Amnesia and Alzheimer's is enough proof we don't have souls, no doubt what we call "consciousness" is really just a network of developed cells and memories that are attached to it. After all no one claims to be able to remember what it was like as an embryo, also when one is under amnesia. One's "soul" doesn't float away. The concept of "soul" is just our irrational psychic defense against the fact we all die someday. That so many peoples and cultures have come up with an afterlife speaks volumes that it is just a reaction against our powerlessness to heal and fix ourselves because of the expense, energy, intelligence and tools to do so.
We experience the self as a unified thing but it isn't. This is proven by people who've had brain damage in accidents and strokes where their "self" functions but they lose specific functions and aspects of 'who they are'.
You can find out more by reading the following book by a Neurologist.
This is Damasio's refutation of the Cartesian idea of the human mind as separate from bodily processes draws on neurochemistry to support his claim that emotions play a central role in human decision making.
... is a joke. The only reviews to trust are the cream of the crop user reviews.
The whole "gaming news industry" is filled with morons and kickbacks. And the pretentiousness of the game industry that it is no par with movies is ridiculous. Games and movies are fundamentally different mediums even if they do have some amount of cross over. We've seen how crappy many games have turned out when they put too much emphasis on the movie part in their games and not enough game. Final fantasy 13 I'm looking at you!
"No matter what the topic, no matter what the victim, journalists are always able to slant stories in a negative direction like this. What's the story?"
The story is it is pointless to have such speeds at such shitty caps at such a shitty price point.
"Just realize the justification of murdering innocent people to preserve the State has been used by Stalin, Hitler, Mao, and every other corrupt government dating back to the beginning of time."
"but it doesn't take any longer to come up with a new and interesting gameplay concept. "
Yes in fact it does, gameplay proto-typing costs money and adds all sorts of complexity developers don't want to deal with. This is why they rehash gameplay concepts. Take RTS for instance one of the most stale genres of all. I have a tonne of ideas that I've never ever seen developers implement.
People tend to stick with what they know and it really shows in the game industry.
The great irony is sweeny "predicted" a return to software rendering back in 1996 he said by "2002-04" we'd be back at software rendering... how wrong the man was. The guy is a giant douche he's been making failed predictions about the end of hardware acceleration but notice he never talks about memory bandwidth, the reason GPU's are so f'n powerful is because they do one thing and they do it as fast as possible.
"For instance we are only using approximately 1/3 of the processing power of the SPUs on the Cell processor in Uncharted."
The great irony is that the cell processor was supposed to do everything, they had to bolt on a GTX to the Cell because the cell didn't have the horsepower to compete with the Xbox 360. This is what is so hilarious about these comments from developers. This is also why the PS3 ended up being so damn expensive since they had to bolt on a GPU because they knew the cell learning curve to utilize it effectively was off the charts compared to the Xbox 360.
... take too long to make today because hardware power has increased asset production time exponentially. So it's obvious why console generations are no longer 5 years, its pretty much approaching 3+ years between a game and its sequel.
Doing a modern AAA game takes at lest 3 or more years to do it right, and games that are developed in 2 years often show it in lack of quality and the use of rehashed concepts ad-nauseum.
Not to mention all the money and years spent wasted in failed attempts and false starts that is hidden from view.
"I'd like to thank you on behalf of those of us who want to live forever...making room for the immortals if awfully kind of you."
Human "Immortals" can still die by guns and bombs. Just because you can regenerate your cells, does not make you immortal. It makes you long lived until something unexpected happens.
"Personally, I'd prefer to see a social and economic reevaluation,"
When that happens americans scream communism or socialism as they were brainwashed to.
Truth is whenever that happens anywhere else america gets involved and tries to install puppets or dictators. Corporations love their cheap slave labor and america is corporately ruled.
Emotions can be modeled in different ways by rating sentiment of a given word "up or down", i.e positive or negative, you begin with simple emotions that are easily expressed or modeled, you don't try to bite off more then you can chew.
The truth is you don't have any idea and thats why you posted as AC.
"...which you can only extract after parsing the strings and symbols!"
My whole point is they are starting with the wrong idea i.e. trying to parse strings. Strings are merely pointers.
What they should be doing is creating concept networks themselves and building databases that map to these concepts networks of meaning using human input by trying building most common variations of statements that equal the same thing. Then have the interpreter try to guess what the meaning is of all these different statements that mean the same thing to hone in on on the patterns that allow parsing of seemingly an infinite number of statements.
To put it another way they are trying to "Extract meaning" instead of building concept networks from human minds, humans are the arbiters of meaning, so humans necessarily will have to be involved in building these networks.
The string isn't what is important, because the string is only the first layer. It points to actual images/difference definitions in the mind - the true meaning is spacial/structural. What we see as "strings" are merely window dressing (packages), they aren't meaning they are pointers to meaning. Meaning is in our minds - images and differences our minds have recorded.
