2010.01.13 01:00 - consciousness, the universe and a message to the future

The Guardian for this meeting was Bolonath Crystal. The comments are by Bolonath Crystal.

    Bolonath Crystal: namaste cal :)
    Calvino Rabeni: _/!\_
    Calvino Rabeni: Namaste
    Bolonath Crystal: namaste steve
    stevenaia Michinaga: hello
    stevenaia Michinaga: Calvino, Bolonath
    Calvino Rabeni: Hello steve
    Bolonath Crystal: how are you today? any new insights?
    stevenaia Michinaga: I should be sleeping, I may very well be.
    Bolonath Crystal: i just got up :)
    Calvino Rabeni: The 1 am slot is always a temptation for me to stay up late
    Calvino Rabeni: Good morning then :)
    Bolonath Crystal: :)
    stevenaia Michinaga: sometimes when I am tired and go to bed early, I just wake up early on the other side
    stevenaia Michinaga: or the cat wakes me us, then sleeps peacefully while I remain awake
    Bolonath Crystal: lol, my cat does the same sometimes

different states of mind

    Calvino Rabeni: When I get locked into that kind of thing, not sleeping when I need it, I find meditation a reliable cure for insomnia
    Calvino Rabeni: Reading boring books doesn't work well
    stevenaia Michinaga: hmm, nods, perhaps that is why I am here
    Bolonath Crystal: yes, the state between sleeping and being awake is a good starting point for meditation
    Bolonath Crystal: the gate to turiya :)
    --BELL--
    Bolonath Crystal: actually many meditation techniques (like e.g. chanting mantras) have exactly this effect: to balance the mental state between sleep and being awake
    stevenaia Michinaga: reading about turiya
    Calvino Rabeni: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turiya
    Calvino Rabeni: It seems to me that it must overlap with the other 3 states
    Bolonath Crystal: overlap?
    Calvino Rabeni: In some way, it's not a separate state?
    Calvino Rabeni: Yes, coexist
    Calvino Rabeni: Or maybe, there is concept to distinguish it
    Calvino Rabeni: like, at night you turn the porch light on
    Calvino Rabeni: during the day it is still on, but you can't see whether it is on or off
    Calvino Rabeni: so a word, for whether the light is on or not,
    Calvino Rabeni: regardless of whether it is day or not
    Calvino Rabeni: so what I meant by overlap - "day" can overlap with "light on"
    Calvino Rabeni: Is there a traditional word for this?
    Calvino Rabeni: That the "states" are not mutually exclusive
    stevenaia Michinaga: At this pint I am amazed at that it has been given such a description from  long ago
    Calvino Rabeni: A similar example - I can dream, while awake during the day
    Calvino Rabeni: so dream and wake aren't necessarily separate either
    Bolonath Crystal: i see. but turiya is a state of the mind, when the 'normal' ego-centered mind is 'off'
    Calvino Rabeni: Sure, but they are separate things
    Calvino Rabeni: so when the awareness exists, and the ego-centered mind is "on" what is that combination called?
    Bolonath Crystal: that is jagrata, the waking state
    Bolonath Crystal: awareness exists in all four states
    Bolonath Crystal: even in deep sleep
    Bolonath Crystal: in deep sleep we just don't remember
    Bolonath Crystal: so when looking back on it, we seem to have a 'gap'
    Calvino Rabeni: It seems a different type of awareness
    Calvino Rabeni: This reminds me of the idea in phenomenology that "consciousness always has an object"
    Calvino Rabeni: Which in philosophy becomes a kind of dogmatic statement
    Bolonath Crystal: is there a difference between awareness and consciousness?
    Calvino Rabeni: and then along come researchers who admit, - well, *usually*, except when it doesn't
    Calvino Rabeni: so they make a distinction in consciousness that the phenomenologist didn't
    stevenaia Michinaga: ponders the state of unconciousness
    --BELL--

