> Well, I don't see many deceptive snakes in nature...
Maybe parent hinted at the fact that snake might refer to a liar instead of a reptile. But no, let's forget that referring to people as animals is commonplace in literature and common talk...
I agree 100%, but the issue might be bigger than that: the PC, due to saturation and the advent of FOSS, was beginning to be too mature (read it "too good for the consumer"), so the manufacturers and the software giants have to find something new. If it means saying goodbye to microsoft, fucking up the PC with drm and pushing always connected mobile and a new OS, so be it.
Microsoft as a company is not yet in trouble, as much as I wish they had never existed. They can reinvent themselves and make money again, not by technical merits but by marketing skills.
If I understood it, it makes sense, but I think it might end up looking too similar to a simple random generated behavior.
Have you tried thinking about life as an evolutionary process (evolution vs. creation is a fake dichotomy...)? the characteristics of living creatures (as the Genesis goes: grow, multiply, populate the earth which implies adapting to different conditions) can be viewed as a good solution to the "how to last longer" problem.
In other words, given enough time and interactions between matter, the structures that result from those interactions should behave like living ones. Those that are not stable disappear, those that do not grow or multiply or populate get eventually wiped out. Note that the interactions do not need to resemble the real world, as many artificial life experiments insist on. Genetic algorithms are more in line with the idea, see http://www.ai-junkie.com/ga/intro/gat1.html
One could apply this to decision making systems (or whatever else).
As a side note my idea of layers of abstraction do not depend on the abstraction itself, but on who generates what. That is, our 3d world scientist can think up an abstract 60 dimension world (in fact they do it), yet the abstraction is dependent from ours just like a 2d conways game of life, so it resides in the same layer of abstraction.
You are very right, grandparent poster has a good point.
The solution: a free phone with an android environment , but in a sandbox. So all the pretty android apps can ask for my sms, mail history, photos, sd, wife and pet, and I can choose what to feed them. For serious work instead I use the GNU/Linux environment.
Jolla are you listening? you are close to a killer phone, wait it's a killer home pc when technology lets it. Think about it.
> If you had $500 to buy a phone, what would you choose? I'd choose the $50 phone that does all that I need, the rest for blackjack and hookers. In fact, forget about the blackjack.
Sounds like a compiler warning to me, all things must be referred when they are defined, that is inside their scope. All reasoning pertaining to a meta world are faith based. Faith in a religion, or faith in the applicability of one's reasoning.
And what do you have against talking snakes? After all we tend to sin because we let our short term survival programming override some more long term and more olistic perception. Some reptilian heritage maybe? So, the biblical satan uses primitive urges to make humans make a step that condemns them, the step is getting aware of good and evil (when you're not mature enough, I guess). If you are not aware you are not responsible. That's why the biblical jhvh tells them "if you eat the fruit you will die", it's because of sin.
The snake doesn't need to talk or be physically there, either. Dissociated people hear voices, it's a medical fact. So, out of the symbolism, it's the reptilian part of the brain, (possibly driven by an evil spirit whatever that means) that bring Eve to disobedience.
Now this is only one of many possible interpretations, the point is not whether it is true, the point is that there are scenarios where it makes sense to use a snake even if genesis were completely made up.
The field of ideas is separate from what we call reality, so in any case, I was not considering Plato. It's quicker to turn the problem upside down.
In the context of a videogame, I am my avatar. I might be picking my nose while the avatar nukes a city, my behavior has no whatsoever effect except for my inputs to the game. So, are we going to call real my nose picking, which cannot be detected at all and has no whatsoever bearing to the action, or are we going to call real whatever happens in the game? We are going to choose the second. Our reality is still important, it is the only thing that permits the videogame to exist as an abstraction. just like the kingdom of a god has bearing in our reality, if any exists.
Or let's consider a simulation, a game of chess. the universe in the game of checkers is the board, from the point of view of the pawn, that is called reality. Interactions have definitive consequences just like real stuff does for us. In fact nothing else is real for the pawn, we sure are not real, because in the abstraction called a game of chess, the nature of the player is irrelevant, there are only moves.
