Re: Life in the Islamic State for women
On Sun, Apr 5, 2015 at 9:45 PM, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: It was a totalitarian government, like within a single corporation. Nothing at all like Marx imagined. Where Marx's idea has been realized is in the Amana colonies in the US and the kibbutz in Israel. So why didn't they devolve into totalitarian states? My bet would be size. I have no doubt that communism works at the tribal level. We are evolved for it to work at that scale. Why aren't corporations as oppressive as the GDR? I'd say it has little to do with their economics. It's because people can stay or leave. I agree, but isn't this just the fundamental idea of capitalism? If you can go somewhere else, this means that businesses have to compete and the competition drives progress. Of course, in crony capitalism, one can use capital to interfere with the regulatory bodies with the goal of artificially restricting competition. In real capitalism this remains a problem, because the wealthiest businesses can make their adversaries go bankrupt by selling at a loss for long enough. But this strategy is less stable: the monopoly can always be challenged in the future. Still, many citizens of the GDR risked their lives to get to the other side. There were never attempts in the opposite direction. This is an almost perfect experiment because both groups had the same cultural background, ethnicity, language, etc. John Locke thought owning land was an oxymoron...you could only own the temporary use of land. Didn't matter for hunter-gatherers, but it was problem that had to be solved for agricultural society. John Locke won, at least in Europe. He didn't have to win in England; the land already belonged to the crown in principle. The exceptions were called free holds. Even today much of England is nominally the crown's and is occupied on 100yr leases. The property taxes are so high that you don't really feel that you own land or property. You lease it, and the government will take it away if you are no longer willing or capable of paying said tax. That now a lot the world's GDP comes from capital has created the same kinds of questions about ownership of capital. Given that rg in Piketty's analysis, is it a good idea to allow the Koch brothers to inherit a billion dollar business (that their father built by drilling for Stalin). The question is if there is a better alternative. My country did exactly that in 1974 -- nationalize big factories. Where did I say anything about nationalizing?? It think the Koch brothers inheritance should have been taxed at a much higher marginal rate and I think property, beyond homesteads, should be taxed whether it is investment capital or land or machinery. It's hard to disagree that the world would be better if the Koch brothers had to pay a hefty inheritance tax. In fact, inheritance tax might be the most ethically justifiable. Taxation of investment capital or means of production seems more of a mixed bag, because it also makes it harder for businesses to survive, pursue large longer-term projects, etc. In the end the cost is transferred to the buyer anyway, so why not just have sales tax instead? It also incentivizes the wealthier to allocate more resources to business ventures and less to hedonism. After 6 months almost none were left. I grew up in front of the ruins of a previously thriving flour mill. The currently richest guy in the country was a chemical engineer at one of these factories. He bought it back from the government for almost nothing when it was about to collapse and grew it back to a thriving business. Now he owns a multinational retail chain, which no longer pays taxes in my country because we moved the HQ elsewhere after a law was passed to increase taxes on capital gains. My point being: wealth inequality is a real problem but I believe all attempts to fix it so far have been worse. At the risk of being repetitive, I believe that withdrawing the power of nations to print money out of thin air and determine interest rates would reduce inequality. I don't see how that would address the problem at all. The problem is that capital (money, machinery, land,...) can be used to earn more capital. And ownership of that capital can be passed on. So it's an unstable system. As my grandfather used to say, The richer get richer and the poor get poorer. There are some countervailing factors: economic mobility of individuals, dispersion of inheritance to multiple heirs, loss of wealth through war or mismanagement,... But on average they are overwhelmed. Indexing currency to a limited resource would stop the central bank - normal bank - rich investor supply of credit. Notice that anytime the central bank prints money, it is in fact uniformly extracting resource-buying power for all of the existing money and centralizing that extracted buying power in the new money. The new money is then
Re: The MGA revisited
On 06 Apr 2015, at 13:25, Bruce Kellett wrote: Bruno Marchal wrote: On 06 Apr 2015, at 07:02, Bruce Kellett wrote: Bruno Marchal wrote: On 05 Apr 2015, at 01:19, Russell Standish wrote: Then what is your definition of a recording? In my eyes, UD* is a recording, particularly a finite portion of it, such as the first 10,000 steps of the first 10,000 programs. You confuse description of computations, which exists in the movies obtained by filming the boolean graph, and the computations themselves, with involves semantic, that is a reality (be it the static standard model of Peano Arithmetic) or a physical reality. Where is the dynamics necessary for computations themselves (as opposed to descriptions of computations) in the static standard model of Peano Arithmetic? I know where the dynamics reside in physical reality. In the truth of the elementary relations which implements a relation between some universal Turing system (universal number) and the program that is implemented. That 'truth' is static. The implementation of a program might be dynamic, but that is because it is implemented on a physical computer that has a physical clock cycle. No, it is dynamic in virtue of a universal machine running it step by step. The physical clock cycle is used in physical implementation, but other can use computable injection in N. I remind you that 'dynamic' means of or relating to force producing motion or active, potent, energetic, forceful; characterized by action or change. In other words, the opposite of static. That is a physicalist account of dynamics. It could be the correct one---I don't know. But even if is the correct one, you have to agree that a diophantine approximation of, let us say the evolution of the milky way + andromeda can exists (unless you presuppose at the start that the Milky Way + andromeda use non computable functions). I don't know that is uses functions at all. Even the three-body problem in Newtonian gravitational dynamics does not have a general closed form solution. Which is a symptom that its set of rational approximations might be Turing universal. But the inverse is easier to prove: a Turing universal machine can emulate all rational approximations of the three-body problem. It is not a 'function' in any standard sense. The system can only be approximated by perturbation theory, and the calculations are different for every set of starting values. There is not a 'function' to be evaluated over some input domain. ? What is the set of staring values, if not the domain of inputs? So your type of dynamics would exist somewhere in the dynamics of some game-of-life pattern, and would appear in the running of a game-of-life Running a game-of-life? Any dynamics there comes from the running -- the clock cycles of the computer on which it is run. It is not intrinsic. I am sorry but you are wrong on this. Computations can be defined in the arithmetical language. It is not intrinsic, but it is intrinsic relatively to a universal number, or to the system assumed at the base (arithmetic, or combinators, etc). pattern emulating the universal dovetailer, which run all game-of- life pattern. Then it would exist in the block-description of the dynamics (digital, discrete) of the universal game of life patter, that you can see as a static infinite cone of some sort. In that case, your acceptance of a block universe, and the way to recover the dynamics internally would work for that pattern. No, it doesn't work like that. The block universe idea arises from special relativity theory -- the fact that Lorentz transformations alter the way in which space and time are interrelated. There is no universal 'time' parameter in that picture, only a local variable 't' that depends on the frame of reference. But that will occur for all emulation of evolving interacting set of universal machine. The UD is intensionally universal: sigma_1 arithmetic emulate all computable processes, indeed, even with oracles. Different notion of times can be defined from inside, in a relative way. Lorentz invariance is a particular case, and it is not excluded nor directly relevant with the fact that arithmetic emulates all computable dynamics. If you accept computationalism, you can understand that a machine emulated cannot feel the difference if the is emulate by a physical u, or an arithmetical u. Yet the point is that by observation they might find evidence that comp is false, because below its computationalist substitution level, the math has to be a sum on all computations (and in that sense QM confirms computationalism). The useful dynamical concepts in relativity are the Lorentz invariants -- quantities that do not depend on the way you slice up separate time and space variables. Time is part of a coordinate system, and you do not have a space-time
