DavidV
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Posts posted by DavidV
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I'd be most worried about the hacking potential. All it takes is one news story that a large hacking attack has taken place, and people will sell like crazy, sending the price plummeting.
That would make some investors very happy, because we would buy like crazy before the prices recovered.
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This is not a prediction, but one plausible timeline out of the many I can imagine:
- Late 2013: The media reports that organized crime, tax evaders, and “terrorists” are using Bitcoin.
- Early 2014: Politicians call for investigation of claims that Bitcoin is being used to facilitate illegal activities. The rhetoric is ratcheted up over the course of the year.
- Late 2014: Bitcoin transactions have been growing exponentially for several years. The world’s established financial institutions cannot compete with the lower costs of unregulated financial markets and pressure governments to act.
- 2015: Western governments raid and shut down all the major BitCoin exchangers and effectively kill the currency. Operators are put away for lengthy sentences, while others are found to have been cooperating with authorities for some time.
- 2020′s: Bitcoin (or something very much like it) revives on a small scale as an underground currency and slowly grows over the next two decades.
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2020-2030: The US empire collapses. The EU has already fallen.
China tries, but fails to replace the dollar as the world’s reserve currency. People hoard gold, but governments prevent it from being effectively used as money. - 2030′s: 3D printing takes off. Established industries attack unlicensed home printing as a violation of their IP. The major non-affiliated (“pirate”) pattern markets are blocked from handling financial transactions, and for a while, a pirate industry matures.
- Late 2030′s: Something very much like BitCoin resurges. This time, it has a killer app: micro payments for 3D printing patterns. Ubiquitous encryption prevents governments and corporations from monitoring transactions and hoarded gold provides the base for monetary exchange.
- 2040′s: With much of the economy being conducted in unregulated 3D pattern markers and most transactions being conducted over BitCoin, the tax base collapses.
- Late 2040′s: Governments seize fiat-denominated savings in a desperate power grab, but fiat money is now worthless compared to an untraceable fiat currency like Bitcoin. Governments attempt to seize real assets to replace lost income, but are met by large-scale protests backed by homemade 3D printed weapons. Mass chaos and violence follows.
- 2050′s: Stability re-emerges, as new judicial systems evolve backed by anonymous transactions. Large states become increasingly irrelevant.
- Late 2050′s: The last stand of centralized governments: politicians call in the military in an attempt to rebuild the surveillance state and kill digital currencies for good. Assassination markets, long used in organized crime, are turned against politicians, as the populace fights back.
Original: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/TruthJusticeAndTheAmericanWay/~3/bxAEz9DJkkQ/ -
It seems the edit function doesn't actually allow editting in the same manner as before the update. I had to choose the full editor function(?) hmm forget the exact terminology
Edit by DavidV: It seems to work for me.
test
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The forum software has been updated. Let me know if you find any issues.
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I've only been a member here for about half the time that OO has existed, and apparently I've missed all of the introductions, so I'd be interested in learning who the owners, administrators and moderators are. I thought that this ten year announcement thread might be a good opportunity for you to toot your horns, tell us about yourselves, and to proudly and publicly associate yourselves with Objectivism. What are your real names, where are you from, what do you do professionally, what types of involvement with Objectivist intellection and activism have you had? Please introduce yourselves.
I am the sole founder, but there are four people without whom this forum absolutely could not have happened. (I will not reveal real names out of respect for their privacy.)
RationalEgoistSG - he helped complete the original vision for the site in 2003.
AshRyan - he organized live events and supported the forum through the rapid growth phase in 2005.
HaloNoble6 - he helped provided content for the main ObjectivismOnline.com site.
softwareNerd - he has been the de-facto leader of this forum since 2006.
Also of course none of this would be possible without the admin and moderator team.
About me:
I am a technical leader working mainly in software development in Shanghai, China. I was born in Ukraine, then lived all over Texas and in New York City before moving to China in 2011. I got married in 2009 and am expecting my firstborn next week :-)
My background in Objectivism comes from co-founding the Objectivism Club at Texas A&M University (2000-2004) and participating in the Ayn Rand Institute's OAC (Objectivist Academic Center) 2002-2004. I met some of the leaders of this forum when I was an intern at OCON 2003. In addition to founding Objectivism Online in 2003, I have been the webmaster/technical architect of Mises.org since 2004. I also co-founded the now-defunct Objectivist Club Association.
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ObjectivismOnline was created 10 years ago on 03 February 2003. Here is the first post, in which I described my plans for this website.
