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Dingus McGee
Social climber
Where Safety trumps Leaving No Trace
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May 15, 2017 - 07:41am PT
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Yanqui,
once you stop making accusations [to the tune that I did not read an article] you start composing sensible replies. Thanks for the above post and the research. It concurs with what I said I suspect of PRNG's.
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jgill
Boulder climber
The high prairie of southern Colorado
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May 15, 2017 - 01:00pm PT
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A few years ago I got interested in cellular automata and wrote a graphics program for it. This is a topic related to randomness and weak emergence. This is an image of Wolfram's Rule 110. It's difficult nigh impossible to predict patterns the lower one goes in the image.
The basic idea is to divide the top row into cells and set up mathematical commands determining how one row produces prodigy in the next row of cells. The algorithms are usually simple.
(a relief to get away from first person vs third person arguments)
Here's one of my own devising.
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yanqui
climber
Balcarce, Argentina
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May 15, 2017 - 04:41pm PT
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I envision Conway trying to draw those types of patterns with pen and paper, when a computer was just a big, clumsy machine that you fed punch cards into.
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jgill
Boulder climber
The high prairie of southern Colorado
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May 15, 2017 - 05:03pm PT
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^^^ My first ghastly experience in 1962 with the computer at the U of Alabama. Even something easy like evaluating a power series was dreadful. If you made a mistake in the programming, well, come back tomorrow afternoon and we will punch some new cards for you.
My late colleague and best friend who passed away a couple of years ago had such bad experiences about this time at Argonne Labs I could never get him to use a PC in later life.
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WBraun
climber
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May 15, 2017 - 09:00pm PT
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You create your own misery and never God.
You're a little spoiled child Jim B and blame your father for all your mistakes .....
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MikeL
Social climber
Southern Arizona
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May 15, 2017 - 09:25pm PT
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Interviewing Wolfram was a part of a pilot study for my dissertation. (The pilots became a paper in a proceedings.) Smart guy. Had a pretty good understanding of competitive dynamics, too. His mathematics may have been pristine and impeccable. Competitively, his industry presented a more complex equation to be solved--and I don't think that there is any true "solution" in such situations.
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WBraun
climber
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May 15, 2017 - 09:25pm PT
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You shake your fist at your own father.
Your father was never indifferent to you.
You are a fool and still a child masquerading as some kind of an adult in front of your own deluded mirror .......
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MikeL
Social climber
Southern Arizona
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May 15, 2017 - 09:30pm PT
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yanqui: Wit be damned!
:-)
Yes. It’s all to be damned.
Now, in that light, what looks fun to you? It seems to me, that’s about all we got. It seems to me that everything is worth doing, and nothing is really important.
If one likes playing around with language (even with these arguments / discussions here), then wit can be worth the effort to develop. Hell, it may even put off a little bit of senior-aged memory problems.
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jgill
Boulder climber
The high prairie of southern Colorado
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May 15, 2017 - 09:58pm PT
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His mathematics may have been pristine and impeccable
I never met anyone who read his entire book (certainly not me). It sits on the floor beside me now, all ten pounds of it. Lots of people talked about it in social settings, though. Wolfram would have you believe cellular automata has miraculous healing powers in mathematics and the sciences. A genius, surely, and an enthusiastic salesman.
"The significance data has on the products Stephen creates transfers into his own life. He has an extensive log of personal analytics, including emails received and sent, keystrokes made, meetings and events attended, phone calls, even physical movement dating back to the 1980s. He has stated '[personal analytics] can give us a whole new dimension to experiencing our lives'" (Wiki)
Darth Vader to JL, no doubt!
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okay, whatever
climber
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May 15, 2017 - 10:41pm PT
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I got on the bandwagon of fractals (via Mandelbrot's book "The Fractal Geometry of Nature", and the subsequent books by Heinz Otto Peitgen, Richard Voss at IBM Watson, etc.), and also cellular automata via Wolfram's book, back in the 1980's and 1990's and early 2000's, when I was a software developer. These models of "complexity", as it was called, were very exciting then, and seemed to hold out the promise of understanding the emergence of sophisticated biological life from a soup of amino acids, and so on. There remains a lot of mystery and lovely mathematical art there (e.g., the Mandelbrot set, which can be beautifully rendered in so many ways at an infinite number of scales, limited only by the time one wants to devote one's computer to iterating that simple "escape velocity" equation on the complex number plane... though there are other algorithms that produce almost the same result far more quickly), but in no significant way did any of it lead to a better UNDERSTANDING of the complexity of the real world, including the emergence of what we call life, alas.
