We can't imagine every action causing an equal immediate reaction in the opposite direction though because things wouldn't move in that case. — Gregory

Newton perfectly well explained the motions of the planets in the solar system using equal and opposite reactions as one of his physical principles.

If I am understanding Newton correctly, smaller objects gain their weight from larger ones, such that the largest mass in the universe has no weight. — Gregory

Poor Newton. What? I don't think that's right. After all, Newton well knew that as the earth pulls on the moon, the moon pulls on the earth. "To every action there's an equal and opposite reaction." The largest mass in the universe gains weight from all the rest of the mass of the universe.

Speaking of poor Newton, after he became a wealthy and famous man he lost a fortune in the South Sea bubble. He famously said, "I can calculate the motion of heavenly bodies, but not the madness of people."

the Turing test has been beaten already by AI. — Paul S

The Turing test is routinely "beaten" by plain old chatbots. The problem isn't that the chatbots are intelligent, but that humans are easily fooled. If you say, "Hello" to a program and it outputs, "Hi there, how are you today?" most people are willing to believe they're talking to their neighbor, with whom they never have any deeper conversation than that yet credit their neighbor with sentience.

But the surface area of the horn, itself being infinite, cannot be painted with a finite amount of paint. — tim wood

No that's not true. Divide the infinite surface area into sections 1 unit long, as for example the positive real number line is partitioned by the integers 1, 2, 3, 4, ...

Between 1 and 2 you use 1/2 gallon of paint. Between 2 and 3 you use 1/4 gallon. Between 3 and 4 you use 1/8 gallon, and so forth. You will then cover the entire infinite surface of the cone with only one gallon of paint. Of course this is a-physical, since the thickness of the paint would soon be far less than the width of an atom. But mathematically you can indeed cover an infinite surface area with a finite amount of paint.

I didn't see the video, but it was referenced on Reddit this morning with the same misconception, so I wonder if Numberphile perhaps confused people on this point.

ps -- It's perhaps easier to see this in two dimensions. Imagine the graph of y = 1/x from 1 to infinity. We know from calculus that the area under the curve is infinite. But for any positive integer n, the area under the curve on the interval [n, n+1] is finite. So you just cover each such interval with a finite amount of paint according to some convergent infinite series such as 1/2 + 1/4 + 1/8 + ... = 1.

Yuval Noah Harari suggests that,
'The liberal story cherishes human liberty as its number-one value. It argues that all authority stems from the free will of individual human, as it is expressed in their feelings, desires and choices. In politics, liberalism believes that that the voter knows best. It therefore upholds democratic elections. In economics, liberalism encourages that the customer is always right. It therefore hails free-market principles. In personal matters, liberalism encourages people to listen to themselves, be true to themselves, be true to themselves and follow their own hearts- as long as they do not infringe on their on the liberties of others. This personal freedom is enshrined in human rights.' — Jack Cummins

That's classical liberalism; and most definitely not contemporary liberalism.

1177 BC -- The year civilization collapsed.

Saw this on Youtube a while back.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1177_B.C.:_The_Year_Civilization_Collapsed

Point being that the world's collapsed more than once. Our weapons are new but our problems aren't.

It's certainly true that asking the right question is often 90% of the quest to find the right answer.

Not following this thread though avidly following the GME/RH fiasco. Ran across this terrific article about RH's business practices, in particular the fact that it gets most of its revenue from Citadel in the form of payment for order flow (PFOF), which (illegally) front-runs the trades.

A great read if you're following this story.

https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/exposing-robinhood-scam-heres-how-much-citadel-paid-robinhood-buy-your-orders

"Frankly, we've had it with the constant stream of lies from Robinhood and neverending bullshit from the company's CEO, Vlad Tenev."

We all know what probability is — TheMadFool

I'd dispute that.

Berkeley called them ghosts of dead space as if space dies as it approaches infinity. — Gregory

A misquote and out of context as well, unless you are referring to something else. If so please provide a reference so that I can learn something. I assume you are referring to "the ghost of departed quantities."

Berkeley called Newton's fluxion (what we now call the derivative) the ghost of departed quantities. He was calling attention to the logical problems in the definition of the derivative; problems that as I indicated earlier were not fully resolved for another 200 years. Berkeley had a point; and, like the intellectuals of the day, could snark with the best. If these guys came back today they'd be right at home online.

