Time is only annoying to humans because it kills us before we get a chance to think very well at all - we don't get a lot of it, subjectively or otherwise, and furthermore, just about the point we begin to really get a grip on things, our hardware begins to fail.
On the other hand, when time is spent well, we like longer events (would you prefer a few second orgasm, or a 10 minute one? The SO prefers the latter, and I can see her point, though I envy her rather pitifully for the capacity...)
Assuming time will be annoying to a thinking creature with a lot more of it available to them in a perfectly healthy, even growing, state, seems completely unjustified to me. So WRT your idea... I'm going to have to go with.... "bullshit.":)
we don't have any evidence that machines would constitute a form of life that could be more innovative, more inventive, more creative.
Sure we do. (a) we are machines by any rational definition of the word. (b) if you can't find someone more creative, innovative, inventive than you are... you're simply not looking. They're out there. Obvious examples, in order: Asimov, Einstein, Koss.
A perfectly compressed message looks exactly like noise (because anything which distinguishes it from noise is a redundancy, and therefore indicates non-perfect compression).
No, the *content* of a perfectly compressed message looks like noise. The message itself will stand out from nature because it will be carried by changing states of something; even broadcasting a message upon a carrier that is indistinguishable from some noise source is just another way to signal its artificiality, because it will only be resolvable when transmitted in isolation from the real noise source.
For instance, you send a perfectly compressed message over ethernet, I can still tell you're sending a message with nothing more than an oscilloscope of sufficient bandwidth, because there's a huge difference between signal and no signal. If you want to carry information - compressed or not - your carrier has to have at least two distinguishable states and be resolvable from a distance. There's no way around it.
You are assuming that analysis of complex problems is possible without emotions. Current research indicates that at least for humans, intuition works considerably better at complex problems than reasoning.
You're not seriously postulating that intuition == emotion, are you?
A disembodied intelligence is likely to be very strange and very much unlike us.
By disembodied, I assume you mean, without human senses.
Shall we consider Helen Keller? Stephen Hawking? Stevie Wonder?
It would appear that the human mind can do pretty darned well in the human scheme of things with fairly limited input, mobility, etc. Especially when the mind in question is powerful.
Since we already know how to provide sensory input for sound, vision, written text, and to some degree touch, heat, perhaps even pain... I strongly suspect that at least initial AIs will be able to perceive us over quite a bit of common ground. Unless we, or they, intentionally design them otherwise.
There is a wide range of possible explanations because we have absolutely no idea how [consciousness] works.
Actually, we have very good reason to presume consciousness works like everything else does (chemical, mechanical, electrical), and that reason is: We haven't found anything yet that doesn't work in those ways.
What you're trying to say is that because we don't understand something yet, it is as likely to be magical as it is mundane. But that's not what the evidence shows.
You're not just as likely to encounter a unicorn when you turn a corner you've never been around before, as you are to encounter a horse. We have thousands of years of experience of horses, and to claim that the odds of encountering a unicorn are equal at the unknown turn is, in the face of that, utterly ridiculous.
Likewise, we have thousands of combined years of experience where we have been put in the position of saying, oh, look, it's mechanical, chemical, electrical. We have none of being put in the position of saying, oh look, something that is not electrical, chemical, mechanical.
The closest we ever get is "dunno right now", and that's clearly not an equal-probability signal for encountering the mundane or something from an unknown realm of effect.
There's a good bit of basic supporting evidence too: When there are chemical, electrical or mechanical insults to the brain, where we are quite certain consciousness resides, consciousness itself is disrupted.
The basic problem with creating a virtual brain is that our technology is limited to serial actions instead of real parallel ones.
No. A serial architecture that can task switch can perform any parallel operation, it just does so more slowly than a comparable parallel architecture (comparable = same instruction sets.) And speed isn't a valid metric for intelligence. If I ask a question that only an intelligence can answer, and I get the answer in ten seconds, or in ten decades, it's still an equally clear indicator of precisely the same degree of intelligence.
Hardware parallelism is unquestionably a means to speed up computation. And a most worthy pursuit on that basis. But that's all it is.
I dunno... I havent seen a PC yet that can outlive a human.
