431 karma · joined April 29, 2018
If we can ever prove that there's plenty of planets and plenty of abiogenesis and plenty of multicellular things out there that just don't know how to make radio waves, then either the leap to technology is exceedingly rare or we are in very big trouble very soon. I could see that keeping some people up at night.
Of course it could just be that, like us, other technological beings don't constantly broadcast super-directional radio transmissions at super-high power into random areas of space. We sent the Arecibo message a couple times for a few minutes, but it was really not enough to ever hope it got noticed by anyone out there. Even if space is bursting with intelligent life. Not even close. Cute project, though. Why do we expect more from others?
There was once a fairly mature plan, back in the 60s I believe, when nukes were still all the rage and people were discussing lots of exciting ways to use them for space exploration, wherein some physicist calculated how much power you'd need to make meaningful, intelligible radio contact a few stars over using an omnidirectional radio source. It involved setting off lots of nuclear bombs somewhere around Jupiter's orbit, in fact modulating the detonations and using the EMP as the signal. Those are the extreme methods needed get a signal out there up and over the noise of our own star, to defeat outrageous inverse square losses, to have it even barely intelligible at a very low baud rate a few light years away. Have we ever actually done that, even once? No.
So that should also tell you that nobody is listening to our old TV broadcasts and it's no surprise we aren't able to pick up anyone else's. No sane technological race is going to do an omnidirectional burst of communications meant for local use at such an enormous magnitude of power. It would be wasteful and destructive. Directed, focused transmissions only reach a billionth of the sky, so that has its own odds against it. SETI is a highly optimistic program considering the physics at work here.
The other argument for Fermi's paradox and why, if there are intelligent beings out there, we should know about it: If there's an advanced race even a couple million years ahead of us--just a blink of an eye in astronomical terms--they should have proliferated through the whole galaxy by now. We wouldn't be listening to their broadcasts, we would be them. Even discounting how unlikely it is that any race will ever be able to get to another star, this assumes that life (or Von Neumann machines) will spread and replicate endlessly, until they fill an extremely large space and convert an astronomically large amount of mass into themselves. We don't really see that with life we have on Earth. Most of our biome is still matter which is not life, and it's been here for billions of years. I don't understand the assumption that life will spread infinitely instead of staking out a reasonably large area that is barely manageable and then cull down, as life does here in our data set.
Even if there's a lot of technological species out there, and they're broadcasting with rational amounts of power, and they've expanded to cover rational amounts of space, it's still no surprise that we haven't found one yet. It's almost impossible to keep in mind just how big it all is. We also haven't been searching exhaustively or for a very long period of time. Would an alien SETI comparable to ours be able to detect our own transmissions? It's actually really unlikely.
Modding quake was one of my first great bursts of curiosity and creativity. I really remember those days fondly.
There's also a big difference between mental health denial / "get over it already" and making steps to finally stop it from totally dominating your life in the future.
Depression is like a separate animal inside you with its own drives for survival and reproduction. You don't turn your back on it, but you don't let it devour you and steal your name and face either.
If it can manage to, it would love to take control of you and make you believe that there is literally nothing that can help and you're utterly powerless to change anything, and that anyone who tries to tell you otherwise is just one of those people who doesn't understand and thinks you can just cheer yourself up out of depression by smiling and going outside or whatever. That's a false dichotomy.
I use my computer in a metal shop and my magsafe gathers iron filings, shorts itself and catches fire. I've gone through so many chargers. I've vowed that the next time it happens, I'm going to mill away part of this laptop's case and solder in a DC barrel jack. So much of apple design is about sleekness and cool factor, not actual robustness or effectiveness. I suppose this isn't the intended use case, but I feel like the use case apple has in mind is unrealistically safe and ideal. And rich.
I still like using a mac, as well as a windows machine and several linux distros. If you have a collection of tools in your tool shed, you want to have all sorts of different tools. Not just rows and rows of the same flat-head screwdriver.
Can't you just hook up the VCC and ground from any USB charging IC to a type-c socket? It's all +5v right? I don't understand why the type of connector dictates how fast a cable should be useful for charging. That seems like it should be up to the simple gauge and length of the wire and thus how much current it can handle.
