I really don't see why Microsoft paid out big dividends instead of investing in R&D -- trying to create something truly monumental, something truly visionary.
For years, we've had better and faster hardware for cheaper prices, but in the last five or seven years, it seems to me (and this is no original thought) that there have been no real exciting new applications that make use of this new hardware.
Sure, there are games. Sure, there's exotic multimedia stuff like video editing.
But where is the new software that revolutionizes how most people interact with their computers on a day-to-day, moment-to-moment basis? Where is the software that makes deep use of the 3 Ghz computers, the 512mb of memory, the (relatively) lightning-fast, huge hard disks? Where is the software that gives us smart, integrated voice and gesture recognition, powerful and startlingly beautiful new interfaces, extraordinary ways of creating new things and dealing with what we already have--in other words, a more intelligent, pleasurable, coherent user experience?
I know that internet-based applications have been a fountainhead of innovation. But what about the power that resides on the desktop computer? Have we really made the most of it -- is this all that's possible?
It seems to me that Microsoft has lost an opportunity to truly redefine this horizon--and create new reasons for billions to buy its products.
FireFox feels a lot clunkier. All the controls, scrolling, highlighting, etc. work just a bit more slowly than in IE, and thus it falls flat in responsiveness compared to something like MyIE2, which has all of Firefox's nice navigation features without any of the clunkiness. Plus, MyIE2 can use the Gecko engine, although support for that isn't perfect.
Yes! I can't believe how many conspiracy nuts there are on this site who really believe in a cartoon picture of the world where the evil fat cats at Microsoft tilt their double chins in displeasure and call the hapless editor at Slate to have the rogue author "neutralized."
There are some very interesting pieces of software out there that combine task management with personal information databases -- places to store bits of information collected from documents, web pages, and so on. Some go far beyond the information organizing capabilities of Outlook and other standard personal information managers (PIMs).
One such piece of software is a cult-hit, Zoot. See reviews here and here. Find out more at the Yahoo Group for it, which also happens to have excellent lists of other excellent but often underappreciated PIM software.
Also consider web-based task managers like Yahoo Calendar. The advantage is that they are easily accessible from anywhere and there's no need for backups. Yahoo task management also syncs with a lot of other stuff, I think.
I think the simple key is that IBM should have to SHARE the wealth... we need policies that make sure the benefits of outsourcing across society.
Because they ARE benefits. After all, what is actually happening here? We are producing more with less. The fact that Indians are willing to do the job Americans can do, but for less money, means that American labor is free to create something else.
The key is that a portion of the profits from outsourcing have to be used to mobilize this now-freed labor and use it to create even more abundance.
If $100 used to buy 10 programmers in the US, then perhaps $10 can buy 10 programmers in India. As long as a good chunk of the $90 saved goes to consumers in the form of lower costs and to new employees in the US in the form of different jobs, perhaps jobs that require even more training and capital, everyone is benefitting, even if $20 goes to the company that outsources as profit.
Social policies simply need to be in place that cushion the jerkiness of outsourcing and ensure that benefits are distributed. Or am I missing something?
First off, a quick apology: I didn't mean to say your explanations were a cop-out but that the idea that we were stuck but didn't know it is a cop-out.. the sense that we are not stuck but really change our thinking has to be explained more substantially.
Second, I wasn't quite clear about why, if a frame could contain a thought, each frame would have to incorporate the complete information of all other frames. In order to know thought C, I contend that one has to contrast it against a previous thought B. But how do you know B? You might say you know B by contrasting it with C. But then at the same time, thinkers also can combine B & C and know them as BC. But how can they recognize BC? Only by comparison with A. But then how about ABC? And so on. So thoughts are not isolated fundamental units that can be reduced to arbitrarily small slices, but each thought is seamless, and *unique*, and its uniqueness consists in its immediate connection to all other past thoughts.
You might argue that the brain has a limited capacity, and I'm not saying that the brain recognizes or remembers *explicitly* all previous thoughts, but that this particular thought's uniqueness lies in a link to all previous thoughts that occurs through motion in real time -- such a link exists even if the brain doesn't recognize it explicitly. Such a link is what defines every thought.
Third, I would still have to argue with the idea that the past and future frame could be incorporated into one thought... it's as if someone proposed a thought experiment where one frame of a DVD contained motion. It just seems inconceivable. Can you think of any physical object where time is frozen to a nothingness? Even a photograph is not of an instant, but certain parts of the photo record a very slightly earlier instant than other parts of the photo...
