Hamlet,Vinge, Kurzweil and the singularity

[Christopher]

Hamlet,Vinge, Kurzweil and the singularity

 

 

The Vingean singularity

The concept of a technological singularity as it is known today is due in part to mathematician and author Dr. Vernor Vinge. Vinge began speaking on the Singularity in the 1980s, and collected his thoughts into the first article on the topic in 1993, with the essay "Technological Singularity". Since then, it has been the subject of many futurist and science fiction stories/writings.

Vinge's essay contains the oft-quoted statement that "Within thirty years, we will have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence. Shortly thereafter, the human era will be ended."

Vinge's singularity is commonly misunderstood to mean technological progress will rise to infinity, as happens in a mathematical singularity. Actually, the term was chosen as a metaphor from physics rather than mathematics: as one approaches the Singularity, models of the future become less reliable, just as conventional models of physics break down as one approaches a gravitational singularity.

Vinge writes that superhuman intelligences, whether created by cybernetically enhancing human minds or through artificial intelligence, will be even more able to enhance their own minds than the human intelligences that created them. "When greater-than-human intelligence drives progress," Vinge writes, "that progress will be much more rapid." This feedback loop of self-improving intelligence is expected to cause large amounts of technological progress within a short period of time. From Wikipedia,

 

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In his 2001 essay, The Law of Accelerating Returns, Ray Kurzweil proposes a generalization of Moore's law that forms the basis of many people's beliefs regarding the Singularity. Moore's law describes an exponential growth pattern in the complexity of integrated semiconductor circuits. Kurzweil extends this to include technologies from far before the integrated circuit to future forms of computation. He declares that whenever a technology approaches some kind of a barrier, a new technology will be invented to allow us to cross that barrier. He predicts that such paradigm shifts will become more and more common as we approach the singularity. He believes that the exponential growth of Moore's law will continue beyond the use of integrated circuits into technologies that will lead to the Singularity, which he defines as the technological change so rapid and profound it represents a rupture in the fabric of human history.

The law described by Ray Kurzweil has in many ways altered the public's perception of Moore's law. It is a common (but mistaken) belief that Moore's law makes predictions regarding all forms of technology, when really it only concerns semiconductor circuits. Many futurists still use the term "Moore's law" to describe ideas like those put forth by Kurzweil. From Wikipedia,

 

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Eternal true forms

 

 

The creativity we see forming is the result of a force emanating from the singularity were all things are formed.

This is the universal duality that are separated by the event horizon, the information that exist beyond the event horizon can not be known outside of it.

This duality is what keeps the universe perpetually moving in this creative circular motion around the eternal..

 

So I walk on the uplands unbound ,

 

And know that there is hope

 

For that which Thou didst mold out of dust

 

To have consort with things eternal.

 

--- The dead sea scolls

 

Information is composed of order; this order collapses around a preexisting possibility of order.

 

As Pythagoras said “eternal true forms” these eternal true forms exist as inherent inevitabilities…. A singularity……..A basin of attraction.

 

The driving force of life are dualities, up down, right left, positive negative, past and future.

These dualities create currents between one another to create movement. All these

dualities can be traced to one source, a singularity. A finality

 

Cognition, is a exponential flow of information within a biological system around the dual singularities of birth and death, in the context of human awareness this can be thought of as existential angst.

 

The main driving force’s in one's life is between the known and the unknown. The archetypal current of all human uncertainty is between life and death.

 

Hamlet ; , act III, William Shakespeare

 

"But that the dread of something after death, the undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveler returns, puzzles the will, and makes us rather bear those ills we have than fly to others we know not of? Thus conscience does make cowards of us all, and thus the native hue of resolution is sicklied over with a pale cast of thought, and enterprises of great pitch and moment with this regard their currents tury awry and lose the name of action."

 

When Shakespeare writes “ the undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveler returns ” he is referring to the event horizon that surrounds the singularity of death, an unknown that cannot be known without a prior irreversible acquiescence. This is what makes Hamlet such a classical story.

