What do you REALLY believe?

[The Good Reverend Roger]

I find there are people in the occult that believe in crazy shit.

Edited for completeness.

[The Good Reverend Roger]

 It's the fuckers who channel Moon Energy and talks to Dragons you have to watch out for sell shit to.

Edited for Canada Bill Jones.

[Triple Zero]

To crib from RAW: "The only thing I believe in that the Universe is far more complex than I will ever understand."

I agree with statement
We probably only understand 10 percent of the universe...

where do you get that figure?

it's just a "feeling", right?

you cannot know this. and if someone were to ask me, I would pick it (according to my "feeling"), much, much lower. partly because I believe it's so, and another few orders of magnitude smaller just to be on the safe side.

hell I might even judge it at epsilon (as in, any arbitrarily small number larger than zero)

[Triple Zero]

the pet belief system I'm trying on this year is the one pushed in the Art of Memetics, where we're basically just a point of consciousness suspended in these nested egregores. And we ourselves are not a singular person, but a nested multiplicity of ideas and identities.


So at a very fine level you have cells. If you zoom in to see just cells, they look like like individual entities.
-zoom out and you see tissue
--zoom out and you see a person
---zoom out and you see a group of people
----zoom out and you see a business, religion, nation...

there's intelligence at all levels. This is fractal logic. Your body has circulatory, nervous, and immune systems. Your country has them too. We're all parts of the same giant entity.

bolded some bits i think are important. thanks Cram for putting this idea into words. this has actually been my belief system for a long, long time. maybe from reading Gödel Escher Bach, but I think already before that even, the first time I came up with a good idea about how consciousness and "free will" work, or are made up of, I immediately saw the correspondence with larger scale structures such as corporations, nations and economy. I thought if intelligence emerges out of complex information-flow networks that have certain properties*, then it must be happening on all levels (but on widely varying timescales btw. some stuff happens so slowly that you can't really communicate with it in one lifetime. the earth ecosystem, or a forest comes to mind).

the good thing about this idea is, that I can argue it scientifically.

however, it is NOT a scientific theory. in some ways (but not really) it is a bit similar to Lovelock's Gaia hypothesis. which was one of the textbook examples of pseudoscience in one of my philosophy classes. the problem with it being, that it is not falsifiable. this whole "fractal memetic network intelligence" idea, is also not falsifiable, so it's not a proper scientific theory.

but that's okay.

science works, no doubt about that. but being the strict formal system that it is, it logically follows that it either cannot produce all true theories, or that it must produce paradoxes (so far it has done both). hence, there must be true theories, that cannot be proven by science. simple as that. if you done a bit of philosophy of science, you should know that the scientific method does have its limitations, but that's okay, cause IMO it is still the most useful system we got.

just, don't confuse it with "the only way to Truth", cause that's nearly (but not quite) as bad as the mistake fundies make.


*unfortunately I only have a vague idea what kind of properties are required to distinguish a network with the potential for intelligence from one that doesnt. I do, however, have a sort of gut-feeling about it. I should probably lend it some more thought and work that out for myself.

[Bebek Sincap Ratatosk]

Sometimes, Trip, I want to have your baby... in some sense 

[Thurnez Isa]

To crib from RAW: "The only thing I believe in that the Universe is far more complex than I will ever understand."

I agree with statement
We probably only understand 10 percent of the universe...

where do you get that figure?

it's just a "feeling", right?

you cannot know this. and if someone were to ask me, I would pick it (according to my "feeling"), much, much lower. partly because I believe it's so, and another few orders of magnitude smaller just to be on the safe side.

hell I might even judge it at epsilon (as in, any arbitrarily small number larger than zero)

It's a very conservative estimate
based on several things I read
link up and write things out
after pancakes, coffee, email checking, ect.

[Cain]

I believe the Universe is essentially complex.

How complex, I couldn't say. It is to me, not a unknown known.  I think if we were able to put a number on it, we'd have to know how much there is that could ever be explained, and tally that up to what we already know. 

Which would be...tricky (though it would be a great thesis, and get you tons of funding).

[Thurnez Isa]

I believe the Universe is essentially complex.

How complex, I couldn't say. It is to me, not a unknown known.  I think if we were able to put a number on it, we'd have to know how much there is that could ever be explained, and tally that up to what we already know.  

Which would be...tricky (though it would be a great thesis, and get you tons of funding).

Way back in the late 70's Carl Sagan asked the questions if we could ever even know... its a good read, but remember some of the specifics are 20 years out of date
http://www.stephenjaygould.org/ctrl/sagan_science.html

Fortunately for us, we live in a universe that has at least important parts that are knowable. Our common-sense experience and our evolutionary history have prepared us to understand something of the workaday world. When we go into other realms, however, common sense and ordinary intuition turn out to be highly unreliable guides. It is stunning that as we go close to the speed of light our mass increases indefinitely, we shrink towards zero thickness in the direction of motion, and time for us comes as near to stopping as we would like. Many people think that this is silly, and every week or two I get a letter from someone who complains to me about it. But it is a virtually certain consequence not just of experiment but also of Albert Einstein's brilliant analysis of space and time called the Special Theory of Relativity. It does not matter that these effects seem unreasonable to us. We are not in the habit of traveling close to the speed of light. The testimony of our common sense is suspect at high velocities.

