BIG successes of Lisp (was ...)

[mike420]

In the context of LATEX, some Pythonista asked what the big
successes of Lisp were. I think there were at least three *big*
successes.

a. orbitz.com web site uses Lisp for algorithms, etc.
b. Yahoo store was originally written in Lisp.
c. Emacs

The issues with these will probably come up, so I might as well
mention them myself (which will also make this a more balanced
post)

a. AFAIK Orbitz frequently has to be shut down for maintenance
(read "full garbage collection" - I'm just guessing: with
generational garbage collection, you still have to do full
garbage collection once in a while, and on a system like that
it can take a while)

b. AFAIK, Yahoo Store was eventually rewritten in a non-Lisp.
Why? I'd tell you, but then I'd have to kill you :)

c. Emacs has a reputation for being slow and bloated. But then
it's not written in Common Lisp.

Are ViaWeb and Orbitz bigger successes than LATEX? Do they
have more users? It depends. Does viewing a PDF file made
with LATEX make you a user of LATEX? Does visiting Yahoo
store make you a user of ViaWeb?

For the sake of being balanced: there were also some *big*
failures, such as Lisp Machines. They failed because
they could not compete with UNIX (SUN, SGI) in a time when
performance, multi-userism and uptime were of prime importance.
(Older LispM's just leaked memory until they were shut down,
newer versions overcame that problem but others remained)

Another big failure that is often _attributed_ to Lisp is AI,
of course. But I don't think one should blame a language
for AI not happening. Marvin Mins ky, for example,
blames Robotics and Neural Networks for that.

[Michele Simionato]

"Andrew Dalke" <ad****@mindspr ing.com> wrote in message news:<Yw******* *********@newsr ead4.news.pas.e arthlink.net>.. .

Michele Simionato wrote:

Now, one can prove that the arbitrarity is
extremely small and has no effect at all at our energy scales: but
in principle it seems that we cannot determine completely an observable,
even in quantum electrodynamics , due to an internal inconsistency of the
mathematical model.

How small? Plank scale small?

Actually it is much *smaller* than that: this is the reason why it is
not significant at all from a physical perspective. I was adopting there
a purely mathematical POV. In practice, only at absurdely high
energy scales, where certainly QED does not apply, the effect is relevant:
so physicist don't need to worry at all. The number I find in my Ph. D. thesis
(http://www.phyast.pitt.edu/~micheles/dott.ps, unfortunaly it is in
Italian since they give the freedom to write the dissertation in English
only the year after my graduation :-() is 10^227 GeV (!) BTW, it seems
too large now, I don't remember how I got it, but anyway I am sure the
number is much much larger than Plank scale (10^19 GeV).

In my post I was simply saying that there are issues of principle:
in practice quantum electrodynamics is the most successful physical
theory we ever had, with incredibly accurate predictions. No doubt
about that ;)

[Michele Simionato]

Stephen Horne <st***@ninereed s.fsnet.co.uk> wrote in message news:<15******* *************** **********@4ax. com>...

And yes, even classical mechanics could not have been our first model
for simple commonsense reasons. How often, for instance, did ancient
Greeks get to observe objects moving through a frictionless
environment?
It is a bit strange that Ancient Greeks did not discover classical
mechanics. Actually, entire books have been written on the subject,
trying to elucidate the economical and psychological mechanisms behind
this failure of the genial Greeks.
I find the 'infinite' theory dubious - if the expansion rate has
remained finite since the big bang, then how can space have grown to
become infinite? The only way I can understand it is if space was
always infinite. That wouldn't necessarily mean it can't 'expand',
just as it isn't necessarily impossible to multiply infinity by two.
You are perfectly right.

