Slashdot Mirror
Calculating A Theoretical Boundary To Computation
TMB writes "Lawrence Krauss and Glenn Starkman, astrophysicists at Case Western Reserve University (and in LK's case, author of a number of books including Physics of Star Trek), just submitted this nice little paper to Phys. Rev. Letters. It claims that in an accelerating universe, the existence of a future event horizon puts a fundamental physical limit on the total amount of calculation that can be done, even in an infinite time. This limit is much smaller than the traditional Hawking-Beckenstein entropy. Among other things, this implies that and Moore's Law must have a finite lifetime, here calculated to be 600 years, and that consciousness must be finite."
This doesn't mention Penrose's work, which is very much like this.
"consciousness must be finite"
;)
Except, of course, for those using certain popular mind-expanding substances
Seriously though - it seems we are finding a new limit every day. Wasn't it last week that they theorized limitations on data storage, as well as data transmission speed?
- To err is human; but to really screw up, you need a computer
Moore's law was never intended to be a scientific theory. It was just a useful observation. It has never had anything other than economic incentive to keep it going. Using it to discuss the calculational ability of the universe is idiotic.
We should now be able to compute the asymptotic limit of web-server bandwidth for slashdot-proofness per year for 600 years. I bet it's a constant price in street dollars.
I was a physics undergrad at Case, and actually had Starkman as a professor for a mathematical physics course. I have chatted with Krauss a few times since graduation on science topics involving public education. These are good guys, glad to see them headlining slashdot this morning.
(feel free to enlighten us then, eh? :)
- To err is human; but to really screw up, you need a computer
It's not a referer link, don't worry...
"and that consciousness must be finite."
So they are saying that, using fundamental physics and mathematics, they have proof that if somebody has infinite wisdon, the universe can not be expanding?
--- Hindsight is 20/20, but walking backwards is not the answer.
I have always though moores law to be crap, I mean its just some marketing scan to force us to upgrade slowly... With quantum computers around the corner (10 - 100 years) we should be able to reach the limit, but the point is by that time, this research might have been proven wrong... Minge for example predicts that computing something will become instant, so in other words there is a limit on computing power! But at that point we won't need to go faster as it is instant already (in our sense of time), and hopefully too by then we won't be morons anymore either...
I'm not sure in exactly what sense the paper is describing consciousness as "finite", but I would say that anything that has a boundary or a limit is finite. The fact that consciousness can be defined means that it must have a boundary around it, that boundary being that which seperates it from "not-consciousness". So consciousness is definitely finite as is anything that is less than Everything.
This article contains a very large number of assumptions, which may well prove not to be the case (constant cosmological constant, no FTL communication/travel, no access to other universes etc. etc.). Still, an interesting intellectual exercise I suppose... ;-)
Galileo: "The Earth revolves around the Sun!"
Score: -1 100% Flamebait
Does this mean I'll be able to compute how much pr0n will be on my server 600 years from now?
b(l)=s/ba bandwidth limit = slashdot/bandwidth available
Penrose is a mathematician who attempts to be philospohical and fails miserably, because he can't distinguish his intuition from fact. You don't need a link. Just remember that he wrote "The Emperor's New Mind", and coil away in horror.
Please use the mirrors. In Australia, the closest one is here.
Its been confirmed by the fed.gov that there is no limit to inflation and the amount of credit with fractional reserve banking that can be made.
in 600 years our debt will be $2569663053366973200
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
Can you even define consciousness?
Are we talking about the physical computational capacity of a headful of neurons, which is finite by definition unless you believe that the brain can somehow reach into unknown dimensions somewhat like early CPUs used bank shifting to increase their RAM range?
Or are we talking about the sensation we have of being alive, a sensation that is arguably simply generated by our brains as a mechanism to ensure our survival. Yes, the vaunted consciousness that reacts a full 1/4 second after the fact when we do most common actions such as crossing the road, kicking a ball, picking up a cup, or typing comments to Slashdot?
The definition of "consciousness" is seriously under debate and it's meaningless to discuss whether it's finite or infinite.
Most likely, consciousness is a sense, like sight or sound. Would you frame the discussion of your sense of smell in terms of computational power? No, me neither.
Mu.
Ceci n'est pas une signature
From the paper:
"In this case, if one treats consciousness, conservatively, as merely a form of computation, then one can derive a finite total lifetime for any civilization in an accelerating universe. This conclusion results from the fact that in such a universe one ultimately has access to only a finite volume, even after an infinite time. In the case of actual conscious living systems, it is difficult to quantify the nature of this limit, because we do not currently understand the precise relationship between computational complexity and consciousness."
They make a bold statement in the first sentence about consciousness, then two sentences later start back-pedalling faster than Wile E. Coyote at the edge of a cliff. This is not science, it's a cry for attention.
"Art is a religion with no god. Science is a disease with no cure." --Bart Hemminger, The Outside Curtain
Read any good sonnets lately?
As usual, it is a prime example of our lame and confused ideas about what's going on in our head. Very few people have any idea what consciousness is, or even if it is, let alone some idea about whether it could be finite or infinite.
This kind of slashdot tagline just perpetuates mumbled conceptions of self that make little to no sense.
L
and wtf do they mean by "consciousness"? is there some technical definition of this term? or are they just throwing around some nonsense?
Strongly suggest you read Vernor Vinge's A Fire Upon The Deep - he develops a very interesting view of expansion of the universe and consciousness.
If you've not heard of Vinge before that isn't a big surprise, but he did write True Names as well - the very foundation of the cyberpunk/hacker genre. This is also a good read if you can actually locate it.
I am very easy to get along with, but I don't have time to waste being nice to people who are being stupid. -Theo
Moore's Law is not a physical theory, it is the observation of a common phenomenon, namely the curve that technology goes through as it becomes cheaper and eventually free.
All technologies seem to obey this general law. Software, chips, disk space, they all tend to zero.
Even a passenger jet costs a fraction of what it did 20 years ago.
Moore's Law turns this around to say that for the same price we can expect more and more capacity. Long before 600 years are passed, this capacity will effectively reach "infinite", being the point where no-one can use more capacity or power, no matter what the application. At which point Moore's Law will gently slow down.
Ceci n'est pas une signature
This article hasn't (yet) been accepted for publication. Caveat lector!
The obvious conclusion of this paper is that there is a finite limit to the amount of pr0n in the universe. That's good to know -- I can now relax, knowing that I won't have to keep buying bigger hard drives forever.
...phil
"For a list of the ways which technology has failed to improve our quality of life, press 3."
But I was under the impression that, since the univserse is expanding faster than light and we cannot transfer data faster than light, then it would be impossible to obtain all the knowledge of the universe at once. Has this essay outlined anything other than what my single sentence did?
Does this paper proove anything other than the fact that the universe cannot contain an exact replica of itself within itself? Seems like common sense to me.
Yep, even the title of this paper is designed to make one stare blankly and nod. With such eloquent scientific lingo wrapped around such an outlandish subject matter, the end effect is comparable to drinking a Pan-Galactic Gargle Blaster.
Is quantum tunnelling across the event horizon of a light cone possible, in the same way that this evaporates black holes? Then excess energy can seep into the limited space.
And what if a light cone included a quasar? Are the physics of this understood well enough for it to be included in the general case?
Esteem isn't a zero sum game
I don't know why, but it reminds me of:
The Universe: some information to help you live in it.
Population: None.
It is known that there is an infinite number of worlds, but not every one is inhabited. Therefore there must be a finite number of inhabited worlds. Any finite number divided by infinity is as near to nothing as makes no odds, so if every planet in the Universe has a population of zero then the entire population of the Universe must be zero, and any people you may actually meet from time to time are merely products of a deranged imagination.
So, if the universe has a limit, and the Mind isn't infinite, and we're all constrained by the entropy of the ever so slowly expanding universe, I have just one question.
