I've manipulated pure nothingness. It continued to be nothing

← like plato + aristotle et al, believe in ether o_O

hello :-) @JohnRennie

@SirCumference But can something be in motion relative to some global coordination system? Like spacetime?

Like you kniw how in video game engines, there is space with x, y, z coordinates. Does real life have that?

good morning neural action potentials and pattern recognizer modules.

I was talking to Slereah (was joking)

Good morning from Sicily everybody.

@G.Smith @Frobenius Good morning with fairness I voted positively and I ticked your answer 4 hours ago. I apologize to you, Frobenius and all the others if I have made so much confusion with my notes I have deleted the wrong content. I wish you a good day and a good Sunday.

@NovaliumCompany yes exactly. You need some coordinate system to define motion :)

Don’t worry about spacetime for now. Just consider the plain old 3d system

So I can say that something is stationary relative to that coordinate system?

But does this coordinate system actually exist or is it just mathematical representation?

@NovaliumCompany What's the difference there?

Oh no

We're entering the murky waters of philosophy

@ACuriousMind do you pass the turing test?

@RyanUnger Given that all the humans in here think I'm an AI, I've probably failed it :P

@ACuriousMind pff no idea

Novalium, you should take a differential geometry course at university

not gonna happen buddy

(the university part)

Since everything is just patterns in our brain, reality is as real as mathematics.

People who liked this slogan also liked: Since everything is just patterns in our brain, reality is as real as hallucinations.

Well, yeah

we have no way to know if there really is something out there

you forgot the "albeit a very persistent one" part :P

good luck trying to understand higher math without going to university

@NovaliumCompany and yet you leave your house by the door and not the second-story window, even though you have no "way to know" that there "really is" floor in front of the door but not the window.

Radical scepticism is a valid but empty position, since no one really acts as if they believed it.

@ACuriousMind I feel personally attacked

yah me too

I guess next time I'm jumping out the window

That...is not the lesson I intended anyone to draw :P

I leave via the window already

farewell Ryan xD

A window is just a door without the door.

i'm genius

I'm reading How to create mind and it's one of those books you can read 10 times and always learn something you didn't last time

A question for everyone: Who is/are your inspiration?

(who do you look up to)

Help me guys. I find myself unable to understand what this OP is talking about.

@EmilioPisanty I have surprisingly strong feelings about that.

@rob of what kind?

@EmilioPisanty I can't decide whether I want it to actually be an animated image or not.

@rob it says it's not

@EmilioPisanty The original says it's not a pipe, because it's a drawing of a pipe. Does adding the "GIF" watermark make this one a drawing of a gif?

Is it stored in the .gif image format, but not animated?

@rob OK, so you're only two or three levels down the rabbit hole

as of now

@rob the file itself is in png

Next time I see it, will the smoke move?

no

assuming you do so without having consumed psychoactive substances beforehand, of course

@EmilioPisanty I'm tempted to spend an evening animating the smoke. Subtly.

@rob that's like gluing a pipe to the original painting

and changing the text to say it is indeed a pipe

I don't have time for all of these feelings

@EmilioPisanty so you're saying it would be art? :P

Anyone from San Francisco? :P

every day the thing I hate the most when I am outdoor is second smoke. It's like wherever I go on street, there can be people smoking. I can only be completely free from second smoke when I am indoor. Oh, a hospital is the only indoor place where I found there are many people smoking. I wonder why so many people smoke. I guess over fifty percent of our population smoke so that I can meet smokers so often.

@CaptainBohemian Wait, they are allowed to smoke in hospitals where you live still?

@CaptainBohemian Welcome to life, where people poison themselves to cover up their problems.

@JMac they are not, but the hospital seemed to have no way to forbid them. That happened years ago. I complaint to the administrators of that hospital, but they said they have no way to forbid them though smoking is forbidden by law. The floors filled with smoke odor were bed rooms for patients with cancers. I even saw a patient smoking with dip-drop on a wheel chair. I condemn him for smoking, and he laughed loudly while continuing smoking.

@CaptainBohemian Yeah, hard to fix when the problem is so cultural... but that really sucks. Hopefully people educate themselves and can improve the conditions. Educating the younger generations usually seems to help in the future

Didn't it used to be a bit like that in the US? Hospitals had requirements ever since I can remember, but being able to choose smoking sections in restaurants/hotels was pretty common when I was younger. There don't seem to be nearly as many people smoking now as when I was younger (though perhaps it has just been replaced with vaping)

@JMac several years ago, our government has passed a law which can fine people smoking in smoke-forbidden places, but I don't know if that actually forbids people from smoking in smoke-forbidden places. Before that law, though there were places forbidding smoking, there was no law to punish people who violate the smoking-forbidding law.

