Sorry, but no. Most editors are "artists" at heart and anti-censorship. If you go back around 30 years, most publishing houses were controlled by people who were "artists at heart and anti-censorship". That's no longer true.
Most publisher these days have been bought up by larger companies, and the publishing business generally has little to do with the goals of the owning conglomerate. Those who work directly in the publishing arm of the conglomerate may still feel the same way, but policy and many actions are dictated by those who, for instance, are more interested in selling liquor (Heublein, e.g.)
Some have speculated that this is a part of a concerted effort to ensure that the media forward the conservative political agenda, and it's difficult to come up with any other reason why such relatively unprofitable enterprises would have been bought by conglomerates. But this isn't actual proof. OTOH, it is worth noting that political demonstrations no longer receive much media coverage, even though one would think them as newsworthy as ever. (Or even more so, as now they are rarer.) (Again, this isn't proof. Merely an interesting coincidence. But I know which way I'd bet if offered a wager.)
Actually, Sony were artists, in a technical vein, until they merged with BMG.
For that matter, many of the people working for Universal and Warner are artists. Just not the ones in management. (And definitely not the companies.) Can't say about EMI, as I know nothing of their history or composition. For all I know calling them artists might be like calling the RIAA artists.
To me it feels like an arm. I sense it's position with goinometric neurons of which I'm not directly conscious, so I just seem to *know* where it's positioned. Etc. Levers don't feel that way.
Yet I *know* it's, among other things, a series of levers and motors. But I don't have direct sensations of those, only inferred ones from neurons that measure things like tendon stretch and muscular exertion. And I combine that with memories of similar sensations and the results that they achieved to make predictions about what this sensation complex is going to achieve. (And yes, it's really more complex than that, as one also needs to deduce about that against which one is exerting effort.)
That's not how a lever feels to me. And yet I know that leverness resides within my arm in a similar way that redness resides within my optical recognition. And that's *ALL* that qualia is.
I think that the very concept of qualia is saying "I can't imagine it, so it's not true".
Do you deny that your arm is a construction of levers and motors (the muscles) just because it "doesn't feel like a lever"? Qualia is just doing the equivalent with sensoria.
It was hell on my mother for years, but *he* seemed to enjoy it.
(The complication was that a year or two after he had been "hospitalized" and gotten to the point where they had to strap him into the bed, one night he stood up in bed and fell out of it, landing on his head and breaking his neck.)
Altzheimers is hard on those close to the patient, not so much on the patient. But this *does* depend on the form. Some people stay aware that they are losing their minds. My father never seemed to notice. I still remember him trying to seduce my wife while both my mother and I were in the room, he was confined to a bed. He was stroking her arm and telling her he didn't have any family...
OK. But if you've got assault rifles, you can't use the fact that someone you are threatening is trying to get an assault rifle as evidence that they are a "bad guy".
You started your post by the assumption that the people trying to get the capability were bad guys. You can't use that to claim that they are bad guys because they are trying to become as powerful as their opponents. That's circular reasoning. Your original assertion that their goals made them bad guys suffices.
In this case, though, it's not clear that they are any more the bad guys than are the Israelis. The chain of "You did this to me!" "Yeah, but you did this to me first!" is too long.
Unless you want to claim they're both bad guys. You could justify that. You could also say that they're both just groups of people who hate each other trying to survive in a hostile snake-pit. And neither "good guys" or "bad guys" are present.
I don't blame Israel with not wanting to trust it's neighbors (any of them) with nuclear weapons. But Israel isn't any shinning light of gloriousness either. It represses those of it's neighbors it has the power to repress. It kills medical workers, drives families from their homes, steals their land without payment, etc. Doesn't sound like "good guys" to me. Yes, they've got reasons, but they are driven by expediency and opportunism, not by morality.
That's because it does. You just need to be a *little* slyer. (Not much.)
This is one point where it really does matter what the target OS is. If your USB is vfat, then you can't have allow execute set to true. But if you use a properly targeted file system (say ext3), then you can set execution permissions. Or even just make it a tar.gz file, and when it's expanded, it ends up with execute permissions set. So you open a jpeg, and actually execute a script that opens the jpeg while executing something else in the background.
(Allowing tar files so set the execute permission is a big weakness...and a vast convenience. But that should require running a separate script or chmod with root permissions.)
Not sure the basis for your claiming they are more "bad guys" than any of the suspected attackers. I'll bet that for every allegation you can produce that they did something bad, I can produce one that says that the alleged perpetrator that you select did something equally bad.
I can say I'd rather my side had things, and their side didn't, but that doesn't make them bad guys for trying to get things. At least no more than it makes my side bad guys for getting them.