Would anyone like some toast?
Waiting for an amusing sig.
My brother recently started work on researching how humans experience smell. He needs to know how many different compounds the nose can sense, and how the brain is able to process combinations of these compounds to produce the sense of smelling something.
Interesting study. Very real.
J
Can't say as how I'm aware of that.
Seeing bad movies only encourages them. Watch responsibly
His criticism was based on the fact that his intuition is faulty, not that his physics and computer science is. Can you read, or are you just a moron?
"...consciousness must be finite."
This assumes that consciousness is based solely on computation. Not proven yet.
And for that matter, even if consciousness is nothing more than computation, how can we put a limit on an activity in space-time when we don't even know how space-time functions, or even how many dimensions it has?
Weaselmancer
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
Time to get cracking on the calculation of how to reverse entropy (per Asimov).
[Insert pithy quote here]
(note of caution - let's see whether this gets accepted, looks more like a Science article than a Phys. Rev. Lett. one to me)
... duh. This is more or less a geometrical analysis (finite causal volume) + basic information theory. No questions asked about physics of inflation and how would that affect the result. So you end up with a trivial result, too - a finite volume can only hold a finite amount of information. If a lot of other assumptions hold - such as whether the available energy in this volume is really finite (how does one sustain an infinitely accelerating model this way?)
so
to feel geekier then the day before...
::hangs head in shame::
I just get into work this morning sporting my copy of "The Physics of Star Trek" and I see this article...
sad thing is I am completely serious...
"why don't you just slip into something more comfortable...like a coma!"
It's like at the bar -- the later in the night you attempt to pick up chicks, the fewer of them are still available.
Meanwhile the auto industry maintains a negative Moores curve getting more expensive with time and even beating inflation to the punch.
So get in as many gaming hours as you can right away, before someone else uses up the universe's quota of computation.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
If this paper is true and there is a limit on consciousness, wouldn't it make the existence of an omnipotent being an impossibility?
In Soviet Russia, hot grits put YOU down THEIR pants.
Brain injuries, brain scans et al might lead one to believe, quite reasonably, that consciousness is indeed closely linked with the brain.
There are some intersting ideas as to what the end of the universe could be.
There's also another theory about that if a couple particles collide with enough energy they can create a more perfect vacuum that would essentially "take over" the current universe (I suppose like an implosion). Maybe somebody knows the link for this.
I mention this as a backdrop for an interesting short story by Isaac Asimov called The Last Question. This link is a summary and contains significant spoilers, you may want to read the story first I think that it is apropos, as it deals with a powerful computer called Multivac.
This story is interesting to read, and interesting humanistic view. Good for pondering this slashdot thread/story. Good science fiction is useful.
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
*blerk* Haven't had morning coffee yet. Consciousness very finite right now. *yawn*
I've found that my posts don't format quite right w/o a sig.
Perhaps they are looking at the universe the wrong way. What if the universe is accelerating *because* some aliens elsewhere in the universe are doing one heck of a lot of computation, could this be the source of dark energy? Remember, we are talking about accelerating and not merely expanding.
-- Instant Karma's gonna get you! [320848 = 2*2*2*2*11*1823]
On power up the new chips would create several parallel universes (one for each execution unit) and destroy them when you turn the machine off -- this way it can continue to grow beyond the 600 year theoretical limit.
300 years is a very long time in terms of what technology can do. I'm sure in 100 years once we have AI that can think as well (or better) than we can, getting around these pesky universal limits will get easier.
Rod Taylor
With infinite _parallel_ universes, why be troubled with _future_ event horizons?
And before this, we all thought an exponentially expanding process would be endless?
People who disagree with you are not automatically evil, greedy, or stupid.
If you belive in the soul, then consciousness knows no boundaries. And the collective consciousness is the embodiment of God.
You may quote me on that if you like. For it's what I believe in.
Life is not for the lazy.
Cars are not really about technology any longer but about materials (and marketing). I think cars reached the flat part of the curve some time ago - probably when Ford started mass production.
Other example: houses. Any physical objects with significant production costs are not going to get cheaper even if the technology they embody is close to free.
But all products where technology (not raw materials, marketing, and labour) is the main cost get cheaper following the standard curve:
- pharmaceuticals
- consumer electronics
Products where raw materials are cheap but production is technically complex get cheaper as their production facilities get cheaper. It's not just about "economies of scale", but about the real reduction in underlying costs:
- bikes
- clothes
- many kinds of food
This is why you can buy Chinese bikes in West Africa for $25.
To a large extent the growth in prosperity that technological advance brings is simply the lower cost of producing the things we need (or want).
But even cars come with a lot more value (if you consider gadgets, smarter engines, reliability, etc. as value) for the same money.
Ceci n'est pas une signature
Corollary: Game developers will always be seeking ways to use that available processing power. For example, one day all our flight simulators (as opposed to non-sim flying games) will be using CFD techniques to model the plane's behavior, and highly sophisticated physics models will be used to control things like tire grip. Racing games might even model the behavior of the engine and associated hardware to give realistic simulation of performance. CFD of the intake air and fuel system will tell you how the fuel mixes. Modeling combustion inside the cylinder will determine how much power an individual stroke will provide, which is affected by any damage to the engine. Then friction is modeled, etc etc. Wouldn't it be nice if cars in video games behaved the way they do in real life? They more or less do when there's not much going on in a racing game, but when you're going the high-friction stuff like power sliding and such, video games never manage to get it right. A physics-based approach (as opposed to a handmade phsyics model which is tweaked until it approaches the proper behavior) is the only way to fix this problem.
We will always find new ways to consume computing resources, be they MIPS, storage, memory, you name it.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I've always thought that life would probably require a heady number of different chemical elements, thus we would find it in areas of the universe with an abudance of heavy elements (like gold, lead, etc.). My guess would be that this solar system is probably a 2nd or 3rd generation system meeting those requirements- 7-10 billion years ago there probably was not nearly as many star systems with the abundance of transistion metals that we have here. And I think those are just as necessary for "complex" life as the basic carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, etc. are for life was we know it.
Aren't there inherent issues with making assumptions or using imperfect systems that can lead to paradoxes? Isn't it inherently impossible to factor this in because there will always be things that we don't know (or even don't know that we don't know)?
Disclaimer: I have not yet RTFA..
The speed of light is a practical limit to lots of physical processes. There was a date "Norman O. Brown day" that was posited as the day that human growth expanded at the speed of light away from the earth. This was a physical limit that the volume of human growth could achieve. Most things we can do have a practical limit that is much less than that. I guess the primary value of such papers is to beseech us to talk with more precision and stop claiming that things we are in contact with are actually infinite. I often talk about things that are semi-infinite. What I mean when I say that is that the things I am talking about are larger than I can conceive. So if I complement you on your infinite wisdom, it just means I think that you are smarter than me. Don't let it go to your head. I really mean semi-infinite.
Long before 600 years are passed, this capacity will effectively reach "infinite", being the point where no-one can use more capacity or power, no matter what the application.
You simply do not understand the power that the porn industy posesses.
I guess the main argumentation of Roger Penrose is that Godel Incompleteness Theorem can not be understood by a computer, because it is computationally undecidable in structure. Well humans can and are therefor outside computation.
that means there isnt an infinite number of trolls typing at an infinite number of computers connected on an infinite number of ISP lines trying to get an infinite number of moderators to mod them down by an infinite number of negative numbers!
What about John Brunner's The Shockwave Rider (1975)? It's not only a cyberpunk precursor but also a "hacker" novel. Vinge is a great author, but the cyberpunk genre is based on the work of many different authors.
True warriors use the Klingon Google
Well, yeah! Unfortunately, the information system would be the size of a hundred solar systems before we'd hit that theoretical limit. But oh, our government will try!
