This is incorrect. Mother nature is not an engineer. She is a tinker in the tradition of Rube Goldberg. Evolution is pragmatic, and settles for any solution. In general it does not find the most optimal solution. Examples, the panda's thumb, not as efficient as a primates thumb; the hemoglobin analog in octipi is not as efficient as true hemoglobin.
right... the best possible solution.
As for the peacocks tail the cost versus benefit ratio is stable not optimal.
For the peacock, the cost versus benefit ratio has evolved to be stable and optimal according to the environment in which these peacocks must compete for survival. They have reached a point where the trade off is almost exactly worth it. Members of the peacock species surely still compete and further redefine exactly what optimal is for them, but it is nonetheless optimal. The same is true of spiderweb designs... Richard Dawkins dedicates an entire chapter to this concept in "Climbing Mount Improbable".
The human brain is complex, but how much of that complexity is because it was evolved in a piece meal fashion? It was not designed to be optimal. It was blindly evolved to work at each step of the way.
sure, but this is the way darwinian evolution works. different species have found different and ingenious ways to fly which were a result of starting point... bats had a flap of skin that became wings, birds had scales that became feathers. still, there's rarely 'extra' stuff in biological systems that doesn't serve a purpose, consumes resources, and persists without reason. these things disappear over time. the evidence we have of the evolution of human intelligence coincides directly with an increased size in the brain... i don't think there's much wasted in our heads. and maybe it's worth noting that evolutionary pressure may be absent so that having an extra arm or an extra leg would pose no threat to an individual... but look at it over evolutionary timescales and you will see that evolution creates species which are perfectly adapted to their environments and as efficient at making their living as possible.
Looking at it from the outside, we could see the redundant and overly complex portions and engineer simpler solutions.
i have to stick by my guns... there is no simpler solution. if you want mosquito intelligence, you'll build something as complex as a mosquito brain. want human intelligence, you'll end up building something as complex as the human brain (and you can argue that our brain does more than think but i'm speaking about that very large portion of it that gives us the ability to think, solve problems, and type into a text box).
we see as well as we need to. owls have other needs. cave fish have no vision needs whatsoever. anything extra is just that--extra.
But I don't see 3.8 billion years of evolution as an efficient method to develop an AI.
nobody does. this argument is void. evolution is a process which has no particular dependence on biological systems or the timescales that they evolved on. we create our own simulations and they move as quickly as our computers can move them... no dependence on chemistry.
This both misses the point of my analogy and supports my argument for engineering simpler designs than evolution.
but my point was that you don't need to engineer anything in the traditional sense if you are able to use evolution. evolution will produce a design as simple as you possibly could if you ask in the right manner... this has been demonstrated many times in evolutionary programming research. it's not a mature science, but the first glimpses of what can be done with evolution seem a much more worthwhile endeavor than the top-down methodologies which have been the hallmark of AI research.
I'm impressed they made any progress at all.
nothing has fundamentally changed in computer theory since von neumann and turing. they may get faster and faster but i don't think the payoff of top-down 'strong' AI is any closer just because computers are so much faster (or memory more ample). our programs are not anywhere near the complexity they should be if we wish them to rival even simple 'intelligent' systems. (read dr. pollack's responses and you'll see he's spending lots of time on evolution as a means to produce systems of incredible complexity... and he's definitely not the only one doing so).
I stand by my statement that it is too soon to tell what method, if any, will lead to success in developing machines that think.
and i will stand by my statement that we know of only one process which can--and has--developed machines that think.
