His Incompleteness Theorem was more subtle than that: (IIRC) it said that you can't guarantee to either prove or disprove an arbitrary theorem
The first incompleteness theorem states that there are theorems in arithmetic that cannot be decided (proved either way). The second one (a straightforward corollary) states that any formal first order system (e.g. one that allows finite reasoning) that contains arithmetic has the same problem. This means that a) you can't fix arithmetic by adding axioms and b) most useful formal systems have the same problem (if you can't do arithmetic in them, they probably aren't very useful).
However you can't make a (correct) statement either way about whether the set containing all sets that do not contain themselves should contain itself or not.
This is the so-called Russell paradox. It is an illustration of the problems with old-fashioned set theory a la Cantor, not an illustration Godel's theorem. The thing that Cantor "contributed" to Godel's theorem was his "diagonalization" argument for the uncountability of the real numbers (Godel's theorem is a diagonalization argument.)
And while I know a lot of people get hot under the collar, there is a great proof of Godel's theorem in Rodger Penrose's "The Emporer's New Mind".
(I personally found GEB annoying to read but YMMV).
There's plenty of reason to believe that people can, in the end, be simulated with Turing machines. Unless you believe that humans have some unknown extra something
One of the candidates for the "unknodwn extra something" may be the time involved. It may well be that we can think of algorithms to simulate all the things we do, but executing them in a reasonable amount of time requires quantum parallelism.
That said, I still think there are several candidates for special things we do (unitary experience and the present moment to name two.)
Funding for welfare, etc., isn't designed to wipe out poverty.
To conter all the knee-jerk "vote buying" arguments, let me just make two observations:
- The idea that people on welfare vote seems pretty dubious to me.
- There has been some scholarly research done on public assistance in this country with the thesis that it has been consistently maintained at a level sufficient to keep the unemployed from rioting.
In light of the latter argument, this is going to be a very interesting election year with the jobless recovery entering its third year and welfare sharply curtailed.
the Chinese are one of the few countries that buys enough dollars to keep their currency at exactly the same level relative to the dollar 1:1(they buy a dollar and issue a yuan).
I thought that the Yuan was off by about 20% for some reason. Is that not true?
our now big export (debt and other financial products)
LOL!
Your 401k will drop like a rock
I don't have one, but I suppose someone does. Why would this happen?
taxes will increase
Yeah, too bad the budget isn't balanced any more...or was it just too late for that? And whose taxes will go up?
Glad to see you put "allowed" in quotes. The simplest way to make US wages competitive with foreign wages is to weaken the dollar. Up to now, the Chinese (and others) have been buying up dollars to keep the dollar high. The massive trade deficit this caused (yes, with China) is finally causing the dollar to fall despite these efforts, but it remains to be seen whether this will help the US job market.
Downsides of the falling dollar are: higher energy costs (once OPEC wises up and stops pricing in dollars) and the upper classes finding it harder to import luxury goods. The former could be viewed as a spur to domestic alternative energy technologies. The latter cause my heart to bleed purple peanut butter all over them...
Empirical evidence shows, at least to me, that children under 21 cannot resist vices.
IIRC, there is also some recent evidence that alchohol affects teenagers differently from adults (something about teens already being uninhibited due to incomplete brain growth). Sorry, no reference...
We did this a few years back and got in as part of a class action lawsuit that the Washington AG was pursuing. They went after the bastards because they junk faxed three hospitals. This is very illegal because it can prevent life-saving information from arriving in a timely manner. We got about USD100 out of the deal and the satisfaction of watching one set of these scum getting financially raped for endangering innocent lives.
Every bit of evidence helps, so report this stuff when it happens - you may save someone's life.
But if you want an even better example of what a bunch of civilians with guns can do when they're tired of the government taking away their freedoms and rights, look at the American revolution. Just a bunch of normal people with hunting rifles at first.
Except that the USRW was not a military victory - it was a diplomatic one. Washington had specific orders not to engage the British, but simply to field a credible army until France could be convinced to come in on the side of the nascent republic. IIRC one of the British generals was stomping all over the south until shortly before Yorktown (which is when the French showed up in force) but its been a while since I read Churchill (who is very sympathetic to the American cause.) Which is not to demean the struggle in any way (I think it was a very clever piece of diplomacy) but to view it as a military victory is a bit of a stretch IMHO.
