Delta1212

Because if the fluid surrounding the brain actively flowed through the rest of the body, the danger of infection reaching the brain through the blood would increase dramatically. That's why the blood-brain barrier exists. You don't want your cerebrospinal fluid (or equivalent) flowing through your heart.

Nobody. The US really dominates that competition.

Ok, I'll briefly cover how a neural network is set up just to make sure we're on the same page: You have three layers of "neurons": the input layer, the hidden layer and the output layer. Technically, you can have multiple hidden layers if you want, but apparently there's some math that I haven't actually looked at that shows more than one hidden layer is unnecessary in pretty much all cases. Anyway, the input layer takes in input (say, the state of all the squares in a tic tac toe board), the hidden layer crunches the data and the output layer gives you a result based on that input (what space to put your next mark in). Every neuron in each layer has a connection to every neuron in the next layer. These connections are weighted. Each neuron also has an activation threshold that tells it whether to fire based on whether its inputs sum to that threshold. So you expose the input layer to some data. Based on the data, some of the neurons activate. Those activations propagate to the hidden layer through the filter of the weighted connections. Based on that, some of the hidden layer neurons are activated. Those activations propagate to the output layer filtered through the weighted connections and some of the output layer neurons activate. Those activations give you your output. Training a neural network involves setting the weights and activation thresholds to the correct values such that a given input will result in the desired output. When using an evolutionary algorithm, we start with a population of neural nets that have the values of their weights and thresholds set semi-randomly. We then apply those networks to whatever task we're training them to perform. The worst performers are discarded and the best performers are allowed to reproduce with "mutations" (i.e. The values have a random chance of deviating by some amount from the values in the "parent" neural net). The next generation is applied to the task and the process repeats until we have a network that performs to whatever standard we've set.

Do you understand how evolutionary algorithms are currently used to train neural networks?

But the equation doesn't tell you how much "intelligence" each one has. You need a characteristic that you're measuring and a way to determine to what degree each individual has that characteristic. Typically when using an evolutionary algorithm, we'd measure the performance at some task, reproduce those most successful at the task and eliminate those that are least successful. I'm not sure how what you're proposing is going to work. Could you provide a break down for what you'd be doing algorithmically step by step?

It is exceedingly unlikely that telekinesis and telepathy will be "all the rage" at any point in the future, and I say this as someone who put together a thought-controlled quadricopter as a project in college.

I guess my question would be: if we're already dealing with an effect that is so small that negligible would be a generous description, is it really reasonable to treat the two as being co-located. Obviously there's not much difference between being in the same spot and being a few feet apart, but "not much difference" applies to most parts of the problem. I understand and agree they'd both hit at the same time if co-located. I'm just wondering if that's a reasonable simplification to make in this case?

The conversation surrounding the relationship and interaction between religion and science. It's important to understand where both come from, how they operate, how people who subscribe to each interact with their institutions and what one can and cannot say about the other. It's a complicated topic and many people draw bad conclusions about it by oversimplifying things.

Biology cares more about how well something works than how easy it is to define. Also, considering how arbitrary taxonomy is, making it easier isn't really an important virtue in the design of a system (especially since I think blurring the line between fluids with separate functions makes taxonomy harder. It's there to make distinctions so that we can understand what is going on better. If we wanted fewer names to remember, we'd just call everything in our body "Human Body Stuff" instead of bothering with distinct names for different tissues and structures.)

But clearly what we currently have is also a scenario that makes sense and can happen because it did happen.

It's not a coincidence, I think, that science tends to flourish in places and among people that have a lot of time and wealth that doesn't need to be spent on basic survival. When you're "wandering in the wilderness" and your primary concern is where your next meal is coming from and how you're going to fend off threats, a religious proscription on shellfish makes sense. They go bad easily and can make you sick. It's better to avoid eating it than gamble with your health, especially when get sick is even more dangerous than in a society with modern healthcare. A lot of religious rules can be traced to a practice of saying "This behavior had a good/bad result. Keep/stop doing it, and here's a best guess as to why or a story to help you remember to do it/not do it." When people aren't so concerned about day to day survival, there is time to figure out whether some practice really is a good or bad idea and, if so, why. We can, for instance, figure out what causes shellfish to make you sick and then figure out ways to preserve, prepare and consume them that avoid the undesirable outcome. When you don't have the time and resources to do this, however, it's generally better to just follow the rules than to experiment with breaking them and wind up getting yourself killed or seriously disrupting the functioning of your society (and thus putting at risk a lot of people who rely on that society to survive). Religion in this case is quite literally the poor man's science, because scientific inquiry is a luxury.

