Random Thread

[zompist]

How can it be already ten years since the year when all the celebrities died? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z04M6NhkIKk

Because every year is the year when all the celebrities died; the deaths of some are simply noticed more than those of others. Celebrities died in 2016, they died in 2017, they died in 2015, and they are dying in 2026.

People die every year at about the same rate, but people we've heard of don't. I'm pretty sure that if you went though all celebrity deaths in your lifetime, and omitted the ones you'd never heard of, you'd get a rising then falling curve. In early years you'd get deaths of your parents' favorite actors etc. that you don't care about, and in later years you'd get deaths of the next generation's favorites, equally ignorable. So each person would have their own particular "year the celebrities died."

My guess is that for most people this year will come in their late 50s or early 60s, based on the current average age at death (76 for males, 81 for females) and an estimate that the celebrities we know average 20 years older than us.

(Maybe that's a high estimate... I don't watch a lot of movies or TV, so I don't know a lot of younger celebs. On the other hand, people younger than me are less likely to die before me!)

[Ares Land]

People die every year at about the same rate, but people we've heard of don't. I'm pretty sure that if you went though all celebrity deaths in your lifetime, and omitted the ones you'd never heard of, you'd get a rising then falling curve. In early years you'd get deaths of your parents' favorite actors etc. that you don't care about, and in later years you'd get deaths of the next generation's favorites, equally ignorable. So each person would have their own particular "year the celebrities died."

My guess is that for most people this year will come in their late 50s or early 60s, based on the current average age at death (76 for males, 81 for females) and an estimate that the celebrities we know average 20 years older than us.

(Maybe that's a high estimate... I don't watch a lot of movies or TV, so I don't know a lot of younger celebs. On the other hand, people younger than me are less likely to die before me!)

I think the reasoning is correct, but the age range for celebrities we know is wider, I'd say 20 years to 40 years (or even 50). I think I started noticing a lot of celebrities dying in my mid-thirties.

[Man in Space]

It amuses me greatly that [i]The Stars My Destination[/i] (the famous A. Bester novel) and [i]The Scars My Defenest

forme concrète…typeset "AAAAA[snip]AAAH" but at a hallway noir angle thus invoking change in multiple degrees. ?

Apparently this has been sitting as an unfinished reply, with no elaboration, for several months.

[naz]

https://youtu.be/KNFSAq7CjiM

Tsilli Review

[malloc]

Next week is looking quite horrible. I have fifty hours of grueling work with an enormous backlog, Trump just got his Reichstag moment, and my esophagus has been acting up again.

[rotting bones]

I'm pretty depressed too. ngl

The anxiety of living in contemporary society is: Will your neighbors decide to kill you this week or next week?

[Travis B.]

I've come to the conclusion that I'm a dualist -- not in the typical Cartesian 'mind-body' sense, but in the sense that I believe that while the physical substrate of reality is 'real' and the realm of ideas and abstractions must be encoded in the physical substrate in one form or another, ideas and abstractions have their own identities and rules independent of the physical substrate, whose encoding need not have any consistent nature in the first place, and these ideas and abstractions are made 'effectively real' based on their interaction with the physical substrate (and in the case of things such as math, their interaction with the physical substrate may be very fundamental -- the rules of physics are intrinsically based on and and inseparable from math, even though math itself is 'unreal' in the sense that mathematical ideas can be completely divorced from physical reality (e.g. much to the dismay of finitists it is easy to express and operate on a number greater than the total number of protons, electrons, and neutrons in the observable universe)).

[bradrn]

I've come to the conclusion that I'm a dualist -- not in the typical Cartesian 'mind-body' sense, but in the sense that I believe that while the physical substrate of reality is 'real' and the realm of ideas and abstractions must be encoded in the physical substrate in one form or another, ideas and abstractions have their own identities and rules independent of the physical substrate, whose encoding need not have any consistent nature in the first place, and these ideas and abstractions are made 'effectively real' based on their interaction with the physical substrate (and in the case of things such as math, their interaction with the physical substrate may be very fundamental -- the rules of physics are intrinsically based on and and inseparable from math, even though math itself is 'unreal' in the sense that mathematical ideas can be completely divorced from physical reality (e.g. much to the dismay of finitists it is easy to express and operate on a number greater than the total number of protons, electrons, and neutrons in the observable universe)).

I believe this is usually known as ‘philosophical realism’.

[Travis B.]

I've come to the conclusion that I'm a dualist -- not in the typical Cartesian 'mind-body' sense, but in the sense that I believe that while the physical substrate of reality is 'real' and the realm of ideas and abstractions must be encoded in the physical substrate in one form or another, ideas and abstractions have their own identities and rules independent of the physical substrate, whose encoding need not have any consistent nature in the first place, and these ideas and abstractions are made 'effectively real' based on their interaction with the physical substrate (and in the case of things such as math, their interaction with the physical substrate may be very fundamental -- the rules of physics are intrinsically based on and and inseparable from math, even though math itself is 'unreal' in the sense that mathematical ideas can be completely divorced from physical reality (e.g. much to the dismay of finitists it is easy to express and operate on a number greater than the total number of protons, electrons, and neutrons in the observable universe)).