I agree with the parent. Off-topic, yes :)
Since evolution's only motto is that the fittest suvive and no holds are barred, then whatever brain can function better while making use of micro wormholes, subspace, metaphysical power, warp speed, and GTK widgets will survive. Nobody needs to know how it works. Evolution only requires that it does.
If it were possible for the brain to make use of some metaphysical data processing, it would do so without asking anyone for permission.
I base this on the observation made when making evolutionary ICs. I read an article on this in SciAm a while back. The chips circuits that evolved through 10000 some odd generations would make unlimited use of the chip's physical features, such as electromagnetic coupling between wires, inductance, temperature, and practically any and all laws of physics that apply... as a result the designs created were irreproducible on different ICs, but that's beside the point.
J
Deep, heady stuff -- but who cares?
Not commenting on the paper itself, but it has been submitted to PRL, not accepted. It hasn't gone through that wonderful process of peer-review that is the very heart of the scientific method (that and falsifiability but thats another topic). NASA has been setting a particularily bad example here with science by "press release". PRL is not an easy journal to publish in, lets wait until other experts have a look and not cheat the scientific method like this. PRL should not be mentioned in connection with this paper until this get published - Anyone can submit a paper to PRL...
At least for the next 600 years.
Several people have come down negatively on this paper for discussing consciousness, moore's law, or the limits of civilization. As a soon to be Phd graduate in AI I'd like to state the following.
It is plainly obvious to me, and to anyone who really has a clue, that the naysayers really don't know what they are talking about. The people who have written this paper are obviously well-versed in their fields, much more so than those who would presume to look down upon them. Physics has always been a core science, and I find it VERY interesting that regardless of manifestation the advance of physical computation has a 600 year hard limit at the current rate. That is not a long time at all, even by human terms.
Several functioning theories of consciousness actually exist, of which computation is one, and none will ever be proven to be correct. We have a theory of gravity, not a theorem of gravity. Theorems only exist in artificial logical systems, like math. In the real world, it is only ever theories, which are never proven, only supported by empirical tests. Claiming that theories of consciousness haven't been proven is similar to christians claiming god exists because it can't be proven that it dosen't exist. An apparent failure of both logical reasoning and our current educational system...
As to the physics this paper was based on itself, that of course could possibly be shown to be incorrect. However by use of the cosmological constant, an empirical observed value, instead of trying to include newer theories that would explain similar effects, the paper rests on physics we are quite familiar with. Instead of speculating based upon as of yet untested string or more (possibly) complicated theories.
Moore's Law was an simple observation of the rate of development of microprocessors. Anyone who has actually seen the paper knows this. Someone has been having too much fun in conspiracy camp when they start thinking it was a marketing ploy.
And finally, a personal opinion on consciousness. As someone who has read many papers on the subject in philosophy, psychology, neuroscience, and AI. It is without a doubt in my mind an entirely emergent computational phenomenon at the newtonian scale. Not involving quantum mechanics, souls, gods, aliens, orbital mind control lasers or anything else beyond the physical mechanisms contained in your head.
Any analog variable has an INFINITE number of states. A wave could have a frequency of 1Hz, 1.1Hz, 1.00057Hz, 1.2399327772883786682676376627676367267Hz, etc. If "computation" is defined as "the act or process of evaluating with numerical or mathematical methods" then there is no physical limit to computation when using analog data storage...
The googleplex, a number that CANNOT be represented digitally (not enough atoms in the universe) can be easily represented by a particularly intelligent shade of the color blue.
> This conclusion results from the fact that in such a universe one ultimately has access to only a finite volume, even after an infinite time
[IANA Scientist of any kind] but don't things like quantum mechanics and chaos theory tell us that some things can have an infinite number of states? Might not an infinite number of states over an infinite amount of time give us access to infinite computing and consciousness w/o limit?
My layman's knee is jerking at the concept of "reality in a box".
Operator, give me the number for 911!
if Duke Nukem Forever isn't released by that time (600 years), we can finally stop waiting...
Seems like you haven't been exposed to scientific computing problems. Even seemingly simple things like solving a linear system Ax=b (if the number of rows is high enough), is impossible to solve with current hardware. And you can bet there are plenty of those models. To have a taste of that try to solve a linear system of 6000 equations and 6000 unknowns in a PC (I do that daily)
Surely the processors discussed in the paper are capable of movement and thus able to counteract the effect of such a computational horizon?
"Since all distant objects recede from the observer at a rate proportional to their distance, objects greater than a specific distance...will be receding at a velocity that exceeds the speed of light."
Someone either doesn't believe in or needs to study special relativity a little more.
How many more doublings of capacity/speed do you need before this becomes commodity?
10? 20? 50?
In any case, far less than the 400 that a 600-year limit on Moore's law implies.
Well I don't necessarily agree with the philosophy, but the Emporer's New Mind was a good read if only for the clear explanations of Turing machines, godel's theorem, etc.
Using computers and brains to compute the limits of computers and brains.
That alone implies enough assumptions to turn the whole thing into a fairly pointless mental excercise.
Operator, give me the number for 911!
Comment removed based on user account deletion
It is considered highly dubious that all aspects of consciousness are implied or explainable within current physics. In otherwords, its most likely that consciousness isn't physical. Because the physical universe maybe finite it does not follow that consciousness is as well. One has to buy into the notion that mind is entirely material or due to material action and *every* argument that is suppose to show that materialism can imply the existence of consciousness has been shown to be specious. Arguments show there is no need for consciousness to arise from or be associated with physical action. Materialism is dead and only in modern Quantum Theory is consciousness an input variable into it's laws of action but has no physical specification itself.
Anyone more enlightened?
I'm getting the feeling that strange forces, "dark" energy, 13D branes of string theory, etc. all have something in common.
They remind me of the epicycles astronomers observed so many years ago.
Simply put, our knowledge case seems not to be expanding, but diversifying, with many theories, and few ways to prove them.
Take a physicist from 1900; tell them about a meteor about to hit the earth. He'd say we're screwed. Take one today; she'd say "deflect it with a nuke".
The point: the entropy death of the universe is a very very very very very long way away. To say we won't be able to do something about it is depressing, and hopefully wrong.
I think Ray Kurzweil had this idea first. Consciousness may well be something in the universe which directly counters entropy. Evolution does seem to go against the grain.
Actually, I suggest to everyone that you read at least the first few chapters of "Age of Spiritual Machines" where he describes the accelerating pace of salient events.
http://while-true.blogspot.com/
Robo-Blogs of the world: UNITE!
I feel exactly the opposite, that "The Emperor's New Mind" is the greatest work of philosophy written in the last 20 years.
e /penros e/
Here's why:
Kurt Godel DID prove that mathematics is infinite. No matter how many rules and computations, OF ANY KIND, that you write down (or program into a computer) those rules can't be complete and consistent. Which means that there are true things about those rules (laws, whatever) which cannot be proven by applying only those rules. Or the rules are inconsistent, which is to say you can prove something both true and false, which is to say wrong.
As an example, look at the computer program for a chess in here:
http://doug-pc.itp.ucsb.edu/online/plectur
This link is actually most of the contents of the book, for those who don't have it.
On a more personal note, Flyboy, I believe your statement can be shown to be inconsistent (and thus worthless) because you imply that a person should be able to distinguish intuition from fact. That this is a basic error has been pointed out by: Plato, Descartes, Kant, Husserl, and others who are indisputably great thinkers of the first degree. I would put Penrose in with them, and I would put you in the great mass of people who hardly understand anything but somehow insist on displaying their ignorance anyway.
If there's only a finite amount of computation available, surely it's irresponsible to run things like SETI and the distributed.net cracking contests?! You're using up all of the sums, dammit!
Ydco co
I wonder if this theory could be used to objectively qualify morons, no idiots, no... damn. all these already have a definition.
