[regal]

As an engineer I was always in the measurement crowd, until I saw that blind kid on a talk show who could "see" by making clicking noises like a bat. If he can tell the difference between a banana and an orange by listening to his voice echo of them, I sure people can tell the difference between opamps.
If that kid doesn't exemplify that modern science is a long way from understaning psychoacoustics I don't know what would.

Then I built a tube amp and now know that not all watts are the same.

 

[ezkcdude]

Quote:

Originally Posted by regal /img/forum/go_quote.gif If he can tell the difference between a banana and an orange by listening to his voice echo of them,

Are you sure he didn't just smell the difference? If you put a banana and orange in front of my face, I could tell the difference blindfolded without making bat like sounds

.

 

[regal]

He was doing other things too, like the difference between a phone and a TV. It was amazing, is amazing what the brain can do.

 

[Crowbar]

Quote:

Originally Posted by regal /img/forum/go_quote.gif He was doing other things too, like the difference between a phone and a TV. It was amazing, is amazing what the brain can do.

It is amazing the self-congratulatory patting on their backs humans do in calling themselves amazing. I guess unabashed pride has no limits.

As someone who has studied cognitive psychology and neuroscience, I see the brain as something, like all the products of evolution, that is far from optimized and in fact a barely 'will make do in most circumstances' solution. Any familiarity with the suboptimal heuristic algorithms the brain uses for most cognitive processing, and not to mention the extreme inefficiency from an energy point of view (it consumes an inordinate fraction of your calories), and I won't even get into all the mental problems and diseases that are far from uncommon...

Humans like to see themselves as the peak of evolution. In fact nothing could be further from the truth. By any evolutionarily meaningful measure of success, be it total numbers, total biomass, adaptability, resilience, being widespread throughout the biosphere in all different environments, it is bacteria that win outright, with no multicellular organism coming close. Why did they win? Simple (pun intended): they're just complex enough, and no more. Chances of a mutation being detrimental are much lower because there is less complexity that could be ****ed up, and the short life cycle and horizontal gene sharing makes them readjust to pretty much any change in environment in no time.

 

[regal]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Crowbar /img/forum/go_quote.gif It is amazing the self-congratulatory patting on their backs humans do in calling themselves amazing. I guess unabashed pride has no limits. As someone who has studied cognitive psychology and neuroscience, I see the brain as something, like all the products of evolution, that is far from optimized and in fact a barely 'will make do in most circumstances' solution. .

I guess you're an expert in Humanity, what you do read a couple books? Give this poster the Nobel prize, he thinks we're inferior to bacteria, brilliant.

Consciousness, yes the brain is the final frontier of modern science and philosophy.

 

[Crowbar]

Quote:

Originally Posted by regal /img/forum/go_quote.gif I guess you're an expert in Humanity, what you do read a couple books?

This is known as the ad hominem fallacy: attacking the one presenting the message instead of addressing the actual argument I presented. It's a sign that you're unable to logically refute what I wrote (either because you've stubbornly taken an indefensible stance on the issue and your ego is not allowing you to admit defeat, or, that as well as an intellectual weakness preventing you from coming up with a plausible counterargument), so you have to resort to attacking my credentials--a clear sign you have lost the argument. You claimed to be an engineer, and I'm disappointed you would resort to hand-waiving, fallacious reasoning.

Quote:

Give this poster the Nobel prize, he thinks we're inferior to bacteria, brilliant.

I have presented a view that most biologists would agree with, and again, you have failed to give any counter-argument.

Quote:

Consciousness, yes the brain is the final frontier of modern science and philosophy.

That's total BS. I have studied cognitive psychology and neuroscience in university, and I can tell you that we are well on the way of elucidating the neural correlates of consciousness. The specific regions involved in making consciousness, and the general mechanisms have already been pretty well nailed down by the research of A. Damasio et al.

Since I initially joined this forum in 2003, I've seen a significant increase in the low quality posts typified by these examples by regal. I wonder if this happens to all forums--as popularity increases, the SNR drops since many of the latecomers are just people jumping on the bandwagon rather than joining not due to peer influences. The discussion I was involved in on the first page of this thread was largely free from the spurious noise people like regal are injecting into recent pages.

 

[regal]

A. Damasio is not a determinist ! Hell he even wrote a book discrediting the father of cartesian thinking.

You say consciousness has been "nailed down" like some algebra formula describing gravity.

