A Mathematical Model Rescued My Book About Math - <AUTHOR> https://lithub.com/how-a-mathematical-model-rescued-my-book-about-math/ <comment><USER2> I am surprised by the usefulness of math concepts as analogies for everyday life. Local vs. global optima, explore vs. exploit, depth-first vs. breadth- first, constraints vs. objectives, necessary vs. sufficient, ...

I also find myself wanting to compose precise statements using "for each", "there exists", "such that", and so on, in a recursive formal logic structure, when discussing non-mathematical topics.

It's hard to tell if those analogies actually help you make real-life decisions, or if they are just a convenient way to state ideas that are also easily stated in non-mathematical language.

<comment><USER3> _THE UNREASONABLE EFFECTIVENESS OF MATHEMATICS_ , Hamming, [https://ned.ipac.caltech.edu/level5/March02/Hamming/Hamming....](https://ned.ipac.caltech.edu/level5/March02/Hamming/Hamming.html)

 _The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences_ , Wigner, [http://www.dartmouth.edu/~matc/MathDrama/reading/Wigner.html](http://www.dartmouth.edu/~matc/MathDrama/reading/Wigner.html) wikipedia article [https://wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unreasonable_Effectiveness_of...](https://wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unreasonable_Effectiveness_of_Mathematics_in_the_Natural_Sciences)

I kind of think much of mathematics was constructed to solve problems, so it's not that surprising that it solves problems.

On a deeper level, any optimal internally consistent system will probably be good at reasoning about any real phenomena with the same constraints.

OTOH our mathematics probably reflects human reasoning styles (despite us not understanding but "just getting used to it"), and aliens might have explored different mathematics first (e.g. algebraic geometry might make us the aliens to Euclid).

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm a little sad that I never get to use calculus as a software engineer. It's relatively easy to use discrete mathematics, or even something more theory- heavy like type-theory or category theory can be used a bit, but I sadly haven't been able to find much work doing calc, even though I really enjoyed the classes.

Maybe if I started learning to make games that would be an excuse to relearn some physics and I'd be able to use calculus again.

<comment><USER5> Linear algebra lands in my professional lap surprisingly often, to the point where I ask myself if it's a linear algebra problem fairly early on in the problem solving process. (I'm in GIS)

Calculus is unusual, but it does happen. We do have data with time dependent variables, but usually we don't need anything more complicated than ax + b.

When I took linear algebra and discrete math in college, my linear algebra professor was amazing and my discrete math professor was terrible. I got an A in both classes, but for the life of me I don't grok how discrete math is applicable to programming, but if someone starts describing a problem they have I'll be like, "have you tried linear algebra?" in the "have you tried turning it off and back on again?" voice.

I need to watch one of those lecture series on discrete math.

<comment><USER4> I recommend playing with TLA+ if you want to see how discrete math can map into compsci; you model everything in terms of discrete states and use logical predicates and set theory instead of "types".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I like the writing style of this essay. The end of the first paragraph is particularly funny. But to fulfill my contractual obligations for gratuitous criticism as a HNer:

It "uses" calculus only tangentially, and I see simulated annealing and optimization as a computational techniques, not mathematics.

Also _but one must be the highest (the "global optimum")_ is not neccessarily true; several can be equally highest, e.g. a sine wave.

<comment><USER6> I agree that saying that he used calculus is a bit of a stretch. However, calculus is essential for all the gradient-based methods (or algorithms) in optimization. Moreover, if you want to analyze these algorithms, you have to know about convex analysis.

I think what the author _meant_ was that he used the intuition derived from calculus to tackle the problem he was framing as a mathematical optimization problem.

Also, you're right, he missed that the global maximum might not be unique in a non-concave function.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> As someone currently being stuck in a kind of scientific writer's block, this was a nice read.

<comment><USER8> What are you writing about? One of the takeaways for me is that it is good to talk to [someone|anyone] about being stuck. The conversation could lead towards a local minimum, or a local maximum, or even a global maximum.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> This applies generally - as an optimal path to creating anything (life philosophy, advancing science, tool creation etc.)

Sketch a breadth-1st near-random (high heat/entropic) exploration map/terrain of conceptual/creation structure optima.

Over time, let the system cool.

Slowly raise the threshold of improvement-gradient acceptability (increasing negative value). This confines your exploration.

Ultimately end in a cooled state, going only directions of direct improvement.

</comment><comment><USER10> I haven't read the book, but now want to, and just want to vent something I've been thinking for a long time---this, or something like it, is a _really really important project_. We desperately need to be able communicate better about calculus.

<comment><USER11> I sort of agree, but the problem is algebra is fundamentally taught terribly in America, a lot of people get confused on simple operations. Here's the goldstandard essay exploring the failures of math education [https://www.maa.org/external_archive/devlin/LockhartsLament....](https://www.maa.org/external_archive/devlin/LockhartsLament.pdf)

<comment><USER10> I love Lockhart's Lament! Poetically, it could be seen as a mourning over a case of Goodhart's Law...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> As a published author, I love this so much. Local vs. global maximum's, simulated annealing. So terrific. It's all so true.

</comment><comment><USER12> Sadly, I rather wish I could read the original book. I _might_ read the book that resulted.</comment>


Should Google Be Paranoid About Losing The Android Name? - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/04/30/should-google-be-paranoid-about-losing-the-android-name/ <comment><USER2> I don't know that the average person even has a clue that it's called Android. All the commercials I've seen usually go along the lines of "T-Mobile G1, with Google".</comment>


Do Or Die Week For Yahoo - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/04/21/do-or-die-week-for-yahoo/ <comment><USER2> really curious to see what happens in this fight. since there doesn't seem to be much of Yahoo left I'm starting to wish MS gets to buy them if only to waste 40 or so billion dollars.</comment>


ActivityPub, a decentralized social networking protocol - <AUTHOR> https://www.w3.org/TR/activitypub/ <comment><USER2> Quite a few large discussions this year:

[https://hn.algolia.com/?query=ActivityPub%20points%3E30&sort...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=ActivityPub%20points%3E30&sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=story&storyText=false&prefix&page=0)</comment>


Show HN: What do you think about this page? I am a newbie to web design. - <AUTHOR> https://www.dropbox.com/s/nkxv35yvmxo0ngi/MLVeda%20Sample%20Home%20Page.jpg?dl=0 <comment><USER2> I think it's pretty solid. One small nit-pick though... you are using purple as a link colour. This goes against the universal browser design language (i.e. purple link is a visited link).

<comment><AUTHOR> Right. Thanks for the observation. Any idea how this will be worth..Any random figure that comes to your mind?

<comment><USER2> I don't think you can put a price on it. The price is dictated more by the context than the resulting mockup.

In one context someone might have paid a few thousand for this design. In another, a few hundred. It is valuable as a solution to a problem, so asking how much it is 'worth' is like asking the value of a chess move. Again, it's all about the context.

What I can say is that I know of designers charging AU$50/h for work of a seemingly similar quality.

<comment><AUTHOR> The context of this was to have a more conversion friendly design. The existing design is mlveda.com. So, I focused both on the design and copy as well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I think it looks great! I would pay money for it :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks...any idea how much this would be worth... :)

<comment><USER4> Good job. I can imagine giving you a web-design job. I have no idea what this would be worth though. I wouldn't be paying much more than $300 if I was a start-up. If you want to check how much this could be worth - ask that on upwork for example. Post a job and wait for the reply from the random set of UI designers, ask for quote and check their portfolio to get an idea how good and expensive they are.</comment></comment></comment>


Return type polymorphism in Haskell - <AUTHOR> https://eli.thegreenplace.net/2018/return-type-polymorphism-in-haskell/ <comment><USER2> That last example reminds me of "scalar context" vs "list context" in Perl - especially the note about it being hard to tell exactly what code will run. :)</comment>


The Sketchy Database: Learning to Retrieve Badly Drawn Bunnies - <AUTHOR> http://sketchy.eye.gatech.edu/ <comment><USER2> So if someone sketched something that hadnt been sketched before it wouldnt find an image for it. Not nearly as interesting at it seemed at first.

</comment><comment><USER3> nice although keywords and photos are more practical query methods than sketches which are harder to input and thus less expressive (i.e. sketch of a bear returning teddy bears and not real bears).

<comment><USER4> There definately are a lot of applications for scetch based retrievals as some features are hard to describe eg. a landmark from a specific angle etc.

<comment><USER5> Communication between people who speak different languages that aren't commonly known.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Great to site but the title is all wrong, these aren't photo realistic images from drawings, this is taking a sketch, classifying it and trying to find a similar photo.

From the site

Abstract We present the Sketchy database, the first large-scale collection of sketch-photo pairs. We ask crowd workers to sketch particular photographic objects sampled from 125 categories and acquire 75,471 sketches of 12,500 objects. The Sketchy database gives us fine-grained associations between particular photos and sketches, and we use this to train cross-domain convolutional networks which embed sketches and photographs in a common feature space. We use our database as a benchmark for fine-grained retrieval and show that our learned representation significantly outperforms both hand- crafted features as well as deep features trained for sketch or photo classification. Beyond image retrieval, we believe the Sketchy database opens up new opportunities for sketch and image understanding and synthesis.

