Ben Banana

Immerse yourself with making your programs the best you can possibly make them. Try doing a lot of practice exercises. Maybe you'll feel like throwing on your headphones, eating some hash browns (leave the bowl at your desk ), cracking open a lot of soda cans and tirelessly hacking at code. Go with that if you want to, whatever is natural and lets your pupils dilate over the required duration of eight hours. Any questions? I'm sort of joking, but expect something like that to happen. For larger and more serious projects which you hope to complete, just keep programming and scrap/rewrite as you go. Of course its good to plan things out, but don't plan too heavily unless you fully understand the components you must integrate (discrete prototypes already written). If you have no idea what's going to happen, go back to experimenting and practice. Good luck.

@JustinW Then what can your free will be? The quality of a strong soul? So, weak souls are weak and always will be? Therefore, weak souls were immediately determined to a foul destiny (hell)? Well, that's more deterministic than the landing of dice! Why do you want to survive? Why not give yourself lethal injections, sterilize the water supplies and extinguish humanity? This aspect is where the belief of free-will thrives; around a deep curiosity over "the meaning of life." This is a classic situation in philosophy, but I suggest, free-will is a poor and insufficient solution.

1. What kind of features do you want your "Smart Home" to have? 2. You need to decide what hardware you'll utilize for the "central hub." It must be capable of handling/processing the various input and sensors rigged with the house. There's a wide variety of interfacing adapters you can find to assist with assembling the rig. 3. Although there's a lot of neat open-source stuff for smart home projects like this, I hope you have some experience with programming. Open Source Kits http://wosh.sourceforge.net/ http://misterhouse.sourceforge.net/ Voice Recognition http://cmusphinx.sourceforge.net/wiki/ http://www.voxforge.org/ Surveillance http://www.zoneminder.com/ Storage Management http://www.freenas.org/ Media & Entertainment http://xbmc.org/ http://www.mythtv.org/ A book: http://www.apress.com/open-source/linux-and-unix/9781430227786 And a dedicated website: http://www.linuxsmarthome.com/ Those are just a few links I quickly pulled up in a matter of minutes. There's some tutorials out there about hashing your own "multi-touch screen interface" together, which might be interesting.

You should put Vi Hart after Trigonometry.

I don't know if this is going anywhere, but let's just confront reality here and now: A yellow slice of cheese. It's true. (I'm not trying to troll, I just ... wanted to say that ... to troll) But to be serious, I think in time we'll amass the facts, develop improved or evolved theories and maybe fully realize that this is not the question to ask, hopefully with alternative promises. I think it may already well be an unreasonable question to ask. But what's the better direction?

I am dumbfounded! Its not about processing power at all. Today's average computers are insanely faster than the human brain. Not only by computation, but also by logic and anything else consistent you throw at them. Its about hierarchy, representation, and structure! Pummeling millions of atomic pieces of information through a tree of classification and reduction, towards an ultimate abstraction. The bigger the brain, the more capable it is of developing and handling higher abstractions. Therefore, the bigger the brain, the more "intelligent" it is. Human brains sort of combine information with the means of processing (don't think of it exactly like that, but..) they have an architecture ideally capable of conscience. A simple algorithm might compare images by summing the red, green and blue bytes into integers (for both individual images). Then it would divide each color-component sum by the total number of pixels that were sampled, take the absolute difference of these color-component values between the two images, add them together, and divide by three. The final result should be a difference value between 0 and 255, 0 meaning they had a perfectly equal quantization of colors. widthA = 20 heightA = 50 redA = 102000 greenA = 30600 blueA = 73950 widthB = 90 heightB = 40 redB = 357000 greenB = 153000 blueB = 229500 areaA = widthA * heightA = 20 * 50 = 1000 areaB = widthB * heightB = 90 * 40 = 3600 redA = redA / areaA = 102000 / 1000 = 102 greenA = greenA / areaA = 30600 / 1000 = 31 blueA = blueA / areaA = 73950 / 1000 = 74 redB = redB / areaB = 357000 / 3600 = 100 greenB = greenB / areaB = 153000 / 3600 = 42 blueB = blueB / areaB = 229500 / 3600 = 64 redDiff = |redA - redB| = |102 - 100| = 2 greenDiff = |greenA - greenB| = |31 - 42| = 11 blueDiff = |blueA - blueB| = |74 - 64| = 10 diffSum = redDiff + greenDiff + blueDiff = 23 diffFinal = diffSum / 3 = 23 / 3 = 7 However, this comparison is almost useless. Who would want to run a program like this on the worlds most powerful super computer? Intelligence must be capable of abstraction, and only a very particular intelligent architecture can be fully conscious as we think of ourselves. When you look at an image, "you" are far from the level of reasoning about a mere collection of colors. I believe its possible to create machines such as self driving cars, or robots capable of reading a book and really understanding the contents, or whatever yet only humans have done to date. But depending on the architecture of the machine, it may or may not be conscious. I predict machines designed for practical efficiency purposes would not be conscious. They really could run on hardware similar to what we have now, but only to serve as extremely versatile number crunching machines. In fact, by the differences of common computer architecture and organic brains, they could be incredibly (INSANELY!) more powerful, yet just as capable of human-like things. They would only lack a conscience, and that's for the better of efficiency.

