Yet there are people who argue that football is a game based on sophisticated strategies, that anyone able to play it proficiently must have an intelligence on the higher outliers of genius.
Now it seems that "mushy" neurons are good enough...
I probably have Asperger's too, because I'm an analyzer and often come to the conclusion that some widely accepted behaviour is often rather stupid.
Then I must have Asperger's too. I don't go to church, I don't watch sports on TV, I believe that men went to the moon, I believe that heavy use of fossil fuels is causing global warming, and I believe fluor is good for your teeth.
One film that showed how to circumvent this was "Demolition Man", where the character played by Wesley Snipes uses an eyeball torn off a doctor to open a door.
Are there any other films using the same idea? It seems pretty obvious to me.
Carbon Dioxide. Isn't that the gas that is needed by plants to produce oxygen.
Yes. But remember, plants also need water. I suggest you throw your flowerpots into the swimming pool since, by your reasoning, if something is needed then the more the better.
remove the freewill of the populace to do anything not in the best interest of our agenda
They are working on that. The process is like this:
1) Find something that's unquestionably bad 2) Exaggerate 3) Profit!!! (no need for ???s)
Examples:
a) Child porn is bad. strategy: Convince people that the mere sight of a nude body by someone under the age of 18 will cause irreparable harm
b) Terrorism is bad strategy: Convince people that enough explosive to destroy a jet plane can be hidden in a shoe sole
c) Drunken driving is bad strategy: Get the federal government to define as "alcohol related" a traffic accident where anyone in the vicinity (including pedestrians) has consumed alcohol
The reason why we have a problem with coal plants pouring CO2 in the atmosphere is that this "control by fear" strategy was successfully used in the past against nuclear energy.
Luckily this strategy is starting to backfire in the case of nuclear energy. After some experts predicted that the Chernobyl accident would cause millions of deaths people started seeing that you cannot always believe the predictions of someone who claims to be an expert.
we do not have any way to verify the decay rate unaffected by cosmic radiation using the classic scientific method
Yes we do. There are nuclides with half lives of billions of years. How do we know? Get a pure sample of some isotope and measure how much of it has decayed after a known period. If after one year one billionth of the nuclei has decayed we can calculate that after a billion years 63.2% of the atoms will have decayed.
We know which nuclides come from which ones. We have a well tested sequence that shows the formation of each isotope, from which other isotope it comes from, how long it takes to decay, and which isotopes are created when it decays. That way we have a very precise way to calculate what will be the proportion of isotopes in a sample a given time after it was created.
All these experiments with isotopes can be performed with high accuracy in laboratories today. We have excellent motives, both theoretical and practical, to believe that the probability of radioactive decay is a precise and unchanging figure. That's why radioactive dating is such a reliable and precise method for dating objects.
Re:Life fills a space defined by its environment
on
Did Sea Life Arise Twice?
·
· Score: 3, Informative
the probability of life isn't equal to zero, and there are a ridiculous number of stars and planets
"Ridiculous number of planets" means nothing. For all we know the probability of life could be "ridiculously" small, so small indeed that multiplied by the total number of planets in the universe the product is still so small that life exists only on earth.
We have indications that this probability is very small. We have two examples of planets in our own stellar system that missed the habitable zone. Venus is so hot that complex molecules are unlikely to exist there. Mars is so cold that water cannot exist in liquid form. It has been conjectured that the moon was essential to the spontaneous creation of life on earth, because otherwise there wouldn't be tidal pools that concentrated the elements in the primitive sea.
Those are all conjectures, of course, and there may be counterpoints to them, but they are consistent with the hypothesis that life could be an extremely unlikely thing to happen in a planet. At this point the only sensible position is "we don't know" if life exists elsewhere.
taking the paradigm from above, you'd need a machine capable of parallel running of 100-400 billion virtual processors. At a minimum, that's a 100-400 billion processor/core system.
The neurons in a human brain work quite slowly, they fire a hundred times per second, approximately. One computer core could emulate several thousand neurons in real time, making it possible to reach human brain capacity with one million cores.
