It may well turn out that emotions are the property of a biological brain only. AIs may be totally emotionless. After all, we know that at least to some extent emotions deal with brain chemistry. Not the action in the network of neurons, but the overall chemistry of the brain itself.
It may well turn out that consciousness is a property of a biological brain only. The chemistry of the brain very much affects the action of the neural network; these are not isolated systems. The brain's operations are called "electrochemical" for a reason. =)
It is my belief that consciousness is an emergent phenomenon that requires a body and lots and lots of interaction with a stimulating environment. Even if I'm wrong about that, it is highly plausible that the physical configuration of the brain and its chemical bath are necessary for consciousness, not only the neural network itself. If that is the case, then any AI would likely have emotions, though I suppose they could be controlled to an extent by flooding its brain (physical or virtual) with chemicals.
I agree with you that an AI if it were to exist could have very different motivations. And I also should have read the entire post before responding, since I see at the end you admit the possibility of bio-only consciousness. For what it's worth, the more I have read about the nature of consciousness, the more likely it seems to me that this is the case. I think a lot of CS types (myself included, until I took the initiative) tend to be isolated from the cognitive sciences and biology, so we have an overly optimistic view of silicon's power for processing consciousness.
Somalia's lack of rules is due to a sordid war-torn history and not a consensus of like-minded individuals. I'm no anarchist and I don't think anarchy works (depending on your definition, and certainly never at a large scale), but I'm tired of seeing the Somalia defense trotted out any time someone mentions anarchy. Or deregulation. Or free markets.
You can't ignore the decades (or more) of history that have led to a current situation, at least if you're trying to make a valid point instead of only being smug.
I like Marshall Brain's story "Manna," and though I haven't read Robotic Nation, I just skimmed it and it looks like it covers a lot of the same territory. It's a neat idea, but I think you're jumping the gun in saying that we're close to it.
if we didn't need food, shelter, medical care and we didn't need to work for it (as we are getting to very rapidly in the U.S., where the majority of people are not doing any real "work"), then we can all have pretty much a permanent vacation.
The US has attempted to move to an information economy, and since we're the big kid on the block it's worked for a while. It's not going to last forever, though, and we're already seeing a lot of those do-nothing people getting cut as their employers try to trim down to essentials.
Brain's claim in Manna is that the tipping point is to solve the problem of computer vision, and that would be a boon for robots in manufacturing but you'll need a lot more than that to replace human farmers with robots.
In this day and age we are getting very close to that. You can lose everything and you don't have to worry about starving, staying somewhere, etc. There is welfare, shelters, etc.
This is so untrue as to be ridiculous. People die of exposure every winter because they have no shelter. Soup kitchens have long lines and run out of food. It's a big problem that gets overlooked because the upper and middle classes simply aren't exposed to it. IMO you're worse off now if you've truly lost everything because there's less of an openness and sense of community about people than there was in the Good Old Days.
It's a neat idea and it would certainly be great if it happened, but we are a lot further from that goal than you think.
Smart asked Torvalds if Microsoft was contributing the code to benefit the Linux community or Microsoft. 'I agree that it's driven by selfish reasons, but that's how all open source code gets written! We all "scratch our own itches." It's why I started Linux, it's why I started git, and it's why I am still involved. It's the reason for everybody to end up in open source, to some degree,' says Torvalds. 'So complaining about the fact that Microsoft picked a selfish area to work on is just silly. Of course they picked an area that helps them. That's the point of open source â" the ability to make the code better for your particular needs, whoever the "your" in question happens to be.'"
I say that the ones who are clearly identifiable as pragmatists - the way I see them at least - are just opportunistic people.
And the reason you say that is because pragmatism is mischaracterized; the term is thrown about most often as a synonym for "practical" but with selfish connotations. It is painted as such in the article when he defines purists--before the pragmatists are even introduced!
The purists believe that compromising on any of the principles of free software is doom, and that the end does not justify the means.
Well, now we know that the pragmatists are ruthless and amoral!*
Except that's not what pragmatism is. Pragmatism is the recognition that "truth is simply a collective name for verification processes, just as health, wealth, strength, etc. are names for other processes connected with life. Truth is made, just as health, wealth, and strength are made, in the course of experience." According to William James, anyway, who ought to know since he came up with the idea.
A pragmatist in the Jamesian sense is someone who takes theories forged from previous experience and strives to apply them in practice. A pragmatist recognizes that what is true in theory is also true in practice; if practice proves otherwise then the theory too is false. If a pragmatic person has come to the conclusion that a principle is sound, then wherever that principle applies he will strive to abide by it.** The scientific method is an explicitly pragmatic process: it is not enough to state a theory, the theory must be tested for truth to be made. In matters outside of science, such as the one at hand, individual perspectives must be taken into account as people's experiences are different enough to lead them to different conclusions given a common set of facts. This is why recognition of perspective is important, and that is the one thing TFA got right.
