Tuesday, June 30, 2015

Best ps4 graphics e3 2015

Watch in fullscreen 1080p directly on youtube for a better experience.

Sunday, June 28, 2015

another kurzweilai forum reply

BTW it is not nonsense to believe in souls since there are NDEs, some of which do seem to refute the idea that consciousness requires a functioning brain.-extropia

Give a memory disrupting chemical to a person, and even if they're conscious for hours after taking it they won't remember a thing, fully living fully breathing fully conscious, and won't be able to say what happened and will claim they weren't conscious. These near death experience, the thing is they are memories recorded in the brain otherwise they couldn't report them, which suggests they're the product of some brain function, if they weren't recorded in the brain we would have the same outcome as happens when brain memory function is chemically disrupted in fully conscious humans, they can't report it.

That is whatever happened took place within the brain, unless we were to claim that the brain has some supernatural way of recording things that happen outside the scope of brain function. Which would be dubious as we know the process of memory storage is physical process of physical change in the brain via physical molecules interacting.-castiel

Saturday, June 27, 2015

nice quote

" If the heart is a biological pump, and the nose is a biological filter, the brain is a biological computer, a machine for processing information in lawful, systematic ways.

The sooner we can figure out what kind of computer the brain is, the better."-link

Kurzweil ai reply on computation and the brain

At the end of the day the computer metaphor is just that... a metaphor and it does little to illuminate the actual workings there in.

/End thread.-purpose

Unless what the brain is doing is actual information processing and algorithms.   A traditional computer can do anything that can be done through algorithms, and it is a machine that does information processing.

Now, let's ask what function of human activity...   Remember the main purpose of brains was to act in the world, so their main purpose is functional, improving survival.   So again, what function done by humans is beyond computers' ability to perform?   Most anyone serious will say there is nothing any animal, including humans, can do physically upon the world that a computer cannot do given the same body.

Actually I'll say computers will not only be able to do the same, but with the right algorithms they will be better at survival than any animal even humans, beating brains at their own game.

Now there are those that say consciousness is nonfunctional, and thus that will be the one thing that can't be done.   Well as a conscious entity, it seems like consciousness provide a HIGH BANDWIDTH ACCESS simultaneously to data from all sensory modalities, it definitely feels functional, and I'm highly skeptical of it being epiphenomenal.  In the end even if this were the case[epiphenomenality], which I'm doubtful of,  that we can achieve functional equivalence or even superiority without this, well the reality is it wouldn't actually matter now would it?  AGIs could still outperform humans, again unless there is some fabled function humans physically perform that a computer cannot given the same body.

What are the odds that rather than finding common computational algorithms, in the landscape of possibilities, to solve problems[with researchers saying they've shown the brain doing algorithms we use on our cell phones like the kalman filter], or gain fields[which have been observed in artificial neural networks], evolution found some special nonalgorithmic way of processing information and generating survival?   What's the prediction you'd make from such a hypothesis?   That algorithmic processes to survive do not exist[an algorithmic machine for survival cannot be built]?  That evolution somehow evaded these?   That such traditional algorithms appear to exist in some brain functions for unknown reasons and do NOT actually contribute to brain function?  -Darien S, kurzweil ai reply

video on automation

Friday, June 26, 2015

cool vid on automation

tricke down economics



Nice quotes:
 "Of course trickle down economics doesn't work. In an age of mass production you need a mass domestic market. If you put the squeeze on the people who provide that mass market. you leave yourself vulnerable to cheaper imports and destroy your own industry. In doing that you progressively increase dependency on welfare and increase the tax burden of paying for it on the mass market you have already put the boot into and expect to consume the home produced goods you have made unaffordable to them. It's economic suicide and always has been. A triple whammy on your own economy. How can massively increasing the purchasing power of 1% and reducing the purchasing power of 99% possibly stimulate a mass production economy? It can't. It can only lead to a progressively shrinking share of your own domestic market and the exodus of manufacturing to countries with cheaper labour, worsening the trade deficit and increasing debt as social welfare balloons. Oh well, never let the facts and the prosperity of the country get in the way of making the rich richer. Let's just put it all down to a word, "globalization." Then government doesn't carry the can for economic  incompetence and putting the interests of the rich before the interests of the nation."-2001 perseus

" The biggest lie every sold to the public originates with the right wing intentionally confusing the effective tax rate with the top tax bracket.  Let's say income over 1 million is taxed at 70% and the tax rate is 35% for income below that. If you make $1,000,001 you only pay the 70% tax rate on that last dollar. The right wing has INTENTIONALLY convinced the public that because you made that extra dollar you now have to pay $750,000.70 in taxes, even though you actually only pay $350,000.70. They KNOW this. They're not stupid. The people that swallow the lie are stupid though. They KNOW that people will still try to make that last dollar, because they GAIN 30 cents rather than LOSING $400,000.70." -Reaves MO

"The misrepresentation of "job creators" is the most destructive myth of our economy. Consumers who spend and create demand are the job creators, not billionaire multinational CEOs who own companies that hire people at the lowest possible wages to produce supply. If no one can buy your products, then demand goes down and people are laid off in droves, like during the financial crisis. This seems like the most basic tenet of a consumer economy, and yet all of Washington is somehow oblivious. How are they "job creators" if they are responsible for a net loss of U.S. jobs? It doesn't even make mathematical sense. It's consumer demand that creates jobs. We have fetishized "entrepreneurs" as if that's where our supply comes from; it's not, no one gets loaned money to start a small business anymore because there's already too many Wal-Marts everywhere. The Waltons didn't create those jobs, demand for cheap products created those jobs, and all the better-paying local businesses that shut down when Wal-Mart came to town supplied the employees (who are now subsidized by the government so they can afford food). Wal-Mart is not an American success story, it's the purest example of the fundamental failures of the U.S. economy over the last 30 years."mediumvillain



Power of chocolate?