How complicated is that process? The Kolmorogrov complexity of a string (or whatever) is the minimum size of the data that you have to give to a machine in order to produce the string. E.g. a string of 100 0s is simpler than a string of alternating 0s and 1s and simpler than encoding the first 100 digits of pi. Write code for each of those and you'll see the measure works
Putting those 800 MB into a computer doesn't do anything if you don't provide the equivalent of the egg
The equivalent of the egg is the industrial infrastructure where the computer is manufactured. A VHDL program that zips to a 800 MB file will get you a pretty complex system after you send it to a chip fabrication plant.
No, upper limit is right. We know that our DNA has all the information needed to create the hardware in our brain, so this sets an upper limit on the necessary amount of information.
to use that description to build an actual model of the brain you need to understand all of the biological processes that are relevant in executing that construction code
I repeat, we do not build airplanes with flapping wings. We would need to understand the biological processes only if we wanted to build a copy of the bran, we don't need that to build a model of the brain's functionality.
The computer I'm using to type this is built with electronic logic gates, but it could also be built with many other functional blocks. People used abacuses and slide rules in the past for doing calculations, there are machines that use hydraulic logic gates and there's research on quantum logic, for instance.
This particular biologist seems to have a pretty good grasp on the fundamental problem with Kurzweil's argument, and that problem is: Kurzweil confuses the purpose of the genome
As I already mentioned in another post, I think PZ Myers distorted or misunderstood Kurzweil's ideas.
A better analogy would be to say that the genome is akin to the VHDL program used to design the CPU. The VHDL code needed to fully describe a computer's electronics is typically much smaller than the code used in that computer's programs.
After one reads an article about the infinite complexity of the human brain, one has to wonder if the fundamentalist protestants are the whackjobs
What do you mean "infinite"? The human brain is composed of one hundred billion or so neurons. Looks like it's pretty much finite to me. I have ten times as many bytes of information in my hard disk.
1. Technology is growing exponentially 2. The brain isn't some magical soul-endowed jesus box. It's a function of physics
PZ Myers threw a red herring there. What Kurzweil says is pretty reasonable, he used the total amount of information in the genome to get an upper limit estimate of the amount of library code needed to simulate a brain. I say "library" to differentiate from data, since a lot of our brain information comes from our experiences, i.e. library == instincts.
Myers goes off in a tangent about biochemistry which has nothing to do with the argument. I've never read anything hinting that the way to simulate a human brain would be to simulate how the molecules in the brain behave. We don't build airplanes with flapping wings either, machines can emulate the functionality of a living being without need to simulate the exact details.
From the number on neurons in the human brain, considering how many interconnections there are and how fast the neurons can fire, I think a machine with one million processing cores at 1 GHz would have approximately the same data handling capacity as a human brain. The rest is software. Neural network software is pretty much routine stuff, the tricky part is learning what are the interconnections between the neurons.
I was on Amtrak once, and I sat next to someone who had a pornographic picture as his desktop background
I had something even worse happening to me once. I was on a train working on my notebook and the guy sitting next to me kept looking over my shoulder to see what I was doing.
You had me until that point. How do you define "significantly affected" is the crucial detail here.
I know for myself because I have done tests at home with a driving simulator. Running a track that I do regularly at 3:10 minutes, give or take a few seconds, I can still do it in the same 3:10 without crashing having drunk three cans in one hour, which would be about.05 BAC.
OTOH, what about the wife who drives her husband's SUV, which she isn't used to, at night, because the husband had two beers at dinner? Wouldn't she be a significant risk? An impaired driver shouldn't drive at all, it doesn't matter if the impairment is caused by drink or by a general clumsiness in dealing with a car.
I call BS on that "significantly affected" figure of.04, the theory that those extremely low limits are designed to let governments rake in cash is the most plausible to me.