The question at issue was the meaning of the derivative. I'll use modern notation rather than Newton's original notation and terminology. If we have some function $y = f(x)$, we can form the difference quotient

$\displaystyle \frac{f(x + h) - f(x)}{h}$

where $h$ is some tiny increment. As $h$ gets very close to 0, the difference quotient approaches what Newton called $\dot x$ and what we today call $f'(x)$ or $\frac{dy}{dx}$. In fact Newton's dot notation is still sometimes used in physics and engineering.

As you can see, as $h$ gets very close to 0, $f(x + h)$ gets very close to $f(x)$, so that the numerator of the difference quotient gets very close to 0; and likewise, the denominator gets very close to 0 as well.

The idea, by the way, is that $f(x)$ gives the position of some object at time $x$; and the derivative turns out to be its velocity. The derivative of your car's position function is exactly what's shown on your speedometer at any moment.

Berkeley rightly pointed out that if $h$ is nonzero, the difference quotient is not the derivative; but if $h$ IS zero, then the difference quotient is the entirely meaningless $\frac{0}{0}$. Newton had no logical explanation and Berkeley was correct to point this out in the witty manner he did.

Yet, the procedure "gave the right answer" and allowed Newton to calculate the orbits of the planets and derive the universal law of gravitation. As so often happens in the history of science, the physicists had a clever procedure that proved incredibly useful and gave the right answer; but that was not mathematically legitimate. It was left to the mathematicians to put derivatives on a sound logical footing, and this is what took 200 years.

Apologies for the freshman calculus lesson (augmented by history, which sadly they DON'T teach in calculus class); but this is what the quote was about.

They were NOT talking about space. They were talking about a mathematical formalism that seemed to be the key to understanding the universe, yet which could not be defended logically with the mathematics of the day.

My question is why does it approach infinity when we get smaller and smaller but not when going in the opposite direction. — Gregory

Not clear what "it" is in this context, but nothing's approaching infinity. Rather, as $h$ gets close to zero, the difference quotient gets close to the true velocity of a moving particle whose position at time $x$ is given by $f(x)$.

Using this idea, Newton was able to work out the inverse square law of gravitational attraction and describe the workings of the universe, and show that the fall of an apple from a tree was exactly the same phenomenon, described by the same law of gravity, as the motions of the planets in the heavens. That was a profound scientific breakthrough. As Berkeley pointed out, we did not understand mathematically what the derivative was; only that it seemed to work.

With the former you get nowhere and in the later we get limited finitude. How can some thing be infinite and finite in regard to its spatial component? — Gregory

I wonder if you can be more specific here. I can't correlate this with what I just described as the mathematical context of the "ghosts of departed quantities" remark as applied to Newton's early concept of the derivative.

If matter is pure extension as Descartes said there results confusion. — Gregory

Nothing to do with the nature of matter; only with the logical nature of a mathematical formalism that allowed Newton to discover his law of universal gravitation; yet did not seem to have a proper logical basis.

Yet Hegel said space was "outside itself" and I try to understand this as curved space. — Gregory

Berkeley's quote has nothing to do with any of this. The context was Newton's definition of the derivative (or as he called it, the fluxion) of a function. The method worked but the logical foundation wasn't clear, nor would it be clear for another 200 years. That's the subject. The mathematical formalism of the derivative as the limit of the difference quotient.

If we have a globe, you can do non-Euclidean geometry on the surface but inside it you can still do Euclidean stuff. However if curvature is prior to other aspects of extension than the whole globe is permeated with a curve. It's from this angle that I am trying to understand infinitesimals and how they loop back into finitude. — Gregory

Yes but this has nothing to do with the development of the logical foundation of the definition of the derivative, which was the actual context of Berkeley's brilliantly snarky remark.Yet even so, Berkeley was the moon to Newton's sun. Berkeley was picking at the logical problems, correctly; but Newton was revolutionizing our understanding of the world.

So you can see I do take this subject seriously. — Gregory

You threw me off a bit going off into the social upheavals of the 1960's. But also with regard to your comments on the nature of space. That was never the subject of Berkeley's remark.