 

Hamlet was driven by the need to resolve his fathers death. The pain he experienced in his “to be are not to be” speech is the embodiment of this existential angst generated between the uncertainty of the past and future. The known and unknown.

 

This tension is the crux of the play, and embodies this pull of the singularity. This ever present tension he was feeling between resolving past events with the future.

“Something's rotten in the state of Denmark” The same force that was moving creating emotional tension in Hamlet, keeps the ones watching the play pressed into their seats to see the final outcome.....The singularity.....the end.

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Vesica attractor

My own singularity model is more close to René Thom’s Catastrophe Theory, and Stuart Kauffman’s autocatalytic sets. However my model is even more radical.

 

I am proposing that complex life formed as separate but adjacent quantum fields collapsed together, or more precisely spiraled together forming a singularity.

This singularity representing a microcosm of the environment as a whole resulting in cognition. These points becoming the well spring of life during the Cambrian explosion.

These original archetypal life forms are silicon [micro-quartz crystals] based at the extracellular level and carbon based at the intracellular level.

 

This model pin points what is missing in our current evolutionary models, the hard drive, Where there is a ram there must also be a rom.

 

This Gaia egg or{ vesica attractor }. Represents natural self-organizing attractor models, as follows; point attractor-cycle attractor-torus attractor-vesica attractor.

This new evidence also shows we did not invent the first silicon based hard drive, nature did. Our current silicon based driven singularity will connect the collective consciousness of mankind into a dynamic cohesive whole. This next step being the same process repeating itself on the next cyclical level.

 

 

 

In Cambrian sea 530 million years ago a the biological singularity occurred when genetic information reached a critical threshold connecting the individual eukaryote cell into complex morphology bringing about cognition.

Just as these cells were connected in the distant past, The technological singularity will occur as the individual human is connected into a cognitive cohesive whole. This whole becoming greater than the sum of its parts.

[UncleAl]

Within thirty years, we will have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence.

Head Start (b. 1965): 45 years of creating the most expensive most refractory morons in America. Vinge owes us a decade.

whenever a technology approaches some kind of a barrier, a new technology will be invented to allow us to cross that barrier.

Head Start. What intellectual prostheses does Kurzweil suggest?

 

The Head Start annual budget is 20% larger than that of the National Science Foundation (that funds all physical science in the US). Has there been any perceptible progress in science during the past 45 years?

[nkt]

Not this vessica thing again!

 

Yes, we all know the singularity approaches - just two days ago, five different teams robot cars finished the DARPA Grand Challenge, a mere year after it was started, and two after it was thought to be impossible.

 

5 years to self-driving cars as smart as the occupants. 6 years to human level AI in your iPod. Vessica attractor not required.

[Christopher]

"Vessica attractor not required."

 

Yes it is. :)

 

The central theme of this thread is centered aroud these these two paragraphs from the original post.

 

 

This Gaia egg or{ vesica attractor }. Represents natural self-organizing attractor models, as follows; point attractor-cycle attractor-torus attractor-vesica attractor.

This new evidence also shows we did not invent the first silicon based hard drive, nature did. Our current silicon based driven singularity will connect the collective consciousness of mankind into a dynamic cohesive whole. This next step being the same process repeating itself on the next cyclical level.

 

 

 

In Cambrian sea 530 million years ago a the biological singularity occurred when genetic information reached a critical threshold connecting the individual eukaryote cell into complex morphology bringing about cognition.

Just as these cells were connected in the distant past, The technological singularity will occur as the individual human is connected into a cognitive cohesive whole. This whole becoming greater than the sum of its parts.