Idealists are the ones who bring innovation and true progress to mankind, the ones who make things interesting. Pragmatists... Well, they just take advantage of what others fought for and use for their own purposes.
...except that the idealists are busy organizing things around their ideals (like "the Earth is 6000 years old") while the pragmatists are out testing them.
I'd like to comment on the article, but it's not very easy because so many concepts and labels are bandied about willy-nilly. At any rate, your comments above and below are misguided. A pragmatist is one who believes that theory is useless unless put into practice, not one who abandons the purity of some cause in order to put a bastardized version into practice. It also has little to do with number-crunching, so I have no idea where you got that notion.
*The article also makes use of the term "ad feminam" as the PC inclusive feminine counterpart to "ad hominem," and is a worthless neologism as "ad hominem" is already gender neutral. Though this shouldn't be unexpected, given the author's lax research of his central terms.
**By this measure, our current president fails at being pragmatic, a quality which he is often praised for.
It's amazing to me how often that tired, inaccurate quote is trotted out to dismiss various phenomena. Hurrah for groupthink.
Anecdotal evidence is evidence. It's not scientific evidence, but it is anecdotal evidence. Something happened. It wasn't in a controlled environment, and there's no guarantee that it could be repeated in a controlled environment, but something happened.
If there is scientific evidence that shows a claim whose support is anecdotal to be false, by all means call shenanigans if you like; I won't complain if your reasoning is sound and you're not making unwarranted leaps in logic. But to say that something is rubbish because the only evidence that exists for it is anecdotal is short-circuiting the entire scientific method. You should be clamoring instead for a rigorous study to be performed. An overwhelming amount of scientific progress is made because someone noticed something strange going on (anecdotally) and decided to experiment (scientifically). Or did you think that scientists pick things to study at random?
If you can't figure out how to set up an experiment to test a phenomenon then the best you can say is "I believe this phenomenon to be rubbish."
Why does someone always bring this up? It's a game, not a simulator!
The two are not exclusive. The closer to the real world a game gets, the more on the simulation end of the spectrum it lies. An FPS is more of a sim than a 2D platformer. Sports games are almost all simulation. You're telling me that a game with guitar-shaped controllers played like guitars, a drum set that is identical in form and function (if not quality or expressiveness) to a professional electric drum kit, a real microphone, and gameplay in which the music for your instrument cuts out when you screw up is not a simulator?
Please, stop acting as if people are using these games as a substitute for playing music, they're not.
You're right about this, though I never said that they were.
If all the music games were to suddenly disappear overnight, people would not go out and buy real instruments, they'd simply play a different game.
Again, agreed when speaking generally. However I think the real fanatics, especially younger players, could very well seek out real instruments in the same way that Wave Race fans might want to try a jet ski or Counter Strike players might go to a paintball arena.
I'm not complaining about GH/RB players, since I am one. And my wording "not quite as easy" was poorly chosen--I certainly can't play GH on Expert, and even Hard can be too much for me. I should have written "simple" instead of "easy" because that's closer to the truth: a GH controller reduces a fretboard to 5 buttons and you don't have to worry about intonation or multiple strings, etc. Simplicity does not imply ease, as anyone who has played ferocious Pong matches can tell you.
To me, as someone who grew up playing music, a real instrument seems to be a logical progression after mastering a game like GH. The multitude of responses to the contrary shows that I'm working with a bias. Though I've heard of people choosing to learn an instrument after playing these games, they're perhaps more rare than I thought.
Don't get me wrong--I enjoy extended Guitar Hero sessions with friends as much as the next guy, so I'm glad it exists. But it seems to me that if you're interested enough in playing music to spend hours on a simplified simulator, you might as well buy a cheap guitar / bass / drum kit and do it for real. It's not quite as easy, but it's far more rewarding and you aren't limited to playing other people's songs.
How my brain turned that tea kettle noise into ethereal music, I don't know, but that convinced me of how powerful the brain is in its ability misperceive.
Was your brain really misperceiving, or was it simply that your extreme physical state managed to somehow suppress your mind's recognition of the "kettle-about-to-boil" pattern, allowing you to hear it, as they say, again for the very first time? Perhaps the glorious music you heard is what a newborn hears...
The cool part is, I could do this whenever I want -- I just have to get really tired and do hard physical labor. There must be an easier way....
There is. It's called psychedelic drugs =P
I don't think you need to qualify the word "spiritual" with quotes, either, unless you're worried about persecution. The way you speak of it, its wonder and ability to move you, it was a significant affirmation that the reality we live in can be tremendously uplifting. When I think of spirituality, my mental image is something like "the magnificent behind the mundane." And there's reslly no other word (in English, anyway) to denote that sort of experience, even if you believe it's nothing more than abnormal brain weather.