From what I've heard re: that chart in OP's link that shows the different fast charge rates for different manufacturer's wall warts and cables, most of that is caused by proprietary ICs doing sneaky things like throttling the charge rate when it discovers it isn't connected to an official Huawei cable or whatever through some resistor value going to ground from one of the data lines, or some similar method. Couldn't the IC in the device read the resistance / inductance of the cable and determine through that how much current it could handle? I feel like this is all bad faith shenanigans through proprietary cable DRM. When charging is concerned, a conductor is a conductor assuming there's enough thickness to prevent overheating, right?
Qualia is essentially what it feels like to experience data. When we see 700nm light, we experience red. When a computer sees 700nm light through a CCD or CMOS, it experiences #FF0000. Does this mean it has qualia? How do we make this distinction? Just from how convincing it sounds when they put it to words?
If it's merely self-reporting, does that mean people weren't conscious until vocabulary for qualia existed? Because that was about 200,000 years for anatomically modern humans. How about animals? They can't report qualia. We essentially are no closer to explaining or defining consciousness at all thanks to qualia.
If I may hazard a baseless conjecture, I'd bet qualia is an illusion. It's still only data. Just like when a thermistor measures some temperature, it's not really communicating the essence of Kelvin to a microprocessor. It's not communicating the frequency of the movement of molecules which is temperature. It's reporting a difference in voltage, which is read by an ADC, which gets assigned a hexadecimal value, which gets interpreted by all kinds of software in all sorts of ways. This sounds suspiciously like qualia, but of course we can't prove or disprove it any more than we can prove or disprove if other consciousness exists besides our own.
Qualia is just data wearing intangible, spiritual clothes. This is just like the classic stoned college freshmen discussion of whether the colors I see are the colors you see, or if the way you perceive red is my green, or whatever. It produced nothing useful then and it produces nothing useful now. All impossible to prove either way, just like solipsism.
"The real sciense[sic] should contain ONLY the things which are proved with real proofs!"
As in mathematical proofs. You can't prove most things the way you can in mathematics, which is rock-solid through tautologies and self-consistent abstract models. When you are observing actual reality you have to make some assumptions.
It's not an ideal solution but it's a practical inevitability to make some assumptions to get things moving. The best of us come back and check the assumptions as soon as they are able to quantify them and perform an empirical experiment, and as a backup we have others independently verifying people's assumptions by trying to replicate experiments and seeing if the predictions line up.
Nobody has magic powers to divine truth from nothing. Science is a filter which gradually strains out the misinterpreted and the biased and the just-plain-wrong, but it still starts with subjective observation and reasoning. As does all human experience. The important part is that it moves away from that instead of stopping there.
I've heard a lot of office buildings will leave every floor's fluorescent lights on in the winter to take a load off the overnight heating bills. I'm sure that lessens the lifespan of the bulbs and ballasts, but for people to adopt that practice it must still be economical in the final tally.
Who knows, I'd love to see more study on this because I think everybody in history has always wondered what the hell is up with dreams. "To keep your noggin warm" seems like a super anticlimactic purpose and I love it. It's so absurd and nihilistic it's funny, which kind of jives with nature's whole style.
Basically if you are strict about trying to eliminate all free riders, you're going to break society in a vain effort to maximize fairness in lieu of effectiveness. Society works because everyone assumes that even if some things are unfair, most will manage and the ups and downs will average out over time.
In the example given on the wiki page, people who swoop in and take the last minutes left on a parking meter that someone else paid for but didn't stay long enough to use are supposedly able to break the system. But I think that trying to lock the system down tight and completely prevent that behavior could feasibly be more damaging to the health of the system than simply tolerating it as an occasional but mostly harmless exploit.
There's a few studies which show that some piracy and other free usage might actually help an industry's profits. Key word is "some"--there is obviously a threshold past which would become very damaging. But nonetheless, if one can set aside their outrage over unfairness (which is very understandable for somebody who has poured their life and soul into working on an IP or paid a lot to license it legitimately) then one can probably stand to benefit even from the thieves and freeloaders if they manage it correctly. https://www.fool.com/investing/general/2014/06/13/does-onlin...