 

 

 

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Quote; The feedback loop which describes Phi is an arithmetic linear operator, (like a binary switch: 0 or 1, off or on) representing the winding or rotation number of the inscribed spiral, which is conventionally represented as a multiple of 2pi;. This is superposed with its expansion ratio; 1 : 1.618 ... which is geometric (logarithmic) and therefore non-linear. This can be represented using the polygonal spiral that preserves the circle in half-radians (pi/2) in a manner reminiscent of the action of i = sqrt(-1), the imaginary number. (See below, re: the complex plane) Note that the natural logarithm e, i and pi are in the following relationship: e **(i pi) = -1. The linear is reversible (and finite) while the non-linear is not (and infinite --- being numerically irrational). Phi is in fact the most difficult irrational to approximate with rational numbers, making it the last KAM torus to collapse before the onset, or edge of Chaos.

 

This quasi-periodic Phi toroid geometry is therefore paradoxically, the most stable (under perturbation), despite also being on the edge of Chaos. This is reminiscent of non-linearities damping dissipation in solutions behavior. Solitons are persistent traveling waves which trade dissipative (resonant) effects off against inherent non-linearity’s, in a way that cancels each other out, (a flame being a simple example,).

 

KAM (after Kolgomorov, Arnold, Moser), tori themselves are geometric models that have been used to solve many-body problems in physics, such as planetary dynamics: it has been suggested that the entire solar system is in this edge of Chaos scenario, as a global spatial/temporal entity - whilst allowing for local spatial/temporal chaotic instabilities, again known as resonances, which could be seen as fine adjustments to the overall dynamic, (such as the orbital gaps between the planets, moons and within ring systems;Quote Nigel Reading

 

 

 

 

 

quote; again, means Phi behavior seems to operate at all scales and in any dimension, and confirms it as when infinitely iterated, the mathematically most stable attractive orbit for achieving a mathematical singularity . The fixed points themselves confirm the orbit between the finite (0) and infinite (-1) attractors. The finite attractor here is the period two orbit, analogous to a graph of: y = sin x. The infinite attractor is that same orbit as the graph of the reciprocal: y=sin(1/x). Remarkably, these graphs of simple harmonic motion can be used to describe the curvature of space-time in approaching the speed of light (relative to an outside observer, i.e.: the rest of the Universe, time stops, you compress to finite size, as one dimension capacities, and gain infinite mass - unless you are initially massless, like a photon), or the approach to (or departure from), a space-time singularity such as a Black Hole, or the Big Bang (when times also stop) - which are intriguingly and non-coincidentally, time reversals of each other. Quote

 

 

http://www.soulinvitation.com/philotactics/

 

 

quote

This is the (ana)Logos of Heraclitis of Ephesus, or the Tao of Lao Tsu. These concepts seem to be part of a universal global archetype, in the Jungian sense, to have been already intuited separately by other cultures, at earlier times.

 

More pertinently, James Lovelock's Gaia hypothesis, (where the biosphere of the planet itself is self-organised), is a paradigm for a truly global homeostasis based on Complexity, where the whole planet is posited to minimise its entropy-production at the edge of Chaos, (fixing gas proportions at non equilibrium levels suitable for life, for example), because of the cellular automata-like action of the biosphere.

 

We have a duty to future generations to learn from Gaia-esque concepts; to preserve humanity, its cultures, and the global ecosystem (and their respective diversities), to live by the maxim of sustainability, which is to: "not make the world a worse place for our children by our current actions or inactions". We have a moral responsibilty of course, but also one based on preserving the complexity and diversity of the only known seat of intelligent life in this Universe. We and our world are like the Mandelbrot Set: the most complex and diverse known entities in existence. The Golden Mean, because of its supreme economy, elegance and capacity for analogy, because it resides where it does in dynamical systems behaviours such as within the biosphere, is therefore also the ultimate metaphor for sustainability. Etymologically speaking, the architect is a "fabricator of archetypes"; these ideas and issues as discussed above are as profound as they are pressing. If we are to mitigate our worst ecological excesses (in better understanding and replicating nature, we can better preserve it), or to create better examples of criticality: metaphors and analogies of reality (with these archetypes), we must assimilate the lessons of the sciences of Complexity, for they are the laws and emergent properties of nature itself.

 

 

Quote;

 

Suffice to say, maximum Complexity is found via self-organized criticality at the edge of Chaos, which is epitomized by the Golden Mean, as the emergent geometric manifestation of the principle of least action: therefore its full temporal/ spatial action is analogous to creation itself.