I take a different view, but it's nowhere near a settled matter within my own mind. I tend to believe in a God of some sort, though my God's qualities differ from the classic Judeo-Christian portrayal--they have to when you remove heaven and hell from the equation as I have. I was raised Christian, so that obviously biases me toward a theistic mindset. I think that my belief in spirituality (of the mind-over-matter miraculous healing type) comes more from reading countless anecdotes (I know, I know) describing such occurrences. I haven't gotten the time, money, or motivation yet to seek them out, but I'm certain I will. That will be what settles the matter for me: if I encounter nothing but the flock of frauds we so often hear about, I'll probably take a different path. I have higher hopes than that, though.
Stop thinking of yourself as the center of the universe
But I am the center of my universe, just as you are the center of yours. When I die, barring an afterlife, my universe ceases to exist. You bet your ass I'm going to try to figure out the meaning of it all, and I'm not satisfied with "you can't do this yet." In the end I may not be able to do it, but it is my right to try.
and realize that the human race has only been seriously attempting to understand the world around us for a millennia or two.
Only if you limit "serious attempts to understand the world around us" to "stuff we learn through application of something approaching the scientific method." Plato and Aristotle were trying to understand the world in which they lived. The Gilgamesh epic, dating back to one of the earliest known civilizations, does the same. I think Jesus got closer than most people ever do, though I won't speak as to his followers. You may consider philosophy and literature and, yes, religion to be worthless when it comes to the ultimate questions, but that's an awfully lonely position to take.
None of this is intended to diminish the fruits of scientific labor, which are many and varied, or its continued practice. But I am inclined to believe that science is and shall remain incapable of answering at least one ("why are we here?") or two ("where did we come from?") of the big questions in a satisfactory manner. Did it make a fundamental difference in how you acted when you found out that your body is composed of cells, or that your brain functions through electrochemical waves? The latter was a big step in the scientific understanding of "why are we here," dealing directly with consciousness, yet it is powerless to explain the experience of "I am."
Here's a delightful little quote from the Wikipedia article on the P = NP problem:
In a 2002 poll of 100 researchers, 61 believed the answer [to Is P equal to NP?] is no, 9 believed the answer is yes, 22 were unsure, and 8 believed the question may be independent of the currently accepted axioms, and so impossible to prove or disprove.
Would you be similarly adamant that all the folks outside of the "no" camp halt their lines of thought for a million years?
At this point in time, it is completely reasonable to expect the religious people to demonstrate at least some proof that their god can do cool shit, and I don't mean some half-assed convoluted interpretation of natural processes or something like that. I mean something like water to wine in a controlled environment -- something that would win the James Randi prize. Raise the dead. Lift a mountain.
That's not how God works. God's MO is to reach into people's heads and tweak some synapses, turning unbelievers into believers. You should be careful about asking for proof, because you could be next. You could be street preaching within the week, my friend, and you would rant and rave against the skeptics who would disregard you as fully as you disregarded those who came before you in God's name.
Someone else wrote above that believing in God does not make you religious. Religion makes you religious; believing in God makes you a theist. You don't have to be Christian or Muslim or Jewish to believe in God, and the God in which you believe does not have to share all of the attributes of those religions' versions of God.
That doesn't make sense. You won't be around in a million years and neither will I, and it's a bit pompous of you to declare that billions of people should discard a line of thinking because you deem it a last resort.
There is also an implicit assumption that Science is the One True Faith and holds final authority (at least for those million years). You may consider it as such, most here do, but not everybody does. You're welcome to believe that religious faith is ridiculous, but you should also recognize that it is held above Science by some and equal to it by others. In the end it's all a matter of preference.
It seemed to me that Miseph (and others) are arguing that gold is no better for use as a currency than unbacked paper. There are good reasons (that I outlined in another post) for why this is not true, one of the big ones as you mentioned being gold's finiteness. That alone makes a dramatic collapse in gold's value much less likely than any fiat currency. Arguments stating that "it only has worth because we believe it does," in addition to being tautologies, are really arguments against all currencies. It is unclear thinking that leads to such arguments being applied against gold as currency.
All I'm saying is that to have any kind of stable economy at any kind of scale worth mentioning, a currency is needed, and that gold's physical properties as well as its history make it more well-suited for use than unbacked paper.
I'm still concerned about M3, and I found a site that recreates M3 from other Fed data still available. You'll see that that hasn't dipped below 5% annual growth since 2005, and was over 14% for most of 2008. It's currently trending downwards, which is good, but 5% growth of M3 is still a hell of a lot of new money.
And then there's the Fed's $9 Trillion in off-balance sheet transactions that they can't even account for. If you count those as part of the money supply (and I do) then the supply of dollars has in fact doubled.
M2 June 2007 - $7225.0 bn M2 May 2009 - $8344.8 bn
(8 344 - 7 225) / 7 225 = 0.154878893
I don't think I'd call 15% growth in 9 months "stable and low." I can't say for sure what M3 is because M3, which tracks M1, M2, and really-freaking-big transactions, hasn't been published since 2006. I wonder why?
