I think I suggested this here (and was of course ridiculed)

https://www.realclearscience.com/articles/2021/07/20/can_consciousness_be_explained_by_quantum_physics_786280.html

It makes sense that some extreme tricks are needed to recognize faces
and hit baseballs in milliseconds, using wet chemical logic gates.

Exploring the design solution space requires massive parallel
cross-correlation processing. Quantum computing could do that.

On Wed, 21 Jul 2021 10:17:51 -0700, John Larkin
<jlarkin@highland_atwork_technology.com> wrote:

>
>I think I suggested this here (and was of course ridiculed)
>
>https://www.realclearscience.com/articles/2021/07/20/can_consciousness_be_explained_by_quantum_physics_786280.html

I've actually read Penrose's paper on this (in a chapter in one of his
books) and was not persuaded, mainly because we were then just
beginning to figure out how mammalian brains work, without resort to
quantum weirdness.

>It makes sense that some extreme tricks are needed to recognize faces
>and hit baseballs in milliseconds, using wet chemical logic gates.

Yes, extreme parallelism.

>Exploring the design solution space requires massive parallel
>cross-correlation processing. Quantum computing could do that.

Turns out that Linear Algebra in hyperdimensional manifolds also
works.

And Linear Algebra can be implemented using lots of neurons, each with
tens of thousands or more synapses to one another. The synapses
(which come in strengths) are the values in the matrix elements.

It is estimated that the human brain contains 86 billion neurons, and
ten times that many glia cells.

..<https://www.nature.com/scitable/blog/brain-metrics/are_there_really_as_many/>

With 125 trillion synapses, or 1453 synapses per neuron. This sounds
far too low.

But take all these estimates with much salt.

..<https://aiimpacts.org/scale-of-the-human-brain/>

But one can make some pretty heroic matrixes from this.

There is already an immense literature, which is rapidly growing.

The big practical implementation problem now is that we have not found
a technology that allows us to implement the math well enough to do
anything mammal-level, never mind with anything like the size, weight,
and power of a few pounds of brain tissue.

I have not found a suitable survey article yet. The primary
literature is very heavy going.

Joe Gwinn

On Wednesday, July 21, 2021 at 10:18:03 AM UTC-7, John Larkin wrote:
> I think I suggested this here (and was of course ridiculed)
>
> https://www.realclearscience.com/articles/2021/07/20/can_consciousness_be_explained_by_quantum_physics_786280.html
>
> It makes sense that some extreme tricks are needed to recognize faces
> and hit baseballs in milliseconds, using wet chemical logic gates.

Yeah, but lots of word salad might 'make sense' without being productive.

> Exploring the design solution space requires massive parallel
> cross-correlation processing. Quantum computing could do that.

Content-addressable memory is hard in computing hardware, but that's
just exactly how human memory operates; every input 'reminds me of...'
a memory record. Analogy with LASER operation seems appropriate, but
the application of quantum computing doesn't. Rather, post
a situation to a chat group of old experienced intelligences, and see
what pops out of the memory warehouses.

On 21/07/2021 20:07, whit3rd wrote:
> On Wednesday, July 21, 2021 at 10:18:03 AM UTC-7, John Larkin wrote:
>> I think I suggested this here (and was of course ridiculed)
>>
>> https://www.realclearscience.com/articles/2021/07/20/can_consciousness_be_explained_by_quantum_physics_786280.html
>>
>> It makes sense that some extreme tricks are needed to recognize faces
>> and hit baseballs in milliseconds, using wet chemical logic gates.
>
> Yeah, but lots of word salad might 'make sense' without being productive.

And it is all pretty pictures and word salad although it does make some
conjectures that could in principle be tested. A Seirpinski triangle
built in atoms is cute but adds nothing at all to the sum of human
understanding. Fractal antennae were all the rage not that long ago -
some people were claiming they had magical properties too.

It may provide a way to refute the Penrose conjecture experimentally
given time but for now it is just more speculation invoking magyck for
no particular reason.

>> Exploring the design solution space requires massive parallel
>> cross-correlation processing. Quantum computing could do that.
>
> Content-addressable memory is hard in computing hardware, but that's
> just exactly how human memory operates; every input 'reminds me of...'
> a memory record. Analogy with LASER operation seems appropriate, but
> the application of quantum computing doesn't. Rather, post
> a situation to a chat group of old experienced intelligences, and see
> what pops out of the memory warehouses.

The interconnectivity of the network is what stores all the information.
Google are pretty much on the right track but the energy requirements to
simulate it with conventional computing elements are very high.

If there is a classical analogue for the human brains configuration it
is more like an N dimensional hypersphere projected into 3-space but
maintaining most of the connections made possible in a higher dimension.

We (mammals) are not the pinnacle of performance per neuron/watt in the
animal world either. An octopus with its highly distributed processing
power is way more intelligent per neuron than any mammalian brain.

Some insect predators like dragon flies may also be well ahead of us per
neuron/watt since they have to respond exceptionally quickly to visual
input from non-ideal compound eyes if they are to take other insects on
the wing. You seriously underestimate what chemical computing can do.

--
Regards,
Martin Brown

On Thu, 22 Jul 2021 10:10:29 +0100, Martin Brown
<'''newspam'''@nonad.co.uk> wrote:

>On 21/07/2021 20:07, whit3rd wrote:
>> On Wednesday, July 21, 2021 at 10:18:03 AM UTC-7, John Larkin wrote:
>>> I think I suggested this here (and was of course ridiculed)
>>>
>>> https://www.realclearscience.com/articles/2021/07/20/can_consciousness_be_explained_by_quantum_physics_786280.html
>>>
>>> It makes sense that some extreme tricks are needed to recognize faces
>>> and hit baseballs in milliseconds, using wet chemical logic gates.
>>
>> Yeah, but lots of word salad might 'make sense' without being productive.
>
>And it is all pretty pictures and word salad although it does make some
>conjectures that could in principle be tested. A Seirpinski triangle
>built in atoms is cute but adds nothing at all to the sum of human
>understanding. Fractal antennae were all the rage not that long ago -
>some people were claiming they had magical properties too.
>
>It may provide a way to refute the Penrose conjecture experimentally
>given time but for now it is just more speculation invoking magyck for
>no particular reason.

By all means let's devote our talents to refuting ideas.

>
>>> Exploring the design solution space requires massive parallel
>>> cross-correlation processing. Quantum computing could do that.
>>
>> Content-addressable memory is hard in computing hardware, but that's
>> just exactly how human memory operates; every input 'reminds me of...'
>> a memory record. Analogy with LASER operation seems appropriate, but
>> the application of quantum computing doesn't. Rather, post
>> a situation to a chat group of old experienced intelligences, and see
>> what pops out of the memory warehouses.
>
>The interconnectivity of the network is what stores all the information.

Was the topic word salad?
>Google are pretty much on the right track but the energy requirements to
>simulate it with conventional computing elements are very high.
>
>If there is a classical analogue for the human brains configuration it
>is more like an N dimensional hypersphere projected into 3-space but
>maintaining most of the connections made possible in a higher dimension.
>
>We (mammals) are not the pinnacle of performance per neuron/watt in the
>animal world either. An octopus with its highly distributed processing
>power is way more intelligent per neuron than any mammalian brain.
>
>Some insect predators like dragon flies may also be well ahead of us per
>neuron/watt since they have to respond exceptionally quickly to visual
>input from non-ideal compound eyes if they are to take other insects on
>the wing. You seriously underestimate what chemical computing can do.

Please pass the vinaigrette.

--

John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc

The best designs are necessarily accidental.

On Thursday, July 22, 2021 at 11:45:43 PM UTC+10, jla...@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:
> On Thu, 22 Jul 2021 10:10:29 +0100, Martin Brown
> <'''newspam'''@nonad.co.uk> wrote:
>
> >On 21/07/2021 20:07, whit3rd wrote:
> >> On Wednesday, July 21, 2021 at 10:18:03 AM UTC-7, John Larkin wrote:

<snip>

> >It may provide a way to refute the Penrose conjecture experimentally given time but for now it is just more speculation invoking magyck for no particular reason.
>
> By all means let's devote our talents to refuting ideas.

As if John Larkin had that kind of talent. Refuting bad ideas - in this case a half-baked and unnecessary hypothesis - doesn't take much talent at all, but John Larkin has even got that much talent
> >>> Exploring the design solution space requires massive parallel
> >>> cross-correlation processing. Quantum computing could do that.
> >>
> >> Content-addressable memory is hard in computing hardware, but that's
> >> just exactly how human memory operates; every input 'reminds me of...'
> >> a memory record. Analogy with LASER operation seems appropriate, but
> >> the application of quantum computing doesn't. Rather, post
> >> a situation to a chat group of old experienced intelligences, and see
> >> what pops out of the memory warehouses.
> >
> >The interconnectivity of the network is what stores all the information.
>
> Was the topic word salad?

