bascule

Well experts also say my ass is purple. Did I mention these are experts in gay sex? "Experts" is about as reliable a source as "It is said" or "It is widely believed" http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2004/11/10_401.html Oh that's credible... Ever heard of ITER? We're on the verge of commercial plasma fusion... ITER is likely to be the last experimental fusion reactor before it is ramped into commercial production. Well, I'll see your "Wake up people you're all blind" paranoia with my own. The Singularity will happen before any of this becomes an issue, and provide the needed solutions. Don't think the Singularity will happen first? Then you should be working to make sure that happens... Aah, Singularitarianism kicks ass...

I certainly did not want to paint evolution a goal directed process, with some sort of inevitable outcome somehow programmed into it from the start, or any unseen process somehow unnaturally influencing selection events. If anything, I'm trying to describe the process of improving recordkeeping as a sort of self-catalyzing reaction. The better records that are kept, the faster a system can move to higher degrees of order. I just think that occasionally environmental pressures may result in the selection of a sort of generalized solution which solves not only the environmental problem which was creating the selection pressure but a whole slew of related problems which affords a massive benefit to the offspring. (e.g. human consciousness)

Then along comes fusion and peak oil is irrelevant...

Okay, let me explain where I'm coming from here... I've been working on stochastic sorting/ranking algorithms which work on ontological structures (i.e. sorting structure through analysis via random walks) This process simply amazes me as it seems to accrue immense order from an overabundance of chaos. Even with the underlying structure it's analyzing constantly changing, the values shift dynamically, trending towards a finalized structure which is never reached due to continuous change in the structure which is being analyzed. What you seem to be saying is that the behavior of the system of life is so chaotic as to escape any kind of analysis. Shouldn't it be possible to look at trends in convergent evolution as revealing a pattern in the way the underlying process behaves. Shouldn't it be possible to analyze the probability that, say, starting from a single cellular replicator, that a population will make the leap to multicellularity in a given number of timesteps? As I read through The Ancestor's Tale Dawkins went over how time and time again we see these beautiful mathematical relationships in the way organisms self-organize (for example, in defense of my previous statement, that genetic variability remains more or less constant among species regardless of reproduction rate because high reproducers create larger populations and thus the gene pool becomes more diluted, whereas slower reproducers have smaller populations and thus it's easier for a variation to spread throughout the entire population. If you'd like I can quote the relevant section of the book.) I just think as time progresses we'll continue to discover higher level interrelationships to the point that we can posit that starting from a single variadic cellular replicator we can define a set of probabilities that a given set of trends will arise in the population in a given amount of time (and be able to calculate that for any time interval)

As promised, here's what Dawkins had to say about sexual reproduction in The Ancestor's Tale:

That's a truly awesome reply

Cellular structure versus the human brain taken as a whole... Are you saying consciousness could possibly result from anything besides the collective operation of the neurons of which the human brain consists? If not, then you have no argument with me...

I've been reading about bacteria quite extensively in The Ancestor's Tale. Pretty nuts, everything they've accomplished. Wow, I really need to reread the section on sexual vs. asexual reproduction in the Ancestor's Tale and get back to you on that one. As for everything else: I was really trying to draw parallels between human sociotechnological evolution and biological evolution, with our present state being substantially "closer to the attractor." It's very true that species can find a niche and thus stop accruing useful novelty. And yes, there's no evidence of teleology... I realize evolution is fundamentally a heuristic search algorithm doing a stochastic walk. A stochastic walk will never get you anywhere in particular...

I started my own thread on this but I agree with Mokele that the thread should've been locked... for this reason in particular: What they're saying there is "Our hypothesis is that a purely natural explanation in the traditional sense is wrong. We are going to presuppose an unnatural influence on the universe through which a telelogical process arises and shapes present events." That's not how it should work. Teleological attractors, in order to be the least bit scientific, should be a consequence of natural processes (Why does God have to break his own laws?) I fully support the search for them, but don't try to claim that you're being scientific if you have to redefine science in order to do so.

