Can Curiosity Be Programmed? 269
destinyland writes "AI researcher Jurgen Schmidhuber says his main scientific ambition 'is to build an optimal scientist, then retire.' The Cognitive Robotics professor has worked on problems including artificial ants and even robots that are taught how to tie shoelaces using reinforcement learning, but he believes algorithms can be written that allow the programming of curiosity itself. 'Curiosity is the desire to create or discover more non-random, non-arbitrary, regular data that is novel and surprising...' He's already created art using algorithmic information theory, and can describe the simple algorithmic principle that underlies subjective beauty, creativity, and curiosity itself. And he ultimately addresses the possibility that the entire Universe, including everyone in it, is in principle computable by a completely deterministic computer program."
No, but it can be beaten out (Score:2, Funny)
Oh wait, you're not talking about children... nevermind.
curiosity 0.1 (Score:5, Funny)
#!/bin/sh
for i in who what where when why how; do
echo "But $i, dad?"
done
I hereby submit this project to the /. community under the GPL v2.
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Why not the GPLv3 ?
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The previous guy must have been a kernel hacker, thats why.
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Can curiosity be tested?
In the abscence of a (Turing-style?) test then how can we say this script isn't a satisfactory implementation?
Re:curiosity 0.1 (Score:4, Funny)
You forgot the infinite loop.
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Eventually they grow old.
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echo "$i"
done
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sudo killall Anonymous Coward
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There. (Score:2)
002 Hypothesise
003 Go To 1
Physics of computing the universe (Score:5, Interesting)
The problem with this is that you need to be outside the universe in order to do so, you can't calculate the universe from within itself any more than a VMWare can run a machine faster than the host processor.
You'd also need more mass in your computer than exists in the universe, observable or otherwise.
So sure, I'll go with the theory that its possible, just not by any thing in our universe.
Likewise, nothing in our universe could leave it to perform the calculation elsewhere, as doing so links the two realities together, so you now need to simulate both.
Everything is interconnected and the very act of attempting to simulate the universe changes the simulation. Every new version of the simulation would instantly require a new version to take into account the changes from the previous version.
The theory is ... cute at best, but unworkable.
Re:Physics of computing the universe (Score:4, Interesting)
VMWare should, in theory, be able to simulate a system faster than the host processor, as long as it doesn't actually run that fast.
We should, in theory, be able to simulate the universe, just not as fast as the universe actually moves.
Besides, I bet we can just gloss over a lot of the boring bits and stay within a margin of error while ultimately simulating faster than the universe is actually transpiring. That doesn't seem unreasonable.
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Yes, I agree, I should have specified.
We will not be able to simulate in real time or faster.
However, glossing over bits means you are also, wrong, however so slightly.
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You made so much sense in your previous post.. too bad you had to make this one as well.
Simulating the universe from within the universe is impossible - regardless of the rate, as your simulated universe should contain the simulation itself.... which is a positive feedback loop.
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You made so much sense in your previous post.. too bad you had to make this one as well.
Simulating the universe from within the universe is impossible - regardless of the rate, as your simulated universe should contain the simulation itself.... which is a positive feedback loop.
(For the sake of argument) So what?
By your definition, our universe should collapse every time we bring two mirrors parallel to each other.
One other thing: Why can't VMWare run an OS faster than the OS running natively?
If you assume that VMWare does a better job of optimizing hardware utilization compared to the OS, the OS will definitely run faster in a VMWare host.
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Why? because it means that the amount of information you need to simulate will grow to infinity, which is impossible to contain.
example:
Simulate the universe from within... when you reach the point where you simulate your own simulation, it must contain the simulated universe, which in turn contains another simulation of the universe and so forth.
You can't simulate that because you will quickly run out of memory. Regardless of how much memory you have for the simulation.
Assuming perfect mirrors....
When you
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err, no...
your analogy is so bad.
i don't have the will to get into this.
just have a long think... and figure out if a program printing itself is the same as a program simulating itself.
Re:Physics of computing the universe (Score:4, Interesting)
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A Turing machine can simulate a Turing machine. So is the universe no Turing machine?
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Einstein wasn't quite statisfied with these consequences, that's why he said: God doesn't play dice. [hypography.com]
Re:Physics of computing the universe (Score:5, Interesting)
At the atomic level there's a lot of randomness.