And as far as your poing about martial arts:
Sorry if you felt I was "posing" (yeah, my foot position sucks), but I was simply trying to argue from my own experience. I don't mean to say that it is not possible for you to have that level of ability, just that based on my own experiences, I feel that it is unlikely that most people can do this in their spare time.
It always wierds me out when people think that they and a bunch of their buddies can take on a determined US Army batallion. I like to illustrate how this point is with unarmed combat, but the argument applies eqully well to armed combat.
I am a 3rd degree black belt (Tae-Kwon-Do), but even back when I was training several times a week I never had the delusion that I could hold out in hand-to-hand combat with the average US Army grunt for more than maybe 30 seconds longer than the average Joe. Simply put: I do this as a hobby, but those guys do it for a living. They have the best equipment, the best teachers and they don't have to worry about anything else (food, job, etc.)
You may counter with the success of the insurgents in Iraq, but their success is simply because the US government is unwilling to wage total war. You know, the brutal kind with random executions, hostage taking, torture, public rape, mutilations, bayoneting of children and so forth. Thus the control that the US citizenry has over the government is not based on force, but on culture: as long as the soldiery is taken from the population as a whole and the population as a whole is civilized and believes in civillian oversight, the military is not going to stage or support a coup.
Where societies have traditionally gotten into trouble is when the military becomes a separate caste (good examples being the Roman Republic after Gaius Maruis' conscription reforms and various South American coutries). That is already happening in the USA and is a far larger threat to US democracy than gun control laws. People who serve in the US military live in separate communities (e.g. Bremmerton near where I live in Seattle), tend to vote in a particular way and come from socio-economic brackets that tend not to be able to afford higher education (many members of the miltary - like one of my relatives - joined for the benefits of the GI bill). And while the US military actively persues having well educated officers, there is a large internal cultural divide between these "college boys" and officers who came up through the ranks (the former tended to oppose the Iraq war but the latter tended to support it).
This cultural separation is also fueled in part by the current "culture war" being waged by various political commentators. The polarization of US politics has caused the segment of the polulation that the military is largely drawn from to become increasingly fascistic. Now this trend is not being driven by the military itself but by cynical business interests, but the resulting polarization is real and I have heard military personnel tell me that they did not feel welcome at my church because it is so "liberal" (whatever that means). This saddens me because once the military starts keeping to itself, we are in trouble.
So go out and shoot if it makes you feel better, but if you really care about your liberties and civil society, work for a world where you can talk to all your neighbors and where the military is part of the community, not off in some ghetto around the base.
Maybe it's just because I went to boarding school (coincidentally with the the author Rick Moody) and knew people like this, but I found The Ice Storm harrowing.
The problem with the legal systems under dictatorships (like Iraq, China, USSR etc.) is not that they don't have reasonable laws, but rather that they are routinely ignored. Rule of Law usually falls down on the Rule part, not the Law part.
God knows I've meant plenty of UNIX bigots, but at least they know something about Windows - they have to, there's no avoiding it. The same is not true about Windows bigots: they combine their parochialism with a triumphalism that is as infuriating as it is unmerited.
That was the least of their problems...escape hatches that required a functioning hydraulic system...inability to float in a water landing...the list goes on!
It is even possible to quantify that processing power to something not beyond reach of current computing technology given some assumptions about how exactly [the] brain operates.
Somewhere on the site I linked to above is a comment to the effect that the usual assumptions are a gross oversimplification of how neurons operate and the real complexity scale is many orders of magnitude off. A simple way to think of this is to observe that single-celled creatures have behavior that is far more complex than a simple switch, so multiply the number of neurons by the complexity of each neuron.
there not a piece of single experimental data in the literature that suggests the universe is not computable because minds do funny things.
Have a look at this. Some of Radin's stuff is speculative, but this experiment has been reproduced a number of times by different groups. This is Feature 7 on the list, and I also find Feature 6 (time flow) pretty strange.
Penrose tends to the belief there are some non-computational processes that in the universe and they may underly consciousness.
You may be interested in this online seminar on the work of him and some of his collaborators.