looking forward to multiple perspectives

    Calvino Rabeni: My belief is that this will be clearer when there is more overlap between the views of traditionalists (hindu theory) and science.
    Calvino Rabeni: Until then, it just looks like
    Calvino Rabeni: well not guesswork, but something more rigid than actually is the case
    Calvino Rabeni: Or more conventional, I might say rather than rigid
    Calvino Rabeni: Interesting times, these, for understanding those "consciousness" topics
    stevenaia Michinaga: not sure how conventional consciousness is until we know what it is
    Bolonath Crystal: consciousness is a very subjective thing. as science always tries to exclude the subjective, it is rather difficult to look at consciousness in a scientific way
    Calvino Rabeni: tacit conventions, steve
    Calvino Rabeni: And if they are based on not really knowing, then they are not very accurate conventions
    Calvino Rabeni: Kind of, assumptions and poetic suggestions
    Calvino Rabeni: This is my bias
    Calvino Rabeni: I'd put my "money" on interdisciplinary research, rather than tradition or standard science
    Calvino Rabeni: And I think it is going to take a while yet
    Bolonath Crystal: so do i
    Calvino Rabeni: Or, we may find, that certain new false dogmas get a grip
    Calvino Rabeni: that would be unfortunate
    Calvino Rabeni: Naievely, it might help if every neuroscientist were a committed meditator, for instance
    Calvino Rabeni: Not that such a thing can be arranged
    Bolonath Crystal: but maybe a few...
    stevenaia Michinaga: others have their toys to "see"
    Calvino Rabeni: Yes, the idea there is for them to have multiple perspectives
    Calvino Rabeni: so they don't take a dogmatic position
    Calvino Rabeni: What are the "seeing toys"?
    Bolonath Crystal: (thinking about how indian phyilosophy attracts modern physicists)
    stevenaia Michinaga: MRI, lab rats, etc
    stevenaia Michinaga: seeing the affect w/o seeing the nature of what they are looking at
    Calvino Rabeni: That seems like the problem also with trying to know the self
    Calvino Rabeni: Knife can't cut it's own handle, to use a chinese proverb
    Calvino Rabeni: However, I think it has to be reasoned indirectly
    stevenaia Michinaga: I often wondered that why consider knowing yourself when others around you know/observe you in ways you cannot know
    Calvino Rabeni: good point
    Calvino Rabeni: in a way, maybe most self-knowledge is reflected
    --BELL--
    Calvino Rabeni: Or you could say, arises out of the mix with others
    stevenaia Michinaga: if you believe them, ofcourse...smiles
    Bolonath Crystal: really knowing yourself means to know your real self, the true self. this includes the insight, that the so called 'others' are a part of true self
    Calvino Rabeni: sure
    stevenaia Michinaga: acceptance of that is a warm thing
    Calvino Rabeni: it seems pretty cooperative to me
    Calvino Rabeni: we have the same "real self"

is Being seeing?