I believe this is usually known as ‘philosophical realism’.

Note, though, that I am a moral anti-realist in the sense that I believe that morals derive from human existence as social beings and are not somehow inherent in the universe -- no God or gods gave humans morals from on high, rather humans created morals themselves.

[zompist]

I've come to the conclusion that I'm a dualist -- not in the typical Cartesian 'mind-body' sense, but in the sense that I believe that while the physical substrate of reality is 'real' and the realm of ideas and abstractions must be encoded in the physical substrate in one form or another, ideas and abstractions have their own identities and rules independent of the physical substrate, whose encoding need not have any consistent nature in the first place, and these ideas and abstractions are made 'effectively real' based on their interaction with the physical substrate (and in the case of things such as math, their interaction with the physical substrate may be very fundamental -- the rules of physics are intrinsically based on and and inseparable from math, even though math itself is 'unreal' in the sense that mathematical ideas can be completely divorced from physical reality [...].

I don't know what philosophical terms should apply here, and I'm not 100% sure I follow you, but this strikes me as the worldview that a programmer has to have, to make sense of their own work.

I think what you're saying is that reductionism doesn't always work. You can reduce the theory of gases to statistical mechanics of gas particles, but you can't reduce human cognition to neurochemistry, or computer programming to electronics.

There are some respectable reasons to say that reductionism doesn't always work in practice. The math may be unsolvable: that's why all of chemistry can't be replaced by relativistic quantum field theory. There's chaos theory, also gumming up the math. Quantum effects mean that strict determinism is untrue and certain things are unpredictable.

A computer is a deterministic machine whose every bit of function can be explained by the electronics: voltage levels, flows of current, relationships between its hundred billion transistors. Not only do programmers not work at this level, it is strictly irrelevant to their work. Even if you work at the assembly level, you're working at a much higher level of abstraction— numbers and basic operations. Moreover, that level can be implemented on very different architectures, and higher-level languages make this an explicit goal.

Plus, computers are designed to work in the world— or at least one aspect of it, the user. But of course they can also analyze pictures and sound, operate a 3-D printer or a robot, and so on. Again, we explain all of this at an abstract level, not an electronic one.

Or to put it more bluntly, if you ask a computer to detect something in an image, the answer will be whether that thing is in the image; if you ask it to add two numbers, the answer is their sum. It'd be ridiculous to say that the answer is inherent in the machine's electronics, rather than out there in the world, or as a mathematical truth, respectively.

[Torco]

I've come to the conclusion that I'm a dualist -- not in the typical Cartesian 'mind-body' sense, but in the sense that I believe that while the physical substrate of reality is 'real' and the realm of ideas and abstractions must be encoded in the physical substrate in one form or another, ideas and abstractions have their own identities and rules independent of the physical substrate, whose encoding need not have any consistent nature in the first place, and these ideas and abstractions are made 'effectively real' based on their interaction with the physical substrate (and in the case of things such as math, their interaction with the physical substrate may be very fundamental -- the rules of physics are intrinsically based on and and inseparable from math, even though math itself is 'unreal' in the sense that mathematical ideas can be completely divorced from physical reality (e.g. much to the dismay of finitists it is easy to express and operate on a number greater than the total number of protons, electrons, and neutrons in the observable universe)).

this strikes me as very much not dualistic, in the sense that there's one sort of substance, material stuff. if non-material stuff only exists by virtue of being encoded in material stuff, then it is matter that gives form substance and existence and so on. sure, form (which means math, or programming, or logic, or etcetera) functions according to its own dynamics, but it's ultimately a thing matter does or has... or have i misunderstood ?

[Travis B.]

Furthermore, the physical substrate is potentially irrelevant to the realm of ideas. In the case of a computer, multiple entirely separate physical implementation of an architecture can implement the very same architecture such that they are indistinguishable from the viewpoint of code and data operating within the scheme of the architecture despite the fact that the physical substrates are quite distinct from one another. In addition, software emulation allows nesting one architecture in another architecture such that the inner architecture cannot tell that it is not running directly on physical hardware, with the only real limitation to the degrees of nesting being the physical limitations of the outermost architecture's physical implementation.

To think outside the realm of computing and to use an analogy I used elsewhere, consider sending an olde-timey telegram by Western Union (back when they sent telegrams). You first think of the message you want to write (in English of course); it exists as ideas in your brain. Then you write the message in English text encoded as ink on a piece of paper, which you take down to your local WU office. Then you hand your piece of paper to the person at the desk at WU; light bounces off the ink and transfers the message to the worker, who converts the messages into keypresses on a teletypewriter. The TTY converts the keypresses into electronic pulses encoding Baudot code, which pass over a wire, ultimately to another TTY. The other TTY converts the electronic pulses into mechanical motion, printing the text in ink on a piece of paper. Then a courier takes the piece of paper, sees light bouncing off the ink which communicates the name and address of the recipient, and goes by car or by bike to that address. Then they hand the piece of paper to the recipient, whose eye perceives the light bouncing off the ink and sends neural pulses to their brain, which understands the message.

