"I am a drifter, and as lonely as that can be, it is also remarkably freeing. I will never define myself in terms of anyone else. I will never feel the pressure of peers or the burden of parental expectation. I can view everyone as pieces of a whole, and focus on the whole, not the pieces. I have learned to observe, far better than most people observe. I am not blinded by the past or motivated by the future. I focus on the present because that is where I am destined to live."
"If you don't get everything you want, think of the things you don't get that you don't want."
"First, flood market with potatoes. Every single shop, fast food store, etc. has your potatoes. They're so cheap that no one can compete and ends up moving to other crops since they can't make a profit. Now, once your potato hegemony is established, slowly roll back potato supply. Enough to cause some rise in prices but not enough for panic. All of a sudden, stop potato supply. No one can supply enough to match your previous supply and the Great International Potato Inflationary Crisis occurs. World leaders clamor for you to resume your supply, and you laugh maniacally from your potato funded spaceship. Hold the world to ransom as supplies of chips, fries and crisps dwindle and die. Once sufficient panic has been created, get plastic surgery done and come back to Earth as the Potato Messiah, slowly bringing back potatoes to the world. The world is so grateful that they vote you World Leader. If they don't, cut off potato supply again.
I might face invasion - potato funded private military for my sovereign space state of Potatica would be used to fend off attacks and burn down competing potato farms on Earth. I mean I'm not saying you'd want to destroy people's lives and incomes, but they really shouldn't be growing potatoes.
Anyway, with near infinite potatoes, you have infinite ammo. With enough research and development we'd have potato bullets, potato armor, potato piercing rounds and potato cannonballs. Global military effort wouldn't stand a goddamn chance against the might of Potatica."
There exists no proof of anything real, and by nature of words (and fundamentally our existence) there never can. That's because the word proof only applies to ideas and reality isn't one. Math has proofs, physics does not. Your idea of reality is just a probabilistic model based on imperfect interpretations of your experiences.
[From somewhere in the depths of reddit.]
"The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams."
Just debated some idiots again and have to vent a little...
1) Nothing is ever proven in science. A proof is an operation of formal logic and is applicable mainly to mathematical truth only, which is basically simply consequence of axioms.
2) Science shows the validity of a theory by demonstrating it is a good model for a set of observations. It is not possible to literally prove any property of the reality. It is only possible to construct models of reality based on observations. The validity of these models is judged by their ability to make predictions.
3) Observation is any phenomenon which leaves some sort of relatively stable track of its existence. There can never be anything uncertain about an observation, only about the interpretation. There is a dependency between the repeatability of obsevations and reliability of the theory. That has historically been observed to be universally significant measure of the predictive power of the theory.
4) The mission of science is to model phenomenons. A model is a compact historically valid description of observations with significant demonstrations of predictive power (concerning then future). Scientific theory is the highest graduation point of this process. A theory is immediately invalid or at most only a limited approximation if it does not match some observation. (Though obviously this effect is sometimes just some fringe outlier. Never the less the exact interpretation of the sentence is still true, but it may often mean nothing more than the inability of the theory and experimenter to predict and observe the exact nature of chaotic thermal noise.)
5) Historically prevalent theories (like Newtons mechanics) have not been wrong, the word is not correct for the context, because they have only been appriximations which have later on been made more accurate by other theories (like Einsteins theory of relativity). Science does not assume theories to be exact models of the world, only good fits to the observations of their time with significant nonzero predictive power.
6) The purpose of peer review is to improve the reliability of generally accepted scientific models and increase the efficiency of progress by cutting out clearly invalid or highly unlikely meaningful material.
7) A phenomenon is not guilty of existence until shown otherwise.
Problem of induction
-------------------------
I'm of the opinion that this is nothing more than playing the game by the rules you have learned. If one day the rules no longer apply or you learn there are exceptions to the rules, you play by the new rules. Shouldn't this be trivial?
And as opposed to what? Not playing by those rules? Or playing by the rules someone else invented? Playing by random rules? Or not playing at all? Feel free, but expect anything.
Logical positivism
----------------------
I would say there is nothing wrong with the goal of logical positivism at all in its root. It was just taken too seriously. Too many saw the ultimate goal to be some sort of absolute mechanism for knowledge and nothing less would constitute to anything, but perhaps they failed to see the reason why such a road could only be approximated and approached never to be reached and perhaps to some extent the arbitrary nature of this endevour. The reason perhaps being finiteness of human experience. Perhaps the same fundamental principle which limits all courses of thought. Manifested by Gödel's incompleteness theorem and Turing's halting problem. We can't deal with absolutes or infinities. There is no finite self consistent doctrine and there can never be. After all, this was essentially proven. But why did they even expect such a thing? We can still approach infinitely even if we know we'll never reach it. We just need to decide to do so even if it is arbitrary and in some sense futile.