[Christopher]

Head Start (b. 1965): 45 years of creating the most expensive most refractory morons in America. Vinge owes us a decade.

 

Head Start. What intellectual prostheses does Kurzweil suggest?

 

The Head Start annual budget is 20% larger than that of the National Science Foundation (that funds all physical science in the US). Has there been any perceptible progress in science during the past 45 years?

 

 

Singularity’s ; The Tao of quantum evolution.

 

I believe, from what I am seeing around me, and comparing this to emergent systems of the past, we are entering an evolutionary event that will not rely on any sort of prior plan of science, or institution of any kind, but will occur as a natural Tao, or way, inherent in information itself.

 

We are at this moment circling around the event horizon of a great confluence, one that will integrate human biological cognitive function with computer networks.

This formation of networks that create a higher ordered state is a natural evolutionary process that can be seen within the lens of the vesica attractor model.

 

http://www.iscid.org/boards/ubb-get_topic-f-26-t-0 00007.html

 

Our future lies in communication technology merging with the biological-cognitive function. But I have the view that this will be accomplished when computer engineers discover our morphologies contain untapped receptors that can be integrated with light and sound to create a new quantum field.

We will then be able to surround ourselves by an artificially generated world, that our biocognitive system will perceive as real.

Once this is accomplished vast possibilities will open up.

I believe from what I have observed from the vesica attractor model, this is a natural evolutionary Tao to combine the sum total of biocognitive evolution with our ability to generate a space connecting humanity into a cohesive vibrant whole. This will be accomplished in same fundamental way as the eukaryote cells came together during the Cambrian explosion. This same fundamental quantum physics that brought the cells together to generate a new world can be utilized in unison with sound and light waves to achieve a non invasive or non Borg like experience in cyberspace.

Once this is achieved we can attach telemetry to people around the world and experience tele-presence in an advanced form.

 

Instead of sitting staring at a computer screen you could walk though a factory in Tokyo , or climb Mt. Kilimanjaro.

The screen will be replaced by module surround us like a cocoon, Inside we would be suspended in such a way that we could walk, run or fly though cyberspace .

Our experience will only be limited by our imaginations and interactive software.

This artificial sense of movement will be achieved by utilizing **???** element combined with the unique symmetry found only in the human morphology.

This symmetry will allow us to generate a field of compression waves that will resonate though our bodies causing an effect call heterodyning. These compression waves combined with being completely enveloped by a plasma screen. Will allow us to experience cyberspace as a reality.

 

Our evolved morphology combined with technology and creativity will connect us in a shared second universe we will build together. The next great Vesica Attractor.

This third ring of life will connect us in the same way the eukaryotes were connected 530 million years ago to create the first complex life. This time these natural processes will connect humanity in a creative integration of cognitionbiology and technology expanding each exponentially.

[UncleAl]

The Tao of quantum evolution.

Mystics are baffled by the obvious yet possess a complete understanding of the nonexistent.

[Christopher]

Mystics are baffled by the obvious yet possess a complete understanding of the nonexistent.

 

The Web of Life; A New Synthesis of Mind and Matter

by Fritjof Capra

 

ISBN 0-00-255499-2

 

Reviewed by Brian Goodwin

 

Something deep and challenging is going on in the Western psyche, and there is no lack of books around that attempt to articulate the nature of the perceived sea-change and its implications for life on earth. The perspective is global but the problem is local - us, and our relationship to nature. For a lucid survey of the scientific concepts that are currently unfolding in the attempt to wrestle with these issues, and their recent history, there cannot be a better source than Fritjof Capra's latest book, The Web of Life. It starts off with the perception that our worldview is undergoing a paradigm shift from the mechanistic model that has dominated modernity to a holistic perspective that is best characterized intuitively by deep ecology. Again, this is not a novel perception. What gives the book its brilliance is the exposition that follows, an unfolding of current insights from earlier attempts to resolve the knots in the psyche that have been tied by our 400 year infatuation with rationality in the service of prediction, control, and domination of nature. This book still celebrates rationality, for Capra remains pre-eminently a scientist, but in the service of something else: the 'magic creative power by which the world is created in the divine play of Brahman'. The book begins and ends on this note; and in between there is a rich and fascinating intellectual journey.

