You have got to be kidding. You are kidding, right?
The first sign that you post is flamebait is that you use the term "intellectual property" instead of the more correct and specific term "copyright". The copyright laws keep getting changed every time Mickey Mouse is about to become public domain. IMO, indefinitely extending the expiration of copyright violates the constitution.
Nonetheless, I agree with you in advising people to not violate the law, although when you call it stealing the RIAA's stuff, I imagine someone backing up a truck to the RIAA offices and carrying stuff away. Copyright violation is not stealing, nor is it the moral equivalent of stealing. It is certainly has nothing to do with robbing and plundering at sea.
I can't speak for everyone, but the problem I have with the RIAA and MPAA is that they are trying to cripple our technology in order to buttress their old fashioned business models. The reason that file sharing (or whatever technology the RIAA is currently fighting against) is a problem for the RIAA is not because people are inherently evil and will always steal things when they get a chance. It is a problem because the RIAA has steadfastly refused to provide a legal way for people to use the new technologies for consuming the RIAA's products.
A long time ago, the RIAA actually provided useful services to society. For example they standardized the RIAA compensation curve for phonograph preamps which meant that people only needed one preamp to play all of their records.
The RIAA was actually helpful in distributing information.
But well before the introduction of consumer digital audio, the concentration of power in the RIAA caused them to become corrupt. One manifestation of this corruption was that their business model changed from encouraging the distribution of information to controlling and restricting distribution which is a typical monopolistic tactic.
I recently saw a round table discussion by a bunch of silicon valley big wigs including the president of Stanford and Jonathan Schwartz from Sun. One of them said that companies whose business model is based on restricting information flow are doomed.
This is the problem facing the RIAA and I think this is why so many people hate them with a passion (even if some of those people are not able to articulate this reason). From what I've seen, ALL of the tactics taken by the RIAA have been to further restrict information flow instead of enhance it.
IMO the people running the RIAA are truly evil, and I don't use that word lightly. They are trying to make money by restricting information flow. They are harming the musicians and harming the consumers and they are charging money for this disservice.
As they say, opposition to novel ideas eventually dies away. I don't know for sure but I have a feeling that the RIAA is controlled by old, rich, fat, white guys who are set in their ways and are fearful of any new technology.
Unfortunately for them, they have good reason to be fearful of the new technologies because these technologies make the RIAA totally redundant. We don't need the big expensive record presses anymore. The RIAA will soon no longer serve any useful purpose. Once that fact is revealed for all to see then the last fig leaf hiding their corporate corruption will be there for all to see. The RIAA will disappear. Consumers will get a lot more music at a much more reasonable price (less than $1 per track) and musicians will make a lot more money.
If the RIAA got back to their original mandate of helping distribute information, they could once again serve a useful purpose. They wouldn't be in almost total control, like they are now, and they wouldn't be getting the biggest slice of the pie, like they are now, but they could provide useful services and receive reasonable compensation for the value they add.
But as long as the RIAA bases their business model on subtracting value instead of adding it, they will be reviled by lots of good people and they will be correctly described as evil.
Some of the posts in this thread (presumably by editors) showed that it was not practical to discourage the spammers. One reason given was that the distribution of people who submit successful stories has a tall spike but an extremely long tail.
CmdrTaco has already posted that he plans to implement noFollow on submitter links which will eliminate or reduce the PageRank incentive.
My point was that it will be easier and more effective to directly encourage the regular users than it will be to discourage the spammers.
I think we agree that regulars are discouraged because their submissions seem to be rejected 100% of the time. Effectively discouraging spammers might help a little, but two problems with this approach have been presented:
There didn't seem to be an effective and fair way to do this, and
discouraging the spammers wouldn't really solve the problem
I think the problem with the "discourage the spammers" approach (which worked will with moderated comments) is that the statistics of submissions make it a much different problem than comments (which by default all get accepted).
The "discourage the spammers" approach, almost by definition focuses only on accepted stories, which also by definition is a very small number (compared to comments). My suggestion of focusing instead on encouraging regular users, increases the number of thingies dealt with (submitted stories instead of accepted stories) and should thus allow a wider range of remedies to be applied.
I think that trying to encourage regulars by discourage spammers is like pushing a rope. But perhaps we will need to agree to disagree.
I prefer to reward speed over quality. But that is a flexible rule too.
I am going to pile on here too.
As I've posted elsewhere, I think part of the solution is to encourage regular users to submit more stories.
