On 25 Oct 2012, at 21:17, Craig Weinberg wrote:
On Thursday, October 25, 2012 2:33:58 PM UTC-4, John Clark wrote:
On Wed, Oct 24, 2012 at 6:20 PM, Craig Weinberg <[email protected]>
wrote:
> Accumulating wealth is hardly an achievement of human progress.
Wealth and human progress are strongly linked and only in very rich
western cultures can anybody afford to say that material things are
not important, and even then it's clear from their actions they
don't really mean it, and people in the third world don't even
bother to say it.
Wealth can be used to generate progress, and it is important, but an
individual person's ability to gather financial resources in a large
pile does not constitute an achievement of civilization in general.
It's important, sure, like going to the bathroom is important, but
it isn't a measure of progress.
> Driving a car is not an abstraction, but aside from being
dangerous if performed badly, it really isn't particularly difficult.
That is incorrect, at a absolute level driving a car is extremely
difficult.
Compared to what? Driving an a molecule is a lot more difficult.
What kind of 'absolute level' are you referring to?
The problem is that until the mid 20'th century nobody understood
what was intellectually easy and what was hard at a fundamental
level. We find it easy to figure out how to move our appendages to
catch a thrown ball, or to recognize objects from any angle even
under strange lighting conditions, but we find it hard to solve
partial differential equations or to play a good game of chess. In
1950 everybody figured that was because one class of tasks was
fundamentally more difficult than the other, but when we tried to
reproduce both chores from square one we learned that catching a
baseball was far more difficult than playing a good chess game.
There must be machinery in our head (constructed from genes) that
makes even the most clumsy among us to be masters of hand eye
coordination compared with today's robots, but there is no such
dedicated machinery for being good at chess, so we find that hard.
In fact I think it is only a slight exaggeration to say that at a
fundamental level a janitor has a more intellectually demanding job
(requiring more FLOPS) than a professor of mathematics.
This is the fallacy of the quantitative bottom up worldview. If you
let inanimate objects define the universe, then yes, behaving like a
toddler is incredibly hard. You can balance that realism however
with our native frame of reference of what is easy and what is hard.
Just because we know that from far away the Earth is round doesn't
mean that locally on the surface it isn't also flat. The universe
isn't measured by one ruler, it is also that which measures.
> Computers were much more exciting in the 1980s than they are now.
People always say that the world was better when they were young,
but what they really mean is that they personally were happier when
they were young.
Um, no. I was in junior high school in the 80s. Happier is not a
word I could use to describe it. Computers had so much going for
them in those early days. You could hack into them easily, make your
own games, there was a lot of new development all the time.
Everything was on a more human level so that you could easily
understand the nature of how things were done, from programming
languages to character sets, player/missile graphics and scrolling,
sound generation, peripherals. Every part of the technology was open
for inspection and customization. Today's computer world is really a
kind of screen based mall experience. It's better than nothing, but
really, it's pretty dull by comparison.
I agree with you. In the 80, the computer where "virgin" universal
machines. You were obliged to program them yourself, and directly talk
with a universal layer.
Of course, economically, it makes sense to use the programs written by
others, and now, a computer just look like a machine having a lot of
applications, and the universal layer is hidden, unless you decide to
install some universal stuff by yourself. Even this is not easy, as
most universal applications are expensive, and also come up with a lot
of programs already written.
In the long run, the universal machine will still reappear, in many
shapes, and then be hidden again, and then reappear, etc. as it is in
its nature to do that. The biological reality does the same, again,
and again, ...
Bruno
You could still get some of those old antique computers on Ebay, but
if you did I think you'd find that they were not nearly as much fun
as you remembered them to be.
I have played with emulators like MAME, but like any artifact from
the past, the fact that it has no future limits the possibilities
for enjoyment. If anything, it is the stark realization of just how
awful the 21st century has turned out to be which is depressing
enough to make me not want to indulge too much in nostalgia. It's
not that it isn't as fun as I remembered, it's that I remember
exactly how much more fun it was then and will never be again.
Remember Napster? That was fun.
Craig
John K Clark
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