So does this imply that all physical computers are finite state machines? Even when connected to the internet, their total number of computational states are finite, though extremely large, and therefore Universal Turing Machines are only a mathematical construct.
The exact numbers may well be in question. However, the conclusion that there is a limit rests on only a couple of premises:
It is certainly possible that one of these premises could be disproven. A simple and obvious possibility is that we are in a locally expanding region of the universe and there are other regions adjacent to it that are expanding toward us. Simply put, even in the speed limit of c holds, it is completely possible for there to be matter and energy outside of our event horizon that will enter it at some future time. Even with that caveat however, the general conclusion hangs together pretty well. Simply put, this is a calculation of one of the specific limits implied by the application of the second law of thermodynamics to the closed system that is the observable universe.
Do they have an MBA program?
It would be cool to have an MBA from a school whose name sounds like a bank.
AFAIK, no, but there *is* some mass associated to information. You need, IIRC, kT/6 of energy (where k is Boltzmann's constant and T is the absolute temperature of the medium) to store one bit of information in a physical medium.
In problems like molecular dynamics, where you need to simulate great numbers of particles which interact with each other, the more computer power you can get the better.
The computing requirements increase nonlinearly with the number of particles.
Same thing with stuff like optimization of large systems, like chemical plants.
If computers become let's say 1 million times more powerful, It still will be short for many practical problems.
Take one grain of rice.
Double your quantity.
Long before 64 times, you have exceeded the capacity of the universe to produce rice.
Moore's Law measures a doubling every 18 months.
600 years is therefore 400 doublings.
Even the porn industry has a finite output and it is far, far below this.
The parent was not a troll. Not my style if you check my posting history.
I'd read the whole artical and found that it dealt with general cases and averages, for example:
"For a matter density today of 30% of closure density"
and
"Using the current measaured value of the Hubble constant of approx. 70 km/s/Mpc"
My understanding is that this won't result in an upper limit in all volumes by using this technique. My understanding is that they're calculating the maximum information processable in an average reachable volume.
Esteem isn't a zero sum game
Voting wasn't about giving smart people a voice. That's a dictatorship of some form or another. Voting is about sharing risk and responsability.
8. hep-ph/0210389 [abs, ps, pdf, other] :
Title: A Model for Neutrino Masses and Dark Matter
Authors: Lawrence M. Krauss (1), Salah Nasri (2), Mark Trodden (2) ((1) Departments of Physics and Astronomy, Case Western Reserve U., (2) Department of Physics, Syracuse University)
Comments: 4 pages, submitted to PRL
Journal-ref: Phys.Rev. D67 (2003) 085002
9. astro-ph/0208010 [abs, ps, pdf, other] :
Title: Comparing WIMP Interaction Rate Detectors with Annual Modulation Detectors
Authors: Craig J. Copi, Lawrence M. Krauss
Comments: 4 pages, 2 figures. Submitted to Phys. Rev. Letters
Journal-ref: Phys.Rev. D67 (2003) 103507
19. hep-ph/9904499 [abs, ps, pdf, other] :
Title: Directional Sensitivity, WIMP Detection, and the Galactic Halo
Authors: Craig J. Copi (1), Junseong Heo (2), Lawrence M. Krauss (1) ((1) Case Western Reserve University, (2) Yale University)
Comments: 4 pages revtex, submitted to PRL
Journal-ref: Phys.Lett. B461 (1999) 43-48
Wham! There's you upper bound on computing (at least for "full" simulations).... now all you need to do is figure out how much mass and time is available in the universe
Note: I'm not about to propose this in earnest to the scientific community. It's just a casual musing of mine. CONSTRUCTIVE criticism is welcome.
Life is too short to proofread.
If God looks in the Universe to measure the state of Jesus, he's dead. And he didn't even need a gieger counter or vial smasher.
Brian Greene likes him.
I was under the impression this was the matrix because any complex idea can be expressed by a simple metaphore and will be expressed though a ludicrous, pompous, reflective, exposition by numerous characters talking to each other in circles while waiting for Linus or Agent Gates to do something.
I strongly suggest that anyone who is into this sort of work check out Seth Lloyd's Ultimate Physical Limits to Computation. It's quite interesting. I saw him speak a few years ago. People had told me that we would "always find a way" to increase computation, which seemed like utter silliness to me. I'm glad to see that some folks are a little more sensible about this.
Heh, heh. I guess that would be the "Schrodinger's Messiah" thought experiment.
I just solved it!
*ahem*
Let their be light!
If Mr. Edison had thought smarter he wouldn't sweat as much. --Nikola Tesla
"...consciousness must be finite."
Speak for yourself.
If you mod this up, your slashdot background will turn into a beautiful sunset!
...sorry, but the rest of you are simply masses of complex molecular units acting out the neurological signals coursing through your skulls.
Umm ... "coil away in horror?" Unless the reader is wrapping cords up at the time, that phrase is just bizarre. I'll grant that it does have a nice "Jabberwock" sound to it, but "recoil" doesn't come from the prefix "re-" plus "coil."
They claim that every computation step requires at minimum energy of ln 2 k_B T (k_B is Boltzmann's constant, T is the temperature of the system). This is only true for irreversible operations such as setting or erasing a bit.
But computation doesn't have to be irreversible. There are various proposals on how to build reversible computers that don't consume this minimum energy per operation. More information about reversible computing can be found in this introduction.
OS Reviews: Free and Open Source Software
Comment removed based on user account deletion
What the parent of your post is referring to is the concept of the "guarenteed not to exceed speed", namely, the point at which a computer can process information faster than a human can input or interpret the output. Any additional speed is thus, by the theory, superfluous, because we wouldn't be able to tell the difference, both seem instentaneous to us.
The flaw in the theory, however, is the assumption that humans have to be a limiting factor in the process. If the process is completely under automated control, with inputs being supplied by equally fast computers working as data gatherers, and output is interpreted by a computer working on analysis then this theory ceases to hold. A good example would be a deep space observation probe which collects information on the universe, feeds it into a model to predict future properties, then feeds it into an analysis suite to sort the simulations based on result and compare them with historical data. Here the speed has no effective limit. Additionally, we could continue to add humans to the a normal system until their combined input power exceeds the computers processing capabilities.
"A man's got to know his limits."
Harry Callahan, Magnum Force
Comment removed based on user account deletion
So, how many bits do I need for a symmetric cipher key in order to push a brute force search past the computational limit of the universe?
The brain may be said to be computational in nature (maybe...its not really my area, but is certainly an acceptable statement). The chemical activity of neurons takes place in the physical universe, is subject to physical laws, performs SOME sort of analytical functions, etc.
:)
However, the fact that the mind perceives all of this going on is a completely different issue. When you think something, does that thought "feel" like billions of little cells firing away, or does it "feel" different than that?
What I am getting at is that the activities of the brain are merely the objects of consciousness, and not necessarily the creative force behind consciousness.
So, regardless of what can or cannot be proven about the brain and its activities, consciousness itself remains a mystery (and hence beyond the scope of such scientific "proofs").
Unfornutately, unlike Moore's Law the theory of Murphy's law is infinite.
Second, what you state is not Moore's law. Moore's Law states that the number of transistors that fit on a chip doubles every N months, where N is usually taken to be 18, but varies from 12 to 24. It has nothing to do with cost, and certainly has no "eventually free" clause.
Third, in this particular context, your point is not even relevant. The article only mentions Moore's law/curve/observation/whatever in passing, stating that the trend cannot continue for more than 600 years. It makes no claim that Moore's law is a "physical theory".
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
Ummm.... no. Godel proved that the axiomatic system of Russel's PM allows the construction statements which can neccessarily neither be proven true nor proven false. There are other axiomatic systems that can be complete and consistent; IIRC it was in fact Godel who proved that the first-order propositional calculus is complete and fully consistent. Godel's fork only attaches to systems that allow the construction of statements about statements; many propositional systems (like the first-order propositional calculus) do not.
