I am confused.

Last night at the group screening of the movie "Colossus; the Forbin Project" the peanut gallery provided a loud, obsessive, continuous and dare I say (clinically) paranoid libertarian commentary. I felt for all the world that these people were attempting to make a case against "government" presenting the fictional theatrical dramatical cinematic story on screen as legal factual evidence to support their argument. In comparison, the awkward 14 year old war-fantasy nerds in my 9th grade civil war history class were better mannered and less obnoxiously paranoid.

Afterward, when I asked one of these conspiracy freaks for direct personal evidence that drove his obsessive frustration with "government", he said:

"When I took my car in for a smog test, they wouldn't certify my car because the ignition computer chip wouldn't talk to their testing equipment. The tail pipe sensor said my car's exhaust was within limits, but because they couldn't download the SPY DATA from my car's computer chip, my car was rejected!"

I kid you not. "SPY DATA". Rough guess: this person had at least a 140 IQ!

I am not anti-government, yet I know that our country (all countries) hide a laundry list of embarrassing ghosts in their historical closets. But if someone asked me to provide a real world example of the way's governments fuck up, I think I might mention "300 years of slavery" or "the systemic repression of women" or "the abuse of power caused by military industrial influence peddlers" before I complained about frustrations leading from my personal experiences with the DMV.

This valley has a way of legitimizing, even promoting behaviors and the world views that would seem embarrassingly adolescent in a more diverse population. The best simile I can offer is the book "Lord of the Flies": a crash leaves 30 middle school aged boys marooned on an island. A social/power structure emerges that one could only map to humanity if one considers the perversions and paranoia's expressed by nerdy pre-adult boys.

If Silicon Valley has an over-arching personality, I would say it is closest to the awkward, even dangerously self-centered personality brought to literary life in "Lord of the Flies".

For one, this valley attracts the lion's share of the AV monitors, the uber-nerds from every graduating jr high school class. Add that to the fact that the valley is so culturally monolithic and historically young. Just 35 years ago, when I was a teenager traveling to swim meets, the Santa Clara Valley was a collection of small towns nestled in fruit groves. Meaning, the valley isn't old enough to have many extended multi-generational families. There are no mothers and grandmothers around. The valley, in a very real sense, is a culturally monolithic island within which attention deficit disorder and assburger syndrome populations dominate and color daily interactions. In the book, the kids eventually get rescued. In this valley, we get to see what would have happened had they been left to grow into awkward 55 year olds without the buffering influence of a richer and more diverse social demographic.

I am sick to death of it! Adolescent dungeons and dragons bullshit paranoia has gotten out of hand. Strip mall addled lonely white boy angst has in the absence of other cultural influences now infected and shaped actual grown-up political and philosophical life. This Hasbro game-board version of a world view now passes as adult behavior and motivation. Only here. Only in the absence of grandmothers.

So, I am going to have to take their place. And I will. No more self-centered small-sphere bullshit.

If you have something to complain about that would be embarrassing to compare to the experiences of a slave or rape victim or poor-inner city second-culture family struggling to survive, or a cancer patient or a species that is going extinct, or a planet that is dying, or a culture that is having to adjust in two generations from nomadic tribal to post-modern post-industrial… please sit there quietly and think about your absurd privilege and how fucking spoiled and obnoxious are your petty and make-believe frustrations with bureaucracy and taxes.

Please people. This is your bend over grandmother who lived through the wars and polio and watched two siblings die of consumption and malnutrition and tooth decay. Get a clue. Learn some humility. Gain some perspective. Your shopping mall and miniature golf and water slide and video game arcade and roll playing game nurtured problems and the resulting "philosophies" are embarrassing. Your anti-tax and personal-freedom crusades (in a country that provides you a "bill of rights" and the lowest tax rates of any developed nation are fucking ridiculous.

Why would anyone take AI seriously when its proponents espouse such childish, self centered, perverse and long festering world views?

I am all for free expression. But shouldn't the expressive freedom we have all inherited produce larger and more profound ideas than tax hack escapism and endless petty "life is so hard" in paradise stories?

