Re: The Evolutionary Tree of Religion
On 27 Apr 2014, at 19:38, meekerdb wrote: On 4/27/2014 1:34 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: I think the same. That's close to Platonism. There is more than what we see, measure, etc. Then we can theorize, which means making assumptions (like the moon exist), and experimentation, like going on the moon. This will not prove that the moon exists in any real or fundamental way, LOL. I think you've been a logician to long. :-) Just being a rationalist, and interested in things going beyond the usual FAPP (For All Practical Purposes). To go to the moon, we need some existence of the moon, not necessarily an ontological existence. To solve the mind-body problem, or to put light on the nature of matter and consciousness (and their relations) it is important to understand that seeing, experiencing, ... don't prove (in the informal logician or mathematician sense indeed) anything about 'reality'. I like when David Mermin said once: Einstein asked if the moon still exist when nobody look at it. Now we know that the moon, in that case, definitely not exist. Well, that was a comp prediction, with the difference that the moon doesn't exist even when we look at it. Only the relative relations between my computational states and infinitely many computations exists. If my consciousness can survive a physical digital substitution, then it survives an arithmetical digital substitution, and what we call the moon has to be recovered as a stable pattern emerging from an infinity of computations in arithmetic, and cannot be related from anything else. The math confirmed that this makes sense, as the logic of 'certainty ([]p t) gives a quantum logic on the arithmetical sigma_1 (computational) proposition p. Bruno Brent He's like a philosopher who says, I know it's possible in practice. Now I'd like to know whether it's possible in principle. --- Daniel Dennett, on Michael Behe -- 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 everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- 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 everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Consciousness: Emotions Feelings
An interesting conversation: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/feeling-our-emotions/?page=1 Bruno, can this be developed in a machine? Samiya *MIND*: Do you believe that we will someday be able to create artificial consciousness and feelings? *Damasio*: An organism can possess feelings only when it can create a representation of the body's functions and the related changes that occur in the brain. In this way, the organism can perceive them. Without this mechanism there would be no consciousness. It is unclear that this could ever develop in a machine or whether we really want machines with feelings. -- 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 everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: The Evolutionary Tree of Religion
It is not possible to define the concept of existence without resorting in some kind of belief. That is why talking seriously about existence is carefully avoided. 2014-04-29 10:18 GMT+02:00 Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be: On 27 Apr 2014, at 19:38, meekerdb wrote: On 4/27/2014 1:34 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: I think the same. That's close to Platonism. There is more than what we see, measure, etc. Then we can theorize, which means making assumptions (like the moon exist), and experimentation, like going on the moon. This will not prove that the moon exists in any real or fundamental way, LOL. I think you've been a logician to long. :-) Just being a rationalist, and interested in things going beyond the usual FAPP (For All Practical Purposes). To go to the moon, we need some existence of the moon, not necessarily an ontological existence. To solve the mind-body problem, or to put light on the nature of matter and consciousness (and their relations) it is important to understand that seeing, experiencing, ... don't prove (in the informal logician or mathematician sense indeed) anything about 'reality'. I like when David Mermin said once: Einstein asked if the moon still exist when nobody look at it. Now we know that the moon, in that case, definitely not exist. Well, that was a comp prediction, with the difference that the moon doesn't exist even when we look at it. Only the relative relations between my computational states and infinitely many computations exists. If my consciousness can survive a physical digital substitution, then it survives an arithmetical digital substitution, and what we call the moon has to be recovered as a stable pattern emerging from an infinity of computations in arithmetic, and cannot be related from anything else. The math confirmed that this makes sense, as the logic of 'certainty ([]p t) gives a quantum logic on the arithmetical sigma_1 (computational) proposition p. Bruno Brent He's like a philosopher who says, I know it's possible in practice. Now I'd like to know whether it's possible in principle. --- Daniel Dennett, on Michael Behe -- 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 everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- 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 everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. -- Alberto. -- 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 everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: The Evolutionary Tree of Religion
On Tue, Apr 29, 2014 at 2:48 AM, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: On 4/28/2014 3:32 PM, Telmo Menezes wrote: On Mon, Apr 28, 2014 at 10:48 PM, ghib...@gmail.com wrote: On Sunday, April 27, 2014 10:12:34 AM UTC+1, telmo_menezes wrote: On Sat, Apr 26, 2014 at 10:43 PM, Bruno Marchal mar...@ulb.ac.bewrote: On 26 Apr 2014, at 21:15, Telmo Menezes wrote: On Sat, Apr 26, 2014 at 8:20 PM, Bruno Marchal mar...@ulb.ac.bewrote: On 26 Apr 2014, at 19:23, Telmo Menezes wrote: On Sat, Apr 26, 2014 at 6:38 PM, 'Chris de Morsella cdemo...@yahoo.com' via Everything List everyth...@googlegroups.comwrote: *From:* everyth...@googlegroups.com [mailto: everyth...