Obviously. We've only decoded the low-level operation and the operation of one higher level structure: the hippocampus. You are aware that Hodgkin and Huxley decoded the nerve impulse, right? As for the phenomenological exchange format of the human brain, we haven't decoded that yet, obviously, but research by Crick and Koch seems to have illuminated the basic structure of its format. From a high-level perspective, no. Your point being? Obviously not. Yes, we are specifically talking about modelling the behavior of human neural networks... Obviously not. Differences in the higher level structure. Consciousness is afforded by the higher level structure of the human brain. The low-level structure is essentially meaningless in the scheme of things; its basic design is shared by most animals on earth. Does that mean neurons are doing anything magical in humans which they aren't in other species? Does that mean that all species with neurons possess consciousness? I don't think either of you two are affording enough respect to our present level of knowledge... and your analysis thereof is rather short sighted...

(ed: AARGH, all this and I posted in the wrong forum. Can someone [Mokele?] please move this to the Evolution forum, or to pseudoscience if I'm being a little too craaaazy here...) There exists one pretty obvious causal relationship in the evolutionary process which I've never really heard mentioned: the rate at which the process is able to discover useful novelty is limited by its ability to keep records and share these records with other memebers of a community. For starters, all life on earth is descended from a relatively complex common ancestor which includes all sorts of complex DNA transcrption and Ribosomal machinery, all of which is needed to keep an incredibly precise (but occasionally variadic) genomic record and use it to replicate and perform all behaviors necessary to stay alive. I think we can safely assume that the very first replicator from which all life descends probably had extremely simple and therefore lousy record keeping equipment and descendants which were highly variadic from the original. After a lot of stumbling around in the dark the process produced better and better record keepers until we arrive at the highly complex eqipment which resided in the common ancestor of all life presently on earth. From the highly complex nature of our shared genome we can deduce that all other descendants of the original replicator were wiped out by our common ancestor and its descendants, such an advantage did its recordkeeping prowess provide. I am in awe of "the cell". In asexual reproduction any solutions which are lost through deleterious mutations must be re-discovered by subsequent beneficial mutations. Beneficial mutations discovered by your ancestral relatives and their descendants are completely useless to your descendants, because your descendants are merely copies of you. Sexual reproduction looks incredibly wasteful at first; only half of the members of the species will be able to produce descendants, thus males become very expensive (in terms of resources) gene vehicles, but the advantages of sexual reproduction are obvious. Genes which are beneficial to a particular environment are selected out of a communal pool shared among a species. Thus the recordkeeping becomes tremendously better; deleterious mutations can be sorted out while beneficial ones are kept, all shared in a pool so advancements made by one individual can be shared throughout the population. But then comes the issue of behaviors... using only genes useful behaviors must be immitated by all members of a community long enough for natural selection to favor the descendants who are best at the given behavior for it to be fixed in the genome (the Baldwin effect). Then evolution came up with us, Homo sapiens sapiens. Behaviors which were temporarily forgotten by a community could be resurrected by reading a written account. If a particular member of a community had trouble immitating a given useful behavior, other members of the community could provide feedback as to the problems, and use abstract descriptions to explain the intricacies of the