I found a trick somewhere on the net for clearing a blocked nose (even very blocked). Hold your nose, inhale deeply, then repeat tipping your head back for four seconds, and then forward for four seconds. Breath out slowly. Then hold your breath as long as you can, still tipping forward and back every four seconds and holding your nose. Eventually you inhale and all the gunk just sort of flows out of your nasal cavity. Warning... much gagging, spluttering and spitting at this point. But it's worth it.
Possibly asking something like "you're good at finding points that back up your beliefs, but you also need to spend time thinking about points that might contradict your beliefs. How many contradictory points can you think of over the next five minutes?"
Usually "Monty Hall"?
Could someone point me towards good fictional stories set in Roman times, like those by Kipling in Puck...? Thank you. (Edit: spelling)
Well there is this little classic that is apparently being made into a movie https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/k067x/could_i_destroy_the_entire_roman_empire_during/c2giwm4
I think you are making an unjustified assumption, e.g. "... that I will pop into existence again...", that there is an "I". There is a pattern of information that feels that it experiences qualia, and then later possibly there is another pattern of information that feels that it experiences qualia, and possibly with additional information representing memories corresponding to the first set of information. Shifting to this viewpoint dissolves the question. If we accept that qualia is an illusion then we still have an interesting question about how the illusion occurs, but many other tricky issues go away.
I think Go, the board game, will likely fall to the machines. The driving engine of advances will shift somewhat from academia to industry.
This is a sucker bet. I don't know if you've kept up to date, but AI techniques for Go-playing have advanced dramatically over the last couple of years, and they're rapidly catching up to the best human players. They've already passed the 1-dan mark.
Interestingly, from my reading this is by way of general techniques rather than writing programs that are terribly specialized to Go.
Advanced quickly for a while due to a complete change in algorithm, but then we seem to have hit a plateau again. It's still an enormous climb to world champion level. It's not obvious that this will be achieved.
Looking at SHRDLU output just trying to recreate that looks pretty challenging for the modern coder, let alone decades ago. A little Lisp goes a long way.
Consciousness exists
If you are trying to be all formal about it, it's good to start by defining your terminology. What do you mean by Consciousness and what do you mean by existence? And one of the best ways to define what you mean by a commonly used term is to delineate its boundaries. For example, what is not-consciousness? Not-quite-consciousness? Give an example of ten. Same with existence. What does it mean for something to not exist? Can you list a dozen of non-existing things?
For example, do pink unicorns exist? If not, how come they affect reality (you see a sentence about them on your computer monitor)? How is consciousness different from pink unicorns? Please do not latch on this one particular example, make up your own.
I am pretty sure you have no firm understanding of what you are talking about, even though it feels like you do in your gut, "but is hard to explain". If you do not have a firm grasp of the basics, writing fancy lemmas and theorems may help you publish a philosophy paper but does not get your anywhere closer to understanding the issues.
If you are trying to be all formal about it, it's good to start by defining your terminology. What do you mean by Consciousness and what do you mean by existence?
I'm trying to be slightly formal, but without getting too bogged down. Instead I would prefer to take a few shortcuts to see if the road ahead looks promising at all. So far I feel that the best I've managed is to say "If a system seems to itself to experience consciousness in the same way that we seem to experience it, then we can call it conscious".
I am pretty sure you have no firm understanding of what you are talking about,
Not as sure as I am ;-) But I am trying to improve my understanding, and have no intention of writing philosophy papers.
Suppose you carry a timetable of your daily routine with you. Whenever you look at the whole timetable, it's the same; but if you just look at a random single line of the timetable, there's a "clock observable" (words saying what time it is) and a "state of the universe observable" (words saying what activity should be happening at that time).
This experiment is "evidence" for the emergence of time from entanglement, to exactly the same degree that the experiment I just described, of looking at your daily schedule, is evidence for time being relational. They have a global superposition which remains the same over time, but in which the observed state of one part is correlated with the observed state of the other part.
The "physics arxiv blog" (which has no official relation to arxiv, it's just someone describing random papers) is completely uncritical, and faithfully repeats whatever claims authors make about the meaning of their work.
So it sounds like you're saying the details may all be correct but the high level interpretation of the results is significantly overreaching. Not too unexpected, I guess.
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Advice solicited. Topics of interest I have lined up for upcoming posts include:
Any thoughts on which of these are of particular interest, or other ideas to delve into?
Have you ever seen this paper that claims a complexity analysis of the Viking lander experiment results can't be explained by chemistry alone? Interesting stuff...
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/257958533_Complexity_Analysis_of_the_Viking_Labeled_Release_Experiments