Hofstadter “discussion” thread number seven

[Don Stockbauer]

I’m also finding out that there are days where it looks very clear, no clouds, and it seems like there should be a shadow wedge towards the east at sunset but there isn’t, there have been days where there’s been clouds or slightly hazy and I can understand that but even like last evening it’s been very clear , no shadow wedge, so I don’t know what’s going on with that.

[Don Stockbauer]

Anyone in the future who is wondering what those three white petrified tree stumps are around the house here in Victoria, Texas , they were obtained at a spot some 20 miles northeast of Tilden, Texas by my brother Fred and I , we got them on a rock hounding expedition in the early 60s, they’re low-grade opal.

[Don Stockbauer]

What would be your best plan if someone suddenly gave you everything in the Universe? probably what you’d want to do is just leave everything in place and declare your dominion over it.

[Don Stockbauer]

Shadow wedge measurement April 15, 2018 by Don Stockbauer, the shadow was
1° up at 7:53 CST
2° up at 7:55
3° up at 7:57
4° up at 7:59
5° up at 8:01
6° up at 8:04
Sunset according to heavens-above was at 7:54. This shows that at sunset the wedge was already up 2° in the east . for the wedge to go from 2° up to 6° took nine minutes , the sun set by 2.25° in that length of time. This is what I suspected, the shadow wedge is rising faster than the amount the sun is setting. If you check it out geometrically you can draw a tangent line to a circle through yourself , that represents the horizon, when the sun is down 1° that projects to 1° high wedge opposite the sun and so on for the sun getting lower. In any case any feedback is welcome .I know there is zero feedback to this group , every now and then it gets some spam ,so maybe I’ll run across the explanation someday , have a nice day.

[Don Stockbauer]

So perhaps the shadow wedge being higher in altitude than the sun is below the horizon has to do with atmospheric refraction. That doesn’t make sense because the atmosphere bends the sun’s light concave toward the observer and it would make the shadow wedge have smaller values in altitude than the sun’s distance below the horizon. The mystery deepens. Be the first person to provide feedback to this group and feel proud of yourself.

[Don Stockbauer]

I think I have an answer to the shadow wedge problem. No thanks to anyone out there. what happens is like when the sun is 2° down the observer is in the shadow wedge and he or she is looking up at the edge of it. by looking up it gives a greater angle than the 2° the sun is down.

[Don Stockbauer]

Well thinking about it the observer is not actually in the shadow wedge it goes above his or her head but still the observer is looking up at it increasing the angle.

[Don Stockbauer]

If someone gets a lot of mail should you write to them to discuss the matter? Should they make appeals to the public for ways to reduce their mail load?

[Don Stockbauer]

Well, hurricane Harvey almost destroyed my trailer house left one room I can patch up and can use for storage, the Victoria County Appraisal office said I’ll have to pay six dollars a year property taxes on it so I guess that one room being used for storage would make that worthwhile.

[Don Stockbauer]

Tools are what humans use to instantiate their free will.

[Don Stockbauer]

Is the mind just another tool? If the mind is just another tool, what entity is using it?

[Don Stockbauer]

When a bunch of biological cells undergo metasystem transition to become a human of course you
get emergence and transcendence which is where you get such things as the mind and free will. Ya think?

[Don Stockbauer]

Well, mowing around the house trying to keep the grass purse from going to seed.

Isn’t dictation software wonderful?

[Don Stockbauer]

Is the price of fame an infinite amount of messages one must deal with?

[Don Stockbauer]

Is the price of us having complete knowledge of the universe having to put up with such nuisances as the Epimenides paradox? Kind of like grassburrs in a nice field of bluebonnets.

[Don Stockbauer]

Actually, the observer IS in the shadow wedge. Shadow wedge waffle (SWW) number 13,362.

[Don Stockbauer]

The games played utilizing language are infinitely deep.

[Don Stockbauer]

Thomas Munnecke's, Riverside, Ca., letter to Scientific American,
August, 1981.

Sirs,

I am happy to see that there has been no response to Dr.
Hofstadter's column on self-reference ["Letters," SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN,
May]. Those who look at self-reference perch themselves precariously
on Ockham's Razor, tottering between hopeless confusion and fantastic
insight. One might as well open a dictionary and find, "recursion:
see recursion." He who is able to see recursion gains fresh insight
into it.

I am reminded of a conversation between an ancient philosopher,
Hee Hoo (whose epitaph reads , "Who is buried in Hoo's tomb?), and W.
V. Hee:

Hoo: What is a question that is also its own answer?

Hee: Why not, "Why not?"?

Hoo: "Why not?"? Why not!

[Don Stockbauer]

“Don’t let me stop your great self-destruction.
Die if you want to, you misguided martyr.
I wash my hands of your demolition.
Die if you want to, you innocent puppet.”

