Main public logs

Combined display of all available logs of Slow Like Wiki. You can narrow down the view by selecting a log type, the username (case-sensitive), or the affected page (also case-sensitive).

08:47, 26 July 2025 Robert.adlington talk contribs created page How to Do Things with Words (Created page with "=== Lecture I === === Lecture II === === Lecture III === === Lecture IV === === Lecture V === === Lecture VI === === Lecture VII === === Lecture VIII === === Lecture IX === === Lecture X === === Lecture XI === === Lecture XII ===") Tag: Visual edit
14:18, 19 July 2025 Robert.adlington talk contribs created page The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society (Created page with "=== Preface === === Cybernetics and History === === Progress and Entropy === === Rigidity and Learning: Two Patterns of Communicative Behavior === === The Mechanism and History of Language === === Organization as the Message === === Law and Communication === === Communication, Secrecy, and Social Policy === === Role of the Intellectual and the Scientist === === The First and the Second Industrial Revolution === === Some Communication Machines and Their Future =...") Tag: Visual edit: Switched
08:14, 12 July 2025 Robert.adlington talk contribs created page The Mind is Flat (Created page with "== Prologue: Literary Depth, Mental Shallows == == Part One: The Illusion of Mental Depth == === 1. The Power of Invention === === 2. The Feeling of Reality === === 3. Anatomy of a Hoax === === 4. The Inconstant Imagination === === 5. Inventing Feelings === === 6. Manufacturing Choice === == Part Two: The Improvised Mind == === 7. The Cycle of Thought === === 8. The Narrow Channel of Consciousness === === 9. The Myth of Unconscious Thought === === 10. The Boundary of Con...")
17:17, 7 July 2025 Robert.adlington talk contribs created page A Little History of Philosophy (Created page with "* Socrates/Plato (400 BC) - Uses clever counter-examples to show that his interlocutor's comments don't apply in every situation and demonstrate that they didn't really know what they thought they knew. ** The man who breaks free is like a philosopher. He sees beyond appearances. Ordinary people have little idea about reality because they are content with looking at what's in front of them rather than thinking deeply about it. But the appearances are deceptive. What they...") Tag: Visual edit
07:58, 6 July 2025 Robert.adlington talk contribs created page Possible Minds: 25 Ways of Looking at AI (Created page with "== Seth Lloyd: Wrong But More Relevant Than Ever == == Judea Pearl: The Limitations of Opaque Learning Machines == == Stuart Russell: The Purpose Put into the Machine == == George Dyson: The Third Law == == Daniel Dennett: What Can We Do == == Rodney Brooks: The Inhuman Mess Our Machines Have Gotten Us Into == == Frank Welczek: The Unity of Intelligence == == Max Tegmark: Let's Aspire to More Than Making Ourselves Obsolete == == Jaan Tallinn: Dissident Messages == == Ste...") Tag: Visual edit: Switched
10:47, 8 June 2025 Robert.adlington talk contribs created page Metamagical Themas: Questing for the Essence of Mind and Pattern (Created page with "=== I: Snags and Snarls === === II: Sense and Society === === III: Sparking and Slipping === === IV: Structure and Strangeness === === V: Spirit and Substrate === === VI: Selection and Stability === === VII: Sanity and Survival ===") Tag: Visual edit
09:57, 31 May 2025 Robert.adlington talk contribs created page Calculus (Created page with "Differentiation and integration are the two fundamental, inverse operations in calculus, a branch of mathematics concerned with continuous change. They provide powerful tools for analyzing the behavior of functions and quantities that are constantly varying. ### Differentiation **Differentiation** is the process of finding the **derivative** of a function. The derivative measures the **instantaneous rate of change** of a function with respect to its independent variabl...")
09:57, 31 May 2025 Robert.adlington talk contribs created page Deep Simplicity: Chaos, Complexity, and the Emergence of Life (Created page with "== Introduction: The Simplicity of Complexity == * Chaos and complexity are based on two simple ideas: ** The sensitivity of a system to its starting conditions ** Feedback == Order Out of Chaos == * The Greeks were superb geometers, who had a very good understanding of the relationships between stationary things, but they had no understanding of how things move or the laws of motion. * The three-body problem - Equations describing systems of three or more objects can be...")
16:11, 11 May 2025 Robert.adlington talk contribs created page The Concept of Mind (Created page with "== Introduction == == Descartes's Myth == * The dogma of the ghost in the machine == Knowing How and Knowing That == * The distinction between being intelligent and possessing knowledge. * We think of intellectual powers as that special class of operations which constitute theorizing. The goal of these operations is the knowledge of true propositions or facts. Mathematics and the established natural sciences ar the model accomplishments of human intellects. * On the cont...")
13:46, 1 May 2025 Robert.adlington talk contribs created page Cognitive Neuroscience: A Very Short Introduction (Created page with "== A Recent Field == * Visualization Techniques: ** PET (Positron Emission Tomography) - 1980s ** fMRI (Functional Magnetic Brain Imaging) - 1990s - the ratio of oxygenated to de-oxygenated blood. * Help us learn about: ** Human capacities ** Human limitations ** Disorders of the nervous system == Perceiving == * Lateral Occipital (LO) complex - an area that is activated when people recognize objects. Critical for the ability to use the ahape and orientation of an object...")
