oldtobor

Intelligence is like software, it can be executed on many different material substrates. But the point is, can a disembodied intelligence exist maybe in a parallel universe ? In a certain sense it is easier to believe in a pure intelligence-consciousness-intentionality that no longer depends on any matter, therefore any physics than a random universe generating intelligence. Our own mind gives us the sensation of being greatly removed from MATTER, it seems to be a pure MONOLITHIC SLAB OF CONSCIOUSNESS existing in some odd limbo beyond MATTER. So the aliens that created this universe and designed some parts of it may inhabit a parallel universe where there is no MATTER AND NO PHYSICAL LAWS and may be disembodied minds. Their universe may have also been designed by another parallel universe made up of simpler laws of physics that are not based on mass-energy. There could be an infinite recursion of universes, or an infinite heirarchy of universes interacting in such a way. Then again the Intelligent Design theory of physics states that there must be some mind that designed the laws of physics, the atoms and the cells. But it could be the other way around in that our mind resembles the laws of physics and we get confused between our mind and the external universe not understanding that they are both purely random or both "intelligent" being that this word is so vague. So matter transcends itself through technological evolution, so maybe many cycles of previously transcended matter have generated many universes one after another, one more complex than another, for an infinite time. In other words maybe matter in a previous universe reached such a high point that it decided to create another universe with these laws of physics to continue its evolution. This universe will continue to evolve through the technological singularity up to another phase transition where another universe will be born-created-simulated or invented. That new one will go on the same and the cycle may be infinite.

Humans are the means by which MATTER LEARNS HOW TO MANIPULATE ITSELF INFINITELY. So the point is evolution creates thinking minds that then learn how to manipulate matter through technology and this technology evolves beyond our understanding, like computers that have minds of their own that greatly surpass ours, or humans that manipulate and engineer their own brains to unknown heights and configurations. The end result is matter that learns how to interact with itself to surpass all limitations. So we as humans are a small intermediate step to a much brighter future where MATTER WILL MANIPULATE ITSELF AND INTERACT WITH ITSELF INFINITELY TO UNKNWON HEIGHTS. At that point even just imagining a computer simulating another universe with other physical laws, other engineered minds with other emotions etc. means that we no nothing at all. A funny thing about evolution, is that not only are the chance possibilities that carbon chemistry creates a thinking mind kind of slim, but also that these minds occur on a planet with just the right amount of metals, energy, gas etc. at just the right depts to extract, just the right amount of fruits and vitamins etc. Just the right history of creating advanced technology when it is so easy to just war each other off. All these quirk chances kind of make Intelligent Design by an ALIEN from a parallel universe seem reasonable.

I would look at the entire thing as MATTER CAPABLE OF SELF MANIPULATING ITSELF, or MASS-ENERGY CONFIGURATIONS THAT SELF EVOLVE AND SELF MANIPULATE INTO COMPLEX STRUCTURES. So granted that maybe on earth carbon chemicals got together and created thinking minds. Then what about in the nucleus of planets ? what about stars ? I wonder in how many other ways mass-energy could combine into complex structures and into configurations way past anything we can imagine. After all if carbon chemistry can make a mind, what could organized electromagnetic fields in stars, soliton populations in stars or any other oddball configration of mass-energy "evolve" into, or more correctly stated, "SELF MANIPUALTE ITSELF" into something else. If matter on a ball of rocks like the earth can create a thinking mind, then who knows what else it can self create. Maybe matter is truly infinite and without any real bounds in its possibilities. The Technological Singularity arriving may show even more incredible possibilities.