@googlegroups.com] *On Behalf Of *Telmo Menezes http://infinitemachine.tumblr.com/image/83867790181 A nice weekend to everyone! Nice graph; that gives a refreshing perspective on religion... as a human evolution of cultural behavior and norms, similar to say how language has a nice tree going back in time. Indeed. It seems plausible that religions are local maxima of cooperation strategies. In recent History (compared to the time scale of this graph), attempts to engineer new cooperation strategies require the removal of existing religions. This was the case in both the communist revolutions (Bolshevik and Maoist) and the enlightenment revolutions (American and French). But naturally evolved religions are highly-adapted, resilient organisms. Very nice graph. I appreciate the remark below it, which asks for some the grains of salt. I am not sure we can eliminate a religion, but we can substitute it by another (better or worst) religion. Perhaps it's useful to make the distinction between religion as the social construct and religion as the private experience. Without forgetting religion as truth, or possible truth. Neither social construct nor private experience are easily related to that truth, even if they depend on it. cooperation strategies needs some goal/sense, for which the cooperation makes sense, and such goal refer to some implicit or explicit religion or reality conception, I think. I'm not so sure... Maybe our goals can be traced back to simple things selected by evolution, that all relate to survival + replication. Then it all collapses into complexification, and the goals only exist when seeing from the inside -- the species, organism, etc. This can lead to a view of public religion as more of a consequence than a cause. Nothing is obvious for me here. Even if in the 3p, our evolution is based only on duplication and survival, it does not mean that all this makes does not acquire sense from higher order perspective (like in arithmetic, technically). To survive relatively to a universal machine you have to be locally self-referentially correct relatively to that universal machine, but globally + taking into account the first person indeterminacy, and thus accounts of a non computable complex structure confronting us, things are less clear to me. Most of the arithmetical truth is non computable. Only god(s) know(s) where iteration of survival + replication can lead. Maybe we have the potential to transcend biology, but I believe that remains to be seen. Well, there is transhumanism, which is a sort of will to apply comp as soon as possible. Google seems to have decided to invest in that direction. Then we have the biological shortcuts, the plants which succeeded in building molecules capable of mimicking some brain molecules. This can transcend biology at different levels. For the 3p long term destiny, I doubt we will completely abandon the carbon, but we will probably come back to something close to a little social bacteria, with radio and GSM, constituting a giant computer. The virtual 1p will not necessarily change so much: we will still see ourselves as humans with arms and legs. This can take a millennium, and that bacteria, (which becomes quantum at low temperature) will expand in the arms of the Milky way. You say that everything will be normal, we'll be human with arms and legs, then you say something highly psychedelic :) Nice to see buddhism and taoism there, but where is (strong) atheism/materialism? Hmm :) The graph says v1.1, so maybe you can issue a bug report :) Where would you say it branches from, in that tree? I would say from the greeks, and then in some growing percentage of the abramanic religions. (But it certainly occurs also elsewhere, like notably in some branch of Hinduism and Buddhism). Platonism is not dead, just dormant, in basically all religions (if not in all brain or universal numbers). We will get virtual, but that is relative, and from the absolute view we already are (assuming mechanism). Sure, virtual is like natural, I'm not sure it means anything. In the arithmetical reality there are two kinds of place we
Re: anyone super-geek here?
I work at a company who's primary business is making large-scale private cloud storage systems, supporting both Amazon's S3 and OpenStack interfaces. While OpenStack has the advantage of being more open, Amazon's S3 protocol seems to have a larger mind share, and more traction as far as becoming a de facto standard. If you are developing client-side applications against cloud APIs, I think you will find the S3 API more powerful and better designed and thought out than the Openstack API, but for simpler use cases that just involve read, write, delete, etc. there's very little difference between them. I think Chris's comment below is particularly good advice. You ought to build an abstraction layer that sits between your application logic and the storage layer such that in the future you can more easily transition to other APIs should the need or desire arise. Jason On Mon, Apr 28, 2014 at 8:03 PM, 'Chris de Morsella cdemorse...@yahoo.com' via Everything List everything-list@googlegroups.com wrote: I looked at it a while back and of the various open source cloud initiatives it looks like the one best positioned to succeed also because it is heavily backed by Rackspace -- a large hosting, col-location service based out of Texas. My advice though, whatever cloud solution you go with would be to try as much as possible to abstract the specific bridge code behind an opaque interface that cleanly separates it from bleeding out into other code. This will help to isolate this layer from other layers in your code. In general an extra layer of indirection is almost always worth it if it can decouple responsibilities and functions. Clean separation is one of the keys to managing mushrooming complexity as code grows and evolves over time. -- *From:* ghib...@gmail.com ghib...@gmail.com *To:* everything-list@googlegroups.com *Sent:* Monday, April 28, 2014 8:09 PM *Subject:* Re: anyone super-geek here? On Monday, April 28, 2014 3:43:35 PM UTC+1, ghi...@gmail.com wrote: Hi, off topic, but I need to throw a few things onto the cloud, and it's important to get package right. So can anyone answer...is it OpenStack ? No need to answer unless you feel you have serious amounts of exposure That could have conveyed a message I didn't intend. All I meant was I've got engineers..it just occurred to me the list might have super-genius experts. I don't want to end up with an infrastructure that isn't going to keep up,. OpenStack looks good though. -- 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 everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. -- 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 everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. -- 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 everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: The Evolutionary Tree of Religion