17:08, 26 April 2025 Robert.adlington talk contribs created page The Experience Machine (Created page with "== Unboxing the Experience Machine == * The number of neuronal connections carrying signals backward in this way is estimated to exceed the number carry signals forward by a very substantial margin. * The brain, at 2% of human body weight is estimated to account for around 20% of total bodily energy consumption. * The bulk of what the brain does is learn and maintain a kind of model of body and world - a model that can then be used, moment by moment, to try to predict th...")
16:09, 21 April 2025 Robert.adlington talk contribs created page MediaWiki:Sidebar (Created page with " * navigation ** mainpage|mainpage-description ** recentchanges-url|recentchanges ** Books|Books ** Films|Films ** Project|Project ** helppage|help-mediawiki * SEARCH * TOOLBOX * LANGUAGES")
16:23, 26 March 2025 Robert.adlington talk contribs created page Science: A History (Created page with "== Origins == * One potential date for the beginning of the revival of Western Europe is 1453: ** Publication of "On the Structure of the Human Body" by Andreas Vesalius and of "On the Revolutions of the Celestial Bodies" by Copernicus", mark the start of the scientific revolution that would transform first Europe and then the world. ** The Turks captured Constantinople marking the end of the old Roman Empire, causing many Greek-speaking scholars fled westwards to Italy...")
10:01, 22 March 2025 Robert.adlington talk contribs created page The Rise and Reign of the Mammals (Created page with "* 303-307m ya - The Carboniferous Rainforest Collapse - The climate became drier, temperatures swung cold and hot, and the ice caps melted, eventually disappearing for good in the ensuing Permian Period. * 252-251m ya - The Permian-Triassic transition. 90% of species were wiped out. Mega volcanoes erupted for several hundred thousand years. Animals that survived became smaller (the Lilliput Effect). By growing fast and reproducing earlier, they have a better chance of su...")
16:48, 12 March 2025 Robert.adlington talk contribs created page Four Ways of Thinking (Created page with "== Introduction == * Science and mathematics are, in large part, about finding better ways of reasoning. This book describes four ways of getting nearer to the truth. * Stephen Wolfram hypothesized that every process, biological or physical, personal or social, natural or artificial, lies in one of only four classes of behavior: ** Stable systems - Are those that reach and stay at an equilibrium, like a ball rolling to rest. ** Periodic systems - Are those that exhibit r...")
08:13, 17 February 2025 Robert.adlington talk contribs created page Adaptionism (Created page with "Adaptationism refers to a perspective that emphasizes the role of natural selection in shaping the traits of organisms. It posits that many, if not most, features of living beings are the result of adaptive processes, where natural selection favors traits that enhance survival and reproduction. The evolution of the brain, in particular, is a complex process that likely involves a combination of adaptation, exaptation, and other evolutionary mechanisms. A balanced ap...")
07:21, 17 February 2025 Robert.adlington talk contribs created page From Bacteria to Bach and Back (Created page with "== Part I: Turning Our World Upside Down == === 1. Introduction === === 2. Before Bacteria and Bach === === 3. On the Origin of Reasons === === 4. The Strange Inversions of Meaning === === 5. The Evolution of Understanding === == Part II: From Evolution to Intelligent Design == === 6. What is Information? === === 7. Darwinian Space: An Interlude === === 8. Brains Made of Brains === === 9. The Role of Words in Cultural Evolution === === 10. The Meme's-Eye Point of View ==...")