@CaptainBohemian Yeah, I believe in Canada you are fined if you smoke somewhere you aren't allowed. It also applies to essentially every workplace. You need to have designated smoking areas. The city where I grew up recently made it illegal to smoke in the city besides designated spots.

@danielunderwood do those smoking sectors actually isolate second smoke and prevent it from spreading to the other places where smoking is forbidden? I found smoke is very permeative and can easily spread to neighboring places. For example, some people smoke in the small cubicle between two adjacent passenger sectors of a train, considering their smoke wouldn't affect people in the passenger sectors, but I can easily sniff their smoke in passenger sector.

So actually law forbids smoking on the whole train. There is no so-called smoking section anywhere on a train.

@CaptainBohemian not really back when it was allowed. Restaurants were just different parts of the restaurant, though I suppose hotels were based on the rooms, which I suppose is a slight isolation. Smoking in restaurants has been forbidden for the past 10-15 years I believe, but some can still have a smell. Hospitals tend to have smoking areas some fixed distance away from the buildings and I believe I've even seen a couple with enclosed smoking areas (like a phone booth or something)

I think there's occasionally tension with people vaping in places they can't smoke and claiming that it isn't smoking, but I think that's been less frequent recently

What on earth is vaping? I have read vaping on web and thought vaping is just one kind of smoking. I seem to have never seen people vaping. Does vaping produce second smoke?

I'm no expert on how it works, but it uses some electronic means of turning a liquid into smoke rather than burning tobacco. Then the companies get to make that liquid into whatever combination of nicotine and flavors/smells needed to keep people around. It produces smoke, so I imagine there would be some sort of secondhand effect as well.

@danielunderwood I have seen that kind of thing sold in night market but have never seen people using it.

@danielunderwood I believe it's not smoke, only vapour. That's how people got away with doing it in public places for awhile, they weren't technically smoking anything, just heating up the goop until it turned into a cloud.

Ah I didn't really think of a distinction. I suppose smoke is only when things are combusting?

@CaptainBohemian they seem to be fairly popular in my area, especially for people under 30 or so. There have also been some issues with high school students I believe

If neurons are just universal pattern recognizers that can adapt any function then why not pour more neurons into someone's brain and see how they adapt?

Or maybe genetically engineer the brain to have more neurons?

@NovaliumCompany "More neurons" alone doesn't do anything, otherwise whales and elephants would be ruling this planet.

@ACuriousMind That's why we have RulingAbility = Neurons*Thumbs

I feel we're unfairly discriminating against trunks there

they're pretty relephant for tool manipulation.

@ACuriousMind True. So neuronic connections is what is important? Does this mean humans have more connections than whales (which have more neuron somas)?

hmm better expand the model and add a trunk term

wut?

@NovaliumCompany I don't know whether humans have more connections, but I definitely know that neuroscience hasn't yet figured out any single cause of "human intelligence".

Maybe it's because we have more connections?

Clearly it's because of quantum mechanics like those smart people on youtube say

wot?

no u

There's a class of people who seem to think human consciousness comes out of quantum mechanics. Evidently quantum mechanics doesn't affect whales. Moral of the story is to not believe everything on youtube or the internet in general...or sometimes on cable tv shows.

@danielunderwood Actually, they usually talk about free will, not consciousness

Maybe whales are smarter than us?

They just dont have hands to make tools and rule the world.

I mean, they communicate (in whale language) and look in the mirror. Maybe they are conscious.

Maybe they are conscious and they have no way of telling us.

Maybe they decided they were better off without a worldwide means of communication

@NovaliumCompany Oh, I'm almost certain they're conscious (as I am for most larger mammals). But what does it mean to say that they are "smarter than us" if they don't do anything that we would recognize as the work of human-like intelligence?

Hmm

Can they do maths at least?

If that's the bar for intelligence quite a lot of humans don't clear it either :P

xDDD

They don't have human vocal cords so they cannot speak our language. We rule that out. They cannot make tools because they don't have the proper hands. We rule that out. Donno pff

Well, if we play them some Gordon Ramsay they might learn to make sushi from their peers?

Is there anything special about the freedom to scale a Lagrangian? I've seen it explicitly mentioned in several resources, but isn't that just equivalent to the freedom to choose units for energy?

nothing special I can think of

Humans can potentially control evolution. If we trapped 100 humans in a room and kill those who for example have small heads, with the years, we'll arrive at a point where the humans in that room a have a gene for a large head.

hmm

I think that was stupid

You realize that that's what we've been doing with crops, dogs and every other domesticated species?

Oh cool

lol

I'm stupid sometimes

@ACuriousMind lol

yo @RyanUnger what's so funny?

@EmilioPisanty indeed

Thanks for creating that.

@ACuriousMind indeed it's almost like we've been doing genetic engineering for tens of thousands of years