Notice that the expansion should not be taken to its
extreme consequences: at a certain scale the Universe enters in its
quantum gravity regime and we don't know nothing about its behavior
then. There are string-inspired models in which the so called Big Bang
does not exist and never happened. Many feel this perspective more
appealing.
I guess 'expansion' relating to the universe is a metaphor too, really
- after all, the universe isn't an object within some other space. The
'expansion' is really just rewriting of the scale factors on the
dimension axes of the universe, I suppose.
You are right.
That being why the speed of
light isn't a problem in inflation - nothing is actually moving faster
than the speed of light, even though the distances between things is
expanding faster than the speed of light.
That's pretty tricky. The maximum velocity for transmission of information
is always the speed of light, but depending on how you define distances
(which is tricky) you can get (apparently) speeds higher than that. I
find impossible to get an intuitive picture of how velocity compose
in the early Universe, even if I understand well the mathematics
involved (nothing more complicate than solving a differential equation
for the geodetic lines). It's the interpretation the real issue, as
always in modern Physics ;)

Also, a thing that confused me was Hubble law: if the speed of galaxies
increases with distance, one would naively think that at a certain moment
it will get higher than c. The solution of the paradox is that the linear
Hubble's law only works locally: there are corrections for far away
galaxies, so the maximum speed is always c.

Interested people should look at Weinberg's book on General Relativity,
the chapter on cosmological distances: however, be warned that it is
non-trivial!
Hmmm - I wonder if 'expansion' or 'scale' is a continuous value in
space-time, like curvature? Well, I guess it must be really - just
write the model in those terms and hey presto - but what I mean, I
guess, is "is there a function that can define that 'scale' in terms
of local physics to explain things we don't currently have an
explanation for?".
I do not understand what you are trying to say here.
And as has already stated, there are other explanations
of waveform collapse that don't require consciousness to take a
special role. Explanations that make more sense, as the observer never
had any control over how the waveform collapses - it is a mechanical
process that follows clearly defined non-mystical rules.

Agreed.

Michele Simionato

[Michele Simionato]

"Andrew Dalke" <ad****@mindspr ing.com> wrote in message news:<Zl******* *********@newsr ead4.news.pas.e arthlink.net>.. .

But my understanding is that the universe, so far as anyone can tell,
is either an infinite space or finite without bounds. In either case,
there is no such thing as a center.
Michele is a better one for this topic. My point was just that many
different answers doesn't necessarily imply a mystic explanation.

Since the Universe is homogenous and isotropic, every point has the
same right to be the center that any other point. In a more
mathematically inclined perspective, notice that in a curved
space the concept of center is tricky. For instance, what's
the center of the *surface* of the Earth? (yes, somebody could
say Washington DC, but I was talking about non-euclidean geometry,
not about politics ;)
I read a popular account of "branes", membrane theory, which
was interesting. I don't know enough to describe it

Then you know as much as the authors of the theory ;)

Michele Simionato

[Andrew Dalke]

Stephen Horne:

Are you sure [about chaos in the solar system]? ... I thought the orbit of the planets around the sun
had been proven stable. Which implies that you needn't worry about
chaos unless you are worried about the minor deviations from the
idealised orbits - the idealised bit can be treated as constant, and
forms a very close approximation of reality no matter what timescale
you are working in.

Quoting from Ian Stewart's "The Problems of Mathematics" (c) 1987,
which is a very good book, and I encourage people to get a copy:

..could the other planets resonate with the Earth .. to make it collide
with Mars, or run off into the cold and empty interstellar wastes?
For imaginary solar systems simpler than ours, this kind of thing
can happen. Could it happen to us? In 1887 King Oscar II of
Sweden offered a prixe of 2,500 crowns for an answer.
..
As far as we know today, no closed form solutions exist [for the
general N body problem with N > 2]; at any rate, the general
behaviour is enormously complicated.... Lagrange and Laplace
between them did manage to show that the total departure from
circularity of the orbits of the planets in the Solar System is
constant; and that this total, even if concentrated on the Earth,
will not switch it to an orbit that escapes the Sun altogether, like
that of a comet. But this didn't show that the Earth might not
slowly gain energy from other planets, and drift out by bigger
and bigger almost-circles until we become lost in the silence and
the dark. Proof was still lacking that we will neither leave the
hearth nor fall into the fire, and for that the king offered his crowns.
[I do like Stewart's writing style :) ]

