Yes, we could be in a simulation. In fact, maybe none of you exist. I might have been created 5 minutes ago complete with false memories in a virtual world where I am the only conscious entity. The folks running the simulation would also be conscious entities. I might be one of their experiments.
The operative words in the above paragraph are 'could', 'maybe' and 'might'. In fact most the time I don't think about it; I just assume that other people exist and my memories and sensory input have a rough correlation to some sort of reality because that seems like the practical thing to do. But I acknowledge that I can't know for sure that that's the case. So, the rest of this post, I'm going to assume that you other people exist and this is not just for the amusement and edification of some AI students observing me in yet another run of their simulation software.
Back in the 1600s, philosopher Rene Descartes considered the matter and decided that the only thing he could know for sure was that he existed, because he was thinking about it. Everything else might have been false. (His famous line, in Latin, was Cogito ergo sum, I think therefore I am.) Older than DesCartes is the idea that life is a dream, or we are living in the dream of some god, who is himself living in the dream of a god, etc.
Presumably, we (or at least I) might be in a simulation nested in another simulation. But working up through the levels, one would expect to get to the original. The creators of that first simulation don't have to be gods. They might have evolved up from a primeval universe formed in a big bang. They wouldn't necessarily know the answers to the really fundamental questions like how did it all get started? Why is there something instead of nothing?
I don't know the answers to the fundamental questions and I don't think anyone else knows. (If I thought somebody else knew, I'd ask them, and then I'd know, right?) This is what being an agnostic (from ancient Greek for not knowing) is all about.
Size doesn't necessarily reflect popularity, or importance for that matter. How much documentation still exists for the Maya Civilization for instance? Their writing system was only recently deciphered, and tomb raiders have destroyed or disturbed a lot of archeological material.
Elvis Presley is well documented and a lot of people liked Elvis Presley and may have wanted to contribute. (I haven't read the article, maybe it was only one person who wrote it all out. Ditto for Poland.)
The Polish wikipedia may have a longer article about Poland than about Elvis Presley. (I haven't checked that either. This reply is, to be honest, rather casual on my part.)
Also some writers are just more verbose than others. Being longer doesn't mean more information is conveyed, or that it is conveyed as well.
As I understand it, red dwarfs are the most numerous stars in the galaxy. (Also much longer lived, if the difference between 5 billion and 100 billion years matters to you.) Although they are smaller, cooler, and redder, if a planet is close enough, it will be in the temperature comfort zone for humans. But what kind of light would one see? Would it be perpetual sunset/sunrise? Would chlorophyll driven photosynthesis work?
I'm also thinking it's all very academic because by the time humanity has the technology to get there (if it ever does), things will be very different with us or our descendants (Who may not be biological descendants.)
How many couples will want to stay together but have his and her sexbots on the side? How many couples will want one sexbot on the side for threesomes?
...of sexbots when they become uh significantly functional?
Will there be a Darwininan selection process where only people who really want children will have them, so eventually everybody wants to have children and is a competent family man/woman?
Will women be relieved that all the jerks have gone off with their sexbots and aren't bothering them anymore?
How many of men and boys that start out wanting a sexbot will grow out of it and learn to appreciate the real thing and how many will be permanently spoiled and never be able to adjust to the give and take of a relationship with another real human?
How many older men, who have had relationships with women, even relatively successful ones, will just decide it ain't worth the work anymore and go for a sexbot?
Why shouldn't the cost be higher where there is frequently ice on the road if that increases the cost to the provider? Are you expecting people in ice free areas to subsidize you?
I've been reading slashdot for quite awhile (notice "cough cough" my 5 digit Id, and I was an AC for awhile before I signed up.) The changes in slashdot are to some extent part of changes in the internet itself. More people are interacting now, and younger people, certain tropes or memes or whatever have gotten established, and in some cases become old hat and shrunk away. Things change, period. I'm nostalgic for the hey day of Usenet, the late 80s. But if I went back and looked at old usenet posts in google groups I'd probably be underwhelmed, partly because the topics from then are dated (flame wars in rec.audio over tubes vs solid state or digital vs analog), or otherwise thrashed over so often that everything got said thrice over. Part of it would be that I've changed too. If I went back and looked at an archive of early slashdot posts (is such a thing possible?) I'd probably get the same feeling of being underwhelmed that I do with usenet. (But slashdot hasn't degraded nearly as much as Usenet has. In fact, I'm not sure I'd say it's degraded much at all, just changed.)