My 1970's era Gimix 6809 machine is still fully operational, no repairs at all. It's outlived many humans. I wouldn't be the least bit surprised if it outlived me. Ferro-resonant power supply, gold-plated connectors and IC sockets, premium components, ceramic CPU... just keeps right on ticking along.
In the US, (IMHO very bad) court decisions have made it so that businesses - corporations - are commonly treated as if they were persons under the law. This leads more or less naturally to weighing the rights of the corporations against the rights of a flesh-and-blood person; and when a corporation contributes more to the public trough than the citizen does, the outcome is often a foregone conclusion.
Lately, it's been rattling around in my old head that perhaps, instead of treating corporations like persons, we should treat them like useful, but very dangerous, viruses. Comparable to one that generates some useful end product, but would eat your flesh off if you got any on you. Because other than the end products they make, I'm really hard put to think of much good corporations do unless they're legislated into a corner and forced into it.
In this case, the nagging thing is that if there's corporation on the one hand, and it thinks it has a right to look at your credit history, your online activity, or how you crap in the bathroom, and an actual person on the other, who thinks they have a right to privacy... you know, I'm probably going to side with the person. Perhaps we should be thinking how to best rein in corporations instead of how to rein in employees. Legally.
Might this disadvantage the corporation? Yeah, it might. Just like the constitution disadvantages (well, is supposed to) the government. My response to that is that if the corporation wants to ensure the person's loyalty and fidelity, that they do so by ensuring that the person in question has every reason to feel that serving the corporation is the best choice. Rather than depending on rights-eroding legislation to trap the employee into a regimented behavior pattern they really don't support.
Perhaps they could start by paying a little less to the top levels, pruning the ridiculously incompetent middle management, and compensating the people who do the actual work a little better. Maybe even provide decent healthcare, you know? Radical, I know, but it's late, and I'm riding the caffeine monkey, or vice versa. All I'm sure of right now is that the ringing in my ears isn't the damned liberty bell.
My netbook does everything the iPad does but 100 times better and at less than half the cost
I have an ipad and a macbook pro. The latter is far more powerful than the ipad, does flash, etc.
The ipad is far more convenient to use. The macbook pro (a fast, loaded, 17" dual-core model) does a lot of sitting around these days. Because the apps on the ipad are truly excellent, and the touchscreen, as it turns out, is a lovely and very direct way to interact with the apps. As far as capability goes, you know, if I really need some horsepower, I can still hang on the couch, open a connection to my desktop, and run my 3 GHz 8-core Mac or my fast Windows box with my feet in the air and a cat in my lap using the iPad.
I agree with those who are saying you "just don't get it", and furthermore, as a guy without an ipad, your opinion of it is of questionable usefulness anyway.
research would be much more valuable to me if it was accessible.
Yes, certainly. What I'm asking here is, where do you obtain the right to that value, as opposed to the people who did the work? Is it your position that just because something is valuable, it should be given to you? What if that changes the value available to the inventors? Should it still be given to you anyway?
I get that you want the valuable stuff. What I don't get is why you think you have a right to it.
society has much more ignorants than savants, so why should fencing knowledge be a net gain to society?
Simply speaking, it's a viable economic model. It's provided a great deal of progress in a very short time -- surely you recognize that in the last hundred years or so, we have made more technical / knowledge progress than ever before in human history; if we cannot credit a capitalist attitude towards knowledge as the cause, we can at least say that the capitalist attitude towards knowledge hasn't prevented it from happening. It's really kind of hard for me to fault the system. And while I see others trying, I don't yet see anything convincing in the various contrary arguments.
You americans can't imagine what it was [complaints trimmed]
No, we were able to imagine it perfectly well. We were the ones who tricked the soviet leadership into completely destroying the USSR's economy, and consequently the union -- remember? Part of the reason for that was a distaste we had almost universally for how your country was being run. Ironic, really, considering today's "Show Me Your Papers" mentality in the USA, but I digress.
That doesn't mean that there are no worthwhile values within the idea of communism; nor does the fact that the soviets did a really crappy job of implementing communism really disqualify those ideas as bad ones. It just indicts the soviets as incompetent brutes.