On 29 Apr 2014, at 00:32, Telmo Menezes wrote: On Mon, Apr 28, 2014 at 10:48 PM, ghib...@gmail.com wrote: telmo, would it be ok to clarify the relation t matter you don't see for consciousness? Do you mean you don't see as true he hypothesis that matter is conscious ? Or you don't see that the physical bring produces consciousness? I mean the hypothesis that the physical brain produces consciousness. I'm not saying it's false, I'm just saying that there is not reason to give more credence to this hypothesis than others: for example, that mater is a byproduct of consciousness. For all the stuff that is covered by the current scientific paradigm, we either have understanding or a glimpse of understanding. For example: we don't know how the brain stores memories, but we understand enough basic principles that it is possible to imagine a progression from our current level of understanding to full understanding. We know about neurons, how they connect in a complex network to create an asynchronous computer and so on. This initial knowledge already leads to technology, like face recognition. But with consciousness, we don't even have a glimpse of understanding. There's no gradient of complexity to climb. We don't even know where to start. I agree that there is no gradient of complexity to climb, but once we assume the computationalist hypothesis, it seems to me that we do have a place to start: computer science and the logic of self-reference, including the intensional variants. Such logics imply the existence of truth, that we can know to be true, in some immediate sense, and they implies also that such truth are not rationally justifiable, making some of them good candidate for consciousness. It can also be shown (that is even easy) that such consciousness is an invariant for some recursive substitution or digital copy, reverifying comp from inside. (That does not prove comp, of course). We don't have to climb in complexity, we need only to learn to distinguish the many internal views of the (many) Löbian numbers from inside arithmetic relatively to many universal numbers (more precisely: finitely many (like in this list) together with infinitely many, like in QM or in comp below our substitution level. So I propose that the current mainstream scientific belief that the brain produces consciousness is mysticism. Which might perhaps make sense if the substitution level is *infinitely low*. In that case we have to say no to *all* doctors, and comp is false. infinitely low is not really a matter of scaling, but like in QM, of isolation from the environment or the relative universal numbers. But even this way to escape comp has its problems. If it is done constructively enough (using the constructive transfinite), then the consequences above still follows and we loss unicity again. If is is done non constructively, things get just more complex, and you need to be either god, or inconsistent, to conclude anything from that. Matter (primitive matter) becomes then a conceptual gap object whose only role would be to escape the consequence of comp. That is worst than (genuine) mysticism, that's pseudo-science or pseudo-religion. Cheers! Bruno http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- 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 everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: The Evolutionary Tree of Religion
On Tuesday, April 29, 2014 11:56:06 AM UTC+1, telmo_menezes wrote: On Tue, Apr 29, 2014 at 2:48 AM, meekerdb meek...@verizon.netjavascript: wrote: On 4/28/2014 3:32 PM, Telmo Menezes wrote: On Mon, Apr 28, 2014 at 10:48 PM, ghi...@gmail.com javascript: wrote: On Sunday, April 27, 2014 10:12:34 AM UTC+1, telmo_menezes wrote: On Sat, Apr 26, 2014 at 10:43 PM, Bruno Marchal mar...@ulb.ac.bewrote: On 26 Apr 2014, at 21:15, Telmo Menezes wrote: On Sat, Apr 26, 2014 at 8:20 PM, Bruno Marchal mar...@ulb.ac.bewrote: On 26 Apr 2014, at 19:23, Telmo Menezes wrote: On Sat, Apr 26, 2014 at 6:38 PM, 'Chris de Morsella cdemo...@yahoo.com' via Everything List everyth...@googlegroups.com wrote: *From:* everyth...@googlegroups.com [mailto: everyth...@googlegroups.com] *On Behalf Of *Telmo Menezes http://infinitemachine.tumblr.com/image/83867790181 A nice weekend to everyone! Nice graph; that gives a refreshing perspective on religion… as a human evolution of cultural behavior and norms, similar to say how language has a nice tree going back in time. Indeed. It seems plausible that religions are local maxima of cooperation strategies. In recent History (compared to the time scale of this graph), attempts to engineer new cooperation strategies require the removal of existing religions. This was the case in both the communist revolutions (Bolshevik and Maoist) and the enlightenment revolutions (American and French). But naturally evolved religions are highly-adapted, resilient organisms. Very nice graph. I appreciate the remark below it, which asks for some the grains of salt. I am not sure we can eliminate a religion, but we can substitute it by another (better or worst) religion. Perhaps it's useful to make the distinction between religion as the social construct and religion as the private experience. Without forgetting religion as truth, or possible truth. Neither social construct nor private experience are easily related to that truth, even if they depend on it. cooperation strategies needs some goal/sense, for which the cooperation makes sense, and such goal refer to some implicit or explicit religion or reality conception, I think. I'm not so sure... Maybe our goals can be traced back to simple things selected by evolution, that all relate to survival + replication. Then it all collapses into complexification, and the goals only exist when seeing from the inside -- the species, organism, etc. This can lead to a view of public religion as more of a consequence than a cause. Nothing is obvious for me here. Even if in the 3p, our evolution is based only on duplication and survival, it does not mean that all this makes does not acquire sense from higher order perspective (like in arithmetic, technically). To survive relatively to a universal machine you have to be locally self-referentially correct relatively to that universal machine, but globally + taking into account the first person indeterminacy, and thus accounts of a non computable complex structure confronting us, things are less clear to me. Most of the arithmetical truth is non computable. Only god(s) know(s) where iteration of survival + replication can lead. Maybe we have the potential to transcend biology, but I believe that remains to be seen. Well, there is transhumanism, which is a sort of will to apply comp as soon as possible. Google