"Quantum Consciousness" does come up a lot in pretentious word salad. In fact the link explicitly refers back to Roger Penrose, so it's recycled word-salad.

> >Google are pretty much on the right track but the energy requirements to
> >simulate it with conventional computing elements are very high.
> >
> >If there is a classical analogue for the human brains configuration it is more like an N dimensional hypersphere projected into 3-space but maintaining most of the connections made possible in a higher dimension.

Suzana Herculano-Houzel expicity makes the point that primate (including human) brains can include as many neurones as they do because they are less connected that most mammalian brains. They won't be maintaining most of the connections possible in higher dimensions. Mammalian brains are rather more two dimensional than bird brains anyway.

> >We (mammals) are not the pinnacle of performance per neuron/watt in the
> >animal world either. An octopus with its highly distributed processing
> >power is way more intelligent per neuron than any mammalian brain.
> >
> >Some insect predators like dragon flies may also be well ahead of us per
> >neuron/watt since they have to respond exceptionally quickly to visual
> >input from non-ideal compound eyes if they are to take other insects on
> >the wing. You seriously underestimate what chemical computing can do.
>
> Please pass the vinaigrette.

John Larkin doesn't know much, so he finds it difficult to understand a perfectly straightforward expositions. He limits the damage to his vanity by writing it off as word salad.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

On 22/07/2021 14:45, jlarkin@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:
> On Thu, 22 Jul 2021 10:10:29 +0100, Martin Brown
> <'''newspam'''@nonad.co.uk> wrote:
>
>> On 21/07/2021 20:07, whit3rd wrote:
>>> On Wednesday, July 21, 2021 at 10:18:03 AM UTC-7, John Larkin wrote:
>>>> I think I suggested this here (and was of course ridiculed)
>>>>
>>>> https://www.realclearscience.com/articles/2021/07/20/can_consciousness_be_explained_by_quantum_physics_786280.html
>>>>
>>>> It makes sense that some extreme tricks are needed to recognize faces
>>>> and hit baseballs in milliseconds, using wet chemical logic gates.
>>>
>>> Yeah, but lots of word salad might 'make sense' without being productive.
>>
>> And it is all pretty pictures and word salad although it does make some
>> conjectures that could in principle be tested. A Seirpinski triangle
>> built in atoms is cute but adds nothing at all to the sum of human
>> understanding. Fractal antennae were all the rage not that long ago -
>> some people were claiming they had magical properties too.
>>
>> It may provide a way to refute the Penrose conjecture experimentally
>> given time but for now it is just more speculation invoking magyck for
>> no particular reason.
>
> By all means let's devote our talents to refuting ideas.

That *is* how science progresses.
You make a testable hypothesis and then you try to refute it.

Only when you have failed to refute a reasonable hypothesis
experimentally several times does it begin to gain any credence as a a
possible theory. It also has to explain all of the observed facts with a
strong heuristic preference for the simplest theory with the fewest free
parameters that can do so. Usually described as Occam's razor.

No matter how beautiful and elegant the equation or theory unless it
describes accurately how nature behaves it is not a scientific theory.

There is no merit in dreaming up imaginative implausible untestable
"theories" that make no useful predictions at all and invoke magyck to
explain all of things that you don't yet fully understand.

That is the superstitious medieval mindset of "just so explanations".
Right up your street...

--
Regards,
Martin Brown

On 7/22/2021 19:19, Martin Brown wrote:
> On 22/07/2021 14:45, jlarkin@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:
>> On Thu, 22 Jul 2021 10:10:29 +0100, Martin Brown
>> <'''newspam'''@nonad.co.uk> wrote:
>>
>>> On 21/07/2021 20:07, whit3rd wrote:
>>>> On Wednesday, July 21, 2021 at 10:18:03 AM UTC-7, John Larkin wrote:
>>>>> I think I suggested this here (and was of course ridiculed)
>>>>>
>>>>> https://www.realclearscience.com/articles/2021/07/20/can_consciousness_be_explained_by_quantum_physics_786280.html
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> It makes sense that some extreme tricks are needed to recognize faces
>>>>> and hit baseballs in milliseconds, using wet chemical logic gates.
>>>>
>>>> Yeah, but  lots of  word salad might 'make sense' without being
>>>> productive.
>>>
>>> And it is all pretty pictures and word salad although it does make some
>>> conjectures that could in principle be tested. A Seirpinski triangle
>>> built in atoms is cute but adds nothing at all to the sum of human
>>> understanding. Fractal antennae were all the rage not that long ago -
>>> some people were claiming they had magical properties too.
>>>
>>> It may provide a way to refute the Penrose conjecture experimentally
>>> given time but for now it is just more speculation invoking magyck for
>>> no particular reason.
>>
>> By all means let's devote our talents to refuting ideas.
>
> That *is* how science progresses.
> You make a testable hypothesis and then you try to refute it.
>
> Only when you have failed to refute a reasonable hypothesis
> experimentally several times does it begin to gain any credence as a a
> possible theory. It also has to explain all of the observed facts with a
> strong heuristic preference for the simplest theory with the fewest free
> parameters that can do so. Usually described as Occam's razor.
>
> No matter how beautiful and elegant the equation or theory unless it
> describes accurately how nature behaves it is not a scientific theory.
>
> There is no merit in dreaming up imaginative implausible untestable
> "theories" that make no useful predictions at all and invoke magyck to
> explain all of things that you don't yet fully understand.
>
> That is the superstitious medieval mindset of "just so explanations".
> Right up your street...
>

Of course science works this way but at times we are just tempted
to muse about this and that.
And when it comes to how our brains work I am pretty sure we are not
far enough to do much better than musing. We may even well be lacking
some fundamental knowledge in physics to get any closer to reasonable
hypotheses about that.
Now whether we call the results of our musing "quantum consciousness"
or some other synonym of "magic" is irrelevant, we will be tempted to
try to grasp it until eventually we do (or do not...). Trying to
understand "magic" is what drives us to hypothesize etc., nothing
wrong coming up with the wildest of these as long as they are not
obviously wrong/laughable.

On Thu, 22 Jul 2021 17:19:20 +0100, Martin Brown
<'''newspam'''@nonad.co.uk> wrote:

>On 22/07/2021 14:45, jlarkin@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:
>> On Thu, 22 Jul 2021 10:10:29 +0100, Martin Brown
>> <'''newspam'''@nonad.co.uk> wrote:
>>
>>> On 21/07/2021 20:07, whit3rd wrote:
>>>> On Wednesday, July 21, 2021 at 10:18:03 AM UTC-7, John Larkin wrote:
>>>>> I think I suggested this here (and was of course ridiculed)
>>>>>
>>>>> https://www.realclearscience.com/articles/2021/07/20/can_consciousness_be_explained_by_quantum_physics_786280.html
>>>>>
>>>>> It makes sense that some extreme tricks are needed to recognize faces
>>>>> and hit baseballs in milliseconds, using wet chemical logic gates.
>>>>
>>>> Yeah, but lots of word salad might 'make sense' without being productive.
>>>
>>> And it is all pretty pictures and word salad although it does make some
>>> conjectures that could in principle be tested. A Seirpinski triangle
>>> built in atoms is cute but adds nothing at all to the sum of human
>>> understanding. Fractal antennae were all the rage not that long ago -
>>> some people were claiming they had magical properties too.
>>>
>>> It may provide a way to refute the Penrose conjecture experimentally
>>> given time but for now it is just more speculation invoking magyck for
>>> no particular reason.
>>
>> By all means let's devote our talents to refuting ideas.
>
>That *is* how science progresses.
>You make a testable hypothesis and then you try to refute it.

Yes kill it off ASAP lest it inspire even more dangerous ideas.

>
>Only when you have failed to refute a reasonable hypothesis
>experimentally several times does it begin to gain any credence as a a
>possible theory. It also has to explain all of the observed facts with a
>strong heuristic preference for the simplest theory with the fewest free
>parameters that can do so. Usually described as Occam's razor.
>
>No matter how beautiful and elegant the equation or theory unless it
>describes accurately how nature behaves it is not a scientific theory.
>
>There is no merit in dreaming up imaginative implausible untestable
>"theories" that make no useful predictions at all and invoke magyck to
>explain all of things that you don't yet fully understand.

Of course there's merit in ideas. Without ideas, there is no progress.

Some people riff on ideas. Some people murder them in infancy.

>
>That is the of "just so explanations".
>Right up your street...

We're brainstorming with three different organizations now. Big stuff.
Fortunately, none are idea hostile.

Our "superstitious medieval mindset" products work and sell! We enjoy
selling magyck.

