New efforts!

[Baaleos]

Here's hoping this comes true, I log in each day hoping to see the good news.

I'm hoping with progress City of Titans has taken with the news they released last week it has shown NCSoft something of what they can achieve and prove the game would be in good hands. But only time will tell, but time waits for no one!

Same, I login hoping for City of Heroes news,
instead I get a thousand pages of 'sh1te'

[chuckv3]

We all seem to have slightly different views of intelligence. Personally, I think people are born with higher or lower raw brain capacity, since evolution is always rolling the dice to find the right balance of any trait. It's a bell curve. More specific than the raw capacity, some people tend to have fewer social skills, which actually require very high computing power, and these less-socially-skilled types can devote their brain power to things like math, physics, and more intellectually-challanging pursuits. It's incredibly rare to find someone who is an intellectual sponge who also excels as social skills, artistic pursuits, has a great memory for details and is very creative. In order to do it all they were probably born with extremely high raw capacity and a good balance of skill sets. It also means that unfortunately there are those who are on the bottom end of all those concerns.

In a similar light, I think that "sanity" is a specific type of social skill related to how we form our world pictures in our minds and how we communicate to others. As some demonstrate (including here on the forums) we all have a fuzzy expectation of how people should model things in ther minds, usually based on how we do so. We can see certain other models as valid even when they are not thosee we personally prefer. When someone seems to be operating from a model that makes no sense, we tend to judge them as "insane". When someone seems to be operating from a model that is simplisitic or incomplete, we ten to judge tham as being "less intelligent".

It kind of reminds me of George Carlin's explanation of drivers. Everybody who drives slower than you is an "idiot" and anybody who drives faster is a "maniac". It's all a sliding scale, so there is an obvious corollary: If you see mostly maniacs you are probably an idiot, and if you see mostly idiots you are probably a maniac.

As far as who can spot a genius, it is definitely not idiots, it is those slightly behind them -- they can truly see that this person puts concepts together faster, associates more far-flung patterns to what they're facing, and discounts blind alleys without as much exploration.

[Baaleos]

We all seem to have slightly different views of intelligence. Personally, I think people are born with higher or lower raw brain capacity, since evolution is always rolling the dice to find the right balance of any trait. It's a bell curve. More specific than the raw capacity, some people tend to have fewer social skills, which actually require very high computing power, and these less-socially-skilled types can devote their brain power to things like math, physics, and more intellectually-challanging pursuits. It's incredibly rare to find someone who is an intellectual sponge who also excels as social skills, artistic pursuits, has a great memory for details and is very creative. In order to do it all they were probably born with extremely high raw capacity and a good balance of skill sets. It also means that unfortunately there are those who are on the bottom end of all those concerns.

In a similar light, I think that "sanity" is a specific type of social skill related to how we form our world pictures in our minds and how we communicate to others. As some demonstrate (including here on the forums) we all have a fuzzy expectation of how people should model things in ther minds, usually based on how we do so. We can see certain other models as valid even when they are not thosee we personally prefer. When someone seems to be operating from a model that makes no sense, we tend to judge them as "insane". When someone seems to be operating from a model that is simplisitic or incomplete, we ten to judge tham as being "less intelligent".

It kind of reminds me of George Carlin's explanation of drivers. Everybody who drives slower than you is an "idiot" and anybody who drives faster is a "maniac". It's all a sliding scale, so there is an obvious corollary: If you see mostly maniacs you are probably an idiot, and if you see mostly idiots you are probably a maniac.

As far as who can spot a genius, it is definitely not idiots, it is those slightly behind them -- they can truly see that this person puts concepts together faster, associates more far-flung patterns to what they're facing, and discounts blind alleys without as much exploration.

If you think about it.
Brain Capacity is like potential to contain/hold knowledge.

Remembering a load of knowledge does not make you intelligent - if it did, then my computer would be intelligent.
Intelligence is the ability to take knowledge, to create or discover more knowledge that was not known before.
A computer can't do that : Many calculation's don't count as knowledge, since they are mathematical constants. (In computing,I think if you were to write 2*2 : some languages would compile it with 4, it doesn't work it out at run time, because it always has the same outcome)


Its an incremental process over generations.
Albert Einstein wasn't born with all the knowledge he had when he made the theory of relativity,
He did however have the capacity / potential to go on, learning and using knowledge from previous generations to discover/theorize something new.

