I don't see the need for it. The information density limit that physics imposes by the Bekenstein bound remains the same regardless of your base (or even whether you use a digital or analog computer).
Nonsense. Native base ten is still done by mainframes in financial transaction processing, because the rounding errors are different and they have to match decimal ones.
Why is this modded as funny?
BTW, since you seem to know a lot about spice--how to I model thermal modulation of transistor parameters in a simulator that doesn't implement native thermal modeling, such as LTSpice (I'm poor, gotta stick to the free stuff)
> "a series of complex chemical reaction sequences"
Electrochemical reactions at a much higher level of scale. Most of the chemical reactions in a neuron have to do with cell physiology and keeping it alive than its contribution to intelligence.
"what would you consider evidence that you, yourself, are really *thinking* and not just doing some tricks to make it seem that way"
Nothing. There's no clear distinction between the two; any distinction is largely a matter of degree, and is a subjective view of semantics. This is generally the case with any emergent phenomena.
LOL. Genetic complexity is required to make something as complex as a cell function--but that has to do with coordinating extremely complex chemical reaction sequences and has nothing to do with any reasonable definition of intelligence one might come up with. The majority of genetic material even in multicellular organisms has to do with running the internal cellular machinery, and much less of it deals with higher level functionality.
"Words are assigned some meaning which represents actual concepts"
But these are relative things. Their sole objective representation is the neural correlates of thought about them. This is why the implication of using the word "actual" in there is misleading, as it implies these mental concepts are concrete entities. The only thing that gives them significance is that we use a shared language and it's only the similarity of specialization across human individuals' thinking that makes them not completely "arbitrary"--but only within this specialized, subjective context--there's no such thing as objective meaning. Thus the inevitable conclusion remains that intelligence is a purely subjective concept, since semantics are subjective.
"Someone who can analyse the source code and determine that it is just parsing responses without any reason to think it's understanding."
LOL! You can't be serious! A brain expert can equally claim you have no understanding--simply replace "someone who can analyse the source code" with "a neuroscientist who can analyse the neurological correlates of human thought", and retain the "just parsing..." part. You are also improperly using words like "understand" which you cannot define well.
"No, but do I need to?"
Of course you do--your argument is begging that question!
"All I care about is whether I can prove this to me."
This is a meaningless comment. What sort of proof is this? In what sort of formal logical system? If outside of one, then it's not a proof, it's trying to satisfy your mind that something is the case on an at least partially emotional level.
"I just want a machine that thinks similarly to me."
Yep, definitely emotional considerations you're basing your post on.
"I have an ability to extrapolate and apply general concepts from simple principles."
Does it make you feel better to believe this? Sorry bud, but it is not nearly so general; you merely think it is because you never consider what your performance would be in an environment that's not so narrowly specific as the one you live in, and to which you have been greatly specialized by evolution (and though civilization has quickly transformed many things, these transformations have still been more or less constrained to create a world that remains relatively easily comprehensible to our specialized thinking). As cognitive psychology has shown, most of the heuristics our brain uses are a product of evolution and it's very easy to create trivial problems that the vast majority of people get wrong--consult your nearest cog.psy. text for examples. The same goes toward anything else to do with our brain. Consider the visual system, for example: we have neural circuits that derive shape from shading, and the way the brain can deal with what is an ill-defined problem is to assume additional constraints such as a single main directional light, and some things about surface properties and typical geometry features of earth objects. Our ability for abstract thought is just a derivative of the language grammar circuits in the brain, and as it's thus more analogous to an interpreted program rather than a compiled one, it's far more inefficient than most other information processing the brain does--which is all special purpose. This ability composes just a fraction of human intelligence, and even this portion is not completely general--the sort of heuristics mentioned before apply here as well and it is very difficult to realize when one is using them and turn them off, so to speak. If you draw a scatter-plot of all humans' thoughts that have been thought in the phase space of all possible thoughts, clustering in a very tiny hypervolume will be the certain case.
"simplistic way to parse responses to match your massive yet limited supply of answers" I laughed when I read this as there are significant parallels between your line of thinking and the infamous Chinese Room thought experiment. The arguments used to invalidate CR have obvious analogs that act against your view, so familiarizing yourself with them is recommended.