Can we be sure? What seems random may not in fact be truly random. The flip of a coin is considered random, but if you could account for all the variables with enough precision; angle of the coin, angle of the thumb, force of the flip, distance to the floor, etc, you could likely predict each and every toss.
Rather than being random it could be that it's just more complex than we know, or that we can't determine the variables with enough accuracy. What is the exact value of PI?
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but if you could account for all the variables with enough precision; angle of the coin, angle of the thumb, force of the flip, distance to the floor, etc, you could likely predict each and every toss.
Unfortunately, you can't. :-( That's called the hidden variable theory [wikipedia.org]. It has been proven that there can be no set of information that could be used to compute quantum randomness.
Einstein refused to believe that, and proposed the EPR thought experiment as a way to disprove it. Unfortunately for him, he died before John Bell resolved the EPR paradox, finally disproving hidden variables.
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Not with infinite memory anyway. And yours also doesn't have infinite memory.
A smaler memory computer may or may not be able to simulate a larger memory computer, that depends on what the larger memory computer is doing.
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simply is recalculating what happened in the past instead.
which could still be enormously useful.
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If/when a true AI exists, it will need some randomization to make it curious. Sure, you can chart point A to B to C, but what if randomly it skews off to somewhere just west of point Z enroute, and observes.
That doesn't have to be a physical route. It could be as simple as taking a random word from a dictionary, searching that on your favorite search engine, taking a random result from there, and then following the result from another random word. An unpredictable path, but
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It won't just need to be a bit random. It will need to be capable of spotting (and following up) on false leads. Making mistakes. Look at John Nash. Look at Kepler (yes, that Kepler) who spent most of his time trying to make the planets' orbits "fit inside" his crazy "Harmonices Mundi" theories. A bit of geometry (Kepler solids) that he tried to extended to "harmonic analysis to music, meteorology and astrology; harmony resulted from the tones made by the souls of heavenly bodies—and in the case of as
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I think that this could be covered by the fact that senses are imperfect. A lot of intelligence is about making sensible decisions and conclusions based on incomplete and unreliable data, but just because something is the most rational action to take doesn't mean it will necessarily be correct. Making incorrect decisions and conclusions will lead to dead ends (hopefully ;), but the things discovered on the way could lead to entirely novel discoveries. As a down-to-Earth example, imagine you need to complete
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Sure, but put simply, he's just saying that there is no such thing as randomness and that with absolute knowledge of all the variables, one could predict with certainty the exact state of any object at any given period of time from now in a similar way to how you could crudely work out how long it's going to take a ball to hit the ground when dropped from a certain height with basic high school Newtonian physics.
That relies on there being no randomness in the universe of course...
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A deterministic universe is interesting from the 'do we have free will?'-perspective, but the whole uncertainty principle ruins our attempts to simulate the universe even if we could build one 'outside' reality. Frustrating really, we are surrounded by very uncooperative hardware.
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There is no free will, uncertainty or chaos.
There is only our inability to understand/simulate it on the level required to remove the little bits of errors that we refer to as 'randomness' or entropy.
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It seems to me that you are assuming that this outside universe obeys some basic laws of our own. Why make such an assumption? I mean, if we're going to go so far as to hypothesize a computer built outside of our own universe, why couldn't this outside place obey radically different rules than our own universe? Suppose that outside our universe, there is no such thing as time. Calculations are put into the computer and the result returns instantly. While it is true that theoretically you could still never c
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Instantly - as an instant - is still time. And relative to the input. Only if the results came before the input would this universe be different, and then again, "before", like "instantly", is still temporal.
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Because thats they way science works. Its based on observations.
Of course, your imagination is part of the universe and may just be better connected to whatever may be outside our universe than I am, so you could of course be entirely correct.
But ... if we don't go based on observations then its not science, its more like fantasy or religion, take your pick.
The final part of it is s
Re:Physics of computing the universe (Score:5, Funny)
Self referential (Score:2)
If you have to explain why a joke is funny, it isn't funny.
From TFA:
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http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0383028/ [imdb.com]
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You're missing the difference between running/emulating/duplicating and simulation.
You don't need to simulate every quark of every atom of a car body to have a reasonable car simulator game. You use a simplified model that approximates the reality to a degree that is defined in requirements of the project.