There are two other considerations that prove my point. First we perceive within intervals such that everything occurs in a smooth cause and effect fashion. If we perceived events every 10 seconds or 1 minute or 1 hour or any other interval, things would be choppy, would appear and disappear instantly, the world would not be a linear flow. Now if you could have a dial that changes the perception intervals from plank times up to macroscopic times exceeding a few seconds, the entire range of intervals would always present miracle like perceptions of everything, THE CONSTANT LINEAR CAUSE AND EFFECT FLOW IS THE EXCEPTION not the norm. Also in 100 years technology has been able to produce computers, if an advanced civilization in maybe a million years of technological evolution created minds that live within computer simulations, they would never know that there is a hidden level in their world. So like the fact that the first cell exceeds our understanding, it could be analogous to the minds in the simulator trying to understand things that origin from outside the alien's computer. So maybe the cell problem is trying to tell us that there is A HIDDEN LAYER THAT WE CANNOT PERCEIVE in the universe, MAYBE WE ARE ALL IN AN ALIEN'S COMPUTER, MAYBE THE REAL LAWS OF THE ALIEN'S WORLD WHICH IS THE REAL ONE are simpler and allow to easily construct living cells.

padren, yes you got it more or less right. The point is that the universe is within something containing it, or there must be something outside the universe, the laws of physics are a subset of a larger universe that is totally lawless. Or maybe MATTER IS INFINITE AND CONTAINS WITHIN ITSELF ALL POSSIBLE UNIVERSES AND LAWS OF PHYSICS. We observe the first living cell and there doesn't seem to be such an easy sequence of cause and effects that can create this first cell. That is where the debate begins in creationism. The cell is something we cannot easily imagine using our physics as just MATTER SELF MANIPULATING ITSELF until a cell emerges. The earth seen from a far enough view is just a ball of rocks with some chemicals. Now let this ball of rocks manipulate itself and then you get a living cell and then a thinking mind. That is what seems so incredible. Take a look at the pictures of the surface of mars and say, hey this large ball of matter called mars will manipulate itself and create a thinking mind! The debate between ID and Evolutionists is mostly a debate on "suspension of belief". When you go see a movie you perform what is known as a suspension of disbelief in the sense that you make believe that the fiction in the movie is real no matter how far fetched. Now what a person who believes in Intelligent Design does is the opposite, he performs a suspension of belief in the fact that matter can automatically evolve itself into a human. And the evolutionist does the same in not believing that a god can assign a human out of thin air. Both can be seen as miracles or can be seen as not possible. It is an aesthetic choice. A person can say that it is not possible for a jet to fly and cross oceans since it is so heavy. He can say that he can never believe that possible and if it does happen it is a miracle, something the mind can't conceive. If we perceived the world with a time interval of a second equal to 100 years, we would see a computer pop out in front of us not having ever seen the intermediate events. It would look like a miracle. But then what is a miracle ? Anything can be seen as a miracle if you perform a suspension of belief. Even a particle that moves 1 cm can be seen as an absolute miracle, impossible to be true and happening. Science tries to be coherent and honest and tries to explain things with what we see and know everyday, therefore the theory of Evolution is as close as science can get to a reasonable truth. Science always says : "I AM NOT SURE, I DON'T KNOW, I MAY BE WRONG." The religious ID proponents are always sure of themselves, they possess the truth, they have no doubts. But if ID is right, they don't know who the Intelligent Designer is. It could be a monster from a parallel universe, or an alien race, or we could all be in a computer simulation. We could be brains in a vat, the god could be any of a million possible things. In case it wasn't clear, what I wanted to say is that the Intelligent Design proponents find it impossible to believe that MATTER all by itself can SELF EVOLVE into organisms as complex as human beings. This to them seems like a miracle or impossible or as they always say like a tornado that can build a new functioning car by pure chance by going through a junk yard of scrap metal. But this is just a subjective impression of theirs based on what seems possible and impossible. No one can really know or measure what is or isn't impossible. We can only measure things according to what we already know and our everyday experience. Therefore science still does the best job in this even though it can never be excluded that supernatural events and items may be possible. Like a robot civilization that can travel through time and design humans. Lets imagine that Intelligent Design is correct. Scientists agree that only some kind of intelligence could have designed the first cell and universe etc. Then you have to ask who or what is the Intelligent Designer ? You have 3 cases: 1) It is a religious God, then which one ? choose between Christian, Jew, Islam, Buddha, Tao or any of other many gods 2) Science Fiction Scenario: Alien Race, Brain in a Vat, robots, monsters from parallel universes etc. The wilder the scenario the more true it probably is. 3) Physical Laws are still valid only we don't know the whole story. Maybe some things happen at the center of stars that can connect to the first cells, maybe there are parallel universes or aliens (even though these seem to mix with point 2, they don't really deny science). Maybe we can't perceive events happening at very small time scales like 10 to the minus 50 seconds. If our mind was made in such a way as to perceive events every 100 years, we would see lots of miracles, computers pop out of thin air, jet planes pop out etc. Maybe we are seeing the world through an analogous limitation. Now science can see linear events down to 10 to the minus 20 seconds I think. But we are completely blind to events that occur at smaller time scales. So if physics does alot of complex interesting things at those time intervals, we simply can't see it and maybe the origin of the first cells has to do with what happens in those intervals. Even in this case the wilder the scenario the more true it probably is.

