To me most communication between I and "me" occurs in symbol arrangements, not sound and language.
This can be annoying: when my wife asks me what I'm thinking about, if I'm thinking about something relatively linguistic (an HN comment, say), it's easy to tell her. Otherwise, I need a fair amount of time and effort to make the consecutive interpretation (and forget about simultaneous!).
Further evidence that my thought is not especially language-mediated: my wife and I share a little over three languages in common; however translating into any of these is about as difficult as any other, suggesting that the original thought is equally "far away" from all of them.
Most of my thinking is not in language, though I do sometimes talk to myself in my head. If someone asks me what I'm thinking or feeling, it sometimes takes great effort to translate it into words; and when I do attempt to express it I often feel the words are pretty inadequate. Like encoding a high-res image into a few pixels, or music into a few notes. Super interesting topic indeed.
Thinking is more than just communication; it involves reasoning, problem-solving, etc., according to the paper. You can definitely think without using language, such as while driving, flying, or even playing sports. A subcategory of thinking probably requires language, one that will be used to communicate with others, like addressing an issue at work or even writing a comment here.
Maybe they shouldn’t be looking for the smallest particle.
If space can be divided down to infinity then maybe there may be always smaller bits as you go deeper, but nothing as fundamental they’re wishing to find. Eventually they need accelerator larger than the Earth and maybe it still doesn’t satisfy :)
Instead why not trying to understand the pattern of division so they could predict what comes next.. With all the data so far I would imagine they could succeed in that, maybe with help of AI, and that might save them huge construction effort, time and money.
I quit using Oura ring and it took almost two years until I didn’t have that feeling in my finger that something was missing. With Apple Watch it took half year.
Makes me wonder maybe brain adapts faster when you add something, and it takes longer to adapt for loss? Also maybe finger took longer time as there are more nerves there?
I took part in a test where they gave me three drinks which I tasted while listening to three different songs. In the end they told me all drinks were the same and I was very surprised! Pop music made it taste sweeter.
Our entire nervous system is neural network, gut has more neurons than brain, heart has neurons and it talks to brain more than brain talks to heart etc.
It’s hard for me to accept this idea that it’s just about the brain. In many other areas brain looks like result of what happened before, not the cause. Why this would be different?
How would you train depressed model? Maybe that gives some clues. Maybe it’s more about our environment and our relationship with that? Our actions are feedforward, brain chemistry is feedback.
Anyways, I don’t know anything but I like to ask different questions. And now.. let the downvotes pour in (like usual hah)
Interesting how someone dares to make such a bold public statement? Is this kind of article an example of being smart then?
Meanwhile there are simple rocks in desert that we cannot transport even today with our modern equipment. Was there previous civilization from Earth who more capable or some visitors, who knows, but we are not the most capable ones yet.
As far as I am aware, modern humanity is by far the most capable civilisation that has ever existed on earth as far as moving rocks is concerned. The only thing beating us right now is glaciers and tectonic activity.
I think they're making reference to some ancient Alien theories along the lines of Erich Von Daniken and others, which tend to postulate that certain ancient and megalithic structures would have been impossible to build without modern technology, and thus can only have been the result of alien interference.
It's worth mentioning that there is often a white supremacist or pro-colonialist dimension to these theories. Rarely does anyone question whether the Greeks built their architecture, for instance, but according to these people it's simply not possible for the Egyptians to have built the pyramids.
The strongest mobile crane in the world can lift about 300 tons. While they are mobile cranes (with wheels) it’s hard for them to move in soft sand even without heavy loads. When they lift something they don’t move.
There are some granite blocks that weigh over 1000 tons. We’re told that these were transported from hundreds of miles away, across mountain and over a river. Historians are not engineers so they don’t understand what they’re saying.
If we were to move those blocks now we would need to build massive crane around it, that would move on tracks (ones you see in harbors).
In this video they transport 340 ton rock. Pretty massive project and they used satellite data to find route without any uphill..
Somehow those ancient blocks were carved and transported thousands of years ago. How it was done and by who is unknown.. I think it’s understandable if someone picks the alien explanation as the most plausible answer. Personally I can entertain any idea but I wouldn’t bet on anything.
> There are some granite blocks that weigh over 1000 tons. We’re told that these were transported from hundreds of miles away, across mountain and over a river. Historians are not engineers so they don’t understand what they’re saying.
I am still unsure which ancient blocks you're referencing though. Stonehenge? Could you link to them, or a picture, or where in the world they are so I can google it?
I asked from ChatGTP how many people would be required to lift 1000 ton block (if we consider slaves).
