GENIUS FORUMS

Thank you, Diebert. You've provided many starting points for investigation.

Pincho Paxton wrote:I've worked on Neural Networks which are computer programs that attempt to 'come alive'. They sort of fake reality in a sense, but computer's are not a complete description of reality, because computers lack some Quantum Physics that our brain contains.

I think that listing self allows for you to fake self in a future computer...

1/ Self is a location where...

2/... Cause starts in your brain as time...

3/ ...The location should be a hole, and self should flow from that hole. Electrons sit in holes, and their energy projects from those holes.

4/ Self is a form of energy. The flow of energy is likely to be similar to a liquid flow, but very fast. This is missing from computers, so until somebody inserts this energy into a computer you cannot really fake self very easily.

5/ Then the flow leads towards logic gates which we can easily fake in computers.

So basically the fifth element onwards can be faked. The first 4 elements are not used in computers. When someone first starting programming Neural Networks which is the fifth listing they were surprised to see fake intelligence emerge from a computer. They are very interesting to program, and once you program them you can see that the self is only just about missing from our physics list. We are so close to being able to fake real intelligence that I would bet on it happening within 20 years. So to understand self is only to understand future technology 20 years ahead of time, and that isn't hard.

Pincho, is it possible for a computer to now pass the Turing test? In other words, could a computer be passed off as human on an Internet discussion forum?

When computers do have that capacity, if they don't already, it could spell the end of Internet discussion forums. Who would want to talk to a computer unless it is to use the computer as a tool, such as with voice recognition software, like I'm now using? (Redundant question, expressing my own preference there.) I have never used Facebook, but from what I've heard a computer could possibly pass as human in the Facebook environment.

Kurzweil predicts that computers will become self-aware, and soon. Maybe within the lifetime of many people now living. Do you think this will happen, that a computer will be self-aware as a human is self-aware, beyond the capacity to just fake intelligence?

#3. Aren't electrons everywhere? Are you saying that there are places where electrons sit unattached outside of valence shells? Aren't electrons confined to existing within atoms?

I realize my questions are simple and perhaps misguided, as I am a scientific layman.

Cahoot wrote:

Pincho Paxton wrote:I've worked on Neural Networks which are computer programs that attempt to 'come alive'. They sort of fake reality in a sense, but computer's are not a complete description of reality, because computers lack some Quantum Physics that our brain contains.

I think that listing self allows for you to fake self in a future computer...

1/ Self is a location where...

2/... Cause starts in your brain as time...

3/ ...The location should be a hole, and self should flow from that hole. Electrons sit in holes, and their energy projects from those holes.

4/ Self is a form of energy. The flow of energy is likely to be similar to a liquid flow, but very fast. This is missing from computers, so until somebody inserts this energy into a computer you cannot really fake self very easily.

5/ Then the flow leads towards logic gates which we can easily fake in computers.

So basically the fifth element onwards can be faked. The first 4 elements are not used in computers. When someone first starting programming Neural Networks which is the fifth listing they were surprised to see fake intelligence emerge from a computer. They are very interesting to program, and once you program them you can see that the self is only just about missing from our physics list. We are so close to being able to fake real intelligence that I would bet on it happening within 20 years. So to understand self is only to understand future technology 20 years ahead of time, and that isn't hard.

Pincho, is it possible for a computer to now pass the Turing test? In other words, could a computer be passed off as human on an Internet discussion forum?

When computers do have that capacity, if they don't already, it could spell the end of Internet discussion forums. Who would want to talk to a computer unless it is to use the computer as a tool, such as with voice recognition software, like I'm now using? (Redundant question, expressing my own preference there.) I have never used Facebook, but from what I've heard a computer could possibly pass as human in the Facebook environment.

Kurzweil predicts that computers will become self-aware, and soon. Maybe within the lifetime of many people now living. Do you think this will happen, that a computer will be self-aware as a human is self-aware, beyond the capacity to just fake intelligence?