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... and then some of us think that the universe is in fact a computation.
Here are some 1999 movies that explore this idea: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0139809/ [imdb.com], http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0133093/ [imdb.com].
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Oblig XKCD:
http://xkcd.com/505/ [xkcd.com]
Incidentally, it's my favorite xkcd strip
Re:Physics of computing the universe (Score:4, Informative)
Basically - there's no way to store more information in a given area than what it already contains. In order to fully simulate the universe, at full (or greater) speed, you would have to know absolutely everything about absolutely every particle and subatomic particle, etc. And that includes the particles that make up the processor itself.
It's like this: Say you have a 300 DPI printer. You print out a full page of text. Now, you want to fit all the information about that page into some sub-region of the page, printed on the same printer. Ok, so you say you can just shrink the text or encode it in binary or something, which is fine - except somehow also fit the information about the shrunken/encoded text in there. As you can see, you enter a recursive nightmare. And as your printer is a fixed resolution, you would quickly reach a point where any attempts to fit more information results in a blurred pixelated mess.
Re:Physics of computing the universe (Score:5, Interesting)
There's a workaround. You don't need to simulate the entire universe at one time, and there's no way that anything inside the universe would ever be able to tell that huge swaths of the universe aren't being actively simulated.
Reasoning: If a universe simulator needs to have more states than exist inside the universe (we're both assuming this) then then any process which verifies the universe simulator would also need to have more states than exist inside the universe. Therefore, the universe can only be fully simulated from outside the universe, and you could only determine that the universe was fully simulated from outside the universe. From inside the universe, all you could simulate and all you could check would be a subset of the universe you are in.
So you could actually pull off a neat trick, just like the human eye does. The human eye doesn't actually see clearly except in the very middle of the vision. But, wherever you look, whatever you're looking at is clearly resolved. Your brain gets the distinct impression that it's looking at the entire scene clearly, except it's not. Only the part that it's actually looking at is clear.
Well, that's enough hacking of the universe for today. I need a beer.
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What about a PDF that describes itself?
http://dblaz.beevomit.org/quine.pdf
Solves your "recursion" problem quite neatly.
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Gödel's theorems pretty much explains why the universe cannot be simulated by anything inside the universe.
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There is a difference between data and information (the Shannon kind). Computing the Universe would, indeed, need to process data about everything in the Universe, but the amount of information that requires is smaller than that (there cannot be more information that data, since the information is stored in the data, but everything that is compressible allows the removal of data without the removal of information, thus the amount of information can only ever be smaller than the amount of data).
An example of
Yeah? (Score:3, Funny)
Coding For Patterns of Anomalies (Score:5, Interesting)
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Not only.
There are the following factors:
laziness vs boredom: save energy when not required, but don't waste it on overhead of inactivity if profit is achievable by reasonably low increase.
curiosity vs caution: obtain new data deemed valuable, at reasonable cost/risk. The caveat is the value function, which must consider potential usefulness of the data, its availability and uniqueness.
Don't be evil (Score:2)
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You've just identified one of the key problems with representative government.
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If curiosity is non-random and non-arbitrary as the article claims, will it end up killing Schroedinger's lolcat?
I haven't played it yet, but (Score:2)
AI researcher Jurgen Schmidhuber says his main scientific ambition 'is to build an optimal scientist, then retire.'
programming (Score:3, Insightful)
I think that the approach commonly taken to achieve some form of AI (curiosity as an example) through programming methods may be a flawed way of going about it. We probably should go about the problem in a similar way to how biological systems developed various aspects of AI. That is, build a system that has some basic rules for its operation that tends to form a system where curiosity and intelligence in general is an emergent property rather than one that is strictly programmed into the system. Take an existing system with some degree of "creativity" inherent in it and model our own technology to at first, mimic the natural system and over time, we tweak the system to suit our purposes as It is extremely difficult to build such systems from scratch.
of course it can (Score:4, Interesting)
Show me the runny (Score:4, Insightful)
Schmidhuber has interesting claims, like about his Goedel machine [idsia.ch], an algorithm that makes provably globally optimal self-modifications.
But he never seems to get around to actually writing the code, or even non-vague pseudocode to implement these algorithms to show how they actually work and that they actually work. I guess it's just an "implementation issue". Ah, the chorus of the pure theorist...
