LastThursday

One thing's for sure, AI will be everywhere and in everything (as if it isn't already). In the next ten years: It will be normal to have an AI friend or AI partner. Everyone will still have to go into the office, but we'll be talking (literally) to AI all day getting it to do things for your employers. I won't be out of my coding job, but I will be expected to be 10x more productive than I am today. The big players will still be there, but there will be a multitude of smaller players and ways to run very powerful AI for yourself "off grid". China will be big in AI, probably bigger than America. AI will get a lot cheaper to run, and per unit of compute will consume orders of magnitude less power. AI hardware compute power will increase exponentially and may well use quantum or light chips. We'll have embodied AI in very realistic humanoid robots, but they'll be the preserve of the rich and research institutions. AI will be used extensively in medicine and especially for designing very targeted drugs and doing it cheaply - possibly personalised drugs. There still won't be flying cars.

Totally agree. Humans evolved to be constantly on the move, the more you move the better for your health. Even twenty minutes of walking can be a great benefit if you can't face a sweaty gym, small steps.

What can I say? Either you believe in infinity or you don't. You can only have infinitely many steps if you believe in infinity. And as I said, you're only looking at one infinity. You CAN cover an infinite number of steps if they're infinitely small in size, that makes two infinities - which come together to make something finite. The confusion with Zeno's paradox is that it is a pure thought experiment, not something you can concretely perform in reality. But I get where you're coming from, even some mathematicians don't believe in infinity. It's would be interesting to try and find an actual infinity in reality. Infinity is a super slippery concept to truly understand.

Like any paradox the resolution to it is to look at it from a different angle. In this case it's a matter of realising there are two infinites at work, not one. Essentially it says it takes an infinite number of steps to get from A to B because you can keep dividing the space between A and B forever, and so it should be impossible to get from A to B: that's one infinity. But what's missing is that for every division the space shrinks by the same ratio, and gets infinitesimally small (another infinity). So one infinity "cancels" the other infinity to produce a finite distance. This can seem super counterintuitive, but you see it all the time in maths. Calculus is based on the same idea. I'm not sure it proves anything about God or consciousness.

I see it as more dynamic, more like a landscape than anything else. You only ever operate from whatever level of consciousness you're currently in. Maybe you start spending more and more time in higher levels, but you can still slip back to lower. One thing that happens is that from higher levels, the lower levels get recontextualised and this can permanently affect how you experience the lower levels. Once you've gained knowledge or insight, it kind of sticks around and affects everything. I don't like the terms higher and lower, it's more like this state and that state, and they're both different and have their own qualities, and maybe in one state you can see things more clearly than the other.

@Sugarcoat you have a great mind.

@Chadders what could be more spiritual or divine than union, and then creation? Then again many things have a divine dimension to them seen in the right light. In some sense you could say that anything that is "natural" is also divine, irrespective of negative consequences such as overpopulation. I'm not sure that maturity is necessarily the best argument for or against having a family. Is it that you need to be mature to start a family or is it that it matures you in the process? A stronger trait to have would be commitment. Can you be committed to your family unit and your kids for twenty years or more? Except I reckon most wouldn't look at themselves and say: boy I've lacked commitment in my life, I really shouldn't be starting a family. No, they just go right ahead and do it anyway, because it's a natural urge if not traditional. It's not really going out of fashion any time soon, even if the make up of having a family changes with tradition. Even people who at one time dismiss having a family, may succumb later in life. But I admit, commitment is probably some form of maturity. I think it's hard to be prescriptive about a process that lasts twenty years or more, if not the rest of your life - things change too much over that time to say anything much about it from the outset, even if it seems obvious two people would make lousy parents. Personally, I've sat on the fence about it most of my life. I feel variously: happy that all my money and time are my own without compromise, I'm stress free moslty, but then, that I'm missing out on the love and connection and joy of having a family (and maybe even yes, maturity). All my friends have just got on with it, without much deeper thought to it I suspect. Most of my male friends weren't ready to be fathers, but I think that was just a hypothetical fear of confinement and probably the unknown - they're all decent committed fathers now without exception. I would probably be the same if the situation arose.

@Leo Gura Half way through the vid and it's good so far. I've argued for the process of evolution on here before being able to explain the intelligence of biology, no God required. But you're quite right that without knowing how life itself arose from non-biological matter, then evolution doesn't have a firm base (because evolution implies a very long chain of cause and effect). My two ideas are that 1) there isn't a difference between dead and alive matter, it's a completely smooth sliding scale from one to the other. 2) life bootstrapped itself from non-life by obtaining a sense of self or identity, i.e. to be alive any alive thing needs to keep itself intact against everything else. My other observervation is about infinity. You exlude mathematical infinity in the arguments, but any discussion about infinity really does have to be mathematical in some sense. The definition of an "absolute" infinity being the lump sum of everything is ultimately circular; because who's to say that there are infinitely many things to lump in? A better definition of infinity should always say something about unboundedness and not how much it can contain. It's non-obvious that reality is unbounded in every aspect. I'm hoping for some subjective idealist arguments in the second half, here goes...

