Viewing profile — grabbalacious

Or bath. Douglas Adams endorsed baths for such purposes! I'm just glad PG is writing them. I don't mind if they're not always in his sphere. That's the point of essays: to try to s…

>Imagine going through life with a high-tech spam filter from the future that can filter out wikihow and boring science. Happily it's available now and it's called intuition . If s…

Very true. From those classic movies I've watched frequently my brain has gleaned a collection of images, phrases and situations which readily pop into mind. They're not all fully-…

The main thing is, "so-and-so proved that" or "he showed that" or "they demonstrated scientifically that" refer to processes that can't convey certainty . Even in mathematics there…

Yes, and isn't this cause for some optimism since many people have now received vaccines such as Prevnar-13 and Pneumovax-23?

Outsider's uninformed opinion: if you attend AA then regardless of any official narrative or agenda this means you're spending important time with people who (a) used to drink, and…

Coming soon, AI prediction of what untelephonic voices would have sounded like! Starting with a detelephonised One Night in Bangkok. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rgc_LRjlbTU

Thanks. It's possible to unconsciously interact with objects. My guess is that conscious perception requires both representations of oneself and the object, together with associate…

Well the reason I think it is that you can't just be conscious: you have to be conscious of something. No, unless the software included a representation of the computer itself. The…

You're quite right. That last sentence was intended to be a catchy and rhetorical summary.

You have to learn to see stuff, or recognise sounds, for example.

Well I suspect a memory system, together with stable input/output hardware, are necessary but not sufficient. To be a conscious agent, said agent's memory must include a representa…

My argument against panpsychism (the principled form of animism, which is ancient) is that to perceive something you have to have a representation of it in memory. Ergo if you don'…

>What is it in us that longs to do that? It is animism , the belief that everything is alive, active and imbued with spirit and it is very natural. It arises because we perceive th…

Why is it not full AGI? Seems to me that the ability to perform 'spontaneous yet coherent storytelling' perforce makes one a universal explainer (i.e. a person).

House rules that obviate this to some extent (e.g. 'free parking') seem a bit like a debt jubilee .

This clip from his first Connections series is a favourite of mine: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MPcZ_5uCldg Near the end it provides an answer to OP's question 'What's the most…

Most thoughtful people seem to agree that school is bad for creativity and that real learning is led by curiosity. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iG9CE55wbtY But we still have lit…

Communities used to be small with the members mutually dependent upon one another, e.g. a medieval village. Everyone knew everyone else and the arrangement had to work. If it didn'…

Well, that's OK, provided we're honest about what it is, e.g. we don't use media to create the illusion of a majority consensus where none exists.

But to begin with he was somewhat aloof from his father and brothers and he decided to kill that police captain. As I recall.

It's hard to think about these potential calamities. Any given pandemic is unlikely to be on the scale of 1918. But the next big one will come, eventually. Any given asteroid strik…

Yeah he tried to get out and he couldn't. Perhaps the secret is not to get sucked in in the first place.

Good point. Although I think it tends to be a consensus among an influential minority of the populace rather than society as a whole.

I started near the end and thought that Columbo had been shot by the mafia. As in Lieutenant Columbo. The horror! More seriously, though, they're great movies and I enjoyed them. C…