[So Poincare' invented topology and the idea of phase space.]
He did not settle the question of the stability of the solar system:
that had to wait until the 1960s. But he made such a dent in it
that in 1889 he was awarded his coveted Oscar, and he throughly
deserved it. .. For instance, he proved that in the motion of three
bodies there are always infinitely many distinct periodic motions...
...
In 1963, using extensive topological arguments, Kolmogorov,
Vladimir Arnol'd and Jurgen Moser were able to respond to
the question 'Is the Solar System stable?' with a resounding and
definitive answer: 'Probably'. Their method (usually called KAM
Theory) shows that most of the possible motions are built up from
a superposition of periodic ones. The planets never exactly
repeat their positions, but keep on almost doing so. However,
if you pick an initial set-up at random, there is a small but
non-zero chance of following a different type of motion, whereby
the system may lose a planet (or worse)--though not terribly
quickly. ... The fasciniating point is that there is no way to tell
by observation which of these two types of behaviour will occur.
Take any configuration that leads to almost periodic motion; then
there are configurations as close as you like where planets wander
off. Conversely, adjacent to any initial configuration from which
a planet wanders off, there are others for which the motion is
almost periodic. The two types of behaviour are mixed up
together like spaghetti and bolognese sauce.

Andrew
da***@dalkescie ntific.com

[Michele Simionato]

Stephen Horne <st***@ninereed s.fsnet.co.uk> wrote in message news:<l4******* *************** **********@4ax. com>...

Superfluid helium is a macroscopic phenomenon - it may be explained in
terms of QM effects, but that doesn't make it a quantum effect in
itself any more than more everyday macroscopic effects (which can also
be described in QM terms). If superfluid helium is your only clue, it
will tell you no more about quantum effects than e.g. lightening tells
you about the properties of an electron.
It is true that superfluidity is described by an effective field theory
which is not directly related to the properties of a single electron;
but still it is a (non-relativistic) *quantum* field theory, so the fact
that it is "quantum" is relevant. Things are different in ferromagnets,
for instance, where a lot of properties can be derived from classical
very unrealistic models (such as the Ising model) due to the universality
property. But not ALL properties. Anyway, I do understand that you have
in mind quantum effects related to the wave function collapse, and
I don't think superfluidity is of big help on these issues, so I must
agree with you on that point. Unfortunately :-(
It was quite a revelation to discover that the physics of the cosmos
were actually the same physics we experience on the ground.
Worth repeating.
The centre of a black hole exists, in a sense, but we can never
observe it because it is inside the event horizon, and as time itself
stops at the event horizon (from the perspective of any outside
observer) there is even good reason for claiming that the space inside
the event horizon doesn't exist.

Michele is a better one for this topic.

It is interesting to notice that the region *inside* the event horizon
is a perfectly physical region and can be relatively well understood.

For instance, an observer can fall inside the horizon and live relatively
well if the black hole is large enough and the tidal forces are small
enough; we can perfectly compute how much time s/he will live and what
s/he will see. It is true that external observers cannot see the poor guy
enter in the black hole, because of the infinite time dilatation, but
this does not mean that the guy does not enter in the black hole, according
to its proper time.

There is only one point (of a set of points if the black hole is
rotating) which we cannot understand, i.e. the singularity.
Near the singularities general relativity fails and we don't know
what happens. It is interesting to notice that Hawking proved
that GR necessarely implies singularities: this means that we know
for sure that GR is certainly not a complete
theory of Physics ;)
I read a book about string and brane theory some time ago - I guess
possibly the same one, though it has vanished into book-borrowing
space as all the best books do so I can't tell you the title.

Lots of theory about possible geometries and topologies of many
dimensional space-time and how they could change from one another.
They didn't address the issue of how they could change at all, given
that time existed within the geometry rather than outside of it, and
for that among other reasons my impression was that it was a
fascinating read that nevertheless left me with no more clue than I
had to start with.
That's normal ;)
I would at least have appreciated a definition of supersymmetry,
rather than the usual 'its too abstract for your puny mind' copout.