I'm not sure if anyone grasped the deep concept I was trying to throw out in my earlier post. I wasn't merely suggesting that "computers are conscious" (which is nonsense), I only said that they can be "conscious". Awe... this will be frustrating to explain. @Santalum Sorry. @calabi Wow, just as I hypothesized! I've been classified "colorblind" my whole life, however from close observation I've doubted the common notion of what it meant. At least in my case, its simply a difference of the brain and how it developed, not of the eyes or of some birth defect. Now to think of it, the idea of a birth defect which somehow makes your eyes "unable to measure select colors properly" sounds very stupid. Great video. I'm glad to see this research has been done. I was actually going to try explaining the very same idea in the last post (to support some things I wanted to say), but I thought the concept would be too alien for anyone to fairly consider. This is a great relief. Thank you very much for sharing that video! Yes, this must be everyone's initial assumption. Its considerably difficult to suggest otherwise, as I will explain why later (not in this post, sorry). I had a dream last night. As I woke up this morning, I wondered particularly about how my brain represented the images and events which I "experienced" in the dream. Sometimes I dream very lucidly, where the dream seems indistinguishable from awake reality. Have you ever had a dream which seems to last for hours of the night, yet you may only be asleep a short duration? You may even experience multiple epics within the same night. Then you wake up in awe with the feeling as if you just read twenty whole novels in a single night! I think this is easy to find an explanation for. Its simply because you "make up" and experience the dream much faster than you can experience awake reality. Due to hierarchical abstraction of information and memory, native experiences (generated by your own mind) can be iterated on the fly. While dreaming, your mind goes through a daft relay of connections. If your dream is full of nonsense, these faulty connections are found (by comparison with "axioms" baked into your memory) and corrected during the natural process. During awake life, you're processing external information. Miniscule observations which may already have been well abstracted and classified into your memory will only bloat your experience, inconveniently prolonged by the persistence of uncontrollable time. When you read a fictional book, its not only necessary to read and understand the words, sentences, dialogue and apply surface-level comprehension. Most importantly, you are required to run this information through a much higher pipeline of abstraction and relation, in the act of "painting a picture" around the story. In contrast, this can all happen simultaneously during a dream. Because dreams are native and your brain is not trying to integrate external information as it usually does, connections are very lively. Evidently, the information and process of a brain are merely the substance and mechanical throughput of a massive dynamic hierarchy.

Definitely, but not always "directly". Highlighting 5:21 - 6:22 "We are a way for the cosmos to know itself." - Carl Sagan A theory is: although you claim to "see a full image" gathered by your eyes, which is seemingly integrated into your "mono-centre of consciousness", this is only because your brain is wired to reflect upon itself like that. Unlike a computer screen where the image displayed is simply a matrix of pixels, the layers and complexity of neurons (particularly visual, but not exclusively) must be so dense and comprehensive -- from precisely concrete to highly abstract, and absolutely everything in between -- that this phenomena of consciousness does bizarrely, yet plainly exist. This is a strong particular case when a system (such as the brain) cannot be pointed directly at itself. Likely one of the strongest cases, at that. Contrary to what you (calabi) have denied, the only way we can understand "consciousness" is by doing the dirty work. Ethos. Scientific research. But in other words, yes a mere machine can "experience with consciousness" just as we believe ourselves to, at least by this concept. From giving this statement, I predict people will insist bringing examples of quantum behavior and other [stretched] ideas to discuss. Helplessly, I can only say we should consider epistemology and for now, stay close to neuroscience. We haven't prepared or discovered enough information to sensibly theorize around the subject of "conscious phenomena". To be decent, I should say I've only given a concept as far as I'm aware. From a high level, character glyphs are found by a memory offset pointing to one bitmap of a bitmap array (a "font"), which a letter or symbol may be encoded by. A well known character standard: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ascii Off-topic note: I wish an AJAX implementation allowed me to look at different pages while creating a post. That would be useful.