By choosing speed over quality you are rewarding the spammers and punishing the regular users. This makes the regular users submit fewer stories so they (as a group) fall further and further behind in the speed game.
I think simply choosing quality over speed may help improve things (slowly as new submitters get rewarded).
It may even be useful to view the first 5 submissions in reverse chronological order. DJ's learned to do this sort of thing years ago and starting saying the Nth caller would win the prize. Picking the first caller was unfair because some people had learned how to game that system. You have the some problem here which caused regular users stop submitting stories because they know they can't win.
A lot of regulars here don't bother to submit stories very often, because the odds of the submission actually being used are not very high.
I think you hit one of the nails on the head.
The solution will not be to discourage spammers, instead it will be to encourage regulars to submit more stories.
One step in the right direction would simply be much better guidelines for story submissions. Some of the statistics given in this thread have been enlightening. Tell me the best times to submit and the type of stories most likely to be accepted. The spammers have gamed the system. Sharing this info with everyone will decrease the spammers' advantage.
Another idea is perhaps submissions by regular users with good karma should trickle up the priority list if they haven't had recent successful submissions.
A third idea is that even the rejected submissions could be graded to encourage good submissions and discourage bad ones. Right now it seems to be an unfair old-boys network and I don't know the secret handshake. I too have stopped submitting stories because it seems to be a total waste of my time.
However it is done, I think encouraging regular users to submit articles is the key to success.
I was working at Fermilab many moons ago and heard a funny story about de-ionized water.
They have a ring of electro-magnets, (well over a mile long, IIRC) that were all cooled with de-ionized water. The magnets were wound with very thick copper wire and the wire had a hole down the middle for the water to flow through.
When they were first getting the thing up and running, they noticed that every few days the number of ions in the water would shoot up drastically and then gradually go down as the de-ionizers did there job.
Turns out that the drain from the floor in one of the bathrooms was incorrectly routed into the de-ionized water supply. Even worse, one of the urinals was backed up and would start to stink after a couple of days so the janitor would wash the room out with bleach which then drained into the de-ionized water supply.
They became so when they didn't fall for the bait and buy out SCO to stop the anti-Linux lawsuits and FUD.
The threat became apparent when IBM and/or Novell began asking for discovery regarding the Microsoft purchase of an "Unix" license from SCO to the tune of tens of millions of dollars.
If IBM can prove that Microsoft funded the frivolous SCO lawsuits then Microsoft is in deep, deep trouble. It could easily cost them billions of dollars and some executives could see jail time.
The examples you gave were engineering problems not physics problems. As you said yourself, people were funded to use physics, which is much different from the work of a physicist: developing new physics.
I am not claiming that all physics before the invention of the atomic bomb was useless.
But as your examples illustrate, the military was primarily interested in using engineers to apply physical principles that were discovered a hundred years previously.
Before the bomb, cutting edge physics wasn't considered to contain such immediately useful results.
Perhaps the biggest exception to this idea was the invention and development of radar. Some of the top theoretical physicist worked on developing radar. There was a lot of overlap between the techniques they used for radar and the field theories they were working on at the time.
But again, most of the physics of radar was discovered a hundred years early and codified in Maxwell's equations.
Before the invention of the atomic bomb, physics was a lot like mathematics: under-funded and only pursued out of love for the field itself.
After the invention of the atomic bomb, governments realized that physicists could actually do something useful. Funding poured in and physics became a business.
A different but similar thing happened to programming in the dotcom boom. The field got flooded with people who were in it for the money and not for the love of the game.
It was the first result that came up when I did a
Google(monsanto farmer). If you haven't tried Google before, I highly recommend it.
From the linked page:
Percy Schmeiser is a farmer from Bruno, Saskatchewan Canada whose Canola fields were contaminated with Monsanto's Round-Up Ready Canola. Monsanto's position was that it didn't matter whether Schmeiser knew or not that his canola field was contaminated with the Roundup Ready gene, or whether or not he took advantage of the technology (he didn't); that he must pay Monsanto their Technology Fee of $15./acre.
I've heard Percy Schmeiser speak. He didn't sound anything like how you described him.