Supersymmetry is a much simpler concept than branes or strings:
unfortunately it is still too abstract to explain, unless one has
expertise in quantum field theory :-(

Modern physics is so difficult than you can happily spend your entire
life on a subject such as string theory and never understand it.
That's life !

Michele Simionato

[Michele Simionato]

Stephen Horne <st***@ninereed s.fsnet.co.uk> wrote in message news:<b1******* *************** **********@4ax. com>...

OK - but if you are describing superfluidity as a single macroscopic
effect then you must describe it within a macroscopic framework. At
which point it has nothing to do with quantum effects because it isn't
within a quantum framework - it is just that the macroscopic
phenomenon called electricity (distinct from electrons moving en
masse) is not subject to the macroscopic phenomenon called resistance
(distinct from energy loss through the electomagnetic interactions
between electrons and atoms en masse) when the macroscopic phenomenon
called temperature (distinct from the kinetic energy of atoms en
masse) is sufficiently low.

There is nothing wrong with this per se - it is the limit of most
peoples (mine included) understanding of superconductivi ty - but it
has nothing to do with the framework of quantum mechanics.

I am sure I am misreading you again, but the equation is not
microscopic=qua ntum, macroscopic=cla ssical. It can be very
well quantum=macrosc opic. For instance, there is no classical
theory able to describe superfluidity, it must be quantum.
If I am misreading you again, let's say that I am doing this
remark for the other readers here ;)

Michele

[Stephen Horne]

On 2 Nov 2003 09:11:56 -0800, mi**@pitt.edu (Michele Simionato) wrote:

Hmmm - I wonder if 'expansion' or 'scale' is a continuous value in
space-time, like curvature? Well, I guess it must be really - just
write the model in those terms and hey presto - but what I mean, I
guess, is "is there a function that can define that 'scale' in terms
of local physics to explain things we don't currently have an
explanation for?".

I do not understand what you are trying to say here.

Once, the shape of space-time (in as much as the concept existed) was
assumed separate from things that are located withing the space-time.
Now we know that space-time curvature is a function of gravity, which
is a function of the distribution of mass.

Maybe the distribution of something else determines the 'scale' or
'expansion rate' of space-time.

Which suddenly sounds familiar - of course general relativity includes
dilation of time and space related to gravity and
velocity/acceleration anyway so there is presumably no need to
postulate a 'something else' to explain the expansion of space-time
(well, besides the already postulated dark energy).

Oh well.
--
Steve Horne

steve at ninereeds dot fsnet dot co dot uk

[Bengt Richter]

On 1 Nov 2003 22:19:11 -0800, mi**@pitt.edu (Michele Simionato) wrote:

Stephen Horne <st***@ninereed s.fsnet.co.uk> wrote in message news:<uh******* *************** **********@4ax. com>... [...]

The evidence suggests that conscious minds exist
within the universe as an arrangement of matter subject to the same
laws as any other arrangement of matter.

If there is some "stuff" whose state can eventually be shown to have 1:1 relationship
with the state of a particular individual's conscious experience, this would seem to
imply that senses and brains etc. are effectively transducers between reality and our
experiencing-stuff. Does the "experienci ng-stuff" itself have matter-nature or field-nature?

From the fact that my consciousness goes out like a light almost every night, I speculate that
that what persists day to day (brains, synaptic connections, proteins, etc) is not the _essential_
basis of my experience, but rather, those persistent things somehow _shape_ the medium through
whose state-changes my conscious experience arises.