behavior. Members of a community can dole out advice as to what behaviors they find useful, and thus those who might never have learned a particular behavior because they didn't know it existed can become aware of a particular behavior by a secondhand account and thus learn which behaviors to learn rather than simply immitating every behavior they see. And thus we have the birth of humanity's great advantage over all of the other animals, meta-information, a way to keep records about the records rather than just requiring natural selection to be the ultimate recordkeeper. Evolution favors strategies which made it less blind, because the more of a record it can keep, the faster it works, or that is to say, the more useful novelty the community/species accrues per unit time. Are there any who would argue that humans have substantially outpaced all other life on earth in terms of accruing useful novelty? In the end, does it really matter how that useful novelty is stored, be it in genes, memes, meme vehicles (i.e. the Internet), or what have you... it's all behavioral evolution. I think it's outright obvious that the evolutionary process favors more complex behavior for a variety of reasons, the more complex your behavior the harder you are to predict, which helps both predator and prey who both try to predict each others' behavior. More complex and intelligent behavior gives you the capacity to deal with more death scenarios which would've wiped out the line of stupider individuals. It improves your ability to locate and successfully reproduce with mates (with some exceptions in our species ). Thus the process favors the capacity to sort and store more and more complex behavior patterns. Barring environmental catastrophe, wouldn't this inevitably result in the production of sentient life? The recordkeeping issue was the biggest problem the system had to solve, and nowadays us humans are doing it more efficiently than ever. Now we have a collective pool of close to all information we've ever accumulated (the Internet), and we're quickly increasing the quality of its structure and the ability of members of our species to access this wealth of information. We're the best recordkeepers ever, and we're evolving faster than ever. We work on a timescale where we can actually begin to analyze the fruits of the evolutionary process and what they truly represent from a philosophical perspective, namely what this process of incrementally improved recordkeeping trying to do. To me the Singularity represents a telelogical attractor, one which if you put any man-like species (in that they are conscious animal-like replicators with a fixed lifespan and a capacity to manipulate their surroundings as they see fit as well as communicate abstract information with each other) will naturally tend towards. It's something which, it seems to me, any variadic replicators unleashed on a planet will always tend towards. And keep this in mind: it's an attractor. It draws a particular scenario towards a particular conclusion, but that doesn't mean that there aren't other forces at work which can prevent the conclusion from being reached. Like evolution it's just a tendancy in a particular direction (towards useful novelty) but that doesn't necessitate that any particular outcome will be reached. Won't any evolutionary process which begins with a microscopic, variadic replicator always tend towards the production of a sentient species (and all subsequent evolution that entails)? Anyway, I see so many trends throughout the evolutionary process which aren't ever discussed in ethological circles... perhaps the most notable being Kurzweil's Law of Accelerating Returns... in the end it's all evolution and I think there's so much yet to discover in the evolutionary process than what biologists/ethologists give it credit for, and it seems like some of the discoveries yet to be made are thoroughly rejected by the overwhelming mentality of their community, which sadly seems to have developed as a response to IDiots who have their own cockamamie telelogical ideas with which they attempt to contradict the underlying ideas of evolution... rather than attempting to extrapolate on top of them.