seems to have decided to invest in that direction. Then we have the biological shortcuts, the plants which succeeded in building molecules capable of mimicking some brain molecules. This can transcend biology at different levels. For the 3p long term destiny, I doubt we will completely abandon the carbon, but we will probably come back to something close to a little social bacteria, with radio and GSM, constituting a giant computer. The virtual 1p will not necessarily change so much: we will still see ourselves as humans with arms and legs. This can take a millennium, and that bacteria, (which becomes quantum at low temperature) will expand in the arms of the Milky way. You say that everything will be normal, we'll be human with arms and legs, then you say something highly psychedelic :) Nice to see buddhism and taoism there, but where is (strong) atheism/materialism? Hmm :) The graph says v1.1, so maybe you can issue a bug report :) Where would you say it branches from, in that tree? I would say from the greeks, and then in some growing percentage of the abramanic religions. (But it certainly occurs also elsewhere, like notably in some branch of Hinduism and Buddhism). Platonism is not dead, just dormant, in basically all religions (if not in all brain
Re: The Evolutionary Tree of Religion
On 29 Apr 2014, at 12:14, Alberto G. Corona wrote: It is not possible to define the concept of existence without resorting in some kind of belief. You are right. For example, you have to believe that 4 + 3 = 7 to believe that it exists a number x such that 4 + x = 7. That is why talking seriously about existence is carefully avoided. We need to be clear which primitive elements are assumed to exist, and then we can derive many other sort of emergent existence and higher order appearances. (If we want to build a usable TOE capable of handling the mind body problem). Bruno 2014-04-29 10:18 GMT+02:00 Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be: On 27 Apr 2014, at 19:38, meekerdb wrote: On 4/27/2014 1:34 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: I think the same. That's close to Platonism. There is more than what we see, measure, etc. Then we can theorize, which means making assumptions (like the moon exist), and experimentation, like going on the moon. This will not prove that the moon exists in any real or fundamental way, LOL. I think you've been a logician to long. :-) Just being a rationalist, and interested in things going beyond the usual FAPP (For All Practical Purposes). To go to the moon, we need some existence of the moon, not necessarily an ontological existence. To solve the mind-body problem, or to put light on the nature of matter and consciousness (and their relations) it is important to understand that seeing, experiencing, ... don't prove (in the informal logician or mathematician sense indeed) anything about 'reality'. I like when David Mermin said once: Einstein asked if the moon still exist when nobody look at it. Now we know that the moon, in that case, definitely not exist. Well, that was a comp prediction, with the difference that the moon doesn't exist even when we look at it. Only the relative relations between my computational states and infinitely many computations exists. If my consciousness can survive a physical digital substitution, then it survives an arithmetical digital substitution, and what we call the moon has to be recovered as a stable pattern emerging from an infinity of computations in arithmetic, and cannot be related from anything else. The math confirmed that this makes sense, as the logic of 'certainty ([]p t) gives a quantum logic on the arithmetical sigma_1 (computational) proposition p. Bruno Brent He's like a philosopher who says, I know it's possible in practice. Now I'd like to know whether it's possible in principle. --- Daniel Dennett, on Michael Behe -- 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 everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything- l...@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- 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 everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. -- Alberto. -- 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 everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- 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 everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: Consciousness: Emotions Feelings
On Tuesday, April 29, 2014 12:22:23 PM UTC+1, telmo_menezes wrote: On Tue, Apr 29, 2014 at 12:00 PM, Samiya Illias samiya...@gmail.comjavascript: wrote: An interesting conversation: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/feeling-our-emotions/?page=1 Bruno, can this be developed in a machine? Samiya *MIND*: Do you believe that we will someday be able to create artificial consciousness and feelings? *Damasio*: An organism can possess feelings only when it can create a representation of the body's functions and the related changes that occur in the brain. In this way, the organism can perceive them. Without this mechanism there would be no consciousness. This is an unfalsifiable claim. Right. This is something about a lot of current thinking that puzzles me. If the reasonable starting position is that we have absolutely no clue what something is, yet believe it is extremely important. And if that thing is surrounded now by mysticism, pseudo-science, endless wondrous illustrative imaginings. Then what does this look like? It looks like the way things were right back at the start. It looks like what the very first pioneers were up against. So in my view that's where to start. Obviously exactly like that, but they used certain approaches that implicitly recognized it wasn't worth trying to guess. It was better to keep everything simple and nail everything hard to an early correction by empirical means. Do it that way, and the whole process will naturally stay intertwined with prediction and falsification. It'll grow organically, and eventually there'll complex arrangements that involve predictions at every level and new things will be getting said about the nature of consciousness that no one would have dreamed of. But this time, it'll be things with large crossovers into new technologies and new fields and who knows what -- 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 everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: The Evolutionary Tree of Religion