" You can't 'see' the future, because information can't be gathered in that direction. "
Well if thoughts were able to be stuffed one-to-a-frame, I may agree, but if they couldn't and we're talking about time-as-a-continuous-seamless-cube, then there there would be no gathering: everything's already gathered. There would be one single thought that thrummed eternally... and it would be a thought OF sequentiality that itself was thought eternally.
But the problem is that I still don't see how you can get the sense of flow in... you would need to see something all at once and at the same time in sequence... again, it would be like looking at a symphony on paper, except instead of ink it would be motion.
Again, is this conceivable? It may be the case that reality is indeed inconceivable in this way, but metaphysics is after all an attempt to make this stuff intelligible, so if it ends in something incomprehensible, I think that's a pretty strong argument against using it as a model.
To describe whether the rock is going up or down, you would need to see whether it was below or above its present position a moment ago. But then you have the same problem again, a step higher: is the rock-which-was-below-a-moment-ago going up or down relative to two moments ago?
So to properly represent the past state you would need its full specification, which involves *its* past state, and so on. And similarly for the future predictions.
Thus what you are saying is that every frame contains all the past frames and a prediction for all possible future frames. Or all time is contained in every moment.
But then all you need is one frame. All time is just one frame. But if all time is one frame, then again you cannot explain any kind of feeling of transition. There would be just one blasting experience, and no sense of transition or time... living life would be like looking at a symphony on paper, experiencing EVEN ITS LINEARITY AND UNIDIRECTIONALITY, so to say, all at once, rather than moment-by-moment. This may be God's standpoint, but it isn't ours.
And this is what you yourself say later in your post: "If this special rule does not exist, then you just have a cube"... but then you sneak time in through the back door when you say "the 'flow' of time from the perspective of a slice is just seeing along the time axis"... SEEING is a sequential process. When does it happen?
"As far as being stuck in one state, the individual in the simulation would never feel like it was "stuck," even if it was."
Sure, we can't prove that we are not stuck, but it is our commonsense impression, and that needs to be explained. As I said, I don't think the one-frame idea does it.
I can similarly explain the universe as a figment of my imagination, and it's possible, but it's a bit of a cop-out if you ask me.
"you could take the state of the brain at each step in the simulation throughout the duration of the thought, and at each step you could say that the brain is "thinking" the same thought."
But which thought would that be? I don't think a particular brain state (meaning a freeze-frame of its neuronal activity and paths, let's say) indicates a thought because while it may in some sense reflect the set of all the changes that brain has undergone, that set of changes may be only one of many possible sets that lead to that particular configuration of neurons and chemicals.
In other words, take a frame in the DVD of a rock in the air. Is the rock going up or down? That information is not given in the frame. Though the frame reflects the information in the previous frame, it does not entirely give that previous frame's information. For that reason, one frame alone cannot be a thought.
"As I said in an earlier post, no one has yet figured out how our physical brains generate our percieved consciousness." -- Certainly agree with that...indeed, there are some who strangely believe that this is because the brain doesn't actually generate our conciousness...indeed, it may be the other way around...
Anyway, though, even if time IS discrete, the DVD model still does not explain our feeling of flow. Even if one frame represented one thought, we would be eternally stuck in that frame, perhaps feeling that we did come from somewhere and were going somewhere, but actually staying with that one thought permanently. We would never have a sense of going between frames, or transitioning, even though that is our actual experience.
"but danger lies in assuming that something is true merely because it is possible."
I think a lot of these matters may be inherently metaphysical, subjects which physics will never empirically prove or disprove, but that ultimately rest on our own intuition.
Thank you for the discussion, too, as I certainly enjoy this stuff as well!
"To make the analogy match my example, you also have to assume that every frame of the DVD is complete (not just a delta) and can be rendered independently of all other frames."
Depends what you mean by complete: I don't think that a thought could fit in any one frame. Since the essence of thought is a change in consciousness, I think that thoughts are *inherently* incapable of fitting on just one tiny infinitesimal slice of time...so in that model, all you would have little brain states, each of which represents exactly no thought by itself, and no process that connects them.
Therefore, the viewer CANNOT be in the DVD; the DVD model is simply incapable of explaining the viewer, ergo, it must be wrong.
"If the entire universe were suddenly created from nothing in its current state, then you would remember a past that never existed."
Yes, but I would argue that you wouldn't begin to experience this false memory till some time had elapsed. My argument has nothing to do with the subjective perception of time: that can be off, that can be manipulated. I'm simply saying that thinking requires dynamic physical processes that occur over time.