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MikeL
Social climber
Southern Arizona
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May 16, 2017 - 06:48am PT
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Okay, Whatever: . . . in no significant way did any of [mathematical complexity renditions] lead to a better UNDERSTANDING of the complexity of the real world, . . . alas.
I don’t think I can say this properly, but the whole knowledge project (in any field) seems to expose a kind of fractal system in and of itself. As yanqui wrote above, finding or developing true randomness would appear to be an impossibility. Instead, we’re always generating (imposing) our sense of pattern on the real world no matter how closely or broadly we look at anything. We can’t help ourselves, it seems. And gosh, there are some *really* smart people involved, so it might make one wonder just how much being smart really helps or matters. Again, guys like Wolfram come to mind—f*cking brilliant, . . . but can they make a good soufflé or be pleasant to visit with casually? :-)
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - May 16, 2017 - 06:50am PT
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... though there are other algorithms that produce almost the same result far more quickly), but in no significant way did any of it lead to a better UNDERSTANDING of the complexity of the real world, including the emergence of what we call life, alas.
----
But .... perhaps it did give you faith in algorithms, emergence, and a vantage of looking at consciousness in terms of complexity - that is, the interface of complex physical functions. One has to wonder if the lack of "a better understanding" is not tied to an analytical model where algorithms, emergence, and the "complexity argument" are held as de facto paths to understanding mind. In my view, they are fantastic modeling tools for looking at half of the process of a unified, dynamic system - the part dealing with objective functioning. However hopes that we are to "some day" understand consciousness exclusively in these terms - which is basically a faith in the hegemony of physical causality - is to not grasp that Chalmer's Hard Problem is a trick question issuing from a false supposition.
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yanqui
climber
Balcarce, Argentina
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May 16, 2017 - 07:00am PT
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Darth Vader to JL, no doubt!
Surrender to the dark side, Largo! There are only algorithms! All else is illusion! Feel the power of the computer!
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Dingus McGee
Social climber
Where Safety trumps Leaving No Trace
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May 16, 2017 - 07:21am PT
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Largo, by your wording it seems all explanations of mind can be put aside by you as mere mechanical explanations. And hence you and Chalmers will be left holding a bag of unexplained mind tricks[in your terms only] that are truly your own creations & problems and are items that are worth little to the rest of us in our understanding.
As I talk to Earth people I get an idea of how they feel. And as I listen to Star Wars characters I get an idea how they feel even though they are not human. They may even be AI characters [with feelings]. Are your feeling only authentic if you are human and they did not arise from mechanisms?
I do say I laugh at your non sense and am likely better off being only amused by it. Keep it up Largo. You are a gauge for other to judge their progress in getting out of an eternally changing swamp.
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WBraun
climber
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May 16, 2017 - 08:28am PT
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The mind, brain chemicals neurons nerves etc the entire material bodies are only the components that life works and flows thru.
All those material components themselves all depend on life itself to animate.
On their own without the life force itself, those components remain inanimate.
Yet what does modern science focus on.
Only the material components and thus completely missing and oblivious to the actual source of their cause for the animation to actually occur due to faulty reductionist philosophy.
If the faulty mechanistic material only theory holds true it would be very easy to be able to create your own frankenstein from all the available parts.
OH ..... I forgot the post dated check they give out which everyone buys into.
No wonder the national debt is so astronomical.
"In the future "WE" and only "WE" so called scientist who rejects everything their own faulty senses can't see and measure will do it.
They failed miserably from the very start, due to the very fact that material senses are defective, to begin with.
Thus they have no source free from defects and are continually searching at the crossroad to the path leading to freedom from defects.
Their motto though is "There's no need to be free from defects"
Absolute insanity .... of which a real sane person will never take to .....
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Dingus McGee
Social climber
Where Safety trumps Leaving No Trace
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May 16, 2017 - 10:21am PT
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Sycoax,
Keep the low brow references and run-on sentences coming.
kiss my ass as you'll love it especially if it is covered with sh#t. Can you contribute anything of substance other than Shakespeare lyrics to this thread? If you do not like my use of and and swamp take the time to send me a well written paraphrased document and you will have contributed something to me.
