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Topic: Dark Enlightenment - page 5. (Read 69267 times)

sr. member
Activity: 336
Merit: 265
March 06, 2017, 06:16:34 PM
Study: Moral Outrage ‘Alleviates Guilt’ over People’s Own Moral Failings
http://www.breitbart.com/tech/2017/03/01/study-moral-outrage-alleviates-guilt-over-peoples-own-moral-failings/

Yup. Moral outrage is always driven by some motive (including selfish goals and even profit) other than objectivity.


JAD must have finally read my points in this thread:

http://blog.jim.com/culture/implementing-patriarchy-without-the-state/
legendary
Activity: 1946
Merit: 1055
March 02, 2017, 11:03:47 AM
Study: Moral Outrage ‘Alleviates Guilt’ over People’s Own Moral Failings
http://www.breitbart.com/tech/2017/03/01/study-moral-outrage-alleviates-guilt-over-peoples-own-moral-failings/
Quote from: Tom Ciccotta
A recent psychological study concluded that moral outrage is sometimes a symptom of personal guilt rather than genuine empathy for the situation of others.
The study, which was conducted by Bowdoin psychology Professor Zachary Rothschild and University of Southern Mississippi psychology Professor Lucas A. Keefer, concludes that the research on guilt suggests that moral outrage over hot-button issues is sometimes self-serving.

According to the study:

Feelings of guilt are a direct threat to one’s sense that they are a moral person and, accordingly, research on guilt finds that this emotion elicits strategies aimed at alleviating guilt that do not always involve undoing one’s actions. Furthermore, research shows that individuals respond to reminders of their group’s moral culpability with feelings of outrage at third-party harm-doing. These findings suggest that feelings of moral outrage, long thought to be grounded solely in concerns with maintaining justice, may sometimes reflect efforts to maintain a moral identity.

Rothschild and Keefer conducted an experiment in which they assessed the relationship of various emotions. The first portion of their research concluded that the level of a subject’s personal guilt uniquely predicted that individual’s level of moral outrage in response to a controversial stimulus. “Study 1 showed that personal guilt uniquely predicted moral outrage at corporate harm-doing and support for retributive punishment,” the research concludes.

Based on their findings, the study’s authors argue that “outrage driven by moral identity concerns serves to compensate for the threat of personal or collective immorality.”

According to the research’s abstract, one of the several studies conducted by Rothschild and Keefer concluded that outrage is often driven by a desire to affirm a certain moral identity in an unrelated societal context: “Study 5 showed that guilt-driven outrage was attenuated by an affirmation of moral identity in an unrelated context.”
sr. member
Activity: 336
Merit: 265
March 01, 2017, 12:49:45 PM
Again for those who don't know what time it is and prefer it graphically conveyed, we are in the tail-end of the 309.6 cycle of the cyclical Fall of Society.

On the chart below, 485 AD was the fall of the Western Roman Empire (when only the Byzantine portion remained) and 1105 AD was the fall of the Eastern (Byzantine) Roman Empire:


sr. member
Activity: 336
Merit: 265
March 01, 2017, 05:58:54 AM
If you are convinced that one needs a king in order to make food, then we will always need a king (in more modern forms of presidents, parliaments, or whatever aristocratic structure).   Because we will never be free of material needs and always be prone to physical violence.

Wow. What you smoking?

If you believe that one day we will be free of material needs and will not be prone to violence, then I think the guy smoking heavily is on the other side of the line Wink

I still need a house, I still need food, I still need a lot of material stuff, and I can still be beaten up, tortured, and killed.  I don't think that this kind of thing will disappear in any near future, on the contrary.

Again you continue to conflate large scale with small scale. The key concepts you elided from your thought process were:

As the physical economy becomes a smaller and smaller portion of the total economy, we can move away from physical violence as necessary for human progress.

Instead of harvesting high diversity of effort (i.e. true investment) with a viral distribution model, IMO Byteball is creating a low entropy speculation with too much top-down control at the nascent stage where it needs exponential distribution. Thus the probability of failure is much higher, i.e. the antifragility is very low.

And the various ways I have tried to explain to you that annealing by decentralized failure is more antifragile than top-down failure. So thus when violence is only at an individual decentralized level, then it can't fail everywhere all at once. It anneals (please search the thread for my use of the word 'anneal'), as in simulated annealing as a form of free market fitness (which is why ice doesn't crack if you freeze it slowly enough).

So the point is that once the intangible Knowledge Age economy is orders-of-magnitude more valuable to humanity than the tangible one, then top-down control over the tangible one won't be economic. The top-down controller wouldn't be able to extract enough value from it to maintain control over those who extract value from the intangible economic.

And that my friend is a "genius" level divergent analysis. We can't train a machine to think this way, because it is induced from creative thinking originating from my unique experiences and integration in the human living network.

I hope you clearly see your error now.
sr. member
Activity: 336
Merit: 265
February 28, 2017, 01:52:18 PM
All incorrect. In essence you are transposing cause and effect, as well transposing large scale changes fromwith "smaller things grow faster" changes. And the agriculture age required roads for economies-of-scale in commerce thus it was not decentralized. You have numerous errors like that throughout.

Well, this is an interesting subject.  Two-wheeled chariots were invented by a "distributed" people, the Andronovo culture in Siberia, about 2000 BC.  One of the oldest roads on earth was build in England at about 3800 BC (the Sweet Track) where it is hard to imagine that it was an empire-induced road building operation.

Again I repeat, you are conflating large scale change with "smaller things grow faster" changes.

Yeah those technological innovations and example prototypes occur due to spontaneous diversity in the decentralized (high entropy) wild, but to scale those innovations out to every human on earth at that time required the monopolist state to conquer all the warlords, and to keep order over interstate commerce. Otherwise it diverged into bandits waiting along the side of the road to effective force you into the business of trading contraband, which destroys commerce.

But the idea that you need a *violence monopolist* and a *king* in order to build roads and be able to do agriculture, is the misguided kind of social lie that we have been fed with since we were children.

...but I don't think that the price of giving all power to an aristocratic elite is necessary to achieve this, which is the basic tenet of statists.

Exactly. And even when a central violent monopolist does do things well (e.g. the height of rome), they don't actually need all that much power. For example look at the tax rate in the Roman empire before sh*t hit the fan. It was 2% but they had a huge empire connected with the best roads, agricultural systems and water distribution systems that weren't reached again till the modern era (and with like 30% tax rates). The problem is that central control brings in corruption and waste, somehow the Romans were able to avoid that (for a while).

Missing from your analysis is the fact that thermodynamic processes are irreversible and you can't just replicate into the past. The state of the empire at the end is of course inefficient, but nature didn't build the empire for the end, but rather for all that it accomplished before the end. You can't get all those in the middle without also getting the end. You can't have it both ways and eat your cake too. Sorry.

As the physical economy becomes a smaller and smaller portion of the total economy, we can move away from physical violence as necessary for human progress.