i think that bottom up engineering has many benefits over top-down design and especially so in the case of artificial intelligence. i do not believe that humans will ever design a top-down system as intelligent as ourselves simply because of the complexity involved. nature builds things to be as efficient as possible--this is an observation all zoologists would agree with. even when we're talking about something as extravagant as a peacock's tail, the cost vs. benefit ratio is optimal. if this argument is extended to the human brain, it would seem that human-like intelligence requires a certain high degree of complexity (considering again the previous argument that any extra complexity has a cost associated with it and would have been selected out of the gene pool over time). from what we know, it seems that biological intelligence is an emergent property of a tremendously complex system. despite our cleverness--and despite the fact that we can engineer so many wonderful things like computers, pharmaceuticals, and 747's--we are not so good at building and understanding complex systems even a small fraction as hairy as our own brains. this is why the recent trend is to invest research energies into bottom-up solutions in favor of top-down ones. except for a few very famous expert systems, top-down AI is a failure nature is efficient... i really don't think we'll ever engineer anything as intelligent as the human brain without having first sailed our way through a sea of complexity too large to imagine--in other words, i won't give us the vote of confidence that we can improve on nature's design enough to cut the complexity to a manageable size by today's standards or even by the probable standards of the next 20 generations of humans. plus, why would we when we could achieve the same result using bottom-up methods which we know will work? we are over-confident in our abilities to design solutions to all problems. a pigeon and a plane may both fly, but nobody ever had to design a pigeon... and i would argue that a pigeon is infinitely more perfectly 'engineered' than a 747 and it is also much, much more complex. we have very fast computers. all of the research i've seen and done in genetic programming, genetic algorithms, evolutionary programming, and other applications of evolution to solve complex problems have been nothing short of shockingly successful and have demonstrated that we can use our fast computers to solve problems and create very complex things using evolution that would otherwise be difficult and in many cases impossible no matter how many people or how much computer power you have at your disposal.
But the point is that the human brain--the type of intelligent system that everyone fantasizes about achieving--was not designed in a top-down fashion at all. There are lessons from nature that should definitely influence our research investigations.
Evolution is the only phenomenon that anyone can ever claim has the power to produce intelligent systems.
I'm not saying that using evolution as a tool is an easy or straightforward endeavor or that it has any bearing on the latest version of your favorite open source project.
What I am saying is that if we are to be responsible investigators of intelligent systems, then we must also be investigators of evolution--the only process in our known universe capable of producing complex systems which really think.
This site should give you all the information you would ever want about Artificial Life including lots of information about what Alife is exactly and what it is not.
And if you want more, go to Google and search for 'alife' and you've got a few weekends worth of stuff to go through!
"Once a Darwinian process gets going in a world, it has an open-ended power to generate surprising consequences: us, for example." Richard Dawkins
I think that as scientists and engineers, attacking the problem of creating intelligent systems begs an obvious question: Do we know of any existing intelligent systems and, if so, how were they 'engineered'. I know evolutionary programming is not a new science and that it's pioneers knew it held promise for evolving intelligent systems. I'm baffled though that the focus of Artificial Intelligence as an academic discipline has forever been on top-down approaches. It's a wonderful thing to be able to completely understand a phenomenon and then engineer machinations that apply the understood theory, but it seems to me plainly obvious that with our use of evolution as a tool, we're much closer to creating amazingly complex and possibly intelligent systems than we are to understanding them.
I get the 'you're a science hippie' attitude when I bring these ideas up to academics... I'd like to hear your comments on the possibility that we'll have real intelligent 'cooked up' systems before we have a complete understanding of them.
i don't think anyone could take lsd "on an hourly basis". this is very suspicious. lsd isn't addictive like this--even if you're a crazy genious looking for inspiration.
i know many people who _could_ take lsd every hour if they wanted to because they maybe have it around them always... but they might drink like alcoholics, do other drugs like heroine, crack, and speed, but they usually moderate the lsd simply because of the nature of the drug. most trips last hours and hours and take a day or several days to recover from.
yes... but i agree with the original post because as recently as a few weeks ago i couldn't export crypto code to other countries. now all of that's changing.
not everyone in government is evil... but turning this argument on its head and calling government saintly or even immune to criticism is ridiculous.
i judge the us government by the laws it creates and upholds... and in regards to drugs i think the government is evil incarnate.
" Most biologists try to understand this event in terms of conventional chemistry -- the random chaotic motion of billions of particles. But even the simplest living cells are extraordinarily complex, far too complex to have arisen by chance alone. "
this is the oldest, lamest, most boring anti-evolution argument that just won't go away. and anyone perpetuating the the stupid boeing-747-from-a-pile-of-parts argument should be carried out of their homes and universities naked.
people need to read more darwin, more dawkins, more sagan, and less from websites like unisci.
you rule, Sleen. i really think you have some funny and original comments in your rants. particularly:
"Besides, all this conversation is blather without a war going on. Comfy industrialist children wishing machines were more amusing."
this is very true. obviously, lots of people have overly-romantic ideas about how we'll all download our brains into big machines (running linux i guess) and have AI just because it'll be fun and because we're such clever hackers that we can do anything.
