# 10

[Don Stockbauer]

And I called up the captain
I said bring me my wine.
they said we haven't had that Spirit here
since the Apollo 11 moon landing.

[Don Stockbauer]

Logic will get you from A to B. Imagination will get you anywhere.

- Einstein

The only trouble is when you get to someplace by imagination it might not be real or desirable.

[Don Stockbauer]

When I was in high school (St. Joseph high school, Victoria Texas) I left my complete set of fingerprints in one of the library books. So I can never commit a crime; the fingerprints are right there!

[Don Stockbauer]

The only time I've been fingerprinted tomorrow knowledge was that Johnson space Center, Houston I remember that they came out really blurry I wonder if there any good like you know windows fingerprint databases if they would even get a hand if they fit in my my fingerprints
Sorry about some of the main garbled but you see i use this iPhone dictatoon software and it is really the bottom feeder of dictation software is getting words wrong right and left.

[Don Stockbauer]

Follow me,
Don't follow me.
I've got my spine, I've got my Orange Crush.

[Don Stockbauer]

If someone receives googolplex emails a day, don't send them an email.

unless it's really important and then only once a month.

because you take a chance that they might block you and lose their warm feelings for you

you need to be especially careful about making appeals to the public for ideas on how to reduce your email load.

The penalty for humanity obtaining all knowledge or at least all knowledge within a subset of all knowledge is to have to put up with such nuisances as the Epimenides paradox.

See it might be a little hard for us to obtain all knowledge. what if we want to know about a planet orbiting a star on the other side of the cosmological event horizon . that might be a little difficult. but I'm sure we can manage it if we just try . what if we want to go beyond obtaining knowledge to actually doing things. can we make our galaxy spin in the opposite direction from which it is spinning now? well you know if you can think it you can do it. Also if you can come up with trite little sayings that everybody believes in you can publish a book and make money.

[Don Stockbauer]

Being humble is a virtue.

[Don Stockbauer]

Begindid - something that begins and ends at the same time.

[Don Stockbauer]

So if something begins and ends at the same time , did it exist?

[Don Stockbauer]

You are but a neuron of the global brain. how much can one neuron know of the mind it helps to form?

[Don Stockbauer]

Love is like oxygen,
you get too much you get too high,
not enough and you're gonna die.

[Don Stockbauer]

If a couple has severe financial difficulties, can they stay married?

[Don Stockbauer]

If you send a bunch of emails to someone, does that make them your friend?

[Don Stockbauer]

As I ransack their home they want to shake my hand.

[Don Stockbauer]

When I was a child we had a fish store close to our house , when you went through the door it rang a doorbell in the owner's house next to it so that she wouldn't have to watch the fish store all the time. I thought that was a great example of cybernetics. An even simpler case was my grandmother had a string running up to her light fixture on the ceiling of her bedroom which she could operate remotely from her bed.

One of my favorite cartoons shows the Tin Man driving a tractor.

[Don Stockbauer]

My father thought of a great way to produce antigravity . what you do you get an object the mass of the Earth and you hold it over the object you want to hover on the opposite side from the real Earth.

What the hell do you expect? He was an auto mechanic.

[Don Stockbauer]

The radius of the object needs to be one earth radius, if it's a lot smaller then the lifting force is much greater than one gee and the object would just go upwards and crash into it.

[Don Stockbauer]

Kid can't read at 17.
The words he knows are all obscene.

[Don Stockbauer]

When the moon is in the Seventh House
And Jupiter aligns with Mars
Then peace will guide the planets
And love will steer the stars
This is the dawning of the age of Aquarius
Age of Aquarius

[Don Stockbauer]

If someone abandons you, should you make some effort to get them back or should you just wave bye-bye?

[Don Stockbauer]

Is this a sketchbook?

[Don Stockbauer]

Don't let me stop,
your great self-destruction.
Die if you want to,
You missguided martyr.
I wash my hands,
Of your demolition.
Die if you want to,
you innocent puppet.

[Don Stockbauer]

Cold hearted orb that rules the night,
Removes the colors from our sight,
Red is gray and yellow white,
But we decide which is right,
And which is an allusion.

[Don Stockbauer]

cs/allusion/illusion/

I have to do that because I don't know how to change usenet posts once they're posted , if they can be changed.

[Don Stockbauer]

Don: "Can you ever be too happy?"

My father, the philosopher: "yes you can be too happy, then you might be mistaken for drunk and get arrested."

What do you expect, he was just an auto mechanic?

[Don Stockbauer]

"Captain Zargo , why did Earth's civilization die?"

"well, the best we can figure out is it got in some kind of runaway technological advancement loop and it blew up like a hydrogen bomb."

[Don Stockbauer]

Yes, he is insane, and unfortunately he had to latch onto a body of knowledge with immense power.

