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Showing posts from January, 2019

About consciousness

How would you define consciousness? Is dreaming a form of consciousness? What happens when you pass out? Consciousness (like in "aware of himself") is a subjective perception that is normally easily accessible subjectively, by introspection. However, the mechanics of consciousness are hardly understood and the consciousness state is hard to evaluate from outside in non-fully awake mind states. Is there a consciousness while being drugged? Is there a consciousness in catatonic people? Where is the consciousness boundary between being awake and asleep? The following reflections aims to give some clues about the nature of consciousness.

US must have wished Brexit

It makes a lot of sense for the US to wish for an Europe that is not big enough to fight economically with US. China is a problem enough. It made sense for Cambridge Analytica to work for Trump and Brexit even without the Russian involvement. The dollar($) value is affected while more goods are traded in Euro. Also, China owns too much dollar bills, they can put pressure on dollar if China moves more savings/commerce in Euro. Russia is not such an economical power yet, so EU is a bigger economical threat for US at this moment. Trump itself kind of said it. From what he said, I suspect that US have a lot of problems with the import/export balance and Euro might further erode the power of the dollar. Great Britain was always a kind of brother of US, so US wants it on their side. This is just a theory/speculation with no proof. Dear reader, please leave a message if you exist! ;) Also, please share this article if you find it interesting. Thank you.

The jug and the bird

In my 5'th grade, the new professor of Mathematics told us a puzzle: there is a jug with water staying in the desert, and a bird wants to drink some water. However, the jug have a tight neck, like the old Greek pottery for olive oil: it is like a sphere at the bottom, becoming tight while going up, only to enlarge a bit at the entry. At least this is how I imagine it. What is clear, the bird cannot reach the water because the head/beak are too big for the jug entry. How can the bird drink some water from the jug?

Irrational numbers

This article contains my personal reflections on irrational numbers, especially the informational property of their infinite strings of decimal - strings that often look close to random at a shallow look. It starts with an introduction of known facts, it continues with some less discussed properties and finishes with some philosophical considerations. Introduction Example of irrational numbers are numbers like √2 and ℼ (PI). Irrational numbers cannot be represented as a fraction like, 0.25 is represented by 25/100 or 1/4. Such numbers have an infinite number of decimals that are not repeating any groups we would take. Numbers like 0.(321) are not irrational, even if they have an infinite number of decimals, because they are repeating: 0.321 321 321 321 ... Such numbers with repeating decimal groups can be represented as a simple fraction: 0.321 = 321/999 an therefore are considered "rational". Rational numbers can be represented as fractions (like 234/789), and the...

Knowledge is all about prediction

Science, mathematics, intelligence, every knowledge can be reduced to the ability of predicting the outcome in two directions: "what happens if certain conditions occurs?", "how can I make to obtain a certain outcome". Basically, this is all the expected benefit of knowledge. The theories are just models that have this unique purpose: to link certain pre-conditions to certain outcome. Intelligence, in particular, is used to predict what happens in certain conditions (forward, like f(x)=?), along with finding the way to obtain a certain expected result (backward prediction), like "what x will make f(x)=y". This might seem to be a too simplistic view of intelligence, as intelligence also contains a creative part - that solves very tricky puzzles that even computers cannot solve. Still, I would argue that this activity is also a backward-prediction applied in many steps. Let's consider o detective that is trying to solve a murder case. His problem is ...