Viruses and prions don't fit everything in your list either, as do other things that reproduce without sex. Aliens could be alien enough to be scaled up things on those lines - which of course is also from the land of make-believe but so is all speculation about aliens when you get down to it. Solaris is deliberately a bit of an extreme but the important question it asks is this: "What if aliens were truly alien?". The more different from us something is the more difficult it is likely to be to communicate.
Besides, willaien was discussing how to communicate with truly alien beings and I just supplied two examples from fiction. I really don't get why you jumped in to be so critical of me when they are not even my ideas.
No, because it's at odds with reality as we know it.
Space is so damned interesting because we don't even know what most of it is, just that the unknown stuff has mass and can't otherwise be observed with what we have now. It's a blank spot on the map that may as well have "here be dragons" on it. For all we know there could be asexual non-carbon based critters out there with intelligence that would just not get a lot of the concepts we see as important. Communicating with such a creature "from the land of make-believe" is unlikely to be trivial. So I gave two examples above - 1/ find a point of commonality and build a bridge (Egan) 2/ a story where the effort to find a point of commonality is still ongoing (Lem). In Egan's novel, Diaspora, most of the human derived intelligences are quite alien to our viewpoint from fairly early in the novel as well, moreso later when some never had physical form, so a major theme is communication between different mindsets.
You could buy discrete ICs that modelled neurons in the 1990s
Only at a very dumbed down 1990 level of understanding based on a theoretical model. I was there and got to play with the things. They were more like using digital computing techniques to simulate some operations of analog computers than anything resembling a nervous system.
What don't we understand about individual "nerves"?
Quite a lot considering what is being published now and making it into the mainstream science press. Preconceptions are being overturned and new questions are arising. Getting to the point where nerve cells can be "printed" has taken a lot of hard work and shown we knew very little about them in the past and still have a bit to learn about them now.
the fact that you've never worked in AI
Yet I've identified issues you appear to be unaware of - so what's your excuse?
subject to the known laws of physics.
Doesn't help much when there's still a lot of unknown biochemistry to sort out.
If you disagree then I think the burden is on you to prove otherwise.
That's not how it works - it's up to the people making extraordinary claims about building machines that think to do so instead of the people who say we don't have much of a model of thinking yet. It's probably coming but we need more insight into the process of thought before it can be implemented in a machine. We can build an increasing range of rules based devices but that's no more thought than the 1800s mechanical turk.
Look up Azusa Street Revival - the weird science denial end of Pentacostalism we see today grew rapidly on the premise that God was doing a Sodom and Gommorah on San Francisco. It's mentioned in a lot of places including a couple of pages near the end of Simon Winchesters book on the 1906 earthquake "The Crack at the Edge of the World." For added irony Islam had a similar movement come out of a reaction to Krakatoa and these paticular "Christian" fundamentalists resemble that far more than they do other branches of Christianity.
Climate science recognised El Nino/La Nina before the current bunch of "fundamentalists" got popular by blaming the 1906 San Francisco earthquake on Gods will instead of geology. The latest batch of science denialism is just the latest recruiting drive for that bunch of merchants in the temple - all you have to do is deny reality and fill the collection box with cash and a dumbed down cardboard God of an unchanging world will make it all better.
Thus, an alien would still experience the same archetypes - conflict, birth, death, success, failure, discovery, hunger, etc
Not necessarily. Lem's lone planet sized alien in Solaris seems to avoid at least a few of those and for the rest nobody can work it out at the time of the story.
it can't produce incomprehensible ones.
Irrelevant since easily comprehensible and incomprehensible are not the only choices. Lem's example is a century+ of almost no progress but that doesn't mean forever. In reality we've had that long since Einstein trying to work out non-Newtonian gravity.
Anyway, that wasn't the only example from fiction I put up, it's just one extreme that has been thought of. It's a good book but since a lot of it is a series of descriptions of academic papers that never existed I'm amazed that it was turned into a movie, let alone two. It's almost as if it was declared unfilmable and was taken up as a bet.
How do you even establish a communication protocol with an entirely alien (technologically) civilization?
Greg Egan had one in a novel that relied on being able to copy and modify human minds then run them as software. You make a copy, tweak it so it has some understanding of the alien and is human enough to communicate with the mind upstream, then another and so on until you have a chain of a dozen or more intelligences that pass a message from the human to the alien.
For a less optimistic view there's Lem's novel "Solaris" (the main theme doesn't make it into the two movies). Spend a century+ studying an alien and end up with just a vast amount of paper listing weird shit it's done with still no idea why. Meanwhile the alien has made perfect copies of people from the memories of human researchers but the copies have no clue about the alien either.
