Viewing profile — vankessel

Oh wow, I wasn't expecting to see this on Hacker News again! This remains my most popular post. I'm very glad about the interest in mathematics it continues to generate! --- To tha…

Yeah, I can't confirm it, but the weirdest I think I've seen is in r/science about research that was funded by the meat industry saying that a diet with meat is healthier than vege…

I don't disagree with you, but Occam's razor is a principle; a guideline. Not a hard law. From the panpsychic perspective all matter is conscious making everything a "subjective ob…

Well, yes. Those examples were chosen to be cartoonish stereotypes. Extremely statistically unlikely events would look... strange, to say the least. Sort of like the flapping of a …

Thank you. I really like the point you are making, but I am unsure about a lack of cause and effect. When I think of cause and effect, I think of it as taking the state of the univ…

But there must be a mechanism for the immortality shouldn't there be? Let's go back to the gun example quickly. (assuming a perfect gun, no misfires, or lucky non-fatal shots) If q…

True, the doctor example is really just supposed to be segue into thinking about how a direct message could work. Although, perhaps facing death and recovering turns you into the k…

My reasoning behind this was that there can be multiple futures where you could exist and experience, but some of them shorter than others. E.g. A------B \ --------C If you are tra…

This is something I very recently was wondering existed. I was thinking of creating a vector logo for a project, and was curious if vector software was capable of defining relation…

Only because you have chosen for the learning rate to decrease over time so the model converges. You could reset it. I would even argue the LR is not relevant to plasticity, it's a…

That sounds like it would be very interesting. And while we can't extend our senses just yet, we may be able to swap them. I'm very curious if anyone has tried to use a space-filli…

Use non spatial dimensions as well, like color, size, and shape. You can also use clever projections like t-sne to reduce the number of dimensions while retaining some of the struc…

Ah yeah I remember that from a while back, too bad it isn't out yet.

Tangential but I've always thought it may be possible for a human brain to experience higher spatial dimensions, it's just that all it ever experiences is 3. Imagine a video game i…

I personally think that the split-octonions[1] hold promise for physics. The subset of the split-octonions where the i, j, k, and l components are 0 have a metric that is similar t…

On the surface I like the idea of the knowledgeable and intelligent having more say, but I do not think it would work in practice. It is misleading to frame it as there being a "co…

Are you serious? That's a terrible idea. Every vote should counted equally as everyone should get to represent their own interests. This is the point of democracy. Taking rights aw…

I'll expand my own take on this thought, borrowing a mathematical analogy I read recently. Take the real and complex numbers. The real numbers have the nice property that they are …

Thank you for the feedback. That is a very valid complaint and one that is hard to avoid because the complex numbers are basically derived by trying to solve equations like x^2 + 1…