Tags / 13 quotes from 5 sources
#metaphor
Beyond Zero and One (Andrew Smart)
AI is still building wing-flapping machines
However, when studying human thought and artificial intelligence we do not have something like aerodynamics. We do not know the right physical principles and models that allow humans to think or be conscious. Right now we are convinced it is through computations, but I believe…
The Byzantine Generals Problem
The Microsoft scientist Leslie Lamport captured the fundamental problem of achieving reliable consensus in distributed control systems with a beautiful and intuitive metaphor in the early 1980s. In a landmark paper called “The Byzantine Generals Problem,” Lamport described what…
There is no computation inside a computer
In an email discussion I had with Riccardo Manzotti, he writes: We use logic and computation to build artifacts—from chairs to spaceships. We need logic and computation as an extension of our innate mental tools. They help us to achieve the precision and generality that we need…
Information is like lift
The concept of information is useful; so is the concept of lift for flight. This does not mean that lift is real. Importantly, we do not include lift in fundamental physics because the phenomenon of lift is reducible to still more basic laws of physics like mass and gravity…
Flight without a theory of everything
invoke the flight analogy, we understand enough about
Computers are like comic-book characters
one of the more counterintuitive parts to this argument is that computers themselves are not really performing computations. Manzotti argues that computers are simply “transferring electricity from one place to another and dissipating a huge amount of it. Computations and…
From Encyclopedia To Ontology: Toward Dynamic Representation Of The Discipline Of Philosophy
Ideas for a visualization system; open challenges for digital philosophy
Such a system would facilitate interaction with the encyclopedia for expert and novice users alike. Experts could see the “big picture” of an idea or philosopher in a glance, capturing a large amount of information in an efficient manner, and novices could surf through the…
The Acid Diaries (Christopher Gray)
Tuning in to one station loud and clear
For me personally, my experience of turning in to the passerby on the street initiated a cycle of boundary-loss experiences, marking a qualitative break with everything that had come before. My earlier trips seemed like fumbling with a radio dial and getting bursts of this or…
The Ego Trick (baggini, Julian)
Facets of a gem with nothing in the centre
it is true that we could talk of multiple selves or multi-faceted selves, but the former is just more truthful than the latter. She illustrates this with the analogy of the self as a gemstone. ‘If you accept the intuitive model, that of a many-faceted gem, a cut diamond…
Hofstadter's marble in the envelopes
example of this given by Douglas Hofstadter, another writer who is keen to talk of illusions, describing the self as ‘a mirage that perceived itself, and of course it didn’t believe that it was perceiving a mirage’.6 He recounts an anecdote in which he pushed down on a pile of…
The self is like a cloud
Perhaps the simplest analogy is with a cloud. From a distance it looks like an object with fairly clear edges, but the closer you get to it, the more indistinct it becomes. Get really close and you can see it’s just a collection of water droplets.
Buildings around the same emptiness
Akong offers a better explanation of what might survive death by use of an analogy. Ultimate reality is like an empty space. Individuals are like buildings occupying a part of this space. The end of a life is like the demolishing of a building, but then we build another – our…
Turtles All The Way Down - Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia
Turtles all the way down
"Turtles all the way down" is a jocular expression of the infinite regress problem in cosmology posed by the "unmoved mover" paradox. The phrase was popularized by Stephen Hawking in 1988. The "turtle" metaphor in the anecdote represents a popular notion of a "primitive…