2023-03-17 01:34:22 Yeah, pad works fine for a lot of things, but you are using non-allocated RAM, so there's no way to entirely eliminate the risk. 2023-03-17 01:35:06 Forth has no dynamic RAM management, generally. It's not hard to add a small simple one, and then you could do that kind of thing right. It's just a matter of what you're willing to do. 2023-03-17 12:41:47 So guys, that Latin book I mentioned last week - that's actually going pretty well. I'm far from having a conversation with someone, but I am finding that I can just work my way through it and accumulate bits of understanding. The author structured it really well. 2023-03-17 12:42:13 writing purple prose in 3, 2, 2023-03-17 12:42:14 Also, audio recitations of the thing are available on YouTube, so I'm picking up the pronunciation too. 2023-03-17 12:42:50 Heh. I doubt i'll ever get good enough to write in it. I'll be happy if I can pick up some Latin source and nominally understand it on reading. 2023-03-17 12:43:11 writin' is rumored to help with the learnin' 2023-03-17 12:43:20 Yeah, true. 2023-03-17 12:43:28 so maybe write out some, I don't know, Horace 2023-03-17 12:43:50 And technically one wouldn't need pronunciation for reading, but some of what I may want to read will be poetry, so I would like to get the right "musicality" from it. 2023-03-17 12:44:34 This is just a very different process from all my prior exposure to other languages. But - it's SLOW. 2023-03-17 12:44:53 I am picking up knowledge, but it's accumulating at a snail's pace. 2023-03-17 12:45:00 the State Department does 40 hours a week plus homework for language training 2023-03-17 12:45:36 I guess I see why - if you're going to be a diplomat you really should be able to converse with the people you work with in a "non-blocking" sort of way. 2023-03-17 12:46:14 also handy skills like reading the text upside down 2023-03-17 12:46:30 ;-) 2023-03-17 12:46:42 but that's probably useful in any business setting 2023-03-17 12:46:43 Throw in a dash of espionage... 2023-03-17 12:47:45 The thing that's taking the longest for me to really habituate to is making all of the C and G souncs hard. 2023-03-17 12:48:11 They just don't use the C sound other than the K variant and the CH variant. 2023-03-17 12:48:18 It never sounds like an s. 2023-03-17 12:50:06 I assume that somewhere a ways in they'll start to introduce some formal language ideas like conjugation and so on, but it starts out just by "intuitively" giving you some words. Like est for is and sunt for are - that's just introduced by context instead of in any formal way. 2023-03-17 12:52:08 Starts off mostly with some place names, illustrated by maps, and words for things like city, river, and island. 2023-03-17 12:52:18 What the heck - my computer just restarted itself. 2023-03-17 12:57:29 Anyway, then it touches briefly on numbers and letters, and the second chapter introduces a family that it's going to unfold a story about. 2023-03-17 12:57:46 The guy that talked about it said the story is good enough to keep you interested, but we'll see. 2023-03-17 13:30:52 Hey, in case any of you have any interest in guitar, I've found this guys stuff to be really, really good and helpful: 2023-03-17 13:30:54 https://www.youtube.com/@StichMethodGuitar 2023-03-17 13:31:24 He's got the whole Patreon thing going on, but he's got quite a lot of free content out there. 2023-03-17 16:08:01 Rupert Sheldrake always gets me to thinking. I doubt his ideas are "spot on," and I think he'd be the first to agree with that. But I think he's niggling around in an area where we just don't have a full understanding of things. There's more going on that we've really got pinned down, and I think he's at least asking the right kind of questions. 2023-03-17 16:08:20 But he really doesn't get much attention - the mainstream is pretty quick to just totally slam that door. :-) 2023-03-17 16:10:05 structure of scientific revolutions and all that 2023-03-17 19:15:13 Yeah. 2023-03-17 19:16:17 My general opinion of Sheldrake's stuff is that there are only two possibilities: either a) we really just lack more understanding of things than is generally conceded by the establishment, or b) Sheldrake is outright lying to us. Because there are several things he's described that, if true, make it completely clear that there are gaps in our knowledge. 