I recently watch a Documentary TV series on PBS called "The Brain WIth David Edelman" which I thought was excellent. There was a place where the series talked about consciousness. First, it pointed out how most of the activity in the brain is unconscious. When people are learning a skill, they are doing things consciously and badly, but later, it becomes an unconscious activity and is done more efficiently.
I was going to call this Edelman's definition of consciousness, but decided that it's really his description of the function. Still worth considering I think. According to the documentary, the function of consciousness is to deal with unexpected and novel events. Edelman compared it to the CEO of a big corporation, and there was a scene of him in a power suit on the top floor of some building. This executive doesn't know about all the goings on on the floors below, maintenance, processing sales orders, etc. The executive is there to handle the unusual matters. In the same way, consciousness doesn't usually involve itself much with breathing or walking. A person might not remember anything about going to the kitchen to get a drink of water unless something unusual happened on the way for example.
So, thinking about the function of consciousness might shed light on what it is exactly.
I visited that link. From what I read, the "no bigger than a large desk" solution is for solar wind, not cosmic rays, which are more energetic. In fact, reading farther down, there was a reply, 'let me rain on this parade' about the strength and power requirements of a field strong enough to deflect cosmic rays. It also gave a link to an article that seems similar to the one I remember reading except that it's gloomier https://engineering.dartmouth.edu/~d76205x/research/Shielding/docs/Parker_06.pdf as in 5 meters, not 3 feet of water. It also talks about the possibly negative effects of such a strong magnetic field.
Two things that I wonder about wrt a magnetic field. I'm not an electrical engineer or a physicist, but, do you need to constantly supply power to such a field? Permanent magnets maintain a field without using power. Also, could the astronauts protect themselves from the field by being in something like a faraday cage?
The article mentions that the 'poles' of the magnetic field would not be shielding from the field. How about the astronauts live in the poles and just protect that patch of space with a water shield? (Ooh, Ooh, where's the patent office?)
Years ago I read an article somewhere about protection from Cosmic Rays. It made an impression, and what's also made an impression is that I don't think I've ever come across anything else about it in the discussions about plans to send people to Mars. I gather though, that cumulative damage from Cosmic Rays are a serious enough issue that it would be criminally negligent of the powers to be if they didn't offer protection. So, what to do about Cosmic Rays? This is from memory about what the article said and may not be quite right but: 1. 3 feet of water offers as much protection from Cosmic Rays as the earth's atmosphere (maybe it was the atmosphere as it is in Denver, Colo.) So a ship going to Mars could be sheathed in a water jacket. That's a lot of mass, but, the bigger the ship, the less the total percentage of mass would be dedicated to the water jacket. Also, the water could be used for drinking, then purified and recycled. (Also, since the article came out, I've read about water being found on the Moon. Getting water from the Moon for the water jacket might be more practical as it has less of a gravity well to be hauled up from.) 2. Alternatively, a very strong magnetic field around the ship would deflect the cosmic rays. This would be less massive. Methinks it would have to be a very powerful field and I'm wondering a bit at the technology to do it.
I learned to program in college before computers were found in the home, starting with Fortran. And, I could do it, but it didn't really come together for me till I learned assembly language. In class, the teacher started with a very simple model of a computer that had only an accumulator and a small instruction set. We didn't learn about index registers until we had had to write self-modifying code to go through a list. We learned about indirection and pointers and so on.
And it wasn't hard! OK, I already had experience, but really, a kid could have learned it easily enough. One could probably turn it into a kind of game without much trouble. And, after that, you just know.
The main reason I've favored intel MBs recently is that they've opened sourced their graphics, which are good enough for me, so I don't have to worry about them. But then, I'm not a gamer. Are there folks out there who need the high end graphics stuff for something besides games?
PS Just for the record, I have ways of wasting my time that may not be any better than playing games so I'm not going to adopt a 'holier than thou' attitude towards gamers. And even I may benefit from the gamer world because gaming does push technology.