It's mapping the meanings in our minds that counts
"Natural Language processing is one of the hardest problems there are in ICT"
That's because they are looking at strings not intents or emotions. Language is not merely symbols there are whole other layers of information embedded in it. Think about words as human beings use them especially in politics think about this word:
Pedophelia.
That word causes people to feel emotions or think immediately of other things on an unconscious level it activates EVERYTHING associated with the word in their minds.
What really needs to happen is that they need to stop looking at language and create models for what is the emotional content of each context they are measuring and what it is pointing at.
"Crysis 2 is innovative? Oh please. Two extra bullet-points on the back of a box do not make a game "innovative"."
The great irony in you saying this is that the reverse is true, console game quality is hurting PC game quality. PC games have been dumbed down for consoles and consolized for multiplatform release.
Also console ports for the PC get sloppy seconds due to multiplatform release. We saw the awful game for windows live inserted into Gears of War for PC. We also saw how Badly Halo and Halo 2 were ported to PC. Halo was originally a PC game they had to fit into the first xbox because MS needed a game to sell the system.
Don't believe it console games have effected PC game quality? Check out supcom 2 and Civ 5's terrible reviews on amazon.
This is what you said:"I'm not looking for a copy/paste of the book or anything like that. But it would be nice to describe briefly what goes on and how the method you describe addresses the grandparent's concern."
First of all any topic that is rather large is not simple to condense the implications of things into nice trite paragraphs without requisite research and examples, this is why I suggested to the GP to read the books, if you do not take the latest scientific research seriously there can be no grounds for communication. I do understand what I am talking about but it's clear you have no background, there is no way for communication.
The whole point I'm getting at, the only way you could begin to understand anything is if you have the requisite concepts in your head and you are capable of linking them together and seeing how they are related.
Concepts are the lenses by which we see interpret the world, improper lense, improper understanding all the way through. The problem is to build much of the conceptual base requires actually reading a lot of literature, it's not easily condensed because you have to understand
Just because I give you information does not mean you will be able to use your "rational mind" to put it together _because REASONING DOES NOT WORK LIKE THAT_ that is the whole point, that there are intractable problems in reasoning.
If you do not believe this consider Daniel tammet... watch the whole thing...
Do you have any idea how he's doing that? Didn't think so, he doesn't have to CONSCIOUSLY think about things, automatic unconscious processes are linking and solving problems for him.
This is how MOST reasoning works and this means that just because I say something or know something DOES NOT MEAN you have the capability of putting it together until it is framed in terms of something you can map to your own experience of what understanding is.
"I'm not sure that no copyright would cause a boom in a "software fixing" industry as much as a "redistribute for profit without paying anything to the author" industry."
Open source code means people could pay for licensed modifications. i.e. people could make money off of additions (mods) to programs, while the main code for said old product is free. This wouldn't just apply to games but ALL software and I'm sure there would be niches.
"Games should be released DRM free, publishers should be free to utilize what means have been approved to protect their work. At least that's how it would work in my perfect world...."
A copy of the games code and assets should be held in public libraries under lock and key and released after 8-12 years so that the game can be fixed and updated. Gamers should have the right to modify and update the products they buy.
This whole idea that gamers are not co-investors and owners of their own products is bullshit, since they are basically investors and supporters of a game companies success through their purchases. Corporations want us to perpetually rent and re-buy everything by cordoning off our rights as customers and it just a form of serfdom.
We should have the right to own our games outright and have the right to access code and assets regulated by law when our games are too old to run on later hardware and operating systems.
This is the problem with copyright, fundamentally there is no "software fixing" industry because of the copyright monopoly.
Slashdot Mirror
Amnesia and Alzheimer's is enough proof we don't have souls, no doubt what we call "consciousness" is really just a network of developed cells and memories that are attached to it. After all no one claims to be able to remember what it was like as an embryo, also when one is under amnesia. One's "soul" doesn't float away. The concept of "soul" is just our irrational psychic defense against the fact we all die someday. That so many peoples and cultures have come up with an afterlife speaks volumes that it is just a reaction against our powerlessness to heal and fix ourselves because of the expense, energy, intelligence and tools to do so.
We experience the self as a unified thing but it isn't. This is proven by people who've had brain damage in accidents and strokes where their "self" functions but they lose specific functions and aspects of 'who they are'.
You can find out more by reading the following book by a Neurologist.
This is Damasio's refutation of the Cartesian idea of the human mind as separate from bodily processes draws on neurochemistry to support his claim that emotions play a central role in human decision making.
http://www.amazon.com/Descartes-Error-Emotion-Reason-Human/dp/014303622X/
Also related clip:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PYmi0DLzBdQ
"Refusing arguments by analogy is absurd."
