WTF Bites
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perhaps the best analogy there is that brains/minds are what computers would be if we took the concept of self-modifying code and, instead of rigorously walling it away from everything to keep the system comprehensible, applied it all levels down to the individual hardware gates. It's an utterly different way of doing things, with everything bound together, interacting and changing each other all the time; nobody builds computers like that except for madmen (who usually fail, or go on to get a PhD or something).
Reminds me of the first attempts at building airplanes with flapping wings. It was only when the mechanisms for propulsion and lift were separated that working airplanes were built.
In this case, they're trying to find some way to get a conclusion (in the ground-to-consequent sense) from causes (cause-and-effect).
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@Tsaukpaetra said in WTF Bites:
@Tsaukpaetra said in WTF Bites:
@Tsaukpaetra said in WTF Bites:
@ben_lubar said in WTF Bites:
@Tsaukpaetra said in WTF Bites:
@pie_flavor said in WTF Bites:
@ben_lubar what?
Why?
Where?
When?
How?
Who?
Owh?
Woh!
Hwo.
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@Applied-Mediocrity said in WTF Bites:
It appears I can't count braces without IntelliSense anymore, smh.
None of my braces have IntelliSense.
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@pie_flavor said in WTF Bites:
Haven't they told you
NULL != NULL?Though actually that doesn't apply here. These are mathematical empty sets, and in mathematics any two sets with the same contents are considered equal.
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There's also the fun part where I recently read an article (I have to follow up on this) where they posited that behavioural science will probably skew sharply towards the "nature" part of nature versus nurture. It would seem that our specific characters/personalities are rather more hardcoded than we previously assumed.
It's not an easy thing to study, since you need to find identical twins that are separated very early in life and brought up in quite different environments (pretty rare) and also allow for all the other things that can happen to cause differences (some diseases, pollution, etc.) Without that, you get caught out by the embuggerances of common upbringing, which is where nature and nurture truly interact even without the direct influence of genes.
Hasn't it been shown that varying the "nurture" will make changes to the "nature"? That would imply that it's actually impossible to test the difference between nature and nurture, even with identical twins.
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@Applied-Mediocrity said in WTF Bites:
It appears I can't count braces without IntelliSense anymore, smh.
I was pretty disappointed after looking up
smhon UrbanDictionary. Thankfully my original guess:s**t my hat, seems to work fine in all the examples so I'll keep using that in my head.
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@ben_lubar said in WTF Bites:
@Tsaukpaetra said in WTF Bites:
@ben_lubar said in WTF Bites:
@Tsaukpaetra said in WTF Bites:
@ben_lubar Huh, 1/20 clicks/impression ratio. That's pretty impressive...
What three sites are so incredibly popular they like linking to his profile?
and to answer your next question:
Wouldn't every post he makes on
what.thedailywtf.combe counted as a link to his user profile?
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@dkf To explain what I meant by the “wat” image, the state of neuroscience is that it has a fairly good idea what memories are made of (patterns of synapses and the strengths of activation of those synapses, both of which are resolutely physical) at least for basic memories, and work is ongoing to understand more about what higher-level memories are like. Probably more of the same if you ask me, but the details are tricky (e.g., are there specialized neurons involved or are we just talking general patterns throughout). Thoughts are trickier — in large part because we're not really sure what they are — but betting that they are non-physical would seem odd. I predict that there won't be a single neuron for anything in particular, but the interplay of different patterns of neurons and synapses will be important. (There have been found neural patterns that act as attention selectors, patterns that act as spatial and temporal pattern detectors, and other patterns that act as phase locked loops of various descriptions. How these things fit together in hierarchies that predict possible futures and plan responses to them, that's one of the absolute total frontiers of science right now.)
This stuff is fun, and really needs interdisciplinary approaches; something that looks utterly confusing to one person is very clear to someone else with a different background. And you'll never understand it by a purely full-neuron-model first approach (just like you'd never understand a Google search by starting at the level of electron movement in CMOS gates); there's too many higher levels of organisation.
This is really cool science, and I'd love to learn more about it, but even so, it fails to address the issue I'm raising. To take your Google search analogy, there may be tons of really interesting and complex operations going on behind a search across the internet, and ultimately they come down to a bunch of electrons flowing through conductors and semiconductors in highly patterned and extremely complex ways on very complicated hardware. But, even though Google's servers are sitting there indexing the internet, a search isn't actually triggered until someone from outside that system inputs a query.