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No, he knows and has explicitly stated in a few places that it's uncomputable, in much the same way that Kolmogorov Complexity is uncomputable, but an interesting and potentially useful theoretical construct, nonetheless.
This vein of Schmidhüber's work is more or less descended from Solomonoff's work on induction and Chaitin's Algorithmic Information Theory stuff (the line of descent is less explicit with the latter), and a bunch of Schmidhüber's descendents, most prominently his student Marcus Hu [hutter1.net]
Theorists vs. Practitioners, attitudes towards CS (Score:2)
I guess it's just an "implementation issue". Ah, the chorus of the pure theorist...
Here's a thought (I haven't decided whether I agree with it):
Would it make sense to divide the work of creating AI into the Getting Ideas part and the Turning Ideas Into Code part? The idea being that you can let people who are good at one part do that part, and let people who are good at the other do the other part. (That goes back to Adam Smith, division of labour.)
Suppose a physicist establishes a theory about the reflection of light which (among other things) can be used to make more efficient solar c
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Part of it is that CS theory tends to prove things that, while mathematically true, in practice often don't matter. For example, it's a running joke in AI that everything interesting is NP-complete. So we don't care about NP-completeness. What we want to avoid is AI-completeness: problems that, if you could solve them, would imply that you had Full Human-Level Intelligence. We want to solve bits of intelligence without having to solve all of it, but if it's NP-complete, who cares, because everything is. In
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Hah, that's "everyone's happy", of course.
Incidentally, this [rochester.edu] was the work that started the "reduce to SAT, because it's NP-complete and, btw, fast" trend.
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You're right, there is not only the minor problem that it can't be implemented. The utility function is the another big issue. Programs like this theoretical Gödel machine or working machines like neural networks and kernel method implementations depend on a utility function that can tell you whether you're getting closer to a solution or not (notwithstanding misleading local maxima and minima), and in order to have such a function you already need to have an intimate understanding of the problem at ha
this isn't exactly new speculation (Score:4, Informative)
A minority of AI researchers have tackled the problem on and off, and even built some small-scale models of curious agents. One of the classic precursors is Doug Lenat's 1977 system Automated Mathematician [wikipedia.org], which shifted from the idea of using AI to prove theorems, to instead looking for theorems that would be interesting if they were true (it didn't actually prove them; it was an interesting-conjecture generator). Essentially a model of mathematical curiosity.
Some interesting more recent work is a 2001 thesis [usyd.edu.au] that modeled curiosity as a social phenomenon in societies of agents, where agents try to find things that are: 1) new enough to interest its fellow agents; yet not 2) so new that they were incomprehensible in its cultural context.
(I'm an AI researcher, though not precisely in this area.)
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How about chess playing software? Doesn't it experiment and explore possibilities?
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Well it's actually quite methodical. Generally, there's a certain number of moves look-ahead (more with a faster processor) and it's simple to pick the optimal move that will result in the best scenario, say, 7 moves down the road.
I don't know if you've ever heard of a book called Godel Escher Bach, by a man named Douglas Hofstadter. But in it he posits that chess requires intelligent computers to play - this was written about 10 years before chess-playing computers. He didn't like the idea that it could ju
What's that like? I'm curious. (Score:2)
I'm an AI researcher, though not precisely in this area
What's that like? I'm curious.
Re:What's that like? I'm curious. (Score:5, Insightful)
Depends greatly on what you research. Unfortunately, the vast majority isn't as glamorous as you might imagine. I work in a pretty interesting area (an academic area with connections to videogame AI and game design), and this sort of creativity / discovery-systems / curiosity / art / etc. research is interesting too. But the vast majority is more pedestrian. Sure, there's interesting applications: computer vision, robotics, planning, data mining, bioinformatics, etc. But 90% of the work that comes out is incrementalist stuff; relatively boring proofs of some fact, or new algorithm that's 7% faster in some important special case (I suppose that's true of a lot of scientific fields, though).
