On Monday, December 19, 2022 at 10:20:13 AM UTC-8, Ed Cryer wrote:
> olympia...@gmail.com wrote:
> > On Thursday, December 8, 2022 at 2:04:25 AM UTC-8, Ed Cryer wrote:
> >> A.T. Murray wrote:
> >>> On Wednesday, December 7, 2022 at 12:31:44 PM UTC-8, Ed Cryer wrote:
> >>>> Silbermann - Jacques De Lacretelle
> >>>> [...]
> >>>> Me valde percussit, quia eram et ego ingeniosior maioritate hominum
> >>>> invidiamque plebis sentiebam.
> >>> Collaborare nolo cum Hominibus Sapientibus.
> >>> Nolo contendere cum expertis quando ipse sum incipiens fatuus et ignorans.
> >>> Mea existentia in vestra Terra Incognita non est communicabilis.
> >>> https://ai.neocities.org/mens.html -- Magnum Opus meum et incommunicabile.
> >>>
> >>> Mentifex
> >>> Fortunatam Natam Me Gigolo Feminam
> >> His nostris diebus mos est stupidum stultumque se praebere hominibus.
> >> Mihi tamen videtur hic mos ipse esse stupidus stultusque, praecipue cum
> >> de intelligentia artificiali praedita accessu ad Interrete tractatur.
> >>
> >> Edus
> >
> > I hope you are coming around to the view the AI is just the shadow side of natural stupidity, Ede.
> > It sounds like Mentifex, with his response, is channeling his Monster Brain without a soul.
> >
> > graphema conexum et directum quod e cellulis cerebralibus constat. Cerebrum virtuale est cui nihil inest nisi vocabula dissoluta et silentia (hoc est litteris exarata) Echus vocum inter se non audiunt.
> >
> > I don't understand that "Fortunatam Natam Me Gigolo Feminam" but Mentifex might have read Richard Power's novel _Galatea 2.2_ in the meantime and given his creation a sex change.*
> > See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galatea_2.2 for synopsis.
> >
> > p.s. gigolo = scurra, comes vēnalis <cf. escort>; amasius conducticius
> >
> > Meanwhile, Ede, I have been astounded by the similarity I see in our reading history. Two exceptions are
> > "The cloister and the hearth" of which I had heard but never looked into and most recently "Silberman." Kavalier and Clay I never finished but it had my interest for a few hundred pages.
> >
> > Now I'm going to stick with Latin version of the latter, at least for a while:
> >
> > "
> > En troisième on passait au grand lycée. Il occupait la moitié de l’établissement et était identique à la partie où j’avais fait mes études pendant quatre années. Même cour carrée, plantée de quelques arbres, dont faisait le tour une haute galerie couverte, élargie à un endroit pour former préau : même disposition des classes tout du long de cette galerie ; et sur les murs, entre les fenêtres, semblables moulages de bas-reliefs antiques.
> >
> > In forma tertia (gradu nono) ad scholam magnam secundariam ivimus. Haec mediam partem instituti occupabat ubi quatuor annos studui. Eadem cohors quadrata, paucis arboribus consita, alta circumdata cryptoporticu, uno loco amplificata ut area lusui dicata: eadem dispositio classium juxta longitudinem huius porticus; et inter fenestras similia anaglypta gypsata antiqua.
> > "
> > * I have given myself one (virtually) with an identity I use on Twitter via the Tor browser. Follow me there..
> >
> > Btraven
> You'll probably applaud other books I've read recently; Sophie's Choice,
> The Book Thief, oh and watching Simon Scharma's latest TV series -
> History of Now - wherein he's pouring his heart out on screen at how the
> world has abandoned the liberal ideology that he grew up with.
> I grew up in the shadow of WWII. Every time you switched TV on, there'd
> be images of the death camps. One video that the BBC repeated almost
> daily (you probably got it in the USA as well) was of bombed-out Berlin;
> starting with a still shot and then the camera would pull back and you'd
> see thousands and thousands of building shells, extending for tens of
> miles, and looking like cancered cells. And all the while they'd play
> Siegfried's funeral march from Wagner's Götterdämmerung.
> This is scorched on my conscious mind; God knows how deeply it's
> embedded in my sub-conscious.
> Mind you, Simon Scharma was born in London in February 1945, while the
> doodle-bugs and V2 rockets rained down on it. And he's Jewish.
>
> I've got a question for Simon Scharma; one that I've puzzled over for
> decades. Why did the Germans put those Arschlöcher in power? They were a
> democracy; and they voted for totalitarianism. Germans! Such a cultured
> people; the heirs of Goethe, Beethoven and Thomas Mann. The usual facile
> answer "because of previous defeats and humiliations" doesn't satisfy
> me. I suspect fear; fear of just what those brown-shirted thugs could do
> if denied.