In 10 years, we've received 270,156 posts from 8,962 members.
- Eiuol, FeatherFall and Dante
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Although I believe in the individual’s right to own the means to defend himself, I want to say that I do not believe that the reason that there are so many violent shootings in the USA is that too few people own guns. Nor do I believe, that the main problem is that people do not receive enough mental health services. The chief problem is that we are sick to begin with.
The main cause of violence in America is that America has a culture of violence. It is everywhere — in our movies, cities, laws, and homes. It is not the weapons themselves nor any admiration for the weapons that is responsible for our worship of violence, but the fact that almost everyone believes that conflicts of interest are inherent to human interaction. Today, violence and destruction are more deeply seeded in our culture than ever before in the history of America. It is instilled in us when we grow up in violent households, go to violent schools, face violent peers, and experience the politics of violence as adults.
By “violence” I do refer primarily to crude physical violence, although there is still plenty of that. I refer to the violence done when any parent, schoolyard bully, teacher, policeman, preacher, government bureaucrat, or politician says: “you must do this or else.” I refer specifically to the philosophical worldview implied in that statement: that human values inherently conflict with each other, and therefore men must extract values from each other by force.
The only thing necessary for the violence to end is for people to recognize that there is no conflict of interest between rational men. Everyone, from parents to businessmen to judges must accept the fact that men should and can gain values from each other by voluntary exchange rather than force. We must fully accept, integrate, and apply the simple idea that force is not a moral or practical means to gain the cooperation of other people.
If we raised our children to believe this for the first few years of their life, the violence in our homes, schools, laws and foreign wars would end.
Original: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/TruthJusticeAndTheAmericanWay/~3/4Nbt5j09SFM/ -
You probably don’t know how to squat. In fact, you are probably not capable of squatting for any period of time, even though it is one of the basic human positions, just like standing and lying. Why does it matter? Because, as I recently discovered, squatting is the optimal position for all sorts of things — eating, working, defecating, exercising, and especially giving birth. Learning to squat can even prevent cancer!
The full, resting squat position
I first learned about squatting through “Natural Childbirth the Bradley Way” book. Squatting is one of the exercises the book recommends to build muscles for birth as well as an alternative birthing position. What most people knows as “squatting” is the partial squat — where only the ball of the foot touches the ground. This position cannot be held for long because it requires continual muscle tension. For the full “resting” squat, you must plant your feet flat on the ground with your buttocks resting on the backs of the calves. Try it. You feel off-balance, right? That’s because a life of sitting on chairs and wearing shoes with heels (including most men’s shoes) has shortened your Achilles tendons and left many muscles underdeveloped.While “civilized” people who have office jobs and read blogs rarely squat, it is still very common in the developing world. In China (where I live), you will often see people squatting while working or eating. The majority of people across the world also squat on the toilet. Is that just because they don’t have money to pay for western-style toilets and chairs?
Squatting for health:
Actually, it turns out squatting offers numerous health advantages for all kinds of activities. First, you must realize that human beings did not evolve to sit on chairs and toilets. This matters because the unnatural position we use while eating and defecating sitting down cause all kinds of health problems including:
- Appendicitis
- Bladder Incontinence
- Colitis and Crohn’s Disease
- Colon Cancer
- Constipation
- Contamination of the Small Intestine
- Diverticulosis
- Gynecological Disorders
- Endometriosis
- Hysterectomy
- Pelvic Organ Prolapse
- Rectocele
- Uterine Fibroids
- Heart Attacks
- Hemorrhoids
- Hiatus Hernia and GERD
- Pregnancy and Childbirth Issues
- Prostate Disorders
- Sexual Dysfunction
Squatting for birth:
Squatting also happens to be the ideal position for birth. Lying down to give birth is a very recent “innovation” due to the replacement of midwives with doctors in the last century. Lying flat for birth reduces blood flow to baby and placenta, increasing the risk of fetal distress, whereas maximizes the spaces between the pelvic bones and puts pressure on the cervix. Unfortunately, after a life time of sitting and wearing heels, most women cannot maintain a squat without extensive exercise.
Squatting for back pain:
About a year ago, I went to a social event which required me to stand while talking to people for several hours. Although no exercise was involved, the effort of just standing for an extended time caused such a strain in my back that I was in pain for weeks. Most adults have experiences some sort of back pain and assume that this one of the costs for the privilege of walking upright. In fact, the reason back pain is so common in the West is because we spend most of our time sitting or reclining rather than walking and squatting.