Oy.... where to start? Kant's Critique of Pure Reason is nothing but 600 pages describing how people distinguish intuition from fact (though admittedly Kant was using "intuition" in a sense that we don't normally use it today). Descartes wrote his Meditations as an attempt to remove "intuition" (again, closer to Kant's sense of the word than ours, but still) from philosophy. Plato, of course, says nothing about the subject directly but narrates several dialectical processes about the subject.
All's true that is mistrusted
This assumes that consciousness is based solely on computation. Not proven yet.
Not quite. It assumes that a limit on computation implies a limit on consciousness.
Taking the contrapositive, this is the same that assuming that unlimited consciousness would allow unlimited computation. In other words, the assumption is not that being conscious is solely based on being able to compute things, the assumption is merely that being conscious includes the ability to compute things.
And no, I can't prove that, but any conception of consciousness without computational ability is fairly unsatisfying. How conscious are you if you can no longer tell me what 2 + 1 is? Even babies' behaviors are strongly (if not deterministically) dependant on what they sense around them.
really. mod this guy up
Depends on your propositional calculus system; some systems recognize a "null" as distinct from a "false", with null = ~true and null = ~false. The popular meme associated with this is the question "have you stopped beating your wife?"
All's true that is mistrusted
Much as I'd love to, I'll never understand unlambda...
What does it do?
That's a lotta nonsence. Consciousness cannot be correctly located within the brain, for which this is a simple proof.
For those of you who may have read any of Michiu Kaku's work, this begs the questions, "What about wormholes?" It seems that multiply connected spaces could get around this limit.
Please comment and discuss, especially if you are a physicist.
-Ben
It's WAY better than the ussual stuff at plus five funny ;)
The sea changes color, but the sea does not change.
Thermodynamic Limitations
One of the consequences of the second law of thermodynamics is that a certain amount of energy is necessary to represent information. To record a single bit by changing the state of a system requires an amount of energy no less than kT where T is the absolute temperature of the system and k is the Boltzman constant. (Stick with me; the physics lesson is almost over.)
Given that k = 1.38x10^-16 erg/Kelvin, and that the ambient temperature of the universe is 3.2K, an ideal computer running at 3.2K would consume 4.4x10^-16 ergs every time it set or cleared a bit. To run a computer any colder than the cosmic background radiation would require extra energy to run a heat pump.
Now, the annual energy output of our sun is about 1.21x10^41 ergs. This is enough to power about 2.7x10^56 single bit changes on our ideal computer; enough changes to put a 187-bit counter through all of its values. If we built a Dyson sphere around the sun and captured all of its energy for 32 years, without any loss, we could power a computer to count up to 2^192. Of course it wouldn't have the energy left over to perform any useful calculations with this counter.
But that's just one star, and a measly one at that. A typical supernova releases something like 10^51 ergs. (About a hundred times as much energy would be released in the form of neutrinos, but let them go for now.) If all of the energy could be channedel into a single orgy of computation, a 219-bit counter could be cycled through all of its states.
These numbers have nothing to do with the technology of the devices; they are the maxiumums that thermodynamics will allow. And they strongly imply that brute-force attacks against 256-bit keys will be infeasible until computers are built from something other than matter and occupy something other than space.
And they say there's no poetry in computing...
One universe is enough for anyone.
capacity will effectively reach "infinite", being the point where no-one can use more capacity or power, no matter what the application.
You are obviously forgetting about Duke Nukem Forever.
There are 01 kinds of cars in the world. The General Lee, and everything else.
Possibly relevant here:
t
Freeman Dyson's 1979 paper "Time Without End: Physics and Biology in the Open Universe."
http://www.aleph.se/Trans/Global/Omega/dyson.tx
Abstract:
"Quantitative estimates are derived for three classes of phenomena that may occur in an open cosmological model of Friedmann type. (1) Normal physical processes taking place with very long time-scales. (2) Biological processes that will result if life adapts itself to low ambient temperatures according to a postulated scaling law. (3) Communication by radio between life forms
existing in different parts of the universe. The general conlusion of the analysis is that an open universe need not evolve into a state of permanent quiescence. Life and communication can continue for ever, utilizing a finite
store of energy, if the assumed scaling laws are valid."
Wow. That really sucks. I was so sure it was a law.
Next you'll tell me there isn't a law of supply and demand. Maybe we can get congress to make it a law.
Wait! I've go a solution. Let's add another definition of law. Something like: A generalization based on consistent experience or results
Oh, it's already there. Funny. It seems the word law has over a dozen meanings. Are all words like that?
this is the worst "proof" ive ever seen in my life.
Nothing useful. It's good for practicing function application. k takes two arguments, evaluates both, and returns the result of the evaluation of the first. s takes three arguments, applies the first to the third, and applies the result of that to what you get when you apply the second argument to the third. As far as the backtick, imagine that this is LISP and the backtick is an open parenthesis (the matching close paren is inferred by the parser at the appropriate place).
All's true that is mistrusted
I don't claim to be anywhere near Turing's stature, but it seems that his premise is bunk. What he's saying (if the poster correctly represents Turing's thesis) is that a simulation of consiousness is the same as the real thing.
Plus, in addition to your 8 step proof, you can add that if a person can be fully consious with either the left half or right half of the brain, then conciousness resides in neither side.
I guess I'm in the "there's gotta be more than just matter" involved in conciousness. If a computer can be built that is self-concious (and not just a good simulator), then at which point does it cross the line from just a pile of electronics into being alive? How many transistors or lines of code does it take?
I'm not sure what I am the most afraid of:
1- The explaination of the parent post
or
2- The fact that I knew all about that and was about the reply the same.
Good thing 1M times more powerful is only 20 doublings or 30 years under Moore's Law.
Today's top supercomputer does 35 Teraflops. Doubled 400 times is a stupifyingly large number.
The Emperor's New Mind is a thoughtful and wide ranging essay. Anyone who prattles on about computers achieving human levels of intelligence should read it. I don't know why you feel it fails miserably, perhaps you could share the reasons. In response to detailed comments he got for ENM he published "Shadows of the Mind" which provides a great deal more technical substance to the already detailed arguments in ENM.
an ill wind that blows no good
All you have said is that each half of the brain is capable of consiousness independently. When both halves of the brain are present in a skull, then they act together via interconnections to produce a single consiousness.
You could say that complete brains consist of the right half, the left half, and the interconnections between them, without the interconnections ( an intact corpus callosum ) you indeed have 2 independently functioning halves that could possibly each be independently consious.
Imagine being the 'other half' of yourself if you had your corpus callousum cut, eternally watching the other half of your brain control things until one day, you gain control of the left hand, pick up a knife and stab yourself while the shocked right hand tries to block your fatal blow.
Eat at Joe's.
I like your argument and would like to believe it. But .. I believe that as stated, there is an error in #2. It should say that a normal person is only conscious once.
There is also an unstated assumption, that consciousness only resides in "normal" persons with normal left undefined.
Now, here is a possibility, perhaps. Suppose a person's brain is cut in half and put into separate bodies. Granting (1), then it seems possible that we could have two similar, but different fully conscious people, with some "consciousness" being present in both of the new persons. The "persons" in this hypothetical case are not "normal" persons, but I don't think your proof disallows this.
I would say my pets are consious. They certainly seem self aware.
Eat at Joe's.
I read the paper. The equation says
Information Processed = 1.35 x 10^120 bits
Not sure where you got the other number.
In the 20s, when expansion was first detected by Dr. Hubble, the "Steady State" theory was advanced to explain it as an alternative to the "Big Bang" theory, which the late Sir Fred Hoyle found offensive. (By the way, he coined both phrases - Big Bang and Steady State.)
