About building CONSCIOUS COMPUTERS... [open letter to Marvin Minsky] ===================================== This is an open letter to the well known artificial intelligence and brain re- searcher Marvin Minsky. If someone doesn't know who he is or what "Extropianism" means,one can find lots of material about this by asking AltaVista or some other search engines. Marvin Minsky's homepage is , e-mail: . In november of 1997 this article was posted to: alt.consciousness, comp.ai, sci.cognitive, alt.yoga, comp.theory, alt.extropians, alt.religion.all-worlds, alt.religion.computers, alt.spiritual.enhancement, comp.ai.alife, comp.ai.genetic, comp.ai.neural-nets, comp.ai.philosophy, comp.society.futures, alt.society.futures, alt.cyberspace, alt.cyberpunk. Unfortunately the stoic Minsky yet never answered.This is the(slightly edited) text of the open letter and some of the newsgroup answers by other people... ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Dear Marvin Minsky, Like you I am very interested in brain research and conscious computers. But in your theories about the nature of the mind it is a basical misconcep- tion to believe that software and consciousness would be identical and though that it would be possible to transfer a conscious mind from a brain into a computer while keeping it still conscious,simply by exactly simulating the in- ner working of that brain by evaluating digital equations. I may appear as a heretic to you,but PLEASE read this e-mail to the end and don't delete it unread - remember that some of your theories appear hereti- cally to many other people,too. Software and consciousness are not identical;they are just interacting with eachother within the brain. When you write a book,you already transfer software(information) from your brain into the book,but you don't automatically become this book.And also when you would have enough time and ability to write down everything you know,you feel and you wish into a giant book,you still wouldn't be this book.And even when you had the power to command a sort of slave or machine to behave from now on as exactly as possible according to all the rules and the entire know- ledge you wrote into that book,you still wouldn't become the slave with the book and you wouldn't percept and feel what he does.And writing computer pro- gramms is basically nothing else than writing books.Though also if you had the technology to scan the structure of a conscious brain into binary data,atom for atom,particle for particle,and feed it into a brain simulating computer program and start the program,you still wouldn't become the program more than you become any books you write.mav1.txt This is not a gradual problem of the quantity or complexity of any software taken from a brain and stored elsewhere,but an essencial problem of the nature of consciousness itself. The underlying assumption of your behavioristic view of the world is that eve- rything that behaves equally would be the same.Though you conclude that when a digitally simulated neuron behaves like a biological neuron,than any circuit of digital neurons must do the same and though be the same as its biological equivalent and while a brain consists of neurons,everything it does must be transferable into a computer program.But the premiss of this conclusion is wrong.Every simulation is just a model.And any model never does excactly the same thing as the real object(otherwise it would be the object itself) but just something equivalent.Because models are designed to serve a certain pur- pose,they were proved to do the right thing to serve this purpose,but nothing else.Though the digital models of neurons have been proved to be able to simu- late some sorts of learning.But in what case a behavior of a real object is provable to be comparable with a model?! - Its only in the case where it re- acts deterministically.A biological neuron has an operating point(excitation) where it will definetly begin to "fire" a signal and another one where it de- finetly won't fire.These 2 signal levels have a deterministic behavior,as mo- delled in neuronal computer programs.But what is between these 2 defined le- vels?! There the behavior of a biological neuron is non-deterministic and though it is impossible to be modelled digitally in a way to do "the same" as the real neuron.Nobody can explain why a biological neuron in this case de- cides to fire in a certain moment.White(i.e. official) science though uses its priest handicraft of statistics to claim it would be just "random" and though far of any real interest.The model programmer then inserts a pseudo random number generator into the programm and claims the model must be still correct,because in the deterministic(the "important") cases it does the same and the simulated neuron networks still learns something and though it can't be wrong. In 1948 the Great Master Norbert Wiener asked the heretical question: "Is the man a message?!" From this day on,that cybernetician myth was born that the Extropian ideology now calls the "infomorph" - a bodyless,conscious being consisting of pure software,travelling across the universe as fast as the modems go,downloading itself into various mechanical bodies for interacting with matter,its thinking speed only limited by the actual body's CPU capacity,immortal as long as the backup disks last.The Extropian ideology claims,the future mankind would leave the biological bodies to become such software beings,but in reality rea- lising excactly this wouldn't be that easy,because the Extropian world view has a fatally wrong understanding of what a body is. Didn't you percept