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In http://www.1729.com/blog/PossiblePriorArtForKootolPatentDated2001.html I examine the relationship between the Kootol patent, Twitter, and my unimplemented Miski system which is (or could have been) similar in many ways to how Twitter actually works. http://web.archive.org/web/20010223204516/miski.sourceforge.net/miski-white-paper.html is a copy of the description of Miski captured 23 Feb 2001 on Wayback.

He basically argued that human's can actually 'understand' Godel's incompleteness theory in a way that an algorithm could not. This allows them to say things about whether an algorithm will terminate that a Turing machine couldn't

It all boils down to whether you believe in Free Will or not. If you do you have to admit there is something missing from Physics. if you don't you don't.

I do by the way so I'm on Penrose's side.

The Biology of Morality

I explain this idea in more detail in my article Published Digital Information is a Public Good: The Case for Voted Compensation.

My article also includes a relevant cartoon.

More details at How I Invented a Decentralised Scaleable Push-Based Micronews System in 2000.

If nothing else, my documented but unimplemented invention might be good prior art, should it be needed.

The only way to load a world view quickly into your brain is to import it from other people. To do this efficiently, your brain must be capable of entering a mode where it uncritically accepts information provided in spoken form (probably mostly from your parents, but other people may play a role). To avoid the risk of abuse, there must be some instinctive criteria that determine when this uncritical uploading of new information should occur. Hypnosis occurs under conditions which mimic the circumstances that satisfy these criteria.

In my blog entry Disorganized Incremental Software Development, I describe an idea for a programming language where all implementations and specifications are named using cryptographic hash codes of their contents. This avoids all name collisions, and means that you can let anyone be a "committer", and indeed dispense with version control altogether (except for comments, which still have to be written by someone who knows what they are writing).

The fallacy of his computability argument can be summed up as follows:

• Suppose there was an algorithm for generating mathematical truths which described the mathematical understanding of a human mathematician.
• Show the algorithm to the mathematician, telling them that this is the algorithm which describes their understanding of mathematics.
• The mathematician then understands that the algorithm is sound as a means of generating mathematical truths.
• This truth cannot be in the set of mathematical truths generated by the algorithm (by Godel's incompleteness theory).
• Therefore the mathematician understands something which is not within their understanding -- a contradiction.
• Therefore human mathematical understanding is not computable.
• Q.E.D.

What's the catch? The hypothetical algorithm described the mathematician's understanding of mathematics, but only on the assumption that the mathematician is not informed of the algorithm and told that it is sound as a system for generating mathematical truths.

The "proof" is a more sophisticated version of the following argument that human behaviour is not predictable according to the laws of physics:

• Predict what my behaviour is going to be.
• I will then decide to do something different.
• Therefore my behaviour is not predictable.
• Q.E.D.

It would appear that Penrose's understanding of complex analysis etc is better than his understanding of logic and computability.

And just in case Penrose is not wrong, I launched a new mathematical journal titled The Algorithmically Unbounded Journal of Mathematical Truths.

The fallacy of his computability argument can be summed up as follows:

• Suppose there was an algorithm for generating mathematical truths which described the mathematical understanding of a human mathematician.
• Show the algorithm to the mathematician, telling them that this is the algorithm which describes their understanding of mathematics.
• The mathematician then understands that the algorithm is sound as a means of generating mathematical truths.
• This truth cannot be in the set of mathematical truths generated by the algorithm (by Godel's incompleteness theory).
• Therefore the mathematician understands something which is not within their understanding -- a contradiction.
• Therefore human mathematical understanding is not computable.
• Q.E.D.

What's the catch? The hypothetical algorithm described the mathematician's understanding of mathematics, but only on the assumption that the mathematician is not informed of the algorithm and told that it is sound as a system for generating mathematical truths.

The "proof" is a more sophisticated version of the following argument that human behaviour is not predictable according to the laws of physics:

• Predict what my behaviour is going to be.
• I will then decide to do something different.
• Therefore my behaviour is not predictable.
• Q.E.D.

It would appear that Penrose's understanding of complex analysis etc is better than his understanding of logic and computability.

And just in case Penrose is not wrong, I launched a new mathematical journal titled The Algorithmically Unbounded Journal of Mathematical Truths.

An idea (or data) is a "public good". "The Lighthouse in Economics" is a classic text on this - see here

conventional wisdom from John Stuart Mill to Paul Samuelson had claimed that the lighthouse was the quintessential "public good," which allegedly had to be provided by government due to the inherent free-riding of those who could not be charged for the services being provided.