The idea that the world places restrictions on what humans might do is frustrating. Why shouldn't we be able to have intermediate rotational positions? Why can't we travel faster than the speed of light? But so far as we can tell, this is the way the universe is constructed. Such prohibitions not only press us toward a little humility; they also make the world more knowable. Every restriction corresponds to a law of nature, a regulation of the universe. The more restrictions there are on what matter and energy can do, the more knowledge human beings can attain. Whether in some sense the universe is ultimately knowable depends not only on how many natural laws there are that encompass widely divergent phenomena, but also on whether we have the openness and the intellectual capacity to understand such laws. Our formulations of the regularities of nature are surely dependent on how the brain is built, but also, and to a significant degree, on how the universe is built.

For myself, I like a universe that includes much that is unknown and, at the same time, much that is knowable. A universe in which everything is known would be static and dull, as boring as the heaven of some weak-minded theologians. A universe that is unknowable is no fit place for a thinking being. The ideal universe for us is one very much like the universe we inhabit. And I would guess that this is not really much of a coincidence.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

I believe the Universe is essentially complex.

How complex, I couldn't say. It is to me, not a unknown known.  I think if we were able to put a number on it, we'd have to know how much there is that could ever be explained, and tally that up to what we already know. 

Which would be...tricky (though it would be a great thesis, and get you tons of funding).

Yes yes. Oh yes baby, yes.

[the last yatto]

SCIENCE DOES NOT REMOVE THE TERROR OF THE GODS
it just makes them shit more

[The Good Reverend Roger]

SCIENCE DOES NOT REMOVE THE TERROR OF THE GODS
it just makes them shit more

You should change your name to "static" or "carrier noise".

[the last yatto]

i liked narf but he wasnt tied on right

[Rev. Stanley Baldwin]

I was reading somewhere that the complexity of a system "c":
is inversely proportional to the number of dimensions "m" used
with calculations regardening complexity...

just a humble token of the 9/10 = 11 thing...

[Golden Applesauce]

I was reading somewhere that the complexity of a system "c":
is inversely proportional to the number of dimensions "m" used
with calculations regardening complexity...

just a humble token of the 9/10 = 11 thing...

Could you dig up something a little more specific to explain what you mean?

[Kai]

the pet belief system I'm trying on this year is the one pushed in the Art of Memetics, where we're basically just a point of consciousness suspended in these nested egregores. And we ourselves are not a singular person, but a nested multiplicity of ideas and identities.


So at a very fine level you have cells. If you zoom in to see just cells, they look like like individual entities.
-zoom out and you see tissue
--zoom out and you see a person
---zoom out and you see a group of people
----zoom out and you see a business, religion, nation...

there's intelligence at all levels. This is fractal logic. Your body has circulatory, nervous, and immune systems. Your country has them too. We're all parts of the same giant entity.

bolded some bits i think are important. thanks Cram for putting this idea into words. this has actually been my belief system for a long, long time. maybe from reading Gödel Escher Bach, but I think already before that even, the first time I came up with a good idea about how consciousness and "free will" work, or are made up of, I immediately saw the correspondence with larger scale structures such as corporations, nations and economy. I thought if intelligence emerges out of complex information-flow networks that have certain properties*, then it must be happening on all levels (but on widely varying timescales btw. some stuff happens so slowly that you can't really communicate with it in one lifetime. the earth ecosystem, or a forest comes to mind).

the good thing about this idea is, that I can argue it scientifically.

however, it is NOT a scientific theory. in some ways (but not really) it is a bit similar to Lovelock's Gaia hypothesis. which was one of the textbook examples of pseudoscience in one of my philosophy classes. the problem with it being, that it is not falsifiable. this whole "fractal memetic network intelligence" idea, is also not falsifiable, so it's not a proper scientific theory.

but that's okay.

science works, no doubt about that. but being the strict formal system that it is, it logically follows that it either cannot produce all true theories, or that it must produce paradoxes (so far it has done both). hence, there must be true theories, that cannot be proven by science. simple as that. if you done a bit of philosophy of science, you should know that the scientific method does have its limitations, but that's okay, cause IMO it is still the most useful system we got.

just, don't confuse it with "the only way to Truth", cause that's nearly (but not quite) as bad as the mistake fundies make.


*unfortunately I only have a vague idea what kind of properties are required to distinguish a network with the potential for intelligence from one that doesnt. I do, however, have a sort of gut-feeling about it. I should probably lend it some more thought and work that out for myself.

You're both talking about emergence, and I love you.