On Thu, 22 Jul 2021 20:29:38 +0300, Dimiter_Popoff <dp@tgi-sci.com>
wrote:

>On 7/22/2021 19:19, Martin Brown wrote:
>> On 22/07/2021 14:45, jlarkin@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:
>>> On Thu, 22 Jul 2021 10:10:29 +0100, Martin Brown
>>> <'''newspam'''@nonad.co.uk> wrote:
>>>
>>>> On 21/07/2021 20:07, whit3rd wrote:
>>>>> On Wednesday, July 21, 2021 at 10:18:03 AM UTC-7, John Larkin wrote:
>>>>>> I think I suggested this here (and was of course ridiculed)
>>>>>>
>>>>>> https://www.realclearscience.com/articles/2021/07/20/can_consciousness_be_explained_by_quantum_physics_786280.html
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>> It makes sense that some extreme tricks are needed to recognize faces
>>>>>> and hit baseballs in milliseconds, using wet chemical logic gates.
>>>>>
>>>>> Yeah, but  lots of  word salad might 'make sense' without being
>>>>> productive.
>>>>
>>>> And it is all pretty pictures and word salad although it does make some
>>>> conjectures that could in principle be tested. A Seirpinski triangle
>>>> built in atoms is cute but adds nothing at all to the sum of human
>>>> understanding. Fractal antennae were all the rage not that long ago -
>>>> some people were claiming they had magical properties too.
>>>>
>>>> It may provide a way to refute the Penrose conjecture experimentally
>>>> given time but for now it is just more speculation invoking magyck for
>>>> no particular reason.
>>>
>>> By all means let's devote our talents to refuting ideas.
>>
>> That *is* how science progresses.
>> You make a testable hypothesis and then you try to refute it.
>>
>> Only when you have failed to refute a reasonable hypothesis
>> experimentally several times does it begin to gain any credence as a a
>> possible theory. It also has to explain all of the observed facts with a
>> strong heuristic preference for the simplest theory with the fewest free
>> parameters that can do so. Usually described as Occam's razor.
>>
>> No matter how beautiful and elegant the equation or theory unless it
>> describes accurately how nature behaves it is not a scientific theory.
>>
>> There is no merit in dreaming up imaginative implausible untestable
>> "theories" that make no useful predictions at all and invoke magyck to
>> explain all of things that you don't yet fully understand.
>>
>> That is the superstitious medieval mindset of "just so explanations".
>> Right up your street...
>>
>
>Of course science works this way but at times we are just tempted
>to muse about this and that.
>And when it comes to how our brains work I am pretty sure we are not
>far enough to do much better than musing. We may even well be lacking
>some fundamental knowledge in physics to get any closer to reasonable
>hypotheses about that.
>Now whether we call the results of our musing "quantum consciousness"
>or some other synonym of "magic" is irrelevant, we will be tempted to
>try to grasp it until eventually we do (or do not...). Trying to
>understand "magic" is what drives us to hypothesize etc., nothing
>wrong coming up with the wildest of these as long as they are not
>obviously wrong/laughable.

Disagree; you are baking inhibitions into invention. In a brainstorm
session, laughable ideas are welcome as jokes. But those jokes, played
with, often lead to good stuff. Great fun when sneering is not
allowed.

We do point out, say, violations of conservation of energy. Not much
else.

There are many paths through the solution space, to find the good
stuff. Some pass through goofy neighborhoods.

Brainstorming, or any imaginative activity, is probably quantum
computing, posing a question as an un-collapsed wave function that
blankets the solution space in parallel, looking for a match. How else
could wet-stuff logic gates explore so many possibilities so fast?

Memory must be similar quantum searching. A person stores millions of
images and smells and sounds and can match one in milliseconds. I
wonder how images are stored.

On 7/22/2021 21:59, John Larkin wrote:
> On Thu, 22 Jul 2021 20:29:38 +0300, Dimiter_Popoff <dp@tgi-sci.com>
> wrote:
>
>> On 7/22/2021 19:19, Martin Brown wrote:
>>> On 22/07/2021 14:45, jlarkin@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:
>>>> On Thu, 22 Jul 2021 10:10:29 +0100, Martin Brown
>>>> <'''newspam'''@nonad.co.uk> wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> On 21/07/2021 20:07, whit3rd wrote:
>>>>>> On Wednesday, July 21, 2021 at 10:18:03 AM UTC-7, John Larkin wrote:
>>>>>>> I think I suggested this here (and was of course ridiculed)
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> https://www.realclearscience.com/articles/2021/07/20/can_consciousness_be_explained_by_quantum_physics_786280.html
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> It makes sense that some extreme tricks are needed to recognize faces
>>>>>>> and hit baseballs in milliseconds, using wet chemical logic gates.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Yeah, but  lots of  word salad might 'make sense' without being
>>>>>> productive.
>>>>>
>>>>> And it is all pretty pictures and word salad although it does make some
>>>>> conjectures that could in principle be tested. A Seirpinski triangle
>>>>> built in atoms is cute but adds nothing at all to the sum of human
>>>>> understanding. Fractal antennae were all the rage not that long ago -
>>>>> some people were claiming they had magical properties too.
>>>>>
>>>>> It may provide a way to refute the Penrose conjecture experimentally
>>>>> given time but for now it is just more speculation invoking magyck for
>>>>> no particular reason.
>>>>
>>>> By all means let's devote our talents to refuting ideas.
>>>
>>> That *is* how science progresses.
>>> You make a testable hypothesis and then you try to refute it.
>>>
>>> Only when you have failed to refute a reasonable hypothesis
>>> experimentally several times does it begin to gain any credence as a a
>>> possible theory. It also has to explain all of the observed facts with a
>>> strong heuristic preference for the simplest theory with the fewest free
>>> parameters that can do so. Usually described as Occam's razor.
>>>
>>> No matter how beautiful and elegant the equation or theory unless it
>>> describes accurately how nature behaves it is not a scientific theory.
>>>
>>> There is no merit in dreaming up imaginative implausible untestable
>>> "theories" that make no useful predictions at all and invoke magyck to
>>> explain all of things that you don't yet fully understand.
>>>
>>> That is the superstitious medieval mindset of "just so explanations".
>>> Right up your street...
>>>
>>
>> Of course science works this way but at times we are just tempted
>> to muse about this and that.
>> And when it comes to how our brains work I am pretty sure we are not
>> far enough to do much better than musing. We may even well be lacking
>> some fundamental knowledge in physics to get any closer to reasonable
>> hypotheses about that.
>> Now whether we call the results of our musing "quantum consciousness"
>> or some other synonym of "magic" is irrelevant, we will be tempted to
>> try to grasp it until eventually we do (or do not...). Trying to
>> understand "magic" is what drives us to hypothesize etc., nothing
>> wrong coming up with the wildest of these as long as they are not
>> obviously wrong/laughable.
>
> Disagree; you are baking inhibitions into invention. In a brainstorm
> session, laughable ideas are welcome as jokes. But those jokes, played
> with, often lead to good stuff. Great fun when sneering is not
> allowed.
>
> We do point out, say, violations of conservation of energy. Not much
> else.
>
> There are many paths through the solution space, to find the good
> stuff. Some pass through goofy neighborhoods.
>
> Brainstorming, or any imaginative activity, is probably quantum
> computing, posing a question as an un-collapsed wave function that
> blankets the solution space in parallel, looking for a match. How else
> could wet-stuff logic gates explore so many possibilities so fast?

I don't think there is much of a disagreement here, we just seem
to put different meaning to "laughable". But yes, even the most
laughable (whichever version of it) thought/suggestion can trigger
a chain of thoughts leading to something interesting. It rarely
happens but well, we don't come up with an idea for an experiment
of the Michelson-Morley magnitude every year or every century,
for that. Make that a millennium, still feels right :). There is
plenty to do until enough has been put on the heap so the next
big breakthrough can be made (tomorrow? next millennium? who knows).
I personally don't like "brainstorming" by a group of people
much but I know what amount of sheer garbage goes through my
head while designing/programming something new.

> Memory must be similar quantum searching. A person stores millions of
> images and smells and sounds and can match one in milliseconds. I
> wonder how images are stored.
>

I am not familiar with how quantum searching works, someone
mentioned "content addressable memory", if it is that then yes, it
might come into play. But we don't know. Me, I am not so sure we even
*know* where memory is located.... do we have some sort of backup,
perhaps remote.... We just don't know. If we have "quantum memory"
why not have zero delay comms... We are complex creatures and we don't
have conscious access to everything inside us, we don't know why
we exist, are our experiences worth backing up to anyone/anything
(I know my designs do have parts which are worth it to me and parts I
don't care about)...
For the time being I tend to do what I can, mostly silicon based :).
Which is not to say I don't try to break my head into questions like
these above quite frequently - only to discover I know too little
to be able to get to any results.

