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Consciousness and the Paranormal

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Burnt State said:
? I have some converters that can do this - what specific files are you looking to convert?
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anything you could do would be great!, I found a free converter, then you have to run it back through a microphone and save as .wav b/c converters don't seem to generate the right kind of file for the converter, then it just spat out a bunch of numbers . . .
 
Constance said:
News we can use:
"The most accurate simulation of the human brain to date has been carried out in a Japanese supercomputer, with a single second’s worth of activity from just one per cent of the complex organ taking one of the world’s most powerful supercomputers 40 minutes to calculate."

Supercomputer models one second of human brain activity - Telegraph
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Don't be misled by the sensationalist headline in the article you posted. The point isn't that computers take much longer to accomplish the same tasks as humans, it's that modelling what is believed to be taking place within the brain down to the nanoscale takes a lot of computational power.

The article seems to be talking about something similar to, or possibly even the same project I mentioned in the Science Minute thread not long ago, It's a very interesting project, but if you want to compare the speeds that computers take to accomplish specific tasks compared with humans, you're looking at an entirely different kind of problem.

For example the chess game engine in most new Windows based computers "thinks" in literally millions of moves per second. For a human to sit and "think" out all those moves and do a comparative analysis of each move based on points would take an entire lifetime and be so complex as to be virtually impossible. The amazing thing is how when playing chess, humans circumvent this "brute force" process and somehow arrive at a small group of the best available moves within a very short time.

So despite the ability of my computer to outcalculate me by leaps and bounds, I still win about 30% of the time on level 8, and ironically I had to lower the game difficulty to make it harder for me to win. Similarly, work with fractals wasn't practical until the advent of computers because the human brain is just too slow at performing the calculations.
 
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ufology said:
Don't be misled by the sensationalist headline in the article you posted. The point isn't that computers take much longer to accomplish the same tasks as humans, it's that modelling what is believed to be taking place within the brain down to the nanoscale takes a lot of computational power.

The article seems to be talking about something similar to, or possibly even the same project I mentioned in the Science Minute thread not long ago, It's a very interesting project, but if you want to compare the speeds that computers take to accomplish specific tasks compared with humans, you're looking at an entirely different kind of problem.

For example the chess game engine in most new Windows based computers "thinks" in literally millions of moves per second. For a human to sit and "think" out all those moves and do a comparative analysis of each move based on points would take an entire lifetime and be so complex as to be virtually impossible. The amazing thing is how when playing chess, humans circumvent this "brute force" process and somehow arrive at a small group of the best available moves within a very short time.

So despite the ability of my computer to outcalculate me by leaps and bounds, I still win about 30% of the time on level 8, and ironically I had to lower the game difficulty to make it harder for me to win. Similarly, work with fractals wasn't practical until the advent of computers because the human brain is just too slow at performing the calculations.
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From what I remember reading when Deep Blue came out and even earlier about how humans play chess, memory and pattern recognition is key - human chess players have a "vocabulary" of chess patterns (similar to linguistic vocabulary and taking about the same amount of time: the proverbial "10,000 hours" to mastery)- this is how accomplished players can play multiple games blindfolded and win . . . and why IQ and chess playing ability may not be strongly correlated.

I did some searches, found several references to people winning more at higher levels, claiming they played more recklessly at lower levels . . .also various tips and "dirty tricks" claiming to exploit weaknesses or patterns in the program (disputed by others) - at any rate, it doesn't appear chess programs get online and swap information (or do they?) . . . does the chess engine adapt in any way to your individual style or make predictions based on knowing how you play, maybe involving some type of neural network . . . or does it always make the "best" move based on brute force calculations? I assume it also has a library of chess openings?

How does it do at speed chess/limiting the clock? Are chess variants right out? I assume the computer would have to be re-programmed?
 