Gold is valuable solely because people believe it to be valuable,
So is every other currency.
but when you get down to it there's no pile of gold big enough to replace food, water and shelter.
The same goes for paper money unless you can survive on a paper diet. At least with a giant pile of gold you know I'm not just running a printing press in the basement--it takes a lot more work to mine more gold.
I think you'd be surprised at just how universal a currency it actually wasn't before European explorers and conquerors imposing it around the world.
Well, you're right, but European explorers and conquerors did impose it around the world. It's at least as close to universal now as the dollar, and it's a hell of a lot more stable.
People will hold on to gold and other shiny things through hard times in the hope that things will return to "normal" and the shiny stuff is restored to its place of value. Short of nuclear-induced war, gold will retain a nominal value that is disproportionate to its functional abilities.
Don't be so quick to discount the functional ability of gold to serve as a currency. That function has historically been far more important than as a conductor that won't corrode, though its physical stability certainly plays a part in its utility as a currency too.
You've heard the talking points before I'm sure. Wikipedia succinctly states that "gold has intrinsic value as representative money due to its physical properties. That is, it is fungible, liquid, divisible, easily recognizable, and rare." Personally I'm not too particular about what kind of metal or resource is used, as long as it has those properties and therefore is a return to a relatively stable hard currency. IMO we wouldn't be in These Hard Economic Times right now had we not been using a fiat currency for 40 years (though sorta 100). But it's a lot harder to fight expensive wars and use your power to pay off your buddies if money is truly a finite resource.
No, he made some excellent points, which you decided to ignore.
I disagree. The responses were clearly knee-jerk reactions to the summaries I quoted. "Computers have peripherals?" Please. That response is either disingenuous or shows a lack of understanding of the tight integration of our massive sensory apparatus and brain. The difference between that and a peripheral, even something as complex as, say, the entire nav system for a Mars rover, is orders of magnitude apart. There is simply no man-made sensory network anywhere near the complexity of the human body, or even that of most animals.
The article makes for fascinating reading, but it isn't at all clear what you're trying to accomplish by citing it. The brain/computer analogy is a useful one for dealing with certain issues. It has its limits. Ultimately, computers today are based on different principles than the human brains.
The article is just a warning (seemingly directed towards cognitive scientists) to take care in drawing conclusions about how the brain works from their understanding of computers. What are you trying to claim? That artificial intelligence is impossible? That it cannot be simulated on a Von Neumann style machine, no matter how fast a processor or how big a RAM store it has? Or maybe that only brain-style AI is possible? I don't think any of those things are true. They certainly can't be derived from the evidence presented.
I claim that neural networks alone will not get you consciousness. I think it highly unlikely that consciousness can be achieved on Von Neumann architecture, yes, and impossible for human consciousness to exist on silicon. I'm not sure what you mean by "brain-style AI."
I didn't make it very clear that this was my position in my original post. If you're not concerned with conscious AI, then skip the rest because that's mainly what I am arguing against.
Regarding specific points:
1) It is entirely possible to build analogue circuits.
Agreed.
2) A content-addressable system can be built atop a standard memory system. I don't see a theoretical problem there.
Expanding on the article, will this content-addressable system experience decay and interference? One of the ways we learn is by replaying important things in our minds and strengthening those connections. If that holds for very young minds (which we have no reason to doubt) then it may be that without interference and decay, we could never begin to make sense of the world. If that is the case, an AI would need some similar way of filtering input.
3) Any parallel computation can be performed in a serial way.
I'm skeptical. This certainly holds for digital computers, but I don't think it does for analog. Someone who knows more about analog computers and circuits can probably shed some light here.
4) There are processors that have no system clocks. See "asynchronous computing."
Asynchronous computing is not a similar mechanism to what the brain does. Asynchronous is still sequential, and there's even a clock, it's just that its rate isn't limited by worst-case instruction calls. FTA:
"The speed of neural information processing is subject to a variety of constraints, including the time for electrochemical signals to traverse axons and dendrites, axonal myelination, the diffusion time of neurotransmitters across the synaptic cleft, differences in synaptic efficacy, the coherence of neural firing, the current availability of neurotransmitters, and the prior history of neuronal firing."
In other words, you're going to have to run a physics simulation if you want the brain's kind of clockless processing.
5) That's not to say that human-style memory couldn't be simulated within a computer-style system.
Slashdot Mirror
It may well turn out that emotions are the property of a biological brain only. AIs may be totally emotionless. After all, we know that at least to some extent emotions deal with brain chemistry. Not the action in the network of neurons, but the overall chemistry of the brain itself.