Leibniz wrote about infinitesimals as monads, that's something I don't know much about. Perhaps that would be of interest to you. And of course there is an ongoing question of the ultimate nature of space. Is it made up of little infinitesimal thingies, or what?

So perhaps I'm being too literal, which is a constant fault of mine. Someone asks a question, I answer it correctly with precision, yet totally miss the point. A bit like Berkeley's logical carping next to Newton's revolutionary discoveries. So be it.

But if the question is what did Berkeley mean by the ghosts of departed quantities, he was referring specifically to the numerator and denominator of the difference quotient as $h$ gets close to 0, and as the difference quotient gets close to the derivative.

Newton himself referred to this as the "ultimate ratio" of the difference quotient and struggled over the course of his life to make logical sense of the derivative. He never succeeded. It took the geniuses of the 19th century to finally nail it down.

The tl;dr:

* Berkeley's quote is about the technical definition of the derivative; a definition that actually makes no sense till you have a rigorous theory of limits, which didn't show up till the 19th century; and

* None of this has anything to do with the actual nature of space, which is a different subject entirely. After all, both the infinitesimals of NSA and the standard epsilon-delta approach are mathematical formalisms that we use to try to model space. They tell us nothing at all about space itself.

If the idea of infinitesimals is a black hole in a garden — Gregory

An infinitesimal is an element of an ordered field that is greater than zero, but less than 1/n for every natural number n. If your original remarks were about mathematical infinitesimals, this is a strange comment; and if not, why the quotes from Russell and the mention of NSA?

I see the point about this. Heidegger started saying "what IS being", and in the 60's and beyond everyone is asking "what IS consciousness" . — Gregory

Surely this has nothing at all to do with infinitesimals.

Ideas too big to grapple with — Gregory

That's funny. Since an infinitesimal is something that's infinitely small, it's ironic to call it an idea too big.

Maybe there is a dialectic behind the whole thing — Gregory

Maybe you could say why you totally changed the subject from your original post. Did I totally waste my time discussing mathematical infinitesimals? Were you never interested in them at all, but rather about something else?

It's sounds as if math professors kind of agree that it's best not to tilt at that particular windmill — Gregory

If I gave that impression I failed in my post utterly. And I see I did.

The epsilon-delta formulation of limits is one of the crowning intellectual achievements of humanity. From Newton and Leibniz's calculus of the late 17th century, it was another 200 years till the late 19th century before we had a fully rigorous account of limits.

There's no windmill tilting being avoided at all. Rather, it's extremely difficult to come up with a logically rigorous theory of infinitesimals. It wasn't done till 1948, by Hewitt, and then Robinson came up with NSA in the 1960's. But to this day, the epsilon-delta idea has all the mindshare, and as I say you need extra strong logical assumptions to get infinitesimals off the ground. And NSA has not turned out to be any improvement in pedagogy. So there are good reasons why they're not used in the calculus curriculum.

according to Russell, Weierstrass's solution was to throw out the very notion of an "infinitesimal" all together. — Gregory

Correct. The modern epsilon-delta formalism finesses infinitesimals. It makes infinitesimals go away. We replace the phrase "infinitely small" with "arbitrarily small," and that turns out to make all the difference. I'd be glad to expand on this but I don't know if you want a discourse on basic calculus here, probably not. Suffice to say that (1) There are no infinitesimals in the real numbers; and (2) We can base calculus on the notion of arbitrary closeness between quantities.

That is: To say that the "limit" if 1/x is 0 as x gets large without bound, is to play a game. You give me a tiny tiny tiny positive real number; and I'll give you an x such that 1/x is strictly between 0 and your number. If I can always win that game by finding a suitable, x, no matter what tiny positive real number you give me, then we say 1/x has the limit 0. No infinitesimals are used nor do they exist. They've been banished from mathematics.

I know that non-standard analysis in the 60's brought "points" back — Gregory

NSA is based on the hyperreal numbers, which are a nonstandard model of the first-order axioms of the real numbers. The hyperreals contain true infinitesimals. One calculus book, by Keisler in 1976, has been written based on NSA. If the idea had pedagogical value we'd have seen more since then; but in fact studies show that students come out of an NSA-based calculus class just as confused as they do from a course in standard calculus.