That's what I'm suggesting happens with our minds. The wetware is sitting there running its background processes and listeners, recording sensations, and offering automatic responses to certain environmental inputs; and then the metaphysical part of a person inputs a command or query, and away it goes responding to that new event.
If there is no metaphysical part of our existence, then everything we think is just another response of our "wetware," which means thoughts are simply more events that we experience, and we are no more responsible for them (and thus for any of our actions) than we are for preferring Brie more than Camembert, nor can we attach any more importance to one thought than another; if there is no metaphysical aspect to our existence, then thinking itself becomes utterly meaningless, and the fact that we think otherwise is just one of those quirks of our "thoughts." There is therefore basically no difference then between sanity and insanity; no one really knows (nor can know) how the universe actually works. And actually, the fact that we think we're making logical arguments or saying real things about reality falls under the same guillotine.
In short, trying to explain how thoughts can be purely the result of the natural biological processes of electrical and chemical reactions in the neurons of our brains can result with the only conclusion being that we cannot actually explain things. And if anything is to mean something, then that's patently ludicrous. Therefore, by non-contradiction, we must conclude that there is a non-physical/metaphysical part of our minds that can introduce new events into the "processing stream" of our physical existence.
Where does this weird idea come from that our thoughts have to “mean something”. That’s the patently ridiculous part.
But... they do... (Many of them, anyways. There's always the thoughts of wishful thinking, prejudices, and insane delusions.)
How else could we communicate?What??
That is not at all related. Thoughts being perfectly deterministic (which is stronger than "based purely on physical phenomena", as that's not really known yet) doesn't conflict with the ability to communicate. And is also unrelated to whether or not there's some magical higher "meaning" to them.
Computer programs can communicate. Data in Star Trek can communicate.You’re trying to do a shaky proof by contradiction on something arbitrary, ill defined and unfounded.
Not at all. It's only shaky, arbitrary, ill-defined, and unfounded (ungrounded) if the physical world encompasses all of existence.
That also doesn't make sense, but okay. So in the universe you're trying to disprove your proof is invalid and only in the one you're assuming your proof it is maybe not invalid. Thus, it's still not a useful proof.
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Emergence doesn't help fix the problem. In essence, it still just says that physical processes are forcing us to "think" certain thoughts. You do understand the distinction between a cause-and-effect relationship between two events and a grounds-to-consequent relationship between two ideas, right? But one thought (i.e. state of the brain) causing the next thought (state of the brain) to occur, no matter how complex the processes, cannot be shown to be more likely to formulate a sound or cogent grounds-to-consequent relationship between the ideas. How could it? A ground does not necessitate drawing all, or even any, of its possible consequents, whereas a cause does inevitably lead to all of its effects.
I think you're arguing a nonsense point.
I was already wondering how long it would take before you'd say this.
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Though actually that doesn't apply here. These are mathematical empty sets, and in mathematics any two sets with the same contents are considered equal.
TIL mathematical sets don't have static typing.
But seriously, it doesn't make much sense in my head that eg. the empty set of real numbers I've successfully divided by zero is equal to the empty set of living dinosaurs I've met last night.
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Might these top-down neuroscientists be suggesting that our minds may be "outside" the normal flow of time? If they're "outside" Time, then they're also outside Space as well, though obviously still connected to it, meaning minds are "meta"-physical, right?
No, that's the complete opposite of what they are suggesting.
Correct. A useful analogy is AJAX calls and threads. They are “outside” the “normal” flow of the main process and may return with data that’s preprocessed and is a distillation if that data across a time span. That can provide the illusion of an instant, when it represents a span in fact. Or they can expand the details of a data snapshot which can provide the opposite illusion.
Couple that with the fact that our brains have multiple, independant processing centers, many with their own “clocks”, running at different speeds...
Subjective time is messy.
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@pie_flavor said in WTF Bites:
Not at all. It's only shaky, arbitrary, ill-defined, and unfounded (ungrounded) if the physical world encompasses all of existence.
Narrator: "It does."
Then you have no way of proving that it does, because you cannot show any reasons to think that logical thinking is actually logical – that it is no more than a sequence of cause-and-effect events.
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Though actually that doesn't apply here. These are mathematical empty sets, and in mathematics any two sets with the same contents are considered equal.
TIL mathematical sets don't have static typing.
But seriously, it doesn't make much sense in my head that eg. the empty set of real numbers I've successfully divided by zero is equal to the empty set of living dinosaurs I've met last night.
Why not? The empty set of real numbers you've successfully divided by zero also contains all of the living dinosaurs you've met last night, and vice versa.