It may well turn out that consciousness is a property of a biological brain only. The chemistry of the brain very much affects the action of the neural network; these are not isolated systems. The brain's operations are called "electrochemical" for a reason. =)
It is my belief that consciousness is an emergent phenomenon that requires a body and lots and lots of interaction with a stimulating environment. Even if I'm wrong about that, it is highly plausible that the physical configuration of the brain and its chemical bath are necessary for consciousness, not only the neural network itself. If that is the case, then any AI would likely have emotions, though I suppose they could be controlled to an extent by flooding its brain (physical or virtual) with chemicals.
I agree with you that an AI if it were to exist could have very different motivations. And I also should have read the entire post before responding, since I see at the end you admit the possibility of bio-only consciousness. For what it's worth, the more I have read about the nature of consciousness, the more likely it seems to me that this is the case. I think a lot of CS types (myself included, until I took the initiative) tend to be isolated from the cognitive sciences and biology, so we have an overly optimistic view of silicon's power for processing consciousness.
Somalia's lack of rules is due to a sordid war-torn history and not a consensus of like-minded individuals. I'm no anarchist and I don't think anarchy works (depending on your definition, and certainly never at a large scale), but I'm tired of seeing the Somalia defense trotted out any time someone mentions anarchy. Or deregulation. Or free markets.
You can't ignore the decades (or more) of history that have led to a current situation, at least if you're trying to make a valid point instead of only being smug.
I like Marshall Brain's story "Manna," and though I haven't read Robotic Nation, I just skimmed it and it looks like it covers a lot of the same territory. It's a neat idea, but I think you're jumping the gun in saying that we're close to it.
if we didn't need food, shelter, medical care and we didn't need to work for it (as we are getting to very rapidly in the U.S., where the majority of people are not doing any real "work"), then we can all have pretty much a permanent vacation.
The US has attempted to move to an information economy, and since we're the big kid on the block it's worked for a while. It's not going to last forever, though, and we're already seeing a lot of those do-nothing people getting cut as their employers try to trim down to essentials.
Brain's claim in Manna is that the tipping point is to solve the problem of computer vision, and that would be a boon for robots in manufacturing but you'll need a lot more than that to replace human farmers with robots.
In this day and age we are getting very close to that. You can lose everything and you don't have to worry about starving, staying somewhere, etc. There is welfare, shelters, etc.
This is so untrue as to be ridiculous. People die of exposure every winter because they have no shelter. Soup kitchens have long lines and run out of food. It's a big problem that gets overlooked because the upper and middle classes simply aren't exposed to it. IMO you're worse off now if you've truly lost everything because there's less of an openness and sense of community about people than there was in the Good Old Days.
It's a neat idea and it would certainly be great if it happened, but we are a lot further from that goal than you think.
Smart asked Torvalds if Microsoft was contributing the code to benefit the Linux community or Microsoft. 'I agree that it's driven by selfish reasons, but that's how all open source code gets written! We all "scratch our own itches." It's why I started Linux, it's why I started git, and it's why I am still involved. It's the reason for everybody to end up in open source, to some degree,' says Torvalds. 'So complaining about the fact that Microsoft picked a selfish area to work on is just silly. Of course they picked an area that helps them. That's the point of open source â" the ability to make the code better for your particular needs, whoever the "your" in question happens to be.'"
This story's article is word salad.
...but I bet he's just a Micro$oft shill.
I say that the ones who are clearly identifiable as pragmatists - the way I see them at least - are just opportunistic people.
And the reason you say that is because pragmatism is mischaracterized; the term is thrown about most often as a synonym for "practical" but with selfish connotations. It is painted as such in the article when he defines purists--before the pragmatists are even introduced!
The purists believe that compromising on any of the principles of free software is doom, and that the end does not justify the means.
Well, now we know that the pragmatists are ruthless and amoral!*
Except that's not what pragmatism is. Pragmatism is the recognition that "truth is simply a collective name for verification processes, just as health, wealth, strength, etc. are names for other processes connected with life. Truth is made, just as health, wealth, and strength are made, in the course of experience." According to William James, anyway, who ought to know since he came up with the idea.
A pragmatist in the Jamesian sense is someone who takes theories forged from previous experience and strives to apply them in practice. A pragmatist recognizes that what is true in theory is also true in practice; if practice proves otherwise then the theory too is false. If a pragmatic person has come to the conclusion that a principle is sound, then wherever that principle applies he will strive to abide by it.** The scientific method is an explicitly pragmatic process: it is not enough to state a theory, the theory must be tested for truth to be made. In matters outside of science, such as the one at hand, individual perspectives must be taken into account as people's experiences are different enough to lead them to different conclusions given a common set of facts. This is why recognition of perspective is important, and that is the one thing TFA got right.
Idealists are the ones who bring innovation and true progress to mankind, the ones who make things interesting.
Pragmatists... Well, they just take advantage of what others fought for and use for their own purposes.
...except that the idealists are busy organizing things around their ideals (like "the Earth is 6000 years old") while the pragmatists are out testing them.
