January 28, 2019 Monday
Bedtime Story
Preposterous Theory
Semmelweis was not so naïve so as to be
unaware that he lacked the evidence for his theory of “cadaverous particles”.
So he might have said something to this
effect:
Hey guys look, you may not believe in my
theory but all that I am asking you is to maintain cleanliness and you will see
the results for yourself.
Always remember that when you make tall
magical claims (magical is anything that is unknown to the current science or
alien to present technology) the onus is on you to provide the evidence and
equally substantial evidence at that.
I am not certain but the fact that
Semmelweis was a German of the mid nineteenth century he would have been aware
of this elementary logical truth since Europe centered on Germany at that time
at being on the forefront of scientific breakthroughs in almost all the
fields.
The theory of “cadaverous particles” was as
preposterous in those days as today’s proposal that our brain is merely a
computing device and consciousness is a product of simulation that our
neocortex is capable of.
No one has put it better to me than Joscha
Bach:
“Some people think that simulation can’t be
conscious and only a physical system can.
But they got it completely backward.
A physical cannot be conscious only a
simulation can be conscious.
Consciousness is a simulated property of
the simulated self.”
These lines shook me and gave me that
hair-raising tingling feeling exactly the type that I got after reading the
masterpiece “The Selfish Gene” ten years ago in 2009.
This is probably the ultimate Occam’s razor
that obviously would be unacceptable to most of you apes as was the theory of
“cadaverous particles” in Semmelweis.
Whereas most do not have any difficulty in
accepting our dreams to be the simulation of an active brain the consciousness
which is a near real-time simulation or modeling of the world around us via the
data collected through our senses in real time sounds quite disagreeable to us.
This idea or perhaps the principle that
minds are generating a simulation, a dream so to speak, from sensory data such
as photons hitting our two retinas did not originally come up to Bach.
This idea was originally proposed by a
mathematician and computer scientist by the name of Ray Solomonoff who was born
in Cleveland Ohio in 1926 to Jewish Russian immigrants.
It was he along with Marvin Minsky (son of
an eye surgeon) and John McCarthy who got seriously interested in machine
learning, organized the seminal Dartmouth Workshop (Dartmouth Summer Research
Project on Artificial Intelligence) in 1956 that lasted six to eight weeks and
perhaps where the science of Artificial Intelligence was born.
It was six weeks of relentless brain
storming primarily by mathematicians who dared to think that computers could be
made intelligent.
Stay tuned to the voice of an
average story storytelling chimpanzee or login at http://panarrans.blogspot.com
Good night Mon Ami and my fellow cousin ape.
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Another great educator and a teacher that I am aware of is
Professor Subhashish Chattopadhyay in Bangalore, India.
While I narrate stories, Professor Subhashish an electronic
engineer and a former professor at BARC, does and teaches real mathematics and
physics.
He started the participation of Indian students at the
International Physics Olympiad.
Do visit him here:
All his books can be downloaded for free through this link:
For edutainment and English education of your children, I
recommend this large collection of Halloween Songs for Kids:
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