TheVat

BTW, bit of confusion on @dimreepr location. Beecee refers to Trump as dimeeper's former President, and Kamala as his current veep, but the profile puts him in UK? Not terribly germane to the topic, I was just curious.

@beecee -- as I was catching up, I saw this bit in your posts.... While I agree with many of your ideas, this struck me as a little facile. The logic seemed on the order of saying "Pancreatic cancer patients are mortally ill. Therefore we shouldn't be concerned about sterilizing their rooms or feeding them or supplying meds. " We have hospitals to make people well, even if they sometimes fail. If we determine as a society that prisons should be places of rehabilitation, then we don't want to let them become harsh and cruel just because the rehab doesn't always succeed with every prisoner. Or because some prisoners have acted cruelly.

All it needs are a few ball bearings.

My wife once received ball bearings as a gift, which suggests that some people really need that long list. Abstractions, like nothing, can be defined conceptually, saving the chore of infinite cardinality. Concepts like nothing depend on some sort of duality, because "the absence of things, " needs the presence of things to gain meaning. Nothing/something is a duality, each dependent on the other.

Like Bufo, I think it would be good to see some solid peer-reviewed trials that make it past a preprint server. Otherwise, this sounds a lot like the hydrochloroquine mass psychosis all over again. Given the reports coming mainly from southern US states of people taking ivermectin in its veterinary dosage (i.e. horse body mass preparations) and getting quite sick (some have shed the linings of their intestines, which comes out as a sort of rope-like extrusion - aren't you glad to have that detail?), I hope that the hysteria can subside and see if any meaningful facts emerge. If vaccines are in short supply many places, that's not a logical argument for taking snake oil. There is never a "front line" justification for an off-label use of a pharmaceutical when any positive effects (beyond placebo) are unproven. (if you're just looking for a placebo, try dropping some TicTacs in a pill bottle) Also, as was the case with 'quine, sometimes the on-label uses are of vital importance and a rush on supplies can deprive others in great medical need, e.g. people suffering from tropical parasites, people who really need their horses to make a living, et al.

I have invited Dr. Don Lincoln, physicist and well-known science author, who works at FermiLab, and who was quoted in this thread here.... ....to join this discussion. If he declines, I will let you all know, so as not to leave you hanging. Mr. Jones suggested I'm a name dropper - I can only add that I have carefully not mentioned my long-ago acquaintance with Isaac Asimov, which I humbly offer as evidence to the contrary.

We're blind elephant fondlers, gradually working our way around the beast. Davy, Will do. Going out a door ATM, so might be a while.

I have Don's email -- he was the resident physics expert at my erstwhile science forum for a decade. Would you like me to invite him here to comment?

So, have to ask, is string theory physics? Or, because we don't know to what degree it might describe the real world, is it a theoretical framework that lies on the borderlands of metaphysics? String theory seems to describe a landscape of possible universes, most of which intelligent life can never behold. At least, with Davy's long-fingered lemurs, we can go to Madagascar and look at quite a few of them. (careful, they will steal your glasses)

Observations are just that -- they are not logic. Logic lies in statements about what has been observed. One can easily stumble in interpreting an observation and make a fallacious statement about it. And draw false conclusions. We humans have a glorious history of doing that.... I observed the sun come up in the east this morning. The sun appeared to be moving across the sky, so I conclude the sun was moving while the Earth was standing still, and that the sun orbits the Earth. So "my logic is simple" didn't get me too far towards the truth, did it?

I noticed that NPR's count of the new laws in TX that went into effect today was.... 666. By the number of the Beast ye shall know them... https://www.npr.org/2021/09/01/1032894148/in-texas-666-laws-take-effect-sept-1-including-many-conservative-priorities @Phi for All, I think this is similar to the gun laws where you essentially have minority rule. IIRC reproductive choice has majority support in TX, and the new "bounty hunter" system of burying clinics in lawsuits is also widely opposed. I feel it's not too late for Justice Roberts to resuscitate his conscience if any cases do find a twisting turning path to SCOTUS.

First, welcome @Davy_Jones, who I know as another contributor of my now-defunct sciencechatforum. While I agree that the whole question of what forces and fields really are crosses into the land of metaphysics, I am also one who wonders at how tenuous our grasp of what gravity is. If we're allowed to free-fall in a gravitational field, then we don't experience a force. We only experience a force when we land on something and our body's atom's outer electrons experience electrostatic forces from, say, a chair's outer electrons. Without that repulsive force, we would just continue our freefall through the chair, the floor, the earth's crust and so on along a space-time geodesic. (and be in pretty bad shape, no doubt?) So, is gravity then construed there as a pseudoforce? Were we only following a line of curved space until a real electrostatic force made itself known to us? It's in such perspectives that gravitons seem especially incoherent as anything but a math toy. John Wheeler always comes to mind... "Spacetime tells matter how to move; matter tells spacetime how to curve." From a meta perspective, it's awfully hard to say what this "telling" process is.

https://sicara.ai/blog/artificial-general-intelligence I understand there is a rule here about no one has to click on a link. For some subjects, where going through a quantity of literature is vital to any meaningful participation, I don't quite see how such a rule can work. It would be ridiculous for me to copy-paste everything in this article on AGI, and create such a long post. So, erm, I guess I'll summarize and then suggest it for further reading? Summary: we are far from AGI. Progress has been made since the sixties, but there is still a great distance to go. Since the law at least tries to be grounded in some reality, it seems likely that we won't be assigning personhood to either washing machines or to AI that can't recognize the simplest objects out of some predefined context.