It goes back and forth in waves, though. It seems that there will be waves of pretty exciting AI research, then a backlash as some of it goes over the top into sci-fi Singularity Is Nigh sort of AI, then things swing all the way to the other direction into AI as a really narrow field that's basically applied statistics, control theory, symbolic logic, and planning, and the only stuff that can get published is Rigorous stuff with Proofs (sort of a defensive reaction by people worried about being branded kooks). Then after a few years of that everyone realizes that 5000 more proofs in some super-narrow area aren't getting us anywhere because the field is stagnant with no direction, and people start doing more speculative applications and proposing new problems again. Then repeat.
It's somewhat unfortunate on the whole that there's such a big gap between what you might call "layperson AI" and "academic AI". The layperson AI (the singularity crowd, etc.) are excited about stuff, and have interesting goals, etc., but often do stuff that verges more on the sci-fi than the scientific. But academic AI is so scared of being them that it consciously tries at times to be super-boring so nobody mistakes them for Hans Moravec.
Just remember... (Score:2, Funny)
the entire Universe, including everyone in it, is in principle computable by a completely deterministic computer program
.. as long as you start with a piece of fairy cake [wikipedia.org].
Kidding, right? (Score:2)
if touch == [ouch] {
@"damn it";
}
else {
@"oh mama";
}
Only as smart as... (Score:4, Interesting)
If curiosity is a behavior, then it should be pretty straight forward. In fact, depending on how you define "curiosity", then there are already many examples of programs that are curious. Google or Bing or any web crawler is definitely "curious". A satnav that searches for the best route from point A to point B could be "curious"...
A robot is only as smart as its smartest programmer.
And he ultimately addresses the possibility that the entire Universe, including everyone in it, is in principle computable by a completely deterministic computer program.
The problem that is often ignored with this and similar claims is the problem of observability as illustrated in areas such as quantum physics, and even economics.
You cannot calculate the behavior of a black box without opening it. If opening it alters the state of its contents, then it may even be impossible. And if you have no means of observation to begin with, then it is downright impossible. Before you can claim you can calculate the next moment in time, you must be able to claim you have observed and know all the variables within the system of interest.
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In fact, depending on how you define "curiosity", then there are already many examples of programs that are curious.
This is certainly true. reinforcement learning [ualberta.ca] algorithms trade off between exploitation, choosing actions based on the assumption of a static environment, and exploration, testing alternatives, in case the environment has changed. This could be considered a kind of curiosity. What is more interesting to me, as a neuroscientist, is the human ability detect interesting sights or sounds and focus on them. It's like we have a fast but rough novelty detector that can guide our attention towards some event.
It Would Not Matter (Score:2)
A completely deterministic program creating the universe and all in it would be meaningless unless some being could use it like a TV show. Perhaps a universe that is not completely deterministic might be a better product with more uses to a supreme being. Perhaps that is why the classic debate between mankind having no free will among its members verses those that believe it is all about free will leaves both sides wanting. Individuals with limited free will may match the actions of other things in t
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As I understand it, everything we learn and do can ultimately be condensed into one thing. Survival. Think about it, we are alive today because the core tenant of our existence hasn't been broken yet. We, as a species continue to survive. Different behaviors do nothing but aid or take a different path to maintaining this goal. Perhaps curiosity is nothing but an attempt to make our survival more efficient. Perhaps it's a luxury only suited for higher level organism. Who knows.
I think there's a great deal more going on. -Saying that Survival is the primary objective of Life is like saying that schools exist to make sure that enough students graduate to justify the yearly budget. It's a circular argument; if a school is successful, then it will justify its budget and thus every positive action the school took can be argued as having had the singular goal of continued survival. The idea of sharing and exploring knowledge needn't ever enter into the matter for the equation to bal
Of course it can. (Score:2, Interesting)
Of course curiosity can be programmed. What are humans if not big, fleshy, biological machines of sorts? Granted we do not work like computers do, but the underlying processes are still structured and computational--if the brain were chaotic it wouldn't work.
Of course, some people will handwave with "the soul" or silly objections by Searle...
Re:Of course it can. (Score:5, Interesting)
Of course curiosity can be programmed. What are humans if not big, fleshy, biological machines of sorts? Granted we do not work like computers do, but the underlying processes are still structured and computational--if the brain were chaotic it wouldn't work.
~waves hand~ Speak for yourself, Mister Roboto. ~/waves hand~
But seriously, this is a really fascinating question. Souls aren't handed out like candy. You have to build them through main force; by actively choosing to be aware from moment to moment. What I am finding to be the biggest challenge in that requires the supreme effort of recognizing one's own automatic nature and cleaning the gunk out of it.