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Spot the difference round 2:
https://i.imgur.com/BqegrkZ.png
https://i.imgur.com/2iNGFjg.png
I'm not exactly complaining, I just think it's funny.
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@Tsaukpaetra said in WTF Bites:
@Tsaukpaetra said in WTF Bites:
@Tsaukpaetra said in WTF Bites:
@ben_lubar said in WTF Bites:
@Tsaukpaetra said in WTF Bites:
@pie_flavor said in WTF Bites:
@ben_lubar what?
Why?
Where?
When?
How?
Who?
Owh?
Woh!
Hwo.
Ohw....
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@pie_flavor said in WTF Bites:
Spot the difference round 2:
https://i.imgur.com/BqegrkZ.png
https://i.imgur.com/2iNGFjg.png
I'm not exactly complaining, I just think it's funny.Even worse. The second four questions are identical to the first four questions.
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Emergence doesn't help fix the problem. In essence, it still just says that physical processes are forcing us to "think" certain thoughts. You do understand the distinction between a cause-and-effect relationship between two events and a grounds-to-consequent relationship between two ideas, right? But one thought (i.e. state of the brain) causing the next thought (state of the brain) to occur, no matter how complex the processes, cannot be shown to be more likely to formulate a sound or cogent grounds-to-consequent relationship between the ideas. How could it? A ground does not necessitate drawing all, or even any, of its possible consequents, whereas a cause does inevitably lead to all of its effects.
I think you're arguing a nonsense point.
When one's fundamental perspective is that the physical is all that there is, the notion that you've got some higher non-physical part is the motivating agent just sounds ridiculous. There multiple levels of operation, sure, but there's ultimately nothing other there than the physical. You can claim that this cannot be, but that doesn't necessarily make your claim correct. The differences you claim between grounds and causes are irrelevant, as there's nothing but causes (though they're often not available to us to examine; we're talking a hidden variable theory here).
Might these top-down neuroscientists be suggesting that our minds may be "outside" the normal flow of time? If they're "outside" Time, then they're also outside Space as well, though obviously still connected to it, meaning minds are "meta"-physical, right?
No, they're suggesting that our perceptions are at least partially illusory.
Are you saying that you think the implication itself is invalid? That a purely physical event (if it's complicated enough) can cause a consequent thought? In other words, a thought being grounds for another (consequential) thought is also sufficient to cause the latter?
Yep. Though to properly state it, it's not just the thought that causes the second one, but rather the whole state of the brain which is extremely dependent on the history of the brain (there's all sorts of environmental insults which can change how things work, of which death is merely one of the more extreme ones). The first thought is merely a part of that state and that history.
Then it seems to me that you're confused about what thinking is. Events and states are not true or false. They just exist or don't exist. A thought, however, is about something else, and can thus be true or false. E.g. a movement of my arm cannot itself be true or false. The thought that I moved my arm here just now can be true or false, depending on whether I did actually move my arm in this place and at this time. You, on the other side of the internet, have no way of "knowing" whether I did actually move my arm, but you must recognize the fact that either I did or didn't, so the thought (or knowledge) that I did is necessarily either true or false. A thought's ability to pose information must be dependent on the factuality of the thing it poses. And that posit is something that must be true or false always everywhere. "If A = B and B = C, then A = C, (given the normal grade-school mathematical meanings)" is true. "2+2=5" is false. "I will move my arm in five minutes" is true or false depending on whether I actually do move my arm in five minutes.
To put it another way, you're proposing that we can find out how we make conclusions, but at the same time, the explanation makes it impossible to justify how our conclusions can be known to be correct. It's usefulness might make it "more" true, but that claim is itself an inference ("if useful, then true") that turns out to need justification, too. ("We think 'if useful, then true' must be true because it is more useful than thinking otherwise, therefore it must be true"?)
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@pie_flavor said in WTF Bites:
https://i.imgur.com/wArTi4M.png
https://i.imgur.com/9SE76eh.png
spot the difference- Question #15 is part 4 of 5; question #16 is part 5 of 5.
- Option (3) is selected in question #15, but nothing is selected for question #16.
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Hasn't it been shown that varying the "nurture" will make changes to the "nature"? That would imply that it's actually impossible to test the difference between nature and nurture, even with identical twins.
