If 2% inflation is the target and if technology advances continue to provide 2% efficiency increases each year, and if the world economy expands 2% per year, then 6% excess money printing can go on forever...as long as the dollar does not lose market share in the world GDP increase. Of course the BRICs and Europeans are not going to put up with this free ride the U.S. dollar is getting forever. Interest rates will soon rise and game will be up. Dollars will come home and the pressure will be so great that finally the money printing will go to main street instead of buying toxic assets off the banks balance sheets...but with the dollars getting on main street and with dollars coming home...look out for inflation, especially in oil and Chinese products.
Friday, February 21, 2014
DNA can't compete with the machines (amazon post)
Electrical motors are about 1,000 times more efficient per energy and capital expense than muscle. Computers are about 10 million times more efficient per energy and capital expense than brains, if the task to be performed can be programmed. The goal of evolution seems to be to utilize available energy and matter sources to create copies of the machine(s) that do the "utilization". This is based on the physics "principle of minimum total potential energy" (see wiki) and I do not know why evolution theorists have not identified this as the "meaning of life" ....i.e. simply following physics. DNA-based machines have been the dominant form of "excess energy extraction" for most of Earth's history, but clearly something new is a-foot. Since 10% of all humans that have ever lived are alive today, statistics indicates we should not be shocked if we are in the midst of humanity's biggest and final days. I'm referring to the "anthropic principle" and "Doomsday Argument". Silicon solar cells are about 100 times more efficient than plants at capturing sunlight energy, and a world covered with their blackness would increase global warming which increases wind speeds for even more energy-capture from wind turbines. DNA is water-based and operating at ambient temperatures and pressures, but our economic system now has access to much higher temperatures and pressures to smelt silicon and other metals, create super-strong carbon-carbon bonds like nanotubes (which are functionally superior in every replicator-needed way when compared to the C-H bonds of organics), and many other things. DNA needs to move ions to create electrical impulses while metals can carry the influence with electrons which weigh thousands of times less. This is the basis of DNA's inability to compete our machines when it comes to capturing photons for energy, utilize that energy to move matter, and to think quickly in how to do it all in the most efficient way. If we want to improve humanity's fate during this transition, I recommend a world-wide economy that we can all agree on that issues more money only to societies that increase "happiness per median person" and to starve societies out of the economic system via currency restriction (cessation of loans and an increase in taxes like duties) that try to devalue their own population (and thereby everyone else if their is free trade) by over-stressed work conditions caused by an EXCESS of machine-intelligent workers who are blind to the negative consequences of their pain and thoughtless competition AGAINST the rest of humanity, in pursuit of cheaper "things" that make everyone's life more costly (the free market under basic rule of law, especially with free trade, optimizes marketplace transactions but only at the expense of the entire system even if most tragedy of the commons are taken into account). I am not advocating a restriction on education or work, but they should be done only for fun and in pursuit of fun. We've had 1,000 times more technology and 30 times more energy per person than we did 100 years ago, and yet we have had maybe only a 10x factor improvement in quality of life. If we were COOPERATING and a little more intelligent, we should have control of these machines and utopia should already be here. But no, blind evolution is the heaviest hand at work here, going under the names of democracy and free markets. Even the most technologically-advanced countries like the miraculous South Korea do not indicate the future is looking good: South Korea has the highest young-adult suicide and alcohol consumption in the world. This is the fate of the world thanks to free trade and blind competition that seeks only to raise GDP. A "real" and "productive" GDP per median person is the goal we should seek while using a fixed-quantity (crypto) currency, although "happiness" would be a lot better than GDP because our material wealth per median person is already high and happiness seems so distant to so many.
Thursday, February 20, 2014
humans as food and a silicon super computer
Brianjones seems to understand me. But from what I can tell from his comments, he and I might be in agreement as to what outcome awaits. It's a wide variety, but the end seems to be a great decrease in the number and importance of people within 200 years.
The agricultural revolution (people able to control plants and animals for food) led to people believing that people were somehow different than animals. Before then, paleolithic peoples were very much aware of the lack of difference between humans and other animals, and the theory of evolution was ingrained in beliefs rather than a surprise. People also viewed rival tribes as threats and had no shame in eating the losing people because it was good meat, same as chimpanzees. It is only after the agricultural revolution that slaves became something you might want after war and for that reason you didn't eat the losing side. The heightened view of human importance due to agriculture even prevent the eating of the dead after European battles. But anywhere protein was scarce (plant agriculture without animal domestication), the dead were a treasured source of food. Aztecs had up to 300,000 skulls hanging on lattices surrounding Tenochtitlan as the Indians in the area learned to farm too well too quickly and ended up with a surplus of humans and depleted sources of natural protein. Sea on 2 sides added additional pressure against mere expansion and other solutions, so that a state could form systematic cannibalism rather than the wild warfare only cannibalism that existed in north and south America that were the result of just having easy protein rather than specifically lack of protein. It's not surprising people used to eat each other. It's surprising Europeans at the end of battle did not.
My point is that human arrogance was invented as a result of domestication that made food energy (energy and mass) more easily available because the plants and animals are more efficient than us at capturing sunlight and converting it to protein, etc. This did not cause a "rise of the animals" over the humans, but it certainly increased the "importance" of animals to the "economic machine" if you could view humans as merely means by which these animals rise to dominate the world, i.e. there are 3 times more chickens than humans. We are just the way super-intelligent chickens acquire food and breeding rights. The mass of humans is more, but the mass of humans compared to what we harvest and kill is something like 0.1%. So we are just the brain for a massive symbiotic system of DNA-based life. But at some point physics and the observed history of the Earth demands that more efficient methods will dominate. There is nothing sacred about water-only, low temperature, low pressure chemistry (DNA life) when other methods are now available.
Our current silicon designs are limited only to the extent they are synchronous, which limits how big the circuits can be due to the speed of light. If they switch faster, then the circuit has to be smaller (10 GHz will have synchronous problems beyond 1/2 of the speed of light divided by 10 GHz which is 1.5 cm CPU chips...intel has 3.7 Ghz chips that are 1.5 cm). But if you cut switching speed in half, you can get 4 times more transistors in a chip area. I wrote an article 20 years ago that claimed 2015 was the limit of single-plane synchronous silicon following IBM's Bennet and Landau, due to heat flipping bits randomnly and the synchrony (light speed) problem, but that may not be true at slower switching speeds which allow bigger and cooler chips. Making it 3D has a heat problem, but it seems like you could many doublings in 3D with air gaps at a slower switching speed. 10 Mhz would be a 1.5 meter chip, with maybe 300 layers 0.5 cm apart with liquid cooling. 10 MHz is 100,000 times faster than neurons but with 5,000 times fewer connections (10,000 connections per neuron and 2 per NAND gate).
300 layers of 1.5 meter chips gives 1 quadrillion NAND gates with intel's 22 nm process (4 transistors per NAND gate). Brain is 100 billion neurons. OK, so Speed*connections*(number of comparison devices) gives current silicon technology as 200,000 times better than a brain. If brains and silicon are reaching the limit in how you can use ions and electrons (respectively), then maybe it is not a coincidence that this is within an order of magnitude of the ratio of the weight of the ions the brain uses to send signals to the weight of an electron that silicon uses, which I stated before (600,000). 200,000 assumes only synchronous. Parallel techniques can provide additional benefits.