RSA Encryption is based on the general form of Fermat's Theorem:
x**phi(n) = 1 mod(n)
where phi(n) is Euler's Totient function which is the number of integers less than n that are relatively prime to n. The number n is chosen to be the product of two primes, p and q. Even if n is known, it is hard of find p and q. Then phi(n) = (p-1)(q-1) and it is easy to pick a d and an e such that
d * e = 1 mod(phi(n))
You give out n and e as your public key and use n and d as your private key. Public en/decryption is done with:
You can bitch and whine all you want, but I sleep more comfortably at night knowing that our military machine is actively trying to kill everyone who beheads westerners for the glory of their god.
On the off chance you actually mean what you say, I will respond.
The execution of westerners in Iraq started only after the USA invaded Iraq for no good reason. Confirmed counts of Iraqi civilian deaths due the invasion range from
27,000 to over 30,000. Estimates of the total number of Iraqi civilians killed are over 100,000.
If foreigners invaded the USA for no good reason and kept the USA under military occupation and killed tens or hundreds of thousands of innocent US civilians, don't you think there would be some reprisals against the invaders?
I am not saying that the executions in Iraq are justified. All deliberate killing is terrible. But are the executions of westerners any worse than the killing of Iraqi civilians?
And your answer to all this killing that makes you sleep more comfortably at night is to kill more Iraqis? Thank goodness only a few Iraqis (the ones committing the executions) think like you do and feel more comfortable knowing people are trying to kill Americans.
Here is a radical idea. The USA has undisputed military dominance over the rest of the world. We spend way more, we have way more nukes, we are better at killing than any other country on Earth. This means we are in a better position to stop killing. So let's just stop killing. Today, or more fitting (depending on your timezone), tomorrow.
Let's pull out of the countries we are occupying as quickly as we can without being foolish about it. Let's remove our military bases from the Middle East. Let's divert some of our military budget (say 10% for starters) to helping provide basic necessities to the poorer parts of the world.
While we're at it, let's stop torturing people and stop jailing people indefinitely without charge or recourse to the court system.
If people getting killed is the problem then killing people is not the solution. Killing people is never the solution.
Thank's for your detailed response.
I've thought about these things for a while and I find other people's thought out views fascinating.
We do have a small disagreement and I hope it doesn't escalate as parodied in the famous
Emo Phillips joke.
This seems to be a topic that it easier to think about than talk about. As you suggest in the title of your original post, a lot of the problem can be mere semantics. Or to paraphrase the old adventure game, we seem to be facing a maze of twisty little metaphors all alike.
Another possible source of disagreement is the perspective of where we are coming from and where we want to go. I am trying to reconcile my "Physics" view of the world with my spiritual view. In particular I am interested in exploring the connections (if any) between the mathematical ideas exposed by Godel's Theorems and my experiences of self-awareness and consciousness. I see some very interesting parallels between the mathematical techniques used to "tame" Godel's Theorems and some of the common threads that run through many of the great spiritual paths.
Another source of difference is our personal experiences. I was extremely struck by my first instant of self-awareness. My realization of the hall of mirrors occurred many years later and was beautiful and dizzying but was not nearly so profound. What was almost as profound was my appreciation of the existence of the consciousness of others. The metaphor I find most useful for this experience is
Indra's Net where each jewel in the net is a consciousness that reflects all of reality.
Perhaps your experience was vastly different from my own. Maybe you were given the hall of mirrors as mediation topic or a koan and it led you to a profound experience.
In your original post you had asked if there was any AI or evolutionary psychology definitions of self-awareness. The best (in fact, only) scientific definition I know of is the mathematical one discovered by Godel and explained in Smullyan's book.
I admit that it might seem foolhardy to try to make any link between the mathematics of Godel and human consciousness. This path is certainly filled with traps that have already caught many. For a while I despaired that anything more than weird coincidences and wild speculation would be impossible. But then I found E. T. Jaynes' book
Probability Theory : The Logic of Science and my hopes increased. Jaynes mathematically defines an optimal "plausible reasoner" and makes several compelling arguments why our own personal models of reality should follow the same rules as the plausible reasoner.
It may never be possible to prove that results similar to Godel's apply to human consciousness. But it might be possible to apply Godel's ideas to Jaynes' plausible reasoner. Any non-trivial results would be extremely interesting and would help give us insights into human consciousness even though we can't prove mathematically that they apply to consciousness. AFAIK, very little (if any) of the non-trivial things that have been said about human consciousness can be proven mathematically.
I am not looking for proofs, for now I am content to examine the analogy and see how the concepts discovered by Godel relate to similar ideas in some of the major spiritual paths. I don't think I can change anyone's beliefs, but I hope to develop a very well defined vocabulary so that practitioners of various paths could say "yes this is what I am talking about" or "no that is not what I mean".