In 2000 I tried to invent a spam-proof usenet. The result of my efforts was Miski. The idea of Miski was that users would have addresses on servers representing what are effectively RSS channels, and other users would subscribe to these channels through their servers. There would be a DNS extension for the naming of servers. Channels would have names like username@example.com/"Java Programming". The system would be spam-proof because your server would only send you what you had subscribed to. It would be "push", because as soon as you posted something to a channel, your server would pass the message on to the servers of those who had subscribed to your channel. Only the notifications would be push: ordinary http would be used to retrieve the actual content.

Miski also had the important concept of "reposting", whereby if you saw something you liked, you could press a single button in your client to repost the notification, so that any subscribers to you could know about the item being reposted, if they had not already heard about it from somewhere else. The presumption was that the client (or the reader's server) would trim out duplicates, so that people posting would have no inhibitions about reposting stuff that maybe many of their subscribers already knew about.

Miski was more than just an attempt to create scalable-push RSS, or a spam-proof equivalent of Usenet: it was a vision of the "global brain". Using posting and reposting, notification of a new "interesting" idea could spread very quickly from the inventor of the idea to almost anyone in the world likely to be interested in that idea, even if the inventor was not well known. We would all be like neurons in the brain, with signals passing from one person to the next as fast as possible. It was an attempt to solve the dual problems of "How can I tell the world what I have to say when I have to compete against the efforts of all those other people trying to tell the world stuff?" and "How can I find out new stuff that's really interesting to me from among all this junk that I am getting from all these people trying to tell stuff to the world?".

I asked the question How fast is the Internet?. Although packets can travel from one computer to another in seconds, or even less, information can still take days, weeks, months or even years to travel from the person who created it to another person who is interested in it. One way to measure this is to consider how often you find a document on the web which is interesting, but which you did not know about, and which has nevertheless been available for months or years, and which would have been interesting to you even when it was originally posted on the web.

Sadly Miski was never implemented, and I reduced my ambitions to write Womcat Bookmarks, which attempted to be a less dynamic version of Miski, but has ended up being just another RSS reader.

In 2000 I tried to invent a spam-proof usenet. The result of my efforts was Miski. The idea of Miski was that users would have addresses on servers representing what are effectively RSS channels, and other users would subscribe to these channels through their servers. There would be a DNS extension for the naming of servers. Channels would have names like username@example.com/"Java Programming". The system would be spam-proof because your server would only send you what you had subscribed to. It would be "push", because as soon as you posted something to a channel, your server would pass the message on to the servers of those who had subscribed to your channel. Only the notifications would be push: ordinary http would be used to retrieve the actual content.

Miski also had the important concept of "reposting", whereby if you saw something you liked, you could press a single button in your client to repost the notification, so that any subscribers to you could know about the item being reposted, if they had not already heard about it from somewhere else. The presumption was that the client (or the reader's server) would trim out duplicates, so that people posting would have no inhibitions about reposting stuff that maybe many of their subscribers already knew about.

Miski was more than just an attempt to create scalable-push RSS, or a spam-proof equivalent of Usenet: it was a vision of the "global brain". Using posting and reposting, notification of a new "interesting" idea could spread very quickly from the inventor of the idea to almost anyone in the world likely to be interested in that idea, even if the inventor was not well known. We would all be like neurons in the brain, with signals passing from one person to the next as fast as possible. It was an attempt to solve the dual problems of "How can I tell the world what I have to say when I have to compete against the efforts of all those other people trying to tell the world stuff?" and "How can I find out new stuff that's really interesting to me from among all this junk that I am getting from all these people trying to tell stuff to the world?".

I asked the question How fast is the Internet?. Although packets can travel from one computer to another in seconds, or even less, information can still take days, weeks, months or even years to travel from the person who created it to another person who is interested in it. One way to measure this is to consider how often you find a document on the web which is interesting, but which you did not know about, and which has nevertheless been available for months or years, and which would have been interesting to you even when it was originally posted on the web.

Sadly Miski was never implemented, and I reduced my ambitions to write Womcat Bookmarks, which attempted to be a less dynamic version of Miski, but has ended up being just another RSS reader.

It is difficult to promote anything on the Internet by word of mouth, unless it has its own URL, as explained at Unsigned Artists: How to Promote Your Songs using RSS. Both MagnaTune and Audio Lunchbox are deficient in this respect. You can make the world's greatest web site, with the greatest navigation features, but we are entering an age where content and navigation are being separated. The most important thing is not that users can navigate around your web-site -- it's that they can navigate around someone else's web-site (or RSS or whatever) to get to the desired destination on your web site.

The Three Levels of Conflict Resolution are direct action, politics and morality. The "heresy" concept is part of the fighting, but it does not neatly fit into any one level. The individual heresy is something that the originator is stating in order to gain political support, and ultimately to challenge the current view of what is moral. But the general notion of "heresy" supports direct action against the heretic: e.g. burn them at the stake if they don't shut up.