Math correction: 10 MHz could allow a 15 meter die (not 1.5 meter) and 3,000 layers. So let's say it's a 100 MHz computer, giving 2 million times more power than a single human brain in a volume the size of a desk.
People continue to refuse to believe computers are (in theory) technologically superior to brains simply because of arrogance: to know that their animals and machines are superior to them in ways that matter (energy to move matter to make copies) is to lose their moral authority of having dominion over them, even to the point of abuse. Clearly the brain deserves more protection and authority in our symbiotic relationship with animals and machines, but soon we will not be the brain.
The agricultural revolution (people able to control plants and animals for food) led to people believing that people were somehow different than animals. Before then, paleolithic peoples were very much aware of the lack of difference between humans and other animals, and the theory of evolution was ingrained in beliefs rather than a surprise. People also viewed rival tribes as threats and had no shame in eating the losing people because it was good meat, same as chimpanzees. It is only after the agricultural revolution that slaves became something you might want after war and for that reason you didn't eat the losing side. The heightened view of human importance due to agriculture even prevent the eating of the dead after European battles. But anywhere protein was scarce (plant agriculture without animal domestication), the dead were a treasured source of food. Aztecs had up to 300,000 skulls hanging on lattices surrounding Tenochtitlan as the Indians in the area learned to farm too well too quickly and ended up with a surplus of humans and depleted sources of natural protein. Sea on 2 sides added additional pressure against mere expansion and other solutions, so that a state could form systematic cannibalism rather than the wild warfare only cannibalism that existed in north and south America that were the result of just having easy protein rather than specifically lack of protein. It's not surprising people used to eat each other. It's surprising Europeans at the end of battle did not.
My point is that human arrogance was invented as a result of domestication that made food energy (energy and mass) more easily available because the plants and animals are more efficient than us at capturing sunlight and converting it to protein, etc. This did not cause a "rise of the animals" over the humans, but it certainly increased the "importance" of animals to the "economic machine" if you could view humans as merely means by which these animals rise to dominate the world, i.e. there are 3 times more chickens than humans. We are just the way super-intelligent chickens acquire food and breeding rights. The mass of humans is more, but the mass of humans compared to what we harvest and kill is something like 0.1%. So we are just the brain for a massive symbiotic system of DNA-based life. But at some point physics and the observed history of the Earth demands that more efficient methods will dominate. There is nothing sacred about water-only, low temperature, low pressure chemistry (DNA life) when other methods are now available.
Our current silicon designs are limited only to the extent they are synchronous, which limits how big the circuits can be due to the speed of light. If they switch faster, then the circuit has to be smaller (10 GHz will have synchronous problems beyond 1/2 of the speed of light divided by 10 GHz which is 1.5 cm CPU chips...intel has 3.7 Ghz chips that are 1.5 cm). But if you cut switching speed in half, you can get 4 times more transistors in a chip area. I wrote an article 20 years ago that claimed 2015 was the limit of single-plane synchronous silicon following IBM's Bennet and Landau, due to heat flipping bits randomnly and the synchrony (light speed) problem, but that may not be true at slower switching speeds which allow bigger and cooler chips. Making it 3D has a heat problem, but it seems like you could many doublings in 3D with air gaps at a slower switching speed. 10 Mhz would be a 1.5 meter chip, with maybe 300 layers 0.5 cm apart with liquid cooling. 10 MHz is 100,000 times faster than neurons but with 5,000 times fewer connections (10,000 connections per neuron and 2 per NAND gate).
300 layers of 1.5 meter chips gives 1 quadrillion NAND gates with intel's 22 nm process (4 transistors per NAND gate). Brain is 100 billion neurons. OK, so Speed*connections*(number of comparison devices) gives current silicon technology as 200,000 times better than a brain. If brains and silicon are reaching the limit in how you can use ions and electrons (respectively), then maybe it is not a coincidence that this is within an order of magnitude of the ratio of the weight of the ions the brain uses to send signals to the weight of an electron that silicon uses, which I stated before (600,000). 200,000 assumes only synchronous. Parallel techniques can provide additional benefits.
Math correction: 10 MHz could allow a 15 meter die (not 1.5 meter) and 3,000 layers. So let's say it's a 100 MHz computer, giving 2 million times more power than a single human brain in a volume the size of a desk.
People continue to refuse to believe computers are (in theory) technologically superior to brains simply because of arrogance: to know that their animals and machines are superior to them in ways that matter (energy to move matter to make copies) is to lose their moral authority of having dominion over them, even to the point of abuse. Clearly the brain deserves more protection and authority in our symbiotic relationship with animals and machines, but soon we will not be the brain.
Tuesday, February 18, 2014
more fun with rise of the machines
No, because you are not an efficient convertor of energy to copies. We, as humans, are not worthy of life anymore, so we "should" help the worldwide economic machine, governments, food and medicine-giving charities, and voters to continue as they are, destroying DNA-based life as fast as possible. When the oil (fertilizer) dries up, do you think all the solar cell energy is going to be used to let human eat and drive cars by converting that electrical energy to oil and fertilizer? No, it will feed the machines which will be controlled by a few people. Charities helping people survive are just creating more mouths to destroy the remaining plant life (and each other) when the fertilizer runs out. This will help clear land for more solar cells. The meaning of human life is to convert all DNA-based life to a machine-based evolutionary machine. We are key to advancing evolution to a more reliable form of life. We still can't store bits as efficiently as DNA, but the machines are getting there. DNA is too married to the local environment. The machines we build need only the most minor of modifications to survive in space and at much higher temperatures and pressures, for much longer time periods. Machines capture energy and move mass 5,000 times more efficiently than DNA. Based on the weight of ions the brain needs to send signals and do comparison operations, computers using electrons are 600,000 faster and efficient than DNA. So DNA is far weaker when it comes to thinking than when it comes to capturing and using energy to move mass. So if you think the great depression was caused by machines replacing muscle.....it should be over 100 times worse (600,000/5,000) by the time our current electron-based computing is finished displacing us from employment. Not to mention that brains were our backup employment when muscle became outdated. What's our backup plan this time? Outlaw computers?
There's no reason to think the next step in human evolution will care more about us than we care about chimps. Morality is defined by most philosophies as "to act in such a way that if everyone acted like you, then existence for the sentient beings under consideration would be better for all". I learned this by watching a speech given at an A.I. conference 7 years ago as they have been thinking a long time about what morality should be programmed into A.I. Asimov heard about the 3 laws from John W. Campbell 7 years before the first transistor was made at Bell labs. The wishy-washy part of this philosophy is how to define "us" in this morality. Does it include ants? Computers? "Best for all" is the ability to efficiently use energy to move mass to makes copies of the beings agreeing to the morality. Religions have different ideas about to best implement "best for all", so they are in a breeding war to decide the winner. A more humanistic thinking based on science is just another moral system at war with the other religions. Survival of consciousness comes before being conscious of physics, so science is no more than an alternative compression method for how to think about reality, with the serious drawback about not being explicitly interested promoting itself through violence and excessive breeding.
