A mini Turing test

I have been thinking about this for a while now and decided to share it with you and get your opinions. The classic Turing test was intended as a way of conveying the strong AI viewpoint that when an entity displays intelligence behaviorally indistinguishable from a human then we have in fact created intelligence. These days we see the use of image based security in most account registration pages. Basically when you create an account on most public mail servers, etc., you may have to go through the step of keying in the characters you see in a provided image. The purpose behind this is to avoid robots, or automated programs, from creating accounts. Clearly then, this is a test that is intended to distinguish humans from non-intelligent machines. It is a form of a Turing test, although less encompassing. To me it appears like a really nice challenge to actually develop a program that can in fact recognize the characters in such images. Sure it is a tough problem, but it has the one nice feature. The image is expected to be unambiguously recognizable to any human creating an account. So I believe that must be a limit to which the characters in the image can be distorted or noise added. So, if we start off with a program that can handle images of a certain class (let us say images generated on a particular website), and progressively improve it to work for more and more web sites, then we might eventually get to the limit where no other image classes exist that are beyond the scope of our programs which are still readable by any human creating an account. If we reach such a point, then mail server companies might change to some other tests, but which still need to be mini Turing tests. We could then take that as the next challenge and continue.

The physicists deserve some credit too...

1. Much of the philosophical work that may have anything to do with cognitive science is not exactly recent, but quite age-old. Christof Koch, one of the leading cognitive scientists of the day says that we 'see with our brains', implying that perception is not simply explicable by the optics of the situation, but involves substantial neural computation. Immanuel Kant in the 1700s took such a stand (though not on anatomical grounds) that perception involves subjective inner states and said ""It remains completely unknown to us what objects may be by themselves and apart from the receptivity of our senses. We know nothing but our manner or perceiving them; that manner being peculiar to us, and not necessarily shared by every being, though, no doubt, by every human being"

We may say that there is no recent, fresh, contemporary input from philosophy that especially drives neuroscience today. It is just that some findings happen to correspond to the speculations of classical philosophers.

2. The credit for systematizing the field is deserved by physicists more than philosophers. Without the work of Helmholtz and other early founders of psychophysics, many of the experimental paradigms which are still the mainstay of cognitive science, might never have been developed.

Pattern recognition

According to Voltaire, "If there were no god, it would be necessary to invent one.”The human mind seems to have developed uncanny capacity of discover patterns in their environment; evolutionarily this makes sense, as recognition of patterns of danger can prolong life and enhance chances of reproduction. Maybe the human mind creates a god, in a desperate attempt to categorize those events, which its limited capacity cannot comport to a logical, discernable pattern. The discussion of the phenomena of human belief in god is interesting and relevant because every human culture seems to worship some type of deity.

What is Time?

In the present state of knowledge of PHYSICS there is no answer to the basic question, ‘what is TIME'. Perhaps there is another way of saying the same thing, i.e. there are multiple answers to this single question, viz., time is a concept, a dimension, an entity (irrespective of whether physical or non-physical or metaphysical) or just an illusion. Going by preponderance of probability it seems Time is a metaphysical entity. We are unable to unravel its mystery because our quest begins and ends with physics. Worse still we consider any talk of metaphysics as unscientific bunkum. I nevertheless foresee the day when physics shall aspire to penetrate the boundaries of metaphysics. It is only then we can expect some definite answer to the question WHAT IS TIME.

About Dreams

Well if you see the most acceptable model of the reason for dreams comes from the Psychology’s biggest shot Prof.Freud, who said that dreams are nothing but a person’s deepest idea, dreams, skills, pride, honor, talent, imaginations etc. That the individual had connected with, earlier in his life at any point of time. It sounds to be a simple proposal yet convincing this was, even though back in late 70's it has given way to more of the modern structural understanding of dreams.

Time From Ancient India

According to classical Indian literature TIME is a concept and a medium. In ancient Indian literature there are two different terms used to denote TIME; 'kaal' (eternal time) and 'samaya' (measurable Time). While 'samaya' is an illusion 'Kaal' is a concept and a medium that is real and non-illusory. 'Samaya' was broken into very small (22nd part of a second) measurable units by ancient Indian scholars but 'kaal' defied measurements and was endowed with three facets; present, past and future. While an ordinary mortal could perceive just one of the three facets, viz., 'present', a person well-versed with the knowledge of stars and planets and the five principles (panch siddhanta) of their speeds of motions etc could see through all the three facets including the past and future. In fact 'kaal' is one of the qualities (guna) of the supreme creator. Under its influence everything undergoes decay and finally destruction. In the Bhagvadgita the Lord says, "I am kaal the eternal time, the sole medium for decau and destruction of everything in this world". (Bhagvadgita, chapter 8 stanza 32). Stephen Hawkings, Roger Penrose and for that matter the works of most western scholars though highly erudite are limited to explaining just the Physics of the concept which is inadequate as its metaphysical aspect is far more overwhelming. Only the classical Indian works strike a balance between its physical as well as metaphysical dimensions.

Aether is unobservable

The presence is just an abstract speculation. In fact, everything, what you can allowed to see in you eyes is a picoseconds biased into past. You cannot see a presence due the limited speed of energy spreading, so you can have virtually nothing at present - not just some Aether. By definition, the Aether is unobservable for us from arbitrarily distant perspective, not just from "present" perspective. It manifests itself just by its causal effects, by the same way, like underwater influents the surface water spreading. But the underwater isn't visible by these waves, so we cannot see the vacuum by using of light as well.