In this example, the message passes through many disparate media (thoughts, ink, light, thoughts, keypresses, electronic pulses representing Baudot code, mechanical motion, ink, light, thoughts), yet the message has a distinct identity that remains constant across all these media; it exists in the realm of ideas divorced from the physical substrate even though if the physical substrate disappeared it too would disappear (e.g. if rain got on the initial piece of paper and the ink ran the message would be lost). In this way things in the ideal realm are independent of yet simultaneously dependent on the physical realm.

[Torco]

sure, but in a way that's not different from saying that form, in general (and a message or an algorythm here is a form) can affect the functioning of a system in a way that is somewhat independent from the substrate, the thing that is taking up said form. In a way, what you're saying is similar to the observation that you can, in fact, build a set of pool balls out of various different materials and they will behave in many ways very similarly, especially within certain constraints.

like sure, pool balls made out of wood will behave different from balls made out of tungsten, but it is also the case that duke nukem 3D runs differently on my computer than it ran on the old pentium 2 i first played it on: and these material constraints on the functional equivalence of form are not that novel either: not all materials are equally capable of taking on a certain form: for example, sure, you can write the same message on paper or on wood or on steel, but you cannot write it in, say, the ocean, or on a pool of oil. the same code can run on your computer and on my computer, but it won't run on a pice of toast.

i do feel though, not to sound all mcluhan, that the independence of form from substrate is more of a map thing than a territory thing: in many ways the medium sort of is the message, as any designer, publicist or author will attest to. in your example of the telegraph sure, there is a lot of very high fidelity transmission of the message, the form (the string of letters, punctuations, spaces and all the rest of it, in that case), but it is also the case that the message will be received very differently depending on the quality of the paper, the typeface its encoded in, and a bunch of other details of the substrate.

and then there's the further complication that matter is, after all, form: it's all protons and neutrons and electrons, or quarks, or sub-quark thingamabobs or whatever, arranged this-or-that-way. In a way, it could be that it's form all the way down.

[zompist]

for example, sure, you can write the same message on paper or on wood or on steel, but you cannot write it in, say, the ocean, or on a pool of oil.

Sure you can. How do you think a radio operates? You set up waves and modify their amplitude or frequency or both.

the same code can run on your computer and on my computer, but it won't run on a pice of toast.

Again, sure it can. Did you know programs can be hand-emulated, using pen and paper? The program doesn't know that it's laboriously hand-modeled. You could do it writing on toast with butter.

That would be inefficient to an absurd degree; but inefficient, philosophically, does not mean impossible.

[Travis B.]

Torco, what do you think about numbers and math? The same number can exist as thoughts in my head, as Arabic numerals in ink on paper, as Roman numerals in chalk on asphalt, as positions of beads on an abacus, as electrical charges and currents in a computer, etc. yet it has one mathematical identity despite all these different physical substates. If I am getting your view right, there is no such thing as an abstract, ideal identity independent of physical media, so how can numbers have such?

[malloc]

I'm pretty depressed too. ngl

The anxiety of living in contemporary society is: Will your neighbors decide to kill you this week or next week?

Yeah, things have only gotten worse for me over the past few years with no reason to expect that they will ever improve. It seems incredible in hindsight that I once had entire years where things went well for me. Now even one good day is quite the rarity.

[Man in Space]

The anxiety of living in contemporary society is: Will your neighbors decide to kill you this week or next week?

I legitimately have a contingency plan to seek asylum in another country if things reach a certain critical threshold, with this as the basis. At least if the Russians invade then I’ll know who my enemy is because it won’t be my neighbor or my brother (metaphorically, I only have a sister).

[alice]

A computer is a deterministic machine whose every bit of function can be explained by the electronics: voltage levels, flows of current, relationships between its hundred billion transistors.

Au contraire, the Computer is a Being of unfathomable Cunning, large and complicated far beyond our Ken, whose Function we can only ascertain in very small Parts at a Time, by offering it divers Incantations and interpreting its Responses with very careful Understanding.

[malloc]

Au contraire, the Computer is a Being of unfathomable Cunning, large and complicated far beyond our Ken, whose Function we can only ascertain in very small Parts at a Time, by offering it divers Incantations and interpreting its Responses with very careful Understanding.

Well, that is certainly the goal for many in the tech industry and one I have consistently opposed.

[WeepingElf]

Au contraire, the Computer is a Being of unfathomable Cunning, large and complicated far beyond our Ken, whose Function we can only ascertain in very small Parts at a Time, by offering it divers Incantations and interpreting its Responses with very careful Understanding.

Well, that is certainly the goal for many in the tech industry and one I have consistently opposed.

You have completely missed the irony in alice's post - a trait they are famous for in these quarters. (Hint: irony has nothing to do with metals, nor with laundry care.)