Yes but the essence of human cognition is to apply our memory of the past and the patterns we have detected in it to our understanding of the present and the future.
That said, you are correct that a "relevant and significant memories retrieved first" algorithm and storage architecture is necessary, to make sense of it all.
Well, one thing that will have to happen is the establishment of "public library" clouds. I guess you could imagine these being funded by various governments or non-profit associations.
Or you could go with the massively P2P model in which the data is stored, in little fragmented encrypted chunks, on millions of edge devices on the net. i.e. peoples' personal computers, en masse, each contributing a tiny bit to the perpetual storage cloud.
I think that many people are failing to appreciate the longevity of information preservation that cloud computing (more specifically, redundant, geographically distributed network storage) can bring.
If we get the protocols right, and insist on open standards for data interchange, we can obtain properties such as:
Data bundles that know how to move themselves to more recently commissioned, and/or more reliable hosts.
Data bundles that know how to check in with copies of themselves, to make sure there are enough of them alive, and that they are adequately geographically distributed, at every given moment. If not, then more baby copies of the same data would be produced and stored elsewhere automatically.
There are other issues to longevity of course, like maintenance of software that understands different versions of data etc. Not trivial but very doable.
How long an individual disk or SSD or stone tablet lasts is COMPLETELY IRRELEVANT to the prospects for information longevity, given the network, and new levels of automated distribution that will take place on it going forward.
Natural Gas is not inherently a carbon-neutral fuel. It emits 50% of the CO2 emissions that gasoline emits for the same amount of energy production.
Currently, all but a vanishing amount of Natural Gas comes from natural gas wells, ie long term stored fossil fuels.
If we ever do start producing significant percentages of natural gas from renewable sources, and doing that without other large-scale environmental damage, then and only then would this be a "green" solution. It may be part of a future green solution but it is a long way off.
Natural gas that we pipe out of underground reservoirs of it is a fossil fuel use that contributes to global warming.
It would only be green if it uses methane or something similar generated from new plant material, algae farms, or garbage dumps.
Gasoline is "plant derived" as well, but it doesn't mean its burning at a rate of 400 years worth of dead plants per year (our current consumption rate) is good for the environment.
To understand how to consider a virus (or virus population) to be alive, you have to change the word "virus" to the "virus living system". A "virus living system" includes the virus and its modified host. When you "have" a virus, you are, temporarily at least, an instance of two species of life. 1. Human, and 2. the particular virus species. Your cells, your (modified) dna, and your metabolism are doing double duty.
What we are doing here is changing the definition of the boundary of the lifeform (form of living system). Typically, we think of these boundaries as being at the physical border of a unitary lump of an organism. The edge of an easily discernible body or cell-wall. But in several cases, that is inaccurate as a definition of "what is the minimum boundary of the self-sustaining lifeform".
Examples of where the "minimum viable system boundary' for a type of lifeform is bigger than a physically always-contiguous single body are:
1. A virus living system 2. Ant/termite/bee colony 3. Arguably also, a sociable higher animal society such as a wolf pack or human tribe. Ask yourself, how long would you yourself last in the world if no other human being existed. If your mate existed, I suppose your germ line might stand a chance, but chances are good you would die when you ran out of corn flakes.
No it's not, and that's consistent with my definition.
The definition does not state how the matter-energy pattern got there in the first place. Once it exists (e.g. the refrigerator), the question is, how long would we expect it to last (or what is the Mean Time Before Failure for 1000 of them.) The environment of the fridge (including parts of the fridge itself) will have processes like friction, oxidation, heating-cooling distortion etc going on. So the fridge will cease to perform its essential function after some MTBF, and will become an unrecognizable lump of rust after additional time. Whatever the MTBF is is the time we would expect the refrigerator pattern to stay instantiated (if orginally instantiated) in the thermodynamic regime.
Now if the refrigerator contained a refrigerator-building program, and housed a refrigerator building robot complete with a metal-mining/scavenging function etc. i.e. if it included an autonomous factory for making several copies of itself out of materials and energy found in its environment, and if that process actually worked reliably generation after generation, then yes, I would argue it is mostly alive.
