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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...")
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...")
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...")
10:31, 14 April 2024 Rob talk contribs created page Brain stem (Created page with " == Pons == Relays signals from the forebrain to the cerebellum, along with nuclei that deal primarily with sleep, respiration, swallowing, bladder control, hearing, equilibrium, taste, eye movement, facial expression, facial sensation, and posture")
10:21, 14 April 2024 Rob talk contribs created page Brain (Created page with " == Brain Parts == * Hypothalamus * Thalamus * Cerebellum - major role in motor control. May also be involved in cognitive functions, such as attention and language as well as emotional control * Cerebral Hemispheres/Cerebral Cortex - concerned with higher mental functions: perception, action, language, and planning. Contains about 100 billion neurons, each with about a thousand synapses, making a total of about 100 trillion synaptic connections ** Fr...")
10:43, 11 April 2024 Rob talk contribs moved page Functions to Functions and Modules
08:57, 5 April 2024 Rob talk contribs created page MediaWiki (Created page with "This page contains links for Mediawiki syntax and extensions: * [https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:Tables Tables in Mediawiki] * [https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:SyntaxHighlight#Usage Syntax Highlighting]")
16:59, 4 April 2024 Rob talk contribs created page Functions (Created page with " <syntaxhighlight lang="python" line> def make_shirt(size = "L", slogan = "I love Python"): # two params both with default values """Generate a T-shirt order with size and slogan """ # for documentation of function purpose print(f"\nYou ordered a T-shirt saying '{slogan}' in size {size}.\n") make_shirt() # call with defaults make_shirt("M")...")
15:45, 3 April 2024 Rob talk contribs created page Loops (Created page with "== while Loops == <syntaxhighlight lang="python" line> my_number = 1 while my_number <= 10: print(my_number) my_number += 1 </syntaxhighlight> <syntaxhighlight lang="python" line> prompt = "Enter any message to share. prompt+= "\nPress q to quit" entry = "" while entry != 'q': entry = input(prompt) print("You quit the program") </syntaxhighlight> <syntaxhighlight lang="python" line> </syntaxhighlight> <syntaxhighlight lang="python" line> </syntaxhighli...")
15:00, 3 April 2024 Rob talk contribs created page Strings and Numbers (Created page with "== Strings == <syntaxhighlight lang="python" line> my_empty_string = "" my_string = "Hello" print(my_string) </syntaxhighlight> Set string to title, lower, or uppercase <syntaxhighlight lang="python" line> full_name = "bob smith" print(full_name.title()) # also .lower(), .upper() </syntaxhighlight> Remove whitespace or text from beginning or end <syntaxhighlight lang="python" line> my_spacey_string = " Hello " print(my_spacey_string.strip()) # also .lstrip() and .str...")
14:23, 3 April 2024 Rob talk contribs created page User Input (Created page with "== Using input() == <syntaxhighlight lang="python" line> secret = input("Tell me a secret. I promise I won't repeat it: ") print(f"Your secret was '{secret}'. Oops, sorry!") </syntaxhighlight> <syntaxhighlight lang="python" line> </syntaxhighlight> <syntaxhighlight lang="python" line> </syntaxhighlight> <syntaxhighlight lang="python" line> </syntaxhighlight> <syntaxhighlight lang="python" line> </syntaxhighlight> <syntaxhighlight lang="python" line> </syntaxhighlight>")
16:40, 31 March 2024 Rob talk contribs created page Nerve cells (Created page with "The biology of nerve cells: * The neuron doctrine - the neuron is the fundamental building block and elementary signaling unit of the brain. * The ionic-hypothesis - focuses on the transmission of information within the nerve cell. It describes the mechanisms whereby individual nerve cells generate electrical signals, called action potentials, that can propagate over a considerable distance within a given nerve cell. The chemical theory of synaptic transmission - focuses...")
16:19, 31 March 2024 Rob talk contribs created page People (Created page with " * Santiago Ramón y Cajal - neuroanatomist who laid the foundation for the modern study of the nervous system.")
14:35, 31 March 2024 Rob talk contribs created page Python Style Guide (Created page with "See https://peps.python.org/pep-0008/ * indent with four spaces * up to 79 characters per line * up to 72 characters per comment line * use blank lines to group code")
09:25, 31 March 2024 Rob talk contribs created page Lists and Dictionaries (Created page with "== Lists == <syntaxhighlight lang="python" line> def quick_sort(arr): less = [] pivot_list = [] more = [] if len(arr) <= 1: return arr else: pass </syntaxhighlight>")
09:21, 31 March 2024 Rob talk contribs created page Python (Created page with "I'll try and organize what I'm learning into a handful of cheatsheets: * Strings and Numbers * Lists and Dictionaries")
18:05, 30 March 2024 Rob talk contribs created page Cells (Created page with "Every cell in a multicellular organism is surrounded by an oily membrane that separates it from other cells and from the extracellular fluid that bathes all cells. The cell surface membrane is permeable to certain substances, thereby allowing an exchange of nutrients and gases to take place between the interior of the cell and the fluid surrounding it. Inside the cell is the nucleus, which has a membrane of its own and is surrounded by an intracellular fluid called the c...")
17:58, 30 March 2024 Rob talk contribs created page Nervous system (Created page with "Parts of the nervous system: * Central nervous system - a bilateral, essentially symmetrical structure with distinct parts. Receives sensory information from the skin through bundles of long nerve fibers, called axons, and transforms it into coordinated motor commands that are relayed to the muscles for action through other bundles of nerves ** Spinal cord - contains the machinery needed for simple reflex behaviors. ** Brain stem - conveys sensory information to higher...")
17:55, 30 March 2024 Rob talk contribs created page Psychoanalysis (Created page with "In Freud's theory, consciousness is the surface of the mental apparatus. The deeper a mental function lies below the surface, the less accessible it is to consciousness. There are three interacting psychic agencies that differ in cognitive style, goal, and function: * The ego (I or autobiographical self) is the executive agency, and it has both a ** conscious component in direct contact with the external world through the sensory apparatus for sight, sound, and touch....")
15:48, 30 March 2024 Rob talk contribs created page Neuroscience (Created page with "Neuroscience comes from a merging of philosophy, psychology, and psychoanalysis with the biology of the brain to produce a new science based on five principles: * Mind and brain are inseparable * Each mental function is carried out by specialized neural circuits in different regions of the brain * All these circuits are made up of the same elementary signaling units, the nerve cells * The neural circuits use specific molecules to generate signals within and between nerve...")
18:08, 19 March 2024 Rob talk contribs created page History (Created page with "This is the intro to history == Cosmological History == * -13.8bn - Big Bang (Big Bounce?) * -4.5bn - Earth formed == Evolutionary History == * -4b - Single-celled life * -3.5b - Photosynthesis * -2b - Eukaryotes * -1.6b - Multi-Celled Life * -1.5b - Fungi * -800m - Plants * -700m - Animals * -538m - Cambrian Explosion * -518m - Vertebrates * -390m - Tetrapods * -243m - Dinosaurs * -170m - Mammals * -85m - Primates * -2.3 - Homo Habilis * -2m - Homo Erectus * -300k...")
09:05, 13 March 2024 User account Rob talk contribs was created