Re: NDE's Proved Real?
On Sun, Apr 7, 2013 at 4:38 PM, John Clark johnkcl...@gmail.com wrote: On Sat, Apr 6, 2013 Telmo Menezes te...@telmomenezes.com wrote: Last week PLoS ONE received its first impact factor — a stunning 4.351. Stunning? Nature = 51.15 Science = 47.72; and you're bragging about a 4.351? This puts the open access journal in the top 25th percentile of ISI’s “Biology” There are many thousands of science journals, so that means there are many hundreds that are better than PLoS ONE; thus nobody, absolutely positively nobody, would publish an article in PLoS ONE that they thought was important if they could get it published in a better journal. where nobel laureates submit articles to. I imagine that Nobel laureates have posted lots of stuff on the internet to many different message boards over the years, but the question to ask is how many of those Nobel laureates received their prize for stuff posted to PLoS ONE? Zero. In contrast although I haven't counted it out I would estimate that 60% of all the Nobel Prizes given out since 1945 in physics or chemistry or medicine was for articles published in just 4 journals, Nature, Science, Physical Review Letters, and The New England journal of Medicine. PLoS ONE is the best known journal of the open-access movement, That's like being the most virile eunuch in the harem. This is getting comically Freudian. :) I never even mentioned religion in this discussion. I invite you to pause for a second and notice how religious you are about Science with a capital S. Wow, calling a guy known for not liking religion religious! Never heard that one before, at least not before the sixth grade. Well if you're that confident then this is a simple no risk way for you to make $1000, hey I'm giving you 10 to 1 odds it's easy money! So are you willing to put your money where your mouth is? No, I agree with you on the odds. But why do you agree with the odds? If a very low ranking journal got astonishingly lucky and published a paper of HUGE transcendental importance before much higher ranked journals then it's just a matter of time before the much higher ranked journals catch on and start publishing articles on that subject of their own. But I'll tell you what, because I like you for a limited time only I'm willing to increase the odds to 100 to 1; if you accept this bet before noon tomorrow on the east coast of the USA and if Science or Nature or Physical Review Letters publishes a positive article about life after death before April 5 2014 I will give you $10,000, if none of them do you only have to give me $100. But wait there's more! As a special bonus if you win not only will I give you $10,000 but I will also kiss your ass and give you 10 minutes to gather a crowd. Operators are standing by, don't delay. You don't understand what I'm saying at all. True, but the question is do you understand what you're saying at all? What I'm trying to say is that I believe you do not distinguish: A) Science the method of inquiry from B) Science the human institution You put both in the same bag. By doing that you fail to apply A to B and even A to A. This creates a blind spot. As for the scientific journals, Russel was way more eloquent than me. 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?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to 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?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: Any human who has played a bit of Arimaa can beat a computer hands down.
On Thu, Apr 4, 2013 at 11:50 PM, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: On 4/4/2013 3:35 PM, Telmo Menezes wrote: On Wed, Apr 3, 2013 at 11:44 PM, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: On 4/3/2013 2:44 PM, Jason Resch wrote: You're making the same mistake as John Clark, confusing the physical computer with the algorithm. Powerful computers don't help us if we don't have the right algorithm. The central mystery of AI, in my opinion, is why on earth haven't we found a general learning algorithm yet. Either it's too complex for our monkey brains, or you're right that computation is not the whole story. I believe in the former, but not I'm not sure, of course. Notice that I'm talking about generic intelligence, not consciousness, which I strongly believe to be two distinct phenomena. Then do you think there could be philosophical zombies? Yes. Could it be that some humans are zombies, or do you assume that to be a zombie would mean being physically different from a human being? I don't know. How would you operationally test a robot to see whether it was (a) intelligent I don't see intelligence as a binary property, but relative to goals. The classical answer for human-like intelligence is something like the Turing test, but I don't like it. I don't think that a generic AI should be measured by it's ability to fool us into making us think it's human. Instead I'd have to ask you first what do you want the robot for? Personally I would want robots to free Humanity from unwanted labor. This is a high-level goal