Re: Life in the Islamic State for women
Samiya, you sweetly fell into the trap of my polite sentence *(...smarter than me*). I did not mention absolute smart. And: I did not ask 'where God came from' - although in an eaarlier post I raised the question 'where (from what system) did the mentioned 'God' come from? A ask, however, Bruno for some explanation he may have about the term God' he uses exrtensively and intensively - dispite of his many times claimed agnosticism. I referred to some 'alien(?) wisdom to re-evaluate out terms -anyway with the criticism that those (new) terms may fit into an alien (not our) system better. Scriptures (all of them, from the pre-Hebrew ones to the most recent ones) are HUMANLY written (published?) and some (e.g. the Quran) only in ONE *human* language, even prohibiting a translation). If, indeed, based on 'Godly' instructions, some 'mortals' (conveying the instructions) should have gotten some believable proof of the 'source' and understanding about the instructed texts. Should we beleieve that after completing any of those 'Scriptures' such influence stopped short and no correction occurred ever since? Those writing clerks should have exercised a super-human precision and understanding indeed, with a clear view of the Supernatural Mind suggesting the texts. *Most* (religious/political - they mix frequently) Scriptures comfort sadistic human pleasures, even prescribe such for 'violations' against their rules. Even the one considered among the 'meekest' (e.g. Hindy) burn widows at the funeral of the deceased husband etc. I feel it hard to believe (agnosticism?) that in ancient times humanity was that much smarter than after millenia of development into more advanced thinking techiques. Unless your (and Bruno's) Supernatural is indeed supernatural, what should be substantiated at least. Regards On Mon, Apr 6, 2015 at 2:09 AM, Samiya Illias samiyaill...@gmail.com wrote: John, How is it possible to find someone absolutely 'smarter' when each one knows/understands something more about something than others, and is less informed about something than someone else? The scriptures seem to be the only source of 'smarter than human' wisdom. A critical yet humble study of ancient wisdom, doubting human (mis)interpretations and (mis)applications, but having faith in the timelessness of the message(s), searching in the original sources, and sifting wisdom from it all, may just be what we need. Its always been with us, perhaps we are just too arrogant/ignorant to use it, and thus wander aimlessly, searching in vain?! Whenever we see a building or any other object of human technology, we assume that someone conceived, designed and then built it, and that it needs to be maintained, or it ends up as a ruin. We cannot imagine that it just 'appeared on its own'. We even wonder about the purpose or utility of it. Yet, the idea of a God [Conceiver, Designer, Creator and Sustainer of the Heavens and Earth] keeps getting rejected, as well as the Scriptures [User Manual]. Why? Simply because we ask where God came from? Isn't that ignorance leading to arrogance? A vicious circle of arrogance - rejection - innovation - experimentation - failure - suffering - humility - resilience - rebuilding - arrogance - ... We are all in the same boat [Earth], sailing the same sea [Cosmos] and the welfare of the boat and its passengers [everyone and everything on planet Earth] is our collective responsibility and in our interest. We have to help each other understand that, if the journey is to be pleasant and worthwhile! Samiya On Mon, Apr 6, 2015 at 12:11 AM, John Mikes jami...@gmail.com wrote: *Brent:* *your line * *Communism is not a terrible idea - it works fine for families. * *i*s a cop-out. The discussion is not about some closely related peoples' lives, it is about a worldwide socio-economic political system - and you know it. I never dreamed of wealthy people giving up their wealth. Not to general welfare, not to any other worthy goal. A NEW SYSTEM has to be established, definitely on NEW TERMS, the question is: W H O can make it and W H O can estblish it? Not anyone from our rotten slave-driving capital/politico establishment. What if 'people' cannot be pesuaded to 'vote' against their interest? if those millions turn out to be worthless? if - horribile dictu - VOTERS start to *T H I N K ? * *For starters: * when there will be a NON vote? (better: NO WAY vote). I entertained the stupid idea as well to the arrival of powerful aliens with more wisdom than Earthlings and install a new way of thinking. The result was: that could be no better than the present one, implementing new, but not becessarily better patterns (for us). We could corrupt those ideas in no time. Or: those would be useless under our circumstances. Hence my search for someone smarter than me. On Sat, Apr 4, 2015 at 4:15 PM, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: On 4/4/2015 6:19 AM, Telmo Menezes
Re: Michael Graziano's theory of consciousness
On Mon, Apr 6, 2015 Telmo Menezes te...@telmomenezes.com wrote: Assuming you're like me, you perceive yourself as a single entity travelling through time in the forward direction. You? Mr. John Clark The Moscow Man will perceive a single entity, and Mr. John Clark the Washington Man will perceive a single entity, and Mr. John Clark The Helsinki Man will no longer perceive anything at all. You left out traveling through time in a forward direction. Who is traveling through time in a forward direction, Mr. John Clark or Mr. John Clark The Helsinki Man? many worlds or duplicating machines you have to specify which Telmo Menezes or which you in the exact same way. No it is not exactly the same way. With copying machines John Clark can see 6.02 *10^23 Telmo Menezes running around and has no idea which one is Mr. You, but in Many Worlds it is dictated by the laws of physics that John Clark can see only one Telmo Menezes, and human language need not be made more precise than the laws of physics. Bruno does this with the concept of diary -- which can be a brain state. What good does that do? We're in Moscow now and John Clark The Moscow Man didn't write that diary, John Clark The Helsinki Man did and John Clark Helsinki Man no longer exists. The position of their brains is unimportant because until the door is opened both are still identical to the Helsinki Man. They are important if we are discussing the implications of computationalism (the belief that you mind can be replaced with some computation, Baloney. If consciousness even has a position it's the place a mind is thinking about or the place where its sense organs are; a mind might not even know or care where the computations are taking place. So you undoubtedly agree that step 3 is correct. In science it's better to be wrong than meaningless and step 3 is so infested with ambiguous personal pronouns that it is meaningless. So I neither agree nor disagree with step 3 just as I don't agree or disagree with a burp or the phrase free will; all three have zero informational content. They don't have enough meat on the bone to even be wrong. Well OK maybe I went a little too far with that, a burp may contain some information about the nature of human digestion. The duplicator uncertainty is perhaps more remarkable, because different worlds exist as first person perspectives, If the one and only thing that can turn the Helsinki Man into the Moscow man is the sight of Moscow then I don't have the least bit uncertainty in predicting that the guy that will see Moscow will turn out to be the Moscow Man, nor do I find that fact remarkable. I find it a tautology while a third person perspective contains the two copies. Well what else did you expect to happen? John K Clark -- 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 MGA revisited