[Don Stockbauer]

I started thinking about it and at first I thought a loop would prevent it from being a runaway situation but not necessarily since each iteration of the loop could bring you to a point higher than you were before.

[Don Stockbauer]

do you think that the only way to get an intelligent AI would be for it to have a brain equivalent to that of a human and also it would need to be trained like a human for 20 or so years?

[Don Stockbauer]

Is it ever worth it to write an email to a university professor because assuredly just a grad student is going to read it.

[Don Stockbauer]

Do you think that university professors should spend some time out in the real world to help with their thinking?

[Don Stockbauer]

Anthony in the story "It's a Good Life": do you think that he was more powerful than God?

[Don Stockbauer]

Can one person make a difference anymore?

[Don Stockbauer]

Do you think that life on this planet has become so complex that no one can handle it anymore?

[Don Stockbauer]

So we're going to have super intelligent machines, or AIs. But who's going to build all this?
Who's in control? The answer is human culture. And we'll have some mighty powerful tools.

[Don Stockbauer]

You reached for the secret too soon, you tried for the moon,
Shine on you crazy diamond.

[Don Stockbauer]

I wonder if a sufficiently advanced civilization would use money or not?

[Don Stockbauer]

Have you ever communicated with someone and it was so good it left a warm feeling in your heart?

[Don Stockbauer]

How can you possibly detect when the federal government has shut down???

[Don Stockbauer]

And the time will come when you see we're all one and life flows on within you and without you.

[Don Stockbauer]

Douglas related how when he was young he stared at three threes for a long time imprinting his brain with the self reference concept. The only thing I did close to that was we had a windmill weight which I still have which has the number four on it and when I was four years old I stared at it for a long time marveling that that was my age.

[Don Stockbauer]

If someone creates something , like a screenplay, does that make them the Creator?

[Don Stockbauer]

I once pondered what humans would be like had we never developed language. but actually we have
that. it occurs when people throw away old friends and just throw other people away in general , they're not using language anymore with them.

[Don Stockbauer]

All human interaction has the form of a game.

- Berme

[Don Stockbauer]

Did you need to die like that , was that a mistake or
did you know your messy death would be a record breaker?

Greater love than this no man hath, than to stay alive iand help out his friends.

[Don Stockbauer]

It's the end of the world as we know it,
it's the end of the world as we know it,
It's the end of the world as we know it
and I feel fine.

Now what does that mean? well it probably doesn't mean the end of humanity or the earth itself. it probably just means that it's the end of the old ways of looking at things. might that have something to do with the instantiation of the Global Brain, mayhaps?

[Don Stockbauer]

Life's a bitch, and then you die.

[Don Stockbauer]

When we used to go out to my uncle Alberts he had a telescope there which was so good it could tell time . now what does that mean? It meant that if you used it to look at the courthouse clocks 5 miles away you could tell time.

[Don Stockbauer]

Kind of hard to have a family isn't it if you have no money.

[Don Stockbauer]

Life's a dance you learn as you go
sometimes you lead sometimes you follow
don't worry about what you don't know
life's a dance you learn as you go

[Don Stockbauer]

This is the way the world ends, not with a bang but a whimsy.

[Don Stockbauer]

Have you ever carried on a long correspondence with a college or university professor and then afterwords wondered if you were only talking to grad students?

[Don Stockbauer]

Is Hofstadter related to Bourbaki?

[Don Stockbauer]

Is there some way we could use all those ICBMs to the benefit of Humanity?

[Don Stockbauer]

(Your witty comment here).

[Don Stockbauer]

Consider this:

[Don Stockbauer]

Go sit in the corner of a circular room.

[Don Stockbauer]

Don't write to someone too often. They'll hate you forever.

[Don Stockbauer]

So if the global brain has neurons the caliber of Hofstadter and there are 7 billion neurons in the global brain, don't you think it would be pretty advanced creature?

[Don Stockbauer]

Do you think it's possible to have World War III at this late stage in the development of the Global Brain?

[Don Stockbauer]

What's puzzling you is the nature of my game.

[Don Stockbauer]

Machines will have a lot of fun trying to overthrow human culture.

[Don Stockbauer]

In the who's rock opera Tommy Tommy has a form of autism brought on by early childhood trauma nothing seems able to bring him out of it except when he stares at his own image in a mirror which frees him . so what is staring at one's own image in a mirror ? why , it's self reference of course and who is the expert on self reference ? you guessed it!!!!!