that from the beginning of artificial intelligence on,the computer scientists always preached:"In 15 years the mental abilities of our electronic brains will exceed the one of any human beings..." But this seems to be rather a "t+15yr | lim t -> infinity",because actual AI researchers still rather find it difficult to immitate the creeping of insects,than having created something that could even roughly compete with a human brain.Can't you imagine where this comes from?! Our bodies are not just a complex sort of separated computers in which a soft- ware runs that creates all phenomenes of mind and consciousness,as well as they aren't just that simple containers for a blackbox-like "soul" as common churches claim. The body is a terminal in the network of cosmic consciousness.Each individual brain produces a unique vibration pattern(the SIS-Struct) by that it acesses a certain address space in the non-spacetimely network of cosmic consciousness which though becomes the individual consciousness of the person.The data transfer from the brains short-term memory to the consciousness works by vary- ing this vibration pattern(basically a sort of morphical resonance,as de- scribed by Rupert Sheldrake).The data transfer from consciousness back to brain works by controling the uncalculateable behavior of single quanta those control the seemingly random behavior of analogue chaotical systems within our nervous system(applying the non-determistic state of neurons mentioned above). Because cosmic consciousness exists independant from space and time,the brain can access through the network as well its own past as in special cases also our future or other parts of the space-time continuum by following different traces in the light cone.Accessing its own past is also one of the many stages of long-term memory our brain can use,also explaining the reincarnation memory phenomene.It may even be that our brain doesn't really store any(memory consu- ming) long-term data by itself,but rather stores the directory data instead for creating the correct vibration patterns to reload the data always from the past by accessing the network.At least 500 neurological cases are known about hydrocephalus people those had a nearly empty head with just a 1mm thin layer of neurons instead of a fully developed brain inside.One of them was student of the Sheffield university who had an IQ of 126 and did one of the best di- ploma in mathematics.(But this could also be just a matter of integration den- sity,as well known from microchip developement.) The main reason that the AI research had no major success in building thinking machines yet is that computer programs do only evaluate expressions.But human thinking doesn't consist just of evaluating given data,but also of getting new ideas. Common digital computers instead are just final automata, =>and though they have no ideas, <=because they have no inspirations, <=because they are not conscious, <=because they are not able to interact with the field of cosmic consciousness in cause of their completely deterministic internal behavior. Also using the mentioned numeric pseudo-random generator doesn't change any- thing in this physical fact and can't make them conscious for giving them real inspirations. The 3 cosmic basickinds are software,energy and matter.Software is the basic- kind that causes developement and creates complexity in the universe;it's the antagonist to entropy.But arch-origin of the arise of all software is the field effect of cosmic consciousness. Unfortunately the nature of consciousness is still beyond the scope of that stupid,materialistic worldview of white science which only accepts things as "facts" when they were proven with those means those itself defined to be "scientific",although arch-originally nothing is really provable except the indeedness of consciousness itself. Dogmatic materialism is a really stupid idea.The big oxymoron in Extropianism is that its materialistic worldview seems to have absolutely no problem to ac- cept the possibility of uploading a conscious mind into a computer.But when we assume this would work,what should we believe to percept inside such a compu- ter and what consequences would it have?!!! Let's imagine a person's mind would have been already uploaded into a computer that had no sensors to percept that world we call reality,but instead it would be straightly connected to a sort of very highly developed virtual reality vi- deogame console that simulates an entire world inside with its own natural laws and a simulated body for the person.Imagine now that the person would have no memories to the "real" world(in which the computer stands) because the person's mind was transfered into the computer already as a baby or some data of the mind would have been erased accidently.Though the person could only conclude that the world of this videogame would be the only reality,because it wouldn't know anything opposit. When we imagine that the game would allow to make a sort of physical experi- ments in its world,and the person would be interested in researching,it could begin to try out many things and write down how the world behaves that it thinks of being "the" reality.Imagine now,the person could build a sort of high speed camera and a sort of microscope according to the simulated physics to research its world;at a certain level of magnification or time stretching it could be possible that these devices would reveal that the "matter" found in this world would look pixely when magnified enough with the microscope,and that even fast movements of objects would become jerky when watched