You say a brain is something which "barely makes do", anyone with any knowledge of brain physiology knows that the brain is the most complex steady state "chemical reaction" in existence. All I'm saying is my brain's perception of sound is "better" than a microphone (~100 part count) or an oscilloscope (~1000 part count.) How many brain cells do we have? Much more complex "instrument" than a mic or a scope.

Your post about bacteria just rubbed me the wrong way, I apologize but Humans have been to the moon. Humans distill mold to selectively destroy bacteria. Humans can engineer the genetic makup of bacteria to spit out insulin for Christ sake.

 

[cosmopragma]

Never mind

 

[Crowbar]

Cartesianism is not equal to determinism, so your first sentence is a non sequitur.

The brain is a physical object. It behaves according to the laws of physics. Quantum physics is not deterministic, so the brain is not either, but that non-determinism is in the form of randomness and so indistinguishable from a deterministic system with really good pseudo-random number generators. Physical limitations such as the forced quantization of information in the real universe resulting from the Bekenstein bound mean that the brain is equivalent to a discrete computational device (i.e. it can be simulated on a powerful enough computer), and not super-Turing (Penrose was wrong, and his arguments to the contrary have been exhaustively refuted). We are just working out details, but the needed raw computational power is less than a couple of decades away.

The brain is not highly optimized by evolution for the exact reason of its complexity. Evolution is an optimization algorithm and something as complex as the brain could have only been partially optimized in the relatively short time its been around. Only the simplest processes in living organisms, interacellular chemical processes, are highly optimized (and a few are completely optimal, in the sense that no other setup of the process can be more effective in whatever the particular function), since short life cycles and length of existence of single-celled organisms has allowed exploration of essentially all possible configurations. Not so for anything multicellular.

Humans have been to the moon and use bacteria, but when humanity no longer exists bacteria will still be around. We are extremely fragile and not very good at inhospitable environments or very drastic environmental changes. We are also completely reliant, as is the rest of the biosphere, on bacteria to complete the nitrogen cycle, and algae for the majority of the photosynthetic oxygen recovery. Considering how poorly we are doing in attempts to control the environment, and how little attention space gets (and is likely to get in the future, with the exception of weaponization issues), it's extremely, unrealistically optimistic to think humanity will survive another thousand years, whereas the bacteria will remain until the sun runs out of fusion fuel.

 

[peelax]

Quote:

Evolution is an optimization algorithm and something as complex as the brain could have only been partially optimized in the relatively short time its been around.

If it had been optimised to a global optima would that mean we wouldn't bother arguing about whether bacteria are better than humans on an internet headphone forum?

Quote:

Only the simplest processes in living organisms, interacellular chemical processes, are highly optimized

I'm sorry but just because bacteria are optimised for eating poo does not mean that they are better than us. Would you say that something like a hinge is better than us because it is perfectly optimised for its job?

Quote:

We are extremely fragile and not very good at inhospitable environments or very drastic environmental changes. We are also completely reliant, as is the rest of the biosphere, on bacteria to complete the nitrogen cycle, and algae for the majority of the photosynthetic oxygen recovery. Considering how poorly we are doing in attempts to control the environment, and how little attention space gets (and is likely to get in the future, with the exception of weaponization issues), it's extremely, unrealistically optimistic to think humanity will survive another thousand years, whereas the bacteria will remain until the sun runs out of fusion fuel.

I do agree with most of this, I do believe that scientific advances will mean we will survive in the long term or at least our mechanical descendants

 

[Crowbar]

There's no actual gobal optimum, as environment changes, and adaptability to those changes would tend to be higher when you're not in a global optimum for the particular situation, but diversified in some way so that as the fitness function landscape changes, at least some of the population would be above the threshold for death. It is simply impossible for multicellular organisms to be able to change as fast as bacteria, partly due to far longer life cycle, partly due to lack of horizontal gene exchange, and mostly due to the fact that a larger portion of possible mutations are detrimental or even fatal.

Quote:

Originally Posted by peelax /img/forum/go_quote.gif just because bacteria are optimised for eating poo

They're optimized to survive. And from an evolutionary perspective, which is what I'm discussing as was clear with my initial post, that is all that matters.