<comment><USER7> This is a recent paper that actually creates photos from sketches of faces, using deep nets: [https://arxiv.org/abs/1606.03073](https://arxiv.org/abs/1606.03073)

Figure 4 does this for self portraits of some famous artists.

<comment><USER8> You could probably apply the same code. The dataset ("acquire 75,471 sketches of 12,500 objects") sounds adequate, and if not, can be boosted by first training a CNN to do photo->sketch (throwing away information is usually easier than imagining it) and using that to boost the dataset for sketch->photo.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> My vagina drawing skills, while not effective, did not disappoint.</comment>


Philosopher Philip Goff answers questions about panpsychism - <AUTHOR> https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/does-consciousness-pervade-the-universe/ <comment><USER5> An interesting thought experiment is to imagine an incredibly-detailed computer simulation of a brain, down to the level of individual cells and neurotransmitters. (While this is beyond our current capabilities, it is in principle possible.) Hook the brain up to some decent IO devices, and you'd have an extremely human-like "AI". (I'm glossing over some tricky details like, do you start with a fetus/baby brain and let it grow up, or somehow clone an existing brain...tricky no doubt, but again, in principle solvable.)

So the question is, this simulated brain, which is behaving very similarly indeed to a biological brain: does it have consciousness? Does it feel?

On the one hand, you might argue of course not, it's just a computer; computers "obviously" don't have feelings. It's just bunch of bits. A precise collection of patterns of electrical charges evolving in time according to rigid rules.

On the other hand, is our own biological brain any different? We don't think of a few cells as having consciousness, but somehow the broader collection does. Can the biological substrate of the complex arrangements really matter?

Maybe consciousness is like a "soul", it's a completely untestable, untouchable "ghost" that can inhabit anything. So maybe everything really does feel, in its own way? Maybe my computer _already_ has some form of consciousness...

<comment><USER6> To build on your thought experiment:

> _So the question is, this simulated brain, which is behaving very similarly > indeed to a biological brain: does it have consciousness? Does it feel?_

If you answer "yes" to this question, what happens if you split the computations of that simulated brain over a million people equipped with pen and paper? Where is its consciousness happening now?

I have yet to hear a satisfying answer from anyone who believes that an AGI will automatically be conscious. But then again, I have yet to hear a satisfying explanation of consciousness from _anyone_...

<comment><USER7> Ah, Searle's Chinese Room, for which the widely accepted response is the system reply: the system as a whole, and not one element of it, is conscious.

Consider performing the algorithm of Alpha Go Zero through a million people equipped with pen and paper. One can hardly argue against this being possible in principle, but what is playing the game?

This is not proof that AGI will automatically be conscious, or even just that some sort of conscious machine intelligence is possible, it is merely intended to suggest that Searle's line of argument does not show its impossibility.

<comment><USER8> There are two distinct meanings of consciousness being used here: my own experience of consciousness in me (it's always first person), and the conclusions people make about consciousness in other people or animals - <USER2> they're conscious because they're like them in important ways. The Chinese Room argument is confusing because it conflates intelligence (understanding Chinese) with consciousness (knowing what it's like to understand Chinese).

So I simplified the problem, by replacing the ability to understand Chinese with the ability to see in colour: [http://www.fmjlang.co.uk/blog/ChineseRoom.html](http://www.fmjlang.co.uk/blog/ChineseRoom.html)

While the simplified system is able to distinguish colours, how does it have the first person experience of seeing in colour?

<comment><USER9> I'm not sure I understand what your link has to do with consciousness. Yes, people experience the world differently. Someone with Tetrachromacy will see the world different than us, but that hardly invalidates our much less capable experience. Perception organs differ somewhat between individuals. I'd see little reason to make a distinction between those organic we are born with and those humans managed to invent.

So yes, the guy in your room can experience colors by using the sheets (though in a different and much less capable way than most of us, thus him not wanting to equate this with our common understanding of experiencing color), and is color blind without. And I kind of get deaf when plugging my ears, though that experience is vastly different from someone who never had hearing to begin with.

That doesn't answer what it is like "seeing red" and "feeling blue". I don't know what it's like for you. I can only look at your behavior, see it being similar to mine under the same circumstances and thus assume your internal state to be similar. Until your behavior tells me it being different... like someone blind running into a wall or someone approaching a chasm with no signs of fear.

ps: had to google "feel blue", as it meaning "depressed" isn't really a thing in my native language. Translating (color based) idioms is actually kind of telling... it seems only possible directly if both cultures had shared aspects / experiences.

So yeah, while conflating consciousness with intelligence doesn't make a lot of sense to me. But I'm not sure equating it with perception is getting us anywhere better (hope idiom didn't get lost in translation).

<comment><USER8> With the exception of our thoughts, pretty much all of our consciousness experience, i.e. involving qualia, is due to perception.

The person in my room (an achromat) can't experience colours at all, and they're able to tell you that. Their eyes have no functioning cones. They see everything in monochrome, so to them, watching a colour movie is how watching a black and white one is to us. Under low light conditions our cones are inactive and we see only in monochrome using our rods, just like achromats do. So people with normal colour vision can experience what it's like to be achromatic, but achromats can't even imagine what colours are like.

In the room, the person can only tell what colours the papers are by observing how dark they look when overlaid with the coloured filters (whose colours they know).

The metaphorical use of colours in the language isn't really important, and as you point out is dependent on culture.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Heh, that's a funny coincidence. I was just reading about panpsychism (and some variations of it) earlier today, specifically this article on forgotten philosopher James Ward: [https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/james- ward/](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/james-ward/)

It seems really alien to our current mental metaphysical model, but if you study the subject and analyze the arguments, it's not as absurd as it seems. It's important to realize that when philosophers use the word "conscious" they don't generally mean "awake" or "aware" in a human-sense; virtually no one is positing that a rock is conscious in the same way a human being is.

Perhaps the main reason why panpsychism fell out of favor among philosophers and philosophers of science in the last century is due to the increased popularity of positivism and the linguistic turn. I'm not sure if panpsychism is necessarily a path forward in terms of _describing the universe_ , but I think it seems promising in terms of a _prescriptive_ use of creating, or attempting to create, new consciousness with machines.

Further reading:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panpsychism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panpsychism)

[https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/panpsychism/](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/panpsychism/)

<comment><USER11> > I'm not sure if panpsychism is necessarily a path forward in terms of > _describing the universe_ , but I think it seems promising in terms of a > _prescriptive_ use of creating, or attempting to create, new consciousness > with machines.

If panpsychism is correct, then all of our machines would _already_ be conscious. Creating new consciousness wouldn't be possible except maybe in the sense that matter itself can be created under certain conditions. What I think you're trying to say is that it might be possible to assemble machines in such a way that a combined "machine consciousness" emerges from the separate low- level consciousnesses of its components. Which may or may not happen with every machine anyway, I'm not sure how you would devise an experiment to test for this.

<comment><USER10> > If panpsychism is correct, then all of our machines would already be > conscious. Creating new consciousness wouldn't be possible except maybe in > the sense that matter itself can be created under certain conditions.

Right. In this case, the goal would be to "increase" the consciousness, rather than create it.

> What I think you're trying to say is that it might be possible to assemble > machines in such a way that a combined "machine consciousness" emerges from > the separate low-level consciousnesses of its components. Which may or may > not happen with every machine anyway, I'm not sure how you would devise an > experiment to test for this.

Essentially, yes. I meant that the model of panpsychism might serve as a useful as a blueprint to create artificial minds from the accumulation of low- level components, even if it isn't necessarily useful as a scientific model of the universe.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Another point to make on panpsychism: how do people who reject the theory explain hierarchical life? To what level is a human conscious if its component cells aren't? Are ant colonies "conscious" due to the complexity of the behavior of the ants? Does that make ants less conscious? To an alien visitor, ant colonies can be considered single organisms, because they act with intent toward a specific goal and react to specific stimuli in semi-predictable ways. Extend this to human nation-states: is the USA "conscious"? It certainly has motivations, and a drive for self-preservation, and exerts directed will. Even if the component humans are not explicitly "aware" of the "thoughts" of the USA, can you disqualify consciousness?

Honestly, to me, this perspective demotes consciousness to obscurity. There's nothing special about it because it's everywhere. What is interesting is an explicit awareness and accurate internal model of reality. But this is a completely separate problem to that of consciousness.

<comment><USER13> That's a good point. One things aliens have that we don't is the ability to merge and divide consciousnesses (like Vulcans do). This has been explored in science fiction but not so much in the real world. Although some siamese twins share a consciousness:

[https://www.cbc.ca/cbcdocspov/features/the-hogan-twins- share...](https://www.cbc.ca/cbcdocspov/features/the-hogan-twins-share-a- brain-and-see-out-of-each-others-eyes)

Within the next 10 or 20 years, we'll have the technology to connect brains to computers, and eventually join brains together and separate them. That will at least give us a theory of how the basic building blocks of consciousness work, perhaps along the lines of how people can lose an entire hemisphere of their brain and still be conscious. Maybe we'll find that only a tiny golfball-sized portion of the brain is required for consciousness. Maybe something smaller.

For example, the twins obviously have their own personalities, but how much of that overlaps into a single definition of self? It could be that there are always two entities. But my gut feeling is that we'll find that consciousness can merge and divide fairly effortlessly, working like a fractal to retain full memories from both halves. It will be a strange experience (a bit like psychedelics) but within a century will be commonplace.

