Frankly, on Fridays I'm not even sure I have consciousness

[andrewducker]

[Poll #1596138]

inspired by

Comments

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

Hm. When I first saw arguments like Penrose's I was comparatively young, and responded something like "wow, that's interesting. it's weird, but the guy is such a notable scientist, it must make some kind of sense, which is awesome".

Now, I think more like "I don't see why it should make any kind of sense." I suppose its possible that the brain does something a computer can't (although it seems unlikely to me) but there certainly doesn't seem to be any evidence other than wishful thinking that it does.

[andrewducker]

Yeah - it does seem to be a case of "I don't like the idea that I could be written in Java, therefore I must be all quantum and stuff."

[drdoug.livejournal.com]

I don't like the idea that I could be written in Java either.

I like to imagine it'd need something like Haskell, or at least Lisp.

More realistically I worry that I am in fact made of a hideous and haphazard hash-up of horrible K&R-style C, some iffy FORTRAN IV, and a few incomprehensible bits of assembler. The evidence definitely suggests I'm not implemented on anything that effectively abstracts memory management away.

[andrewducker]

ObXKCD:
http://xkcd.com/224/

[drdoug.livejournal.com]

Always thought that one was sailing close to pure blasphemy. God never used Perl for His hacking. If He did, it'd have been sh scripts (definitely no bash), a bit of sed, and if absolutely necessary a touch of awk. That's Hacking As God Intended.

[andrewhickey.livejournal.com]

No Bash?! Can you really see a real deity writing scripts without tab-completion?! (Not to mention he'd want to use a Free Software solution rather than a proprietary, closed one).

Personally, though, I think the mere existence of perl is proof that God doesn't exist, or that if he does he hates me...

[drdoug.livejournal.com]

I know some people think Richard Stallman is God, but even He would admit that he isn't. :-)

[mooism.livejournal.com]

God might use Free Software, but surely surely doesn't write it: we've not been given the source code. We're having to reverse engineer it.

apt-get install universe-src

[andrewhickey.livejournal.com]

Maybe he'd give it us if anyone asked him for it - he's just not provided it as a default, to save disk space. But of course those who ask him stuff the most (the priesthood) make too much money from providing tech support to want anyone to be able to do anything by themselves.

Re: apt-get install universe-src

[mooism.livejournal.com]

God's Will being frustrated by Downstream? Say it ain't so!

[zz]

I'm now pondering what styles of code other pasta shapes would be besides spaghetti.

[holyoutlaw.livejournal.com]

That's very funny.

[channelpenguin.livejournal.com]

Oh Penrose is cracked -- at least on that issue. At least the microtubules thing (Emperor's new mind) is just... well... hmm.. At the time I had not long written a bloody long essay on microtubules so I was pretty sure he was talking out of his backside rather than way, way cleverer than me (and , of course, all the sources I had used in my essay, some of whom most defintiely *were* way cleverer than me).