Reality for a Conway's game of life creature is about cells being empty or full, nothing more, nothing less is real.
Reality for us is all the things we can directly or indirectly or potentially experience. What makes reality behave like this? an ARBITRARY set of rules and who knows what more. A god behind those rules? we cannot tell.
Reality is the name given to an abstraction by agents belonging to that same level of abstraction. Simulation is what has one more level of abstraction. The creator hypothetically resides in one less level of abstraction.
> you then have to explain the existence of a separate universe in which the simulation is running
That would be a rather popular but huge mistake, you have absolutely NO DATA about the "meta" world that might host the simulation, so you cannot say anything about it.
There is no recursion because the context is undefinable, "Who created the creator" is a question without meaning, you might as well ask "when purple the creator", because in the contest you make the question, the term Who is undefined, the verb Created is undefined. Thinking that logic, or better, the common binary logic employed by us, is a principle equally valid in any meta world is an ugly assumption.
The meta world can be modeled by binary logic, or by the principle of no contradiction, or by any other construct which we use for proofs pertaining to our universe? who knows. Those are very useful things in this universe, but they were formalized in, and for, this universe. You can surely think about an abstraction where binary logic and no contradiction are useless or wrong (I leave this as an exercise).
The abstract function is fascinating OTOH, I still ascribe it to details of implementation of the universe though, religions deal with the meta instead.
No, gringo, nothing Italian in this way of rescuing the ship.
The Italian way is: - "Mario! that ship!" - "What!" - "It has to go before it crumbles down!". - "OK Luigi! [half an hour passes] DONE!" - "Done what?" - "I got rid of the ship, by tomorrow it is disappeared, hordes of people will have taken it apart!" - "How come?" - "I wrote a big sign on it: PROPERTY OF STATE, DO NOT TOUCH ANYTHING!" - "HAHAHA GENIUS! IT WON'T SURVIVE THE NEXT HOUR!" - "HAHAHA I HOPE SO! YOU OWE ME A DRINK!"
Even if you model the universe as to require a god, and it is shown as the only possible model, you still may not have a god because the universe is still not bound by that model and we cannot prove for sure any mechanism used by the universe to follow or break any model, since we are inside it. In other words, the universe can break logic because logic is derived from it, not the other way around, so it is logic who has to match, or be incomplete.
OTOH Even if you prove that the universe has always existed and always will and track down every single particle's interactions to disprove any external influence, you still may have a god, since creation can happen with time and not at some point in time, which is a dumb idea.
Dumb, because it requires time as an absolute above god, in which god operates. Which religions suppose that? The main ones explicitly declare the opposite, because, if fake, they were conceived by people able to think more clearly than our generations. If no religions suppose something, then you havent disproved any of them. God, residing beyond time, creates an universe with an infinite time in both, or n directions. Like man, residing outside Geometry, thinks up a plane with an infinite surface. Big deal.
It is dumb because the simple experiment of imagining an abstraction usually forces an independent timeline. (example, chess has the sequence of moves as time. Chess is a good example because it has timeout. Even the timeout is an atomic event instead of a chunk of time. You could sure start recording players' names, time taken for each move, but that is irrelevant metadata just as the weather that day, the color of a player's tie, how many times his wife cheated on him... because the abstraction named 'a game of chess' does not need any of it to properly respect all the chess rules)
You are not simply sharing something, you are building upon other people's code. If you bear this in mind, the tyranny begins to belong more to the guy closing down stuff, IMHO.
If you want to keep parts proprietary, build upon different people's code instead. Seems not tyrannical at all.
I have an objection, the trend towards more affordable gear started with midi and pcs, so it boomed in the 90s, while the possibility for distribution through internet boomed before 2000. Plenty of time to witness the renaissance you speak of. It is not happening, quality goes down.