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Space and time are not two sides of a coin

Why do you think so? In AWT exactly the opposite appears pretty logical. Only at the case, the energy can spread immediately through environment, it takes some time and we can talk about space as well. And the model of water surface explains, why the time dimension is asymmetric with compare to space dimension: every space-time is flat density fluctuation of Anther. Such view is consistent with geodesics concept of relativity, btw. In addition, the foam model of another brings a new testable prediction into space-time concept, for example the explanation, why some scientists are talking about two-dimensional time (in 3D foam the space is formed by pair of surface gradients in each space-time membrane). It means, the model of space-time by AWT is pretty well substantiated and it brings a new deep insight into it. While the claim of yours isn't supported by any evidence or reasoning by you.

Science and Religion

Consider somebody atheist and even an atheist scientist gets in a deep problem and he feels no natural way out of it says his child (or his nearest relative or beloved) has a hopeless disease like cancer, does it feel strange to you if you see him praying for something to help him out of this? I am sure your answer is negative. So why is it not strange? We know he is atheist and in other word he doesn't believe anything except the reasonable facts. This is the inner and sometimes hidden need that I am talking about. And no one can deny it. Now the question is: What is this? What do you name it? We should not make a mistake this is not the religion itself but it is the need. If the man described above had the ability to be aware of the emotional procedure taking affect within his mind/soul what would he be starting to believe in? My answer is at least he would begin to shape his own personal religious belief and may be different to all other religions. So what should people mostly ordinary people - who are not scientists or philosophers yet - do with this requirement? Could anybody show them a firm belief to depend on? If somebody shows such a belief they call him a prophet. And the belief itself would form the religion. The hope that there could be a day where the human kind would have no essential problem that cannot be solved by some scientific focus seems to be a fiction. So the religion and religious thought would last forever.

Discovery and Creation

At least in natural sciences, I would say, it is not clear, how to distinguish these 2 concepts. Discovery of a phenomenon is one thing, that surely can happen by accident, but then to "create" a working framework with a predictive theory out of a mere "monkey" discovery is a far more creative work that always will need a deductive mind. Often this "discovery" is also not much more than an extrapolation of known models to a bigger parameter space, as seen so many a times with electro-magnetic waves (accidental x-ray discovery, accidental infrared-discovery). But on the other hand, there are also some discoveries made in astrophysics that were done by a thorough search for predicted phenomena, worked out on a purely theoretical basis. This, I would name a tad more creative than the aforementioned accidental discoveries. I think I would conclude that answering the question, if discovery and creation are the same in science, it really depends on what you see as a "useful" discovery? As it wouldn't have helped the world at all, when the Curie couple, at the discovery of x-rays, just would have stopped to research it, saying: "Hey we found some invisible stuff that is black-ending photographic plates"! But they put hard work in it, and even paid with their life’s (though unknowingly) to understand why that was happening. So, actually, I dare to make my own conclusion: in science there is no discovery without creation or vice versa.

The Element of belief

Popper showed us that we only can falsify theories, never proof their certainty with the result (as quoted over and over again by Popper): There is no absolute certainty. Does that not automatically imply that scientists have to believe in a current model/theory as long as it has not been falsified? Maybe this "belief" is proportional to the number of times this current model has been tried to falsify, but still I would say, one cannot escape the "belief" element. And this is not restricted to Popper's scheme. Kuhn's world of paradigms needs at least as much, if not more the belief in the current paradigm. So, surprisingly, although I believe (oh no!) that one motivation for scientists to work in science always has been the safety of experimental falsification or the safety of logical falsification of theoretical models respectively, none in science seems to be able to escape the element of belief at all??

Infinite Speed

Parmenides made the ontological argument against nothingness, essentially denying the possible existence of a void. According to Aristotle, this led Leucippus to propose the atomic theory, which supposes that everything in the universe is either atoms or voids, specifically to contradict Parmenides' argument. Aristotle himself, proclaimed, in opposition to Leucippus, the dictum "nature abhors a vacuum". Aristotle reasoned that in a complete vacuum, motion would encounter no resistance, and thus infinite speed would be possible, something which Aristotle could not accept. There is a need for speed. The energy in a few grams of antimatter is enough to transport an unmanned spacecraft to Mars within few minutes. Aristotle did not think about antimatter at that time, but he was against the existence of absolute vacuum. He could not accept that in a complete vacuum infinite speed would be possible!

Psychic reality

The human being is capable of forming representations according to its imagination and to its desires. In this sense the human becomes a being able to fulfill its desires through re-presentations, by virtue of the autonomization of imagination. "Originally", wrote Freud, "the mere existence of a re-presentation [Vorstellung] was a guarantee of the reality of the represented". At this origin level , which persists in the unconscious, all desires are not simply fulfill able but always already fulfilled. The location, where the Unconscious exists, is without any relationship to Truth or Untruth, such definitions are alien to it, and they belong to another area of Existence. The radical imagination as unconscious is this Non-Existence - according to the rules of conscious life - which Freud called 'psychic reality'. This psychic reality consists mainly of imaginary re-presentations (Vorstellungen). Only when these re-presentations are translated to the thinking process, and herewith would be an object of consciousness, only then "think we that we think about the truth."