<comment><USER14> _> One things aliens have that we don't is the ability to merge and divide consciousnesses (like Vulcans do)._

We should ask them to teach us. Or maybe they could license their technology to us for a small price.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Read Bernardo Kastrup's, a Dutch computer scientist and philosopher, criticism on panpsychism: "[https://www.bernardokastrup.com/p/papers.html](https://www.bernardokastrup.com/p/papers.html)

[https://iai.tv/articles/will-we-ever-understand- consciousnes...](https://iai.tv/articles/will-we-ever-understand- consciousness-auid-1288) [https://www.reddit.com/r/philosophy/comments/emtud2/bernardo...](https://www.reddit.com/r/philosophy/comments/emtud2/bernardo_kastrup_on_consciousness_panpsychisms/)

He proposes an alternative answer for the mind-body problem; idealism instead of materialism [https://www.bernardokastrup.com/p/papers.html](https://www.bernardokastrup.com/p/papers.html)

<comment><USER16> For some reason I enjoy trying to share intuitions for idealism. Let me try to do so here.

First, notice that it's impossible to prove which metaphysics (materialism, idealism, solipsism, Last Thursdayism, simulationism...) is correct. Next, notice that the situation is even worse: you can't even assign _probabilities_ to those possibilities without making assumptions about whatever is "outside" reality -- which are by definition untestable.

Now, notice the strong urge to throw your hands up and say "since I can't know, I should just default to the most obvious choice" (which usually ends up being materialism). Avoid this devious trap! It's keeping something hidden.

Next, notice the one thing you _can_ be sure about: the present sheer fact of experiencing _something_. Notice the mind's attempts to explain it. If you introspect carefully enough, you'll discover that _thought_ isn't the most fundamental capacity you have: "pure consciousness" is. Consciousness takes the _form_ of thoughts -- as well as all sensory perceptions -- and shapes itself into the experience you call "me and my life." You discover that thoughts can no more point at consciousness than a mouse pointer can point at the vibrant pixels it's made of (but boy, do they keep trying). And yet, somehow, consciousness can know itself non-dually and im-mediately.

At some point, the intellectual knowledge that you cannot assign probabilities to metaphysics finally penetrates your core, and there's a mind-shattering "aha" moment that turns your reality inside-out. Various traditions call this "awakening." _You_ do not awaken. "Reality" or "consciousness" awakens to itself, rediscovering its primordial freedom.

Then maybe you go about preaching a philosophy of consciousness-only. Or maybe you just live the best and most loving life you can, knowing that in an impossible-to-communicate sense, we are all the one Love appearing as many.

<comment><USER17> Very nice, your mouse pointer analogy is really good!

<comment><USER16> Thank you!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Why so much dislike for this? It's a theory that pushes on some of the foundational assumptions we make. Maybe it resonates and maybe not. But just being open to a new set of ideas means we can maybe learn something new and interesting. Or not and that's fine too. People seem angry that someone else would talk about an idea they don't currently agree with.

<comment><USER19> Because there are a lot of scientific wackos that are trying to push it to mainstream without any proof, see e.g. PhDs in congnitive neuroscience with focus on art and whole conferences organized around such ideas. It looks like some New Age cult inside science. Whether it's true or not, there is no methodology how to measure it, putting it outside scientific domain. It's on the level of simulation hypothesis. The rationale is that consciousness as a quality exists and is present in universe, so there must be some mechanisms for consciousness to emerge - if it is another layer or whatever on top of universe we have no clue. But most proponents of the theory sound like cultists.

<comment><USER20> There's an assumption that consciousness _must_ be a result of emergent properties. I am not sure something like that has been definitively proven.

I think there will never be a proof of consciousness that will satisfy the standards set by scientific experimentation.

<comment><USER19> OK, my use of "emergent" is not appropriate either, it's just difficult to say anything as I have no clue what is behind it, if it is emergent, if it is an inherent property of universe, if it is outside universe in some "machine" or superbeing or whatever. Those are great sci-fi and philosophical topics, not sure about science itself as we know it right now though.

<comment><USER20> Just saying, what if it is the scientific method itself is what limits what we can explore with consciousness? There is also an underlying assumption that the scientific method can explain _everything_ ...

... it is a far cry from the early scientists who considered Nature as an intelligence one has to trick or seduce into giving up its secrets through the scientific method. That to hold an objective or skeptical stance was to _pretend_ that there is such a thing as absolute objectivity.

These days, the modern stance is the default, not the radical stance.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I'm trying to be open-minded and make sense of the position.

The first big leap is considering experience to be a continuum from humans down to inorganic matter. This is stretching the meaning of 'experience'. If I walk on snow, does it experience deformation, or does it just deform?

The second leap is saying science only tells us what matter does and not "the intrinsic nature of matter: what matter is, in and of itself." I can't see how this gets you anywhere, you can say it's anything and it's self-satisfying.

The Hollywood ending really lost me. Let's just sweep this consciousness problem into a tiny tiny place and call it intrinsic: "So it turns out that there is a huge hole in our scientific story. The proposal of the panpsychist is to put consciousness in that hole. Consciousness, for the panpsychist, is the intrinsic nature of matter."

<comment><USER22> > The first big leap is considering experience to be a continuum from humans > down to inorganic matter. This is stretching the meaning of 'experience'. If > I walk on snow, does it experience deformation, or does it just deform?

This is the part where materialism has the burden of proof to explain a mechanism for how, suddenly, snow doesn't experience de-formation.

You get it. You've made the logical link of connections from human down to snow, and you see no mechanism for a sudden loss of the ability to experience.

The rational answer is to say that provided what we know about the universe right now, it seems that there is nothing that does not have the property of experience.

The only other rational answer is solipsism because there's no real evidence that anything other than your self has any experience, but that's no fun and doesn't have any interesting conclusions.

<comment><USER23> I don't get this. I have an experience because I have specialized organs for delivering _information_ to a central information processing unit which can evaluate the experience in a way that is _temporally decoupled_ from the event itself. There is no such mechanism in snow, it doesn't convert "deformation" into data separately from the physical fact of its deformation.

<comment><USER22> What you have are carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and a few other pieces of earth, water, and air that are dancing around each other in a very complex way in order to dance up a very complex experience that has interesting properties that the snow does not exhibit in its experience of simple deformation.

Your very special organs are nothing but melted snow(water) deforming against broken up rock(carbon), repeatedly, in beautiful fractal patterns that have emerged through evolutionary processes over billions of years.

These evolutionary processes that turned Snow into You.

The _information_ is higher order deformation.

<comment><USER21> So redefine experience = process? That's all I can parse out of it.

<comment><USER22> Cool, that's a start. Another implication is that you're a lot older and you've experienced a lot more than you identify with at the moment in the span of time identifying as this human system.

I won't give you more than you can chew. Accepting that process=experience is already a huge paradigm shift.

If you're interested in deeper implications, it's better if you come to them without anyone handing them over.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Mu. The definition provided ("consciousness is experience") explains nothing, you cannot experimentally decide if atoms experience anything, the fact that they do or don't doesn't change any prediction for how they behave over time. It's meaningless, like wondering if magic exists but is actively hiding from us. Paranoia is that way.

> Despite great progress in our scientific understanding of the brain, we > still don't have even the beginnings of an explanation of how complex > electrochemical signaling is somehow able to give rise to the inner > subjective world of colors, sounds, smells and tastes that each of us knows > in our own case. There is a deep mystery in understanding how what we know > about ourselves from the inside fits together with what science tells us > about matter from the outside.

We can make a very simple robot that reacts to the environment - for example follows light and learns where the walls are so as not to collide with them in the future.

It checks all the boxes that simple life does - if you say that a bacteria experience world then so does that robot. So it is conscious but we know where it comes from - it comes from the computational power and interactions with the world it can do. There's no magical spiritualism around it, it's just nested if-then-elses + memory + feedback. Which btw is as good a definition for consciousness as any other. When you become unconscious the feedback loop is interrupted.

> "Of course, you can't do that. I designed physical science to deal with > quantities, not qualities."

"Quantity has a quality of its own". There's no qualities in the universe, just quantities and we arbitrarily assign labels (qualities) to them.

In the end I think "is X conscious" is as productive a question as "is Pluto a planet" or "can submarines swim".

<comment><USER25> > So it is conscious but we know where it comes from - it comes from the > computational power and interactions with the world it can do.

How little computational ability is required to define something as conscious? Even a brick reacts to stimuli, albeit in the same completely predictable (to our high-powered brains) way that a simple robot does.

<comment><USER24> My point exactly. Why is Mercury a planet and Pluto isn't? Because we arbitrarily decided on the threshold. Universe doesn't care, there's nothing in the laws of physics about Pluto or planets it's just a special case we focus on.

Let me try another definition:

Consciousness is a feedback loop we can empathize with.

<comment><USER26> "We" and "empathy" are doing a lot of work in that definition.

<comment><USER24> At least the arbitrariness is obvious :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Am I the only one who thinks the consciousness question is really quite easy to understand and answer?

The illusion of consciousness is obviously beneficial. For example, I could tell a computer, through the use of sensors, to report that it's in pain when it's hit. But you wouldn't take it seriously, or care for its suffering, because it hasn't also declared that it is under the illusion that its suffering has a kind of physical manifestation in its mind.