Not saying that everyone who has a theory is intelligent - but intelligence is just a form of creativity.
It might not be inherently artistic (its a subjective thing I guess), but intelligence gives you the potential to 'create' new knowledge.

If you think back to cave man times:
The discovery of the 'wheel' was probably at a time when all of humanities 'knowledge' could fit in a 30 page note book, along with what berries to eat and what not to eat and avoid falling in volcanoes.

Now, our knowledge has increased to the point where we need the internet and cloud computing just to hold it all.
Was that Caveman 'dumber' than Albert Einstein, or did Einstein just have the benefit of the generations that came before him.

Genetically speaking, our brains shouldn't have changed that much in terms of capacity and processing power.
Granted - our physical bodies and mental acuity might be better, because we exercise both in ways that were not possible for Cave Man. 
(we have IQ Tests and education systems which give us things to remember, our jobs also entail more mental exercise than Mr Cave Man's foraging would have required.)

Genetically speaking - Cave Man may have had the same potential as Einstein to come up with Relativity - had he the same start in life.
(Note - I am referring to the early Homosapien - Not Neanderthal, there is a distinct genetic difference in the two species)

[Arcana]

There might be just a hint of a false dichotomy there.

Ya think?

[Arcana]

I think it is dangerous to over-analogize brains as computers because fundamentally speaking brains are not computers, at least not like computers anyone would be familiar with.  Brains are evolutionarily hierarchical patchworks of neural networks.  There isn't the same separation between computation and memory that exist in classical computing architectures.  Information isn't stored volumetrically, so it is not like brains can "fill up."  Information processing happens in massively parallel fashion, nearly all of which we are unaware, and almost none of it in conventional algorithmic fashion.

In a computer, information is just bits stored in a memory.  It is in a sense a physical property of the computer, not a dynamic property of the computer.  In brains, however, information and how that information is processed are much more closely linked.  It is entirely possible for things like intelligence and consciousness to be emergent properties of information in the brain because in a colloquial sense, storage and software are tied together.

Also, overwhelming evidence proves that brains don't work by a single organizing principle or functional model.  Consider the case of learned skills: learning to drive, learning to juggle, learning to ride a bicycle.  The brain doesn't learn to do these things in the same way it learns geography or history.  The brain programs parts of its neural networks to perform those tasks through repetition and reinforcement until they can happen practically automatically.  The brain doesn't store a memory of how to do that and then call it up again.  In a sense a part of the brain "hard wires" itself with those tasks.  That's why we don't add four plus three, somewhere in our brains four plus three is hard wired to generate twelve.  But since nowhere in our brains did we train it on forty-three plus thirty-one, we do (most of us) mechanically add those.

If we are talking in very general terms, intelligence is the whole point of brains.  All brains in all organisms are specifically intended to do one thing: take sensory input and react to it in a way that is beneficial.  Brains are the best way evolution has come up with performing that function.  Going back to my original definition of intelligence:

Core intelligence, oversimplifying greatly, is something I think revolves around three abilities: comprehension - the ability to understand and derive information, rationalization - the ability to create mental models and systems, and problem solving - the ability to synthesize algorithmic solutions to goal-seeking situations.

That definition is slightly tweaked to refer to human intelligence, but it is trivially easy to restate that in terms that would apply to all intelligence, which is intentional.  A good definition of intelligence cannot, in my opinion, simply be a way to collectively refer to "all the things I've seen smart people do."  It should at least in principle be objectively detectable and measurable, if not simplistically linearly.  And it should encompass all behavior we'd consider proof of intelligence of at least some degree, no matter what entity we were testing.

To put it another way, I don't define intelligence as the opposite of stupidity.  Stupidity is a judgment of something acting in a way we feel is suboptimal.  But ironically, stupidity requires intelligence.  Only something with intelligence can misuse it in a way we'd judge as stupid.  Something completely lacking in intelligence, like a rock or a tree, can't really be judged stupid.  A mouse, on the other hand, is capable of doing all the things I describe as the properties of intelligence: a mouse can extract useful information from its environment, create mental models and abstractions, and generate algorithmic solutions to specific problems - like running through a maze or evading Sylvester the Cat.