So does the universe pick this being to be active now and that being to be active later? If so when is it choosing?
If all beings are active timelessly, then according to your reasoning we, as instantiations of one particular being, should be stuck in one state, always feeling like we were just at 6:29:00:00:29 pm or whatever, and are on our way to 6:29:00:00:30 pm... no?
Also, to reiterate, I don't agree that thought that ever be found in any particular instant of time, and the same goes for memory. Memory, experience, and thought all inherently span time and time must flow for them to manifest.
That's why there is no particular being at any particular instant who thinks any particular thing, any more than anyone is moving even for an instant in a DVD frame.
I'm not so happy with the the universe-as-computer idea, but running with it:
Your analogy is similar to calling the universe a DVD. A DVD is a set of frames, after all. And all the frames might be described by an algorithm that for each frame works on the previous frames to generate its result. The whole DVD is akin to your complete set of static data describing everything.
But where is the motion? The motion only exists when you play the DVD. The motion is NOT on the DVD itself, but is generated purely in the motion between frames. But you can't play the DVD if time is frozen -- when would you have the time to play it?
Similarly, a brain state itself correlates to no thought. Thought is generated purely in the motion between brain states, something that cannot be achieved with a set of static data.
There may be no difference to the "brain" as a physical process whether the universe is static or not but it will make a difference to the "experiencer," because if time is unreal no experience is possible.
Well so the simple question is when does it go from one moment to the next? If it doesn't, how do we ever experience change? A brain having information about the past and projecting into the future still does not explain our experience of change; we would be locked into one context-and-projection-filled-thought forever in your theory -- some other being would experience the next thought, but no being would experience one thought and then another, which is clearly our day-to-day experience.
Interesting questions. First let me clarify that the important thing about thoughts that has to be explained vis-a-vis time is the SUBJECTIVE or experiential component of them.
Even if a Turing machine could be a true AI, as long as it had internal experiences like humans, these internal experiences could only consist of MULTIPLE states. One particular state would not be experienced at all, since one only recognizes experience as a CHANGE from something else, or so I would contend.
If one particular state does not an experience make, then that shows the inability of the frozen-time hypothesis to explain subjective experience, as it cannot explain jumps between states either.
I think on quick reflection that the *experience* of time could definitely differ for different entitites, but I am arguing for *some* kind of universal flow of time, some way in which the future is really undetermined as of yet, regardless of whether all entities are aware of it in the same way or not.
His Explanation of Time seems a Non-Explanation
on
The Fabric of the Cosmos
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· Score: 5, Interesting
Disclaimer: I'm not a physicist, and don't even know that much about physics, but I'm very interested in the philosophical implications of Greene's view of time, or what little I read of it.
I briefly read one of this book's chapters on time, and it doesn't seem to explain much. Greene argues that time doesn't flow by pointing out how, due to special relativity, events in my future may be in someone else's past.
Therefore, Greene concludes, all events, past, present, and future, must already exist and must always exist. And our sense that time flows is an illusion.
Interestingly, Greene explicitly REJECTS the notion of a "projector" illuminating one cross-section of this frozen river of time one piece at a time. He rightly sees the problem with this analogy: when does the projector operate? It would have to operate at no time at all, so the concept is incoherent.
How does Greene account for flow? He says that the feelings, thoughts, and perceptions one has at any particular point in time contain sufficient context that one senses their relationship to the past and to the future. This we call flow.
My problem with this explanation is that I don't think you can have thought without change. I don't think there is reason to believe that there is a fundamental unit of time, within which some kind of fundamental unit of thought would exist.
Thought is inherently based on movement or change in our mental landscape, and this movement must happen in time. There is no possibility for thinking without flow. Thinking cannot account for flow, but rather assumes it.
Also, if we take the frozen river hypothesis, how do we find ourselves at one point in time and then at another point in time... how does this movement ever occur? And to whom? Wouldn't we be locked helplessly at our one "point" in time?
Finally, even if special relativity does show that events in one person's future may subjectively be perceived in another person's past, the very fact that we can correlate these two pieces of information: does that not show that there is some master set of times that relates everything to everything else?
I see one new business model for the RIAA as being the management of music. Even if file-sharing persists, who really wants to go through the trouble of setting up and running a file-sharing app, finding the file you want, finding a fast source, waiting to download it, being unsure about the quality, lacking some selection, knowing it's illegal, and then: storing it on your hard drive, backing it up, sharing your bandwidth with others if you want to share it, transferring it from computer to computer or from computer to iPod or whatever, etc. etc. etc.