Now you may want to insist that the fridge-with-its-own-factory also needs a way whereby its factory-program can create incrementally different variants of the fridge, and thus test those varying copies against each other and the environment. Ok. Fine. Matter of definition. What that extra capability really does is keep the type of matter-energy pattern instantiated for even longer than expected, and in increasingly general / varying environments. So it is better at being life.
Of course, if it varies itself, it is not sustaining exactly the same matter-energy pattern (nor even exactly the same core machine-building program information, which is the essence of what is being conserved in the region longer than expected.) What you have is a trade-off of the thing introducing or allowing to be introduced a tiny amount of entropy and variation into its pattern, over time, in order to conserve the vast majority of the pattern (and pattern information) over a considerably longer time.
This could be called "The Paradox of the Evolution of Stability"
Yes, with the following modifier added to "temporary cohesion equivalent to life"
As long as the cohesion (the maintenance of the mutual information) consistently lasts longer, for some matter-energy pattern type, than you would expect given the thermodynamic regime which forms the environment of the matter-energy pattern.
By "thermodynamic regime, I mean the amounts of free energy that are around to do entropizing work on the matter-energy pattern.
Life = Excess sustained negentropy in a space-time region, compared to what random chance (without the pattern's self-sustaining structure and behaviour) would produce.
I believe you can actually measure that amount of excess sustained negentropy (i.e. excess sustained localized mutual information), using a unit like bit seconds, or perhaps bit seconds / joule.
By the way, evolution's direction is to increase that quantity in a spacetime region, compared to the total amount of matter and energy present in the region
Yes, with the following modified added to "temporary cohesion equivalent to life"
As long as the cohesion (the maintenance of the mutual information) consistently lasts longer, for some matter-energy pattern type, than you would expect given the thermodynamic regime which forms the environment of the matter-energy pattern By "thermodynamic regime, I mean the amounts of free energy that are around to do entropizing work on the matter-energy pattern.
Life = Excess sustained negentropy in a space-time region, compared to what random chance (without the pattern's self-sustaining structure and behaviour) would produce.
I believe you can actually measure that amount of excess sustained negentropy (i.e. excess sustained localized mutual information), using a unit like bit seconds, or perhaps bit seconds / joule.
By the way, evolution's direction is to increase that quantity in a spacetime region, compared to the total amount of matter and energy present in the region.
Which is why the "new athiests" don't allow themselves to be framed as outcasts from God, which is what the whole "athiest" term connotes. "athiest" is a positioning statement created by "theists" to make the "athiests" seem to be a small group of deviants who are missing something, and seem to be a bit off.
Instead, realizing the insidiousness of this framing, some of the "new athiests" call themselves "brights", which though it is obnoxious and arrogant, it is deliberately so to make a point. The new category "Brights" is itself a marvelous piece of "framing" through careful use of vocabulary:
Post-modern thought is only cynical if it is done carelessly.
If you still use careful logical and meta-logical thinking, so that you realize that some facts and models are more generally applicable than others, and some are better proven than others, but yet you accept that there are many stories, that narratives and archetypes create our context for understanding the world, that cultural bias is ubiquitous, and that cultural context determines much of the content of popular thought and opinion, then you are getting closer to enlightenment, by my definition anyway.
Take the example of "moral relativism". This is unfairly critiqued, because it is portrayed as meaning that there are no moral rules that are any better than any others. But a careful thinking "moral relativist" still accepts the applicability and utility of GENERAL moral rules such as "do unto others as you would have them do unto you" but points out that other moral rules like "eat only fish on Fridays" are culturally specific and after the passage of enough time that the perhaps valid reason for the rule has passed, a tad arbitrary.
However, the two types who get more reproductive opportunities are middle-of-the-road compromisers, as you say, but also the winning and skilled of the high-stakes all-or-nothing gamblers. They tend to become successful group leaders who win resources for their group, which translates in the primate world into more mating access.
So it looks like that game might produce a balance of compromisers and extrremists.
Remember, when blaming "they" ("they do this","they don't know that") there really is no "they". It's different executives each time.
Fundamentally, it is up to old programmers to start their own tech companies, so that programmers can be given the gift of not having to work for non-technical managers who don't understand what is important in programming ability and programming environment.