 

This journey starts with systems theory, initiated by the biologist Ludwig von Bertalanffy in the 1930s as an attempt to think scientifically about wholes and process simultaneously - a natural preoccupation for a life scientist. I got involved in this as a biology student in the 40s and 50s, but grew out of it by the 60s when new ideas were coming on line. Capra describes the information revolution of the 50s that accompanied cybernetics (literally the art of steersmanship - still in the control mode) and gave rise to artificial intelligence. This saw the mind as a problem-solving system that used complex informational networks of the type that operated in the new technology of the time - computers. But a novel set of ideas had begun to emerge in the 60s based on the concept of self-organization, and it is the ramifications of this and related ideas that form the core of Capra's book.

 

The players in this drama are diverse, coming from both biology and physics and leading towards a new marriage of the two. Here we meet the work of Prigogine, Haken, and Eigen from physics, Lovelock, Margulis, Kauffman, Maturana and Varela from biology, to name but a few. To follow the ideas involved, Capra takes the reader through a lucid tutorial in the qualitative mathematics of complexity, since self-organizing systems are necessarily complex and the problem is to understand how order emerges out of the chaos of complex dynamics. We encounter fractals and strange attractors, dissipative structures in chemical and physical systems that generate order from fluctuations and energy flows, and the whole spectacle of living order that has emerged through evolution. Capra recognizes that, while Lovelock, Margulis, and Kauffman demonstrate how unexpected, counterintuitive order emerges from interactions between components of living systems that are as much co-operative as they are competitive, mainstream biology has marched resolutely in the opposite direction, celebrating selfish genes as the agents of evolution and reductionism as the method of unravelling nature's mysteries. This book continuously focuses on concepts and models that allow us to transcend these dualisms.

 

The difficulty that now leaps off the page is how we are going to account for mind, and more generally the self, which is doing the organizing while being organized. Somehow the Cartesian split between mind and matter has to be transcended so that mind becomes embodied. Capra follows the lead of Maturana and Varela: 'Living systems are cognitive systems, and living as a process is a process of cognition'. To live is to know, and to know is to act meaningfully whether you are an amoeba, a rose, or a dolphin. Organisms are patterns of relationships that close on themselves, resulting in coherence within and openness to their surroundings. As coherent wholes, organisms extend their natures by creating coherent, meaningful worlds from their interactions with one another and the environment.

 

And so we get back to creative play, the exploration of ever-new patterns of meaning within the never-ending fluidity of process, with nothing fixed or certain except change and creation. Deep ecology expresses, for Capra, the appropriate relationship between humans and such a world, a relationship whereby the knots in the psyche can be untied and our divisions healed. Inevitably there are gaps and inconsistencies in this story; otherwise there would be no continuing creation for us to participate in. As Blake put it, and Capra quotes:

 

May God us keep

From single vision

And Newton's sleep.

[Christopher]

Mystics are baffled by the obvious yet possess a complete understanding of the nonexistent.

Collective intelligence

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 

 