[darkgob]

That's why we don't add four plus three, somewhere in our brains four plus three is hard wired to generate twelve.

um

[Ironwolf]

4 x 3 might be what you were shooting for.

The lawn chair thing he was planning on how much oxygen to take, how cold it would be and when to start shooting the balloons for a safe landing.

I believe he was smart enough to plan it successfully - however I was able to explain being able to do a thing does not equal the wisdom in doing it. Many redneck jokes start with - hey look at me or shoot I can do that.

[Arcana]

um

Base five?

[Vee]

Ya think?

just a whisper of one :D

[Twisted Toon]

Base five?

That might explain the 7 out of 5 people who are math illiterate...since thr brain is hardwired for base 5 and the schools try to program us into translating that into base 10.

[Sihada]

Same, I login hoping for City of Heroes news,
instead I get a thousand pages of 'sh1te'

Nothing has happened with City of Heroes proper, and it has been a very long time since there was any reason to think that anything is ever going to happen.

[Felderburg]

Regarding the balloons... why weather balloons? Why not the gas filled balloons they actually use to carry people in? I'm pretty sure they go reasonably high.

Dipstick.

For a second there I thought I was being called a dipstick.

Core intelligence, oversimplifying greatly, is something I think revolves around three abilities: comprehension - the ability to understand and derive information, rationalization - the ability to create mental models and systems, and problem solving - the ability to synthesize algorithmic solutions to goal-seeking situations.

Regarding problem solving, "algorithmic" implies a "one size fits all" solution to problems. "Goal-seeking situations" implies the broad realm of life. I'm not entirely confident that algorithms would be sufficient for events that fall outside the bounds of normal day-to-day life.

This is...remarkably accurate. The first and last letter of each word doesn't change, so it's not perfect, but very well done.

There's that phenomenon where (presumably non-dyslexic) people can read words if the first and last letter don't change, even if all else does, so I suspect that may be why. However, that page was pretty hard for me when I encountered words that I didn't know what they were supposed to be in the first place.

I'm hoping with progress City of Titans has taken with the news they released last week it has shown NCSoft something of what they can achieve and prove the game would be in good hands. But only time will tell, but time waits for no one!

City of Titans is not related to the negotiations. One guy from CoT (Nate Downes) is the one that kicked them off, but that's the only connection.

[Arcana]

The lawn chair thing he was planning on how much oxygen to take, how cold it would be and when to start shooting the balloons for a safe landing.

I believe he was smart enough to plan it successfully - however I was able to explain being able to do a thing does not equal the wisdom in doing it. Many redneck jokes start with - hey look at me or shoot I can do that.

I'm not sure this is an easy thing to demonstrate, but assuming you are characterizing his thought process accurately, just saying "when to start shooting" is enough to prove, not just guess, but prove, the guy was either punking you or had no idea whatsoever what he was talking about.  That implies he thought it was possible to do this with a large number of relatively inefficient balloons, and thought that it would be reasonable to descend under control from stratospheric altitudes by reducing displacement in a reasonable amount of time.  Both of those ideas are completely ludicrous.  In 2014 Alan Eustace made an ascent to 135,000 feet in a specially constructed balloon and then freefell back to Earth before deploying a parachute.  His ascent took two and a half hours.  He needed an insulating space suit to survive the freezing temperatures at high altitude, and then counterintuitively needed special cooling systems to cool him off in the stratosphere where the lack of air made it impossible to conductively cool off.  And all of that to achieve an altitude that was as much "near orbit" as I achieved riding the elevator up to work today.

Lets be really, really generous and say that anyone that makes it just 51% to the altitude generally recognized as "space" - 62 miles or 100km - can claim "near orbit" iin the sense of being closer to space than to the nearest Burger King.  That would be 31 miles or about 164,000 feet.  The air density at that altitude is approximately one tenth that at the 135,000 foot altitude that Eustace reached.  Eustace's balloon reached eleven million cubic feet in volume at maximum altitude, which if it was spherical would be approximately 275 feet across.  Eustace's balloon had the displacement of about 500 high altitude weather balloons, and just to make it to 164,000 feet - nowhere near space but close enough to make a stupid argument about it - you'd probably need ten times that displacement even without extra engineering problems.