"With apparently genuine humility, Penrose emphasizes that these ideas should not be called theories yet: be prefers the word 'suggestions.'"
Indeed, the lack of arrogance is part of the appeal. I find the closed-mindedness of the Strong-AI adherents to be quite counterproductive.
I think where Penrose got into trouble was trying to "prove" things about reality. His Godel argument is powerful as what mathematicians call "motivation" - and I think it has been quite fruitful - but the proof of the pudding in science is empirical data and while that is promising, they still have a ways to go. (But I am still betting on them being more correct then Strong-AI!)
What you describe is called the Computational Emergence Theory (or the Strong AI Hypothesis) - that given enough complexity, conscious awareness simply emerges. Here is a list (scroll to the bottom) of problems with this theory.
My big problem with computational emergence is that it does not predict anything but just states its conclusions as an article of faith. You may not agree with Hameroff and Penrose, but at least they are making testable predictions. Quick: At what level of complexity does consciousness emerge in computational systems? H&P predict preconscious awareness in flatworms and their model encompasses observed intelligent behavior in single-celled creatures. Computational Emergence does not have much to say on this subject.
Incidentally I (and H&P) do agree that if the universe is computable, then your conclusion follows. We just feel that this is an unwarranted assumption (given the list above) and I agree with another poster that this assumption is being driven by the current facination with computing - which for some of us has been going on for about 30 years!
Determining part of speech in English is AI-complete.
The most famous example being "Time flies like an arrow, fruit flies like a banana." Still, I think the OP's point is valid, all you have to do is preprocess the dictionary and you have still reduced the search space dramatically, even with some ambiguous words. (You could even do a first cut at automating the process by parsing the output of dictionary.com.) And as another poster pointed out, you can be a bit sloppy if all you want is one password for the system.
Slashdot Mirror
This is the so-called Russell paradox. It is an illustration of the problems with old-fashioned set theory a la Cantor, not an illustration Godel's theorem. The thing that Cantor "contributed" to Godel's theorem was his "diagonalization" argument for the uncountability of the real numbers (Godel's theorem is a diagonalization argument.)
And while I know a lot of people get hot under the collar, there is a great proof of Godel's theorem in Rodger Penrose's "The Emporer's New Mind".
(I personally found GEB annoying to read but YMMV).
That said, I still think there are several candidates for special things we do (unitary experience and the present moment to name two.)
- The idea that people on welfare vote seems pretty dubious to me.
- There has been some scholarly research done on public assistance in this country with the thesis that it has been consistently maintained at a level sufficient to keep the unemployed from rioting.
In light of the latter argument, this is going to be a very interesting election year with the jobless recovery entering its third year and welfare sharply curtailed.
I thought that the Yuan was off by about 20% for some reason. Is that not true?
LOL!
I don't have one, but I suppose someone does. Why would this happen?
Yeah, too bad the budget isn't balanced any more...or was it just too late for that? And whose taxes will go up?
Glad to see you put "allowed" in quotes. The simplest way to make US wages competitive with foreign wages is to weaken the dollar. Up to now, the Chinese (and others) have been buying up dollars to keep the dollar high. The massive trade deficit this caused (yes, with China) is finally causing the dollar to fall despite these efforts, but it remains to be seen whether this will help the US job market.
Downsides of the falling dollar are: higher energy costs (once OPEC wises up and stops pricing in dollars) and the upper classes finding it harder to import luxury goods. The former could be viewed as a spur to domestic alternative energy technologies. The latter cause my heart to bleed purple peanut butter all over them...
Please contact your state attorney general.
We did this a few years back and got in as part of a class action lawsuit that the Washington AG was pursuing. They went after the bastards because they junk faxed three hospitals. This is very illegal because it can prevent life-saving information from arriving in a timely manner. We got about USD100 out of the deal and the satisfaction of watching one set of these scum getting financially raped for endangering innocent lives.
Every bit of evidence helps, so report this stuff when it happens - you may save someone's life.
Sorry if you felt I was "posing" (yeah, my foot position sucks), but I was simply trying to argue from my own experience. I don't mean to say that it is not possible for you to have that level of ability, just that based on my own experiences, I feel that it is unlikely that most people can do this in their spare time.
