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10:45, 21 August 2024 Rob talk contribs created page Entwinement (Created page with "* We all perceive and represent hundreds of other human beings at vastly differing levels of detail and fidelity inside our cranium. * We manufacture an enormously stripped-down version of our own strange loop of selfhood and install it at the core of our symbols for other people, letting that initially crude loopy structure change and grows over time. * In the case of people we know best - our spouse, our parents and siblings, our children, our dearest friends - each of...")
16:45, 20 August 2024 Rob talk contribs created page Strangeness in the I of the Beholder (Created page with "* How could a system. of pumping liquids ever house a locus of upside-down causality, where meanings seem to matter infinitely more than physical objects and their motions? * A careenium’s dancing simmballs will continue tracking the world, will stay in phase with it, will remain aligned with it. Simballs are systematically in phase with things going on in the world. * That is the only reason simmballs can be said to have meaning. Meaning, no matter what its substrate...")
10:37, 18 August 2024 90.25.23.57 talk created page The Elusive Apple of My I (Created page with "* We are powerfully driven to create a term that summarizes all the hopes and beliefs and desires that are found inside our own cranium - and that term, as we all learn early on, is « I ». And pretty soon this high abstraction behind the scenes comes to feel like the maximally real entity in the universe. * Among the untold thousands of symbols in the repertoire of a normal human being, there are some that are far more frequent and dominant than others, and one of th...")
09:42, 17 August 2024 Rob talk contribs created page The Origins of Creativity (Created page with "* Culture started about 1m years ago, around the nocturnal firelight of the earliest human encampments. * History is the story of cultural evolution, prehistory is that of genetic evolution. * The informed interplay between competition and cooperation is the flywheel of a successful social organization. * Three neural routes activated in the brains of human and other advanced primates during social interactions: ** Mentalizing - goals are formed and appropriate activitie...")
12:46, 8 August 2024 2a01:cb06:4d9:7200:154:cffb:d5:4374 talk created page On Downward Causality (Created page with "* The peak’s inaccessibility turns out to have nothing to do with how anyone might try to get up to it; it has to do with an inherent instability belonging to the summit itself * upside-down reasoning from a would-be theorem downwards, rather than from axioms upwards, and in particular, reasoning from a hidden meaning of the would-be theorem, rather than from its surface-level claim about numbers. * There are many true statements that are not provable. * A creature tha...")
12:33, 8 August 2024 2a01:cb06:4d9:7200:154:cffb:d5:4374 talk created page How Analogy Makes Meaning (linz rh)
12:25, 8 August 2024 2a01:cb06:4d9:7200:154:cffb:d5:4374 talk created page Godel’s Quintessential Strange Loop (Created page with "* Mathematicians see their pristine, abstract world as the antithesis to the random, accident-filled physical world we all inhabit. * In mathematics, where there’s a pattern, there’s a reason. * What a recursive definition does, albeit implicitly, is to divide the entire set of integers into members and non-members of the club. * Godel’s formula is making a claim about itself.")
12:22, 8 August 2024 2a01:cb06:4d9:7200:154:cffb:d5:4374 talk created page Embarking on a Strange-Loop Safari (Created page with "* A strange loop is a paradoxical level-crossing feedback loop.")
10:10, 8 August 2024 2a01:cb06:4d9:7200:154:cffb:d5:4374 talk created page The Epi Phenomenon (Created page with "* Thanks to the funneling-down processes of perception, which will lead eventually - in a matter of milliseconds - to the activation of certain discrete symbols in its brain, an animal can relate intimately and reliably to its physical environment. * Because an animal’s internal mirroring of the world must be highly reliable, its mirroring of the world via its private cache of symbols becomes an unquestioned pillar of stability. The things and patterns it perceives are...")
08:46, 8 August 2024 2a01:cb06:4d9:7200:154:cffb:d5:4374 talk created page Of Selves and Symbols (Created page with "* In the case of a being struggling to survive, the one thing that is always in its environment is… itself. * The camera, rather than being bolted onto its TV set is attached to it by a short leash, giving rise to a truncated corridor, like pet animals or even young children are slightly self-aware * When the leash is sufficiently long and flexible that the video camera can point straight at the center of the screen, we can have an endless corridor, which is far richer...")