I also think that if you are dreaming of a "new economy" (the dematerialized economy you're talking about) before hoping that a distributed society like it was before agriculture, is possible again,

Agriculture was never decentralized. Hunting was decentralized. Agriculture required protection from the bandits. You apparently don't know anything about farming. The Bible says don't mix your field with many kinds of plants and don't produce just enough for yourself. Produce an whole hectare of produce and then trade. This is economy-of-scale and maximum division-of-labor which has been absolutely necessary for the productivity of man to increase above subsistence level.

...you will have to wait for eternity.

Dude it is already underway. This is covered extensively in the Economics Devastation thread in the Economics forum.

If you are convinced that one needs a king in order to make food, then we will always need a king (in more modern forms of presidents, parliaments, or whatever aristocratic structure).   Because we will never be free of material needs and always be prone to physical violence.

Wow. What you smoking?
sr. member
Activity: 336
Merit: 265
February 27, 2017, 11:17:03 PM

I don't fully agree with this analysis.  I think cause and consequence are inverted here, although you do have a point.  I don't think that government *was needed* ; rather that it was *unavoidably created*.  To me, the "warlords" ARE the governments, and they arise BECAUSE there is wealth to steal ; not the other way around.  It is not because one created governments, that wealth occured ; it is because there was wealth, that warlords became governments.

Incorrect.

Warlords (feudalism) is what you get when there is a power vacuum and thus nothing can be organized on any sufficient economies-of-scale. It is what the Western Roman Empire collapsed back to for a Dark Age, because we didn't have the Roman military guarding the road construction and commerce.

In my view, a state is nothing else but a warlord, one that got so strong over a territory, that competition was exterminated, and that the only warlords remaining, were the neighbours.

I think that what states do, is nothing else but "upscale" feudalism.  Instead of having local fights, you get more global wars, and instead of having a fight every year, you get a serious war every few decades.  Now, this is maybe what you are referring at, that as these "windows of opportunity" get larger, during these periods of prosperity, in between periods of slavery, war and destruction, there's enough room to progress and "set information aside" for the next cycle, which is less the case if these cycles happen on smaller scales, with less violence, but also with less large windows of prosperity.

I think the fundamental error is to think that the problem of violence can be solved by having such a big violence monopolist that everybody has to surrender to it.  This only slows down, but amplifies, the cycles of violence and slavery.  True, as the cycles are slowed down, the windows of opportunity grow larger (but the destructions that follow are also more severe, maybe to the point of no return).  That said, the *natural tendency* for war lords is, by economies of scale, to obtain automatically a violence monopolist.  So the appearance of states is a natural consequence.  But that doesn't mean that one has to approve it.  

I do not agree that the government permitted less violence: what was local small scale violence, was replaced by inter-governmental wars on large scale.

Agreed, but it did enable massive progress for mankind. You can't deny the Agricultural, Industrial, and now Computer revolutions of which the first two at least could not have happened without the nation-state as I explained above.

I think you have this impression because we just had a few decades of prosperity after a half century of devastating war (the first and second world wars were just one war with a pause).  After a period of war, there is always some "relief" (or not, when you look at the soviet union).

However, there is a way to empower individuals with weapons of mass destruction.  As such, the economies of scale on the level of warlords/states will lose its significance.

That is a non-sequitor. Chaos of physical security on the large scale would only send us back into a Dark Age with warlords.

Rather if human activity becomes sufficiently decentralized, then we no longer are threatened by physical attack. For example, it is impossible to attack the heartland of the USA with an army because there is a citizen's gun under every blade of grass. (the heartland can be attacked by isolating it from commerce and trade though, because we aren't 100% in the decentralized Knowledge Age yet)

I don't think that this is related.  Agriculture is decentralized.  But nevertheless, states occured.  I think they didn't occur because people needed protection, but rather because agriculture permitted so much production that the accumulation of wealth and taxation became possible.  When you have a population of nomads that can only just survive, you cannot accumulate wealth by taxing them.  You only kill them, and there's too little to take.  When you have peasants, you can accumulate wealth (food) by taxing them, you can finance armies, and you can become a state.
But the peasants didn't need a state.  Of course, you told them that they needed you, but they didn't.  A passing war lord cannot come and "steal" from every peasant.  That's not lucrative.  But taxing local peasants against "protection", is what made Kings rich.
It is the origin of states.  Production, and theft through taxes.

Quote
In the decentralized Knowledge Age, the important people won't live in any concentrated area.

I think we're dreaming of a similar utopia.  But in my opinion, that utopia could have been realized at any stage of development, if people didn't fall for the lie that they needed state protection, and we don't have to wait for a specific technological advancement in order to realize that.  I also think that as long as this erroneous belief lives on, that utopia will remain a dream and states will continue to convince people that they "need their protection".  So there's no reason to wait.

Quote
Sorry we can't move (within the next decade or two) to Monero's absolute anonymity. Sorry. We need a more pragmatic approach for Stage #5 of the global economic collapse because the State will still be strong in Asia and destructive in the West. I propose anonymity that is compatible with taxation, because Asia will have strong States not total collapse.

I don't see the use of anonymity if you allow for taxation.  And in fact, you can never prove that you declared everything.  You can prove that everything related to these addresses you own, is declared.  But you can never prove that you DON'T own the keys to other addresses.  What if you owned them, and lost them ?  How can you prove you have forgotten something ?

All incorrect. In essence you are transposing cause and effect, as well transposing large scale changes from "smaller things grow faster" changes. And the agriculture age required roads for economies-of-scale in commerce thus it was not decentralized. You have numerous errors like that throughout.

But I am not paid to refute every person's unending list of misconceptions.

And so to not further fill up this thread with only posts from myself and yourself, I will for the time being not provide my refutations.

Also I have more urgent other work that beckons.

Thanks for the discussion. Best regards.
sr. member
Activity: 336
Merit: 265
February 27, 2017, 05:53:12 AM
Last, who gives a f*ck!?

Obama is gone.

Incorrect:

https://www.armstrongeconomics.com/world-news/civil-unrest/obama-setting-up-shadow-government-civil-unrest-will-lead-to-civil-war/
https://www.armstrongeconomics.com/world-news/civil-unrest/obama-is-the-source-of-the-coup/