Yes, but it isn't that great of a result.
:) )
If you are an athiest, and this result is true, you are necessarily going to cease to exist with no hope of immortality.
The only hope now is for the people who believe in the 'Santa' God who 1) exists at all and 2) bothered to think enough of some electrochemical singnals in a few conscious monkeys' brains after they die.
(Yes, the American religious moderators will mod this shit down severly, hence AC
More information on splitting the human brain (sagittal section) can be found here.
You're right on some thing and wrong on others.
It was indeed Gödel who proved that first-order logic is both sound and complete. The latter fact is Gödels *completeness theorem*. These theorems establish that a given expression is a first-order theorem if and only if it is true in all models. In other words, provability coincides with validity.
The incompleteness theorem also applies to first-order logic. Despite of what one might think, the completeness-theorem and the incompleteness-theorem are not negations of each other as you seem to say. They are in fact both true properties of first-order logic. The incompleteness-theorem states that you can't axiomize the set of the natural numbers with a recursive set of axioms (a potentially infinite set of axioms) - you can't create such a recursive set of axioms that has the property that an expression is provable from it if and only if the expression is a true property of the natural numbers.
The problem is, that for any recursive and consistent set of axioms that tries to be axioms of the natural numbers, there will be expressions that can neither be proved or disproved from them. From the *completeness* theorem we can conclude that this must mean that there exist multiple models that satisfies all the axioms in the set and that differ with respect to satisfiability of certain expressions (because if an expression was true in any model satisfying the axioms, the completeness theorem states that there would indeed be a proof from the axioms). So even though you can make attempts at axiomzation of the natural numbers that look very convincing (ie they look like any model satisfying them would have to agree on any stateable property) these attempts will either be inconsistent (ie any expression can be proven from them) or they will be incomplete (ie there will be true properties of the natural numbers not provable from them, because of the fact that there exists other models of the axioms in which those properties are not true). Contrary to what some authors state, inconsistency does NOT have to be apparent. Early axiomatic set theory is a good example: It took many years before someone (Russell) came up with an inconsistency even though every well-formed expression (including all contradictiions) did in fact have a proof all along. This inconsistency was fixed by weakening one of the axioms.
Is it possible to define consciousness in boolean terms (is there/isn't there), or is it an "analog" value ("full consciousness" of humans vs "traces of consciousness" of insect vs "no consciousness" of rocks)?
Your mind expands beyond the bounds of space and time.
Moore's Law turns this around to say that for the same price we can expect more and more capacity. Long before 600 years are passed, this capacity will effectively reach "infinite", being the point where no-one can use more capacity or power, no matter what the application. At which point Moore's Law will gently slow down.
Well, no. You might still be able to find applications to use the capacity. For example, a really large A.I. Or a Matrix, of human conciousness (without the bodies). The article points out that there just won't be enough energy to power it.
Processing information means going against entropy, and this requires some loss of energy as heat. The article calculates how much energy we can turn to heat under our current view of the universe, and then shows that we won't be able to power so much computation if Moore's law were to keep going for 600 years.
Hmm, I wonder if we'll be able to solve chess in that time. It would be sort of cool if we couldn't.
Must I remind you that this is the same University where the "Syrup Chug" remains the number one undergraduate past time.
"A great many different proofs of Godel's theorem are now known, and the result is now considered easy to prove and almost obvious: It is equivalent to the unsolvability of the halting problem, or alternatively to the assertion that there is an r.e. (recursively enumerable) set that is not recursive."
International Journal of Theoretical Physics 22
I put the 'fun' in fundamentalism
A universe with a finite beginning, a finite end, and a finite limit to consciousness seems much more likely to be created by God than by randomness.
No no, you totally missed the point!
The Emperor wants to control outer space;
Yoda wants to explore inner space.
That is the fundamental difference between the light and dark sides of the Force!
Fight Frist Psoting!
Browse Slashdot with 'Newest First'!
OK, consciousness might be finite, but how do you explain human stupidity? That's pretty damn infinite to me!
"If at first you don't succeed... So much for skydiving." - Henry Youngman.
Flawed. Half a cloud is still a cloud.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
What does this limit translate to in frames-per-second?
It's easy to confuse self-awareness with instinct and habit. Especially since you have a special connection to your pets and want them to personify them.
What?
Thats pretty junk science, your assumming conciousness involves anythign more then the brain? It's a finite state machines. If you can simulate it accuratly enough it makes sense that the simulation will behave almost exactlyliek the real thing. The turing tests is a measure if it's sufficiently advanced to be conscious simply have it tested, if no one can distinguish it from people then it's sufficiently aware to be concious.
"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
Hardly. The paper merely says that you can't
know precisely how to relate the numerical limits on computation to numerical limits on how long one can be conscious because, while we may suspect that consciousness requires computation, we don't know how many commputations are required per unit time of consciousness.
So, there is a limit to porn?
Table-ized A.I.
rand() is not truly random like quantum events are. Further, such a function cannot be constructed without going back to some truly random events, i.e. quantum events. Which means that you cannot simulate rand() -- you have to have a connection to the most "basic" level of reality.
HAND.
I think it's entirely possible that it's a continuum. Still, to claim that consciousness "emerges" from non-consciousness and leave it at that is still pseudoscience.
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
It will be an awful long time before computers can put out more information than people can process. The limiting factor will long continue to be the quality and creativity which goes into the representations of data.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
What he's saying (if the poster correctly represents Turing's thesis) is that a simulation of consiousness is the same as the real thing.
Or he's saying that there's no real thing -- we're just as much a simulation of consciousness as a computer AI.
Plus, in addition to your 8 step proof, you can add that if a person can be fully consious with either the left half or right half of the brain, then conciousness resides in neither side.
Not necessarily. A person with brain-damage might still be fully conscious, but not in the same way as if they had properly functioning wet-ware. The fact that your consciousness can be altered by changes to your grey matter is a strong indicator that consciousness is a property of the brain's functioning.
If a computer can be built that is self-concious (and not just a good simulator), then at which point does it cross the line from just a pile of electronics into being alive? How many transistors or lines of code does it take?
We can ask similar questions of organisms -- at what point does a conglomeration of cells become conscious? How many neurons does it take? Of course, such questions assume that it's a binary issue -- humans are conscious but chimps aren't; or perhaps chimps are and dogs aren't. It couldn't possibly be a continuum, could it.
Les Miserables Volume 1 now up with my reading of
...what hasn't been invented yet.
It disregards science like the alchemists disregarded chemistry. Scientific methodology, statistical analysis, etc were not exactly well developed when the various texts of the bible were written.
Integrate Keynote and LaTeX
I don't know if anyone out there is aware but a paper was put out quite some time ago by Seth Lloyd on the "computational capacity of the universe."
All science is either physics or stamp-collecting.
...is that that amount of computation is insufficient to derive a method of changing the behavior of our universe or creating and/or obtaining access to another universe.
Godel's Theorem says one simple thing a finite list of axioms can never create a logic that can 'talk' about everything.
The best education consists in immunizing people against systematic attempts at education. - Paul Feyerabend
Likewise, a kid can have half his brain removed in an accident and still be fully functional, fully conscious, and excel academically.
Depends upon which half. The brain is bilaterally symmetric, so it is hardly surprising if one side of the brain is sufficient for consciousness. It's like arguing, "You don't need your arms to play baseball, because a person with one arm can throw a ball." On the other hand, I don't know of anybody without a cerebrum who is fully conscious and excels academically.
The funny thing about consciousness is that we're talking about what it's like to be something. For instance, I know what it's like to be a clump of brain cells. I don't know what it's like to be a ping-pong ball. I know I'm sounding a little wacky, but perhaps it is a characteristic of physical stuff to have "awareness". My awareness is "self-awareness" because the clump of neurons that is me is a simulations of the universe that is self-referencing.