2023-03-17 19:17:24 The most "clear example" is this business he describes about lab mice learning their way through a maze. Apparently this all started at Harvard almost a century ago. There was a guy there who had Lamarkian beliefs (i.e., learned knowledge can be inherited). 2023-03-17 19:17:38 So he did this experiment, where he trained successive generations of mice to run this maze. 2023-03-17 19:17:59 And he documented that each generation seemed to learn more quickly than the generation before. This seemed to support his premise, so he published. 2023-03-17 19:18:20 Well, Lamarkian ideas were already well on their way to being heretical, so this stirred up a lot of controversy. 2023-03-17 19:18:34 Eventually, a lab in Australia decided to replicate the experiment. 2023-03-17 19:18:52 They built the same maze (the Harvard guy published all the numbers on it), and they used the same species of mouse. 2023-03-17 19:19:05 However, none of their mice were actual descendents of the Harvard mice. 2023-03-17 19:19:25 To EVERYONE'S surprise, the Australian mice PICKED UP WHERE HTE HARVARD MICE LEFT OFF. 2023-03-17 19:19:34 Larmark's theory does not explain that. 2023-03-17 19:20:02 Mainstream science doesn't explain it either - it's just NOT EXPLAINABLE within the purview of mainstream science. So, if it's true, we're missing something. 2023-03-17 19:20:42 Sheldrake things that each species has what he calls a "morphic field" in which they collectively store learned knowledge. That hypothesis does explain it. 2023-03-17 19:20:58 But... it's totally out on or even past "the fringe." 2023-03-17 19:21:28 He thinks this is the same thing Jung was referring to when he talked about "the collective subconscious." 2023-03-17 19:22:22 It almost makes me want to try to do experiments of my own, because it's the kind of thing where I just don't know if I can trust anyone out there. 2023-03-17 19:23:38 The idea is that the more closely knit (genetically) a group of organisms is, the more highly they "tune in" to a shared morphic field. 2023-03-17 19:24:53 So it works not only at the species level, but at the sub-species level, the family level, etc., and even all the way down to the "self" - you are more like "past you" than you are like any relative or fellow member of your species - Sheldrake thinks this is how our personal memories are stored, rather than actually being stored "in the brain," literally. 2023-03-17 19:25:53 He first came up with this as an evolution of an idea put forth back in the 1920s to explain how organisms get their form / shape. 2023-03-17 19:26:08 Because apparently there's not enough information storage capacity in the genome to pass that information along genetically. 2023-03-17 19:26:26 He also thinks it's related to how these salamanders that can re-generate manage to do so in the correct way. 2023-03-17 19:27:15 At least some of what they formerly would have accused of being Lamarkian has now been "rebranded" as "epigenetics" and is now acceptable. 2023-03-17 21:19:36 i hate to be that guy but just from your summary it sounds explicable by the australian lab having smarter mice to start with than the harvard guys were using 2023-03-17 21:28:42 You could explain practically anything if you're willing to introduce exogenous variables like that. They were the same species, and I would assume statistically significant populations were used - individual to individual variation would render one-off experiments useless. You'd do a population so you could average such things out. 2023-03-17 21:29:07 I don't know those details of the experiment, but I thinkwe should assume common sense practices were used to control such variations. 2023-03-17 21:30:30 pretty much everything is venemous down under, of course the (surviving) meese are brighter 2023-03-17 21:43:24 I can't speak to the origin of the mice, but lab mice are an industry. They weren't caught wild. 2023-03-17 21:46:13 KipIngram: i wouldn't assume common sense practices are used to control stuff when a result is explicable either by everything we know about the world being wrong or else by sloppy experimental protocol 2023-03-17 21:46:41 when the latter happens a lot more than the former 2023-03-17 21:49:23 Well, I'm certainly not in a position to defend any of that, but it's just one of many examples he gives, and in fact I *do* think that there are a lot of things we just don't fully understand yet. So I'm certainly willing to keep an open mind. 2023-03-17 21:50:03 I've felt for years that mainstream physics theories (which I've spent a lot of time studying) can't really explain how the self-aware minds of living things work. 2023-03-17 21:50:11 We just really don't have a clue. 2023-03-17 21:51:45 I'm just pretty much completely unwilling to believe that a computer, as we build them currently, no matter how big and complex, can possibly become self aware. And yet we are self aware. So there's something more to it. I don't know what, but the stuff Sheldrake talks about seems to allude to that general kind of thing. Just missing chunks in our understanding of things. 