If your statement was not meant for me I apologise and otherwise your nagging is a simple immature response and as in campfire talk the above assessment still applies.
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MikeL
Social climber
Southern Arizona
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May 16, 2017 - 12:33pm PT
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sycorax: Keep the low brow references and run-on sentences coming.
Only sophisticated erudite references will do?
You know, surely, that there have been many thoughtful and insightful explanations of Darth Vader and the Star Wars epic. I think of Joseph Campbell for one. He may not have had a Ph.D. in literary studies or the liberal arts (and he later claimed it was a sign of incompetence if one had a Ph.D. in his area), but many learned people have read and shared his ideas with interest. I’ll bet Campbell and Northrup Frye would have had much to talk about if they had met.
If a person can communicate their thoughts and feelings with smoke signals, it’d be fine by me.
I remember a wonderful teacher (reminds me of Werner—cantankerous) of literary criticism who said that if a big bruiser sat next to me in a bar and said “I don’t want no more lip from you,” I'd understand what he meant loud and clear.
Be well.
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - May 16, 2017 - 04:18pm PT
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Largo, by your wording it seems all explanations of mind can be put aside by you as mere mechanical explanations. And hence you and Chalmers will be left holding a bag of unexplained mind tricks[in your terms only] that are truly your own creations & problems and are items that are worth little to the rest of us in our understanding.
No cigar on that one, Dingus, notwithstanding the smoke you are blowing.
Though your writing is not concise or exact enough to know quite what you are saying, my sense of it is that you have some mechanical explanation about sentient life, and if you do, trot it out my brother. This is one of the lasting fictions per physical causes "creating" consciousness (of else it is "magic") - that such a belief can simply crowhop the threshold to where objective BECOMES subjective, providing the machine is sufficiently complex, has lightspeed processing power, is running the hand-tooled sentience logorithm, and (fill in the blank). As I have said all along, anyone who believes this is forthcoming, I gots some real estate for you on Pluto. Cheap, too. This kind of sci-fi thinking has never taken a serious look at consciousness itself, or you'd know that any content-based model (the machine DOES create content for awareness) is certain to fail in explaining how you are aware of any thing in the first instance.
Lumping me in with Chalmers is also off the mark because his starting position (not my own) is that a physical/causal break down CAN provide an explanation for experience (basically that the brain creates sentience - what else would, right?), and he posits the Hard Problem for all who believe so to answer. Of course as many posts have shown, the standard dodge is to try and explain away the Hard Problem, or even more shamelessly, to invert the challenge as you have attempted, as to accuse us of "holding a bag of unexplained mind tricks[in your terms only] that are truly your own creations & problems and are items that are worth little to the rest of us in our understanding."
First, it is hardly a trick to ask: By what physical process does my sense of being me ---- arise? Seems like a pretty basic question to most of us. If answering that question is of little interest to you, so it goes. This work is not for everyone with one of those plastic sleeves that fits into the front pocket of your Docker's shirt, bristling with ballpoints and micrometors.
But verily, when you rambled onto "the rest of us in our understanding," one is made curious as to your understanding per how you are aware of being alive, right now, in time and space, and what that awareness is. And this time, kindly look at your own mind, and not a code book. That's like stepping on the bolt - we can easily see why.
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jgill
Boulder climber
The high prairie of southern Colorado
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May 16, 2017 - 04:29pm PT
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Keep the low brow references and run-on sentences coming
So, a highly sophisticated book is "low brow" because it is not a work of literature? You seem far more impressed with a well-turned phrase than with content. Sad. Are you a "big" reader or are you "widely read?"
I wouldn't mind returning to the never-ending saga of first person vs third person if JL would tell me why it is so important to focus on "empty awareness" or awareness before content - but only from an internal perspective, all else being mere mechanics? After conceding the existence of this state, where does one go? It's like a mathematician fascinated by the empty set: { }
. . . per how you are aware of being alive, right now, in time and space, and what that awareness is. And this time, kindly look at your own mind, and not a code book
This work is not for everyone with one of those plastic sleeves that fits into the front pocket of your Docker's shirt, bristling with ballpoints and micrometors
We are so humbled, oh Wizard. How should we righteously proceed?
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WBraun
climber
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May 16, 2017 - 04:39pm PT
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This work is not for everyone with one of those plastic sleeves that fits into the front pocket of your Docker's shirt, bristling with ballpoints and micrometers.
LOL .....Ha ha ha
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