Music downloading and management is a huge hassle. I think once RIAA music services like Listen.com and iTunes mature, they will offer their selection of music from anywhere. You will buy the rights to a song or a subscription to many songs, and be able to listen to your purchase in your car and on your portable wireless-Internet-enabled headset.
When you want that song on your cousin's computer, you will be able to download it instantly from multiple high-quality, high-bandwidth sources at varying bitrates. You will be able to get the song in WAV or MP3 format.
There will be no waiting, no worry about selection, no worry about backup or management, no worry about illegality.
And all this will be pretty cheap. Cheap enough that most people will buy it. That's my prediction.
We're heading there. And there will be very little incentive to fileshare, since everything will be available in such abundance.
The author first bemoans the lack of exciting reasons to buy powerful new hardware. Then he argues that open source software must step up and provide these killer apps.
Let's take his first statement first. Do you think that the PC is as fast as you'd like it? Is it as reliable? Are you really content to stay with the current generation of GUIs? Are you not interested in voice or gesture recognition, not interested in virtual reality, not interested in intelligent agents, not interested in vastly more intelligent means of storing and sorting your data?
The answers are obvious. I don't think the PC is done yet. Far from it. Greater reliability, ease-of-use, and more interesting applications will all require endless new hardware. All it will take is a good product and good marketing to make PC hardware sexy again.
And where are many of these kinds of innovations going to come from? Well, they could come from Linux or another open-source project, or they could come from Microsoft or Apple or another large company. Indeed, if we really want to see such tools go out widely in the near future, Microsoft will likely have to lead the way. And I think it will.
As long as there's the potential for cool new software (and there is), the PC can still evolve. I think we're in a transition period right now. The Internet has temporarily eclipsed the fundamental hardware and software elements of the PC, but the game's only just begun.
Sorry, but I don't think there are currently many good economic reasons for people to buy music/movies/software if they can easily download or copy such items for free.
"So I can have the full-resolution "original" at hand on durable, read-only media that can't get accidentally erased by a Windows crash."
People already trade uncompressed music. This will become even more common in the future as bandwidth gets cheaper. You can burn the uncompressed music on a CD-R in 3 minutes on a new recorder on media that costs $0.50 or less.
"It also gives me someone to bitch at if the disc turns out to have a real, physical defect (as opposed to an artificial defect, like copy protection)."
No need to bitch if you can simply download another copy.
"So I can have the manual."
Instead of spending even $50 for the software, spend $30 for a third-party manual that is likely miles better than the included copy.
"So I can have original, trusted media from which to reinstall when Windows trashes the disk/trashes the registry/runs the latest virus/etc."
You could always burn your downloaded copy when you first obtain it and know it's healthy.
"So I can have someone to bitch at if the software itself trashes my work."
Possibly the most legitimate reason. But depending on the cost and nature of the software, and how responsive the company is, this often simply isn't worth it.
"Being a software engineer myself, to show my appreciation for work well done."
Good for you, but I don't think that this is a strong enough motivation for most people to buy what they could easily obtain otherwise.
I don't think that the model of buying music and mp3s album-by-album or song-by-song is a viable long-term model. It should be replaced with a service that promises bandwidth, continuity of access, legitimacy, selection, and convenience. The new music services like listen.com are moving in the right direction, but the selection and quality are still lacking, and the price is too high.
I like how you omitted the part about how "Sweden's long-successful economic formula of a capitalist system interlarded with substantial welfare elements has recently been undermined by high unemployment, rising maintenance costs, and a declining position in world markets."
Note: it's a primarily *CAPITALIST* system that happens to have some socialistic elements within it, which might just have something to do with those high maintenace costs.
"You have the right to work, but for the work's sake only. You have no right to the fruits of work. --Bhagavad Gita"
Ugh... this quote is completely misleading. For your information, the Bhagavad Gita really has nothing to say about property rights. I don't know what translation you are using, but the Gita's general statement about work is personal: if you want to be free of the shackles of greed and desire, then work hard, but don't worry about the outcome, or fruit of the work.
When all is said and done, to what extent does the Internet now and will the Internet in the future continue to give little players a chance to compete with the big guys?
Specifically, do you think it's still *realistic* to take a good idea for a web service from the garage into the big leagues without $3 million in venture capital to start with, as some analysts seem to say is required?