FWIW, I suspect that there would be more benefit in increasing short-term memory than long term memory. If for no other reason, it would allow one to be more selective about what was remembered in long term memory, and improve the indexing.
That said, additional capacity or speed improvement to long term memory would also be advantageous, especially in taking tests in school. I'm not sure if it would help in any other context, as usually one can look things up.
N.B.: We have much more long-term memory than we make use of. At one time most classical poets could remember the entire Iliad and Odyssey. Word for word. And many other poems. Now I need to use the spell-checker to spell Iliad correctly. But I remember lots of other things than poetry. The problem is more retrieval than capacity. (Not to say that improvements in either wouldn't be advantageous.)
Well, I guess I'm glad you found something that would work for you. Perhaps. A lot depends on things you *aren't* saying. E.g., do you feel that your way is the only way? That everyone else should follow it? If so, then I'm *sure* you gave up on philosophy WAY too soon.
I also found gods. Plural. (Actually, several different times I found a god, but it was different gods at different times.) I'm quite convinced that they are real, but also that they aren't a part of the external universe. Think of them as internal actualizations of Jungian Archetypes. They aren't purely mental, as they are built into the hardware (wetware?). And they are literally indescribable in language. I don't think they serialize, but even if they do communication through language depends upon similar experiences. The best one can do is attempt to evoke them in someone else. And even when this appears to be successful, it's impossible to be certain that what they experience traces back to the same thing you experienced. Only that it has certain descriptive elements in common.
And anyone who actually reads the bible and is still inspired by it is reading it through very strong filters. You don't want to hear what it sounds like to me.
People are shortsighted compared to what they need to be, but not compared to other animals.
It's organizations of people (and, of course, mobs) that are really shortsighted. It's the difficult problem of credit assignment. How do you ensure that the person making the decision is charged with either the rewards or penalties that result? It's the more difficult as the decision is usually shared between many different people, some of whom made the best decision available, and others the most self-serving.
Interesting, I took Mageia as a back-reference to the magician theme that Mandrake used. Mageia, then, would be (freely adapted) the arts & skills of the Magus.
Sorry it didn't mean anything to you.
The problem, though, isn't when it doesn't mean anything, as much as when it means something you really don't want it to mean, the the Chevy Nova in Spanish speaking countries.
(No va == "Doesn't go")
unhh...Japan is severely overpopulated. This is ONE of the reasons their immigration policies are so restrictive. (Admittedly not the only one.)
It's true that the population is aging, but you don't solve a population problem by increasing the size of the base of the pyramid. Robots MAY be an answer. (Even if they aren't good enough to care for elders, they can do other jobs, which free those people to take other jobs, freeing some people to assist elders. Whether this will work depends on how easily people can transition from job class to job class, which is largely dependent on social policies. (It's usually been handled pretty damn poorly everywhere on the planet...but that just means it's something that needs improvement, it doesn't mean it isn't the right answer.)
P.S.: When I say difficult, I'm including economic and retraining costs as difficulties. And support for oneself and ones dependents while in the process of transition. Also possible relocation expenses...including reestablishing a network of friends. EVERYTHING, and there's lots. All of which are generally handled in an extremely poor manner, because the displaced person is in a powerless position. This NEEDS to be improved, or the robots are just going to be trashed by angry mobs. (Robot soldiers aren't the correct answer to this problem, but it appears to be the only solution that's being worked on.)
Why do you assume that humans aren't limited in precisely that same way? I rather think they are.
Do you know the solution to the hill climbing problem? You need to start lots of independent maximizers at lots of different points across the search space. Each will only find the locally optimal maximum, but one of them will find the best of the local maxima from all of the starting points selected. There's still no proof that it's a global maximum, but it's something that can be done in a feasible amount of time. (If it can't, reduce the number of points that you are testing, and be prepared to suffer a reduction in the quality of your result.)
Each human is such an optimizer...they're all starting from slightly different points, and optimizing slightly different goals. And each species is such an optimizer. If, as seems to me likely, there are other planets with life, each of those planets is another such optimizer.
Notice that I was describing a system of nested optimizers. They still aren't guaranteed to find a globally optimal solution. Artificial Intelligence with be just another set of optimizers. Not different from people in any essential way.
Human brains are poorly understood. They're not only complicated, but those want to study them are under lots of restrictions that don't apply to those wanting to study rat or octopus brains. But this doesn't give it any mystical powers. If you want to invoke mystical powers, you'll need to provide hard evidence for them, and reasons why it would be less miraculous to use an explanation that didn't invoke those powers.
P.S.: What limitations do binary systems have that aren't shared by all other systems of information encoding or processing? The only thing I can think of is more precision (which can be fuzzed) and less compression (which can also be fuzzed if you are willing to lose information). One can argue, perhaps, that for certain classes of problem quantum processes would be faster or more compact, but that's not a fundamental difference. And even so it only applies to a small class of problems.