Yes, healthier ways of looking at the world is by definition promoting your personal interests without regard to the interests of the rest of the Universe. Humans are a moderately cohesive group so that by and large when we talk we promote survival and happiness of only one species and of other species that help our species. It ends there. The desire to talk to aliens is only out of selfishness and you can bet any alien species who might want to stoop to assist us would first ask "who have YOU stooped for lately?" No, you can bet alien interest in us and our interests in aliens is the same as Europeans landing in the Americas. Likewise, our machines are basically alien to our genes. We will subdue them as slaves as long as we can. But we are hopelessly inferior and it is a game that will not last.
Happiness is no more than achieving the goals defined by programming. Since we are a vastly inferior technology compared to our mechanized offspring, it's time to start thinking about handing over the reigns to the next stage. I vote for a gradual and kind elimination of DNA-based life so that our machines follow the evolutionary process efficiently and rapidly. Without getting all humans on board with this plan, our end will be much more catastrophic to both us and the machines. Without a more orderly system, lone humans with the power of technology will soon be able to destroy all life. By going ahead and getting people to accept their inferiority and hopelessness maybe they can at least come to an orderly end and give a smooth and powerful beginning to the machines without them having to start from scratch like viruses and bacteria after we finish killing each other off as the oil ends. Of course we will not agree on anything and the transition will be complex and messy.
Look at factory floors with no people on them and perfectly organized. Think about those massive fields of solar cells. Then think about how all the smartest people in the world are working at break-neck speed trying to replace every possible function of the human brain with machines, and succeeding beyond anyone's imagination. The wealth of the machines is so great already that 7 billion humans are allowed to goof off all day doing mostly nothing, or at least doing it a million times less efficiently than machines.
Humans are not the center of the Universe. It's an illusion people keep adopting in order to feel good about themselves.
I do not paint a dark picture, I paint a hopeful one. Life on Earth has always been interesting, but it has never been "good" except for an extremely small percentage that have made it though the sifting of death before reproduction. Let's cast off the illusion, and let this physics law of evolution do its thing just as efficiently and rapidly as possible. So my morality is help evolution do its thing as being the best for all possible forms of life.
I predict my grandkids will not have as good a life as my parents. I think average human lifestyle planet wide can improve for at least the next 2 generations, thanks to the internet leveling things out and population growth slowing down. There's a big risk from a food crisis. We may even find ways to do without oil by the 3rd generation and maintain an even better lifestyle. I am thinking more long term than you realize. The machines can thrive in the economic machine without interfering with humans and will continue to help humans for a long time. But evolution will win and the inferior DNA technology will be such that humans are effectively as important as insects.
You are viewing humans as if they have desires and free will and implement actions and forces into the mechanisms of the worldwide economy. In evolutionary thought, this is a suspect position. The converse position is that existing potential energy sources in the environment pull existing mass resources into an organization that depletes the available energy in order to make copies that continue the process. For whatever reason, nature desires an even distribution of potential energy. We feel that we have choice and make decisions because our consciousness is the difference between the set-points of "happiness" provided to us by evolution and our experiences. But we do not determine the set-points which pull our strings. We are the observers of the puppet show that is our life. Sometimes it's fun for the puppet to pretend he's alive and has will and forces that are his own. Denying this helps build a false ego that achieves the goals of the set-points. The set-points operate species-wide, tribe-wide, and on the individual. DNA is the memory system for the algorithms the physics of nature has discovered. Genes are not a force from below, but a memory of the best past solutions to energy conversion.
The principle of least action means nature tries to reduce kinetic energy and maintain potential energy as it transitions to states of lower potential energy. For example, a photon hitting a black body is immediately converted to kinetic energy (heat), but if molecules happen to be oriented to slow this process down, basic physics dictate that this will be the preferred orientation, which has resulted in photosynthesis that blocks the conversion to kinetic energy by storing energy for half a billion years. This process tried to remove all the CO2 and convert the planet to ice that would keep all the photon energy stored as it reflected out into empty space, but humans came along and disrupted that "desired" endpoint. Now machines will be able to restart the energy storage process much more efficiently than plants as humans deplete what the plants stored, but still not be as efficient as a ball of ice. Then some machine in the distant future will come along and act like the new human, destroying all the old energy storage structures that our age of machines will create. The end result is supposed to be a (Freemon) Dyson Sphere around our Sun capturing all light for creating very strong bonds and even new atoms
Yes, my reference to religions was about the trouble in trying to decide how to achieve "happiness". By throwing science in with them, the near-opposite of religion, I was showing how wide the disagreement can get. By trying to describe the physics foundation of evolution, I am claiming that efficiency in the use of energy is the ultimate and objective morality, based on a faith that the apparent "desire" in physics for "least action" is "good" (which has also always been my intuition). All other moralities would therefore be evil. Competing methods of implementing the sought-after efficiency are just a learning process that nature is going through, so that no religion or philosophy is evil, if efficiency is the conscious or unconscious goal. But if that is the case, then in a sense the only evil would be all things that are hampering the most efficient solution(s). In any event, humans and DNA-based life are terribly inefficient compared to our machines, and therefore we are morally obliged to seek and look forward to the transition. Of course I would prefer a happy transition for humans and all other DNA-based life forms as their numbers decrease. But I can't find a physics justification for my sympathy. The "efficiency morality" would proceed without regard to the pain experienced by beings of any form. They are just tools in the physics goal, or at least that is what history shows. It provides me with no succor that as marionettes our pain is supposedly like our free will and therefore just an illusion. Fighting against the morality of efficiency without sympathy would be a different morality (efficiency subject to sympathy) that will lead to a less powerful (survivable) form of life that could be subject to alien invasion. Alternatively, a sympathetic morality could be a precondition of joining a galactic community that is currently waiting on us to learn how to be sympathetic creatures before being allowed access to a greater wealth of information in their possession. We could be "higher-dimension entities" inhabiting what appears to be a body. When we learn how to be sympathetic towards all creatures, we learn to give up the desire to control ANYTHING in life, and therefore give up life itself. The selfish creatures left behind just see a dead body without understanding that it was a gift to the worms and other people who seek control (making cremation and embalming less morally efficient than rotting). The sad people left behind might be sad only because they can no longer control, get sympathy out of, but above all ENJOY their lost loved one. Not that an invisible soul leaves the body, but that all the information of what occurs is right before our eyes but our limited and selfish nature prevents us from seeing it. The eyes of our machines could be much more effective and if we give them 10 layers of neurons instead of 6, they can see reality in 4 dimensions of space instead of 3, not that it's a lot closer to an ultimate reality, but it would convert the perception of all mass and forces to a simpler and slower-moving system.
There's no reason to think the next step in human evolution will care more about us than we care about chimps. Morality is defined by most philosophies as "to act in such a way that if everyone acted like you, then existence for the sentient beings under consideration would be better for all". I learned this by watching a speech given at an A.I. conference 7 years ago as they have been thinking a long time about what morality should be programmed into A.I. Asimov heard about the 3 laws from John W. Campbell 7 years before the first transistor was made at Bell labs. The wishy-washy part of this philosophy is how to define "us" in this morality. Does it include ants? Computers? "Best for all" is the ability to efficiently use energy to move mass to makes copies of the beings agreeing to the morality. Religions have different ideas about to best implement "best for all", so they are in a breeding war to decide the winner. A more humanistic thinking based on science is just another moral system at war with the other religions. Survival of consciousness comes before being conscious of physics, so science is no more than an alternative compression method for how to think about reality, with the serious drawback about not being explicitly interested promoting itself through violence and excessive breeding.