...and I still find it somewhat comforting that we also know that...
...any finite-state machine, if left completely to itself, will fall eventually into a perfectly periodic repetitive pattern. The duration of this repeating pattern cannot exceed the number of internal states of the machine...
Dualism, qualia and philosophical zombies - the hard problem of consciousness
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1) The claim is that qualia cannot be reduced to anything physical.
2) That is the claim, now demonstrate it, because I don't feel it.
What is it like to be a bat? Nagel argued that even if we knew everything there was to know from a third-person, scientific perspective about a bat's sonar system, we still wouldn't know what it is like to be a bat.
I don't see how this would point towards dualism. To me it simply means we are not the bat. The causal chain of thinking about pain is not the same as feeling the pain. And obviously "we" cannot have the same causal chain without becoming the bat.
"If my mental processes are determined wholly by the motions of atoms in my brain, I have no reason to suppose that my beliefs are true ... and hence I have no reason for supposing my brain to be composed of atoms."
Perhaps so, but nature doesn't care and neither do I. And in some ways, neither do you. Because you have no reason to suppose or to do anything at all. You just do. We keep living, and we keep playing the game, in the end because that's what we are, that's what we do and in some sense that's what we must do.
Causal interaction requires that dualism must explain how consciousness interacts with physical reality. Well they certainly don't explain it, but when someone said quantum mechanics they grabbed their last straw. I'd like to see their faces if quantum mechanics turned out to be deterministic, but though I think that'll turn out to be the case, even if that's not, we know things about the nature of quantum mechanics which seems to make it irrelevant. The statistical nature of quantum mechanics seems completely devoid of something I'd call mind and we understand and have tested that nature very well.
Somehow the strongest argument for the existence of some unknown aspect (which I still don't really believe) of the mind in is my mind the following scenario.
Let's say a machine capable of copying humans is made, and it is used to make a copy of you. (It is in fact impossible to copy exact quantum states, but let's say they are not meaningful or just simply ignore it.)
1) At the same time the original is destroyed. What do you experience? How do you feel (if anything) after this process has taken place?
2) Both the original and the copy are kept. What do you experience? Which "you" do "you" experience?
What does the experiencing? The universe? Is there a well defined you?
Some possibilities:
1.1) You die and experience nothing. A new consciousness is born (with your memories) and the universe goes about its merry business never knowing any better. But, what is death anyway?
1.2) You observe as if you'd been transported. But then is it actually "you" who's experiencing it or is it the universe somehow? One thing to consider is that the wavefunction of that which is essentially you has nonlocal properties according to quantum mechanics. Your wavefunction actually covers the whole universe and though it has peak existence here and now it is as objectively as can be, true, that you simultaneously exist everywhere and in fact everytime as well. You will "feel" what happens on the other side of the universe. Even locally your atoms are continuously tunneling from place to place and time to time and have no unique objective existence. You already are an information state of the universe. So quantum mechanics which was supposed to be the saviour of dualism has basically already beamed you up.
2.1) You keep your old body and experience nothing out of the ordinary. The copy is just a new consciousness born, but the universe can't tell the difference and perhaps neither can the copy, for the copy's point of view he was just you transported.
2.2) As you now essentially exist identically in two places at once you experience some sort of odd synthesis and duality of experience (but how?), perhaps what was you was some weird mechanism of the universe and something really odd occurs ...or not! According to quantum mechanics when atoms interact they entangle their states to some extent depending on the strength of this interaction. However, all atoms continuously interact (if only extremely weakly) with all other atoms. And they have a history of interaction as long as the lifetime of the universe already. You are already entangled with yourself, your friends, your surrounding and the rest of the universe. You have no independent existence, you never had. It's all just a matter of degrees. Perhaps whatever we could ever do could only be described as an unusually quick fast change in our state of affairs.
The argument for solipsism tends to boil down to something along these lines...
...everything is you and you aren't aware of the vast majority of it.
However, this seems exceedingly counterproductive definition of the word "you" to me. I would rather define not me as that which I am not directly aware of. Or at the very least something which isn't integral part of that which is my core consciousness. Me is that which is close to me, not me is that which is far from me.