It is because the brain works on metaphors. Metaphors are partially equal comparisons of the structure or relationships of what is being compared.
http://www.amazon.com/Metaphors-Live-METAPHORS-LIVE--OS/dp/B001TI9FYE/
... is a joke. The only reviews to trust are the cream of the crop user reviews.
The whole "gaming news industry" is filled with morons and kickbacks. And the pretentiousness of the game industry that it is no par with movies is ridiculous. Games and movies are fundamentally different mediums even if they do have some amount of cross over. We've seen how crappy many games have turned out when they put too much emphasis on the movie part in their games and not enough game. Final fantasy 13 I'm looking at you!
"No matter what the topic, no matter what the victim, journalists are always able to slant stories in a negative direction like this. What's the story?"
The story is it is pointless to have such speeds at such shitty caps at such a shitty price point.
"Just realize the justification of murdering innocent people to preserve the State has been used by Stalin, Hitler, Mao, and every other corrupt government dating back to the beginning of time."
The government tends to reflect its people.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eScDfYzMEEw#t=02m21s
... everyone interested in the ongoing bullshit with the banks should see this.
http://dailybail.com/
Some of their videos just make me livid. Socialism for the rich, free market for everyone else.
"but it doesn't take any longer to come up with a new and interesting gameplay concept. "
Yes in fact it does, gameplay proto-typing costs money and adds all sorts of complexity developers don't want to deal with. This is why they rehash gameplay concepts. Take RTS for instance one of the most stale genres of all. I have a tonne of ideas that I've never ever seen developers implement.
People tend to stick with what they know and it really shows in the game industry.
The great irony is sweeny "predicted" a return to software rendering back in 1996 he said by "2002-04" we'd be back at software rendering... how wrong the man was. The guy is a giant douche he's been making failed predictions about the end of hardware acceleration but notice he never talks about memory bandwidth, the reason GPU's are so f'n powerful is because they do one thing and they do it as fast as possible.
"For instance we are only using approximately 1/3 of the processing power of the SPUs on the Cell processor in Uncharted."
The great irony is that the cell processor was supposed to do everything, they had to bolt on a GTX to the Cell because the cell didn't have the horsepower to compete with the Xbox 360. This is what is so hilarious about these comments from developers. This is also why the PS3 ended up being so damn expensive since they had to bolt on a GPU because they knew the cell learning curve to utilize it effectively was off the charts compared to the Xbox 360.
"Honesty can destroy peace - in fact it usually does."
Who's to say that the peace was worth saving? This idea that conflict should always be avoided may in fact be counter intuitively harmful.
... take too long to make today because hardware power has increased asset production time exponentially. So it's obvious why console generations are no longer 5 years, its pretty much approaching 3+ years between a game and its sequel.
Doing a modern AAA game takes at lest 3 or more years to do it right, and games that are developed in 2 years often show it in lack of quality and the use of rehashed concepts ad-nauseum.
Not to mention all the money and years spent wasted in failed attempts and false starts that is hidden from view.
"I'd like to thank you on behalf of those of us who want to live forever...making room for the immortals if awfully kind of you."
Human "Immortals" can still die by guns and bombs. Just because you can regenerate your cells, does not make you immortal. It makes you long lived until something unexpected happens.
"Personally, I'd prefer to see a social and economic reevaluation,"
When that happens americans scream communism or socialism as they were brainwashed to.
Truth is whenever that happens anywhere else america gets involved and tries to install puppets or dictators. Corporations love their cheap slave labor and america is corporately ruled.
See Coca cola killings.
http://killercoke.org/
http://www.tuxpaint.org/
"I have a hard time imagining that most people, who give politics serious thought, would run on that warped analysis of decision making."
Believe it, they do.
Emotions can be modeled in different ways by rating sentiment of a given word "up or down", i.e positive or negative, you begin with simple emotions that are easily expressed or modeled, you don't try to bite off more then you can chew.
The truth is you don't have any idea and thats why you posted as AC.
"...which you can only extract after parsing the strings and symbols!"
My whole point is they are starting with the wrong idea i.e. trying to parse strings. Strings are merely pointers.
What they should be doing is creating concept networks themselves and building databases that map to these concepts networks of meaning using human input by trying building most common variations of statements that equal the same thing. Then have the interpreter try to guess what the meaning is of all these different statements that mean the same thing to hone in on on the patterns that allow parsing of seemingly an infinite number of statements.
To put it another way they are trying to "Extract meaning" instead of building concept networks from human minds, humans are the arbiters of meaning, so humans necessarily will have to be involved in building these networks.
The string isn't what is important, because the string is only the first layer. It points to actual images/difference definitions in the mind - the true meaning is spacial/structural. What we see as "strings" are merely window dressing (packages), they aren't meaning they are pointers to meaning. Meaning is in our minds - images and differences our minds have recorded.