In 2001, Tadeusz (Ted) Szuba from AGH University in Poland proposed the formal model for phenomenon of Collective Intelligence. It is assumed to be an unconscious, random, parallel, and distributed computational process, run in mathematical logic by the social structure. This theory was fully published in the book Computational Collective Intelligence by Szuba T. (Wiley book series on parallel and distributed computing, 420 pages, Wiley NY, 2001). In this model, beings and information are modeled as abstract information molecules carrying expressions of mathematical logic. They are quasi-randomly displacing due to their interaction with their environments with their intended displacements. Their interaction in abstract computational space creates multithread inference process which we perceive as Collective Intelligence. Thus, a non-Turing model of computation is used. This theory allows simple formal definition of Collective Intelligence as the property of social structure and seems to be working well for a wide spectrum of beings, from bacterial colonies up to human social structures. Collective Intelligence considered as a specific computational process is providing a straightforward explanation of several social phenomenon. For this model of Collective Intelligence, the formal definition of IQS (IQ Social) was proposed and was defined as "the probability function over the time and domain of N-element inferences which are reflecting inference activity of the social structure." While IQS seems to be computationally hard, modeling of social structure in terms of a computational process as described above gives a chance for approximation. Prospective applications are optimization of companies through the maximization of their IQS, and the analysis of drug resistance against Collective Intelligence of bacterial colonies.

[justforfun]

This whole singularity business is an example of tunnel vision. Any model of technological singularities which fails to figure in global warming and kookie politicians isn't valid. Before we turn into mutant borgs, something else will happen from outside the 'tunnel'. While this is not reassuring, it is logical.

[nkt]

I have yet to see a single example of how a collective is smarter than a small team, or even one person. A collective won't beat a grand-master at chess, even when they get hours to move and are allowed whatever chess aids they want. Democracy in it's purest sense is normally paralysed by inaction when it is overtaken by events, and this is why we have a vote for the leaders, rather than for each of the actions those leaders take.

 

Two heads might be better than one, but 20 are not, and 200 certainly are not, whilst 20,000,000 is a disaster waiting to happen (if only because where are you going to stack that many jars?)

 

Unless it is for a "dumb" task, like finding bugs in software when using it, or giving opinions on the war in Iraq, the man on the street is not likely to be some kind of genius, even when it comes to his chosen specialist subject.

[Tormod]

Christopher - are all those quotes taken from sources that allow copying? Otherwise most of this thread is in violation of our rules.

[Eclogite]

The central theme of this thread is centered aroud these these two paragraphs from the original post.

 

This Gaia egg or{ vesica attractor }. Represents natural self-organizing attractor models, as follows; point attractor-cycle attractor-torus attractor-vesica attractor.

This new evidence also shows we did not invent the first silicon based hard drive, nature did. Our current silicon based driven singularity will connect the collective consciousness of mankind into a dynamic cohesive whole. This next step being the same process repeating itself on the next cyclical level.

 

In Cambrian sea 530 million years ago a the biological singularity occurred when genetic information reached a critical threshold connecting the individual eukaryote cell into complex morphology bringing about cognition.

Just as these cells were connected in the distant past, The technological singularity will occur as the individual human is connected into a cognitive cohesive whole. This whole becoming greater than the sum of its parts.

Point 1: [No response necessary.] Christopher, if this is your central theme, why did we have to sit through the lengthy preamble? Why did you not stress that those two paragraphs were your central point? What makes you feel that quoting lengthy, poorly separated extracts from the works of others without providing a clear thematic linkage between them will further your aim to promote the vesica attractor?

To you, the associations and connectivity of these concepts may be obvious and prominent. Not so to many of your readers. I have previously taken you to task for the turbidity of your posts. I see you have treated my advice with the same disregard most readers will treat your hypothesis.

Point 2: [Response requested.] Microscopic, bi-lateral, multi-cellular, internally complex eukaryotic fossils have been recovered from sediments aged between 580 million and 600 million years old. These entirely obviate the need for and eliminate the significance of any purported vesica attractor fossil dating from some fifty million years later.

Please explain how you deal with that reality.

http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/305/5681/218

for a fuller and more popular account see here

http://www.uwm.edu/~sdornbos/PDF's/SciAm.2005.pdf

[Eclogite]

Operator error.:xparty:

Double post deleted.

Just be glad they don't let me fly 747s any more.:lol:

[questor]

probably 3/4's of the world's population can't read this stuff. of the 1/4 that can read it, probably 90% can't understand it. so it bespeaks of certain ''intellectuals'' trying to communicate with each other about esoteria, while the rest of the world goes about it's business using the mundane traits of human nature which may take eons to change.