[11:03 PM] Comments (0) | philipd:\>

My physics friends over at UCSD sent me this article... will read up with it after I'm done working on these linear systems I have for tomorrow's meeting...

Scientific American: Information in the Holographic Universe -- [ PHYSICS ] -- Theoretical results about black holes suggest that the universe could be like a gigantic hologram

[09:20 PM] Comments (0) | philipd:\>

Hilts e-mailed this in regarding Relative Addictiveness of Drugs. Marijuana is the least addictive, nicotine in the middle, and heroin near the top.

[08:54 PM] Comments (0) | philipd:\>

How will the magic be preserved when we pass thorugh the Singularity? A tremendous lot of human survival depends on magical interpretations of things... the magic of love, the magic of compassion, the magic of consicousness, the magic of free will, democracy, intelligence, good, etc. All of these things hold weights a birth, and are very difficult to unearth. i.e. try being celibate.

Anyways, the magic has been fairly well conserved by Darwinism as those that see through the magic and then lose faith in certain mechanisms probably died off or fade away. i.e. If a son woke up one day and said, "hmm, this family construct is arbitrary and unecessary, and so is life, I'm just going to walk out and do my own thing" he would eventually die.

I think the natural adaption after instincts became meme-suspectibility which allowed the mind to be flexibly controlled by those around us.

But what happens when the Singularity comes by and we all become a lot smarter than meme-enforcement. What happens when everybody becomes enlightened, but not in a happy "yes, I see the light, let's go!" kind of way but in a "man, everything is gray because there is no magic" way. Will we just have an ever-increasing rise in suicide, with 50% of people just randomly plopping off because they decide to stroll down certain thought experiments and decide "hey, there's nothing for me here, good bye."

I doubt there's anything we can do about it. We're rapidly become the densest concentration of intelligence in a self-aware system.

If people start dying randomly, I won't shed too many tears, but if we do end up in a situation where our concentrated intelligence is so vast that everybody has access to the big red button, then it could pose a problem.

I've read in a few places that one of the possible reasons we haven't encountered intelligent life is because after they become smart enough, they eventually destroy themselves. Remember, this was a real danger during the 50s Nuclear Era, but it looks like we survived the first test. Continuing on the strain of the previous post, it could be because we're just dumb enough to collude on nuclear non-proliferation OR as in certain extreme cases of the Prisoner's Dilemma, the consequences of defect-defect are so terrible that people become risk-adverse to defecting PERIOD.

It would be nice if we could prove that other alien smart civilations just got too smart that they destroyed themselves, or at least speculate that.... this would help us then figure out what to do about ourselves... <- although, continuing on the previous post, it is irrational to care about whether we survive or not, which is a product of too much smarts, which if we already have too many people who are too smart to give a shit, then we may just very well be screwed.

Is a dumb president our only hope then?

[08:40 PM] Comments (0) | philipd:\>

There has to be some sort of upperbound on the amount of intelligence that individual nodes can carry for greater systems that depend on those nodes to function properly. For example, take rationalism. Greater intelligence tends to include greater rational thinking, but with too much rational thinking, democracy wouldn't be tenable.

Rationally speaking, one shouldn't waste their time voting because their single vote is not going to have an impact.

Then some nay-sayer says, "Yeah, well if we ALL did that, then we'd be screwed." Yes, exactly. That still doesn't give me reason to vote. Why should I vote? I don't control the all, I just control whether I vote. With millions of other people voting, how will my vote make a difference.

Then people stand proud and say, "It's people like YOU who are destroying democracy." Okay, fine then, I guess then it's people who obey certain "values" a priori that vote. Like, they should be able to look at themselves and be proud that they are fine members of democracy... great, it's a nice construct, but you can't argue with me that it's not irrational to think your vote counts or its worth your time.

Anyways, what I'm saying is that certain constraints on the amount of intelligence present in a self-aware node are necessary to prevent people from being Stoicists and just sitting around doing nothing or being philosophers who just sit around and think (but don't publish any work), or from becoming nihilists and just destroying things wantonly. And/or there has to be interfering memes that can prevent someone from acting out on their intelligent thinking.

Intelligently speaking, our love is false, but my hormones and your insecurities bind us together and make a wonderful unit.

It's like you have to dumb parties down in order to prevent the Prisoner's Dilemma from occuring in situations.

I think natural selection has already done a good job at weeding out people who are "too smart" for their own good, but with the accelerating pace of order and intelligence, it will be necessary for us to enforce natural selection's rule.

Some might say, well, nature will eventually take care of things. Not true, natural selection could continue to "march on" by potentially making Earth be an trial that failed while as other life systems elsewhere that managed to actively deal with prisoner's dilemma's afflicting their pass through the singularity being able to survive and reproduce, and so forth.

i.e. right now, natural selection is still taking care of the Planet because it's domain is just members of the planet. When our reach extends beyond the constraints of this planet, Natural selection will be operating on a interplanetary and galactic scale which would still mean we would have to "fight for our survival" in the universe just as everything else does.