More:

https://www.armstrongeconomics.com/international-news/politics/the-road-ahead/
https://www.armstrongeconomics.com/armstrongeconomics101/understanding-cycles/the-collapse-of-socialismmarxism/
https://www.armstrongeconomics.com/international-news/politics/democrats-in-civil-war-against-obamas-ofa/
https://www.armstrongeconomics.com/world-news/civil-unrest/the-continued-uprising-that-will-destroy-the-usa/
https://www.armstrongeconomics.com/world-news/civil-unrest/entertainment-industry-is-leading-charge-to-civil-war/
https://www.armstrongeconomics.com/world-news/civil-unrest/comments-from-san-francisco/
https://www.armstrongeconomics.com/world-news/civil-unrest/the-united-states-will-become-just-the-states/
https://www.armstrongeconomics.com/world-news/civil-unrest/the-new-american-coup-media-leading-charge-to-topple-government/
https://www.armstrongeconomics.com/history/americas-economic-history/california-files-petition-to-secede-from-usa-calexit/
https://www.armstrongeconomics.com/world-news/civil-unrest/a-sign-of-the-times/
https://www.armstrongeconomics.com/world-news/civil-unrest/trump-supporter-surrounded-by-womens-march/
https://www.armstrongeconomics.com/world-news/civil-unrest/the-democrats-anti-religion-position/
https://www.armstrongeconomics.com/international-news/north_america/2016-u-s-presidential-election/so-whats-all-the-protests-against-trump/
https://www.armstrongeconomics.com/international-news/north_america/2016-u-s-presidential-election/the-real-story-at-new-hampshire-college/
https://www.armstrongeconomics.com/world-news/civil-unrest/how-professors-are-engaging-in-undermining-the-country-in-collages/
https://www.armstrongeconomics.com/international-news/north_america/2016-u-s-presidential-election/hatred-of-the-left-continues-to-set-stage-for-revolution/
https://www.armstrongeconomics.com/world-news/civil-unrest/why-the-left-government-are-the-greatest-threats-to-the-domestic-life/
https://www.armstrongeconomics.com/international-news/north_america/2016-u-s-presidential-election/hillary-tells-supporters-to-effectively-revolt-against-trump/
https://www.armstrongeconomics.com/world-news/civil-unrest/have-the-democrats-unleashed-a-new-age-communist-revolution/
https://www.armstrongeconomics.com/international-news/north_america/americas-current-economy/the-color-purple-not-the-movie-but-a-movement/
https://www.armstrongeconomics.com/international-news/north_america/2016-u-s-presidential-election/the-new-american-communist-revolution/
https://www.armstrongeconomics.com/world-news/civil-unrest/george-soros-the-man-trying-to-create-a-socialist-revolution/
https://www.armstrongeconomics.com/international-news/north_america/2016-u-s-presidential-election/american-civil-unrest-keying-to-election/
https://www.armstrongeconomics.com/world-news/civil-unrest/the-cycle-of-civil-unrest-martial-law/
https://www.armstrongeconomics.com/world-news/civil-unrest/children-and-propagana/
https://www.armstrongeconomics.com/international-news/north_america/2016-u-s-presidential-election/here-is-the-wikileaks-index-to-files/
sr. member
Activity: 336
Merit: 265
February 26, 2017, 03:18:36 PM
@dinofelis, for as long as physical violence is effective, we will continue to have government (per Max Weber's canonical definition of government as a "monopoly on the use of violence"), because the primary reason government formed was to enable civilization to progress from warlords to investment in commerce via sea transport (Athenian Empire) and roads (Roman Empire) for the Agricultural (first and second) revolutions. Government was necessary to aggregate the capital and protection for large economy-of-scale fixed capital investments continuing into the First and Second Industrial Ages. We are now entering the Second Computer Revolution which my thesis posits is spawning the Knowledge Age due to network effects from the First Computer Revolution.

I don't fully agree with this analysis.  I think cause and consequence are inverted here, although you do have a point.  I don't think that government *was needed* ; rather that it was *unavoidably created*.  To me, the "warlords" ARE the governments, and they arise BECAUSE there is wealth to steal ; not the other way around.  It is not because one created governments, that wealth occured ; it is because there was wealth, that warlords became governments.

Incorrect.

Warlords (feudalism) is what you get when there is a power vacuum and thus nothing can be organized on any sufficient economies-of-scale. It is what the Western Roman Empire collapsed back to for a Dark Age, because we didn't have the Roman military guarding the road construction and commerce.

That said, it is true that the monopoly of violence (the ultimate winner of the law of the strongest) DID have a positive side-effect: as there was no competition on the violence side any more (there was no incentive to do so, as the monopolist was so terribly strong that it was a waste of effort, and would lead to one's demise), it DID allow for the investment in violence to be left to the government, which, through economies of scale, could reduce the total expenditure for violence (and limit the total amount of capital destruction by violence).

Not only that, but it enabled protection for large scale infrastructure and commerce.

Competing Dark Age warlords means interstate commerce dies.

I do not agree that the government permitted less violence: what was local small scale violence, was replaced by inter-governmental wars on large scale.

Agreed, but it did enable massive progress for mankind. You can't deny the Agricultural, Industrial, and now Computer revolutions of which the first two at least could not have happened without the nation-state as I explained above.

So to get rid of the natural demand for government, then we need to transition the economy away from fixed capital investments to non-fungible, decentralized creativity.

There is no natural demand for government in my opinion.  There is a demand for a mutual agreement for non-violence but that doesn't need to go through the concentration of violence in the hands of warlords (states) that use this to fight each other in wars.

It requires a nation-state and it is a natural demand when the economies-of-scale of humans was in physically threatened work in the agricultural and industrial ages.

However, there is a way to empower individuals with weapons of mass destruction.  As such, the economies of scale on the level of warlords/states will lose its significance.

That is a non-sequitor. Chaos of physical security on the large scale would only send us back into a Dark Age with warlords.

Rather if human activity becomes sufficiently decentralized, then we no longer are threatened by physical attack. For example, it is impossible to attack the heartland of the USA with an army because there is a citizen's gun under every blade of grass. (the heartland can be attacked by isolating it from commerce and trade though, because we aren't 100% in the decentralized Knowledge Age yet)

But the second, much more attractive weapon of mass destruction I see evolving, is what I'd call "DNA printers".  If you have a DNA (or RNA) synthesizer - which will most probably be developed in the near future and will be of the size of less than table-top - you can synthesize about any known or artificial virus, and its antidote.   Give it 20 or 30 years and I think this kind of technology will be available.  The spread of a virus (eventually a triggerable virus, that you first let propagate without symptoms to get sufficient people contaminated, and that you can activate afterwards by a second infection that can be much more targetted) can then be done very very easily by just any individual who created or downloaded the right virus file and "printed" it, while giving himself and his kin the anti-dote.

When individuals can whipe out entire cities or continents, I don't see how the governments can keep their monopoly on violence based upon their economies of scale on warfare and killing.

In the decentralized Knowledge Age, the important people won't live in any concentrated area.
sr. member
Activity: 336
Merit: 265
February 26, 2017, 04:42:36 AM
Re: [POLL] Are You losing Interest [in crypto-currency]?

@dinofelis, for as long as physical violence is effective, we will continue to have government (per Max Weber's canonical definition of government as a "monopoly on the use of violence"), because the primary reason government formed was to enable civilization to progress from warlords to investment in commerce via sea transport (Athenian Empire) and roads (Roman Empire) for the Agricultural (first and second) revolutions. Government was necessary to aggregate the capital and protection for large economy-of-scale fixed capital investments continuing into the First and Second Industrial Ages. We are now entering the Second Computer Revolution which my thesis posits is spawning the Knowledge Age due to network effects from the First Computer Revolution.

So to get rid of the natural demand for government, then we need to transition the economy away from fixed capital investments to non-fungible, decentralized creativity. This is what my seminal essay in 2012 "Rise of Knowledge, Death of Finance" was about.