On 22/07/2021 18:29, Dimiter_Popoff wrote:
> On 7/22/2021 19:19, Martin Brown wrote:
>> On 22/07/2021 14:45, jlarkin@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:
>>> On Thu, 22 Jul 2021 10:10:29 +0100, Martin Brown
>>> <'''newspam'''@nonad.co.uk> wrote:
>>>
>>>> On 21/07/2021 20:07, whit3rd wrote:
>>>>> On Wednesday, July 21, 2021 at 10:18:03 AM UTC-7, John Larkin wrote:
>>>>>> I think I suggested this here (and was of course ridiculed)
>>>>>>
>>>>>> https://www.realclearscience.com/articles/2021/07/20/can_consciousness_be_explained_by_quantum_physics_786280.html
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>> It makes sense that some extreme tricks are needed to recognize faces
>>>>>> and hit baseballs in milliseconds, using wet chemical logic gates.
>>>>>
>>>>> Yeah, but  lots of  word salad might 'make sense' without being
>>>>> productive.
>>>>
>>>> And it is all pretty pictures and word salad although it does make some
>>>> conjectures that could in principle be tested. A Seirpinski triangle
>>>> built in atoms is cute but adds nothing at all to the sum of human
>>>> understanding. Fractal antennae were all the rage not that long ago -
>>>> some people were claiming they had magical properties too.
>>>>
>>>> It may provide a way to refute the Penrose conjecture experimentally
>>>> given time but for now it is just more speculation invoking magyck for
>>>> no particular reason.
>>>
>>> By all means let's devote our talents to refuting ideas.
>>
>> That *is* how science progresses.
>> You make a testable hypothesis and then you try to refute it.
>>
>> Only when you have failed to refute a reasonable hypothesis
>> experimentally several times does it begin to gain any credence as a a
>> possible theory. It also has to explain all of the observed facts with
>> a strong heuristic preference for the simplest theory with the fewest
>> free parameters that can do so. Usually described as Occam's razor.
>>
>> No matter how beautiful and elegant the equation or theory unless it
>> describes accurately how nature behaves it is not a scientific theory.
>>
>> There is no merit in dreaming up imaginative implausible untestable
>> "theories" that make no useful predictions at all and invoke magyck to
>> explain all of things that you don't yet fully understand.
>>
>> That is the superstitious medieval mindset of "just so explanations".
>> Right up your street...
>>
>
> Of course science works this way but at times we are just tempted
> to muse about this and that.

Indeed but unless it makes something by way of testable predictions it
is just so much hot air. I did give this one some credit for possibly
being testable although I also indicated the result I expected.

> And when it comes to how our brains work I am pretty sure we are not
> far enough to do much better than musing. We may even well be lacking
> some fundamental knowledge in physics to get any closer to reasonable
> hypotheses about that.

Any scientist knows that breakthroughs pretty much occur either by
serendipity or new mathematics or a hunch that leads to a creative new
way of looking at things that bypasses a previous impasse.

Sqrt(-1) is a classic which opened up all of signal processing and a lot
more besides.

In some ways science and art are more closely linked that we might care
to admit - both involve creative leaps that in the case of science are
back filled as logical deduction from known methods to gain acceptance.
Newton set the scene by using his method of fluxions (calculus) to solve
problems and then back constructing weird geometrical proofs.
(we should all give thanks that Leibnitz's notation mostly prevailed)

Though f'(x) and f"(x) live on.

Radical new ideas that don't fit with the orthodoxy do have a hard time.

Big Bang cosmology vs Hoyle's Steady State universe being one of the
most bitterly fought scientific battles in the last century.

The guy I feel most sorry for was Belousov whose work on chemical clocks
was completely ignored in his lifetime and is one of a handful of Turing
complete computational chemistry reactions. The BZ reaction became a
sensation when it finally reached the West in the late 60's.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belousov–Zhabotinsky_reaction

However, most unorthodox ideas are just batwing crazy.

> Now whether we call the results of our musing "quantum consciousness"
> or some other synonym of "magic" is irrelevant, we will be tempted to
> try to grasp it until eventually we do (or do not...). Trying to
> understand "magic" is what drives us to hypothesize etc., nothing
> wrong coming up with the wildest of these as long as they are not
> obviously wrong/laughable.

But this one is pretty much laughable.

Consciousness is probably an emergent behaviour in any sufficiently
complex network of computing elements. We haven't yet been able to build
one big enough to get close to human capabilities but they are getting
there. ISTR IBM's cat brain simulation appeared to have dreams.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/graphic-science-ibm-simulates-4-percent-human-brain-all-of-cat-brain/

NB it is past 2019 and they are not on target any more...

Google might be though.

I would never have expected the world human Go champion to be defeated
by a computer in my lifetime but it has already happened. Now Google has
a deep learning engine that can bootstrap up from a set of rules to
better than their original programmed Go machine in under a month.

It has also found several novel set piece winning positions that have
never arisen (or rather been recorded) in millennia of human play.

--
Regards,
Martin Brown

On 7/22/2021 11:59 AM, John Larkin wrote:
> On Thu, 22 Jul 2021 20:29:38 +0300, Dimiter_Popoff <dp@tgi-sci.com>
> wrote:
>
>> On 7/22/2021 19:19, Martin Brown wrote:
>>> On 22/07/2021 14:45, jlarkin@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:
>>>> On Thu, 22 Jul 2021 10:10:29 +0100, Martin Brown
>>>> <'''newspam'''@nonad.co.uk> wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> On 21/07/2021 20:07, whit3rd wrote:
>>>>>> On Wednesday, July 21, 2021 at 10:18:03 AM UTC-7, John Larkin wrote:
>>>>>>> I think I suggested this here (and was of course ridiculed)
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> https://www.realclearscience.com/articles/2021/07/20/can_consciousness_be_explained_by_quantum_physics_786280.html
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> It makes sense that some extreme tricks are needed to recognize faces
>>>>>>> and hit baseballs in milliseconds, using wet chemical logic gates.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Yeah, but lots of word salad might 'make sense' without being
>>>>>> productive.
>>>>>
>>>>> And it is all pretty pictures and word salad although it does make some
>>>>> conjectures that could in principle be tested. A Seirpinski triangle
>>>>> built in atoms is cute but adds nothing at all to the sum of human
>>>>> understanding. Fractal antennae were all the rage not that long ago -
>>>>> some people were claiming they had magical properties too.
>>>>>
>>>>> It may provide a way to refute the Penrose conjecture experimentally
>>>>> given time but for now it is just more speculation invoking magyck for
>>>>> no particular reason.
>>>>
>>>> By all means let's devote our talents to refuting ideas.
>>>
>>> That *is* how science progresses.
>>> You make a testable hypothesis and then you try to refute it.
>>>
>>> Only when you have failed to refute a reasonable hypothesis
>>> experimentally several times does it begin to gain any credence as a a
>>> possible theory. It also has to explain all of the observed facts with a
>>> strong heuristic preference for the simplest theory with the fewest free
>>> parameters that can do so. Usually described as Occam's razor.
>>>
>>> No matter how beautiful and elegant the equation or theory unless it
>>> describes accurately how nature behaves it is not a scientific theory.
>>>
>>> There is no merit in dreaming up imaginative implausible untestable
>>> "theories" that make no useful predictions at all and invoke magyck to
>>> explain all of things that you don't yet fully understand.
>>>
>>> That is the superstitious medieval mindset of "just so explanations".
>>> Right up your street...
>>>
>>
>> Of course science works this way but at times we are just tempted
>> to muse about this and that.
>> And when it comes to how our brains work I am pretty sure we are not
>> far enough to do much better than musing. We may even well be lacking
>> some fundamental knowledge in physics to get any closer to reasonable
>> hypotheses about that.
>> Now whether we call the results of our musing "quantum consciousness"
>> or some other synonym of "magic" is irrelevant, we will be tempted to
>> try to grasp it until eventually we do (or do not...). Trying to
>> understand "magic" is what drives us to hypothesize etc., nothing
>> wrong coming up with the wildest of these as long as they are not
>> obviously wrong/laughable.
>
> Disagree; you are baking inhibitions into invention. In a brainstorm
> session, laughable ideas are welcome as jokes. But those jokes, played
> with, often lead to good stuff. Great fun when sneering is not
> allowed.

No. Positing ideas that stand no realistic chance of "making sense"
is just folly.

I have a knack for looking at problems "differently". Folks who know
me (and my presentation style) KNOW that when I start to pitch an
idea, they should be careful to dismiss it and, instead, should
THINK HARDER about what I am trying to say. Because experience has
taught them that looking at the problem MY way often sheds insight
on a better solution -- than the solution they were pursuing (to
no avail).