2023-03-17 21:53:04 Anyway, the whole lab mice thing is pretty interesting - some scientists have taken the position that they've been bread in captivity for so long, and under such conditions, as to have lost the "biochemical similarity" to humans that originally made them such good animals for drug tests and so on. 2023-03-17 21:53:22 Which calls into question the validity of tons and tons of drug safety tests that have been done in recent years. 2023-03-17 21:53:53 He tried to publicize this, but wound up having it stepped on by drug company lobbying; he could get reporters interested in it, but their editors shut the stories down. 2023-03-17 21:54:14 there seems to be something more to consciousness and i don't know what it is. i just don't see how you get from there to morphic resonance in mice that somehow cares especially much about particular learning experiments of interest to rupert sheldrake above all the other mousey activity going on in the world 2023-03-17 21:54:19 Sounded like the kind of t hing that could potentially become a big scandal. 2023-03-17 21:54:46 the powers that be don't like you kicking at the golden goose 2023-03-17 21:54:50 I'm not going from there to morphic resonance. I'm just noting that big gap and saying that SOMETHING must fill it. 2023-03-17 21:55:17 It's more that I'm "open to the possibility" than I'm "fully supportive." 2023-03-17 21:55:35 assulting money lenders on the temple steps, that sort of things 2023-03-17 21:55:44 It certainly seems like something worth testing. 2023-03-17 21:57:03 Like I said earlier, what I usually say about Sheldrake is that "if he's not lying to us" then something's up. He seems like a fairly nice and conscientious guy, but you can never tell for sure. 2023-03-17 21:57:16 Could all be a great big scam that he's making his career on. 2023-03-17 21:57:43 I certainly do think that there are plenty of quacky types out there overall. 2023-03-17 21:58:34 It does seem, though, that there is a tendency in the mainstream to "not even be willing to look" - it's just presumed from the jump that any results that show something odd must be wrong, or fraudulent, or something. 2023-03-17 21:58:53 An attitude that we "are so sure of ourselves" that we don't even need to consider those possibilities. 2023-03-17 21:59:06 Which is just not a very "scientific attitude" if you ask me. 2023-03-17 22:01:03 So to some extent I've come to be a little distrustful of a lot of the mainstream, but that's also the case in other areas too, like say archaeology (especially Egyptology). 2023-03-17 22:01:37 I think some of the indications that things are older than the mainstream story purports seem fairly solid, but the mainstream just says "No, that's wrong" and closes the door. 2023-03-17 22:01:42 i haven't really looked into his stuff since 2004 or so my memory on the details is a bit foggy. the impression i came away with was that he had huge blind spots to side channels and just-so dismissals for failed replications. and that having thoroughly fooled himself he was basically honest in the not-deliberately-lying sense 2023-03-17 22:02:28 I've mostly just watched his own videos, which is why I hang that big caveat on it when I mention it to other people. 2023-03-17 22:03:18 This experiment with the mice was not his own, though - it was done way back in the first half of the twentieth century. I once tried to see if I could find any original material on it, but I couldn't. 2023-03-17 22:03:45 The thing is, though, is that a lot of this stuff seems like it would be fairly easy to test, so I'd think we should at least check into it. 2023-03-17 22:04:01 It's mostly just the unwillingness to even engage that I find disturbing. 