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smcder said:
213. John Hagelin, Ph.D. - Buddha at the Gas Pump

#213 with John Hagelin, there's a download below the video for .mp3
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File was downloaded (i use Wondershare as the definitive file converter - almost anything can go in with a huge variety of output choices - very handy for all your audio/video editing needs). I've uploaded the file to VoiceBase which completes machine transcripts for free. i scoured the net looking for a software that would do this type of generic work as opposed to Dragon N.S. software where you need to train the software to read your voice over time to increase accuracy. There is very, very little accurate, functional software out there to do this work. I'm not on a PC so that limited my options and don't have the latest Mac OS which comes with a dictation software - go figure. Results from VoiceBase are dependent on the original quality of the file - so I'm not holding my breath on MP3 quality - could be gibberish. If there's something functional that comes from the machine transcript i'll let you know, but given the number of sites i ran into offering human transcription services i can see that we are not quite there yet with the algorithms to get great accuracy for free.
 
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smcder said:
213. John Hagelin, Ph.D. - Buddha at the Gas Pump

#213 with John Hagelin, there's a download below the video for .mp3
Click to expand...
Ok, i got the machine transcript and it is one large giant text file. What's neat about the site is now that it's been processed you can search any word in the audio file and it will take you to those time stamps where that word occurs - a very neat function.

See if you can access the file here - as it's supposed to be public, but might be restricted by my login. On the bottom right of the screen is a small box that says, "show raw machine transcript" - click this and you will get wall of text. From what i can see it looks fairly accurate! At the very least you have an excellent text base to start with to make a clean transcription if you wanted to.

VoiceBase - Store, Search and Share Recordings

p.s. - this entire process of uploading to getting the free machine file took about 10-15 minutes maybe to complete the entire file - pretty surprising. All hail the mighty programmer!
 
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ufology said:
All good points, but they aren't relevant to the original one, which was that the headline in the article posted by Constance is misleading. A true test of side by side power would be to pit human and a computer against each other in a side-by-side race to complete the same task ( 3D modelling of all the interactions that take place in one second of brain activity ) each using the same information as a starting point. Clearly there is a reason that a supercomputer is being used. It's not because the brain is actually faster at performing the same task we see in the article. It's because it's actually incredibly slow at performing such tasks, so slow in fact that it would be impossible for a human to do ever get the job done. If that weren't the case, then we wouldn't be needing a supercomputer to do it for us would we?
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I understood your point. I was asking the other questions out of curiosity.

If I undersand them correctly, the computers Moravec and Kurzweil want to see would neither rely on "brute force" nor try to simulate the human brain, but would instead actually have a structure similar to organic brains or an entirely different structure from following their own evolutionary path - as long as they were adapted in some way to function in the world.
 
ufology said:
I figured as much, but unless it's stated, it still leaves an element of wonder, and other people might not give you the benefit of the doubt, so it's always a good idea to make a segue way clear. Thanks.

Kurzweil is a visionary. He and I ( and probably a number of other people ) came up with the same approach to solving voice recognition back when whether or not it was even possible was still a matter of debate. But he also patented it and developed it, and got rich off it. I was too young and inexperienced at the time to do more than talk with my school buddies, and I had no adults around who understood what I was talking about or cared to take it seriously. At the time my dad thought computers were a fad. Kurzweils book ( now a modern classic ), The Age of Spiritual Machines, is a good intro to Kurzweil's vision of transhumanism.
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I've read that one and The Age of Intelligent Machines.
 
Burnt State said:
Ok, i got the machine transcript and it is one large giant text file. What's neat about the site is now that it's been processed you can search any word in the audio file and it will take you to those time stamps where that word occurs - a very neat function.

See if you can access the file here - as it's supposed to be public, but might be restricted by my login. On the bottom right of the screen is a small box that says, "show raw machine transcript" - click this and you will get wall of text. From what i can see it looks fairly accurate! At the very least you have an excellent text base to start with to make a clean transcription if you wanted to.