It's important to mention that the hyperreals require, for their mathematical existence, a weak form of the Axiom of Choice. So NSA requires stronger logical assumptions to get off the ground than standard math does.

, but was calculus taught before this without infinitesimals? (How is that possible?) — Gregory

It's done every day. We don't use infinitesimals in math, they've been banished. [To be fair, NSA does have its uses, and Fields medalist Terence Tao and others them in their work. But in terms of mainstream math, NSA is a niche idea with hardly any mindshare in the curriculum].

Pedagogically you don't need to know any of these subtleties to teach basic calculus, which is mostly a grab bag of tricks and techniques that ignores these logical subtleties. It's not till a course in real analysis, offered mostly to math majors, that the logical underpinnings of calculus are clarified. So there are a lot of educated physicists and engineers around who really don't care about any of this; and in fact physicists freely use infinitesimals in their reasoning.

As I say I would be glad to expand and expound at length on these ideas but it's best to keep it short an respond to questions, if any.

like General Ripper in Dr. Strangelove, didn't avoid women but denied them his essence. — Ciceronianus the White

LOL. Our precious bodily fluids.

The universe contains all objects. — Benj96

Does it contain all objects that don't contain themselves?

Good attempt but tusks are nothing more than overgrown teeth. — TheMadFool

And consciousness is no more than an epiphenomenon, or doesn't exist, or is merely an emergent property, or some other such philosophical objection to the importance of consciousness.

You are privileging consciousness (as I do myself); but you are not making the case that it should be privileged; and others make the case that it shouldn't.

It must be that, from the "many" in the definition, the more components there are, the more complex something is. Ergo, a human, possessing consciousness in addition to a physical body, must be more complex than a p-zombie which is only physically identical but lacks consciousness. — TheMadFool

So an elephant is more complex than me because it has tusks?

An entertaining philosophical topic. What would Kant think? :chin: — jgill

"German philosopher Immanuel Kant never actually married during his entire 79-year lifespan."

-- Google search for "Was Kant married?"

"You're not too bright, are you? I like that in a man."

-- Kathleen Turner's character to William Hurt's character in Body Heat. Right before she gets him to murder her inconvenient husband and makes sure he's convicted of the crime while she gets away with the inheritance.

Calculus is more complex than basic arithmetic and if someone were to tell me that they're taking a course in calculus, it goes without saying that they have basic airthmetic under their belt, — TheMadFool

I'd take the other side of both of those propositions.

First, calculus has been artithmetized. That is, we can formalize calculus using only the arithmetic of the natural numbers within set theory.

https://encyclopediaofmath.org/wiki/Arithmetization_of_analysis

So it's true pedagogically that 2 + 2 = 4 is "simpler" than \(\displaystyle \lim_{x \to \infty} \frac{1}{x} = 0\), but logically, there's no fundamental difference between them.

Secondly, speaking as someone who's been to beer and pizza with a bunch of math grad students, I can assure you that mathematicians are no better at simple arithmetic than the average non-mathematician.

There's a famous story about Alexander Grothendieck, the greatest mathematician of the second half of the twentieth century. (Hilbert won the first half). He was famous for thinking in extremely abstract terms and not thinking much about down-to-earth cases. Once he proved some theorem about primes and someone asked, Can you give a specific example of a prime? And Grothendieck answered, "You mean like 57?" The joke being that 57 = 3 x 19 is not prime, but he was too abstract a thinker to realize that. 57 is now known ironically as a Grothendieck prime.

I don't see what this has to do with p-zombies particularly, but your premises are easily falsified.

P-zombies are simpler than normal humans for they're missing consciousness. — TheMadFool

Hmmm. More on topic to your point (ignoring the premises that aren't relevant and are false anyway) even this doesn't follow from anything. Am I simpler than an elephant because I'm missing a trunk and tusks? And what of those philosophers who consider consciousness an epiphenomenon, or not even existing (I don't understand that point but some smart people believe it) or is merely an emergent property or whatever? Is a thing with consciousness automatically more complex than a thing without it? By what measure of complexity? I think you have a hard row to hoe to support this thesis.