What are the limitations on the states of the experience-medium? It seems that e.g., damaged brains
create changes in the possible range of experiences, both creating new possibilities and removing
others, but this would not seem to be a limitiation of the experience-medium itself, but rather
of the reality-transducer. Besides physical brain changes, drugs can also apparently change how
the reality-transducer works or does not work (e.g., psychedelics or anaesthetics). But what of
the (hypothetical at this point) medium itself? Could it be capable of other states if it were
conditioned by another transducer? (How would the experiencer know that was happening, BTW?)
E.g., are the limitations on temperature and electrical gradients etc. of the brain effectively
limitiations on the range of possible conscious experience, that might not limit experience
conditioned through another "transducer ?"

Now consider the experience of being "convinced" that a theory "is true." What does that mean?

Does our experience-medium get shaped repeatedly through layers and layers of abstraction and
re-representation to where some bit of memory is sensed to have a comfortable stability w.r.t.
sensations derived from a series of experiemnts, and we are satisfied by some pleasure-connect
with this state of brain? Is it pain and pleasure at bottom, tied to subtle internal state
sensations? Do we form theories like patterns of sand form on a vibrating membrane at quiescent
spots for a given mode of vibration? Do internal cognitive dissonances drive the "sand" away
from untenable positions in patterns of theory? Is our conscious experience-medium passive in
being shaped by the transducer, or does it have its own properties? E.g., is our sense of
connected-ness of a broken line in our visual conscious experience due to shaping of a field?
I.e., due to our very experience medium having field-nature and naturally taking some form
across gaps between features due to its own properties?
I think that mind is a an arrangement of matter, too; nevertheless,
I strongly doubt that we will ever be able to understand it. Incidentally, I think we will find out a lot yet. Beautiful, subtle stuff ;-) Too bad we are
wasting so much on ugly, dumb stuff ;-/
I am also quite skeptical about IA claims. Yes, but AI doesn't have to be all that "I" to have a huge economic and social impact.
The trend is towards private concentrated control and ownership of super-productive capital
equipment (temporarily simulated as necessary by Asian cheap labor), and AI IMO will play an
evolving role. The question is how the increasingly large fraction of people who will not be needed
for producing anything will be able to play the role of customer, unless we figure out some new
social machinery to go along with the other kind. ... Maybe a UN-member-funded humanitarian
consortium should buy Google before it becomes conscious as someone's private genie ;-)

Well, as you say,
[...]That's life, but it is more interesting this way ;)

Yes, and we could be working on global renaissance if we could globally
figure out how to spend $500bn/year (>15kUSD/second!) on good stuff
instead of miserable conflict. I would like to see leaders elected who re-affirm
at every news/media event the goal of eliminating this global stupidity,
and see the ability to kill fellow humans (at least) as aberrant instead
of just another notch on the scale of dirty-play competition that they are
willing to engage in themselves -- unable to recognize their own aberration through
the thinnest delusory veils of justification (never mind through the filters
of a raging polarized mindset).

Sorry, I get a little upset with the waste and consequent unnecessary suffering ;-/

Regards,
Bengt Richter

[Stephen Horne]

On 2 Nov 2003 10:16:20 -0800, mi**@pitt.edu (Michele Simionato) wrote:

Stephen Horne <st***@ninereed s.fsnet.co.uk> wrote in message news:<b1******* *************** **********@4ax. com>...

OK - but if you are describing superfluidity as a single macroscopic
effect then you must describe it within a macroscopic framework. At
which point it has nothing to do with quantum effects because it isn't
within a quantum framework - it is just that the macroscopic
phenomenon called electricity (distinct from electrons moving en
masse) is not subject to the macroscopic phenomenon called resistance
(distinct from energy loss through the electomagnetic interactions
between electrons and atoms en masse) when the macroscopic phenomenon
called temperature (distinct from the kinetic energy of atoms en
masse) is sufficiently low.

There is nothing wrong with this per se - it is the limit of most
peoples (mine included) understanding of superconductivi ty - but it
has nothing to do with the framework of quantum mechanics.