Also, I don't think you've ever tried to figure out what a program is doing, where all you had was the compiled code. If you had you'd be much less sanguine about people comprehending, in any general way, what a program was doing.
Infinity is just a label for something that doesn't really exist in a finite universe. And the universe appears to be finite, just too large to think about. (Somewhere around the powerset of 10^66 states, but some of those are identical by symmetry, and I don't know how many that eliminates. Still, it's huge!)
Note that while distance is quantized, and discrete, it's not definite when one gets towards the small end due to quantum fuzziness. The smallest meaningful unit of distance is somewhere around 10^-33 cm, and the larges it somewhere around 10^33 cm. I'm not sure what the smallest meaningful unit of time is, but it's clearly shorter than a femtosecond. This doesn't make time continuous rather than discrete, but it means that we can't measure it finely enough to notice the granularity. (We can't measure distances small enough, either. We can calculate the granularity of space from first principles, and then using the relativity transform of space to time show that time must also be discrete.)
Looking over what I've written, I see that I probably underestimated the number of discrete states of the universe. It's probably more on the order of the powerset of (10^66)^4. A number too large to think about, but definitely finite.
Neural networks do "fill up" (overtrain), but this can be handled to some extent by forgetting. The real limit isn't how much you can remember, as what you can spare attention for. And it doesn't take any millions of years for people to start forgetting things.
As to limits about what people can learn... that's a tricky one. We don't have an adequate formulation, but I'd say roughly that people have a definite stack size and a definite heap size, and anything that won't fit in the stack or the heap can't be learned. Also that this varies from person to person. Now this is to be understood as an analogy, not as a literal analysis, but we do seem to have something that acts like a stack, and we use it when parsing a sentence. And we have something that acts sort of like a heap, call it short-term memory. Attention seems to work from the stack (or maybe a large set of registers would be better). There's also something that's limited to around seven plus or minus two different states, but the experiments on that have focused on sensory modalities. For most things one can't be anywhere near as precise.
So, yes, there are limits. And the limits of human knowledge and awareness are considerably below the limits set by the nature of the universe. But it's hard to see the back of your own head...still, if you want to try: There's a piece of mathematics called the proof of the four-color theorem. It was made by a computer, because no mathematician could do it. Now that it's done, no mathematician can understand the whole thing. Lots of them can understand pieces of it, and the pieces that some of them understand overlap, so we're pretty sure that the theorem is correct. I.e., the whole thing has been understood by mathematicians, but not be *a* mathematician. You could try to understand it. There are probably also analogies to this in programming, e.g. I doubt that anyone understand all of GCC, but I'm not as sure.
Where did you get the idea that a Moebius strip didn't have boundaries? It has two. One edge and one face. Similarly for a Klein bottle. The Klein bottle may not have an inside and an outside, but it is still a bounded surface. (Besides, it's impossible to really build a Klein bottle, but I mean if you could.)
And whatever kind of thought you are thinking, if you are thinking it, it has structure. You may not be attending to the structure, but it's there.
Everything real has structure. Except, perhaps, quarks and leptons...and even there I have my doubts. And there can't be thought without computation. Also, get rid of the word infinite. Everything real has boundaries, though sometimes they are a bit fuzzy. (I don't consider "real numbers" to be real. They are artifacts of how we symbolize numbers so as to deal with a domain whose bounds we don't know. E.g., PI is a value that depends on the shape of space, but when the area being inspected gets small enough, the shape is variable with quantum flux, and around 10^-33 cm it appears to become discontinuous. But what value of PI requires accounting for this? This depends on your circumference and radius and where your circle is located. Near a star you'll get different values than in intergalactic space.) As to at just what decimal place PI becomes indeterminate...I've never bothered to calculate it. Certainly far before infinite.
Just because something is handled with visual imagery doesn't mean that something equivalent to calculation isn't going on. My visual imagery is frequently very simplified and cartoonish, but that's just because the thoughts don't require the details to be filled in. If I'm thinking of a triangle, without specifying what kind of triangle, my mental imagery switches quickly from one representation to another, one filled with a flat color, another wire-frame, one acute, another right, still another obtuse. The form isn't very fixed, but each representation requires calculation, even though I'm not conscious of it...not even conscious of it enough to know whether I'm constructing triangles or retrieving them from (simplified) memory of prior experiences. It's probably a combination, but I'm not sure. The same argument applies to all other sensory emulations. And I don't believe in "abstract thought" that doesn't manifest as a sensory emulation....though I am including sensation of internal states, including emotions, as sensory.
The point is that they've started to realize that they don't, and are starting to design around them rather than continuing to spec them just because that's what the old designs called for.
