joycian

Perhaps the exorbitant price of a PC that could run Crysis well enough to even think about multiplayer acted as a filtering mechanism?

It seems Bayes never actually wrote down what is now called Bayes Theorem. (Perhaps he knew of it). I think it was Laplace that recognized the full generality of the relationship.

Not sure what you mean by self-contained, but there is the Homotopy Type Theory book:

https://homotopytypetheory.org/book/

Susskind's Theoretical Minimum series might be to your liking?

Also, Visual Group Theory.

Seconding this. His other books are great as well (Reverse Mathematics, Naive Lie Theory). Great writer.

I don't think the genealogy is that convenient - the Eastern Roman Empire arguably has a stronger claim to being the successors of "The Greeks" that are often claimed to be the root of "Western" civilization than any place in Western Europe. Constantinople became the capital of the entire Roman Empire by 324 and the importance of the West (and Rome itself) for the empire dwindled already hundreds of years before the official "fall" of the Western Empire (which is arguable, among other things, because the "Gothic" king Theodoric received the official Western imperial regalia from the Eastern Emperor, after Odoaker had sent them to Constaninople when he deposed Romulus Augustulus). The Gallic provinces even spent some time as an independent Empire during the Crisis of the Third Century.

In the end, the modern name of "Byzantine" seems to be misplaced - these people were the Romans.

It's not because it's not part of western culture. Is Eastern France part of the west?

AlphaGo != AlphaGo Zero

Only because we somehow don't count the Byzantine empire (actually the Roman Empire) as western.

Well, no, it doesn't change the fact that DNA contains (most of) the information. What it means is that even if I give you all of the bases on all of the chromosomes, if you don't know how these strings of beads will fold in a real cell (in the presence of all kinds of other things, like proteins and metal ions, which in a fertilized egg will come from the mother - a bootstrapping problem), it does not get you very far. It might not be unlike getting all the lines of code in a codebase, but not getting the ordering, only a bag of lines of code.

I don't know, are go-to statements and code reuse a small twist in the dogma of software engineering?

Is your Python-level code directly interacting with CPU operations and memory bit flipping a small twist?

Hi-C 3D DNA structure experiments as well as small RNA fragments interfering with transcriptions and protein function are not a small twist in my opinion - it's like finding out there's an entire extra hierarchy of layers to the system.

Not much. Society is paying to improve the value of the land.

Does anybody here know of a good modern book about land value tax or Georgist economics in general? Any (constructive) opinions would also be welcome.

I just want to add, because some people might find it interesting, that a version of the fast Fourier transform was already known to Gauss (though not published in his lifetime). More info can be found in the article "Gauss and the history of the fast Fourier transform" by T. Michael.

A virtual particle is only a virtual particle because we as humans implicitly have the particle view as fundamental. There's nothing special about a fluctuation in a quantum field being not long lived enough or not stable enough for us to recognize it as "a real particle".

So your quotation is right, but you need to go one level deeper.

> I can imagine a being that is physically identical to a human in every way, but is not conscious

I can't, and I think that's the central point. This means you're claiming the big c is not a physics process. But I suspect that the next sentence is a more accurate representation of your argument:

> there is no reason to think that intelligent behavior requires consciousness

To which I would say, what if consciousness is just a side effect of data integration. What if it's just what if "feels like" to be a system that has memory, external and internal data integration? Nothing magical about that.

> So what is the difference between such a being and a conscious human, if the two are physically identical?

Again, you're tacitly assuming that consciousness is not physical, thus assuming your earlier conclusion.

I understand, there is indeed a large difference between Orthogonal and the rest in the sense that it might be technically a fantasy series instead of hard science fiction. However, the exploration of the alternate physical laws gave me the same thrill that other hard science fiction evokes. In some sense, the changed mechanics gave me more insight into physics as a whole (especially with Egan's fantastic online appendices, which might be my favorite aspect of his style).

I forgot it above, but I think Incandescence is the "our universe" counterpart to Orthogonal and it is quite good.

The Quantum Thief trilogy by Hannu Rajaniemi.

Why did you single out Orthogonal as lesser? I found those better than some of his other books (Quarantine, Teranesia and Distress). I would say Diaspora is his best by miles, with Schild's Ladder.

In general, I like the physics discovery books more than the books focusing on subjective quantum mechanics (especially Quarantine), although they are still well done.

Most of this structure comes from the ordered set properties. Special relativity can be seen as a consequence of trying to quantify length by projecting to two ordered sets.

K.H. Knuth, a professor at Albany, has been working on this for some time. He also has some results about QM.

A free version of his paper "A Potential Foundation for Emergent Space-Time" (2014). What Wolfram is talking about seems to me a consequence of the principles K.H. Knuth has been investigating since at least 2011.

https://arxiv.org/abs/1209.0881

And Hilbert actually beat him to the final equation.

No, it's called "history". At least that's what the poster means I think.

Could you point me to resources where I could learn about this?

What? Human cloning is basically possible but illegal, we can absolutely grow artificial organs (intestine, heart, certain brain structures), life extension and diseases cures are closer via Crispr, metabolomics has advanced, hospitals use glycomics for diagnosis, gene therapy is used in clinical trials, machine learning for materials science, drug discovery and protein folding is coming along.

What is your definition of iota? We're not there, but to say there's no progress is just untrue.

Have you seen CTRL Shift Face, the YouTube channel?

Why is it weird that simple programs have a sliver of consciousness? That seems like a nice practical, non-magic conclusion?

What do you mean by "original paper" here?

According to Scott Aaronson, Martinis himself rebutted Kalai's objections: the calibration still allows you to load any circuit later.

Did the teacher write his ideas down somewhere? Could you point me to them?