The really weird thing is the binding problem. I'm a bunch of neurons with different neurons having different information about the self-referencing simulation of the universe. So how does this clump of neurons seem to experience the different bits of information in different places as a whole? I see and hear at the same time. What's up with that? Well, perhaps the complex continuous electromagnetic field that the clump of brain cells generates is the thing that has subjective experience. Maybe all continuous electromagnetic fields have subjective experience. It's just an aspect of the universe.
What is a "thing" anyway. That's what I'd like to know!
The Moore-Murphy Law: The number of things that will go wrong will double every 2 years.
Hmm... not sure what you mean. For starters, the axioms in Godel's proof did not need to be finite, merely denumerable. And he didn't make conclusions about what a system "can" or "can not" "talk" about. He simply showed that in certain systems that share characteristics with the Principia Mathematica one may construct propositions that cannot be proven true or false.
All's true that is mistrusted
reminds me of a quote from the Bible... "where there is knowledge, it will pass away"
This is wrong on many levels. On the most pedantic level, a human cannot simulate a Turing machine because he does not have infinite memory.
Also, it does not follow that anything that can simulate a Turing machine can be simulated by a turing machine. Searles chinese rooms explains this perfectly--there is only syntax in a computer, no content. Humans have content, data (semantics) independent from structure.
Next, rand() cannot be used to simulate quantum mechanics because rand() uses hidden variables. Again this gets to content: the world is made up of things that have their own identity independent from structure.
There exists no logic derived from a countable set of axioms that can prove every proposition true or false. I hope thats a better explanation.
The best education consists in immunizing people against systematic attempts at education. - Paul Feyerabend
Oh come on, this paper is a joke. Mixing up hubbles constant with conciousness and moores law you conclude the end of civilization?
Wake up!
You claim that the naysayers are less versed than these "experts" in consciousness is a classic appeal to authority or Argumentum ad verecundiam. Physics is not the be-all and end-all of understanding; rather, semantic and ontological constructions form the entire basis of bases. Only through unification and reconciliation with all branches of science and philosophy will consciousness be truly understood.
I will also say that I personally disagree with your theory of the mind as being limited to a Newtonian scale. I've actually designed and been involved in the design of AI algorithms (read: large slow Matlab simulations and FPGA implementations). No matter what I did, there was a level of complexity beyond the understanding of the subject at the time. That's a practical obstacle that I and others have experienced. I believe it's definitely at least quantum in nature. But our personal opinions are not necessarily relevant to the truth now, are they?
Consciousness involves much more than anything that mathematics or computing science can explain so far.
When I get injured, I *feel* pain. When it gets cold or hot outside, I *feel* that. And I am aware of my own thoughts.
Now you may be able to build a robot whose circuitry and programs are so advanced that they can simulate -- to an external observer -- these characteristics of self-awareness. But the robot will not truly be self-aware. It will *not* feel pain, but merely sense it, with no consciousness. It will *not* feel hot or cold, but merely sense them, likewise.
So you are saying, for yourself anyway, simulated sex is identical with the real thing.
Virtual reality anyone?
Please mod the parent up.
Now define simulated sex? I'd say a blow job is simulated sex and yes a blow job does the job so to speak. Hand job isn't close enough.
"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
AC's always get the mod smack down lol. You simply explained some simply autonomic systems, Feel cold? so does most thermal sensors. Feel pain? thats an internal diagnostic telling you somethign is wrong, in a way the temperature sensor ina P4 chip is similiar. Feel depressed, you need more serotonin.
Nothing overly special about people, their animal just like dogs and their thoughts aren't particularly complex. Eat/sleep/copulate, thee things occupy us way mroe then "I wonder why I'm here".
"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
It seems that paper assumes that information cannot be communitated between locations faster than the speed of light. AFAIK, this is still an open question.
While I don't know of any experiment that has demonstrated faster than light communication, non-locality itself has been proven by the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen experiment.
IIIIII-mmanuel Kant was a real pissant
Who was very rarely stable.
Heidegger, Heidegger was a boozy begger
Who could think you under the table.
David Hume could out-consume
Schopenhauer and Hegel,
And Wittgenstein was a beery swine
Who was just as schloshed as Schlegel.
There's nothing Nietzsche couldn't teach ya
'Bout the raising of the wrist.
Socrates, himself, was permanently pissed.
John Stuart Mill, of his own free will,
On half a pint of shandy was particularly ill.
Plato, they say, could stick it away
Half a crate of whiskey every day.
Aristotle, Aristotle was a bugger for the bottle,
Hobbes was fond of his dram,
And Rene Descartes was a drunken fart:
"I drink, therefore I am"
Yes, Socrates, himself, is particularly missed;
A lovely little thinker but a bugger when he's pissed!
i've always felt that moore's law was a guideline set by Intel's CEO for releasing chips. a pace, if you will, so that they won't out-compete each other into bankruptcy.
I have a 286 with one of those "386 overdrive" hacky things stuck in the socket. it's quite slow really! i want to piss on it
There are other axiomatic systems that can be complete and consistent; IIRC it was in fact Godel who proved that the first-order propositional calculus is complete and fully consistent. Godel's fork only attaches to systems that allow the construction of statements about statements; many propositional systems (like the first-order propositional calculus) do not.
I wouldn't say many do not. Other than sentence and 1st order propositional logic, what logics in common use are complete? Godel's proof was actually more broad then you claim, he proved that ANY system that can construct arithmetic is incomplete. Almost all useful mathematical systems can construct arithmetic, and therefore almost all useful mathematical systems are incomplete.
And it's not technically correct to say it only applies to systems that can construct "statements about statements", rather that he can construct metastatements from outside the system that have a consistent meaning within the system. But again, the ability to construct the natural numbers and operations on them is all you need to be incomplete.
Source: wikipedia
The original poster is quick to dismiss after-death experiences without considering them scientifically. Absense of proof is not proof of absense.
Tired of free ipod spam sigs? Opt ou
I'd say, unlike you and BJ Clinton, that a BJ is a form of real sex. I was thinking more like virtual reality, where you are wearing goggles and a body suit.
Of course, for most nerds, VR sex would be alot better than autoerotic stimulation.
The point of this finding is that computation has an upper bound. K&S's work shows the best you can get, in a Friedmann universe with perfect computation results. Any other situation will do less computation.
Sure, the methods K&S propose are not practical. They're not even plausible. But if they were, they would achieve better results than any other possible method that has been thought of.
Some people have mentioned reversible computing. As others have pointed out to them, reversible computing requires you store all intermediate results. It reduces the number of bits you can actually make use of. And in an accelerating, expanding universe where you are losing access to energy every second, you may in theory be able to continue your reversible computing forever but your total storage cannot increase.
Therefore you have a finite number of possible states of the system -- which means that there's a finite limit to the thinking you can do before you have to repeat yourself.
Godel proved a good deal more than that. The original paper was on "PM and related systems", but he later proved that any formal system strong enough to contain basic arithmetic was incomplete. The reason he did not have this full result initially was that there was no precise defintion of "formal system" yet (1931). So yes, first-order propositional logic is complete, but no "interesting" (i.e. mathematical) system is.
If you take a persons brain and disconnect the two halves, there is, in some sense, 2 consciousnesses (sp!). THIS HAS BEEN DONE:
With one child whose brain was split - consistently one half wanted to grow up to be a cowboy, the other an astronaut.
Sorry I don't have a link - google is the obvious answer here.
The interesting thing about the case was that it is hard to communicate with each half separately - especially when one half tends to be in change of communication, the other something else, etc. But there are ways to do it.
Actually, coincidentally, I think I first read about this in Penrose's book...
---
I type this every time.