Cause and effect is when a physical system that is present in a mass-energy configuration A jumps to a new configuration B within the minimum time interval that physical events occur. So if the minimum time interval is 10 to the minus 50 seconds, after this amount of time the system that was in A will jump to configuration B. Now B could be any other configuration, it could be probabilistic like sometimes A jumps to B and sometimes to C, it could be totally unpredictable like A jumps to C which is completely unrelated, for example a butterfly becomes a star then becomes a computer after 3 time intervals, maybe with a quantum probability of being very low, but still possible. Also the minimum time interval could be variable so sometimes the jump occurs after 10 to the minus 1000 seconds, sometimes after 10 to the 30 seconds etc. So what is so sacred about cause and effect ? It is a sequence of pictures each picture could be anything, the jump has no cause, it is a causeless effect. Something that pops up from A to B without no cause or reason is a MIRACLE, CAUSE AND EFFECT IS SIMPLY ANOTHER WAY OF STATING A MIRACLE. We are simply used to seeing a group of constant regular transitions between mass-energy configurations which then become the laws of physics, but these laws are only models, the reality is that there are no laws of physics, only a sequence of pictures that could also become completely different from anything we could expect. So then any physical universe exists and is just as real as ours. Any sequence of pictures could pop up just like the ones we always see and this sequence is just as real and fundamental as the ones that we see regularly. Laws of physics are pure quirks.

A MIRACLE is something totally outside any possibility of happening. Something that cannot happen from what we know and see as humans. Like walking on water gives the impression of being a miracle or rising from the dead. A physical system that simply changes state from A to B is INCREDIBLE, CANNOT POSSIBLY HAPPEN, IS AN ABSOLUTE MIRACLE, IS MIND BOGGLING! A miracle is really our subjective reaction to something completely new that we see. The Internet was a REAL MIRACLE for those sensitive enough to perceive it, but we always wash down everything into everyday events. THERE ARE NO EVERYDAY EVENTS, EVERYTHING IS A MIRACLE AND IMPOSSIBLE TO BE, EXISTENCE IS AN ABSOLUTE MIRACLE!.

What makes any configuration of matter-energy either complex or simple, either functional (to us humans) or not, like for example a Ford Truck or a stone or a butterfly DIFFERENT ??? NOTHING. These are just QUIRKS OF NATURE AND THE LAWS OF PHYSICS and have nothing requiring any explanation of how they became, if they became or not, if they followed a chain of cause and effect or just popped into existence from nothing. It is our human subjective view of things that assign things important or not, requiring explanations or not, meaningful or not. In fact they are all equivalent and the very concept of complexity is a purely ARTISTIC concept invented by humans. The laws of physics are just RANDOM QUIRKS WITHOUT NO FURTHER EXPLANATION OR MEANING THAN THE FACT THAT THEY JUST ARE, THEY JUST POPPED OUT OF NOWHERE FOR NO REASON! Any other universe with any other laws of physics or gods or chains of causes and effects or any other ODDBALL QUIRKY COMBINATION OF ELEMENTS ARE REALLY ALL THE SAME AT A METAPHYSICAL LEVEL. THEREFORE THE ORIGINS OF LIFE DON'T EVEN NEED ANY EXPLANATION WHETHER RELIGIOUS OR SCIENTIFIC!