Neural networks was one of the worst misdirection in the history of AI. These was a lot of wasted effort on that idea.
Especially since a lot of it was really just a digital simulation of analog computers. This industry has memory problems which means old ideas keep being dragged up as new with little of the improvements made on the old ideas coming with it.
We still don't really have a full handle on how individual nerves work, so we are still some way distant from producing something with the reasoning capacity of an ant. There are plenty of "mechanical turk" style simulations that in specific situations look as if thought is happening but they are just a bunch of rules in a black box with no actual thinking going on. This prediction relies on a breakthrough that hasn't happened yet.
I take it back - in some backward countries where people even argue for their right to not wear seatbelts it is perfectly acceptable to poison homeless alcoholics with dangerous shit like that. Other places stopped putting it in back when Grandpa was a boy because it was killing off too many people in the 1930s depression.
but I don't think the govt should be in business of enforcing that
How about a government being in charge of enforcing that businesses disclose where their sensitive data is? For instance the company I work for uses a bank that processes all the financial data in India, which only became apparent when a long serious of network problems made it unavailable on many occasions.
That's a MSDS of what may be in there, including historical liquids in storage for decades, and not a list of what's in the stuff that's been sold since grandpa is a boy. Why do people play these pointless mass debate games with links that are not what the poster pretends they are? Is there that much of an ego boost in making people look like they are wrong that there's a need to fake it? If so, I made a bad typo on another thread where I mixed up "more" with "less" - if you want to kick this puppy go jump on that instead of doing it with something made up and misdirection to try to make it look real.
limits specific formulas for different uses
Which are restricted so more difficult to obtain than any other form of alcohol.
... and the point is keep the stuff close enough that you can at least in theory get local lawyers and politicians to do something about it when things go wrong.
Good link there too. Some time in the late 1800s an enterprising German distillery was selling schnapps with greater than 95% alcohol. They did it by adding benzene to allow more water to be driven off, which worked but made it something of a poison.
Do I need a million examples instead of just one? Come to think of it personal email is another good example considering the fuckup this week by someone at Goldman Sachs who wanted an email sent to gmail deleted. Despite it being an incredibly stupid idea a lot of commercially sensitive information is sent via email where it can be easily read by anyone with access to routers on the way to it's destination. Given how there is no real boundary between government and commercial interests in some parts of US intelligence (eg. outsourcing the NSA to many little operations like Booz Allen - WTF?), it makes sense for another nation for trade reasons alone to encourage people to not host their emails on the other end of international cables that are now known to be watched.
I suggest getting out of the pointless us and them mentality and reverse the situation - would you be happy if your emails were hosted in China or Russia and you know that a great deal of the traffic in and out is being watched? Does my argument make sense now put into that context? That's why I tried to avoid pointless jingoistic arguments such as yours by putting "Nationalism aside" in the subject. Perhaps you missed it and I should have put it in bold in the body instead of the subject. Maybe we need to being back the BLINK tag so late night slashdot readers don't miss things that should be obvious.
They want to make it easier for themselves to play NSA.
That's being dealt with elsewhere and is too fucking incredibly obvious to mention since the bunch Putin used to work for inspired 1984 so why drag it in here? In this sort of field the NSA are playing like kids (Star Trek set designer and similar shit) while Russians are leaving fucking Polonium calling cards to let people know without question who did the killing. Can we discuss other implications as well without getting "corrected" by the stuff on page 1 when the rest of us know that and are half way through the book?
Which is why they stopped putting methanol in to discourage drinking some time before grandpa was a boy. The name "methlyated spirits" stuck without the methanol.
To get that methanol buzz and blindness and/or death you have to go to places like Bali where the locals make spirits for tourists without knowing or caring how to do it properly.
No problem. If you make your alcohol impossible to drink (but still usefull for industrial activities) then you don't have to pay taxes on it.
I used to get a lot of industrial ethanol when my work required it. Additives would have ruined it's use in that situation, but the answer was that I had to have a permit before I could buy a drum of the stuff. It was very cheap, not a lot more than petrol/gasoline per litre. There's more expensive stuff with a higher water content - it's very hard to distill ethanol without getting some water condensing with it.
Really "all" or do only Microsoft operating systems count to you? While I've got the scripts turned off to avoid annoyance surely javascript can do no more than fuck up your browser settings in any non-MS operating system these days?
Nationalism aside it's not a bad idea, since having your medical records sent to the Phillipines for data entry and many similar stupid shortcuts are bad ideas. If your sensitive information is being stored in a different legal juristiction where people speak a different language there's not much you can do if someone wanders off with it and puts it to other uses unless you have as many international lawyers on staff as IBM.