I am sure I am misreading you again, but the equation is not
microscopic=qu antum, macroscopic=cla ssical. It can be very
well quantum=macrosc opic. For instance, there is no classical
theory able to describe superfluidity, it must be quantum.
If I am misreading you again, let's say that I am doing this
remark for the other readers here ;)

Michele

But within a framework you don't explain the effects described in that
framework - at best you quantify them. e.g. Newton did not give an
explanation for how gravity works - he just quantified it. If you want
to explain the classical concept of gravity, you need to look at some
other model that predicts it - e.g. gravity is created by gravitons
(an old quantum theory which IIRC has been abandoned) or gravity is
space-time curvature (a relativistic theory).

If you are describing superconductivi ty as a single effect (rather
than explaining it in terms of quantum effects working en masse) then
it is certainly a macroscopic effect (you can look at it), but
basically in that framework you are saying 'this is how it is, get
used to it'.

This is the same as giving a formula for electrical resistance rather
than explaining it in terms of the many interactions of electrons and
atoms within the wire. The formula belongs in the macroscopic
framework. I'm not saying a single quantum effect cannot be
macroscopic, but superconductivi ty is explained by the way that
electrons interact with atoms at low temperature - it is only a single
effect in itself in a macroscopic framework where you say "here is how
it is, get used to it".

If you are explaining how superconductivi ty arises, then it arises out
of microscopic quantum effects acting en masse.

However, now that I think harder, I just countered myself in a way.
There isn't just one QM framework exactly - there are layers within
that too (e.g. quarks relative to protons) so a macroscopic quantum
effect can be explained in terms of a microscopic quantum effect and
so on. It really depends on whether you call superconductivi ty a
quantum effect even though you aren't looking at simple interactions
between quanta.

Maybe my definition of 'quantum' is odd, in other words, taking a
principle too strictly and ignoring normal conventions.
--
Steve Horne

steve at ninereeds dot fsnet dot co dot uk

[Stephen Horne]

On 3 Nov 2003 00:13:58 GMT, bo**@oz.net (Bengt Richter) wrote:

On 1 Nov 2003 22:19:11 -0800, mi**@pitt.edu (Michele Simionato) wrote:

Stephen Horne <st***@ninereed s.fsnet.co.uk> wrote in message news:<uh******* *************** **********@4ax. com>...[...]

The evidence suggests that conscious minds exist
within the universe as an arrangement of matter subject to the same
laws as any other arrangement of matter.

If there is some "stuff" whose state can eventually be shown to have 1:1 relationship
with the state of a particular individual's conscious experience
No-one has ever shown that. Actually, exactly the opposite. Our
consciousness is a very poor substitute for reality. You may see you
conscious awareness as detailed, but that is only because as soon as
you shift you focus on some detail it naturally enters the
consciousness (indeed it often gets backdated, so that you think it
was in your consciousness at a time that it simply wasn't there at
all).

What would be a particularly valued aspect of consciousness? How about
'agency' - the sense of owning and controlling our own actions - the
sense of free will?

Well, if electrodes are placed on your brain in the right place, they
can directly move your arm. So what? Well, you will be completely
unaware of the remote control - unless you are told about it, you will
claim that you chose to move your arm of your own free will. You will
even have an excuse for why you moved your arm which you believe
implicitly.

In fact you don't even need electrodes on the brain - the same effect
can be seen with people whose left and right brains are separated
(corpus callosum cut). Hold up a card saying 'get a drink' so that it
is visible only to one eye and they will go to get a drink. Hold up a
card saying 'why did you get a drink?' to the other eye and they will
show no awareness of the first card, insisting they just felt thirsty
or whatever.

Quite simply, consciousness is nothing special. It is a product of
information processing in the brain. Sometimes that information
processing goes wrong for some reason or another, and consciousness
gets distorted as a result.

The 'transducers' are our senses, providing information about reality
(imperfectly) to our brains.
From the fact that my consciousness goes out like a light almost every night, I speculate that
that what persists day to day (brains, synaptic connections, proteins, etc) is not the _essential_
basis of my experience, but rather, those persistent things somehow _shape_ the medium through
whose state-changes my conscious experience arises.
What if the thing that woke up the next day was a perfect copy of you,
complete with the same memories, rather like Arnie in the Sixth Day?