that requires what I consider to be generic AI. Can it learn all sorts of tasks like driving a car, working in a factory, following fuzzy requirements, etc Yes, I agree with that. I'd say intelligence is being able to learn to be competent at many tasks, but there is no completely general intelligence. Agreed. I think for social beings it includes being able to explain, to give reasons, which implies some empathy. No doubt. But could the ability to model other beings be sufficient for empathy? A sort of dispassionate empathy? I think so. etc? (b) conscious? I don't believe that such a test can exist. I don't even think we can know if a glass of water is conscious. Have you ever been unconscious? I don't know. All I know is that there are periods of my timeline that I cannot remember. During college, there where a couple of incidents that I cannot remember but my friends would tell you I was conscious. Telmo. 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?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to 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?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: Scientific journals
On Sunday, April 7, 2013 7:24:12 PM UTC-4, Russell Standish wrote: On Sun, Apr 07, 2013 at 11:38:24AM -0400, John Clark wrote: But why do you agree with the odds? If a very low ranking journal got astonishingly lucky and published a paper of HUGE transcendental importance before much higher ranked journals then it's just a matter of time before the much higher ranked journals catch on and start publishing articles on that subject of their own. But I'll tell you what, because I like you for a limited time only I'm willing to increase the odds to 100 to 1; if you accept this bet before noon tomorrow on the east coast of the USA and if Science or Nature or Physical Review Letters publishes a positive article about life after death before April 5 2014 I will give you $10,000, if none of them do you only have to give me $100. But wait there's more! As a special bonus if you win not only will I give you $10,000 but I will also kiss your ass and give you 10 minutes to gather a crowd. Operators are standing by, don't delay. The top two journals have a policy of not even sending out half of their submissions to peer review. This editorial rejection rate really means that the next big thing will almost certainly not be published in Science or Nature. Of course this leads to high impact factors for those journals, as they're only publishing papers in established bandwagon fields, with lots of people citing each other's papers. What's somewhat disturbing is that a lot of middle ranked journals are now doing the same This to me is revealing of the overall decline of science as tool of Enlightenment into it's corrupt, indulgence-selling era. The same thing can be seen with universities, as the prestige brand institutions are elevated beyond the reach of anyone but the most overprepared students from the wealthiest families, the value of a non-elite bachelor's degree level is falling beneath the level of the debt it incurs. The stage is now set for a kind of academic feudalism which is driven by careerism and accreditation rather than learning and understanding. The fallout of this is that no university can afford to support research outside of the bandwagon and science becomes little more than a clergy for corporate legal departments. Oh well, Western Civilization was a nice idea while it lasted. Craig -- 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?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: Free-Will discussion
On Sun, Apr 7, 2013 at 11:35 PM, Craig Weinberg whatsons...@gmail.com wrote: It does mean you could replicate World War II if you replicate the complex arrangement of matter. It does not mean you would necessarily understand it if you replicated it, any more than a photocopier understands the image it is copying. But if the photocopier were technically very good, the copy could be arbitrarily close to the original in the opinion of anyone who *did* understand it. Similarly, if you replicated World War II to a close enough tolerance the observers inside the replication would understand it and an external observer would understand it. Your view assumes that time is a generic plenum of duration, while I understand that it is precisely the opposite. Time is proprietary and unrepeatable subjective content. Experiences can be inspected and controlled publicly to a limited extent but no single event or collection of events can be repeated in the absolute sense since all events are eventually intertwined causally with all others. You want to make this about arrangements of matter but it is about experiences of time. Where do you get the idea that subjective events cannot repeat? It seems another thing that you've just made up, with no rational justification. Matter is, indeed, not absolutely important for mind. What is important is the functional arrangement of matter. If this is replicated, the mind is replicated. By that assumption, if I