At best it would be a precise language with which to discuss consciousness and spiritual matters, at worst it would be all:
That is not what I meant at all.
That is not it, at all.
I think of the infinite recursion like a tv camera hooked up to a monitor and then pointed at the monitor so you get a picture of the picture of the picture... It is a pretty little model but we don't learn very much from it.
Another model I have of self-awareness is a detailed, animated map of a city, like something out of a Harry Potter movie that is so detailed it even shows the person holding the map and the very map itself.
One question is: can something like this map exist? The answer is yes. Self aware consciousness is one example. Godel gave a mathematical example.
Another question is: what are the limitations of such a map? Can all of the details of the entire map be embedded in the little image of the map?
This second question is very, very interesting. It arises in just the first iteration, we don't need the infinite recursion in order to get to a very interesting question and AFAIK, the study of the infinite recursion does not lead to interesting questions or answers.**
Godel found, (with just one iteration) that there were some limits to what mathematical models that modeled themselves could say about themselves. Famously, he proved there would always exist at least one true statement about the model that the model itself was incapable of saying.
The case of human self awareness is even more interesting but has not yet been as well developed. In this case, the model of the model, (the map containing an image of itself) is our model of the physical world around us. The model inside the model, (the image of the map on the map) is our perception of ourself. Not just our face and body but awareness of our own consciousness. I think this may be directly related to the psychological concept of "the ego" or the spiritual concept of the "self" (with a little "s").
Certainly the problems of "taming the ego" and achieving humility by knowing our proper place in the world, neither too high, nor too low, all occur with just one iteration. If you master just the first iteration, you will have completed a lot of psychological and spiritual work. I think you will have become a buddha, but I certainly don't have any experimental evidence for that.
The first iteration is already hard enough and interesting enough by itself. Tame your ego and your ego's ego with take care of itself.
** But don't let my opinion deter you from investigating. Maybe you can discover some interesting questions and answers there.
You should really try to work through Raymond Smullyan's book "Forever Undecided: A Puzzle Guide to Godel".
In it you would learn many very interesting things. One of the more trivial things you would learn is that once one is aware that one is aware, the infinite recursion comes along for free and is mostly a red herring. Smullyan explains Godel's Theorems mathematically and also in terms of "reasoners" reasoning about their own reasoning.
IMO, Smullyan has a much deeper and more fundamental understanding of Godel's Theorems than Nagel and Newman who popularized them in their book "Godel's Proof". Unfortunately, Hofstadter got most of his intuition about Godel's proofs from Nagel and Newman so he has continued to propagate their limited understanding onto the masses.
In a nutshell, Godel's Theorems deal with the mathematics of self-awareness.
... they sent us java developers to the Java conference and we were forbidden to go into any of those [RoR] seminars.
Why? Probably because they don't want us picking up any bad habits.
I think it is more likely they didn't want to
foment a general revolt amongst their Java devs.
It kinda sucks to learn you can do the same things in 1/3 the time or less by changing languages.
But perhaps you meant this all along and I didn't pick up on your subtle humor.
no no.. I got it.. ENGLAND.. solar panels.. not compatible! (Lot's of rain and fog in England)
Solar panels don't work in England?? H'mm,
maybe you should let
these
people know.
One link is to an article about a block of apartments that are going to use solar panels to generate about 1/3 of their needed electrical energy. The other article is about tax cuts planned by the British government targeted at people who use solar energy.
We must stop them before they waste any more money on their foolish schemes. Imagine their surprise and consternation when you inform them that there's lots of rain and fog in England so their solar panel projects can't work.
Slashdot Mirror
Perhaps this is part of a campaign to instill fear in the hearts of the "guilty" by first stringing up a few obviously innocent people.
The first sign that you post is flamebait is that you use the term "intellectual property" instead of the more correct and specific term "copyright". The copyright laws keep getting changed every time Mickey Mouse is about to become public domain. IMO, indefinitely extending the expiration of copyright violates the constitution.
Nonetheless, I agree with you in advising people to not violate the law, although when you call it stealing the RIAA's stuff, I imagine someone backing up a truck to the RIAA offices and carrying stuff away. Copyright violation is not stealing, nor is it the moral equivalent of stealing. It is certainly has nothing to do with robbing and plundering at sea.