This is a kind of quantifiable quantity. I can think of a N number of thing in t amount of time I can't expect to be able to do at arbitrary time of my choosing. However, I cannot think of any thoughts I could not think of (kind of obviously). Of course I might still be limited by the lack imagination when it comes to my own thoughts, or even be only a product of a deterministic processes and as such possess no "true" imagination, but never the less I experience the feeling that I can think of any thoughts I can imagine at any time I desire.
For example dreams aren't really part of my core consciousness in a relevant way even if they might be an unavoidable byproduct of the machinery that makes my core essence possible. I cannot exert the same level of control over my dreams immediately and arbitrarily or things external to me as I can exert over my thoughts right now. I'm basically omnipotent when it comes to my thoughts, but I'm very much less so of the external world.
Additionally, I can see my consciousness existing perfectly well without experiencing any dreams. Similarly, I can see it existing perfectly well without other people. However, I cannot see it existing without my thoughts and experiences. Even though my existence might in the end become empty and meaningless should all the people vanish from the world and should I be unable to find meaning in solitary endeavours like exploring the remaining universe let alone the case where no universe would be left to experience anymore and I would only be stuck in perfect void with only my limited memories.
Existence of these distances in the experiences is that which ultimately separates me from others (and everything else not me). It may very well be that I need the entire universe to exist as I do and the universe might need me. However, it is the distances and consequences of those distances, the amount of coupling between my immediate beingness and my less immediate environment, that makes concepts such as me, you and consciousness possible and meaningful. If you become one with the world, you cease to exist as a separate entity within it. But also, without any coupling to the external world, you become small and isolated. The world has the potential to make you great, and perhaps you have the potential to make the world greater, but the balance may be fragile.
It seems trivial to me there is a world external to me, it's simply the way language is used. To claim otherwise would appear to me only as dysfunction and incoherent semantics counterproductive to the purpose of language.
It also seems trivial to me that we cannot have absolute knowledge of anything short of our own existence and we shouldn't expect to. This is simply the nature of information. All knowledge itself seems to be subject to this same kind of continuum of distance as this internal and external world discussion. Nothing particularly surprising, unknown or problematic in my opinion.
To certain extent there doesn't seem to be any point in trying to draw a well defined line between individual and the world as everything interacts with everything. The wave function of a single electron covers the whole universe. It is still reasonable to discuss degrees of separation, isolation, distance, time etc as near and far is not equal. This is true even if it is a discussion of physics or simply thought.
It is my impression that this sort of discussion would be a good starting point for analyzing consciousness as well. I'm not convinced philosophical zombie for example is a meaningful concept, or if it is then we should perhaps all consider ourselves philosophical zombies. For example if there is a mechanistical explanation to human mind which perfectly explains all observations then there doesn't seem to be any room left for unknown factors. If some unknown "essence" would be added on top of the equation then we would still necessarily be reduced only to prisoners in our own bodies.
However, that is already much more subtle point than my point about solipsism. Solipsism I would consider trivial and unproblematic aspect of human experience whereas I might still be open to the idea that there might still be some fundamental questions left about consciousness.
"When he has succeeded in being Caesar's friend, he has none the less failed to get what he was seeking. For what is it that every man is seeking? To live securely, to be happy, to do everything as he wishes to do, not to be hindered, not to be subject to compulsion … If he is not invited [by Caesar], he is hurt, and if he is invited, he dines like a slave at a master's table, all the time careful not to say or do something foolish … When did you sleep more peacefully, now or before you became Caesar's friend?" Epictetus. Book IV, Chapter 1.
"Men in great place are thrice servants: servants to the sovereign or state, servants of fame, and servants of business, so as they have no freedom, neither in their persons, nor in their actions, nor in their times." Francis Bacon. Essays, Of Great Place.
"When, therefore, neither those who are styled kings live as they will, nor the friends of these kings, what free men are left? Seek and you will find. For nature has given you resources to find the truth." Epictetus. Book IV, Chapter 1.
I noticed wikipedia has a new visualization for the Riemann zeta function. However I'm not sure it's quite best way to show it in every case. This is how it looks:
This is a complex function so each point in 2D-plane has phase and amplitude. In the domain coloring scheme the phase is represented by hue (color) and amplitude by value (intensity). This particular image has some modulo coloring of the amplitude etc. and the difference can be most easily seen by comparing it to these 3D-plots I made where the hue independently represents the phase and amplitude is simply represented by the 3rd dimension.
The second image has phase exaggerated quite a lot to make it clear that for these values the true change of phase is quite different from what it appears in the wikipedia image.
While I was at it, I also plotted the Mandelbrot fractal in terms of the complex value after iteration instead of number of iterations as it's usually done. This too resulted in a rather trippy image. Though obviously hue coloring tends to always results in rather trippy images.