geeks sometimes tend to read more science fiction than science fact and when it comes time to discuss science you get a bunch references to sci fi (or even just fi in most cases). anyone can claim that we'll be able to 'upload' our brains into machines in 50 years but no practicing scientist with a respect for their credibility would agree or even have their name mentioned in such a far-fetched discussion.
ai is a story of failure so far. mostly because people made radical claims and had high hopes when they didn't have a right to.
hopefully, as we learn more about brains (human and nonhuman)--and the environmen, conditions, and mechanism with which these organs evolved, we'll begin to understand how they solve problems and maybe be inspired to think differently and solve some new problems ourselves. this is what real ai seeks to accomplish and i think it's pretty exciting and a worthy endeavor...
but people shouldn't start planning for their afterlife in kernel 5.2.
i mean, if i had video for linux as eyes, i think i'd rather be dead. (joke)
in the end... intelligence appears to be a function of structure. biology is complicated but hopefully nobody is talking about simulating the _biology_ since we'd have to rethink computer science and find ways to solve impossible problems in the gap between one instant of time and the next! we can't even understand (or simulate) a folding protein!
maps of connected neurons (even static ones) serve a purpose. neural networks don't simulate every detail of a synapse, usually are completely ignorant of neurotransmitters, and never include glial cells! they don't need to--they simply simulate the structure of the relationship between the individual neurons and a methematical statistical model of how they communicate, excite and inhibit eachother. they don't and probably wont ever approach the complexity of even a small chunk of human brain but you can't deny that they do work... maybe intelligence doesn't need biology at all.
just because our only example of intelligence is based in biology, don't be so quick to assume it's the only way.
i'll agree though that evolution is a necessary component. we'll never 'engineer' something like the human brain... but we might program our computers to evolve intelligences.
but don't forget that the definition of life can fall anywhere on a continuum.
there are computer scientists alive today that would argue their software simulations are alive. they're not crazy, they just have a different definition of what 'alive' means. as might some biologists you'll run into.
i don't know how i'd compare my existence as a computer simulation to my experience at this very moment... but don't forget that there are computer scientists alive today that have found it extremely useful to think of this reality as nothing more than a simulation on a grand scale;-). maybe it'll be the same! but i guess we would have to learn to solve several intractable problems on the fly if our simulated realities were ever to be convincing.
we'd have to simulate our entire little corner of the galaxy.
now the rich politicians who hold all of our leashes will exert their influence from beyond the grave. i am a little apprehensive when it comes to high technologies like these which may some day be feasible but will surely be expensive and highly guarded and controlled. who will decide who gets stored? will we have to pay for cpu cycles just to think? the world will need to change tremendously before this technology benefits humanity as a whole and not just the few idiots who currently horde most of the power in the world. can you imagine the pope living forever? what a nightmare. death is a good thing... it forces us to change.
all of the complex systems you deal with including yourself and the people around you are a function of structure... structure of neurons, cells... matter--all of it.
get over it. it's a product of scientific endeavor and it is this endeavor which has unearthed nature's greatest mysteries. Sure, it has not yet unearthed _all_ of natures mysteries, but this is no reason to discard it in the wholesale fashion you seem to suggest.
your lung argument is a hundred years late. read "The Blind Watchmaker" by Richard Dawkins and you will have your answer to "who" created all of this. you fundamentally misunderstand darwinian evolution.
you speak of the "life consciousness" as if it is a real thing. has it ever registered in anyone's experiments? does it yield to some system of modeling maybe in physics? chemistry? biology? I don't think so. It is clear now--thanks to science and only science--that all of biology (including your brain) is reducible to chemistry. All of chemistry is reducible to physics. Period.
What is so terrible about science, after all? It has allowed us to harness electricity, refine manufacturing methods, and ultimately put your computer on your desk. Ditto for your television, microwave oven, processed foods, medications, automobile, i dare say, every human product you can possibly lay your hands on in your home has been accelerated in discovery and quality by science.