And I don't see how p-zombies falsify physicalism. We have human-like creatures with consciousness and without. But both are physical. Consciousness is just something extra, like tusks. You haven't shown that consciousness is not physical.

the evil Melvin hedge fund were overcome by "small investors" — ssu

Just another myth. There were big hedge funds on both sides of the trade.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/this-hedge-fund-made-700-million-on-gamestop-11612390687

Richard Mashaal and Brian Gonick started buying GameStop Corp. shares in September.

They aren’t Reddit day traders or Discord users. They are hedge-fund managers in New York. And when the stock surged from less than $10 a share to above $400 and the dust had settled, they were sitting on a profit of nearly $700 million, one of the great fortunes of the January market mania.

Worth a read. See also:

https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/curious-timing-hedge-fund-made-700-million-gamestop

Many professionals made money going long on GSE. Michael Burry, the guy played by Christian Bale in The Big Short, made a 1400% gain buying GME. Plenty of professionals saw the short squeeze opportunity on a stock with 140% short interest. With short interest that high, professionals and amateurs alike saw that the short sellers would not be able to cover their shorts except at much higher prices.

Remember, a high short interest on a stock or on the market at large is regarded as a bullish indicator. Why? Because every share sold short must soon be bought back. The short interest represents a pool of guaranteed buyers, placing a floor under how far the stock can fall, and serving as rocket fuel if the stock price should start to rise.

Stocks with an extreme level of short interest, however, may be viewed by contrarians as a bullish signal.

https://www.investopedia.com/terms/s/shortinterest.asp

The idea that professionals didn't see the short squeeze opportunity is a myth. The big insiders want to demonize the "deplorable" Redditors. In fact ithe people who should be punished are the hedge funds who conspired to engage in naked short selling, made illegal in 2008 but clearly not enforced, for the purpose of driving an innocent company into the ground and destroying its employees and retail investors. And they were punished, by the market. The GME incident is a beautiful example of the free market in action. Players look at the available information and place their own money at risk, of their own free will, and live with the consequences.

Only our criminal overlords in Congress could have a problem with that. And the hearings will be presided over by Janet Yellen, who took $800k in bribes -- err, speaking fees -- from Citadel, and who in October promised to recuse herself from matters like this, and has just broken her "ethics" promise. This is the kind of corruption people are sick and tired of living under.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-treasury-yellen-gamestop-exclusiv/exclusive-treasurys-yellen-calls-top-regulator-meeting-on-gamestop-volatility-consults-ethics-lawyer-idUSKBN2A306A

You have the right to remain silent. — Nikolas

Not any more. If you're not actively "anti-racist" then you're racist. Silence will not protect you from the mob.

↪fishfry I don't see a philosophical computer as a hoax. Not sure I know what you mean otherwise. — Don Wade

Buzzwordy bullshit (*) taken for profundity, as any such philosophical chatbot must necessarily be..

(*) I use the word in the sense of Harry Frankfurt, and not as a barnyard epithet. "Speech intended to persuade without regard for truth." Since machines don't do semantics, that's all that could be output by any such computer program as you propose.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Bullshit

I want to start a small school to create a small community of kids in an affluent area where they just may have the resources necessary to band together and make some substantial world changes. — Megolomania

Sounds like a hybrid of Montessori and Hitler youth.

I find the Copenhagen interpretation quite persuasive, as far as I understand it. I read Manjit Kumar’s ‘Quantum’ and David Lindley’s ‘Uncertainty: Einstein, Heisenberg and the Battle for the Soul of Science’, both difficult reads, but informative with respect to the philosophical aspects. — Wayfarer

Rockstar physicist and engaging Youtuber Sean Carroll is big on Many Worlds. But the fact that people argue about the right interpretation of QM, is not by any stretch of the imagination an argument for the thesis that "computers are magic." After all, radios used to work on vacuum tubes. Those depend ultimately on quantum effects too. But you can't credibly say that a tube radio of the 1950's was just an engineering artifact but the transistor radios of the 1960's suddenly became "magic" by virtue of using transistors. That's stretching a point to no purpose, since it's ahistorical and ignores the nature of engineering progress. A transistor does exactly the same thing as a vacuum tube. They're functionally equivalent.