It's mapping the meanings in our minds that counts
"Natural Language processing is one of the hardest problems there are in ICT"
That's because they are looking at strings not intents or emotions. Language is not merely symbols there are whole other layers of information embedded in it. Think about words as human beings use them especially in politics think about this word:
Pedophelia.
That word causes people to feel emotions or think immediately of other things on an unconscious level it activates EVERYTHING associated with the word in their minds.
What really needs to happen is that they need to stop looking at language and create models for what is the emotional content of each context they are measuring and what it is pointing at.
"Slashdot may have political bias"
Speaking about political bias, peoples understanding of what reason is and how it functions is seriously incorrect on all sides.
Everyone on slashdot should see the following:
Clip from important part:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PYmi0DLzBdQ
Te whole thing on youtube
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xOdJMuCreDA
"Sorry if that breaks your worldview where everyone ought to get along in peace."
If we could remove the stupid warmongering half of the worlds population, the world could be a nice place.
The obsession with social games and simplification, they made civ revolution (for consoles) before civ 5.
See here:
Social anxiety (article @ gamesppot)
http://www.gamespot.com/news/6284524.html?tag=topslot;title;4
Search for "facebook" or "civilization"
Also see here (console version of civ)
http://www.amazon.com/Sid-Meiers-Civilization-Revolution-Xbox-360/dp/B000WMEEAI/
Note that Civ 5 was hugely stripped down and console-itis and "facebook games" is part of the problematic mentality of the game industry right now.
"Crysis 2 is innovative? Oh please. Two extra bullet-points on the back of a box do not make a game "innovative"."
The great irony in you saying this is that the reverse is true, console game quality is hurting PC game quality. PC games have been dumbed down for consoles and consolized for multiplatform release.
Also console ports for the PC get sloppy seconds due to multiplatform release. We saw the awful game for windows live inserted into Gears of War for PC. We also saw how Badly Halo and Halo 2 were ported to PC. Halo was originally a PC game they had to fit into the first xbox because MS needed a game to sell the system.
Don't believe it console games have effected PC game quality? Check out supcom 2 and Civ 5's terrible reviews on amazon.
Civ 5
http://www.amazon.com/Sid-Meiers-Civilization-V-Pc/dp/B0038TT8QM/
Supcom 2
http://www.amazon.com/Supreme-Commander-2-Pc/dp/B002BXN6GY/
This is what you said:"I'm not looking for a copy/paste of the book or anything like that. But it would be nice to describe briefly what goes on and how the method you describe addresses the grandparent's concern."
First of all any topic that is rather large is not simple to condense the implications of things into nice trite paragraphs without requisite research and examples, this is why I suggested to the GP to read the books, if you do not take the latest scientific research seriously there can be no grounds for communication. I do understand what I am talking about but it's clear you have no background, there is no way for communication.
The whole point I'm getting at, the only way you could begin to understand anything is if you have the requisite concepts in your head and you are capable of linking them together and seeing how they are related.
Concepts are the lenses by which we see interpret the world, improper lense, improper understanding all the way through. The problem is to build much of the conceptual base requires actually reading a lot of literature, it's not easily condensed because you have to understand
Just because I give you information does not mean you will be able to use your "rational mind" to put it together _because REASONING DOES NOT WORK LIKE THAT_ that is the whole point, that there are intractable problems in reasoning.
If you do not believe this consider Daniel tammet... watch the whole thing...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AbASOcqc1Ss
Do you have any idea how he's doing that? Didn't think so, he doesn't have to CONSCIOUSLY think about things, automatic unconscious processes are linking and solving problems for him.
This is how MOST reasoning works and this means that just because I say something or know something DOES NOT MEAN you have the capability of putting it together until it is framed in terms of something you can map to your own experience of what understanding is.
"I'm not sure that no copyright would cause a boom in a "software fixing" industry as much as a "redistribute for profit without paying anything to the author" industry."
Open source code means people could pay for licensed modifications. i.e. people could make money off of additions (mods) to programs, while the main code for said old product is free. This wouldn't just apply to games but ALL software and I'm sure there would be niches.
"Games should be released DRM free, publishers should be free to utilize what means have been approved to protect their work. At least that's how it would work in my perfect world...."
A copy of the games code and assets should be held in public libraries under lock and key and released after 8-12 years so that the game can be fixed and updated. Gamers should have the right to modify and update the products they buy.
This whole idea that gamers are not co-investors and owners of their own products is bullshit, since they are basically investors and supporters of a game companies success through their purchases. Corporations want us to perpetually rent and re-buy everything by cordoning off our rights as customers and it just a form of serfdom.
We should have the right to own our games outright and have the right to access code and assets regulated by law when our games are too old to run on later hardware and operating systems.
This is the problem with copyright, fundamentally there is no "software fixing" industry because of the copyright monopoly.