From extropians-request@gnu.ai.mit.edu Wed Jul 7 14:37:15 1993 Return-Path: Received: from usc.edu by chaph.usc.edu (4.1/SMI-4.1+ucs-3.0) id AA27433; Wed, 7 Jul 93 14:37:12 PDT Errors-To: Extropians-Request@gnu.ai.mit.edu Received: from geech.gnu.ai.mit.edu by usc.edu (4.1/SMI-3.0DEV3-USC+3.1) id AA14595; Wed, 7 Jul 93 14:37:06 PDT Errors-To: Extropians-Request@gnu.ai.mit.edu Received: by geech.gnu.ai.mit.edu (5.65/4.0) id ; Wed, 7 Jul 93 17:19:31 -0400 Message-Id: <9307072119.AA08570@geech.gnu.ai.mit.edu> To: ExI-Daily@gnu.ai.mit.edu Date: Wed, 7 Jul 93 17:19:08 -0400 X-Original-Message-Id: <9307072119.AA08563@geech.gnu.ai.mit.edu> X-Original-To: Extropians@gnu.ai.mit.edu From: Extropians-Request@gnu.ai.mit.edu Subject: Extropians Digest V93 #0379 X-Extropian-Date: Remailed on July 7, 373 P.N.O. [21:19:30 UTC] Reply-To: Extropians@gnu.ai.mit.edu Errors-To: Extropians-Request@gnu.ai.mit.edu Status: OR Extropians Digest Wed, 7 Jul 93 Volume 93 : Issue 0379 Today's Topics: AIT VirtSem: General Comments on the Seminar [1 msgs] MAIL: mail service idea [1 msgs] META: Away for awhile; be back soon. [1 msgs] NANO: Drexler style nanotech is unworkable [4 msgs] Nightly Market Report [1 msgs] PAGANISM: Portrait of the Artist as a Young Pagan [4 msgs] PAGANISM: Portrait of the Artist as a hunt-and-peck typist [1 msgs] Stephen Hawking [2 msgs] Administrivia: This is the digested version of the Extropian mailing list. Please remember that this list is private; messages must not be forwarded without their author's permission. To send mail to the list/digest, address your posts to: extropians@gnu.ai.mit.edu To send add/drop requests for this digest, address your post to: exi-daily-request@gnu.ai.mit.edu To make a formal complaint or an administrative request, address your posts to: extropians-request@gnu.ai.mit.edu If your mail reader is operating correctly, replies to this message will be automatically addressed to the entire list [extropians@gnu.ai.mit.edu] - please avoid long quotes! The Extropian mailing list is brought to you by the Extropy Institute, through hardware, generously provided, by the Free Software Foundation - neither is responsible for its content. Forward, Onward, Outward - Harry Shapiro (habs) List Administrator. Approximate Size: 50086 bytes. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Tuesday, 6 July 1993 23:15:08 PST8 From: "James A. Donald" Subject: NANO: Drexler style nanotech is unworkable In <9307062021.AA04607@wookumz.gnu.ai.mit.edu>, ebrandt@jarthur.Claremont.EDU (Eli Brandt) wrote: > > > From: "James A. Donald" > > Drexler's his conception of Van der Waals forces is false. > > Van der Waals forces directly cause static friction, > > independent of imperfections. Making and breaking contact > > between atoms involves substantial grabbiness and non > > uniformity. > > "VdW forces directly cause static friction" -- what do you mean by this? > Your previous use of terms such as "energy hole" suggests that you agree > that these forces are conservative. So where's the friction come in? > If it ain't dissipative, it's not "friction" in my book. 1. I am talking about the machine locking up, not slowing down. No dissipation when you are at a dead stop. 2. If you build a machine with knobbly wheels and shafts, sticky cams and cogs, it is going to shake like hell. The averaged out energy loss from this shaking macroscopically manifests itself as friction and heat dissipation Viscous friction just slows stuff down - no problem - the nanomachines will double in a week instead of a minute. Static friction stops stuff. Static friction is the force needed to push stuff over the energy barriers. Dissipation is not static friction, it is an indirect effect of static friction. You put in energy to lift something over the energy barrier, then you lose the energy you put in when it slips down over the other side. If you have an elaborate piece of clockwork, each stage will have some static friction. So you use a stronger spring. But the greater forces increase the static friction, and the machinery locks up. A small problem with Babbage's computer. A much worse problem on smaller scales, especially if the system is unlubricated. Drexler assumes thermal motion will take the nanosystem over the energy barriers. This will be true if the nanomachinery has significant entropy - if the number of internal degrees of freedom in random motion times kT is equal to the energy barriers. But then you lose the determinism that Drexler wants to achieve. Without determinism, designing nanomachines and predicting their behavior becomes substantially more complex. The simplest way of increasing the number of the internal degrees of freedom is to make the nanomachine components soft, like protein molecules, so that they can caterpillar against each other. Another way of reducing the energy barriers is to have the nanomachine components floating in solvent. If you do both, then you wind up with something very like soft complex protoplasm, instead of Drexler's hard predictable easy to understand clockwork. --------------------------------------------------------------------- | We have the right to defend ourselves and our James A. Donald | property, because of the kind of animals that we | are. True law derives from this right, not from jamesdon@infoserv.com | the arbitrary power of the omnipotent state. ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 07 Jul 1993 11:36:48 -0400 From: "Perry E. Metzger" Subject: NANO: Drexler style nanotech is unworkable X-Reposting-Policy: redistribute only with permission Michael Clive Price says: > I am inclined to agree, without detailed knowledge, with the point James > Donald makes about the inappropriateness of scaling down macro designs > to the nano-scale. I, too, find the classical concepts of axles, gears, > bearings, rods, etc to be highly unconvincing at the molecular scale. It appears that such items as flagella and cillia are operated precisely by the molecular equivalents of axles, gears, etc. There is also increasing evidence that the contents of cells are far more ordered than we think -- the recent work that has been done on tagging and monitoring molecular transport inside cells seems to indicate that things are more "machine like" than we ever suspected possible. Certainly its possible that some specifics that Drexler et al have come up with won't work -- but the designs feel very convincing to me at this point. I don't believe that any of them are "real" in the same sense that modern manufacturing plants are not simply scaled up water mills, but the principles seem fairly good. Perry ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 7 Jul 93 11:51:33 CDT From: derek@cs.wisc.edu (Derek Zahn) Subject: PAGANISM: Portrait of the Artist as a Young Pagan Thanks, Eric. That was a nice (if somewhat arrogant) piece. I have a couple of questions: 1) What does paganism offer to people who (to their knowledge) haven't been channeling ancient gods in public for years? 2) I notice that you omit from your list of gifts the gift of Hacking. Presumably you've been a prodigous hacker at times and have felt the same sort of connection with the machine being programmed as you feel with your flute. Does paganism lack the proper archetype for that kind of experience? 3) Besides access to deeply-wired psychological mechanisms, your essay displays an equally important commitment to continual growth and self-observation, which can be difficult to maintain. Was this a component of your personality prior to your conversion to paganism? Do you feel that paganism offers a view on this that helps maintain such a state? 4) Other qualities, such as clarity of purpose, are expressed well by other (competing?) systems -- for example, the idea of the warrior's outlook and the path with heart from Castaneda. Paganism apparently has a rather established theology; how open is it to other empirical systems of organizing psychological phenomena? 5) Is "Noopagan" a neologism? derek ------------------------------ Date: Tuesday, 6 July 1993 23:29:30 PST8 From: "James A. Donald" Subject: NANO: Drexler style nanotech is unworkable In <9307070159.AA07719@wookumz.gnu.ai.mit.edu>, Mark_Muhlestein@Novell.COM (Mark Muhlestein) wrote: > Well, it is unsupported in that quote, but it is "shown in Chapters > 6, 7, and 10." If you want me to take you seriously, I want to > see evidence that you have read and understood those chapters. > Chapters 7 and 10 examine the mechanical properties of > sliding, unreactive, atomically precise interfaces in which > van der Waals attraction and overlap repulsion are the > dominant forces. [footnote: This is not universal: metal > surfaces (for example) would undergo bonding rather than > repulsion; potential functions are discussed in > Israelachvili (1992).] This requires a model for the > interaction energy of two such surfaces at small > separations. > In the interfaces of greatest practical ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ > interest, the structures of the two surfaces are out of ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ > register (owing to differences in lattice spacing or to a ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ > relative rotation). ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ This is of course a description of HOPG, or at least it is a description of what the manufacturers of HOPG claim it is. (Later I discuss Mark's argument that if it behaves in an un Drexler like manner, it cannot be what the manufacturers claim it is.) Thus by Drexler's argument HOPG should have insignificant shear strength. Furthermore, by Drexler's argument, when random external molecules become entrained between the HOPG layers this should increase static friction, but in fact it drastically reduces static friction, making HOPG into a tolerably good lubricant instead of a very rigid solid. As I said earlier, in his force calculations Drexler is making the assumption that Van der Waals forces are pairwise independent, which is false. Of course the reason he is doing this is that if you do not do it, you cannot do the calculations at all. Those few people who actually understand van der Waals forces seldom attempt to calculate anything bigger than a cluster of three noble gas atoms. A very crude way of describing the problem (and somebody who actually knows something about van der Waals forces could shoot me down in