It always wierds me out when people think that they and a bunch of their buddies can take on a determined US Army batallion. I like to illustrate how this point is with unarmed combat, but the argument applies eqully well to armed combat.
I am a 3rd degree black belt (Tae-Kwon-Do), but even back when I was training several times a week I never had the delusion that I could hold out in hand-to-hand combat with the average US Army grunt for more than maybe 30 seconds longer than the average Joe. Simply put: I do this as a hobby, but those guys do it for a living. They have the best equipment, the best teachers and they don't have to worry about anything else (food, job, etc.)
You may counter with the success of the insurgents in Iraq, but their success is simply because the US government is unwilling to wage total war. You know, the brutal kind with random executions, hostage taking, torture, public rape, mutilations, bayoneting of children and so forth. Thus the control that the US citizenry has over the government is not based on force, but on culture: as long as the soldiery is taken from the population as a whole and the population as a whole is civilized and believes in civillian oversight, the military is not going to stage or support a coup.
Where societies have traditionally gotten into trouble is when the military becomes a separate caste (good examples being the Roman Republic after Gaius Maruis' conscription reforms and various South American coutries). That is already happening in the USA and is a far larger threat to US democracy than gun control laws. People who serve in the US military live in separate communities (e.g. Bremmerton near where I live in Seattle), tend to vote in a particular way and come from socio-economic brackets that tend not to be able to afford higher education (many members of the miltary - like one of my relatives - joined for the benefits of the GI bill). And while the US military actively persues having well educated officers, there is a large internal cultural divide between these "college boys" and officers who came up through the ranks (the former tended to oppose the Iraq war but the latter tended to support it).
This cultural separation is also fueled in part by the current "culture war" being waged by various political commentators. The polarization of US politics has caused the segment of the polulation that the military is largely drawn from to become increasingly fascistic. Now this trend is not being driven by the military itself but by cynical business interests, but the resulting polarization is real and I have heard military personnel tell me that they did not feel welcome at my church because it is so "liberal" (whatever that means). This saddens me because once the military starts keeping to itself, we are in trouble.
So go out and shoot if it makes you feel better, but if you really care about your liberties and civil society, work for a world where you can talk to all your neighbors and where the military is part of the community, not off in some ghetto around the base.
Maybe it's just because I went to boarding school (coincidentally with the the author Rick Moody) and knew people like this, but I found The Ice Storm harrowing.
But I am European (and it looks like you are American), so maybe it should read:
s/UNIX/Us/
s/Windows/Them/
to be more universal!
s/UNIX/Europeans/
s/Windows/Americans/
(Ducks!)
A friend of mine takes Wu-Shu from an internationally famous instructor. She has a two inch fingernail on her left pinky.
I doubt it is cosmetic.
That was the least of their problems...escape hatches that required a functioning hydraulic system...inability to float in a water landing...the list goes on!
Have a look at this. Some of Radin's stuff is speculative, but this experiment has been reproduced a number of times by different groups. This is Feature 7 on the list, and I also find Feature 6 (time flow) pretty strange.
While I mostly find Heinlein annoying these days, I think that "Rub her feet" is pretty wise.
Indeed, the lack of arrogance is part of the appeal. I find the closed-mindedness of the Strong-AI adherents to be quite counterproductive.
I think where Penrose got into trouble was trying to "prove" things about reality. His Godel argument is powerful as what mathematicians call "motivation" - and I think it has been quite fruitful - but the proof of the pudding in science is empirical data and while that is promising, they still have a ways to go. (But I am still betting on them being more correct then Strong-AI!)
My big problem with computational emergence is that it does not predict anything but just states its conclusions as an article of faith. You may not agree with Hameroff and Penrose, but at least they are making testable predictions. Quick: At what level of complexity does consciousness emerge in computational systems? H&P predict preconscious awareness in flatworms and their model encompasses observed intelligent behavior in single-celled creatures. Computational Emergence does not have much to say on this subject.
Incidentally I (and H&P) do agree that if the universe is computable, then your conclusion follows. We just feel that this is an unwarranted assumption (given the list above) and I agree with another poster that this assumption is being driven by the current facination with computing - which for some of us has been going on for about 30 years!