There must be something more to it, the motivation for making music is a factor affecting the quality of the result, for example. What if the new musicians want simply to imitate the former ones because "make music to become a star" is a hotter topic in our media than "make music to be a better listener, a better band member, a more capable, that is satisfied, person"?
For all their sincere wish to be original and loved for what they really are, artists are objectively imitating. The wealth of technology and material might help triggering this, when you have less and you work around limitations you're likely to be more creative. But, there is a matter of philosophy. New generation soaks up what's fed to them, as usual, and the result is wasted talent, wasted ears, wasted minds.
Even if there the renaissance happens, it cannot be a global phenomenon but a personal one, it will be limited to your playlist. Because the players in the global market play with the same old rules and they control the distribution channels. So, some occasional superstar talent will cut into that, at times, because it's simply too good to be ignored, but I think the music enthusiast will converge to "hipster kitty".
Yet it's a wonderful time for people who like music and want to find their own stuff instead of following the zeitgeist.
> I like how your idea of consciousness is a counter-point to those ridiculous "What if the universe is a simulation" things...
My preferred counter-point is that "a simulation pertaining the universe" and "reality" are the same concept. The mistake is considering one model of reality more or less real than the other. It is only more accurate or useful, not more or less real.
For the question itself, if we can create abstractions, like "a tic tac toe game played in your mind", we can be an abstraction.
Slashdot Mirror
> Well, I don't see many deceptive snakes in nature...
Maybe parent hinted at the fact that snake might refer to a liar instead of a reptile. But no, let's forget that referring to people as animals is commonplace in literature and common talk...
LOL it's the week of the serpent, see my comment history.
I agree 100%, but the issue might be bigger than that: the PC, due to saturation and the advent of FOSS, was beginning to be too mature (read it "too good for the consumer"), so the manufacturers and the software giants have to find something new. If it means saying goodbye to microsoft, fucking up the PC with drm and pushing always connected mobile and a new OS, so be it.
Microsoft as a company is not yet in trouble, as much as I wish they had never existed. They can reinvent themselves and make money again, not by technical merits but by marketing skills.
Whales could walk and serpents could talk. No problems whatsoever.
If I understood it, it makes sense, but I think it might end up looking too similar to a simple random generated behavior.
Have you tried thinking about life as an evolutionary process (evolution vs. creation is a fake dichotomy...)? the characteristics of living creatures (as the Genesis goes: grow, multiply, populate the earth which implies adapting to different conditions) can be viewed as a good solution to the "how to last longer" problem.
In other words, given enough time and interactions between matter, the structures that result from those interactions should behave like living ones.
Those that are not stable disappear, those that do not grow or multiply or populate get eventually wiped out.
Note that the interactions do not need to resemble the real world, as many artificial life experiments insist on. Genetic algorithms are more in line with the idea, see http://www.ai-junkie.com/ga/intro/gat1.html
One could apply this to decision making systems (or whatever else).
As a side note my idea of layers of abstraction do not depend on the abstraction itself, but on who generates what.
That is, our 3d world scientist can think up an abstract 60 dimension world (in fact they do it), yet the abstraction is dependent from ours just like a 2d conways game of life, so it resides in the same layer of abstraction.
You're right, forget about the phone, too.
I have second hand cards, and very few problems myself, but when somebody puts a thing on sale for quite some $$$, I expect the damn thing to deliver.
You are very right, grandparent poster has a good point.
The solution: a free phone with an android environment , but in a sandbox.
So all the pretty android apps can ask for my sms, mail history, photos, sd, wife and pet, and I can choose what to feed them. For serious work instead I use the GNU/Linux environment.
Jolla are you listening? you are close to a killer phone, wait it's a killer home pc when technology lets it. Think about it.
> If you had $500 to buy a phone, what would you choose?
I'd choose the $50 phone that does all that I need, the rest for blackjack and hookers. In fact, forget about the blackjack.
Sounds like a compiler warning to me, all things must be referred when they are defined, that is inside their scope.