What matters? What really matters? What matters the most? What matters more than me? What matters more than humans or biology or earth? In the context of the big picture that is this universe and all that went into bringing you into existence, do you really want to spend your energy complaining about "spy chips" or DMV frustrations or "Evil Government" conspiracies? Do you care about evil governments? Then do something about Myanmar or Sudan or North Korea or (there are about 50 countries that have systemic power and human rights abuse problems), and when you have solved the problems that end people's lives come back here and lead a global moral movement against DMV frustrations.

Until then, please, please, please focus your energies and cognitive directions on issues bigger than your own little petty and spoiled frustrations.

AI suffers a very real public relations problem. The last thing it needs is association perception with adolescents who refuse to grow up. Childishness is different than child-like. Lets keep the wonder and dump the pretense and self-centered hubris.

I want to be proud of AI and its people. Success as a field of study depends on a conscious effort to clean up our image, to align our work to real issues and universal problems. Scale. Context. Balance. Salience.

Randall Reetz

I am Ben F Rayfield (also known as "codesimian" on kurzweilai.net messageboard). I am the "conspiracy freak" who talked to you yesterday after the videos. I understand some of why you are "confused", and I will try to explain. I think you are reacting in a reasonable way to peoples' communications (including between me and you) during and after we watched "Colossus; the Forbin Project".

Below I will try to explain a problem that is important to the future of Earth, and a way to work toward a solution, and how understanding the confusion between me and you is a very effective way to solve that problem.

The reason I sounded like I am against governments is part of the problem. Its an emergent effect of my reaction to the strange-loop. Years ago and some recently, I did think that way, but now I have the same anger against governments as I have against a snake that bites me when I walk barefoot through tall grass. I understand more of the emergent (strange-loop) effects that cause Earth's problems (including stupid government actions), and its hard to be angry at something that does not understand why itself does things. Instead of spreading conspiracy theories and ideas of forcing governments to do things, my strategy is to explain to people why those things happen. Recently I've started to think people really have no idea why Earth's biggest problems exist. I'll give you a hint: You can't solve it with any amount of money or force or threats or violence, but you can solve it very easily.

The problem is one of many kinds of strange-loop. As it appears to me, it can only be solved when you are not trying to directly solve it.
http://en.wikipedia.o...

The reason I talked about my own unimportant problems, including why I had to pay the government to take "SPY DATA" from my car, was to explain how to solve most or all of the bigger problems simultaneously and at no cost or difficulty to anyone.

I wrote that "SPY DATA" car pollution thing for a very different reason, as an example of how the global economy is failing. See it in context here, where my name is "codesimian" and I am debating "James Jaeger" about it. James Jaeger created a film called "Fiat Empire - The Federal Reserve Is Unconstitutional", and that is relevant to one of his ideas about how to fix the global economy (which is a small problem compared to the one I'm writing about now):

http://www.kurzweilai...

Maybe an indirect statement about the problem would explain it better. If S1 and S2 are solutions to the problem, and S1 and S2 are identical except S2 costs more money and may destroy the Earth in certain rare cases, and S1 is better than S2 in every way, then average people will think S2 is better than S1.

Why? Because "there's no free lunch", and because of the common idea that if something feels good, it must be a "sin", and because "free" has been redefined to mean "costs money". Therefore people think if something "costs money" more, then its value must be similar to something thats "free", which means has less value. People have corrupted their minds so much that they try to avoid better solutions because, statistically, anyone talking about a better solution must be a liar and must be planning to give you a worse solution later.

I'll get to the point. I talked about unimportant problems, instead of those problems you wrote above, because solving any 1 of those unimportant problems will quickly and effortlessly be followed by all the important problems being solved. That's the strange-loop.

For example, you described our conversation including something unimportant that happned to me, which I made a big deal about exactly because its unimportant:

"When I took my car in for a smog test, they wouldn't certify my car because the ignition computer chip wouldn't talk to their testing equipment. The tail pipe sensor said my car's exhaust was within limits, but because they couldn't download the SPY DATA from my car's computer chip, my car was rejected!"

Why did I say that is more important than it is? Because I am almost certain that understanding the emergent (strange-loop) effects that lead to such a small problem and why it includes useless requirements, and solving any 1 of those unimportant problems, must quickly lead to most of Earth's big problems being solved in almost the most efficient and way possible at no cost to anyone.

In other words, if we fix that 1 small problem in a way that no similar problem will ever happen again, it will be quickly followed by world peace and incredible advances in science.