2023-03-17 22:04:25 You think someone's wrong - show that. Don't just hide behind a dogma. 2023-03-17 22:05:34 i read stuff of his online shortly after 'the sense of being stared at' came out. it was a fun rabbit hole but he didn't seem like the most careful experimentalist or statistician ever 2023-03-17 22:06:26 and i feel bad saying this because my memory is now fuzzy enough on the details that i would be hard-pressed to defend that statement without doing more rereading than i care to just now 2023-03-17 22:06:31 One of the things he says about that (the staring thing) does kind of "not go over well" with me. The words he uses around that - it's something like our attention "reaches out and touches" the thing being looked at. 2023-03-17 22:06:41 Well, that seems completely bizarre to me. 2023-03-17 22:07:01 We know full well how we see things, and it involves photons going from viewed to viewer - not anything going the other way. 2023-03-17 22:07:41 The context he says this in, though, is along the lines of "our minds extend beyond our brains," and that I am willing to have an open mind toward. But the notion of something "beaming out of our eyes" just doesn't fly with me. 2023-03-17 22:08:11 The notion that there might be some kind of "interconnection" among all of us though, that doesn't seem totally unreasonablel to me. 2023-03-17 22:08:42 It ties in with Bernardo Katrup's notions of "one fundamental conscious," which we're all aspects of, and it also ties in with Jung's stuff about "the collective subconscious." 2023-03-17 22:09:09 That general type of thing I think falls into that big zone that we don't fully understand, so I can be open minded toward there being "something." 2023-03-17 22:09:14 well it is what happens during 3d scene rendering but from the ‘camera’ and not eyes. 2023-03-17 22:09:45 Do those cameras use ultasound or something? I thought they just used cameras at different angles. 2023-03-17 22:10:31 I can also buy the idea that that collective consciousness connection might be stronger within more closely related groups. 2023-03-17 22:10:33 plus, in many muds, moos, and interactive fiction you do interacting with an object 2023-03-17 22:10:40 If it's there at all, I mean. 2023-03-17 22:10:48 read what I wrote again 2023-03-17 22:11:30 Well, it sounded like you're saying some effect moves from the camera(s) to the object being viewed. 2023-03-17 22:11:34 was it beaming out of our eyes or just the attention itself? i mean, you could say the same thing about learning - that sensory data flows from the world into our brains and gets processed there, and there is no mechanism there for insights generated inside our heads to reach out and teach someone else with no apparent interaction 2023-03-17 22:11:39 Some energy of some form. 2023-03-17 22:11:54 i think the learning thing and the sense of being stared at are both absurd but i don't see how the starting is *more* absurd 2023-03-17 22:12:00 s/interacting with an object/interacting with an object when looking at it./ 2023-03-17 22:12:49 I'm not sure what I think about the sense of being stared at thing. I think it just depends on exactly what's going on in that zone we don't understand yet. 2023-03-17 22:13:13 To me "mind" is so inexplicable by standard physics that I feel like we're missing something fairly major, so I don't know what all it might encompass. 2023-03-17 22:13:25 as the twilight zone would have it, "do not adjust your set" 2023-03-17 22:13:34 re the sense of being stared at. This has been tested in various fun ways. 2023-03-17 22:14:13 I'm generally not willing to say "I'm convinced is real" about any of the "stranges x's," but I'm also not willing to stick the other stake in the ground and say "Impossible." 2023-03-17 22:14:24 I don't think we know on some of these things. 2023-03-17 22:14:46 And sure, given the way we're trained scientifically, a lot of stuff IS going to seem "absurd." 2023-03-17 22:15:15 cd 2023-03-17 22:15:18 whoops 2023-03-17 22:15:26 Maybe someone will come up with a real and plausible mechanism for how self awareness DOES arise from physical processes, and suddenly I'll feel very different. 2023-03-17 22:15:45 But it's just a really big thing to leave "unexplained" to suit me. 2023-03-17 22:16:34 KipIngram: what sort of self awareness are we talking about? goal execution agency kind or? 2023-03-17 22:17:39 No, we can program machines to seek goals. I'm talking about my innate sense that "I am." It's a purely subjective experience and I can't prove to you I have it. You can't prove to me you have it, but I'm certainly willing to assume you do, since we seem "fairly similar." 