Sense of identity, of a self, seems intimately tied to our environment and experiences of others. Without developing a sense of other, and the boundaries between self and world, seems unlikely that a conscious awareness of identity would emerge. IIRC, studies in child psychology show there is no sense of being a separate being until a couple of years pass. Will try to catch up with this later...

Second that. Wow. Instrumental breaks were outstanding. Though maybe bring the piano break up a little in the mix -- didn't need quite so much rhythm section right there. And agree with @swansont the Dead cover of Good Lovin really thrives with their unique sound. You people are going to have me in a tie-dye and ponytail, if this keeps up.

Sometimes a cover supplies something that the song really needed (and was not quite getting from the original band), like Joe Cocker taking The Animals Please Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood and knocking it out of the park with his vocals. Or Santana's cover of Fleetwood Mac's Black Magic Woman. Or Janis Joplin taking Bobby McGee away from Kris Kristofferson. I'll give the Dead version a listen. That's a band I used to be meh about back in the day, but have found more to like as I get older. And, as far as covers go, Counting Crows slow tempo version of Friend of the Devil is a far lesser thing than the original.

It was just the abstract which is linked at the homepage of Imagination Engines which you linked for us. (linked at bottom of left-hand column) https://www.worldscientific.com/doi/abs/10.1142/S2705078521500053 Am still trying to get at the full paper, without a paywall.

Thanks, @Alex_Krycek. I went off and did a lit search, too, found some of the ones you posted, including Thaler's paper in Journal of AI and Consciousness. I want to look at some critical responses (not just from my imagitron...) to some of his claims like Which is a pretty bold claim. Whenever we go from so-called weak AI ( simulating specific tasks found in human intelligence, through pre-programmed algorithms ) to strong AI (Turing test-worthy, responsive to novel situations, showing general intelligence and self-programming growth), some people get all metaphysical about it. If Thaler wants to assign his DABUS subjective feelings, while retaining a "parental" ownership of all the patents, then he is indeed having his cake and eating it. Too much, the magic DABUS. If the machine reaches a point where it can make awful wordplay based on The Who lyrics, then I think it should find itself an android body so as to walk itself into a courtroom and request a cut of the proceeds.

I was speculating that Thaler's move is driven by some idealism regarding future AGI and not purely his own financial benefit. Financially, as you've noted, it makes more sense for him to be the inventor and DABUS a tool of cognitive enhancement. Perhaps someday he'll be a "father, " like Dr. Daystrom on Star Trek...

I can see why Thaler might want to get those issues into the open. Self-aware AGI is not here, but it doesn't hurt to lay some groundwork in advance. I agree with @Alex_Krycek (though I always find his chain-smoking pal a bit smug) that the some of the issues are philosophical. And it's worth asking what a court-ordered Turing test would be like. The CM doesn't seem sentient, and the selective criteria that its "critic" uses to steer things are set by Thaler, so the CM is more a prosthesis for Thaler's brain than a brain in and of itself.

Yikes! That made me cringe as much as laugh. I feel there has to be more to this than what the picture shows, because that looks just f--ing insane. Are those pads made of some special material that will give way enough to allow the train wheels to stay in the groove and yet not cut or burst the hose? Hard to imagine.

Thomas Austin ordering 24 rabbits shipped to his home in Australia.

One of the best descriptions of the Africa/US slave trade I've read came from a British author, Neil Gaiman, as a fictional historical interlude in American Gods. Based on other nonfiction accounts I've read, Gaiman seems to have done some research, and captured the brutality and misery and death involved in the abduction, sale, and transport (as densely-packed human cargo, belowdecks) of slaves to the Southern US and Carribean. In none of my readings have I found any mention of voluntary emigration or anyone leaving their village and family in ways other than at the point of a sword or barrel of a gun. It's possible, however, there were varying degrees of coercion, and in earlier phases of the trade some routes to freedom (as there were with the poor in Britain who were "transported" to the colonies and had in theory a path to purchasing emancipation). I see several closely spaced posts made mine a bit redundant. Ah well.

I've tended to rethink the risk as I become aware that the definition of "serious illness" is not always agreed upon between pundits, pols, and scientists. This morning I heard a health official point out that the CDC et al. are using the term to mean "needing hospitalization and ventilation assistance," whereas many people tend to think that, if they get sick with a breakthrough infection and are in bed at home for a week and can barely cross the room, that is also a fairly serious illness. Some of them don't understand, as a result of this confusion of nomenclature, that even when they are vaccinated they may get quite sick and have their life adversely affected (with some chance of lingering myocarditis and other nastiness). Just because the chances of serious illness (in the CDC definition) are quite small, doesn't mean there isn't a more substantial chance of having quite a nasty bout. And of doing a bit of virus shedding that gives others a similar ordeal. FB really needs to find its moral compass (something better than "move fast and break things," Zuckerboy) and start enforcing rules against disinformation and ideological propaganda.