The reason we care more about animals today than in the past is because we finally began to question whether or not they had a similar sense of self as us - perhaps when we are cruel to animals they don't just know they're in pain and understand like a computer might that pain is bad, but their brains actually tell them they are physically feeling a sensation of pain. Similarly, I presume if an AI ever said it had a similar physical experience of pain to us then we would considering treating that AI with similar regard to that of a human.

If I'm correct, then an illusion of consciousness makes complete evolutionary sense. It's not really consciousness, but a sense of self, and more importantly, a sense that there are others with a similar sense of self to our own.

Our consciousness is just our brains saying you're a real thing that thinks and feels. It's a lie our brain tells us that our pain and the pain of others is important and worth caring about.

<comment><USER28> How do you define an illusion without first positing a being that can experience (hence conscious) an illusion?

What does it mean that consciousness is a 'lie our brain tells us', who are we? Are you assuming some form of cartesian dualism, or perhaps you are making a sort of homunculus argument?

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homunculus_argument](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homunculus_argument)

<comment><USER27> By illusion I just mean there isn't really a physical pain (sub atomic elements don't feel pain) but our brains still act as if we experience pain from the perspective of a self. From this perspective the self is a real thing, you are a conscious human, not a collection of atoms - you matter more than your matter.

Let me try this another way... Imagine an identical universe with one difference - no one is conscious. If I decide to kill in this hypothetical universe is it wrong? And even if you say yes, is it equally as wrong as in a universe with conscious beings? This is the explanation for consciousness and why the illusion is important.

We think we're aware of our senses and in control of our actions, but we know we're not. We know what we consciously obverse is different from the input we get from our sensory organs - which is the reason things like optical illusions exist. We also know that we subconsciously make our decisions a fraction of second before we're consciously aware of them. In my opinion this all points towards consciousness being an illusion, rather than an actual awareness of self.

<comment><USER29> > but our brains still act as if we experience pain

That's fine for someone else's brain -- I can see it act as if a person is experiencing pain -- but I know that _I_ experience pain. I'm not just going through the motions, I experience it.

Again, your argument is a homunculus argument -- that your brain is lying/whatever for the benefit of something else inside that is experiencing the "illusion" of consciousness. Again, you can't have an illusion of consciousness, because an "illusion" requires consciousness.

<comment><USER27> > I know that I experience pain

I accept you perceive pain in the context of a self.

> you can't have an illusion of consciousness, because an "illusion" requires > consciousness.

I think this might be the core of our disagreement. I don't know why you think that?

An illusion is just a false perception of reality so it doesn't technically require consciousness - but I think I know what you're getting at.

Imagine a computer which can "see" its surroundings through a camera.

Why couldn't I program this computer to think it's conscious and to experience its visual data in the context of a self? That's what I honestly think we're doing and what you're describing when you talk about consciousness.

I don't know why the experience you're calling consciousness can't just be explained more easily by your brain processing sensory inputs in the context of a self. I understand to you this feels like a special thing, but from a physical perspective I honestly don't know what you're describing that couldn't be explained as sensory inputs in the context of a self.

Would I be right in thinking you don't believe my example computer is conscious? And would it help you understand my position if I said I think my computer might be conscious in a very primitive way?

<comment><USER30> That's why you can't be sure that someone else is conscious. If you program the computer to say it's conscious, that doesn't tell you whether it's conscious or not, only whether it claims to be conscious.

However, you do know that you, yourself, are conscious. Consciousness proves its existence every moment by presenting itself to you, by your own pain being something you can notice.

If you were a computer who was simply programmed to act as if you were conscious, there would be no subject to the experience. The rest of the world would think you were conscious, but you would be "dead inside". There would be nothing it would be like to be you.

So the reason why the experience called consciousness can't just be explained by the brain processing inputs like a computer is that that gives no theory for why consciousness feels so immediate to the person who experiences it. It explains why someone would act as if he were conscious, but not why consciousness itself would exist the way it shows itself to exist to you every moment.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> There's an interesting podcast where Philip Goff and Sean Carroll discuss about various aspects of panpsychism. Sean plays a very good devil's advocate, so if you enjoy a nice friendly critic of the above ideas, I highly recommend this episode!

[https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2019/11/04/71-p...](https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2019/11/04/71-philip- goff-on-consciousness-everywhere/)

<comment><USER32> The list of guests on that podcast is just astonishing. From Thorne to Grimes, MacFarlane to Greene, from wine to robot abuse. Never fails to impress.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Is the progression toward the heat death of the universe a result of innumerable suffering particles steering themselves in ways that minimize their pain? Should we as humans accelerate the heat death of the universe to end subatomic suffering?

Or is gravity their preferred route? Being together. Maybe the answer is funneling all of the universe into black holes.

Diamonds are very stable. Does this mean their particles are very happy? Is converting your loved one's remains into diamonds the greatest thing you can do for them, or is this reasoning flawed and is the eternal stasis a bad thing?

</comment><comment><USER34> Consciousness is obviously a property of the universe _somehow_ , or else humans couldn't have it in the first place, since we're part of the universe.

I've long assumed it has to be something that appears qualitatively like magnetism -- no large-scale effects in most materials, but when small-scale elements of certain types are configured/aligned in certain ways, _presto_ it appears. And that brains evolved such a configuration because consciousness must have conferred certain evolutionary benefits.

But it's not clear to me whether that is considered panpsychism, though. Because it doesn't imply that e.g. rocks have any meaningful level of "consciousness" any more than most rocks would be considered magnetic.

</comment><comment><USER35> I think non-duality / advaita makes much more sense than panpsychism, as it requires less assumptions while remaining compatible with our experience.

Panpsychism seems like a bandaid to solve the hard problem of consciousness, which non-duality does not suffer from.

<comment><USER36> > Panpsychism seems like a bandaid to solve the hard problem of consciousness

It doesn't even do that, it just pushes it down the stack.

If I ask, why is the sky blue, I don't want to hear "Because it's made of blue stuff."

Not only is it wrong, it doesn't have any explanatory power at all. Ultimately if you want to understand why something has a certain property, you want to know how it arises from the emergent behavior of something more fundamental. A hurricane isn't made of hurricane bits, and brains aren't made of consciousness particles.

<comment><USER37> >If I ask, why is the sky blue, I don't want to hear "Because it's made of blue stuff."

Well, you are not going far if you hear only what you want to hear. PS sky is blue because you perceive it as blue.

<comment><USER38> You missed the meaning of that idiom entirely. They don't want to hear "because it's made of blue stuff" because it's wrong and useless, not because it is distasteful.

<comment><USER37> I don't think I missed anything, if you already decided what is wrong - <USER3> is not a honest search - you just want to find something which satisfies your views.

<comment><USER39> I think he/she wants something that isn't circular and therefore meaningless.

<comment><USER37> Again, you put restriction of meaningful answer. But why not beautiful answer? Or poetic answer? Or funny one? Ultimately you still decided what you want first and then trying to find what fits.

<comment><USER39> "you put restriction of meaningful answer"

I know, pretty crazy of me there. Meanwhile I annoy car dealers by going in with an expectation of a vehicle that can actually get me from one place to another, rather than just sit there and amuse me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> It all rests on what your definition of consciousness is.

Philip: > But when I use the word consciousness, I simply mean experience: pleasure, pain, visual or auditory experience, et cetera.

But that just kicks the can again. What is "experience"? What is pain versus pleasure?

Ultimately we have to arrive at a reductionist definition that doesn't reference undefined terms. After many years of thinking about this problem, here's my best shot:

 _Experience_ is equivalent to state change, e.g. the state change induced in a thermometer or a radio receiver due to stimuli. _Consciousness_ is ultimately a system of modeling that is complex enough to have developed a model of itself, thus "realizing" that the system is separate from the environment that produces stimuli.

Humans arrived at consciousness through evolving larger and larger brains whose main goal is to model the environment and behavior of other individuals in order to predict what will happen next, in order to make plans for survival.

Panpsychism is then scientific, and perhaps inescapable, if we use these definitions. But, it doesn't mean that rocks and black holes are conscious. Only those things that undergo state change in response to stimuli and are complex enough to have models of themselves. There is no evidence that rocks have information-processing capabilities at all, and worms' brains are too small to have a model of themselves, however simplified.

</comment><comment><USER41> Panpsychism is interesting but I'm not convinced.

If I can summarise the idea it's answering the question "how can consciousness arise from unconscious matter (like the human brain)" with "it can't, matter is already conscious (i.e. it has conscious experience)".

It's a very simple explanation, a very Occamist explanation. But at the same time it is not _really_ an explanation. It just pushes the question back from "how can complex matter like the human brain be conscious?" to "how can simple matter like quarks be conscious?". But panpsychism does not even attempt to answer the further question- it's simply ignored. That is, panpsychism says that "matter is conscious" but it doesn't say _why_ matter is conscious, or what exactly consciousness _is_ after all. It just passes the buck.

So it's not very different than answering the question with "because God willed it". I mean, that's an answer too. It's a metaphysical answer- but so what? Panpsychism is not metaphysical but it's not more explanatory than God. Not until it explains _what_ consciousness is and _why_ quarks have it.

