Don Stockbauer <donstockba... at (no spam) hotmail.com> wrote:
On Jul 19, 2:15=A0pm, c... at (no spam) kcwc.com (Curt Welch) wrote:
Tim Tyler <seemy... at (no spam) googlemail.com> wrote:
Curt Welch wrote:
The idea that physics runs on what is essentially a digital computer
explains why the universe is computable.

The universe isn't computable. Why would you say it is? There's
no evidence to support that it is. The Heisenberg uncertainty principle
shows that even if all physical effects could be computed, it's
impossible for us (as part of the universe) to ever measure the current
state to a precision required to show that it's computable on a finite
state machine.

Unless you can find a back door around the Heisenberg uncertainty
principle, the hypothesis is unfalsifiable and as such, worthless
drivel.

It's the back door of the substrate being able to be ignored when
higher levels emerge via the metasystem transition.  This is why you
can think being totally unaware of your neurons firing - they're at
the substrate level.  Elementary particles and molecules are even more
ignorable, as they are at a much lower level than neurons.

Or, another way to say that, is that there is much predictability at the
higher levels, and we can understand that predictability alone, without
having to understand why it's there - without having to understand the
predictability that exists at the lower level as well.

On Jul 21, 11:31 am, c... at (no spam) kcwc.com (Curt Welch) wrote:


I hadn't heard of the electrical synapse.

I have. The suggestion is they work in conjunction with
inhibitory neurons to synchronize ...

Sly <Sly at (no spam) nowhere.com> wrote:
There's actually another kind of synapse: electrical synapse.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrical_synapse
[SNIP...]

Very interesting. I hadn't heard of the electrical synapse.

Curt Welch wrote:
Sly <Sly at (no spam) nowhere.com> wrote:
There's actually another kind of synapse: electrical synapse.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrical_synapse
[SNIP...]

Very interesting. I hadn't heard of the electrical synapse.


Me neither.

They've been detected very lately, in the years 2000. Actually once
chemical transmission have been detected, no body was expecting these
electrical transmission, so nobody was looking for them anymore :)

They seem to be many order of time less numerous than chemical synapses.

Tim Tyler <seemysig at (no spam) googlemail.com> wrote on Tue, 21 Jul 2009:
Don Geddis wrote:

I don't think that's quite the right way to think about it. You seem to be
suggesting that there actually is some precise state, and the uncertainty
principle is a mask over this state, not allowing us to see what it is.
That's exactly what I am saying.
The reality is, that the actual state is a distributed, spread-out thing.
No - or at least not in the MWI.

We seem to disagree about this.

Of course you /could/ say that the multiverse is "a distributed, spread-out
thing" - but it most certainly *does* have "a precise state".

Sure, the state is "precise". What I meant was, a photon is never just
"here". It is false to believe that the photon is "really" right here
in this exact location, only this annoying Heisenberg thing is preventing
us from measuring where it really is.

The reality is that the (one, single) photon is distributed throughout space.

It is deterministic and local - just like the universe was thought to be in
the good old days of Newtonian mechanics. The universe really is "out
there".

Deterministic, I'll give you. Local, not so much.

Don't you think the double-slit experiment (especially if you accept MWI)
pretty convincingly shows you that photons are not local entities? A single
photon interferes with _itself_, going through _both_ slits.

Uncertainty is in the mind. It is a psychological phenomenon.
The universe itself is not "uncertain".

I completely agree with you here.

So it really comes down to "local". I'll give you this much:
http://www.hedweb.com/manworld.htm#local
Namely, QM and MWI are constrained by special relativity, so there's no
instant "action at a distance".

But that's not the same as saying that photons "really are" in a very narrow
place at any given time, only we happen not to be able to measure what that
place is (due to some bizarre Heisenberg magic).

Sly wrote:

Still we DON'T KNOW how the brain operates. Digital? Continuous?

We know this mouch:
[...]

But nerve impulses are not dragooned
into bytes: they don't assemble into discrete code numbers. Instead,
the strength of the message (the loudness of the sound, the brightness
of the light, maybe even the agony of the emotion) is encoded as the
rate of impulses. Engineers know this as Pulse Frequency Modulation,
and it was popular with them before Pulse Code Modulation was
adopted.