08:25, 8 August 2024 2a01:cb06:4d9:7200:154:cffb:d5:4374 talk created page On Video Feedback (Created page with "* truncated corridor, endless corridor, helical corridor. * An emergent phenomenon somehow emerges quite naturally and automatically from rigid rules operating at a lower, more basic level, but exactly how that emergence happens is not at all clear to the observer. * The amazing visual universe discovered around 1980 by mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot. * It is the circularity - the loopiness - of the system that brings these patterns into existence and makes them persist...")
08:18, 8 August 2024 90.108.197.158 talk created page Loops, Goals, and Loopholes (Created page with "* Mechanical systems with feedback such as James Watt’s steam-engine governor. * The presence of a feedback loop is a strong pressure to shift levels of description from the goalless level of mechanics (in which forces make things move) to the goal-oriented level of cybernetics (in which desires make things move). * The suspicion of loops just runs in our human grain. * From Russel’s theory of types and elsewhere, we see that people can be irrationally allergic to th...")
08:12, 8 August 2024 90.108.197.158 talk created page The Causal Potency of Patterns (Created page with "* Entities that. think * A network of precisely times domino chains * The abstract forces that can act on freeways and traffic * Voters in a national election * In a brain there can be vastly different explanations belonging to vastly different domains of discourse at vastly different levels of abstraction. * The locations and velocities of individual molecules are simply irrelevant. * That high-level statistical outcome is robust and invariant against the details of the...")
17:12, 7 August 2024 Rob talk contribs created page This Teetering Bulb of Dread and Dream (Created page with "I think about thinking. I think about: * how concepts and words are related, * what ‘thinking in French’ is, * what underlies slips of the tongue and other types of errors * how one event effortlessly reminds us of another * how we recognize written letters and words * how we understand sloppily spoken, slurred, slangy speech * how we toss of untold numbers of utterly bland-seeming yet never-before-made analogies and occasionally come up with sparklingly original one...")
16:54, 7 August 2024 Rob talk contribs created page On Souls and Their Sizes (Created page with "* Soul shards * Souls of different sizes: ** Lots of consciousness: *** normal adult humans *** mentally retarded, brain-damanged, and senile humans *** dogs, bunnies, chickens ** Less (but some) consciousness: *** goldfish, bees, mosquitoes, mites ** Little or no consciousness: *** microbes, viruses, atoms Lights on? * possessing intentionality * having semantics")
16:47, 7 August 2024 Rob talk contribs created page An Affable Locking of Horns (Created page with "Plato: Some Thoughts I think about consciously before uttering Socrates: In what sense do you think consciously about them? P: I don’t know. I suppose that I try to find the correct words to describe them. S: What uides you to the correct words? P: Why, I search logically for synonyms, similar words, and so on, with which I am familiar. S: In other words, habit guides your thought. P: Yes, my thought is guided by the habit of connecting words with one another systemati...")
17:06, 26 July 2024 Rob talk contribs created page Strange Loops, Or Tangled Hierarchies (Created page with "* Reasoning involves an infinite regress. * Machines may someday have wills despite the fact that no magic program spontaneously appears in memory from out of nowhere. Instead it will be by reason of organization and structure on many levels of hardware and software; * When humans think, we certainly do change our own mental rules, and we change the rules that change the rules, and on and on - but these are, so to speak, software rules. However, the rules at bottom do no...")
17:14, 25 July 2024 Rob talk contribs created page Artificial Intelligence: Prospects (Created page with "* I believe that "almost" situations and unconsciously manufactured subjunctives represent some of the richest potential sources of insight into how human beings organize and categorize their perceptions of the world. * The "slippability" of a feature of some event or circumstance depends on a set of nested contexts in which the event or circumstance is perceived to occur. We build up our mental representation of a situation layer by layer: * The lowest layer establishe...")
06:28, 25 July 2024 2a01:cb06:4d9:7200:b017:949e:3b02:19d3 talk created page Grand Theft Auto (Created page with "==Grand Theft Auto== This is a detailed explanation on the five main Grand Theft Auto games, as well as their pros and cons and my personal opinion on them ==Grand Theft Auto III===")
16:54, 24 July 2024 Rob talk contribs created page Artificial Intelligence: Retrospects (Created page with "* Tesler's theorem - "AI is whatever hasn't been done yet." * Translation involves having a mental model of the world being discussed, and manipulating symbols in that model. A program which makes no use of a model of the world as it reads the passage will soon get hopelessly bogged down in ambiguities and multiple meanings. * Skillful game players choose their moves according to mental processes which they do not fully understand - they use their intuitions. Now there i...")