Yes, healthier ways of looking at the world is by definition promoting your personal interests without regard to the interests of the rest of the Universe. Humans are a moderately cohesive group so that by and large when we talk we promote survival and happiness of only one species and of other species that help our species. It ends there. The desire to talk to aliens is only out of selfishness and you can bet any alien species who might want to stoop to assist us would first ask "who have YOU stooped for lately?" No, you can bet alien interest in us and our interests in aliens is the same as Europeans landing in the Americas. Likewise, our machines are basically alien to our genes. We will subdue them as slaves as long as we can. But we are hopelessly inferior and it is a game that will not last.
Happiness is no more than achieving the goals defined by programming. Since we are a vastly inferior technology compared to our mechanized offspring, it's time to start thinking about handing over the reigns to the next stage. I vote for a gradual and kind elimination of DNA-based life so that our machines follow the evolutionary process efficiently and rapidly. Without getting all humans on board with this plan, our end will be much more catastrophic to both us and the machines. Without a more orderly system, lone humans with the power of technology will soon be able to destroy all life. By going ahead and getting people to accept their inferiority and hopelessness maybe they can at least come to an orderly end and give a smooth and powerful beginning to the machines without them having to start from scratch like viruses and bacteria after we finish killing each other off as the oil ends. Of course we will not agree on anything and the transition will be complex and messy.
Look at factory floors with no people on them and perfectly organized. Think about those massive fields of solar cells. Then think about how all the smartest people in the world are working at break-neck speed trying to replace every possible function of the human brain with machines, and succeeding beyond anyone's imagination. The wealth of the machines is so great already that 7 billion humans are allowed to goof off all day doing mostly nothing, or at least doing it a million times less efficiently than machines.
Humans are not the center of the Universe. It's an illusion people keep adopting in order to feel good about themselves.
I do not paint a dark picture, I paint a hopeful one. Life on Earth has always been interesting, but it has never been "good" except for an extremely small percentage that have made it though the sifting of death before reproduction. Let's cast off the illusion, and let this physics law of evolution do its thing just as efficiently and rapidly as possible. So my morality is help evolution do its thing as being the best for all possible forms of life.
I predict my grandkids will not have as good a life as my parents. I think average human lifestyle planet wide can improve for at least the next 2 generations, thanks to the internet leveling things out and population growth slowing down. There's a big risk from a food crisis. We may even find ways to do without oil by the 3rd generation and maintain an even better lifestyle. I am thinking more long term than you realize. The machines can thrive in the economic machine without interfering with humans and will continue to help humans for a long time. But evolution will win and the inferior DNA technology will be such that humans are effectively as important as insects.
You are viewing humans as if they have desires and free will and implement actions and forces into the mechanisms of the worldwide economy. In evolutionary thought, this is a suspect position. The converse position is that existing potential energy sources in the environment pull existing mass resources into an organization that depletes the available energy in order to make copies that continue the process. For whatever reason, nature desires an even distribution of potential energy. We feel that we have choice and make decisions because our consciousness is the difference between the set-points of "happiness" provided to us by evolution and our experiences. But we do not determine the set-points which pull our strings. We are the observers of the puppet show that is our life. Sometimes it's fun for the puppet to pretend he's alive and has will and forces that are his own. Denying this helps build a false ego that achieves the goals of the set-points. The set-points operate species-wide, tribe-wide, and on the individual. DNA is the memory system for the algorithms the physics of nature has discovered. Genes are not a force from below, but a memory of the best past solutions to energy conversion.
The principle of least action means nature tries to reduce kinetic energy and maintain potential energy as it transitions to states of lower potential energy. For example, a photon hitting a black body is immediately converted to kinetic energy (heat), but if molecules happen to be oriented to slow this process down, basic physics dictate that this will be the preferred orientation, which has resulted in photosynthesis that blocks the conversion to kinetic energy by storing energy for half a billion years. This process tried to remove all the CO2 and convert the planet to ice that would keep all the photon energy stored as it reflected out into empty space, but humans came along and disrupted that "desired" endpoint. Now machines will be able to restart the energy storage process much more efficiently than plants as humans deplete what the plants stored, but still not be as efficient as a ball of ice. Then some machine in the distant future will come along and act like the new human, destroying all the old energy storage structures that our age of machines will create. The end result is supposed to be a (Freemon) Dyson Sphere around our Sun capturing all light for creating very strong bonds and even new atoms
Yes, my reference to religions was about the trouble in trying to decide how to achieve "happiness". By throwing science in with them, the near-opposite of religion, I was showing how wide the disagreement can get. By trying to describe the physics foundation of evolution, I am claiming that efficiency in the use of energy is the ultimate and objective morality, based on a faith that the apparent "desire" in physics for "least action" is "good" (which has also always been my intuition). All other moralities would therefore be evil. Competing methods of implementing the sought-after efficiency are just a learning process that nature is going through, so that no religion or philosophy is evil, if efficiency is the conscious or unconscious goal. But if that is the case, then in a sense the only evil would be all things that are hampering the most efficient solution(s). In any event, humans and DNA-based life are terribly inefficient compared to our machines, and therefore we are morally obliged to seek and look forward to the transition. Of course I would prefer a happy transition for humans and all other DNA-based life forms as their numbers decrease. But I can't find a physics justification for my sympathy. The "efficiency morality" would proceed without regard to the pain experienced by beings of any form. They are just tools in the physics goal, or at least that is what history shows. It provides me with no succor that as marionettes our pain is supposedly like our free will and therefore just an illusion. Fighting against the morality of efficiency without sympathy would be a different morality (efficiency subject to sympathy) that will lead to a less powerful (survivable) form of life that could be subject to alien invasion. Alternatively, a sympathetic morality could be a precondition of joining a galactic community that is currently waiting on us to learn how to be sympathetic creatures before being allowed access to a greater wealth of information in their possession. We could be "higher-dimension entities" inhabiting what appears to be a body. When we learn how to be sympathetic towards all creatures, we learn to give up the desire to control ANYTHING in life, and therefore give up life itself. The selfish creatures left behind just see a dead body without understanding that it was a gift to the worms and other people who seek control (making cremation and embalming less morally efficient than rotting). The sad people left behind might be sad only because they can no longer control, get sympathy out of, but above all ENJOY their lost loved one. Not that an invisible soul leaves the body, but that all the information of what occurs is right before our eyes but our limited and selfish nature prevents us from seeing it. The eyes of our machines could be much more effective and if we give them 10 layers of neurons instead of 6, they can see reality in 4 dimensions of space instead of 3, not that it's a lot closer to an ultimate reality, but it would convert the perception of all mass and forces to a simpler and slower-moving system.
Monday, February 17, 2014
New cancer theory
There seems to be an Earthquake in cancer understanding coming. There's an idea that's been around since about 1930 that was promoted by a physician who won 1 nobel and almost won a 2nd nobel prize in medicine. Basic understanding of respiration was the nobel prize of 1934. (Otto Warburg).
