I had thoughts about a second May Mandelbrot post that got a bit deeper into the weeds, but a couple attempts today went nowhere (except the trashcan). But I been having some fun exploring the Mandelbrot with Ultra Fractal, and I thought some pictures might be worth a few words.
Click on any to see bigger versions.
Mandelbrot Antennae
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I’ve heard it called “the most complex” mathematical object, but that’s a hard title to earn, let alone hold. Its complexity does have attractive and fascinating aspects, though. For most, its visceral visual beauty puts it miles ahead of the cool intellectual poetry of Euler’s Identity (both beauties live on the same block, though).
For me, the cool thing about the Mandelbrot is that it’s a computation that can never be fully computed.
Did someone say walkies?
I’m spending the weekend dog-sitting my pal, Bentley (who seems to have fully recovered from eating a cotton towel!), while her mom follows strict Minnesota tradition by “going up north for the weekend.” So I have a nice furry end to the two-week posting marathon. Time for lots of walkies!
As a posted footnote to that marathon, this post contains various odds and ends left over from the assembly. Extra bits of this and that. And I finally found a place to tell you about a metaphor I stumbled over long ago and which I’ve found quite illustrative and fun. (It’s in my metaphor toolkit along with “Doing a Boston” and “Star Trekking It”)
It involves the idea of making a bad ROM call…
Last Friday I ended the week with some ruminations about what (higher) consciousness looks like from the outside. I end this week — and this posting mini-marathon — with some rambling ruminations about how I think consciousness seems to work on the inside.
When I say “seems to work” I don’t have any functional explanation to offer. I mean that in a far more general sense (and, of course, it’s a complete wild-ass guess on my part). Mostly I want to expand on why a precise simulation of a physical system may not produce everything the physical system does.
For me, the obvious example is laser light.
I’ve been on a post-a-day marathon for two weeks now, and I’m seeing this as the penultimate post (for now). Over the course of these, I’ve written a lot about various low-level aspects of computing, truth tables and system state, for instance. And I’ve weighed in on what I think consciousness amounts to.
How we view, interpret, or define, consciousness aside, a major point of debate involves whether machines can have the same “consciousness” properties we do. In particular, what is the role of subjective experience when it comes to us and to machines?
For me it boils down to a couple of key points.
Philosophical Zombies (of several kinds) are a favorite of consciousness philosophers. (Because who doesn’t like zombies. (Well, I don’t, but that’s another story.)) The basic idea involves beings who, by definition, [A] have higher consciousness (whatever that is) and [B] have no subjective experience.
They lie squarely at the heart of the “acts like a duck, is a duck” question about conscious behavior. And zombies of various types also pose questions about the role subjective experience plays in consciousness and why it should exist at all (the infamous “hard problem”).
So the Zombie Issue does seem central to ideas about consciousness.
In one of the more horrific examples of virtual personal enslavement in the service of philosophy, another classic conundrum of consciousness involves a woman confined for her entire life to a deep dungeon with no color and no windows to the outside. Everything is black, or white, or a shade of gray.
The enslaved misfortunate Mary has a single ray of monochromatic (artificial) light in her dreary existence: She has an electronic reader — with a black and white screen — that gives her access to all the world’s knowledge. In particular, she has studied and understands everything there is to know about color and how humans perceive it.
Then one day someone sends Mary a red rose.
After a weekend of transistorized baseball, it’s time to get back to wandering through pondering consciousness. I laid down a few cobblestones last week; time to add a few more to the road. Eventually I’ll have something on which I can drive an argument.
There are a number of classic, or at least well-known, arguments for and against computationalism. They variously involve Pixies, different kinds of Zombies, people trapped in different kinds of rooms, and rock walls that compute. (In fact, they compute rooms that trap Pixies. And everything else.)
Today I’m going to ruminate on the world’s most unfortunate file clerk.
Talk about mixed feelings! It was both very exhilarating — and slightly painful — to watch my Minnesota Twins rout the Seattle Mariners over the last three nights. The Mariners get a chance to get back some of their own this afternoon, and I almost hope they win. Being swept this badly is awful.
How awful? Well, so far: 25 more runs (36 total), 22 more hits (45 total), and 7 more home runs (11 total). The Twins pounded the Mariners’ starters, who only averaged three innings of work each (giving up 20 ER and 9 HR in 10.1 innings), while our own starters averaged six innings (and gave up only 8 ER and 3 HR in 18.1 innings).
Suffice to say the Twins are off to an awesome start this year!
I think this may be the most (unintentionally) hysterical thing I’ve seen in a good long time (oh, the world of the future):
I mean seriously side-splitting, tears streaming down the face, really truly, delightfully, must-see funny. (I love the wrist device! Dick Tracy has come true in that regard. And just imagine: portable televisions!)
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