Bruno Marchal wrote: On 06 Apr 2015, at 13:25, Bruce Kellett wrote: Bruno Marchal wrote: To be more precise, I should explain you how computations and emulation is defined in arithmetic, in term of the truth of elementary number theoretical relations. A computation will exist through the fact that it is true that some numbers divide some other numbers, and other facts like that. On the contrary, a description of a computation will be a number from which we can extract the description of a sequence of states, but that is different from the states existence being the result of a set of true relation. So you can use these terms in that way. But that does not make 'computation' a dynamical concept. It is not a physical time related concept. But computer, or universal number (or universal combinators) needs only a discrete static time: 0, 1, 2, 3, .. OK, but that is an ordering parameter and it does not make the computational dynamical rather than static. There is no change or movement involved. Arithmetic is completely static, as are the relations between numbers. Block universe are static too. It is the point of a relativity theory. Time and space comes from comparison between clock and meter, nothing can prevent the sigma_1 reality to emulates all those comparisons , and by assuming computationalism, of the conscious entities which make sense of the comparisons. It is similar to the block universe view in that your internal ordering parameter is entirely static. But the analogy is not perfect for what you want to do with comp. The physical block universe is often referred to in terms of two separate points of view: the 'bird' view which is from the outside, from which (entirely metaphorical) view, the universe is static; and the 'frog' view from within, from which view the universe is dynamical. In this case the bird (block) view is completely equivalent to a recording of the experiences of the frog in real time. Because the time parameter is defined internally, the recording can be run as often as required by the bird, and the result (and conscious experiences of the frog) are identical every time. The same thing would happen in the static view of the dovetailer with states ordered by the step number. The whole shebang would be no different from a recording of the same shebang -- in fact, it is a recording because it is static from the external view. The experience of time by the internal consciousness emulated is exactly the same for 'reruns' of the same portion of the dovetailer's output by some external 'bird' observer. Now, as I understand it, you want to avoid this conclusion by appealing to the notion of counterfactual correctness. The particular sequence of states is not itself conscious because it is not counterfactually correct -- given a different environment, that sequence of states would give the same conscious experience, not some modified experience. It is just a recording, after all. Your model then appeals to the idea of the infinite number of separate occasions that that same set of internal states occurs in the overall picture of the dovetailer, and you claim that, in some sense, the 'actual' conscious experience is a 'sum' over these separate emulations, even though they be separated by many billions of computational steps of the dovetailer. I put words like 'actual' and 'sum' in scare quotes because I do not think these ideas make much sense. You appeal to techniques like the Feynman sum over paths in QM to make sense of your model. But that analogy fails because the Feynman sum is merely a calculational technique -- it does not correspond to and actual sum of separate really existing things that nature somehow 'performs' to get a particle from A to B. It is a calculational heuristic, and like so much in quantum mechanics, reifying computational tricks leads to endless problems. For example, the Feynman diagrams as used in field theory are terms in a perturbation expansion, they do not have separate independent existence. It is only the sum that is physical, and that same result can be obtained by many other calculational techniques that never mention Feynman diagrams. One problem that occurs to me is: who does this sum over dovetailer states? FPI would suggest that there is no such sum. The future of the 'person' experiencing that conscious moment is indeterminate -- the person cannot predict the future in anything other than a probabilistic way. But that makes each conscious moment unique, and actually a static recording of itself -- just as in the block universe view of physics. Again, FPI of the dovetailer has nothing in common with indeterminacy in quantum mechanics. Mere external similarity does not imply equivalence. Bruce -- 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,
Re: Michael Graziano's theory of consciousness
On 7 April 2015 at 09:57, John Clark johnkcl...@gmail.com wrote: On Mon, Apr 6, 2015 Telmo Menezes te...@telmomenezes.com wrote: Assuming you're like me, you perceive yourself as a single entity travelling through time in the forward direction. You? Mr. John Clark The Moscow Man will perceive a single entity, and Mr. John Clark the Washington Man will perceive a single entity, and Mr. John Clark The Helsinki Man will no longer perceive anything at all. You left out traveling through time in a forward direction. Who is traveling through time in a forward direction, Mr. John Clark or Mr. John Clark The Helsinki Man? Arguably there is no John Clark as a single entity persisting in time, since even in a single world with no duplication, time travel or other anomalies both your hardware and your software changes; for example, you have very little in common with your one year old self. Nevertheless, you feel that you are the same person from day to day and year to year, even if you know this is an illusion. -- Stathis Papaioannou -- 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: Michael Graziano's theory of consciousness
On Mon, Apr 6, 2015 Stathis Papaioannou stath...@gmail.com wrote: you feel that you are the same person from day to day and year to year, even if you know this is an illusion. How would things be different if this were not an illusion? John K Clark -- 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 MGA revisited
Bruno Marchal wrote: On 06 Apr 2015, at 13:25, Bruce Kellett wrote: You want a dynamic like in physics, a function from time to space, but in computer science, and to understand the problem here, the dynamics are given by function from N to mind states. You need to give magical ability to a turing machine so that she can distinguish (by its consciousness, in a first person way) the difference between a physical emulation, and an arithmetical emulation. The physical will give rise to the right measure, but not by magic, only because the physical is run by the sum on all computations below its substitution level. But all this is not needed to get the reversal in step seven. So I guess again that you are OK with step seven and see that if a primary physical universe exists and run the UD, then physics is reduced to arithmetic (seen from inside). Do you see that. I understand what you are claiming, but I do not agree with it. The primary physical universe certainly exists, and it is not running your UD! I think we might notice if it were. I think that Russell is right when he suggested that even by step seven your dovetailer has to be running in Platonia, not in a physical embodiment. This has to do with the fact that the dovetailer can never complete. It is running all possible programs and most of these will never complete. So you never complete and get back to running all the steps of early programs in the sequence. So you do not compute all possible instantiations of a conscious moment by any finite time in a physical universe. Or even in Platonia because the idea of a completed infinity of computations makes no sense. So no conscious moment, even in with a dovetailer in Platonia, can ever be completely counterfactually correct, because there will always be related sequences of states that never get to be computed -- no completed infinities even in arithmetic. Physics is not reduced to arithmetic seen from the inside because arithmetic is never completed by the dovetailer or anything else and there are no non-magical ways in which similar states that might give rise to ordered physical laws can ever be be related. You only ever get out of a model like this what you put in. You have put in arithmetic, so that is what you get out. You will never get physics this way. Bruce With occam, a believer in comp can already stop here, and work on the measure problem. But a phsysicalist can still conclude that there is a primary unique universe, and that it can't run the UD, nor any significant part. The step 8 address this situation and shows precisely why invoking a primary physical universe makes it magical, with neuron needing prescience, and movie getting experiences, and indeed nothing getting all experiences. It is good news, as it suggest we might understand the origin of the physical laws, from non physical things, the gluing properties of universal numbers' dreams. Bruno Bruce -- 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: The Object
That all sounds very plausible to me. (Although sadly my pay grade doesn't match that fact.) -- 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: Michael Graziano's theory of consciousness
On 7 April 2015 at 11:58, John Clark johnkcl...@gmail.com wrote: On Mon, Apr 6, 2015 Stathis Papaioannou stath...@gmail.com wrote: you feel that you are the same person from day to day and year to year, even if you know this is an illusion. How would things be different if this were not an illusion? You are less the same person compared to your self from a year ago than you are compared to a copy of you that might exist in the next room. It's just that you don't encounter your previous selves. -- Stathis Papaioannou -- 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: DNA Wormholes can cause cancer (what!?)