2023-03-17 22:17:48 I'm talking about my "I-ness." 2023-03-17 22:18:04 The fact that I feel and so on. 2023-03-17 22:18:10 Experience pain, etc. 2023-03-17 22:18:16 oh, I see. 2023-03-17 22:18:27 What they call "the hard problem of consciousness." 2023-03-17 22:19:07 well it seems quite mysterious but propably isnt per se. 2023-03-17 22:19:49 One of the main reason I started studying physics in the first place was a desire to understand how that worked. 2023-03-17 22:19:58 And it's 35 years later, and I have zero answers. 2023-03-17 22:20:04 subjective consciousness is a really big thing to leave unexplained and while i hesitate to call any explanation impossible, there is nothing about any explanation i've seen that makes me find it more likely than the output of a random hypothesis generator 2023-03-17 22:20:12 Though I know a lot more physics than I did when I started. :-) 2023-03-17 22:20:31 this might be an emergent property of autobiographical short term memory, goal executive, attention and a like. 2023-03-17 22:20:46 didn't Douglas Hofstadter write on the topic a bit 2023-03-17 22:20:52 How? How would I construct it in a computer? 2023-03-17 22:21:30 And after I'd done that, where precisely would that consciousness be? Transistors aren't conscious, and they don't interact with each other in any way other than by voltages and currents. 2023-03-17 22:21:31 KipIngram: with lot of work. 2023-03-17 22:21:53 So adding a lot of them doesn't expand what they "do." 2023-03-17 22:22:20 I think consciousness is well a quite complex information processes. 2023-03-17 22:22:41 I've just never been able to see that as "enough." 2023-03-17 22:23:03 When I process information in a computer, each bit of that information is still just "a bit." 2023-03-17 22:23:11 No one bit knows anything about any of the others. 2023-03-17 22:23:30 you think central nervous system neurons have some wierd propery over and beyond transistors? 2023-03-17 22:23:46 So it's the same as with the transistors - adding more bits doesn't bring anything fundamentally "new" to the process. 2023-03-17 22:24:23 Now, I do want to make it clear that I think it's possible (and something we'll eventually do) to "mimic" the behavior of a conscious mind as accurately as we wish (given enough compute power). 2023-03-17 22:24:36 In theory, I could see us making robots that are indistinguishable from humans. 2023-03-17 22:24:50 But if I blew one's head off I don't think I'd have committed murder. 2023-03-17 22:25:02 so that difference - that is what I'm talking about. 2023-03-17 22:25:19 KipIngram: I hold forth that actually quantaty of interacting elements do provide something “new”: emergent behaviour 2023-03-17 22:25:54 like water is wet whilist a few h2o moles are not 2023-03-17 22:25:58 But each transistor is still just being a transistor, and each bit of information is still just a bit. There is no "whole." 2023-03-17 22:26:49 No transistor will at any point start doing "something new" just because it's ganged together with a bunch of others. 2023-03-17 22:27:34 I don't think there's any way to "win" a debate like this, though. 2023-03-17 22:27:58 just like activation spike trains in a cortical column just keeps a bit of information and not having a “whole”? 2023-03-17 22:28:27 I think you got into an reductionist trap somehow. 2023-03-17 22:28:55 it is like the one about the Chinese Room thought experiment 2023-03-17 22:29:59 btw no transistor decided on ganging up. A transistor is a made artifact. 2023-03-17 22:30:52 nevermind transistors, where i have trouble accepting ai consciousness is that anything implementable as turing machines can in principle be worked on pencil and paper by following a few rote procedures. and i can't get past the absurdity of a (very large) stack of papers operated on by a rotating staff of interns doing some arithmetic having its own subjective experience 2023-03-17 22:30:57 (yeah, see also: the chinese room) 2023-03-17 22:31:15 but neurons and such? they are specialized cells, “programmed” by evolution or more precisely natural selection. 2023-03-17 22:32:16 koisoke: what is so wierd about the paper ai you just described? 