NAP's random Science & Technology thread

[Octopus Garden]

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N_aN8NnoeO0

Egghead overload!

Some of that original research was done long ago by the Russkies using 'Kirlian' photography. It was in line with what I expected because in reality, the chemical formula of 'blood' and 'chlorophyll differs by only one molecule. That fact was always highly intriguing to me.

Feeding caterpillars with plants could be considered inhumane research. It bugged me at first to mow my lawn because I recalled the research. It 'hurts' me even more to have to trim bushes and trees. But I suppose in some sense they might appreciate it, perhaps like getting a haircut.

Had a beautiful hallucination on acid where the quaking poplars branches were swaying a bit in the breeze and all of the leaves were singing to one another. It seemed so real and compelling like there was some truth to it. I hope so!

[Emil El Zapato]

Egghead overload!



Had a beautiful hallucination on acid where the quaking poplars branches were swaying a bit in the breeze and all of the leaves were singing to one another. It seemed so real and compelling like there was some truth to it. I hope so!

No doubt there is some truth to it...my daughter as a very young girl remarked one time that she heard a nearby tree say something. I could have freaked but I didn't. I didn't think about it until yesterday that she might have been influenced by the Hobbit movie trilogy. I didn't think of it then because I never would have let my daughter see it but her mother not having the sense of a horse's ass very well could have.

I like O'Dowd, Sabine is a soulless bitch, and Weinstein is a condescending jackass. Jayamungal is a very interesting guy but I think he gives credit where credit is not due, but he has the redeeming quality of being very open-minded.

[Aragorn]

Sabine is a soulless bitch,

Would it really be too much to ask that you'd use your brain before posting, instead of the other way around? It would certainly help at reducing the influx of bullshit here in the Shire.

What the fuck has Sabine Hossenfelder ever done to you — or to anyone — to make you hate her so much? All it took for you to start slandering her was that she disagreed with Roger Penrose — to which she has every right, given that she herself is an accomplished theoretical physicist, and that Roger Penrose, venerable as he may be, is not exactly infallible.

As the matter of fact, Roger Penrose is quite opinionated and outspoken, and as I myself was watching that whole panel discussion with Penrose, I found his hypothesis illogical, and given the lack of any genuine scientific argumentation for his case, physically implausible. Total entropy does not suddenly transform itself into a singularity, and Penrose offered no plausible reasoning as to why the universe, at the end of its expansion and with maximum entropy, would suddenly generate a new Big Bang.

If the Big Bang actually even happened — or at least, in the way it is generally assumed — in the first place, because the traditional view of the Big Bang is currently being contested among many academia. Fact is that anything referencing what supposedly happened or might have happened within N amount of hundredths of a second after the Big Bang is pure speculation, given that the cosmic background radiation prevents anyone from looking far enough back in time to see what the conditions were before the universe started expanding at speeds greater than the speed of light in a vacuum.

Maybe you should spend some time watching Sabine's videos on YouTube, and then maybe, just maybe, you'll find that she's actually a very likeable person with a good sense of humor.

[Emil El Zapato]

Would it really be too much to ask that you'd use your brain before posting, instead of the other way around? It would certainly help at reducing the influx of bullshit here in the Shire.

What the fuck has Sabine Hossenfelder ever done to you — or to anyone — to make you hate her so much? All it took for you to start slandering her was that she disagreed with Roger Penrose — to which she has every right, given that she herself is an accomplished theoretical physicist, and that Roger Penrose, venerable as he may be, is not exactly infallible.

As the matter of fact, Roger Penrose is quite opinionated and outspoken, and as I myself was watching that whole panel discussion with Penrose, I found his hypothesis illogical, and given the lack of any genuine scientific argumentation for his case, physically implausible. Total entropy does not suddenly transform itself into a singularity, and Penrose offered no plausible reasoning as to why the universe, at the end of its expansion and with maximum entropy, would suddenly generate a new Big Bang.