On 4/29/2014 1:18 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 27 Apr 2014, at 19:38, meekerdb wrote: On 4/27/2014 1:34 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: I think the same. That's close to Platonism. There is more than what we see, measure, etc. Then we can theorize, which means making assumptions (like the moon exist), and experimentation, like going on the moon. This will not prove that the moon exists in any real or fundamental way, LOL. I think you've been a logician to long. :-) Just being a rationalist, and interested in things going beyond the usual FAPP (For All Practical Purposes). To go to the moon, we need some existence of the moon, not necessarily an ontological existence. To solve the mind-body problem, or to put light on the nature of matter and consciousness (and their relations) it is important to understand that seeing, experiencing, ... don't prove (in the informal logician or mathematician sense indeed) anything about 'reality'. Proof in the informal logician or mathematical sense don't prove anything about reality either. A proof is just a set of relations between premises and conclusions that preserve a measure T, we nominally call true. So who you gonna believe, your premises and inferences or your lyin' eyes? :-) I like when David Mermin said once: Einstein asked if the moon still exist when nobody look at it. Now we know that the moon, in that case, definitely not exist. Well, that was a comp prediction, with the difference that the moon doesn't exist even when we look at it. Only the relative relations between my computational states and infinitely many computations exists. Thus completely eviscerating the meaning of exist. If my consciousness can survive a physical digital substitution, then it survives an arithmetical digital substitution, and what we call the moon has to be recovered as a stable pattern emerging from an infinity of computations in arithmetic, But only, I think, in a different digital universe in which we are also stable patterns of relations. And in THAT universe what we call the Moon is what we can fly too and and on. Brent Everyone knows that dragons don't exist. But while this simplistic formulation may satisfy the layman, it does not suffice for the scientific mind. The School of Higher Neantical Nillity is in fact wholly unconcerned with what does exist. Indeed, the banality of existence has been so amply demonstrated, there is no need for us to discuss it any further here. The brilliant Cerebron, attacking the problem analytically, discovered three distinct kinds of dragon: the mythical, the chimerical, and the purely hypothetical. They were all, one might say, nonexistent, but each nonexisted in an entirely different way... --- Stanislaw Lem, The Cyberiad and cannot be related from anything else. The math confirmed that this makes sense, as the logic of 'certainty ([]p t) gives a quantum logic on the arithmetical sigma_1 (computational) proposition p. Bruno Brent He's like a philosopher who says, I know it's possible in practice. Now I'd like to know whether it's possible in principle. --- Daniel Dennett, on Michael Behe -- 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 everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com mailto:everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com mailto:everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/%7Emarchal/ -- 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 everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com mailto:everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com mailto:everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. -- 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 everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: Interesting Google tech talk on QM
*Brent(?) wrote*: No I never read that, but hell yeah, MWI worries me! Doesn't it worry you? I mean I know at one level that in a very real sense it doesn't matter whether it's true or not, since the other universes can never affect me, but at another the reality that everything happens to me that I can imagine is just plain terrifying. And the 'me' isn't just the versions of me that are still called by my name, I can't escape the conclusion that I am everyone and everyone is me and that *everyone's* experience is my experience at some level. If MWI ever does become the accepted conception of reality, we have a huge amount of philosophical reorientation ahead of us. For instance, if I take some risk (like drink-driving, a relevant topic on another thread), and 'get away with it', MWI suggests I am still responsible for other realities in which I crashed and injured or killed myself and/or others. My whole approach to risk management becomes quite different if all outcomes are realised. It no longer makes sense to think about if something will happen to me in the future. I have to accept that it all will happen, it's just that all those future mes won't know about the other ones, so they will all have the impression of a single outcome. It's a disorienting and disturbing thought. Of course it should't lead to fatalism, since one's choices are part of the deterministic system that determines the 'weight' of certain futures - and I suppose it should actually lead to a kind of 'radical acceptance'. There's no point thinking why me? or what bad luck, since your experiencing this, and indeed everything, is inevitable. But then I console myself by thinking that any human-level qualitative interpretation of this level of reality is mistaken, a kind of confusion of levels. And still it horrifies me... (But like Bruno, my dedication to truth keeps me from rejecting it purely because I hate it. The logic is very compelling.) *Stathis: * We accept as a society the risk of death by motor vehicle accident because there is a 1/10,000 chance per year it will happen to an individual, even though that means that in a large city a person will on average be killed every day. I think this situation is analogous to the moral question of MWI versus a single world interpretation of QM. *Me:* #1: I do not consider quantitative chance (probability) because of its unidentified sequence of occurrence . #2: I take MWI as a potentially valid idea - with the proviso that the unverses are DIFFERENT. In my narrative I give an idea to occur infinite universes of infinite qualia - ours seems to be a moderate one with no structural access to others, what does not mean the same vice versa. Hence: the ZOOKEEPER theories and the unexplained occurrences. #3: I take exception to any extension of anthropocentric ideas to the everything of which we are not equipped to know a lot. -That pertains to quantizing (math?) and drawing conclusions upon observations of phenomena we don't know indeed. JM On Mon, Apr 28, 2014 at 12:17 AM, Stathis Papaioannou stath...