“It would require approximately 19,753 people to lift a 1000-ton granite boulder, given the assumptions made regarding average lift capacity and efficiency factors. This is a theoretical estimate and assumes perfect conditions where all individuals can contribute equally and simultaneously, which may not be feasible in reality due to the physical space required and coordination challenges.
1. *Weight of the Boulder*: 1000 tons (US tons) = 2,000,000 pounds (lbs) since 1 ton = 2,000 lbs.
2. *Average Lift Capacity per Person*: The average untrained adult can safely lift about 135 pounds (deadlift, which is a reasonable approximation for lifting something off the ground) without training. However, for trained individuals, this number can be significantly higher. Let's use the untrained capacity for a conservative estimate.
3. *Safety and Efficiency Factors*: When lifting heavy objects, especially with many people, not everyone will be able to lift their maximum capacity due to the awkward shape of the object, grip issues, coordination, and safety concerns. Thus, we might apply a safety factor to ensure we're considering a realistic scenario. Let's assume 75% efficiency to account for these factors.”
But you can’t fit that many people under the rock. If you wanted to use chains to help lifting it would require something better than wine ropes. Even chain made from copper wouldn’t hold it.
That fallen Ramses statue is rose granite.
Another mystery is how this statue was created. Because it’s so symmetrical and smooth we would have to use machinery in order to do it.
Quick TLDR. They don't lift it, they dig under it. Either constructing a canal, and putting a weighted barge beneath it. Then remove the ballast so the barge lifts up the weight. For overland they do a similar thing, but with a sled, pour a lubricant under the sliders, and then pull. Apparently 2 people can pull 1 Ton this way. So 500 people pulling the sled. (They had approx 2000 people working on a similar project) Also they used shallow ramps over long distances to raise it up.
There was also a modern thing when they moved a lighthouse.
The 80 ton statue was difficult because they wanted to do it with minimal people, and with minimal disruption, and quickly. If you had 2000 people working 5 days a week, 3 years to do it in, and the legal ability to dig up the road/canal etc it can be done. The amazing thing to me is how much priority Ancient Egyptians gave building these monuments, seems like the most important thing they were doing. I guess it gets easier to deal with planning permission when your absolute ruler says "Do it".
Can some explain me, since I don’t know, but I have this idea that ideally quantum computer is like artificial neural network hardware which can change its connections in realtime.
I just cannot help seeing how cubits are very much like probabilities comes out from ML, something between 0..1.
I’m I completely lost here? I’m curious to understand better:)
PS. Is it possible that brain is organic quantum computer?
Also. Do you see it possible that our senses and awareness are “prompting” the models we have built during life and thoughts are what comes back from the prompts?
Pretty lost yeah, but you're asking questions which is better than 90% of the people who are lost. Some very brief answers:
They're called qubits; a cubit is a length about 50cm. Pronounced the same though.
Quantum computers are not about being able to change connections in real time. We know how powerful such a computer could be (it can be simulated by a classical computer in polynomial time), and quantum computers are more powerful than that. (Some nitpicker is going to swoop by and say that technically we haven't proven that BQP != P, but if BQP==P then quantum computers are useless anyways.)
Quantum amplitudes are not just probabilities: they can be imaginary, and they can be negative. You can add up two non-zero amplitudes and get 0, which is very much not how probabilities work. You can't have a non-zero probability that A happens and a non-zero probability that B happens but a zero probability that A OR B happens, yet with quantum mechanics you get exactly that.
Whatever intuition you have for how quantum computers works, it's wrong.
Plenty of people have considered that the brain is doing quantum computations. It seems unlikely because the brain is large, wet, and hot, and quantum mechanical systems really like to decohere under those circumstances (breaking the computation). But Roger Penrose still thinks they are.
The main takeaway I'd like to convey is that quantum computers are vastly better than classical computers for a few very specialized tasks like taking discrete logarithms and factoring, and no better than classical computers for most everything else. (Vastly better meaning exponentially better: it takes a classical computer with roughly 2^1000 bits of memory to simulate a quantum computer with 1000 bits of memory.)
Not a huge fan of the top answer and pretty disappointed by it being voted so highly:
>The idea that electricity "does not exist" is just verbal sophistry along the same lines as "matter does not exist, it is frozen energy" or, "you do not exist, you are a figment of your own imagination". At best these are all just over-dramatic and misleading ways of saying that what these things actually are is not what you probably think they are. At worst, misguided eccentrics create "straw" definitions of such well-known words just so they can burn them and trump them with their own untenable notions.
"You do not exist" or "matter does not exist" might be unhelpful sophistry or they might be thought-provoking invitations to a deeper discussion. It depends on the context and the intent.