    Bolonath Crystal: maybe the nature of the true self can be defined as what is left of it, when nobody looks at it ;)
    stevenaia Michinaga: including yourself
    Bolonath Crystal: yes, of course :)
    stevenaia Michinaga: nothing hiden
    Calvino Rabeni: The self that is seen by looking isnt the real self then.
    Calvino Rabeni: The self that does the looking is the real self but isn't seen
    stevenaia Michinaga: indeed
    Calvino Rabeni: The real self being somewhat defined as that-which-sees
    stevenaia Michinaga: is Being seeing?
    stevenaia Michinaga: what we play with here
    Bolonath Crystal: interesting view
    stevenaia Michinaga: but "pretend" is is not self looking
    Calvino Rabeni: not sure, a lot of "as if seeing" is done via imagination
    stevenaia Michinaga: yes, a very creative view
    Bolonath Crystal: being has the power to create by seeing. without this creation there is simply emptiness
    Bolonath Crystal: and the creation is called samsara :)
    Bolonath Crystal: we have no chance to catch a glimpse of real self by looking at the creation. we'd rather have to look at the patterns of creating
    Bolonath Crystal: 'being seeing' for example :)
    Calvino Rabeni: I don't think even that is it
    Calvino Rabeni: closer though :)
    Bolonath Crystal: when we know about the patterns of creating, we can go the steps backwards and see what remains. yes, pretty close, i think
    Calvino Rabeni: people sure think about this stuff a lot :)
    stevenaia Michinaga: time for me to go back to my dreamstate, will keep you posted
    Bolonath Crystal: nite steve :)
    Calvino Rabeni: OK, steve, enjoy
    --BELL--
    Calvino Rabeni: The thing I was trying to get at earlier, with the porch light analogy
    Calvino Rabeni: Or, you wouldn't say, on a clear day, that the stars were not visible
    Calvino Rabeni: simply that they couldn't be seen with the normal unaided eye
    Calvino Rabeni: They are present, unseen, rather than "gone"
    Bolonath Crystal: 'not visible' doesn't mean 'not there' :)
    Calvino Rabeni: Yes
    Bolonath Crystal: it depends on the eyes, not on the stars
    Calvino Rabeni: Yes, but more than that, suppose they were a more variable structure
    Calvino Rabeni: Like, say, it was venus that was being used for analogy
    Calvino Rabeni: It may actually not be present above the horizon during daytime
    Calvino Rabeni: or it might
    Calvino Rabeni: So if someone said they could see it
    Calvino Rabeni: during the day, you would first check whether it was above the horizon
    Calvino Rabeni: to determine whether that was even possible
    Bolonath Crystal nods
    Calvino Rabeni: So the venus-watcher may be making accurate observations not accessible to others
    Calvino Rabeni: What I am getting at is something like - there is a clear light of consciousness that I'd rather call -sometimes there- sometimes not-
    Calvino Rabeni: than to take the traditional definition that it is "always there" but not seen
    Calvino Rabeni: It's a different ontological assumption to explain a real experience
    Calvino Rabeni: and it yields to empirical investigation of the phenomenological type
    Bolonath Crystal: that isn't so much different... even venus doesn't stop to exist, when it is under the horizon
    Calvino Rabeni: Yes but blocked by earth not sky
    Calvino Rabeni: which are different blocks
    Calvino Rabeni: because the light really does pass through the sky to the eye
    Calvino Rabeni: but not through the earth to the eye
    Bolonath Crystal: hm, let's take another example: is it true that the sun turns red in the evening? everyone can see it, but nevertheless a sun observing satellite proves that it doesn't change color at all
    Calvino Rabeni: well if I were sitting on the satellite it would make observations correlated with mine
    Calvino Rabeni: if in the same perspective
    Bolonath Crystal: it is the process of seeing which gives things their characteristics
    Calvino Rabeni: that seems like a familar but kind of dead end philosophical direction
    Calvino Rabeni: the point being, to look at the correlation between data from the human and the instrument (satellite)
    Calvino Rabeni: Which is ignored by the distinction you made, I think, even though it has other uses as a metaphor
    Calvino Rabeni: The seeing process of the human and satellite do produce characteristics, and they correlate when those two observers are in similar relationship to the observed
    Calvino Rabeni: and correlate less well otherwise
    Bolonath Crystal: agree
    Calvino Rabeni: that's part of the definition of objectivity
    Calvino Rabeni: Same with investigations of consciousness I would think
    Bolonath Crystal: sorry. RL is calling... we have to continue this item next time
    Calvino Rabeni: no point in the discussion unless the second observer did whatever it takes to gain a similar perspective to the first, before then looking for correlations
    Calvino Rabeni: OK Bolonath - thanks for chewing this with me :)
    --BELL--
    Calvino Rabeni: :) have a good day!
    Bolonath Crystal: have a good night, cal. om shanti
    Calvino Rabeni: om shanti

