How memories are stored certainly matters, it is too much of an assumption that levels are sealed off. Such an assumption may be implicitly negated in a model, but obviously this doesn't mean something has changed; the nature of material systems has this issue, unlike mathematical ones.
Another poignant property of material systems is that at times there is a special status of observer for them. In the case of the mind, you have the consciousness of the person and while certainly it can be juxtaposed to other instances of it, it is a different relation from...
Going by practice, it does seem likely that intertwined (nominally separate, as over-categories) memories will be far easier to recall at will, than any loosely related (by stream of consciousness) collection of declarative memories. However it is not known if the stored memories (of either type) actually are stored individually or not; they are many competing models for how a memory is stored and recalled, up to the lowest/"lowest" -for there may be no lowest in reality - level of neurons.
That said, I was only asking about other people's intuitive sense of what works better. It isn't possible to answer using a definitive model, due to the number of unknowns.
I mean more cost-effective, so to speak. My sense is that while procedural is easier to sustain (for years, or even for the entirety of your life), it really is more suitable for focused projects instead of random/general knowledge accumulation. Then again it is highly likely that procedural memories help with better organization overall, acting as a more elegant system. In that, declarative memories are more like axioms, with procedural being either rules or just application of rules, with far fewer axioms needed.
I agree. Although my question was not whether 3d is real/independent of the observer. I was wondering why for us it had to be specifically 3d instead of something else.
For all we know, maybe "3d" isn't 3d either, in that any way of viewing things would end up seeming to be 3d. In a set system, with known axioms, examined from the outside, 3d just follows 2d. But if as an observer you are 3d-based, it doesn't have to follow that this is a progression from 2d at all and it might just be a different system.
You are confusing "reason to choose" (which is obviously not there; optimal strategy is trivial to find) with "happens to be chosen". Ie you are looking at what is said from an angle which isn't crucial to the point.
Everyone is aware that scissors is not be chosen at any time if the player has correctly evaluated the dynamic. Try asking a non-sentence in a formal logic system to stop existing cause it evaluated the dynamic, and you'll get why your point is not sensible.
Thank you, I will have a look!
My own interest in recollecting this variation (an actual thing, from my childhood years) is that intuitively it seems to me that this type of limited setting may be enough so that the inherent dynamic of 'new player will go for the less than optimal strategy', and the periodic ripple effect it creates, can (be made to) mimic some elements of a formal logic system, namely the interactions of non-sentences with sentences.
So I posted this as a possible trigger for more reflection, not for establishing the trivial (optimal strategy in this corrupted variation of the game) ^_^
Please read my edited reply to lsusr.
Edit (I rewrote this reply, cause it was too vague in the original :) )
Very correct in regards to every player actually having identified this (indeed, if all players are aware of the new balance, they will pick up that glue is a better type of scissors so scissors should not be picked). But imagine a player comes in and hasn't picked up this identity, while (for different reasons) they have picked up an aversion to choose rock from previous players. Then scissors still has a chance to win (against paper), and effectively rock is largely out, so the ...
" Presumably the machine learning model has in some sense discovered Newtonian mechanics using the training data we fed it, since this is surely the most compact way to predict the position of the planets far into the future. "
To me, this seems to be an entirely unrealistic presumption (also true for any of its parallels; not just when it is strictly about the position of planets). Even the claim that NM is "surely the most compact [...]" is questionable, given that obviously we know from history that there had been models able to pr...
Thank you all for your answers... I will be taking this piece out, cause ultimately it isn't anything good :)
Cthulhu ^_^
Well, this is only an introductory part. The glyphs are to be described later, and they stand for the meaning of the intense emotion. Much like the idol symbolizes the emotion as a whole, the glyphs on it are specks which may be analyzed.
If I may, to address both yours and MakoYass gist of the replies:
-I do feel that the summation of the excerpt is not loyal to the idea I had - which, to be sure, means I did fail, cause I cannot ask of the reader to see just what I aimed. That said, my own summation would be as follows:
1) vengeful acts seem to b...
" People don't live merely to survive: we're hardwired to propagate our genes. If you cannot think abstractly and articulate your ideas well, you will have difficulty attracting a mate. People who have disabled their ability to examine themselves will be quickly eliminated from the gene pool. Hence, it seems unlikely that such an illness will occur because it goes against how natural selection has shaped us. "
I don't disagree with the gist of the above. However it is tricky to assign clear intentions to a non-human agent, a...
