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Favourite Philosophical Concept?

MyDoorsAreOpen said:
...Matryoshka Brain...
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Fascinating! I'm way too high to figure this out so can someone explain this? A Matroyosha Brain is "A hypothetical megastructure proposed by Robert Bradbury, based on the Dyson sphere, of immense computational capacity. It is an example of a Class B stellar engine, employing the entire energy output of a star to drive computer systems." Apparently necessary to compute Transcomputational Problems which are problems "that requires processing of more than 10^93 bits of information.[1] Any number greater than 10^93 is called a transcomputational number. The number 10^93, called Bremermann's limit, is, according to Hans-Joachim Bremermann, the total number of bits processed by a hypothetical computer the size of the Earth within a time period equal to the estimated age of the Earth.[1][2] The term transcomputational was coined by Bremermann."

Yet:

" The retina contains about a million light-sensitive cells. Even if there were only two possible states for each cell (say, an active state and an inactive state) the processing of the retina as a whole requires processing of more than 10^300,000 bits of information. This is far beyond Bremermann's limit."

*scanners.gif* if true.
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Favourite philosophical concept is that the universe is a simulation, life is only a dream and we are the imagination of ourselves. But I don't understand how if this is a simulation of universe1, 'you/I' am conscious of it but in universe2. Now if universe2 is a simulation, then the process goes all the way up until their is a universe that is not a simulation. Now, how would the laws of physics be altered to create a universe that was real and not simulated?
 
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Foreigner said:
Physical immortality would be a curse for humanity. We rely on the cycle of death and birth to bring renewed knowledge and understanding. Human historical paradigms would be much, much longer if people lived for even 500 years. It's true that when people die we lose the good, but we also lose the bad. At least death brings change.

I think humanity would stagnate if all the upper echelon of society never died out to be replaced by new blood. For all we know we would be dealing with immortals who never change their values.
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If people were immune to disease from birth, overpopulation would become an even bigger problem than it is now that humans would rapidly create a situation of scarce resources and the planet would be in a continuous state of warfare.
 
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Apparently necessary to compute Transcomputational Problems which are problems "that requires processing of more than 10^93 bits of information.[1] Any number greater than 10^93 is called a transcomputational number. The number 10^93, called Bremermann's limit, is, according to Hans-Joachim Bremermann, the total number of bits processed by a hypothetical computer the size of the Earth within a time period equal to the estimated age of the Earth.[1][2] The term transcomputational was coined by Bremermann."
Click to expand...

I don't understand what this law means. What does it mean to "process" a bit? Is it sent through a single logic-gate operation, or what?


" The retina contains about a million light-sensitive cells. Even if there were only two possible states for each cell (say, an active state and an inactive state) the processing of the retina as a whole requires processing of more than 10^300,000 bits of information. This is far beyond Bremermann's limit."
Click to expand...

I don't understand how we went from a million photoreceptors to 10^300k (a nearly unfathomably large number). Current computer displays are nearing this number of pixels, and the CCDs in digital cameras have surpassed the number of human photoreceptors some time ago. Certainly, though, we can feasibly process the information they contain.

ebola
 
Favorite philosophy?
Christianity
Sartre's Existentialism
Analytical Philosophy
Campbell's reading on Mythology (not truly a philosophy but the way he describes it definitely skates the line)
Jung.
Freud's okay.
 
MyDoorsAreOpen said:
ebola, thanks for introducing me to the Strange Loop -- definitely an interesting idea. By this logic, we could very well create (or maybe have already created) a computer which possesses a form of self-awareness, but we could probably not create a form of artificial intelligence that recognized us as its creators and grasped the hardware and software engineering that undergirded its sentience. If this is the case, then Douglas Hofstaeder has killed off another beloved sci-fi trope.

I'm too tired to come up with any famous writer or public intellectual's name for this concept, but I'm much taken with the idea that time could be a Moebius strip, whereby technology advances to the point where we build an enormous computer like the Matryoshka Brain, capable of simulating our entire world down to the subatomic level. So then we all plug into it, a la The Matrix, and stay there. At that point, it becomes impossible, dare I say a moot point, to determine whether what we're living in and experiencing now is the original naturally-evolved world, or a perfect simulation of it. Or a simulation within a simulation. Or if there ever was a naturally-evolved world in the first place, as opposed to an endless (or at least very long) regress of simulations within simulations.