arrange styrofoam balls in the shape of the molecules of a cheeseburger, then a gigantic person would be able to eat it and it would taste like a cheeseburger. If that were true, then we should see the same arrangements over and over again - giant ants the size of a planet, etc. Arrangement is only important because of the properties of what you are arranging. If you arrange inert blobs, then all that you can ever get is larger, more complex arrangements of inert blobs. No mind is present in arrangement. Before we move to styrofoam balls, it's problematic that you don't even accept the modest assumption that the same matter in the same configuration will yield the same behaviour and same subjective states, such as they may be. This happens in the course of normal physiology, whereby all the matter in your body is replaced with different matter from the food you eat, but you still feel that you are you. That's because your lifetime is made of subjective experience, and experience is publicly accessible in a limited way as forms and functions. Your view confuses the vehicle of life with a producer of life. If your lifetime is made of subjective experiences, the matter in your body seems essential for these experiences to be realised. Disrupting the form of this matter disrupts the experiences, while swapping the matter for different matter in the same form does not. But why would a complex experience require a complex arrangement of matter? It doesn't require it, that is just the inevitable embodiment of it. If you want to play baseball, you play on a baseball diamond. The baseball diamond doesn't conjure baseball players to the field out of the aether (only in the dreams of Kevin Costner and functionalists does 'Build it and they will come. work out.). But it does seem, at the very least, that building a person out of matter builds the experiences. Use the same matter but disrupt the form - no experiences; use different matter and keep the form - experiences. The experience is primary, and why is to allow complex interactions and experiences as a kind of trellis to extend aesthetic qualities. If the experience supervenes on arrangement then you have to explain why there is any experience there to begin with, what it is, and how it comes to attach itself to 'arrangements'. You can't do that, but nobody can because it's incorrect. Can you explain what use there is for bodies, why experience is attached to them and disrupting the body disrupts the experience? The influences going back billions of years are just the means to create organisms now alive. Why do you think that there is a now? What causes it and where does it come from? Aren't the organisms now alive just the means to create organisms which will live in the future? The organisms now alive purport to create organisms in the future, but they might all be wiped out. The universe doesn't care and has no purpose or function. It took billions of years of evolution to create cars, but if a car randomly fell together from scrap iron and so on in the exact form of a Toyota Corolla, it would function exactly the same as a Toyota Corolla despite never seeing the inside of a Toyota factory. That's because the Toyota doesn't feel like anything. If it did, then it would not feel like a Toyota since it had never been inside of a Toyota factory. It would, in the absence of other cars, roads, garages, etc feel like a collection of scrap iron would
Re: Any human who has played a bit of Arimaa can beat a computer hands down.
On Monday, April 8, 2013 7:42:22 AM UTC-4, telmo_menezes wrote: On Thu, Apr 4, 2013 at 11:50 PM, meekerdb meek...@verizon.netjavascript: wrote: On 4/4/2013 3:35 PM, Telmo Menezes wrote: On Wed, Apr 3, 2013 at 11:44 PM, meekerdb meek...@verizon.netjavascript: wrote: On 4/3/2013 2:44 PM, Jason Resch wrote: You're making the same mistake as John Clark, confusing the physical computer with the algorithm. Powerful computers don't help us if we don't have the right algorithm. The central mystery of AI, in my opinion, is why on earth haven't we found a general learning algorithm yet. Either it's too complex for our monkey brains, or you're right that computation is not the whole story. I believe in the former, but not I'm not sure, of course. Notice that I'm talking about generic intelligence, not consciousness, which I strongly believe to be two distinct phenomena. Then do you think there could be philosophical zombies? Yes. Could it be that some humans are zombies, or do you assume that to be a zombie would mean being physically different from a human being? I don't know. Sociopaths are emotional zombies. Corruption or addiction can make people into moral zombies. Driving for a long time can make someone a highway zombie. Cults and brainwashing can make someone an intellectual zombie. There are many ways which aspects of personal human consciousness can become subconscious, sub-personal, and sub-human. Craig -- 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?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: NDE's Proved Real?