P.S.: Who is "our"? Intel? Where do they manufacture? If the chip comes out of China, calling it a US chip because the company offices are in the US is a bit flimsy. The designs come out of the US would make a a stronger, but still not a secure, case. In fact, most industry on that scale is *global*. Assigning it to a particular country is silly. What's going on here is many companies are finding the bureaucratic restrictions so burdensome that they are taking a global manufacturing process and removing all steps that involve the US in order to escape from them. It still won't be a British chip or a German chip, but it *will* be a non-US chip.
Well, the post office used to be pretty good, outside of forbidding competition and giving advertisers a break in rates.
Yeah, it didn't cover expenses. That was expected. The attempt to make it a profit center broke it noticeably. (It's still pretty good, but nothing compared to what it was. And, of course, that never compared with the earlier British Post Office.)
OTOH, given e-mail perhaps the post offices don't need to be as good as they were. What's delivery three times a day (central London, Victorian times) compared to e-mail.
I've sort of come to the conclusion that elections are the wrong way to go, and that leaders should be selected by lottery. Of course, this means that one person should NEVER be able to decide things by himself. You might get a real turkey. But given the results of the recent (last 3 decades) elections, voting doesn't insulate you from turkeys, and at least this guy wouldn't be bribed before achieving office, and wouldn't be selected precisely *because* he was a power hungry bastard with no scruples (at least about lying). (Actually, I think that in elections a certain class of psychopath has a definite advantage...though Regan proved that it could also be achieved with sufficient stupidity. [Alzheimers may not be quite stupidity, but it's a good simulation.])
On what basis do you claim that abstract thought couldn't be expressed in a flow chart? (And how do you define it?)
I'll grant that the concept of "flow chart" needs to be expanded to handle multiple parallel streams of computation, that only becomes serialized as it is necessary to express it in language, but there are already "flow chart" forms that handle this. (Clumsily.) You can't do it with the kind of flow chart that you learn in "Introduction to Programming", but you also can't synchronize multiple processes with that kind of flow chart. The basic idea of flow chart is a chart that describes the flow of computation. Not all flow charts restrict themselves to a single flow of computation, some handle multiple threads, some handle multiple processes. (Not much difference between the last two, except how information transfers. The ones handling multiple processes can't presume *any* global variables...well, except process id.)
Thinking of thought "flowing like a river" is reasonable from a distance, but it's not a model that helps you understand it's structure.
Maybe. Depends on what you mean by "free thought". A lot of people seem to have definitions that I don't believe ANYBODY can manage, much less the people proffering them.
While it's true that animate thought is a lot more complicated than a flow chart, it could still be expressed *fairly* simply.
E.g.: The mind contains a set of beliefs about the world, a set of goals within the world, a model of how the world works, and the ability to run simulations to determine what actions would transition it to a state closer to achieving it's most important goals. Not perfect, and definitely more complicated that "just a flow chart", even though technically it could be expressed in a flow chart. (It just couldn't be understood that way.) I left out language handling, though I'm certain it's basically the same process, but with a few features emphasized and others weakened...but I'm not yet to the point of trying to figure out how to implement language handling, merely basic mental processes. (Given the hardware I'm working with, even that's pretty ambitious.)
N.B.: This description only covers thinking, not learning. Learning requires adding another layer or two of complexity for pattern recognition, deciding which patterns are important, etc. I *THINK* Bayesian statistics can be used, but I'm not certain just how it should be applied, and the means of application will drastically bias the results. Clearly, however, the results of the Bayesian reasoning need to modify both the model and the beliefs. It probably shouldn't be allowed to modify the goals, but I'm not absolutely certain of this.
Is this "free thought"? I think that it's a decent model for how people think. So if humans have "free thought" and a robot thinks in the way I have described, then I would ascribe "free thought" to it. If not, you need to define your terms or I won't understand you.
I'd be interested in seeing how they make that consistent with an inverse square law. The only time I considered that, I was only expanding gravity through time, and thus I could handle the inverse square law by getting attractions from both the past and the future. I was thinking that this might allow me to derive inertia when I gave up and switched to thinking about something else.
But the inverse square law is due to the three-dimensional nature of space. (Thus an magnetic field from a long straight wire falls off as 1/r, because you are getting readings to an external point from various points along the wire.) If you are radiating through 11 dimensions, I'd expect the drop off to be like 1/r^10. This is made lots more difficult to figure, though, because most of the dimensions are very small. But if they're significant enough to cause gravity to be a weak force, they should affect the drop off rate.
Slashdot Mirror
While your definitions are pretty much spot-on, your expectations of Slashdot commentary are ludicrous.