I'll state all the following as if it is all known, factual, correct, and without qualifications to facilitate easy reading.
When a normal nucleus is inserted to replace a "cancerous" nucleus, the cells continue to multiply, keeping the good nucleus without modification. Inserting the nucleus from a cancer cell into any normal cell does not maintain the cancer. So cancer is not in the nucleus, the nucleus is just interacting with the rest of the cell, although obviously sometimes the nucleus is genetically biased towards certain cancers.
The mitochondria's ability to generate ATP can become impaired for some reason, like a toxin or a virus. Viruses target mitochondria DNA before the nucleus. Mitochondria also produce ROS for immunity defense. If enough mitochondria structures fall apart and if certain sufficient enzymes are present in the cell, cell death occurs. Also, based on a certain receptor, less dead mitochondria are needed to cause cell death. If there are not many mitochondria and they are not producing much ATP, they will not have a lot of the protein (cyt C) that initially signals cell death by this method. Muscles never get cancer ... supposedly partly because they are loaded with mitochondria that can more easily signal cell death when needed.
If the cell does not die from the above and the mitochondria are not producing sufficient ATP (or the needed enzymes are not present) for whatever reason such as stress, then "cancer-causing" genes in the nucleus (many of which are normal) are activated into action to produce proteins that will allow 2 other non-aerobic pathways to produce ATP. These are ancient anaerobic pathways that are much less efficient and use glucose and produce lactic acid. It is anaerobic fermentation to produce ATP. Muscles really know this pathway, or a variation on it, and apparently know how to deal with it.
Something occurs that causes the cell to multiply. If there is insufficient vit D3, which can be caused locally by a certain protein being released that converts it all, then new vessels can be formed to supply the cells. (although there are I suppose many other reasons angiogenesis can incorrectly occur).
So I have insufficient mitochondria (specifically cyt C) or certain enzymes, multiplication, and low vit D3 or an excess of one of its breakdown enzymes, all of which can be influenced by the nucleus, but it's not fair to say the nucleus is the cause if the mitochondria or the enzymes can be improved to overcome a virus, diet, or genetic bias.
Metastases are supposedly being cause by macrophages being released by the cell, which are allowed to spread by design in the body....ironically for purposes of killing other cells (immunity) or repairing. But you can see they have the technology inside them to be cancer if used incorrectly.
You can greatly slow the progression of a cancer by using a calorie-restricted ketogenic diet (no carbs) which allows the mitochondria to do their job with oxygen without GLUCOSE. No carb diets do not help unless it is calorie-restricted because fats and protein can be converted to glucose.
LED light therapy (red and near-infrared, 830 nm being preferred) kick-starts the mitochondria's to use OXYGEN to produce more ATP (via both glucose and ketones). This might activate signals to be sent that produce more mitochondria. Or if you over-supply the light it can produce ROS. So the combination of a ketogenic diet, hyperbaric oxygen, and LED light therapy, and a non-active glucose mimic to plug the anaerobic pathway, we might be getting close to effectively reversing many forms of cancer. Almost every phytochemical you can identify that has been studied at a weight of 1% or 2% of diet in mice and rats can slow cancer models about as much as the low-calorie diet. 50% slower progression for many. If you take any plant and isolate the 3 best cancer nutrients in it and give it 3% of diet without excess carbs, you better see the cancer slow by at least 30% or you did your study wrong. Paleolithic plants were much smaller and had much higher surface areas and much fewer carbs per nutrient.
Here is a video on the core of the ideas, by Thomas Seyfried. References to muscles, vitamin D3 as related to angiogenesis, and light therapy are from other sources.
[media]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sBjnWfT8HbQ[/media]
"Excessive angiogenesis" diseases reads like a who's who list of insufficient vitamin D3. Cancer, Alzheimer's, psoriasis, inflammation, arthritis, etc.
I'll state all the following as if it is all known, factual, correct, and without qualifications to facilitate easy reading.
When a normal nucleus is inserted to replace a "cancerous" nucleus, the cells continue to multiply, keeping the good nucleus without modification. Inserting the nucleus from a cancer cell into any normal cell does not maintain the cancer. So cancer is not in the nucleus, the nucleus is just interacting with the rest of the cell, although obviously sometimes the nucleus is genetically biased towards certain cancers.
The mitochondria's ability to generate ATP can become impaired for some reason, like a toxin or a virus. Viruses target mitochondria DNA before the nucleus. Mitochondria also produce ROS for immunity defense. If enough mitochondria structures fall apart and if certain sufficient enzymes are present in the cell, cell death occurs. Also, based on a certain receptor, less dead mitochondria are needed to cause cell death. If there are not many mitochondria and they are not producing much ATP, they will not have a lot of the protein (cyt C) that initially signals cell death by this method. Muscles never get cancer ... supposedly partly because they are loaded with mitochondria that can more easily signal cell death when needed.
If the cell does not die from the above and the mitochondria are not producing sufficient ATP (or the needed enzymes are not present) for whatever reason such as stress, then "cancer-causing" genes in the nucleus (many of which are normal) are activated into action to produce proteins that will allow 2 other non-aerobic pathways to produce ATP. These are ancient anaerobic pathways that are much less efficient and use glucose and produce lactic acid. It is anaerobic fermentation to produce ATP. Muscles really know this pathway, or a variation on it, and apparently know how to deal with it.
Something occurs that causes the cell to multiply. If there is insufficient vit D3, which can be caused locally by a certain protein being released that converts it all, then new vessels can be formed to supply the cells. (although there are I suppose many other reasons angiogenesis can incorrectly occur).
So I have insufficient mitochondria (specifically cyt C) or certain enzymes, multiplication, and low vit D3 or an excess of one of its breakdown enzymes, all of which can be influenced by the nucleus, but it's not fair to say the nucleus is the cause if the mitochondria or the enzymes can be improved to overcome a virus, diet, or genetic bias.
Metastases are supposedly being cause by macrophages being released by the cell, which are allowed to spread by design in the body....ironically for purposes of killing other cells (immunity) or repairing. But you can see they have the technology inside them to be cancer if used incorrectly.
You can greatly slow the progression of a cancer by using a calorie-restricted ketogenic diet (no carbs) which allows the mitochondria to do their job with oxygen without GLUCOSE. No carb diets do not help unless it is calorie-restricted because fats and protein can be converted to glucose.
LED light therapy (red and near-infrared, 830 nm being preferred) kick-starts the mitochondria's to use OXYGEN to produce more ATP (via both glucose and ketones). This might activate signals to be sent that produce more mitochondria. Or if you over-supply the light it can produce ROS. So the combination of a ketogenic diet, hyperbaric oxygen, and LED light therapy, and a non-active glucose mimic to plug the anaerobic pathway, we might be getting close to effectively reversing many forms of cancer. Almost every phytochemical you can identify that has been studied at a weight of 1% or 2% of diet in mice and rats can slow cancer models about as much as the low-calorie diet. 50% slower progression for many. If you take any plant and isolate the 3 best cancer nutrients in it and give it 3% of diet without excess carbs, you better see the cancer slow by at least 30% or you did your study wrong. Paleolithic plants were much smaller and had much higher surface areas and much fewer carbs per nutrient.