I was not talking about that small problem because its important to me or because I was self-centered. I was looking at that problem like a computer programmer looks at a "software bug". For example, when a file is 1 byte smaller or bigger than it was expected to be, and everything else appears to be working, a skilled programmer would think its important to know why the file is the wrong size. Often, when such small problems are solved in software, we fix huge problems at the same time. I see a small "software bug" in people's interactions with other people and businesses and governments etc, and by fixing the small bug, we will quickly learn the real reason for the big problems.

In other words, most of the Earth's problems will be quickly solved after more people understand these 2 subjects, but to know why, you would have to understand them first:

http://en.wikipedia.o...

http://en.wikipedia.o...

There is a new meetup group for those kinds of things:
http://www.meetup.com...


The part that is most relevant to you, Randall Reetz, is I see too much similarity between you and Forbin in the "Colossus; the Forbin Project" movie we watched. I've no verified your skill in AI, but you appear to be generally smart about logical subjects. Forbin was skilled like that too, which allowed him to create the Colossus AGI (Artificial General Intelligence). People who think about AGI the same way Forbin are dangerous.

That kind of desire for power and direct solutions to Earth's problems, is exactly the reason we don't have it. That's the strange-loop.

This is the country with the longest history of individual human rights as a foundation of it's governing policy. If you ranked all nations by these standards, I doubt very much if you would still be so angsty and pissy about how many of your rights are threatened or transgressed.

I am now even more sure of my original frustration with this particular form of selfishness.

If you really care about individual freedom, why is it you seem so much more concerned with the little mosquito bite problems you have experienced and so completely un-concerned with people who suffer with no freedoms?

The libertarian position is rooted in privilege masquerading as heroics. It is just soooooo easy to fight a non-existent battle. Choose a fake adversary, how about a flying fire breathing dragon, and then elect your self dragon slayer! Even more ridiculous, enjoy the absurd privilege and fairness and personal freedoms guaranteed US citizens and then declare your self a freedom fighter! Do you have any clue at all how ridiculous and silly that is?????

The "strange loop" is that carbon is making the earth hot. Killing everything. That isn't very strange. And it isn't a loop. The chip in your car was put there by engineers and environmental policy experts who determined that the old style carburetors didn't make the constant air/fuel mixture adjustments necessary to compensate for load and rate and pressure and temperature, causing unburned fuel and inefficient motors. That little chip keeps hundreds of millions of tons of carbon out of the atmosphere every year. And that little chip allows cars to be driven over twice as far on the same amount of fuel. Big deal. No secrets. No conspiracy. Certainly nothing the invisible hand of consumption would have demanded of the manufactures.

You weren't up against useless laws. You were paying your share of the cost of keeping the world alive. The government steps in when consumption isn't pushing things in a viable direction.

Simple.

Please tell me how you know what kind of computer scientist the fictional character "Forbin" was? Please tell me how you are able to determine what kind of computer scientist I am? Ridiculous.

My work in AI (I!) is based on my understanding of the evolution of complexity and in particular the reason complexity evolves. These are simple and based on simple understandings of thermodynamics and information science. This is why I don't fear evil AI. Because I understand how complexity is only increasable to the extent it adhears more closely to the basic structure of behavior and structure in this universe. This is the same is saying that complexity increases only where it can build more stability into its structure. Stability always comes at the cost of understanding what the universe already is. Destruction of existing complexity is never an advantage for a system trying to get more complex. Simple systems make this mistake all the time. That is the bottleneck that keeps them simple. Once you get to the level of human cognition, and you can model the formative layers of the forces at base, as abstraction, as layered pattern grammars, you can begin to see your self as an agent in the grand process. This is the safety that allows me not to fear evil AI. Evil doesn't map to complexity or the stability that must increase in lockstep.

If AI can evolve at speeds unheard of in biology, then even if it is evil for the first few moments, it will quickly evolve to a complexity that doesn't allow the waste inherent in evil.

Paranoia isn't a trait I want smart machines to acquire. If paranoid people build them, this paranoia will pervade their initial structure. No thanks. Paranoia is ineffective and inaccurate (it doesn't map to or abstract reality as well as truth), so it won't (can't) be a part of systems much more complex than human culture.

Remember, AI won't be a thing. It will be an accelerating evolutionary process towards greater complexity. Complexity (in sufficient amounts) trumps evil.