" The idea that consciousness is an phenomenon unrelated to brain structure and neural connections, is not helpful" is something I agree with. My question meant to have you argue in what way this hypothesis prerequisites a duallistic view.
Hi, I read the synopsis in that wiki page. While the Snow Crash story seems highly unlikely, indeed there isn't any prerequisite of understanding (by the conscious person) so that a change may take place. One could go as far as to claim that understanding by its very nature rests mostly on not understanding, while focusing on something to be understood.
I certainly am not aiming to define possible conditions under which something like the DZI may occur. Those may or may not exist. However it isn't by itself unrealistic that if we suppose that the ...
Intuitively, I think it is possible it will appear.
Rationally, one may consider the following as well:
-not much time has passed since the first use of language (by prehistoric people) to this day, so it can be assumed that only a negligible part of the possible mental calculations/connections has occured
-there is no direct survival bonus through ability to think in complicated manner; on the other hand there is arguably an cost-effective logic in disabling great freedom in self-examination
However it may take centuries for that to happen.
At any rate, it is ...
I wish to examine a point in the foundations of your post - to be more precise, a point which leads to the inevitable conclusion that it is not problematic in this discussion to use the term 'agent' while it is understood in a manner which allows a thermostat to qualify as an agent.
A thermostat certainly has triggers/sensors which force a reaction when a condition has been met. However to argue that this is akin to how a person is an agent is to argue that a rock supposedly "runs" the program known as gravity, when it falls. The issue i...
I do suspect that when things make sense it is because of a drive of the sense-making agent to further his/her understanding, but I think that unwittingly it is actually a self-understanding and not one of the cosmos. If the cosmos does make sense, it isn't making sense to some chance observer like a human who is at any rate a walking thinking mechanism and has very little consciousness of either his own mental cogs or the dynamics between his own thinking and anything external and non-human. That this allows for distinct and verifiable progre...
I generally agree, and I am happy you found the discussion interesting :)
In my view, indeed the Babylonian type of labyrinth does promote continuous struggle, or at least multiple points of hope and focus on achieving a breakthrough, while ultimately a majority of the time they won't lead to anything - and couldn't have lead to anything in the first place. The Arabian type at least promotes a stable progression, towards an end - although that end may already be a bad one.
Most of the time we simply move in our labyrinth anyway. And with more theoretical goals it can be said that even a breakthrough is more of a fantasy borne out of the endless movement inside the maze.
A good question. I would think that while the story doesn't have much to offer regarding conscious mental calculation and systems, it still includes a set of powerful allegories (in my article I did mention one of them: Algernon seems to stand for the somatic part, with the person turning into a purely mental entity; another allegory seems to be about the need to stop extrapolating thoughts to prevent an overload) which can, consciously or not, bring about changes to the reader's rationality.
I don't think the story has much to do with youth ...
I entirely agree with you. The story isn't hard scifi at all, and this much is clear :)
It still is one of the gloomiest pieces of literature ever written, and it does manage to move the reader...
While "yes requires the possibility of no" is correct, one should also establish whether or not either yes or no is meaningful itself in the context of the examination. For example, usually one is not up against a real authority, so whether the view of the other person is in favor or against his/her own the answer cannot be final for reasons other than just the internal conflict of the one who poses (or fears to pose) the question.
Often (in the internet age) we see this issue of bias and fear of asking framed in regards to hybrid matters, both sc...
There is a nice quote by Socrates (iirc it is in the dialogue with the geometrician Theaetetos*) where Socrates mentions one of the views about the origin of philosophical thinking, namely that it is born from the sense of dazzle (thamvos, in Greek). He meant (in context) that when a thinker senses something impressive and unknown, he/she is bound to examine it.
Thamvos is, of course, distinct from anxiety, such as when the sense is negative or even horrific.
In essence I agree that one of the prerequisites for intricate thought is the ability (and chance) t...
" Well, here is the point where we disagree. In my view, equations for e.g. gravity or quantum physics are given by nature. Different species may use different syntax to describe them, but the freedom to do so would be quite limited. "
Yet differences of syntax connote relative uniformity in the observers as well as presupposing science being cosmic (also math being cosmic, where it relates to scientific examination). In my view supposing that indeed the cosmos (something clearly external to our mind) is examined and accounted for in a way whic...
" If the hypothetical aliens live in the same universe, they will probably develop natural numbers, some version of calculus, probably complex numbers, etc. Because those are things that describe the universe. "
I think that they might not. Of course I cannot be certain, but at least in the hypothetical I meant aliens which indeed do not have even the concept of a natural number or other similar concept. And in my view the notion of a sum (a oneness, something specific and easy to contrast to other objects or qualities) is quite possibly (tied t...