</comment><comment><USER42> Honestly "consciousness" is not a good term for this phenomenon. It is much more "observeness", and here is why. If we suppose that not all things have such a property, these things can still be complex enough to exhibit the behavior similar to those who have it. E.g. someone who is me could not have it, could simply exist and write this message, but "real me" would mot be a thing. I can imagine other people, but I'm not them. What happens when I die? There still are other people. Now switch me with any of them and you've got a world without "me".

The phenomenon is real, as we can detect it with an intelligence and discuss (otherwise no one would understand me). But it is not necessary, nor provable that _it_ drives our behavior or _it_ feels and experiences events. It observes us, we observe it and this observer meta-identifies with a body that is aware of the idea, like a fixed point in calculus. So (imo) it is not a physical control, feedback or consciousness, but a symbiosis of physical and "observing".

Anyway, I can't see why we should dismiss it and move on, like some people suggest. It may be a key to something important about reality.

</comment><comment><USER43> ORT (Only Read Title)

There's a riddle in the Gospel of Thomas[1]:

"Make the inside like the outside and the outside like the inside."

Here's an interpretation: "inside" and "outside" refer to the inner world and the outer world.

These share some qualities or aspects, both are known only subjectively, and there's a similarity of form (there are e.g. red triangles in both worlds) and susceptibility to will (we can move our bodies _and_ we can affect what we imagine, aka the faculty of imagination. Both of these abilities present the same problem: what is intention and how does it relate to will to cause changes in perception?)

Otherwise they are very different. The outer world is made of matter/energy in various configurations and, while we don't (yet) know what the inner world is made of, it's obviously very different than matter/energy. Perhaps the main difference is that you can more-or-less manipulate the contents of imagination (I'm using the word here as a proxy for the whole of internal world) "at will" but the contents of the real world obey a physics that dictates that you more- or-less have to push things with other things to get anything in particular to happen (please forgive my gross simplification.)

Now consider the _subjective_ experience of an omnipotent, omniscient being. If you can know and alter the "outer" world just as easily as you can know and alter the "inner" world, wouldn't they effectively be the same?

In the context of a Gnostic tradition, I think it means that, when one unifies the self with the Self the "real" world and the "imaginary" world also become one.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gospel_of_Thomas](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gospel_of_Thomas)

</comment><comment><USER44> Sabine Hossenfelder's opinion on pan-psychism and why it can't be true from a physics standpoint: [https://backreaction.blogspot.com/2019/01/electrons-dont- thi...](https://backreaction.blogspot.com/2019/01/electrons-dont-think.html)

</comment><comment><USER12> I think there's a lot of homo-exceptionalism in the challenges to this hypothesis.

What I mean by that is, everyone is incredulous that stones can have the same experience as humans, but consider it the other way around: humans have essentially the same experience as stones. Both react to the physical processes happening at their peripheries in dynamically-consistent ways, i.e., computing a quasi-deterministic function. The conclusion then is that since we are conscious, there's no reason that stones couldn't also be. It's a matter of degree, encoded in the complexity of that quasi-deterministic function mentioned above.

The main difference between us and stones is that, in order for our DNA to have arisen and propagated itself this far, it had to have a strong set of skills to survive over the history of the universe. It can literally create lumps of proteins that achieve that goal. For the body of the animal, being aware of its own history by constructing a self-consistent and closed narrative arc (the 'I' that we all contend and interact with) obviously has advantages, since it would be hard to operate in society without pre-defined and agreed-upon roles, which we assume as our identity.

So the fact that we experience reality as such, with our emotional reactions and persistent self-narrative, is an evolved trait which helped the human genome become the dominant life form on Earth.

</comment><comment><USER45> This is bad philosophy masked in scientific jargon.

</comment><comment><USER46> Here's my problem with panpsychism: I don't understand why it isn't immediately self-refuting via Ockham's razor.

What I mean is, my understanding is that panpsychism posits that all matter has some degree of consciousness somehow, i.e. even an atom has a little bit, humans just have a lot more. Fine. But clearly this property isn't simply additive: panpsychists don't argue that a Solar System-sized collection of ping-pong balls has more conscious experience than a human being. However this property agglutinates, it has to be something more than just "amount of matter"; it has to be some function of _which_ matter and how it is arranged.

But that's just the materialist position! "Matter can make conscious systems if and only if it's arranged in a particular way (possibly, but not necessarily, meaning a way that involves simulating a Turing machine)" is materialism. At that point, the fundamental quanta of consciousness is an unnecessary addition to the theory that can be discarded with no difference.

I fully grant that I'm a programmer with very little philosophical background, but I just don't get what the panpsychist hypothesis buys us that we didn't already have.

<comment><USER47> > But clearly this property isn't simply additive: panpsychists don't argue > that a Solar System-sized collection of ping-pong balls has more conscious > experience than a human being

I think the main difficulty of this argument is that consciousness can only be experienced by the experiencer (mediation/drug-induced experiences aside). Therefore how can you tell how conscious the Solar System, a horse, mouse, atom, etc. is if you can't communicate with them to ask?

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> I tend to think consciousness is universally fundamental and effectively intrinsic, since all we can know is our experience that requires it. That's why we can never get behind consciousness, as noted by Max Plank in 1931. ([https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Max_Planck](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Max_Planck))

</comment><comment><USER49> "The Spirit Atma by which all this universe is pervaded, is indestructible. No one can destroy the imperishable Spirit."

\- Chapter 2 Yoga of Knowledge Sankhya Yoga Verse 17 48

"There is nothing higher than Me, O Arjun. Everything in the universe is strung on Me, the Supreme Being Para- Brahma Paramatma, like jewels are strung on the thread of a necklace."

Chapter 7 Knowledge & Wisdom Verse 07 254

String theory?

searchgita.com

appstore.com/searchgita

</comment><comment><USER50> Monadology (French: La Monadologie, 1714) which is one of Gottfried Leibniz's best known works representing his later philosophy has pretty much the same arguments.

[1][https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monadology](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monadology)

</comment><comment><USER51> Even the theory's advocate acknowledges in this interview that it's untestable. There is no way to observe that the world would behave differently whether or not the theory is true. If that's so, I can't think what point there is discussing it, except as a mental exercise. If you can't test a theory, that means it can't affect anything. I.e. it has no practical use, except as a form of entertainment.

I would almost argue that it doesn't make sense to talk about something being true or untrue if it cannot be tested nor used to make any predictions. The whole concept of truth, for me, reflects the extent to which reality conforms to belief. So if there isn't and will never be a way to test a belief, then it's neither true nor false.

IMO, this is the type of thinking that gives philosophers a bad rap.

<comment><USER25> Consider the following: your consciousness, that experience you have of being, the one that --in the minds of many-- separates you from a computer programmed to behave like you, cannot exist under your model because it cannot be tested for. Consider also that this statement is ridiculous, because you clearly do have an experience of being. What does this tell us?

Empiricism and the scientific method are a philosophy for modelling reality, and they've undoubtedly done a bang up job of progressing human understanding, but that model is also incomplete. Think of it like Newtonian gravitation, another undoubtedly very useful model that, it turns out, is also incomplete.

<comment><USER51> I can generally agree that something like consciousness exists, because I seem to be experiencing it. The test of that fact is ongoing, as I type these words, and it continues to be true. I suspect, based on the fact that other people act like me and all also claim to be conscious, that they are having internal experiences similar to mine, although I can't know for sure.

So I don't agree that consciousness _in general_ can't be tested for. We can test our own consciousness, and we can use induction to guess that at least other humans are experiencing something similar.

<comment><USER25> But you can't measure it objectively. You can't tell me that other people have consciousness, you just assume it is true because they seem to be like you. You have no mechanism for determining the limits of your assumption and indeed past societies have drawn the line in even narrower constraints than "human".

<comment><USER51> > you just assume it is true because they seem to be like you

A minor, but important point. I don't _assume_ it's true. I just think it is more likely than not.

I suppose that the philosopher I'm talking about could say the same of their theory. And I guess that's OK, if all they're claiming is that this is something that seems likely. My only response to that would be that his induction is _prima facie_ questionable to me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> This hits at a long standing question ive had about how consciousness arises. Its clear that it results mechanistically (obeying physics) from complex systems of simple components. The big question in my mind is whether it arises with a sudden jump (like a phase transition) or if its truly a continuum. I think mathematics may prove much more useful at disentangling this than the article implies.

"Erdős and Rényi (1960) showed that for many monotone-increasing properties of random graphs, graphs of a size slightly less than a certain threshold are very unlikely to have the property, whereas graphs with a few more graph edges are almost certain to have it. This is known as a phase transition (Janson et al. 2000, p. 103)."

</comment><comment><USER53> > There is a profound difficulty at the heart of the science of consciousness: > consciousness is unobservable. You can't look inside an electron to see > whether or not it is conscious. But nor can you look inside someone's head > and see their feelings and experiences. We know that consciousness exists > not from observation and experiment but by being conscious.

But can't we measure brain waves with CAT scans? Isn't there research going on now into observing brain patterns and actually figuring out what the subject is thinking about in real time?

Perhaps this lines up another distinction between the thinking mind and actual consciousness.....but I'm not really convinced by the argument that consciousness is an unobservable black box.

<comment><USER25> > But can't we measure brain waves with CAT scans? Isn't there research going > on now into observing brain patterns and actually figuring out what the > subject is thinking about in real time?