Everything is really subjective. If you look at the surface of mars and say MATTER can SELF ORGANIZE itself into a human, it would seem impossible. It really doesn't matter if this process of self organization occurs in one shot as a magical assignment or after a billion years of interacting with other pieces of MATTER. The path from stones to man, from A to B is not at all important, it is just a design choice, like a painting, how many different intermediate pictures would you like ? The bible says there is only one picture, evolution says there are trillions, but it is only a numerical difference. They both agree on at least ONE CAUSE AND EFFECT, but cause and effect itself can be perceived as miraculous or normal everyday events. That events follow some ODD, QUIRKY, AND VERY ARBITRARY LAWS OF PHYSICS means nothing at all, even a magical assignment that does not follow any laws of physics at a METAPHYSICAL LEVEL is just as valid. We constrain reality within our cause and effect descriptions discovered through interacting with physics and think that this regular scheme of things is general and always valid within all ranges, but this is FALSE, there are no general schemes only some that LOOK LIKE they work for us humans in our interaction with physics. The law of conservation of mass energy is only valid at our macroscopic space-time range. At 10 to the minus 40 seconds and millimeters, particles pop up from nowhere, last some time and then disappear according to Quantum Electrodynamics. If you are within a much shorter time range of the lifetime of the particles, you would be seeing miracles all the time. Even because the particles that pop up could be a very complex and unique combination of mass-energy somewhat like if you where to see a computer or car pop up in front of you from nowhere. So even the concept of miracles is only a relative concept compared to what we are used to seeing. Those that live at the quantum level would think our macroscopic level is a miracle since things at our level have a slow linear "cause and effect" type flow which would be really absurd for them. Really even evolution is quite incredible and just about as magical as a god creating people from dirt. Think of evolution as MATTER that is capable of SELF ORGANIZING ITSELF through various processes and interactions and in the end you got a human. Now that is just as incredible as the bible! Even more interesting is the basic problem of "what is an explanation ? ". Why is a sequence of "cause and effects" as evolution describes more reasonable or true than a one shot miracle assignment by a god or an alien computer ? At a deeper level there is really no difference between the two "explanations" or "descriptions" of what happened. It is just an aesthetical, I would say artistic preference between the two.

Quantum Electrodynamics states that particles pop into and out of existence all the time at a small enough time and space scale. As long as it is for a short enough time or small enough energy. I think it is h=dtde. Anyways inside the Electron, mass-energy configurations pop up and disappear all the time so these configurations can be very complex and quirky like a full blown microbutterfly. So there you got a MIRACLE. The point is that the miracle does not consist of the contents of the quirk energy configuration but in the fact that any physical system simply changes state. If the particle becomes a photon or a butterfly or a Ford Truck does not matter at all. THESE CONFIGURATIONS ARE ALL EQUIVALENT, THEY ARE ONLY A QUIRK COMBINATION OF MASS-ENERGY so any combination whether complex or simple is the same. The fact that a state CHANGES IS AN ABSOLUTE MIRACLE. There cannot be an infinite chain of cause and effects, this would be impossible, so the chain ends where miracles begin.