Ultimately, of course, even they would disappear. Even if space-faring bacteria riding on chunks of rock struck off the planet by an asteroid impact are able to escape Sol's death, accelerating expansion guarantees that life (whether biological, mechanical, pure energy, whatever) will eventually become impossible in the universe. The expansion guarantees that non-gravitationally bound galaxy clusters will in the end spread apart from each other faster than the speed of light (possible since the space itself is expanding and the limit applies only to matter/energy traveling through space) . Thus, a finite amount of matter/energy will remain in any given Hubble volume, and though globally the expansion prevents entropy from equalizing things everywhere, locally in any Hubble volume there will be no energy gradients left with which to do work (such as living, or anything else). Beyond that, on extremely long time scales baryon decay and in even larger ones a quantum smearing of positions (I'm using the term in the same sense as H. Stapp) essentially blurs out any kind of structure.

Back to optimization: what happens when you have an evolutionary algorithm and you keep diversification (mutation etc.) but remove selection? If the population is elevated towards some (local) minimum, then over time its average fitness will decrease as it randomly diffuses (less paths lead towards higher fitness unless you're closer to a minimum). Humanity is in that situation. The majority of selection pressures have been removed. Clearly, natural selection cannot be practically applied to humans, but artificial selection can, and should, be used.

 

[regal]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Crowbar /img/forum/go_quote.gif . Clearly, natural selection cannot be practically applied to humans, but artificial selection can, and should, be used.

I really hope readers of this thread understand what Crowbar is talking about. Artificial Selection (Eugenetics) was a main impedus of the Third Reich.

A headphone forum is no place for pushing genocide or sterilization of "the inferior."

Mods please close this thread. It is turning into a pulpit for political extremists.

 

[Crowbar]

You're way over the line, since I'm not proposing anything that can be likened to what the Nazis were doing, which was just a cover for genocide. And again you are appealing to emotion instead of addressing anything logically. You have shown yourself to be nothing but a troll.

What I'm talking about is already being done in artificial insemination procedures, where the parents often have the option to genetically screen which fertilized eggs are implanted. What I was going towards is that such arbitrary intervention is not necessarily useful for humanity as a whole, since parents are likely to choose for the same attributes (no disease X, strong body, smart mind), and thus in the long run diversity will disappear.

Modern genetic intervention is advocated by plenty of scientists nowaday, and has nothing to do with restricting people's ability to freely reproduce (though China is doing this as population control); moreover, what Nazi Germany did was not scientifically based in any way, and gave a bad name of something that nowadays is supported by mainstream biologists, such as Nobel laureate John Sulston, considered the UK's leading geneticist, who said "I don't think one ought to bring a clearly disabled child into the world", etc.

James Watson is one of the co-discoverers of the structure of DNA, and also a Nobel laureate. Here's what he has to say in full support of a what is essentially modern eugenics (BTW notice the correct spelling, you couldn't even get that right): http://www-tech.mit.edu/V119/N46/46watson.46n.html

As a third famous name to add to the list, everyone's favorite geneticist Richard Dawkins is also a supporter of some forms of genetic intervention.

It's also interesting to look at Wikipedia's article on the subject, and especially the secion entitled "Ethical re-assessment".

I do want to thank you, regal, for meeting my expectation and being the first to meet Godwin's Law on this thread, which states that As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one.

Why should this thread be closed? I've been contributing since page one, and you're the last one to be telling moderators what they should do, especially after your obvious trolling and a lack of ability to present a rational argument that goes far beyond that of the most extreme subjectivist audiophile. I've backed up my stance with explanation and reference to the highest authorities in modern genetics. Now let's see if you can come up with something more than name-calling.

 

[mcshaggy2]

Quote:

Originally Posted by regal /img/forum/go_quote.gif I really hope readers of this thread understand what Crowbar is talking about. Artificial Selection (Eugenetics) was a main impedus of the Third Reich. A headphone forum is no place for pushing genocide or sterilization of "the inferior." Mods please close this thread. It is turning into a pulpit for political extremists.

i read:

Quote:

Originally Posted by regal /img/forum/go_quote.gif I can't defend myself with real information so I'm going to make a ridiculously baseless comparison between you and Hitler. Could you do me a favor and close the thread before I make myself look any more like an idiot? You could blame it on his Nazi agenda.

seriously, do you have anything to actually argue with in here regal?

 

[Crowbar]

Quote:

Originally Posted by mcshaggy2 /img/forum/go_quote.gif Misc: various Starquad cables

Those have high capacitance (comparable to coax) and are not really suitable for line level applications unless you have low output impedance on the source. But if the cable is short and you have noise problems, works good.