Actually, by definition, an autonomic nervous system doesn't involve conciousness. Can you control you heartbeat, sweating, serotonin level?
My cat feels pain, but does he know that, or just react to it? Even bacteria react to external stimuli, but do they "know" it?
There is a post further down the list, which illustrates that even if you harnest the power of a supernova to power the most efficient computer imaginable, you still can't brute-force through an encryption key 256-bit long. The computation time is of no importance, you simply do not have enough energy to do it.
This is simply an illustration of a simple problem that people might actually want to solve, that we will never be able to even with the most efficient computer that we can imagine.
Tell that to this guy. He says he's been to both places!
In the end, if the parent is true, morality, law, and order IS POINTLESS and one could do '...whatever they want to whomever they want whenever they want.'
Science has yet to create a truly sentient computer such as HAL 9000
Also, science has yet to prove 'The Big Bang' is the correct explanation for 'all that is that is in existence'.
The only other credible explanation according to Occam's Razor is:...
There is a whole bunch of modal logics which are complete and very important in applications in computer science such as program verification. For example CTL, Computational Tree Logic or description logics such as SHIQ (which is an important part of the design of the OWL language for the semantic web). In fact, Gödel's work (and the subsequent advent of the computer) has completely transformed logic as a subject. Nowadays it is studied in a way where you want to know how adding different features to your logic will change it's decidability, completeness and computational complexity.
The interactive way to Go -- http://www.playgo.to/iwtg/en/
Thats my point. The things the anonomous coward listed aren't higher brain functions. I'm sure the cat knows and is concious of pain. He's a vertibrate that not too far away from us, so it's likley he "feels" it the same way.
Think of it this way, dolphins have a completely different frame a reference then humans, if they are concious it'd be a very alien conciousness. Conciousness is hard to define partly because we can only see things from our point of view. We can't ask a cat if it thinks about the nature of being, so we dont' know. It might be that all creatures have "philosophy" and other things we associate with higher brain functions, but theirs is just alien.
If we made an AI it would have a thrououghly different frame of reference, the turing tests may be erronous. It may be concious and intelligent but utterly inhuman.
PS. You can control your heart beat to an exstent, you can control your sweatign to an exstent, and serotonin levels can also be manipulated. I can cause sweatign by thinking about it, and slow my heart beat with meditation and ditto with serotonin.
"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
The simulated sex you described is insufficiently similiar for me. BJ is a manual simulation of vaginal intercourse, and by god it's just as good.
"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
The big bang theory has more credible proof than theology has. Besides it only explains what happend in the very begining of the universe (the first few nanoseconds), Not what happend at the zero'th nanosecond, or right before it.
And you're always welcome to disprove any part of the theory. Religion on the other hand isn't very keen on people disproving anything it says. Weird idea of "credible explanation" you have.
The Genesis tale doesn't explain the origine of the universe. It just replaces the question. It's the same as answering the question of where life came from by saying that Earths life was created by Aliens.
If God created the heavens and the Earth, where did God come from? And is God alive? If she is, she didn't invented life, just made more of it, (Like a genetic engineer creating a new species), and if she isn't, than what is she?
Occam's Razor isn't a fundamental law, just a guide line. But this is a bad one to apply to quantum mechanics and astrophysics. Especially on the subject of the beginning of the universe.
Although I'm a Christian and believe in god, there is more evidence pointing to the big bang then to other theories. Is it so hard to think god caused the big bang and god motivates evolution? Theres a difference between faith and random stupidity.
"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
God the Creator, Man the Assembler/Implementer:
Challenge: Have a man really create something tangible with the five senses (seeing, hearing, touching, tasting, smelling) from absolutely nothing at all.
I say it can't be done--Man is, in this case, a product of his environment. Everything he conceives and creates in this environment is a measurable byproduct of his existince and interaction in his environment and the accumulated knowledge he gained in said environment. This is accomplished in incremental steps combining the materials and knownledge at hand in an effort to produce a desired result and gain additional knowledge.
For example, a 'basic' H-bomb is a three-stage weapon of mass destruction. It is a small conventional (non-nuclear) explosive charge triggering a much larger fission explosion (A-bomb), which in turn triggers the massive fusion explosion (H-bomb) at the end...all happening well within one second!
The only thing man can create 'out of nothing' (albeit with prior environmental influences) are ideas.
You cannot directly see, hear, touch, taste, or smell an idea conceived by another person unless said idea is implemented using the materials at hand--even other people.
Since man is a product of his environment, what caused the existence of his environment in the first place?
If you say 'The Big Bang', then what caused 'The Big Bang'?
Again, according to Occam's Razor, you are left with two choices:
1) A statement of doubt: I don't know.
2) A statement of faith: In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.
There are several major fallacies in your statements.
:).
Firstly I have to say I dont' disagree that god caused it all, I don't disagree that we can't create something strictly from scratch. But occams razor is a guide not a law and second the big bang can be reasonable explained as the intersection between two 5 dimensional planes that exsist in a 11 dimentional univers which gives rise to our 4 dimensonal space and time. Thats string theory, there is some support for it. The big bang was the intersection event and we exsist only on the intersection.
As for ideas being things we create, I'd object and say ideas are things we derive not create. Our perception of the world fuels our ideas and thus are derivatives of it. Random ideas occur too but they too are causal, I'm refering to induced ideas like the strange ideas you get when you take drugs or have a brain tumor. Perhaps you'd liek to provide a counter example of a created idea but I cannot.
The next issue, is that you state man cannot create soemthing then give a list of sensory input, just being nit picky but thats nonsensical. it's like asking me to build a house with the spoken word "goatse".
As for your last point I belive #2, but there are more then two options. Some say Randomness (two 5 dimensonal planes intersecting) caused it. I tend to beleive my christian god is random and the whole universe is tending to be closer to him
"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
Oh come on, that's easy.
Though to be pedantic, it requires a man and a woman. ;-)
[TMB]
Ah, but you've glossed over the requirement: absolutely nothing at all.
To procreate offspring, 'material' from the man is combined with 'material' from the woman inside the woman's body for an approximate nine month gestation period before birth and delivery of said offspring. These 'materials' obviously exist as they can be perceived with the senses and the end result, the offspring, can also be perceived with the senses.
In one way, not counting artificial insemination techniques, you are correct. Nothing 'artificially manmade' per se is used or needed for procreation so on that level you are correct.
The best example of 'absolutely nothing at all.' that I know of concerning procreation, is this:
PS: I'm not counting the similar origin of a world famous movie character from a particular movie released in 1999--that is 100% fictional.
Perhaps the writer/director of said movie used the above cited text as 'inspiration'....
Concerning 'ideas': I agree, though my exact wording:
did not give you that impression. The 'prior environmental influences' would be the 'derivation' you mentioned.
The closest counterexample I can come up with that may meet your criteria is the Bible itself which says in it:
Concerning 'next issue': A simple counterexample: one can create a house using their imagination. I stand corrected in that respect ^^;. However, without proof in a tangible form to one or more of the five senses, no one will ever know you built 'the house of your dreams.' Faith, proper faith, is the key to making the intangible tangible
and the tangible intangible
Concerning 'last point': I belive that a combination of God's omniscience and the free-will given to Man (and the angels) could be construed as a third alternative. Googling 'omniscience' brought up two links that caught my eye:
The Omniscience of God and the Free-Will of Man
Tachyons, Time Travel, and Divine Omniscience
wait wait wait. Thats a theological no no. The angels don't have free will. Humans do. Angels do not. they have no sex and all bu the seraphim do not have free will.
"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
If that is so, how do you explain Lucifer, and the 'fallen' angels--one-third of the number originally created by God?
Then there is Judas....
Free will or 'predestination' in his case?
Please elaborate on all the above.
Lucifer was a seraphim, and Judas was a man.
"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."