I can't speak for everyone, but the problem I have with the RIAA and MPAA is that they are trying to cripple our technology in order to buttress their old fashioned business models. The reason that file sharing (or whatever technology the RIAA is currently fighting against) is a problem for the RIAA is not because people are inherently evil and will always steal things when they get a chance. It is a problem because the RIAA has steadfastly refused to provide a legal way for people to use the new technologies for consuming the RIAA's products.
A long time ago, the RIAA actually provided useful services to society. For example they standardized the RIAA compensation curve for phonograph preamps which meant that people only needed one preamp to play all of their records. The RIAA was actually helpful in distributing information.
But well before the introduction of consumer digital audio, the concentration of power in the RIAA caused them to become corrupt. One manifestation of this corruption was that their business model changed from encouraging the distribution of information to controlling and restricting distribution which is a typical monopolistic tactic.
I recently saw a round table discussion by a bunch of silicon valley big wigs including the president of Stanford and Jonathan Schwartz from Sun. One of them said that companies whose business model is based on restricting information flow are doomed.
This is the problem facing the RIAA and I think this is why so many people hate them with a passion (even if some of those people are not able to articulate this reason). From what I've seen, ALL of the tactics taken by the RIAA have been to further restrict information flow instead of enhance it.
IMO the people running the RIAA are truly evil, and I don't use that word lightly. They are trying to make money by restricting information flow. They are harming the musicians and harming the consumers and they are charging money for this disservice.
As they say, opposition to novel ideas eventually dies away. I don't know for sure but I have a feeling that the RIAA is controlled by old, rich, fat, white guys who are set in their ways and are fearful of any new technology.
Unfortunately for them, they have good reason to be fearful of the new technologies because these technologies make the RIAA totally redundant. We don't need the big expensive record presses anymore. The RIAA will soon no longer serve any useful purpose. Once that fact is revealed for all to see then the last fig leaf hiding their corporate corruption will be there for all to see. The RIAA will disappear. Consumers will get a lot more music at a much more reasonable price (less than $1 per track) and musicians will make a lot more money.
If the RIAA got back to their original mandate of helping distribute information, they could once again serve a useful purpose. They wouldn't be in almost total control, like they are now, and they wouldn't be getting the biggest slice of the pie, like they are now, but they could provide useful services and receive reasonable compensation for the value they add.
But as long as the RIAA bases their business model on subtracting value instead of adding it, they will be reviled by lots of good people and they will be correctly described as evil.
</rocket science>
CmdrTaco has already posted that he plans to implement noFollow on submitter links which will eliminate or reduce the PageRank incentive.
My point was that it will be easier and more effective to directly encourage the regular users than it will be to discourage the spammers.
I think we agree that regulars are discouraged because their submissions seem to be rejected 100% of the time. Effectively discouraging spammers might help a little, but two problems with this approach have been presented:
I think the problem with the "discourage the spammers" approach (which worked will with moderated comments) is that the statistics of submissions make it a much different problem than comments (which by default all get accepted).
The "discourage the spammers" approach, almost by definition focuses only on accepted stories, which also by definition is a very small number (compared to comments). My suggestion of focusing instead on encouraging regular users, increases the number of thingies dealt with (submitted stories instead of accepted stories) and should thus allow a wider range of remedies to be applied.
I think that trying to encourage regulars by discourage spammers is like pushing a rope. But perhaps we will need to agree to disagree.
As I've posted elsewhere, I think part of the solution is to encourage regular users to submit more stories.
By choosing speed over quality you are rewarding the spammers and punishing the regular users. This makes the regular users submit fewer stories so they (as a group) fall further and further behind in the speed game.
I think simply choosing quality over speed may help improve things (slowly as new submitters get rewarded).
It may even be useful to view the first 5 submissions in reverse chronological order. DJ's learned to do this sort of thing years ago and starting saying the Nth caller would win the prize. Picking the first caller was unfair because some people had learned how to game that system. You have the some problem here which caused regular users stop submitting stories because they know they can't win.
The solution will not be to discourage spammers, instead it will be to encourage regulars to submit more stories.
One step in the right direction would simply be much better guidelines for story submissions. Some of the statistics given in this thread have been enlightening. Tell me the best times to submit and the type of stories most likely to be accepted. The spammers have gamed the system. Sharing this info with everyone will decrease the spammers' advantage.
Another idea is perhaps submissions by regular users with good karma should trickle up the priority list if they haven't had recent successful submissions.