Sorry, but no. Most editors are "artists" at heart and anti-censorship. If you go back around 30 years, most publishing houses were controlled by people who were "artists at heart and anti-censorship". That's no longer true.
Most publisher these days have been bought up by larger companies, and the publishing business generally has little to do with the goals of the owning conglomerate. Those who work directly in the publishing arm of the conglomerate may still feel the same way, but policy and many actions are dictated by those who, for instance, are more interested in selling liquor (Heublein, e.g.)
Some have speculated that this is a part of a concerted effort to ensure that the media forward the conservative political agenda, and it's difficult to come up with any other reason why such relatively unprofitable enterprises would have been bought by conglomerates. But this isn't actual proof. OTOH, it is worth noting that political demonstrations no longer receive much media coverage, even though one would think them as newsworthy as ever. (Or even more so, as now they are rarer.) (Again, this isn't proof. Merely an interesting coincidence. But I know which way I'd bet if offered a wager.)
Actually, Sony were artists, in a technical vein, until they merged with BMG.
For that matter, many of the people working for Universal and Warner are artists. Just not the ones in management. (And definitely not the companies.) Can't say about EMI, as I know nothing of their history or composition. For all I know calling them artists might be like calling the RIAA artists.
Odd.
To me it feels like an arm. I sense it's position with goinometric neurons of which I'm not directly conscious, so I just seem to *know* where it's positioned. Etc. Levers don't feel that way.
Yet I *know* it's, among other things, a series of levers and motors. But I don't have direct sensations of those, only inferred ones from neurons that measure things like tendon stretch and muscular exertion. And I combine that with memories of similar sensations and the results that they achieved to make predictions about what this sensation complex is going to achieve. (And yes, it's really more complex than that, as one also needs to deduce about that against which one is exerting effort.)
That's not how a lever feels to me. And yet I know that leverness resides within my arm in a similar way that redness resides within my optical recognition. And that's *ALL* that qualia is.
I think that the very concept of qualia is saying "I can't imagine it, so it's not true".
Do you deny that your arm is a construction of levers and motors (the muscles) just because it "doesn't feel like a lever"? Qualia is just doing the equivalent with sensoria.
My father died of complications of Altzheimers.
It was hell on my mother for years, but *he* seemed to enjoy it.
(The complication was that a year or two after he had been "hospitalized" and gotten to the point where they had to strap him into the bed, one night he stood up in bed and fell out of it, landing on his head and breaking his neck.)
Altzheimers is hard on those close to the patient, not so much on the patient. But this *does* depend on the form. Some people stay aware that they are losing their minds. My father never seemed to notice. I still remember him trying to seduce my wife while both my mother and I were in the room, he was confined to a bed. He was stroking her arm and telling her he didn't have any family...
OK. But if you've got assault rifles, you can't use the fact that someone you are threatening is trying to get an assault rifle as evidence that they are a "bad guy".
You started your post by the assumption that the people trying to get the capability were bad guys. You can't use that to claim that they are bad guys because they are trying to become as powerful as their opponents. That's circular reasoning. Your original assertion that their goals made them bad guys suffices.
In this case, though, it's not clear that they are any more the bad guys than are the Israelis. The chain of "You did this to me!" "Yeah, but you did this to me first!" is too long.
Unless you want to claim they're both bad guys. You could justify that. You could also say that they're both just groups of people who hate each other trying to survive in a hostile snake-pit. And neither "good guys" or "bad guys" are present.
I don't blame Israel with not wanting to trust it's neighbors (any of them) with nuclear weapons. But Israel isn't any shinning light of gloriousness either. It represses those of it's neighbors it has the power to repress. It kills medical workers, drives families from their homes, steals their land without payment, etc. Doesn't sound like "good guys" to me. Yes, they've got reasons, but they are driven by expediency and opportunism, not by morality.
That's because it does. You just need to be a *little* slyer. (Not much.)
This is one point where it really does matter what the target OS is. If your USB is vfat, then you can't have allow execute set to true. But if you use a properly targeted file system (say ext3), then you can set execution permissions. Or even just make it a tar.gz file, and when it's expanded, it ends up with execute permissions set. So you open a jpeg, and actually execute a script that opens the jpeg while executing something else in the background.
(Allowing tar files so set the execute permission is a big weakness...and a vast convenience. But that should require running a separate script or chmod with root permissions.)
That would be a reasonable response. So don't expect it.
Not sure the basis for your claiming they are more "bad guys" than any of the suspected attackers. I'll bet that for every allegation you can produce that they did something bad, I can produce one that says that the alleged perpetrator that you select did something equally bad.
I can say I'd rather my side had things, and their side didn't, but that doesn't make them bad guys for trying to get things. At least no more than it makes my side bad guys for getting them.