I'm trying to develop some ideas which will wind up in my podcast, so I thought I'd bounce them off the forums here and see what people thought. These ideas are going to be a bit too complex for my podcast's target audience and I'm trying to think of ways to simplify them. I'm sure it's going to take a few successive rewrites in order for that to happen. My apologies to all you blog and Podcast haters out there, but hopefully this explanation will help elucidate you as to why they are important, which is something the mainstream media has horribly failed to describe with any degree of clarity. Anyway, let's begin... The bottom up model describes the process of amateur content syndication by anyone. This has occured so far in the form of blogs, which syndicate words, podcasts, which syndicate speech, and vidcasts, which syndicate video. When the claim is made that blogs have been around forever but weren't really noticed until the term "blog" was coined, what is being overlooked is the fundamental syndication technology which lets anyone tap into a little bit of your stream of consciousness and receive regular installments of your ideas, quickly and easily. This model fills a gap in the information distribution process which sits between traditional word-of-mouth and the traditional top-down model employing a large scale, expensive distribution process controlled by a media outlet. By filling this gap the bottom up model fixes a number of problems which exist in both the word-of-mouth distribution model and the top down model. When information is passed via word of mouth, its quality degrades quickly. What you end up receiving is a series of successive interpretations by various people. You risk people embellishing information, adding irrelevant or false information, or mistaking what they heard, among other things. The bottom up model fixes this problem in several ways. First, blogs can leverage word-of-mouth spread of information to gain popularity, but rather than someone who wants to spread the blog's information having to communicate everything directly, they can simply point you at the blog and you get the same copy of the information that the original person read. The bottom up model can facilitate a word-of-mouth like analysis of ideas, with bloggers responding to other bloggers, adding their opinions and other relevant information as they see fit. However, unlike word-of-mouth exchanges, blogs can link back to each other and to the original information they were analyzing. In this way, you can see the process of ideas evolving, as well as sifting through the opinion to find the actual facts being discussed so you can judge them yourself, rather than a thirdhand or fourthand account of them. Everywhere people are having convergent ideas which they may not be aware of. How many times have you thought of something you considered novel only to discover that someone else has already thought of it. This happens all the time: people come to the same conclusions as each other independently, but unless you can get your ideas noticed no one else will be aware that you have had them. The bottom up model lets people form groups to work on problems which the media and mainstream society have not yet taken notice of. The biggest problem of the top down model is fairly obvious: access. In order to mass distribute your ideas through the top down model, you have to find some way to tap into the system, and so the flow of great ideas is blocked by the additional barrier of trying to get a media outlet to notice your ideas and embrace them enough to fund packaging them for mass distribution. The second problem with the top down model is the issue of oligarchian control. The top down model places the means of mass distribution of ideas in the hands of relatively few people. Since these people ultimately select what ideas they broadcast, what you end up with is a vision of the world skewed to advance the agenda of those who control the broadcast system, be they a Ted Turner or a Rupert Murdoch. The bottom up model lets anyone select any ideas they want to and package them for mass consumption. Likewise, an idea consumer via the bottom up model has the freedom to select anyone's ideas they choose. The third problem with the top down model is the issue of feedback. If you have been misquoted or your opinions mischaracterized by a mainstream media outlet, your options in the past were rather limited: you could write a letter to the reporter who mischaracterized you asking them to clarify your position, you could write a letter to the editor indicating your dissatisfaction with the way the reporter interpreted your ideas, or you could turn to another media outlet and attempt to appeal to their desire to discredit their competitors and let them report on your mischaracterization by a rival. The bottom up model provides a much needed instant feedback mechanism to the media. If you have been mischaracterized by the mainstream media you can now simply write about it in your blog and give the exact interpretation of your ideas you wished for the media outlet to have reported, then other bloggers can pick up on your ideas and spread the word for you. Reporters can now browse the blogosphere and see how people are reacting to their stories. Through this process they can discover factual inaccuracies in their reports because bloggers will inevitably point them out, or they can discover new and relevant information to include in a follow up article. Several news sites now feature a "Who's blogging about this article?" feature which gives you instant access to all this information, so you need not even wait for a follow up article, you can peruse the blogs and discover the factual inaccuracies or mischaracterizations for yourself. However, the bottom up model is not just important because it now plays a vital role in the flow of ideas from person to person; it's most important because it mimics the behavior of consciousness itself. The leading model of consciousness among neurophysiologists, cognitive scientists, and phenomenological philosophers is called the "pandemonic model," and consists of innumerable specialists who can remove and insert ideas from a global workspace. When a specialist finds a particular idea sitting in the global workspace which they like, they can tell other specialists, or they can provide their own embellishments to the idea then their copy of the idea into the global workspace. Ergo, ideas which are good enough to be noticed by large numbers of specialists are the ones that dominate our thought process and used to take action. The bottom up model lets people collectively shape ideas which "bubble up" through the blogosphere and capture the attention of more and more people. What you eventually end up with are very compelling arguments for particular courses of action, the kind which, if they were in our heads, would lead us to take a particular course of action. The way people work in groups will more and more start to mimic the way the specialists which comprise consciousness work collectively to solve larger problems. The behavior of human society will thus continue to take on more and more of the characteristics of a single conscious entity.