Not necessarily end to end, but leave yourself a trail of breadcrumbs as you trace through and learn the code stories. If you can write about it accurately, you understand it. If you can't, you have to dig deeper in that area til you comprehend it enough to summarize it and its quirks accurately.
I had a prof once who shall remain nameless, though he claims to have "invented" modules. But he did have some good advice. He said, even if you just hacked together some code (or someone else did), you can retrofit software engineering standards onto it by going through it and writing the design document after the fact (assuming the crap didn't come with one.) This not only leaves a legacy of a maintainable project, but allows you to understand the essence of the software and the important decisions that were made in the construction of the software.
The apparently contradictory opposing-view curriculum can be considered to be a method for confusing the students.
The book I mentioned clears up the confusion, because it both explains in plain language how evolution works, and also explains why so many people believe in the teachings of religion. It thereby explains the existence of the contradictory viewpoints. Thus "unconfusing" the students.
I figure that there should be mandatory classes, at the mid to upper high school level, in basic epistemology and metaphysics (i.e. meta-level topics such as):
-How to think carefully, logically.
-How to search.
-How to formulate good questions.
-How to recognize bias; people who are "speaking for effect"; trying to influence you, and some of the common motivations why people do that.
How to form beliefs using epistemic responsibility.
Then set them free to explore the information from a billion sources that we have available to us at a mouse click today.
The scariest kind of graduate is one who has been taught only to parrot, and to conform to orthodoxy, and who does not know how to question.
It explains how and why religion and god-concepts evolved in human culture.
It is very well written in plain-spoken language, and the author is an accomplished evolutionary biologist.
If we could get that one on to the Texas high school science curriculum, or into their high school libraries, it might go a long way in putting this debate in the proper perspective for confused Texan students.
Do I have really intelligent people who are also able and likely to work hard when they are motivated well to build something new and interesting.
Do my team members take pride in producing excellent and elegant code? (which includes really good, coherent, useful doc & comments).
Do my team members know how to model domains?
Are my team members fully versed in patterns and re-use and 3rd party software selection factors.
Do my team members understand that it is essential to look out for red-flag technical risks, draw immediate attention to them, and actively manage the course of the project based on the principle of addressing them first.
Are they also all good and smart social interactors? Do they know what others need to know. Are they friendly, co-operative, good-humoured, and willing to help each other.
Have I done what it takes to positively motivate this great team?
Is the project new and worthwhile and interesting, and do the developers think so?
Have I created an environment where it is safe to spend your time helping others on the team?
Have I given the people private environments where they can think and design or code for long periods of time uninterrupted?
If you've done all these things, then let them go, and occasionally check in.
You will get software produced as well, and as fast, as you could possibly hope for. So don't micro manage their work or schedule. Just continually reassess the questions above, and how well you are continuing to do at creating an environment for software development success.
You cannot hope to do better than that. If setting up those conditions won't do it for you, nothing will and you had very unrealistic expectations.
You can try using historical trends, but you always face the possibility that the next bug you discover will be akin to an invasion by aliens, madmen, or unscrupulous bankers i.e. a discontinuity in complexity requiring a 75% refactor of your whole project. Most times you'll be lucky and won't see this, but I'm just saying: You can't prove to me it won't happen. It comes from Rumsfeld's unknown unknowns (the really dangerous unknowns) department.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes but the essence of human cognition is to apply our memory of the past and the patterns we have detected in it to our understanding of the present and the future.
That said, you are correct that a "relevant and significant memories retrieved first" algorithm and storage architecture is necessary, to make sense of it all.
Well, one thing that will have to happen is the establishment of "public library" clouds. I guess you could imagine these being funded by various governments or non-profit associations.
Or you could go with the massively P2P model in which the data is stored, in little fragmented encrypted chunks, on millions of edge devices on the net. i.e. peoples' personal computers, en masse, each contributing a tiny bit to the perpetual storage cloud.
I think that many people are failing to appreciate the longevity of information preservation
that cloud computing (more specifically, redundant, geographically distributed network storage) can bring.