Do they really want to save lives? Then every driver should be required to do a test driving an SUV on a wet road at night at the highest legal driving speed, demonstrating that he or she can do evasive maneuvers and emergency stops safely under those conditions.
Slashdot Mirror
That's being done routinely all over the world today.
People who drink are statistically more likely to commit traffic accidents, so they are convicted without the need to actually do any harm to anyone.
Yet there are people who argue that football is a game based on sophisticated strategies, that anyone able to play it proficiently must have an intelligence on the higher outliers of genius.
Now it seems that "mushy" neurons are good enough...
Then I must have Asperger's too. I don't go to church, I don't watch sports on TV, I believe that men went to the moon, I believe that heavy use of fossil fuels is causing global warming, and I believe fluor is good for your teeth.
Maybe I was vaccinated when I was a kid.
You've been reading too much Slashdot. Now go and play outside, it's a lovely day.
Then maybe that's why Simon Phoenix stuck the eyeball on a fountain pen in that film. He could use ink pressure to compensate for blood pressure loss.
They need their big rich neighbor in the North to decriminalize recreational drugs.
Chicago was also a violent and corrupt city when the recreational use of ethanol was unconstitutional.
One film that showed how to circumvent this was "Demolition Man", where the character played by Wesley Snipes uses an eyeball torn off a doctor to open a door.
Are there any other films using the same idea? It seems pretty obvious to me.
Would you say that showing one inch of cleavage is "dressing immodestly"?
From which part of Iran do you come from?
Yes. But remember, plants also need water. I suggest you throw your flowerpots into the swimming pool since, by your reasoning, if something is needed then the more the better.
They are working on that. The process is like this:
1) Find something that's unquestionably bad
2) Exaggerate
3) Profit!!! (no need for ???s)
Examples:
a) Child porn is bad.
strategy: Convince people that the mere sight of a nude body by someone under the age of 18 will cause irreparable harm
b) Terrorism is bad
strategy: Convince people that enough explosive to destroy a jet plane can be hidden in a shoe sole
c) Drunken driving is bad
strategy: Get the federal government to define as "alcohol related" a traffic accident where anyone in the vicinity (including pedestrians) has consumed alcohol
The reason why we have a problem with coal plants pouring CO2 in the atmosphere is that this "control by fear" strategy was successfully used in the past against nuclear energy.
Luckily this strategy is starting to backfire in the case of nuclear energy. After some experts predicted that the Chernobyl accident would cause millions of deaths people started seeing that you cannot always believe the predictions of someone who claims to be an expert.
Well, radioactive dating depends on mathematics and he has certainly demonstrated how inaccurate math can be...
Yes we do. There are nuclides with half lives of billions of years. How do we know? Get a pure sample of some isotope and measure how much of it has decayed after a known period. If after one year one billionth of the nuclei has decayed we can calculate that after a billion years 63.2% of the atoms will have decayed.
We know which nuclides come from which ones. We have a well tested sequence that shows the formation of each isotope, from which other isotope it comes from, how long it takes to decay, and which isotopes are created when it decays. That way we have a very precise way to calculate what will be the proportion of isotopes in a sample a given time after it was created.
All these experiments with isotopes can be performed with high accuracy in laboratories today. We have excellent motives, both theoretical and practical, to believe that the probability of radioactive decay is a precise and unchanging figure. That's why radioactive dating is such a reliable and precise method for dating objects.
"Ridiculous number of planets" means nothing. For all we know the probability of life could be "ridiculously" small, so small indeed that multiplied by the total number of planets in the universe the product is still so small that life exists only on earth.
We have indications that this probability is very small. We have two examples of planets in our own stellar system that missed the habitable zone. Venus is so hot that complex molecules are unlikely to exist there. Mars is so cold that water cannot exist in liquid form. It has been conjectured that the moon was essential to the spontaneous creation of life on earth, because otherwise there wouldn't be tidal pools that concentrated the elements in the primitive sea.