flames here ) is to say that the van de Waals forces are the result of electron correlations in Hilbert space between the two HOPG sheets, and that the correlation extends over a very large area of physical space, hence any shift in the two sheets is going to cause a wholesale reordering over a large area. Even though the sheets are out of register, a pattern develops in Hilbert space that is in register, and when you move them in physical space, it has to jump to another pattern over the whole sheet. You cannot get the total force by simply summing atom to atom forces between neighbors as Drexler does. If you could it would be really easy to calculate van der Waals interactions. > James, please read chapters 7 and 10, and explain where Drexler > goes wrong. I'm not saying he's not wrong, I would just like you > to explain it in terms of the data presented there. I am growing > frustrated with assertions such as: > > > This assumption can only be true if the nanomachine has > > substantial internal random degrees of freedom, but the > > whole point of a Drexler design is to avoid this. He > > assumes that which he denies. Thermodynamics. A fully deterministic nanomachine has negligible entropy, therefore it is thermodynamically preferable for it to sit in an energy minimum - the nanoscale equivalent of a macroscopic machine that locks up through static friction. Overcoming binding forces by thermal motion is analogous to melting. You need an entropy gain to offset the entropy loss that came from jumping out of the global energy minimum. So you can compare a nanomachine to a solid composed of large molecules, such as naphthalene. A better comparison is a solid composed of a random collection of many different large molecules, such a bitumen. Point is, if the molecules are fairly big and rigid, it is a solid. If the molecules are random, hence mismatched, it is a glassy or amorphous solid. > > Consider two randomly oriented graphite planes, as in > > highly oriented pyrolytic graphite. By Drexler's arguments > > (10.8) there should be systematic cancellation in the > > energy barrier against one layer sliding over the other > > because the two planes are randomly oriented, so the layers > > should easily slide. > The point about the lower energy barrier of coupled objects serves to > illustrate only one difference with static friction. Even so, your > example seems to be off the mark. Are the HOPG planes atomically > precise and perfectly flat? If not, graphite's unsaturated tetravalent > atoms can react under a compressive load of ~0.5 nN per atom (p. 297). ~0.5 nN per carbon atom is two million pounds per square inch. I think something else will give way before that becomes a problem The manufacturers claim that HOPG is atomically precise and perfectly flat over quite large distances. distances, but they could be kidding themselves. It looks perfect on scanning tunneling microscope images, apart from shit lying around on the surface, but then maybe the people who take those images throw out the crappy ones. I know that HOPG is quite strong against shear forces, having handled it. I find it hard to believe that such solidity is the result of a very small number of imperfections. The example of fullerene spheres on a HOPG surface is pretty good, because the HOPG is certainly perfect on a scale vastly larger than a fullerene sphere - and vastly larger than the likely size of Drexler nanomachine component. You have no doubt seen photos of fullerene spheres on HOPG. They stayed still for long enough to be scanned, despite thermal vibration. > > Molecules analogous to those proposed by Drexler exist. > > Their behavior is roughly what you would expect by scaling. > > Nanomachines will suffer the same problems as micromachines > > do, only more so. > If you can produce any of the molecular machine designs proposed in > chapter 10 of _Nanosystems_, I'm sure the list would kick in to buy > your ticket to Stockholm (insert smiley as needed). I was referring to examples such as fullerene spheres sitting on HOPG planes, and Langmuir films absorbed on mica. Drexler's basic intuition about how molecules behave is radically different from mine, which is why I only skimmed his book. I did however check out his arguments on static friction. I did not examine his thermodynamic arguments carefully. I just assumed that if his dynamics was wrong, his thermodynamics would be worse. > > Also, I have the impression that you assume that Drexler ignores all > problems in his analyses. Chapter 7 ends with this paragraph: I failed to read this section: > _Some open problems._ Many of these mechanisms are > associated with open problems. The theory of phonon > transmission through sliding interfaces, in particular, is > challenging and in need of further work. For example, in > the regime of lowest drag -- at separations where the mean > interfacial stiffness goes to zero -- the phonon > transmission model described here becomes unrealistic. > Further, the interfaces of greatest engineering interest > are not between identical half-spaces; they may be curved, > or juxtapose dissimilar materials, or couple a small > component to [a] large environment. Finally, drag > resulting