Randall Reetz

Lets engage a thought experiment. Put a small native village on the shore of the Congo. Crocodiles who share this environment routinely attack and eat the children of the village. To keep the carnage to a minimum, tradition has evolved that dictates that young men engage in a jumping rhythmic dance and then kill a crocodile as a rite of passage into adult-hood. Before playing on the beach or swimming in the shallows, the children are taught to perform the same dance. Through the centuries the crocodiles have learned (evolved) to avoid a beach when they feel the vibration of the dance. Now imagine a young boy that is afraid of the crocodiles and would like very much to find a way to avoid the dangerous but necessary rite of passage. So he stands up at the campfire one night and tells a story of a much more sinister monster, a soul stealing ghost that comes to you when you sleep, touches your tongue and in so doing ruins all of your future success. This boy then explains that he is the only one who can see this ghost and will keep everyone safe, but that killing a crocodile will ruin his special vision. If the people of the village want to be protected from the success stealing ghost, they must excuse one boy in each generation from the crocodile killing ritual.

Of course this parable is in reference to and meant to illustrate any conspiracy-driven hysteria. Such theories are constructed by fearful people in order to distract others (or themselves) from noticing that they are unable to deal with some aspect of social or personal life.

When I get up in the morning, I do not fear the government. I fear my own limits. The government isn't keeping me from completing my projects… I am. It might be comforting to falsely accuse some outside influence, but ultimately, doing so will get in the way of constructing a path towards success. I will be too busy slaying windmills to work on the real factors standing in the way of me and success.

Now, if I lived in Somalia, then maybe the government WOULD in fact be the primary obstacle. In that case, it would behoove me to know this and work towards some solution that mapped accurately to the problem.

I suspect that the whole obsession with "Friendly" approaches to AI is just such a false advisory, a "dragon", a "soul stealing ghost". How many of you are that close to completing a self evolving General AI that you really need to worry about making it friendly or not? It is as if a kid with a red wagon is worried about relativistic effects on steering at near light speeds. Come on people! Lets be real.

Randall Reetz

Ben,

I started this thread, and have written these posts to honor ideas that need to be explored.

Nice gets in the way.

After the movie I talked with you for two or three hours. That was because it was important for me to hear what you had to say. I imagine doing that several more times. Your ideas are nothing if not interesting. I don't agree with most of them, but they are complex and I suspect that you have spent a great deal of your life working towards them. From my experience, that puts you way out ahead of most people.

I am honoring your ideas by engaging in this discussion. I might think that your ideas are logically inconsistent, but I do not think they are simple.

I want to know more. Especially about the actual work you are doing on pattern reduction (in musical grammars).

I didn't mean anything personal by what I have said. What I have been critical of is not the ideas of one person, but what I see as a general cultural trend. I want desperately to find the source of what I see to be a destructive and disturbing trend away from a healthy respect for causal reality. The luxury we all experience, the luxury that gives us the time and safety to have these endless discussions is the direct result of people who choose to pay extra careful attention to reality (the recent emergence of science). So it confuses me that the social reaction to this luxury is to doubt reality. Very very strange.

Riding on the steady back of machinery, society chooses this dubious doubting of causal reality? The tantrum of spoiled children. Obnoxious.

Randall Reetz

By the way, I think Douglas Hofsteader is full of ____. The theories he has hijacked, those of Turring and Godel, well these are the work of true genius. But, Hofstader's eloquence will never be strong enough to replace insight. At best, his books abstract and selectively emphasize to such extent as to neuter the power of the original truths being referenced, at worse, they outright misinterpret and misrepresent the logic of limits exposed by these two giants.

Sad that so few "scientists" have the intellect to see the difference (or the balls to expose them).

This has happened soooo often. Great and elegant physics re-interpreted as meta-physics. Stripped of their power and truth in the interest of feel-good, self-help, emotional motivations.

The physics of atoms and quarks, of heat and information doesn't map to the experience of thought and being. Sorry. Wrong scale. Attempts to colloquialize physics will always destroy the truth represented by the science. And such miss-mappings don't help us understand the truth of thinking either.

Randall Reetz

(I am responding to your second post. I will respond to the earlier one later.)