So we can't go all the way to Stage #6 in one step. We have to go through Stage #5 as a process of evolution.

Thus our decentralization technologies need to be compatible with Stage #5. That is why I am outlining what I conjecture to be some flaws in Monero's anonymity design. Afaics, we can't go all the way to "no taxes" now. Impossible. Asia will rise up and they don't have the socialism clusterfuck of the West, so they can have effective governance with low taxes. Thus IMO, Monero will not be tolerated by the society and thus governments in Stage #5.

Your model is too black & white. You need to imagine the transitional evolution mankind must go through.

@Spoetnik, my analysis of what has been transpiring and will transpire has been excellent. Have you reviewed the partial account of highlights my record? I'd prefer we stay on topic of the issues and that means not arguing about whether I am crazy or fallible. Refute our arguments instead.
sr. member
Activity: 336
Merit: 265
February 25, 2017, 06:48:42 AM
As if a very smart philosophy would focus only on materialism or one's own life. Even my proposed cultural evolutionary strategy didn't make that mistake.

But of course analogously as for a hammer everything is a nail and/or a thumb, to a religious zealot everything is a moral dilemma, fatalism, and/or a pulpit. The inkblot is all too messy to not be conspicuous even from afar.

If the writer was an "enlightened one", saluting academics inkblot his fiction as fact.
legendary
Activity: 1946
Merit: 1055
February 25, 2017, 02:07:30 AM
Excerpt From Les Misérables
by Victor Hugo

"Egad, Bishop, let's have a discussion. It is hard for a senator and a bishop to look at each other without winking. We are two augurs. I am going to make a confession to you. I have a philosophy of my own."

"And you are right," replied the Bishop. "As one makes one's philosophy, so one lies on it. You are on the bed of purple, senator."

The senator was encouraged, and went on:—"Let us be good fellows."

"Good devils even," said the Bishop.

"I declare to you," continued the senator, "that the Marquis d'Argens, Pyrrhon, Hobbes, and M. Naigeon are no rascals. I have all the philosophers in my library gilded on the edges."

"Like yourself, Count," interposed the Bishop.

The senator resumed:—
"I hate Diderot; he is an ideologist, a declaimer, and a revolutionist, a believer in God at bottom, and more bigoted than Voltaire. Voltaire made sport of Needham, and he was wrong, for Needham's eels prove that God is useless. A drop of vinegar in a spoonful of flour paste supplies the fiat lux. Suppose the drop to be larger and the spoonful bigger; you have the world. Man is the eel. Then what is the good of the Eternal Father? The Jehovah hypothesis tires me, Bishop. It is good for nothing but to produce shallow people, whose reasoning is hollow. Down with that great All, which torments me! Hurrah for Zero which leaves me in peace! Between you and me, and in order to empty my sack, and make confession to my pastor, as it behooves me to do, I will admit to you that I have good sense. I am not enthusiastic over your Jesus, who preaches renunciation and sacrifice to the last extremity. 'Tis the counsel of an avaricious man to beggars.

Renunciation; why? Sacrifice; to what end? I do not see one wolf immolating himself for the happiness of another wolf. Let us stick to nature, then. We are at the top; let us have a superior philosophy. What is the advantage of being at the top, if one sees no further than the end of other people's noses? Let us live merrily. Life is all. That man has another future elsewhere, on high, below, anywhere, I don't believe; not one single word of it. Ah! sacrifice and renunciation are recommended to me; I must take heed to everything I do; I must cudgel my brains over good and evil, over the just and the unjust, over the fas and the nefas. Why? Because I shall have to render an account of my actions. When? After death. What a fine dream!

After my death it will be a very clever person who can catch me. Have a handful of dust seized by a shadow-hand, if you can. Let us tell the truth, we who are initiated, and who have raised the veil of Isis: there is no such thing as either good or evil; there is vegetation. Let us seek the real. Let us get to the bottom of it. Let us go into it thoroughly. What the deuce! let us go to the bottom of it! We must scent out the truth; dig in the earth for it, and seize it. Then it gives you exquisite joys. Then you grow strong, and you laugh. I am square on the bottom, I am.

Immortality, Bishop, is a chance, a waiting for dead men's shoes. Ah! what a charming promise! trust to it, if you like! What a fine lot Adam has! We are souls, and we shall be angels, with blue wings on our shoulder-blades. Do come to my assistance: is it not Tertullian who says that the blessed shall travel from star to star? Very well. We shall be the grasshoppers of the stars. And then, besides, we shall see God. Ta, ta, ta! What twaddle all these paradises are! God is a nonsensical monster. I would not say that in the Moniteur, egad! but I may whisper it among friends. Inter pocula. To sacrifice the world to paradise is to let slip the prey for the shadow. Be the dupe of the infinite! I'm not such a fool. I am a nought. I call myself Monsieur le Comte Nought, senator. Did I exist before my birth? No. Shall I exist after death? No.

What am I? A little dust collected in an organism. What am I to do on this earth? The choice rests with me: suffer or enjoy. Whither will suffering lead me? To nothingness; but I shall have suffered. Whither will enjoyment lead me? To nothingness; but I shall have enjoyed myself. My choice is made. One must eat or be eaten. I shall eat. It is better to be the tooth than the grass. Such is my wisdom. After which, go whither I push thee, the grave-digger is there; the Pantheon for some of us: all falls into the great hole. End. Finis. Total liquidation. This is the vanishing-point. Death is death, believe me. I laugh at the idea of there being any one who has anything to tell me on that subject. Fables of nurses; bugaboo for children; Jehovah for men. No; our to-morrow is the night. Beyond the tomb there is nothing but equal nothingness. You have been Sardanapalus, you have been Vincent de Paul—it makes no difference. That is the truth.

Then live your life, above all things. Make use of your I while you have it. In truth, Bishop, I tell you that I have a philosophy of my own, and I have my philosophers. I don't let myself be taken in with that nonsense. Of course, there must be something for those who are down,—for the barefooted beggars, knife-grinders, and miserable wretches. Legends, chimeras, the soul, immortality, paradise, the stars, are provided for them to swallow. They gobble it down. They spread it on their dry bread. He who has nothing else has the good. God. That is the least he can have. I oppose no objection to that; but I reserve Monsieur Naigeon for myself. The good God is good for the populace."

The Bishop clapped his hands.

"That's talking!" he exclaimed. "What an excellent and really marvellous thing is this materialism! Not every one who wants it can have it. Ah! when one does have it, one is no longer a dupe, one does not stupidly allow one's self to be exiled like Cato, nor stoned like Stephen, nor burned alive like Jeanne d'Arc. Those who have succeeded in procuring this admirable materialism have the joy of feeling themselves irresponsible, and of thinking that they can devour everything without uneasiness,—places, sinecures, dignities, power, whether well or ill acquired, lucrative recantations, useful treacheries, savory capitulations of conscience,—and that they shall enter the tomb with their digestion accomplished. How agreeable that is! I do not say that with reference to you, senator. Nevertheless, it is impossible for me to refrain from congratulating you. You great lords have, so you say, a philosophy of your own, and for yourselves, which is exquisite, refined, accessible to the rich alone, good for all sauces, and which seasons the voluptuousness of life admirably. This philosophy has been extracted from the depths, and unearthed by special seekers. But you are good-natured princes, and you do not think it a bad thing that belief in the good God should constitute the philosophy of the people, very much as the goose stuffed with chestnuts is the truffled turkey of the poor."
sr. member
Activity: 336
Merit: 265
February 24, 2017, 07:01:57 AM
Apology if this thread is becoming a monologue. I will try to take a break from it. (Also if you were following the discussion between @dinofelis and myself, we seem to have understood each other).