But what does that have to do with consciousness (the experience of being)? All it shows is that our brains work the same way machines do, which isn't really a surprise. We can use a logic probe on machines and figure out how they work too. There is no way to determine if something _experiences_ the world around it or "merely" is a product of a complex mechanism of reactions and interactions. That's what is meant by consciousness being unobservable.

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> > Panpsychism gives us a way of resolving the mystery of consciousness, a way > that avoids the deep difficulties that plague more conventional options.

Eh, not really. With panpsychism you end up with, e.g. human, consciousness often becoming an emergent property of complex-enough systems. But in reality, you might have systems that are quite complicated (say, more complicated than a brain even) that _aren 't_ conscious. I do think that consciousness is most likely a "foundational" property of our universe, but the argument that "everything is conscious" (even to a tiny degree) doesn't seem very useful.

</comment><comment><USER55> Oh, it's cool the universe (both laws and initial energy/mass distribution) provides a mechanism to blow things apart and squish them together on so many time scales and in so many ways. The universe is so dead and cold overall, but extraordinarily verdant in places like Earth, a tiny place in a sliver of time.

I don't think it's consciousness (or some form of entelechy) built into space- time. It's more like a kind of complexity-seeking at the several interlocking scales in a gravity well that happens to sit in some ambient heat.

</comment><comment><USER56> I am more interested in the nature of consciousness than its location . . . not sure where this idea could lead.

</comment><comment><USER57> My only concern with the consciousness debate is purely from a self- preservation PoV. Here is a scenario to elaborate: 1) In fifty years compute horsepower is enough to be able to fully simulate a brain. 2) population of earth is 10B and climate change is really making the planet unlivable. 3) we believe that consciousness is an emergent phenomenon 4) we decide we'll invest in computronium and just continue our (& other species) lives in cyberspace 5) civilization opts-in to shed the mortal coil and jump to cyberspace.

now at this point some super advanced quantum computer realizes that wait a minute, we made some subtle mistake and there does seems to be something else (perhaps quantum) aspect to consciousness that we missed. so now essentially we have committed genocide on ourselves. I just want to be really really really sure that there is nothing else to consciousness before I give in to the 'emergent consciousness thesis'.

Personally, I like Roger penrose's 'Orchestrated objective reduction' theory of consciousness where he posits that proto-consciousness is an innate property of universe due to quantum wavefunction collapse. so essentially everytime there is a wf collapse its like the system had a conscious moment. human brain is just an instrument complex enough to 'catch' phenomena and turn it into a conscious experience. The 'how' part is where it gets murky, there have been some attempts to link it to microtubules in brain cells but nothing concrete yet. IMO its worth a serious look from biochemistry point of view.

<comment><USER58> > IMO its worth a serious look from biochemistry point of view.

I'm not a scientist, and certainly not a quantum physicist. But from what I understand, the main argument against this idea (that is, quantum effects within neurons - or some other biological quantum effect system) is the fact that as far as we know, such quantum effects cannot occur at any temperature near "average human body temperature".

If such could be demonstrated, it would upend a massive amount of knowledge in and around QM/QP.

But then again, dual-slit experiment? Maybe something is there? Again - <USER4> outside my understanding and knowledge, and likely is completely wrong, etc.

It might make a good science-fiction plot for a novel or something, though...

<comment><USER57> >> as far as we know, such quantum effects cannot occur at any temperature

thats the too warm wet & noisy argument generally made. AFAIK it has been demonstrated that energy transfer in leaves for photosynthesis depends on quantum effects, so does sense of smell & direction in certain birds IIRC. there is a section on the wikipedia page for this that addresses this with ref links: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orchestrated_objective_reducti...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orchestrated_objective_reduction)

my point is rather simple, IF there is any evolutionary advantage to quantum processes in brain AND these quantum effects are available to ANY exploitable degree then evolution will favor selection of those mechanisms until they become pervasive and lose advantage. so its not really surprising that once the consciousness is aware enough to self reflect, the pace of technological development accelerated exponentially.

I do agree that it sounds like new-age BS but that will always be the case, religion with always try to hijack the scientific development but that should not be a deterrent to a lot more research conducted on this really fascinating field.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER59> It always amazes me how much people refuse the reality of consciousness. Just goes to show you the mental gymnastics people will use to contort themselves in order to maintain some semblance of coherency in their world view.

</comment><comment><USER60> [https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=lfAhup- fDYs](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=lfAhup-fDYs)

Same guy was on Sean Carroll's podcast. His arguments didn't resonate with me very well.

</comment><comment><USER61> What if our ideas about consciousness were an artifact of our language?

Just like our ideas about morality? Where a lot of the time if you are explicit all the "mystery" goes away?

So when you say an ought statement "A should do B", what you really mean is "A should do B if A wants C to happen" which expands to "If A does B and C doesn't happen, then any D can't blame A if D wants to be rational". It's a bit self referential like that.

Ok so now everything suddenly becomes clear and you find you can't formulate a single basic question about morality in English that doesn't have an obvious answer. "You should do your homework! Unless you don't care about your grades." or "You should be consistent! Unless you don't care about being viewed as a hypocrite."

What if things simply were, and scrupulously including unspoken clauses made all basic questions about consciousness have obvious answers?

"What is it like to be a bat" is not a well formulated question.

However, try including the subject and object of the sentence all the time.

The bat saw the phenomenon

The bat's body experienced a feeling

And so on.

Then the question comes down to two things:

1) Identity. That is a mental construct that organisms develop. It can have a lot of layers, such as how you see yourself, how you choose to express yourself, etc. But the biggest one is how you identify with the person you were a few years ago and with who you will be in the future. If you were gonna go on a vacation for 2 weeks but later not remember anything about it, does it matter where you go? Do you do things just to make your 80 year old self proud to remember them? And so on.

2) Existence. Yes actually the word existence has no well-defined meaning without resorting to conscious observers. Consider the question of whether the Harry Potter World exists or not. How is it different than not existing or a made-up work like blabladeblaa? The sentence "the Harry Potter World Really Exists" has almost no meaning without resorting to consciousness, we are just used to saying that word. Be thorough and you'll always invoke yourself and your conscious awareness.

Now what if life never arose in the universe? In what sense would the universe exist any more than a Harry Potter world?

So in a way, the concepts of existence of consciousness are duals of each other!

People often think that the concept of existence is something fundamental. But it is really a dual of the concept of consciousness.

</comment><comment><USER62> Give me a precise definition and I'll give you a precise answer. Can you write that question in mathematical notation? If not then don't expect a precise answer

</comment><comment><USER63> Panpsychism is also supported by Integrated Information Theory. So far it is probably the most fruitful attempt to mathematically describe consciousness.

<comment><USER64> Panpsychism isn't really supported by IIT, at least not any version of panspychism that is resurging. IIT says the organization determines the level of consciousness. Panpsychism has no theory for how organization increases or combines conscious properties of the individual conscious units of matter.

</comment></comment><comment><USER65> Why does "panPshychism" sound like the idea of "Brahman" from Veda? Is it same as Brahman? If not, what is the difference?

</comment><comment><USER66> Mildly relevant: Peter Watts' novel Blindsight

</comment><comment><USER67> And to think that I used to have great respect for Scientific American magazine. This article is the worst sort of pseudo-intellectual tripe. It uses fancy-schmancy academic language to dress up silly ideas and wordplay. Masking itself in the facade of reasonableness to make hand-wavy conjecture and baseless assertions. Moreover, many of the supporting points made by Goff are simply wrong, betraying his ignorance of our current understanding of nature. I'm saddened that SA has published this.

<comment><USER68> I am too.

Even just publishing it in their forum is destructive for science.

<comment><USER47> Yes I really wish they wouldn't challenge my conventional idea of materialism. The last thing we need is another Einstein coming along making us think differently.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER69> > That's what panpsychists believe.

Why is it we can't discuss ideas without labeling someone as a -ist of some kind?

</comment><comment><USER70> Isn't this the idea behind Philip Pullman's _His Dark Materials_?

<comment><USER29> He talks about Dust giving everything consciousness, but I don't recall that he ever really goes into the details of what that _means_.

</comment></comment><comment><USER71> I believe time is intrinsically linked with our experience of consciousness, maybe consciousness in general.

Sorry for the armchair philosophy, this is a topic I like to think about.

We know that time is the 4th dimension, all things exist in 4-dimensions and we just experience one 'slice' of this dimension at a time. The concept of something having 'not happened yet' really means 'we haven't experienced it yet' \- it'd be like saying that the house 5 blocks away isn't on fire 'yet', simply because we haven't walked 5 blocks over and seen it yet. If we were able to move through time as freely as we move through other dimensions, then a house that catches on fire 'tomorrow' is really on fire 'now'('now' really isn't the right word here, but I don't think a better one exists) - we just have to walk down the street into tomorrow and see it.

In this way, we also exist as infants and as old men and women at the same time. We experience on infinitesimally small slice of ourselves at a time, each slice being a moment in time. Why don't we experience this all at once? Our body IS existing in the past and the future and the now, we are all tasting our 60th birthday cake right now, but we don't experience it yet.

There are two possibilities: Consciousness is the one thing that exists outside of time, such that instead of existing throughout our whole lifespan consistently and experiencing our whole life at once and constantly, we move through time experiencing one moment at a time, and maybe move into and out of time via birth/death. If you start thinking about memory this gets very interesting(as does the other possibility) in so far as memory is represented by the physical state of your brain and memory stores 'past' events. Basically implying that for some reason the 4D shape of your brain is such that on the 'future' side of your brain there are neurons arranged in such a way to describe what the state of your brain is on the 'past' side.