Although 3D graphics are extremely interesting (one of my largest interests), you're a beginner and you should start with a more simple and easy to complete project. Way back when I was first learning C++, I made a console-based restaurant tycoon game. It was a relatively easy project and very fun to play with. Like this: That's just an example of how you can do it. You can integrate all kinds of strategic elements, upgrades and research trees (like marketing insight, or special restaurant equipment) etc. Have fun!

Some are of zealous speculation, claimed to be validated even by the "gap filler" thought as science. There's always people on the internet who use disgustingly projected reason to invent a new sort of "God" or extreme significant consciousness. There's also those super-theories, believed to solve all problems of science using a loosely connected basis of religious excitement and faulted math. Most often, I see this turned into . Common people eventually get very involved looking for (and carelessly accepting) any kind of convincing revelation, buried secrets, sacred mysteries or conspiracy they can find (to tease their mind). They're encouraged to stomp in front of physicists faces, probably while not really having the slightest understanding of the things they've heard around physics, "watered down" on some mind-teasing TV special. A lot of people unknowingly stretch the definition energy (in regards to physics), eventually until it leaks into the usual nonsensical spiritual realm. I think I know me cheese, so if anyone thinks this is cynical, just speak up please. Thank you.

I could throw out the words: "And after that, there's negative everything, like a number line!" But, that toss-out just doesn't make any new ideas which are useful. I don't think you could even bring it to enough consistency to affect our progress around this unanswered question, in anyway. To be an effective philosopher, you can't just speculate. Let's not get our philosophy programs canceled just because so little "philosophers" today really know what philosophy is. Philosophy is awesome, but its community sucks. Edit: Oh! I didn't notice how there's currently 5 pages.

Yes. I desperately tried to make a response the day after I posted that. However, I still need to do my "homework" before replying. By that, I mean how I'm still inable to read the statements you presented. Could you please share a few links or recommend any books that might help? I don't know what's good. Just, please, don't hand over Let Me Google That For You. You mentioned Bertand Russell, Georg Cantor and Kurt Godel. I've heard (and read a bit) about all of them. However, I've never actually read any of their books or published papers. Questions: Have you? Which ones in particular? Would you recommend I read them rather than a dry introduction (such as this)? I guess I'm being a puppy. Would you rather I just find a quick guide and reply as soon as possible? I'm sorry for the let down, but this looks like a good topic and I don't want to make a cheap response.

Compiler Construction, buddy! @khaled Wouldn't that mean the least of "Computer Science" ? Your first point (a), however unfortunate is true. You don't get to make an actual compiler during the class. But your second set me off. The class is far more valuable (to a computer scientist) than data warehousing (which appears IT related). Actually, you probably should just take the binary quantum cyberspace hyper-technology digital technology circuits & wires internet technology class of awesomeness. I found that the most useful of all. Oh, and then go buy an iPad and sell your computer.

I can't wait for when you are banned.

Hydrogen Fuel Cells for the win.

Excuse me as I exclaim without any elaboration, but I really like where this is going! Very interesting, Trestone. I was about to throw together a nice response, but my provincial reality took me away... and now I should go to bed. Stay tight; I hope to return tomorrow.

You're welcome!

No, it's not true. You yourself roughly tried to say "there haven't been any discoveries in science about soul." So you really told yourself that you're wrong; we don't know anything definite or real about "soul". Accidental liars paradox, eh? For all I know, "soul" is an imaginary concept made-up by the cult which all religion may be. Because creative people such as me get together and make them. Thank you very much.

Yeah, most politicians are dangerously stupid anyway.

Although the link was removed, I'm betting it was written by Marko Rodin! Yeah, I think I'm right. He's been a popular crackpot lately; I recognize some of his terms in the abstract. In summary, Mark Rodin claims that: x mod (radix-1) = Super Awesome. And that is ... I think he should try being a politician instead. That would suit his idiocy better.

Are you kidding me? Fiction writers (or comic artists ) mostly never do any thorough research, if any at all. And any thorough research to them would usually mean lousy research to a real scientist.

Any AOT-compiled language should be as good as, if not better than C and C++. But because they're both so popular and mature, everything except for the languages themselves is unbeatable: their compilers & utility, a countless number of libraries and SDKs, as well as the fact that all popular operating systems have a significant portion written in C. I think you should look at this: http://crypto.stanford.edu/~blynn/c/index.html

@Xittenn I was wrong. My bad.. I should have known that. Thanks. @TransformerRobot I didn't show signs of it until 8-13.

A neurologist wouldn't be able to tell you anything about Autism. However, they would be able to discuss "Brain Computer Interfacing"