If this blogger is "basically sound at an experimental and phenomenological level", isn't demanding public denouncements and retractions from everyone using the term "electricity", and has no shortage of thoughts and elaboration about his "eccentric" thoughts on the subject then what exactly is the harm here? Where is this user's uncharitability and hostility coming from?
Drilling into definitions, or "quibbling over semantics" if you prefer, isn't always fun for everybody but that doesn't mean there's an inherent need to come in and break up the party.
I think the top answerer had a few electric bugbears they wanted to get off their chest. Best skipped over, and time spent looking for simple and thoughtful answers. It's a shame the stackoverflow model isn't proving effective for that oft-asked question.
I remember one of my physics professors at uni explaining this theory and for some reason, I had this weird anxiety at the thought. A lonely electron doing all the work of every electron in the universe. Semifun fact, Feynman used the electron traveling back in time analogy to help teach the principles of QED.
The theory also has some merit at least in the boundaries of QED, it's impossible to draw a QED Feynman diagram where the arrows representing positron/electrons just stop, each one must eventually reach the other end of the diagram.
It doesn't quite work as you move beyond that, you get stuff like neutrons decaying into protons and electrons (and some neutrinos somewhere). Unless of course you take seriously consider Wheeler's suggestion that the positrons might be hiding in the protons.
Given that gravity has been observed to work on antimatter the same way as it does on normal matter, doesn't that refute this? or is there another aspect of symmetry that keeps it consistent?
The question is never if we have free will or not. The question is if we are in a state where free will is available or not.
For example, when I’m aware that there is space around myself, then I’m also aware that there are thoughts, feeling in the body, breath etc. In this state, I believe, it’s possible to choose. In this test I can choose the only press the other key and this algorithm doesn’t do so well.
Then something triggers my attention, I react, I forget that there is space, breath, thoughts etc. and I start to execute my conditioning, which is highly predictable and free will simply isn’t available at that point.
Then eventually something pulls me back to the presence, awareness. I remember there is space, breath, mind, feelings, emotions. I’m home. I’m free.
Yea I also like to say that if my will is truly free, it's not under anyones control.
One thing I want to add: I think will and intention is also a question of scale or perspective. Bacteria is capable of making "their own" decisions but they probably cannot dictate which direction body is going to walk.
In similar way Planet Earth is under influence of the Sun, and the Sun is under influence of larger forces of the Milky Way and so on.
You could say that every level of existence is probably under a will of some level above and maybe each level can impose their will on levels below them.
From this perspective we could say that pure awareness is beyond physical body, brain and mind, so then if you want to really will your body it must be done from the state of pure consciousness - and then the body, brain, mind must follow as they're level below.
Anyways, don't take me seriously, this just entertainment.
If I ask you to choose A or B, and let you take as long as you want to make this decision, at the point where you make the decision, you still have no idea why you chose what you chose. It is ultimately mysterious to you and anyone else why you chose what you chose. If you had any reasoning, it is still mysterious why that reasoning caused you to choose what you chose and why it didn't have the opposite effect?
The impetus to choose A or B in this case arises from the dark pool of the mind, sneaks up behind you and you mistakenly identify with this decision. You simply cannot think to think what to think.
You say “if I ask you to choose” but if there is no free will then I cannot choose.
Also if there is no free will then we cannot judge anyone, no matter what they did, because they didn’t have choice.
Actually my argument is that the best evidence for free will is that the world is such a mess. Without free will we would live in perfect harmony with nature, like all the other species do. We are so free that we can even deny the existence of our freedom, hence avoid taking responsibility of our actions.
> Also if there is no free will then we cannot judge anyone, no matter what they did, because they didn’t have choice.
This doesn't make sense. If there is a rock in the middle of the road, it would make sense to remove the rock from obstructing the road. Are we "judging" the rock in this case?
OTOH, if the rock happen to cause a massive accident, it seems absurd to punish the rock and try to cause as much suffering to the rock to compensate for all the suffering it caused.
> Without free will we would live in perfect harmony with nature, like all the other species do.
Harmony how? Like all the viruses, parasites, do you know what dolphins to pufferfish? What about cannibalism? Or infant mortality in nature?
> We are so free that we can even deny the existence of our freedom, hence avoid taking responsibility of our actions.
Realizing that free will does not exist does not mean that we don't have to live life anymore. We still have to live it. What it does it remove a lot of unnecessary baggage. Is it necessary to punish a rock for falling over a person? An elephant going on a rampage? What about murder?