Evolution breakthrough: There are ONLY Miracles! Just like we humans cannot perceive and distinguish events occuring at nansecond intervals without the help of machines then: Consider a mind from a parallel universe that perceives our universe only in time increments of 5 billion years. While observing our earth it first sees only stones then a moment later it sees humans. For this mind the humans popped out of nowhere already completely "evolved" since it cannot perceive the cause and effects occuring at smaller time intervals. Hence for this mind a miracle occured, or maybe it would consider anything that pops out of nowhere, no matter how complex as the normal way of things of our universe. Now we can imagine other similar minds having a perception and being able to distinguish only intervals of 100 years or 10,000 years or anything you want. In this case it would always see other items pop out of nowhere like cars and computers etc. These minds could not distinguish each segment of cause and effects, the chain that brought forth a new item. But we ourselves are actually in this same situation. We cannot distinguish events at 10 to the minus 50 seconds, we can perceive naturally at most a few hundred microseconds 10 to the minus 5 seconds. So then if physics is performing complex processes at the 10 to the minus 50 seconds time interval, we could not distinguish them or follow the chain of cause and effects. The end results would be a change of a physical system from state A to state B in a moment without any cause, a CAUSELESS EFFECT for all we can perceive. But this in fact is the reality since any change from state A to state B must occur in some time interval, but the interval must end somewhere. Wherever it ends, even if 10 to the minus 1000 seconds, then the change from A to B is a sudden jump, a sudden change without no further cause, A CAUSELESS EFFECT! This is in fact A MIRACLE. Now if the change is from any state A to any other, no matter how complex, it will always be a jump, a MIRACLE ASSIGNMENT. In fact there could not be AN INFINITE CHAIN OF CAUSES AND EFFECTS SINCE THERE WOULD NEVER BE ENOUGH TIME TO EXECUTE THEM ALL, THERE MUST BE A FINITE NUMBER OF CAUSE AND EFFECTS AND WHERE THE INTERVALS OF TIME CAN NO LONGER BE DECREASED YOU HAVE THE REIGN OF MIRACLES. It matters not what state a physical system changes from A and into B no matter how complex, it is a miraculous jump just like a complex mass-energy configuration that pops out of nowhere. It is an aesthetic perception that a simple change like a small movement is more or less miraculous than a complex change like a particle becoming a butterfly. At the ultimate time interval both changes are acceptable and possible since reductionism is not even operating anymore, there are no longer any causes and chains of cause and effects, just miraculous transitions between different states of a physical system, just like the mind that perceives intervals of billions of years. Hence the debate on evolution is just a debate on where to assign the miracles and at what time intervals.

Now tell me how much of that extra work is/was "personality" related, human network related, how important was it to be able to sell yourself to other people through your personality or the people you knew ? I ask this because many times I offered to work for companies on my own for their technical problems but they kind of just laughed making me feel as if the problems are not technical or knowledge or making that program, but behavioral, personality related. I mean it seems like the real message today is "anyone can read a book on a given technology, learn it and create that program or technical solution so there is no great demand for this or no need to pay much for this anymore, what we really need is good salesmen, good personality types, good people willing to network with others finding markets and holding lots of meetings, especially people who are willing to stay late nights in the office giving the impression of great effort, sense of urgency, etc." At least this is my impression, if you think I am wrong explain. Thanks.

The range of most salaries in the US is between 1,000 dollars to 3,000 dollars a month. IF you want more you have to work for "real companies"... The real companies are the ones that won't hire you or the ones that will keep you for 6 months or a year then kick you out because of the insane work load they hand you. Who can find a job in a "real company" anymore ? If you walk on water and have a hundred "networked" people within, maybe. These "real comapines" can choose who they want and very few normal humans can get in. I know alot of techs that are 35 years or older and can't find any 50k jobs anymore. Tell me where in the US they will hire an average good tech that isn't willing to be burned out by stress !