Why not argue against science in a sane manner? how about making some points about nuclear weapons and responsibility? global warming? human experimentation? gene therapies? cloning? your arguments are boring because they are not arguments at all--only complaints brought about by your own misunderstanding of the subject.
to understand the problem you need to analyze who you get your information from and what their interests ultimately are. i'm not talking about conspiracy theories, i'm talking about common sense. all major media outlets are corporations which have shareholders and thus a prime directive of their own: profit. the reason we see distortions is because they make the stories more interesting... at least to most of the people who never miss the 5 o'clock news.
it's more interesting to tell people that the banks will fall apart next year, that hackers have taken over a satellite, that dennis rodman's hair is green this week. none of it is news--it's pacification... and unfortunately most americans eat it up and love it.
journalism is dead in the mainstream... the public can't appreciate real journalism and would rather hear about kiko the whale's dramatic rescue by sea world. everything is human interest now and each night there's a story about the dangers of such-and-such product and "what you should do now to protect your kids". crap... complete crap.
did you know any author who appears on oprah to promote a book is instantly a bestseller?!? nobody reads the good ones anymore.
anyhow, i do have some hope that new information channels will be facilitated by the internet and people's ability to disseminate information easily without a super-watt antenna. slashdot is one example, even though it's not the traditional format. but you do need advertisers to pay for your existence... right now i'm looking at one for hermanmillerstore.com, will they some day convince slashdot to run a favorable article about their product? i doubt it. but read the latimes and you realize they have an agenda, just like the nytimes, cnn, abc, cbs, every one of them. it's subtle sometimes and overt at other times... but it's naive to think they don't pick and choose their stories and then distort the ones that could sell a few more papers or push up the ratings.
there seems to be a melding of the sitcoms and the newsshows lately--news anchors are celebrities for reading words off a screen and looking like plastic with makeup.
this just signals the end of the world to me. corporations play the public like pawns and unfortunalely most americans enjoy being played.
Slashdot Mirror
This is incorrect. Mother nature is not an engineer. She is a tinker in the tradition of Rube Goldberg. Evolution is pragmatic, and settles for any solution. In general it does not find the most optimal solution. Examples, the panda's thumb, not as efficient as a primates thumb; the hemoglobin analog in octipi is not as efficient as true hemoglobin.
right... the best possible solution.
As for the peacocks tail the cost versus benefit ratio is stable not optimal.
For the peacock, the cost versus benefit ratio has evolved to be stable and optimal according to the environment in which these peacocks must compete for survival. They have reached a point where the trade off is almost exactly worth it. Members of the peacock species surely still compete and further redefine exactly what optimal is for them, but it is nonetheless optimal. The same is true of spiderweb designs... Richard Dawkins dedicates an entire chapter to this concept in "Climbing Mount Improbable".
The human brain is complex, but how much of that complexity is because it was evolved in a piece meal fashion? It was not designed to be optimal. It was blindly evolved to work at each step of the way.
sure, but this is the way darwinian evolution works. different species have found different and ingenious ways to fly which were a result of starting point... bats had a flap of skin that became wings, birds had scales that became feathers. still, there's rarely 'extra' stuff in biological systems that doesn't serve a purpose, consumes resources, and persists without reason. these things disappear over time. the evidence we have of the evolution of human intelligence coincides directly with an increased size in the brain... i don't think there's much wasted in our heads. and maybe it's worth noting that evolutionary pressure may be absent so that having an extra arm or an extra leg would pose no threat to an individual... but look at it over evolutionary timescales and you will see that evolution creates species which are perfectly adapted to their environments and as efficient at making their living as possible.
Looking at it from the outside, we could see the redundant and overly complex portions and engineer simpler solutions.
i have to stick by my guns... there is no simpler solution. if you want mosquito intelligence, you'll build something as complex as a mosquito brain. want human intelligence, you'll end up building something as complex as the human brain (and you can argue that our brain does more than think but i'm speaking about that very large portion of it that gives us the ability to think, solve problems, and type into a text box).
we see as well as we need to. owls have other needs. cave fish have no vision needs whatsoever. anything extra is just that--extra.
But I don't see 3.8 billion years of evolution as an efficient method to develop an AI.
nobody does. this argument is void. evolution is a process which has no particular dependence on biological systems or the timescales that they evolved on. we create our own simulations and they move as quickly as our computers can move them... no dependence on chemistry.
This both misses the point of my analogy and supports my argument for engineering simpler designs than evolution.
but my point was that you don't need to engineer anything in the traditional sense if you are able to use evolution. evolution will produce a design as simple as you possibly could if you ask in the right manner... this has been demonstrated many times in evolutionary programming research. it's not a mature science, but the first glimpses of what can be done with evolution seem a much more worthwhile endeavor than the top-down methodologies which have been the hallmark of AI research.