Do an image search for an automatic transmission valve body. It even looks like a big industrial circuit board. Some components are passive like a check valve, some are active like a valve which is operated by pressure from some other part of the circuit. Newer ones also have partial electronic control, with microcontroller-driven solenoids and actuators moving around valves to control hydraulic rams which finally engage or disengage clutches. But it all began with no electronics at all. Pretty neat trick if you ask me.
I remember being a kid taking apart my first Ford transaxle and being amazed by the sheer complexity, almost to the point where it seems biological. My dad bought a really bad one for a couple bucks at a junkyard. We didn't need it to fix anything, he just wanted to feed my curiosity. It was a great parenting move. I recommend doing it yourself if you find a cheap busted one, just to get the ideas flowing.
There's also the issue of the blood-brain barrier. Might make normal thermal regulation insufficient. In any case, it seems like they intend to do further study to see if this hypothesis is really correct and if there is more to the story. Who knows--it might be that for some species it's not necessary, but left over as a vestigial behavior like a tailbone. That's pure conjecture on my part, excuse me.
Something I find interesting about this, if a little off-topic, is that the Ancient Egyptians had a misconception that the brain simply existed to cool the blood. When they mummified a body they threw that part in the trash. How far we've come.
You can't eat mathematical proofs.
How can you possibly say failure can't be useful? How do you iterate your plans and designs? I don't think you appreciate how knowledge works. Your weird demonization of failure (including it somehow being a moral issue?) won't force success, it's just going to stop you from realistically evaluating your goals.
Aside from that explanation, I'm not dying to debate you or list exhaustive examples or whatever because you're belligerent and arrogant. People like you can't be convinced, you have to go through it yourselves several times to figure it out, if ever.
After all you can cook up multiple self-consistent ideas of how a machine works in your imagination, but until you actually examine the machine you can't say that your idea actually explains how it works. It's a way it might work.
Usually you want to have at least some cursory observation to form a hypothesis, but admittedly it's inherently very difficult to observe something like the nature of how you are able to observe things. That's why I'm so hesitant to believe anyone who says they have objective knowledge about it.
For all we can prove, the appearance of self-awareness is all that is necessary for consciousness. I could be that if you point a webcam at a computer, then that computer gains some rudimentary self-awareness like an insect might have, or not have, we can't really prove it either way. Sentience is not necessarily sapience.
It could also be that computer sentience is absurd and rendered impossible by some as of yet unknown mechanic. In either case we have no reason to make assumptions about it.
It may seem solipsist, but if you want to make a rigorous reproducible experiment with empirical observations, we have just as much reason to assume a CPU has some form of animal sentience as we do with an insect or a bird which reacts in simple ways to external stimuli. As of yet there's no compelling reason to believe this is either correct or incorrect.
Occam's razor doesn't even work very well here. Does it require fewer assumptions to say that a machine that reacts to external stimuli is less conscious than an equivalent animal, or does it require fewer assumptions to say that this behavior indicates consciousness regardless of the media it operates on?
We have no idea if something is really different. We only have assumptions.
"Whatever you tell Deepak Chopra, he responds as if he knew in advance what you were going to say." I love how he thinks he's smart for predicting people will treat him like a nut after he acts like a total nut for decades.
When a field is largely pre-scientific like consciousness, lots of "gurus" are drawn in who try to substitute flashy language and bold, general statements for actual rigor and reproducible predictions. The state of the study of consciousness today almost guarantees by definition that there is no objective observation or falsifiable claims, and reproduction of someone's experiment is very difficult in any way that proves anything meaningful.
Chopra just excels in saying some unnecessarily terse and ambiguous statement that will naturally appeal to one's pareidolia, causing people to think it's some incredibly deep and multifaceted wisdom when in fact it can be replicated with a random word bank: http://www.wisdomofchopra.com/
The whole quantum woo crowd is really saddening. I mean obviously quantum effects have something to do with it, in as much as quantum effects have something to do with everything. But when you take some barely-understood, bleeding-edge physics and apply it to a horrifically complex and almost completely unknown field like the origin of consciousness, stating that this is where your soul or free will or whatever comes from, you can be ABSOLUTELY GUARANTEED that this person is so full of shit their eyes are turning brown. Quantum weirdness™ does not exist solely to prop up people's baseless spiritual beliefs. Be very wary of people who twist physics in to such convenient and anthro-centric ways.