I will try to offer my reflection on the two matters you mentioned.
1)First of all whether this development may have been social. It would - to a degree - but if so then it would be a peculiar and prehistoric event:
If I was to guess, at some point (in deep prehistory) our ancestors could not yet be able to communicate using anything resembling a language, or even words. Prior to using words (or anything similar to words) prehistoric humans would only tenuously tie their inner world (thinking & feeling) to formulated or isolated notions. It is highly li...
Hi, yes, I do not mean why the Fibonacci spiral approximates the Golden Spiral. I mean why we happen to see something very close to this pattern in some external objects (for example some shells of creatures) when it is a mathematical formation based on a specific sequence.
I referred to it to note that perhaps we project math onto the external world, including cases where we literally see a fully fledged math spiral.
There are other famous examples. Another is The Vitruvian Man (proportions of man by Vitruvius, as presented by DaVinci). One would be tempted...
Thank you. Intuitively I would hazard the guess that even non-obvious systems (such as your example of the story which rests on axioms) may be in the future presented in a mathematical way. There is a very considerable added hurdle there, however:
When we communicate about math (let's use a simple and famous example: the Pythagorean theorem in Euclidean space) we never focus on parameters that go outside the system. Not only parameters which are outside the set axioms which define the system mathematically (in this case Euclidean space) but more import...
If you mean my example using people who were born blind, I meant that much like they develop their own system and theory to identify what they cannot sense (visible space), so do all humans in regards to identifying how the external world/the cosmos functions. It isn't about which one is "less real", unless we claim that there is one being (or one group of beings etc) which witness an actual reality. That itself is highly debatable (eg Descartes, and some other thinkers, usually reversed such a role for a deity).
If those aliens are able to understand notions such as momentum, it would be because they can (in whatever way; sense or other) understand more fundamental notions which may be non-cosmic. Some good examples of such notions, from Eleatic philosophy (Parmenides, Zeno etc) are size, form, position, movement (change) and time. To a human, those ideas tie to something evident. An alien may not have them at all. An alien closely resembling humans may have them (as well as math).
Indeed, crows are a good example of non-human creatures that use something which may be identified as math (crows have been observed to effectively even notice the -its practical manifestation, obviously - law of displacement of liquids :) )
I used human as a synecdoche here, that is chose the most prominent creature we know that uses math, to stand for all that (to some degree) do. Even if we accept that crows or other creatures have a similar link (itself debatable) it still would link math to dna found on our planet. My suspicion is that what we identify...
Thanks for the reply. I think that it does matter, because if math is indeed anthropic then it should follow that humans are in effect bringing to light parts of our own mental world. It isn't a discovery of principles of the cosmos, but of how any principles (to the degree they exist in parts of the cosmos) are translated by our mentality. I do find it a little poetic, in that if true it is a bit like using parts of yourself so as to "move" about, and special kind of "movement" requires special knowledge of something still only hu...
The thing-in-itself indeed ties somewhat more clearly to the HPL mythos beings, in that they are (by majority; or at least the major ones in the pantheon) supposed to not be three-dimensional in the first place. The thing-in-itself is the object without having to be rendered by any specific observer's point of view.
While in (most) philosophy one doesn't examine a topic which is able to cause anxiety, the notions themselves do negate a possible anxiety which would be caused by any examination, in my view. Again, even the notion of the thing-in-its...
A nice story!
If I may intrude on the solar labyrinth a bit, in my view the mental world may indeed have aspects of a solar labyrinth, only that at set times (triggered by difficult to calculate events) what had been only a game of shadow and light now takes the form of the most concrete wall.
I do love your remark about the solar labyrinth not forcing the guest to even accept it as a labyrinth. Yet I think that at some point (potentially) any mental scheme which seems fleeting and easy to bypass can indeed become stable and even frighteningly immediate & demanding a solution if one is to be allowed to leave.
Machine language is a known lower level; neurons aren't; perhaps in the future there will be more microscopic building blocks examined; maybe there is no end to the division itself.
In a computer it would indeed make no sense for a programmer to examine something below machine language, since you are compiling or otherwise acting upon it. But it's not a known isomorphism to the mind.
If you'd like a parallel to the above, from the history of philosophy, you might be interested in comparing dialectic reasoning and Aristotelian logic. It's not by a... (read more)