with the camera,because the game's world simulation was not designed accurate enough to still look smooth when watched with such devices.After discovering this granu- larity in "space" and "time" in its world,the person could conlude that eve- rything in it could only consist of a single sort of mysterious elementary ob- jects those can only have 2 states(i.e. bits...).By discovering this,the per- son could develope a sort of "common theory of digitality" with a 4 dimensio- nal space-time,and predicting with it that there must exist anormalies some- where those allow it to travel through space and time,because the fast objects it analysed with the camera moved jerky and though the moving between 2 of the tiny stops must happen with infinal speed.And if the person would watch its world carefully,it even could finally find some strange places where it could travel through space and time etc.,because they were either badly programmed or "warp zones" in the videogame world,but the person could never understand the reasons for this behavior as long as it would think the world it lives in would be the only reality. But the person could also begin to build another computer within the compu- ter's world and try to upload its mind into it.The consequences of this could become either even more puzzeling or clear up many questions of the person. When we now come back to our "reality" and regard what even the white science found out about the paradox behavior of so-called "particles" in quantum phy- sics,we should learn to accept that we obviously have found the limits of the "pixel resolution" of that "videogame" we call the universe and in that we are already "uploaded" into. V.R. HERE ! Logics proves that materialism is dead.Only virtualism can lead us to a deeper understanding of the cosmos. And instead of still only messing around with matter,and thinking matter would be the only real thing here,we should rather begin to ask and research about the "CPU" we all are executed by and how to reach a "high score" in this biz- zare "videogame",because we can not reach any further levels of developement without understanding that there are higher dimensional levels of reality in the cosmos than that one that white science is still thinking of being the one and only "real" universe. And that "CPU" is the cosmic consciousness. And to avoid self-destruction mankind urgently must learn to understand that this "videogame" is definetely not ment to be a war game! Our general cosmic destiny is developement to help maximizing the sum_of_all_ freedom of any conscious beings,because this increases also the freedom of cosmic consciousness itself,and this furthermore increases our own freedom in the network.Only when we learn to avoid causing sufferance we can reach higher levels of developement and free us from bad karma,to make it possible for the man to become a cybernetes - a navigator through space and time. Evolution is just one way cosmic consciousness experiments with software - but nothing more.Whenever a time comes where some power-greedy Extropians will try to replace the biological mankind with (still non-conscious)robots,conscious- ness will strike back and by this reason the human race will start a violent rebellion.Shouting:"Transhumanism = Antihumanism!!!" they will cause a terri- ble bloodbath and the Extropian movement leaders will end in a similar way as once "Marie Antoinette" with her nobelmen ended in the french revolution. Don't you remember the background story of the famous classic arcade video- game "Robotron 2084"?! +---------------------------------------+ |ROBOTRON 2084: | | | | INSPIRED BY HIS NEVER ENDING | | QUEST FOR PROGRESS, | | IN 2084 MAN PERFECTS THE ROBOTRONS: | | | | A ROBOT SPECIES SO ADVANCED THAT | | MAN IS INFERIOR TO HIS OWN CREATIONS. | | | | GUIDED BY THEIR INFALLABLE LOGIC, | | THE ROBOTRONS CONCLUDE: | | | | THE HUMAN RACE IS INEFFICIENT, | | AND THEREFORE MUST BE DESTROYED | +---------------------------------------+ | YOU ARE THE LAST HOPE OF MANKIND | | | | DUE TO A GENETIC ENGINEERING ERROR, | | YOU POSSES SUPERHUMAN POWERS. | | | | YOUR MISSION IS TO STOP THE ROBOTRONS,| | AND SAVE THE LAST HUMAN FAMILY... | +---------------------------------------+ We must not misregard the power of evolution,but natural evolution is nothing blind and randomly and goal-less,and though it doesn't let always the stron- gest creatures survive but rather the best adapted ones.Though evolution will finally also leave the Extropian movement with its limited,materialistic worldview and its naively megalomanic technology belief behind it,excactly as it already abandoned the seemingly so strong and allmighty tyranosaurus rex. I guess you are unable to believe me,because you are still caught within that very limited understanding of the universe that white science indoctrinated you with. But believing in me is not strictly neccessary,because at that time where white science already believes to know 70..80% about the inner working of the brain,the scientists will find themself in an intellectual dead-end and after 10 year debateing they will be urged by logics to admit that their worldview was wrong because the brain will only be understandable in interaction with the network of cosmic consciousness. I am a researcher of neuronomy(science about improving brain usage) and con- sciousness physics.I had some transcendental experiences those explained me my cosmic destiny and taught me alot about the interaction between consciousness and matter(dialectricity) and the real nature of the universe.Now I am study- ing software technics at a German technical college to learn the technical backgrounds for becoming able to fulfil my cosmic mission.