Languages are affected by the cultures they are used in. I think this is mostly a matter of vocabulary. In Japanese for instance, you would use a different word for 'brother' if it was your own brother as opposed to someone else's brother. In fact there are different words for older and younger brother. That says something about Japanese culture. Do you incorporate things in your languages that specifically reflect the cultures involved?
There can be intense debates about the merits and flaws of one computer language versus another. Some languages have tried to be able to do everything and they usually don't catch on. (PL1 might be the first example.)
Natural human languages are not, for the most part, designed, though grammarians may sometimes try to 'fix' them a bit. But they have flaws. The easiest things to point out are the ambiguities and redundancies. (Some redundancy might be a good thing, allowing a listener to guess at meaning when a speaker isn't heard perfectly.)
Do you deliberately put flaws in languages or, on the other hand, try to design 'ideal' languages that are somehow better than the naturally evolved ones?
Not exactly what you were asking for, but, as others have pointed out, getting them to be interested or care is a major part of it. So you might go over statistics as used in big league sports. Would the movie Moneyball be over their heads?
I was about the same age when I saw 'Forbidden Planet' in its 1st run as the OP was when he saw 'Star Wars' (That's what it was called when I saw it in its 1st run in theaters.)
I have to say, my overall opinion of FP hasn't changed much. I loved the philosophical implications then and I still do now. I didn't like the stupid mushy romance between the Captain and Altaira then and I still don't like it now. I liked the special effects then (though even as a kid I could see that clunky, barely able to walk Robbie wasn't a very practical design), and I still like them now. (One difference, now I can see the monster without getting nightmares.)
After seeing 'Star Wars', I left the theater thinking it was a lot of fun, but overall, probably not quite as good as Lucas's 'American Graffitti'. Hmm, I wonder, if I saw 'American Graffitti' again, would I think that had aged well or poorly.
This is one of those times when I actually RTFMed. I agree there was self-promotion, but Wolfram has the chops to really digest and understand the Victorian era style and necessarily rough first casting of novel ideas. Plugging through all that documentation couldn't have been easy, and it's not like the guy doesn't have other things to do, so he deserves some kudos in my opinion. Wolfram may have been serving himself, but he also served Ada and Charles Babbage, and that makes it worth reading.
One thing that came up several times in Massimo's interesting notes was the limitation of not looking outside the particle cone (or is it 'light cone'). I was wondering though, if someday technology might allow us to recognize that a particle was entangled with a particle on the other side of the light cone, and therefore, give a hint as to what was out there. Hmmm, is that analogous to trying to find out what's inside a black hole?
In Surely You're Joking Mr Feynman Richard Feynman talks about seeing the cyclotron at Princeton after having been at MIT, and the one at Cornell later. MIT had a big cyclotron and he expected Princeton's to be even bigger. He was surprised to find out it was in the basement of an old building, but when he saw it, he understood.
It was wonderful! Because they worked with it! They didn't have to sit in another room and push buttons!... (When I got to Cornell...It was the word's smallest cyclotron but they got fantastic results. They had all kinds of special techniques and tricks.
I'm not a physicist either. I first remember reading about this in a Scientific Amercian Article years and years ago.
I think the notion came from studying black holes and the entropy associated with them. (See the wikipedia article on black holes under the section on 'entropy and black holes'.) Entropy is related to information, and the amount of information that can be contained in a volume of space increases as the surface area increases rather than as the volume increases. If you double the diameter of a sphere, the volume increases by 2 cubed, while the surface increases by 2 squared. So, you think of being able to put 8 times as many gumdrops in a bowl with twice the diameter, but you apparently cannot stuff 8 times as much information, only 4 times as much, so it's as though all the info contained could be represented on its surface, like a hologram.
I recently saw a 6 part documentary on PBS, "The Brain With David Eagleman" that impressed me quite a bit. It covers a lot of ground in it's 6 hours about the brain, from basic biological attributes of the physical brain to philosophical questions about reality and questions about the more disturbing aspects of human behavior.
Included are people who have suffered one kind of mental disability or another. There's a man who had Asperger's Syndrome and seems to have been cured during a scientific study, and a woman who was in a traffic accident and now cannot make decisions. (According to the documentary, emotions are what help us prioritize alternatives and help in the decision process. Somehow, that emotional part that assists was disconnected from the rational for this unfortunate woman. She got very emotional while trying to make decisions so it wasn't that the emotions weren't there BTW.)