2023-03-17 22:33:03 sure its chronometric is absurdly slow relative to ours 2023-03-17 22:33:49 (see flicker fusion rate on how this is measured in humans and animals) 2023-03-17 22:36:29 Zarutian_iPad: nothing is weird about it. it will work fine if really slowly. "the hard problem of consciousness" is about a weirdness of biological minds that i don't have any good explanation for but which gets really, really weird if one posits extending to substrates like the paper ai 2023-03-17 22:36:42 Re: "emergent behavior" - it's a great phrase, but I think it gets overused. One example I've seen (that I think "qualifies") is how "termite towers" wind up taking on a spiral shape, due to something about the sand particles or whatever - I forget the details. 2023-03-17 22:36:59 But in any case, it's a "small shape" giving rise to a surprising complex "large shape." 2023-03-17 22:37:16 That doesn't seem surprising to me at all - I might not have predicted it, but I can see how we get there. 2023-03-17 22:37:38 pesky fractals, always showing up 2023-03-17 22:37:58 But when the phrase is used to explain away consciousness, I just don't get it. You're talking about an entirely new and different "large behavior," and the cute phrase lets them dodge any sort of REAL explanation. 2023-03-17 22:38:07 fractals and combinartoric complexities 2023-03-17 22:38:15 If consciousness "emerges" from complexity in the brain, I need to be told EXACTLY how. 2023-03-17 22:38:25 Until we can do that it's not an adequate explanation. 2023-03-17 22:38:28 with an Lsystem you can draw a fern with some simple rules 2023-03-17 22:38:32 one such example are Wang Tile carpets 2023-03-17 22:38:42 Maybe it turns out to be right, but no one can actually prove it yet. 2023-03-17 22:39:21 It reminds me of this: 2023-03-17 22:39:23 https://image.slidesharecdn.com/20100608webcontentchicagoslideshare-100609140333-phpapp02/95/slide-31-1024.jpg 2023-03-17 22:39:52 KipIngram: and here is the crux of it. We, humanity do not yet know how conscuisnrss “emerges” in brains. 2023-03-17 22:40:08 And therefore we don't know that it DOES. 2023-03-17 22:40:19 It's left as a possibility that it isn't purely physical. 2023-03-17 22:40:49 The mainstream argument boils down to "it *must* arise from complexity, because there's no other way to get it." 2023-03-17 22:41:28 thrig: re Lsystems: pretty neat. Hell a guy on Second Life made plants that way. Electronic virtual house plants for example. 2023-03-17 22:41:31 It's just too big of a question mark for me to swallow without further support. 2023-03-17 22:44:05 hmm.. before the invention of the microscope it was thought that living things had anima or chi essence to them. Sort of an element of life. 2023-03-17 22:44:32 sort of like phlogiston in burnt things 2023-03-17 22:45:31 turns out living things are made of cells that are quite complicated 2023-03-17 22:47:31 seen an complexity map of say the linux kernel? it is like a little blob beside a jupiter sized behemoth of say E. coli basic metabolic pathway regulation network 2023-03-17 22:51:01 KipIngram: ya got an OpenAI ChatGPT account? What does it say if you ask it about these things? 2023-03-17 22:58:23 I tried that last weekend for the first time - I didn't ask it about these things, but overall I wasn't horribly impressed. 2023-03-17 22:59:52 I think the best way for me to sum up how I feel is that it's a stretch to consider the possibility that our minds are "magic" in some way. But it's also a stretch (for me) to see minds as arising from purely physical processes, and at least at this point in my life that latter stretch is bigger and harder for me. I'm sufficiently skeptical about the viability of a physical explanation, that it's easier 2023-03-17 22:59:54 for me to regard it as "something" outside of physicality that we don't understand yet. 2023-03-17 23:00:02 Exactly what I can't possibily see how to say. 2023-03-17 23:00:42 I did find Bernardo Katrup's basic idea as at least a little bit plausible when I read about it. 2023-03-17 23:01:42 And once I've taken that step, it's suddenly a lot easier to be open minded about some of these other possibilities, just because the "thing we don't understand yet" is such a big thing. 2023-03-17 23:01:56 Who knows what all comes along for the ride. 2023-03-17 23:02:50 I mean, I'm fallible, so I could certainly be wrong, but "physical consciousness" LOOKS more or less impossible to me.