*Subject:* Re: DNA Wormholes can cause cancer (what!?) Chris, Hi. It sounds like you might be in computing since you mentioned some terms like reposited (I've never heard of that in bio!)? If so, you are very well educated in biology. Nice job! Your knowledge of the complexity of a cell and of things moving around via motor proteins and the cytoskeleton as opposed to diffusion only, etc. are real impressive. Many of the computer and engineering guys I know seem to be allergic to biology knowledge. Although, I admit I know almost nothing about computing either, except for stuff from a few simple classes in Pascal, Fortran, etc. a long, long time ago. I'd never heard of that model where they ran it backwards to find the genesis of life, but it sounds pretty neat. I think it's certainly possible that life started in a far away stellar nursery and then came to Earth on a comet or something. Although, I kind of liked that Star Trek (The Next Gen.) episode where some ancient race of bald people seeded lots of different oceans with their DNA and put a code in their that, once we decipher it, will play a video of the bald people talking to us. I thought that was one of their best episodes. But, the final question is still there. How did the life originate where ever it came from? I can't rule out anything, but I bet they'll be able to someday figure out a chemical mechanism for things to start replicating themselves. One big advantage that computing and engineering have over drug discovery is that the scientist can design a system he or she wants to make when it's code or a chip or something. But, because everything is so wet, bouncing around, cross-reacting and squishy in bio, it's hard to design things to work just the way you want them. Cells are always mutating, proteins are always moving around and chemicals are always cross-reacting. I think we'll eventually need to combine small mol. drugs and biological drugs with nanotechnological devices and tiny molecular computers to cure diseases. I checked out that article on microbes being passed from generation to generation. It was very interesting; although, it kind of sounded like it was passed via an environmental route because the next generation of animals lived in the same environment as the previous generation, and the microbes are probably all over the environment in the form of feces, shed fur, surfaces, animals touching each other, etc. I'd have to read more about it, but it sounded like not quite a direct mechanism of transmission. One more pontification, and I promise I'll stop, but I think some of the physics guys could learn from biochemists because biochemists are always looking for mechanisms of action for how things work. But, it seems like the physicists are more content to say something works and we have the math to describe it. For instance, I don't think they really know even why positive and negative charges attract or two positive charges repel, do they? I know there are fields of force, and exchange of photons (or other force particles for other forces), but how exactly does this lead to attraction or repulsion? I admit I know very little about it, but this kind of thing frustrates me when reading popular physics articles. In their defense, though, force particles are much smaller than proteins! At least, Monday is over! Have a good week. Roger -- 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 MGA revisited
On 6 April 2015 at 08:10, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: On 4/5/2015 9:12 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: If you mean something else by physical, I have no idea what you mean. It is what is studied by physics, mainly through empirical means: the measurable quantities in laboratories. Aristotle (well mainly its followers) assume that the physical reality is irreducible, so that we have to assume primitively physical objects, like atoms, particles, 3d spaces, or today, strings for example. It makes physics the fundamental science (physicalism). I was just saying that arithmetic is not a branch of physics, that numbers, sets, functions, are, by virtue of their definitions, not physical. More below. That's like saying electrons are not physical because they're defined by Dirac's equation. Physical just means we can interact with it in our common, non-solipist world and reach intersubjective agreement about it. It's no more magic than supposing prime numbers exist because they're defined by axiom systems. The difference is between physical and primitively physical - as I would think Bruno knows?! We all agree that the physical universe exists, the question of interest is whether it's primitive, as opposed to being derived from something more fundamental. -- 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: Histones (proteins that form the scaffolding around which DNA wraps itself may also themselves be involved in heredity processes
Anything in the egg cell, or donated at any point during gestation from the mother (in mammals, at least) can be passed on, I assume. (What about mitochondria?) -- 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 Object
By the way, the phrase above my paygrade was invented by someone less intelligent than you to keep you in your place, at least until they get around to reintroducing full scale feudalism. -- 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: Life in the Islamic State for women
John, How is it possible to find someone absolutely 'smarter' when each one knows/understands something more about something than others, and is less informed about something than someone else? The scriptures seem to be the only source of 'smarter than human' wisdom. A critical yet humble study of ancient wisdom, doubting human (mis)interpretations and (mis)applications, but having faith in the timelessness of the message(s), searching in the original sources, and sifting wisdom from it all, may just be what we need. Its always been with us, perhaps we are just too arrogant/ignorant to use it, and thus wander aimlessly, searching in vain?! Whenever we see a building or any other object of human technology, we assume that someone conceived, designed and then built it, and that it needs to be maintained, or it ends up as a ruin. We cannot imagine that it just 'appeared on its own'. We even wonder about the purpose or utility of it. Yet, the idea of a God [Conceiver, Designer, Creator and Sustainer of the Heavens and Earth] keeps getting rejected, as well as the Scriptures [User Manual]. Why? Simply because we ask where God came from? Isn't that ignorance leading to arrogance? A vicious circle of arrogance - rejection - innovation - experimentation - failure - suffering - humility - resilience - rebuilding - arrogance - ... We are all in the same boat [Earth], sailing the same sea [Cosmos] and the welfare of the boat and its passengers [everyone and everything on planet Earth] is our collective responsibility and in our interest. We have to help each other understand that, if the journey is to be pleasant and worthwhile! Samiya On Mon, Apr 6, 2015 at 12:11 AM, John Mikes jami...@gmail.com wrote: *Brent:* *your line * *Communism is not a terrible idea - it works fine for families. * *i*s a cop-out. The discussion is not about some closely related peoples' lives, it is about a worldwide socio-economic political system - and you know it. I never dreamed of wealthy people giving up their wealth. Not to general welfare, not to any other worthy goal. A NEW SYSTEM has to be established, definitely on NEW TERMS, the question is: W H O can make it and W H O can estblish it? Not anyone from our rotten slave-driving capital/politico establishment. What if 'people' cannot be pesuaded to 'vote' against their interest? if those millions turn out to be worthless? if - horribile dictu - VOTERS start to *T H I N K ? * *For starters: * when there will be a NON vote? (better: NO WAY vote). I entertained the stupid idea as well to the arrival of powerful aliens with more wisdom than Earthlings and install a new way of thinking. The result was: that could be no better than the present one, implementing new, but not becessarily better patterns (for us). We could corrupt those ideas in no time. Or: those would be useless under our circumstances. Hence my search for someone smarter than me. On Sat, Apr 4, 2015 at 4:15 PM, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: On 4/4/2015 6:19 AM, Telmo Menezes wrote: Hi John On Fri, Apr 3, 2015 at 10:10 PM, John Mikes jami...@gmail.com wrote: TELMO: I did not expect from you to point to the 2 centuries old obsolete and theoretical exercise of Marx-Engels (irrespective of Lenin's intermitted LATER speculations) as blueprint for a (still?) viable(?) political system. I don't think it was ever viable, and I don't think it's relevant to the current times, as it is based on too many assumption from an era that is long gone (early Industrialism). What I mean is, when people use the word communism, there is a document that describes precisely what this word is supposed to mean. A blueprint for communism. I do think that Marx-Engels correctly identified social problems that remain being problems to this day, namely the self-reinforcing nature of wealth inequality. The issue is that their proposed solution seems to equalize society by throwing the majority of people into extreme poverty and servitude. It never got further than a tyranny of 'leftish-sounding' slogans by pretenders. As the original authors dreamed it up, it never (and nowhere) did get off from the ground. I know, I lived in a so called Peoples' Democracy (Called 'commi' system - ha ha) which was neither peoples' nor democracy. Nor Marxist, nor Leninist. It was a Stalinist tyranny. And Maoist, Pol-Pot, plus a KimIrSen-istic one. I would be very interested in any story you had to share about those times. I agree that these societies never achieved anything resembling what Marx proposed. The remaining communists of today tend to argue that all of past communist movements were not sincere in their motivations. That might very well be true, but even then it is an important piece of information on human nature. If we are trying to get from A - B and we always stumble on the same horrors along the way, maybe the plan is just not viable for this world. So