Fish fry, by "magic" I mean that suppose you take a potato and rub it and it turns into a Lamborghini. Modern day computers are just like that. — elucid

No, computers aren't anything like that. They're engineering artifacts that can be rationally explained and reliably designed and manufactured down to the chip level. The chips themselves are manufactured in wafer fabrication facilities. It's all completely explainable. The parts that aren't are the fundamental laws of electronics and materials science depending on physics. But even most of that is understood, it's only the deepest levels of physics that aren't understood. But that's true about rocks and tomatoes as well so computers are no different.

You might enjoy reading up on integrated circuits, computer architecture, operating system kernels, modern cpu design, and the like. Those are the things that appear magical from the application programming level. But they're not, any more than cars are magic to someone who only knows how to operate the steering wheel, accelerator, and brakes. Those things are not understood by the driver, but they're well understood by the automotive engineers who designed and built them.

Not at all. Computers rely on discoveries made in quantum physics in order to operate at all. And computers are indeed 'special', they are one of the most consequential discoveries of the 20th c. — Wayfarer

"Computers are magic because semiconductors take quantum effects into account and Feynman snarked that nobody understand quantum physics" is a poor argument in my opinion. Oranges are magic because nobody knows what life is. Oranges are much more magical than computers, which are engineering artifacts whose early implementations did not depend on quantum physics at all, but were built with standard telephone relays and could, if we so chose, be made out of dominoes. But dominoes are magic because they're made out of atoms which in the end are just probability waves that we don't really understand. It's a terrible argument because it doesn't distinguish computers from oranges or dominoes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domino_computer

And quantum physics is what Feynman says 'nobody understands' — Wayfarer

He meant interpretations of quantum physics. Feynman perfectly well understood the physics of it.

But even taking you at your out-of-context interpretation of the quote, that would apply to everything. Apples are magic because they're made of quantum fields. Tuna sandwiches are magic because they're made of quantum fields. Then there is nothing special about computers in this regard, you're just saying everything is magic because everything ultimately rests on quantum physics, which Feynman made an ironic remark about to make a point about the lack of sensible interpretations.

I am a self taught web programmer and I would like to share my view on the modern day computer. How would you categorize it? I, personally, would put in the category of magic. I am not saying it is not technology. I think that magic and technology can be one and the same. So, to better categorize it, I think it fits perfectly in the category of Magical technology. — elucid

What's your definition of magic? Computers are based on perfectly well understood science and technology. Software runs on the hardware. Hardware is based on electronics, which is based on physics. It's all completely deterministic and not only well-understood, but precisely manipulated by engineers. We can put 60 billion transistors on a chip, and do it well and repeatedly. There's nothing magic about it.

Unless by magic you simply mean awe-inspiring or cool or fun or interesting or something like that, in the sense of Industrial Light and Magic. In the same sense of "Hollywood magic." There's nothing supernatural about movies, but the effect can be magical. Is that the kind of thing you mean?

Tesla who ~(~)invented AC said he recieved information from extra-natural creatures. — turkeyMan

Ramanujan said that his mathematical ideas came to him from the Goddess Mahalakshmi of Namakkal. "The mathematician said that he dreamed of the Goddess' male consort Narasimha, who is denoted by droplets of blood, after which, scrolls of complex mathematical work unfolded in front of his eyes."

Who of us can say otherwise?

https://www.indiatoday.in/education-today/gk-current-affairs/story/srinivasa-ramanujan-life-story-973662-2017-04-26

There is something fundamentally similar between AI and how our brain works. — Raul

I just disagreed with you about that. Do I have to say it again then you send me another Youtube video and I re-reiterate my disagreement? I'm not uninformed about how neural nets work and on record that brains don't work like that.

We teach the AI what is the content of an image as we do with our children — Raul

Not true as I understand it. We do not weight our childrens' brain nodes and backtest the weights repeatedly until we get good results. Current approaches to ML aren't anything like how brains work. We don't even know how brains work. This kind of misunderstanding is very prevalent and is a real hindrance to understanding both brains and AI.