Eagleman points out how 'consciousness' is only a very small part of the brain's total activity. He compared it to the top executive of a big company. The executive is not even aware of the routine, mundane and commonplace goings on that make up most of the company's activity. It's only the exceptions, the surprises and things that require some new kind of behavior, that get the executive's attention, and that, according to Eagleman, is what consciousness is in the brain. Consciousness is usually not dealing with breathing or walking or eating unless, say, you want to see how long you can hold your breath, or you're trying to find stepping stones across a stream, or you're wondering if the bread you're about to eat is too stale.
The kind of AI that most people are excited by (whether with enthusiasm or fear) is the kind that could produce conscious thought. I reckon someday it will be achieved, probably through a gradual process where it gets understood a little bit, and that little bit is modeled artificially, which helps in gaining further insight which then leads to better modeling, and so on.
I have an old telephone line serial modem made by Practical Peripherals that also had faxing ability. Occasionally I do still find myself wanting to send a fax, but it had gotten to the point where only one old computer still had a serial port, and using it even on that seemed like a dicey affair. (I'm not sure if the hardware was going South, or if support for serial ports in the software wasn't as good or what.) Anyway, I finally broke down and for a few bucks bought a usb fax modem, and it works well and smoothly. The only thing I miss is the song of the phone modem as it makes its connection since the new gadget doesn't have a speaker.
The other thing replaced is the parallel port for printers. I still have an old fashioned printer cable and a printer that has both parallel and usb connections on it. So, one time, just for grins, I tried to use it to connect that same old computer that had a parallel port, and I couldn't get the system to recognize the printer, whereas when connecting by usb it's detected automatically. (I vaguely remember in the old days, one had to go through various incantations to get linux to recognize a printer, I must still have my notes around somewhere, but too much work to try to dig them out.)
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, we could be in a simulation. In fact, maybe none of you exist. I might have been created 5 minutes ago complete with false memories in a virtual world where I am the only conscious entity. The folks running the simulation would also be conscious entities. I might be one of their experiments.
The operative words in the above paragraph are 'could', 'maybe' and 'might'. In fact most the time I don't think about it; I just assume that other people exist and my memories and sensory input have a rough correlation to some sort of reality because that seems like the practical thing to do. But I acknowledge that I can't know for sure that that's the case. So, the rest of this post, I'm going to assume that you other people exist and this is not just for the amusement and edification of some AI students observing me in yet another run of their simulation software.
Back in the 1600s, philosopher Rene Descartes considered the matter and decided that the only thing he could know for sure was that he existed, because he was thinking about it. Everything else might have been false. (His famous line, in Latin, was Cogito ergo sum, I think therefore I am.) Older than DesCartes is the idea that life is a dream, or we are living in the dream of some god, who is himself living in the dream of a god, etc.
Presumably, we (or at least I) might be in a simulation nested in another simulation. But working up through the levels, one would expect to get to the original. The creators of that first simulation don't have to be gods. They might have evolved up from a primeval universe formed in a big bang. They wouldn't necessarily know the answers to the really fundamental questions like how did it all get started? Why is there something instead of nothing?
I don't know the answers to the fundamental questions and I don't think anyone else knows. (If I thought somebody else knew, I'd ask them, and then I'd know, right?) This is what being an agnostic (from ancient Greek for not knowing) is all about.
Size doesn't necessarily reflect popularity, or importance for that matter. How much documentation still exists for the Maya Civilization for instance? Their writing system was only recently deciphered, and tomb raiders have destroyed or disturbed a lot of archeological material.
Elvis Presley is well documented and a lot of people liked Elvis Presley and may have wanted to contribute. (I haven't read the article, maybe it was only one person who wrote it all out. Ditto for Poland.)
The Polish wikipedia may have a longer article about Poland than about Elvis Presley. (I haven't checked that either. This reply is, to be honest, rather casual on my part.)
Also some writers are just more verbose than others. Being longer doesn't mean more information is conveyed, or that it is conveyed as well.