A third idea is that even the rejected submissions could be graded to encourage good submissions and discourage bad ones. Right now it seems to be an unfair old-boys network and I don't know the secret handshake. I too have stopped submitting stories because it seems to be a total waste of my time.
However it is done, I think encouraging regular users to submit articles is the key to success.
They have a ring of electro-magnets, (well over a mile long, IIRC) that were all cooled with de-ionized water. The magnets were wound with very thick copper wire and the wire had a hole down the middle for the water to flow through.
When they were first getting the thing up and running, they noticed that every few days the number of ions in the water would shoot up drastically and then gradually go down as the de-ionizers did there job.
Turns out that the drain from the floor in one of the bathrooms was incorrectly routed into the de-ionized water supply. Even worse, one of the urinals was backed up and would start to stink after a couple of days so the janitor would wash the room out with bleach which then drained into the de-ionized water supply.
The threat became apparent when IBM and/or Novell began asking for discovery regarding the Microsoft purchase of an "Unix" license from SCO to the tune of tens of millions of dollars.
If IBM can prove that Microsoft funded the frivolous SCO lawsuits then Microsoft is in deep, deep trouble. It could easily cost them billions of dollars and some executives could see jail time.
But as your examples illustrate, the military was primarily interested in using engineers to apply physical principles that were discovered a hundred years previously.
Before the bomb, cutting edge physics wasn't considered to contain such immediately useful results.
Perhaps the biggest exception to this idea was the invention and development of radar. Some of the top theoretical physicist worked on developing radar. There was a lot of overlap between the techniques they used for radar and the field theories they were working on at the time.
But again, most of the physics of radar was discovered a hundred years early and codified in Maxwell's equations.
After the invention of the atomic bomb, governments realized that physicists could actually do something useful. Funding poured in and physics became a business.
A different but similar thing happened to programming in the dotcom boom. The field got flooded with people who were in it for the money and not for the love of the game.
It was the first result that came up when I did a Google(monsanto farmer). If you haven't tried Google before, I highly recommend it.
From the linked page:
I've heard Percy Schmeiser speak. He didn't sound anything like how you described him.And a Merry Christmas to you too!
The execution of westerners in Iraq started only after the USA invaded Iraq for no good reason. Confirmed counts of Iraqi civilian deaths due the invasion range from 27,000 to over 30,000. Estimates of the total number of Iraqi civilians killed are over 100,000.
If foreigners invaded the USA for no good reason and kept the USA under military occupation and killed tens or hundreds of thousands of innocent US civilians, don't you think there would be some reprisals against the invaders?
I am not saying that the executions in Iraq are justified. All deliberate killing is terrible. But are the executions of westerners any worse than the killing of Iraqi civilians?
And your answer to all this killing that makes you sleep more comfortably at night is to kill more Iraqis? Thank goodness only a few Iraqis (the ones committing the executions) think like you do and feel more comfortable knowing people are trying to kill Americans.
Here is a radical idea. The USA has undisputed military dominance over the rest of the world. We spend way more, we have way more nukes, we are better at killing than any other country on Earth. This means we are in a better position to stop killing. So let's just stop killing. Today, or more fitting (depending on your timezone), tomorrow.
Let's pull out of the countries we are occupying as quickly as we can without being foolish about it. Let's remove our military bases from the Middle East. Let's divert some of our military budget (say 10% for starters) to helping provide basic necessities to the poorer parts of the world. While we're at it, let's stop torturing people and stop jailing people indefinitely without charge or recourse to the court system.
If people getting killed is the problem then killing people is not the solution. Killing people is never the solution.
This seems to be a topic that it easier to think about than talk about. As you suggest in the title of your original post, a lot of the problem can be mere semantics. Or to paraphrase the old adventure game, we seem to be facing a maze of twisty little metaphors all alike.
Another possible source of disagreement is the perspective of where we are coming from and where we want to go. I am trying to reconcile my "Physics" view of the world with my spiritual view. In particular I am interested in exploring the connections (if any) between the mathematical ideas exposed by Godel's Theorems and my experiences of self-awareness and consciousness. I see some very interesting parallels between the mathematical techniques used to "tame" Godel's Theorems and some of the common threads that run through many of the great spiritual paths.
Another source of difference is our personal experiences. I was extremely struck by my first instant of self-awareness. My realization of the hall of mirrors occurred many years later and was beautiful and dizzying but was not nearly so profound. What was almost as profound was my appreciation of the existence of the consciousness of others. The metaphor I find most useful for this experience is Indra's Net where each jewel in the net is a consciousness that reflects all of reality.