Artificial intelligence is not there yet, agreed, but they are already reaching the level of artificial dumbness. — Olivier5

Yes I've had the same thought. "Intelligence" means two different things. Humans are intelligent in ways sea slugs are not. On the other hand we say some people are highly intelligent and others not. These are two different meanings of the word. What if someday we build a true, self-aware general AI and it's as bright as Barney Fife?

These processors are designed specifically however to enable machine learning models to 'think' in pretty much the same way we do — Mick Wright

This is not remotely true. We don't know how we think. We know a bit about how our brains are organized. But we don't know how we think. That's a neuroscience claim far (far!) in excess of what is actually known.

Our brains don't assign weights to nodes or "backtest" strategies or anything else of the sort of things that are done in neural nets. You are confusing the model with the thing it's trying to model. There's the famous instance of the neural net that was trained to distinguish wolves from huskies). The net achieved startling accuracy, until it started making mistakes. It turned out that they trained it on pictures of huskies (or wolves, I forget) with snow in the background. All it was doing was identifying snow.

Brains don't work ANYTHING like neural nets.

https://innovation.uci.edu/2017/08/husky-or-wolf-using-a-black-box-learning-model-to-avoid-adoption-errors/

others may indefinitely remain in denial — FrankGSterleJr

Like those who voted for serial hair sniffer and public molester Joe Biden? Credible accusations of sexual assault were leveled against him. Kamala Harris said she believed women made uncomfortable by Joe's unwanted touching. You could look it up, I just did. The media buried the story. Same as it ever was.

a consequence of arresting Galileo for the heresy of proving the earth orbits the sun — counterpunch

My understanding is that this is a simplistic description of what happened. The Pope was scientifically literate and buddies with Galileo. Galileo went out of his way to be a pain in the ass, and that's why he got in trouble. It was totally avoidable. I haven't time to dive into the full history, but simplistic myths should not be taken for history.

Five feet of heaven in a ponytail.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_5-HHxwoa98

↪fishfry

"... a Black woman, of South Asian descent ..."
~President-elect Biden referring to Vice President-elect Harris, January 19, 2021 — 180 Proof

You dug up a four month old thread to troll me with this? You'll have to do better.

Might be worth mentioning Ron Cram's previous posts on this topic. — Wayfarer

I read through the entire Newton thread, really enjoyed myself. Thanks for posting those links. Before this I knew nothing of Hume, but it turns out I've been making versions of his arguments for years. From his Wiki entry, it says that

Hume argued that inductive reasoning and belief in causality cannot be justified rationally; instead, they result from custom and mental habit. We never actually perceive that one event causes another but only experience the "constant conjunction" of events.

If I'm understanding his intent, he's saying that physical law is imposed on the world by us, but it's not an intrinsic or actual part of the world. I believe in the Newton thread @Ron Cram referenced a paper noting that Hume said physical law was extrinsic, not intrinsic, to the world. If I'm understanding these philosophical terms correctly, this is also what I believe. The universe does its thing and we build contingent mathematical models of whatever aspects of it we're able to observe and measure; but we're never getting at any kind of ultimate truth. Or is that too much of a distortion or simplification of what's being said?

I had one question for Ron from that thread.

My first paper on Hume is not published yet, but it is not possible that the world is a consistent illusion. — Ron Cram

Are you saying that you can prove, absolutely, the falsity of Berkeley's subjective idealism, modern simulation theory, brain in a vat, and Boltzmann brains? If I read your first paper and repeated its argument to myself while I'm dreaming, could I prove that I'm not actually dreaming when I am?

How long is it? — counterpunch

And will this be on the test?? :-)

thought isn't a physical reality, is it? — counterpunch

LOLOLOL. After you keep claiming it is. "Any rationalist" would agree. Your own words.

I see you are so very keen to respond, you didn't read the argument I made — counterpunch

Funny I was going to say the same about you. The funny thing is, you don't seem to read YOUR OWN posts. All the best.

ps here's your earlier quote.

Ultimately, a rationalist has to suppose that the brain is a machine - a biological machine, capable of thinking. — counterpunch

So which is it? Is thinking the result of a machine> Or is it NOT a physical reality? You see, I read your posts. You don't read your own posts, as I noted.