[Don Stockbauer]

In GEB Douglas talks about Improvising fugues. he says improvising a six part fugue would be as difficult as a person playing 60 games of blindfolded chess against 60 opponents and winning them all . he says improvising an eight part fugue is beyond human capability . now think of how many people have 60 friends . playing a game of chess is vanishingly simple compared to maintaining a human relationship . yet many humans are able to maintain a relationship with 60 friends which would be much harder than playing blindfolded chess against them. So perhaps one person improvising an eight part fugue would not be beyond human capability and of course when you have resources available use them , appeal to the global brain.

[Don Stockbauer]

Perhaps all the previous post illustrates is the fact that the game of chess is much simpler than the game of life.

[Don Stockbauer]

Suppose you're all set up to observe a very rare transit of Venus and then a total eclipse of the Sun comes along and ruins it for you. As an exercise to the reader calculate when this will next happen.

[Don Stockbauer]

The Donner party wound up in their situation where they resorted to cannibalism because they were sold a map which was not true, so fake news never hurts anybody, does it?

[Don Stockbauer]

If you are on the moon during a total lunar eclipse and you look back at the Earth you'll see brilliant ring of light all the way around the Earth. that light has travelled from the sun , it reaches the earth tangentially to its surface and forms the ring and then goes on to the Moon. if you are at the point of it being tangent on Earth you'll see the sun on the earth's horizon. if the sun is on the horizon that's a sunrise or sunset .for half of that ring you're looking at sunsets , the other half sunrises.

[Don Stockbauer]

Some of that was pretty self-obvious, wasn't it?
What was I talking about ? it was my immediate previous post . when Google groups was adapted for the iPhone they did a pathetic job of quoting, reference and everything, Plus their dictation software is worse than pathetic , which I'm using right now; is that self reference?it is one of the most important concepts in the universe, yes?

[Don Stockbauer]

All in all you're just another brick system helping to form the wall metasystem via metasystem transition.

[Don Stockbauer]

For a really neat explanation of how all human interactions and possibly all interactions in the entire universe have the form of a game , see Eric Berne's book "Games People Play."

[Don Stockbauer]

And the time will come when you see we're all one and life flows on within you and without you.

[Don Stockbauer]

There was a BC comic strip, BC has his little raft , he puts a message on it which says "Did you people go extinct or are you just not communicating with me anymore?" So he puts the note on his raft and sets it out to sea toward the horizon, the other people are beyond the horizon, and he waits a day , two days , a week , a month, a year,
10 years.

[Don Stockbauer]

The Game of Life:

1. Make moves (exchange information).

2. Take turns.

3. Achieve bragging rights (I'm more intelligent than you are).

[Don Stockbauer]

The way person A has infinite power over person B is when person B desires to communicate with person A and person A is lazy and does nothing.

[Don Stockbauer]

So cyberneticists say that disruption is a good thing ,
keeps society from stagnating . well , is that a middle ground thing , you don't want too much or too little? like World War III: is that too much disruption?

[Don Stockbauer]

Sickness will surely take the mind, where minds don't usually go.
Come on the amazing journey, and learn all you should know.

[Don Stockbauer]

I've wondered how do we know that the ICBM system is still alive and going? Maybe people on both sides cooperated, came to their senses and disarmed it. You wouldn't have to destroy all the rockets and silos and everything , you could just go in and take away key software or key hardware components , it would be like taking the firing pin out of a gun. So how do we know this hasn't been done? I mean the whole system is as highly classified as you can get , who would know one way or the other? Who in the military would even know? This uncertainty is the ultimate paradox , besides the paradox of creating the damn thing to begin with.

[Don Stockbauer]

I wonder if self-organization is going to make the Earth a truly fantastic place to live?

[Don Stockbauer]

Do you think that highly intelligent machines or AIs or whatever the hell you wanna call them can overcome human culture?

[Don Stockbauer]

LSD: better living, through chemistry.

[Don Stockbauer]

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

[Don Stockbauer]

Is Bowman lobotomizing HAL any different in principle than you adjusting the temperature of
your water heater? Is the only difference one of complexity? Or does with the complexity
come emergence?

[Don Stockbauer]

There's a story titled "It's a Good Life" in which the main character Anthony is a child with seemingly Godlike powers. He for instance is able to kill someone and then wish them into the cornfield burying them by pure mental thought . He also made the entire universe disappear beyond the edge of his village. Certainly no one has such power over physical objects but since we live in the age of memes is it possible that someone could have similar powers producing memes which are then distributed by our global communication system which could bring about like changes?

[Don Stockbauer]

All human interaction has the form of a game.

- Berne

to correct error

never have figured out how to correct the text of a usenet post if it can be done.

[Don Stockbauer]

Probably can be done with a better newsreader than Google groups.

[Don Stockbauer]

I was going to say that we've developed a world system where one friend can throw away another friend with no consequences, but then I started thinking of counterexamples , like you throw away your friend and then he or she has a rare blood type and only they could save your life.