The difference between “nature” and “nurture” is indeed rather artificial, especially with epigenetic markers and expression levels (and loads of other detail at the cellular level). Perhaps a better way of putting it is to say that one's genes are the single greatest influence (that's why we're people, not dogs or trees or bacteria or…) but what happens with those genes is very much influenced by the environment they're in, whether the immediate cellular environment or the wider environment of the overall organism. Genes aren't predestination in any ways other than the crudest; they're just recipes for making particular proteins (and so on) often in response to certain stimuli.
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Thoughts being perfectly deterministic (which is stronger than "based purely on physical phenomena", as that's not really known yet) doesn't conflict with the ability to communicate.
The processes involved are, to a very good approximation, stochastically determined. The processes involved have quite a bit of randomness, some of which is quantum, but really most of it is because measuring the positions and energies of all those molecules involved to even a fairly basic level — well within what the uncertainty principle allows — is actually a total ball-ache. We have not a hope of measuring what all the water molecules involved are really up to, for example.
But here's the thing: put a bunch of stochastic processes together and the result becomes pretty predictable anyway. Thermodynamics is one of the simplest applications of this, but non-equilibrium systems (like neurons) are still actually statistically predictable. The equations for doing it are a horrible collection of around a dozen coupled non-linear ordinary differential equations with quite a lot of state variables, so modelling it (especially at any scale!) is pretty awful, but our understanding of what individual neurons do is actually pretty good. To the point where those models have (apparently) been used to predict phenomena that were subsequently observed in real neurons. Scaling those up to looking at networks of neurons is… intensely challenging, and we don't yet know how to simplify things to the point where essential features are retained but inessential ones removed. (A whole bunch of people have hypotheses on how to do that, but nobody has proved or disproved any of them yet. Yes, this is real cutting edge stuff.)
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@dkf To explain what I meant by the “wat” image, the state of neuroscience is that it has a fairly good idea what memories are made of (patterns of synapses and the strengths of activation of those synapses, both of which are resolutely physical) at least for basic memories, and work is ongoing to understand more about what higher-level memories are like. Probably more of the same if you ask me, but the details are tricky (e.g., are there specialized neurons involved or are we just talking general patterns throughout). Thoughts are trickier — in large part because we're not really sure what they are — but betting that they are non-physical would seem odd. I predict that there won't be a single neuron for anything in particular, but the interplay of different patterns of neurons and synapses will be important. (There have been found neural patterns that act as attention selectors, patterns that act as spatial and temporal pattern detectors, and other patterns that act as phase locked loops of various descriptions. How these things fit together in hierarchies that predict possible futures and plan responses to them, that's one of the absolute total frontiers of science right now.)
This stuff is fun, and really needs interdisciplinary approaches; something that looks utterly confusing to one person is very clear to someone else with a different background. And you'll never understand it by a purely full-neuron-model first approach (just like you'd never understand a Google search by starting at the level of electron movement in CMOS gates); there's too many higher levels of organisation.
This is really cool science, and I'd love to learn more about it, but even so, it fails to address the issue I'm raising. To take your Google search analogy, there may be tons of really interesting and complex operations going on behind a search across the internet, and ultimately they come down to a bunch of electrons flowing through conductors and semiconductors in highly patterned and extremely complex ways on very complicated hardware. But, even though Google's servers are sitting there indexing the internet, a search isn't actually triggered until someone from outside that system inputs a query.
That's what I'm suggesting happens with our minds. The wetware is sitting there running its background processes and listeners, recording sensations, and offering automatic responses to certain environmental inputs; and then the metaphysical part of a person inputs a command or query, and away it goes responding to that new event.
If there is no metaphysical part of our existence, then everything we think is just another response of our "wetware," which means thoughts are simply more events that we experience, and we are no more responsible for them (and thus for any of our actions) than we are for preferring Brie more than Camembert, nor can we attach any more importance to one thought than another; if there is no metaphysical aspect to our existence, then thinking itself becomes utterly meaningless, and the fact that we think otherwise is just one of those quirks of our "thoughts." There is therefore basically no difference then between sanity and insanity; no one really knows (nor can know) how the universe actually works. And actually, the fact that we think we're making logical arguments or saying real things about reality falls under the same guillotine.
In short, trying to explain how thoughts can be purely the result of the natural biological processes of electrical and chemical reactions in the neurons of our brains can result with the only conclusion being that we cannot actually explain things. And if anything is to mean something, then that's patently ludicrous. Therefore, by non-contradiction, we must conclude that there is a non-physical/metaphysical part of our minds that can introduce new events into the "processing stream" of our physical existence.
Where does this weird idea come from that our thoughts have to “mean something”. That’s the patently ridiculous part.