I hadn't heard of Harry Mack, but he's phenomenal.

I tried again with Miles and a better mic this time and had a lot smoother conversation. It still misunderstands and goes off on a tangent, so you kind of have to interrupt it and guide it back on track. I can definitely see using it for bouncing ideas around.

I have a whole list of these I enjoy on my journal here:

@integral I tried it for ten minutes or so. It was very good, but still not quite there IMO. I did feel quite awkward talking to a machine especially since the tone was super upbeat and American (sorry Americans) - like a happy puppy. It wasn't helped by the bot misinterpreting what I was saying, maybe due to a bad mic or just an accent thing. I found that if I didn't talk cleanly to it (no hesitation or mumbling) it would misunderstand me and start going off on a tangent. All in all: awkward. But it's still science fiction come true.

If the system allows the by-pass then it's there for a reason, take advantage of it. If you're concerned about eligibility, but not convinced by the people you've spoken to, then speak to someone higher who can definitively say yes or no. Also, do you have a tutor you can talk things over with, can they find out for you? And, if you're still not convinced after all that, then don't take the option. Either way, a year or the extra effort may seem like a lot now, but in the bigger scheme of things it won't seem like much. An extra year would give your more experience and knowledge and better grounding, or putting in the effort now will rob you of time and peace, but it's only for a short period.

It's no coincidence. AI is made in our image. What the technologists are hell bent on doing is creating a facsimile of a human. Why? Because machines are tireless, don't complain and don't get ill. But we are also intrinsically fascinated by ourselves, it is an indulgence for men to create a person from wires and electricity and pure logic.

Probably Donald Hoffman or possibly Daniel Dennett or Anil Seth. Being an AI is just the modern version of Rene Descartes "Evil Demon", an all powerful entity that creates a deceptive reality for us, and try as we might we can never be certain that we're not being deceived. We can't have "certain knowledge" about anything at all. On the face of it your question has no clear answer. Then again, the only AI is the AI we have now, and it's taken 70 odd years to get here, and it's very clear that it's nowhere near the level of capability to simulate our reality. So if you're basing your question on our current AI (anything else is a fantasy), then no, we're not AI. The problem with these sorts of questions is that you have to find the "Evil Demon" or catch him out, to prove or disprove the question. You may as well replace the word "AI" with "God", it's the same difference.

Some of my random analytical thoughts. You could say that "feeling empty" is just a figure of speech or stock phrase, and so it just stands for something not connected to its literal meaning: there isn't some sort of emptiness. Maybe then it's just a general malaise whatever that might be, some negativity, so nothing special there. On the other hand, if you take it in a more metaphorical way, then just look to its opposite: "feeling full". Full of what and what is being filled? I guess that's fairly nebulous, but you could substitute in any number of things like joy, excitement, stimulation, emotion, fulfilment of goals and so on. You are the container being filled with these nominalisations, like a bottle being filled with liquid. Feeling empty then is not being filled with those positive things, a metaphorical lack. I think the common everyday usage of it though is just as a way to describe a generally overwhelming emotion, say "feeling empty" after someone's death; or, when the fun stuff in life has been taken away, or when there's nothing meaningful going in life in general. In short a lack or removal of something positive. It is fascinating how much metaphorical language is taken in a literal way. People go around acting as if there are actual hurdles to jump over, and mountains to climb, and bottled up rage ready to explode. It goes to show how much abstract ideas and emotions need to be grounded in more concrete things even if it's just in our heads. Consequently, one way to do therapy is to play with that metaphorical language: "if you were to feel full, how would that be?" and so on.

The only way to change how you act is through introspection and self awareness - which is what you're doing. When your anger is triggered by whomever, it triggers a programme of set behaviour (i.e. a habit) within yourself. That happens because nearly 99% of the way we act is automatic. So you have options: cut the link between the trigger and response (behaviour), or change the behaviour itself, or just avoid the trigger. Since you learnt the behaviour over time, it can be unlearnt. One way to unlearn a habit is by pure repetition: every time you find yourself overacting angrily, you force yourself to calm down or behave differently in the moment - this is doable but takes time and patience and good self-awareness. Another way to unlearn behaviour is by interrupting the automatic programme. You can do this by doing something completely different in the middle of the behaviour: hug your father for example or walk out of the room, start dancing, go for a run, the choices are endless. The point is to interrupt the pattern every time it happens. Over time the behaviour will be weakened or "unlearnt" - and as a bonus you will find other ways to cope with your angry emotion. I'm not pulling this out of nowhere, this is what NLP (Neuro-Linguistic Programming) is all about.