So you're sitting in a lawn chair that somehow doubles as a life support system.  You have five *thousand* weather balloons hovering above you.  You decide to return to Earth.  So you start, uh, shooting them.  Which ones?  The farthest ones are hundreds of feet away.  The closest ones are probably still hundreds of feet away.  They are all overlapping in a giant cluster so shooting at any of them probably hits lots of them.  It probably took you over three hours to reach this altitude.  A controlled descent achieved by bursting balloons would if anything be slower (or much, much faster and much, much less successful).  And just exactly what are you shooting these balloons with?  Did your acquaintance figure on bringing the minigun from the movie Predator along with him?  An M4 rifle with several boxes of ammo strapped to his lawn chair compatible space suit?

The whole idea that this endeavor is possible with any engineered solution that vaguely resembles a guy sitting in a chair with a couple of balloons above him that he could pop with a BB gun is literally no different than someone thinking they can reach the moon with a spaceship constructed out of Amazon shipping boxes and the GPS from their smart phone.  Smart people might seem like they can sometimes do the impossible, but sometimes it is just that outside their own specific area of expertise they are just as dumb as everyone else, or dumber because they think they are smarter than they actually are.

Also, even if it was possible to do this with duct tape and party hats, just the sheer scale of it would be costly.  You're talking about hundreds of thousands of dollars of weather balloons alone.  I don't know what lawn chairs with twin cup holders *and* life support systems cost, but I bet they are crazy expensive even with Amazon Prime free shipping.

[Arcana]

Intriguing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9yW--eQaA2I

[Vee]

Regarding the balloons... why weather balloons? Why not the gas filled balloons they actually use to carry people in? I'm pretty sure they go reasonably high.

Why not novelty bachelorette party dick balloons?

[Abraxus]

There is another fundamental difference between our brains, and the processing units we have created via technological advancement.  Currently, no computer processor, no matter how powerful "feels" anything (at least not yet) about the information it processes.  It has no preference, no hesitation (short of a malfunction), and no reservation about what it is asked to do.  Our brains have an emotional response to every thought, and every piece of sensory data that it takes in.  Choose a memory about anything, and there will be an emotion invoked by it, even if that emotion is "I don't really care".

[Arcana]

There is another fundamental difference between our brains, and the processing units we have created via technological advancement.  Currently, no computer processor, no matter how powerful "feels" anything (at least not yet) about the information it processes.  It has no preference, no hesitation (short of a malfunction), and no reservation about what it is asked to do.  Our brains have an emotional response to every thought, and every piece of sensory data that it takes in.  Choose a memory about anything, and there will be an emotion invoked by it, even if that emotion is "I don't really care".

Are you certain that is a fundamental difference?  Let's attack this non-traditionally.  Let's say I accept as a given that you have an emotional state.  We won't get into the philosophical problems of trying to prove that absolutely.  How about lower primates?  Do they have an emotional state?  Most people would say yes.  How about dogs and cats?  Still sure?  How about ducks?  Fish?  Grasshoppers?  Before we start asking whether technological computers can or do have an emotional state, at what point did organic brains make the "fundamental" leap to having them?  Is the ability to experience emotional responses a *fundamental* aspect of organic brains, or is it a more fuzzy non-binary emergent property of increasing levels of consciousness?

And what does it mean to "feel" something?  Describe feeling hungry.  Describe feeling sad.  Describe feeling confused.  What is your model for those mental states that makes you absolutely certain that when a program, say, receives a software interrupt that is categorically *not* the same thing as feeling pain and responding to it.  When a program receives less compute cycles to perform the same tasks in a multitasking operating system, does it "feel" something?

I think there are two separate things to consider here.  The first is whether an entity is capable of *receiving* stimulus consistent with "feeling" something, and completely separate from that whether it is capable of introspectively examining those feelings.  The latter requires consciousness in at least some capacity.  The former doesn't.  A completely brain dead person can still biologically experience pain, but has no capacity to be consciously aware they are experiencing pain.  When you say that technological computers don't "feel" anything are you saying they can't receive and react to stimulus, or they can't be consciously aware of that experience. Because if you mean the latter, then what you are really saying is that current technological computers don't possess consciousness, not that they cannot feel.  But that may be a fundamental difference in the same way that there are similar fundamental differences between human brains and grasshopper brains.  That fundamental difference may not have a binary either-or dividing line between people and computers in the same way there may be no such dividing line between humans and insects.