OR, consciousness does exist within 4 dimensions as our bodies do, and we ARE experiencing our entire lives at once. I don't know about you, but for me it FEELS like I'm only experiencing this single moment right now. But that doesn't mean I'm not also experiencing every other moment right now. At this moment in time, my brain is in a certain state(in terms of neurons and neurochemicals), that state encodes my memories and feelings that I have at this moment, personally I think that state encodes all the qualities of my consciousness, but I know this could be argued. So if I were experiencing all moments at once, then this moment would feel exactly like it would feel if this were the only moment I was experiencing. I would also be experiencing moments in the future, and in those moments this moment would be just a memory. So how do I know whether I'm experiencing those other moments as well right now, this current moment clearly feels unique to me and it seems like the only moment I'm experiencing, but maybe that's how all moments feel. Maybe there is a different 'me' experiencing every other moment right now, and I happen to be in this moment typing this message BECAUSE this moment IS the one where I happen to be sitting here typing this message. The me that's eating my 60th birthday cake is also doing that right now, and not thinking about the nature of consciousness, but maybe has a vague memory of this moment because the physical structure of my brain encodes 'previous' brain states as memories in 'future' brain states for whatever reason.

</comment><comment><USER36> This is textbook God of the Gaps

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/God_of_the_gaps](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/God_of_the_gaps)

It adds nothing to our understanding of the universe, but it gives some people a warm and fuzzy feeling.

</comment><comment><USER72> Do you remember when this philosophy was called animism?

</comment><comment><USER73> Broadening the definition of consciousness to the literal limits seems pointless, it dilutes the already difficult to manifest definition of consciousness to complete uselessness.

</comment><comment><USER74> This is the exact wrong direction we should take if we want to have any hope of understanding consciousness. Rather than pass a bong around and declare the whole universe is conscious, we should question the consciousness even of entities whose consciousness we currently take for granted. We should ask: is it really true that all humans are conscious[1], or is there something specific that triggers consciousness? For example, maybe consciousness is caused by a certain benevolent bacteria living in our guts, and anyone without that bacteria isn't conscious. If we refuse to even question these things, then of course we'll never come up with any answer.

[1] Of course, it goes without saying that for ethical purposes we should act under the assumption that all humans are conscious.

<comment><USER75> Spoken like the stereotypical materialist.

<comment><USER74> Was Jesus Christ a materialist? "Follow me, and let the dead bury their own dead." (Matthew 8:22)

<comment><USER35> Actually, he was, and Abrahamic religions are probably the reason for materialism in science.

It all starts with the distinction between heaven and the earth, the spirit and the flesh… Abrahamic religions are fundamentally dualistic, by contrast with eastern religions like hinduism or buddhism wich have had the concept of non-duality for long.

My understanding is that the only places you find a form of non-duality in Abrahamic religions is in their mystical variants.

<comment><USER74> There's tons of non-duality in Christ's teachings, but it's subtler and doesn't smash you over the head as much.

"Do not judge, or you will be judged. For with the same judgment you pronounce, you will be judged; and with the measure you use, it will be measured to you." (Matthew 7:1-2)

"For whoever does the will of My Father in heaven is My brother and sister and mother." (Matthew 12:50)

"Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers of Mine, you did for Me." (Matthew 25:40)

<comment><USER35> You could just as well interpret that "dually" though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER76> is it just me or is there something on this website that makes scrolling the page unusable?

</comment><comment><USER77> I recently finished watching Prof. Patrick Grim's excellent Mind-Body Philosophy[0] course, which helped me clarify my own position. I thought that it fit reasonably well under the term "panpsychism", but this article is making me think it may be something slightly different. Under the expectation that it has already been studied, I'm now curious what it is named.

In short, I am a computationalist[1]: consciousness is a pattern that may appear in physical processes. I expect it can be translated into different physical processes. I think the definitional boundary separating conscious processes from other processes is subjective, even if there are common landmarks we generally agree are on one side or the other.

That seems all well and good. However I am not a hard materialist[2]: I do not believe that physicalism addresses the hard problem of consciousness[3]. I like to note this by the absence of timelessness in my experience: the present moment seems to be distinguished from the perceived past and future only because I am experiencing it. Contrast this to a physical description or model of myself and my surroundings that seems sound without reference to a specific "present" moment. To see that such a model does not contain a "now", think about simulating it: you would need to choose a moment on the timeline to start, to insert a "now". Physical models don't seem to capture the notion of "present moment". Attempts to shoe-horn it in (with e.g. consciousness particles or what have you) seem simultaneously untestable and offensive to Occam's razor.

Subjective experience then seems to be unaccounted for. I am content saying it is not found in any model of physical processes, only in the physical processes themselves. Notice I am no longer talking about consciousness: the computation and brain state is still susceptible to description. Only the subjective experience, whose toe we can catch with the present moment, escapes.

Odd as it might sound, I find it tempting to say that the subjective experience is not personal. It seems incommunicable, but what I mean is that there is no aspect of myself in it: that's all over in the computation (incidentally I am reminded of one of the objections to "Cogito, ergo sum"[4].)

At this point, the idea of "Atman"[5] is starting to look pretty good (thank you those who found the Adviata link, I would not have.) However, besides Prof. Grim's touch on the topic I know nothing about it (haw). My impression of Atman is that it is ineffable, primitive and pervasive. It does not have a location because it is not a thing: it is an aspect of reality.

And now we arrive at panpsychism, or at least what I thought panpsychism is. Subjective experience, but not the computational content that gives rise to the more visible parts of consciousness, is a fundamental aspect of reality. Rocks have subjective experience. Rocks are not conscious, unless they include physical processes we choose to recognize as consciousness. A rock's subjective experience is a lot like your subjective experience of the IR spectrum, assuming that you are like me and have no qualia affected by it.

[0]: [https://www.thegreatcourses.com/courses/mind-body- philosophy...](https://www.thegreatcourses.com/courses/mind-body- philosophy.html) [1]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computational_theory_of_mind](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computational_theory_of_mind) [2]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Materialism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Materialism) [3]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_problem_of_consciousness](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_problem_of_consciousness) [4]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cogito,_ergo_sum#Use_of_%22I%2...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cogito,_ergo_sum#Use_of_%22I%22) [5]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advaita_Vedanta](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advaita_Vedanta)

</comment><comment><USER78> no-one knows...

</comment><comment><USER79> Pure nonsense theory

</comment><comment><USER80> Panpsychism is incredibly silly. It's just obfuscated dualism. It literally doesn't explain _anything_ , and it's obviously wrong for the simple reason that it gives no way to explain why humans _act on_ their conscious experience and have it modelled internally _as_ a conscious experience.

The brain's use of electrical pulses or DNA doesn't result in an innate internal model of electricity or DNA. Similarly, if a proton has 'experience', then clearly 'experience' is a property _completely outside_ of the computation the mind performs, and so we should not have introspective awareness of it. (Or rather, if we were to, the question of why would be no easier than the original Hard Problem.)

<comment><USER10> Panpsychism is often put forth as a solution to the dualism/physicalism problem. That is...sort of the entire point. To call it obfuscated dualism is to completely misunderstand the idea, so much so that I have a hard time believing you've read any material on the topic.

This is covered in the introductory paragraph of the SEP article:

[https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/panpsychism/](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/panpsychism/)

<comment><USER80> Panpsychism is often _claimed_ to be a solution to these things. I've never actually seen any argument that would defend the thesis.

I say panpsychism is obfuscated dualism because it involves no causal mechanisms anywhere, and even worse its entire construction rules out there being any non-convoluted causal mechanism.

I'm not as unread on the topic as you imply. I'm no professional philosopher, but I've opened a Chalmers PDF on the topic or two.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER81> Information is dark matter. Absence of information is dark energy. A shower thought of mine...

</comment><comment><USER82> > Does Consciousness Pervade the Universe?

NO!

> Where does consciousness come from?

Emergent properties of a functional brain.

<comment><USER83> Why such a quick dismissal? We have virtually zero evidence one way or the other. Calling consciousness an "emergent property" is a cop-out answer. What, materially, is that property, what physical laws explain it, and by what mechanism does it emerge from mere electrical impulses?

<comment><USER82> > .. What, materially, is that property ..

Synapses firing ..

> .. what physical laws explain it ..

Physics ..

> .. and by what mechanism does it emerge from mere electrical impulses?

Through the senses and acting on the environment through muscles triggered by synapses firing.

<comment><USER84> Heard of the China brain thought experiment? [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_brain](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_brain)

Would such a brain be conscious? Why or why not?

<comment><USER82> > Would such a brain be conscious? Why or why not?

If the brain was stimulated by inputs from the surrounding environment then YES!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER85> No, consciousness can only appear in self-replicating systems, unless it is artificially supported (as in AI). Without self-replication there is no genetic evolution, and without evolution there can be no consciousness.

<comment><USER86> Why? Why does evolution have something to do with consciousness?

<comment><USER85> Without evolution there would not be the necessary brain power to ask this smart question, to begin with.