UPDATE: According to neoshroom, Dennet says a similar thing about the Prisoner's Dillema being overcome by dumb people in Darwin's Dangerous Idea

[08:25 PM] Comments (0) | philipd:\>

What if the universe consists of two parallel 3 dimensional planes one of matter and one of the empty black space, and that the matter that we see now is just the existence of holes in the black space with stuff from the matter-space bleeding through those holes

[08:07 PM] Comments (0) | philipd:\>

Is there a difference between intuitive and counter-counter-intuitive? Think about it.

[08:03 PM] Comments (0) | philipd:\>

Deanisms

I asked Howard Dean about blogging and the White house, this is what he haid to say:

Finally, one of you asked if there would be a White House blog. Why not? Thanks again, Howard Dean".

Dean's a cool guy--I knew him when I was building websites. After he checked out Philosophistry, he asked me if I could help setup his own blog. So I pointed him over to my friend Lawrence Lessig at Stanford, and they ended up working out an arrangement where Dean would cover Lessig's blog while Lessig was hanging out in San Diego with my parents (I had homework so I stayed in Palo Alto--also to make sure Dean wasn't misusing his blog).

Alter clued me into this piece he wrote at Newsweek regarding Dean.

Personally, I'm an Edwards fan, but that's only because Microsoft decided to buy a controlling stake in the articles that I post on Philosophistry. On Microsoft's blog, they normally pump Edwards regarding his passion. I've read some of the stuff he said, and it's pretty cool as well.

However, this Dean guy's been making big headway and it's been hard for me to give Edwards equal spotlight. Anyways, unfortunately, I'm afraid Dean is going to end up a McLoser like McCain and McGovern... i.e. be a darling to the brain-crust but miss out on the NASCAR dads and Soccer moms.

Oh well, we'll throw a party for Dean in San Diego when it's all over. Take care.

[07:56 PM] Comments (0) | philipd:\>

+1 Cute

Napster Cartoons

[07:46 PM] Comments (0) | philipd:\>

Theorized Solution to Zeno's Paradox

Lynd e-mailed me the other day in response to my complaint that "Why hasn't anybody solved Zeno's Paradox." This is an exerpt of what he had to say...

Lynds' solution to the Achilles and the tortoise paradox, submitted to Philosophy of Science, helped explain the work. A tortoise challenges Achilles, the swift Greek warrior, to a race, gets a 10m head start, and says Achilles can never pass him. When Achilles has run 10m, the tortoise has moved a further metre. When Achilles has covered that metre, the tortoise has moved 10cm...and so on. It is impossible for Achilles to pass him. The paradox is that in reality, Achilles would easily do so. A similar paradox, called the Dichotomy, stipulates that you can never reach your goal, as in order to get there, you must firstly travel half of the distance. But once you've done that, you must still traverse half the remaining distance, and half again, and so on. What's more, you can't even get started, as to travel a certain distance, you must firstly travel half of that distance, and so on.

According to both ancient and present day physics, objects in motion have determined relative positions. Indeed, the physics of motion from Zeno to Newton and through to today take this assumption as given. Lynds says that the paradoxes arose because people assumed wrongly that objects in motion had determined positions at any instant in time, thus freezing the bodies motion static at that instant and enabling the impossible situation of the paradoxes to be derived. "There's no such thing as an instant in time or present moment in nature. It's something entirely subjective that we project onto the world around us. That is, it's the outcome of brain function and consciousness."

Rather than the historical mathematical proof provided in the 19th century of summing an infinite series of numbers to provide a finite whole, or in the case of another paradox called the Arrow, usually thought to be solved through functional mathematics and Weierstrass' "at-at" theory, Lynds' solution to all of the paradoxes lay in the realisation of the absence of an instant in time underlying a bodies motion and that its position was constantly changing over time and never determined. He comments, "With some thought it should become clear that no matter how small the time interval, or how slowly an object moves during that interval, it is still in motion and it's position is constantly changing, so it can't have a determined relative position at any time, whether during a interval, however small, or at an instant. Indeed, if it did, it couldn't be in motion."

[03:14 PM] Comments (0) | philipd:\>

USATODAY.com - Study links depression, suicide rates to teen sex

[02:52 PM] Comments (0) | philipd:\>

THE KOBE TIMES - Official Kate Faber Kobe Bryant Trial Website. Kobe Times? Is Vanessa mad? Questions answered. MetroSpy is at it again.: "EAGLE -- According to Colorado Radio personality Jann Scott, 'Police have pictures of the victim that show her thighs, lower stomach area, and genital area black and blue.'
Scott's police sources say, 'Her legs, knees and back are also black and blue. He hurt her. He beat her up. She finally escaped in the early morning.'
In his daily journal, Scott writes, 'When (police) saw her and interviewed her, there was no doubt, no question about what happened. This is a bad guy, like Mike Tyson.'
'That’s why we went right over there and arrested him. The evidence spoke for itself. When these pictures come out in court, that'll be it,' writes Scott."

-- I know this is not philosophistry, but this is interesting, nonetheless

[01:12 PM] Comments (0) | philipd:\>

All your base are belong to us - Official Video Site

Internet time is so compressed that All Your Base is now "retro." It's impact was also so widespread, that the gist of "All your base" has lost its grammatical humor, i.e. it's been imprinted so much that it doesn't seem ungrammatical to say "All your base" in lieu of "All of your bases"...