"From each according to their ability, to each according to their need" is a very beautiful idea. I don't really think it's viable with honor such a minor concern of most people, but still, in special circumstances where the citizens were uniformly high quality folks, I could see it working. That leaves the USA out, though.
The huge fallacy in your argument is the assertion that people are ONLY motivated by financial gain.
Actually, since I made no such assertion, the straw man here is yours. I'm speaking from the standpoint where the model is *already* a dollars-for-production one, that's all. I do both commercial and PD software myself (not GPL, because that's not free enough.) That doesn't give me the right to force my chosen economic models upon someone else, though, no matter how convenient it would be for me to have the performance, software, or other intellectual property. If I don't want to support a commercial venture, I vote with my wallet. That's the extent of my legitimate input, and I'm perfectly ok with that.
Photoshop has benefited many. Is adobe wrong to sell it? Windows has benefited many. Is microsoft wrong to sell it?
Quicken has benfited many. Is intuit wrong to sell it?
Is a doctor wrong to charge you for his diagnosis?
Or a mechanic?
Just asking.
You'll find out how "imaginary" it is when your refusal to financially support the people doing the work causes them to stop doing it.
See, that's the huge fallacy with the argument that intellectual property has no owner, and therefore no financial value to any entity as it should be distributed without recompense: People generally do work because they are motivated. Things like houses, sending the kids to college, paying the water bill, buying the occasional gratuitous item -- if you take months of work and don't return something (and I'm not talking about a pat on the back), eventually, people will begin to ask themselves, "So... why did I do this again? I could have been working at McDonald's and paying off my house."
I will grant you it is easy to take work without recompense - particularly software, ideas, and performance recordings - especially since digital transfer has become so easy of itself; but I put it to you that your mindset is going to either kill the golden goose, or mutate it into something you're *really* not going to like. I don't think there's even a ghost of a chance you're going to see a transition into a Soviet-style "from each according to their ability, to each according to their need"; and that's the *only* type of society where your idea of "imaginary property" translates into something sensible: property that isn't so much imaginary, but owned equally by all.
We don't have more than a rudimentary understanding of how the brain works, or even what Consciousness is.
Woo-woo aside, consciousness is almost certainly no more than "computing beyond our comprehension."
I say this because computing is the process of acting on data, using other data and procedures as the basis for action.
We know that computing does occur in the mind, we can perceive it at some levels. We also know that computing is an enormously successful strategy for coping with problems. This is so well understood and integral to the idea, that almost every problem we have that remains unsolved is expected to be at least partly solved by the application of computing. We know of no other process that yields results at the levels computing does. The number of problems we could *not* solve without unaided grey matter that have fallen to one or another computing strategies is huge, and that's understating the case.
We -- as a group, speaking generally -- have a very strong tendency to describe things we don't (yet) understand in terms of wonder; the analogy of the "unclimbable mountain" appears over and over. Realms we cannot see. Information we cannot have. Insights we cannot make. These are (at best) philosophical positions, because while they make these postulations with an air of great certainty, experience has shown that they simply are too limited in vision.
We couldn't fly; well, we do. We'll never make a good chess-playing program. Done. We'll never be able to make a biped robot walk. We could and did (and with a z-80!) Neural nets couldn't be effectively extended (MIT's Minsky, no less.) Wrong, they can and it is enormously enabling to do so. The director of the patent office once famously said that "Everything that can be invented has been invented." That was in 1899. I think its safe to say we've invented some things since then, even fundamental things. I could go on - for a long, long time, but the point should already be made: We're really, really bad at looking at where we are, and taking stances that such-and-such is impossible, not coming in X time, or "out of our realm(s.)"
Nowhere in nature have we encountered any process that incorporates anything even remotely like the idea of "spirit"; there is no neural operation, capacity or feature that we have discovered that does not slot neatly into some permutation of biologically engendered [electrical, chemical, mechanical.] We have found some other basic building blocks in brains that we think may be active participants in brain operations, but again, there is nothing known about them that isn't mundane. Nor is there anything else living in the world that we have discovered that is not constructed so.