But... they do... (Many of them, anyways. There's always the thoughts of wishful thinking, prejudices, and insane delusions.)
How else could we communicate?What??
That is not at all related. Thoughts being perfectly deterministic (which is stronger than "based purely on physical phenomena", as that's not really known yet) doesn't conflict with the ability to communicate. And is also unrelated to whether or not there's some magical higher "meaning" to them.
I'm not referring to a "magical higher" meaning. I mean the plain meanings of the sort you can find in a dictionary.
Computer programs can communicate.
Because programmers tell them how to interpret and respond to various inputs.
Data in Star Trek can communicate.
Because his programmers "told" him how to interpret and respond to various inputs (including how he can change his programming in response to various inputs). Data is a really interesting response to the question (even while raising more questions, like whether an AI can really desire something) of whether we can make an AI indistinguishable from a human, and whether such an AI should be treated as human.
You’re trying to do a shaky proof by contradiction on something arbitrary, ill defined and unfounded.
Not at all. It's only shaky, arbitrary, ill-defined, and unfounded (ungrounded) if the physical world encompasses all of existence.
That also doesn't make sense, but okay. So in the universe you're trying to disprove your proof is invalid and only in the one you're assuming your proof it is maybe not invalid. Thus, it's still not a useful proof.
Truth is a totally separate claim than usefulness. After all, lies might be more useful in some situations than truths, depending on one's goal. And the claim that the physical world is all that exists is a truth-claim. Yet at the same time, it says that truth claims are produced entirely by irrational processes, which (by the nature of logical proofs) invalidates the claims. At best, it says that truth claims are unknowable. Therefore, a claim that avoids this conundrum and allows truth claims to actually be true or false is an infinitely more useful theory.
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Though actually that doesn't apply here. These are mathematical empty sets, and in mathematics any two sets with the same contents are considered equal.
TIL mathematical sets don't have static typing.
But seriously, it doesn't make much sense in my head that eg. the empty set of real numbers I've successfully divided by zero is equal to the empty set of living dinosaurs I've met last night.
Equal ≠ equivalent.
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Google is shutting down Google+.
Because they finally realized nobody uses it?
No, because they discovered a massive security breach they won't even reveal:
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Equal ≠ equivalent.
The myriad distinctions between those are one of the subtler areas of mathematics and logic.
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because you cannot show any reasons to think that logical thinking is actually logical
I don't think this is the case. Logic is useful because it's internally consistent. There are a few base axioms (which don't conflict with each other) and the rest of logic builds on these. If you accept the base axioms, you can very well show that some process (though or not) is actually logical. And in many cases, logic is just cause and effect.
Same with math. The reason "2+2=5" is false is because we have a set of base axioms from which derive the natural numbers and the operation that is addition. The reason we say it's false and accept this, is because we apply the same base axioms.
You can come up with a different logic or math, but if the base axioms are in conflict, it's not very useful. But even if they are, if you can't convince other people that the base axioms make sense, it's also not very useful, because any argument you build on them will fail because they do not accept your premises.
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To put it another way, you're proposing that we can find out how we make conclusions, but at the same time, the explanation makes it impossible to justify how our conclusions can be correct. It's usefulness might make it more true, but that claim is itself an inference ("if useful, then true") that turns out to need justification, too. ("We think 'if useful, then true' must be true because it is more useful than thinking otherwise, therefore it must be true"?)
I honestly have no idea how you arrive at that conclusion. I find nothing earlier in your post supports that argument.
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@pie_flavor said in WTF Bites:
https://i.imgur.com/wArTi4M.png
https://i.imgur.com/9SE76eh.png
spot the differenceProtip: if you shut up about this, there's a big chance that whoever made this will never fix this, possibly making graduation easier.
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@Cursorkeys said in WTF Bites:
@Applied-Mediocrity said in WTF Bites:
It appears I can't count braces without IntelliSense anymore, smh.
I was pretty disappointed after looking up
smhon UrbanDictionary. Thankfully my original guess:s**t my hat, seems to work fine in all the examples so I'll keep using that in my head.
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Side note - I never liked this SMH acronym. It just doesn't roll as nicely as all the others. LOL, OMG, WTF, IMHO, BDSM are extremely easy to say (in Polish) and sound almost like words (in Polish). SMH, not so much.
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@Gąska hah.
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Though actually that doesn't apply here. These are mathematical empty sets, and in mathematics any two sets with the same contents are considered equal.
TIL mathematical sets don't have static typing.