Here is a video on the core of the ideas, by Thomas Seyfried. References to muscles, vitamin D3 as related to angiogenesis, and light therapy are from other sources.
[media]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sBjnWfT8HbQ[/media]
"Excessive angiogenesis" diseases reads like a who's who list of insufficient vitamin D3. Cancer, Alzheimer's, psoriasis, inflammation, arthritis, etc.
more thoughts on the coming of the machines
Yes, it became conscious in a sort of unconscious way. Even today I doubt few in these complexes want to hurt fellow Americans. They lobby extensively with very logical explanations to themselves and to congressmen why certain laws will benefit voters. "More jobs" is the most common excuse....but you see more jobs for the sake of more jobs without actually producing anything we need are actually needed (military, banking, and health insurance employees are just receiving a disguised welfare enacted by law) but only because machines and computers have already replaced the jobs we actually need to have in place. If Asian labor were not so cheap there would just be more machines and we would pay a small amount more. None of the engineers I know who get paid and feed their children by making war machines realize that the sole purpose of their life's work is to cause unemployable young people to get permanently and horribly disabled (especially mentally) so that American taxpayers would have to pay 4 year's worth of our total oil requirements in Iraq war expenses. The estimate total past and future cost of Iraq war is $3 trillion. We use 20 million barrels a day. I get 4 years by using $100 per barrel. Imagine 4 years of free oil and no injured 25 year old warriors. No dead fathers. Imagine how much money the medical industry will get from injured veterans. Now consider that the 13 of 15 hijackers of 911 were disgruntled Saudis, thanks to being one of the most repressed nations in the world thanks to the U.S. supporting the family dictatorship there. So throw in Afghanistan too. Now Pakistan is all angry at us, and the military-industrial-medical industries are unconsciously begging for another terrorist attack.
Really?? The military-industrial complex did just that and as I recall the chief Pooh-Bah of that complex in the '40s and '50s and Dwight left office in 1960 with the very simple warning, "beware the military industrial complex."
A response: "Really?? The military-industrial complex did just that and as I recall the chief Pooh-Bah of that complex in the '40s and '50s and Dwight left office in 1960 with the very simple warning, "beware the military industrial complex."
Yes, it became conscious in a sort of unconscious way. Even today I doubt few in these complexes want to hurt fellow Americans. They lobby extensively with very logical explanations to themselves and to congressmen why certain laws will benefit voters. "More jobs" is the most common excuse....but you see more jobs for the sake of more jobs without actually producing anything we need are actually needed (military, banking, and health insurance employees are just receiving a disguised welfare enacted by law) but only because machines and computers have already replaced the jobs we actually need to have in place. If Asian labor were not so cheap there would just be more machines and we would pay a small amount more. None of the engineers I know who get paid and feed their children by making war machines realize that the sole purpose of their life's work is to cause unemployable young people to get permanently and horribly disabled (especially mentally) so that American taxpayers would have to pay 4 year's worth of our total oil requirements in Iraq war expenses. The estimate total past and future cost of Iraq war is $3 trillion. We use 20 million barrels a day. I get 4 years by using $100 per barrel. Imagine 4 years of free oil and no injured 25 year old warriors. No dead fathers. Imagine how much money the medical industry will get from injured veterans. Now consider that the 13 of 15 hijackers of 911 were disgruntled Saudis, thanks to being one of the most repressed nations in the world thanks to the U.S. supporting the family dictatorship there. So throw in Afghanistan too. Now Pakistan is all angry at us, and the military-industrial-medical industries are unconsciously begging for another terrorist attack.
Really?? The military-industrial complex did just that and as I recall the chief Pooh-Bah of that complex in the '40s and '50s and Dwight left office in 1960 with the very simple warning, "beware the military industrial complex."
A response: "Really?? The military-industrial complex did just that and as I recall the chief Pooh-Bah of that complex in the '40s and '50s and Dwight left office in 1960 with the very simple warning, "beware the military industrial complex."
Yes, it became conscious in a sort of unconscious way. Even today I doubt few in these complexes want to hurt fellow Americans. They lobby extensively with very logical explanations to themselves and to congressmen why certain laws will benefit voters. "More jobs" is the most common excuse....but you see more jobs for the sake of more jobs without actually producing anything we need are actually needed (military, banking, and health insurance employees are just receiving a disguised welfare enacted by law) but only because machines and computers have already replaced the jobs we actually need to have in place. If Asian labor were not so cheap there would just be more machines and we would pay a small amount more. None of the engineers I know who get paid and feed their children by making war machines realize that the sole purpose of their life's work is to cause unemployable young people to get permanently and horribly disabled (especially mentally) so that American taxpayers would have to pay 4 year's worth of our total oil requirements in Iraq war expenses. The estimate total past and future cost of Iraq war is $3 trillion. We use 20 million barrels a day. I get 4 years by using $100 per barrel. Imagine 4 years of free oil and no injured 25 year old warriors. No dead fathers. Imagine how much money the medical industry will get from injured veterans. Now consider that the 13 of 15 hijackers of 911 were disgruntled Saudis, thanks to being one of the most repressed nations in the world thanks to the U.S. supporting the family dictatorship there. So throw in Afghanistan too. Now Pakistan is all angry at us, and the military-industrial-medical industries are unconsciously begging for another terrorist attack.
Saturday, February 15, 2014
paleo plant nutrient levels
One thing I don't hear anyone talking about in regards to the paleo diet is this: ancient vegetable foods were small compared to today which means much higher surface area to volume. This means lower carbs to nutrient ratio (including proteins). Strawberries 1/4 today's radius would have 4 times more seeds (on the surface) per calorie. Grapes 1/3 the current radius would have 3 times the surface area per carb, containing most of the sun-hardened colorful phytochemicals including resveratrol.
random note on cancer treatment (partial email to Dominic)
In the 2nd video "angiogenesis" at timestamp 3:15 he lists problems caused by "excessive angiogenesis". It's also a list of ailments that are associated with vitamin D insufficiency. In looking all around in pubmed this morning, I have the following perception: Vit D3's active form calcitriol stops angiogenesis. Mitochondrial protein CYP24 depletes calcitrol and thereby removes a rodblock to angiogenesis. Some cancers over-express CYP24 which depletes the calcitriol which allows vessels to grow. A cancer that responds to vitamin D3 does not increase CYP24.
Hyperbaric oxygen and 830 nm light can push impaired mitochondria to generate more ATP than needed and once there is an excess of the H+ in the intermembrane, there can be excess ROS from electron transport chain leakage. If the excess ROS kills the mitochondria (the body is thinking there is too much mitochondria present because of the ATP build up) then it releases cytochrome C which signals the nucleus for cell death (via excess calcium and cysteine protease, Wikipedia). So, ketones supply the carbons and hydrogens, hyperbaric supplies the O2, and excess red and near-infrared light can kickstart the CCO into creating too much H+ to kill the weakened cells. Vit D3 can then close down the vessels as the excess CYP24 is no longer present. Not just cancer, but also viruses. This makes me think sunlight (UV for vit D3 and red-infrared for more ATP) and exercise (more O2) while chasing food due to starvation (ketones) is a healthy lifestyle.