Calvino's message to readers in the future

    Calvino Rabeni: Hello all you log-readers, are you enjoying reading the logs lately?
    Calvino Rabeni: Some of you are very creative with the interpretations, and add spice to the text
    Calvino Rabeni: In fact, sometimes a state of consciousness may even seem to transfer through time via the text record
    Calvino Rabeni: Isn't that astounding.
    Calvino Rabeni: And also, some of you readers are "Googlers" who may know little about PaB
    Calvino Rabeni: Or may not have considered the nature of the things being talked about in this pavilion
    Calvino Rabeni: You might be wondering - what possesses these people to spend the amount of time they do, talking about and thinking about this stuff?
    Calvino Rabeni: Those are excellent questions - if you have any real insight into it, I'd invite you to communicate them to PlayAsBeing somehow.
    Calvino Rabeni: Unless, perhaps, a great amount of time has elapsed and PlayAsBeing is from your perspective a distant historical event.
    Calvino Rabeni: In that case I'd be curious to know your view of the state of understanding that we humans had back in the year 2010.
    Calvino Rabeni: Was there a major and relatively rapid paradigm change that happened at some point?
    Calvino Rabeni: In which after the shift, things seemed "obviously, the way they are now has always been"?
    Calvino Rabeni: In that case you've forgotten how it used to look from the perspective of this day and age.
    Calvino Rabeni: As we have forgotten the insights and clarities of the people of the past.
    Calvino Rabeni: Unless perhaps you have some as-yet-undiscovered technologies that aid in shifting fundamental qualities of experience and understanding.
    Calvino Rabeni: Instant enlightenment perhaps.
    Calvino Rabeni: If that is so, I will hazard a guess that it becomes a commonplace rather than an object of awe and a cause for devotion.
    --BELL--
    Calvino Rabeni: Perhaps you will have evolved to a borg-like collective or hive mind.
    Calvino Rabeni: If that is the case, you may flirt with individuality and separateness and regard it as a mystic state worthy of cultivation
    Calvino Rabeni: And now I want to address the children of the investigators that populate PlayAsBeing.
    Calvino Rabeni: Perhaps you are adult children now. Or grandchildren.
    Calvino Rabeni: You may be curious about what exactly your ancestors did with their time, and not be sure about whether it changed the world, or just rode along with other changes that were perhaps of a more material variety.
    Calvino Rabeni: I would have liked to have this information about my father and grandfather, for example.
    Calvino Rabeni: On the other hand, perhaps you have future media, for instance omni-computing and prosthetic memory
    Calvino Rabeni: You may be buried under facticity.
    Calvino Rabeni: But not be able to quite understand the fortitude and challenges involved in the kind of separate individualism of the beginning of the 21st century.
    Calvino Rabeni: On the other hand, you may be able to "mine" the past for states of experience as well as fact.
    Calvino Rabeni: I suspect you will be well-beyond the primitive ideas we currently have about what we call knowledge and inforamtion.
    Calvino Rabeni: After all, we're still doing "search" as a primary and most common operation.
    Calvino Rabeni: And think, or are tempted to assume, that knowledge does not exist unless we can "access" it as the result of a search.
    Calvino Rabeni: Even during my short lifetime this has changed noticeably.
    Calvino Rabeni: I also believe you'll have a rather different notion of "language" and the thing we call "concepts".
    --BELL--
    Calvino Rabeni: This second thing might not make any sense at all
    Calvino Rabeni: Or perhaps your virtualization technologies will have expanded to encompass past and future objects and intelligent entities.
    Calvino Rabeni: Remember, as I write this, we're still working on simulating the physical objects,and at the "present" time.
    Calvino Rabeni: Our computing devices barely attempt to model temporality.
    Calvino Rabeni: Because the "semantic web" is still a vague dream - or a commercial slogan - and your familar concepts of "abstract virtual reality" have not yet been invented.
    Calvino Rabeni: (monologue suspended)

information, computing and the shift of AI paradigms - would consciousness emerge, if a computer is complex enough?