It's certainly not a "field without foundation;" consciousness has been the subject of extensive multidisciplinary research by neurophysiologists, by cognitive scientists, by artificial intelligence researchers, by behaviorial psychologists, and by phenomenological philosophers. To simply cast aside their work shows a fundamental lack of understanding in the field, which is probably why you fell so easily for pseudoscience like "quantum consciousness" (although someone apparently likes you enough to have filed this one under "Speculations" instead of "Pseudoscience") Hardly. We've been reducing biological neural networks to mathematical models of their operation for years. See Genobyte and this New Scientist article on building an artifical hippocampus from a mathematical model of its operation. Consciousness runs on a neural network. We can model the operation of neural networks. Therefore we can model consciousness.

Neurophysiology also renders the issue moot. The behavior of the brain can be mathematically modeled (in a completely deterministic manner) well above the quantum level. Otherwise the Blue Brain Project would be methodologically unsound. Your statement is a false dilemma. Even if the universe is somehow fundamentally non-deterministic that doesn't mean the operation of the brain need be.

Not to mention the issue of who granted Bush the authority to remove Saddam from power...

Umm, yes, substantially. What exactly was shady about that? Rather than hold a vote on Murtha's bill, they decided to write one of their own and force it to vote, which received a whopping 3 yes votes and was otherwise struck down unilaterally.

Actually most of my thoughts on the Singularity have come about through my own introspection. I've been trying to put together something that outlines my specific view, but I've talked about it at length around here. I read Kurzweil's The Age of Spiritual Machines around 2001 or so, and subsequently discovered Vernor Vinge's paper.

I think you would find that the majority of the world's neurophysiologists and cognitive scientists would disagree with that statement. The prevailing view is that consciousness is a completely deterministic algorithm.

You don't even need that, you just need a direct neural interface; a way to move bits and pieces of phenomenological data in and out of the brain. Re OP, you're describing the function of the hippocampus (short term memory) which does appear to be "cleared" during sleep, however how much this relates to the process of dreaming is still a matter of intense research. This is a common idea that several people have stumbled upon, but like anything with common sense appeal the reality is much more complex. Also, ROM is inherently unwritable (it must be "programmed" after which point it merely stores data permanently)

The Internet is a universal meme vehicle (i.e. memes physically embodied as part of a transient stage of movement from mind to mind). In that respect it is no more alive than a library; without users its behavior is purely mechanistic. As a Singularitarian I would say the Internet is quickly shaping into the single universal ontology (in the information theory sense) which will, in the future, guide all human endeavours in lieu of the ontologies we individually keep inside of our heads.

Be sure to check out the University of Washington's Advanced Electric Propulsion program, namely Mini-Magnetospheric Plasma Propulsion (a variant upon the solar sail idea)

Mokele, ecoli, and zyncod: You're all hitting on something quite important here, namely that land use is likely to be the most important anthropogenic climate forcing. The ways in which land use affects the climate system are diverse and rather complex. But the way we use land has a tremendous (detrimental) impact on the Earth's radiative imbalance, much more so than "greenhouse gasses."

All indications are that the majority of the shift in the Earth's radiative balance is occuring as part of a natural cycle. That's not to say that there aren't anthropogenic forcings altering the Earth's climate system, but they are (probably) not responsible for the majority of changes we are seeing. As a bleeding heart liberal progressive working on global warming research, I agree with Bush: more research is needed before we take action. I also believe the importance of CO2 as a climate forcing has been greatly overembelished by the mainstream media. There are many first order climate forcings which should most likely take precedence over CO2 (namely nitrogen compounds) but these hardly ever get attention in press coverage of global warming. Climate science reporting by the mainstream media has always been full of gross distortions which generally take an alarmist position and have instilled a great deal of (potentially unwarranted) fear about the potential adverse effects of global warming. For example, we're given doomsday scenarios about the polar ice caps melting, and while average summer Artic sea ice coverage has been decreasing, this is offset by an increase in Antarctic sea ice to the point that total loss of polar sea ice is essentially nil. Until we have reliable multi-decadal models of the entire climate system any global warming predictions you are seeing are essentially intelligent guesswork. Also there's a prevailing, scientifically unjustified alarmist attitude that has led to a great deal of cherrypicking and fitting science to policy (rather than the other way around) which has been quite deterimental to climate science research. Anyway, sorry, people not involved in climate science research spouting off about how global warming will kill us all tend to get on my nerves...

Looks like a strawman to me... And Joseph Wilson aside, what about the conclusions of Marine Gen. Carlton W. Fulford Jr.?

Have you ever heard of this thing called "macroeconomics"? Aggregate supply and demand? Peak oil implies a gradual, steady decrease in supply. If supply decreases while demand remains constant, then price increases. As the price increases then demand for alternatives to oil, including ethanol, kerosene (coal oil), and hydrogen, will increase, and a new energy infrastructure will begin to materialize as demand for alternatives increases and the money made from them can be re-invested back into developing the infrastructure. The grid doesn't just break when it runs out of something. The market will respond dynamically by bolstering alternatives as oil becomes increasingly more expensive.