While it would be interesting to make such a discovery, the existence of "I don't understand it" actually doesn't, historically speaking, imply that such a thing exists. What it has meant - every time so far - is that the pundit making the statement simply was unable to imagine the problem space well enough to visualize that a solution could exist. If you want to look clearly at what possibilities the future offers us, you have to get past the idea that because you can't visualize it as solvable within the realms of the mundane, it cannot be. That's been so dependably wrong as to be more a subject of humor than anything else. Not that it stops philosophers from declaring "consciousness is magic" in one baseless rationalization after another.
Sometimes it's a matter of the problem space. I well remember one fellow saying that we'd never be able to mimic human arm motions, because these were such complex motions, mathematically speaking, that they simply could not be "solved" in the time it takes us to do them. Today, we have fuzzy logic solutions that solve that problem (and many others) at a level far above just "doing math" operates, and yet, in an enormously simple manner; and you guessed it, the resulting motions are as flexible and hu
This still rests on the assumption that the opposition can't distinguish the new pad from a real message.
The only way to break a message - or a pad - encrypted with a OTP, is to have the OTP that was used to encrypt it. And the opposition doesn't have that. Nor is that pad re-used. So no one is going to be breaking the new pad that is in transit. It doesn't even *matter* if they know it's a pad (by length, for instance, if you're really naive about your messaging), because *they can't know what's in it*. Consequently there are no chinks, other than the usual endpoitn compromises - steal the pad, or get the message from the principles (beat it out of them or sweet-talk it out of them.) You simply can't break OTP messages if the encode/decode OTP is used properly and the OTP is truly random, as of course it must be. There are no exceptions.
If the new OTP is the same length as the reserved elements of the old OTP, why not just use the old OTP?
Each exchanged OTP introduces another incomprehensible message to the channel which, for almost no effort on your part, can consume opposition decryption resources (to no effect) as it is not distinguishable from a real message, while it also buries actual messages in between. Confusion to the enemy is rarely a bad way to go. It's trite, but it is none the less true.
is mistaken in the idea that you can use a bitstring longer than the pad itself
I didn't mean to suggest that. I can see how it could be read that way, "cyclic" was poor wording on my part (I meant new random against old random, not reusing a short pad against a long message), I'm entirely on board with the updated OTP having to be the same (or lesser) length than the reserved OTP. Otherwise the repeated presence of the short OTP provides an analytical hook.
Impersonation is an entirely different problem, and it may or may not be an advantage: for instance, when the endpoints are (or must be) trusted, it's irrelevant. And I should point out that if the endpoints aren't trusted, you shouldn't be talking to them at all.
Slashdot Mirror
Time is only annoying to humans because it kills us before we get a chance to think very well at all - we don't get a lot of it, subjectively or otherwise, and furthermore, just about the point we begin to really get a grip on things, our hardware begins to fail.
On the other hand, when time is spent well, we like longer events (would you prefer a few second orgasm, or a 10 minute one? The SO prefers the latter, and I can see her point, though I envy her rather pitifully for the capacity...)
Assuming time will be annoying to a thinking creature with a lot more of it available to them in a perfectly healthy, even growing, state, seems completely unjustified to me. So WRT your idea... I'm going to have to go with.... "bullshit." :)
Sure we do. (a) we are machines by any rational definition of the word. (b) if you can't find someone more creative, innovative, inventive than you are... you're simply not looking. They're out there. Obvious examples, in order: Asimov, Einstein, Koss.
The Great Time Machine Hoax by Keith Laumer.
In this story, Genie (the computer) has made similar discoveries. The Colossus series, by D.F. Jones, also looks at this.
That's because it's already found you. Now go wash your hands and see if you can slow them down a little.
No, the *content* of a perfectly compressed message looks like noise. The message itself will stand out from nature because it will be carried by changing states of something; even broadcasting a message upon a carrier that is indistinguishable from some noise source is just another way to signal its artificiality, because it will only be resolvable when transmitted in isolation from the real noise source.
For instance, you send a perfectly compressed message over ethernet, I can still tell you're sending a message with nothing more than an oscilloscope of sufficient bandwidth, because there's a huge difference between signal and no signal. If you want to carry information - compressed or not - your carrier has to have at least two distinguishable states and be resolvable from a distance. There's no way around it.
