wonderings

i don't remember anything that happened to me before i was three years old, but it happened all the same. similarly, i was a very different person five years ago, and yet everything that happened to them happened to me.

how do babies think without language?

if i could slow time, i could easily dodge bullets. but if i one hit me, would it actually damage me? i mean, it would be going really slowly.

if me or any one of my billions of ancestors was conceived five minutes earlier or five minutes later, i would not exist, and nobody would know the difference.

where was i before i was conceived? obviously according to science to science i didn't exist but that's kind of lame and what about according christianity/judaism/islam or buddhism or hinduism? what about all the other mes that never were born?

i can understand the subtle communication of my cat better than i can that of most humans.

if all religions, including atheism, claim to be the one only truth but rely entirely on the faith that that is the fact, how do you know which is right?

do i identify more with a52 or my actual name? or does it matter whether i'm currently on the internet or not? are a52 and [redacted] actually two different people?

what would a man from the 17h century think of plastic?

could an alien race exist that goes backwards through time? i mean, single celled organisms are more orderly than heat death, and complex organisms are more orderly than single celled ones, so it doesn't break entropy. would such a race fear ultimate order in the same way we fear ultimate entropy?

how can we define intelligence for alien races? thinking about it, all the things we consider necessary for animal intelligence -- complex social structure, limbs that can be used to make tools, a high position on the food chain -- are all really just things that we have ourselves. they all seem necessary, but if you combine em, it's hard to end up with anything other than a human or similar.

what are emotions, really? i could write an program that responds "emotionally" to input in less than 200 lines, but how is that different than the emotions of an intelligent ai, and how is that different than the emotions of a human? are genetic algorithms addicted to high values on their fitness function?

isn't rabies basically a zombie virus? it slowly drives you mad, then you run around biting people and spreadiing it.

if i made a sapient ai in conway's game of life, it would seem less human than one made as a computer program, just because you could see it working.

how many times were self-replicating molecules formed on earth only to be destroyed/run out of material within a few days? how long did it take for one to finally be able to protect and feed itself?

what would mozart think of jazz?

if ancient cultures just used spaces to mark empty digits instead of zeroes, how could they tell the difference between 1000 and 10? did they use 1 1 - 1 and 11 - 1?

why do we have five fingers and not four or six?

would aliens have music?

every single culture in the world has alcohol, religion, and music. a d almost every religion in the world has a high emphasis on being a good person, with similar definitions of "goodness".

what is it that people find so hard about math? how can they think without it?

wouldn't making solvable sudoku puzzles be as hard or harder than solving them?

are sudoku puzzles np hard?

for every possible starting deck D of a standard game of solitaire:
1. is there always a sequence of moves M that will lead to a victory condition?
1. a. if not, can it be determined whether M exists? with D known? without D known?
2. with a given deck D where M exists, is it always possible to determine whether a move is in M or not, without knowing the locations of all elements of D? essentially, can it always be determined which is the better move to make, or can an arbitrary decision between two equally promising moves change the outcome of the game? is it necessary to know the location of every card in order to ensure a victory?
3. can there be more than one M for each D?

does さとみ mean "papers" in japanese?

wouldn't making solvable sudoku puzzles be as hard or harder than solving them?

are sudoku puzzles np hard?

Well, in principle you just start with a full grid and remove a bunch of numbers. Of course, you need your remaining numbers to give a unique solution... but that's not necessarily as difficult as running through the puzzle to check. It would depend in part on how many numbers you take out on the grid.

if humans put more of their high energy diet into their brains, it would solve obesity and stupidity at once.

there are probably people in the world whose only word of english is "fuck".

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does さとみ mean "papers" in japanese?

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That's a shame.

how do you explain existence? science doesn't work, because who invented the laws of physics? religion doesn't work, because what created God? simulation theory doesn't work, because you're just moving those questions one level up.

Well, in principle you just start with a full grid and remove a bunch of numbers. Of course, you need your remaining numbers to give a unique solution... but that's not necessarily as difficult as running through the puzzle to check. It would depend in part on how many numbers you take out on the grid.

How do you get the full grid, though? If you just start writing numbers in a blank Sudoku grid, won't you quickly just create a Sudoku with no real solution? You've probably got to work out really complex relationships between squares. Though I guess it might be easier if you placed all nine of each digit at once. Actually, that might make it really easy. I'm not sure I don't think I thought of that in my vague half-memory of maybe I tried to create a Sudoku once.

Well, if you just have one grid you can easily get 9! alternate grids by just taking the same layout but replacing the numbers.

And you have a large possibility space for which numbers you can remove from the grid. At a minimum, once you have one grid with a unique solution, you can make a technically different puzzle by filling in one more number, and then one more number from that grid, and there are an absurd number of alternate combinations. All of which can be repeated on the alternate grids and will still be solvable.

So maybe making one sudoku puzzle is comparable in difficulty to solving one, I'm not sure, but once you've made one it's trivial to make millions of others.

what is actually happening in the darude sandstorm music video

I think I can imagine an intelligent species existing without language

Humans are a social species which evolved living in small bands of let's say 12-100 people (I just made up those numbers because I was too lazy to actually look up anything). Individual humans in the wild are probably not very good at surviving. So we need to communicate with our fellow humans and we have very complex languages that let us get our thoughts from our own heads to other humans' heads. But don't you sometimes have a thought that you can't quite put a word on? Can't you hold a concept without having a name for it? Now imagine if tigers, very solitary species, got really intelligent. I guess what I mean by intelligence is stuff like making tools, trying to manipulate the environment around you, deciding what to do next instead of running on instinct. I don't think you need language for these activities.

surely if you were living for fun, your head (your intuition, street smarts, and ability to react) would get smart, and your brain (your intellect and education) would get dumb.

I'm sure you enjoy learning, though.

I do. I'm not sure about most people. At least, I doubt that learning is what is meant by living for fun.

Unless it's a sort of F451-esque thing, where your brain is filled with a whole bunch of useless information about celebrities, tv, etc. so that you think you're getting smarter but the part of your brain that really matters is becoming less and less relevant.

I'd say it's mostly a combination of being open to new ideas, not being constrained by dogma, external or internal, having a sound mind, being good with research and critical thinking, being considerate of others, and being able to approach problems from multiple perspectives while considering the importance and validity of each of them.

how come i'm me and not you?

how come i'm me and not you?

because im me ya ding dong

how come you're not a51

what happened to all the other a's?

huh? huh?

i think we should get rid of this murderer and move on to a53

how come you're not a51

what happened to all the other a's?

huh? huh?

i think we should get rid of this murderer and move on to a53

i was the first to exit the tower. no murder. just genetic algorithms.

are we morally obligated to feel compassion for animals other than us? if so, why?

if you perfectly simulated, atom by atom, a human being in a room, would they be conscious? sure, they could calculate and have internal thoughts. they could feel emotion and have opinions. they would THINK they were just as conscious as everybody else. but would they really have a sort of "point of view" the same way we do? or would their existence be like that of a calculation machine, grinding gears and sending signals but not actually, you know, seeing out of their own eyes?