quantum consciousness

I think the processing goes on when I'm asleep, and the ideas are delivered in the shower.

No accident. Most of your brainpower is background processing.

You don't cull them. You just don't consciously think about them.

And you can't really stop your background processing from doing exactly that. Your brain doesn't have a "delete" option.

Not that there seems to be much "creativity" there to destroy.

It's not a "cultural mindset". It's what they know and are used to paying attention to.

So are some of yours . If you don't know what circuits have been invented to solve problems like theirs, you too are likely to come up with rather clumsy solutions.

John Larkin being as ignorant as he usually is. The theories do exist, but they haven't got far enough to be all that useful yet. Think "phlogiston".

Was that supposed to be evidence? Physicists and chemists haven't usually put in enough effort to learn about the sort of electronics they turn out to need. I've published a few rude comments in Rev. Sci. Instruments to that effect.

Not all that unusual. If Winfield Hill had stuck with his Ph.D. he'd be another. I might qualify too.

The CERN physicists do world class electronics, as Jeroen Belleman reminds us from time to time.

John Larkin's perceptions are warped by dealing with physicists who know so little about electronics that they'd go to him for electronic expertise.

Yes, it can be. It can also occur when you are waking up, or other times when you are relaxed or thinking about something else.

Yes. This is why I disagree with your claim that "The best designs are necessarily accidental."

There is nothing accidental about revelations.

You have gone beyond tedious. Just ignore him. If you can.

But they are unplanned and the best ones were totally unexpected. They are often stimulated by some chance event that seems to be unrelated to any current problem or activity.

One model of invention is a noise generator with bandpass filters. The wider the better.

I'll just ignore everything either of you post.

Our ancestors were hunter-gatherers, and had to explore for bits of edibles, and recall the 'best kind of place' for those. That's why we have memory, and it's usually mainly memory, not creation, when we put together an invention.

I suspect folk who look at a memory with a broad viewpoint put more hooks into their memory recall, and can dredge up more info relevant to each arising situation.

If you roll a die, and it comes up 'three', some folk know that it's a three. Others know the facet on the table is a 'four', and that the faces around the sides are 'two', 'one', 'five', and 'six', in that order. There's a wide range of different ways to see a situation, and simplifying that kind of understanding doesn't help you to gather grubs... or craft trapezoidal waves.

Creative folk give detailed descriptions, because that's how they see the world.

Humor is similarly tied into how strongly associative your memories are. It relies on exploiting some "learned" fact in a different, *twisted* way. If you fail to "retrieve" the analogy being targeted, you won't "get the joke".

A priest, a minister and a rabbit walk into a bar. The rabbit says, "I think I'm a typo..."

Meditation may be the key. I've had some wonderful insights when I was able to turn off my conscious chatter

ISTR an observation (recently) that one of the effects of LSD is that it allows parts of your brain that haven't "spoken to each other" since early childhood to reconnect. So, things that you have learned as being "absurd" are, once again, allowed to play out in your mind. Much like the fantasies children would fabricate.

I've always found music to be inspiring. And, other types of music to be "motivating" (i.e., one drives the creation, the other the reification)

The salient chapter from Penrose's "Emperor's New Mind" didn't work - at least for me. I don't think he quite got the implications of Godel right.

Godel just means "there exists no meta-machine which can produce mathematics mechanically." It's no more or less magical than the Cantor diagonalization on which it is based. So here's an IEEE 754 NaN....

IMO, his error was to make the ability to do mathematics somehow indicative of ordinally-more complexity than the inability. There's probably more to it than that. I've noticed that mathematics takes practice, too. Good practice, not thrashing around.

I've no idea what q-bits will be any good at nor good for.

It's also not really "wet chemical logic gates" per se; the HUMBIO videos from Stanford ala Sapolsky are a start but humans are more like teams of extremely specialized controllers with the neocortex bolted on.

There is, SFAIK, still no evolutionary justification for the neocortex.

The realtime stuff is just evolved over a massive time base and is usually heavily shared with other species.

Nah. It's attempting to rifle through a box of concept-parts to find one of the roughly right shape. The humor part is just filtering through absurdity. It's the visual asking the neocortex "Hey mr Language; anything ridiculous or contradictory about this?"

One of my hobbies is "metaprogramming", basically scraping data sets to find relationships necessary to produce a working model that "understands" the data. Do enough of this and it begins to remind you of plain old Gaussian elimination.

It's more like that. A basic intuition for associativity takes some practice.

"Images" aren't even conceptually uniform across all humans. IMO, meatware makes for bad analogies with computing, usually.

That Newton guy was an alchemist. Nobody would ever believe anything he says.

John Larkin wrote: <snip>

Why is that impressive? It was inevitable. The progress of things like weapons have been constrained by precision , power density and metallurgy all along.

I pick "weapons" because they attracted money and could be shown to be effective or not. They also had surprisingly slow and erratic paths of evolution. There is also almost always a "explosives v. fertilizer" trade space with them. If you get steel, you get the steel plow, etc etc.

There is a BBC thing showed by PBS called "Victorian Farm" and for even a show about golden age machines, the power and basic design is wanting. A 40 horse Ford tractor was a game-changer.

It's quite early days, so it's not like it can be exploited. People dismiss things too far off. Like I say, I don't even know what qbits are any good for.

Penrose's metaphor with Godel just didn't work; leading to some of the sneering. I'm not sneering btw, I just think he missed the point of the theorems.

So far, useless but suggestive.

Quantum superposition is a potential way to do basically infinitely fast, massively parallel, pattern lookups (and idea generation) with slow chemical machinery.

Until someone discovers how brains work, I'll consider the quantum thing to be possible. It does encourage certain attitudes that I find to be useful.

Yes. Our brains are not procedural programs, and no amount of procedural programming will ever be conscious.

Electronics won. Fluidics, clockwork machines, wet film photography, snail mail, databooks, dictionaries, libraries, clipboards lost.

Electronics is dominant in the world. Instant communications, video, GPS, lighting, really changed things. It's a good time to be an EE.

I just read a book about the historic naval battle off Trafalgar. It was hard to manage a navy when it took weeks or months to get information from place to place, and some of that arriving out-of-order. Envision bad control loops.

Napoleon was notorious for making snap decisions, sending out micro-managing orders, changing his mind, and sending out different orders the next day. And blaming people when it didn't work.