You're not seriously postulating that intuition == emotion, are you?
By disembodied, I assume you mean, without human senses.
Shall we consider Helen Keller? Stephen Hawking? Stevie Wonder?
It would appear that the human mind can do pretty darned well in the human scheme of things with fairly limited input, mobility, etc. Especially when the mind in question is powerful.
Since we already know how to provide sensory input for sound, vision, written text, and to some degree touch, heat, perhaps even pain... I strongly suspect that at least initial AIs will be able to perceive us over quite a bit of common ground. Unless we, or they, intentionally design them otherwise.
Actually, we have very good reason to presume consciousness works like everything else does (chemical, mechanical, electrical), and that reason is: We haven't found anything yet that doesn't work in those ways.
What you're trying to say is that because we don't understand something yet, it is as likely to be magical as it is mundane. But that's not what the evidence shows.
You're not just as likely to encounter a unicorn when you turn a corner you've never been around before, as you are to encounter a horse. We have thousands of years of experience of horses, and to claim that the odds of encountering a unicorn are equal at the unknown turn is, in the face of that, utterly ridiculous.
Likewise, we have thousands of combined years of experience where we have been put in the position of saying, oh, look, it's mechanical, chemical, electrical. We have none of being put in the position of saying, oh look, something that is not electrical, chemical, mechanical.
The closest we ever get is "dunno right now", and that's clearly not an equal-probability signal for encountering the mundane or something from an unknown realm of effect.
There's a good bit of basic supporting evidence too: When there are chemical, electrical or mechanical insults to the brain, where we are quite certain consciousness resides, consciousness itself is disrupted.
No. A serial architecture that can task switch can perform any parallel operation, it just does so more slowly than a comparable parallel architecture (comparable = same instruction sets.) And speed isn't a valid metric for intelligence. If I ask a question that only an intelligence can answer, and I get the answer in ten seconds, or in ten decades, it's still an equally clear indicator of precisely the same degree of intelligence.
Hardware parallelism is unquestionably a means to speed up computation. And a most worthy pursuit on that basis. But that's all it is.
If I see that, I'm going to assume they're not functioning correctly.
My 1970's era Gimix 6809 machine is still fully operational, no repairs at all. It's outlived many humans. I wouldn't be the least bit surprised if it outlived me. Ferro-resonant power supply, gold-plated connectors and IC sockets, premium components, ceramic CPU... just keeps right on ticking along.
Just sayin...
In the US, (IMHO very bad) court decisions have made it so that businesses - corporations - are commonly treated as if they were persons under the law. This leads more or less naturally to weighing the rights of the corporations against the rights of a flesh-and-blood person; and when a corporation contributes more to the public trough than the citizen does, the outcome is often a foregone conclusion.
Lately, it's been rattling around in my old head that perhaps, instead of treating corporations like persons, we should treat them like useful, but very dangerous, viruses. Comparable to one that generates some useful end product, but would eat your flesh off if you got any on you. Because other than the end products they make, I'm really hard put to think of much good corporations do unless they're legislated into a corner and forced into it.
In this case, the nagging thing is that if there's corporation on the one hand, and it thinks it has a right to look at your credit history, your online activity, or how you crap in the bathroom, and an actual person on the other, who thinks they have a right to privacy... you know, I'm probably going to side with the person. Perhaps we should be thinking how to best rein in corporations instead of how to rein in employees. Legally.
Might this disadvantage the corporation? Yeah, it might. Just like the constitution disadvantages (well, is supposed to) the government. My response to that is that if the corporation wants to ensure the person's loyalty and fidelity, that they do so by ensuring that the person in question has every reason to feel that serving the corporation is the best choice. Rather than depending on rights-eroding legislation to trap the employee into a regimented behavior pattern they really don't support.
Perhaps they could start by paying a little less to the top levels, pruning the ridiculously incompetent middle management, and compensating the people who do the actual work a little better. Maybe even provide decent healthcare, you know? Radical, I know, but it's late, and I'm riding the caffeine monkey, or vice versa. All I'm sure of right now is that the ringing in my ears isn't the damned liberty bell.