As I understand it, red dwarfs are the most numerous stars in the galaxy. (Also much longer lived, if the difference between 5 billion and 100 billion years matters to you.) Although they are smaller, cooler, and redder, if a planet is close enough, it will be in the temperature comfort zone for humans. But what kind of light would one see? Would it be perpetual sunset/sunrise? Would chlorophyll driven photosynthesis work?
I'm also thinking it's all very academic because by the time humanity has the technology to get there (if it ever does), things will be very different with us or our descendants (Who may not be biological descendants.)
How many couples will want to stay together but have his and her sexbots on the side?
How many couples will want one sexbot on the side for threesomes?
...of sexbots when they become uh significantly functional?
Will there be a Darwininan selection process where only people who really want children will have them, so eventually everybody wants to have children and is a competent family man/woman?
Will women be relieved that all the jerks have gone off with their sexbots and aren't bothering them anymore?
How many of men and boys that start out wanting a sexbot will grow out of it and learn to appreciate the real thing and how many will be permanently spoiled and never be able to adjust to the give and take of a relationship with another real human?
How many older men, who have had relationships with women, even relatively successful ones, will just decide it ain't worth the work anymore and go for a sexbot?
How many women will want sexbots?
Why shouldn't the cost be higher where there is frequently ice on the road if that increases the cost to the provider? Are you expecting people in ice free areas to subsidize you?
Heavy lifting has fixed the back and shoulder pains that had plagued me for decades.
Ditto. (Well, maybe not the decades part; I started a regimen sooner than that. Back extensions with weights were really what fixed up my back.)
I've been reading slashdot for quite awhile (notice "cough cough" my 5 digit Id, and I was an AC for awhile before I signed up.)
The changes in slashdot are to some extent part of changes in the internet itself. More people are interacting now, and younger people, certain tropes or memes or whatever have gotten established, and in some cases become old hat and shrunk away.
Things change, period. I'm nostalgic for the hey day of Usenet, the late 80s. But if I went back and looked at old usenet posts in google groups I'd probably be underwhelmed, partly because the topics from then are dated (flame wars in rec.audio over tubes vs solid state or digital vs analog), or otherwise thrashed over so often that everything got said thrice over. Part of it would be that I've changed too. If I went back and looked at an archive of early slashdot posts (is such a thing possible?) I'd probably get the same feeling of being underwhelmed that I do with usenet. (But slashdot hasn't degraded nearly as much as Usenet has. In fact, I'm not sure I'd say it's degraded much at all, just changed.)
I recently watch a Documentary TV series on PBS called "The Brain WIth David Edelman" which I thought was excellent. There was a place where the series talked about consciousness. First, it pointed out how most of the activity in the brain is unconscious. When people are learning a skill, they are doing things consciously and badly, but later, it becomes an unconscious activity and is done more efficiently.
I was going to call this Edelman's definition of consciousness, but decided that it's really his description of the function. Still worth considering I think. According to the documentary, the function of consciousness is to deal with unexpected and novel events. Edelman compared it to the CEO of a big corporation, and there was a scene of him in a power suit on the top floor of some building. This executive doesn't know about all the goings on on the floors below, maintenance, processing sales orders, etc. The executive is there to handle the unusual matters. In the same way, consciousness doesn't usually involve itself much with breathing or walking. A person might not remember anything about going to the kitchen to get a drink of water unless something unusual happened on the way for example.
So, thinking about the function of consciousness might shed light on what it is exactly.
I visited that link. From what I read, the "no bigger than a large desk" solution is for solar wind, not cosmic rays, which are more energetic. In fact, reading farther down, there was a reply, 'let me rain on this parade' about the strength and power requirements of a field strong enough to deflect cosmic rays. It also gave a link to an article that seems similar to the one I remember reading except that it's gloomier https://engineering.dartmouth.edu/~d76205x/research/Shielding/docs/Parker_06.pdf as in 5 meters, not 3 feet of water. It also talks about the possibly negative effects of such a strong magnetic field.
Two things that I wonder about wrt a magnetic field. I'm not an electrical engineer or a physicist, but, do you need to constantly supply power to such a field? Permanent magnets maintain a field without using power. Also, could the astronauts protect themselves from the field by being in something like a faraday cage?
The article mentions that the 'poles' of the magnetic field would not be shielding from the field. How about the astronauts live in the poles and just protect that patch of space with a water shield? (Ooh, Ooh, where's the patent office?)