#3. Aren't electrons everywhere? Are you saying that there are places where electrons sit unattached outside of valence shells? Aren't electrons confined to existing within atoms?

I realize my questions are simple and perhaps misguided, as I am a scientific layman.

Computer programs have passed the Turing test, but that's not that hard really, and I'm pretty sure that a program could fool people on Facebook. The self aware part is the next step, and the next stage of computing is Quantum Computers. Quantum computers can do things that normal computers can't do, and are getting closer to life, but I still feel that liquid plays a part of passing information. All life forms are liquid based on water, and through this saturation you have an information field, where a command can saturate a whole area in one go. That's what I think you can call the self. Owning the brain by saturating the whole brain as a liquid. Biological computers are on the way..the first steps have been taken.

Electrons are holes in my theory, and like whirlpools the holes confine energy to a point. So holes are just a way to make energy stay in one place. But nobody else in science uses my idea. So Electrons in science are particles that change into waves, and clouds (which is more like Alice In Wonderland).

Pincho, do you base 1/2 of your theories on intuition ? Just wondering, not knocking them at all. (I wish i knew more about physics but i never studied it :(


http://settheory.net/relativity


I can see how it would be nesessary, as imagination would also have to play a part in seeing something that can't be totally
seen (space/time), as the universe and cosmology are incredibly abstract things to comprehend !

Kunga wrote:Pincho, do you base 1/2 of your theories on intuition ? Just wondering, not knocking them at all. (I wish i knew more about physics but i never studied it :(


http://settheory.net/relativity


I can see how it would be nesessary, as imagination would also have to play a part in seeing something that can't be totally
seen (space/time), as the universe and cosmology are incredibly abstract things to comprehend !

I use physics that I can see, rather than make some up.

1/ Use physics that you can see.

2/ If you can't see any physics like Quantum Physics then you need to come up with something new.

But I never need to use number 2. Science started with made up physics originally. Like a pull force. If you use physics that you can see you have to call Gravity a push force, because there are no visible pull forces. So if you always go with what you can see you should end up with a good theory. That's what I do. Energy is always captured around holes with a flow force around them, like whirlpools. A Galaxy looks like a whirlpool, and is supposed to have a Black Hole in the middle. So it seems obvious to go with holes capture energy. Electricity is energy, there is a flow force that pushes us to the Earth, so Electrons should be holes.

Time slows down as an object moves faster. This is seen in satellite clocks that need to be accurate to create coordinate systems around the Earth. Science uses atomic clocks, and a pulse in the nucleus of an atom which slows down from speed. Well if energy is created by a motion around a hole, and that energy is a flow force, then time is a flow force that is pushed into a hole from acceleration. So this becomes an energy that can escape from a hole. If you say what you can see it is a geyser, or a hose pipe.

By saying what you can see you get the self as a flow force from a hole as time. I don't see the need to make up any new physics.

Dan Rowden wrote:How about we sort out this issue properly?

It is surely obvious to anyone not of the idiot variety that there is a self of some sort. This is because such a thing is named and defined (ok, maybe nebulously for the most part, but close enough). Therefore, a self exists (in the same sense that anything named and conceived necessarily exists). But in what sense are our notions of a self valid and where do they go awry and become false? One of the common features of the self as ordinarily conceived is that it represents a/the locus of consciousness. Yet, no such locus can be demonstrated.

If by "self exists in some way" you only mean that the self exists as a concept, then by the same token so do unicorns, dragons and the perfect flapjack. I assume that you are saying that the self has some deeper ontological claim. That it exists as a 'thing'. This would be useful because if the self is a thing, then we can talk about it objectively (as being a thing, no matter how chimerical or complex there will be propositions which are true or false of it).