Folks, I spend my working days being hard-nosed and logically rigorous; please forgive me if my taste in philosophical concepts is wishful, cheesy, and decidedly not highbrow or cutting edge :)
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In Dubio said:
Fascinating! I'm way too high to figure this out so can someone explain this? A Matroyosha Brain is "A hypothetical megastructure proposed by Robert Bradbury, based on the Dyson sphere, of immense computational capacity. It is an example of a Class B stellar engine, employing the entire energy output of a star to drive computer systems." Apparently necessary to compute Transcomputational Problems which are problems "that requires processing of more than 10^93 bits of information.[1] Any number greater than 10^93 is called a transcomputational number. The number 10^93, called Bremermann's limit, is, according to Hans-Joachim Bremermann, the total number of bits processed by a hypothetical computer the size of the Earth within a time period equal to the estimated age of the Earth.[1][2] The term transcomputational was coined by Bremermann."

Yet:

" The retina contains about a million light-sensitive cells. Even if there were only two possible states for each cell (say, an active state and an inactive state) the processing of the retina as a whole requires processing of more than 10^300,000 bits of information. This is far beyond Bremermann's limit."

*scanners.gif* if true.
------
Favourite philosophical concept is that the universe is a simulation, life is only a dream and we are the imagination of ourselves. But I don't understand how if this is a simulation of universe1, 'you/I' am conscious of it but in universe2. Now if universe2 is a simulation, then the process goes all the way up until their is a universe that is not a simulation. Now, how would the laws of physics be altered to create a universe that was real and not simulated?
Click to expand...

you both are required to read stross' "accelerando" which is legitimately and freely available from the author's website here:
http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/fiction/accelerando/accelerando-intro.html

take it from me and ebola, this stuff is tops.
 
a line or two from "rule 34" made me think stross might have been, even if fleetingly, a member of bl.

dude, if you are reading this, i know you are a robot. o_0
 
^I am also a fan of hyperreality. www.newscientist.com/article/mg2162...lation-isnt-science-fiction.html#.UqDQmcRdXkw

Never heard of pronoia though.. I know of a guy (schizophrenic) who asked his friends to stop casting magic spells on him and that he "knew" they were trying to help..

The third one is a statistical probability reaching IT WILL HAPPEN due to the nature of infinite unless I am very mistaken.

The zombie theory fails on a key point. Thoughts, dreams, imaginations, etc ARE physical things.. they exist as electrical impulses and chemicals being decoded to mean / be something by the brain. To say thought doesn't exist in the physical world is like saying software doesn't doesn't exist.
 
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^yeah, something like the statistical chance is close to zero. The probability of randomly generating a few sentences is equal to a few universes filled with monkeys typing away for more than the lifespan of the universe or something absurd. A really big number.
 
the whole finite/infinite thing is ends both ways in absurdity. neither makes rational sense.
 
Aye infinite is just a mathematical tool.. Nobody knows if it's even possible in the real world.. although i do believe some things are infinite.. such as existence.. meant in the sense that something has had to have always existed, even if it is just the laws that made existence as we know it possible.

I disagree about finite, though. What about it doesn't make sense?
 
what lies outside of it. how is outside defined. even "void" is something.
 
finite, of course. you can't have an outside with inifinite universe.

also, definitions are comparative in essence. there's a plethora of things to define inside the universe against one another. so, when you try to define a finite universe, there is nothing else, so definitions fail.
 
Oh right sorry i thought you literally meant the terms / meanings infinite and finite.

Well if we take the universe as the laws of physics, matter, energy, etc and place is in a "bubble" then there can be an outside. Or there could be a multitude of dimensions in which are universe sits on the plane of one (or 3, 4, 11, 1000).

Or the universe is inifite.. but that doesn't really make sense to me either unless you define universe as everything.
 
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