Farewell to the chair?
While some Western ideas about birthing position and toilet design are unequivocally bad, I’m not so sure about chairs. Chairs for common use (rather than as thrones) only because common with the European Renaissance. Asian cultures certainly saw no need for them until the introduction of Western ideas.
I’m not a doctor or expert in ergonomics, but I suppose that sitting in a chair certainly has ergonomic and practical benefits. It allows for a better of the surroundings, better access to operate machinery, and probably requires less calories. Are these benefits relevant to the modern office work? I don’t know. The important thing is not to rely exclusively on the chair (or couch or bed) to support one’s body. Every now and then, you must let your muscles and tendons train for the job they were designed for.
Original: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/TruthJusticeAndTheAmericanWay/~3/fvEwwq6sz3E/ -
“Mais où est Dieu dans tout cela?”“[sire,] je n’ai pas eu besoin de cette hypothèse.”
If you ask a pre-modern, pre-scientific person why he believes in God, he would probably mention the need to explain some natural phenomena, living or geological, or perhaps offer some ontological justification. If you ask a modern person, you are likely to get an explanation in terms of social goals – the need to justify or discourage various kinds of actions and attitudes.
If you ask a pre-modern, pre-democratic person why there needs to be a State, he would probably mention some specific purpose such as the need for defense against foreign threats. If you ask a modern person about the need for a government, he would probably first mention the need to enforce certain socially desirable activities and prohibit undesirable ones.
It seems to be that the justifications offered for religion and the State today are essentially the same. People believe that (1) an agent is needed to create and enforce the desired “natural” order and (2) that this agent is immune or excluded from the conditions giving rise to this need.
For example, it is believed that all entities require a creator, but the creator is excluded from this requirement. Likewise it is believed that people cannot peacefully coexist without a monopoly on the use of force, but that the States themselves can coexist without a single ruler over themselves.
If you offer a religious person a naturalistic basis for ethical behavior, or a natural explanation of the universe they will usually not try to disprove your argument on an empirical basis, but ask you to refute their arbitrary claims. For example, they will say that life itself is not a valid basis for a moral theory because it does not include a justification for their ethical doctrine (sacrifice, altruism, etc). Likewise, the instability of nothingness due to vacuum energy cannot be a justification for the universe because it does not explain their version of “theological” nothingness. Arbitrary claims like this are impossible to disprove by any empirical evidence.
If you explain to someone who supports the State how a non-monopolistic, private agency could better accomplish some state-run function, they will usually not refute the argument directly, but ask you to refute their arbitrary assumption that only a coercive, monopolistic agency can full-fill that role. For example, if you explain why a private education would function better, they would not address the evidence directly, but ask how those who have neither funds nor charitable support could obtain an education – as if the State-run system is funded by magic, without either funds or electoral support. Their basic assumption is that voluntary cooperation is not possible to human beings in meeting certain kinds of values – but that the State is exempt from that same requirements.
The purpose of the above is not to convert the uninitiated but simply to point out how two popular memes have adapted to the Age of Reason by evolving from empirical to non-empirical, non-testable justifications.
Original: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/TruthJusticeAndTheAmericanWay/~3/sN_0Jk2tuhE/
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We are animals not far removed from the jungle. Genetically, we are identical to primitive man.
Our bodies have been shaped by our environment to make the best of the resources available to us. Our genotype (the DNA) only develops a healthy phenotype (our body and mind) in response to the environmental inputs it evolved to thrive in. The trouble with our modern, industrial lifestyle is that it is very different from the environment our bodies evolved to thrive in.As a result, most of us are plagued by chronic illnesses that our ancestors never dealt with. If they survived childhood illnesses and accidents, our primitive ancestors could expect to live almost as long as us without the help of any modern comforts.
What are the sins of the modern lifestyle?
- We eat terrible, non-human food: our bodies are adapted to handle a diet of mainly whole animal carcasses, leafy greens,nuts & berries, whereas modern man eats a diet full of grains and starches – full of carbohydrates that were a rare delicacy for primitive man.
- We evolved to eat whatever food is available and to handle occasional fasts no to gorge ourselves multiple times a day on substances engineered to directly trigger our pleasure hormones.
- We evolved to tone our bodies with hours of daily activity, but today we fight every exertion with door to door transportation.
- Most people who try exercise programs follow stressful, repetitive and boring workouts which can be counter-productive and do not match the natural workouts our bodies adapted to.