I have an ipad and a macbook pro. The latter is far more powerful than the ipad, does flash, etc.
The ipad is far more convenient to use. The macbook pro (a fast, loaded, 17" dual-core model) does a lot of sitting around these days. Because the apps on the ipad are truly excellent, and the touchscreen, as it turns out, is a lovely and very direct way to interact with the apps. As far as capability goes, you know, if I really need some horsepower, I can still hang on the couch, open a connection to my desktop, and run my 3 GHz 8-core Mac or my fast Windows box with my feet in the air and a cat in my lap using the iPad.
I agree with those who are saying you "just don't get it", and furthermore, as a guy without an ipad, your opinion of it is of questionable usefulness anyway.
Yes, certainly. What I'm asking here is, where do you obtain the right to that value, as opposed to the people who did the work? Is it your position that just because something is valuable, it should be given to you? What if that changes the value available to the inventors? Should it still be given to you anyway?
I get that you want the valuable stuff. What I don't get is why you think you have a right to it.
Simply speaking, it's a viable economic model. It's provided a great deal of progress in a very short time -- surely you recognize that in the last hundred years or so, we have made more technical / knowledge progress than ever before in human history; if we cannot credit a capitalist attitude towards knowledge as the cause, we can at least say that the capitalist attitude towards knowledge hasn't prevented it from happening. It's really kind of hard for me to fault the system. And while I see others trying, I don't yet see anything convincing in the various contrary arguments.
No, we were able to imagine it perfectly well. We were the ones who tricked the soviet leadership into completely destroying the USSR's economy, and consequently the union -- remember? Part of the reason for that was a distaste we had almost universally for how your country was being run. Ironic, really, considering today's "Show Me Your Papers" mentality in the USA, but I digress.
That doesn't mean that there are no worthwhile values within the idea of communism; nor does the fact that the soviets did a really crappy job of implementing communism really disqualify those ideas as bad ones. It just indicts the soviets as incompetent brutes.
"From each according to their ability, to each according to their need" is a very beautiful idea. I don't really think it's viable with honor such a minor concern of most people, but still, in special circumstances where the citizens were uniformly high quality folks, I could see it working. That leaves the USA out, though.
Actually, since I made no such assertion, the straw man here is yours. I'm speaking from the standpoint where the model is *already* a dollars-for-production one, that's all. I do both commercial and PD software myself (not GPL, because that's not free enough.) That doesn't give me the right to force my chosen economic models upon someone else, though, no matter how convenient it would be for me to have the performance, software, or other intellectual property. If I don't want to support a commercial venture, I vote with my wallet. That's the extent of my legitimate input, and I'm perfectly ok with that.
You're arguing for a particular income model. Do you think you should have the right to define that choice for others?
Photoshop has benefited many. Is adobe wrong to sell it? Windows has benefited many. Is microsoft wrong to sell it? Quicken has benfited many. Is intuit wrong to sell it? Is a doctor wrong to charge you for his diagnosis? Or a mechanic? Just asking.
You'll find out how "imaginary" it is when your refusal to financially support the people doing the work causes them to stop doing it.
See, that's the huge fallacy with the argument that intellectual property has no owner, and therefore no financial value to any entity as it should be distributed without recompense: People generally do work because they are motivated. Things like houses, sending the kids to college, paying the water bill, buying the occasional gratuitous item -- if you take months of work and don't return something (and I'm not talking about a pat on the back), eventually, people will begin to ask themselves, "So... why did I do this again? I could have been working at McDonald's and paying off my house."
I will grant you it is easy to take work without recompense - particularly software, ideas, and performance recordings - especially since digital transfer has become so easy of itself; but I put it to you that your mindset is going to either kill the golden goose, or mutate it into something you're *really* not going to like. I don't think there's even a ghost of a chance you're going to see a transition into a Soviet-style "from each according to their ability, to each according to their need"; and that's the *only* type of society where your idea of "imaginary property" translates into something sensible: property that isn't so much imaginary, but owned equally by all.
Woo-woo aside, consciousness is almost certainly no more than "computing beyond our comprehension."
I say this because computing is the process of acting on data, using other data and procedures as the basis for action.
