You are currently looking at Flamebate, our community forums. Players can discuss the game here, strategize, and role play as their characters.
You need to be logged in to post and to see the uncensored versions of these forums.
Anansi's Flamebate Posts
View Anansi's ProfileSearch Results | ||
---|---|---|
TROLLS IN SPACEspacekadt Posted:
Absolutely. If Forumwarz hasn’t colonized Urbum already, it can’t be done. (view post) |
03/11/2010 | |
THINGS OTHER THAN FORUMWARZ ORANGE THAT YOU COULD SPEND 36 DOLLARS ON.Groceries. (view post) |
02/19/2010 | |
The Official St. Valentine's Day ThreadHappy Valentine’s Day, Forumwarz.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I have a date Log in to see images! (view post) |
02/14/2010 | |
Who's your favorite EP3 character this far? [SPOILER WARNING]E-Dipus for the psychologitroll (view post) |
02/14/2010 | |
ITT I answer your posts with obscure references to various mediaStill waiting for obscure. (view post) |
02/13/2010 | |
Since February is Black History Month...tl;dr
http://www.theonion.com/content/node/27933 (view post) |
02/13/2010 | |
Pascal's Wager converted me from Catholicism to Agnosticism!Duncecap Posted: Of course you can’t…Think about it. Log in to see images!
But, setting the possibility of “unthinkables” aside for a moment: having the ability to translate from, say, Japanese to Spanish doesn’t mean Japanese and Spanish are the same.
That is why I do not conflate thought with other forms of computation, while I am fairly comfortable calling thought a type of computation.
It’s interesting sometimes, but most of the time you just end up reinventing the wheel with a different name and a different number of spokes. Everything I do has to satisfy a constructivist . . . it all has to be mathematically provable from the bumumptions. A lot of computer science is like: “Yeah, we can’t prove it, but you can see where it goes, right?”. Indirect proofs are rarely allowed. Ah…Validity. Still sounds like a neat job.
But yeah, looking forward to your answer. Sorry about the delay, been distracted lately.
One must be careful with the hardware/software analogy, useful though it is…A brain with its particular set of connections between neurons is hardly a tabula rasa. (view post) |
02/09/2010 | |
Pascal's Wager converted me from Catholicism to Agnosticism!Duncecap Posted: Sounds like a fun career. It must be nice to regularly do that kind of problem-solving.
There’s one job I have hanging now for a couple of months, where the operation between two objects of the same type, cannot be defined in less than a couple hundred lines in english. Wanna bet it’s longer than that in any programming language? Log in to see images! At least you have a worthy project.
Anyhoo, no, never heard of Hofstadter. Well, probably not worth bothering to look up. He wrote quite a bit in the aforementioned book about Godel’s incompleteness theorem, which is why I thought of it.
And I would ask what differentiates a thought from other computation? I can think of no computation which is not also a thought.
Which is not also a thought, or which cannot be thought?
I will add more later—time to get some rest. (view post) |
02/04/2010 | |
that was the coldest ****ing thing I've ever heard you say.(view post) |
02/03/2010 | |
Pascal's Wager converted me from Catholicism to Agnosticism!Duncecap Posted:
Sarcasm? Well, in case it is not, he wrote a number of books including Godel, Escher, Bach, which has become famous among those (both within and outside the field) interested in philosophy of mind and computation. I haven’t looked at it in ages. Couldn’t give a fair appraisal.
I’m a mathematical programmer by trade, that’s where this is all coming from ;p As in optimization? Or as in, slave to Stephen Wolfram? Log in to see images!
The question this all sprang from was the legitimacy of thought: If thought is not necessarily legitimate, then we are not a necessary condition for thought.
Clearly thought exists in some sense.
I guess what I was trying to say is that thought may be regarded as a form of computation, but that doesn’t mean all computation is thought.
You were right to not privilege it over other forms of computation, though. (view post) |
02/03/2010 | |
N****r of the Narcissus becomes N-word of the NarcissusCheins Sanchez Posted:
And even if someone were writing the book today, suppose it were historical fiction. Should that be censored? I say no. (view post) |
02/03/2010 | |
Reverting iRAWR's ban: ReduxSergeant Cid Posted: Have you seen his blog? Hahahaha
About iRAWR…
Posting with an illegal alt to request being unbanned was not the best idea. However, openly admitting it was both funny and well played. I say give him one last chance. Let him know this is the last chance, so there will be no confusion if he messes up again. (view post) |
02/03/2010 | |
Pascal's Wager converted me from Catholicism to Agnosticism!Duncecap Posted: You don’t say.
Duncecap Posted: Thanks for the compliment Log in to see images!
In other words, we can only sensibly perceive interpretations that are consistent with our existing interpreters. Oh, so that’s where all this is coming from…You must have read Hofstadter’s book.
|
02/01/2010 | |
Pascal's Wager converted me from Catholicism to Agnosticism!Duncecap Posted:
Now imagine that there are infinite possible meanings, including nonsensical ones.