Here hue represents phase angle of the complex number and value (intensity) the amplitude. 3D representation is also rather interesting.
Here only hue is varied.
N = 1024;
s = zeros(N, N);
for y = 1:N
for x = 1:N
z0 = (6*x/N-3.5) + j*(6*y/N-3);
z = 0;
iteration = 0;
max_iteration = 256;
while norm(z) < 8 && iteration < max_iteration
z = z^2 + z0;
iteration = iteration + 1;
end
s(x, y) = log(iteration);
S(x, y) = z;
end
end
figure;
imagesc(s);
truesize;
colormap(hot(256));
h = angle(S);
h = h-min(min(h));
h = h/max(max(h));
v = abs(S);
hsv(:,:,1) = h;
hsv(:,:,2) = 1;
hsv(:,:,3) = 1;
% hsv(:,:,3) = v/max(max(v));
rgb = hsv2rgb(hsv);
figure;
x = 6*[1:N]/N-3.5;
y = 6*[1:N]/N-3;
surf(x, y, v, rgb, 'edgecolor', 'none');
shading interp;
figure;
image(x, y, rgb);
imwrite(rgb, 'compmand.png', 'png')
How to test shaders with minimal effort on OSX (though it'll work with relatively minor changes on linux as well)...
How about this shit (http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=58666):
[bits 32]
; Use Python to load the SDL library, open an SDL window, mmap us into memory,
; then start the intro.
db `python -c"from ctypes import *;S=CDLL('libSDL.so');`
db `CFUNCTYPE(int)(S.mmap(0,1,7,2,S.open('$0',2),0)+167)`
db `(S.SDL_SetVideoMode(640,480,0,0),S.SDL_PollEvent,S.SDL_Flip);" #`
; Global constants
%define XRES 640 ; X resolution of screen
%define YRES 480 ; Y resolution of screen
%define VOXEL_SIZE 4 ; Size of a voxel (2^VOXEL_SIZE)
%define MAXITS 32 ; Maximum number of iterations when marching
%define ROT_SPEED 120 ; Speed of rotation (larger = slower)
; Pseudonyms for stack addresses within main()
%define SURFACE ebp + 08 ; Pointer to an SDL_Surface
%define SDL_POLLEVENT ebp + 12 ; Pointer to SDL_Pollevent() function
%define SDL_FLIP ebp + 16 ; Pointer to SDL_Flip() function
main:
push ebp
mov ebp, esp
...
This fellow does interesting trick to avoid having to make a proper binary on linux, resulting in 512 byte demo.
One can dynamically (or sometimes even not so dynamically) load function addresses in C as well.
Looks like one can save 4 bytes in the gzip header technique by just leaving last 4 out. They are crc-32, so they aren't really needed. It'll say truncated input, but works just fine. Previous code gives 675 byte executable (Mac).
I'm not troubled by the fact that there are (mathematical) problems which I do not understand. However, I'm deeply troubled that there are problems which I do understand and yet remain unable to solve.
Suppose the Universe is simply a big computer, a deterministic binary calculator, simple naive information, bit flips and other trivial operations. A machine which simply must exist like the value of pi must be whatever it is, something as simple (in relative terms) as natural numbers for some reason. Suppose we’ll never exceed the speed of light or build a time machine because the Universe doesn’t support those ideas. Suppose all known mysteries of math will have a straightforward closure. P=NP, co-primes can be factored in polynomial time, a perfect games of chess can be found, go gets solved. What goes up, must come down. All fundamental principles will be known. Standard model, quantum mechanics and relativity will merge to give us the theory of everything. Life is just a matter of complexity, mind nothing more than a complex machine, free will an illusion. Life after death doesn’t exit. Art is a simple pattern corresponding to our similarity, brain states, math, and evolutionary history of our species. Love just chemistry. Moore’s law hits a limit. Peace on earth, a cure for cancer. All predictable. All controllable by a perfect machine. AI will surpass human capacity in every way imaginable, but will reveal nothing fundamentally unexpected or unpredictable. Suppose normal biological death will be cured so we may live forever if we so desire and choose.
Then what?
What reason will there be to live? Other than perhaps the human compulsion, the need to feel, but will it be any different from the chemical high of heroin? Was it ever different? Ever noble? Does it need to be? Was it always arbitrary? When all is said and done, would it not be better to remain small, to remain stupid and weak, out of control, be able to forget so we might feel again like the first time? But is this not self deception? Does it have value? Does anything have value? Perhaps not really, but it may not matter, because we are small today and will undoubtedly remain small for years to come. Only in the far distant future can we hope to see far enough on our path to give meaningful answers to these questions.