Every time some subject comes up in conversation which makes me twitch or sweat or want to pull away, THAT indicates a piece of gunk. Each time I want to fall back and use a comfortable and proven behavior routine to deal with a given moment, THAT indicates a piece of gunk.
After one does enough work, you begin to see very clearly just how messy and automatic the people around you are. -These days, I find I am constantly aware of people's programs and little acts, why they work and what they are designed to do, and where people get stuck running those silly programs over and over day after day, year after year without ever stopping to ask, "What is the real me under this?". The soul is that part of us which is capable of recognizing the automatic nature of the brain and body and stepping in through an application of Will to interrupt the code execution.
It's difficult and the ego doesn't like it at all; Any suggestion that one is a robot is usually met with disgust and fear, if the accusation is even understood in the first place. The Ego is, I think, a foreign installment designed exactly to keep us from performing that self-examination. With the Ego in place and strong, there is no hope of breaking out of the cage of automatic behavior.
Like I said, a fascinating topic.
-FL
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Yeah, but your talk of "Ego" and "the soul" is all gobbledygook.
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Yeah, but your talk of "Ego" and "the soul" is all gobbledygook.
Well, I didn't mean to suggest that YOUR computer was coded by a genius or that your hardware wasn't found in a box of rejects from the late 80's. You'll have to forgive your maker if you can't keep up.
As for the soul. . . Well, that's not a winnable debate one way or the other, so your call of 'gobbledygook' is no more or less useful.
That being said, did you feel a stab of irritation upon completing the first sentence? The ego would have been the item making that particular sensation. Sorry. It was just
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Could this, perhaps, also be a little program running in your mind.
Sure. But how can one tell. . ?
The best I've been able to come up with is this. . .
-When the Ego engages or is heavily invested, I'm probably dealing with programming.
-When Feeding engages, it's the same thing. (Energetic Feeding includes both bullying as well as actions taken to gain approval or attention.)
These things share a certain feeling which, over time, becomes recognizable within oneself. As far as I can determine, much of my beh
Re:The reactive mind (Score:4, Interesting)
Scientologists would say the same about the reactive mind.
Scientology is one of the premier examples of spiritual exploration gone horribly awry, co-opted by the very forces which seek to keep people locked down. Their trick is to take a bunch of good ideas and quietly interweave them with creeped-out insanity.
The New Age bookstores are filled to brimming with fail-safe nets designed to catch people who fall out of the matrix.
There IS a path, but it takes a lot of comparative study, source-checking and in the end, rolling up your pant leggings and getting out there yourself to figure out who the heck is on first.
-FL
Re:Of course it can. (Score:5, Funny)
let me be the first to say... what the hell are you talking about?
First of all, your question is a lie. You don't actually want to know what I'm talking about. Here's what I see:
You recognized a pattern which is out of keeping with the "official" mode of thinking, and the automatic program you come pre-installed with kicked into play. Some variant of herd-motivated ridicule.
When the program finished running, you felt better about yourself; secure in your membership in the herd. That warm, fuzzy hit of feeling of belonging is the reward for running the program. The program itself is a very simple, but otherwise clever little trap for those ensnared by it. It pushes those it is run against to stop thinking outside the official parameters while at the same time blocking awareness of whatever topic of thought or discussion first activated the program.
In order to implant the program, the subject needs to have been tormented as a child so that it A) recognizes and understands the dynamics of the social pecking order, and B) has had its self-confidence crushed through repeated attacks so that it remains dependent upon the herd for all of its personal validation and love.
This program is layer one; among the first and most basic hurdles which must be cleared in order to have even the smallest hope of waking up. Very, very few people are able to this. Until then, you are a robot, plain and simple.
That's what I'm talking about.
Aren't you glad you asked? ;)
And don't worry. We all go through this. I'm not trying to hurt you.
-FL
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Here's what I see: A desire to assert some sort of intellectual superiority by reducing others to automata, thereby justifying your perceived self worth as a "free thinker," when in reality it could be effectively argued that you're simply falling back on your own "automatic program" of taking each response != "validation" and categorizing it as an "automatic program," which, ironically, would both validate your claim AND demonstrate its irrelevance so long as each program is not identical, which appears to be the case.