If we get the protocols right, and insist on open standards for data interchange, we can obtain
properties such as:
Data bundles that know how to move themselves to more recently commissioned, and/or more
reliable hosts.
Data bundles that know how to check in with copies of themselves, to make sure there are enough of
them alive, and that they are adequately geographically distributed, at every given moment.
If not, then more baby copies of the same data would be produced and stored elsewhere automatically.
There are other issues to longevity of course, like maintenance of software that understands different
versions of data etc. Not trivial but very doable.
How long an individual disk or SSD or stone tablet lasts is COMPLETELY IRRELEVANT to
the prospects for information longevity, given the network, and new levels of automated distribution
that will take place on it going forward.
Such a paradoxical construction is called a quine, after the philosopher Willard Quine.
One of his examples:
"is not a sentence" is not a sentence.
"We have no word for GOD in our language, but we have a word for DOG."?
No no no.
The S.C.A.M. you see written all over it is the label written on the
super-conducting aspiration modulator, a key component of the device.
Natural Gas is not inherently a carbon-neutral fuel. It emits 50% of the
CO2 emissions that gasoline emits for the same amount of energy production.
Currently, all but a vanishing amount of Natural Gas comes from natural gas wells, ie long term
stored fossil fuels.
If we ever do start producing significant percentages of natural gas from renewable sources,
and doing that without other large-scale environmental damage, then and only then would
this be a "green" solution. It may be part of a future green solution but it is a long way off.
Natural gas that we pipe out of underground reservoirs of it is a fossil fuel use that contributes to global warming.
It would only be green if it uses methane or something similar generated from new plant material, algae farms, or garbage dumps.
Gasoline is "plant derived" as well, but it doesn't mean its burning at a rate of 400 years worth of dead plants per year (our current consumption rate) is good for the environment.
To understand how to consider a virus (or virus population) to be alive, you have to change the word "virus" to the "virus living system". A "virus living system" includes the virus and its modified host. When you "have" a virus, you are, temporarily at least, an instance of two species of life. 1. Human, and 2. the particular virus species. Your cells, your (modified) dna, and your metabolism are doing double duty.
What we are doing here is changing the definition of the boundary of the lifeform (form of living system). Typically, we think of these boundaries as being at the physical border of a unitary lump of an organism. The edge of an easily discernible body or cell-wall. But in several cases, that is inaccurate as a definition of
"what is the minimum boundary of the self-sustaining lifeform".
Examples of where the "minimum viable system boundary' for a type of lifeform is bigger than a physically always-contiguous single body are:
1. A virus living system
2. Ant/termite/bee colony
3. Arguably also, a sociable higher animal society such as
a wolf pack or human tribe. Ask yourself, how long would you yourself
last in the world if no other human being existed. If your mate existed,
I suppose your germ line might stand a chance, but chances are good
you would die when you ran out of corn flakes.
No it's not, and that's consistent with my definition.
The definition does not state how the matter-energy pattern got there in the first place. Once it exists (e.g. the refrigerator), the question is, how long would we expect it to last (or what is the Mean Time Before Failure for 1000 of them.) The environment of the fridge (including parts of the fridge itself) will have processes like friction, oxidation, heating-cooling distortion etc going on. So the fridge will cease to perform its essential function after some MTBF, and will become an unrecognizable lump of rust after additional time. Whatever the MTBF is is the time we would expect the refrigerator pattern to stay instantiated (if orginally instantiated) in the thermodynamic regime.
Now if the refrigerator contained a refrigerator-building program, and housed a refrigerator building robot complete with a metal-mining/scavenging function etc. i.e. if it included an autonomous factory for making several copies of itself out of materials and energy found in its environment,
and if that process actually worked reliably generation after generation, then yes, I would argue it is mostly alive.
Now you may want to insist that the fridge-with-its-own-factory also needs a way whereby its factory-program can create incrementally different variants of the fridge, and thus test those varying copies against each other and the environment. Ok. Fine. Matter of definition. What that extra capability really does is keep the type of matter-energy pattern instantiated for even longer than expected, and in increasingly general / varying environments. So it is
better at being life.
