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Google is good.

Man, a google is a lot, or better saying, a whole awful fscking lot of things. It is estimated that the universe has something in the range of 10^77 nucleons

This makes sense, even from the view point on increasing density and complexity of data alone being packed into smaller and smaller containers. Even if you only allocated 1 electron per bit, after a while all of those bits start to add up. Unless you go to another system.

As an example, people often cite the human brain, with all of it's nueral connections and pathways. But this might not be all that is going on.

Biomineralization of ferrimagnetic magnetite is known to occur in a number of organisms including animals. Recent investigations have revealed the presence of biogenic magnetite in human brain tissue as well. The presence of magnetite in the brain has been established using a variety of magnetic and electron microscopic techniques.

This has interesting implications for data processing in the brain, as well a exotic areas of research into the phenomena of consciousness

Regardless of your opinion on the above (some of which is highly speculative), this leads us to the vision of a computer technology where not not only electronics states are used for data processing, but magnetic ones as well.

This makes sense, even from the view point on increasing density and complexity of data alone being packed into smaller and smaller containers. Even if you only allocated 1 electron per bit, after a while all of those bits start to add up. Unless you go to another system.

As an example, people often cite the human brain, with all of it's nueral connections and pathways. But this might not be all that is going on.

Biomineralization of ferrimagnetic magnetite is known to occur in a number of organisms including animals. Recent investigations have revealed the presence of biogenic magnetite in human brain tissue as well. The presence of magnetite in the brain has been established using a variety of magnetic and electron microscopic techniques.

This has interesting implications for data processing in the brain, as well a exotic areas of research into the phenomena of consciousness

Regardless of your opinion on the above (some of which is highly speculative), this leads us to the vision of a computer technology where not not only electronics states are used for data processing, but magnetic ones as well.

Here is an interesting animation of Poincare Dodecahedral Space, also known as S3#.

ok, it might have some quantum computing ability,but that is far from accepted fact

Check out this page -- the math is way over my head, but it does clearly state that the human brain works on quantum principles.

It also has many, many links to supporting papers.

My mind was blown back in March of 2000, when I read an article that stated the brain worked on quantum principles, so if we wanted to create a computer as powerful as the human brain we needed to understand quantum physics.

3 weeks later, I read an article which said we had identified a quantum effect and could reproduce it in the lab: entanglement.

Basically, entanglement allows instantaneous communication at a distance; by changing the spin of one electron, the spin of its entangled pair is also changed. This article shows that (in 1997) they had tested it to a distance of 7 miles; they say there's no theoretical limit to the distance it could work at.

What blew my mind was that combining the two articles -- the human brain works on quantum principles, and one of those principles is communication at a distance -- I now believe that telepathy is possible.

Then I thought of the (admittedly anecdotal) evidence: we've all heard about a mother knowing when a child is in danger. But how many times have you heard of a father knowing? Me either. It must be that, during the 9 months the child is inside the mother's womb, exchanging fluids, that they are performing entanglement with each other.

Thinking further, we hear about twins being much more closely linked than any mother and child. This also makes sense, since they are right next to each other and have more opportunity to entangle than mother and child, whose brains are about 2 feet apart.

I'd imagine we're in the first 10% or so of our "evolution" of telepathy, since we communicate with words and rarely use entanglement to communicate. That's really neat, because most people think "we're top of the food chain, we're perfect" but we are still evolving capabilities.

The article also mentions that SETI may be doomed to failure since it's looking for radio signals, and any sufficiently advanced species would use entanglement for their communications since it's much faster and more efficient.

(overall a good read. certainly a buttload of speculation but no more (actually probably less) than found in Wolfram's book)

On the other hand, I see nothing wrong with offering a prize for what he believes in. Heck we have the Templeton prize out there (more than the Nobel, no less) for best achievement in religion (christianity specifically, methinks), so what's wrong with offering 100G of his own money? We also have the X-BOX cracking contest - who is willing to bet that the believing in the chance of solving a 2048bit key in a few monthes is MUCH dumber than trying to shoot for some "not everybody agree as AI" AI?