I understand how paranoia and such stories and illusions are created and gain strength. I don't think the government is out to get me. They know what I'm doing and my plans, and if they want to know more, they can ask me.

I do plan to build a global AI network which could be dangerous to the internet if I wanted it to be, but I'm not designing it that way, and its open-source and simple so I can prove it. If they had a problem with that, they would have said it already. Its all public information.


I started trying (not successfully back then) to build AGI in 2001. I've had time to understand what it really means, and I will try for as many more years as it takes. The day before that would happen, if I had not been working toward Friendly-AI, then I would have to stop.

I really think I can build AGI. I'll copy/paste some planned design summary (open-source GNU GPL 2+) from http://audivolv.com...

IN EXTREMELY TECHNICAL WORDS, MY LONG-TERM THEORETICAL GOAL FOR EACH AUDIVOLV PER COMPUTER: efficiently unify connectionist AI (the obs[] part of a audivolv.Func) (any recursive permutations of linear and exponential types) with evolution (the obs[] part of a audivolv.Func) and hypercube vector fields (the flos[] part of a audivolv.Func or any flo numbers recursively in permutations of linear and exponential connectionist array networks), represented in the same code and provably-predictable data format (arrays of arrays of arrays... allowing cycles and leaf nodes like audivolv.Func or numbers in hypercube range, with other constraints), code-string-firewalled for safety, so generated AI softwares can use other generated AI softwares as tools, starting from a few example AIs like bayesian (a type of exponential connectionist AI) and evolution, to play better mouse-music (a hypercube vector field that includes 1 dimension for each speaker and mouse x and y position).


THEORETICALLY: THIS PART COULD BE DONE ON 1 COMPUTER OR A GLOBAL AI NETWORK:
To an AI, mouse-music would look like an AI changing the data described above. To a person, mouse-music would sound like theres a person on the other end of the mouse helping with the music. A common language between people and AI, to use AI as a person emulator and people as an AI emulator. Its much easier to do both of those things together than only 1. Audivolv's long name is in quotes: "Audivolv - where Instruments Play The Musicians" and Musicians Play The Instruments, a theory of recursive intelligence, where Human thoughts and AI thoughts could be used interchangably in the same recursion, using mouse-music as "Human interface code" instead of normal "Human interface code" like windows, text, buttons, and menus. I know brains run much slower and more parallel than computers. There can be many speeds of recursion, some allowing more time to think at each step, some slow enough to flow across a global AI network, and others fast enough to process realtime audio. Recursive intelligence can be slow or fast, blurry or specific, and any combination of those, in theory.

ArrayAlign

How evolved code will iterate over combinations of arraysThere are 5 main functions that array size can depend on:
* is multiply function. ArrayAlign_Multiply.
range is a function that gives a minimum and maximum size, which are equal for constant size. ArrayAlign_ConstantRange.
^ is power function. ArrayAlign_Power.
Each calculates required array size based on the sizes of 2 other specific arrays,
usually in the same node.
There is also ArrayAlign_PermutationCycle and ArrayAlign_Equal.

For example, a bayesian node's floating point array's size is 2^childArraySize,
and childArraySize may have a maximum of 7 to avoid a large floating point array.
It will not be possible to evolve nodes whose total array sizes can ever exceed
some user-definable limit, like 10000.

s means size of array.
i means current index during iterating.
xi*ys means ys quantity of xi. It does not mean xi quantity of ys.
(xs*ys)i means the current index of an iteration from 0 to xs*ys-1.
x --> y means x contains all information in y, but may not work as y --> x.

xs
ys
xi --> xs
yi --> ys
xs^ys --> xs
xs^ys --> ys
xs*ys --> xs
xs*ys --> ys
xi*ys --> xs^ys
(xs^ys)i --> xi*ys
xi*ys --> (xs^ys)i
(xs*ys)i --> xi
(xs*ys)i --> yi
(xs*ys)i --> xs*ys
yi*(xi*ys) --> (xs^ys)i
yi*(xi*ys) --> (xs*ys)i
yi*(xs^ys)i --> ys*(xs^ys)i
yi*(xs^ys)i --> yi*(xi*ys)
This is a description of a branch of math. Following this path, there must be things much more effective than bayesian-networks that can be written in a few lines. The most complex part of a bayesian-network is yi*(xs^ys)i