FWIW, I suspect that there would be more benefit in increasing short-term memory than long term memory. If for no other reason, it would allow one to be more selective about what was remembered in long term memory, and improve the indexing.
That said, additional capacity or speed improvement to long term memory would also be advantageous, especially in taking tests in school. I'm not sure if it would help in any other context, as usually one can look things up.
N.B.: We have much more long-term memory than we make use of. At one time most classical poets could remember the entire Iliad and Odyssey. Word for word. And many other poems. Now I need to use the spell-checker to spell Iliad correctly. But I remember lots of other things than poetry. The problem is more retrieval than capacity. (Not to say that improvements in either wouldn't be advantageous.)
Well, I guess I'm glad you found something that would work for you. Perhaps. A lot depends on things you *aren't* saying. E.g., do you feel that your way is the only way? That everyone else should follow it? If so, then I'm *sure* you gave up on philosophy WAY too soon.
I also found gods. Plural. (Actually, several different times I found a god, but it was different gods at different times.) I'm quite convinced that they are real, but also that they aren't a part of the external universe. Think of them as internal actualizations of Jungian Archetypes. They aren't purely mental, as they are built into the hardware (wetware?). And they are literally indescribable in language. I don't think they serialize, but even if they do communication through language depends upon similar experiences. The best one can do is attempt to evoke them in someone else. And even when this appears to be successful, it's impossible to be certain that what they experience traces back to the same thing you experienced. Only that it has certain descriptive elements in common.
And anyone who actually reads the bible and is still inspired by it is reading it through very strong filters. You don't want to hear what it sounds like to me.
People are shortsighted compared to what they need to be, but not compared to other animals.
It's organizations of people (and, of course, mobs) that are really shortsighted. It's the difficult problem of credit assignment. How do you ensure that the person making the decision is charged with either the rewards or penalties that result? It's the more difficult as the decision is usually shared between many different people, some of whom made the best decision available, and others the most self-serving.
Interesting, I took Mageia as a back-reference to the magician theme that Mandrake used. Mageia, then, would be (freely adapted) the arts & skills of the Magus.
Sorry it didn't mean anything to you.
The problem, though, isn't when it doesn't mean anything, as much as when it means something you really don't want it to mean, the the Chevy Nova in Spanish speaking countries.
(No va == "Doesn't go")
unhh...Japan is severely overpopulated. This is ONE of the reasons their immigration policies are so restrictive. (Admittedly not the only one.)
It's true that the population is aging, but you don't solve a population problem by increasing the size of the base of the pyramid. Robots MAY be an answer. (Even if they aren't good enough to care for elders, they can do other jobs, which free those people to take other jobs, freeing some people to assist elders. Whether this will work depends on how easily people can transition from job class to job class, which is largely dependent on social policies. (It's usually been handled pretty damn poorly everywhere on the planet...but that just means it's something that needs improvement, it doesn't mean it isn't the right answer.)
P.S.: When I say difficult, I'm including economic and retraining costs as difficulties. And support for oneself and ones dependents while in the process of transition. Also possible relocation expenses...including reestablishing a network of friends. EVERYTHING, and there's lots. All of which are generally handled in an extremely poor manner, because the displaced person is in a powerless position. This NEEDS to be improved, or the robots are just going to be trashed by angry mobs. (Robot soldiers aren't the correct answer to this problem, but it appears to be the only solution that's being worked on.)
Ok. I don't think this can go any further. This appears to be our basic disagreement.
Why do you assume that humans aren't limited in precisely that same way? I rather think they are.
Do you know the solution to the hill climbing problem? You need to start lots of independent maximizers at lots of different points across the search space. Each will only find the locally optimal maximum, but one of them will find the best of the local maxima from all of the starting points selected. There's still no proof that it's a global maximum, but it's something that can be done in a feasible amount of time. (If it can't, reduce the number of points that you are testing, and be prepared to suffer a reduction in the quality of your result.)
Each human is such an optimizer...they're all starting from slightly different points, and optimizing slightly different goals. And each species is such an optimizer. If, as seems to me likely, there are other planets with life, each of those planets is another such optimizer.
Notice that I was describing a system of nested optimizers. They still aren't guaranteed to find a globally optimal solution. Artificial Intelligence with be just another set of optimizers. Not different from people in any essential way.
Human brains are poorly understood. They're not only complicated, but those want to study them are under lots of restrictions that don't apply to those wanting to study rat or octopus brains. But this doesn't give it any mystical powers. If you want to invoke mystical powers, you'll need to provide hard evidence for them, and reasons why it would be less miraculous to use an explanation that didn't invoke those powers.
P.S.: What limitations do binary systems have that aren't shared by all other systems of information encoding or processing? The only thing I can think of is more precision (which can be fuzzed) and less compression (which can also be fuzzed if you are willing to lose information). One can argue, perhaps, that for certain classes of problem quantum processes would be faster or more compact, but that's not a fundamental difference. And even so it only applies to a small class of problems.
Also, I don't think you've ever tried to figure out what a program is doing, where all you had was the compiled code. If you had you'd be much less sanguine about people comprehending, in any general way, what a program was doing.
Infinity is just a label for something that doesn't really exist in a finite universe. And the universe appears to be finite, just too large to think about. (Somewhere around the powerset of 10^66 states, but some of those are identical by symmetry, and I don't know how many that eliminates. Still, it's huge!)
Note that while distance is quantized, and discrete, it's not definite when one gets towards the small end due to quantum fuzziness. The smallest meaningful unit of distance is somewhere around 10^-33 cm, and the larges it somewhere around 10^33 cm. I'm not sure what the smallest meaningful unit of time is, but it's clearly shorter than a femtosecond. This doesn't make time continuous rather than discrete, but it means that we can't measure it finely enough to notice the granularity. (We can't measure distances small enough, either. We can calculate the granularity of space from first principles, and then using the relativity transform of space to time show that time must also be discrete.)
Looking over what I've written, I see that I probably underestimated the number of discrete states of the universe. It's probably more on the order of the powerset of (10^66)^4. A number too large to think about, but definitely finite.
Neural networks do "fill up" (overtrain), but this can be handled to some extent by forgetting. The real limit isn't how much you can remember, as what you can spare attention for. And it doesn't take any millions of years for people to start forgetting things.
As to limits about what people can learn... that's a tricky one. We don't have an adequate formulation, but I'd say roughly that people have a definite stack size and a definite heap size, and anything that won't fit in the stack or the heap can't be learned. Also that this varies from person to person. Now this is to be understood as an analogy, not as a literal analysis, but we do seem to have something that acts like a stack, and we use it when parsing a sentence. And we have something that acts sort of like a heap, call it short-term memory. Attention seems to work from the stack (or maybe a large set of registers would be better). There's also something that's limited to around seven plus or minus two different states, but the experiments on that have focused on sensory modalities. For most things one can't be anywhere near as precise.
So, yes, there are limits. And the limits of human knowledge and awareness are considerably below the limits set by the nature of the universe. But it's hard to see the back of your own head...still, if you want to try:
There's a piece of mathematics called the proof of the four-color theorem. It was made by a computer, because no mathematician could do it. Now that it's done, no mathematician can understand the whole thing. Lots of them can understand pieces of it, and the pieces that some of them understand overlap, so we're pretty sure that the theorem is correct. I.e., the whole thing has been understood by mathematicians, but not be *a* mathematician. You could try to understand it. There are probably also analogies to this in programming, e.g. I doubt that anyone understand all of GCC, but I'm not as sure.
Where did you get the idea that a Moebius strip didn't have boundaries? It has two. One edge and one face. Similarly for a Klein bottle. The Klein bottle may not have an inside and an outside, but it is still a bounded surface. (Besides, it's impossible to really build a Klein bottle, but I mean if you could.)
And whatever kind of thought you are thinking, if you are thinking it, it has structure. You may not be attending to the structure, but it's there.
I take it you've never taken abstract algebra...
Everything real has structure. Except, perhaps, quarks and leptons...and even there I have my doubts. And there can't be thought without computation. Also, get rid of the word infinite. Everything real has boundaries, though sometimes they are a bit fuzzy. (I don't consider "real numbers" to be real. They are artifacts of how we symbolize numbers so as to deal with a domain whose bounds we don't know. E.g., PI is a value that depends on the shape of space, but when the area being inspected gets small enough, the shape is variable with quantum flux, and around 10^-33 cm it appears to become discontinuous. But what value of PI requires accounting for this? This depends on your circumference and radius and where your circle is located. Near a star you'll get different values than in intergalactic space.) As to at just what decimal place PI becomes indeterminate...I've never bothered to calculate it. Certainly far before infinite.
Just because something is handled with visual imagery doesn't mean that something equivalent to calculation isn't going on. My visual imagery is frequently very simplified and cartoonish, but that's just because the thoughts don't require the details to be filled in. If I'm thinking of a triangle, without specifying what kind of triangle, my mental imagery switches quickly from one representation to another, one filled with a flat color, another wire-frame, one acute, another right, still another obtuse. The form isn't very fixed, but each representation requires calculation, even though I'm not conscious of it...not even conscious of it enough to know whether I'm constructing triangles or retrieving them from (simplified) memory of prior experiences. It's probably a combination, but I'm not sure. The same argument applies to all other sensory emulations. And I don't believe in "abstract thought" that doesn't manifest as a sensory emulation....though I am including sensation of internal states, including emotions, as sensory.