I'd like to comment on the article, but it's not very easy because so many concepts and labels are bandied about willy-nilly. At any rate, your comments above and below are misguided. A pragmatist is one who believes that theory is useless unless put into practice, not one who abandons the purity of some cause in order to put a bastardized version into practice. It also has little to do with number-crunching, so I have no idea where you got that notion.
*The article also makes use of the term "ad feminam" as the PC inclusive feminine counterpart to "ad hominem," and is a worthless neologism as "ad hominem" is already gender neutral. Though this shouldn't be unexpected, given the author's lax research of his central terms.
**By this measure, our current president fails at being pragmatic, a quality which he is often praised for.
It's amazing to me how often that tired, inaccurate quote is trotted out to dismiss various phenomena. Hurrah for groupthink.
Anecdotal evidence is evidence. It's not scientific evidence, but it is anecdotal evidence. Something happened. It wasn't in a controlled environment, and there's no guarantee that it could be repeated in a controlled environment, but something happened.
If there is scientific evidence that shows a claim whose support is anecdotal to be false, by all means call shenanigans if you like; I won't complain if your reasoning is sound and you're not making unwarranted leaps in logic. But to say that something is rubbish because the only evidence that exists for it is anecdotal is short-circuiting the entire scientific method. You should be clamoring instead for a rigorous study to be performed. An overwhelming amount of scientific progress is made because someone noticed something strange going on (anecdotally) and decided to experiment (scientifically). Or did you think that scientists pick things to study at random?
If you can't figure out how to set up an experiment to test a phenomenon then the best you can say is "I believe this phenomenon to be rubbish."
Why does someone always bring this up? It's a game, not a simulator!
The two are not exclusive. The closer to the real world a game gets, the more on the simulation end of the spectrum it lies. An FPS is more of a sim than a 2D platformer. Sports games are almost all simulation. You're telling me that a game with guitar-shaped controllers played like guitars, a drum set that is identical in form and function (if not quality or expressiveness) to a professional electric drum kit, a real microphone, and gameplay in which the music for your instrument cuts out when you screw up is not a simulator?
Please, stop acting as if people are using these games as a substitute for playing music, they're not.
You're right about this, though I never said that they were.
If all the music games were to suddenly disappear overnight, people would not go out and buy real instruments, they'd simply play a different game.
Again, agreed when speaking generally. However I think the real fanatics, especially younger players, could very well seek out real instruments in the same way that Wave Race fans might want to try a jet ski or Counter Strike players might go to a paintball arena.
Yes, that's pretty accurate.
I'm not complaining about GH/RB players, since I am one. And my wording "not quite as easy" was poorly chosen--I certainly can't play GH on Expert, and even Hard can be too much for me. I should have written "simple" instead of "easy" because that's closer to the truth: a GH controller reduces a fretboard to 5 buttons and you don't have to worry about intonation or multiple strings, etc. Simplicity does not imply ease, as anyone who has played ferocious Pong matches can tell you.
To me, as someone who grew up playing music, a real instrument seems to be a logical progression after mastering a game like GH. The multitude of responses to the contrary shows that I'm working with a bias. Though I've heard of people choosing to learn an instrument after playing these games, they're perhaps more rare than I thought.
Don't get me wrong--I enjoy extended Guitar Hero sessions with friends as much as the next guy, so I'm glad it exists. But it seems to me that if you're interested enough in playing music to spend hours on a simplified simulator, you might as well buy a cheap guitar / bass / drum kit and do it for real. It's not quite as easy, but it's far more rewarding and you aren't limited to playing other people's songs.
Don't apologize, it was a wonderful anecdote!
How my brain turned that tea kettle noise into ethereal music, I don't know, but that convinced me of how powerful the brain is in its ability misperceive.
Was your brain really misperceiving, or was it simply that your extreme physical state managed to somehow suppress your mind's recognition of the "kettle-about-to-boil" pattern, allowing you to hear it, as they say, again for the very first time? Perhaps the glorious music you heard is what a newborn hears...
The cool part is, I could do this whenever I want -- I just have to get really tired and do hard physical labor. There must be an easier way ....
There is. It's called psychedelic drugs =P
I don't think you need to qualify the word "spiritual" with quotes, either, unless you're worried about persecution. The way you speak of it, its wonder and ability to move you, it was a significant affirmation that the reality we live in can be tremendously uplifting. When I think of spirituality, my mental image is something like "the magnificent behind the mundane." And there's reslly no other word (in English, anyway) to denote that sort of experience, even if you believe it's nothing more than abnormal brain weather.