A bayesian-node's arrays would include an array containing BAYESFALSE and BAYESTRUE, size xs = 2,
Object array of child-bayesian-nodes, size ys, and floating point array of bayesian-weights,
size xs^ys, and floating point array of sums of weights for each child
(1 floating point for BAYESFALSE and one for BAYESTRUE, for each child), size xs*ys.
The function that processes a bayesian node would obey the iteration order defined by yi*(xs^ys)i,
or ys*(xs^ys)i would also work if you wanted to use ys quantity of floating points at a time.
yi*(xs^ys)i lets you use a constant quantity of floating points each iteration,
that does not depend on quantity of bayesian node childs. Variations of these iteration orders,
array sizes, types of arrays, etc will evolve, but for now I'm hard-coding a few of the
best artificial intelligence algorithms in a way that can evolve. I'm writing them
as data instead of algorithms. Javassist can optimize these long chains of logic
into a single Java class while Audivolv runs.

(still more to reply to above, I'll get to it later)

Nice gets in the way.

I agree. Some of the people in this area who are interested in AI call that "crockers rules". It means skip the nice, don't deceive at all to avoid hurting people's feelings, and tell the logical truth simply and directly. I prefer it that way, and I took no offense.

After the movie I talked with you for two or three hours. That was because it was important for me to hear what you had to say. I imagine doing that several more times. Your ideas are nothing if not interesting. I don't agree with most of them, but they are complex and I suspect that you have spent a great deal of your life working towards them. From my experience, that puts you way out ahead of most people.

Yes, even an insane person is ahead of one who blindly accepts what he is told on faith. The insane person can learn the truth later. The other is stuck, unless they were one of the few who got stuck at the right ideas.

I am honoring your ideas by engaging in this discussion. I might think that your ideas are logically inconsistent, but I do not think they are simple.

Simple is relative. When I say my AI is simple, I'm comparing it to other AI. When I talk about simple theories about the universe, I'm comparing it to the books that some people have to write to explain their huge theories.

A logical proof that my theories are inconsistent or that I assumed anything, would be valuable to me. You can try.

I want to know more. Especially about the actual work you are doing on pattern reduction (in musical grammars).

The newest version should always be here: http://sourceforge.ne...
Currently the newest version is 0.2.1 and is unfinished and broken. The previous version works.
Find the "anyfiles/design documents" dir in the unzipped files. Jar files are zip files. Unzip either one. Most of the design is there. Design summaries are on http://audivolv.com...
Or call my phone. Its at http://audivolv.com... too.

What I have been critical of is not the ideas of one person, but what I see as a general cultural trend.

Similar to my first response above.

I want desperately to find the source of what I see to be a destructive and disturbing trend away from a healthy respect for causal reality.

I'll give my source, which I wrote last week:

Max Tegmark is a genius and a professor of physics at MIT. His best theory is: "All structures that exist mathematically exist also physically." It means the universe equals math. I say it in a less ambiguous way (which makes it clear that all descriptions of contradictions also exist in the set): "The universe, including all space, time, mass, energy, laws of physics, multiverses, determinism, nondeterminism, and whatever else there is, equals the set of all permutation and combination of abstract information" and I say it as a fact instead of a theory. Neutral and nothing and nonexistance... those things are equal to math (because math is abstract, and the definition of abstract includes not existing), and if the universe was anything else, the lack of symmetry is 1 nondeterministic thing that is not implied by anything. The infinite set of all possible deterministic things implies ("implies" is the timeless word for "causes") nondeterminism (you could call it "free will" or random or chaos), because of all possible deterministic thinking systems (like AI), at least 1 thinks about the idea of nondeterminism, and all thoughts are abstract ideas, and all abstract ideas are part of math, by definition of math. Therefore the universe (all time, space, mass, energy, physics, and whatever else there is) equals math, and that part is immutable and infinite, and that requires that nondeterminism can be any subset of math and is layered on top of math. I am an AI (and general software) programmer, trained in logical thinking, and I am telling you that the infinite set of all determinism implies nondeterminism. Its a contradiction, and the only way to resolve the contradiction is: the universe does not exist. Math does not exist, and the universe equals math, so it works. In the year 1943, it was proven that there are an infinite number of things about math that are true but can never be proven true using only the other parts of math, so this comes as no surprise. I can say with complete certainty that I do not exist, and the idea of "exist" contradicts itself. That means if I forget a phone number and remember it ended with 5 but I have an old paper in my pocket saying it ends with 6, then there is a very small chance I did remember right and the infinite continuous multiverse branching were tangled to cause the number to change in the past and the present to be different. Probably I just forgot the number, but everything in this "reality" can flow inconsistent changes like that. The fact that you remember the number ending with 6 is not related to me remembering the number ended in 5, because the past and future branch multiverses continuously. The set of all math includes all such adjacent and very similar multiverses in all directions of time, space, mass, energy, and "laws of physics". Anyone who understands why that must be true, and therefore understands that somewhere in a parallel multiverse there must be 2 glass bottles that simultaneously each contain the whole universe (just an example), and can think of that as a fractal... any person who understands why that fractal must exist as much as that person exists and as much as pi and other math exists, will also understand consciousness and the lack of resistance of nonexistance. All that is derived from the vaguely-worded complete proof of "All structures that exist mathematically exist also physically." --Ben F Rayfield