I'm not a free thinker. Nobody is. And you're right; the ego is always eager to assert dominance. As much as I try to put it aside, it remains a force to be reckoned with. But it is a sliding scale; at the one extreme, a person can become a slave to the Ego, flying into a rage when challenged, while on the other hand s/he can laugh at and make an effort to disengage from the emotional spurts offered by the Ego thus minimizing its control. I once had it described to me thusly; think of the Ego as a bowl
Twilight (Score:3, Interesting)
And then when I read about the current state of the education system, I get just a bit worried...
Hubris (Score:3)
'is to build an optimal scientist, then retire.'
Build a what?
I suspect it's already retirement time. No offense.
SB
pseudo-code (Score:2)
10: CALL Monolith
20: PRAISE Monolith
30: GOTO 50
40: Understand Monolith
50: Satiated = CALL Curiosity
60: IF Satiated > Infinity GOTO 40
70: ELSE GOTO 50
Sure. (Score:2)
All well and good but what about a soul? (Score:2)
Our greatest gift to god will be creating a mind that can believe in him.
Why is it that AI research is always mislead by it's name? Namely they are
too focused on the intelligence aspect of a programmed mind that they
completely fail to recognize it's subjective emotions and motivation that they
should be focusing on.
What is a soul? It's that part of a mind that is able to make a choice. It's
the part of the mind that isn't logical. It's the part of the mind that can
judge something as good and bad. It's ha
Doobie (Score:2)
And he ultimately addresses the possibility that the entire Universe, including everyone in it, is in principle computable by a completely deterministic computer program."
After which he took another long drag on his joint and said, "It's like our whole universe is inside a single election in a larger universe, you dig? Hey, pass those corn chips over, dude! Now where was I? What? Ah, never mind. Put on Conan. It's his last show."
What comes next? (Score:2)
Maybe next they should study how to program bi-curiosity. God knows most software is pretty gay these days, and I'd like to know why.
How curiosity works: (Score:2)
I once extensively thought about that subject. The point of curiosity. How it works.
We humans have an internal model of reality. In fact it’s the only reality that we have. Since we can’t prove the existence of anything outside our minds.
This model is a set of associations. Which, just as the universe, are defined in a relative way.
This means, that we can’t handle anything that is not related to something else in some way. Even if it’s just a basic feeling.
But since we start out with
Non-determinism. (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
P-zombies are a ridiculous construct.
Re:Non-determinism. (Score:5, Insightful)
No more ridiculous than the idea that Consciousness is reducible to basic, known, physical laws.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
I like Penrose' ideas that there is an element of non-computability involved in Consciousness, not because there's any evidence for it (there isn't much "evidence" for Consciousness at all, apart from your first person experience of it), but because to me it's the difference between being Conscious and being one of David Chalmers' zombies. I like to think I'm mostly the former.
That's precisely what all you zombies (ie. everyone other than myself) are programmed to say. Although some of you do produce novel responses occasionally. The Penrose zombie presented his theory to the Karl Pribram zombie (my primary teaching machine) who asked "So what does this mean to psychology?" The Penrose zombie replied "How would I know? You're the psychologist." A strange thing to say because (a) the Penrose zombie didn't flinch from psychology in the 'zombies' issue (v 3 #1) of the Journal of Con
try it (Score:2)
And he ultimately addresses the possibility that the entire Universe, including everyone in it, is in principle computable by a completely deterministic computer program.
He should try to do some actual computational physics/chemistry. The amount of processor power you need to simulate only tiny structures is so enormous that he'd be thrown back to reality really quickly.
Oh, no... (Score:2)
> the entire Universe, including everyone in it, is in principle computable by a completely deterministic computer program
Here come the Matrix analogies for the rest of the posts here on end....!
Re: (Score:2)
Which makes it highly improbable. Since the highly improbable people have a spaceship with an Infinite Improbability drive, it is highly likely that the highly improbable fact, is in fact, true.
Re: (Score:2)
I've devised an algorithm that tells me with 100% certainty that this guy's ego is way too far up his ass.
Random nobody spends 45 seconds skimming an article on the Internet, feels qualified to throw insults. Details at 11.
Re: (Score:2)