Slashdot Mirror
The appropriate Calvin and Hobbes reference
I really don't see why Microsoft paid out big dividends instead of investing in R&D -- trying to create something truly monumental, something truly visionary.
For years, we've had better and faster hardware for cheaper prices, but in the last five or seven years, it seems to me (and this is no original thought) that there have been no real exciting new applications that make use of this new hardware.
Sure, there are games. Sure, there's exotic multimedia stuff like video editing.
But where is the new software that revolutionizes how most people interact with their computers on a day-to-day, moment-to-moment basis? Where is the software that makes deep use of the 3 Ghz computers, the 512mb of memory, the (relatively) lightning-fast, huge hard disks? Where is the software that gives us smart, integrated voice and gesture recognition, powerful and startlingly beautiful new interfaces, extraordinary ways of creating new things and dealing with what we already have--in other words, a more intelligent, pleasurable, coherent user experience?
I know that internet-based applications have been a fountainhead of innovation. But what about the power that resides on the desktop computer? Have we really made the most of it -- is this all that's possible?
It seems to me that Microsoft has lost an opportunity to truly redefine this horizon--and create new reasons for billions to buy its products.
FireFox feels a lot clunkier. All the controls, scrolling, highlighting, etc. work just a bit more slowly than in IE, and thus it falls flat in responsiveness compared to something like MyIE2, which has all of Firefox's nice navigation features without any of the clunkiness. Plus, MyIE2 can use the Gecko engine, although support for that isn't perfect.
Yes! I can't believe how many conspiracy nuts there are on this site who really believe in a cartoon picture of the world where the evil fat cats at Microsoft tilt their double chins in displeasure and call the hapless editor at Slate to have the rogue author "neutralized."
Whoops that first link to a review should be http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/97aug/zoot.htm. It's by James Fallows from The Atlantic Monthly.
One such piece of software is a cult-hit, Zoot. See reviews here and here. Find out more at the Yahoo Group for it, which also happens to have excellent lists of other excellent but often underappreciated PIM software.
Also consider web-based task managers like Yahoo Calendar. The advantage is that they are easily accessible from anywhere and there's no need for backups. Yahoo task management also syncs with a lot of other stuff, I think.
Can't agree. IE 4 was quite definitely superior to Netscape 4, and that was the turning point of the war.
I think the simple key is that IBM should have to SHARE the wealth... we need policies that make sure the benefits of outsourcing across society.
Because they ARE benefits. After all, what is actually happening here? We are producing more with less. The fact that Indians are willing to do the job Americans can do, but for less money, means that American labor is free to create something else.
The key is that a portion of the profits from outsourcing have to be used to mobilize this now-freed labor and use it to create even more abundance.
If $100 used to buy 10 programmers in the US, then perhaps $10 can buy 10 programmers in India. As long as a good chunk of the $90 saved goes to consumers in the form of lower costs and to new employees in the US in the form of different jobs, perhaps jobs that require even more training and capital, everyone is benefitting, even if $20 goes to the company that outsources as profit.
Social policies simply need to be in place that cushion the jerkiness of outsourcing and ensure that benefits are distributed. Or am I missing something?
First off, a quick apology: I didn't mean to say your explanations were a cop-out but that the idea that we were stuck but didn't know it is a cop-out.. the sense that we are not stuck but really change our thinking has to be explained more substantially.
Second, I wasn't quite clear about why, if a frame could contain a thought, each frame would have to incorporate the complete information of all other frames. In order to know thought C, I contend that one has to contrast it against a previous thought B. But how do you know B? You might say you know B by contrasting it with C. But then at the same time, thinkers also can combine B & C and know them as BC. But how can they recognize BC? Only by comparison with A. But then how about ABC? And so on. So thoughts are not isolated fundamental units that can be reduced to arbitrarily small slices, but each thought is seamless, and *unique*, and its uniqueness consists in its immediate connection to all other past thoughts.
You might argue that the brain has a limited capacity, and I'm not saying that the brain recognizes or remembers *explicitly* all previous thoughts, but that this particular thought's uniqueness lies in a link to all previous thoughts that occurs through motion in real time -- such a link exists even if the brain doesn't recognize it explicitly. Such a link is what defines every thought.
Third, I would still have to argue with the idea that the past and future frame could be incorporated into one thought... it's as if someone proposed a thought experiment where one frame of a DVD contained motion. It just seems inconceivable. Can you think of any physical object where time is frozen to a nothingness? Even a photograph is not of an instant, but certain parts of the photo record a very slightly earlier instant than other parts of the photo...