Or, maybe hyperbaric oxygen and 830 nm light can help the mitochondria repair itself to swamp the fermentation pathway.
Hyperbaric oxygen and 830 nm light can push impaired mitochondria to generate more ATP than needed and once there is an excess of the H+ in the intermembrane, there can be excess ROS from electron transport chain leakage. If the excess ROS kills the mitochondria (the body is thinking there is too much mitochondria present because of the ATP build up) then it releases cytochrome C which signals the nucleus for cell death (via excess calcium and cysteine protease, Wikipedia). So, ketones supply the carbons and hydrogens, hyperbaric supplies the O2, and excess red and near-infrared light can kickstart the CCO into creating too much H+ to kill the weakened cells. Vit D3 can then close down the vessels as the excess CYP24 is no longer present. Not just cancer, but also viruses. This makes me think sunlight (UV for vit D3 and red-infrared for more ATP) and exercise (more O2) while chasing food due to starvation (ketones) is a healthy lifestyle.
Or, maybe hyperbaric oxygen and 830 nm light can help the mitochondria repair itself to swamp the fermentation pathway.
Thursday, February 13, 2014
"Fundamental Unit of Intelligence"
I have been wondering the last few years if I could think of a "fundamental unit of intelligence" in the same way the "bit" is a measure of raw uncompressed information and that a complete Turing machine (in my mind a "fundamental unit of thought") can be constructed out of a bunch of NAND or XOR gates without anything else. The "intelligence" (or value?) of the bits is what they represent and the "intelligence" of the NAND gates is how many there are and the memory they hold (bit states), assuming they are wired efficiently. There are certain ways of wiring for maximum efficiency for certain applications (for example to implement specific mathematical formulas), and for simple Turing machines it may not be hard to get close to an ideal.
Since I've mixed in "intelligence" with my bits and NAND gates, I need to define "intelligence" better. Rather than philosophizing ad naseum, I'll just jump to the end and tell you the answer to life, the Universe and everything so that I can define intelligence. The answer is to the question "how can we quickly convert energy to structure". This is the meaning of life, its goal. To take high energy photons, chemical bonds, heat differentials, nuclear bonds, and gravitational fields and to reduce these extractable sources of energies into ... well exactly what I am not sure. Making exact or imperfect copies of the things that do the extraction for more extraction is a beginning step. More and more complex and "intelligent" forms of life seem to come along with the ability to extract energy from the reduced forms of energy. It seems to increase the rate at which the heat death of the Universe is achieved. This is normally viewed as a perfectly random system of fundamental particles not moving (at least relative to each other), assuming the Universe does not collapse and begin again. But random is only the result of perception. It might be more accurate to say the final structure ("randomness") is perfectly logical in that it extracted all the energy sources available. To be more concrete, imagine we mine all matter in the solar system to place a shield around the Sun to capture all the photons so that we can create high-energy bonds of Silicon, Carbon, or whatever can be used to get the most out of each photon so that lower-energy photons do not leave the solar system. When we've idealized the structure that surrounds the Sun, then the extract photons could be converted to particles for more structure. Maybe gravitons could be captured, but that leads to things that take me off-track. But then we have high-energy sources again in the Si-Si and C-C bonds and whatnot. So it seems avoiding the heat death of the Universe is possible. Could "we" recycle energy at 100% efficiency so that each galaxy has perpetual "happiness"? The galaxies are supposed to be moving such that one day they will never be able to influence each other, not even getting light from each other.
Well, ANYWAY, all the AI I see seems to be about "prediction" which is a better way of saying "pattern recognition". "Compression" seems to be intimately connected with effective prediction. Or rather, compression algorithms are the most efficient way of representing a given type of "media". The compression algorithm is better if it is tailored to the type of media in the same way the brain is pre-coded to develop to be able to do certain tasks better. The most efficient compression will be an algorithm designed for a specific type of media, and then designs an instance of itself even better based on the totality of a given set of data being compressed: it creates a "look up table" and an algorithm to decompress a string of representations based on the data at hand. In other words, a highly-tailored algorithm will be created that has the ability to convert the data at hand into representations that refer to the look up table. In Numenta's CLA that is supposed to be like the brain, each cell or segment of synapses is like a "fuzzy word". By this I mean each one is like an item in a look up table, but the item by itself does not have meaning and needs to be combined with other cells or synapse activations to have meaning in the next-higher level of cells. So the tailored algorithm will refer to a string of representations which will refer to a look up table. The string is read by the algorithm, so the string is the condensed program and the algorithm is the interpreter. The look up table is the memory. But it's hard and probably not necessary to keep the algorithm and string of "representations" and look up table as distinct. The string is intrinsically connected to the look up table and algorithm. It's all really just an algorithm as in kolmogorov complexity. Or rather, it's like physics trying to reduce the observed world to the simplest set of equations (Occam's razor), and that this methodology results in the most "accurate" equation because more complex equations have more bits that can define equivalent results. Maybe this is useful in physics at least because smaller equations also allow for describing a wider range of things. Longer equations seem more specific, and they are if they are the shortest possible length and there are no equivalents. But now imagine there are a lot of equivalent equations for a given set of observations, which means they will also be more restrictive with respect to each in terms of "potential" observations not yet tested. Imagine they are all correct in the potential observations, but not overlapping due to being too restrictive because they are too "long". Then a simpler equation, if it can be found, is more important.
OK, well, I still haven't gotten close to where I want to go. AI seems to concentrate on "prediction" and in the closest cases of achieving "intelligence" it seems to be looking for compression to a kolmorogov ideal simplicity. Sort of like physics equations are the most "intelligent" thing AI knows. The thing I see missing in AI discussion is "achieving profit", whether or not it is defined as "making copies of oneself". Compression/prediction is a type of seeking profit, and I'm sure there are plenty of more directly-interpretable profit-seeking algorithms like least squares curve fitting, hill climbing, and the calculus of variation. Compression/prediction has inherent it some sort of "model" of whatever is generating the data. It may be related to the actual thing generating the data, or an even more efficient representation of it. What's needed (I think I'm finally getting to my point) is the ability to identify what "inputs to" or "control knobs in" the generator can be controlled at the least expense to get the most profit. Profit needs to be defined for the algorithm, but an intelligent algorithm is one that most efficiently discovers the most efficient algorithm that can get the most profit from a giving data generator. Intelligence needs not only to predict, but to change the data stream or the generator in order to profit. A compressor has a certain level of reversibility to it depending on its desired accuracy. Being able to change the data or generator seems to insert causality.