- We evolved to handle occasional intense stresses (chasing prey and escaping predators) but we are overwhelmed with constantly stressful modern workplaces and hectic schedules.
- The substitution of a physiologically proper diet with highly processed modern foods and toxic, synthetic sweeteners has destroyed our health as well as our sense of taste: we can no longer taste or appreciate the natural sugars and flavors in many foods.
So, why Paleo?
- Eat stuff your body is adapted to thrive with
- Rediscover the natural taste of foods
- Get the athletic body your ancestors had
Original: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/TruthJusticeAndTheAmericanWay/~3/h8kyxGGG7nc/ -
Conservatism: the philosophical position that one should oppose new ideas and practices.
Moderatism: the idea that one’s pursuit of truth should never conflict with the majority opinion — too much.
Extremism: the belief that one should adopt beliefs opposed to the majority.
In relation to reality, in any given society, conservatives, moderates and extremists have similar ideas, since they have no epistemological method by which to come to believe anything else.
Radicalism: the idea that one should reach conclusions based solely on the evidence without regard for other people’s opinion. In other words, radicalism is intellectual honesty consistently followed to ultimate conclusions. Most people who have made a difference in history have been radicals.
True radicals tend to be opposed by conservatives, moderates, and extremists, since they are the farthest removed from the consensus.
I don’t know of a single perfectly consistent radical, either personally or in history. Everyone whom I have known or studied has compromised when the facts became too uncomfortable or inconvenient. It is not a matter of intelligence. To be absolutely honest with oneself and interested in the truth is the hardest thing there is.
What are the facts? Again and again and again — what are the facts? Shun wishful thinking, ignore divine revelation, forget what “the stars foretell,” avoid opinion, care not what the neighbors think, never mind the unguessable “verdict of history” — what are the facts, and to how many decimal places? You pilot always into an unknown future; facts are your single clue. Get the facts!– Robert A. Heinlein
Original: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/TruthJusticeAndTheAmericanWay/~3/OM6-GJcYb68/ -
Human beings naturally group people into those we identify with and “others.” We understand and empathize with “our” kind of people, but simplify others into stereotyped models. We treat our family, school, city, country, race, sport team, political or sexual identity, or whatever with various degrees of familiarity.
And then perhaps we travel to another city or country or social circle and meet some people who are different. Perhaps we get to know some of them. And when we return to our old grounds and see someone from the new group we have gotten to know, perhaps we feel a little different and a little less “otherness” about them. Perhaps we repeat this process a few more times. Everyone does this to some extent.
I think some people always feel a need to categorize other human beings into “us” and “them.” But travel allows some of us to make a generalization about human beings: there is no “us” and “them.” There are only human beings, and we all have dreams and fears and hopes. You can call that awareness empathy — the intellectual and emotional integration of the knowledge that other beings have a consciousness just as you are conscious. Even animals and plants, in their own ways. Maybe for some people this is natural, but I think for the vast majority it is something that has to be learned. This is one of the virtues of travel. Unfortunately, I think many people are never really aware of their own consciousness, so cannot see it in others. They see only the meaningless, superficial traits of physical appearance and cultural trivia.
I think once you see parts of yourself in others, it changes how you treat people. If you come to learn that you are flawed and believe in and love the good in you nonetheless, you will love it in others. You still see the good and the bad — without expecting the same understanding in return. You will not feel hate or anger because they are different from you. You will celebrate their values just as you celebrate yours and maybe feel some sadness when you see the consequences of bad ideas, but only in the sense of a lost opportunity, not as a wall between you or a fault which you must correct.
To accept the values of others as inherently justified is to accept other people as ends in themselves, just as your life is an end in itself. Accepting that others are ends in themselves means accepting self-ownership, and this is the key to peaceful, non-violent coexistence.
To recognize the commonality of life is also a means come to terms with mortality. Your life is important and unique, but it is just one combination of many. That particular combination will never exist again, but many other sets containing the same values and ideas will. The meaning of life is creating an aesthetic and authentic expression of elements, not mere survival.
Does the idea of universal empathy seem like a utopian dream? It’s an ideal — not a destination, but a direction. But I think it’s a path which contains some truth and practical usefulness.
Self-understanding is a requirement for other-understanding. We build models of other people’s consciousness by applying our self-image to them. At the same time, we form our own self-image by observing and interacting with other people. It’s necessarily synergistic process. As we come to know others, we discover ourselves. As we discover our own nature, we better understand the actions of others. And if we learn to love ourselves (and I believe that value is a necessary facet of all knowledge), we learn to love others — all others.