We know that computing does occur in the mind, we can perceive it at some levels. We also know that computing is an enormously successful strategy for coping with problems. This is so well understood and integral to the idea, that almost every problem we have that remains unsolved is expected to be at least partly solved by the application of computing. We know of no other process that yields results at the levels computing does. The number of problems we could *not* solve without unaided grey matter that have fallen to one or another computing strategies is huge, and that's understating the case.
We -- as a group, speaking generally -- have a very strong tendency to describe things we don't (yet) understand in terms of wonder; the analogy of the "unclimbable mountain" appears over and over. Realms we cannot see. Information we cannot have. Insights we cannot make. These are (at best) philosophical positions, because while they make these postulations with an air of great certainty, experience has shown that they simply are too limited in vision.
We couldn't fly; well, we do. We'll never make a good chess-playing program. Done. We'll never be able to make a biped robot walk. We could and did (and with a z-80!) Neural nets couldn't be effectively extended (MIT's Minsky, no less.) Wrong, they can and it is enormously enabling to do so. The director of the patent office once famously said that "Everything that can be invented has been invented." That was in 1899. I think its safe to say we've invented some things since then, even fundamental things. I could go on - for a long, long time, but the point should already be made: We're really, really bad at looking at where we are, and taking stances that such-and-such is impossible, not coming in X time, or "out of our realm(s.)"
Nowhere in nature have we encountered any process that incorporates anything even remotely like the idea of "spirit"; there is no neural operation, capacity or feature that we have discovered that does not slot neatly into some permutation of biologically engendered [electrical, chemical, mechanical.] We have found some other basic building blocks in brains that we think may be active participants in brain operations, but again, there is nothing known about them that isn't mundane. Nor is there anything else living in the world that we have discovered that is not constructed so.
While it would be interesting to make such a discovery, the existence of "I don't understand it" actually doesn't, historically speaking, imply that such a thing exists. What it has meant - every time so far - is that the pundit making the statement simply was unable to imagine the problem space well enough to visualize that a solution could exist. If you want to look clearly at what possibilities the future offers us, you have to get past the idea that because you can't visualize it as solvable within the realms of the mundane, it cannot be. That's been so dependably wrong as to be more a subject of humor than anything else. Not that it stops philosophers from declaring "consciousness is magic" in one baseless rationalization after another.
Sometimes it's a matter of the problem space. I well remember one fellow saying that we'd never be able to mimic human arm motions, because these were such complex motions, mathematically speaking, that they simply could not be "solved" in the time it takes us to do them. Today, we have fuzzy logic solutions that solve that problem (and many others) at a level far above just "doing math" operates, and yet, in an enormously simple manner; and you guessed it, the resulting motions are as flexible and hu
Read the thread, please. Asked and answered.
The only way to break a message - or a pad - encrypted with a OTP, is to have the OTP that was used to encrypt it. And the opposition doesn't have that. Nor is that pad re-used. So no one is going to be breaking the new pad that is in transit. It doesn't even *matter* if they know it's a pad (by length, for instance, if you're really naive about your messaging), because *they can't know what's in it*. Consequently there are no chinks, other than the usual endpoitn compromises - steal the pad, or get the message from the principles (beat it out of them or sweet-talk it out of them.) You simply can't break OTP messages if the encode/decode OTP is used properly and the OTP is truly random, as of course it must be. There are no exceptions.
Each exchanged OTP introduces another incomprehensible message to the channel which, for almost no effort on your part, can consume opposition decryption resources (to no effect) as it is not distinguishable from a real message, while it also buries actual messages in between. Confusion to the enemy is rarely a bad way to go. It's trite, but it is none the less true.
I didn't mean to suggest that. I can see how it could be read that way, "cyclic" was poor wording on my part (I meant new random against old random, not reusing a short pad against a long message), I'm entirely on board with the updated OTP having to be the same (or lesser) length than the reserved OTP. Otherwise the repeated presence of the short OTP provides an analytical hook.
Impersonation is an entirely different problem, and it may or may not be an advantage: for instance, when the endpoints are (or must be) trusted, it's irrelevant. And I should point out that if the endpoints aren't trusted, you shouldn't be talking to them at all.