Re: Life in the Islamic State for women
On 06 Apr 2015, at 08:09, Samiya Illias wrote: John, How is it possible to find someone absolutely 'smarter' when each one knows/understands something more about something than others, and is less informed about something than someone else? The scriptures seem to be the only source of 'smarter than human' wisdom. A critical yet humble study of ancient wisdom, doubting human (mis)interpretations and (mis)applications, but having faith in the timelessness of the message(s), searching in the original sources, and sifting wisdom from it all, may just be what we need. Its always been with us, perhaps we are just too arrogant/ignorant to use it, and thus wander aimlessly, searching in vain?! It is because the message has always been with us that we need to search inward, and to be skeptical for text and people pretending to know the answer. If you trust the source inside you, it will talk to you. If you trust the talk of any others, it will leave you. Whenever we see a building or any other object of human technology, we assume that someone conceived, designed and then built it, and that it needs to be maintained, or it ends up as a ruin. We cannot imagine that it just 'appeared on its own'. Today we know that simple relation (like z_n = (z^(n-1)^2 + c)) can lead to highly complex structure. We even wonder about the purpose or utility of it. Yet, the idea of a God [Conceiver, Designer, Creator and Sustainer of the Heavens and Earth] keeps getting rejected, as well as the Scriptures [User Manual]. Why? I reject, not God, but the idea of using God to justify anything. Even if true, it cannot be used in an explanation, as it reduce a complex problem into a more complex problem. The human designing a building is more complex than the building. A priori God is more complex than the creation. Invoking God in an explantion is bad science, as it stops the inquiry. It is like the élan vitale of some ancient biologiste. Then user manual can be inspiring and helpful, but none has the right to say that a manual is more authentical than others. That leads to useless conflicts, which again hide the real question. We need to be humble, and to say that a text is authentical against other texts is immodesty. Simply because we ask where God came from? Isn't that ignorance leading to arrogance? We might need to go toward God, and then we might understand something, but we can't use God as the explanation itself, because that is a mockery of an explanation. God made it can only be a poetical way to say I don't know. Yet, when people take scripture literally, it is transformed into shut up and obey, and that leads to the criminal use of religion, genocide, etc. On the contrary, accepting that a sacred text is a human text, pale recovering of a plausible mystical experience by a human, we allow ourselves to comment it, criticized it, and through sequence of comments we can progress, and get possibly closer to the original experience. A vicious circle of arrogance - rejection - innovation - experimentation - failure - suffering - humility - resilience - rebuilding - arrogance - ... We are all in the same boat [Earth], sailing the same sea [Cosmos] and the welfare of the boat and its passengers [everyone and everything on planet Earth] is our collective responsibility and in our interest. We have to help each other understand that, if the journey is to be pleasant and worthwhile! I agree with this, but Earth and Cosmos are still images, and might be less real than Boat and Sea :) Bruno Samiya On Mon, Apr 6, 2015 at 12:11 AM, John Mikes jami...@gmail.com wrote: Brent: your line Communism is not a terrible idea - it works fine for families. is a cop-out. The discussion is not about some closely related peoples' lives, it is about a worldwide socio-economic political system - and you know it. I never dreamed of wealthy people giving up their wealth. Not to general welfare, not to any other worthy goal. A NEW SYSTEM has to be established, definitely on NEW TERMS, the question is: W H O can make it and W H O can estblish it? Not anyone from our rotten slave-driving capital/politico establishment. What if 'people' cannot be pesuaded to 'vote' against their interest? if those millions turn out to be worthless? if - horribile dictu - VOTERS start to T H I N K ? For starters: when there will be a NON vote? (better: NO WAY vote). I entertained the stupid idea as well to the arrival of powerful aliens with more wisdom than Earthlings and install a new way of thinking. The result was: that could be no better than the present one, implementing new, but not becessarily better patterns (for us). We could corrupt those ideas in no time. Or: those would be useless under our circumstances. Hence my search for someone smarter than me. On Sat, Apr 4, 2015 at 4:15 PM, meekerdb
RE: DNA Wormholes can cause cancer (what!?)
From: everything-list@googlegroups.com [mailto:everything-list@googlegroups.com] Sent: Sunday, April 05, 2015 7:58 PM To: everything-list@googlegroups.com Subject: Re: DNA Wormholes can cause cancer (what!?) Chris, Hi. It is kind of an interesting job in that I can keep up with the latest stuff and I do find the idea of organizing scientific information very interesting. But, it can be a little boring sometimes, too. But, I guess most people would say that about their jobs, though. Epigenetics is pretty neat. When the histones are methylated/demethylated and acetylated/deacetylated by various enzymes, this can cause the DNA wrapped around them to become less or more compact, which affects how the genes in that area are expressed. You're sure right about their finding more levels of operation than ever before. Since they developed what they call next generation sequencing about 2005 or so, they've been able to find out a lot more levels in all areas. One thing that's kind of neat is that the supposedly junk DNA between genes can encode small RNAs that regulate the expression of the genes. These microRNAs are really a hot area of research now. Another big breakthrough was the combination of various techniques to make very large scale analysis of proteins (proteomics) possible. So, they're combining gene expression, protein studies, epigenetics, etc. to see how it all fits together in the body. They call that systems biology, and it's bringing more progress. But, there are so many interacting molecules inside a single cel, they've got a long way to go. Life seems to use whatever pathways (and combinations of pathways) it can leverage in order to transmit – over many layered systems of encoding (even within DNA itself) – the complex and dynamically responsive best response. I suspect the multi-layered dimension of heredity provides it with greater meta-stability than a system, exclusively reposited (comp term for the act of being stored within a repository) within a single mechanism. Have you heard about the computer model they ran in which they used the pretty well known well sampled current diversity of life on the planet in combination with the also pretty well known rates of mutation for life on earth and using these rates (and admittedly extrapolating backward in time based on the application of these rates of mutation) they ran the model backwards to discover the singularity… the moment of genesis so to speak of life. The answer they got was entirely unexpected. Based on all the parameters for their model, which were well checked – e.g. current planetary genetic diversity, recursively getting applied to a rewinding function based on known rates of mutation. – the genesis of earth life, according to this model is some eight billion years ago – that being four billion years before our star first formed in its birth cloud. Raises some interesting speculation as to the origins of life. Maybe life really is seeded everywhere in those great stellar nurseries and every newborn star (+whirling accretion disk that is not swept away by the energetic wave front powered by the star as it lights up) is seeded with icy cometary spores, bearing microbial life Often people think of microbes as miniscule blobs, which of course they also are, but the levels and depth of levels of complexity operating within, even a single microbe are stunning and hard to grasp and understand all together. I really like the systems approach that the wave front of research seems to be focusing on. Reductivism is fine, and has yielded impressive results in some areas, but somethings are best understood from the dynamic whole-systems viewpoint. Even just a single organelle in a cell is amazing molecular machinery… take a ribosome for example… or the complex lipid interface of the cell wall. The level of nanoscale sophistication in a single microbe is impressive. By far most evolution happened before multicellular creatures evolved. All multicellular life is the result of a symbiosis of earlier life forms (some like the mitochondria seeming like symbionts that took up cellular residence, a long time ago, preserving their own DNA). But even just a single ribosome is a molecular factory of incredible complexity, where the protein folding magic goes on. A ribosome is around 40% RNA by weight and has all kinds of different RNA variants doing many different things, interacting with animo acids, assembling proteins, QA-ing them and destroying faulty product… a very sophisticated muli-step process. It would not surprise me in the least if they discover that ribosomes themselves have some kind of run-time RNA based OS – a kind of frontline processing unit right there in the protein assembly plant. Cells also have very fine scale highly branched networks within their own cellular inner-verse; these function like super-highway networks,