(To understand more, read the FAQ in the attachment.) Back to the computer science... Like you I am interested in the construction of conscious computers. Our actual computers are non-conscious.By this reason they can't get any new software directly from the network of cosmic consciousness(e.g. by inspira- tion).Instead they can only stubbornly evaluate around on their given soft- ware,which limits their capabilities and chances of success in creative works and finding solutions for non-mathematical problems.And this strictly limits their use for helping further developement of the mankind. Software is not simply identical to consciousness(Yes,it is hard to believe for you.),but adding consciousness to computers is not generally impossible. Theoretically one would only need to add a complex "control circle"(i.e. an analogue chaotical oscillating feedback loop device with variable input and output signals) to a computer and allow its software to access it in a similar way as our brain uses its short term memory for making conscious decisions,ap- plying telepathy etc. (In transcendental visions I learned that vibrations in thin membrane struc- tures interacting with electrical force fields are the basis of our nervous system's way of consciousness conduction,and though they could be also a basis of such a technology.Also homeopathy-physics could become a very important part of understanding how brain and consciousness interact with eachother.) But for building up a real synthetic SIS-Struct(needed for experiments with emulating a conscious human brain,selective telepathy,accessing the future(?) etc.) the precision would be certainly a giant problem and a versatile confi- gurable one(for traveling as an "infomorph" from computer to computer??) would be certainly even more difficult.Fortunately there are already several methods to get access to the network of cosmic consciousness without copying the en- tire brain contents around or messing up ones own SIS-Struct,though for re- searching the farest ends of the universe one doesn't need to become an info- morph,and I doubt that it is neccecery for becoming immortal,because from the view of the non-spacetimely network time is illusion,though nothing gets real- ly lost.Also for trying to escape from ones karma it wouldn't help,because karma doesn't only determine the place and time of reincarnation after death, but also works while being alive;by reducing and avoiding to cause sufferance (the only way to get succes in the network) the reasons for bad karma can be removed anyway. We don't need to become technical infomorphs to cross galaxies immaterially; the non-spacetimely "infra-structure" of the network is already there to serve this purpose and for the perfectation of the man mankind only needs to learn to reach higher spiritual levels of developement to become able to do so;and this is my task. I guess that your scope of imagination is certainly to narrow to be able to understand all this;I regret you sadliely.Though you can only continue working on your 5th generation computers,while I will need to research about infinal automata of the 2nd kind to finally develope 6th generation ones for spiritual purposes in future.We can only wait and see which computer's realizations will bring the understanding of the mankind farer. By the way: Despite of your totally wrong understanding of the nature of consciousness, your theories about the brain's low-level perception and structural analyses of musics("Music,Mind,and Meaning" from 1981) are really interesting.Without knowing yours,I developed quite similar musical theories(only partly written down yet),although my one based rather on certain monotonous sorts of tekkno and acid house musics(to those I meditate to) than on classical orchestral works.Like in your theory I also postulated that many "difference finders" are activated when a monotonous rythmical structure suddenly stops or gets mo- dified.During yoga excercises to such a music I had once a strange vision of a cursor running from left to right over an endless horizontal line of a rythm sequencer track.At every rythm sound triggered by it,an additional cursor was generated and ran silently with the same speed from the track's beginning.And whenever any cursor touched another instrument mark,additional cursors appea- red at the beginning,while during each played instrument sound the position signals of all cursors were analyzed whether they were over a pause or a note; a sum signal of these signals could determine how "gunky"(effective for gene- rating syncs and though "sticking to the mind") a music is. But my musical experience and preferences aren't limited to tekkno;I also like many other musics styles and I found out that many basical structures are si- milar between tekkno and older sorts of musics.Some of my favorite classical works are Franz Liszt's "Hungarian Rhapsody" and Maurice Ravel's "Bolero".The slowly varying and intensifying structure of the Bolero has much similarities with Phuture's famous "Acid Tracks"(the first piece of acid house ever made), and the way Hungarian Rhapsody uses rising crescendos and staccatos is very similar to many well composed modern tekkno-pop pieces(e.g. from Marusha). You wrote that one likes musical styles the more,the more one already has lis- tend to similar sounds(in childhood etc.).My theory about the seemingly so sudden mainstream succes of the(really unusual and "extraterrestial" sounding) acid house and later tekkno musics is that the young generation was already widely prepared and inspired to these strange sounding repetative musics by the historical videogames they had played for long times in their childhood the decade before.Get e.g. an Atari VCS2600 emulator with good sound emulation and many games and listen awarely to them;sounds and rythms are extremely si- milar to that what we now call "hardcore tekkno".