tekni5

Quite impressive and all public domain with an option to donate how ever much you want and get everything he ever made in a single zip.

Not really because I mentioned "as a food replacement for a few months.", people have reported that Soylent worked for them for some period of time (weeks or months as I understand). All I am saying is that other products that exist may have the same effect. But Soylent isn't marketed as a short term meal replacement, it's marketed for long term use which I assume means years. You can survive on quite a few things for a short period of time, doesn't mean the product is good for you.

Not sure if you can compare fast food to Soylent, because there are many different types of fast food and not all of fast food is bad for you. Fast food can also contain vegetables, live cultures, and various assortment of ingredients which are good for you. Overindulgence of anything is bad, fast food just makes it easier because it's easy to get, generally tastes good and is packed with a ton of calories. If you ate fast food very carefully, then you'd probably be okay.

Furthermore, there probably isn't a simple shortcut to nutrition. If you want to be healthy you need to be involved in what you eat.

I'm sure the driving force for Soylent is profit as well, otherwise they would have done years of testing and scientific studies, before releasing a mix of chemicals as a solution to food. I suspect they'll get sued down the road, there is no way to predict what long term effects this will have when someone decides to use it for years.

I wouldn't mind a product that can replace food, if it's cheaper, more convenient, provides all necessary nutrition and eliminates the feeling of hunger.

However the biggest issue I have with Soylent is that I cannot trust it. It hasn't been tested long term and it doesn't sound like it's being developed by people who know what they are doing.

Also let's stop pretending it's something new, stuff like Plumpy'nut have existed for a while, used in developing nations for malnutrition treatment. I bet it would be as effective as Soylent as a food replacement for a few months. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plumpy%27nut

Thanks, excellent points. Maybe one day I will sit down and write everything down properly, and re-edit not to make semantic errors.

I don't mean to imply the first conscious entity is a god, it's possible there is no first but simply a time frame where conscious entities arise.

Yes it is a pattern in a sea of infinity, the process by which consciousness exists is by continuous grouping of that pattern where all conditions of that consciousness to exist are met. The grouping is just a byproduct of infinite information. It's sort of difficult to imagine, because we are so constrained in our reality. It may very well be circular reasoning, but it seems to make sense to me.

As far as how it relates to Artificial Intelligence, I can provide the following example. The various interconnections and information that exist to create the internet may have already given rise to a similar process. If we viewed say each day of global internet activity as raw data, we maybe able to see certain mathematical patterns emerge. Such patterns might be an echo of a simplified universe and a hint of intelligence, which has naturally emerged due to the vast size of information being created, moved and processed. The intelligence which is emerging probably has no conception of us and is unable to communicate, it simply relies on the natrual occurring patterns of interconnections to exist. It maybe thinking and trying to find out the purpose of its existence as well. The only way we could ever communicate with it is to figure out what patterns to look for and in what time frame.

This is going to sound pretty absurd, but I have this unscientific hypothesis about what consciousness really is.

I believe there is a chance that consciousness is a requirement for a universe to exist. Without consciousness the universe exists as random information, contained within some infinite outside universe, where there is no time or space.

So imagine this infinite outside universe full of all possible information, it exists in some metaphysical location, it has always existed and it will always exist. All this data makes zero sense and has zero purpose. Within this information exist patterns of every kind, everything real and not real is there. However for this data to become expressed, a conscious entity is required to exist inside of this data for the overall universe to place it in some sort of order.

Therefore consciousness acts as a binder of random information, for this very conscious entity to exist some of this infinite information must be placed in a coherent order. So in this view, the start of the universe does not occur with the big bang, but with the first conscious entity. After this point, for consciousness to continue to exist, it must have a narrative based on fundamental laws which explain how it came into existence. All of history is created after the first conscious entity appears, the formation of the planets, evolution, etc.

To better understand this, imagine a roll of film. You take each frame of this film and make it a separate slide. If you shuffle all these separate film slides and ask someone to view them in no given order, it would make very little sense of what the storyline is. However if you let them sort this information, they might be able to arrange this film in a continuous and coherent storyline. Similarly each planck time of our universe is a separate slide of information which exists in infinity. If a conscious entity exists in that frame the universe must provide a coherent storyline for that entity. Therefore additional frames are pulled out from infinity to allow consciousness to glide through infinity and essentially exist.

I hope that made sense, if I have failed to explain it I apologize.

Can confirm bought a bunch of pre-paid Huawei Y300s for $50 ($56.50 total with 13% tax + $5 to unlock) on sale in Canada. Awesome Android phones for the price.

I don't think we would need to simulate a human brain 100% to have strong artificial intelligence. Similarly how we don't need to simulate the SNES 100% to be able to enjoy the games.

Furthermore I'm pretty sure a human brain also maintains various bodily functions, which use some percentage of the brain's computational power.

I also suspect that strong AI is probably not as complicated as we think, it's just that no one has thought of the correct set of ideas required for strong AI to emerge.

There is also nik.bot.nu, socwall.com & probably others.