We were designing a power supply for a product some years ago.
The load was very dynamic in magnitude and frequency. Someone
came up with the idea of putting batteries ("dry cells") *in*
the power supply as a way of further decreasing its output impedance
across the (load) frequency spectrum.

Imaginitive? Yes. Practical? No. The batteries significantly
impacted the weight, size and *maintenance* of the product.

When the problem rose to the level of "group awareness" (i.e., beyond
the domain of the power supply guys), I suggested altering the *load*
so the load was better behaved: "Why not? There's a processor in
there that is *essentially* determining the characteristics of the
load so why not change the criteria that it uses for handling that
load?"

On its surface, this makes sense -- even if the audience doesn't understand
how that could be done, in practice.

"Bigger batteries" was surely a non-starter!

> We do point out, say, violations of conservation of energy. Not much
> else.
>
> There are many paths through the solution space, to find the good
> stuff. Some pass through goofy neighborhoods.

And search patterns tend to shutdown those paths. Google minimax (maximin).
When playing chess, you don't pursue a strategy that costs you a piece
on each move -- in the hope that (MAGICALLY) this leads to a win!

> Brainstorming, or any imaginative activity, is probably quantum
> computing, posing a question as an un-collapsed wave function that
> blankets the solution space in parallel, looking for a match. How else
> could wet-stuff logic gates explore so many possibilities so fast?

Because they are massively parallel. It's the difference between
SISD and MISD (or MIMD).

> Memory must be similar quantum searching. A person stores millions of
> images and smells and sounds and can match one in milliseconds. I
> wonder how images are stored.

As with all memories, in the interconnects between neurons.

If you've ever written a neural network, this is abundantly clear.
What is NOT clear is how you can extract information from an
examination of those interconnects: "Which one(s) supported
this decision/recognition?"

I.e., "*How* did I recognize that?"

On 7/22/2021 12:52 PM, Martin Brown wrote:
> I would never have expected the world human Go champion to be defeated by a
> computer in my lifetime but it has already happened. Now Google has a deep
> learning engine that can bootstrap up from a set of rules to better than their
> original programmed Go machine in under a month.
>
> It has also found several novel set piece winning positions that have never
> arisen (or rather been recorded) in millennia of human play.

The advantage non-organic intelligence has is that we can improve on
it in a rather predictable way. You KNOW how to get more MIPS, more
state, etc.

With organic intelligence, you have to hope the "right" two individuals
copulate; their offspring survives; is recognized as a prodigy; and given
opportunities to learn/apply its talents.

Cranking out more/faster silicon seems to be the winning strategy.
Esp as you can then make *more* of "whatever you get" -- instead of
hoping biology repeats itself (on demand!).

On Thursday, July 22, 2021 at 11:42:51 AM UTC-7, John Larkin wrote:
> On Thu, 22 Jul 2021 17:19:20 +0100, Martin Brown
> <'''newspam'''@nonad.co.uk> wrote:

> >You make a testable hypothesis and then you try to refute it.

> Yes kill it off ASAP lest it inspire even more dangerous ideas.

A valid refutation is better than an invalid premise. Danger, and inspiration,
are not relevant concepts, but progress is.

> >There is no merit in dreaming up imaginative implausible untestable
> >"theories" that make no useful predictions at all and invoke magyck to
> >explain all of things that you don't yet fully understand.

> Of course there's merit in ideas. Without ideas, there is no progress.

Many ideas are progress, and many are regress. No human
individual or group is "without ideas", so I'm not seeing any real
relevance in that observation.

On 7/22/2021 23:13, Don Y wrote:
> On 7/22/2021 12:52 PM, Martin Brown wrote:
>> I would never have expected the world human Go champion to be defeated
>> by a computer in my lifetime but it has already happened. Now Google
>> has a deep learning engine that can bootstrap up from a set of rules
>> to better than their original programmed Go machine in under a month.
>>
>> It has also found several novel set piece winning positions that have
>> never arisen (or rather been recorded) in millennia of human play.
>
> The advantage non-organic intelligence has is that we can improve on
> it in a rather predictable way.

Hah, Don, how sure are you about that :-) Last two days I spent writing
a script which "only" had to collect the latest versions of things from
various directories on my disk and thus put together a "latest" version
of a boot drive disk image to ship to customers; it *did* cost me two
days until I got it working and I had thought I'd manage it in
minutes...
Just having a laugh about it, obviously I see your point.

However the more complex a system we built becomes the less we are able
to know everything it does... Even when it is a one man's child (like
in my case), I just cannot remember it all (done over >25 years).
Then wait until it begins to learn on its own...
There was a story by Lem, "Golem 14", perhaps not his greatest literary
achievement but he played with the idea of AI becoming so much smarter
than us that it treated us like children - sometimes it would feel like
explaining this or that and other times would simply want us go away.
One of his sentences - written decades ago - said nobody knew when
simple computers gained consciousness, it just became gradually...
I read it perhaps 30 years ago - in Russian, there was no Bulgarian
translation and looking for an English one back then was a waste
of time (and I am not sure which one I'd have preferred, I had
just managed a few Asimov books in English but he is perhaps
the easiest to read and I was pretty good at reading in Russian).

On Thu, 22 Jul 2021 13:07:37 -0700, Don Y
<blockedofcourse@foo.invalid> wrote:

>On 7/22/2021 11:59 AM, John Larkin wrote:
>> On Thu, 22 Jul 2021 20:29:38 +0300, Dimiter_Popoff <dp@tgi-sci.com>
>> wrote:
>>
>>> On 7/22/2021 19:19, Martin Brown wrote:
>>>> On 22/07/2021 14:45, jlarkin@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:
>>>>> On Thu, 22 Jul 2021 10:10:29 +0100, Martin Brown
>>>>> <'''newspam'''@nonad.co.uk> wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>>> On 21/07/2021 20:07, whit3rd wrote:
>>>>>>> On Wednesday, July 21, 2021 at 10:18:03 AM UTC-7, John Larkin wrote:
>>>>>>>> I think I suggested this here (and was of course ridiculed)
>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>> https://www.realclearscience.com/articles/2021/07/20/can_consciousness_be_explained_by_quantum_physics_786280.html
>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>> It makes sense that some extreme tricks are needed to recognize faces
>>>>>>>> and hit baseballs in milliseconds, using wet chemical logic gates.
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> Yeah, but lots of word salad might 'make sense' without being
>>>>>>> productive.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> And it is all pretty pictures and word salad although it does make some
>>>>>> conjectures that could in principle be tested. A Seirpinski triangle
>>>>>> built in atoms is cute but adds nothing at all to the sum of human
>>>>>> understanding. Fractal antennae were all the rage not that long ago -
>>>>>> some people were claiming they had magical properties too.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> It may provide a way to refute the Penrose conjecture experimentally
>>>>>> given time but for now it is just more speculation invoking magyck for
>>>>>> no particular reason.
>>>>>
>>>>> By all means let's devote our talents to refuting ideas.
>>>>
>>>> That *is* how science progresses.
>>>> You make a testable hypothesis and then you try to refute it.
>>>>
>>>> Only when you have failed to refute a reasonable hypothesis
>>>> experimentally several times does it begin to gain any credence as a a
>>>> possible theory. It also has to explain all of the observed facts with a
>>>> strong heuristic preference for the simplest theory with the fewest free
>>>> parameters that can do so. Usually described as Occam's razor.
>>>>
>>>> No matter how beautiful and elegant the equation or theory unless it
>>>> describes accurately how nature behaves it is not a scientific theory.
>>>>
>>>> There is no merit in dreaming up imaginative implausible untestable
>>>> "theories" that make no useful predictions at all and invoke magyck to
>>>> explain all of things that you don't yet fully understand.
>>>>
>>>> That is the superstitious medieval mindset of "just so explanations".
>>>> Right up your street...
>>>>
>>>
>>> Of course science works this way but at times we are just tempted
>>> to muse about this and that.
>>> And when it comes to how our brains work I am pretty sure we are not
>>> far enough to do much better than musing. We may even well be lacking
>>> some fundamental knowledge in physics to get any closer to reasonable
>>> hypotheses about that.
>>> Now whether we call the results of our musing "quantum consciousness"
>>> or some other synonym of "magic" is irrelevant, we will be tempted to
>>> try to grasp it until eventually we do (or do not...). Trying to
>>> understand "magic" is what drives us to hypothesize etc., nothing
>>> wrong coming up with the wildest of these as long as they are not
>>> obviously wrong/laughable.
>>
>> Disagree; you are baking inhibitions into invention. In a brainstorm
>> session, laughable ideas are welcome as jokes. But those jokes, played
>> with, often lead to good stuff. Great fun when sneering is not
>> allowed.
>
>No. Positing ideas that stand no realistic chance of "making sense"
>is just folly.