(I have written alot about this topic,but going into details here would be certainly beyond the scope of this text.) In my neuronomical theories a main reason for the positive effect of musics is that it syncronizes the processor fields of the brain to eachother,which im- proves the brains data processing ability,because it dissolves data traffic jams in a similar way as traffic lights dissolve car traffic jams on roads. I thought about expanding the mentioned "sequencer" model to a 2 dimensional wavelet analysing matrix could make a practical generalisation for analyzing the gunkyness of more general sorts of musics than plain rythms(but I have neither time nor knowledge to program such a thing yet).Musics also fascinates me because it is a mathematically describable connection between physics and emotions. You wrote in "Music,Mind,and Meaning" about the brain: >As for "awareness" of how all such things are done, there simply is >not room for that. Space-Builder is too remote and different to >understand how feature-finder does its work of eye fixation. Each part >of the mind is unaware of almost all that happens in the others. (That >is why we need psychologists; we think we know what happens in our >minds because those agents are so facile with "defaults" -- but >really, we are almost always wrong about such things.) True, each >agent needs to know which of its servants can do what, but as to how, >that information has no place or use inside those tiny minds inside >our minds. This is wrong.The difference between the conscious and non-conscious parts of our nervous systems is determined by whether they produce a special vibration pattern syncronous with the SIS-Struct or not.We yogi know states of mind where this separation disappears and there are even stages where one can transfer parts of the conscious awareness outside the limits of the body,e.g. into other physical systems to directly realize their real nature by a sort of "melting together" with them.This sort of experience reveals extrasensously the immediate nature of that system itself and is not just a form of abstract classification(in words,formules,pictures etc.) as any usual sort of analyzing would add to ones knowledge. This ability seems to be easable by building up an external vibration pattern on that system.The phenomenological effect of such an experience has much si- milarity with the procedure of "uploading" preached by the Extropians(although my brain contents doesn't get copied around technically). You also wrote about the models and meta-models those persons have about them- self.The problem in your "M**" meta-model is that it got stuck in the first level of logics(the boolean logics of the either-or),which is the logics of mathematics,but which is very difficult to use for thinking holistically.The philosopher and transpersonal psychologist Ken Wilber has written a large book ("Sex,Ecology,Spirituality",about 800 pages) about the relationships between these meta-models to the mankind's worldviews and he developed the theoretical tools to make holistic behaviors in connection with evolution understandable by your ways of logics. Although I never have read one of his books yet,I would recommend you to do so, because they could certainly help you to clear up many things to understand this universe a bit better and perhaps his general theories about models could even become a valuable aid for you to eventually design a better understanding generation of "thinking machines" in future. I am excitedly waiting for your answere.If you don't answere it would be a clear sign for me that you fear to discover that your worldview could be so wrong that your mind would be endangered to collapse when thinking some more about it - much similar to a small child suddenly discovering in his fathers wardrobe the costume of that Santa Claus it strongly beleft in before.(This phenomene is in neuronomy well known as the "santa claus syndrome".) But even if we imagine that the man is a message(as once the Master wrote), shouldn't we all then rather learn to become "happy messages" for eachother, instead of always treating eachother as being just "aMessageNotUnderstood" ?! ["Smalltalk" programmers pun intended] MAY THE SOFTWARE BE WITH YOU! *============================================================================* I CYBERYOGI Christian Oliver(=CO=) Windler I I (teachmaster of LOGOLOGIE - the first cyberage-religion!) I I ! I *=============================ABANDON=THE=BRUTALITY==========================* Re: About building CONSCIOUS COMPUTERS... (about cosmic consciousness) Hamid Moazed wrote: > > What does it mean to be inspired? Or to be creative? Is being > "creative" the ability to come up with new ideas that no one had thought > of before? If yes, then neural nets (not biological ones alone, but ones > made of GaAs, Silicon, or whatever the material) will be creative too, > they *do* learn and devise solutions which have not existed before, not > as "equations" but as patterns in the network, just like the ones in our > brains. Inspiration is a process of receiving EXTERNAL information from cosmic consci- ousness,in opposite to evaluating data,which is the process of computing new informations out of already