Of course, if it varies itself, it is not sustaining exactly the same matter-energy pattern (nor even exactly the same core machine-building program information, which is the essence of what is being conserved in the region longer than expected.) What you have is a trade-off of the thing introducing or allowing to be introduced a tiny amount of entropy and variation into its pattern, over time, in order to conserve the vast majority of the pattern (and pattern information) over a considerably longer time.
This could be called
"The Paradox of the Evolution of Stability"
Or the "bargain that life makes with entropy".
Yes, with the following modifier added to
"temporary cohesion equivalent to life"
As long as the cohesion (the maintenance of the mutual information)
consistently lasts longer, for some matter-energy pattern type, than you would expect given the thermodynamic regime which forms the environment of the matter-energy pattern.
By "thermodynamic regime, I mean the amounts of free energy that are around to do entropizing work on the matter-energy pattern.
Life = Excess sustained negentropy in a space-time region, compared to what random chance (without the pattern's self-sustaining structure and behaviour) would produce.
I believe you can actually measure that amount of excess sustained negentropy (i.e. excess sustained localized mutual information),
using a unit like bit seconds, or perhaps bit seconds / joule.
By the way, evolution's direction is to increase that quantity in a spacetime region, compared to the total amount of matter and energy present in the region
Yes, with the following modified added to
"temporary cohesion equivalent to life"
As long as the cohesion (the maintenance of the mutual information)
consistently lasts longer, for some matter-energy pattern type, than you would expect given the thermodynamic regime which forms the environment of the matter-energy pattern By "thermodynamic regime, I mean the amounts of free energy that are around to do entropizing work on the matter-energy pattern.
Life = Excess sustained negentropy in a space-time region, compared to what random chance (without the pattern's self-sustaining structure and behaviour) would produce.
I believe you can actually measure that amount of excess sustained negentropy (i.e. excess sustained localized mutual information),
using a unit like bit seconds, or perhaps bit seconds / joule.
By the way, evolution's direction is to increase that quantity in a spacetime region, compared to the total amount of matter and energy present in the region.
pre-emptive spelling correction: I meant "atheist" not "athiest" - doh!
Which is why the "new athiests" don't allow themselves to be framed as outcasts from God, which
is what the whole "athiest" term connotes. "athiest" is a positioning statement created by "theists"
to make the "athiests" seem to be a small group of deviants who are missing something, and seem to be a bit off.
Instead, realizing the insidiousness of this framing, some of the "new athiests" call themselves "brights",
which though it is obnoxious and arrogant, it is deliberately so to make a point.
The new category "Brights" is itself a marvelous piece of "framing" through careful use of vocabulary:
i.e. If you are not a "bright", you must be a....
Post-modern thought is only cynical if it is done carelessly.
If you still use careful logical and meta-logical thinking, so that you realize that some facts and models are more generally
applicable than others, and some are better proven than others,
but yet you accept that there are many stories, that narratives and archetypes create our context for understanding the world,
that cultural bias is ubiquitous, and that cultural context determines much of the content of popular thought and opinion,
then you are getting closer to enlightenment, by my definition anyway.
Take the example of "moral relativism". This is unfairly critiqued, because it is portrayed as meaning that there
are no moral rules that are any better than any others. But a careful thinking "moral relativist" still accepts the
applicability and utility of GENERAL moral rules such as "do unto others as you would have them do unto you" but
points out that other moral rules like "eat only fish on Fridays" are culturally specific and after the passage of
enough time that the perhaps valid reason for the rule has passed, a tad arbitrary.
Insightful. Sorry I have no mod points.
However, the two types who get more reproductive opportunities are middle-of-the-road compromisers,
as you say, but also the winning and skilled of the high-stakes all-or-nothing gamblers.
They tend to become successful group leaders who win resources for their group,
which translates in the primate world into more mating access.
So it looks like that game might produce a balance of compromisers and extrremists.
Remember, when blaming "they" ("they do this","they don't know that") there really is no "they".
It's different executives each time.
Fundamentally, it is up to old programmers to start their own tech companies, so that
programmers can be given the gift of not having to work for non-technical managers
who don't understand what is important in programming ability and programming environment.