It works for us. Most great inventions didn't make sense to most
people.

>
>I have a knack for looking at problems "differently". Folks who know
>me (and my presentation style) KNOW that when I start to pitch an
>idea, they should be careful to dismiss it and, instead, should
>THINK HARDER about what I am trying to say. Because experience has
>taught them that looking at the problem MY way often sheds insight
>on a better solution -- than the solution they were pursuing (to
>no avail).

Sometimes in a brainstorm session an amateur, and intern or somebody,
says something silly and it evolves to a great idea.

I'm reading "Drunk" by Slingerland. He talks about how our frontal
cortex inhibits creativity. Kids have underdeveloped FCs so are very
creative; unfortunately they haven't learned a lot of engineering
theory.

He recommends alcohol.

>
>We were designing a power supply for a product some years ago.
>The load was very dynamic in magnitude and frequency. Someone
>came up with the idea of putting batteries ("dry cells") *in*
>the power supply as a way of further decreasing its output impedance
>across the (load) frequency spectrum.
>
>Imaginitive? Yes. Practical? No. The batteries significantly
>impacted the weight, size and *maintenance* of the product.

Not every silly idea (or every serious idea) leads to good stuff. So
have lots of them.

>
>When the problem rose to the level of "group awareness" (i.e., beyond
>the domain of the power supply guys), I suggested altering the *load*
>so the load was better behaved: "Why not? There's a processor in
>there that is *essentially* determining the characteristics of the
>load so why not change the criteria that it uses for handling that
>load?"
>
>On its surface, this makes sense -- even if the audience doesn't understand
>how that could be done, in practice.
>
>"Bigger batteries" was surely a non-starter!
>
>> We do point out, say, violations of conservation of energy. Not much
>> else.
>>
>> There are many paths through the solution space, to find the good
>> stuff. Some pass through goofy neighborhoods.
>
>And search patterns tend to shutdown those paths. Google minimax (maximin).
>When playing chess, you don't pursue a strategy that costs you a piece
>on each move -- in the hope that (MAGICALLY) this leads to a win!

Spinning ideas is not destructive, like losing chess pieces or
battleships.

>
>> Brainstorming, or any imaginative activity, is probably quantum
>> computing, posing a question as an un-collapsed wave function that
>> blankets the solution space in parallel, looking for a match. How else
>> could wet-stuff logic gates explore so many possibilities so fast?
>
>Because they are massively parallel. It's the difference between
>SISD and MISD (or MIMD).
>
>> Memory must be similar quantum searching. A person stores millions of
>> images and smells and sounds and can match one in milliseconds. I
>> wonder how images are stored.
>
>As with all memories, in the interconnects between neurons.

That's not a very detailed explanation.

How is the image of a cat stored; how does it also evoke the word
"cat" ?

On Thu, 22 Jul 2021 20:52:49 +0100, Martin Brown
<'''newspam'''@nonad.co.uk> wrote:

>On 22/07/2021 18:29, Dimiter_Popoff wrote:
>> On 7/22/2021 19:19, Martin Brown wrote:
>>> On 22/07/2021 14:45, jlarkin@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:
>>>> On Thu, 22 Jul 2021 10:10:29 +0100, Martin Brown
>>>> <'''newspam'''@nonad.co.uk> wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> On 21/07/2021 20:07, whit3rd wrote:
>>>>>> On Wednesday, July 21, 2021 at 10:18:03 AM UTC-7, John Larkin wrote:
>>>>>>> I think I suggested this here (and was of course ridiculed)
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> https://www.realclearscience.com/articles/2021/07/20/can_consciousness_be_explained_by_quantum_physics_786280.html
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> It makes sense that some extreme tricks are needed to recognize faces
>>>>>>> and hit baseballs in milliseconds, using wet chemical logic gates.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Yeah, but  lots of  word salad might 'make sense' without being
>>>>>> productive.
>>>>>
>>>>> And it is all pretty pictures and word salad although it does make some
>>>>> conjectures that could in principle be tested. A Seirpinski triangle
>>>>> built in atoms is cute but adds nothing at all to the sum of human
>>>>> understanding. Fractal antennae were all the rage not that long ago -
>>>>> some people were claiming they had magical properties too.
>>>>>
>>>>> It may provide a way to refute the Penrose conjecture experimentally
>>>>> given time but for now it is just more speculation invoking magyck for
>>>>> no particular reason.
>>>>
>>>> By all means let's devote our talents to refuting ideas.
>>>
>>> That *is* how science progresses.
>>> You make a testable hypothesis and then you try to refute it.
>>>
>>> Only when you have failed to refute a reasonable hypothesis
>>> experimentally several times does it begin to gain any credence as a a
>>> possible theory. It also has to explain all of the observed facts with
>>> a strong heuristic preference for the simplest theory with the fewest
>>> free parameters that can do so. Usually described as Occam's razor.
>>>
>>> No matter how beautiful and elegant the equation or theory unless it
>>> describes accurately how nature behaves it is not a scientific theory.
>>>
>>> There is no merit in dreaming up imaginative implausible untestable
>>> "theories" that make no useful predictions at all and invoke magyck to
>>> explain all of things that you don't yet fully understand.
>>>
>>> That is the superstitious medieval mindset of "just so explanations".
>>> Right up your street...
>>>
>>
>> Of course science works this way but at times we are just tempted
>> to muse about this and that.
>
>Indeed but unless it makes something by way of testable predictions it
>is just so much hot air. I did give this one some credit for possibly
>being testable although I also indicated the result I expected.
>
>> And when it comes to how our brains work I am pretty sure we are not
>> far enough to do much better than musing. We may even well be lacking
>> some fundamental knowledge in physics to get any closer to reasonable
>> hypotheses about that.
>
>Any scientist knows that breakthroughs pretty much occur either by
>serendipity or new mathematics or a hunch that leads to a creative new
>way of looking at things that bypasses a previous impasse.
>
>Sqrt(-1) is a classic which opened up all of signal processing and a lot
>more besides.
>
>In some ways science and art are more closely linked that we might care
>to admit - both involve creative leaps that in the case of science are
>back filled as logical deduction from known methods to gain acceptance.
>Newton set the scene by using his method of fluxions (calculus) to solve
>problems and then back constructing weird geometrical proofs.
>(we should all give thanks that Leibnitz's notation mostly prevailed)
>
>Though f'(x) and f"(x) live on.
>
>Radical new ideas that don't fit with the orthodoxy do have a hard time.

That's science; this group is presumably about electronic design. We
don't have to prove anything except that it ultimately works. And the
cost of exploring unorthodox ideas is usually small... especially when
you let them ferment overnight.

Engineering academia wants to be "scientific" so teaches the kids to
be analytical and follow rules. Papers are graded according to their
conformance with the theory and the course material, no credit for new
ideas.

>
>Big Bang cosmology vs Hoyle's Steady State universe being one of the
>most bitterly fought scientific battles in the last century.
>
>The guy I feel most sorry for was Belousov whose work on chemical clocks
>was completely ignored in his lifetime and is one of a handful of Turing
>complete computational chemistry reactions. The BZ reaction became a
>sensation when it finally reached the West in the late 60's.
>
>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belousov–Zhabotinsky_reaction
>
>However, most unorthodox ideas are just batwing crazy.
>
>> Now whether we call the results of our musing "quantum consciousness"
>> or some other synonym of "magic" is irrelevant, we will be tempted to
>> try to grasp it until eventually we do (or do not...). Trying to
>> understand "magic" is what drives us to hypothesize etc., nothing
>> wrong coming up with the wildest of these as long as they are not
>> obviously wrong/laughable.
>
>But this one is pretty much laughable.

That Penrose guy is a notorious fool. Nobody would ever believe
anything he says.

On 7/22/2021 3:05 PM, Dimiter_Popoff wrote:
> On 7/22/2021 23:13, Don Y wrote:
>> On 7/22/2021 12:52 PM, Martin Brown wrote:
>>> I would never have expected the world human Go champion to be defeated by a
>>> computer in my lifetime but it has already happened. Now Google has a deep
>>> learning engine that can bootstrap up from a set of rules to better than
>>> their original programmed Go machine in under a month.
>>>
>>> It has also found several novel set piece winning positions that have never
>>> arisen (or rather been recorded) in millennia of human play.
>>
>> The advantage non-organic intelligence has is that we can improve on
>> it in a rather predictable way.
>
> Hah, Don, how sure are you about that :-) Last two days I spent writing
> a script which "only" had to collect the latest versions of things from
> various directories on my disk and thus put together a "latest" version
> of a boot drive disk image to ship to customers; it *did* cost me two
> days until I got it working and I had thought I'd manage it in
> minutes...