These two comment posts are very interesting:

http://blog.jim.com/global-warming/conservatives-find-their-balls/#comment-1541271

In the context of Jim's prior blogs:

http://blog.jim.com/war/after-the-flight-93-election/
http://blog.jim.com/politics/courts-predictably-rule-trumps-election-platform-illegal/
http://blog.jim.com/politics/the-first-confrontation-between-the-trumpenreich-and-the-permanent-government/


USA citizens still have guns. Europeans don't. Keep that in mind going forward.

I don't know exactly how it will all play out, but I think we are in for a chaotic (as in the unpredictable outcome of the pendulum in Chaos theory) ride as we descend into Stage #5...
sr. member
Activity: 336
Merit: 265
February 23, 2017, 02:03:55 PM
My demonstration is that the premises lead to the existence of a network of nodes which surpasses the human network in all respects concerning political, economical, scientific intelligence: the nodes are individually more performing than individual humans, and the network is at least as performing as the human network.

Since (as I demonstrated in my prior reply to you with the example of unbounded entropy of the universe) it is impossible for any of us to have a top-down totally-ordered comprehension of the totality of the complexity of the human network, then your presumption that you can make such a determination by comparing a few aspects of the network that you deem to be cardinal is quite ludicrous and audacious (but respectfully your communication has not been ostentatious and again my frustration is having to repeat myself).

Publish an academic paper with such "sound" arguments and subject it to peer review, lol.

Read on for more specific refutation...

The last bit is simple to demonstrate: as the human network is built ON TOP of a machine network

And on top of a human network which builds and maintains that machine network.

If you removed ALL of the humans for 1 hour, the machine network would experience failure and outages. Within probably 24 hours or so, the entire Internet would probably be down.

You seem to forget/discount that the machine network exists within the chaos of nature, a nature to which we biological humans are already well adapted over 1000s (or millions?) of years.

then of course the machine network, as a network is at least as performingperformant as the human network built on top of it.

So TCP/IP is as performant as Bitcoin's protocol which is built on top of TCP/IP. Logic fail.  Roll Eyes

This also goes for "public knowledge".  All public knowledge "on the internet" is of course also available to machines.

As if everyone human interprets every slice of information in the same way.

There is no one "correct" (canonical) interpretation of anything. The entire point of diversity and adaptation is resilience to an UNKNOWN (unbounded entropy) future.

None of us can measure the entropy of the human network. It in incalculable. I have already explained why but you don't seem to grasp the example of unbounded entropy (did you not watch Hewitt's video which I linked for you). For as long as you fail to understand why, then you are wasting my time by replying. Unless you say something new which doesn't repeat the same mistakes, I am probably going to ignore your future posts on this issue. Because this is getting redundant.

You seem to think we start only with a very low entropy of a few TBs total and somehow adapt to all that chaos in our existence ongoing and don't go extinct. Rather the reason we cope well (and machines don't!) is because of the massive entropy encoded in our living system (ridiculous that you assume that system is only the genes and that it only starts with the individual human that is born tomorrow).

So the only thing that makes the difference is the individual node intelligence.  When individual node intelligence surpasses individual human intelligence, my theorem is demonstrated.

I have already explained why that is an incorrect assumption. But even in that case, I have already explained why the machine "intelligence" can never match a human, because the human's entropy is not just any particular performance metric you decide to measure of the brain, but it is the interaction of all the cells, bacteria, and environment that makes each human and their actions, personality, thoughts, etc. all unique. And the unbounded entropy due to unbounded communication delay (see the Hewitt video!) across the network of interactions (not just the Internet but in all forms of human interaction) means that there is unbounded entropy in the network which is alive.

Machines might become part of the network, but for them to become cardinal to humans, they must adapt better than humans and subjugate humans. Raw processing power is not a given to make it so. Humans will also adapt. We can embed machines in our own body to supplement any areas where we feel machines have an advantage and then we still have our advantage of being more adapted as a starting point and we are biological, so we are much more complex with much higher entropy (there is variability even in the dynamic life of our DNA and RNA which is not completely deterministic by the starting point of the genes at birth).

But more than the comparison of any one component or aspect is the holistic adaptation and integration which we can't measure nor fathom in totality because omniscience can't exist. So it means that for machines to attain it, they would have to evolve to it, since we can't impart it to them. Evolution is orthogonal to processing power of the brain. Evolution is a phenomenon driven by the annealing of chaos over long epochs.

That was the essence of my previous posts: no, it isn't that terribly complex.  The human brain is a processing system of which the fundamental software cannot surpass the full genetic information needed to *build a brain*.

Incorrect. The human is a complex system that is not deterministic from fertilization. The unbounded entropy interacts with the human body and produces a chaotic and unique result for each one. Refer to the pendulum example from Chaos theory. Refer to Hewitt's video. Refer to the example I provided in my prior reply to you.

Now, the human brain is a self-modifying piece of software, which "learns" by obtaining sensory information.  You're entirely correct on that.  But to "make a brain" you only need to BOOTSTRAP its construction, in exactly the same way as the human brain is constructed from genetic and epi-genetic information in the womb of the mother.

You need the entire biology, rearing, and lifetime of the human in its network environment to produce a human. That environment and network even includes the microflora that enter the digestive system. Which is very diversified and every human has a different population of microflora strains and even every bacterium is unique as each human is unique (nature doesn't ever produce an exact duplicate of anything).

You are talking about reproducing a very artificial simulation of one narrow aspect of a human. We can train A.I. to do things that we recognize as reproducible in our environment. But we can't train A.I. to adapt and evolve with the same complexity as the totality of the human network. If machines are going to evolve to be cardinal that will be due to some unpredictable outcome of nature. It is not unavoidable or fatalistic. It is quite unlikely. It is much more likely that humans will incorporate machines into human and adapt and remain cardinal to machines (because we are in a myriad of adaptation that machines don't have but we can't measure it ourselves because it is invisible information in the living network of our historic adaptation, which is not just the genes as I have explained to you but of course you won't comprehend it or agree because it doesn't fit your fatalistic Singularity religion).

One shouldn't confuse the "run-time" structure of the human brain (which can be very complex) with the code needed to implement that run-time.

And don't confuse running it now with running over millions of years in a living network which has been continuously living all that time. You have no way to extract the information in that system, because a total order of omniscience doesn't exist.

Btw, I also studied A.I. and neural nets in the 1980s.