@Ninja_pig classic Escher. @trenton your link didn't work.

You could also take the intent angle and ask yourself does "sober living" align with your intent? Nearly all of us carry on living without any strong intent, and we end up relying on what society provides to give us meaning: news, social media, streaming, junk food and on and on. All those things can be quite exciting or strongly stimulating and a way to fill time or to feel like you're taking part in society. And, we end up being neurotic because we start relying on that stimulation to feel "normal". Without it we feel lost or detached from society, and without the distraction we start looking inward at all the bad things about ourselves. To re-engage with loving life, you need to build up strong intent in how you go about things. In other words you actively choose what you want for yourself, instead of being spoonfed by society: a life purpose. But a good start, is to cut out the time wasting distractions, so you can at least give yourself time and mental space for working out what you want out of life.

Rant: I have to congratulate you on actually engaging with your own question, many on the forum make a post but don't bother to actually engage with the answers. Rant over. I suppose you could look at it from the other end. What does being gullible involve? Such a person would take anything they're told to be true. They will go about their day acting as if X fact is suddenly now true. Maybe they believe they're God, or that they'll reincarnate when they die, or that the world will end in 2027, or that eating peppers is bad for the gut, or that you can survive on air alone and so on. Maybe all of those things at once. Applying your heuristic, then you could fairly say that the aforementioned are all wrong, and you'll then need to wait patiently for proof of each of them to come along (or look for proof proactively). Some things you may never know until it actually happens, for example the end of the world, effectively making the belief unfalsifiable - you can neither say it's right nor wrong, and you can't take a position at all (logically). If you do proactively look for proof, then you're admitting a more neutral position: why waste your effort if it couldn't possibly be true? I think it's this that you're arguing not wasting time on. My point then was that discernment works better than proof. If a belief is unfalsifiable, then you just move on, and cut the potential BS at the root. If you do have a modicum of belief then your discernment should kick in first. For example, is reincarnation real? Well, you have to look at the numbers of reports of it compared to the number of people in the world (or who have ever lived), hmm it's probably BS, since that ratio is near zero. Another example, do mobile phones give you brain cancer? That's less clear, but you can still be discerning, i.e. radio waves don't travel well in water, and your brain is mostly water, it's probably BS then. In short most of us have some ability to discern things and judge whether something is true or not. Gullible people just choose not to be so discerning, they want to be believe, because it's exciting or through wish fulfilment or it makes some sort of sense, or they just "know" it's right. They are actively guillible (if not consciously so).

I don't know, it feels as though there's more nuance to openmindedness. There is a process of discernment which comes with having knowledge and experience and this allows you to cut through most BS. It's also quite possible to hold a neutral or ambiguous position towards things, and then fall to one side or the other as you get more experience or knowledge around it, or even flip-flop over time. I would say that you're free to take whichever starting point you want, wrong until proven right, right until proven wrong, or something more neutral, because in the end you may change your mind in any direction. But, if you're not very discerning in the first place, then wrong until proven right is a helpful heuristic.

I believe they're also called Alsatians, Alsace being in France (now). Sorry couldn't resist.

Scotland and Wales are already countries. Countries are imaginary. The European Union is just an admission of this fact and in lots of ways acts a de facto country in world affairs, especially economically. There's benefit to having divisions at lots of different levels, humans are good at dealing with a certain amount of organic chaos. People should be free to able to choose when to be separate and when to be together at any level they see fit. The one serious downside to countries (nations) is that the division it creates can increase the sense of separation, protectionism and induce potential conflict. But, fundamentally the Earth itself belongs to no-one and no one person has any more right to a piece of land than any other. Do animals care about international borders?

Having a vision is only a means to an end. The crux of it is somehow building up a strong positive emotion in yourself that will propel you forward. A vision is just a good story that gets your emotions going, if there isn't a vision that does that for you, then you'll need to try other things. Another way is finding your Zone of Genius, basically, all the things you're good at. The reason for doing that is because there are already positive emotions attached to the things you're good at. Concentrating your efforts around those things focuses your time into positive emotions. I could be wrong but that is essentially what Leo's Life Purpose course taps into. Other things you can do is to research. Learning new things can open up avenues that excite you. If you're a people person, then collective activities may inspire you instead. So rather than focusing narrowly on having "vision", you should be focusing on "what produces strong positive emotion within me?" and that will carry you forward.

Fundamentally most telecommunications is based on light, electricity, computers and materials technology. But each of those things in themselves are huge areas of physics and engineering. I'm not sure there's any one channel that covers all those things, it really depends on how much depth and technology knowledge you're after. For example this video covers Maxwell's Equations which are to do with electromagnetism (light): But that might be too much information? Anyway, any of the science channels I posted in my journal will be of interest to you (towards the bottom of that page): I short you'll have to look around for stuff that matches the level you're interested in.