Correction: if we can do that, then we're close to human-like AI, not human-level AI--the two are not the same. The human way of thinking is very specialized by our evolutionary circumstances. The most useful AIs would be ones that complement us by excelling in areas where we're not that good.
Mirror image recognition is not a good self-awareness test because it relies on a certain level of intelligence. Self-awareness and consciousness are at a lower level than that, and all mammalian brains have those functionalities (see Damasio's work identifying the relevant neurological components).
Why was "beautiful jellyfish" selected as the portion of the text hyperlinking to the article? I clicked on it expecting to see a beautiful jellyfish, and instead saw three humans that are not quite beautiful...
You're an idiot. A simple consult of Wikipedia would have told you the timebase is provided by a pendulum (and it wouldn't have made sense to expect anything else) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corpus_Clock
The face plate was made by exploding a steel sheet to a mold underwater. This also happens to be one of the most advanced mechanical clocks in existence. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corpus_Clock
> "And the clock itself really isn't much of a clock. The only mildly interesting thing about it is the "time eating" grasshopper that travels around the outside."
This is a ludicrous statement, considering this is one of the most advanced mechanical clocks in existence (electricity is used simply for the lights and a motor to rewind the clock). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corpus_Clock
Research. Actual research is going to virtual retinal displays, which is also more efficient in terms of battery use since all the emitted light impacts the retina, instead of being wasted by projecting on an actual screen which diffuses the light so that only a small portion goes to the retina. It's also a proven technology, and can even create varying depth of focus.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't see the need for it. The information density limit that physics imposes by the Bekenstein bound remains the same regardless of your base (or even whether you use a digital or analog computer).
Nonsense. Native base ten is still done by mainframes in financial transaction processing, because the rounding errors are different and they have to match decimal ones.
Why is this modded as funny? BTW, since you seem to know a lot about spice--how to I model thermal modulation of transistor parameters in a simulator that doesn't implement native thermal modeling, such as LTSpice (I'm poor, gotta stick to the free stuff)
What's funny is the GP thought SPICE is for diagramming (it's for simulation).
Sorry bud, but SPICE is for simulation, not diagramming (CAD software is for the latter).
The same thing the US did in Japan, and (by Truman's estimate), saved many more lives than were, albeit more dramatically, destroyed.
I have AVG on my computer, but I've started installing Antivir on others' now and I have to say I might switch myself.
The most important point is actually to block electromagnetic interference coming from the computer. That's why I laugh at cases with plastic windows.
it shouldn't have entries that try and guess
How about entries that try to guess?
> "a series of complex chemical reaction sequences"
Electrochemical reactions at a much higher level of scale. Most of the chemical reactions in a neuron have to do with cell physiology and keeping it alive than its contribution to intelligence.
"what would you consider evidence that you, yourself, are really *thinking* and not just doing some tricks to make it seem that way"
Nothing. There's no clear distinction between the two; any distinction is largely a matter of degree, and is a subjective view of semantics. This is generally the case with any emergent phenomena.
LOL. Genetic complexity is required to make something as complex as a cell function--but that has to do with coordinating extremely complex chemical reaction sequences and has nothing to do with any reasonable definition of intelligence one might come up with. The majority of genetic material even in multicellular organisms has to do with running the internal cellular machinery, and much less of it deals with higher level functionality.
"Words are assigned some meaning which represents actual concepts"
But these are relative things. Their sole objective representation is the neural correlates of thought about them. This is why the implication of using the word "actual" in there is misleading, as it implies these mental concepts are concrete entities. The only thing that gives them significance is that we use a shared language and it's only the similarity of specialization across human individuals' thinking that makes them not completely "arbitrary"--but only within this specialized, subjective context--there's no such thing as objective meaning. Thus the inevitable conclusion remains that intelligence is a purely subjective concept, since semantics are subjective.
"Someone who can analyse the source code and determine that it is just parsing responses without any reason to think it's understanding."