Maths is much more freeform than any programming language. It doesn't have to conform to any pre-existing syntactic or semantic rules.
But seriously, it doesn't make much sense in my head that eg. the empty set of real numbers I've successfully divided by zero is equal to the empty set of living dinosaurs I've met last night.
Because it doesn't. It's just a weird consequence of taking the definition of equality literally. Unlike most other fields, mathematicians are much more willing to accept all the weird quirks in corner cases than to patch their rulesets - see axiom of choice and Banach-Tarski paradox.
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@dkf To explain what I meant by the “wat” image, the state of neuroscience is that it has a fairly good idea what memories are made of (patterns of synapses and the strengths of activation of those synapses, both of which are resolutely physical) at least for basic memories, and work is ongoing to understand more about what higher-level memories are like. Probably more of the same if you ask me, but the details are tricky (e.g., are there specialized neurons involved or are we just talking general patterns throughout). Thoughts are trickier — in large part because we're not really sure what they are — but betting that they are non-physical would seem odd. I predict that there won't be a single neuron for anything in particular, but the interplay of different patterns of neurons and synapses will be important. (There have been found neural patterns that act as attention selectors, patterns that act as spatial and temporal pattern detectors, and other patterns that act as phase locked loops of various descriptions. How these things fit together in hierarchies that predict possible futures and plan responses to them, that's one of the absolute total frontiers of science right now.)
This stuff is fun, and really needs interdisciplinary approaches; something that looks utterly confusing to one person is very clear to someone else with a different background. And you'll never understand it by a purely full-neuron-model first approach (just like you'd never understand a Google search by starting at the level of electron movement in CMOS gates); there's too many higher levels of organisation.
This is really cool science, and I'd love to learn more about it, but even so, it fails to address the issue I'm raising. To take your Google search analogy, there may be tons of really interesting and complex operations going on behind a search across the internet, and ultimately they come down to a bunch of electrons flowing through conductors and semiconductors in highly patterned and extremely complex ways on very complicated hardware. But, even though Google's servers are sitting there indexing the internet, a search isn't actually triggered until someone from outside that system inputs a query.
That's what I'm suggesting happens with our minds. The wetware is sitting there running its background processes and listeners, recording sensations, and offering automatic responses to certain environmental inputs; and then the metaphysical part of a person inputs a command or query, and away it goes responding to that new event.
If there is no metaphysical part of our existence, then everything we think is just another response of our "wetware," which means thoughts are simply more events that we experience, and we are no more responsible for them (and thus for any of our actions) than we are for preferring Brie more than Camembert, nor can we attach any more importance to one thought than another; if there is no metaphysical aspect to our existence, then thinking itself becomes utterly meaningless, and the fact that we think otherwise is just one of those quirks of our "thoughts." There is therefore basically no difference then between sanity and insanity; no one really knows (nor can know) how the universe actually works. And actually, the fact that we think we're making logical arguments or saying real things about reality falls under the same guillotine.
In short, trying to explain how thoughts can be purely the result of the natural biological processes of electrical and chemical reactions in the neurons of our brains can result with the only conclusion being that we cannot actually explain things. And if anything is to mean something, then that's patently ludicrous. Therefore, by non-contradiction, we must conclude that there is a non-physical/metaphysical part of our minds that can introduce new events into the "processing stream" of our physical existence.
Where does this weird idea come from that our thoughts have to “mean something”. That’s the patently ridiculous part.
But... they do... (Many of them, anyways. There's always the thoughts of wishful thinking, prejudices, and insane delusions.)
How else could we communicate?What??
That is not at all related. Thoughts being perfectly deterministic (which is stronger than "based purely on physical phenomena", as that's not really known yet) doesn't conflict with the ability to communicate. And is also unrelated to whether or not there's some magical higher "meaning" to them.
I'm not referring to a "magical higher" meaning. I mean the plain meanings of the sort you can find in a dictionary.
Computer programs can communicate.
Because programmers tell them how to interpret and respond to various inputs.
Data in Star Trek can communicate.
Because his programmers "told" him how to interpret and respond to various inputs (including how he can change his programming in response to various inputs). Data is a really interesting response to the question (even while raising more questions, like whether an AI can really desire something) of whether we can make an AI indistinguishable from a human, and whether such an AI should be treated as human.
Whether a computer program / Data was “told” what to do or not is entirely irrelevant to your objection that there needs to be a meta-physical / non-deterministic process involved, since there clearly isn’t.