@gmail.comwrote: On 23 April 2014 21:33, Pierz pier...@gmail.com wrote: On Tuesday, April 22, 2014 11:12:53 PM UTC+10, Brent wrote: On 4/22/2014 4:54 AM, Pierz wrote: Thanks Brent. I read Mermin and am both wiser and none-the. It seems to me in this paper he is chickening out by saying that QM shouldn't really think about the conscious observer, because that leads to the fairy tale of many worlds. Instead it should consider consciousness to reside outside the competent scope of a physical theory. I don't think he means that. He just means that it's a separate question from the interpretation of QM and that it's a mistake to mix them together. It's kind of like his answer is to say don't ask those questions. And he explicitly repudiates the notion that it's all in your head or that a quantum state is a summary of your knowledge of the system. The correlations are objective. What I liked about the paper though was the notion of correlations without correlata (which Garrett invokes) - the idea that quantum theory is about (and only about) systemic relationships makes a lot of sense. To take the answer to what is QM telling us? just a little further philosophically than what Mermim is prepared to, I'd say it's telling us (for one thing) that we've hit the limits of atomism. We're bouncing off the boundary of the reductionistic epistemology. Anyway, sadly I haven't yet seen anything that could supply a cogent alternative to MWI. I'll move on to the other papers tomorrow night... :) Chris Fuchs is the main proponent of quantum Bayesianism, which also takes the wave-function to just be a summary of one's knowledge of the system - and so there is nothing surprising about it collapsing when you get new information. Of course another alternative is an objective collapse theory like GRW. I'm just now reading a book by
Re: Consciousness: Emotions Feelings
On 4/29/2014 3:00 AM, Samiya Illias wrote: An interesting conversation: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/feeling-our-emotions/?page=1 Bruno, can this be developed in a machine? Samiya *MIND*: Do you believe that we will someday be able to create artificial consciousness and feelings? *Damasio*: An organism can possess feelings only when it can create a representation of the body's functions and the related changes that occur in the brain. In this way, the organism can perceive them. Without this mechanism there would be no consciousness. It is unclear that this could ever develop in a machine or whether we really want machines with feelings. A Mars Rover knows its temperature, how much energy it has, where it is, where it wants to go, what it wants to do when it gets there, what obstacles are directly ahead. It knows whether it is healthy, i.e. all systems working or disabled. 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 everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: The Evolutionary Tree of Religion
On 4/29/2014 9:11 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: Matter (primitive matter) becomes then a conceptual gap object whose only role would be to escape the consequence of comp. That is worst than (genuine) mysticism, that's pseudo-science or pseudo-religion. Uh-oh! Now you've defined a heresy, Bruno. 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 everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: Interesting Google tech talk on QM
On 4/29/2014 12:02 PM, John Mikes wrote: */Brent(?) wrote/*: Nope. Wasn't me, I wrote: / //Chris Fuchs is the main proponent of quantum Bayesianism, which also takes the wave-function to just be a summary of one's knowledge of the system - and so there is nothing surprising about it collapsing when you get new information.// // //Of course another alternative is an objective collapse theory like GRW. I'm just now reading a book by Ghirardi,Sneaking a Look at God's Cards which surveys the experiments that force the weirdness of QM on us and the various interpretations. Of course he devotes a special chapter to GRW theory, but he is very even handed.// // //I'm not sure why you're worried about MWI though. Is it because you read Divide by Infinity? I don't think that's what MWI really implies.// / Brent No I never read that, but hell yeah, MWI worries me! Doesn't it worry you? I mean I know at one level that in a very real sense it doesn't matter whether it's true or not, since the other universes can never affect me, but at another the reality that everything happens to me that I can imagine is just plain terrifying. And the 'me' isn't just the versions of me that are still called by my name, I can't escape the conclusion that I am everyone and everyone is me and that *everyone's* experience is my experience at some level. If MWI ever does become the accepted conception of reality, we have a huge amount of philosophical reorientation ahead of us. For instance, if I take some risk (like drink-driving, a relevant topic on another thread), and 'get away with it', MWI suggests I am still responsible for other realities in which I crashed and injured or killed myself and/or others. My whole approach to risk management becomes quite different if all outcomes are realised. It no longer makes sense to think about if something will happen to me in the future. I have to accept that it all will happen, it's just that all those future mes won't know about the other ones, so they will all have the impression of a single outcome. It's a disorienting and disturbing thought. Of course it should't lead to fatalism, since one's choices are part of the deterministic system that determines the 'weight' of certain futures - and I suppose it should actually lead to a kind of 'radical acceptance'. There's no point thinking why me? or what bad luck, since your experiencing this, and indeed everything, is inevitable. But then I console myself by thinking that any human-level qualitative interpretation of this level of reality is mistaken, a kind of confusion of levels. And still it horrifies me... (But like Bruno, my dedication to truth keeps me from rejecting it purely because I hate it. The logic is very compelling.) */Stathis: /* We accept as a society the risk of death by motor vehicle accident because there is a 1/10,000 chance per year it will happen to an individual, even though that means that in a large city a person will on average be killed every day. I think this situation is analogous to the moral question of MWI versus a single world interpretation of QM.