Yes, but that's an impedance mismatch between the biological and
electronic systems! :>

> Just having a laugh about it, obviously I see your point.
>
> However the more complex a system we built becomes the less we are able
> to know everything it does...

Yes. That was my point wrt neural nets; it can *perform* as you intend.
But, you can "dissect" it and still not figure out WHY it works.

The biological equivalent would be like saying "which neurons are
responsible for recognizing a particular piece of music"? And,
*if* you could identify them (ALL of them), being able to
identify *how* that recognition was accomplished!

How many layers are "best" for a particular class of problem?
(How do you even define those *classes*????)

There are anecdotes about AIs deducing things that aren't
(or hadn't been!) obvious to humans. Is that "thought"?
Or, just a mechanical search of the "interconnect space"?

Imagine being able to buy neural arrays as popcorn parts
(mass produced as they, untrained, are identical to each other).
What would "design" be like?

"OK, in this situation, I want you to behave as _____"
"And, in this OTHER situation, I want you to behave as _____"
"And..."

Lather. Rinse. Repeat.

> Even when it is a one man's child (like
> in my case), I just cannot remember it all (done over >25 years).
> Then wait until it begins to learn on its own...

A machine can have more patience than an organic student. And,
less "distraction". It also doesn't have a "quit early" criteria
that would cause it to (possibly erroneously) abandon its task
prior to completion.

I remember when I built my "file archiver". With a list of EVERY
file and associated metadata, it was amazing how many duplicates
it was able to find -- that I'd not even considered looking for!

Of course, there's no "intelligence", there -- just persistence!
If *I* was inclined to systematically examine half a BILLION files,
I'm sure *I* would have found those, as well!

> There was a story by Lem, "Golem 14", perhaps not his greatest literary
> achievement but he played with the idea of AI becoming so much smarter
> than us that it treated us like children - sometimes it would feel like
> explaining this or that and other times would simply want us go away.

Doesn't that only stand to reason? Even parents don't have unlimited
patience with their children. Imagine a creation becoming bored
with its creator(s)?!

> One of his sentences - written decades ago - said nobody knew when
> simple computers gained consciousness, it just became gradually...
> I read it perhaps 30 years ago - in Russian, there was no Bulgarian
> translation and looking for an English one back then was a waste
> of time (and I am not sure which one I'd have preferred, I had
> just managed a few Asimov books in English but he is perhaps
> the easiest to read and I was pretty good at reading in Russian).

I think, if you can, reading (or otherwise consuming) a work in its
native form is always preferable. Esp if you have some experience
with the culture, as well. Often, there are nuances that don't easily
translate into another language (and another culture).

Or, differences that we "map" incorrectly in the translation between.

For an obscure example, latinas, here, tend to dress provacatively;
"let it all hang out". The white protestant culture misinterprets
that as a sign of "availability" -- because such a display in *that*
culture would tend to be associated thusly. ("No self-respecting
woman would flaunt it, like that")

But, *their* culture includes constraints that make such "displays"
*safe*; a latino would never misinterpret it for an "opportunity"
("look, but don't touch")

[I have a well-endowed lady friend who receives such unwanted attention.
Men thinking that because it's not wrapped in a nun's habit, that she must
be "looking for something". It is hard not to take offense, *for* her!
And, anything I *say* in her defense is interpreted in that set of
"assumptions" -- *I* must be "getting some"]

On 7/23/2021 2:10, Don Y wrote:
> ... >> One of his sentences - written decades ago - said nobody knew when
>> simple computers gained consciousness, it just became gradually...
>> I read it perhaps 30 years ago - in Russian, there was no Bulgarian
>> translation and looking for an English one back then was a waste
>> of time (and I am not sure which one I'd have preferred, I had
>> just managed a few Asimov books in English but he is perhaps
>> the easiest to read and I was pretty good at reading in Russian).
>
> I think, if you can, reading (or otherwise consuming) a work in its
> native form is always preferable.  Esp if you have some experience
> with the culture, as well.  Often, there are nuances that don't easily
> translate into another language (and another culture).

Well I can't read Polish so I have only read translations of Lem.
The Bulgarian ones make an excellent reading though.

>
> Or, differences that we "map" incorrectly in the translation between.

Indeed. But sometimes it can be for the better... I remember reading
Heller's "Catch 22" in Bulgarian (in my early 20-s, my English was
nowhere near good enough to try it on that).
The translator had done a very good job at taking the humour not
just from the narrative but also that part which is inherent to
the English language; thus to this day (having read it in English
as well) I can enjoy the Bulgarian translation more than the original.
Obviously this is not the case with all books/authors.

On Thursday, July 22, 2021 at 11:59:31 AM UTC-7, John Larkin wrote:

> Brainstorming, or any imaginative activity, is probably quantum
> computing, posing a question as an un-collapsed wave function that
> blankets the solution space in parallel, looking for a match. How else
> could wet-stuff logic gates explore so many possibilities so fast?

No, that is NOT probable, It seems you think 'quantum computing' is merely
some word-salad term that's fun to use. Searching in memory, one
will always find errors/uninitialized storage/noise. There's only your
common sense to act as error-detect-and-correct, so you come up with
a plausible record out of storage, that in turn reminds you of related info...

> Memory must be similar quantum searching.

I'd say not 'similar', but 'the same', and hardly 'quantum' in any but the broadest sense.

On Thu, 22 Jul 2021 16:56:29 -0700 (PDT), whit3rd <whit3rd@gmail.com>
wrote:

>On Thursday, July 22, 2021 at 11:59:31 AM UTC-7, John Larkin wrote:
>
>> Brainstorming, or any imaginative activity, is probably quantum
>> computing, posing a question as an un-collapsed wave function that
>> blankets the solution space in parallel, looking for a match. How else
>> could wet-stuff logic gates explore so many possibilities so fast?
>
>No, that is NOT probable, It seems you think 'quantum computing' is merely
>some word-salad term that's fun to use.

Not at all. I think that extraordinary stuff is going on in our heads,
and there will be corresponding extraordinary discoveries why.

People keep saying that quantum effects happen only at cryo
temperatures, so biological systems can't use quantum effects. That's
crazy.

https://phys.org/news/2014-01-quantum-mechanics-efficiency-photosynthesis.html

"When this happens electronic and vibrational degrees of freedom are
jointly and transiently in a superposition of quantum states, a
feature that can never be predicted with classical physics."

Quantum Biology has met with a lot of hostility. I don't understand
why.

On Friday, July 23, 2021 at 4:42:51 AM UTC+10, John Larkin wrote:
> On Thu, 22 Jul 2021 17:19:20 +0100, Martin Brown
> <'''newspam'''@nonad.co.uk> wrote:
>
> >On 22/07/2021 14:45, jla...@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:
> >> On Thu, 22 Jul 2021 10:10:29 +0100, Martin Brown
> >> <'''newspam'''@nonad.co.uk> wrote:
> >>
> >>> On 21/07/2021 20:07, whit3rd wrote:
> >>>> On Wednesday, July 21, 2021 at 10:18:03 AM UTC-7, John Larkin wrote:
> >>>>> I think I suggested this here (and was of course ridiculed)
> >>>>>
> >>>>> https://www.realclearscience.com/articles/2021/07/20/can_consciousness_be_explained_by_quantum_physics_786280.html
> >>>>>
> >>>>> It makes sense that some extreme tricks are needed to recognize faces
> >>>>> and hit baseballs in milliseconds, using wet chemical logic gates.
> >>>>
> >>>> Yeah, but lots of word salad might 'make sense' without being productive.
> >>>
> >>> And it is all pretty pictures and word salad although it does make some
> >>> conjectures that could in principle be tested. A Seirpinski triangle
> >>> built in atoms is cute but adds nothing at all to the sum of human
> >>> understanding. Fractal antennae were all the rage not that long ago -
> >>> some people were claiming they had magical properties too.
> >>>
> >>> It may provide a way to refute the Penrose conjecture experimentally
> >>> given time but for now it is just more speculation invoking magyck for
> >>> no particular reason.
> >>
> >> By all means let's devote our talents to refuting ideas.
> >
> >That *is* how science progresses.
> >You make a testable hypothesis and then you try to refute it.
> Yes kill it off ASAP lest it inspire even more dangerous ideas.
> >
> >Only when you have failed to refute a reasonable hypothesis
> >experimentally several times does it begin to gain any credence as a a
> >possible theory. It also has to explain all of the observed facts with a
> >strong heuristic preference for the simplest theory with the fewest free
> >parameters that can do so. Usually described as Occam's razor.
> >
> >No matter how beautiful and elegant the equation or theory unless it
> >describes accurately how nature behaves it is not a scientific theory.
> >
> >There is no merit in dreaming up imaginative implausible untestable
> >"theories" that make no useful predictions at all and invoke magyck to
> >explain all of things that you don't yet fully understand.
>
> Of course there's merit in ideas. Without ideas, there is no progress.