[Don Stockbauer]

One area where one person has infinite power over another person is to deny them communication.

[Don Stockbauer]

Be careful about griping at people, for you’ll very probably have one ten times worse thrown back in your face.

[Don Stockbauer]

All the interaction currently on the Internet was here previously in another form.

[Don Stockbauer]

Is there a decision procedure to determine whether an email is substantive?

[Don Stockbauer]

You know, if you make a tool you ought to use it; who would make a hammer and never use it for anything? That should be the same for nuclear weapons. If you’re going to make them, use them. I mean a lot of time and expense went making them, we need to get some payback for our money invested so maybe the World situation needs to be destabilized somehow and Trump and Putin could have at each other and we can get our money’s worth out of them.

[Don Stockbauer]

If anyone in the future is wondering what all those approximately 8 inch diameter white rocks are around our house near Victoria from what I can remember they were ore being hauled to Alcoa near Pt. Lavaca and there was a train wreck somewhere in the vicinity of Nursery, Texas and Mom and I picked up a bunch of them. Either ore or just white rocks.

[Don Stockbauer]

Why is the shadow wedge 2° high in the east when the sun is just setting in the west? It seems to me it should be zero , just starting to form. I don’t think you can explain it by the horizon being depressed by that much because that isn’t nearly enough.

[Don Stockbauer]

It’s humanity at its lowest when someone decides to never speak to you again.

[Don Stockbauer]

We will have achieved true AI when dictation software reproduces exactly what you said and meant , particularly meant.

[Don Stockbauer]

So a 2° shadow wedge is in the east when the sun is exactly setting in the west when it seems that it should be zero degrees; one idea is when you have the situation of sunlight going from the sun through you to your eastern horizon that is the longest path sunlight can make through the atmosphere . Then as you go up from 0° to 1° and then 2° the sunlight is making progressively a shorter and shorter path through the atmosphere , so when you’re at 2° you’re back to normal sky. Comments are welcome, but let’s not set any dangerous new precedents.

[Don Stockbauer]

Is there any difference between making all these posts to alt.fan.hofstadter or not making them?

[Don Stockbauer]

Isn’t it infuriating when you write to somebody and they don’t write back.

[Don Stockbauer]

Is anything worn under the kilt?

[Don Stockbauer]

It’s a wonderful day in the neighborhood,
It’s a wonderful day for a neighbor.
Would you be mine?

[Don Stockbauer]

If you don’t ever do anything you can never make a mistake. Except one. That of not doing anything.

[Don Stockbauer]

Have you ever wanted to write to someone but you just couldn’t figure out what to say?

[Don Stockbauer]

What prevents us from seeing our civilization advancing at lightning speed? The fact that a rising tide raises all boats.

[Don Stockbauer]

Our technology could create a paradise for us, but we’d all still gripe about things.

[Don Stockbauer]

How fast can our planet self-organize into a single living organism?

Ever shake a super-saturated solution?

[Don Stockbauer]

I’m thinking along the line of AIs will never achieve any kind of greatness , certainly not greater than humans , because your strongest system is a symbiosis of humans and AIs. You don’t get a strong system with either humans alone or machines alone . I think that no matter how advanced civilization gets AIs will always just be our tools; very sophisticated tools, but just tools nonetheless.

[Don Stockbauer]

What will be the emergent properties of the Earth as it undergoes metasystem transition into a unified living being?

[Don Stockbauer]

Isn’t it embarrassing, talking to oneself?

[Don Stockbauer]

What determines if someone answers you?

[Don Stockbauer]

How many sentences are possible?

[Don Stockbauer]

Well I just think that our ability to communicate all around the globe instantly is a game changer in ways people can’t even realize , it’s like going from a bunch of free swimming bacteria in the ocean to a unified entity such as a whale or tree. It’s all so complex that no one person has any remote chance of understanding it; it would be like a single nerve cell in your brain trying to understand your entire mind and all its complexities.

[Don Stockbauer]

Beautiful shadow wedge tonight.

[Don Stockbauer]

Human conversation is the most complex game there is. You take turns, you make moves, you’re out to win the game called “I’m smarter than you.”

[Don Stockbauer]

Did you know that if you look at the format of humans messaging each other, that is , you get a message and you can delete it , you can archive it , you can respond to it, so forth and so on , all that has the same format as an artificial neural network so it turns the communication system of the earth into a neural network which means that instantiates the global brain . that and $.10 will get you a cup of coffee.

[Don Stockbauer]

Has the price of coffee gone up due to Starbucks?

[Don Stockbauer]

Have you ever noticed how two of Arthur C Clarke‘s laws say the same thing? the one about the elderly professor and the one about pushing past the limits of the possible say essentially the same thing. so really he just has two laws. actually the third law about any sufficiently Advanced Technology is indistinguishable from magic has the same flavor because he is saying technology can drive us to nearly infinite heights.