The point is what is being produced today in most companies ? My idea is that since most basic needs and products are available and can easily be produced, most companies now just produce fluff. I mean what sense does it make for managers to have endless meetings talking about vague ideas etc ? Why is most work simply information ? What seems to be produced at the end of the day is practically hot air, nothing or pseudo projects that are all thrown away the next day and the cycle goes on forever. For those items that must really be produced and are produced, there is no need to talk about it forever, there is no need for a traditional company structure in most cases, it can be done quickly and at a very low cost. Why rent out offices in high cost cities ? Because the dominating culture is one of status quo, don't really change anything. Why do people have to drive to offices in silicon valley when most work there is just thoughts ? Because companies want to make a STRONG STATEMENT OF PURE POWER AND CONTROL.

It seems to me that in the last decade or more technical know how is no longer so important for companies. I have the impression that personality modes, human networks, who you know, AND ESPECIALLY HOW YOU BEHAVE is much more important. Now this may have always been true to some degree but it seems like companies today don't even know how to judge people or judge by quirks or gut feelings. They ask for alot of knowledge (at least in software, the field I think I know) but in the end it seems that what really counts is AGE, HOW MUCH OVERTIME YOU ARE WILLING TO DO, HOW MUCH YOU LICK ASS etc. I mean even the relationship between work and time at work or working hours is not at all clear or demonstrated. You can achieve alot in 5 hours of work, but then companies think you worked too little, rarely looking at the real results of the work. Whereas if you stay to 10 pm every night and not get anything done you give the impression that you are working. Like in Japan the "salaryman" has to wait until his boss leaves at midnight even if he does nothing because behavior and ritual are of the upmost importance. Then again companies just hand out insane deadlines so you are forced to work 80 hours a week. All this could be the result of technology's efficiency because the basic mechanisms work, production is relatively easy and basic needs are more or less easy to satisfy. So you have companies that just like to play around with people, I know many good people who were fired or let go or laid off etc because the companies don't even know what they want, or just to express a PURE STATEMENT OF POWER AND CONTROL. Any ideas, am I dead wrong, or are there logical reasons behind this ?

An interesting example is if this circularity is applied to time. Then if you go farther in the future you end up back into the past. Or if you consider smaller and smaller time intervals you start getting back to larger times either gradually or with giant jumps, like at 10 to the minus 100 milliseconds time jumps to trillion of years. If you apply circular time with a combination machine going back and forth in time on a circle, you can overcome the COMBINATIONAL LIMITS. Like all the combinations of bits on a DVD would be equal to all the possible films, or applied to books all possible ideas. So 10 to the 10 billion bytes exceeds our ability to try them all out, but with circular time you have an infinite amount of time and you can try them all out. An interesting case could be that if the electron contains a universe named "A", then the electron of the universe "A" could coincide with the original electron. Since the relationship of sizes is coherent and defined within a single universe, but does not need to be coherent outside the universe, then sizes and the concepts of "containing" or "being contained within" do not have to be respected. Hence the smallest dimension can simply conicide with the largest. You would get an infinitely recursive universe, or a sizeless universe where sizes matter and are coherent only in a small range of reciprocal dimensions. It could be that the planck level sizes and dimensions and smaller, not only render time and space incoherent, but also logic, mathematics and the very concepts of sizes, and larger or smaller sizes or containing or contained within. Hence since greater than or less than cannot be defined, neither can logic or math be used. At 10 to the minus 1000 mm the sizes are so small that they are GIGANTIC. Another idea that comes in mind is if the universe is actually only 2 dimensional and the depth dimension really is a size dimension. If something is far away it looks smaller because it IS smaller. When we take a picture and project a 3 dimensional world on a 2 dimensional picture maybe we are actually getting back to the true nature of the world. Things seem far away because in reality they are smaller, and their size changes constantly by bringing them closer and farther. And maybe the entire universe is a plane that is ever expanding or contracting with some things getting smaller and larger relative to each other but globally decreasing or increasing.

Is size circular ? If physics discovers that A is composed of B, and B of C, this would be a typical reductionist view A -> B -> C. Now imagine that at the planck level C ends up being composed of a smaller A, and the above loop goes on forever. If you were at any given size level you could say A is composed of "a smaller" A and is encolsed within a "larger A". But if the 2 As are identical except for size and the loop goes on forever, then A would really simply be composed of itself. You couldn't distinguish between the larger and smaller, they are relative and an infinite "recursive" like loop. Then an easy way out would be to think of the sizes like points on a circle. If you keep on going along the circle you will get back to the point you were at. So maybe size levels are like this, if you keep on getting smaller you get back to the original size. It is a bit like an inversion in space, at a certain point even though you seem to be getting to smaller items, you are actually going back up to larger ones. So maybe particle physics will end up being composed of circular sizes, just like the earth is round and if you walk straight you can get back to where you started, so reductionism could be like this. And maybe even explanations in general and time and many other things like "irreducible" complexity could end up being circular, self-composed, within an infinite recursive loop. An ultimate elementary particle is made up of itself and enclosed within itself, a monolithic slab.

Contrary to what most say and think, from the satellite images, it seems that both the US and Germany are quite similar. They both have most people living in single family homes in suburb like areas, granted with some differences, but generally I see similarities and not differences! The differences are that Germany doesn't have malls or large shopping structures, but the towns are really suburbs and do resemble the american style to some degree. I may be wrong but that is the impression I get from seeing them both from above. Also if you look at random suburbs in the US there are all kinds of types many with winding roads and I think many different economic levels whereas Germany seems more monolithic, its towns are quite similar probably implying a not too large economic diversity.

I was looking at maps.google.country (com or de for germany) and comparing random american suburbs with german suburbs. Both countries are similar since it seems that most people live in single family homes (or at most a few families) with gardens or yards around them. However there is alot of insight you can perceive of the differences between the 2 countries just by looking at the satellite images. The US seems to have alot more infrastructure as far as malls and shopping centers go. There are also alot more highways, roads and generally wider and larger roads. The suburbs in the US tend to go on for miles and merge into other towns. Germany doen't seem to have malls, the roads and highways are fewer and smaller, the towns in germany are also smaller but very well organized. They seem to have alot of room for homes like the US but the towns seem much more person friendly as the sizes don't get to large and without any centers. Anyways you can see that both countries are very rich by the fact that the population is well distributed in many towns and suburbs, they are not all concentrated in a few giant cities like in most of the rest of the world. This may really be the secret of creating rich countries, use up all the land available, suburban sprawl creates wealth. Any comments from anyone who knows both countries well ? It makes me laugh to think that countries like Japan are still light years away from this kind of wealth, let alone China and India etc.

There was a very simple function in Basic called get a$ or inkey$ that could allow you to enter one character without hitting Return in the early 80s. In gwbasic you could have something like this: 10 a$=inkey$: if a$="" goto 10 20 print "you hit";a$ It waits and as soon as you hit a key it prints it out. Simple. I can't find a way to do this in Java. I found a way in Perl after downloading an InKey module, but I can't find a way to do it in Java. Any ideas ? This is one of many reasons why I dislike Java and OO, simple things are complicated. I am using DOS for this and using the simple console input output style program, no windows or graphics, the simplest possible. Thanks anyways for any help.

I read an elaborate debate on the internet between a guy who says that he was programming in Java for 4 years and concluded that it sucked and another guy that said he simply didn't know how to use it. That is exactly the point. A language where these kind of debates happen means that it is a bad language. No one would debate another person that he didn't know how to use Pascal or Basic, at most you could debate the design of bad algorithms. Object oriented Hyporama is another big piece of crap. Objects are just PROCEDURE NAMES in the end. So you make up a nice set of names that have a logical connection between them and you get all the objects you want. If companies where really interested in Reuse they would have created a very simple procedural language with many libraries of procedural functions capable of doing anything. You would just enter the question describing a function you needed in a search engine and the language environment would list the names of the closest procedures, END OF STORY. Compare that with having to navigate class libraries, pointers, threads etc. Another thing that was probably completely wrong was the choice of Client - Server architectures. These created another level of complexity that is totally uselss. IBM mainframes had these problems licked 40 years ago, countless designers are still struggling with remote calls, lans, network objects and all the other problems. Add Java and OO and C++ to all that and you have millions of man years of totally useless work being done.

Actually programming languages didn't develop anymore. They went backwards. There was a time when a simpler and easier language meant progress while a more complex one meant the opposite. In fact the change from assembler to Basic for example was exactly this. Then someone (maybe at Sun or Microsoft) decided that it was time to make things HARD. Now you have the high priests of Java for example saying that to really know how to use it you must spend months on it. That is really ridiculous. The goal is to make them always harder so they can sell books and courses and HYPE by the TONS.

Information Technology is actually a history of regression. I started programming in Basic on Commodores and PCs in the early 80s. It was fast to learn and fast to put ideas into practice. In fact I would argue that 99 % of all IT programming problems were already well solved just using some well thought out Basic programs. Most problems IT has to deal with are really relatively simple. Then came along Turbo Pascal which was a truly great language, fast and very well designed especially to produce well structured programs. I would say that you could really feel a great improvement from Basic to Pascal. You knew things were really getting better. But good things don't last too long. Progress ended. Progress ended when Unix and C started to become popular. Not so much Unix which has some good scripting ideas and languages such as AWK, But the worship of the C language was the beginning of REGRESSION. C was complicated, and was an abrupt departure from progress. I remember that I could quickly whip up good programs in Pascal, but in C things just seemed to start to slow down. Why did I have to allocate memory ? Why do I need the pointers ? and so on. So C started to become popular and programmers started to have to waste time understanding alot of uselss details. Maybe client-server was wrong and mainframe architecture was better. Fast forward the mid 90s and you get OO and JAVA and C++. Ten times more complicated, slower, a never ending list of odd questions, why collect garbage ? why do I need to download 10 Mega ? Why is everything an Object ? etc. etc. The end result today is a mass complication of things that were really solved more then 20 years ago. Maybe Javascript and PERL was the correct direction to follow, but crappy Java became the norm. There is a sociological reason for all this: we need to keep people busy at work, we need to create a never ending set of complex obscure ideas and languages probably because there really is not enough work for everyone. And companies make money by selling hype after hype. It could be that our social system can furnish enough wealth to everyone with very little work since we have an enormous EXCESS CAPACITY in almost all sectors. But this is pure politics - sociology. Fast forward the year 2020 we will have thousands of very complex languages requiring 200 GB of disk to download. Turbo Pascal occupied 40,000 bytes and ROCKED.

Explanations are paintings or drawings. If in the future we somehow lived inside a computer simulation where objects popped into existence from nowhere and then dissappeared or where we could walk on water if we said a magic formula and any other extravagant miraculous phenomena existed, then we would create a science and a description and explanations of cause and effect based on this. So the science or explanations (the causes and effects, the organizing principles etc.) would be a function of the universe we were observing. Change the rules of the universe and the science will change. Extrapolate this to the oddest and most creative combinations of phenomena we could design in the simulator and you would have a Science that would become an Art, a design, an invention, arbitrary with no intrinsic truth other than we are locked inside that particular universe through the simulation. Now imagine that we are really living inside a simulator where a god or an alien race is designing the reality we observe and hence our Science. In this case isn't science just a painting, an art form ? What difference than does it make if we are inside a simulator or if this is the bare reality, isn't it just a quirk combination of elements, cause and effects, just like any quirk Painting (like the more abstract paintings) ? Reality/physics/universe could be (in a simulator) or could have been (in other possible universes) anything imaginable, hence even science is at the most fundamental level truly Arbitrary. In this sense, seen from a far enough angle everything is just an Art form, Art is Science.