from interfacial phonon-phonon scattering > deserves a thorough treatment. A survey of the devices > discussed in Chapters 10-14 reveals many situations of > practical interest for which the models presented in this > chapter provide only rough estimates of energy > dissipation. In addition, many of these models can be > improved by means of better approximations or more thorough > analysis. Having read it now, I do not see it as meaningful. Phonon phonon scattering will only produce viscous drag, so it merely affects how fast the machine can go, not whether it is workable or not. Furthermore it is clearly impossible to produce a realistic estimate of the extent of viscous drag by purely theoretical calculations in the absence of any practical experience. Obviously nanomachines will work quite fast, so who cares about the exact speed. Eliminating lubricant replaces the viscous friction of the solvent with the static friction of contact. Drexler correctly predicts that viscous friction between dry bearings will be small. He is correct, but not in the way that he intended. If you really want to know how fast they will move, measure the drag between the planes of hot HOPG in a vacuum while shearing it rapidly. (Not seriously recommended as a lubricant in a vacuum.) > James, it sounds like you have interest and abilities in this area. If > you are wrong, and Drexler-style nanotech _is_ workable, why not find > that out as soon as possible, so we can get to work on some of these > problems. I believe we need something like nanotech to create the future > we all want. Agreed. But I expect that nanotech is going to look very much like biotech, hence hard to understand, predict, and debug. We will find ways of making it easier. We will not find ways of making it easy. We now have the capacity to make arbitrary proteins, arbitrary RNA and DNA molecules, and arbitrary branched polysaccharides. What we would like to do is build a machine capable of receiving macro scale information and transcribing it to DNA, and of reading DNA and signaling the data as macro scale information. --------------------------------------------------------------------- | We have the right to defend ourselves and our James A. Donald | property, because of the kind of animals that we | are. True law derives from this right, not from jamesdon@infoserv.com | the arbitrary power of the omnipotent state. ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 6 Jul 93 18:01:11 EDT From: baumbach@atmel.com (Peter Baumbach) Subject: MAIL: mail service idea Danny Willis says: > I apologize for putting all my replies in one msg, but it's very > clumsy to communicate via MCI, and I am billed per message. Seems like a need to create a remailer which can split one message into sub messages with different addresses. Maybe the opposite would be usefull: a digest mailbox. When a certain total length of messages is accumulated, a remailer forwards them all together as one message. Just a thought, Peter Baumbach baumbach@atmel.com ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 7 Jul 93 12:18:51 CDT From: derek@cs.wisc.edu (Derek Zahn) Subject: NANO: Drexler style nanotech is unworkable James Donald: > Even though the sheets are out of register, a pattern > develops in Hilbert space that is in register, and when > you move them in physical space, it has to jump to another > pattern over the whole sheet. You cannot get the total > force by simply summing atom to atom forces between > neighbors as Drexler does. If you could it would be > really easy to calculate van der Waals interactions. Not just neighbors -- all pairwise interactions sufficiently close. For large flat surfaces, it appears that the approximation integrates these. Your point about hilbert space is another one that may or may not be true -- what reason do we have to think that the potential wells caused by this kind of "secondary" registration must be deep? derek ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 7 Jul 93 10:53:48 PDT From: tcmay@netcom.com (Timothy C. May) Subject: Stephen Hawking > Huh? > > To my knowledge, Hawking got ill AFTER he was already well on his way > to his current position in the field. According to various accounts, including the outstanding film version of "A Brief History of Time," Hawking was a typically careless student when he was intially diagnosed with ALS (aka Lou Gehrig Disease). For whatever reason, this is when he began to buckle down. I studied his Hawking and Ellis, "Large Scale Structure of the Universe," under James Hartle in 1973, and Hawking had been ill for several years but only famous for a few years. And the "Hawking radiation" (evaporation of black holes) work came a couple of years later. > Furthermore, lets say that what you say is true. Does that mean that > we should go up to random people and tell them that we are going to > kill them in 15 years in order to make them more productive? Hawking, > and anyone else, has no obligation to society -- if someone wants to > live rather than die, society should not tell them what to do. I don't think this was being said. Some folks will sign up for cryonics, some won't. -Tim -- .......................................................................... Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, tcmay@netcom.com | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero 408-688-5409 | knowledge, reputations, information markets, W.A.S.T.E.: Aptos, CA | black markets, collapse of governments. Higher Power: 2^756839 | Public Key: PGP and MailSafe available. Note: I put time and money into writing this posting. I hope you enjoy it. ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 6 Jul 93 23:59:24 EDT From: The Hawthorne Exchange Subject: Nightly Market Report The Hawthorne Exchange - HEx Nightly Market Report For more information on HEx, send email to HEx@sea.east.sun.com with the Subject info. --------------------------------------------------------------- News Summary as of: Tue Jul 6 23:59:01 EDT 1993 The QUOTE command will now accept multiple reputation symbols, and provides the same level of information as the market report. Two new commands have been implemented: TRANSFER and PAY Use the COMMANDS request for more information. TRANSFER can be used to transfer shares between accounts. PAY can be used to transfer cash between accounts. These two commands now make it possible for someone to setup an independant brokerage service, currency conversion service, etc. No special permission is needed to do any of these, but by contacting the Exchange first, we may be able to offer you some assistance. Newly Registered Reputations: (None) New Share Issues: Symbol Shares Issued LEFTY 10000 Share Splits: Symbol n-for-1 Total Issued P 100 1000000 --------------------------------------------------------------- Market Summary as of: Tue Jul 6 23:59:02 EDT 1993 Total Shares Symbol Bid Ask Last Issued Outstanding Market Value ACS 10 29 10 10000 100 1000 ALCOR 10 35 10 10000 100 1000 ANTO - - - NA NA NA BLAIR 15 30 50 10000 25 1250 CHAITN - - - NA NA NA DEREK 50 100 100 10000 2 200 DRXLR 15 20 10 10000 120 1200 E 15 100 100 10000 15 1500 ESR - - - NA NA NA EXI - - - NA NA NA FCP - - - NA NA NA GOBEL 20 50 50 10000 2 100 H - - - NA NA NA HEX 100 105 100 10000 3608 360800 HFINN - - - NA NA NA IMMFR 50 - - 10000 0 NA LEF 80 100 100 10000 1 100 LEFTY - - - 10000 0 NA LIST - - - NA NA NA LL - - - NA NA NA MARCR - - - NA NA NA MLINK 1 60 50 10000 1 50 MWM - - - NA NA NA N 50 125 50 10000 33 1650 P 25 25 25 1000000 735 18375 PRICE - - 1 10000000 400 400 R 25 50 - 10000 0 NA ROMA - - - NA NA NA SGP - - - NA NA NA TIM* - - - NA NA NA TRADE 85 105 - 10000 0 NA TRANS 30 50 - 10000 0 NA WILKEN 9 10 10 10000 1 10 ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 7 Jul 93 14:18:43 EDT From: Brian.Hawthorne@East.Sun.COM (Brian Holt Hawthorne - SunSelect Engineering) Subject: PAGANISM: Portrait of the Artist as a Young Pagan Derek Zahn writes: > 4) Other qualities, such as clarity of purpose, are expressed well > by other (competing?) systems -- for example, the idea of the > warrior's outlook and the path with heart from Castaneda. Paganism > apparently has a rather established theology; how open is it to > other empirical systems of organizing psychological phenomena? The established theology is that of Wicca, a particular religious group that is neopagan. There are many of neopagans who are neither Wiccan, nor particularly religious. The group I work with uses techniques quite similar to some of those that Eric describes, but without the theology. [ Related aside: Our group does belong to the Covenant of the Goddess, a national religious group, since some of our members feel a need for a religion (for marriages, etc.) Recently we have come under attack from various fundamentalist Wiccans who argue that because we do not require belief in "the Goddess" we ought not to be eligible for membership in the Covenant, despite having helped found the New England local council. Interesting that you can't escape fundamentalists, no matter where you go. I mention this to point out that there are just as many non-rational people in neopagan circles as there are in the general public. ] Rowan ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 7 Jul 93 14:36:27 WET DST From: rjc@gnu.ai.mit.edu (Ray) Subject: Stephen Hawking Timothy C. May writes: > > >>Huh? >> >>To my knowledge, Hawking got ill AFTER he was already well on his way >>to his current position in the field. > >According to various accounts, including the outstanding film version >of "A Brief History of Time," Hawking was a typically careless student >when he was intially diagnosed with ALS (aka Lou Gehrig Disease). For >whatever reason, this is when he began to buckle down. I don't think it was his mortality that caused him to buckle down but the disabling effects of ALS. Remember, he was only given 6(?) years to live when his was diagnosed. Many people, if they had to choose between living an exciting knock-down drop-out life with their final 6 years, or attending graduate physics classes would choose the former. Hawking was forced to stop being a careless student. When your whole body is unusable, the only thing left to work on is your mind. It can be the only sense of pride for him, I think. -- Ray Cromwell | Engineering is the implementation of science; -- -- EE/Math Student | politics is the implementation of faith. -- -- rjc@gnu.ai.mit.edu | - Zetetic Commentaries -- ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 7 Jul 93 12:10:00 -0700 From: tcmay@netcom.com (Timothy C. May) Subject: AIT VirtSem: General Comments on the Seminar Derek Zahn makes some good comments on our seminar, on the relatively light participation, and on directions for the future: >Notes on the seminar: The discussion here is at least as good as >any I've seen in the many "real" seminars I've attended, but >the number of active participants is fewer. Though Tim has been >doing an admirable job of providing reading material on-line, we >do suffer from the lack of seminar-style "paper presentation" talks I also have many more papers ready to be OCRed. I'm awaiting a Xerox of Bennett's "Sci. Am." Martin Gardner column (guest contributor) on Chaitin and Omega. Someone out there has said he'll send it to me (saving me $13 to buy Gardner's book). >that participants give. Then again, we're not paying hundreds of >dollars to participate like we would do in a "real" seminar. Still, >I am taking it quite seriously and am getting lots out of it. It >would help if we had more direction. In particular, if our most >important primary goal is to make sure that we have a good grasp >of the technical issues involved in the basic AIT formalisms, we >should focus on that kind of thing. I can make up homework problems! >Would anybody do them? Homework would of course drive away the lurkers, and maybe even some of the active particpants (four, by my count....Nick, Derek, Hal, and me). I'd like to encourage lurkers and "auditors" to speak up, even if your questions are not, by your standards, up to the detailed debate that sometimes goes on here. After all, we all have our particular interests. In the Drexler-James Donald thread, for example, I freely admitted my ignorance of physical chemistry and said I hadn't studied any chemistry since 1968! Surely the Rucker, Barrow, Davies, and Casti books have now been read by some of you out there. You must have questions, doubts, etc. By all means, speak up. .... >of the objects under study. In particular, if we want to use a >physical (perhaps evolutionary) analogue of Logical Depth to define >physical complexity, we'd want different Darwin Machines to be >similarly trivial translations. However, I'm concerned that the >translation may be much more time-consuming than the generating >program, making comparisons of logical depth for things of low >complexity (like us) difficult, and once again requiring the >introduction of context-dependent features to make comparisons >meaningful (the approach I still favor anyway). The translation between "programs" is not trivial. Even in the Turing machine sense (abstract, formal machines), there is no guarantee that finding such a translation is easy, will run efficiently, etc. (Else we'd be running on one CPU, probably a simple one, and emulating all other instruction sets!). In particular, the "frog program" that encodes frogness, is not translatable except with incredible slowdown in the "human program," and perhaps not even then. (The Physical Church-Turing Thesis is true, so far as most of us know, but is of little practical use, not surprisingly.) > >> So, it appears to me that evolutionary processes may be characterized by >> the production of logical depth. > >The above caveat aside, this seems reasonable to me. Evolution >searches a "space" of possible objects. The chances of a starting >state being the endpoint (if there is one) of that search is >quite small and evolution uses lots of work to do that search. I think there's not a shred of doubt that evolution produces (drives toward, whatever) greater logical depth and greater algorithmic information content. I may next scan-in a paper from the Zurek-edited Los Alamos book in which Bennett compares the many attributes of "life." -Tim -- Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, tcmay@netcom.com | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero 408-688-5409 | knowledge, reputations, information markets, W.A.S.T.E.: Aptos, CA | black markets, collapse of governments. Higher Power: 2^756839 | Public Key: by arrangement Note: I put time and money into writing this posting. I hope you enjoy it. ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 7 Jul 93 15:08:07 EDT From: boojum!esr@gvls1.VFL.Paramax.COM (Eric S. Raymond) Subject: PAGANISM: Portrait of the Artist as a Young Pagan > Thanks, Eric. That was a nice (if somewhat arrogant) piece. That's me. Nice, if somewhat arrogant. :-) > 1) What does paganism offer to people who (to their knowledge) haven't > been channeling ancient gods in public for years? Um...the opportunity to start doing so? I thought I made that pretty clear. My experience was unusual mainly in that I started having shamanic experiences spontaneusly, *before* Wiccan training. What neopaganism provides is a ritual technology and social context that makes having such experiences easier. And language to describe them. > 2) I notice that you omit from your list of gifts the gift of Hacking. > Presumably you've been a prodigous hacker at times and have felt > the same sort of connection with the machine being programmed as > you feel with