I take a different view, but it's nowhere near a settled matter within my own mind. I tend to believe in a God of some sort, though my God's qualities differ from the classic Judeo-Christian portrayal--they have to when you remove heaven and hell from the equation as I have. I was raised Christian, so that obviously biases me toward a theistic mindset. I think that my belief in spirituality (of the mind-over-matter miraculous healing type) comes more from reading countless anecdotes (I know, I know) describing such occurrences. I haven't gotten the time, money, or motivation yet to seek them out, but I'm certain I will. That will be what settles the matter for me: if I encounter nothing but the flock of frauds we so often hear about, I'll probably take a different path. I have higher hopes than that, though.
Stop thinking of yourself as the center of the universe
But I am the center of my universe, just as you are the center of yours. When I die, barring an afterlife, my universe ceases to exist. You bet your ass I'm going to try to figure out the meaning of it all, and I'm not satisfied with "you can't do this yet." In the end I may not be able to do it, but it is my right to try.
and realize that the human race has only been seriously attempting to understand the world around us for a millennia or two.
Only if you limit "serious attempts to understand the world around us" to "stuff we learn through application of something approaching the scientific method." Plato and Aristotle were trying to understand the world in which they lived. The Gilgamesh epic, dating back to one of the earliest known civilizations, does the same. I think Jesus got closer than most people ever do, though I won't speak as to his followers. You may consider philosophy and literature and, yes, religion to be worthless when it comes to the ultimate questions, but that's an awfully lonely position to take.
None of this is intended to diminish the fruits of scientific labor, which are many and varied, or its continued practice. But I am inclined to believe that science is and shall remain incapable of answering at least one ("why are we here?") or two ("where did we come from?") of the big questions in a satisfactory manner. Did it make a fundamental difference in how you acted when you found out that your body is composed of cells, or that your brain functions through electrochemical waves? The latter was a big step in the scientific understanding of "why are we here," dealing directly with consciousness, yet it is powerless to explain the experience of "I am."
Here's a delightful little quote from the Wikipedia article on the P = NP problem:
In a 2002 poll of 100 researchers, 61 believed the answer [to Is P equal to NP?] is no, 9 believed the answer is yes, 22 were unsure, and 8 believed the question may be independent of the currently accepted axioms, and so impossible to prove or disprove.
Would you be similarly adamant that all the folks outside of the "no" camp halt their lines of thought for a million years?
At this point in time, it is completely reasonable to expect the religious people to demonstrate at least some proof that their god can do cool shit, and I don't mean some half-assed convoluted interpretation of natural processes or something like that. I mean something like water to wine in a controlled environment -- something that would win the James Randi prize. Raise the dead. Lift a mountain.
That's not how God works. God's MO is to reach into people's heads and tweak some synapses, turning unbelievers into believers. You should be careful about asking for proof, because you could be next. You could be street preaching within the week, my friend, and you would rant and rave against the skeptics who would disregard you as fully as you disregarded those who came before you in God's name.
Someone else wrote above that believing in God does not make you religious. Religion makes you religious; believing in God makes you a theist. You don't have to be Christian or Muslim or Jewish to believe in God, and the God in which you believe does not have to share all of the attributes of those religions' versions of God.
That doesn't make sense. You won't be around in a million years and neither will I, and it's a bit pompous of you to declare that billions of people should discard a line of thinking because you deem it a last resort.
There is also an implicit assumption that Science is the One True Faith and holds final authority (at least for those million years). You may consider it as such, most here do, but not everybody does. You're welcome to believe that religious faith is ridiculous, but you should also recognize that it is held above Science by some and equal to it by others. In the end it's all a matter of preference.
No, no, don't use vanilla. Give it the licorice flavor and we've got a space elevator! Or at least a space ladder...
It seemed to me that Miseph (and others) are arguing that gold is no better for use as a currency than unbacked paper. There are good reasons (that I outlined in another post) for why this is not true, one of the big ones as you mentioned being gold's finiteness. That alone makes a dramatic collapse in gold's value much less likely than any fiat currency. Arguments stating that "it only has worth because we believe it does," in addition to being tautologies, are really arguments against all currencies. It is unclear thinking that leads to such arguments being applied against gold as currency.
All I'm saying is that to have any kind of stable economy at any kind of scale worth mentioning, a currency is needed, and that gold's physical properties as well as its history make it more well-suited for use than unbacked paper.
Oh, man, that was bad, good catch.
I'm still concerned about M3, and I found a site that recreates M3 from other Fed data still available. You'll see that that hasn't dipped below 5% annual growth since 2005, and was over 14% for most of 2008. It's currently trending downwards, which is good, but 5% growth of M3 is still a hell of a lot of new money.
And then there's the Fed's $9 Trillion in off-balance sheet transactions that they can't even account for. If you count those as part of the money supply (and I do) then the supply of dollars has in fact doubled.
from http://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/h6/Current/
M2 June 2007 - $7225.0 bn
M2 May 2009 - $8344.8 bn
(8 344 - 7 225) / 7 225 = 0.154878893
I don't think I'd call 15% growth in 9 months "stable and low." I can't say for sure what M3 is because M3, which tracks M1, M2, and really-freaking-big transactions, hasn't been published since 2006. I wonder why?