Re: The Object
On 04 Apr 2015, at 19:04, spudboy100 via Everything List wrote: My view is that rather than being a simulation, our universe and an infinitude of others,are programs that yields physical universes, as a programmatic process. ? That seems contradictory. Being a simulation means being brought by a program implemented in some universal number relation (physically realized or not, at first). The underlying software and hardware are more real than the reality we sense, OK, so we can take the simplest one: elementary arithmetic, for example. but our lives are very real. In the case above, our lives are very epistemologically, or phenomenologically real. Underneath everything is organized data, programs, processes, and pipelines to other universes (or parts of a greater very big universe). This is like using a God in an explanation. Why to introduce a universe to make programs and program execution, when we know that already exists once we assume elementary arithmetic? (with some measure that we can test so that we can test the hypothesis). So theoretically, humans and galaxies and bacteria, get promoted (as in software) to other places. I am stealing from Eric Steinhart's Promotion hypothesis, to suit my own pitiful intellect, and emotions. It is OK, but you don't need universes, still less other bigger universe. The whole of real math and physics use a tiny amount of arithmetical truth. Only logicians, category theorists and theologian needs sometimes to refer to the big one, the whole of the arithmetical reality, that we cannot even define from inside. That is *very* big. Bruno -Original Message- From: Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be To: everything-list everything-list@googlegroups.com Sent: Sat, Apr 4, 2015 11:10 am Subject: Re: The Object Nice! Quite Platonist! We never invent anything---we always only discover. would assess a platonist. Bruno On 07 Jan 2015, at 23:54, Jason Resch wrote: From Douglas Jone's short story ( http://frombob.to/you/ aconvers.html ): But suppose it were possible to create physical universes like yours within an appropriately specified computational universe. What could you say about the origin of the universe then? Very little, actually. Why? Because all general-purpose computers are equivalent. If it is possible to perform this computation within any one computational universe, then there are an infinite number of computational universes in which this computation is performed. If you were to try to follow the chain of causality back past the origin of your physical universe, you would find an infinite number of causes. These are all deep, deep questions. We have been thinking about them, and doing experiments, for a very long time. Our mathematicians have proven certain things... I’m sorry, I have to be very careful about what I say here. There is the very real possibility of inducing cardiac arrest in certain people if I say too much. So let me say some vague things: There exists an object, a mathematical object, which has certain properties. For reasons that should be obvious, there is no general agreement on what the best name for this object is, so for the sake of convenience, let’s just call it The Object. Your world, that is, the entire universe that you can observe, is an infinitesimal part of that Object. And so is mine. And so is every universe that can possibly exist. And everything else that can exist, whether or not you would call it a universe. All of Mathematics is inside that Object. And the various parts of that Object are somehow connected together. We expend a considerable amount of effort attempting to deduce the properties of that Object. In a sense, we are Exploring it. As I said before, we are Explorers, and we are exploring Everything. And exploring the nature of the connections between the various parts of The Object is the most fundamental kind of exploration there is. And some of the most interesting kinds of connections are related to Consciousness. The Object is Eternal. It exists outside of time. It has no beginning and no end; it simply Is. It contains many universes that have a property called Time, and you live in one of them, and so do I. But these universes are Eternal too. The Time within them is visible only from a particular point of view. Whenever we speak of creating a computational universe, or of creating a physical universe, or of creating anything, we are not really speaking of creation; we are really speaking of making a connection. Making a connection between different parts of The Object. The parts are already there. They have always been there. And we don’t really make the connection; the connection was always there too. We just discover what is already there. In other words, we just become aware of it. So whenever we think we’re creating something, this is just a
Re: The MGA revisited
On 06 Apr 2015, at 07:02, Bruce Kellett wrote: Bruno Marchal wrote: On 05 Apr 2015, at 01:19, Russell Standish wrote: Then what is your definition of a recording? In my eyes, UD* is a recording, particularly a finite portion of it, such as the first 10,000 steps of the first 10,000 programs. You confuse description of computations, which exists in the movies obtained by filming the boolean graph, and the computations themselves, with involves semantic, that is a reality (be it the static standard model of Peano Arithmetic) or a physical reality. Where is the dynamics necessary for computations themselves (as opposed to descriptions of computations) in the static standard model of Peano Arithmetic? I know where the dynamics reside in physical reality. In the truth of the elementary relations which implements a relation between some universal Turing system (universal number) and the program that is implemented. I remind you that 'dynamic' means of or relating to force producing motion or active, potent, energetic, forceful; characterized by action or change. In other words, the opposite of static. That is a physicalist account of dynamics. It could be the correct one---I don't know. But even if is the correct one, you have to agree that a diophantine approximation of, let us say the evolution of the milky way + andromeda can exists (unless you presuppose at the start that the Milky Way + andromeda use non computable functions). So your type of dynamics would exist somewhere in the dynamics of some game-of- life pattern, and would appear in the running of a game-of-life pattern emulating the universal dovetailer, which run all game-of-life pattern. Then it would exist in the block-description of the dynamics (digital, discrete) of the universal game of life patter, that you can see as a static infinite cone of some sort. In that case, your acceptance of a block universe, and the way to recover the dynamics internally would work for that pattern. The FPI makes this a bit more complex, because from the point of view of the self-aware entities emulated in the universal pattern, their real future is not really defined by some location in the pattern, but from all their infinitely many locations in that pattern. To be more precise, I should explain you how computations and emulation is defined in arithmetic, in term of the truth of elementary number theoretical relations. A computation will exist through the fact that it is true that some numbers divide some other numbers, and other facts like that. On the contrary, a description of a computation will be a number from which we can extract the description of a sequence of states, but that is different from the states existence being the result of a set of true relation. It is very much like the difference between the Gödel number of the sentence 3 divides 6, and the true fact that the number 3 divides 6. The first one is a number, and needs some encoding; the second is a truth involving the number 3 and 6, and which does not needs any encoding to be true (only to be communicated). Bruno Bruce -- 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: Fast moves for nuclear development in Siberia
Brent, Fear of a nuclear accident, in the 80's Chernobyl, and in 2011, Fukushima. In Germany, the government shutdown uranium, and bought tons and tons, of cheap US bituminous and anthracite, to burn in their old, power plants. Merkel started last year, to re-light the atom plants once again, after pumping tons of pollutant in the air. I am not opposed to u235 plants or thorium 232-u233 plants, but the rest of the world seems to be. Your rationalism is far better then the feelings of joe six pack, but that is that. -Original Message- From: meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net To: everything-list everything-list@googlegroups.com Sent: Sun, Apr 5, 2015 5:37 pm Subject: Re: Fast moves for nuclear development in Siberia On 4/5/2015 2:05 PM, spudboy100 via Everything List wrote: Really, it's an interesting piece of tech, but it just seems too clumsy and too costly. There are 442 nuclear power reactors in operation. France gets most of it's electrical power from nukes. If nuclear power plants had been discovered first, would anybody even consider building a coal fired plant? 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. -- 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: Fast moves for nuclear development in Siberia