Once you get that raw brain up and running on sufficiently powerful hardware, you can FEED it similar stimuli than a small baby receives from its sensory inputs, the most important one being the visual stimuli.

We can get machines to mimic the processing of our environment which we have identified as reproducible. What you can't teach the machine is our historic adaptation to an unknown future which is stored in the continuous living analog network for which you don't even know which sensors to build. Since you can't know everything that has ever happened, you can know the entropy that is stored in the living network.

But what is more, biological nature cannot clone a brain state, while silicon can very easily clone a brain state.

That difference should have been instructive to you, but for some reason the significance didn't occur to you.

I explained the importance of this in a prior reply:

You still don't seem to understand that the network (i.e. the free market) is alive and dynamic and no one can capture that information ever.

If you tried to extract that information then due to Chaos theory, you'd add to it in the process and then when you tried to extract what you added it to it, you add to it some more. You'd never get to the edge of the universe, because this would require that we don't exist in the first place.

We can't even extract our entropy in order to transfer it to machines. That we can't copy or even measure or know our own entropy but can copy of the entropy of machines is very instructive.

Nature never produces an exact copy of anything. You seem to think even in fertilization that the only input entropy are the genes, but that is not the case. We also have cosmic rays, the environment of the womb, etc and then the environmental stimulus ongoing even from the first cell split of the embryo. Thus the entropy of the human system is not just a few TBs of genes. The fact that you can copy machines indicates their entropy is very low.

You don't seem to understand that a total perspective on information is always contingent on the future outcomes (i.e. to distinguish information from noise requires understanding the future outcomes to which the current body of entropy will be applied) and due to the Butterfly effect then you will egregiously underestimate the possible permutations of outcomes. That is why it is incalculable. And this is also the reason that the network is the vastly greater portion of the entropy and why it is itself also alive. If we had more time and inclination, we could elucidate this more formally.

You are making a major mistake here.

No, you are.

You are perfectly right that it is essentially impossible to reproduce exactly a VERY PARTICULAR brain state: the brain state of Mary on Monday morning.  That will depend on details and is prone to chaotic divergence you talked about.  But we don't need Mary's brain state on Monday morning.  These details don't matter.  If Mary didn't look at a particular movie when she was 7 years old, she would be a different person  last Monday.  But we don't care.  The different Mary will do too.  It will also be an intelligent brain that can think politically, economically, financially and scientifically.  In a totally different way than the Mary version that saw the movie. But that doesn't matter.  The Mary that saw the movie, and the Mary that didn't see the movie, are both human brains that outsmart chimps.  In the same way, the exact brain state our silicon arrives at doesn't matter, if it can outsmart systematically most humans.  This is why chaos theory and so on don't matter in this.

The fact that Mary is a unique derivative of unbounded entropy our living, continuous, analog network is absolutely critical to the point of why the resilience and adaptation of the human system is eons greater than that of the machines.

It is sufficient that the possibility exists, and sooner or later, it will be realized.  As its realization will be irreversible, once is enough.

If everything was random (i.e. instead of unbounded entropy, we had reached infinite entropy and nothing was distinguishable), then we wouldn't even bother talking about a Singularity and machines being evolutionarily superior to humans.

You are totally right that the KIND of society that will evolve is not predictable because prone to chaotically impossible to trace effects, but that's not what I'm talking about.  This kind of discussion is like me saying that a big meteorite is going to hit the earth and this is going to eradicate a lot of species, and you are telling me that I can't know that because I cannot predict the details of every aspect of the collision: where will what piece of rock fly ?  I don't need to do these (indeed impossible) predictions to know that the impact of the meteorite will kill off a lot of species.  I would need to do this impossible thing if I'd have to predict what new species would arise afterwards.  But just predicting the broad lines of the extinction doesn't need to delve into the details.

You don't seem to comprehend that the information stored in the living network is a historic adaptation to those unpredictable events and that you can't know all of it. It is recorded in our living adaptation, but you can't go experience it. It is there, but inaccessible to you. Our living network will react to its environment with that stored entropy but you can't possibly measure not calculate it (because you can't go back in time and experience every thing, and especially not every cell mutation, etc). Top-down knowledge is not complete. The little nuances of differences are what stores the eons of quadrillions (or more!) of historic adaptations.

Let's use the equation for Pi as an example. We can communicate all of the digits of Pi by simply sending the equation for it. So it seems the entropy is very low in isolation. Now let's introduce a network of actors which respond to input by computing from Nth digit as a function of the input and their prior state, plus the unbounded nondeterminism of the communication latency across the network. Now you have unbounded entropy. That is Chaos theory. The entropy is incalculable and unbounded because it is alive. This is why top-down control always fails. This is the why the free market anneals better because the decisions are made by actors closer to their local gradients.

This is totally wrong.

No, you are incorrect again.

What I'm saying is that, indeed, sending the equation tells you how to calculate Pi.  If there is enough raw computing power, you will be able to calculate the 100 billionth digit, while I sent you under one KB of information.  So *it will be possible to calculate Pi's 100th billionth digit* with just 1 KB of crucial information.  You don't need the more than 100 GB of run-state information to do so.  Thank you for giving an example that illustrates what I'm saying.  That it would be difficult or impossible to predict the EXACT STATE of a network of nodes trying to calculate that digit doesn't change the fact that in the end, that digit can be calculated.  That's the point.  We don't care about the exact state of a particular realisation of that computation.  We only want to show that it is possible, and not even very difficult to do so.

It was the unbounded entropy introduced by the unpredictable communication delay that means the entropy of the equation for Pi is not the entropy of the system. And the point is that the continuous, living human network is going react to that unpredictable environment with its quadrillions (or more!) of historic adaptations which are stored in the knowledge and diversity of the network. But we can't extract or even calculate that pre-existing state which is also an input to the system.

P.S. another problem is it is very likely that the Singularity has become an ideological cause or religion for you. You've likely invested a lot into it being true. So it not being true is going to be a big blow.

...

What is nice about the singularity argument, is that you can stop worrying about the world.

You can stop worrying without the Singularity. The human race is well adapted unless the Earth is totally destroyed. And we are approaching extraterrestrial adaptation.
legendary
Activity: 3906
Merit: 1373
February 23, 2017, 01:01:10 PM
The problem that crypto is facing, as compared to penny stock, is that it has no economic function AT ALL.

It has been much more easy for me to take investment from angel investors anonymously via Bitcoin (some was sent with XMR.to and ShapeShift) than I could have achieved with fiat to my bank account in the USA.

We agree.  But that's because this is not totally complying to all legal requirements.

Afaik, I haven't broken any law. Well I've read it conjectured that in the USA that everyone commits 3 felonies a day and doesn't know it, but I mean reasonable and auspicious laws that everyone tends to adhere to.

The point is that blockchains and crypto do LEGAL features that the legacy systems can't do! And the WWW of blockchains is going to do LEGAL things that the legacy WWW can't do.


In America, the people who make the laws are, well, people. Where did they get their right to have such authority? From some documents that were set in place hundreds of years ago?

Their authority isn't any greater than yours if you want to state the opposite. The only place they get their authority to bind you to their legality is if you decide to be bound and accept it.