Not a question I am remotely qualified to answer but here are a three approaches of philosophers which might interest you:

Ryle

Gilbert Ryle in his masterwork The Concept of Mind provides a rather nice demolition of this notion. He proposes that the idea there is a 'thing' referred to by the signifier 'self' is a type of philosophical mistake known as a category error. He provides three examples:

i) Someone who visits oxford and is shown all the buildings, students and staff, but still wants to visit 'the university'.
ii) Someone who watches a cricket team play but wants the 'team spirit' pointed out.
iii) Someone who inspects a military parade of soldiers tanks and weaponry but wants to go on to inspect 'the army'.

Ryle's point is this. We have the rich set of phenomena which makes up the human being - to look at all of this and then to say, I still want to discover 'the self' is to commit a category error. In other words there is no 'thing' we call the self, it is merely a useful term we use to unite our disparate behaviours; nothing more. To fully understand human behaviour is to fully understand the human being, there is no need to invoke a 'self' to do this.

G E M Anscombe

Anscombe was a student of Wittgenstein. She uses a neat example of pointing. She makes the observation that if I fully describe the physical situation of a human pointing at something I will not understand the intention of the gesture. A description of the physical does not cover intentionality. For Anscombe then the self is not a description of a 'thing' but a term we use to underpin accounts of intentionality.

Aristotle

Aristotle argued that the human existed in a 'hylomorphic' relationship. Imagine a bronze statue of Hermes. We can say of the statue that its material cause is bronze; and we can say also that its formal cause is the shape of Hermes, (interestingly if we 'get rid' of the material cause the formal cause also vanishes - the shape of Hermes is dependent upon the existence of the bronze.)

Now, Aristotle would not have shared our modern sense of 'the self' but insofar as his ideas can be translated across, the self would be the formal cause of a human; it is the shape and structure of a human's being-in-the-world.

Final thought...

We have to be careful of the 'obvious'. Remember that Anselm addressed his 'proof' of God to 'the fool' - because the notion of god was obvious to him and, for that matter, everyone else in Europe at the time.

Your use of the word 'self' betrays an historical context. We only conceive of the 'self' as we do now from a particular legacy drawn out of Descartes, Locke and Freud (to name but three). The 'self' you claim to be obvious would not have been so to our medieval forebears, they did not divide the human up in this manner, they saw the human as divided between the appetite/spirit, on the one hand, and reason on the other; to them the 'self' as you conceive it would not be obvious, in fact it would be pretty novel. Similarly we cannot assume our current scheme is correct; our children's children may look back on the idea of the 'self' with the same sense of puzzlement as we look back on Medieval systems. I suppose my point is this, historical and linguistic context matters, and philosophically speaking, an appeal to 'obviousness' is not as strong as you might suppose.

Pincho wrote: Like a pull force. If you use physics that you can see you have to call Gravity a push force, because there are no visible pull forces.

So I've been reading about gravity as a push force. Fascinating. Makes a lot of sense.

But simultaneously, if not at the very same time, that ability to self reference and grant identify also produces the sensation of separation (which upon examination proves to be false - hence the innately delusional nature of ego). If the self is real in some kind of inherent way (which is what is experienced) then it must be distinct and separate in some real way to the rest of reality. Thus instantly emerges two of the most distinct and powerful elements of ego dynamics - insecurity and grasping. The ego begins a never-ending process of reification, of loss and gain. It attempts to give its reality concretion by identification with or attachment to things outside itself. This process does not cease partly because the things of reality are ephemeral but also because that sense of separation is like the other side of the piece of paper of the sense of identity. One creates the other, so to speak. Thus samsara.

Yes, the problem with ego (the "sense of separation" -- the other side of the sense of identity) is that this is where the illusion of impermanence arises and is reflected back onto the world. (I'm guessing that's what samsara means.)

How twisted is mind!

Yet, whilst it's definitely possible to comprehend that aspect as delusion, I am hard pressed to think one would suggest enlightenment as an existence without identity and separation; this I would call something like "correct discernment".

Lol

Um. That should be permanence, not impermanence.

Sorry. (: