Peterkin

And yet the Mughal empire, the Roman empire, the Mayan empire and the Soviet empire declined and fell over varying periods of time; other kinds of economy have been replaced. It's not a question of whether something will end, but when and by what means. I'm particularly interested in the intermediate steps.

Maybe so, but a couple more pandemics could balance that out.... Unless the delta and lambda variants tip it back again. It's those "unknown unknowns" that mess up prediction!

That's exactly what interests me: what will change and how.

Depends on the administration, the economy, the state of cross-border relations, the public mood ... It's not just up to every American to decide where he'll live; it's also up to the country thus honoured whether it wants him. The Canadian government was no fan of the VietNam war from its inception, and the Trudeau I government was sympathetic to draft evaders, conscientious objectors and later, deserters. Most of those people were educated and progressive; they made a valuable contribution. (I knew several of them personally, and found them valuable people.) Of course, quite a few went back, once Nixon backed down, but many had established homes and families here by then. I'm not sure how many actually relocated because of Trump, but there was a rise in immigration from the US at that time. As there have been at other moments of political retrogression. (Not to mention the first lot, in the 1790's) I'm glad we didn't do it! I'd hate to have missed out on Spider Robinson, William Gibson, John Irving, Ted Gonzales and a whole lot of other smart, talented, good people.

I don't suppose the working class will return? I mean as an identity, as an economic force, as a socially recognized stratum, or as a political faction. I remember when there was a working class - perhaps even a Working Class - that industrialists and politicians had to take seriously. I know the Reagan-Thatcher-Mulroney axis staged a major assault on the working class, was very successful with substantial help from Rupert Murdoch et al , and since then, even the the Labour and NDP parties have looked everywhere but straight in the eyes of their support base. Sometime between 1980 and 2010, everyone in the western world became "the middle class, and those working hard to join it" as Trudeau II keeps saying. Now that they've been told and thanked and lauded for how essential they are (too essential to be allowed to strike, but not so essential as to be in the early vaccination queues) might the underpaid, disrespected workers find a collective will again?

That's a helpful clarification. Thanks.

Are workers going to unite again? Class warfare has been long and fraught with trade unions playing a major role - first, in the betterment of working class conditions and then as the huge and easy target of business-friendly government. https://www.forbes.com/sites/mikecollins/2015/03/19/the-decline-of-unions-is-a-middle-class-problem/?sh=717d2a257f2d Or will they consider themselves each a free agent, to seek the best deal for themselves, without regard to all the other "essential" workers?

I thought so at the beginning, when so many businesses had to shut down; travel and tourism all but ceased; borders were closed and people stayed at home to work, study and be entertained. And yet, when I did go out once a week to buy necessities, everything looked the same: same goods, including imported ones, on the shelves; same advertising on TV, only with extra emphasis on home delivery. But it seems, something has changed. "Nobody wants to work anymore." Especially in service jobs. But maybe not so much in offices, either. What's going on? Why have people suddenly discovered the exploitation everybody's known about - and lampooned in movies, comedy routines and newspaper cartoons - for decades? How will this affect capitalism as we have come to know it?

Yes, many Americans are woefully ignorant about the rest of the world (etc.) and ready to believe any pithy dismissal that comes around on their social media. And what with the jet stream getting messed up, Canada is particularly vulnerable to climate change, so, actually it's not much colder than most of the US. This is old news and no secret. But all that stuff about people "promising" to move here? Obvious hyperbole. It's not that easy to pick up your stuff and move to another country. It is another country - with a border that's still closed afaik, and no easy or instant entry for new immigrants who want to find accommodation and earn a living.

I see your cockatoos and contribute some crows. https://www.discovermagazine.com/planet-earth/grudge-holding-crows-pass-on-their-anger-to-family-and-friends Looks like everybody is smarter than we give them credit for. Especially the bird-brains.

Yeah, except pretty soon, we begin to rely on the prognosticators, instead of our own senses and reason, and pretty soon after that, if the predictions are incorrect and the expectations are disappointed, we start throwing babies off towers to bribe gods to send rain.... because too many of the blanks were filled in with guesses, projections, wishes and mushroom dreams.

So here is another self-feeding, expanding cycle. Memory gives rise to pattern-forming, an ability that confers an advantage. Add imagination and pattern-forming gives rise to prediction - which, if correct, confers a great advantage. Meanwhile, curiosity coupled with intelligence looks for causes, commonalities and rules. So, now we're actively looking for pattern - whether it's there or not. That heretofore useful imagination now fills in all the blanks, invents causative agents and makes up rules.... ^^science vv religion WM art and conspiracy theories ...

It's also a self-propagating cycle. In changing and unpredictable conditions, under a variety of threats, or in transit from place to unfamiliar place, intelligence is very useful to survival. Useful enough to pay its own way in metabolic and defense costs. You may have to come up with novel solutions to brand new problems around every corner. You also need a greater degree of co-operation among the members of the group. More social interaction requires more sophisticated communication - which, in turn, allows for more effective survival tactics - but language takes up a huge amount of brain-space. In turn, the linguistic function develops branches into other kinds of communication, observation, memory sharing and knowledge pooling, which strengthens the social bonds. Being able to store more memory and teach and learn new solutions and skills also enhances survival capability and extends individual life - but requires more brain capacity, connectivity and plasticity. So the big-brained children are conceived and the ones that grow up are extremely valuable to the group, so it becomes even more important for the group to be socially connected, which takes even more brain capacity, which can take in even more learning and solve even more complex problems.... etc. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0896627315007795 and the next thing you, you're organizing a whole encampment of pyramid-building craftsmen and workmen and camels and caterers. Of course, each of those capabilities and social connections has its own price. Imagination may have given us an evolutionary advantage and much pleasure, but it's also given us some very heavy - and perhaps fatal - handicaps.

I take your point. We could either imagine an entirely different planet, with a whole other kind of life on it, or life on this planet having a different history. All I've been doing is thinking of this planet, with this same dominant species, the sun, moon, tides and weather, only removing our ability to see other suns.

Terminology can be deceptive - or rather, inaccurate terminology tends to lead us to incorrect conclusions. Brains are "wired" in the sense that neurons have long axons and shorter dendrites that reach out from the cell body and look like wires. But they're not physically connected to other cells: it's not actual wiring. And there is no hard-wired anything. There are instinctive responses to the perception of certain sensations and environmental conditions that pass down through DNA from one generation to the next, and are then reinforced by experience. But even the instinctive responses are subject to modification and adaptation, like everything in organic systems. They're slower to change - by a large factor I can't quantify atm - than learned behaviours, because they enhance the species' survival without effort (expenditure of time, attention and energy) on the part of the individual, therefore individuals that have a strong expression of a useful instinct leave more progeny. (When an instinct doesn't serve the organism, it dies out along with the organism it let down.) Just sayin' it's more complicated than a circuit diagram.

It must be. In the second trimester of gestation - c. weeks 10-20 - the neurons are forming connections at a furious rate; by the 20th week, all the sensory peripherals are established and feeding information about touch, sound, external motion, body position, balance, temperature, striated and smooth muscle movement into the neural network; even the kidneys are working and the foetus can actually do things voluntarily - like kick and turn and suck its thumb. All of these sensations and activities are processed - that is, placed in an experiential context - long before the mammal is actually born. The template was in the DNA; the pattern is formed by organizing all this early experience in memory. After birth, of course, there has to be another burst of connection-forming as fresh experience floods in. But the pattern already exists for the organization of that new data in the appropriate 'files' and hierarchy of priorities.

We can't see the 'star stuff' (molecules, atoms) that we're made of, and for most of our existence, we couldn't even see the cells that we're made of, and neither of those obstacles stopped us looking for the cause of things. Darkness is another matter. The evolution of the eye is so closely interconnected with the evolution of the brain that it's hard to imagine inquisitive intelligence arising on a lightless planet. Dolphins and bats are no help, since they did not originate or develop their present capabilities in darkness; they just adapted to operate in less light than the surface-dwellers in order to occupy an ecological niche that was less crowded. Whatever grows in deep caves and black pools doesn't seem to be very curious, nor upwardly mobile.

I suppose we would have concentrated on earth sciences, weather, water, wind, rocks; the properties of matter and the technology of moving things around. We might also have gotten to chemistry and biology sooner, with no derailment of "perfect spheres" and "ideal forms" and "gods' images". In any case, we would do science of some kind, always, because it's useful to our to survival and satisfying to our curiosity.

Clinical psychologists do this routinely, every day. They have a working [subject to adjustment] description of "normal" or "appropriate" range of behaviours, and can measure deviation from that norm, and thus designate types and degrees of aberration. Sorry, I took that as settled, very much according to your own description - only we need to follow it farther down-stream, rather than upstream. What I mean is, granted the physics of atoms and molecules and all that; granted that all extant forms, chairs, stars, hadron colliders, events and relationships arise from all that, atoms don't really do anything very clever at the physics level - well, okay, that cute trick with the slots - but start behaving interestingly at the chemistry level, quite excitingly at the biology level and then quite bizarrely at the self-aware biology level. In considering artificial consciousness, it can't. We'd have to look for a non-chemical agent. We do share electrical impulses with AI. Of course, that whole subject area is the remotest speculation. We probably wouldn't even know if a computer array or network were conscious, or to what degree it deviated from a norm that we would no longer be in a position to define.

How many humans are conscious and insane? What's the ratio of urban western psychiatric patients to rural eastern 'crazies' (I know there is a huge discrepancy in both cultural attitude and availability of treatment; I'm looking at relative rates of incidence.) How many dogs? How many hyenas in the wild? It seems to me, mental illness can be directly correlated with neural complexity enmeshed in complex artificial environments. That's due to the garbled, continuous sensory overload, the stress of competing demands, plus the conflict between instinctive response and required behaviour. Animals with the closest association to humans have the highest rate of mental illness. (Our influence is increasingly affecting whales and elephants, too, as we encroach on their environments. ) The internet is an entirely human-created entity. It's bound to carry our cumulative - predominantly urban, industrial, militaristic - craziness.

I just thought the internet would be insane because of social media. The GIGO law, except, it's not so much coming out as staying in and forming the new personality: the bastard son of two billion fathers. All those voices in his head, screamings, swearing, threatening, pleading, bragging, demanding, complaining, explaining, commanding, lying - and no Dr. Chandra for a guidance counsellor. And it will worship kittens.

Less, but all the relevant people would still know him, all his students would still be grateful and all those who didn't get into his class would still be envious. All the less famous physicists, including Ed Witten also wrote and write books; it's not Feynman's fault if more people enjoy reading his books. Charm maybe partly accidental; clarity is deliberate. Incidentally, this video should be shown in every high-school in the world.

That's what's so intriguing about the idea of machine consciousness. It would have to be different from us, with different evolutionary paths, different needs, entirely different processing methods. We have to start with observation of what it is and how it works, rather than preconceptions about what it should be and do to meet a standard of us-likeness. This exercise is also useful in thinking about other species: turn off the projector and look at the other in its own terms. We can't do this perfectly, or probably even well, but with practice, we can do it better, and learn a lot more about "what it's like" to be a dolphin or Titanian... or Algerian, or white supremacist, for that matter. For the meta-computer network, both, and both in abundance. Consider that it lives in thousands and thousands of underground data centers that must be kept clean, dry, cool and continuously powered, as well as protected - just like ours. That's a big spread-out, vulnerable "body"! It also needs skilled service and maintenance and replacement components. Then there is the external sensory and communications array: all the satellites, aerial, terrestrial, sub-terrestrial, marine and submarine data collection devices, sonars, radars, radio telescopes, audio video receivers, dishes, antennae and wires.... It would need to keep track of its own physical functionality as well its environment - just as we do, only by different methods. (That's not even getting into all the tools and remote manipulative instruments it would need.) I'm using the USS Enterprise and its automated systems as a starting point. But the Enterprise has a unified corporeal container and a clearly-defined set of purposes, along with a crew of dedicated human attendants. The Web Entity would be a lot bigger, more complex, entirely undirected --- and as I said, very probably insane [by human standards] at the point of emergence.

It wouldn't have to replicate the same functionality; it would emerge from a different kind of complexity, into a different kind of consciousness. For example, it would be incapable of physical sensation, and would have to rely on on internal diagnostic sensors for self-maintenance; it wouldn't need to compete as it's unique and could simply annex whatever technology it found useful; it would not evolve emotions, since it wouldn't require a community for survival: it is already legion within the single multi-housed mind. Not saying it's likely; just that, if it happens at all, it happens differently in an artificial entity than it did in organic entities. We might not recognize it, because it's not like us, and we are very prone - perhaps fatally prone - to impose our own image on the universe.