    Calvino Rabeni: Hello Aztlan
    Aztlan Foss: hi Calvino
    Calvino Rabeni: How many times have you come to this pavilion by now?
    Aztlan Foss: 4 or 5 times?
    Aztlan Foss: I'm bad at counting
    Calvino Rabeni: Seems about so.
    Calvino Rabeni: Not so good at it myself.
    Aztlan Foss: I don't know if it's the lag but my avatar isn't doing what I want it to
    Calvino Rabeni: Maybe SL is wonky right now
    Calvino Rabeni: Mine misbehaved a bit also
    Aztlan Foss: so what's semantic web?
    Calvino Rabeni: It means, arranging for computers to keep track of the broader meaning of the information that is being processed
    Calvino Rabeni: So that more flexible operations can be done with it
    Aztlan Foss: ok so for information to be retrivable in context
    Calvino Rabeni: Well yes, a lot of it is adding lots of layers of context
    --BELL--
    Aztlan Foss: the instructed dedicated a few lectures on a similalr subject when I took discrete math
    Aztlan Foss: he was pointing out how there's no way to complete amgiguity or when something means two things at the same time
    Aztlan Foss: so he used jokes as an example, sometimes things are funny because they mean several things at the same time
    Aztlan Foss: so he was saying, with the methods we use, whenyou compute something, you only get one answer and it only means one thing at one time.
    Calvino Rabeni: right, that was the old-fashioned classical idea of information
    Calvino Rabeni: an unfounded assumption actually
    Aztlan Foss: no he had a prood of it
    Aztlan Foss: proof
    Aztlan Foss: based on the way we compute now
    Aztlan Foss: you'd have to rework computing for it to work
    Calvino Rabeni: The classic idea was to separate facts and make them unambiguous and clearly defined
    Calvino Rabeni: But I think it will be abandoned
    Calvino Rabeni: What was his proof about?
    Aztlan Foss: i forget the name, his proof was about discrete structures and how they would require human interpretation to be anything more than just data
    Calvino Rabeni: Yes, that makes sense, but the classic idea would be that it would be a bad idea to attempt it, while the newer idea would be that it ought to be modeled just like other aspects of factuality
    Aztlan Foss: and he was illustrating the push down automaton show his point.
    Calvino Rabeni: I don't quite get the connection with PDA's but that sounds interesting
    Aztlan Foss: yeah his proof was that what computing is based on is discrete and therefore has the limit of not being able to interpret one thing as having two meanings at the same time
    Aztlan Foss: his argument goes in to AI
    Calvino Rabeni: Yes, ultimately, but it didn't get in the way of language being used ambiguously in literature
    Aztlan Foss: you CAN parse data and try to extract a context though
    Aztlan Foss: you just can't tell the computer to understand a joke
    Calvino Rabeni: Yes, you get a discrete approximation of some model of context
    Calvino Rabeni: The AI paradigms will shift I suppose
    Calvino Rabeni: Or have been, rather
    Aztlan Foss: overall it's a great idea, I've seen lectures where they show how they got some neat stuff working. The guy was saying you could do a search that would grab results from various sources and give you combinations of sources of related contexts
    Calvino Rabeni: Right, there's a new approach that treats reasoning as probablistic and informal
    Calvino Rabeni: It takes classic AI people a while to make the shift
    Aztlan Foss: so like, if you do a search for a certain chemical and you want to know about it's interactions with things it hasn't been tested on you could easilly pull together various sources that you would have otherwise had to seek out one by one.
    --BELL--
    Calvino Rabeni: Well that extends "search" over a virtual space that is partly simulated
    Calvino Rabeni: The simulations would at first be fairly discrete, but eventually become more and more non-local
    Aztlan Foss: AI is still about faith. they haven't realy come out with anything solid and what is pushing people is the idea that MAYBE it will happen. Right now they are at least using hypothesis of the mind as models to compute a brain. Now now it's at least testable.
    Calvino Rabeni: I agree, pretty much
    Aztlan Foss: the old idea was that if you ask a computer questions and you don't know if it's a human or a computer then the computer thinks
    Aztlan Foss: the old Turing test
    Calvino Rabeni: turing test never made sense to me
    Aztlan Foss: but now the one I've liked the most is the idea that we recieve information and then our brains generate the world that we see and we project it outwardly
    Aztlan Foss: so the best attempt so far is a real big computer with several processors simulating neurons all working together to try and see if the collective communication between the cores, the neural nets, will rise up some kind of measurable experience.
    Calvino Rabeni: that is a seductive model - a kind of halfway house to something more reasonable that what we had before - but I think we may have passed the peak for that model and be moving to something new by now.
    Aztlan Foss: maybe, they ran these tests just a few months ago
    Calvino Rabeni: The experiments should be done, in order to discover what their limitations are
    Aztlan Foss: the software is working, they are trying to figure out if they can read images from it, like they can read images from the brain now.
    Calvino Rabeni: What they are reading is correlations, and I think that is OK
    Calvino Rabeni: but there's still to much mysticism involved
    Calvino Rabeni: for instance the idea that if you made a computer complex enough, that at some undetermined magic threshhold "consciousness" would emerge
    Calvino Rabeni: It is basically just avoiding the definitional question
    Calvino Rabeni: A kind of have your cake and eat it too approach
    Aztlan Foss: no it's trying to answer it
    Aztlan Foss: the debate is the chicken and egg idea