When I speak of universal love, I do not mean an abstract, unconditional, and ignorant kind of love, but of love which comes from understanding and seeing our ideas and values in others. And not just a few values which our conscious mind labels as important, but all values — values as such. Not that thin slice which is a shared background, but everything that makes us — us. We may disagree with ideas on the abstract level but still appreciate the broad base we all share. The taste of our favorite foods, and the hugs of those we love, and the reason we go to work every day, and the hero-worship and the starry nights and taste of the water we drink. To see and to value this in all people on a deep intellectual-emotional level is an essential part of self-understanding.
Original: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/TruthJusticeAndTheAmericanWay/~3/LjqPAOTGdMI/ -
How about now?
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Words are a very imperfect means of conveying our thoughts. The original idea is distorted by a vague and stereotyped vocabulary, ambiguous grammar and meaning. And then it is distorted again by the different definitions and mental models of the recipient.
Meaning is in people. Words are very imperfect symbols for communicating an idea.
When we speak, we take an enormous set of abstractions linked with sensorial associations in our mind, distill them down to a short set of symbolic associations which are then re-linked with an entirely different set of associations in someone else. It is a lot to ask of an animal brain evolved to convey data about a hunting and gathering lifestyle to fit all the complexity of modernity into that medium.
Sometimes we can accompany our words with body language and pictorial imagery, but the modern civilized lifestyle demands more and more abstract and hypothetical thinking. It stretches the limits of verbal communication. It is possible for two people to have a conversation about art or theology or politics with both thinking that they had a meaningful interaction without a single idea ever being shared. Two brains expressing, but never really communicating.
It is for this reason that I like science, engineering, and programming. When we repeat experimental results, or implement a blueprint, or collaborate on software, the result is unambiguous. The unity of a shared reality confirms the tie between our minds.
Original: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/TruthJusticeAndTheAmericanWay/~3/0xGObxVAQNs/ -
The forum software has been updated. Let me know if you find any issues.
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USA annual GDP is about $15 trillion.
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USA nuclear weapons program: total cost about $10 trillion dollars.
- USA aircraft carriers: $22 billion lifetime cost * about 80 since 1922 = $1.7 trillion
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Apollo program: $170 billion (2005 dollars)
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USA nuclear weapons program: total cost about $10 trillion dollars.
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In 2003, I founded Objectivism Online as a community for Objectivism.
Now in 2012, I am founding the Free Capitalist Network (freecapitalists.org) to provide services for free-market intellectuals and entrepreneurs.
The first service I am providing is free blog hosting - YourBlog.FreeCapitalists.Org
Check it out here: FreeCapitalists.org
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The forum software has been updated. Let me know if you find any issues.
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Government is for the sake of protecting innocents from people who would initiate force or fraud. Since they do exist, and always will, we need government. Galt's Gulch did not have anybody in it who would ever intentionally initiate force or fraud, nor did it have anybody who would deny it, if it turned out they had done so accidentally.
That is wrong. The proper function of a judicial system is to provide restitution for harms.
Even if all people were perfectly moral and perfectly rational, there would still be disagreements about contracts and tort claims (accidental damages.)
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expression versus communication:
It is far easier to express oneself than to communicate. You can express yourself to a rock just as well as to a human being. But to communicate, you must understand how your words will be processed by another mind. You must estimate their level of knowledge, their potential for misunderstanding, their emotional response to your ideas, their capacity for new ideas, and their willingness to listen.
As social animals, we evolved to optimize our communication by relying on non verbal feedback in one on one interactions. When communicating in writing, the challenge is doubled, and doubled again when ongoing feedback is not provided. No wonder then that so few people learn how to be effective writers.
Original entry: See link at top of this post
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The double standard of creationism:
Let’s consider the double standard posed by Creationists. They insist that we must see something directly for it to exist. Since we did not see the origin of the universe (actually we can still see it today, but never mind that), the formation of the earth, or of life, they insist that we cannot know how these happened. But THEY know, even though they never saw Genesis themselves, the seas parted, the dead come to life, and ghosts rise into to the sky. They don’t need evidence, because they have a book. We have thousands of independent data points which all point to the age of the universe and the earth and the common ancestry of all life, but this evidence does not count because we learned these things indirectly, through systematic observation and induction. But they have a book, and since they operate entirely on the primitive level of concrete-bound perception, deduction from the words in a book trumps any kind of inductive evidence.
