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Once I see the possibility that some idea may be expressed in crisp mathematics, I'm no longer interested in vague philosophical treatments of that idea.
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comment
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Aguirre, Tegmark, Layzer "Cosmological interpretation of quantum mechanics"
In response to
comment
by
on
Aguirre, Tegmark, Layzer "Cosmological interpretation of quantum mechanics"
Why do you think, the arxiv article is more precise than classical astronomy? Actually, it is about "vague" philosophical interpretations of QM, in this case leading it back to classical, newtonean concepts. Whereas the classical physics was free of such issues.
In response to
Alternate Sleep Schedules
A related experiment with mice: http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/01/circadian-disruption/
Once upon a time, there was a prisoner in solitary confinement, a former public enemy number one of France, aside the wards alone in the prison and allowed only to read science books. When he came across an astronomy textbook by Lagrange, he suddenly had the same idea as you express. http://ideafoundlings.blogspot.com/2009/10/nemo-eternal-returning.html
ThomasR appears here to be throwing around interesting-sounding trivia which he doesn't understand. Looking at his other contributions to the site, I can guess that he's developed a reputation for that, which would explain the downvotes here.
What do you think I would not undestand? Hinton's Cubes share since ages a bad reputation of disturbing the minds of his followers, fitting nicely to contemporary theories of learning and habit-development of the brain. Only two mathematicians seem to have profited from an exposition to them in their childhood. Ans the one who played around with constructing 3D/4D-analogues to Penrose/Escher 2D/3D-"impossible figure" doubted that such an endeavor woud threaten his health. The info on Talmud etc. came from a well known scholar. Both examples fit to the questions above.
Thanks. Try writing your posts more like this to begin with and they'll be less likely to get voted into the negative.
I find it interesting that the cofounder of the Singularity Institute now expresses so sarcastic about attempted work on AI the past decades. Has there been any related discussion on this or similar sites?
In response to
Being your own censor
Martin Gardner reported a case of No. 3 on people becoming mad after mistreating their minds wih "Hinton Cubes". That are simple mechanical tools for developing a various parts of 4-dim. visual imagination (actually, when reading on regular solids etc., I can imagine such things without toys tools...). The unlucky practitioneers of a cult Hinton made out of that got mad because the trained ways of modified perception started working automatically, they could not stop that any more. Now imagine, someone would have confronted them with suitable analogues of impossible figures etc....
An other case of No. 3 was reported by a jewish scholar on the Talmud this way: It's 63 volumes are not only 'passionate disputes': By demanding the reader to follow them, they provide a training in the type of thinking used by those medieval, hermetic scholars. ... Then a clever designed 'mental trick lock', an 'intellectual vortex' comes. The emotional and motivational aspect of all the training with repetitions, variations, rythms, starts working like a maelstrom along the previous levels of learning. The first 'trick lock' the student meets is the barrier of his own intellectual strength, a barrier artificially made thicker than necessary. Only then comes the real 'trick lock' for the student who thinks he has the trouble behind him: The now since long dragged-in mental concepts and thinking-ways are set into conflict. A Talmudist described it: "... it puts the mind at war with itself; the more powerful the mind, the more destructive the conflict."
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Kasparov interview
That real innovations reduced to arrive at homeopathic dosis fits my perceptions. I would even guess stronger variants.
I have no idea what you're saying here.
I mean that substantial innovations came the past ca. 3 decades much rarer than one should have expected. Kasparov and Thiel say that in view of AI and communication technology, whereas my impression comes from science.
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generalized n-categories?
Not quite so. The n-Lab contains a page on it: http://ncatlab.org/nlab/show/hyperstructure , but that is not that new. The usual deficiency of such constructs (and the many attempted definitions of n-categories) is their reliance on set theory. Grothendieck seems to have been the first to suggest to forget set theory as foundations, and Voevodsky's way to build a homotopy-theoretic foundation of mathematics on some sort of computer language (leading to entirely new approaches to artificial theorem proving/checking): http://ncatlab.org/nlab/show/hyperstructure may be interesting for Baas' ideas too. Interestingly too, homotopy theory, n-category were caused by attempts to deal with topology, and Baas' concepts come from the same background. He was apparently motivated by Charles Ehresmann's ctitique that n-categories should be insufficient.
generalized n-categories?
This looks like an interesting, but a bit strange, old story. A bit similar to parts of an earlier posted essay by Gromov. However that may be, the Princeton IAS invited the author and so I'd like to know about how his concepts are intended to become implemented and applied: http://vbm-ehr.pagesperso-orange.fr/ChEh/articles/Baas%20paper.pdf
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Thanks for all the interesting responses, everyone!
Here's another question: Do you find that academic books and papers take longer to read as you grow older? Or not at all?
That is hard to estimate, but I think I need the same or less time for studying them. But of course the issue is how one reads them and how much one spends into extracting the hidden ideas and translating them into one's own mental structures (instead of turning one's mind into an emulation of the author's one) . One can study and understand very advanced papers fast and well without a productive "translation", and the more one knows, the easier it is to restrict reading that way.