All reasoning pertaining to a meta world are faith based. Faith in a religion, or faith in the applicability of one's reasoning.
And what do you have against talking snakes? After all we tend to sin because we let our short term survival programming override some more long term and more olistic perception. Some reptilian heritage maybe? So, the biblical satan uses primitive urges to make humans make a step that condemns them, the step is getting aware of good and evil (when you're not mature enough, I guess). If you are not aware you are not responsible. That's why the biblical jhvh tells them "if you eat the fruit you will die", it's because of sin.
The snake doesn't need to talk or be physically there, either. Dissociated people hear voices, it's a medical fact. So, out of the symbolism, it's the reptilian part of the brain, (possibly driven by an evil spirit whatever that means) that bring Eve to disobedience.
Now this is only one of many possible interpretations, the point is not whether it is true, the point is that there are scenarios where it makes sense to use a snake even if genesis were completely made up.
The field of ideas is separate from what we call reality, so in any case, I was not considering Plato. It's quicker to turn the problem upside down.
In the context of a videogame, I am my avatar. I might be picking my nose while the avatar nukes a city, my behavior has no whatsoever effect except for my inputs to the game. So, are we going to call real my nose picking, which cannot be detected at all and has no whatsoever bearing to the action, or are we going to call real whatever happens in the game? We are going to choose the second. Our reality is still important, it is the only thing that permits the videogame to exist as an abstraction. just like the kingdom of a god has bearing in our reality, if any exists.
Or let's consider a simulation, a game of chess. the universe in the game of checkers is the board, from the point of view of the pawn, that is called reality. Interactions have definitive consequences just like real stuff does for us. In fact nothing else is real for the pawn, we sure are not real, because in the abstraction called a game of chess, the nature of the player is irrelevant, there are only moves.
Reality for a Conway's game of life creature is about cells being empty or full, nothing more, nothing less is real.
Reality for us is all the things we can directly or indirectly or potentially experience. What makes reality behave like this? an ARBITRARY set of rules and who knows what more. A god behind those rules? we cannot tell.
Reality is the name given to an abstraction by agents belonging to that same level of abstraction. Simulation is what has one more level of abstraction. The creator hypothetically resides in one less level of abstraction.
> you then have to explain the existence of a separate universe in which the simulation is running
That would be a rather popular but huge mistake, you have absolutely NO DATA about the "meta" world that might host the simulation, so you cannot say anything about it.
There is no recursion because the context is undefinable, "Who created the creator" is a question without meaning, you might as well ask "when purple the creator", because in the contest you make the question, the term Who is undefined, the verb Created is undefined. Thinking that logic, or better, the common binary logic employed by us, is a principle equally valid in any meta world is an ugly assumption.
The meta world can be modeled by binary logic, or by the principle of no contradiction, or by any other construct which we use for proofs pertaining to our universe? who knows. Those are very useful things in this universe, but they were formalized in, and for, this universe. You can surely think about an abstraction where binary logic and no contradiction are useless or wrong (I leave this as an exercise).
The abstract function is fascinating OTOH, I still ascribe it to details of implementation of the universe though, religions deal with the meta instead.
No, gringo, nothing Italian in this way of rescuing the ship.
The Italian way is:
- "Mario! that ship!"
- "What!"
- "It has to go before it crumbles down!".
- "OK Luigi! [half an hour passes] DONE!"
- "Done what?"
- "I got rid of the ship, by tomorrow it is disappeared, hordes of people will have taken it apart!"
- "How come?"
- "I wrote a big sign on it: PROPERTY OF STATE, DO NOT TOUCH ANYTHING!"
- "HAHAHA GENIUS! IT WON'T SURVIVE THE NEXT HOUR!"
- "HAHAHA I HOPE SO! YOU OWE ME A DRINK!"
THE END
where do you live, what version of locksmith you got? can you mail me a recent one? KTHXBYE
That's nice, have fun!