The CIA ran guns to Castro while another portion opposed his revolution, and that's when the CIA was relatively small. One of the guys running guns to Castro later got mixed up in Watergate which is how that sillyness eventually came out in court and got into the press.
Some time in the 1970s US gun clubs got taken over by batshit insane weekend "warrior" draft dodging pussies who want to use military grade weapons as toys without the responsibility to learn how to use them properly. They have failed to run their sport well since then but they have put a LOT of effort into dabbling with politics.
He was clumsy. His attention seeking witch hunt aimed at getting him into the White House failed when he started calling US war heroes traitors. He did a lot of damage before that implosion.
Slashdot Mirror
Solaris is deliberately a bit of an extreme but the important question it asks is this: "What if aliens were truly alien?". The more different from us something is the more difficult it is likely to be to communicate.
Besides, willaien was discussing how to communicate with truly alien beings and I just supplied two examples from fiction. I really don't get why you jumped in to be so critical of me when they are not even my ideas.
Space is so damned interesting because we don't even know what most of it is, just that the unknown stuff has mass and can't otherwise be observed with what we have now. It's a blank spot on the map that may as well have "here be dragons" on it. For all we know there could be asexual non-carbon based critters out there with intelligence that would just not get a lot of the concepts we see as important. Communicating with such a creature "from the land of make-believe" is unlikely to be trivial. So I gave two examples above -
1/ find a point of commonality and build a bridge (Egan)
2/ a story where the effort to find a point of commonality is still ongoing (Lem).
In Egan's novel, Diaspora, most of the human derived intelligences are quite alien to our viewpoint from fairly early in the novel as well, moreso later when some never had physical form, so a major theme is communication between different mindsets.
Only at a very dumbed down 1990 level of understanding based on a theoretical model. I was there and got to play with the things. They were more like using digital computing techniques to simulate some operations of analog computers than anything resembling a nervous system.
Quite a lot considering what is being published now and making it into the mainstream science press. Preconceptions are being overturned and new questions are arising. Getting to the point where nerve cells can be "printed" has taken a lot of hard work and shown we knew very little about them in the past and still have a bit to learn about them now.
Yet I've identified issues you appear to be unaware of - so what's your excuse?
Doesn't help much when there's still a lot of unknown biochemistry to sort out.
That's not how it works - it's up to the people making extraordinary claims about building machines that think to do so instead of the people who say we don't have much of a model of thinking yet. It's probably coming but we need more insight into the process of thought before it can be implemented in a machine. We can build an increasing range of rules based devices but that's no more thought than the 1800s mechanical turk.
Nice put down if we were not speculating about something nobody has observed. Of course we are using examples from the land of make-believe.
Look up Azusa Street Revival - the weird science denial end of Pentacostalism we see today grew rapidly on the premise that God was doing a Sodom and Gommorah on San Francisco. It's mentioned in a lot of places including a couple of pages near the end of Simon Winchesters book on the 1906 earthquake "The Crack at the Edge of the World."
For added irony Islam had a similar movement come out of a reaction to Krakatoa and these paticular "Christian" fundamentalists resemble that far more than they do other branches of Christianity.
Climate science recognised El Nino/La Nina before the current bunch of "fundamentalists" got popular by blaming the 1906 San Francisco earthquake on Gods will instead of geology. The latest batch of science denialism is just the latest recruiting drive for that bunch of merchants in the temple - all you have to do is deny reality and fill the collection box with cash and a dumbed down cardboard God of an unchanging world will make it all better.
Not necessarily. Lem's lone planet sized alien in Solaris seems to avoid at least a few of those and for the rest nobody can work it out at the time of the story.
Irrelevant since easily comprehensible and incomprehensible are not the only choices. Lem's example is a century+ of almost no progress but that doesn't mean forever. In reality we've had that long since Einstein trying to work out non-Newtonian gravity.
Anyway, that wasn't the only example from fiction I put up, it's just one extreme that has been thought of. It's a good book but since a lot of it is a series of descriptions of academic papers that never existed I'm amazed that it was turned into a movie, let alone two. It's almost as if it was declared unfilmable and was taken up as a bet.
There was a war to pay for and NASA was turned into a machine to produce jobs in areas where that could influence elections.
Greg Egan had one in a novel that relied on being able to copy and modify human minds then run them as software. You make a copy, tweak it so it has some understanding of the alien and is human enough to communicate with the mind upstream, then another and so on until you have a chain of a dozen or more intelligences that pass a message from the human to the alien.
