the hot new programming language

Plato is identified (probably wrongly) as the source of this bizarre material/spiritual dualism which extends all the way to more modern Cartesian thinking. It's purest mysticism, and doesn't answer the main question that it purports to: how can our lives have significance if we are machines with no "truly" free will. It does not - and cannot - answer this question because it just relegate "significance" to another realm - which has the same problems. If that realm has no rules, it's chaos, and if it does, how is it not a machine? It's turtles all the way down, folk.

The populist rubbish in which Larkin suggests the two realms are joined by quantum uncertainties (without breaking the idea of the physical world as mechanistic) has never been demonstrated to be plausible, and represents just another attempt to clutch at straws in the search for a meaning beyond our individual finite lives. Why should the "spiritual" realm be any more capable of carrying meaning than the one world we

You reckon it was around 1955 that people started to call bullshit on this nonsense? Do you associate any particular event or person with that event?

Brain structure and operation is quite unlike any existing logic machine, but it's still a logic machine. The recent adoption by the IBM Cortical Learning Center of Jeff Hawkins' (of Numenta) approach called Hierarchical Temporal Memory (HTM) will show that our brains are not magical. The resources that IBM are bringing to bear on realising the incredible recent achievements of small-scale HTM - like, they're now starting to build wafer-scale devices consisting of eventually up to half a dozen stacked full wafers - will tell the truth, and this mystical nonsense will finally be seen for what it it - a failed attempt to dream that humans have some significance beyond just the arrangement of molecules that make us.

One life, then it ends. Make a difference while you can, don't spend it preparing for a future life where eternity requires that no difference can ever be made.

Clifford Heath.

No, it doesn't reduce the gain at all, at least any differential between insta-tradez/speculation and long-term investments.

Irrelevant.

No argument is actually needed until you present evidence of the existence of this meta-magical woo. I'm not the one claiming it exists, you are, and I'm just pointing out the psychological motivations for such delusions. Prove it. Or are you limited to merely your "faith the evidence of things unseen"?

Meantime, you completely missed the 'turtles' argument. It's blatant illogic to think that a lack of significance in this world can be remedied by saying that it all makes sense in the next. It's intellectual crime of the first order to push the one thing that people most want to a place that's eternally and by definition just beyond the reach of observation.

You also missed that I pointed you to success in mimicing the actual neurological structure, operation and behaviour of the brain, as it is understood through the last decades of MRI work. This is not the failed "neural net" technology which cannot learn complex material before the heat death of the universe; it learns rapidly and it scales. Perhaps try reading about the work I referred to before you discount what I said?

Clifford Heath.

The point would be to heavily tax assets owned for a short time, like, say, 300 milliseconds.

A fixed transaction tax has much the same effect.

And the frenzy for quarterly returns, and IPOs.

A human, with a wet-chemistry brain, using millisecond logic gates, can whup a teraflop-CPU robot at tennis.

I just use the PARSE$ function.

The whole singularity thing is a red herring. It's a symptom of the decline of thinking in our age that most folks assume without proof that 'modern science' has proven that the human mind is just the pure physical operation of the human brain under physical causation and nothing else.

That argument isn't modern at all, and in fact was debunked quite conclusively about 400 BC. We can't think without our brains, but we don't altogether think *with* them. If pure physical causation (what Aristotle called 'efficient causation') is all that's going on when our brains change from one state to the next, there's no room for *logical* causation at all. A madman's brain is just as good as Einstein's, on that view, and if (per impossibile) the state of a brain happened to correspond to one step of a logical argument, there would be no way to even notice that the next step went wrong, let alone correct it.

This was a philosophical commonplace up until our culture lost its mind, sometime around 1955.

NB this has nothing to do with any particular religion--Plato and Aristotle knew all about it.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

How does it work?

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

The model of a brain as a bunch of threshold logic gates (the Neural Network approach) is silly. Prop delay alone makes the idea absurd. Single-celled critters can do pretty cool adaptive stuff.

The brain must be quantum mechanical at the cellular level, with all the mysticism and noncausal behavior of quantum mechanics.

PowerBasic actually has two:

The PARSE statement uses user-defined delimiters and an input string and extracts the delimited substings into a string array. The PARSECOUNT function predicts how many will be found.

Example

a$ = "Trevor, Bob, Bruce, Dan, Simon, Jenny" DIM b$(1 TO PARSECOUNT(a$)) PARSE a$, b$() ARRAY SORT b$() Result b$(1) = "Bob" b$(2) = "Bruce" b$(3) = "Dan" b$(4) = "Jenny" b$(5) = "Simon" b$(6) = "Trevor"

The PARSE$ function is similar but, given the delimiters and N, it plucks out the Nth delimited string from the input string.

Example a$ = PARSE$("one,two,three", 2) ' returns "two" a$ = PARSE$("one;two,three", 2) ' returns "three" a$ = PARSE$("one",2) ' returns ""

Comma is the default delimiter, but you can name other, multiple delimiters.

And if you can't remember the gory details, just type PARSE and hit F1 for help.

That's sort of like Rexx, except with the usual BASIC dollars-sign ugliness that the punters know and love. ;)

My parsing library has things like

unsigned ParseNDoublesOnOneLine( char **pc, double *af, unsigned int N);

which does what it sounds like, and

SkipCommentLines(char ** pc);

for comfort features. I've used it for reading parameters files for a decade or more. Works great.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

So where's your actual argument?

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

You define logical thought as requiring logical causation, in other words, as "why" the thought occurred, the reason (logic) behind the thought.

Has it ever occurred to you that thought might be *reasonable* in and of itself without needing such an a-priori assumption that it originates elsewhere, somewhere other than "in the machine"?

You define a kind of thought that cannot exist in a machine (because it originates outside a machine) and then you "prove" that such thought cannot exist in the machine. It's begging the question.

The madman's brain has the same random noise in it as Einstein's does, but only Einstein has the appropriately trained resonant filters to choose noise that fits training that others recognise as "reasonable".

It's not possible to refute a tautological argument, and that's what this is.

No. You're claiming that for thought to be "logical", it has to originate outside the brain - you presume that such an "outside" exists. That's the "magic" I was referring to. It's the same error that has existed since Plato tried to divide form and substance.

Clifford Heath.

They will just rig the market like they did for Forex and Libor.

Think about it! The informed inner circle could then make bets on the market already knowing what is really about to happen - pretty much like the most astonishingly successful hedge fund managers do!

That is an aeon in the present era of high frequency trading. They are trading at rates up to MHz. It is funny when the algorithms c*ck up eg.

The practitioners claim it increases liquidity but in practice they all quit the market if their parasitism cannot yield an instant profit.

I am inclined to agree that anyone holding shares in a company for less than a day should incur punitive transaction taxes.

I can make neither head nor tail of your claims, they appeart to be based on tautologies, and thus I choose to leave this matter unresoved.

Crap. I meant to post this link.

Sold for $1,533.87.

Hong Kong has a 'stamp duty' on share transactions- a fairly small 10 basis point (0.1%) transaction tax, and it does discourage HFT. Here is the argument for scrapping it:

--sp

It's incredible that a market velocity of 44% per month is considered low.