Years ago I read an article somewhere about protection from Cosmic Rays. It made an impression, and what's also made an impression is that I don't think I've ever come across anything else about it in the discussions about plans to send people to Mars. I gather though, that cumulative damage from Cosmic Rays are a serious enough issue that it would be criminally negligent of the powers to be if they didn't offer protection. So, what to do about Cosmic Rays? This is from memory about what the article said and may not be quite right but:
1. 3 feet of water offers as much protection from Cosmic Rays as the earth's atmosphere (maybe it was the atmosphere as it is in Denver, Colo.) So a ship going to Mars could be sheathed in a water jacket. That's a lot of mass, but, the bigger the ship, the less the total percentage of mass would be dedicated to the water jacket. Also, the water could be used for drinking, then purified and recycled. (Also, since the article came out, I've read about water being found on the Moon. Getting water from the Moon for the water jacket might be more practical as it has less of a gravity well to be hauled up from.)
2. Alternatively, a very strong magnetic field around the ship would deflect the cosmic rays. This would be less massive. Methinks it would have to be a very powerful field and I'm wondering a bit at the technology to do it.
I learned to program in college before computers were found in the home, starting with Fortran. And, I could do it, but it didn't really come together for me till I learned assembly language. In class, the teacher started with a very simple model of a computer that had only an accumulator and a small instruction set. We didn't learn about index registers until we had had to write self-modifying code to go through a list. We learned about indirection and pointers and so on.
And it wasn't hard! OK, I already had experience, but really, a kid could have learned it easily enough. One could probably turn it into a kind of game without much trouble. And, after that, you just know.
The main reason I've favored intel MBs recently is that they've opened sourced their graphics, which are good enough for me, so I don't have to worry about them. But then, I'm not a gamer. Are there folks out there who need the high end graphics stuff for something besides games?
PS
Just for the record, I have ways of wasting my time that may not be any better than playing games so I'm not going to adopt a 'holier than thou' attitude towards gamers. And even I may benefit from the gamer world because gaming does push technology.
Languages are affected by the cultures they are used in. I think this is mostly a matter of vocabulary. In Japanese for instance, you would use a different word for 'brother' if it was your own brother as opposed to someone else's brother. In fact there are different words for older and younger brother. That says something about Japanese culture. Do you incorporate things in your languages that specifically reflect the cultures involved?
There can be intense debates about the merits and flaws of one computer language versus another. Some languages have tried to be able to do everything and they usually don't catch on. (PL1 might be the first example.)
Natural human languages are not, for the most part, designed, though grammarians may sometimes try to 'fix' them a bit. But they have flaws. The easiest things to point out are the ambiguities and redundancies. (Some redundancy might be a good thing, allowing a listener to guess at meaning when a speaker isn't heard perfectly.)
Do you deliberately put flaws in languages or, on the other hand, try to design 'ideal' languages that are somehow better than the naturally evolved ones?
What does "formal mechanisms for norm articulation" mean?
Not exactly what you were asking for, but, as others have pointed out, getting them to be interested or care is a major part of it. So you might go over statistics as used in big league sports. Would the movie Moneyball be over their heads?
Worth keeping a vhs player for
Get a TV capture card and digitize with mencoder before the tapes wear out.
I was about the same age when I saw 'Forbidden Planet' in its 1st run as the OP was when he saw 'Star Wars' (That's what it was called when I saw it in its 1st run in theaters.)
I have to say, my overall opinion of FP hasn't changed much. I loved the philosophical implications then and I still do now. I didn't like the stupid mushy romance between the Captain and Altaira then and I still don't like it now. I liked the special effects then (though even as a kid I could see that clunky, barely able to walk Robbie wasn't a very practical design), and I still like them now. (One difference, now I can see the monster without getting nightmares.)
After seeing 'Star Wars', I left the theater thinking it was a lot of fun, but overall, probably not quite as good as Lucas's 'American Graffitti'. Hmm, I wonder, if I saw 'American Graffitti' again, would I think that had aged well or poorly.
This is one of those times when I actually RTFMed.