[Don Stockbauer]

Sorry for all the chatty debate in this user group . I know it gets a little irritating at times . maybe I should just spout out my opinions instead

[Don Stockbauer]

Does persistence always pay off ?what if somebody believes that 2+2 is 5 and they try to convince everybody of that. Like trying to convince people of the global brain. is this persistence useful?

[Don Stockbauer]

“Fantastic insight into the true nature of reality is isomorphic to insanity.”

Now that means that someone who has fantastic insight into the true nature of reality may be driven insane by all they know and how they think. Analogous to an engine which is revved up too high and the valves float and it no longer runs well. However, the corollary isn’t necessarily true , that insane people are necessarily geniuses. That’s the way I read it anyway . And I should, I came up with it.

[Don Stockbauer]

I’m probably the only student to ever get away with calling his high school principal a son of a bitch. That’s because in baseball I can almost never hit to anywhere but right field . We were playing a game , the principal was attending and he said “for this person only if he hits to right field he’s out.” sure enough I hit to right field and he said you’re out. I said you son of a bitch. of course he was indignant, he said Stockbauer come into a classroom with me. he asked me Don, is there something wrong , please tell me about it . I said yeah , there’s something wrong , what you did wasn’t fair and he let me go unpunished.

[Don Stockbauer]

One time when I was hiking I tried to get to the lowest point in North America in Death Valley National park to see what kind of marker they have there. The trouble was a few miles from the goal I bogged down in mud and had to go back. They must have had a lot of rain .

[Don Stockbauer]

I once hiked the bright angel trail in the Grand Canyon from rim to river and back in one day . they tell you not to do that but they also say take twice as long to come back up as it took to go down . so I got up at 5 AM , was at the river at 10 and was back on the rim at eight . all I can say about it is I sure wish I could do that today at 65.

[Don Stockbauer]

I can remember Bertrand Russell telling me of a horrible dream. He was in the top floor of the University Library, about A.D. 2100. A library assistant was going round the shelves carrying an enormous bucket, taking down books, glancing at them, restoring them to the shelves or dumping them into the bucket. At last he came to three large volumes which Russell could recognize as the last surviving copy of Principia Mathematica. He took down one of the volumes, turned over a few pages, seemed puzzled for a moment by the curious symbolism, closed the volume, balanced it in his hand and hesitated....
Hardy, G. H. (2004) [1940]. A Mathematician's Apology. Cambridge: University Press. p. 83. ISBN 978-0-521-42706-7.

********

Ahh, throw them away; it wouldn’t affect how the real world works.

[Don Stockbauer]

Throwing away the printed copy will only deprive money from rare book sellers. With all the copies of it online , thousands of them, there’s no chance of the information being lost. Unless WW III is accomplished.

[Don Stockbauer]

All those ICBMs that both the United States and Russia have. Are they still operational? Has the entire system been defused? How will the public ever know? It’s all top-secret. Another paradox to add to our collection. The penalty for having all knowledge of the Universe is to have to put up with such nuisances as the Epimenides paradox.

[Don Stockbauer]

If Christ and the Antichrist meet and shake hands, will they both go up in a huge nuclear explosion?

[Don Stockbauer]

Don’t Democrats and Republicans cancel each other out, and nothing is accomplished?
Wouldn’t it be better to have leaderless, decentralized cybernetic socialism so that a collective intelligence can settle in?

[Don Stockbauer]

Life’s a bitch, and then you die. And achieve blessed eternal nothingness (BEN).

[Don Stockbauer]

Having Experian do a dark web scan for you is about like having them generate a list for you of all the criminals in your city.

[Don Stockbauer]

I’d love to change the world,
But I don’t know what to do.
So I leave it up to you.

[Don Stockbauer]

“Say, you’re an expert on the subject of gerbils. Why do gerbils have webbed feet?”

“Oh, I could directly tell you, but instead I’m going to refer you to my 8,582 page book “Gerbils R Us”.

“Gee, thanks, see you in about a week.”

[Don Stockbauer]

Looks like we’re in for a lot of rain according to the forecast here in Victoria Texas this coming Sunday evening to Monday , they seem fairly sure of this . I have always understood that you can’t predict the weather more than five days ahead .guess we’ll see.

[Don Stockbauer]

This post no information.

[Don Stockbauer]

This X no Y.

[Don Stockbauer]

Doesn’t mean that much to me, to mean that much to you.

[Don Stockbauer]

There’s a universe of things to do out there. how will you determine what to do next? I’m sure you’ll think of something. You have free will.

[Don Stockbauer]

Today President Trump said that a country without borders is not a country.

Isn’t that exactly what we want?

Imagine there's no countries
It isn't hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion too

- Imagine, John Lennon

Isn’t that what the Global Brain is? A world without borders or countries?