What about living (forever)? Why does it have value? Why does continuity have value? Because I feel so? But why do I feel so? What difference does it make? Perhaps nothing, and it might be that living a million years would be enough, I wouldn’t know, I can't know, until I’ve lived a million years.
Perhaps you really can’t get an ought from an is. Perhaps it all is what it is, trivial.
I still wish I could have my millions of euros, millions of years and millions of lives, for some reason. I wish to be, do and will. And who’s to say there’s anything wrong with that.
But not to give up on hope entirely... There are still wondrous mysteries and things like the infinity appearing in all of math and science, and many wonderful problems, something which might imply the Universe is still a bit more complicated and wonderful than we can imagine. The quantum mechanics possibly implying there is a reality hidden from us containing an amount of information which is possibly infinitely greater than that which we can observe now (or not). Perhaps there is hope and the Universe is still much greater than we've ever been able to imagine. I just hope I get to experience someday at least some of that greatness.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Necessitarianism
—
Halting problem? What problem? It is well know that “...any finite-state machine, if left completely to itself, will fall eventually into a perfectly periodic repetitive pattern. The duration of this repeating pattern cannot exceed the number of internal states of the machine…”
An ant starts to crawl along a taut rubber rope 1 km long at a speed of 1 cm per second (relative to the rubber it is crawling on). At the same time, the rope starts to stretch by 1 km per second (both in front of and behind the ant, so that after 1 second it is 2 km long, after 2 seconds it is 3 km long, etc).
When will the ant reach the end of the rope?
...the answer in the end.
----
Intel Ivy Bridge CPUs (rdrand instruction) and Raspberry Pi have a hardware random number generator which allows the production of seemingly very secure non-deterministic random numbers from thermal etc. sources for cryptographic purposes.
I also noticed that my MacBook Air uses Ivy Bridge i5 which comes with the rdrand instrunction. However the gcc on MacOS didn't seem to support this instruction so I wrote an assembly program (using nasm) to test if I get random numbers out of it. Seemed to work.
I tested the hwrng on the rpi and found that FIPS 140-2 gives similar results to /dev/urandom on linux, however /dev/hwrng on rpi should be intrincically non-deterministic, or at least similarly non-deterministic as thermal noise. The performance seems to be around 107 kB/s, rdrand appeared to give around 240 MB/s on a single core and single thread. I didn't bother tweaking. The official figure is supposedly at least 500 MB/s.
It's another question whether one can trust these hardware implementations or not as we have no sure way of knowing what they actually do and hardware manufacturer may be collaborating with NSA for example and get pseudorandom numbers anyway which might have a pattern identifiable by someone who knows how it was done.
; nasm -f macho64 rdr.asm ; nasm -f elf64 rdr.asm bits 64 global rdr section .text rdr: rdrand rax ; jnc rdr ; if CF=0, random data not available, try again, however, does not occur on Ivy Bridge so can be ignored at the moment ret ; gcc rdr.c rdr.o #include <stdio.h> int rdr(); int main() { int x; for(x=0; x<256*256*256*2; x++) printf("%c", rdr()); } #!/bin/bash clear dd if=/dev/urandom of=./urandom.bin count=65536 ./a.out > hwrandom.bin echo echo --rdrand--rdrand--rdrand--rdrand-- echo cat hwrandom.bin | rngtest echo echo --urandom--urandom--urandom--urandom-- echo cat urandom.bin | rngtest rngtest: starting FIPS tests... rngtest: entropy source exhausted! rngtest: bits received from input: 268435456 rngtest: FIPS 140-2 successes: 13413 rngtest: FIPS 140-2 failures: 8 rngtest: FIPS 140-2(2001-10-10) Monobit: 1 rngtest: FIPS 140-2(2001-10-10) Poker: 0 rngtest: FIPS 140-2(2001-10-10) Runs: 5 rngtest: FIPS 140-2(2001-10-10) Long run: 2 rngtest: FIPS 140-2(2001-10-10) Continuous run: 0
... this is about 60MS/s, for the xcorr calculation discussed before it would be 2x20 MS/s (2 forwards, 1 backwards).
----
Eating one banana gives you higher dose of radiation than living next to a nuclear power plant for a year. Sleeping next to another human for 100 days equals one dental x-ray.
----
…the answer to the ant problem being about 8.8e43421 years.
(A huge, yet finite number much larger than any quantity in this universe.)