The point is that they've started to realize that they don't, and are starting to design around them rather than continuing to spec them just because that's what the old designs called for.
P.S.: Who is "our"? Intel? Where do they manufacture? If the chip comes out of China, calling it a US chip because the company offices are in the US is a bit flimsy. The designs come out of the US would make a a stronger, but still not a secure, case. In fact, most industry on that scale is *global*. Assigning it to a particular country is silly. What's going on here is many companies are finding the bureaucratic restrictions so burdensome that they are taking a global manufacturing process and removing all steps that involve the US in order to escape from them. It still won't be a British chip or a German chip, but it *will* be a non-US chip.
Well, the post office used to be pretty good, outside of forbidding competition and giving advertisers a break in rates.
Yeah, it didn't cover expenses. That was expected. The attempt to make it a profit center broke it noticeably. (It's still pretty good, but nothing compared to what it was. And, of course, that never compared with the earlier British Post Office.)
OTOH, given e-mail perhaps the post offices don't need to be as good as they were. What's delivery three times a day (central London, Victorian times) compared to e-mail.
I've sort of come to the conclusion that elections are the wrong way to go, and that leaders should be selected by lottery. Of course, this means that one person should NEVER be able to decide things by himself. You might get a real turkey. But given the results of the recent (last 3 decades) elections, voting doesn't insulate you from turkeys, and at least this guy wouldn't be bribed before achieving office, and wouldn't be selected precisely *because* he was a power hungry bastard with no scruples (at least about lying). (Actually, I think that in elections a certain class of psychopath has a definite advantage...though Regan proved that it could also be achieved with sufficient stupidity. [Alzheimers may not be quite stupidity, but it's a good simulation.])
On what basis do you claim that abstract thought couldn't be expressed in a flow chart? (And how do you define it?)
I'll grant that the concept of "flow chart" needs to be expanded to handle multiple parallel streams of computation, that only becomes serialized as it is necessary to express it in language, but there are already "flow chart" forms that handle this. (Clumsily.) You can't do it with the kind of flow chart that you learn in "Introduction to Programming", but you also can't synchronize multiple processes with that kind of flow chart. The basic idea of flow chart is a chart that describes the flow of computation. Not all flow charts restrict themselves to a single flow of computation, some handle multiple threads, some handle multiple processes. (Not much difference between the last two, except how information transfers. The ones handling multiple processes can't presume *any* global variables...well, except process id.)
Thinking of thought "flowing like a river" is reasonable from a distance, but it's not a model that helps you understand it's structure.
Maybe. Depends on what you mean by "free thought". A lot of people seem to have definitions that I don't believe ANYBODY can manage, much less the people proffering them.
While it's true that animate thought is a lot more complicated than a flow chart, it could still be expressed *fairly* simply.
E.g.: The mind contains a set of beliefs about the world, a set of goals within the world, a model of how the world works, and the ability to run simulations to determine what actions would transition it to a state closer to achieving it's most important goals. Not perfect, and definitely more complicated that "just a flow chart", even though technically it could be expressed in a flow chart. (It just couldn't be understood that way.) I left out language handling, though I'm certain it's basically the same process, but with a few features emphasized and others weakened...but I'm not yet to the point of trying to figure out how to implement language handling, merely basic mental processes. (Given the hardware I'm working with, even that's pretty ambitious.)
N.B.: This description only covers thinking, not learning. Learning requires adding another layer or two of complexity for pattern recognition, deciding which patterns are important, etc. I *THINK* Bayesian statistics can be used, but I'm not certain just how it should be applied, and the means of application will drastically bias the results. Clearly, however, the results of the Bayesian reasoning need to modify both the model and the beliefs. It probably shouldn't be allowed to modify the goals, but I'm not absolutely certain of this.
Is this "free thought"? I think that it's a decent model for how people think. So if humans have "free thought" and a robot thinks in the way I have described, then I would ascribe "free thought" to it. If not, you need to define your terms or I won't understand you.
I'd be interested in seeing how they make that consistent with an inverse square law. The only time I considered that, I was only expanding gravity through time, and thus I could handle the inverse square law by getting attractions from both the past and the future. I was thinking that this might allow me to derive inertia when I gave up and switched to thinking about something else.
But the inverse square law is due to the three-dimensional nature of space. (Thus an magnetic field from a long straight wire falls off as 1/r, because you are getting readings to an external point from various points along the wire.) If you are radiating through 11 dimensions, I'd expect the drop off to be like 1/r^10. This is made lots more difficult to figure, though, because most of the dimensions are very small. But if they're significant enough to cause gravity to be a weak force, they should affect the drop off rate.