*/ /* */Me:/* #1: I do not consider quantitative chance (probability) because of its unidentified sequence of occurrence . #2: I take MWI as a potentially valid idea - with the proviso that the unverses are DIFFERENT. In my narrative I give an idea to occur infinite universes of infinite qualia - ours seems to be a moderate one with no structural access to others, what does not mean the same vice versa. Hence: the ZOOKEEPER theories and the unexplained occurrences. #3: I take exception to any extension of anthropocentric ideas to the everything of which we are not equipped to know a lot. -That pertains to quantizing (math?) and drawing conclusions upon observations of phenomena we don't know indeed. JM On Mon, Apr 28, 2014 at 12:17 AM, Stathis Papaioannou stath...@gmail.com mailto:stath...@gmail.com wrote: On 23 April 2014 21:33, Pierz pier...@gmail.com mailto:pier...@gmail.com wrote: On Tuesday, April 22, 2014 11:12:53 PM UTC+10, Brent wrote: On 4/22/2014 4:54 AM, Pierz wrote: Thanks Brent. I read Mermin and am both wiser and none-the. It seems to me in this paper he is chickening out by saying that QM shouldn't really think about the conscious observer, because that leads to the fairy tale of many worlds. Instead it should consider consciousness to reside outside the competent scope of a physical theory. I don't think he means that. He just means that it's a separate question from the interpretation of QM and that it's a mistake to mix them together. It's kind of like his answer is to say don't ask those questions. And he explicitly repudiates the notion that it's all in your head or that a quantum state is a summary of your
Re: The Evolutionary Tree of Religion
On 4/29/2014 1:18 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: If my consciousness can survive a physical digital substitution, then it survives an arithmetical digital substitution, and what we call the moon has to be recovered as a stable pattern emerging from an infinity of computations in arithmetic, and cannot be related from anything else. The point is that what we call the Moon IS the Moon. 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 everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: Interesting Google tech talk on QM
On Tue, Apr 29, 2014 at 3:02 PM, John Mikes jami...@gmail.com wrote: *Brent(?) wrote*: No I never read that, but hell yeah, MWI worries me! Doesn't it worry you? I mean I know at one level that in a very real sense it doesn't matter whether it's true or not, since the other universes can never affect me, but at another the reality that everything happens to me that I can imagine is just plain terrifying. And the 'me' isn't just the versions of me that are still called by my name, I can't escape the conclusion that I am everyone and everyone is me and that *everyone's* experience is my experience at some level. If MWI ever does become the accepted conception of reality, we have a huge amount of philosophical reorientation ahead of us. For instance, if I take some risk (like drink-driving, a relevant topic on another thread), and 'get away with it', MWI suggests I am still responsible for other realities in which I crashed and injured or killed myself and/or others. My whole approach to risk management becomes quite different if all outcomes are realised. In what ways would your approach to risk management need to change if there was still some notion of different outcomes having different measures that correspond to normal classical probabilities? In a MWI context you might have a scenario where you can say if I take action X, then I expect in 95% of worlds outcome Y will occur, but in 5% of worlds outcome Z will occur, but in what cases would your choice about whether to take outcome X be any different than a one-world scenario where you can say if I take action X, then I expect there's a 95% probability outcome Y will occur, but a 5% probability outcome Z will occur? Can you think of any specific examples where this would change your decision? The MWI advocate David Deutsch had a quote about choices and morality in the article at http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg17122994.400-taming-the-multiverse.htmlwhich made sense to me: By making good choices, doing the right thing, we thicken the stack of universes in which versions of us live reasonable lives. When you succeed, all the copies of you who made the same decision succeed too. What you do for the better increases the portion of the multiverse where good things happen. Jesse -- 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 everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: Interesting Google tech talk on QM
On Tue, Apr 29, 2014 at 04:19:01PM -0400, Jesse Mazer wrote: The MWI advocate David Deutsch had a quote about choices and morality in the article at http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg17122994.400-taming-the-multiverse.htmlwhich made sense to me: By making good choices, doing the right thing, we thicken the stack of universes in which versions of us live reasonable lives. When you succeed, all the copies of you who made the same decision succeed too. What you do for the better increases the portion of the multiverse where good things happen. Jesse Makes no sense to me. You do not thicken the stack of universes, nor do you increase the portion of the multiverse where good things happen. The Multiverse just is - proportions do not change because of choices of inhabitants. Rather, I think decision theory should be based on what choices (of measurement) do I make such that the most likely outcome (that I observe) is 'good', and 'bad' outcomes are unlikely (to be observed). David Deutsch seems to be badly conflating the static block multiverse picture with a dynamic einselectionist picture. Cue the obvious response from John Clark that free will is meaningless noise, and so consequently is decision theory :). Cheers. -- Prof Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile) Principal, High Performance Coders Visiting Professor of Mathematics hpco...@hpcoders.com.au University of New South Wales http://www.hpcoders.com.au Latest project: The Amoeba's Secret (http://www.hpcoders.com.au/AmoebasSecret.html) -- 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 everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
RE: The Evolutionary Tree of Religion