No - not a clone. A clone is at best an identical twin with a
different age as well as different memories, and identical twins do
not have identical brains even at birth - there isn't enough
information in our DNA to give an exact blueprint for the initial
connections between the neurons in our brains.

But assume a perfect copy of a person, complete with memories, could
be made. How would it know that it wasn't the same self that it
remembered from yesterday?

Now consider this...

The brain really does change during sleep. In a way, you literally are
not the same person when you wake up as when you went to sleep.

More worryingly, the continuity of consciousness even when awake is
itself an illusion. Think of the fridge light that turns off when the
fridge is shut - if you didn't know about fridge lights, and could
only see it when the door is open, you would assume the light was
always on. Similarly, whenever you try to observe your state of
consciousness it is inherently on so it apears to be always on and
continuous, but science strongly suggests that this appearance is
simply wrong.

So do we have any more claim to our conscious sense of self than this
hypothetical copy would have?

The fact is that no-one has shown me anything to make me believe that
we have 'experience' separate from the information processing capacity
of the brain. So far as I can see, the copy would have as much claim
to the conscious sense of self, 'continuing on' from prior memory, as
the original.
Now consider the experience of being "convinced" that a theory "is true." What does that mean?
Science suggests that all subjective meaning is linked to either
direct senses or action potentials in the brain. If you think of the
concept 'democracy', for instance, you may actually generate the
action potentials for raising your hand to vote (depending on your
particular subjective understanding of that abstract term) - though
those potentials get instantly suppressed.

In fact a key language area (Brocas area IIRC) is also strongly linked
to gesture - hence sign language, I suppose.

This makes good sense. Evolution always works by modifying and
extending what it already has. The mental 'vocabulary' has always been
in terms of the bodily inputs and outputs, so as the capacity for more
abstract thought evolved it would of course build upon the existing
body-based 'vocabulary' foundations.

I can easily suggest possible associations for the term 'convinced' by
referring to a thesaurus - 'unshakeable', for instance, is a clear
body/motion related metaphor.

Or maybe it relates to the body language action potentials associated
with the appearance of being convinced?

At which point I'm suddenly having an a-ha moment - maybe the verbal
and nonverbal communication deficits in Asperger syndrome and autism
are strongly linked. Maybe a person who is unable to associate an idea
to its body language, for instance, loses a lot of the intuitive sense
of that idea. Thus the idea must be learned verbally and the verbal
definition inherently gets taken too literally.

Basically, if a person has to give the concept a new, abstract,
internal symbol instead of using the normal body-language associated
internal symbol, then any innate intuitions relating to that concept
will be lost. The neurological implementation of the intuitions may
exist but never get invoked - and therefore it will tend to atrophy,
even if its normal development doesn't depend on somatosensory
feedback in the first place.

That could explain some odd 'coincidences'.

Hmmmm.

I think I might post this idea somewhere where it is actually on topic
;-)
Is it pain and pleasure at bottom
Nope - the innate circuitry of our brain brings a lot more than that.
'Pain' and 'pleasure' are actually quite high level concepts, things
which we experience as 'good' or 'bad' only because we have the
information processing machinery that makes those associations.
I think we will find out a lot yet. Beautiful, subtle stuff ;-) Too bad we are
wasting so much on ugly, dumb stuff ;-/

'Ugly' and 'dumb' are themselves only subjective perceptions. If you
really want to know the truth, you must accept that it will not always
be what you want to hear.
I am also quite skeptical about IA claims.

Yes, but AI doesn't have to be all that "I" to have a huge economic and social impact.

I thought IA != AI, though I have to admit I'm not sure what IA stands
for. Instrumentalist something-or-other?

As for AI, I'd say I agree. Having a human-style consciousness is not
necessarily a practical asset for an intelligent machine.
--
Steve Horne

steve at ninereeds dot fsnet dot co dot uk