your flute. Does paganism lack the proper archetype > for that kind of experience? Mr. Zahn, you have a real knack for the penetrating question! No, the Gods didn't give me my knack for hacking. I had that before. And no, paganism has no really good archetypes for invoking that experience. Yet. Give us time; computers have only existed for fifty years! I've sometimes thought we could stand to pay a bit more attention to Papa Legba, the Voudoun/Santeria/Candomble god called the Intercessor, or the Opener of the Way (cognate to Hermes). Santerists regard him as the patron of divination, calcolation, and (explicitly) computers. The `hack mode' state isn't quite the same as what I do when I play the flute or invoke in circle. There's no sense of opening up to the universe, of being filled with inrushing power. It's more a sort of cool, single-pointed concentration. More like Zen's "sitting quietly, doing nothing", but not identical to that, either. But you probably know that; I presume you've been in hack mode yourself. > 3) Besides access to deeply-wired psychological mechanisms, your essay > displays an equally important commitment to continual growth and > self-observation, which can be difficult to maintain. Was this > a component of your personality prior to your conversion to paganism? > Do you feel that paganism offers a view on this that helps maintain > such a state? Ugh. Please don't use the word "conversion". Conversion makes robots. We pagans don't seek converts and we don't trust people who act "converted". To answer your questions: No, I wasn't particularly self-aware or "committed to growth" before. Except on the level of being curious about everything. I suppose you could say that I was trying to grow by understanding everything, including myself. But the self-understanding part never seemed specially critical before my first mystical experienceS. As to your second question, I'd say than paganism very definitely *does* support and encourage self-awareness of the kind you're describing. The shaman's and magician's instrument is his/her own psyche; thus, performance demands a kind of clarity that requires self-awareness to maintain. > 4) Other qualities, such as clarity of purpose, are expressed well > by other (competing?) systems -- for example, the idea of the > warrior's outlook and the path with heart from Castaneda. Paganism > apparently has a rather established theology; how open is it to > other empirical systems of organizing psychological phenomena? Quite open. If they look useful, we just co-opt them. I had to laugh when you said paganism has an established theology. NOT! It has about 2,317 different "established theologies" varying by practioner, functional aim, and day of the week. Me, I'm mostly a witch, occasionally a Discordian, and often a practitioner of Zen. I've participated in Thelemite rituals and helped write chants for Norse-pantheon revivalists. This kind of eclectism is not at all unusual. (However, I will state that I am not a fan of Castaneda.) > 5) Is "Noopagan" a neologism? If I used it in the essay, it's a typo. Kind of a neat one, though. -- Eric S. Raymond ------------------------------ Date: 07 Jul 1993 16:36:43 -0400 (EDT) From: Mark Sulkowski Subject: META: Away for awhile; be back soon. The computer account which I normally use to receive extropians is temporarily unavailable to me. If this creates problems for the list, please take me off temporarily. If you wish to send me email, please send to: SULKOM@UBVMS.CC.BUFFALO.EDU Thank you, and I hope to participate again soon. Mark Venture ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 7 Jul 93 13:26:13 -0700 From: freeman@MasPar.COM (Jay R. Freeman) Subject: PAGANISM: Portrait of the Artist as a hunt-and-peck typist I thought that a "noopagan" was an assembly-language programmer fond of wasting cycles ... Yours for ever better typogriffical(*) errors ... -- Jay Freeman (*) Typogriffin. n. A mythical beast with the hindquarters of a lion, the forequarters and wings of an eagle, and the head of a Remington. PS: I have two outstanding candidates for truly great typographical errors. One is from the 1960s -- from _Time_ magazine, no less -- a reference to the United States Special Farces in Vietnam ... The other was a reply to the referee of an article submitted to a scientific journal, refused for publication by said referee. We revised the article and resubmitted it with a cover letter. I had drafted, "We thank the referee for a thorough reading of our manuscript...", but the secretary had typed, "We thank the referee for a thorough rending of our manuscript..." ======= Unhappily, we caught it before it went out. ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 7 Jul 93 16:18:08 WET DST From: rjc@gnu.ai.mit.edu (Ray) Subject: PAGANISM: Portrait of the Artist as a Young Pagan Let me see if I can condense this story a little bit. 1) You discovered that music can be a very powerful, emotional force. Nothing ground breaking there. You discovered that believing that mystical forces were involved enhanced your ability. 2) Sex. Nothing to say here except that you should get together with Wilt Chamberlain (maybe he's a pagan?) Your story does give new meaning to the phrase, "God's gift to women." 