Besides, computer programs can actually be made to “evolve” in an optimization process, tooYou’re trying to do a shaky proof by contradiction on something arbitrary, ill defined and unfounded.
Not at all. It's only shaky, arbitrary, ill-defined, and unfounded (ungrounded) if the physical world encompasses all of existence.
That also doesn't make sense, but okay. So in the universe you're trying to disprove your proof is invalid and only in the one you're assuming your proof it is maybe not invalid. Thus, it's still not a useful proof.
Truth is a totally separate claim than usefulness. After all, lies might be more useful in some situations than truths, depending on one's goal. And the claim that the physical world is all that exists is a truth-claim. Yet at the same time, it says that truth claims are produced entirely by irrational processes, which (by the nature of logical proofs) invalidates the claims. At best, it says that truth claims are unknowable. Therefore, a claim that avoids this conundrum and allows truth claims to actually be true or false is an infinitely more useful theory.
I should’ve left out the last sentence, or simply said “wrong” instead of “useless”, since you clearly failed to realize your so called proof was assuming the conclusion.
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set of living dinosaurs I've met last night.
There's been a notable lack of Dilbert here for too long, so I'm feeling obliged to post this.
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@Applied-Mediocrity it probably doesn't surprise anybody that I'm unable to understand the joke in a comic strip drawn years before I was even born.
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@anotherusername said in WTF Bites:
Does anybody else have a problem on Windows 7 where two (completely different) windows can end up in some kind of quantum entangled state where Windows can't decide which one's icon it should use?
(2 screenshots, same 2 windows in both screenshots... activating either of the windows is "fixing" its icon but then the other window's icon changes to mimic it as soon as its button is repainted, e.g. moused over or if the taskbar reappears after auto hiding)
Update: Fixed it by exiting Explorer (and then killing its process from Task Manager, because it didn't exit when I told it to exit) and then restarting it (also from the Task Manager).
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Side note - I never liked this SMH acronym. It just doesn't roll as nicely as all the others. LOL, OMG, WTF, IMHO, BDSM are extremely easy to say (in Polish) and sound almost like words (in Polish). SMH, not so much.
You pronounce it, like "smuh"... it sounds just like shaking your head feels.
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StatusL It took almost three minutes for Azure to trundle its gears and tell me the following:
syntax error. Expected one of: AGG ALL AND ARRAY BETWEEN BIGINT BIT BINARY BY COLUMNSET CREATED CSHARP CURRENT DATETIME DATETIME2 DECIMAL DISTINCT EXISTS FILE FLOAT FOLLOWING GROUP IN INT IS LENGTH LCID MAP MAX MODIFIED MONEY NULL NVARCHAR OR OVER PARTITION PRECEDING REAL SMALLINT SQL STRUCT TINYINT UNBOUNDED UNIQUEIDENTIFIER VARBINARY VARCHAR WITHIN string-literal numeric-literal character-literal punctuation-mark identifier quoted-identifier reserved-identifier variable system-variable expression-end '[' ']' '(' '{' '}' '=' '.' '*' ':' '?' '<' '>' ANTISEMIJOIN AS ASC BROADCASTLEFT BROADCASTRIGHT CROSS DESC EXCEPT FETCH FROM FULL FULLCROSS HASH HAVING INDEXLOOKUP INNER INTERSECT JOIN LEFT LOOP MERGE OFFSET ON OPTION ORDER OUTER OUTER UNION PAIR PIVOT PRODUCE READONLY REQUIRED RIGHT SAMPLE SEMIJOIN SERIAL SORTED UNION UNPIVOT USING WHEN WHERE WINDOW ';' ')' ','Apparently,
KitchenSinkis not one of the expected.THREE MINUTES to detect a SYNTAX ERROR!
Hot shit!
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@Tsaukpaetra said in WTF Bites:
Hot shit!
This is apparently not like SQL at all...
SELECT expression is missing an AS alias, did you mean to capitalize [as]?I don't know? Does that seem like a logical conclusion that I would need to capitalize a KEYWORD??!??!?
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@Tsaukpaetra said in WTF Bites:
a logical conclusion
It's fucking 20 Mb of data!
Either it's stuck and is now just wasting time, or Big Data really does cost more!
What a load of crap!
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because you cannot show any reasons to think that logical thinking is actually logical
I don't think this is the case. Logic is useful because it's internally consistent. There are a few base axioms (which don't conflict with each other) and the rest of logic builds on these. If you accept the base axioms, you can very well show that some process (though or not) is actually logical.
Not logic – logical thought.
