The Eternal Doorman

This made me think a bit harder about identity and separateness. My comment : Your remark about personal identity being necessary, and your earlier one about our personal identity being a construction reminded me of something that happened a couple of months ago. I passed out and evidently collapsed onto the floor, but I had no recollection of actually falling. Someone "woke me up" and as I became aware of this person talking to be, I felt as though I had been dragged away from a place of complete calm and comfort, into a world of pain and nausea with blood on the floor where I had apparently hit my head. The relevance to your remark is that it is actually our physical existence as healthy living organisms that lies at the root of that identity. Not just our ability to recall events in our past, which is a large part of our idea about what we really are, but the physiological memories that we carry completely unconsciously. As it happens I had a pulmonary thrombosis which cau...

My comment : Ada and Isaac! Of course! ❤️ Great to see you again! It doesn't really matter that this whole video is based on a ludicrously implausible premiss, which in fact betrays some awful chauvanism: monkeys' behaviour is no more random than the behaviour of human beings! So, as the experiment in that English zoo indicated, even an infinite number of monkeys given an infinite amount of time would not even write out a couple of verses of one play. Maybe this was what they explored in that Simpsons episode. It is much more likely that the monkeys would get so bored and fed up that they would eventually figure out what it was they were expected to do, and then start deducing from the behaviour of the people studying them what was the sort of thing they should type, and then they probably would be able to learn to type out Shakespeare plays just as good as the plays that the monkey Shakespeare wrote. The sonnets, however, might be more difficult. Subscribe to  Up and Atom . 

I found this interesting 1982 paper by William Clinger:  Nondeterministic call by need is neither lazy nor by name  and another paper, this one from 2002 by Maribel Fernández and Lionel Khalil:  Interaction Nets with McCarthy's amb . See  Sean Haas on Models and Programming .

Some eye-opening remarks towards the end of this.  Subscribe to  Dialogue Works . She mentions that the Pentagon did attempt to do an audit once, but I guess the data is just not there anymore? And their banks' data?  See  https://karenkwiatkowski.substack.com/ . See  https://matthewhoh.substack.com/ . Subscribe to  Judging Freedom . 

See  Toby Hendy has Published Her Book: A Guide to Making Friends in the Fourth Dimension  and  Toby on Why Her Book Isn't Available on Amazon .  If you just want people to read your book, then give away the PDF file. The only thing publishing does is provide some means to get money for your effort. Some publishers will market your book and therefore perhaps it will reach more potential readers, but who knows? See also  Toby on YouTube's AI Curation of Content Providers .  Subscribe to Tibees .  Luca the Jaguar turned 19 in June 2023 and according to one report he died later that year.  Subscribe to  Toronto Zoo . 

My comment : That slogan "The purpose of a system is what it does" probably has its origin in Aristotle's De Anima . For Aristotle the soul was three different but interdependent things: the vegetative, the animal and the rational. Plants have a vegetative soul which is how they reproduce, animals have a vegetative soul and an animal soul, and human beings have vegetative, animal and rational souls. The nature of these souls he called their perfection: what they strived to be. This was the teleological purpose or final cause of the soul. So Aristotle was saying that what a system does, when it is functioning properly , is its purpose. The kinds of system the cyberneticists studied were systems which had this teleological, goal-seeking behaviour by virtue of the internal relations of their parts to one another. So when you apply this slogan to what is loosely called "the education system" you are really abusing the terms 'system' and 'purpose'. It...

You end up with shit like prediction markets and AI chatbots instead of social media that's actually helpful to people and empowers them.  Subscribe to  Kyla Scanlon . 

See also  LA Times - California orders bottled water company to stop ‘unauthorized’ piping from springs  and  In California Bees Can Legally be Fish .  Subscribe to  The Katie Halper Show . Subscribe to  Watermelon Pictures . 

I didn't realise until just now that Adjunct of Computing is an Adjunct to Advent of Computing. The adjunct to this episode is  People Talking about Programming . Subscribe to  Advent of Computing .