There's merit in some ideas. Good ideas do contribute to progress. Bad idea don't. John does get enthusiastic about a lot of bad ideas.
> Some people riff on ideas. Some people murder them in infancy.

Some people are quicker to realise that particular ideas happen to be rubbish, and wipe them off the table. This is merely evolution in action.

John Larkin has endorsed enough truly silly ideas here - about the nonexistence of climate change, amongst others to make perfectly clear that he isn't good at separating the wheat from the chaff, and he does get emotionally attached to his own chaff.
> >That is true of "just so explanations".
> >Right up your street...
>
> We're brainstorming with three different organizations now. Big stuff. Fortunately, none are idea hostile.

If they are brain-storming with you, they'd have to be actively gullible.

> Our "superstitious medieval mindset" products work and sell! We enjoy selling magyck.

Except that it isn't magic. John Larkin doesn't seem to understand how his products work, and has an exaggerated idea of their performance and their novelty.

This may have a magical effect on sales, but it isn't making the world a better place.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

On Friday, July 23, 2021 at 8:37:40 AM UTC+10, John Larkin wrote:
> On Thu, 22 Jul 2021 13:07:37 -0700, Don Y <blocked...@foo.invalid> wrote:
> >On 7/22/2021 11:59 AM, John Larkin wrote:
> >> On Thu, 22 Jul 2021 20:29:38 +0300, Dimiter_Popoff <d...@tgi-sci.com> wrote:
> >>> On 7/22/2021 19:19, Martin Brown wrote:
> >>>> On 22/07/2021 14:45, jla...@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:
> >>>>> On Thu, 22 Jul 2021 10:10:29 +0100, Martin Brown <'''newspam'''@nonad.co.uk> wrote: > >>>>>> On 21/07/2021 20:07, whit3rd wrote:
> >>>>>>> On Wednesday, July 21, 2021 at 10:18:03 AM UTC-7, John Larkin wrote:

> >>> Of course science works this way but at times we are just tempted
> >>> to muse about this and that.
> >>> And when it comes to how our brains work I am pretty sure we are not
> >>> far enough to do much better than musing. We may even well be lacking
> >>> some fundamental knowledge in physics to get any closer to reasonable
> >>> hypotheses about that.
> >>> Now whether we call the results of our musing "quantum consciousness"
> >>> or some other synonym of "magic" is irrelevant, we will be tempted to
> >>> try to grasp it until eventually we do (or do not...). Trying to
> >>> understand "magic" is what drives us to hypothesize etc., nothing
> >>> wrong coming up with the wildest of these as long as they are not
> >>> obviously wrong/laughable.
> >>
> >> Disagree; you are baking inhibitions into invention. In a brainstorm
> >> session, laughable ideas are welcome as jokes. But those jokes, played
> >> with, often lead to good stuff. Great fun when sneering is not
> >> allowed.
> >
> >No. Positing ideas that stand no realistic chance of "making sense" is just folly.
>
> It works for us. Most great inventions didn't make sense to most people.

Great inventions are difficult to explain - they wouldn't have been difficult to invent if they weren't. Finding an explanation that works for an unsophisticated audience takes time and effort, and nobody is going to bother doing that unless the invention really is great.
> >I have a knack for looking at problems "differently". Folks who know me (and my presentation style) KNOW that when I start to pitch an idea, they should be careful to dismiss it and, instead, should THINK HARDER about what I am trying to say.

The implication is that you should work harder at coming up with accessible explanations. It's not a area where I've been all that successful - I can still remember spending a fortnight to come up with a verbal explanation of a circuit that worked fine on the bench, and was perfectly comprehensible to me - at the nonverbal level.

> >Because experience has taught them that looking at the problem MY way often sheds insight on a better solution -- than the solution they were pursuing (to no avail).

Can happen.

> Sometimes in a brainstorm session an amateur, and intern or somebody, says something silly and it evolves to a great idea.
>
> I'm reading "Drunk" by Slingerland.

<snipped nonsense:>
> He recommends alcohol.

That really is nonsense.
<snip>

> Not every silly idea (or every serious idea) leads to good stuff. So have lots of them.

And dump the silly ideas fast (but do it kindly).
> >When the problem rose to the level of "group awareness" (i.e., beyond
> >the domain of the power supply guys), I suggested altering the *load*
> >so the load was better behaved: "Why not? There's a processor in
> >there that is *essentially* determining the characteristics of the
> >load so why not change the criteria that it uses for handling that
> >load?"
> >
> >On its surface, this makes sense -- even if the audience doesn't understand
> >how that could be done, in practice.
> >
> >"Bigger batteries" was surely a non-starter!
> >
> >> We do point out, say, violations of conservation of energy. Not much else.

John Larkin doesn't know much. There's not a lot else that he could point out.
> >> There are many paths through the solution space, to find the good stuff. Some pass through goofy neighborhoods.

For John Larkin's idea of a path. There are many more bad paths that don't lead to good stuff.
> >And search patterns tend to shutdown those paths. Google minimax (maximin).
> >When playing chess, you don't pursue a strategy that costs you a piece
> >on each move -- in the hope that (MAGICALLY) this leads to a win!
>
> Spinning ideas is not destructive, like losing chess pieces or battleships.

But persisting with bad ideas is a waste of time.

> >> Brainstorming, or any imaginative activity, is probably quantum
> >> computing, posing a question as an un-collapsed wave function that
> >> blankets the solution space in parallel, looking for a match. How else
> >> could wet-stuff logic gates explore so many possibilities so fast?
> >
> >Because they are massively parallel. It's the difference between
> >SISD and MISD (or MIMD).
> >
> >> Memory must be similar quantum searching.

"Must"? This is an assertion, not back up by the smallest sliver of argument.

> >>A person stores millions of images and smells and sounds and can match one in milliseconds. I wonder how images are stored.

In brain cells. Electroshock can kick them out of storage.
> >As with all memories, in the interconnects between neurons.
>
> That's not a very detailed explanation.
>
> How is the image of a cat stored; how does it also evoke the word "cat" ?

You store lots of images of lots of different cats. in lots of different poses. Each image presumably included meta-data saying that this is an image of cat (and probably of a particular sort of cat - Manx, tabby, Persian, Siamese ...). Images of bigger cats presumably included metadata about whether it can eat you, and whether its fur coat is worth selling.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

On Friday, July 23, 2021 at 10:10:14 AM UTC+10, John Larkin wrote:
> On Thu, 22 Jul 2021 16:56:29 -0700 (PDT), whit3rd <whi...@gmail.com>
> wrote:
> >On Thursday, July 22, 2021 at 11:59:31 AM UTC-7, John Larkin wrote:
> >
> >> Brainstorming, or any imaginative activity, is probably quantum
> >> computing, posing a question as an un-collapsed wave function that
> >> blankets the solution space in parallel, looking for a match. How else
> >> could wet-stuff logic gates explore so many possibilities so fast?
> >
> >No, that is NOT probable, It seems you think 'quantum computing' is merely
> >some word-salad term that's fun to use.
>
> Not at all. I think that extraordinary stuff is going on in our heads, and there will be corresponding extraordinary discoveries why.

That''s not "thinking". It's merely fantasising.

> People keep saying that quantum effects happen only at cryo temperatures, so biological systems can't use quantum effects. That's crazy.

Nobody has observed that kind of quantum indeterminacy in material objects at anything but cryo temperatures, and it does go away rapidly at slightly higher cryo temperatures. Ignoring that experimental fact would be crazy.
> https://phys.org/news/2014-01-quantum-mechanics-efficiency-photosynthesis..html
>
> "When this happens electronic and vibrational degrees of freedom are jointly and transiently in a superposition of quantum states, a feature that can never be predicted with classical physics."

The guy I went through primary school with in Tasmania (and who is now a professor of chemistry in Melbourne) did a lot of work on this. The photosynthetic path seems to involve some ten transition metal atoms tied together by a remarkably complicated organic molecule and involves a complicated interaction between all of them.

Classical physics is useless at that scale, and simple chemical bonding theory (which does involve quantised states) isn't all that helpful either. Happily there is more sophisticated theory, which doesn't happen to involve prolonged periods of quantum indeterminacy.
> Quantum Biology has met with a lot of hostility. I don't understand why.

You don't understand what quantum biology is talking about, and get jeered at for getting it wrong. The hostility is directed at your imperfect comprehension of what is known to be going on and you don't know enough to realise this.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney