Is he somehow related to Roger Penrose, author of "The Emperors New Mind"?
What's perceiving the free will?
Your consciousness is. But experiments indicate that your conscious experience of free will is an illusion. Measurements on the brain indicate that the moment you perceive that you made a decision is approx 2 seconds after the moment your brain started carrying it out. Ergo, consciousness is an afterthought that merely tries to make sense of how your mind works.
Oh but you can and do observe your own thinking. Every time you do a conscious decision you are able to observe, and in fact change your decision based on your observation. If you didn't have this ability you wouldn't think it over, you would just act.
How often do you think about your own thoughts?
My guess is something like less than 5% of the time, the rest of the time you just act. Being self conscious to me is not observing one's own thoughts, but observing one's own actions.
I know yours is the stance in GEB, and Edelman also said something similar, but that was long ago. I respect your view, although I don't agree with you.
AI is likely to occur with very little notice to the researchers, who probably didn't draw up design docs for the contingency.
Ah so it is. This is obvious right?
Seriously, all attempts at AI up to date have been designed, especially the hard-core symbolic approaches that everyone talks about here (as opposed to the connectionist ones, artificial neural nets etc, which have a somewhat more relaxed design.)
Expecting abstract stuff like desires or hopes to not appear just because we don't build them in is an error. I'd say that an AI _must_ have something like a "desire", or else it will sit in an infinite empty loop.
Ahem, expecting it not to appear is an error, but expecting it to appear is not? This is the way the medieval alchemists reasoned when they tried to make gold by mixing various substances.
I agree that AI must have something like a desire, but I don't expect it to just appear.
The basics to get self-aware systems is to define a self looping reasoning for the system. That is, the system must be able to observe it's OWN thoughts not only what is happening outside. It must be able to react and change it's thoughts by it's own thinking. That is very important. That also means you need to create a basic language system of some sorts for those underlying systems.
How can you be so sure of this? I for one am fully self-aware, and I strongly doubt that my own thoughts are observable by introspection, except for a very small part of them. AFAIK there isn't yet a man made self-aware system that works the way you prescribe.
...was created differently, or had a memory error in the right location, and it suddently isn't constrained by hardwired rules.
But ofcourse this is assuming that the rules are represented as in an expert system. For security reasons you would probably want to have an other representation for rules, for instance one similar to the one humans have. For instance: Try bending one of your toes without moving the others. This rule won't go away by changing a few neurons:-)
What is meant by brain geometry is usually the "wiring", ie. how different centra connect etc.
To me it sounded as if "Bobo" meant something like this: Desires don't appear by magic, they are consequences of how our brains are wired, and unless we do something similar with AI it will have no desires at all.
Ah, but think of the interesting implications if the AI is capable of reprogramming itself? I leave the results of that scenario up to your imagination:)
But you would still have to design it to want to reprogram itself. In what way should it do it, and for what reasons? These would still be design decisions...
Two notes:
1. Assume that your sequence appears somewhere in the decimal sequence of PI. Then surely you can predict the next digit using the knowledge of where in the sequence you are.
2. Assume that you have a subset of the decimal sequence of PI and don't know where it belongs. Then there is no way to predict the next digit, since it will occur at infinitely many places.
OTOH you will also have all sorts of atmospheric disturbances. Even if we assume that there are no clouds or particles in the way, different air temperatures will cause refraction in the atmosphere at boundaries of air with different temperatures, ie. the same effect as when you look at something through the air above a fire--the light path gets diverted. The effect is ofcourse much smaller in the atmosphere than above a fire, but it's a long way down, and many small errors add up...
Why would they even want their software to stabilize? They make quite a big profit out of selling upgrades. The thing they extend is their revenue rather than the joys of development.
Noone is forced to pay the money unless they actually want to. If noone can be arsed to make the improvements and release it under the BSD (there is nothing to stop them doing it) then maybe the motivation of money will get it done.
Maintaining compatibility with the "improvements" can be quite tricky when the source is closed. Even worse, it could in some cases be illegal due to patents.
Either a bit is on or off, how can it be in between?
Hard drives are magnetic media, i.e. they are analogue. The bits are what you get when you round the analogue signal to the nearest of your code words (not necessarily just 0 and 1, modems for instance use many more levels.). Actually even the ones and zeros in your computer are analogue DC levels, that are rounded off.
The write heads on the hard drive are never positioned exactly the same way on two writes. This means that you could potentially uncover the data that was there before. By overwriting the original contents several times, it is likely that a larger part of them are completely overwritten.
Why random data? Why not just write all zeros?
My guess is that it is easier to sort out what was the original contents of the hard drive if you know all patterns that was written "on top" of it. A silly example: if you know that two numbers have been added, their sum is 11, and one of them is 5. What is the other one?
The eye only sees one small detail at once and shifts to another one approximately 70 times a second. I guess that's why the ergonomic frequency barrier in monitor refresh rates is usually 72Hz.
There is a 70 Hz tremor in the eye called nystagmus tremor which is probably what you are thinking about. This only affects refresh rates on CRT displays, and only when your eyes are close to the screen though. The problem occurs due to interferrence between the high frequency screen flicker and the eye tremor.
AFAIK the pixels stay lit on LCDs in-between frames, so there is no screen flicker that could interfere with the eye tremor. For this reason the refresh rate is better called an update rate on an LCD.
> Not that the human eye needs 30 but still....
That's an urban myth.
Well, OK, you might not need more than 30 depending on what you are doing, but you can certainly see far higher than 30.
Hmm.... wonder why TV uses 25 fps and film 24 fps then. They don't look to bad to me, but when you move to lower frame-rates the inter-frame flicker becomes noticeable. There is a very real limit here, set by the intergration time in our rods and cones.
You're probably being confused by motion blur.
Motion blur is certainly the key issue here. In graphics rendering you don't have motion blur, each frame is perfectly sharp. For perceptually pleasing results, moving objects should be smeared an amount that depends on the amount of inter-frame movement. This happens as a side effect in cameras, so film captured this way looks OK at 24 fps. In graphics rendering on the other hand you will have what is known as temporal aliasing due to moving objects being too sharp. By increasing the frame-rate, an acceptable blurring will instead occur in the retina.
Slashdot Mirror
I like Charles Penrose's theories a little bit,
Is he somehow related to Roger Penrose, author of "The Emperors New Mind"?
What's perceiving the free will?
Your consciousness is. But experiments indicate that your conscious experience of free will is an illusion. Measurements on the brain indicate that the moment you perceive that you made a decision is approx 2 seconds after the moment your brain started carrying it out. Ergo, consciousness is an afterthought that merely tries to make sense of how your mind works.
It couldn't have been. The Turing Test is completely domain-inspecific.
Even so, a lesser form of the test is quite common: Discussion on a specific topic such as travels, wine, sailing etc.
And it plays only one movie right? :-)
Oh but you can and do observe your own thinking. Every time you do a conscious decision you are able to observe, and in fact change your decision based on your observation. If you didn't have this ability you wouldn't think it over, you would just act.
How often do you think about your own thoughts? My guess is something like less than 5% of the time, the rest of the time you just act. Being self conscious to me is not observing one's own thoughts, but observing one's own actions.
I know yours is the stance in GEB, and Edelman also said something similar, but that was long ago. I respect your view, although I don't agree with you.
AI is likely to occur with very little notice to the researchers, who probably didn't draw up design docs for the contingency.
Ah so it is. This is obvious right?
Seriously, all attempts at AI up to date have been designed, especially the hard-core symbolic approaches that everyone talks about here (as opposed to the connectionist ones, artificial neural nets etc, which have a somewhat more relaxed design.)
Expecting abstract stuff like desires or hopes to not appear just because we don't build them in is an error. I'd say that an AI _must_ have something like a "desire", or else it will sit in an infinite empty loop.
Ahem, expecting it not to appear is an error, but expecting it to appear is not? This is the way the medieval alchemists reasoned when they tried to make gold by mixing various substances.
I agree that AI must have something like a desire, but I don't expect it to just appear.
The basics to get self-aware systems is to define a self looping reasoning for the system. That is, the system must be able to observe it's OWN thoughts not only what is happening outside. It must be able to react and change it's thoughts by it's own thinking. That is very important. That also means you need to create a basic language system of some sorts for those underlying systems.
How can you be so sure of this? I for one am fully self-aware, and I strongly doubt that my own thoughts are observable by introspection, except for a very small part of them. AFAIK there isn't yet a man made self-aware system that works the way you prescribe.
I thought the innate grammar theory was refuted long ago.
But ofcourse this is assuming that the rules are represented as in an expert system. For security reasons you would probably want to have an other representation for rules, for instance one similar to the one humans have. For instance: Try bending one of your toes without moving the others. This rule won't go away by changing a few neurons :-)
What is meant by brain geometry is usually the "wiring", ie. how different centra connect etc.
To me it sounded as if "Bobo" meant something like this: Desires don't appear by magic, they are consequences of how our brains are wired, and unless we do something similar with AI it will have no desires at all.
Ah, but think of the interesting implications if the AI is capable of reprogramming itself? I leave the results of that scenario up to your imagination :)
But you would still have to design it to want to reprogram itself. In what way should it do it, and for what reasons? These would still be design decisions...
Two notes:
1. Assume that your sequence appears somewhere in the decimal sequence of PI. Then surely you can predict the next digit using the knowledge of where in the sequence you are.
2. Assume that you have a subset of the decimal sequence of PI and don't know where it belongs. Then there is no way to predict the next digit, since it will occur at infinitely many places.
It it in this sense that PI is random.
Not at all. These are fractions, not plain integers. For instance 0.1 in base 10 is a never ending sequence in binary (and hex) notation.
According to the article it does corrupt the actual stream.
OTOH you will also have all sorts of atmospheric disturbances. Even if we assume that there are no clouds or particles in the way, different air temperatures will cause refraction in the atmosphere at boundaries of air with different temperatures, ie. the same effect as when you look at something through the air above a fire--the light path gets diverted. The effect is ofcourse much smaller in the atmosphere than above a fire, but it's a long way down, and many small errors add up...
Why would they even want their software to stabilize? They make quite a big profit out of selling upgrades. The thing they extend is their revenue rather than the joys of development.
Noone is forced to pay the money unless they actually want to. If noone can be arsed to make the improvements and release it under the BSD (there is nothing to stop them doing it) then maybe the motivation of money will get it done.
Maintaining compatibility with the "improvements" can be quite tricky when the source is closed. Even worse, it could in some cases be illegal due to patents.
Either a bit is on or off, how can it be in between?
Hard drives are magnetic media, i.e. they are analogue. The bits are what you get when you round the analogue signal to the nearest of your code words (not necessarily just 0 and 1, modems for instance use many more levels.). Actually even the ones and zeros in your computer are analogue DC levels, that are rounded off.
Why 20 or 30 times?
The write heads on the hard drive are never positioned exactly the same way on two writes. This means that you could potentially uncover the data that was there before. By overwriting the original contents several times, it is likely that a larger part of them are completely overwritten.
Why random data? Why not just write all zeros?
My guess is that it is easier to sort out what was the original contents of the hard drive if you know all patterns that was written "on top" of it. A silly example: if you know that two numbers have been added, their sum is 11, and one of them is 5. What is the other one?
Even worse, the number of base pairs has nothing to do with the rate of evolution :-)
The eye only sees one small detail at once and shifts to another one approximately 70 times a second. I guess that's why the ergonomic frequency barrier in monitor refresh rates is usually 72Hz.
There is a 70 Hz tremor in the eye called nystagmus tremor which is probably what you are thinking about. This only affects refresh rates on CRT displays, and only when your eyes are close to the screen though. The problem occurs due to interferrence between the high frequency screen flicker and the eye tremor.
AFAIK the pixels stay lit on LCDs in-between frames, so there is no screen flicker that could interfere with the eye tremor. For this reason the refresh rate is better called an update rate on an LCD.
Only a loser (noun: unsuccessful person, not a winner) would misspell 'loser' as 'looser' (adjective: more loose, less tight).
It's actually quite common among non native English speakers.
> Not that the human eye needs 30 but still....
That's an urban myth.
Well, OK, you might not need more than 30 depending on what you are doing, but you can certainly see far higher than 30.
Hmm.... wonder why TV uses 25 fps and film 24 fps then. They don't look to bad to me, but when you move to lower frame-rates the inter-frame flicker becomes noticeable. There is a very real limit here, set by the intergration time in our rods and cones.
You're probably being confused by motion blur.
Motion blur is certainly the key issue here. In graphics rendering you don't have motion blur, each frame is perfectly sharp. For perceptually pleasing results, moving objects should be smeared an amount that depends on the amount of inter-frame movement. This happens as a side effect in cameras, so film captured this way looks OK at 24 fps. In graphics rendering on the other hand you will have what is known as temporal aliasing due to moving objects being too sharp. By increasing the frame-rate, an acceptable blurring will instead occur in the retina.
I don't see how it could mess up Xwindows...
Well, it can. NS 4.77 has locked XF86 several times for me... without me being root...
Don't blame Ford when you had your keys to a 3 yr old and they wreck the car....
If the car looked like a toy and was easy to use for the three year old, and on top of this, was of a major brand (i.e. had cred), I would...