I'm impressed they made any progress at all.
nothing has fundamentally changed in computer theory since von neumann and turing. they may get faster and faster but i don't think the payoff of top-down 'strong' AI is any closer just because computers are so much faster (or memory more ample). our programs are not anywhere near the complexity they should be if we wish them to rival even simple 'intelligent' systems. (read dr. pollack's responses and you'll see he's spending lots of time on evolution as a means to produce systems of incredible complexity... and he's definitely not the only one doing so).
I stand by my statement that it is too soon to tell what method, if any, will lead to success in developing machines that think.
and i will stand by my statement that we know of only one process which can--and has--developed machines that think.
i think that bottom up engineering has many benefits over top-down design and especially so in the case of artificial intelligence. i do not believe that humans will ever design a top-down system as intelligent as ourselves simply because of the complexity involved.
nature builds things to be as efficient as possible--this is an observation all zoologists would agree with. even when we're talking about something as extravagant as a peacock's tail, the cost vs. benefit ratio is optimal.
if this argument is extended to the human brain, it would seem that human-like intelligence requires a certain high degree of complexity (considering again the previous argument that any extra complexity has a cost associated with it and would have been selected out of the gene pool over time).
from what we know, it seems that biological intelligence is an emergent property of a tremendously complex system. despite our cleverness--and despite the fact that we can engineer so many wonderful things like computers, pharmaceuticals, and 747's--we are not so good at building and understanding complex systems even a small fraction as hairy as our own brains.
this is why the recent trend is to invest research energies into bottom-up solutions in favor of top-down ones. except for a few very famous expert systems, top-down AI is a failure
nature is efficient... i really don't think we'll ever engineer anything as intelligent as the human brain without having first sailed our way through a sea of complexity too large to imagine--in other words, i won't give us the vote of confidence that we can improve on nature's design enough to cut the complexity to a manageable size by today's standards or even by the probable standards of the next 20 generations of humans. plus, why would we when we could achieve the same result using bottom-up methods which we know will work?
we are over-confident in our abilities to design solutions to all problems. a pigeon and a plane may both fly, but nobody ever had to design a pigeon... and i would argue that a pigeon is infinitely more perfectly 'engineered' than a 747 and it is also much, much more complex.
we have very fast computers. all of the research i've seen and done in genetic programming, genetic algorithms, evolutionary programming, and other applications of evolution to solve complex problems have been nothing short of shockingly successful and have demonstrated that we can use our fast computers to solve problems and create very complex things using evolution that would otherwise be difficult and in many cases impossible no matter how many people or how much computer power you have at your disposal.
But the point is that the human brain--the type of intelligent system that everyone fantasizes about achieving--was not designed in a top-down fashion at all. There are lessons from nature that should definitely influence our research investigations.
Evolution is the only phenomenon that anyone can ever claim has the power to produce intelligent systems.
I'm not saying that using evolution as a tool is an easy or straightforward endeavor or that it has any bearing on the latest version of your favorite open source project.
What I am saying is that if we are to be responsible investigators of intelligent systems, then we must also be investigators of evolution--the only process in our known universe capable of producing complex systems which really think.
http://alife.santafe.edu/
This site should give you all the information you would ever want about Artificial Life including lots of information about what Alife is exactly and what it is not.
And if you want more, go to Google and search for 'alife' and you've got a few weekends worth of stuff to go through!
"Once a Darwinian process gets going in a world, it has an open-ended power to generate surprising consequences: us, for example."
Richard Dawkins
I think that as scientists and engineers, attacking the problem of creating intelligent systems begs an obvious question: Do we know of any existing intelligent systems and, if so, how were they 'engineered'. I know evolutionary programming is not a new science and that it's pioneers knew it held promise for evolving intelligent systems. I'm baffled though that the focus of Artificial Intelligence as an academic discipline has forever been on top-down approaches. It's a wonderful thing to be able to completely understand a phenomenon and then engineer machinations that apply the understood theory, but it seems to me plainly obvious that with our use of evolution as a tool, we're much closer to creating amazingly complex and possibly intelligent systems than we are to understanding them.