I agree there was self-promotion, but Wolfram has the chops to really digest and understand the Victorian era style and necessarily rough first casting of novel ideas. Plugging through all that documentation couldn't have been easy, and it's not like the guy doesn't have other things to do, so he deserves some kudos in my opinion.
Wolfram may have been serving himself, but he also served Ada and Charles Babbage, and that makes it worth reading.
One thing that came up several times in Massimo's interesting notes was the limitation of not looking outside the particle cone (or is it 'light cone'). I was wondering though, if someday technology might allow us to recognize that a particle was entangled with a particle on the other side of the light cone, and therefore, give a hint as to what was out there. Hmmm, is that analogous to trying to find out what's inside a black hole?
In Surely You're Joking Mr Feynman Richard Feynman talks about seeing the cyclotron at Princeton after having been at MIT, and the one at Cornell later. MIT had a big cyclotron and he expected Princeton's to be even bigger. He was surprised to find out it was in the basement of an old building, but when he saw it, he understood.
It was wonderful! Because they worked with it! They didn't have to sit in another room and push buttons! ... ...It was the word's smallest cyclotron but they got fantastic results. They had all kinds of special techniques and tricks.
(When I got to Cornell
I'm not a physicist either. I first remember reading about this in a Scientific Amercian Article years and years ago.
I think the notion came from studying black holes and the entropy associated with them. (See the wikipedia article on black holes under the section on 'entropy and black holes'.) Entropy is related to information, and the amount of information that can be contained in a volume of space increases as the surface area increases rather than as the volume increases. If you double the diameter of a sphere, the volume increases by 2 cubed, while the surface increases by 2 squared. So, you think of being able to put 8 times as many gumdrops in a bowl with twice the diameter, but you apparently cannot stuff 8 times as much information, only 4 times as much, so it's as though all the info contained could be represented on its surface, like a hologram.
I recently saw a 6 part documentary on PBS, "The Brain With David Eagleman" that impressed me quite a bit. It covers a lot of ground in it's 6 hours about the brain, from basic biological attributes of the physical brain to philosophical questions about reality and questions about the more disturbing aspects of human behavior.
Included are people who have suffered one kind of mental disability or another. There's a man who had Asperger's Syndrome and seems to have been cured during a scientific study, and a woman who was in a traffic accident and now cannot make decisions. (According to the documentary, emotions are what help us prioritize alternatives and help in the decision process. Somehow, that emotional part that assists was disconnected from the rational for this unfortunate woman. She got very emotional while trying to make decisions so it wasn't that the emotions weren't there BTW.)
Eagleman points out how 'consciousness' is only a very small part of the brain's total activity. He compared it to the top executive of a big company. The executive is not even aware of the routine, mundane and commonplace goings on that make up most of the company's activity. It's only the exceptions, the surprises and things that require some new kind of behavior, that get the executive's attention, and that, according to Eagleman, is what consciousness is in the brain. Consciousness is usually not dealing with breathing or walking or eating unless, say, you want to see how long you can hold your breath, or you're trying to find stepping stones across a stream, or you're wondering if the bread you're about to eat is too stale.
The kind of AI that most people are excited by (whether with enthusiasm or fear) is the kind that could produce conscious thought. I reckon someday it will be achieved, probably through a gradual process where it gets understood a little bit, and that little bit is modeled artificially, which helps in gaining further insight which then leads to better modeling, and so on.
I have an old telephone line serial modem made by Practical Peripherals that also had faxing ability. Occasionally I do still find myself wanting to send a fax, but it had gotten to the point where only one old computer still had a serial port, and using it even on that seemed like a dicey affair. (I'm not sure if the hardware was going South, or if support for serial ports in the software wasn't as good or what.) Anyway, I finally broke down and for a few bucks bought a usb fax modem, and it works well and smoothly. The only thing I miss is the song of the phone modem as it makes its connection since the new gadget doesn't have a speaker.
The other thing replaced is the parallel port for printers. I still have an old fashioned printer cable and a printer that has both parallel and usb connections on it. So, one time, just for grins, I tried to use it to connect that same old computer that had a parallel port, and I couldn't get the system to recognize the printer, whereas when connecting by usb it's detected automatically. (I vaguely remember in the old days, one had to go through various incantations to get linux to recognize a printer, I must still have my notes around somewhere, but too much work to try to dig them out.)