For a less optimistic view there's Lem's novel "Solaris" (the main theme doesn't make it into the two movies). Spend a century+ studying an alien and end up with just a vast amount of paper listing weird shit it's done with still no idea why. Meanwhile the alien has made perfect copies of people from the memories of human researchers but the copies have no clue about the alien either.
Especially since a lot of it was really just a digital simulation of analog computers. This industry has memory problems which means old ideas keep being dragged up as new with little of the improvements made on the old ideas coming with it.
We still don't really have a full handle on how individual nerves work, so we are still some way distant from producing something with the reasoning capacity of an ant. There are plenty of "mechanical turk" style simulations that in specific situations look as if thought is happening but they are just a bunch of rules in a black box with no actual thinking going on.
This prediction relies on a breakthrough that hasn't happened yet.
I take it back - in some backward countries where people even argue for their right to not wear seatbelts it is perfectly acceptable to poison homeless alcoholics with dangerous shit like that. Other places stopped putting it in back when Grandpa was a boy because it was killing off too many people in the 1930s depression.
Which would not be on sale to the general public because it is fucking poisonous.
What is it with clowns like you?
How about a government being in charge of enforcing that businesses disclose where their sensitive data is? For instance the company I work for uses a bank that processes all the financial data in India, which only became apparent when a long serious of network problems made it unavailable on many occasions.
Why do people play these pointless mass debate games with links that are not what the poster pretends they are? Is there that much of an ego boost in making people look like they are wrong that there's a need to fake it? If so, I made a bad typo on another thread where I mixed up "more" with "less" - if you want to kick this puppy go jump on that instead of doing it with something made up and misdirection to try to make it look real.
Which are restricted so more difficult to obtain than any other form of alcohol.
However you are in the US now so an equivalent idea would be to keep the information in the US to stop Russian agencies snooping on it.
... and the point is keep the stuff close enough that you can at least in theory get local lawyers and politicians to do something about it when things go wrong.
Good link there too.
Some time in the late 1800s an enterprising German distillery was selling schnapps with greater than 95% alcohol. They did it by adding benzene to allow more water to be driven off, which worked but made it something of a poison.
I suggest getting out of the pointless us and them mentality and reverse the situation - would you be happy if your emails were hosted in China or Russia and you know that a great deal of the traffic in and out is being watched? Does my argument make sense now put into that context? That's why I tried to avoid pointless jingoistic arguments such as yours by putting "Nationalism aside" in the subject. Perhaps you missed it and I should have put it in bold in the body instead of the subject. Maybe we need to being back the BLINK tag so late night slashdot readers don't miss things that should be obvious.
That's being dealt with elsewhere and is too fucking incredibly obvious to mention since the bunch Putin used to work for inspired 1984 so why drag it in here? In this sort of field the NSA are playing like kids (Star Trek set designer and similar shit) while Russians are leaving fucking Polonium calling cards to let people know without question who did the killing. Can we discuss other implications as well without getting "corrected" by the stuff on page 1 when the rest of us know that and are half way through the book?
Which is why they stopped putting methanol in to discourage drinking some time before grandpa was a boy. The name "methlyated spirits" stuck without the methanol.
To get that methanol buzz and blindness and/or death you have to go to places like Bali where the locals make spirits for tourists without knowing or caring how to do it properly.
I used to get a lot of industrial ethanol when my work required it. Additives would have ruined it's use in that situation, but the answer was that I had to have a permit before I could buy a drum of the stuff. It was very cheap, not a lot more than petrol/gasoline per litre. There's more expensive stuff with a higher water content - it's very hard to distill ethanol without getting some water condensing with it.
Really "all" or do only Microsoft operating systems count to you? While I've got the scripts turned off to avoid annoyance surely javascript can do no more than fuck up your browser settings in any non-MS operating system these days?
Nationalism aside it's not a bad idea, since having your medical records sent to the Phillipines for data entry and many similar stupid shortcuts are bad ideas. If your sensitive information is being stored in a different legal juristiction where people speak a different language there's not much you can do if someone wanders off with it and puts it to other uses unless you have as many international lawyers on staff as IBM.
The CIA ran guns to Castro while another portion opposed his revolution, and that's when the CIA was relatively small. One of the guys running guns to Castro later got mixed up in Watergate which is how that sillyness eventually came out in court and got into the press.
Some time in the 1970s US gun clubs got taken over by batshit insane weekend "warrior" draft dodging pussies who want to use military grade weapons as toys without the responsibility to learn how to use them properly. They have failed to run their sport well since then but they have put a LOT of effort into dabbling with politics.
He was clumsy. His attention seeking witch hunt aimed at getting him into the White House failed when he started calling US war heroes traitors. He did a lot of damage before that implosion.