Google. Geek executives. Need I say more?
Not necessarily end to end, but leave yourself a trail of breadcrumbs
as you trace through and learn the code stories.
If you can write about it accurately, you understand it. If you
can't, you have to dig deeper in that area til you comprehend it enough
to summarize it and its quirks accurately.
I had a prof once who shall remain nameless, though he claims to
have "invented" modules. But he did have some good advice. He said,
even if you just hacked together some code (or someone else did), you
can retrofit software engineering standards onto it by going through it
and writing the design document after the fact (assuming the crap didn't
come with one.) This not only leaves a legacy of a maintainable project,
but allows you to understand the essence of the software and the
important decisions that were made in the construction of the software.
6,378 kilometers (radius of earth = rE)
740,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 kilometers (radius of observable universe = rU)
Significance of Earth and people in Universe, proportionally = no more than
4Pi rE^2
------------
4/3 Pi rU^3
=
1
----
3.3x10^72
=
1
---
3,300,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000
Are you ok with that conception of God and his works? It's obviously not
about us in any meaningful sense.
The apparently contradictory opposing-view curriculum can be considered
to be a method for confusing the students.
The book I mentioned clears up the confusion, because it both explains
in plain language how evolution works, and also explains why so many people
believe in the teachings of religion. It thereby explains the existence
of the contradictory viewpoints. Thus "unconfusing" the students.
I figure that there should be mandatory classes, at the mid to upper high school level,
in basic epistemology and metaphysics (i.e. meta-level topics such as):
-How to think carefully, logically.
-How to search.
-How to formulate good questions.
-How to recognize bias; people who are "speaking for effect"; trying to
influence you, and some of the common motivations why people do
that.
How to form beliefs using epistemic responsibility.
Then set them free to explore the information from a billion sources
that we have available to us at a mouse click today.
The scariest kind of graduate is one who has been taught only to
parrot, and to conform to orthodoxy, and who does not know how to question.
There's a great book by David Sloan Wilson called
"Evolution for Everyone: How Darwin's Theory Can Change the Way We Think About Our Lives"
http://www.amazon.com/Evolution-Everyone-Darwins-Theory-Change/dp/0385340214
It explains how and why religion and god-concepts evolved in human culture.
It is very well written in plain-spoken language, and the author is an accomplished
evolutionary biologist.
If we could get that one on to the Texas high school science curriculum, or into their high school
libraries, it might go a long way in putting this debate in the proper perspective for
confused Texan students.
Iran Away!
Iran T
Iran dom
What you should do is ask questions like:
Do I have really intelligent people who are also able and likely to work hard
when they are motivated well to build something new and interesting.
Do my team members take pride in producing excellent and elegant
code? (which includes really good, coherent, useful doc & comments).
Do my team members know how to model domains?
Are my team members fully versed in patterns and re-use and 3rd party
software selection factors.
Do my team members understand that it is essential to look out for red-flag technical
risks, draw immediate attention to them, and actively manage the course of the project
based on the principle of addressing them first.
Are they also all good and smart social interactors? Do they know what
others need to know. Are they friendly, co-operative, good-humoured, and
willing to help each other.
Have I done what it takes to positively motivate this great team?
Is the project new and worthwhile and interesting, and do the developers think
so?
Have I created an environment where it is safe to spend your time helping
others on the team?
Have I given the people private environments where they can think and design
or code for long periods of time uninterrupted?
If you've done all these things, then let them go, and occasionally check in.
You will get software produced as well, and as fast, as you could possibly
hope for. So don't micro manage their work or schedule. Just continually
reassess the questions above, and how well you are continuing to do at
creating an environment for software development success.
You cannot hope to do better than that. If setting up those conditions won't
do it for you, nothing will and you had very unrealistic expectations.
You can try using historical trends, but you always face the possibility that
the next bug you discover will be akin to an invasion by aliens, madmen, or
unscrupulous bankers i.e. a discontinuity in complexity requiring a 75% refactor
of your whole project. Most times you'll be lucky and won't see this, but
I'm just saying: You can't prove to me it won't happen. It comes from
Rumsfeld's unknown unknowns (the really dangerous unknowns) department.