Chocolate-loving Sarah Knauss is the second oldest person whose age has ever been authenticated. She was a youthful 99 years old in the picture above. She lived another 20 years. The only person ever proven to have lived longer than Sarah Knauss was fellow chocoholic Jeanne Calment - who lived to be 122.-link

Nice quote

Tuesday, June 23, 2015

Nice neuroscience news article.

Our brains track moving objects by applying one of the algorithms your phone's GPS uses, according to researchers at the University of Rochester.-link



A nice article that suggests the brain uses algorithms similar to those devised by engineers in our technology.

Wednesday, June 17, 2015

Programmed aging article

ABSTRACT
Standard evolutionary theories of aging and mortality, implicitly based on mean-field assumptions, hold that programed mortality is untenable, as it opposes direct individual benefit. We show that in spatial models with local reproduction, programed deaths instead robustly result in long-term benefit to a lineage, by reducing local environmental resource depletion via spatiotemporal patterns causing feedback over many generations. Results are robust to model variations, implying that direct selection for shorter life span may be quite widespread in nature.-link

Study provides more support for the viability of programmed aging theories.

Tuesday, June 9, 2015

cool exercise machine

Nice quote from a theguardian.com article

Norman Reimer, executive director of the National Association for Criminal Defense Lawyers, was less circumspect when he recently spoke about this issue:
"Bail is used as ransom to extract a guilty plea. Fact."-Link

Monday, June 8, 2015

Video with comments regarding strong ai

interesting vid on ai

Comment on a Q&A I saw on the site reasonablefaith

Comments on an answer regarding God
   You state your fundamental question as follows: How do we know that God is good?Now at one level, as I explained in last week’s Question #294, that question is easy to answer: it is conceptually necessary that God be good. That is to say, goodness belongs to the very concept of God, just as being unmarried belongs to the concept of a bachelor. For (i) by definition God is a being worthy of worship, and only a being which is perfectly good would be worthy of worship; and (ii) as the greatest conceivable being God must be morally perfect, since it is better to be morally perfect than morally flawed.

Read more: http://www.reasonablefaith.org/on-the-goodness-of-god#ixzz3cRvGSh7H

Notice,  That this doesn't answer what is good?  Is it what humans define as good?  What is moral, is it humanity's morality that defines all morality?   It also assumes that there is such a thing as absolute or objective morality, it is an open question whether such truly exists.(some have even argued that morality requires authority, which is another open question).   

 It is also questionable to say that the greatest conceivable being must necessarily be either good or moral, at least by human standards, and even without human standards, this depends on objective goodness and objective morality existing.   All that it needs to be is perfect, and we can't say humans definition of perfection is necessarily equivalent to true perfection.    An entity of absolute knowledge and power,  a truly perfect divine being, might have arrived at a rational basis for action that could be entirely alien from a human perspective, it could very well be beyond human morality and human definitions of good and evil.



Thus, the source of our moral duties is God’s commandments. That’s why what Herod did was wrong: he transgressed a divine command to not murder. Now since God presumably does not issue commands to Himself, it follows that He has no moral duties. Hence, it is logically incoherent to allege that God has done something which He ought not to do.

Read more: http://www.reasonablefaith.org/on-the-goodness-of-god#ixzz3cRzCRr7o

Notice that the commandments require very high level of proof to say they are tied to a divine being, also note that archaeological evidence regarding the exodus story is scant.  IT is looking highly likely that like Noah, and Adam and eve, this too is yet another fictional story in the bible some ancient writer made up.    How can we claim the writings from some ancient uneducated man emerge from a divine being?   These were believed to be literal events that took place, but if they're made up, we have no more reason to hold them up than say the Illyad or Harry Potter.


Does that mean that God can just do anything? No, for God cannot act contrary to His own nature. God is essentially loving, fair, patient, consistent, and so forth

Read more: http://www.reasonablefaith.org/on-the-goodness-of-god#ixzz3cS08WX6L

Again we observe that what human's consider good, moral, just, perfect are being attributed to the divine.   But the imperfect products of evolution, whose morality is nothing more than a bare code to act in a social setting, is in all likelihood inadequate to match any objective morality there may or may not be, nor are humans' visions of the perfect necessarily correspondent with what is truly perfect. 

Now in another question and answer it seems the fallibility of man is accepted


Still, some attributes, such as moral perfection, omniscience, and omnipotence are evidently great-making properties.
You ask, “Even if we could imagine a greater being, can it not just be that those ''greater/higher attributes'' are unnecessary and therefore not really greater attributes?” Of course, as the examples just given show. But that is very different than disputing that God is the greatest possible being. We might mistakenly esteem an impassible God to be greater than a God capable of suffering, but that only shows that we failed to form an adequate conception of the greatest conceivable being. God is necessarily the greatest being possible, even if our concept of what such a being is like is fallible and so capable of correction and refinement.


Read more:http://www.reasonablefaith.org/why-cant-god-be-just-the-greatest-being 



 Well omniscience and omnipotence, within certain constraints are reasonable.   It is interesting to note that true omniscience basically requires determinism, and seems incompatible with true randomness.   Of course true randomness, like free will seems like a nonsensical concept if you look deeply into it.    Yet without free will, an incoherent concept, human beings are not truly morally responsible for their actions.   Thus they're guilt free, especially in a deterministic system, which it likely is, where it would be the one who set everything in motion upon whom all the moral responsibility would fall upon, as the initial conditions would determine all that was to come... unless this entity too was internally complex, and it too was deterministic then the blame would fall on no one.