there is always going to be enough thermal noise and jitter to break out of any purely deterministic "lack of free" will bind.
He is an interesting guy even so. Better known for spinors, twistors and other ways of handling spacetime constructs than his pop-sci books.
formatting link
Perhaps not as well known for this as he should be.
Insults against a group of people do nothing to invalidate the claims they make. If their claims are wrong, they are wrong because of flaws in their logic or their facts.
I find many right-wing claims abhorrent. I sometimes wonder how a caring person could make such claims. But - attacking the persons making the claims doesn't get me anywhere. If I do that, they can turn right around and call me a "bleeding-heart liberal" or whatever, and nothing is accomplished.
Of course in all honesty, I don't suppose much is accomplished in any political discussion, so perhaps it doesn't matter anyway...
--
Kindness is the beginning of cruelty.
-- Muad'dib [Frank Herbert, "Dune"]
Thank you, Bob. That's a great point. It's been going on for hundreds of years, too. Back when electricity was first being investigated, people were talking about electricity. When magnetism was the new rage, people talked about "animal magnetism" (hypnosis). When Einstein came along, it was the mind (or soul) going into "dimensions." Then it was quantum everything.
Well put.
Yes, I think I may reread Emperor's New Mind, with a somewhat more critical eye. Last time I kind of swallowed it whole.
--
"Elves and Dragons!" I says to him. "Cabbages and potatoes are better
for you and me."
-- J. R. R. Tolkien
It worked. The "Godless Cormies" spent themselves to extinction.
Reagan's greatest insight was that Star Wars didn't need to work. It just needed the Soviet strategists to believe that we believed it would work. Classic double-cross strategy, honed to perfection in WWII.
--
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence
over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled."
(Richard Feynman)
That's true, but that meant it looked like we were going to have the option of abandoning MAD. *That* was why it was game over - we could defect from the Prisoners Dilemma aspect of MAD without tit for tat to follow...
Plus, it resonated with their internal propaganda that we're gangsters. I wonder if that was all thought through by Reagan's people or if it just emerged? It helped that gorbachev did not wish to be Stalin
ElectronDepot website is not affiliated with any of the manufacturers or service providers discussed here.
All logos and trade names are the property of their respective owners.