13 DEC 2017 by ideonexus
The Coal Standard
Here's a thought: maybe we could buy off the simplistic goldbug-minded "money is a commodity" thinkers by proposing a coal standard? That is: treat burnable fossil carbon as money?
Like BTC, there's a finite amount of it remaining to be mined. Like BTC, mining the last reserves gets incrementally harder over time. Unlike BTC, if you burn it, it's gone for good, so there's an incentive to stockpile it and not burn it (ideally by stockpiling it in the ground, where it comes from, by buying lan... 1 
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notes23 APR 2013 by ideonexus
Entropy as a Purpose in Life
To the best of our knowledge, these tool use puzzle and
social cooperation puzzle results represent the rst successful completion of such standard animal cognition tests using
only a simple physical process. The remarkable spontaneous emergence of these sophisticated behaviors from such a
simple physical process suggests that causal entropic forces
might be used as the basis for a general—and potentially
universal—thermodynamic model for adaptive behavior.
Namely, adaptive behavior might ... 1 notes
notesResearchers have created an AI that self-directs itself into activities like balancing a ball on a stick or buying stocks low and selling high by simply programming it with the desire to maximize the "future histories" available to it (ie. if the ball drops or the AI runs out of money, then the possible futures are reduced to one in the simulation). This suggests a thermodynamic relationship between intelligence and disorder; that we might seek to maximize the entropy in our lives by staying alive, making money, getting educated, or otherwise increase the number of future histories available to us.