" You can't 'see' the future, because information can't be gathered in that direction. "
Well if thoughts were able to be stuffed one-to-a-frame, I may agree, but if they couldn't and we're talking about time-as-a-continuous-seamless-cube, then there there would be no gathering: everything's already gathered. There would be one single thought that thrummed eternally... and it would be a thought OF sequentiality that itself was thought eternally.
But the problem is that I still don't see how you can get the sense of flow in... you would need to see something all at once and at the same time in sequence... again, it would be like looking at a symphony on paper, except instead of ink it would be motion.
Again, is this conceivable? It may be the case that reality is indeed inconceivable in this way, but metaphysics is after all an attempt to make this stuff intelligible, so if it ends in something incomprehensible, I think that's a pretty strong argument against using it as a model.
To describe whether the rock is going up or down, you would need to see whether it was below or above its present position a moment ago. But then you have the same problem again, a step higher: is the rock-which-was-below-a-moment-ago going up or down relative to two moments ago?
So to properly represent the past state you would need its full specification, which involves *its* past state, and so on. And similarly for the future predictions.
Thus what you are saying is that every frame contains all the past frames and a prediction for all possible future frames. Or all time is contained in every moment.
But then all you need is one frame. All time is just one frame. But if all time is one frame, then again you cannot explain any kind of feeling of transition. There would be just one blasting experience, and no sense of transition or time... living life would be like looking at a symphony on paper, experiencing EVEN ITS LINEARITY AND UNIDIRECTIONALITY, so to say, all at once, rather than moment-by-moment. This may be God's standpoint, but it isn't ours.
And this is what you yourself say later in your post: "If this special rule does not exist, then you just have a cube"... but then you sneak time in through the back door when you say "the 'flow' of time from the perspective of a slice is just seeing along the time axis"... SEEING is a sequential process. When does it happen?
"As far as being stuck in one state, the individual in the simulation would never feel like it was "stuck," even if it was."
Sure, we can't prove that we are not stuck, but it is our commonsense impression, and that needs to be explained. As I said, I don't think the one-frame idea does it.
I can similarly explain the universe as a figment of my imagination, and it's possible, but it's a bit of a cop-out if you ask me.
"you could take the state of the brain at each step in the simulation throughout the duration of the thought, and at each step you could say that the brain is "thinking" the same thought."
But which thought would that be? I don't think a particular brain state (meaning a freeze-frame of its neuronal activity and paths, let's say) indicates a thought because while it may in some sense reflect the set of all the changes that brain has undergone, that set of changes may be only one of many possible sets that lead to that particular configuration of neurons and chemicals.
In other words, take a frame in the DVD of a rock in the air. Is the rock going up or down? That information is not given in the frame. Though the frame reflects the information in the previous frame, it does not entirely give that previous frame's information. For that reason, one frame alone cannot be a thought.
"As I said in an earlier post, no one has yet figured out how our physical brains generate our percieved consciousness." -- Certainly agree with that...indeed, there are some who strangely believe that this is because the brain doesn't actually generate our conciousness...indeed, it may be the other way around...
Anyway, though, even if time IS discrete, the DVD model still does not explain our feeling of flow. Even if one frame represented one thought, we would be eternally stuck in that frame, perhaps feeling that we did come from somewhere and were going somewhere, but actually staying with that one thought permanently. We would never have a sense of going between frames, or transitioning, even though that is our actual experience.
"but danger lies in assuming that something is true merely because it is possible."
I think a lot of these matters may be inherently metaphysical, subjects which physics will never empirically prove or disprove, but that ultimately rest on our own intuition.
"An instant from now another "you" will have that same feeling. And the instant after that, and so on."
So when is this shifting of instants going on?
Thank you for the discussion, too, as I certainly enjoy this stuff as well!
"To make the analogy match my example, you also have to assume that every frame of the DVD is complete (not just a delta) and can be rendered independently of all other frames."
Depends what you mean by complete: I don't think that a thought could fit in any one frame. Since the essence of thought is a change in consciousness, I think that thoughts are *inherently* incapable of fitting on just one tiny infinitesimal slice of time...so in that model, all you would have little brain states, each of which represents exactly no thought by itself, and no process that connects them.
Therefore, the viewer CANNOT be in the DVD; the DVD model is simply incapable of explaining the viewer, ergo, it must be wrong.
"If the entire universe were suddenly created from nothing in its current state, then you would remember a past that never existed."