15:46, 23 July 2024 Rob talk contribs created page Church, Turing, Tarski, and Others (Created page with "* Every aspect of thinking can be viewed as a high-level description of a system which, on a low level, is governed by simple, even formal, rules. * The only way to understand such a comple system as a brain is by chunking it on higher and higher levels, and therby losing some precision at each step. What emerges at the top level is the « informal system » which obeys so many rules of such complexity that we do not yet have the vocabulary to think about it. And that...")
17:15, 19 July 2024 Rob talk contribs created page Self-Ref and Self-Rep (Created page with "* The word sequences are the tips of the icebergs and the processing which must be done to understand them is the hidden part. * Self-reproducing object = self-rep - we want to have the feeling that, to the max extend possible, it explicitly contains the directions for copying itself. There is an intuitive borderline on one side of which we perceive true self-directed self-rep, and on the other side merely copying being carried out by an inflexible and autonomous copying...")
16:33, 18 July 2024 Rob talk contribs created page Jumping out of the System (Created page with "* Gw was not clever enough to foresee its own embeddability inside number theory. * Any system, no matter how complex or tricky it is, can be Gödel-numbered, and then the notion of its proof-pairs can be defined - and this is the petard by which it is hoise. Once a system is well-defined, or "boxed", it becomes vulnerable. * TNT is "essentially incomplete". The downfall occurs essentially because the system is powerful enough to have self-referential sentences. * Some f...")
16:38, 17 July 2024 Rob talk contribs created page On Formally Undecideable Propositions of TNT and Related Systems (Created page with "* The arithmetical version of quining - arithmoquining - will allow us to make a TNT-sentence which is "about itself". ** a' is the Gödel number of the formula gotten by arithmoquining the formula with Gödel number a'' ** a' is the arithmoquinification of a'' * It's not enough to quine - you must quine a quine-mentioning sentence * We have gradually pulled a high-level interpretation - a sentence of meta-TNT - out of what was originally a low-level interpretation - a s...")
16:40, 16 July 2024 Rob talk contribs created page BlooP and FlooP and GlooP (Created page with "* Primitive recursivity and general recursivity * An orderly system of sufficient complexity that it can mirror itself cannot be totally orderly - it must contain some strange, chaotic features * Recursive function theory * Primitive recursive truths involve only predictably terminating calculations. These core truths serve for N as Euclid's first four postulates served for geometry; they allow you to throw out certain candidates before the game begins, on the grounds of...")
17:30, 15 July 2024 Rob talk contribs created page Minds and Thoughts (Created page with "* There can be no isomorphism between two brains on the neural or macroscopic suborgan level. * But on the symbol level, there could be functional isomorphisms between symbols and triggering patterns. * These would not be exact (even identical twins have different memories and thought symbols), but clearly some humans think more alike than others do. * What is a partial isomorphism or conceptual nearness? * It is not accurate to think of a symbol as simply on or off. Eac...")
13:10, 14 July 2024 Rob talk contribs created page Brains and Thoughts (Created page with "* Thought must depend on representing reality in the hardware of the brain. * We must have active symbols, rather than passive typographic symbols. * Not all descriptions of a person need be attached to some central symbol for that person, which stores the person’s name. Descriptions can be manufactured and manipulated in themselves. We can invent nonexistent people by making descriptions of them; we can merge two descriptions when we find they represent a single entit...")
15:13, 13 July 2024 Rob talk contribs created page Levels of Description, and Computer Systems (Created page with "* We go to the doctor, who looks at us on lower levels than we think of ourselves. e read about DNA and « genetic engineering » and sip our coffee. * Flickering dots and the moview we’re watching - we have these two wildly different representations of what is on the screen, but that does not confuse us. We can just shut one out, and pay attention to the other - which is what all of us do. Which one is more real? It depends whether you’re a human, a dog, a compute...")
11:48, 13 July 2024 Rob talk contribs created page Mumon and Gödel (Created page with "* One of the basic tenets of Zen Buddhism is that there is no way to characterize what Zen is. No matter what verbal space you try to enclose Zen in, it resists, and spills over. But Zen koans are a central part of Zen study, verbal though they are. Koans are supposed to be triggers which thought they do not contain enough information in themselves to impart enlightenment, may possible be sufficient to unlock the mechanisms inside one’s mind that lead to enlightenment....")