consciousness, quantum physics and infinite possibilities to collapse

    Aztlan Foss: what came first, conciousness or the universe?
    Calvino Rabeni: Well, the spiritualists say consciousness, and the materialists say universe... they're both wrong I'd guess
    Aztlan Foss: one idea uses conjectures from quantum physics which says you need an observer for anything's infinite posibilities to callapse in to one existence
    Calvino Rabeni: I never believed that - I think it is folk mysticism
    Aztlan Foss: quantum physics?
    Calvino Rabeni: No, the idea of the observer and the assumption that there is consciousness necessarily involved in that wave collapse
    Calvino Rabeni: Unless you want to redefine consciousness as something that is one and the same with the process of wave collapse
    Aztlan Foss: well the experiments so far favor that idea
    Calvino Rabeni: Only as a matter of mystical interpretation I suppose
    Aztlan Foss: hehe
    Calvino Rabeni: See the ghost keeps sneaking back into the experiment
    Aztlan Foss: so what they figured out so far is this, if you send out a photon in a direction and it has the posibility of TWO outcomes, like a coin flip, the photon should land on either the left or right side
    Aztlan Foss: as long as there is a photon detector present, you only get one result, left or right.
    Aztlan Foss: if you remove the detector, you get both results
    Aztlan Foss: the photon went both to the left and to the right.
    Aztlan Foss: works every time.
    Calvino Rabeni: so where's the consciousness in that?
    Calvino Rabeni: It seems just an interference
    Calvino Rabeni: It's not like the photon detector is an observer
    Aztlan Foss: oh you mean the idea that you need to be a human for things to come in to existence?
    Aztlan Foss: there's people that thing observers can be anything that can come in to contact with anything else that's substantial enough
    Calvino Rabeni: that is part of the mystical interpretation people wrap around quantum theory
    Aztlan Foss: yeah I think I'm getting at what you're saying.
    Aztlan Foss: and I somewhat agree
    Calvino Rabeni: OK, but that stretches the classic idea of "observer" beyond all relationship to humans and their intelligence /subjectivity
    Aztlan Foss: the reason it's wrapped around mystisysm is because there realy are implications about how you as a being of the universe interacts with the universe
    --BELL--
    Calvino Rabeni: It seems an act of projective imagination
    Aztlan Foss: it basicly puts you in the middle as a major player instead of merely a seperate inatimate object
    Calvino Rabeni: Yes, but what's so mystical about that? It just points out the unreasonableness of observer processes being disconnected
    Calvino Rabeni: It doesn't seem like epiphany material\
    Calvino Rabeni: Unless one is a philosopher perhaps
    Calvino Rabeni: Let me adjust that statement - I don't mean to malign a philosopher
    Calvino Rabeni: I meant once you have a basic scientific understanding of matter and energy
    Calvino Rabeni: the apparent phenomena of disconnected observation always seemed to favor vision as a sense mode
    Aztlan Foss: sorry my computer rebooted on me
    Calvino Rabeni: Since without knowing about light, then matter appears disconnected
    Calvino Rabeni: Yes, MS has launched an auto-update