On Mon, Apr 8, 2013 Telmo Menezes te...@telmomenezes.com wrote: What I'm trying to say is that I believe you do not distinguish: A) Science the method of inquiry from B) Science the human institution And I am saying is you do not understand that only one of the following is true: A) Science can sometimes make predictions better than the law of averages would allow. B) Science is the only way to make predictions better than the law of averages would allow. And it is physically impossible for me to personally perform every experiment that I'd like to, so I have no choice but to look to the human institution of science to help me out, but that would be useless to me unless I have reason to trust that the experiment was actually performed as described, and that's where the web of trust comes in that you get from journals like Nature and Science. When I read about some shit that somebody I've never heard of typed onto a obscure part of the internet that I've also never heard of about revolutionary experimental results that would change everything if true there is no web of trust and thus I am not in the least impressed because I know how to type too. 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?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: Scientific journals
On Mon, Apr 08, 2013 at 01:55:22PM -0400, John Clark wrote: You want to bet? I mean it, I'll bet you that there is a 50% chance that at least one of the next Nobel Prizes will be for work first publised in Science or Nature and a 0% chance it was for stuff published in PLoS ONE. I will not be taking the bet, for the following reasons: Firstly, we agree on the latter clause - there is an infinitesimal chance that any particular named open-access journal (eg PLoS) will scoop the Nobel prize - approaching zero in limit of an infinity of journals, so the bet should only be about the first clause. Secondly, it will take an enormous amount of effort to establish that the research was in fact published first in Nature or Science, rather than merely been cited there. It would involve reviewing all of the thousands of journals out there (as historically, it is often the second or third guy that thinks of an idea that gets the credit) to see if anyone has published the idea in any form whatsoever. Its not impossible - something like a Google Scholar scale of big data computation will make it feasible, but it will require writing custom tools, getting both of us to agree on the methodology, and well to be frank - I have other things to do with my time. Those journals have not changed their policy in decades yet it's in them we first learned why the stars shine, that DNA contains the information in life and told us its shape and how it reproduced, told us about the existence of the neutron which led to nuclear bombs and power, told us about the first animal to be cloned, told us that continents moved, that a huge asteroid crashed into Mexico 66 million years ago, that most of the matter in existence is made of some strange invisible stuff, that neutrinos have mass and oscillate, that the universe is not only expanding but accelerating, that a quantum computer could factor numbers mush faster than a regular computer. All those big things were first published in Science or Nature, why is that going to change now that the world is awash in junk science articles? I don't know that your first claim is correct Those journals have not changed their policy in decades, but I do know that if the world is awash in junk science articles now, and wasn't in the past, then it is highly likely you'll need to change your policy to cope. Just like we (almost) all use spam filters these days, but didn't 10 years ago. The policy I'm referring to (editorial rejection based on perceived interest or status) seems likely to be a reaction to the very junk science problem you mention. What's somewhat disturbing is that a lot of middle ranked journals are now doing the same Because crappy articles vastly outnumber even mediocre articles, and there are not enough mediocre outside judges to read all the stuff that is sent to mediocre journals. Yes - and believe it or not, I've seen plenty of articles in Nature that I would have rejected as obvious crap if I was refereeing the papers. I don't recall having read much in Science, fo some reason, and I don't recall having read a Nature article for about 10 years so - most of the stuff I'm interested in appear in specialty journals, although usually I read them from arXiv. Peer review is hardly perfect, but doing without it would probably be worse. What I am saying is in this wired world, where journal space is not a scarce resource, papers should only be rejected for obvious scientific reasons (which deals with most of the pseudo science rubbish, actually), or for being off-topic (Science should quite rightly reject humanities papers, for instance). Other papers, where there are doubts or confusion, should be subject to the author adequately addressing the referees' criticisms. Furthermore, with Google, or Google Scholar, and arXiv, you don't need the status of Nature or Science to make your article visible or cited. Good science will get cited, no matter where it is published (even arXiv articles get cited, where relevant). It does help for visibility to network, network, network, of course - present at conferences, seek out scientific leaders and establish relationships, and so on - all of which can be hard work, but I seriously doubt a Nature or Science article will help. Where it clearly does help is in applying for tenure. Universities love the prestige that Nature or Science brings. But I don't think that helps science as a whole to advance -- 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 -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe
Great Scientist ≠ Good at Math
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323611604578398943650327184 WSJ Article Fortunately, exceptional mathematical fluency is required in only a few disciplines, such as particle physics, astrophysics and information theory. Far more important throughout the rest of science is the ability to form concepts, during which the researcher conjures images and processes by intuition. The annals of theoretical biology are clogged with mathematical models that either can be safely ignored or, when tested, fail. Possibly no more than 10% have any lasting value. Only those linked solidly to knowledge of real living systems have much chance of being used. Hehe -- 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?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