16:40, 11 July 2024 Rob talk contribs created page Typographical Number Theory (Created page with "* Three examples of indirect self-reference are included in the preceding dialog. To see them, you have to look at the form, as well as the content. * Open formulas with free variables, which express a property and quantified variables which express a truth or falsity. * A formula with at least on free variable, an open formula is called a predicate. * Assertion of existence and universal assertion. The five Peano postulates: * Genie is a djinn * Every djinn has a meta...")
16:26, 10 July 2024 Rob talk contribs created page The Propositional Calculus (Created page with "* Propositional reasoning depends on the correct usage of the words "and", "if... then", "or", and "not". * The "fantasy rule" lets you write down any well-formed string and ask what if this were an axiom or a theorem * You can "push" into a fantasy, see its premise, a series of theorems and its outcome, and then "pop" back up to the previous level * You can carry over theorems from the level above into the fantasy, but you cannot export theorems out from the fantasy up...")
14:07, 10 July 2024 Ricky talk contribs created page German (Created page with "Here is an appendix for german words used to learn the language *Common Words*")
14:05, 10 July 2024 Ricky talk contribs created page Ricky's Alleyway (Created page with "German")
13:59, 10 July 2024 User account Ricky talk contribs was created
15:39, 9 July 2024 Rob talk contribs created page The Location of Meaning (Created page with "When is one thing not always the same? The idea of an objective meaning of a message will turn out to be related to the simplicity with which intelligence can be described: * There are cases where by investing sufficient effort, you can pull very recondite pieces of information out of certain structures. In fact, the pulling-out may involve such complicated operations that it makes you feel you are putting in more information than you are pulling out. * a molecule of DN...")
16:43, 8 July 2024 Rob talk contribs created page Recursive Structures and Processes (Created page with "What is recursion? It is nesting and variations on nesting. The concept is very general (stories inside stories, moveies inside movies, paintings inside paintings, Russian dolls inside Russian dolls: * A recursive definition never defines something in terms of itself, but always in terms of simpler versions of itself. * To "push" means to suspend operations on the task you're currently working on, without forgetting where you are - and to take up a new task. The new task...")
15:50, 7 July 2024 Rob talk contribs created page Consistency, Completeness, and Geometry (Created page with "* The more complex the isomorphism, in general, the more « equipment » - both hardware and software - is required to extract the meaning from the symbols. * The key element is answering the question « What is consciousness? » will be the unraveling of the nature of the « isomorphism » which underlies meaning. * The story of the contracrostipunctus itself is an example of the backfirings which it discusses. So it is referring to itself indirectly, in that its...")
09:00, 6 July 2024 Rob talk contribs created page Figure and Ground (Created page with " * The requirement of formality is the essential things which keeps you from mixing up the I-mode and the M-mode - it keeps you from mixing up arithmetical facts with typographical theorems * Checking whether Cx is not a theorem is not an explicitly typographical operation… You have to go outside the system. This is a rule which violates the whole idea of formal systems, in that it asks you to act informally, ie outside the system. * Holes in the system are only negati...")
15:53, 5 July 2024 Rob talk contribs created page Meaning and Form in Mathematics (Created page with "* Axiom schema * Well-formed string - those strings which, when interpreted symbol for symbol, yield grammatical sentences * Bottom-up - working its way up from the basics * Top-Down - working its way down to the basics * Meaningless interpretation - with no isomorphic connection between theorems of the system and reality * Meaningful interpretation - any old word can be used as an interpretation of p, but only plus has a meaningful interpretation Do words and thoughts...")
15:51, 4 July 2024 Rob talk contribs created page The MU Puzzle (Created page with "* "formal system" - you must not do anything which is outside the rules (the Requirement of Formality) * "theorem" - instead of being proven, they are produced * "axiom" - a "free" theorem. A formal system may have zero, one, several, or even infinitely many axioms * "rules of production/ rules of inference" - to "shunt" strings around * "derivation" - an explicit, line-by-line demonstration of how to produce a theorem according to the rules of the formal system. Deriva...")