On a slight tangent, the area of research I find most interesting when it comes to the question of consciousness is the fact that strong evidence suggests that consciousness is at least in large part an illusion.  When someone says they are conscious or self-aware, the interesting question to ask is "self-aware of *what*?"  The obvious answer is "of myself."  And we know that's a lie, told by each of us to ourselves.  Studies of patients with certain kinds of brain injuries, particularly corpus callosum damage that divides the two hemispheres of the brain show that the two halves of the brain when mostly separated will continue to try to function, but without the ability to coordinate activity they can actually possess totally different emotional states that can be independently tested.  What's more, the "person" at least insofar as we can communicate with them, will often disagree with the results of both tests.  Dramatically, ask such a person a question, and tell them to both say the answer and write the answer, and you can get two different answers.  What's more, the person will often adamantly assert that each is the correct answer, and be literally unable to answer the question of why he or she gave two different answers.  They will in fact often refuse to believe or admit they gave two different answers, even with the evidence right there in front of them.

And yet.  We don't see two separate consciousnesses form.  There is still just one.  It is as if each half of the brain was an independent person, but they were collectively holding the strings of a puppet pretending to be a third person called "consciousness."

The "person's" "self" awareness can actually be about a "self" that doesn't actually exist.  It can be a lie that says "I just gave one answer twice" even though that is provably false.  The fact that "self-awareness" can be illusory in these circumstances suggests it could be in all cases.  Humans are very good social entities.  Much like wolves, or horses, or primates, our brains are extremely good at observing others and deriving information about them, their mental and emotional states, and making predictions about them based on those mental models.  I happen to believe that the quantum leap made between lower organisms and primates, of which we sit at the top of the chain, is that we primates took our mental tools for creating mental models of others and starting putting ourselves into the model, making mental models of ourselves.  Our mental models of ourselves became the foundation for consciousness. So while a dog might instinctively feel hungry, and to address that instinct the dog will use its mental model of its master and realize that if it whines at 5:00pm then master will provide food, humans added an extra innovative step: humans instinctively feel hungry, and think to themselves if I drive to Taco Bell and buy food, then I will eat the food and then I won't be hungry anymore.  Humans can ask more sophisticated questions about what will happen to themselves if they do this or that.  That's the evolutionary advantage to self-awareness: it allows for more sophisticated social interactions.   

If I tell Bob to go to Taco Bell and get food, Bob won't go because Bob doesn't want to drive there but if I say I will pay for the food then I know Bob is a cheapskate and will like the fact he will get free food and if I was Bob I would then drive even though I don't want to drive because I want the free food more so I will tell Bob I will pay and then Bob will drive and get the food and when Bob comes back I will get the food and eat it and then I won't be hungry anymore.

That requires self-awareness.  Thinking about Bob and myself as actors, and trying to figure out how Bob thinks and trying to understand what I want and how I should try to get it and how I will react to my own plans, all that requires some minimal amount of self-awareness.  I think that self-awareness comes out of evolutionary pressure to be the best social animal in the tribe.  To put it more contemporaneously, I believe consciousness evolved to give us the ability to win Survivor: Primate Edition.

[Goddangit]

Many redneck jokes start with - hey look at me or shoot I can do that.

I submit "Hold my beer..." as another possibility.

[Aggelakis]

I submit "Hold my beer..." as another possibility.

"I ain't skeert."
"That looks easy!"

[Zerohour]

Somewhere in the mid sixties.  The smartest person I ever knew in person and could hazard a guess was somewhere north of eighty-five.  I lost track of him after he triple majored in math, physics, and Russian studies, graduated in three and a half, and was invited to Russia for advanced scholarship.  In the mid eighties.

When I was six I was reading college textbooks.  He was academically smart in a way I couldn't hope to match on my best day.  Although I could parallel park better than him, so there's that.

when did this thread become about how smart Arcana *says* she is?