> Why not make a more efficient mechanical generator to convert directly to electricity instead?

Tony Smith came up with a novel answer to this question, but I prefer to think that what Morpheus told Neo was not actually true. In the film, the "human-based energy source" topic never comes up again, so I see no particular reason to believe it. The film doesn't say "human batteries", it only says that Morpheus says "human batteries".

As an alternative, perhaps the AIs are using the humans as biological computers of some sort.
See here for another.

this reminds me of schumann resonances.. you can read about them at: http://www.innerx.net/personal/tsmith/Schumann.htm l

i was telling a buddy about these and he recommended i check out http://www.bwgen.com/ .. its a sound generator that can create a wide variety of frequencies (including shumann resonances) .. i have found several presets all over the place and now i use it to relax, to fall asleep, to study for that big test.. many applications :]

Maybe I'm missing something from the article, but I don't think that "constants" like alpha changing is a new idea (though it is very cool if alpha changing over time can be directly observed like this). Changing coupling "constants" is already a part of the established "Standard Model" of physics, and is an essential feature of Grand Unified Theories.

Grand Unified Theories rely on all of the interaction strengths for all known forces (Strong force, weak force, electromagnetic force, and sometimes gravity) becoming the same at some energy scale earlier on during the formation of the Universe. In the present Universe, the strong force that holds quarks together is much stronger than the electromagnetic force, but if GUTs hold true then they were much closer earlier on.

See here for a graph illustrating this effect, or rather its failure for one particular GUT theory. This is the first I found using a quick google search for "GUT" and "coupling constant"; it is a common plot shown for papers on GUTs in general.

Its been a couple of years since I studied this stuff. I'd be interested to know if this article is pointing to something new theoretically.

Quantum Consciousness. Neural stuff.

100% goat-neuron free. ;-D

Radio 4 does transmit a simultaneous broadcast on the Net. Unfortunately,
(1) as this page states:
We regret that, for rights reasons, we are not yet able to offer a full webcast service across the the Radio 4 schedule
(2) and of those programmes that are webcast, archived copies are only accessible to BBC researchers.

IMHO I think the only solution to this is to get /., or some similar site, to host discussions concerning wider topics of interest to us. We should be able to vote for people who arouse our curiousity. For instance, earlier today on the Radio 4 programme, In Touch, there was a lively debate about consciousness between Roger Penrose and a doubting physicist. Penrose is one of the chaps, the other being Stuart Hameroff, who have suggested that there a structures in the brain called microtubules where electron tunneling occurs [across Gap Junctions] between microtubules in each of two adjacent neurons. These microtubules are connected to each other by Microtubule Associated Proteins (MAPs). With these structures in mind Roger Penrose and Stuart Hameroff propose that Consciousness involves a Planck scale Collapse of Quantum Superpositions that they call Orch OR. More info here.

Penrose claims that there can be no artificial intelligence due to the purely mechanistic workings of automata. He called for more research into consciousness as a bridge between the micro - quantum physics and the macroscopic everyday world.

One huge problem is the abuse of the system. Someone could simply set up the knowledge base to go fishing for some secret industrial data, well someone already did.

The story of the german energy company Enercon is a good example here. In short it describes how a german company finds their own invention already patented in the US, by the US competitor Kennentech, with papers bearing even Enercon logos! It sounds funny until you realize that Enercon lost 100 million DM and 300 people lost their jobs, as Enercon was not allowed to sell their products in the US.

So if you are looking for some adversely affected 'decent citizens' (though not US citizens) throw the words 'Enercon' and 'NSA' at your preferred Searchengine. I did so and got some coverage of the case here or a little down the page from heise. German readers might want to look at a script for the "plusminus" show or a "Spiegel" or "Zeit" article. While digging up the case i also stumbled over this nice collection of slides concerning the NSA.