Agreed. -Original Message- From: 'Chris de Morsella' via Everything List everything-list@googlegroups.com To: everything-list everything-list@googlegroups.com Sent: Sun, Apr 5, 2015 9:37 pm Subject: RE: Fast moves for nuclear development in Siberia From: everything-list@googlegroups.com [mailto:everything-list@googlegroups.com] Sent: Sunday, April 05, 2015 2:05 PM To: everything-list@googlegroups.com Subject: Re: Fast moves for nuclear development in Siberia Really, it's an interesting piece of tech, but it just seems too clumsy and too costly. Please note that I love this kind of tech, if for no other reason in that the promise of fusion just keeps on receding into the future. We can talk of everything from tokamaks, to inertial confinement, to colliding beam fusion, to muon catalysis, and so forth. With fission, it's the same thing, with gas cooled reactors, betavoltaics, pwr's, bwr's, mini-reactor's, CANDU reactors. Here, also, the proper engineering, costs, and safety, as well as waste disposal just keep fading back into dreamland. I love this stuff, being a nerd, and all, but I can no longer listen to the blissful b.s. proffered by newsies, and academics, alike. What's holding back solar is one great flaw, storage. You cannot run a modern large city on solar during cold nights and cloudy days, so storage has to be demonstrated over solar cell efficiency. Barring the development of solar storage, there's natural gas (methane) and coal. Right now, despite solar enthusiast's claims, gas turbines are beating all other energy sources down. Some are sure that shale gas is just another economic bubble, and it may be, but there is the use of gas hydrates on the horizon, not economically, but in 20 + years, or longer, than yes. This is the future, unless we get some fixes in for fission, fusion, solar, geothermal, or anything else. The rapid spread of all electric vehicles and plugin hybrids is also a build out of a distributed electric energy storage network that will provide significant peak load capacity or the much easier to provision dribbles of energy (relative to peak load demand) that are needed in the middle of the night when the sun isn’t shining (but the wind generally is blowing). The problem is solving itself; it is not insurmountable; spinup reserves of nimble medium scale gas turbines could fill the rare gaps. -Original Message- From: meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net To: everything-list everything-list@googlegroups.com Sent: Sun, Apr 5, 2015 4:39 pm Subject: Re: Fast moves for nuclear development in Siberia On 4/5/2015 11:09 AM, 'Chris de Morsella' via Everything List wrote: Actually compared with the Uranium fuel cycle the Thorium fuel cycle is neutron poor, a LFTR produces enough neutrons to burn up 100% of the Thorium but there isn't a lot of wiggle room, however this is an advantage not a disadvantage. If somebody tried to secretly siphon off some of the U233 produced in a reactor to make a bomb the reactor would simply stop and it would be hard to keep that secret, also fewer neutrons means less damage to the equipment, you already don't have to worry about the most important maintenance problem that a conventional reactor has, cracks in the solid fuel rods caused by neutrons, because a LFTR has no solid fuel rods, it's fuel is a liquid and you can't crack a liquid. The reason LFTRs have been touted as proliferation resistant is that the U233 is mixed with U232 which makes its use in a weapons almost impossible. But the proliferation problem for a LFTR is that Proactinium can be chemically remove from the cycle, which prevents the accumulation of U232. Then the U233 can be siphoned off and used. A 2GW LFTR is expected to produce about 60Kg of excess U233 per year; enough for 7 to 8 nuclear weapons. So the proliferation resistance is exaggerated. 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. -- 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
Re: The MGA revisited
Bruno Marchal wrote: On 06 Apr 2015, at 07:02, Bruce Kellett wrote: Bruno Marchal wrote: On 05 Apr 2015, at 01:19, Russell Standish wrote: Then what is your definition of a recording? In my eyes, UD* is a recording, particularly a finite portion of it, such as the first 10,000 steps of the first 10,000 programs. You confuse description of computations, which exists in the movies obtained by filming the boolean graph, and the computations themselves, with involves semantic, that is a reality (be it the static standard model of Peano Arithmetic) or a physical reality. Where is the dynamics necessary for computations themselves (as opposed to descriptions of computations) in the static standard model of Peano Arithmetic? I know where the dynamics reside in physical reality. In the truth of the elementary relations which implements a relation between some universal Turing system (universal number) and the program that is implemented. That 'truth' is static. The implementation of a program might be dynamic, but that is because it is implemented on a physical computer that has a physical clock cycle. I remind you that 'dynamic' means of or relating to force producing motion or active, potent, energetic, forceful; characterized by action or change. In other words, the opposite of static. That is a physicalist account of dynamics. It could be the correct one---I don't know. But even if is the correct one, you have to agree that a diophantine approximation of, let us say the evolution of the milky way + andromeda can exists (unless you presuppose at the start that the Milky Way + andromeda use non computable functions). I don't know that is uses functions at all. Even the three-body problem in Newtonian gravitational dynamics does not have a general closed form solution. It is not a 'function' in any standard sense. The system can only be approximated by perturbation theory, and the calculations are different for every set of starting values. There is not a 'function' to be evaluated over some input domain. So your type of dynamics would exist somewhere in the dynamics of some game-of-life pattern, and would appear in the running of a game-of-life Running a game-of-life? Any dynamics there comes from the running -- the clock cycles of the computer on which it is run. It is not intrinsic. pattern emulating the universal dovetailer, which run all game-of-life pattern. Then it would exist in the block-description of the dynamics (digital, discrete) of the universal game of life patter, that you can see as a static infinite cone of some sort. In that case, your acceptance of a block universe, and the way to recover the dynamics internally would work for that pattern. No, it doesn't work like that. The block universe idea arises from special relativity theory -- the fact that Lorentz transformations alter the way in which space and time are interrelated. There is no universal 'time' parameter in that picture, only a local variable 't' that depends on the frame of reference. The useful dynamical concepts in relativity are the Lorentz invariants -- quantities that do not depend on the way you slice up separate time and space variables. Time is part of a coordinate system, and you do not have a space-time model that can be spanned by a coordinate system. The FPI makes this a bit more complex, because from the point of view of the self-aware entities emulated in the universal pattern, their real future is not really defined by some location in the pattern, but from all their infinitely many locations in that pattern. That is, again, an entirely static concept. You have not introduced any time parameter. To be more precise, I should explain you how computations and emulation is defined in arithmetic, in term of the truth of elementary number theoretical relations. A computation will exist through the fact that it is true that some numbers divide some other numbers, and other facts like that. On the contrary, a description of a computation will be a number from which we can extract the description of a sequence of states, but that is different from the states existence being the result of a set of true relation. So you can use these terms in that way. But that does not make 'computation' a dynamical concept. There is no change or movement involved. Arithmetic is completely static, as are the relations between numbers. It is very much like the difference between the Gödel number of the sentence 3 divides 6, and the true fact that the number 3 divides 6. The first one is a number, and needs some encoding; the second is a truth involving the number 3 and 6, and which does not needs any encoding to be true (only to be communicated). 'Communicated'? A transition from a state of not knowing to a state of knowing? But that is a temporal concept, and you have no time variable in your model. The truth that 6 is divisible by 3 does not
Re: The Object