For fuck's sake, people, the credit card guys haven't actually bought a law concerning hereditary debt slavery yet
Nope, the US government already has that one all sewn up ;)
Gold is valuable solely because people believe it to be valuable,
So is every other currency.
but when you get down to it there's no pile of gold big enough to replace food, water and shelter.
The same goes for paper money unless you can survive on a paper diet. At least with a giant pile of gold you know I'm not just running a printing press in the basement--it takes a lot more work to mine more gold.
I think you'd be surprised at just how universal a currency it actually wasn't before European explorers and conquerors imposing it around the world.
Well, you're right, but European explorers and conquerors did impose it around the world. It's at least as close to universal now as the dollar, and it's a hell of a lot more stable.
People will hold on to gold and other shiny things through hard times in the hope that things will return to "normal" and the shiny stuff is restored to its place of value. Short of nuclear-induced war, gold will retain a nominal value that is disproportionate to its functional abilities.
Don't be so quick to discount the functional ability of gold to serve as a currency. That function has historically been far more important than as a conductor that won't corrode, though its physical stability certainly plays a part in its utility as a currency too.
You've heard the talking points before I'm sure. Wikipedia succinctly states that "gold has intrinsic value as representative money due to its physical properties. That is, it is fungible, liquid, divisible, easily recognizable, and rare." Personally I'm not too particular about what kind of metal or resource is used, as long as it has those properties and therefore is a return to a relatively stable hard currency. IMO we wouldn't be in These Hard Economic Times right now had we not been using a fiat currency for 40 years (though sorta 100). But it's a lot harder to fight expensive wars and use your power to pay off your buddies if money is truly a finite resource.
In the inkblots?
Or...?
No, he made some excellent points, which you decided to ignore.
I disagree. The responses were clearly knee-jerk reactions to the summaries I quoted. "Computers have peripherals?" Please. That response is either disingenuous or shows a lack of understanding of the tight integration of our massive sensory apparatus and brain. The difference between that and a peripheral, even something as complex as, say, the entire nav system for a Mars rover, is orders of magnitude apart. There is simply no man-made sensory network anywhere near the complexity of the human body, or even that of most animals.
The article makes for fascinating reading, but it isn't at all clear what you're trying to accomplish by citing it. The brain/computer analogy is a useful one for dealing with certain issues. It has its limits. Ultimately, computers today are based on different principles than the human brains.
The article is just a warning (seemingly directed towards cognitive scientists) to take care in drawing conclusions about how the brain works from their understanding of computers. What are you trying to claim? That artificial intelligence is impossible? That it cannot be simulated on a Von Neumann style machine, no matter how fast a processor or how big a RAM store it has? Or maybe that only brain-style AI is possible? I don't think any of those things are true. They certainly can't be derived from the evidence presented.
I claim that neural networks alone will not get you consciousness. I think it highly unlikely that consciousness can be achieved on Von Neumann architecture, yes, and impossible for human consciousness to exist on silicon. I'm not sure what you mean by "brain-style AI."
I didn't make it very clear that this was my position in my original post. If you're not concerned with conscious AI, then skip the rest because that's mainly what I am arguing against.
Regarding specific points:
1) It is entirely possible to build analogue circuits.
Agreed.
2) A content-addressable system can be built atop a standard memory system. I don't see a theoretical problem there.
Expanding on the article, will this content-addressable system experience decay and interference? One of the ways we learn is by replaying important things in our minds and strengthening those connections. If that holds for very young minds (which we have no reason to doubt) then it may be that without interference and decay, we could never begin to make sense of the world. If that is the case, an AI would need some similar way of filtering input.
3) Any parallel computation can be performed in a serial way.
I'm skeptical. This certainly holds for digital computers, but I don't think it does for analog. Someone who knows more about analog computers and circuits can probably shed some light here.
4) There are processors that have no system clocks. See "asynchronous computing."
Asynchronous computing is not a similar mechanism to what the brain does. Asynchronous is still sequential, and there's even a clock, it's just that its rate isn't limited by worst-case instruction calls. FTA:
"The speed of neural information processing is subject to a variety of constraints, including the time for electrochemical signals to traverse axons and dendrites, axonal myelination, the diffusion time of neurotransmitters across the synaptic cleft, differences in synaptic efficacy, the coherence of neural firing, the current availability of neurotransmitters, and the prior history of neuronal firing."
In other words, you're going to have to run a physics simulation if you want the brain's kind of clockless processing.
5) That's not to say that human-style memory couldn't be simulated within a computer-style system.
Agreed, this is almost
It's only confusing if you assume that corporations are one monolithic entity.
In fact, they're the exact opposite of a monolithic entity.
The monolith made our monkey ancestors more intelligent. Corporations are making us more stupidity again =(