Evolution is a gradient-free, population based algorithm that optimises the survival of genes. This is slow learning. On the other hand we have brains and senses - that is fast adaptation. Both have the same purpose - to support life and by necessity, self replication.

I think it's a good rule of thumb - where there is consciousness there must be self replication. That would eliminate theories such as panpsychism and give consciousness an intrinsic purpose.</comment></comment></comment>


Obamacare Website Violates Licensing Agreement for Copyrighted Software - <AUTHOR> http://www.weeklystandard.com/blogs/obamacare-website-violates-licensing-agreement-copyrighted-software_763666.html <comment><USER2> Summary: healthcare.gov uses an open-source (choice of GPLv2 or BSDish) jQuery plguin named DataTables. They do distribute the source and include both the plugin name and version, but for unknown reasons removed the attribution and copyright notices.

<comment><USER3> Perhaps a contractor is defrauding the government, submitting an open source project as their own development work?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> It also looks like someone made around 30 or so small changes from the standard 1.9.1. I wonder if the contractor may have negotiated a non open source license or maybe datatables was included with another piece of software.

<comment><USER3> The feds didn't negotiate anything, the article the company sponsoring Data Tables is planning to take action against the government.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Aren't normal people thrown in jail for years for copyright theft these days, e.g. some kid with a few dozen pirated CDs?

BTW Datatables are fab and the developer deserves lots of credit.</comment>


Things in C# you might have missed - <AUTHOR> http://fekberg.com/2012/09/18/things-in-c-you-might-have-missed/

<comment><USER2> C# has a lot of these little things, that can make you struggle until you discover them.

But beware with yield-return, you have to be very conscious of the execution model of LINQ. Take for example this piece of code:

        IEnumerable<string> Readlines(Stream io)
        {
            while(io.CanRead)
            {
               io.Read(buffer, 0, bufferLength)
               ... do things with buffer and get a line...
               yield return line;
            }
        }

        IEnumerable<string> ReadFileLines(string filename)
        {
            IEnumerable<string> lines
            using(FileStream file = new FileStream(filename))
            {
               lines = ReadLines(file);
            }
            return lines;
        }

This would _always_ fail and throw an exception. Why? When you call ReadLines, the actual object that is returned is not the list of strings. ReadLines is not executed until that list is not enumerated. ReadFileLines opens the stream, passes it as an argument and then closes the stream. When you enumerate that list, ReadLines will start and try to access a closed stream, which causes an exception. Read more here: [http://blogs.msdn.com/b/charlie/archive/2007/12/09/deferred-...](http://blogs.msdn.com/b/charlie/archive/2007/12/09/deferred- execution.aspx)

EDIT: Another problem that you could face with deferred execution is that you could execute a method multiple times without noticing.

        var lines = ReadLines(file);
        var count = lines.Count();
        var text = lines.Aggregate("", (acc, x) => x + acc);

This would read all the lines two times (one for count and another for aggregate), and would probably throw another exception because the EOF had been reached in the first execution. In other situations you could have a ultra-slow function because you're executing a heavy function with yield- return multiple times.

This is not a problem of yield-return on itself (as SideburnsOfDoom says, it's as easy as calling ToList()), but should remind you that using yield-return everywhere instead of lists is not a good idea.

<comment><USER3> I guess you'd fix that by doing this?

       lines = ReadLines(file).ToList();

ToList() is the go-to method to force eager evaluation of a lazy enumeration.

<comment><USER2> Of course, but you can only do that if you know that ReadLines is using yield- return. If this method were to be used by other people you should use a temporary list to read all the stream before returning from the method; it's the expected behaviour.

<comment><USER3> Not _just_ yield return. In quite a few different circumstances LINQ will return an IEnumerable<T> that is a wrapper over a query that won't be executed until you try and pull results out of it. LINQ Queries can wrap database queries, http results, active directory, file system or anything else.

And as you note, enumerating it twice can mean doing the underlying query twice, with potentially differing results.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Another neat tip, you can alias namespaces:

        using Super.Long.Namespace.Utilities

Can be used as:

        using Utils = Super.Long.Namespace.Utilities

Using C# since 2.0 and only learned about this a month ago!

<comment><USER5> This is one which had escaped me for years:

        private static bool GreaterThanOne(int @int)
        {
            return @int > 1;
        }

However, it would seem to me to fall into the "never, ever use this" category.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Very disappointing article; half of it is irrelevant low-level bit-fiddling which _isn't in any way specific to C#_

</comment><comment><USER3> > When the code is compiled, it doesn't matter if you wrote string or > System.String

... however the coding guidelines are to use the language keyword (i.e. "string" ) where you can.

</comment><comment><USER7> This thread on Stack Overflow is useful if you want to broaden your C# skills by using features/idioms/techniques you may not yet even be aware of:

<http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9033/hidden-features-of-c>

The question is closed, but there are plenty of interesting answers.

One caveat: some idioms may seem really smart and/or terse, but others may have trouble understanding such code at at glance.

</comment><comment><USER8> Was hoping for some of C#'s more interesting features. Bit shifting isn't really anything to do with C#, any C programmer will know about it.

</comment><comment><USER9> In 2012, using bit shifting in your code for multiplication or division by powers of 2 is a bad idea. It makes the intent of your code less obvious and it's not always safe (think 2's complement negative numbers). The compiler or the JITter will make this optimization for you when it's appropriate.</comment>


Ask HN: What will be consequences if Ymail is shut down permanently? - <AUTHOR> This is just a hypothetical question which popped up in my mind when I was using an yahoo email to authenticate a service and suddenly remembered yahoo is getting sold. what happens if the buyer decides to shut it down. <comment><USER2> See why proprietary oAuth is actually not the best idea ether?

I remember years ago i hosted my own auth server, and many websites actually let you put in your own "auth uri". Was that oauth as well? What happened with this?

<comment><AUTHOR> I am not even talking of oAuth yet, was looking at plain email/username - password combination.but yeah oAuth is a big factor too. How do I do a forget password if the email is going to end up in some dead land.</comment></comment>


Welcome PyT. Python DSL for fast (X)HTML generation - <AUTHOR> http://www.cliws.com/e/OlAcV-_fd_EJMOf55HZ6Mg/

<comment><USER2> experience tells me the closer you stay to html the better. ZenCoding + LESS should sufficiently lower code generation. Abstraction layers over html tend to introduce a lot of hussle with premise of easier maintainably ( tried haml and many others, hardly added anything to the table)

<comment><USER3> Depends on a) how comfortable you are working with HTML to begin with, b) what functionality you're implementing with your DSL, and c) how many people are working on the project? If you're someone with a lot of Python experience and no HTML experience, and you're doing a solo project, this is a perfectly appropriate.

One other area where abstraction is appropriate is form generation. I've used Django a lot and recently Clojure+Noir a bit, and in both of those I've ended up using an abstraction for all the form code (Django forms in the former, Hiccup+helpers in the latter). In the Clojure project I was even working with someone knew HTML and not Clojure, so most of the site is rendered using Mustache templates, but I ended up rewriting all the forms in Hiccup because it's just easier to work with.

All that said, you seem like someone that might like Enlive (<https://github.com/cgrand/enlive>). I'm not sure if equivalents exist in other languages, but the gist of using it for templating is that you write a plain HTML file, and run the text through Enlive along with some transforms (identified by CSS-style selectors). I've never used it for anything major, but other people have, and it seems really cool.

<comment><USER2> a)if you are not, you should get or let someone else do it b)right, this fits nice with forms... forms are not purely html issue, but a whole another layer of serverside complexity underneath...(escapes, xss, tokens) c)argument against imo, if more people have to work on something more I am eager to use something common, standard...

Enlive is kind of like haml from what I see. For me its right on the border, I like it, I see the benefits but you have to take some leap and believe you wont hit the pit.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I like his advice:

"""You probably know this feeling when you think that code is not ready for public release yet and you need to implement at least 50% of your huge todo.txt to make it good enough.

Today in the morning news on TV was said that we all need to finish postponed stuff because Mayan 'End of Time' is too close to postpone again. I said: "Well, if even Maya need this, I will release today". """

</comment><comment><USER5> You shouldn't worry about the word ending, at least not according to a NASA's scientists [1].

Either way, thanks for releasing your code. I'll check it out later. I love reading python.

[1] [http://news.cnet.com/8301-17938_105-57556172-1/nasa-there- wi...](http://news.cnet.com/8301-17938_105-57556172-1/nasa-there-will-be-a- year-2013-so-plan-accordingly/)

</comment><comment><USER6> i see certain similarities to nevow stan (created about 10 years ago by my calculation). anybody care to point out the differences?

[http://code.activestate.com/recipes/286210-very-basic- exampl...](http://code.activestate.com/recipes/286210-very-basic-example-of- nevow-capabilities/)</comment>


Tide turns for Polish émigrés, lured home by booming economy - <AUTHOR> https://archive.ph/WFzm2 <comment><USER2> I loved living in Warsaw. I have been trying to get back there for some time now but things just keep falling apart. Because of my health and associated losses I jut cannot do it alone or normally, and there is zero chance applying for asylum would be successful. I know to many Poles that sounds absurd. It wasn't paradise, the grass wasn't really "greener", it was just home to me in a way I cannot explain and my heart and those I loved were left there. Instead I end in rural American hell...which is just the perfectly wrong place.</comment>