Viewing profile — randomImmigrant

It is good to see the real game being clarified, and openly admitted to. Nothing about this technology makes it special. What’s allowing for such conversations is entirely traceabl…

>How long can a cell survive without liquid water? Depends on the cell, but it’s not instant death. By definition, a cell is a membrane with some water inside it. Sure, move that c…

I believe there’s a reasonable explanation for this effectiveness: mathematics is created by brains. Brains have evolved to track and entrain to various physical phenomena, and the…

Presence of metallic catalysts is just an environmental factor. No, it isn’t quite that. For it to count as “environment” the organism must be able to survive for at least a time w…

There could be deep subsurface microbes that are exposed to both pure metal and anoxic conditions that are similar, but note, it’s not “metal or protein” for catalysis. Many protei…

No it’s not that simple. We don’t fall dead the moment we don’t get vitamin D. We can stay alive long enough to get more. That wouldn’t have been the case in these early beings, th…

Hardly. There are nucleic and amino acids pretty much in every star system, we now know. But not during the big bang. Theres a lot of intermediate stages before stars are young eno…

The difference is more on survival. A closed loop metabolism is indeed a good boundary marker. Viruses would fail this. But many have “closed but for a few critical dependencies”, …

The ingredients and building blocks aren’t there in the same way. Because life formed, those early ingredients are now transformed, as is the environment. This blocks new life of t…

No, because conditions have changed markedly. For metals to act as catalysts, and replace some metabolic enzymes, they need to be in highly reduced conditions. This was true in ear…

The metabolic science is really cool. The conclusion that life arose twice requires you to buy that proto-cells that grew on these vents and needed those metallic surfaces to survi…

> The Connection Machine CM-2 (1987) has a non von Neumann architecture and mixes memory and processing .. so that's been done, 40 years ago. Are you claiming that it therefore thi…

Because “Europe” hasn’t been one thing for any length of time. And what even does “become so dominant” mean? You do know evolution isn’t some straight accumulative equation, right?…

What about the simple fact that biology is a dynamic substrate running actively and always on, whereas silicon is passive substrate that can be indefinitely off and can never self …

Relax. I don’t think the OP means there’s some genetic flaw in Europeans that makes them ecologically imbalanced by nature. They’re saying that a lot of indigenous culture and prac…

Yes... when these things are done, we can talk. Which is why I said "I believe machines could be made that think". They can be. We just haven't done it yet.

This is neuroscience. I don't give a damn about Christianity. And nothing here says humans are special. Only that biology broadly is different than computing.

Made some updates to my post but glad you brought up simulation: today when we simulate the brain, at whatever resolution, we do so in digital systems that have the Von Neumann bot…

I believe machines could be made that think. But not purely digital ones. The brain most certainly isn’t a thinking machine precisely because it doesn’t have the luxury of unlimite…

You mean apart from all the biological evidence? I explained some of that in another thread in this topic.

It's very obvious actually, because it isn't just nerves in the brain. There's an equal number of glial cells, which form a continuous network, or syncitium. Their activity is in t…

Yep. They also don't experience time. They can count compute steps. They can look at the wall clock and tell you the time. But give them a task at 11:59 PM, and if they get it done…

It's pretty meaningful actually. Because biological neurons don't sit alone. There's a third player in every synapse: the astrocyte. And astrocytes form a large syncitium, a collec…

Of course it's meaningful! It would be highly meaningful if submarines could actually swim. And we are building submersible bots that swim, they just tend to be small and made of b…

Preach. The way out is to find truly basic problems that you’re attacking at a fundamental level. That rarely gets funded. And even more rarely handed off to grad students. In a se…