To me, it's almost the same (but not quite exactly) as someone posting code on stack overflow, and developers using and relying on that code for their job.
The idea of what part of information is owned and what is shared is a concept that fascinates and bewilders me consistently. Art has all these emotional attachments to it, this personal affect, and not many stop to think that for some people, code - even mathematics, is exactly the same.
Why is there a difference between someone who posts a solution on the internet, versus someone who teaches a course and publishes a book, versus someone who traces a drawing using a projector for art? Public and cultural education, myth, and superstition, mostly. But in quantity and quality - these determine the success or failure of any venture business; even the start of a lifelong friendship.
How do people come to the thoughts they conclude with? How do people get ideas? I guarantee you, if you lock yourself up in a little room and wall yourself off from society, you will either arrive at some derivative of absolute truth or you will go insane, possibly both.
If I post this comment, and then other people have ideas that are profitable as a result of my comment, does it matter how similar their idea to my comment appears? Do I own those ideas that result from my comment? I would say no, because that's absurd, but yet, we live in a world that has opinions that cover the entire spectrum of this dialogue, and then some.
> Death for you _is_ a binary switch, and once you're gone, you are gone. Games do a good job portraying that.
Yea, I think this culture is way too obsessed with the idea of binary opposites. It's just as hard to demonstrate that what seems like two distinct and opposing things are actually the same thing, and it's just that you've allowed yourself to grow into this mind that believes otherwise. You can see every life as something that is in a constant decay towards death, and you can see everything that has decayed to contribute to the creation of new life. Stars don't have life or death, yet we come from them. At some point our own complexity perplexes us, and is that where we draw the line?
As someone who has as well, dealt with more thinking about death than most people ever will in their life, I don't know if I'll ever see how I see things get expressed in a video game. I just don't think it's capable of being expressed.
It's funny, I'm a senior software developer at Temple University, and I started working here just to be able to take classes at the college (I have my MSc in Comp Sci from Stevens Institute of Technology).
I don't understand what people want from computer science - no thinking? Computer science is awesome because it's hard and you can't just solve problems by beating them up with brute force combinations of things you can find on stackoverflow. Computer science is all thinking.
I'm also female, and this is one of the places I've been where I don't feel like an outsider all the time. I don't know what it's like around the students and professors as a general population. But plenty of my coworkers are students, and some are professors and some have gone off to be full time professors, so... just throwing in a perspective from the other side.
I don't agree with that, on the compartmentalization of the brain. Some of what we think in one compartment of the brain can work concurrently in another part of the brain, which can cause us to make all sorts of irrational leaps of reasoning that we abstract over and call logic or rationalization.
It's pattern matching, and some people get too carried away with it, because that pattern matching is typically what initially marked them as intelligent by everyone else, and it works, most of the time, except when we have paradoxes, which we just cover up with more symbolic logic, because we'd prefer to explain logic with more logic, than explain it with common sense.
Some people can think with perfect clarity and be seen as crazy by everyone else, just because people seem to want to observe things that way.
I mean, consider how the homeless who stole from this man may think. Many patterns of which to reason with, none of which are purely mathematical or logical.
I mean, on one hand, we use these things we've been taught mark intelligence and cunning, half truths dressed up in eloquent, alluring, and rhetorically deceptive wording, the rhythm and tempo of each sentence.
On the other hand, it's only the correlation between the Harvard 4.0 GPA and being fascinated with the random dreams and images one's mind presents to oneself day to day. You don't have to literally hallucinate in order to become convinced that your hallucinations are real. That's often a problem with language - day to day, we think some of it literally exists, and it doesn't (or we at least can not prove that it does).
I don't know what George Price symbolizes, because I don't pretend to understand him. But it gives me something to think about that is new.
I leave my house around 5:10, I get to work at 6:50ish. I leave work from 3-5, and depending on traffic, I get home anywhere from 4:30 to 6:30. Then I shower, blow dry my hair (~45-60 min), then I eat (~30-60 min), then I code/study, then social email / doctor who, then sleep.
I don't have a ton of free time, but I make it work.
Anecdotally, I would agree with you for some, but for others not so much. I get a short boost followed by a long crash when drinking coffee. It's also like an unfocused focus - like as long as what I want to focus on is nearby, I will do that. But if I have to figure out what I want to focus on, that feels like frustration and hypertension.
I prefer tea. I get up at 4:50 am 5 days a week, and I rarely sleep past 7-8 on weekends. I just make sure I'm asleep by 10:00 pm before work nights, and weeknights I stay up til 11:00 max.
I really like thinking that I think slowly, and that I can control my thinking direction using another level of meta-thinking. It's one of my most favorite and dramatic life shifts as an adult, that I have made. Pretending that my mind is a machine that needs to be turned on is a one way ticket to crazy town, and it's pretty hard to leave crazy town.
But otherwise, I don't understand how loneliness has to do with any of this. I'm lonely regardless of whether I drink tea or coffee.
Painting, playing the piano, walking, laying out in the sun, day exploring for pretty scenery - this is for emotion handling/conflict/resolution
Building electronics, studying computer engineering, physics, mathematics, in addition to computer science, programming, logic, formal languages, various theories of philosophy, psychology, cognitive science - this is because I usually feel like I am drowning in information, so I study, refine, simplify, and create strong associations in my mind of core concepts that I discover through carefully and tenderly planned activities of observation and thought. I do not care if they are linguistically inexpressible, it's like finding the perfect models for every field, that build the foundation and explain the creation of all the other things (or are capable of being questioned, elaborated on, relabeled or categorized, or destroyed, depending on whether they retain their truth characteristics).
Zen Buddhism - for when I repeatedly hit the same vague mental wall that the above procedure constructs. I can't prove that it exists or why, but I know it exists and it bothers me, sometimes.
Because it's easy to construct angels and demons in one's mind, about anything. It polarizes the mind into fear and desire, forcing forcing a person to continuously oscillate between extremes. It makes it seem like there are always only two choices, when in reality, there are many, if not infinite.
Also, there are always going to be some people who understand the machine better than the machine understands itself. Even if it means taking those gigantic tables of probabilities and abstracting over them to form some kind of representational language that can be used to predict complex non-deterministic machine behavior (similar to how we already try to predict non-deterministic behavior, or not) in complex systems.
As a corollary, I would argue that machines have already modified humans. They affect the way we think and reason. They are an integral part of our life and the machine abstraction can be projected onto that which it does not describe completely (in which, the technology that exists now can not construct the technology we envision). We program machines, machines program us. This seems obvious.