Yes, this discussion is, as the saying goes, above my pay grade but I do it to please (neurobiologically) my amygdala, and satisfy my cerebrum. Since I am stealing and modifying Eric Steinhart's theories on the Universe(s), consciousness, Leibniz, existence, and all the rest, I would say that God, as Mind, evolved from the simplest possible mind (arithmetic??) and spawned more and greater versions of himself/herself, all the while carrying along the previous iterations, as what physician called a veriform appendix to refer to, the simpler versions being a look-up table. I make these imbecilic statements because I suspect they are fact. Steinhart has speculated that each subsequent God/Mind has a universe within it. Where he gets this, I don't remember, but I somehow, like it. To paraphrase the old American rock song, Be true to your God, just like you would to your girl! Steinhart uses his background in computer science to formulate his philosophy, since more and more, as physicists, astronomers, and mathematicians, start identifying analogies in nature, that we discover in computer science. He is big on Plato and Plotinus, as well as our old friend Nietszche, John Leslie, Liebniz again, etc. So your Platonic otherworld is, a subset of a big computer system. Where'd it come from? It evolved. How'd it evolve? Probably a program. Who programmed these sets to evolve? I don't know. Steinhart can sometimes espouse some kind of mathematical polytheism. I am not sure that I do. Benefits? It provides for a certitude of an afterlife, though his Revision theory of Resurrection, is all about improved universes with improved clones.Clones are likely via Everett's MWI, and Lewis's Modal realism. Not interesting for me. His Promotion theory solves this but using the under-floor of reality as computation,programs, axioms, arithmetic,processes. Information gets transferred to a better environment via pipelines, and Promoted. What makes these other universes better? Well, the operating system of these other domains have more evolved minds running the place, plus, depending on how time works, our ancestors and our descendents. Input-Processing-Output. Pipelines move our old minds into, wherever? Problems? It could all be useless dreck, and it's a complex and nuanced view. It is logical, but rational? It sort of works for me and all I am doing is modifying such thinking, on the fly, as we say in the states. -Original Message- From: Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be To: everything-list everything-list@googlegroups.com Sent: Mon, Apr 6, 2015 5:18 am Subject: Re: The Object On 04 Apr 2015, at 19:04, spudboy100 via Everything List wrote: My view is that rather than being a simulation, our universe and an infinitude of others,are programs that yields physical universes, as a programmatic process. ? That seems contradictory. Being a simulation means being brought by a program implemented in some universal number relation (physically realized or not, at first). The underlying software and hardware are more real than the reality we sense, OK, so we can take the simplest one: elementary arithmetic, for example. but our lives are very real. In the case above, our lives are very epistemologically, or phenomenologically real. Underneath everything is organized data, programs, processes, and pipelines to other universes (or parts of a greater very big universe). This is like using a God in an explanation. Why to introduce a universe to make programs and program execution, when we know that already exists once we assume elementary arithmetic? (with some measure that we can test so that we can test the hypothesis). So theoretically, humans and galaxies and bacteria, get promoted (as in software) to other places. I am stealing from Eric Steinhart's Promotion hypothesis, to suit my own pitiful intellect, and emotions. It is OK, but you don't need universes, still less other bigger universe. The whole of real math and physics use a tiny amount of arithmetical truth. Only logicians, category theorists and theologian needs sometimes to refer to the big one, the whole of the arithmetical reality, that we cannot even define from inside. That is *very* big. Bruno -Original Message- From: Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be To: everything-list everything-list@googlegroups.com Sent: Sat, Apr 4, 2015 11:10 am Subject: Re: The Object Nice! Quite Platonist! We never invent anything---we always only discover. would assess a platonist. Bruno
Re: Fast moves for nuclear development in Siberia
On Mon, Apr 6, 2015 , meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: In general you can't assume that it takes one critical mass to make a bomb. You do unless you're very sophisticated, otherwise it will likely take you more than one critical mass to make a bomb, for example the critical mass of U235 is 114 pounds but the Hiroshima bomb had 141 pounds of it. If you can implode the fissile U235 or Plutonium metal and compress it to arbitrary density then you can make the critical mass arbitrarily small, but that takes great sophistication far beyond the reach of a terrorist. And even the most sophisticated bomb makers in the world on both sides of the iron curtain found that making U233 bombs to be so hard it just wasn't worth bothering with. the fissionable material is surrounded by other materials to act as neutron reflectors so the fissionable mass can be considerably smaller that the critical mass. That's the technology that went into the design of nuclear artillery shells. All nuclear bombs use neutron reflectors. What makes nuclear artillery shells unusual is that they used the gun method to achieve criticality and that was only tried twice, the Hiroshima bomb and one test of a nuclear artillery shell in the 1950s. The gun method is simple but is very inefficient and wasteful of super expensive U235. In the Hiroshima bomb only 1.5% of the 141 pounds of U235 actually split, 98.5% was harmlessly blasted away before it could fission because of pre-detonation, modern bombs use up nearly 100% of their U235 or Plutonium. Because of inefficiency the gun method can't achieve high enough temperatures to serve as the ignition for a H-bomb, and because of this pre-detonation problem the gun method won't work at all for Plutonium, much less for U233. All modern nuclear bombs use the implosion method. John K Clark -- 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: Michael Graziano's theory of consciousness
On Sat, Apr 4, 2015 at 11:04 PM, John Clark johnkcl...@gmail.com wrote: On Sat, Apr 4, 2015 Telmo Menezes te...@telmomenezes.com wrote: If you take the MWI seriously, then you are open to the possibility that you are constantly being duplicated If the MWI is true then it's not a possibility it's a certainty Assuming you're like me, you perceive yourself as a single entity travelling through time in the forward direction. You? Mr. John Clark The Moscow Man will perceive a single entity, and Mr. John Clark the Washington Man will perceive a single entity, and Mr. John Clark The Helsinki Man will no longer perceive anything at all. You left out traveling through time in a forward direction. I leave it as an exercise to the reader to figure out why. Hint: it has something to do in betting on what happens next. And John Clark is really starting to hate personal pronouns, as a exercise try writing a paragraph or at least a sentence without using any, it will do Telmo Menezes good. Assuming you're like me means exactly the same as Assuming John Clark is like Telmo Menezes. No ambiguity was added or removed. I really don't understand your noun fetish. If many worlds or duplicating machines you have to specify which Telmo Menezes or which you in the exact same way. Bruno does this with the concept of diary -- which can be a brain state. subjectively there is only one Stathis Papaioannou because they are identical. Subjectively from whose perspective? From the only one that matters, from Stathis Papaioannou's perspective. Two identical Stathis Papaioannous running in parallel is subjectively identical to one. Perfect. After the doors are opened they no longer are identical because they see different things; one sees Moscow and becomes Mr. Stathis Papaioannou The Moscow Man, and the other sees Washington and becomes Mr. Stathis Papaioannou The Washington Man. But before the doors are opened and after the duplication, you can ask them through the intercom to guess where they are. The position of their brains is unimportant because until the door is opened both are still identical to the Helsinki Man. They are important if we are discussing the implications of computationalism (the belief that you mind can be replaced with some computation, or saying yes to the doctor) to materialism (the belief that matter is the fundamental substance of reality, the brute fact). A much better question is to ask them to guess what will happen when the door opens. Both know with 100% certainty that photons will impinge on them and will change them, but they are uncertain if the photons will come from Moscow or from Washington. So you undoubtedly agree that step 3 is correct. But this is just the classical old fashioned sort uncertainty that is due to simple lack of information, it's not inherent uncertainty of the Quantum Mechanical sort. The MWI also kills that distinction. Lack of information is always lack of information about in which world you are. Monty Hall always had the information about which door the car was behind, and the person on the other end of that intercom knows which parallel copy of Telmo Menezes will see photons coming from Moscow and turn into the Moscow Man and which will see photons coming from Washington and turn into the Moscow Man. But the information on if that atom of Carbon 14 will decay in the next hour is not just unknown the information does not exist, it's inherently uncertain. Unless you accept the MWI, in which there are worlds for which the car is behind each door. The duplicator uncertainty is perhaps more remarkable, because different worlds exist as first person perspectives, while a third person perspective contains the two copies. But the level of intellectual excitement is irrelevant to the correctness of step 3, which I believe you admitted to be correct with your above statement. The much better question you propose is precisely what is proposed in step 3. Telmo. John K Clark If they are forced to make a bet, you will find that they tend to be right 1/2 of the time. But the probability is about if the protons that come through that open door will come from Moscow, in which Mr. Telmo Menezes you will change This is all you're being asked to agree with. I can predict with 100% certainty that it doesn't matter though, because you made your mind before giving the idea a chance. Telmo. John K Clark -- 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