The amazing and unique thing about human beings is that by the use of reason we can know all kinds of things that we cannot see with our senses: we know that matter is made of atoms, we know the earth is round, we know the shape of our galaxy, we know what dinosaurs looked like, we know what the continents looked like hundreds of millions of years ago.
There are many things we knew in detail before we ever saw them and then confirmed by observation: for example, we learned about atoms over hundreds of years and only “saw” them for the first time a few years ago. But there were no surprises in seeing atoms because we had indirectly learned all the relevant facts from indirect observation. We knew the earth was round long before we saw it from space. We sent probes to precise destinations at the edge of the solar system across billions of kilometers by deriving the universal laws of gravitation from dropping weights on earth.
Even as they deny our kinship with other animals, creationists demand that we operate on a pre-human animal level: reject everything but the lowest-level perceptual induction, abandon the scientific worldview which makes your civilization possible and uncritically accept the theology you grew up with. This incidentally is the cause of ideological and religious violence: those who abandon reality as the arbiter of truth have nothing but raw coercion to convert the unfaithful to their side.
Here is the one way that Creationists are more consistent than theists who accept evolution: they recognize that if the systematic application of reason in science spreads to ethics, politics or metaphysics, it would invalidate all religious beliefs not based on evidence, and thus they reject reason in science, against all the evidence in the world.
Original entry: See link at top of this post
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We are informational beings in the eternal now:
What are we? What sets us apart from the universe?
We believe that we exist in limited time and space. We believe that we are defined by hereditary and environmental influences, leaving room for only a nebulous core of individuality. There is some truth in this perspective. But there is more.
What is time? The present is the sum of everything that is past, and the future evolves from the present. We only see the past as fixed and future as malleable because our minds process information in one direction. But every existent can only act in accordance with its nature and causality. The future is as firmly defined as the past. Every grain of existence implies by its identity the sum of all it has been and everything it will ever be. Time is not a dimension that we move through. Time is the iteration of the possible states of the configuration space of the Universe. It is a single system slowly revolving through all the configurations both possible and necessary to it. All that exists is the eternal present. Time is one’s perspective of the Long Now.
What makes us – us? We are machines, built out of matter and energy, but more importantly, we are information processing structures, the total of which defines our unique configuration. Many mistakenly place emphasis on either the genes or environment as determining structures. But there is no fundamental difference. Genes are triggered, expressed, or suppressed in response to environmental stimuli. Whether we are healthy or sickly because of good genes or good diet makes no difference to the end result. What matters is not our genotype, but our total phenotype — the sum of genetic and environmental influences. The particular combination is only important to biologists.
As human beings, we contain two complex information-processing systems: the genetic and the mental. Of the two, our mental structure is the far more important. We are each unique configurations of information-processing systems that spend our lives gathering up memes and observations and spitting out conclusions and actions. Our mental structures work in method much like our genetic systems, absorbing, modifying and sharing memetic structures through Darwinian processes. On a rare occasion, we cut, paste, and synthesize ideas to form a new unique yet stable and contagious meme-structure and add it to the shared pool of ideas, sending ripples through our shared meme-space and the physical environment through which we enact our ideas.
Mentally and physiologically, we are unique to a very basic level — it is just as unlikely for two people to have identical chromosomes as to have an identical understanding of an idea. Yet on both the fine details and the broad pattern of large structures, we share almost all of our mental and genetic identity with our species and genetically, with all life. There is no need to seek our identity in a mystical hidden soul. We are the unique yet utterly common sum of everything we inherit from the Universe. Our bodies are made from atoms created in the heart of dying stars and designed by a three billion year old genetic inheritance — each a unique information-processing system.
As individual biological systems, our slice of the Long Now is small. But as information systems, we inherit all that is and contribute to all that will be. As the latest expression of the evolving complexity-generating process of nature, we are seeds of the growing intelligence of the universe.
Original entry: See link at top of this post
Reblogged: Ultimate limits on computation
in The Objectivism Meta-Blog Discussion
Posted
1: The computer cannot be denser than that which would create a black hole (Bekenstein bound)
2: The temperature of the cosmic microwave background radiation sets the minimum operating temperature
3: Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, Planck’s constant,E = mc2 set a maximum on the energy processing per unit mass (2 x 1047 bits per second per gram of its mass)
4: Due to the second law of thermodynamics, there is a minimum to the energy consumption per computation (Landauer limit)
More: Wikipedia
Original: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/TruthJusticeAndTheAmericanWay/~3/7tuVKx2LQik/