Yes, but I would argue that you wouldn't begin to experience this false memory till some time had elapsed. My argument has nothing to do with the subjective perception of time: that can be off, that can be manipulated. I'm simply saying that thinking requires dynamic physical processes that occur over time.
So does the universe pick this being to be active now and that being to be active later? If so when is it choosing?
If all beings are active timelessly, then according to your reasoning we, as instantiations of one particular being, should be stuck in one state, always feeling like we were just at 6:29:00:00:29 pm or whatever, and are on our way to 6:29:00:00:30 pm... no?
Also, to reiterate, I don't agree that thought that ever be found in any particular instant of time, and the same goes for memory. Memory, experience, and thought all inherently span time and time must flow for them to manifest.
That's why there is no particular being at any particular instant who thinks any particular thing, any more than anyone is moving even for an instant in a DVD frame.
I'm not so happy with the the universe-as-computer idea, but running with it:
Your analogy is similar to calling the universe a DVD. A DVD is a set of frames, after all. And all the frames might be described by an algorithm that for each frame works on the previous frames to generate its result. The whole DVD is akin to your complete set of static data describing everything.
But where is the motion? The motion only exists when you play the DVD. The motion is NOT on the DVD itself, but is generated purely in the motion between frames. But you can't play the DVD if time is frozen -- when would you have the time to play it?
Similarly, a brain state itself correlates to no thought. Thought is generated purely in the motion between brain states, something that cannot be achieved with a set of static data.
There may be no difference to the "brain" as a physical process whether the universe is static or not but it will make a difference to the "experiencer," because if time is unreal no experience is possible.
Well so the simple question is when does it go from one moment to the next? If it doesn't, how do we ever experience change? A brain having information about the past and projecting into the future still does not explain our experience of change; we would be locked into one context-and-projection-filled-thought forever in your theory -- some other being would experience the next thought, but no being would experience one thought and then another, which is clearly our day-to-day experience.
Interesting questions. First let me clarify that the important thing about thoughts that has to be explained vis-a-vis time is the SUBJECTIVE or experiential component of them.
Even if a Turing machine could be a true AI, as long as it had internal experiences like humans, these internal experiences could only consist of MULTIPLE states. One particular state would not be experienced at all, since one only recognizes experience as a CHANGE from something else, or so I would contend.
If one particular state does not an experience make, then that shows the inability of the frozen-time hypothesis to explain subjective experience, as it cannot explain jumps between states either.
I think on quick reflection that the *experience* of time could definitely differ for different entitites, but I am arguing for *some* kind of universal flow of time, some way in which the future is really undetermined as of yet, regardless of whether all entities are aware of it in the same way or not.
Disclaimer: I'm not a physicist, and don't even know that much about physics, but I'm very interested in the philosophical implications of Greene's view of time, or what little I read of it.
I briefly read one of this book's chapters on time, and it doesn't seem to explain much. Greene argues that time doesn't flow by pointing out how, due to special relativity, events in my future may be in someone else's past.
Therefore, Greene concludes, all events, past, present, and future, must already exist and must always exist. And our sense that time flows is an illusion.
Interestingly, Greene explicitly REJECTS the notion of a "projector" illuminating one cross-section of this frozen river of time one piece at a time. He rightly sees the problem with this analogy: when does the projector operate? It would have to operate at no time at all, so the concept is incoherent.
How does Greene account for flow? He says that the feelings, thoughts, and perceptions one has at any particular point in time contain sufficient context that one senses their relationship to the past and to the future. This we call flow.
My problem with this explanation is that I don't think you can have thought without change. I don't think there is reason to believe that there is a fundamental unit of time, within which some kind of fundamental unit of thought would exist.
Thought is inherently based on movement or change in our mental landscape, and this movement must happen in time. There is no possibility for thinking without flow. Thinking cannot account for flow, but rather assumes it.
Also, if we take the frozen river hypothesis, how do we find ourselves at one point in time and then at another point in time... how does this movement ever occur? And to whom? Wouldn't we be locked helplessly at our one "point" in time?
Finally, even if special relativity does show that events in one person's future may subjectively be perceived in another person's past, the very fact that we can correlate these two pieces of information: does that not show that there is some master set of times that relates everything to everything else?
I see one new business model for the RIAA as being the management of music. Even if file-sharing persists, who really wants to go through the trouble of setting up and running a file-sharing app, finding the file you want, finding a fast source, waiting to download it, being unsure about the quality, lacking some selection, knowing it's illegal, and then: storing it on your hard drive, backing it up, sharing your bandwidth with others if you want to share it, transferring it from computer to computer or from computer to iPod or whatever, etc. etc. etc.