From: everything-list@googlegroups.com [mailto:everything-list@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of meekerdb On 4/29/2014 1:18 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: If my consciousness can survive a physical digital substitution, then it survives an arithmetical digital substitution, and what we call the moon has to be recovered as a stable pattern emerging from an infinity of computations in arithmetic, and cannot be related from anything else. The point is that what we call the Moon IS the Moon. IMO - both points of view, are valid though. You are correctly equating the definition or label of the moon with the qualia - i.e. the moon experience. It seems to me that Bruno was describing a hypothesized means by which that which we call the moon becomes manifest as the qualia we experience. That this qualia emerges through a dynamic computational process. Chris 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 everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: Interesting Google tech talk on QM
On Tue, Apr 29, 2014 at 10:24 PM, Russell Standish li...@hpcoders.com.auwrote: On Tue, Apr 29, 2014 at 04:19:01PM -0400, Jesse Mazer wrote: The MWI advocate David Deutsch had a quote about choices and morality in the article at http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg17122994.400-taming-the-multiverse.htmlwhich made sense to me: By making good choices, doing the right thing, we thicken the stack of universes in which versions of us live reasonable lives. When you succeed, all the copies of you who made the same decision succeed too. What you do for the better increases the portion of the multiverse where good things happen. Jesse Makes no sense to me. You do not thicken the stack of universes, nor do you increase the portion of the multiverse where good things happen. The Multiverse just is - proportions do not change because of choices of inhabitants. I agree that we don't change the multiverse itself since the MWI is deterministic, but thicken and increase could just be taken as a comparison between those whose personalities and beliefs make them more likely to make good choices and those whose brains make them less likely. And given the power of habit, perhaps each good choice modifies your brain somewhat to make subsequent good choices more likely. If that's the case, then a good choice at decision point A thickens the stack of branches where you make further good choices about events BC that follow A, in comparison to the thinner stack of branches where your subsequent choices about BC were good after you made an immoral choice at A. Jesse -- 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 everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
RE: anyone super-geek here?
From: everything-list@googlegroups.com [mailto:everything-list@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Jason Resch Sent: Tuesday, April 29, 2014 8:08 AM To: Everything List Subject: Re: anyone super-geek here? I work at a company who's primary business is making large-scale private cloud storage systems, supporting both Amazon's S3 and OpenStack interfaces. While OpenStack has the advantage of being more open, Amazon's S3 protocol seems to have a larger mind share, and more traction as far as becoming a de facto standard. If you are developing client-side applications against cloud APIs, I think you will find the S3 API more powerful and better designed and thought out than the Openstack API, but for simpler use cases that just involve read, write, delete, etc. there's very little difference between them. I think Chris's comment below is particularly good advice. You ought to build an abstraction layer that sits between your application logic and the storage layer such that in the future you can more easily transition to other APIs should the need or desire arise. I would also add that doing so is a lot easier when first building a system. After dependencies creep through a code base it becomes increasingly difficult to retrofit an abstraction layer into a body of code. Believe me I know, I have tried and seen a lot of other attempts. Have worked with some code for some very large software companies that is a forest of pre-processor commands that make it almost impossible to follow the code through the forest of #ifdefs, #elif, #defines, #endif directives AND_A_WHOLE_BUNCH_UGLY_LONG_STRINGS… in this one instance I believe they still struggle with the massive bleed through of dependencies throughout a very large code base. Once a body of code becomes inherently coupled by dependencies it can become impossible – in practice – to achieve loose coupling. On the other hand sometimes strong dependency makes perfect sense, but for anything that is peripheral to the core function of the software it often makes sense to emplace abstraction layers early on in the life-cycle. It is a case of do it now; or risk not being able to do it later… architecting an abstraction layer is also an opportunity to reflect on actual requirements and what kind of models and system topologies make sense. It can lead to better design over all. Chris Jason On Mon, Apr 28, 2014 at 8:03 PM, 'Chris de Morsella cdemorse...@yahoo.com' via Everything List everything-list@googlegroups.com wrote: I looked at it a while back and of the various open source cloud initiatives it looks like the one best positioned to succeed also because it is heavily backed by Rackspace -- a large hosting, col-location service based out of Texas. My advice though, whatever cloud solution you go with would be to try as much as possible to abstract the specific bridge code behind an opaque interface that cleanly separates it from bleeding out into other code. This will help to isolate this layer from other layers in your code. In general an extra layer of indirection is almost always worth it if it can decouple responsibilities and functions. Clean separation is one of the keys to managing mushrooming complexity as code grows and evolves over time. _ From: ghib...@gmail.com ghib...@gmail.com To: everything-list@googlegroups.com Sent: Monday, April 28, 2014 8:09 PM Subject: Re: anyone super-geek here? On Monday, April 28, 2014 3:43:35 PM UTC+1, ghi...@gmail.com wrote: Hi, off topic, but I need to throw a few things onto the cloud, and it's important to get package right. So can anyone answer...is it OpenStack ? No need to answer unless you feel you have serious amounts of exposure That could have conveyed a message I didn't intend. All I meant was I've got engineers..it just occurred to me the list might have super-genius experts. I don't want to end up with an infrastructure that isn't going to keep up,. OpenStack looks good though. -- 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 everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. -- 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 everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List
