quantum consciousness (2023 Update)

Read "Drunk" by Slingerland. He talks a lot about the disadvantages of having a frontal cortex.

Read Aesop on the fox who had lost his tail talking about the disadvantages of of having a tail. If John Larkin has a neocortex, it doesn't seem to work all that well.

He is a brilliant mathematician his spinor methods for insights into GR and recreational maths Penrose aperiodic tiling are truly excellent. There is no doubt that he is very creative too.

However, when he goes outside his area of clear expertise he is not that different to any other pundit. His brother is a top UK chess puzzle solver. Even so he made claims in the Emperors New Mind about the limitations of AI in blocked pawn positions that were incorrect.

Deep Blue had the capability back then (although no-one can recall if it was actually enabled in the Kasparov matches) and today you would be hard pressed to find any serious chess program that could not see deeply enough to understand that original sort of puzzle.

He has refined it though by adding three bishops to a similar position so that the branching factor can take engines beyond their limits. His latest puzzle the best engines cannot see how to obtain a draw by essentially doing nothing other than move the king. They never recognise the draw although none of them will ever play into the loss. Ultimately it hinges on the 50 moves without a capture rule 100 ply deep.

It is a bit puzzling to me in that I'd have expected against a terminal node score of -28 the draw by repetition nodes would be favoured in cache. The problem appears to be the swap off value algorithm at terminal nodes contaminating the search so nothing really profound at all. (in almost all circumstances taking material left en prise is good)

This position exploits the fact that it is fatal to do so.

8/p7/kpP5/qrp1b3/rpP2b2/pP4b1/P3K3/8 w - - 0 1

He thinks it might explain human consciousness. I think it merely highlights that we can spot what to ignore and how to be lazy. That is a heuristic that sometimes has to be programmed into machines. It is all too easy to rely on computational brute force in a machine or in this case a heuristic that is almost always true but sometimes (very rarely) isn't. Zugswang is the other but that occurs in real games often enough to be covered by any serious chess engine (basically when any legal move you can make puts you in a worse position but you have to make one).

He is opening a Penrose Institute in La Jolla to study human consciousness very nice seaside location for one. I spent some time at the Scripp's Institute there once working on a mass spectrometer.

I don't see very much from the UK - it says "Under Maintenance". There is a facebook page too.

I bought a used PDP-11 system from Scripps, rented a trailer, and Mo and I drove it up US1, the coast road, to San Francisco, in a few days. What a beautiful drive.

We ran the RSTS timeshare system on it, which I had a lot of applications for. PCs eventually got good enough to replace the DEC stuff.

I had a brief venture into FTMS controllers, until Agilent bought the company and shut them down.

+1

First time I was on holiday in the USA we did that loop on the way back to friends who still live in SF (who we haven't seen for while). Towing on the narrower windy bits must have been a bit tedious.

I particularly liked the grove of giant sequoias. There is the odd one in the UK but nothing like as majestic as the old growth US ones. There is a single specimen metasequoia a century old in the area where I live.

I grew up in the hot muggy muddy flatlands, namely New Orleans. So I'm still awed by the climate and landscape and mountains of California. The Brat grew up here and takes it for granted.

In school we had geography classes and they talked about different kinds of rocks. We didn't believe them. We knew that rocks came down the river on barges from rock factories.

If you ever return to SF, I'll show you my favorite walks.

Martin Brown wrote: <snip>

Godel's work is amazing and served as a wakeup call in so many ways but it's not all that. He literally reused the Cantor Diagonalization strategy most elegantly and we don't, SFAIK, think that the reals are some mysterious quantum thing just because they're a superset of the rationals.

It just means that nonsense is a possibility :) But we knew that.

<snip>

Lots of things were nonsense until they became orthodoxy. Any other sequence presumes that we know everything, and always have.

As ironically stated by the John Doe snipped-for-privacy@message.header troll in message-id <sdhn7c$pkp$ snipped-for-privacy@dont-email.me who has posted yet another incorectly formatted USENET posting on Thu, 29 Jul 2021 12:08:48 -0000 (UTC) in message-id <sdu5of$rm1$ snipped-for-privacy@dont-email.me.

<snip>

That's obvious. Your mindless reactions rarely have anything to do with what was posted. I'm inclined to think you are too stupid to understand what was being said, and are squalling like a baby in the hope of getting the attention you crave.

with the Google post settings, I'm trying to find someone who actually does read what you write and replies to you, but that ain't easy...

The thread "Low noise, high bias voltage on picoAmp TIA's input, howto?" should give you enough examples.

It's a bit too technical for you, like most of the threads where I do have useful interactions, but you will just have to live with that.

Why do you suppose I'm having difficulty with the google post settings? I do edit out the trash that your posts include, at the same time as I put your top-posted idiocies into a more conventional place in the response. It takes a conscious effort. You may not know what that means

As ironically stated by the John Doe snipped-for-privacy@message.header troll in message-id <sdhn7c$pkp$ snipped-for-privacy@dont-email.me who has posted yet another incorectly formatted USENET posting on Thu, 29 Jul 2021 18:20:43 -0000 (UTC) in message-id <sdurhq$to9$ snipped-for-privacy@dont-email.me.