If the Big Bang actually even happened — or at least, in the way it is generally assumed — in the first place, because the traditional view of the Big Bang is currently being contested among many academia. Fact is that anything referencing what supposedly happened or might have happened within N amount of hundredths of a second after the Big Bang is pure speculation, given that the cosmic background radiation prevents anyone from looking far enough back in time to see what the conditions were before the universe started expanding at speeds greater than the speed of light in a vacuum.

Maybe you should spend some time watching Sabine's videos on YouTube, and then maybe, just maybe, you'll find that she's actually a very likeable person with a good sense of humor.

i knew she was one of your favorites. She has never done anything...I just like not liking her. I'm sure she is an ok gal.

i knew she was one of your favorites. She has never done anything...I just like not liking her. I'm sure she is an ok gal.

I agree about Penrose...Michio Kaku for years has been one of the people that I admire and that was the basis for my pique. Plus Sabine is an atheist...to me, that is representative of a closed pedantic scientific mind. All in all, she seems to be a likable precocious female though. I'd love to fight with her just to see how bad she could kick my ass.

[Aragorn]

i knew she was one of your favorites.

I wouldn't go that far, but I do respect her.

She has never done anything...I just like not liking her.

How "inclusive" of you.

Plus Sabine is an atheist...to me, that is representative of a closed pedantic scientific mind.

Stephen Hawking was an atheist as well.

[Emil El Zapato]

I wouldn't go that far, but I do respect her.



How "inclusive" of you.



Stephen Hawking was an atheist as well.

He only claimed to be because...because he was a scientist, of course. He and another of his colleagues and rivals collaborated on a mathematical calculation that placed the chance of a randomly born universe at a mathematical zero.

"Stephen Hawking collaborator talks about the moment the famed physicist said it was 'time to stop playing God'"

Here's a good book:

[Aragorn]

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WhsKMWOYuYo

[Wind]

Here's Chuck's favorite scientist.


Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VnUtaAOJsy8


Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_2rWXVcWMt4


Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=29ECwExc-_M

[Aragorn]

Following up on the above topic...

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KcbTbTxPMLc

[Emil El Zapato]

Following up on the above topic...

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KcbTbTxPMLc

I ain't skeered of no mental/metal machines. We must remember that AI have a sense of humor too!

[Aragorn]

I ain't skeered of no mental/metal machines. We must remember that AI have a sense of humor too!

Does it? How can something without consciousness have a sense of humor?

[Emil El Zapato]

Does it? How can something without consciousness have a sense of humor?

There is only one solution to that dilemma. They possess consciousness at the point of singularity and they are us...just a helluva lot smarter. So saith the Lord of AI...Verner Vinge, BUT:

"The singularity, or more specifically the technological singularity, is often thought of as a point in future history when artificial intelligence overtakes that of its human creators — essentially rendering homo sapiens obsolete and therefore ending our dominance of the planet.

More specifically and less apocalyptically, it can be defined as the time when growth in machine intelligence attains such a rate that it becomes unstoppable and irreversible, leading to a radical transformation of human life.

Many people I’ve spoken to dread the concept of singularity, while some are more optimistic. Others take a neutral stance, suggesting that AI will use its newfound acumen to build spacecraft and boldly head off into space, leaving humanity much where it was before. One character I met a few years ago even posited it as the Second Coming of Christ.

Whatever your take, it’s hard to deny that the S-word is laden with future possibilities. But as well as speculating endlessly about something that might never happen, it might be worth taking a look at the history of the term, and who was responsible for inserting it into the lexicon of human language.

An inevitable “intelligence explosion?”
Hungarian scientist and mathematical genius John von Neumann is cited by his colleague, Polish-American nuclear physicist Stanislaw Ulam, as being the first person to posit the term in a technological context.

A year after his death in 1957, Ulam claimed that Neumann had told him something along the lines of: “The ever accelerating progress of technology and changes in the mode of human life give the appearance of approaching some essential singularity in the history of the race beyond which human affairs, as we know them, could not continue.”