I get the 'you're a science hippie' attitude when I bring these ideas up to academics... I'd like to hear your comments on the possibility that we'll have real intelligent 'cooked up' systems before we have a complete understanding of them.
hernan_at_well_dot_com
bruce didn't tell us if coke or pepsi won world war III.
but you have to pronounce it "goon-tuuhr"
i don't think anyone could take lsd "on an hourly basis". this is very suspicious. lsd isn't addictive like this--even if you're a crazy genious looking for inspiration.
i know many people who _could_ take lsd every hour if they wanted to because they maybe have it around them always... but they might drink like alcoholics, do other drugs like heroine, crack, and speed, but they usually moderate the lsd simply because of the nature of the drug. most trips last hours and hours and take a day or several days to recover from.
so i have to ask...
does your employer (microsoft) test its employees for drug use?
would any members of the management pass you think?
yes... but i agree with the original post because as recently as a few weeks ago i couldn't export crypto code to other countries. now all of that's changing.
not everyone in government is evil... but turning this argument on its head and calling government saintly or even immune to criticism is ridiculous.
i judge the us government by the laws it creates and upholds... and in regards to drugs i think the government is evil incarnate.
"
Most biologists try to understand this event in terms of conventional chemistry -- the random chaotic motion of billions of particles. But even the simplest living cells are extraordinarily complex, far too complex to have
arisen by chance alone.
"
this is the oldest, lamest, most boring anti-evolution argument that just won't go away. and anyone perpetuating the the stupid boeing-747-from-a-pile-of-parts argument should be carried out of their homes and universities naked.
people need to read more darwin, more dawkins, more sagan, and less from websites like unisci.
you rule, Sleen. i really think you have some funny and original comments in your rants. particularly:
"Besides, all this conversation is blather without a war going on. Comfy industrialist children wishing machines were more amusing."
this is very true. obviously, lots of people have overly-romantic ideas about how we'll all download our brains into big machines (running linux i guess) and have AI just because it'll be fun and because we're such clever hackers that we can do anything.
geeks sometimes tend to read more science fiction than science fact and when it comes time to discuss science you get a bunch references to sci fi (or even just fi in most cases). anyone can claim that we'll be able to 'upload' our brains into machines in 50 years but no practicing scientist with a respect for their credibility would agree or even have their name mentioned in such a far-fetched discussion.
ai is a story of failure so far. mostly because people made radical claims and had high hopes when they didn't have a right to.
hopefully, as we learn more about brains (human and nonhuman)--and the environmen, conditions, and mechanism with which these organs evolved, we'll begin to understand how they solve problems and maybe be inspired to think differently and solve some new problems ourselves. this is what real ai seeks to accomplish and i think it's pretty exciting and a worthy endeavor...
but people shouldn't start planning for their afterlife in kernel 5.2.
i mean, if i had video for linux as eyes, i think i'd rather be dead. (joke)
in the end... intelligence appears to be a function of structure. biology is complicated but hopefully nobody is talking about simulating the _biology_ since we'd have to rethink computer science and find ways to solve impossible problems in the gap between one instant of time and the next! we can't even understand (or simulate) a folding protein!
maps of connected neurons (even static ones) serve a purpose. neural networks don't simulate every detail of a synapse, usually are completely ignorant of neurotransmitters, and never include glial cells! they don't need to--they simply simulate the structure of the relationship between the individual neurons and a methematical statistical model of how they communicate, excite and inhibit eachother. they don't and probably wont ever approach the complexity of even a small chunk of human brain but you can't deny that they do work... maybe intelligence doesn't need biology at all.
just because our only example of intelligence is based in biology, don't be so quick to assume it's the only way.
i'll agree though that evolution is a necessary component. we'll never 'engineer' something like the human brain... but we might program our computers to evolve intelligences.
ok--everyone flame the hippie now.
you can smoke a fat joint and kill a few neurons.
and i promise you'll feel the same the next day.
but don't forget that the definition of life can fall anywhere on a continuum.