07:12, 17 February 2025 Robert.adlington talk contribs moved page Gödel, Escher Bach to Gödel, Escher, Bach
16:01, 16 February 2025 Robert.adlington talk contribs deleted page Strange Loops, Or Tangled Hierarchies (content was: "* 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...", and the only contributor was "Rob" (talk))
16:00, 16 February 2025 Robert.adlington talk contribs deleted page Artificial Intelligence: Prospects (content was: "* 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 ou...", and the only contributor was "Rob" (talk))
16:00, 16 February 2025 Robert.adlington talk contribs deleted page Artificial Intelligence: Retrospects (content was: "* 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 p...", and the only contributor was "Rob" (talk))
16:00, 16 February 2025 Robert.adlington talk contribs deleted page Church, Turing, Tarski, and Others (content was: "* 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...", and the only contributor was "Rob" (talk))
16:00, 16 February 2025 Robert.adlington talk contribs deleted page Self-Ref and Self-Rep (content was: "* 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...", and the only contributor was "Rob" (talk))
16:00, 16 February 2025 Robert.adlington talk contribs deleted page Jumping out of the System (content was: "* 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 essentiall...", and the only contributor was "Rob" (talk))
16:00, 16 February 2025 Robert.adlington talk contribs deleted page On Formally Undecideable Propositions of TNT and Related Systems (content was: "* 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 -...", and the only contributor was "Rob" (talk))
15:59, 16 February 2025 Robert.adlington talk contribs deleted page BlooP and FlooP and GlooP (content was: "* 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...", and the only contributor was "Rob" (talk))
15:59, 16 February 2025 Robert.adlington talk contribs deleted page Minds and Thoughts (content was: "* 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 con...", and the only contributor was "Rob" (talk))
15:59, 16 February 2025 Robert.adlington talk contribs deleted page Brains and Thoughts (content was: "* 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 descriptio...", and the only contributor was "Rob" (talk))
15:59, 16 February 2025 Robert.adlington talk contribs deleted page Levels of Description, and Computer Systems (content was: "* 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...", and the only contributor was "Rob" (talk))
15:59, 16 February 2025 Robert.adlington talk contribs deleted page Mumon and Gödel (content was: "* 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...", and the only contributor was "Rob" (talk))
15:59, 16 February 2025 Robert.adlington talk contribs deleted page Typographical Number Theory (content was: "* 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 universa...", and the only contributor was "Rob" (talk))
15:58, 16 February 2025 Robert.adlington talk contribs deleted page The Propositional Calculus (content was: "* 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 l...", and the only contributor was "Rob" (talk))
15:58, 16 February 2025 Robert.adlington talk contribs deleted page The Location of Meaning (content was: "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 f...", and the only contributor was "Rob" (talk))
15:58, 16 February 2025 Robert.adlington talk contribs deleted page Recursive Structures and Processes (content was: "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 wo...", and the only contributor was "Rob" (talk))
15:58, 16 February 2025 Robert.adlington talk contribs deleted page Consistency, Completeness, and Geometry (content was: "* 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 b...", and the only contributor was "Rob" (talk))
15:58, 16 February 2025 Robert.adlington talk contribs deleted page Figure and Ground (content was: " * 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...", and the only contributor was "Rob" (talk))
15:58, 16 February 2025 Robert.adlington talk contribs deleted page Meaning and Form in Mathematics (content was: "* 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 interp...", and the only contributor was "Rob" (talk))
15:57, 16 February 2025 Robert.adlington talk contribs deleted page The MU Puzzle (content was: "* "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 demonstra...", and the only contributor was "Rob" (talk))
15:57, 16 February 2025 Robert.adlington talk contribs deleted page Introduction: A Musico-Logical Offering (content was: "* 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 ours...", and the only contributor was "Rob" (talk))
15:45, 15 February 2025 Robert.adlington talk contribs deleted page This Teetering Bulb of Dread and Dream (content before blanking was: "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 ori...")
15:45, 15 February 2025 Robert.adlington talk contribs deleted page The Quandary (content was: "* We humans are doomed, as spiritual creatures in a universe of mere stuff, to eternal puzzlement about our nature. * The presence or absence of animacy depends on the level at which one views a structure. Animate entities are those that, at some level of description, manifest a certain type of loopy pattern. * When perception at arbitrarily high levels of abstraction enters the world of...", and the only contributor was "Rob" (talk))
15:45, 15 February 2025 Robert.adlington talk contribs deleted page The Epi Phenomenon (content before blanking was: "* 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 perc...")
15:45, 15 February 2025 Robert.adlington talk contribs deleted page The Causal Potency of Patterns (content before blanking was: "* 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 detai...")
15:45, 15 February 2025 Robert.adlington talk contribs deleted page The Blurry Glow of Human Identity (content was: "* The "caged-bird metaphor" - one soul in one brain. * In fact, every normal adult human soul is housed in many brains at varying degrees of fidelity, and therefore every human consciousness or "I" lives at once in a collection of different brains, to different extents. * Common sense tells us, unnambiguously that we are always in just one place, not two or more. * But when watching a mov...", and the only contributor was "Rob" (talk))
15:44, 15 February 2025 Robert.adlington talk contribs deleted page Pattern and Provability (content was: "- No Notes! - (Chapter 10 of "I am a Strange Loop" by Douglas Hofstadter)", and the only contributor was "Rob" (talk))
15:44, 15 February 2025 Robert.adlington talk contribs deleted page On Video Feedback (content before blanking was: "* 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 the...")
15:44, 15 February 2025 Robert.adlington talk contribs deleted page On Souls and Their Sizes (content before blanking was: "* 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 (Chapter 2 of "I am a Strange Loop" by Douglas Hofstadter)")
15:44, 15 February 2025 Robert.adlington talk contribs deleted page On Magnanimity and Friendship (content was: "* I would point to individuals whose behavior is essentially the opposite of that of violent psychopaths: Mohandas Gandhi, Eleanor Roosevelt, Raoul Wallenberg, Jean Moulin, Mother Teresa, Martin Luther King, and César Chavez - extraordinary individuals whose deep empathy for those who suffer leads them to devote a large part of their lives to helping others, and to doing so in nonviolent...", and the only contributor was "Rob" (talk))
15:43, 15 February 2025 Robert.adlington talk contribs deleted page On Downward Causality (content was: "* 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 that think...")
15:43, 15 February 2025 Robert.adlington talk contribs deleted page Of Selves and Symbols (content before blanking was: "* 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 f...")