> Now kiddies, Ritalin yourselves!
Fixed that for you.
Newspeak, here we come! UNTABLETED!!!!!
In other word, you visit a page using http, aka hyper text transport protocol, you got served some hypertext, AND YOU COMPLAIN???
If the author of the web were here, it would get mad. What was his name, Steve Jobs or something like that....
Even if you model the universe as to require a god, and it is shown as the only possible model, you still may not have a god because the universe is still not bound by that model and we cannot prove for sure any mechanism used by the universe to follow or break any model, since we are inside it. In other words, the universe can break logic because logic is derived from it, not the other way around, so it is logic who has to match, or be incomplete.
OTOH
Even if you prove that the universe has always existed and always will and track down every single particle's interactions to disprove any external influence, you still may have a god, since creation can happen with time and not at some point in time, which is a dumb idea.
Dumb, because it requires time as an absolute above god, in which god operates. Which religions suppose that? The main ones explicitly declare the opposite, because, if fake, they were conceived by people able to think more clearly than our generations. If no religions suppose something, then you havent disproved any of them.
God, residing beyond time, creates an universe with an infinite time in both, or n directions. Like man, residing outside Geometry, thinks up a plane with an infinite surface. Big deal.
It is dumb because the simple experiment of imagining an abstraction usually forces an independent timeline. (example, chess has the sequence of moves as time. Chess is a good example because it has timeout. Even the timeout is an atomic event instead of a chunk of time. You could sure start recording players' names, time taken for each move, but that is irrelevant metadata just as the weather that day, the color of a player's tie, how many times his wife cheated on him... because the abstraction named 'a game of chess' does not need any of it to properly respect all the chess rules)
You are not simply sharing something, you are building upon other people's code. If you bear this in mind, the tyranny begins to belong more to the guy closing down stuff, IMHO.
If you want to keep parts proprietary, build upon different people's code instead. Seems not tyrannical at all.
Yes, the music biz is not the music scene.
I have an objection, the trend towards more affordable gear started with midi and pcs, so it boomed in the 90s, while the possibility for distribution through internet boomed before 2000. Plenty of time to witness the renaissance you speak of. It is not happening, quality goes down.
There must be something more to it, the motivation for making music is a factor affecting the quality of the result, for example.
What if the new musicians want simply to imitate the former ones because "make music to become a star" is a hotter topic in our media than "make music to be a better listener, a better band member, a more capable, that is satisfied, person"?
For all their sincere wish to be original and loved for what they really are, artists are objectively imitating. The wealth of technology and material might help triggering this, when you have less and you work around limitations you're likely to be more creative. But, there is a matter of philosophy. New generation soaks up what's fed to them, as usual, and the result is wasted talent, wasted ears, wasted minds.
Even if there the renaissance happens, it cannot be a global phenomenon but a personal one, it will be limited to your playlist. Because the players in the global market play with the same old rules and they control the distribution channels. So, some occasional superstar talent will cut into that, at times, because it's simply too good to be ignored, but I think the music enthusiast will converge to "hipster kitty".
Yet it's a wonderful time for people who like music and want to find their own stuff instead of following the zeitgeist.
> I like how your idea of consciousness is a counter-point to those ridiculous "What if the universe is a simulation" things...
My preferred counter-point is that "a simulation pertaining the universe" and "reality" are the same concept. The mistake is considering one model of reality more or less real than the other. It is only more accurate or useful, not more or less real.
For the question itself, if we can create abstractions, like "a tic tac toe game played in your mind", we can be an abstraction.
Sorry to have derailed.
> Even the people who participate in cyber-sex consider the term vulgar.
I DON'T!!!
oh wait...
> Most of the proprietary code is interface.
But that is what makes the desktop. You say that essentially in the rest of your post
Sharkablanca, Whiteshark and the seven carps, Huckleberry Fin. I won't spoil the stories.
> It is a very complex driver :D
Well, you have to put the spying code SOMEWHERE