;-). maybe it'll be the same! but i guess we would have to learn to solve several intractable problems on the fly if our simulated realities were ever to be convincing.
there are computer scientists alive today that would argue their software simulations are alive. they're not crazy, they just have a different definition of what 'alive' means. as might some biologists you'll run into.
i don't know how i'd compare my existence as a computer simulation to my experience at this very moment... but don't forget that there are computer scientists alive today that have found it extremely useful to think of this reality as nothing more than a simulation on a grand scale
we'd have to simulate our entire little corner of the galaxy.
now the rich politicians who hold all of our leashes will exert their influence from beyond the grave. i am a little apprehensive when it comes to high technologies like these which may some day be feasible but will surely be expensive and highly guarded and controlled. who will decide who gets stored? will we have to pay for cpu cycles just to think? the world will need to change tremendously before this technology benefits humanity as a whole and not just the few idiots who currently horde most of the power in the world.
can you imagine the pope living forever? what a nightmare. death is a good thing... it forces us to change.
how about the experience of visiting
www.digiscents.com
and filling the room with a thick, moist cloud of bullshit smell?
hehehe
i just couldn't take their website seriously. java smell api coming out soon?
%ping god
ping: Cannot resolve "god" (Unknown host)
all of the complex systems you deal with including yourself and the people around you are a function of structure... structure of neurons, cells... matter--all of it.
get over it. it's a product of scientific endeavor and it is this endeavor which has unearthed nature's greatest mysteries. Sure, it has not yet unearthed _all_ of natures mysteries, but this is no reason to discard it in the wholesale fashion you seem to suggest.
your lung argument is a hundred years late. read "The Blind Watchmaker" by Richard Dawkins and you will have your answer to "who" created all of this. you fundamentally misunderstand darwinian evolution.
you speak of the "life consciousness" as if it is a real thing. has it ever registered in anyone's experiments? does it yield to some system of modeling maybe in physics? chemistry? biology? I don't think so. It is clear now--thanks to science and only science--that all of biology (including your brain) is reducible to chemistry. All of chemistry is reducible to physics. Period.
What is so terrible about science, after all? It has allowed us to harness electricity, refine manufacturing methods, and ultimately put your computer on your desk. Ditto for your television, microwave oven, processed foods, medications, automobile, i dare say, every human product you can possibly lay your hands on in your home has been accelerated in discovery and quality by science.
Why not argue against science in a sane manner? how about making some points about nuclear weapons and responsibility? global warming? human experimentation? gene therapies? cloning? your arguments are boring because they are not arguments at all--only complaints brought about by your own misunderstanding of the subject.
http://www.csupomona.edu/~hsilberman/webstuff/read .html
The Blind Watchmaker by Richard Dawkins
The Dragons of Eden by Carl Sagan
the best books ever written about the evolution of intelligence... hands down...
vassago
... and nano is making quantum computers a real possibility as well. can't wait for the day when one is built!
to understand the problem you need to analyze who you get your information from and what their interests ultimately are. i'm not talking about conspiracy theories, i'm talking about common sense. all major media outlets are corporations which have shareholders and thus a prime directive of their own: profit. the reason we see distortions is because they make the stories more interesting... at least to most of the people who never miss the 5 o'clock news.
it's more interesting to tell people that the banks will fall apart next year, that hackers have taken over a satellite, that dennis rodman's hair is green this week. none of it is news--it's pacification... and unfortunately most americans eat it up and love it.
journalism is dead in the mainstream... the public can't appreciate real journalism and would rather hear about kiko the whale's dramatic rescue by sea world. everything is human interest now and each night there's a story about the dangers of such-and-such product and "what you should do now to protect your kids". crap... complete crap.
did you know any author who appears on oprah to promote a book is instantly a bestseller?!? nobody reads the good ones anymore.
anyhow, i do have some hope that new information channels will be facilitated by the internet and people's ability to disseminate information easily without a super-watt antenna. slashdot is one example, even though it's not the traditional format. but you do need advertisers to pay for your existence... right now i'm looking at one for hermanmillerstore.com, will they some day convince slashdot to run a favorable article about their product? i doubt it. but read the latimes and you realize they have an agenda, just like the nytimes, cnn, abc, cbs, every one of them. it's subtle sometimes and overt at other times... but it's naive to think they don't pick and choose their stories and then distort the ones that could sell a few more papers or push up the ratings.
there seems to be a melding of the sitcoms and the newsshows lately--news anchors are celebrities for reading words off a screen and looking like plastic with makeup.
this just signals the end of the world to me. corporations play the public like pawns and unfortunalely most americans enjoy being played.
hernan@well.com