3) See 1) 4) Nothing special about paganism there. You can always make lots of friends when you join a group that shares your interests. >Fine. You've explained it. Correctly, even. But you can't *do* it! > >And as long as you stick with the sterile denotative language of psychology, >and the logical mode of the waking mind, you won't be able to --- because you >can't reach and program the unconscious that way. It takes music, symbolism, >sex, hypnosis, wine and strange drugs, firelight and chanting, ritual and >magic. Super-stimuli that reach past the conscious mind and neocortex, in and >back to the primate and mammal and reptile brains curled up inside. Here, you just assert something which is obviously false. There are hundreds of great poets, composers, and musicians who don't need to dance naked around fires to tune their skills. I used to play the piano. I was never good at music, but one day when I was 10, I heard a real piano and decided I wanted to learn to use it. I got good very quickly, and ended up playing at a community concert with 4 other students from my school (who had been playing much longer than I had). I didn't need paganism. I simply wanted to play the piano so badly, liked music so passionately, and enjoyed playing so much, that I practiced every day until I could. I was also never a great dancer (and to this day, I am not), but back around 1982, I got into break dancing, joined a break dancing group, and competed in front of large crowds of people. Performing in front of a crowd (I am a shy person), gave me a new sense of confidence and power that actually improved my ability far beyond what I am normally able to do on my own. The key here was people admiring my ability, not believing I was a God. Finally, I used to be into grafitti (until I got arrested) and became quite artistic and good at painting (the sides of buildings and garages along the Baltimore subway line). The key to my ability here was respect from peers and my ability to show off my work to the whole world on the subway line. Now I have found a new hobby. The study of math and the practice of hacking. I feel that math and hacking are just as beautiful as any poem, and they have the added bonus of not having to drop your left brain in the waste basket. I think your problem is, and the reason you need paganism, is that you are insecure about your abilities. You seem to constantly try to prove that you are the alpha-male of this group in every post. Seriously, I don't think you have ever posted a message to Extropians without either mentioning your IQ scores, your bench press ability, your martial arts abilities, your love making ability, your SO's current state of dress, ... I haven't witnessed such a display since I subscribed to rec.org.mensa. I'm not trying to put you down, but if you go back in the Extropian archives, you will see quite a number of messages with phrases like "The reason I am so fucking brilliantly smart is because of ... (paganism, general semantics, etc)" or "all of my teachers have said my IQ was off the scale". This type of ego boasting is generally considered flame bait. A number of times you have also directed attacked rationalists (e.g. "I'm not an emotionally/sexually/fun deprived cerebral geek" [like the rest of you suckers] <- my emphasis). I also don't see any real difference between what neopagans and the SCA or what Robert Bly's movement does. You're trying to get into contact with your right brain and your animal instincts. The problem with religious methods of achieving this, rather than cultural ones, is that people tend to carry their mystical memes into their left brain where it becomes poison. If you don't really believe that supernatural forces exist, how is it that your realization of them so strongly influence your abilities? Are you able to go into "true believer" mode and switch if off after you've achieved your goal? I doubt it. Some part of your left brain must believe in what your right side is feeding it. You said earlier that people can't become poetic/sexual/musical without drugs/hypnosis/fire dancing/mysticism (well, maybe they can't if they are talent deprived hippies). Let's assume for argument that this is right. What would you say is the central reason why mysticism works? Surely, we aren't genetically programmed for religion, it has to be something else. (most likely, the ability to shut down rational inquiry deactivating the logic parts of the brain) You know, art has its place, but art won't build nanomachines nor develop immortality. While the native-americans and africans were dancing around fires, the western rationalist Europeans were busy building the technology needed to create new civilizations, and the weapons of war needed to aquire the resources. If you accept evolutonary arguments, you see that rationalism has definately been the most power force of all. -- Ray Cromwell | Engineering is the implementation of science; -- -- EE/Math Student | politics is the implementation of faith. -- -- rjc@gnu.ai.mit.edu | - Zetetic Commentaries -- ------------------------------ End of Extropians Digest V93 Issue #0379 ****************************************