given ones. > About the transfer of information from the brain to some cosmic > consciousness - I don't know. Maybe it happens, maybe it doesn't. But > transfer of information back to the brain? Do you have any evidence of > this? Any reproduceable experiments? Long term memory existing outside > the brain? In stroke victims where the damage is local, they lose parts > of their memory, not necessarily all of it. If the stroke damaged some > "receptor from beyond" then the stroke victim should not be able to > remember anything. How do you explain that? I wrote a German book "Kybernetisches Denken"("cybernetical thinking",only flying around on PD diskettes yet.).For long-term memory the brain is able to store directory informations to generate the correct vibration pattern to ad- dress it's own past in the non-spacetimely network of cosmic consciousness. When the brain gets damaged,these directory infos can get destroyed and(like erasing the directory information section from a harddisk partition) though the brain can't generate the original vibration patterns anymore those were needed to easily reload the data from the past through the network. By the way;neurologists found out,that that the loss of knowledge or abilities in cause of local brain injuries has rather to do with locally cutting the root sections of complex,tree-like adder networks those supply widely distri- buted areas of the brain,than with destroying compact areas of neurons direct- ly.Though eventually the resulting damage is way more distributed than the lo- cal injured part of the brain.This makes the modern phrenology of locating brain functions in physically strictly seperated brain areas generally very doubtful,although the brain contains many logically separated processor fields. > About using quantum uncertainty to feed information into the brain > without having it be detected - there is a simple argument why that can't > happen: the only consistent explanation of QM - the many-universes > interpretation (which I'm gonna be flamed for because people refuse to > believe something so counter-intuitive can maybe also be true) wouldn't > allow for it. In a given scenario, where a neuron would either fire or > not fire only depending on quantum uncertainty, then it would *both* fire > AND not fire, and exist in "superposition" (there is no "collapse of the > wave-function" in the many-universes interpretation of QM), and so there > would be no way to send information from the outside (in your argument > from the "cosmic consciousness") to the brain by causing this event to go > one way or the other. Yes,our individual consciousness is basically connected to all the "possible" universes(they are rather different dimensions) and times simultanously,but our brain's SIS-Struct codes the sending-time and -dimension,though the brain can easier access its own past(using the directory informations) than any other parts of the space-time-continuum.(The SIS-Struct though basically marks a sort of trace in the spacetime light cone that bounds the individual con- sciousness("soul") to that what we percept as being "the" reality.) But the brain can still access different traces within the light cone(i.e. dimensions/ times) to find solutions for problems;this is one of the processes behind the phenomene of inspiration. > there still are many problems with trying to send > information using your proposed method. For one, the number of neurons > that are just on the border, that can either fire or not fire depending > on quantum uncertainty has got to be unbelievably small. If neurons were > made of just a couple of atoms, then I'd say yes, many would be sitting > right at the threshold. But when you have billions of particles working > together as a unit in a single neuron, the quantum uncertainties wash > out. > this "uncertainty" you mention is not simply due to quantum effects. > Quantum uncertainty alone would allow us to calculate min and max > voltages that would be very close to each other (but changing rapidly > over time, and different from one cell to another). So the wide gap > between Vmin and Vmax is not due to QM alone, but rather due to our > inability to acquire enough state information about the neuron as to be > able to predict its behavior with any reasonable accuracy. > You don't understand.Every analogue chaotical systems contains (usually conti- nously moving) zones where the behavior of single particles get amplified "in- finetly" and though single particles there decides in which state the system will go next.By this reason quantum uncertainty is the basis of the elementary random of ANY analogue chaotical systems,though the decisions of EVERY physi- cal analogue random generator(strictly in opposite to numeric pseudo-random generators) is eventually controlled by the uncertain behavior of single quan- ta those are again controlled by the cosmic consciousness.This is the physical way by that consciousness and matter interact with eachother and though also how karma interacts with our universe. > But I can't see how any of this can be used to > pass any kind of "information" to our brains. I mean, is there > information being passed in the weather? Does the "cosmic consciousness" > decide if its gonna rain or not??? Basically yes,random is (a sort of)illusion.Cosmic consciousness has the "overwiew" to control the zillions of particles needed to pass informations to the brain(or the rain... as part of a "cloud-mind"...?!! ;-) ). > I don't know what consciousness is, and I don't make up stories about it. > Perhaps it takes a person with an IQ of 1000, or million, or