Since I've mixed in "intelligence" with my bits and NAND gates, I need to define "intelligence" better. Rather than philosophizing ad naseum, I'll just jump to the end and tell you the answer to life, the Universe and everything so that I can define intelligence. The answer is to the question "how can we quickly convert energy to structure". This is the meaning of life, its goal. To take high energy photons, chemical bonds, heat differentials, nuclear bonds, and gravitational fields and to reduce these extractable sources of energies into ... well exactly what I am not sure. Making exact or imperfect copies of the things that do the extraction for more extraction is a beginning step. More and more complex and "intelligent" forms of life seem to come along with the ability to extract energy from the reduced forms of energy. It seems to increase the rate at which the heat death of the Universe is achieved. This is normally viewed as a perfectly random system of fundamental particles not moving (at least relative to each other), assuming the Universe does not collapse and begin again. But random is only the result of perception. It might be more accurate to say the final structure ("randomness") is perfectly logical in that it extracted all the energy sources available. To be more concrete, imagine we mine all matter in the solar system to place a shield around the Sun to capture all the photons so that we can create high-energy bonds of Silicon, Carbon, or whatever can be used to get the most out of each photon so that lower-energy photons do not leave the solar system. When we've idealized the structure that surrounds the Sun, then the extract photons could be converted to particles for more structure. Maybe gravitons could be captured, but that leads to things that take me off-track. But then we have high-energy sources again in the Si-Si and C-C bonds and whatnot. So it seems avoiding the heat death of the Universe is possible. Could "we" recycle energy at 100% efficiency so that each galaxy has perpetual "happiness"? The galaxies are supposed to be moving such that one day they will never be able to influence each other, not even getting light from each other.
Well, ANYWAY, all the AI I see seems to be about "prediction" which is a better way of saying "pattern recognition". "Compression" seems to be intimately connected with effective prediction. Or rather, compression algorithms are the most efficient way of representing a given type of "media". The compression algorithm is better if it is tailored to the type of media in the same way the brain is pre-coded to develop to be able to do certain tasks better. The most efficient compression will be an algorithm designed for a specific type of media, and then designs an instance of itself even better based on the totality of a given set of data being compressed: it creates a "look up table" and an algorithm to decompress a string of representations based on the data at hand. In other words, a highly-tailored algorithm will be created that has the ability to convert the data at hand into representations that refer to the look up table. In Numenta's CLA that is supposed to be like the brain, each cell or segment of synapses is like a "fuzzy word". By this I mean each one is like an item in a look up table, but the item by itself does not have meaning and needs to be combined with other cells or synapse activations to have meaning in the next-higher level of cells. So the tailored algorithm will refer to a string of representations which will refer to a look up table. The string is read by the algorithm, so the string is the condensed program and the algorithm is the interpreter. The look up table is the memory. But it's hard and probably not necessary to keep the algorithm and string of "representations" and look up table as distinct. The string is intrinsically connected to the look up table and algorithm. It's all really just an algorithm as in kolmogorov complexity. Or rather, it's like physics trying to reduce the observed world to the simplest set of equations (Occam's razor), and that this methodology results in the most "accurate" equation because more complex equations have more bits that can define equivalent results. Maybe this is useful in physics at least because smaller equations also allow for describing a wider range of things. Longer equations seem more specific, and they are if they are the shortest possible length and there are no equivalents. But now imagine there are a lot of equivalent equations for a given set of observations, which means they will also be more restrictive with respect to each in terms of "potential" observations not yet tested. Imagine they are all correct in the potential observations, but not overlapping due to being too restrictive because they are too "long". Then a simpler equation, if it can be found, is more important.
OK, well, I still haven't gotten close to where I want to go. AI seems to concentrate on "prediction" and in the closest cases of achieving "intelligence" it seems to be looking for compression to a kolmorogov ideal simplicity. Sort of like physics equations are the most "intelligent" thing AI knows. The thing I see missing in AI discussion is "achieving profit", whether or not it is defined as "making copies of oneself". Compression/prediction is a type of seeking profit, and I'm sure there are plenty of more directly-interpretable profit-seeking algorithms like least squares curve fitting, hill climbing, and the calculus of variation. Compression/prediction has inherent it some sort of "model" of whatever is generating the data. It may be related to the actual thing generating the data, or an even more efficient representation of it. What's needed (I think I'm finally getting to my point) is the ability to identify what "inputs to" or "control knobs in" the generator can be controlled at the least expense to get the most profit. Profit needs to be defined for the algorithm, but an intelligent algorithm is one that most efficiently discovers the most efficient algorithm that can get the most profit from a giving data generator. Intelligence needs not only to predict, but to change the data stream or the generator in order to profit. A compressor has a certain level of reversibility to it depending on its desired accuracy. Being able to change the data or generator seems to insert causality.
I really need to write a book on this
I think you guys are using a restricted definition of 'algorithm'. My definition is "anything that can run on a Turing machine" and is therefore computationally universal, which includes anything the brain can do and more. To assume intelligence is something that can go beyond any and all algorithms is a religious viewpoint that is not based in an adequate computer, engineering, medical, or philosophical education. DNA-based life depends on water and ambient temperatures and pressures and therefore can't make direct use of modern technologies. 1) Brains, 2) muscles, and 3) photosynthesis are respectively about 10 million, 100, and 50 times less efficient than our "machines" in 1) prediction/reaction, 2) moving matter, and 3) acquiring energy. Evolution is the principle of minimum potential energy being followed as fast as the Universe can discover. A useful but limited definition of intelligence is the ability to perceive and then decide how to (predict->react) acquire and use ENERGY to move MATTER to make COPIES or imperfect copies of oneself. The "copy" is the embodiment of the intelligence, so they may be regarded as the same thing. As the potential energy is depleted and competition increases, "life" gets more "complex". This complexity appears random to less-intelligent blind statistical mechanics equations that might be philosophically wrong in calling the final results the heat "death" of the Universe. Our economic system is achieving evolution's goal as it continues to replace the biosphere with "harder" technologies that seek out all sources of potential energy (i.e., Sun photons, Earth-based radiation sources like fission, and chemical bonds that are not able to "defend themselves" against the energy-extracting). All "desire" might be no more than the principle of minimum potential energy trying to be followed. Earth is in the midst of the 6th great extinction, but this time DNA will probably not be the foundation in evolution's next step. DNA can only transmit computational signals via sodium and potassium ions whereas the ability to smelt metals has enabled modern machines to use electrons instead, which are 600,000 times lighter. The brain is massively parallel because it is fantastically slow from the use of heavy ions. Intelligence used to be defined by the ability to do math, to remember, and in processing and reaction speed. The ability to take a hammer to a computer makes us more "intelligent" only in the restricted evolutionary sense, but even then it is not true since computers are multiplying and swarming around us like ants. Soon we'll be less than our current status of being temporarily-needed aphids excreting silicon and electricity for the computers to feed on. Soon they will not need the traditional banking, legal, and health systems to control our economies and governments. "Force" still has no identifiable inherent causality in physics, and evolution still sneers at the ideas of "desire" and free will", so that it's not scientific to think of our economic and government systems in terms of what people "want". Evolution looks only at the spread of genes and memes, and the quantity of DNA is going down while transistors are racing ahead. What percent of programmers in the U.S. are NOT already in banking, finance, law, health insurance, and other means of controlling the population for the benefit of a few people and many machines, to the detriment of the non-programming people? Even programmers often do not have an enviable life style. If you discount the effects of the cold war, life in the U.S. has not improved with the advent of the transistor because it replaces neurons. This would not be a problem if muscles were still needed. Our muscles and neurons are woefully outdated. Our economic system needs to get rid of us as fast as possible so that the remaining fossil fuels can be used more efficiently to make copies of itself. We're not even interested in spreading ourselves to other solar systems. The rallying cry of our machines will soon be "First, let's kill all the humans."
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