    Calvino Rabeni: Mine is trying to reboot also
    Calvino Rabeni: Az, I am curious about the toys hung on your av's belt, what are those
    Aztlan Foss: but yeah basicly your body can be seen as a big network of detectors so the implications are about how that can have a participatory effect on the universe
    Aztlan Foss: so they're trying to answer the question of how come it is that matter can come together in such a way that it makes us
    Calvino Rabeni: Sure, but why isn't this just a "of course,how else could it be" thing, instead of some kind of aha?
    Aztlan Foss: huh?
    Calvino Rabeni: Well "us" appears to be a rather complex business.
    Aztlan Foss: I guess it depends on who you're listening to. There's plenty of people looking in to it, the ideas are still flowing and there's real research and experiments being designed to test out the ideas
    Calvino Rabeni: Yes, that's the good thing about what is going on now, I agree
    Aztlan Foss: of course there's people who have made up their minds but they aren't the ones moving the knowledge forward
    Calvino Rabeni: exactly
    Calvino Rabeni: take the so called "hard problem" of consciousness
    Calvino Rabeni: I think it's not useful to use that label
    Calvino Rabeni: there are lots of hard problems
    Calvino Rabeni: and that one frames things in a fairly narrow way
    Calvino Rabeni: which would tempt people to adopt its premises
    Calvino Rabeni: after all if you're a philosopher, you're not going after the "easy problem"
    Calvino Rabeni: no glory in that :)
    Aztlan Foss: hehe yeah it's like kids are afraid of math because they think it's hard
    Calvino Rabeni: :)
    Calvino Rabeni: the "hard problem" will eventually evaporate by a simple maneuver of perspective I think, if I had to guess
    --BELL--
    Aztlan Foss: there's no problem in guessing
    Aztlan Foss: I was thinking how cool is that information is harder to destroy now
    Aztlan Foss: it's not impossible but less things might go unnoticed
    Aztlan Foss: like, if that one guy's books had survived or been seen by more, what's his name...
    Aztlan Foss: Arcamedes or something
    Aztlan Foss: we would have had Calculus over a thousand years earlier
    Calvino Rabeni: The inventor of the antikythera device
    Aztlan Foss: so things would be way cooler now
    Calvino Rabeni: Surely different
    Calvino Rabeni: who knows, maybe humanity would have self-destructed
    Aztlan Foss: hehehe
    Aztlan Foss: I have a more positive outlook on things
    Aztlan Foss: I think things are cool now
    Aztlan Foss: so any improvements on this is way cooler
    Calvino Rabeni: the calculus is better at creating effective weapons than preventing their applications
    Aztlan Foss: better integration with the environment
    Aztlan Foss: wireless resulable electricity
    Aztlan Foss: I'm all for that
    Aztlan Foss: we can carry our computers in our pockets!
    Aztlan Foss: we can just go take walks and texts our friends to join us and listen to our music while we ride our push scooters on the beach
    Aztlan Foss: pretty damn cool stuff
    Calvino Rabeni: Right, my phone has more compute power than the moon mission

after two hours of absence I returned just in time to learn some more about the connection between knowledge and energy