Those are all conjectures, of course, and there may be counterpoints to them, but they are consistent with the hypothesis that life could be an extremely unlikely thing to happen in a planet. At this point the only sensible position is "we don't know" if life exists elsewhere.
The neurons in a human brain work quite slowly, they fire a hundred times per second, approximately. One computer core could emulate several thousand neurons in real time, making it possible to reach human brain capacity with one million cores.
Information entropy is the concept you are looking for.
The equivalent of the egg is the industrial infrastructure where the computer is manufactured. A VHDL program that zips to a 800 MB file will get you a pretty complex system after you send it to a chip fabrication plant.
No, upper limit is right. We know that our DNA has all the information needed to create the hardware in our brain, so this sets an upper limit on the necessary amount of information.
I repeat, we do not build airplanes with flapping wings. We would need to understand the biological processes only if we wanted to build a copy of the bran, we don't need that to build a model of the brain's functionality.
The computer I'm using to type this is built with electronic logic gates, but it could also be built with many other functional blocks. People used abacuses and slide rules in the past for doing calculations, there are machines that use hydraulic logic gates and there's research on quantum logic, for instance.
As I already mentioned in another post, I think PZ Myers distorted or misunderstood Kurzweil's ideas.
A better analogy would be to say that the genome is akin to the VHDL program used to design the CPU. The VHDL code needed to fully describe a computer's electronics is typically much smaller than the code used in that computer's programs.
What do you mean "infinite"? The human brain is composed of one hundred billion or so neurons. Looks like it's pretty much finite to me. I have ten times as many bytes of information in my hard disk.
PZ Myers threw a red herring there. What Kurzweil says is pretty reasonable, he used the total amount of information in the genome to get an upper limit estimate of the amount of library code needed to simulate a brain. I say "library" to differentiate from data, since a lot of our brain information comes from our experiences, i.e. library == instincts.
Myers goes off in a tangent about biochemistry which has nothing to do with the argument. I've never read anything hinting that the way to simulate a human brain would be to simulate how the molecules in the brain behave. We don't build airplanes with flapping wings either, machines can emulate the functionality of a living being without need to simulate the exact details.
From the number on neurons in the human brain, considering how many interconnections there are and how fast the neurons can fire, I think a machine with one million processing cores at 1 GHz would have approximately the same data handling capacity as a human brain. The rest is software. Neural network software is pretty much routine stuff, the tricky part is learning what are the interconnections between the neurons.
FTFA: The end result is a brain that is much, much more than simply the sum of the nucleotides that encode a few thousand proteins.
Likewise, the end result of a computer is much, much more than simply the sum of the commands that encode a CPUs instruction set.
I had something even worse happening to me once. I was on a train working on my notebook and the guy sitting next to me kept looking over my shoulder to see what I was doing.
You had me until that point. How do you define "significantly affected" is the crucial detail here.
I know for myself because I have done tests at home with a driving simulator. Running a track that I do regularly at 3:10 minutes, give or take a few seconds, I can still do it in the same 3:10 without crashing having drunk three cans in one hour, which would be about .05 BAC.
OTOH, what about the wife who drives her husband's SUV, which she isn't used to, at night, because the husband had two beers at dinner? Wouldn't she be a significant risk? An impaired driver shouldn't drive at all, it doesn't matter if the impairment is caused by drink or by a general clumsiness in dealing with a car.
I call BS on that "significantly affected" figure of .04, the theory that those extremely low limits are designed to let governments rake in cash is the most plausible to me.
Do they really want to save lives? Then every driver should be required to do a test driving an SUV on a wet road at night at the highest legal driving speed, demonstrating that he or she can do evasive maneuvers and emergency stops safely under those conditions.
In one word, yes. It's all a matter of sensibility.
The mothers of all the soldiers who died in Pearl Harbor are dead by now. The mothers of the soldiers who died in Afghanistan are not.
Your grandfather may have died in Pearl Harbor, but let's face it, people have stronger feelings for their children than for their grandparents.
What do you mean "so what"?
First there's the question of precedent.
Second there's the question of just punishment