When you realize that murder (or whatever immoral actions) is just the totality of the universe, you can think of any bad actions as just a very complex case of a brain tumor. You wouldn't blame a person for committing homicide once we learn that they went on a rampage because they have a brain tumor. But if we know enough about the universe, we will realize that pretty much anything that a human ever do is just another complex case of a brain tumor. Why did they do what they did? Well, here's a trillion page explanation of exactly why it happened starting from the Big Bang. Does it make sense to blame them now, still?
My experience is the converse: when distracted, I assume I am the author of my thoughts, the doer of my actions, but when I really pay attention, I notice that thoughts and intentions arise unbidden.
I identify with consciousness, and the origins of these intentions is unconscious, therefore I conclude that the intentions do not originate from “me”. It’s still my action, my “choice”, my kamma, but it’s not my “free will”.
I remember reading Rand where she argued that free will existed solely in the decision to focus or not. When you focused, what you thought was determined by your characteristics and history; and when you didn't, the same, although not in the same way. But free choice manifested in the decision to intentionally focus attention or not.
I don't know that I agree, but thought it was interesting.
The universe led up to this moment where you fool yourself into thinking you have free will just cause you sat still for a bit. Doesn't mean much.
Think about it, if the universe is all predetermined, how peaceful your mental state is or isn't has no impact on it. We all either have free will or not, but breathing deep isn't gonna trigger it.
Free will is any random process with an asymptotically infinite number of degrees of freedom, by definition.
Are humans such a process?
Who knows, but attempts to model individual humans have certainly failed before. (We need lots of humans in aggregate to successfully model them, once the central limit theorem starts working.)
I challenge you to get any more than a single digit percent of any representative sample of people to agree a random process is free will by definition. It's one of exceedingly few definitions I've heard in decades of discussing the subject that I'll agree doesn't immediately make free will impossible, but at the same time it's one that too me at least exemplifies something that is neither free nor will.
No, I don't. I can reject the notion of free will on the basis that I would never consider a "random process" either "free" nor an expression of "will".
When you say "you fool yourself" then I have to admit that I don't know who am I or how I could define myself anyways. I have been sitting with that question every day for about 12 years now.
Only reason you believe there is a mind is because the mind says it exists. But have you investigated where is that mind and who is that which mind if speaking to?
The thing is for this discussion, analysis of the ego and the role of "the mind" or however you want to call it, I simply don't think it matters for the question of free will. It's one of causality at the beginning of the universe for me. The mechanism through which humans would drive their thought process or behavior is besides the point if the cause is the initial state of the universe and how all the particles and forces interact from that point onwards. A rock on the ground's "life" (path through universe) would be as predetermined as ours, it wouldn't change it if the rock had thoughts or an ego.
The discussion about the ego and "the mind" and the "who you are" in that sense are then still useful for the human to feel comfortable in feeling like they have agency, and I am aware of Buddhist philosophy in finding peace through detaching from our inner voice and gaining wisdom from not letting ourselves being driven purely by what we think we are or "what the ego says we are", but I think it's besides the point in this context (but very useful to include in a balanced "diet of thoughts").
Maybe the ego is an evolutionary defence against nihilistic traits so we all don't kill ourselves by realising none of what we do is any agency and it's all predetermined by the start of the universe. But anyway this part of the discussion enters into a rabbithole detached from the core discussion of there being free will or not, at least to me, because I cannot accept that a core property of the system "universe" and the definition of it's causality or not could depend on the thought process that goes through minds of humans in some remote part of that very universe. A detail about the higher level thought process of some "blobs of particles" in the universe don't define the way the universe itself works. Our relationship to the self doesn't have anything to do with physical reality of if-this-then-that. In other words the causality doesn't care what we think of it, it's either all pre-determined or not, our opinion doesn't matter.
What exactly do you mean by choose? Are you saying there are actions that have no discernable cause? That there's a state in the brain that is unrelated to the state of the brain a brief moment ago? If so, is that a type of telekinesis?
Yeah, I think what we experience as free will takes place mostly in what we think of as our brain pretty much by definition. We might be a brain in a vat or even a Boltzmann brain, but whatever it is, the organ that constructs our reality is a brain.
To me thinking is primary tool of communication between I and “me” and it’s entirely based on sound and language.
Can you think without using language?
When you have song playing in your head, how is that different from your thoughts?
Isn’t talking out loud just act of thinking, the output being connected to mouth?
Have you ever tried to repeat mantra in your thought, slow down until coming to full stop? What remains when thinking stops?
Have you noticed that thinking is like breathing, in a way that it’s happening automatically and you can also take over?
Have you noticed that thinking consciously is linked with breath and being aware of space?
Fascinating topic!