Perhaps your experience was vastly different from my own. Maybe you were given the hall of mirrors as mediation topic or a koan and it led you to a profound experience.
In your original post you had asked if there was any AI or evolutionary psychology definitions of self-awareness. The best (in fact, only) scientific definition I know of is the mathematical one discovered by Godel and explained in Smullyan's book.
I admit that it might seem foolhardy to try to make any link between the mathematics of Godel and human consciousness. This path is certainly filled with traps that have already caught many. For a while I despaired that anything more than weird coincidences and wild speculation would be impossible. But then I found E. T. Jaynes' book Probability Theory : The Logic of Science and my hopes increased. Jaynes mathematically defines an optimal "plausible reasoner" and makes several compelling arguments why our own personal models of reality should follow the same rules as the plausible reasoner.
It may never be possible to prove that results similar to Godel's apply to human consciousness. But it might be possible to apply Godel's ideas to Jaynes' plausible reasoner. Any non-trivial results would be extremely interesting and would help give us insights into human consciousness even though we can't prove mathematically that they apply to consciousness. AFAIK, very little (if any) of the non-trivial things that have been said about human consciousness can be proven mathematically.
I am not looking for proofs, for now I am content to examine the analogy and see how the concepts discovered by Godel relate to similar ideas in some of the major spiritual paths. I don't think I can change anyone's beliefs, but I hope to develop a very well defined vocabulary so that practitioners of various paths could say "yes this is what I am talking about" or "no that is not what I mean".
At best it would be a precise language with which to discuss consciousness and spiritual matters, at worst it would be all:
Another model I have of self-awareness is a detailed, animated map of a city, like something out of a Harry Potter movie that is so detailed it even shows the person holding the map and the very map itself.
One question is: can something like this map exist? The answer is yes. Self aware consciousness is one example. Godel gave a mathematical example.
Another question is: what are the limitations of such a map? Can all of the details of the entire map be embedded in the little image of the map?
This second question is very, very interesting. It arises in just the first iteration, we don't need the infinite recursion in order to get to a very interesting question and AFAIK, the study of the infinite recursion does not lead to interesting questions or answers.**
Godel found, (with just one iteration) that there were some limits to what mathematical models that modeled themselves could say about themselves. Famously, he proved there would always exist at least one true statement about the model that the model itself was incapable of saying.
The case of human self awareness is even more interesting but has not yet been as well developed. In this case, the model of the model, (the map containing an image of itself) is our model of the physical world around us. The model inside the model, (the image of the map on the map) is our perception of ourself. Not just our face and body but awareness of our own consciousness. I think this may be directly related to the psychological concept of "the ego" or the spiritual concept of the "self" (with a little "s").
Certainly the problems of "taming the ego" and achieving humility by knowing our proper place in the world, neither too high, nor too low, all occur with just one iteration. If you master just the first iteration, you will have completed a lot of psychological and spiritual work. I think you will have become a buddha, but I certainly don't have any experimental evidence for that.
The first iteration is already hard enough and interesting enough by itself. Tame your ego and your ego's ego with take care of itself.
** But don't let my opinion deter you from investigating. Maybe you can discover some interesting questions and answers there.
In it you would learn many very interesting things. One of the more trivial things you would learn is that once one is aware that one is aware, the infinite recursion comes along for free and is mostly a red herring. Smullyan explains Godel's Theorems mathematically and also in terms of "reasoners" reasoning about their own reasoning.
IMO, Smullyan has a much deeper and more fundamental understanding of Godel's Theorems than Nagel and Newman who popularized them in their book "Godel's Proof". Unfortunately, Hofstadter got most of his intuition about Godel's proofs from Nagel and Newman so he has continued to propagate their limited understanding onto the masses.
In a nutshell, Godel's Theorems deal with the mathematics of self-awareness.
But perhaps you meant this all along and I didn't pick up on your subtle humor.
Solar panels don't work in England?? H'mm, maybe you should let these people know.
One link is to an article about a block of apartments that are going to use solar panels to generate about 1/3 of their needed electrical energy. The other article is about tax cuts planned by the British government targeted at people who use solar energy.
We must stop them before they waste any more money on their foolish schemes. Imagine their surprise and consternation when you inform them that there's lots of rain and fog in England so their solar panel projects can't work.