The 9th Amendment says that we have all the rights that we had before Government was around. Even Government states that the things that it says and does are not binding on us.

Cool
sr. member
Activity: 336
Merit: 265
February 23, 2017, 12:19:06 PM
The problem that crypto is facing, as compared to penny stock, is that it has no economic function AT ALL.

It has been much more easy for me to take investment from angel investors anonymously via Bitcoin (some was sent with XMR.to and ShapeShift) than I could have achieved with fiat to my bank account in the USA.

We agree.  But that's because this is not totally complying to all legal requirements.

Afaik, I haven't broken any law. Well I've read it conjectured that in the USA that everyone commits 3 felonies a day and doesn't know it, but I mean reasonable and auspicious laws that everyone tends to adhere to.

The point is that blockchains and crypto do LEGAL features that the legacy systems can't do! And the WWW of blockchains is going to do LEGAL things that the legacy WWW can't do.

I am preparing to work on this seriously as soon as my disseminated, extra-pulmonary Tuberculosis is cured.

This is a real use case.  I'm launching this argument in the face of the people wanting total legality of crypto.  THEN it can be done with fiat, or it is (somewhat) illegal.

Myopic, too binary, and fatalistic.

There are entirely legal things that crypto can do that fiat can't do. Decentralization is a feature that isn't always illegal. I think you don't understand why top-down control destroys degrees-of-freedom, which thus inhibits maximum productivity (this ties in with your myopia on why you don't understand that the Singularity is nonsense). You have a very top-down structured, fatalistic perspective on nature. But nature is very decentralized and chaotic (by chaotic we mean UNBOUNDED ENTROPY). The UNBOUNDED ENTROPY is your huge blindspot.

I'm NOT talking (only) about buying guns and drugs on dark markets.  But exactly about your kind of economic relation, which would be dangerous and/or illegal if these guys have it their way.

You presume that TPTB can obtain a total order on the control of the Earth. I understand that due to Chaos theory, they can't. They won't get their way. They are not an omniscient God.

The following shows how it is impossible to maintain total order control, and look at the Gallup poll which shows that the public has lost confidence in top-down institutions:

As you say in the rest of your post, you use crypto to hide from the sticky fat fingers of state and law.

Not making my cash easily accessible to someone's abuse of the State and another agency's abuse of the law is just degrees-of-freedom and chaos in action. It doesn't mean I did anything illegal or I am hiding from the law. It means it was more efficient (cheaper and more expedient) than going to court or otherwise fight abuse by others in the society. It is not an absolute matter of it being illegal, because for the moment it is afaik not illegal. Someone sent me BTC and I didn't move it to my bank account. No government agency requires me to report that action to anyone at this time. And by the time the USA gets around to requiring that, I will have renounced my citizenship (this is on my TODO list asap). These top-down Western clusterfucks will collapse back to third world cesspools. The world will move on.

That's the true reason for crypto to exist.  When it becomes entirely "legal" it will not serve that purpose any more.

There are things we really need on the Internet which can't be done currently, but which can be done with decentralized micropayments and decentralized consensus on data (i.e. a blockchain).

Soon (if my health cooperates) you will become more informed about my plans...
sr. member
Activity: 336
Merit: 265
February 23, 2017, 08:46:00 AM
sr. member
Activity: 336
Merit: 265
February 23, 2017, 12:03:35 AM
Just wanted to remind you all again i don't think law / regulation = death of crypto.
There is laws for the New York Stock Exchange right ? Well they still trade "penny stocks"

And they are all scams too. I created miningstocks.com in 2007 and so I know something about this.

They trample innovation because only the scammers have the connections, resources, and time to waste getting listed. And they place onerous restrictions on the way a coin could be structured, distributed, etc.. It would absolutely kill the Steem concept, which I think is going to be critical (with significant tweaks, e.g. no voting) to attaining mass adoption.

I hope you also understand that the required underwriting for IPOs is a scam that enables the investment bankers such as Goldman Sachs to take all the early stage gains of an IPO.

Regulation is scam, because the regulated are in bed with the regulators. The regulations end up being a way to keep all the non-scammers out of the profits.

I grow tired of pointing out the hypocrisy.

Yeah we grow tired of your hypocrisy.

Why don't you just admit human nature instead of lying to yourself?
sr. member
Activity: 336
Merit: 265
February 22, 2017, 01:15:16 PM
sr. member
Activity: 336
Merit: 265
February 22, 2017, 01:56:37 AM
You seem to have a doomsday attitude, so I don't think you are likely to be in touch with the reality of what will transpire:

I don't think we will reach stage #6.  The Singularity will hit us first.  We are just the breading ground for the machines to take over.  They will take over the totalitarian mechanisms set in place in stage #5.

Btw, I have refuted the Singularity in the past. It will never happen.

I don't want to debate it again right now, which is why I didn't respond to the above comment in that thread.

Just put it this way, total orders have never existed in our universe. So the probability of total doomsday is 0.

For machines to become more important than humans from an evolutionary standpoint (which is all that matters actually in terms of species extinction), then they must become alive and that means they must have a bell curve of attributes and have failure. Because without failure, there isn't existence of life (the past and future will collapse into undifferentiated without friction and imperfection).

Infinite entropy can't exist. Kurzweil is a smart idiot.



As I told you, it is not about *stopping* you.  I used to think that, but they won't try to stop you.  At all.  Unless you piss them off, and then they will simply OBSERVE you, and come after you.  I'm only talking about market manipulation, giving favours (inside knowledge) to their allies, and pumping value out of you (make you buy high, and sell low).

Let's don't get into an ego battle here where to admit being wrong is to lose one's manhood.

Market manipulation doesn't stop Bitcoin from being used as the onramp that I described is its critical function in this revolution.


I think that the singularity is unavoidable.  Simply because the random algorithm of evolution is less efficient in improving systems than intelligent design.

Re-read my post. I added the text necessary to make you see your stance in implausible. That is if you understand what I have been writing else where about why the speed-of-light must be quantifiable. I am not going to re-explain all that in this thread. We are going off-topic.

For machines to become more important than humans from an evolutionary standpoint (which is all that matters actually in terms of species extinction), then they must become alive and that means they must have a bell curve of attributes and have failure. Because without failure, there isn't existence of life (the past and future will collapse into undifferentiated without friction and imperfection).

Of course, and there's nothing inherently impossible to that.  On the contrary.  What makes you think that machines won't "come alive", have bell curve distributed attributes and have failure (I'd say that if there's one thing they already have, is exactly that !) ?

So then you can't predict the future of human interaction with machines. Absolutism doomsday predictions requires a total ordering perspective, which can't exist.

For example, humans may incorporate the machines into themselves. We become partially Cyborgs.

We're just an intermediate species.  Machines are better.

Better must be quantified with the unknown future. Resiliency is better. It can't be predicted. Learn about Taleb's antifragility.

Since when did you become the omniscient God who has a total order perspective on the universe?



For example, humans may incorporate the machines into themselves. We become partially Cyborgs.