Intelligence is about being able to perform complex tasks. If you aren't training this AI to do anything in particular, how exactly are you going to apply a selection pressure to evolve it toward anything? Eve in humans, we didn't exactly evolve "intelligence." There are a lot of tasks we needed to perform and our brains evolved to get better at those tasks by being continuously tested for its ability to pull off complex behaviors that were necessary for survival. Our brains are good at a lot of different things because there was a pressure to be good at each of those things. If you don't have a task, or range of tasks, for an AI to perform, you're not going to be able to evolve it to do anything. Performance is how you quantify which configurations are more "intelligent" and if you can't quantify that, you can't make any sort of progress.

Why is your scenario better than what we have?

Indeed, if you no longer needed to worry about an object's gravity once you'd passed another object we'd be flung out of the solar system every time mercury crossed between Earth and the Sun.

If it is impossible for a universe to exist without having been created by a deity, then God is necessary and must exist. If God does not exist, then it is not necessary and it must be possible for the universe to exist in the absence of a creator God. We don't currently have the knowledge needed to declare unequivocally whether or not God is necessary for the existence of the universe. Every argument I've ever seen to the contrary has assumed one position or the other as a premise. Either God is necessary and we do live in a universe with a God or we do not live in a universe with a God and God is not necessary.

You need two fluids because it is a hell of a lot easier to design two separate tools to perform two completely different tasks than it is to design a single tool that performs just as well at both tasks as a dedicated tool performs at each.

Also, sort of a 2b and something that wouldn't really matter at all except probably for 1, but the acknowledgement that the lines we use to classify things are essentially arbitrary and you can develop a classification system that would group or exclude pretty much any object that you want for any given category. Combine that with resistance to change without some compelling reason and throw in that there doesn't seem to be a particularly major one for this reclassification and I can see the annoyance. That said, Pluto is still exactly the same object it always was and I don't think it makes all that much difference what we call it, myself.

Yeah, evolutionary algorithms represent one of the two big ways that neural networks are trained (the other being back-propagation). Of the two, I have more experience using evolutionary algorithms, but you'd apply those to competing networks, not individual "neurons." Honestly, the only reason I hadn't already responded to this topic is because I'm not entirely sure what the question is. Unity, could you explain how you think AIs are being developed now, what you're proposing as an alternative and how the two are different? I know that's more or less what you tried to do in the OP, but I'm having some difficulty understanding what you meant.

Yes, but you said the closing speed of the Earth and the object, rather than the acceleration of the object. I realize that the acceleration due to Earth's gravity is going to be the same, but the acceleration of Earth due to the object's gravity is not (barely) so the closing speed won't be the same (again, technically though not measurably, and insomuch as two accelerating objects have a closing speed). I probably shouldn't have said the elephant will 'fall' faster in that case, but I was looking at it from an Earth-stationary perspective. Am I mistaken in all this?

Buh dum tss Technically isn't the attraction dependent upon both masses, it's just that the Earth is so much more massive than anything that we find on the Earth that the non-Earth's contribution is essentially negligible? So an elephant will actually fall faster than a mouse but by an immeasurable amount because compared to the Earth an elephant and a mouse might as well have the same mass. That aside, I think fall is a better word than move. Fall implies an acceleration where move generally doesn't. I conjure a different mental image when I hear that two objects fall toward one another than when I hear that two objects move toward one another, and the image I get from the word fall more closely matches what is happening.

Yes, good idea. Please do this.

None of the above. You can't classify composite materials as if they were a single substance. To take from the example above, is a glass of water a solid or a liquid? Well, the glass is a solid and the water is a liquid. The glass of water is not a solid or a liquid, it is a solid containing a liquid. Similarly, the human body is not a solid, liquid or gas. It's a combination of a lot of different substances, some of which are solids, some liquids and some gasses. Trying to treat the human body as if it were a single unit is going to lead to a lot of confusion because it isn't made up of some homogenous substance that can be classified in that way.

I think the "donut hole" should have zero g as long as you're in line with a plane running through the equator. The surface along the inner equator would have an apparent gravity pointing toward the core from the spin, though. I think.

That's roughly accurate. I say roughly because in actual practice eye color isn't determined by a single gene, so inheritance isn't going to be quite that simple and straightforward.

Maintaining a gravitational field does not consume any energy.