The same symptoms have been slowly creeping into American society for the last 50 years and increasingly in the last 5 years.

> Has any other democracy ever voted itself out? Athens got sucked into
> the Macedonian empire; Rome's Republic fell to internecine warfare
> within its aristocracy.

I read Schama's _Citizens_ but I was not impressed by his analysis of 18th century French society. For me Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy's chapter on the French Revolution in _Out of Revolution_ is worth more than Schama's whole book. He's also Jewish, but a convert to Christianity. I don't remember Schama saying much about that finest flower of French corruption in those days (in both Church and State) : the Marquis de Sade, who is just the most public and sensational tip of the iceberg..

Background:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Susan_Neiman
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marquis_de_Sade
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LTI_%E2%80%93_Lingua_Tertii_Imperii

I can't answer your assertion comparing the subtlety of the Creator to that of a 9 year old (in another forum) but the Creator (him/her self) either wasn't able or chose not to answer Job's complaints. See Neiman's book
_Evil in modern thought_ or even better Jack Miles' _God: a Biography.

Othered

>
> Ed
>
> P.S. I have a little sympathy with AI. This sympathy's based on a
> scientific theory of mind; that it's an emergent property, possibly
> triggered in highly complex systems.
> Maybe if we should run Windows 7, 8, 10, 11 and Linux plus android
> simultaneously on a Threadripper, a little voice might suddenly say "Hello".

This is quite impossible. The string "Hello", even flanked by spaces, can happen in random output and the sequence 123456789 has been found in the decimal expansion of pi but it is necessarily meaningless in both cases. It is impossible to build a self evaluating function into a robot or an ego function interfacing with the real world. AI experts haven't yet given pertinent answers to John Searles debunking of their wishful thinking and never will.

I don't have anything , in principle, to a chatbox as an interface to a database or a search engine but I am pretty sure there is a more elegant and intellectually honest way to do even that. Of course there is money in successfully fooling most of the people most of the time, but that's a different matter.... decipiantur.