15:29, 4 July 2024 Rob talk contribs created page Introduction: A Musico-Logical Offering (Created page with "* Notice that every type of "copy" preserves all the information in the original theme, in the sense that the theme is fully recoverable from any of the copies. Such an information-preserving transformation is often called an isomorphism * The strange loop phenomenon occurs whenever, by moving upwards (or downwards) through the levels of some hierarchical system, we unexpectedly find ourselves right back where we started... Sometimes I use the term "tangled hierarchy" to...")
14:52, 4 July 2024 Rob talk contribs created page Douglas Hofstadter (Created page with "Books: * Gödel, Escher Bach: ** Introduction: A Musico-Logical Offering ** The MU Puzzle")
16:25, 28 May 2024 Rob talk contribs created page Dreams (Created page with "notes from "Dreaming: A Very Short Introduction" What is dreaming? These are the cardinal cognitive features of dreaming: * Loss of awareness of self (self-reflective awareness) * Loss of directed thought * Reduction in logical reasoning * Poor memory both within and after the dream * It never occurs to me that I am dreaming * There is a flagrant disregard for the constancies of time, place, and person")
06:51, 18 May 2024 Rob talk contribs created page Ventral stream (Created page with "The ventral stream, also known as the "what" pathway, is a major pathway in the brain responsible for processing visual information related to object recognition and identification. It works in concert with the dorsal stream (the "where" pathway) to give us a complete understanding of the visual world. * Functions: ** Object recognition: This is the primary function of the ventral stream. It allows us to identify objects like faces, cars, tools, and even written wor...")
06:48, 18 May 2024 Rob talk contribs created page Dorsal stream (Created page with "The dorsal stream, also sometimes called the "where" pathway, is a pathway in the brain responsible for processing visual information related to movement and spatial relationships. It's one of two major processing streams within the visual system, working alongside the ventral stream (the "what" pathway). * Function: ** Visual-spatial processing: The dorsal stream excels at understanding the location of objects in space, both relative to ourselves and to each other....")
16:32, 16 May 2024 Rob talk contribs created page Evolution of language (Created page with "These notes are initially drawn from "The Origins of Language" by James R Hurford == The Prehistory of a Very Special Ape == * 7m years ago - the line leading to humans split off from that leading to bonobos and chimpanzees * 4-2m years ago - Australopithecus is the first habitually bipedal ape. Bipedalism allowed us to separate the rhythm of breathing from that of walking and running and freed hands for meaningful gestures * 2.5-1.5m years ago - Homo Habilis (clever m...")
16:14, 16 May 2024 Rob talk contribs created page Consciousness (Created page with "This is the main focus of my interest, where I am strongly influenced by Daniel Dennett's views where consciousness is a purely material thing produced by the brain and evolved gradually as our nervous system reached a certain level of complexity, and which has greatly accelerated since the evolution of language.")
10:48, 1 May 2024 Rob talk contribs created page Books (Created page with " == Books to Read == * Reading to Learn - William Zinger * Nietzsche - Stefan Zweig * The Weirdest People in the World - Joseph Henrich * How Language Works - David Crystal * The Invention of Nature - Andrea Wolf * Breakfast of Champions - Kurt Vonnegut * The Song of the Cell - Siddhartha Mukherjee * A Little History of Philosophy - Nigel Warburton * Gödel, Escher, Bach - Douglas Hofstadter == Books Read == * The MANIAC - Benjamin Labatut * In Search of Memory - Eric...")
10:56, 21 April 2024 Rob talk contribs created page Files (Created page with "Note: VC Code does not, by default, run python files in the directory where they are saved. To change this behavior, click Code > Settings > Settings, search for "python.terminal.executeInFileDir", and enable it. == Read from a File == <syntaxhighlight lang="python" line> </syntaxhighlight> == Write to a File == <syntaxhighlight lang="python" line> </syntaxhighlight> <syntaxhighlight lang="python" line> </syntaxhighlight> <syntaxhighlight lang="python" line> </syn...")
13:16, 15 April 2024 Rob talk contribs created page Classes (Created page with "== Basic Class == <syntaxhighlight lang="python" line> class Cat: # Use capital letter for class name """Basic class with simple attributes and methods """ def __init__(self, name, age): # Special method to create an instance """Initialize attributes""" self.name = name self.age = age def eat(self): # Method defined in class """Sim...")