VoiceBase - Store, Search and Share Recordings

p.s. - this entire process of uploading to getting the free machine file took about 10-15 minutes maybe to complete the entire file - pretty surprising. All hail the mighty programmer!
Click to expand...

Sweet! Thank you so much, I grabbed the wall o'text and will start editing it.
 
ufology said:
I figured as much, but unless it's stated, it still leaves an element of wonder, and other people might not give you the benefit of the doubt, so it's always a good idea to make a segue way clear. Thanks.

. ..
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At 00:21 Bob Newhart demonstrates how to properly segue:

 
smcder said:
Sweet! Thank you so much, I grabbed the wall o'text and will start editing it.
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if you want any others processed just let me know - or feel free to sign up for that software as it appears the machine transcriptions are free, and you can upload a significant amount of material to be processed. it is very flexible with accepting a wide number of files but if you ever need something odd to be converted just PM me or request it in a thread we're on.
 
Burnt State said:
if you want any others processed just let me know - or feel free to sign up for that software as it appears the machine transcriptions are free, and you can upload a significant amount of material to be processed. it is very flexible with accepting a wide number of files but if you ever need something odd to be converted just PM me or request it in a thread we're on.
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Perfect, thank you again. I listen to a lot of podcasts and think this software will come in handy.
 
Burnt State said:
if you want any others processed just let me know - or feel free to sign up for that software as it appears the machine transcriptions are free, and you can upload a significant amount of material to be processed. it is very flexible with accepting a wide number of files but if you ever need something odd to be converted just PM me or request it in a thread we're on.
Click to expand...

Welllll . . .

"Others may be morning gone an instant, so it seems like a very inefficient process and not one with a great deal of intelligence overhaul of intelligence or purposeful minute because it's so random. It does in string theory seem to have that element, but all those universes are filled with intelligence, although the universes follow more olive universes are proficient fascinating once a gap biological life would only exists as we know it anyway. Relative handful. What are we wasting anyway. I mean, these are all free lazy is the nature of his unified just by its very systems to percolate universes Sowell wasting anything is really in the middle of sperm reaches the cannot really say that's a really fairy could now see the intelligent design in the well know about this him also. I mean, work hard of thinking anthropomorphic live here."

I don't think we have to worry too much about computers eavesdropping on our conversations any time soon! :-)
 
smcder said:
Welllll . . .
"Others may be morning gone an instant, so it seems like a very inefficient process and not one with a great deal of intelligence overhaul of intelligence or purposeful minute because it's so random. It does in string theory seem to have that element, but all those universes are filled with intelligence, although the universes follow more olive universes are proficient fascinating once a gap biological life would only exists as we know it anyway. Relative handful. What are we wasting anyway. I mean, these are all free lazy is the nature of his unified just by its very systems to percolate universes Sowell wasting anything is really in the middle of sperm reaches the cannot really say that's a really fairy could now see the intelligent design in the well know about this him also. I mean, work hard of thinking anthropomorphic live here."

I don't think we have to worry too much about computers eavesdropping on our conversations any time soon! :)
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But for a brief series of seconds I suddenly felt transported back to Curtis Lecture Hall L where I and 500 other students are trying to make sense of a morning lecture while the university elves are pumping sleep gas into the room so we all blow our full tuition scholarships. It all made perfect sense to me, just like then. If I want things to make more sense then I have to pay extra.
 
Burnt State said:
But for a brief series of seconds I suddenly felt transported back to Curtis Lecture Hall L where I and 500 other students are trying to make sense of a morning lecture while the university elves are pumping sleep gas into the room so we all blow our full tuition scholarships. It all made perfect sense to me, just like then. If I want things to make more sense then I have to pay extra.
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Always the promise that things will make sense if you just pay a little extra . . .;-)
 
"Cash is king!" my colleague exclaims to me in the hall one day. Get me out of this kingdom then, I mutter back to him. Once a serf always a smurf is what I say.
 
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