Btraven wrote:
> On Monday, December 19, 2022 at 10:20:13 AM UTC-8, Ed Cryer wrote:
>> olympia...@gmail.com wrote:
>>> On Thursday, December 8, 2022 at 2:04:25 AM UTC-8, Ed Cryer wrote:
>>>> A.T. Murray wrote:
>>>>> On Wednesday, December 7, 2022 at 12:31:44 PM UTC-8, Ed Cryer wrote:
>>>>>> Silbermann - Jacques De Lacretelle
>>>>>> [...]
>>>>>> Me valde percussit, quia eram et ego ingeniosior maioritate hominum
>>>>>> invidiamque plebis sentiebam.
>>>>> Collaborare nolo cum Hominibus Sapientibus.
>>>>> Nolo contendere cum expertis quando ipse sum incipiens fatuus et ignorans.
>>>>> Mea existentia in vestra Terra Incognita non est communicabilis.
>>>>> https://ai.neocities.org/mens.html -- Magnum Opus meum et incommunicabile.
>>>>>
>>>>> Mentifex
>>>>> Fortunatam Natam Me Gigolo Feminam
>>>> His nostris diebus mos est stupidum stultumque se praebere hominibus.
>>>> Mihi tamen videtur hic mos ipse esse stupidus stultusque, praecipue cum
>>>> de intelligentia artificiali praedita accessu ad Interrete tractatur.
>>>>
>>>> Edus
>>>
>>> I hope you are coming around to the view the AI is just the shadow side of natural stupidity, Ede.
>>> It sounds like Mentifex, with his response, is channeling his Monster Brain without a soul.
>>>
>>> graphema conexum et directum quod e cellulis cerebralibus constat. Cerebrum virtuale est cui nihil inest nisi vocabula dissoluta et silentia (hoc est litteris exarata) Echus vocum inter se non audiunt.
>>>
>>> I don't understand that "Fortunatam Natam Me Gigolo Feminam" but Mentifex might have read Richard Power's novel _Galatea 2.2_ in the meantime and given his creation a sex change.*
>>> See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galatea_2.2 for synopsis.
>>>
>>> p.s. gigolo = scurra, comes vēnalis <cf. escort>; amasius conducticius
>>>
>>> Meanwhile, Ede, I have been astounded by the similarity I see in our reading history. Two exceptions are
>>> "The cloister and the hearth" of which I had heard but never looked into and most recently "Silberman." Kavalier and Clay I never finished but it had my interest for a few hundred pages.
>>>
>>> Now I'm going to stick with Latin version of the latter, at least for a while:
>>>
>>> "
>>> En troisième on passait au grand lycée. Il occupait la moitié de l’établissement et était identique à la partie où j’avais fait mes études pendant quatre années. Même cour carrée, plantée de quelques arbres, dont faisait le tour une haute galerie couverte, élargie à un endroit pour former préau : même disposition des classes tout du long de cette galerie ; et sur les murs, entre les fenêtres, semblables moulages de bas-reliefs antiques.
>>>
>>> In forma tertia (gradu nono) ad scholam magnam secundariam ivimus. Haec mediam partem instituti occupabat ubi quatuor annos studui. Eadem cohors quadrata, paucis arboribus consita, alta circumdata cryptoporticu, uno loco amplificata ut area lusui dicata: eadem dispositio classium juxta longitudinem huius porticus; et inter fenestras similia anaglypta gypsata antiqua.
>>> "
>>> * I have given myself one (virtually) with an identity I use on Twitter via the Tor browser. Follow me there..
>>>
>>> Btraven
>> You'll probably applaud other books I've read recently; Sophie's Choice,
>> The Book Thief, oh and watching Simon Scharma's latest TV series -
>> History of Now - wherein he's pouring his heart out on screen at how the
>> world has abandoned the liberal ideology that he grew up with.
>> I grew up in the shadow of WWII. Every time you switched TV on, there'd
>> be images of the death camps. One video that the BBC repeated almost
>> daily (you probably got it in the USA as well) was of bombed-out Berlin;
>> starting with a still shot and then the camera would pull back and you'd
>> see thousands and thousands of building shells, extending for tens of
>> miles, and looking like cancered cells. And all the while they'd play
>> Siegfried's funeral march from Wagner's Götterdämmerung.
>> This is scorched on my conscious mind; God knows how deeply it's
>> embedded in my sub-conscious.
>> Mind you, Simon Scharma was born in London in February 1945, while the
>> doodle-bugs and V2 rockets rained down on it. And he's Jewish.
>>
>> I've got a question for Simon Scharma; one that I've puzzled over for
>> decades. Why did the Germans put those Arschlöcher in power? They were a
>> democracy; and they voted for totalitarianism. Germans! Such a cultured
>> people; the heirs of Goethe, Beethoven and Thomas Mann. The usual facile
>> answer "because of previous defeats and humiliations" doesn't satisfy
>> me. I suspect fear; fear of just what those brown-shirted thugs could do
>> if denied.
>
> The same symptoms have been slowly creeping into American society for the last 50 years and increasingly in the last 5 years.
>
>> Has any other democracy ever voted itself out? Athens got sucked into
>> the Macedonian empire; Rome's Republic fell to internecine warfare
>> within its aristocracy.
>
> I read Schama's _Citizens_ but I was not impressed by his analysis of 18th century French society. For me Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy's chapter on the French Revolution in _Out of Revolution_ is worth more than Schama's whole book. He's also Jewish, but a convert to Christianity. I don't remember Schama saying much about that finest flower of French corruption in those days (in both Church and State) : the Marquis de Sade, who is just the most public and sensational tip of the iceberg..
>
> Background:
>
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Susan_Neiman
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marquis_de_Sade
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LTI_%E2%80%93_Lingua_Tertii_Imperii
>
> I can't answer your assertion comparing the subtlety of the Creator to that of a 9 year old (in another forum) but the Creator (him/her self) either wasn't able or chose not to answer Job's complaints. See Neiman's book
> _Evil in modern thought_ or even better Jack Miles' _God: a Biography.
>
> Othered
>
>>
>> Ed
>>
>> P.S. I have a little sympathy with AI. This sympathy's based on a
>> scientific theory of mind; that it's an emergent property, possibly
>> triggered in highly complex systems.
>> Maybe if we should run Windows 7, 8, 10, 11 and Linux plus android
>> simultaneously on a Threadripper, a little voice might suddenly say "Hello".
>
> This is quite impossible. The string "Hello", even flanked by spaces, can happen in random output and the sequence 123456789 has been found in the decimal expansion of pi but it is necessarily meaningless in both cases. It is impossible to build a self evaluating function into a robot or an ego function interfacing with the real world. AI experts haven't yet given pertinent answers to John Searles debunking of their wishful thinking and never will.
>
> I don't have anything , in principle, to a chatbox as an interface to a database or a search engine but I am pretty sure there is a more elegant and intellectually honest way to do even that. Of course there is money in successfully fooling most of the people most of the time, but that's a different matter.... decipiantur.
I don't believe in God. My analysis of "God the Creator" is based around
empirical data from the world I live in; how it works, concepts of good
and evil, efficiency, the place of humanity in it all. And I conclude
that God is either evil, stupid, a 9-year old learner at school who
created this world as homework, got told by his teacher to destroy it
immediately, but forgot and left it running in a corner of his bedroom.
We humans have to make the best we can of this bad job we live in.
Ed