Tim Tyler <seemysig at (no spam) googlemail.com> wrote on Wed, 22 Jul 2009:
Curt Welch wrote:

In all higher level issues except quantum mechanics, I would say we have
discovered that there is always an underlying state we simply don't fully
know. Talking like that implies there is something there to be known, and
that we simply didn't have the correct equipment or sensors in place to
collect the data. With quantum mechanics however, we are standing on the
edge of the cliff. We don't know what's on the other side and it's no
longer just a matter of not having the correct equipment or sensors in
place. There are tools available to show us the state. It's simply
unknown.
Jaynes proposes we apply Occam's razor, and extend this to quantum mechanics.
If you do that, what you get is the MWI.

I still think your wording is misleading.

Curt's description suggests a "hidden variable" theory:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hidden_variable_theory
but Bell's Theorem
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell%27s_theorem
explicitly rules those out (the local ones, anyway).

casey wrote:
By the way I spent a lot of time some years ago trying
to find out what Curt's views were, while, unlike anyone
else, programming a working version of his net. He would
talk about two pulses never entering the units at the
same time because of the infinitesimal difference all
pulses would have in time.

I think maybe you've overlooked the fact that in biological
systems events that are "close enough together in time" are
parsed as "simultaneous."

care what term you use to refer to this information hiding - the point is
that the information is not all accessible to embedded observers.
[...]

Are you honestly that lost about how spike signals code information in the
temporal domain?

read this...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neural_coding

casey wrote:

[...]

The question however is not about the "right frame of mind" but
what a particular neuron *actually does* in terms of pulses in
and pulses out keeping in mind there are different neurons and
they behave differently.


It turns genes on and off.

On Jul 26, 2:20 pm, Wolf K <weki... at (no spam) sympatico.ca> wrote:
casey wrote:

[...]

The question however is not about the "right frame of mind" but
what a particular neuron *actually does* in terms of pulses in
and pulses out keeping in mind there are different neurons and
they behave differently.

It turns genes on and off.

So behaviorists can have a peek inside the black box to explain
the behavior?

JC

Don Stockbauer <donstockba... at (no spam) hotmail.com> wrote:
On Jul 31, 1:16=A0am, c... at (no spam) kcwc.com (Curt Welch) wrote:
Someone once talked to me about making a branding iron for them and I
did a little research but didn't get to do it. He got an old friend
"back home" to make it for him. Still seem like it would be fun to make
one.

I don't have the welding skills.  My friend, Kort Angerstein, would be
able to do it in his blacksmith shop, but he doesn't seem to want to
get together too much anymore.

:(

Yeah for the past few years I've been learning metalworking for the fun of
it (partially motivated by wanting to do more robotics AI work).  I took 6
welding classes at my local community college to complete their welding
certificate program and this year, I've been getting into blacksmithing
though a local blacksmithing guild.  I was just at a class last night which
is part of the second course I've taken so far on blacksmithing.  Making a
branding iron would be simple and fun for me.  Sorry your blacksmithing
friend doesn't want to get together any more!  Welding is neat, but
blacksmithing is just down right fun (as long as you stay away from that
farrier nonsense where animals want to bite and kick you all the time).

Oh God, stop talking about it before it takes us over! You are only
feeding the monster! :)

Does refusing to talk about it change it from a runaway positive
feedback situation to a moderated one using negative feedback
control?  Usually no feedback means extinction or explosion.  Feedback
means control.  Or in this case, does feedback mean extinction?  Is
this yet another paradox of the GB?

I think talking about not talking about it is as much feeding the monster
as is normal talking about it.  It keeps growing more every day whether
we like it or not.

On Jul 31, 1:16=A0am, c... at (no spam) kcwc.com (Curt Welch) wrote:

Someone once talked to me about making a branding iron for them and I
did a little research but didn't get to do it. He got an old friend
"back home" to make it for him. Still seem like it would be fun to make
one.

I don't have the welding skills. My friend, Kort Angerstein, would be
able to do it in his blacksmith shop, but he doesn't seem to want to
get together too much anymore.

Oh God, stop talking about it before it takes us over! You are only
feeding the monster! :)

Does refusing to talk about it change it from a runaway positive
feedback situation to a moderated one using negative feedback
control? Usually no feedback means extinction or explosion. Feedback
means control. Or in this case, does feedback mean extinction? Is
this yet another paradox of the GB?

Our global economy is what creates and drives our universal cooperation.
It's already here and going strong. It will continue to grow stronger over
time, both as new technologies emerge, and as new generations adapt to the
systems we already have in place. There is still much more than can be
done, but relatively speaking, I think it's a far stretch to try and claim
we don't already have universal cooperation.