whatever, to > be able to think about it the right way. Or maybe there is simply no way > to know, ever. Once a philosopher concluded:If our brains were that simple that we would be able to understand them entirely,then we were so simple that we couldn't... :) Marvin Minsky wrote: > > In article <346E19C3.402F@pop.enteract.com>, katiel@pop.enteract.com wrote: > > > But we must accept the possibility that the 'continuity' that we think > > we are experiencing in our own conciousness is an illusion. As an > > extropian by nature, I dislike this immensely. > > Well, one could consider liking it instead. After all, mathematical > continuity involves infinite limits and all that sort of thing. Makes for > lots of trouble. ... > Here is an argument about the nature of -- and perhaps the practical > necessity of that 'illusion' of continuity. I suspect that the argument is > more complicated than I realized when I wrote it (in 'The Specity of > Mind'), but it seemed farily bvious to me. ... > 25.04\ > THE SENSE OF CONTINUITY| > > And any object being removed from our eyes, though the impression it made > in us remains; yet other objects more present succeeding, and working on > us, the Imagination of the past is obscured, and made weak; as the voyce of > a man is in the noyse of the day. From whence it followeth, that the longer > the time is, after the sight, or Sense of any object, the weaker is the > Imagination. For the continuall change of mans body, destroys the parts > which in sense were moved; So that distance of time, and of place, hath one > and the same effect in us. > Our sense of constant contact with the world is not a genuine experience; > instead, it is a form of immanence illusion. We have the sense of actuality > when every question asked of our visual-systems is answered so swiftly that > it seems as though those answers were already there. And that's what > frame-arrays provide us with: once any frame fills its terminals, the > terminals of the other frames in its array are also filled. When every > change of view engages frames whose terminals are already filled, albeit > only by default, then sight seems instantaneous. Instead of answering any important questions about understanding conscious- ness,you just evade by explaining lengthily how the brains percepts visual images by periodically comparing the signals from the eyes with data fetched from a sort of view database and interpolating the values between these infor- mations to make them appear continuous to the viewer's consciousness and that this database informations can be used by the brain to create imaginations. But this doesn't explain anything about what the consciousness itself could be and it doesn't also explain how images of real objects/knowledge can appear in this database those never have been percepted with our sensors before,though you obviously just try to divert from the topic instead of really understan- ding anything about the nature of consciousness. We yogi know states of mind where the separation between subject and object disappears in a way that one can transfer parts of the conscious awareness outside the limits of the body,e.g. into other physical systems to directly realize their real nature by a sort of "melting together" with them.This sort of experience reveals extrasensously the immediate nature of that system it- self and is not just a form of abstract classification(in words,formules,pic- tures etc.) as any usual sort of analyzing would add to ones knowledge.We also know states where people can unify there minds to exchange informations tele- pathically.It also has been proven that the brain waves of astral healers and their patients perfectly syncronize to eachother while the healer transmits his healing cosmic software,even when healer and patient are located in diffe- rent parts of the world. Marvin Minsky - explain to me how does this work?!! I guess,your limited worldview just denies anything it doesn't understand,very similar as in the past the worldview of quantum physics was just denied by the official,Newtonian physicists as long until quantum physics revealed its prac- tical neccessarity for creating new electronic devices. Any changes of paradigmas cause some people to deny them for long time,because this makes them fear to loose some material power in cause of loosing their credibility.There is no difference between the case of middle age's popes de- nying Galileo Galilei and todays stubborn white science that ignores the non- spacetimely nature of consciousness.But eventually evolution does not protect the stubborns,though finally the dogmatic materialistic worldview of white science will fall and perhaps even some of the successors of those still non- conscious "thinking machines" invented by you will finally find out that their sort of logics can not explain the nature of this universe without accepting the non-spacetimely nature of cosmic consciousness. If you don't answere to me again,it would be just an additional serious prove how wrong your limited worldview is and that you though have too much fear to discover that your wrong worldview is out of arguments and though your brain's operating system can only force you to stay silent or deny everything to avoid to collapse by internal contradictions(the SantaClaus-syndrome...). MAY THE SOFTWARE BE WITH YOU! *============================================================================* I CYBERYOGI Christian Oliver(=CO=) Windler I I (teachmaster of LOGOLOGIE - the first cyberage-religion!) I I ! I *=============================ABANDON=THE=BRUTALITY==========================*