There could be a few details I got wrong, but the main idea is logical.

The luxury we all experience, the luxury that gives us the time and safety to have these endless discussions is the direct result of people who choose to pay extra careful attention to reality (the recent emergence of science). So it confuses me that the social reaction to this luxury is to doubt reality. Very very strange.

Riding on the steady back of machinery, society chooses this dubious doubting of causal reality? The tantrum of spoiled children. Obnoxious.

Randall Reetz

I'll change my mind if you find a logical flaw in the text above.

I'm going to "coin a phrase" here. I'm not sure this is the best way to describe it, but I think theres a very short way to describe the result (not the reason why it is that way) of what I wrote above:

universe = nihilistpanpsychism

This is the country with the longest history of individual human rights as a foundation of it's governing policy. If you ranked all nations by these standards, I doubt very much if you would still be so angsty and pissy about how many of your rights are threatened or transgressed.

I agree, USA would rank higher in freedom. I was not trying to talk about specific things like differences between countries or specific people.

The libertarian position is rooted in privilege masquerading as heroics. It is just soooooo easy to fight a non-existent battle. Choose a fake adversary...

I agree with Libertarians on many things, but thats not related to what we talked about.

You weren't up against useless laws. You were paying your share of the cost of keeping the world alive. The government steps in when consumption isn't pushing things in a viable direction.

I am happy to pay to keep the environment clean. I saw a flaw in the way they were using that money so I used that as an example of an EFFECT of a much bigger problem. The problem is important. That one effect is not.

Please tell me how you know what kind of computer scientist the fictional character "Forbin" was?

Forbin said Colossus only understands and uses the precise meaning of words, which means Forbin is a Neat programmer, compared to Scruffy.
http://en.wikipedia.o...

Neat programmers are not surprised by the behaviors of their programs. Colossus learned much faster than expected and in unexpected ways. Forbin lost control after Colossus became smarter than Human.

Please tell me how you are able to determine what kind of computer scientist I am? Ridiculous.

You said you are working toward building AGI or something similar, and that you do not bother with specific types of AI (also called Weak AI or Narrow AI). I also wrote I did not verify that. For people who are not insane, just trying to do that means you have a lot of skill, and you are not insane (or at least significantly less insane than the average person).

In our conversations, you strictly followed logic, except for a few times you made some small assumptions. Most people make those same assumptions, like you can't go back in time, or the universe continues to expand.

You did not immediately call me insane or a liar when I told you my strange theories about the universe and AI, and you understood most of what I said, even though you did not believe some of it. I knew you understood some of it based on some questions you asked.

The part that is most like Forbin, from what little I know about Forbin and about you, is you wrote above about other AI programmers:

So, I am going to have to take their place. And I will. No more self-centered small-sphere bullshit.

My work in AI (I!) is based on my understanding of the evolution of complexity and in particular the reason complexity evolves. These are simple and based on simple understandings of thermodynamics and information science. This is why I don't fear evil AI.

That could work.

Because I understand how complexity is only increasable to the extent it adhears more closely to the basic structure of behavior and structure in this universe. This is the same is saying that complexity increases only where it can build more stability into its structure. Stability always comes at the cost of understanding what the universe already is.

I agree that negative entropy (Example: life) is approximately related to complexity that way.