    Bolonath Crystal: hello cal and aztlan
    Aztlan Foss: sup Bolonath
    Calvino Rabeni: Greetings Bolo
    Calvino Rabeni: I forgot to leave earlier
    Bolonath Crystal: hehe
    Calvino Rabeni: Although I had to resort to a lengthy monologue
    Bolonath Crystal: i thought so, because i didn't get a link yet from the recorder
    Calvino Rabeni: Interestingly, then, Aztlan showed up and kind of picked up some of the themes from that monologue
    Bolonath Crystal: sorry, phone call
    Bolonath Crystal: back again... sorry, i didn't want to interrupt
    Calvino Rabeni: There was a book by Dennett, "Consciousness Explained"
    Calvino Rabeni: A new book by someone else is titled "Consciousness Explained Better"
    Calvino Rabeni: that seems like it might be a modest advance :)
    Bolonath Crystal: explained from which viewpoint?
    Calvino Rabeni: In the second case, a kind of half -neurology / half "perennialist" philosophy
    Calvino Rabeni: I suppose I like the attempt to combine the two different perspectives
    Calvino Rabeni: http://www.amazon.com/Consciousness-...ct/1557788839/
    Bolonath Crystal: i think neurosciences can bring some light to that matter, but in the end it is an attempt by 'knife to cut it's own handle', as you said earlier
    Calvino Rabeni: It might satisfy neither the traditionalists or the scientists
    --BELL--
    Calvino Rabeni: A new "green" search engine launched this week
    Calvino Rabeni: I'm trying to remember the name
    Calvino Rabeni: ah, forgot about the pause
    Calvino Rabeni: http://ecosia.org/
    Calvino Rabeni: They are calling attention to the energy footprint of searches on the internet
    Calvino Rabeni: Which is a good thing for philosophy and kind of relates to what Aztlan and I were talking about
    Calvino Rabeni: if loosely
    Calvino Rabeni: It sounded like quantum and observer interaction and all that
    Bolonath Crystal: what do you mean by 'energy footprints'?
    Calvino Rabeni: as a challenge to the traditional separation of observer and matter
    Calvino Rabeni: Well, it refers to the amount of power it takes to do a common operation like a google search
    Bolonath Crystal: oic
    Calvino Rabeni: The new search engine company says they save a couple of square meters of rain forest fore EACH SEARCH
    Calvino Rabeni: in other words the energy cost is significant
    Calvino Rabeni: and hidden by technology of course
    Bolonath Crystal: i hope the world won't get totally overcrowded by rainforest, when everyone uses this search engine ;))
    Calvino Rabeni: and given the classical metaphysics of information, people will not be predisposed to think about the connection between knowledge and energy
    Calvino Rabeni: since classic metaphysics believes they are separate
    Calvino Rabeni: and that information is a mystical weightless thing
    Bolonath Crystal: it isn't!
    Calvino Rabeni: No not at all
    Calvino Rabeni: The quantification is a good thing to contemplate
    Calvino Rabeni: What is the energy cost, for instance, of the "B" in "Bolonath"?
    Calvino Rabeni: (just to make a point)
    Bolonath Crystal: how much rain forest will be saved, if i call myself 'olonath'? *ggg*
    Calvino Rabeni: BUt really, people act as if searches were truly "free" in terms of money and in terms of environmental impact
    Calvino Rabeni: :)
    Calvino Rabeni: Perhaps I will be "Alvino"
    Calvino Rabeni: Or find a new av with a minimal name like "I Dot"
    Calvino Rabeni: Anyway, the data centers are huge hot furnaces of information
    Calvino Rabeni: Quantities out of context aren't that meaningful however
    --BELL--
    Calvino Rabeni: My compute wants to reboot, and actually, so do I :)
    Calvino Rabeni: Thanks fo the talks, Bolo and Aztlan
    Bolonath Crystal: i have to go back to RL
    Calvino Rabeni: See you later.
    Calvino Rabeni: good day
    Bolonath Crystal: see you next time, cal, aztlan