And in many cases, logic is just cause and effect.
Logic is grounds-to-consequent. There are reasons for the conclusion, and the relationship between the reasons and the conclusion always holds true, regardless of location or time.
Cause-and-effect describes the relationship between two connected events that occur in series in a particular location and time.
Same with math. The reason "2+2=5" is false is because we have a set of base axioms from which derive the natural numbers and the operation that is addition. The reason we say it's false and accept this, is because we apply the same base axioms.
Right. We accept certain axioms, and because the relationship always holds, we accept that 2+2=4, not 5. The axioms and definitions are the grounds, and particular mathematical relationships are the consequents.
You can come up with a different logic or math, but if the base axioms are in conflict, it's not very useful. But even if they are, if you can't convince other people that the base axioms make sense, it's also not very useful, because any argument you build on them will fail because they do not accept your premises.
The most basic premise that everyone must accept (and everyone does accept it, unless they're too young or clinically retarded to understand it) is that logic works. Everything knowable is based on that. Everything knowable derives from that. Any position that contradicts that axiom is logically untenable. But I am trying to explain how a universe that exists alone, and not alongside (or possibly subordinate to) some form of "supernature," is just such a position.
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@Tsaukpaetra said in WTF Bites:
What a load of crap!
I'm glad I've taken the time to try and figure this stuff out. I've been given a contact at MS who supposedly specialises in partner-things (i.e. "How can Microsoft help you use Microsoft services to do your thing?") and we have a Skype Call on Thursday to Discuss Opportunities.
I'm leading up the meeting with this:
Let's see if they can satisfy me.
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@Tsaukpaetra said in WTF Bites:
syntax error. Expected one of: AGG ALL AND ARRAY BETWEEN BIGINT BIT BINARY BY COLUMNSET CREATED CSHARP CURRENT DATETIME DATETIME2 DECIMAL DISTINCT EXISTS FILE FLOAT FOLLOWING GROUP IN INT IS LENGTH LCID MAP MAX MODIFIED MONEY NULL NVARCHAR OR OVER PARTITION PRECEDING REAL SMALLINT SQL STRUCT TINYINT UNBOUNDED UNIQUEIDENTIFIER VARBINARY VARCHAR WITHIN string-literal numeric-literal character-literal punctuation-mark identifier quoted-identifier reserved-identifier variable system-variable expression-end '[' ']' '(' '{' '}' '=' '.' '*' ':' '?' '<' '>' ANTISEMIJOIN AS ASC BROADCASTLEFT BROADCASTRIGHT CROSS DESC EXCEPT FETCH FROM FULL FULLCROSS HASH HAVING INDEXLOOKUP INNER INTERSECT JOIN LEFT LOOP MERGE OFFSET ON OPTION ORDER OUTER OUTER UNION PAIR PIVOT PRODUCE READONLY REQUIRED RIGHT SAMPLE SEMIJOIN SERIAL SORTED UNION UNPIVOT USING WHEN WHERE WINDOW ';' ')' ','They can't even sort the tokens by name. They give it a good go… but then appear to decide to say “fuck it” and start over from the beginning again.
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TIL that YAML supports expressing integers and integer parts of floats in "base 60" to make it easier to write down times and angles:
[-+]?[1-9][0-9_]*(:[0-5]?[0-9])+ [-+]?[0-9][0-9_]*(:[0-5]?[0-9])+\.[0-9_]*survey: timeSleep: 01:30:00You may expect this to parse the string 01:30:00 as the value for timeSleep, but instead you will find that it’s the integer 5400. […] This can become even stranger when you try to insert this value into a MySQL database, because MySQL will interpret this integer as a time in the HHMMSS format or even MMSS if it makes sense as a time. In the above example, 5400 will go into the database as 00:54:00.
Source: http://blog.teamlazerbeez.com/2009/04/15/yaml-gotchas/
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To put it another way, you're proposing that we can find out how we make conclusions, but at the same time, the explanation makes it impossible to justify how our conclusions can be correct. It's usefulness might make it more true, but that claim is itself an inference ("if useful, then true") that turns out to need justification, too. ("We think 'if useful, then true' must be true because it is more useful than thinking otherwise, therefore it must be true"?)
I honestly have no idea how you arrive at that conclusion. I find nothing earlier in your post supports that argument.
Sorry. The first "it" there is ambiguous. I think that may have been a typo.
Edit: Wait, it might be referring to restating @dkf's position.
Google is shutting down Google+ for consumers following security lapse
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