Brent, as much as I like the idea of quantum effects being true, and the Hameroff-Penrose thesis that microtubules are da' bomb, I feel we have to ask what good this does us? Medically, or philosophically, I am not certain. How does knowing that one of the moons of Neptune is called Neirid? Exactly! It don't. Am I screaming for the cause of willful ignorance? Not intentionally, but I still want all scientific analysis to benefit humankind. Call it a super-goal.
-----Original Message----- From: meekerdb <[email protected]> To: everything-list <[email protected]> Sent: Mon, Jan 20, 2014 2:27 pm Subject: Re: Discovery of quantum vibrations in brain microtubules confirms Hameroff/Penrose consciousness theory basis On 1/20/2014 9:38 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 20 Jan 2014, at 10:50, LizR wrote: On 20 January 2014 22:39, Russell Standish <[email protected]> wrote: The point about acting randomly is that clearly you are not optimising your utility. You a choosing something other than the optimum action, so are behaving irrationally by definition. Yet, it could be a beneficial strategy to do so, for all the reasons raised (fooling your opponents, making a timely decision, and so on). Sorry to be dense, but I still don't see this. When I say "acting randomly", I assume we don't mean just doing anything, deciding to go swimming in the arctic or declaring yourself to be Napoleon, I assume we mean picking one of a number of options that appear to have equal utility. Let's say we're playing scissors-paper-rock. The best strategy - the one that gives you the best chance of winning at least half the time - is to choose randomly. Anyone who doesn't choose randomly is open to having their moves predicted, and losing more often than they otherwise would. So in this case acting randomly is rational... isn't it? OK. But now acting randomly is not that simple, and studies have shown that the humans are very bad at that. A machine can easily distinguish a human from a good pseudorandom generator. Humans have a tendency to homogenize adding an order implicitly. Most humans get wrong when shown ten pictures of random and non random pictures. When presented with true randomness, humans extract order which are not there. Most people are amazed of the presence of long sequence of 1 and 0, and 10, ... in the binary development of PI (11.001001000011111101101010100010001000010110100011...). Can we act randomly? Well, we might do that when panicking. Or we can use some random generator, or the rest of coffee in a cup, or the shape of the clouds, ... Of course what we need to do is to act unpredictably, and random is just a limit of extreme unpredictability. In an actual finite sequence of actions there's no way to distinguish true random from just sufficiently random. Brent -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
