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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: skinowski who wrote (441325)	8/19/2011 2:31:44 PM
From: Maurice Winn	4 Recommendations Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 793914

Good morning. Wake up and smell the coffee Skinow: < it is far from certain that we can even define true intelligence. ... suddenly, as if by miracle, our creation will acquire a personality, and the new Homunculus will wake up, and smell the roses, and say good morning. Who knows, maybe this is exactly what will happen.... But so far, at least in this Universe, we've seen no evidence to this effect. > Come on, take a look around. There is all the evidence in the world, literally. You can track consciousness and intelligence back through the DNA record to a few molecules of carbon twisting around itself in a crystallization process like diamond, graphite, bucky balls, graphene and wax crystals, to form DNA. It's the nature of electrostatic forces to mold materials into such gorgeous forms from an amorphous mass. You can track back from people, who you say are conscious and intelligent, to primates, to early mammals to reptiles to as far back as you want to go into the primordial soup of not even single cells and there is no point at which you can say intelligence or consciousness suddenly appear. In the same way, you can track a sperm and egg from single cells all the way to a 24 year old in their prime and then all the way into senility and not see a dividing line but of course there is a transition from mere electromagnetic forces to consciousness. There is no sudden about it. There is as much evidence as you can bothered considering. There is also enough evidence to show that extra-somatic consciousness is just as easy to do and it's under development now. The mistake many make is to think a computer will sit on a desk and be conscious like a brain in a jar. Consciousness is attached to reality and is a response to reality. It is defined by input senses, a model and memory of reality which sits in the hardware of the brain/computer, and output to change reality, with a feedback loop to monitor changes and change the model of reality in response to those changes. There is no lower limit to intelligence nor upper limit. While you might be unable to define true intelligence, as with pornography, which is notoriously hard to define, we know it when we see it. Women are not at all shy about conducting their eugenics programmes in the selection of intelligence and the elimination of the unintelligent. They do not randomly mate and reproduce with any testosterone laden gonads which show up, much to the dismay of a billion males. Women use intelligence to seek intelligence, even though you say they are unable to define it. They might not be scientific about it, but they know it when they see it, the same as they know pornography when they see it. I shall now postulate that pornography is when human sex is portrayed without attachment to intelligence. Sex without intelligence is pornography. Sex with intelligence is erotic art. Males watch pornography. Women watch erotic art. There is no doubt a research grant project there for somebody. Now that I think about it, there is probably a huge business opportunity too - intelligent eroticism for women. Males run the porn industry. No wonder women don't like it - it lacks intelligent life. But I might be ill-informed and admit that my theory is based on guesswork rather than research. The big lump above our eyebrows confirms that their eugenics process is successful. The Flynn Effect is evidence that the process has not ended. An intelligent consideration of the logic shows that it won't be stopping any time soon and in fact will accelerate with DNA analysis, zygote selection and genetic engineering and the fact that there is now a gene pool of 3 billion males to sort through and reject. In the bad old days of a few centuries ago, they were limited to millions. Progress was slow and local. 30,000 years ago, the total human population was tiny and progress was very very slow and more akin to chimp choices. Back then, one bloke left Africa and fathered all non-African people. Now there are a few billion of his descendants to be sorted and filtered. Progress is fast. And in the process of going extra-somatic. Mqurice

To: skinowski who wrote (441325)	8/21/2011 4:21:08 PM
From: Maurice Winn	1 Recommendation Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 793914

Speak of the Devil. IBM has announced an intelligent computer. That happened only a week or so after your assertion. Imagine what will be achieved a few decades or centuries from now. Wet chemistry is a hopeless way to run a computer: bits.blogs.nytimes.com <August 18, 2011, 1:00 AM I.B.M. Announces Brainy Computer ChipBy STEVE LOHR Since the early days in the 1940s, computers have routinely been described as “brains” — giant brains or mathematical brains or electronic brains. Scientists and engineers often cringed at the distorting simplification, but the popular label stuck. IBMDharmendra Modha, an I.B.M. researcher, is the leader of the project to create cognitive computer chips. Wait long enough, it seems, and science catches up with the metaphor. The field of “cognitive computing” is making enough progress that the brain analogy is becoming more apt. I.B.M. researchers are announcing on Thursday two working prototype cognitive computer chips. The chip designs are the result of a three-year project involving I.B.M. and university researchers, supported by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. The academic collaborators are at Columbia University, Cornell University, the University of California, Merced and the University of Wisconsin. The results to date have been sufficiently encouraging that Darpa is announcing on Thursday that it will commit an additional $21 million to the project, the third round of government funding, which brings the total to $41 million. The cognitive chips are massively parallel microprocessors that consume very little power. But they also have a fundamentally different design. The two prototype semiconductor cores each has 256 neuronlike nodes. One core is linked to 262,144 synapselike memory modules, while the other is linked to 65,536 such memory synapses. The researchers call the design a “neurosynaptic core.” “This is a critical shift away from today’s Von Neumann computing,” said Dharmendra Modha, an I.B.M. researcher who is the project leader. He is referring to the design and step-by-step sequential methods used in current computers, named after the mathematician John Von Neumann. The new design, Mr. Modha said, should lead to chips suited for tasks that are difficult for computers like pattern recognition. They can learn on their own. “We aren’t there yet, but before long these chips will be able to rewire themselves on the fly,” he said. Such cognitive chips, Mr. Modha added, will be adept at absorbing and interpreting huge amounts of data from increasingly low-cost digital sensors. For example, cognitive computers — using sensor measurements of air and water temperature, ocean tides, wind patterns and atmospheric pressure — could make more timely and accurate predictions of tsunamis and hurricanes, he said. ... continued... > Mqurice