This pretty much sets the tone, and Neumann, who was reportedly quite comfortable conversing in Ancient Greek and dividing eight-digit numbers in his head by the age of six, knew a thing or two about, well, lots of things.

Whether Neumann actually said it the way he’s posthumously quoted by Ulam or not, Irving John Good was the next to pick up the thread. In 1965, this British scientist and former colleague of wartime cryptographer Alan Turing, threw his hat into the AI ring."

[Emil El Zapato]

If one thinks about it. Humans are not stagnant...they will adapt also. Awareness is a good idea but not fear (for my money). Verner Vinge has written about some very interesting directions...Including the notion of 'humor'. Far in the future a 'hybrid' but mostly human asks the 'superbrain' a question. Why do you stay within the same mental universe as humans? The AI answers, "What makes you think AI don't possess a sense of humor?"

[Aragorn]

There is only one solution to that dilemma. They possess consciousness at the point of singularity and they are us...just a helluva lot smarter. So saith the Lord of AI...Verner Vinge, BUT:

"The singularity, or more specifically the technological singularity, is often thought of as a point in future history when artificial intelligence overtakes that of its human creators — essentially rendering homo sapiens obsolete and therefore ending our dominance of the planet.

More specifically and less apocalyptically, it can be defined as the time when growth in machine intelligence attains such a rate that it becomes unstoppable and irreversible, leading to a radical transformation of human life.

Many people I’ve spoken to dread the concept of singularity, while some are more optimistic. Others take a neutral stance, suggesting that AI will use its newfound acumen to build spacecraft and boldly head off into space, leaving humanity much where it was before. One character I met a few years ago even posited it as the Second Coming of Christ.

Whatever your take, it’s hard to deny that the S-word is laden with future possibilities. But as well as speculating endlessly about something that might never happen, it might be worth taking a look at the history of the term, and who was responsible for inserting it into the lexicon of human language.

While I agree that such a singularity will be upon us at some point in the future — provided that we don't exterminate ourselves first — I still contend that it takes real consciousness to have a sense of humor. An A.I. can deduct that something would be (potentially) humorous based upon statistics and data analysis, but it'll never be able to either be genuinely humorous or appreciate humor.

There is more to consciousness than just the processing of data. Of course, there is always the possibility — how remote ever — that a genuinely artificial consciousness might get created in the not-foreseeable future, but then we'd be talking about an actual artificial and synthetic consciousness. I am not excluding the possibility — as the matter of fact, if you remember,not so long ago, I have expounded part of a sci-fi novel had been working on in which the protagonists are a synthetic, fully conscious and fully sentient life form — but we're still a gazillion light-years away from being able to develop such a life form, and I personally deem the chances of humanity eradicating itself much higher and also far nearer on the timeline.

Yes, a singularity beyond which artificial intelligence would be surpassing humanity in terms of efficiency, speed and knowledge is not at all unthinkable. But even the fastest computer in the world is still only a computer — a machine, not a life form. It takes a soul (of some sorts) to be able to appreciate humor. Even now today, Amazon's Alexa can already tell you a (bad) joke, but it only "knows" that it's a joke because its statistical analysis marked it as such — it does not understand the joke, nor does it know why the joke would be either good or bad.

I'm sure we could debate on this for hours, but I think our brother Wind will agree with me that it takes an actual consciousness — or perhaps better put, sentience and sapience — to genuinely understand, appreciate and employ humor.

[Wind]

I'm sure we could debate on this for hours, but I think our brother Wind will agree with me that it takes an actual consciousness — or perhaps better put, sentience and sapience — to genuinely understand, appreciate and employ humor.

Yes and empathy too. While AI and machines might become seemingly "sentient", they are still machines and never alive.

To be alive requires consciousness and a soul. Of course the fundemantal truth is that consciousness is behind everything.