The message is something external to them. If you want to state it that way, yes, it causes thought in someone else, a thought that would not have occurred if they had not read the message, and it is the same thought as you were thinking when you wrote the sentence. It causes a thought in someone else, but you cannot be sure it is the same thought you were thinking when you wrote the sentence. How can you possibly defend the claim that there is a one-t o-one mapping between a sentence and a particular meaning?
Even better, take a really large, really complex computer, and get it to simulate a human brain. Can it think? We do indeed have this technology, and we we can, in fact, with a large enough cluster, do exactly this right now. If any of you have heard about “Blue brain”, a couple of research teams are competing against each other with a simulated cat brain to discover more about neuronal interaction. Artificial neural networks are still not as good as neurons. I say this not out of the bumumption that hardware is incapable of imitating wetware, but as a statement of fact—we cannot build brains, at least not yet.
But I digress, the point is, would such a machine be able to think? The old “Is a haystack with one strand of hay removed still a haystack?” problem isn’t the core of the issue. Still, in order to begin answering the questions you pose, we would need a definition of thought. In Funes el memorioso, Borges’ narrator describes thought as the collapsing of distinctions. I would add the ability to make distinctions to that. This would be a bare-bones definition, in a sense something a single neuron is capable of. However, human thought (what we mean when we normally say thought) is more complicated. How? We don’t need an interpreter for our thoughts—we can interpret them ourselves.
Now, here’s where I blow your mind: Don’t count on it.
A computer does not need to be made of silicon or use electricity. A grid of stones in a field could be a computer, and technically speaking, with enough time, space and stones. run exactly the same software as your computer on your desk. Uh, yeah, it’s called a Turing machine.
So even once a computer becomes too simple to be held in electronics, we can simplify it further into rocks. Or trees. Or the movement patterns of unladen swallows. True. Yet, it still requires an interpreter.
So the root question is: What is a thought? Having defined that, when is a “mind”, (seeing that ANYTHING can hold, represent, contain, change and create a thought), incapable of having a thought? That is the root question, but the claim in parentheses is not quite right.
Further if we define something as having a mind if it thinks, than would we have to extend the set of things that have minds to include the universe? You could say that the universe thinks in a sense, but that sense would be unintelligible—the universe would be thinking mostly nonsense.
So yes, for some interpretation of the period at the end of your sentence, it does indeed contain the meaning of life, the universe, and everything. The key word in my question was intrinsic. Are the meanings of the period at the end of that sentence inherently part of its makeup, or are they arbitrary possible interpretations? (view post) |
02/01/2010 | |
The function of art.Art is a game, like everything else we do. (view post) |
01/31/2010 | |
Pascal's Wager converted me from Catholicism to Agnosticism!Aldo_Anything Posted: What about World War II?
Religion and nationality seem to create a natual rivalry, like prefessional sport teams. You want your guys to win. Well said.
Unlike science, where they leave it to more or less intellectual jokes. There’s quite a bit of rivalry and mudslinging within the scientific community. Who gets ridiculed and dismissed? Who gets grants? Actual science may be impartial, but scientists are still apes and the direction of scientific inquiry is shaped by monkey business.
@Soron You haven’t made a compelling argument against belief in God so much as an observation/philosophic stance: doing good just for the sake of getting into Heaven isn’t really doing good.
I agree with you.
A good counter, though: regardless of your reasons, doing good still helps people.
Also, in the case of Christianity it’s not by good works but God’s grace (and/or faith) that one receives salvation. Like Shii says.
Chawin Posted:
Yeah, you see philosophers making claims and then others working with the validity of their arguments ( “Is this logically self-consistent?” ) more often than anything else.
@Duncecap Pascal’s Wager is a satire? I hadn’t heard that before, but it makes sense. If you can post a link or explanation, I’d love to see it.
Duncecap Posted:
“This is a thought” is not a thought except in a mind. It is convenience that leads us to treat the words themselves as a thought. They evoke the thought when read, they represent the thought, but the meaning of symbols is arbitrary.
If you are prepared to say thoughts exist without thinkers, meaning can exist outside of minds, and the period at the end of this sentence inherently contains the meaning of life. Does it? (view post) |
01/31/2010 | |
Sugarcult tries to pick up a girl; hilarity ensues@OP:
Wait, you’re serious?
Log in to see images! (view post) |
01/31/2010 | |
SCIENTIFIC FACT: women enjoy enjoy and sexual harrbummentIt’s good to know that OP’s posting quality hasn’t changed since before I went on sabbatical. Wait, no, it’s not. (view post) |
01/31/2010 | |
The Banning Gamebanned for quarantine: bad posting disorder (view post) |
01/29/2010 | |
ITT We are snobsFie Posted: Well played, sir. Well played indeed. It is with great pleasure that I upvote your post.
Professor Commie PhD Posted:
Quite so, my good fellow. Quite so! For there could scarcely be more unequivocal an elucidation of the King’s observation than this particular series of tubes.
The King knew that the gift of Teuth (lovely choice on the Greek spelling there, old chum) would bring the mbumes not to knowledge but to ignorance. If anything, these Intertubes are the subsequent step in intensifying said ignorance such that without them we are helpless. (view post) |
01/29/2010 |