LOL! You can't be serious! A brain expert can equally claim you have no understanding--simply replace "someone who can analyse the source code" with "a neuroscientist who can analyse the neurological correlates of human thought", and retain the "just parsing..." part. You are also improperly using words like "understand" which you cannot define well.
"No, but do I need to?"
Of course you do--your argument is begging that question!
"All I care about is whether I can prove this to me."
This is a meaningless comment. What sort of proof is this? In what sort of formal logical system? If outside of one, then it's not a proof, it's trying to satisfy your mind that something is the case on an at least partially emotional level.
"I just want a machine that thinks similarly to me."
Yep, definitely emotional considerations you're basing your post on.
"I have an ability to extrapolate and apply general concepts from simple principles."
Does it make you feel better to believe this? Sorry bud, but it is not nearly so general; you merely think it is because you never consider what your performance would be in an environment that's not so narrowly specific as the one you live in, and to which you have been greatly specialized by evolution (and though civilization has quickly transformed many things, these transformations have still been more or less constrained to create a world that remains relatively easily comprehensible to our specialized thinking). As cognitive psychology has shown, most of the heuristics our brain uses are a product of evolution and it's very easy to create trivial problems that the vast majority of people get wrong--consult your nearest cog.psy. text for examples. The same goes toward anything else to do with our brain. Consider the visual system, for example: we have neural circuits that derive shape from shading, and the way the brain can deal with what is an ill-defined problem is to assume additional constraints such as a single main directional light, and some things about surface properties and typical geometry features of earth objects. Our ability for abstract thought is just a derivative of the language grammar circuits in the brain, and as it's thus more analogous to an interpreted program rather than a compiled one, it's far more inefficient than most other information processing the brain does--which is all special purpose. This ability composes just a fraction of human intelligence, and even this portion is not completely general--the sort of heuristics mentioned before apply here as well and it is very difficult to realize when one is using them and turn them off, so to speak. If you draw a scatter-plot of all humans' thoughts that have been thought in the phase space of all possible thoughts, clustering in a very tiny hypervolume will be the certain case.
"simplistic way to parse responses to match your massive yet limited supply of answers" I laughed when I read this as there are significant parallels between your line of thinking and the infamous Chinese Room thought experiment. The arguments used to invalidate CR have obvious analogs that act against your view, so familiarizing yourself with them is recommended.
Correction: if we can do that, then we're close to human-like AI, not human-level AI--the two are not the same. The human way of thinking is very specialized by our evolutionary circumstances. The most useful AIs would be ones that complement us by excelling in areas where we're not that good.
How is this insightful? It's the sort of silly semantics game that a child would come up with.
Your argument is what happens when basic sanity checks are omitted. The ant's "intelligence" is constrained by its dismal neurology.
Mirror image recognition is not a good self-awareness test because it relies on a certain level of intelligence. Self-awareness and consciousness are at a lower level than that, and all mammalian brains have those functionalities (see Damasio's work identifying the relevant neurological components).
Why was "beautiful jellyfish" selected as the portion of the text hyperlinking to the article? I clicked on it expecting to see a beautiful jellyfish, and instead saw three humans that are not quite beautiful...
Writing "integer dimensionality" is grammatically incorrect; you should have written "integral dimensionality" because "integer" is always a noun.
You're an idiot. A simple consult of Wikipedia would have told you the timebase is provided by a pendulum (and it wouldn't have made sense to expect anything else) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corpus_Clock
The face plate was made by exploding a steel sheet to a mold underwater. This also happens to be one of the most advanced mechanical clocks in existence. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corpus_Clock
> "And the clock itself really isn't much of a clock. The only mildly interesting thing about it is the "time eating" grasshopper that travels around the outside."
This is a ludicrous statement, considering this is one of the most advanced mechanical clocks in existence (electricity is used simply for the lights and a motor to rewind the clock). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corpus_Clock
Research. Actual research is going to virtual retinal displays, which is also more efficient in terms of battery use since all the emitted light impacts the retina, instead of being wasted by projecting on an actual screen which diffuses the light so that only a small portion goes to the retina. It's also a proven technology, and can even create varying depth of focus.