Music downloading and management is a huge hassle. I think once RIAA music services like Listen.com and iTunes mature, they will offer their selection of music from anywhere. You will buy the rights to a song or a subscription to many songs, and be able to listen to your purchase in your car and on your portable wireless-Internet-enabled headset.
When you want that song on your cousin's computer, you will be able to download it instantly from multiple high-quality, high-bandwidth sources at varying bitrates. You will be able to get the song in WAV or MP3 format.
There will be no waiting, no worry about selection, no worry about backup or management, no worry about illegality.
And all this will be pretty cheap. Cheap enough that most people will buy it. That's my prediction.
We're heading there. And there will be very little incentive to fileshare, since everything will be available in such abundance.
The author first bemoans the lack of exciting reasons to buy powerful new hardware. Then he argues that open source software must step up and provide these killer apps.
Let's take his first statement first. Do you think that the PC is as fast as you'd like it? Is it as reliable? Are you really content to stay with the current generation of GUIs? Are you not interested in voice or gesture recognition, not interested in virtual reality, not interested in intelligent agents, not interested in vastly more intelligent means of storing and sorting your data?
The answers are obvious. I don't think the PC is done yet. Far from it. Greater reliability, ease-of-use, and more interesting applications will all require endless new hardware. All it will take is a good product and good marketing to make PC hardware sexy again.
And where are many of these kinds of innovations going to come from? Well, they could come from Linux or another open-source project, or they could come from Microsoft or Apple or another large company. Indeed, if we really want to see such tools go out widely in the near future, Microsoft will likely have to lead the way. And I think it will.
As long as there's the potential for cool new software (and there is), the PC can still evolve. I think we're in a transition period right now. The Internet has temporarily eclipsed the fundamental hardware and software elements of the PC, but the game's only just begun.
Or perhaps something like the $24.99 Jamstudio 7x5-inch USB/Serial Graphic Tablet with Software
Sorry, but I don't think there are currently many good economic reasons for people to buy music/movies/software if they can easily download or copy such items for free.
"So I can have the full-resolution "original" at hand on durable, read-only media that can't get accidentally erased by a Windows crash."
People already trade uncompressed music. This will become even more common in the future as bandwidth gets cheaper. You can burn the uncompressed music on a CD-R in 3 minutes on a new recorder on media that costs $0.50 or less.
"It also gives me someone to bitch at if the disc turns out to have a real, physical defect (as opposed to an artificial defect, like copy protection)."
No need to bitch if you can simply download another copy.
"So I can have the manual."
Instead of spending even $50 for the software, spend $30 for a third-party manual that is likely miles better than the included copy.
"So I can have original, trusted media from which to reinstall when Windows trashes the disk/trashes the registry/runs the latest virus/etc."
You could always burn your downloaded copy when you first obtain it and know it's healthy.
"So I can have someone to bitch at if the software itself trashes my work."
Possibly the most legitimate reason. But depending on the cost and nature of the software, and how responsive the company is, this often simply isn't worth it.
"Being a software engineer myself, to show my appreciation for work well done."
Good for you, but I don't think that this is a strong enough motivation for most people to buy what they could easily obtain otherwise.
I don't think that the model of buying music and mp3s album-by-album or song-by-song is a viable long-term model. It should be replaced with a service that promises bandwidth, continuity of access, legitimacy, selection, and convenience. The new music services like listen.com are moving in the right direction, but the selection and quality are still lacking, and the price is too high.
I like how you omitted the part about how "Sweden's long-successful economic formula of a capitalist system interlarded with substantial welfare elements has recently been undermined by high unemployment, rising maintenance costs, and a declining position in world markets."
Note: it's a primarily *CAPITALIST* system that happens to have some socialistic elements within it, which might just have something to do with those high maintenace costs.
"You have the right to work, but for the work's sake only. You have no right to the fruits of work. --Bhagavad Gita"
Ugh... this quote is completely misleading. For your information, the Bhagavad Gita really has nothing to say about property rights. I don't know what translation you are using, but the Gita's general statement about work is personal: if you want to be free of the shackles of greed and desire, then work hard, but don't worry about the outcome, or fruit of the work.
Specifically, do you think it's still *realistic* to take a good idea for a web service from the garage into the big leagues without $3 million in venture capital to start with, as some analysts seem to say is required?