10 MAR 2019 by ideonexus
Asimov Story on Computation
■ N 1958, American science fiction legend Isaac Asimov wrote a very short story called "The Feeling of Power." In it, lowly technician MyI ron Aub discovers that he is capable of duplicating the work of his computer by multiplying two numbers together on a piece of paper. Amazing! This miraculous discovery makes its way up the chain of command, where the generals and politicians are stunned by Aub's black magic. The top general is intrigued by the possibility that human calculations could g...30 NOV 2015 by ideonexus
Lovecraft's Mythos Denies Humanity Rather than Upholds It
The weird realism that runs through his writings undermines any belief system—religious or humanist—in which the human mind is the center of the universe. There is a tendency nowadays to think of the world in which we live as an artefact of mind or language: a human construction. For Lovecraft, human beings are too feeble to shape a coherent view of the universe. Our minds are specks tossed about in the cosmic melee; though we look for secure foundations, we live in perpetual free fall. W...30 NOV 2015 by ideonexus
The Inability of the Human Mind to Comprehend
The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad...25 FEB 2015 by ideonexus
Tabletop RPGs are Better than Video Game RPGs
You see, in this day of amazing technology, lightning fast communications and constant, exciting innovation, there is nothing that comes close to role-playing. That's because we utilize the ultimate computer, the one that can think for itself, imagine and dream - the human mind. No machine can match it. No machine can "imagine" and "create" fictional characters, places, and ideas that exist only in the mind of that individual and share it with others. No machine can read words and "see" them...Folksonomies: rpg role-playing game
Folksonomies: rpg role-playing game
24 JAN 2015 by ideonexus
Religion and Science are Alike
When I talk about religion, I speak for myself alone. Any statement which attempted to express a consensus of scientists about religious and philosophical questions would miss the main point. There is no consensus among us. The voice of science is a Babel of diverse languages and cultures. That is to me the joy and charm of science. Science is a free creation of the human mind, and at the same time it is an international club cutting across barriers of race and nationality and creed. Many fir...01 DEC 2014 by ideonexus
Fractal Minds Inside Stories
I cover my ears when Tawaddud shouts the Name. By now I have a fairly good idea about how it works. Extreme fractal compression of some kind, a self-referential loop inside a story, forcing the target brain to iterate it all over again, bootstrapping a new mind inside it into existence. How it is possible, I do not know. Even encoding pictures in such dynamical maps takes a lot of computational power, and doing the same for a human mind seems like something that is firmly in the realm of the ...Folksonomies: transhumanism
Folksonomies: transhumanism
10 NOV 2014 by ideonexus
Borg Bandwidth
How large bandwidth is needed? We can estimate a lower bound from the bandwidth of speech and body language, which appears to be on the order of 10-100 bits/s. A highest upper bound would be total interconnection at the same signal density as the human mind, or roughly 10^18 bits/s, quite an extreme range. However, the two human hemispheres communicate closely through the corpus callosum normally with no discernible differences; this connection has a theoretical bandwidth on the order of 10^1...Folksonomies: collectivism
Folksonomies: collectivism
10 NOV 2014 by ideonexus
Borg Bandwidth
How large bandwidth is needed? We can estimate a lower bound from the bandwidth of speech and body language, which appears to be on the order of 10-100 bits/s. A highest upper bound would be total interconnection at the same signal density as the human mind, or roughly 10^18 bits/s, quite an extreme range. However, the two human hemispheres communicate closely through the corpus callosum normally with no discernible differences; this connection has a theoretical bandwidth on the order of 10^1...21 APR 2014 by ideonexus
Mathematics is one of humanity's great achievements
Mathematics is one of humanity’s great achievements. By enhancing the capabilities of the human mind, mathematics has facilitated the development of science, technology, engineering, business, and government. Mathematics is also an intellectual achievement of great sophistication and beauty that epitomizes the power of deductive reasoning. For people to participate fully in society, they must know basic mathematics. Citizens who cannot reason mathematically are cut off from whole realms of ...Folksonomies: education mathematics
Folksonomies: education mathematics
Mathematical illiteracy is crippling.
24 DEC 2013 by ideonexus
Turing's Two Great Insights
Alan Turing, the father of the modern computer, began by thinking about the highly conscious and deliberate step-by-step calculations performed by human “computers” like the women decoding German ciphers at Bletchley Park. His first great insight was that the same processes could be instantiated in an entirely unconscious machine, with the same results. A machine could rationally decode the German ciphers using the same steps that the conscious “computers” went through. And the uncons...Alison Gopnik on how the father of the computer realized machines could do the work of women "computers," and how much of hte human brain was like a computer.