I would call that "the machines took over".  If the thing that you incorporate is smarter than your human brain is, then that thing is "the boss" and you are just its biological support.  If you incorporate an exo-skeleton, then that exo-skeleton augments your abilities as a human.  If you incorporate an electronic brain that tells your body how to act, then YOU are the bio-skeleton of that electronic brain, no ?

Replace 'better' with 'smarter' in my prior post, and also refer to my essay, Information is Alive! on why every human brain is unique and that is where creativity and adaptability is actually derived. When TSHTF, creativity bails out the species. Creativity and adaptability doesn't derive from faster deterministic processing. It derives from entropy. Replication is low entropy.



My point is that this exact ability will be, one day, done better by a machine.  The day that machines become more creative than humans is the day I'm talking about.

Why would machines have more entropy? Replication and acquiring knowledge faster is not an increase in entropy.

A human brain is nothing else but a piece of physics, a data processor.  There's no reason that a silicon version of it cannot be better at everything that a human brain can do, including creativity.

You didn't even comprehend my point about entropy then. Try again to read the Information is Alive! essay and think more carefully about it.

It is our interaction biologically with our environment over long periods of evolution that has given us the extremely high entropy that we can't transfer to machines (because it would require the machines be each one of us because none of us can totally comprehend the entire network of all of us). That entropy is buried not only in our genes but in our living biology (which includes the billions of variants of living personalities, cultures, etc). The robots could process information faster, but that gives them no inherent evolutionary advantage in terms of resilient creativity and adaptation due to the historical accumulation of entropy in the species.

This is why it is much more likely that the advantages of machines become incorporated into our species.

Machines can easily have bigger entropy sources than biological entities.   Biological entities derive their evolutionary source of entropy from random mutations.  I don't know what the entropy flux is, but it is monstrously low.  Maybe a few bits per year for a whole species.  The other entropy source is the random recombination of DNA during sexual reproduction.  If it is a megabyte per procreation, it is a lot.

The genes are not the largest store of entropy in our species. The encoding our entropy is in the living network of the species. Our network is alive also, analogous to the brain of ants is the collective brain of the colony. Our entropy is on the magnitude of some exponential or perhaps factorial of a billion (will need to think this out a bit when I have more time).

True random number generators, based upon physical noise, can provide machines with entropy sources of tens of megabytes per second using a few transistors only.  Machines outsmart us already concerning entropy sources.

When we speak about entropy in this context we differentiate noise from Shannon information. So your noise generator is not applicable.

And all processing that a brain can do is deterministic, or stochastic (which is nothing else but deterministic with a true random generator as input, Monte Carlo style).  So there's nothing that a human brain can think off, that a machine cannot think off.

You are thinking about the system of the species by looking at one brain in isolation. That is very myopic. The value is in the diversity of the network.



It is our interaction biologically with our environment over long periods of evolution that has given us the extremely high entropy that we can't transfer to machines. That entropy is buried not only in our genes but in our living biology (which includes the billions of variants of living personalities, cultures, etc). The robots could process information faster, but that gives them no inherent evolutionary advantage in terms of resilient creativity and adaptation due to the historical accumulation of entropy in the species.

Our genetic record (which is essentially most of what remains from all that entropy) is a few GB.  If you take into account on top of that, all epigenetic stuff and I'm being extremely large, lets say a factor of 1000 we end up with at most a few TB.  It is much, much less than that, but I don't need to argue here.

I refuted that already. If you refuse to read and understand what has been written, then I have nothing more to say.

A few TB is ridiculously stupid. We won't even be able to store the monetary blockchain of the world in a few TB. The NSA needs huge datacenters just try to store all the information that humans spit out onto the Internet.

And you think we can put human entropy on a single harddisk. Dude what are you smoking.

Edit: your error is your are thinking the entropy of the human species distills down to some encoding at the physical level of the individual humans, but the network of the humans (the connections and interrelations) is also alive and the entropy of the entire system is incalculable. We don't have the omniscience to perform that computation because it can only be determined with a total order (including on the future). Your doomsday perspective is analogous to "omniscient" leftists who think they can understand and control nature better than nature itself. It is a form of evil.

Btw, this is why the Internet was such a powerful innovation, because it unleashed the power of this species entropy as we are able to network much more efficiently and in wider scope. And this is going to change the world radically with decentralization technology. We are accelerating into the Knowledge Age and the Second Computer Revolution.



You are thinking about the system of the species by looking at one brain in isolation. That is very myopic. The value is in the diversity of the network.

You are comparing all of humanity to one machine.  That is not fair.  You should compare one human to one machine.  Because then you should compare a network of billions of machines to humanity.  If a single machine can outsmart a single human, then a network of a billion of those machines will outsmart a network of a billion of humans (also called humanity).  Guess what ?  That network of humans even needs the machine network to exist ; the machine network doesn't need the humans to interact.

I didn't want to start this debate, because I knew you would drag me into a long noisy debate and now as expected you are ignoring the points I have made. I have already refuted this line of argument.

Please revisit what I have already written and put your thinking cap on. You are not dumb. You have the IQ to understand, if you take off your blinders.

Comparing one human to one machine is not informational at all. That is your first fundamental logic error on this subject matter. Then work forward from there really thinking carefully about my other points.

Why would machines have more entropy? Replication and acquiring knowledge faster is not an increase in entropy.

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It is our interaction biologically with our environment over long periods of evolution that has given us the extremely high entropy that we can't transfer to machines (because it would require the machines be each one of us because none of us can totally comprehend the entire network of all of us).

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The genes are not the largest store of entropy in our species. The encoding our entropy is in the living network of the species. Our network is alive also, analogous to the brain of ants is the collective brain of the colony. Our entropy is on the magnitude of some exponential or perhaps factorial of a billion (will need to think this out a bit when I have more time).

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You are thinking about the system of the species by looking at one brain in isolation. That is very myopic. The value is in the diversity of the network.



And you think we can put human entropy on a single harddisk. Dude what are you smoking.

Edit: your error is your are thinking the entropy of the human species distills down to some encoding at the physical level of the individual humans, but the network of the humans (the connections and interrelations) is also alive and the entropy of the entire system is incalculable. We don't have the omniscience to perform that computation...

Even if you wanted to compare an individual human's entropy to that of your best machine, the machine would still lose:

A 'reference man' (one who is 70 kilograms, 20–30 years old and 1.7 metres tall) contains on average about 30 trillion human cells and 39 trillion bacteria, say Ron Milo and Ron Sender at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel, and Shai Fuchs at the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto, Canada.

And so now don't just consider the entropy of the DNA in those cells but attempt to calculate the entropy of the living network of interactions and interrelationships between those cells, which will be unique in every human body.

I hope you are starting to fathom why Kurzweil is either not a very sophisticated thinker and/or is a paid propagandist of JAD's Cathedral (i.e. the establishment elite), who employing fearmonging to mind control you (which they have done quite effectively). The Cathedral wants men to feel hopeless, useless, and abandon their manhood.

Please regurgitate the blue pill. I am handing you a red pill.
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