Re: Logic of Zero

Joe E. Dees (jdees0@students.uwf.edu)
Sun, 27 Sep 1998 01:46:31 -0500

Date sent:      	Sun, 27 Sep 1998 17:13:15 +1200
From:           	"J. Maxwell Legg" <income@ihug.co.nz>
Organization:   	Ekus UN-incorporated
To:             	extropians@extropy.com
Subject:        	Re: Logic of Zero
Send reply to:  	extropians@extropy.com

> Ian Goddard wrote:
> >
> > At 12:26 PM 9/27/98 +1200, J. Maxwell Legg wrote:
> >
> > >Systems need to change and they need to be able to anticipate their own
> > >future behavior or change and the constructions that permit them to see
> > >themselves across some stages of change. My gut feeling is that zero
> > >can't do this.
> >

Are you talking about the concept, current in contemporary complexity theory, of anticipatory feedforward?

> > IAN: Change is defined by its displacement from zero
> > change. If a system anticipates its change, it must
> > use "no change" as a hypothetical point of measure
> > the deviation from which defines a state of change.
> > So zero is implicit in the measurement you speak of.
> >
>
> That's a tricky definition of change but it's not the only one, e.g.,
> FPGA circuits can be made to work without ever using zero.
>
> "One major disadvantage of the Babylonian system however was their lack
> of a zero.
> This meant that numbers did not have a unique representation but
> required the
> context to make clear whether 1 meant 1, 61, 3601, etc. "
>
> http://www-groups.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/~history/HistTopics/Babylonian_and_Egyptian.html
>
> How I intend to use this analogy in my AI model is by activating the
> constructions implied by the "1, 61, 3601, etc. " and then simply
> promote the context that eventually causes feedback; without the need to
> compare thread results. Massively parallel Internet computers converging
> the results of Ingrid's independent component analysis will soon
> determine if this approach is valid. If I find evidence that the
> Babylonian system can't implement an AI then I'll abandon my quest for
> artificial consciousness. Here I'm just using "Babylonian" to refer to
> my continuous Ingrid amathematical approach.
>
> http://come.to/ingrid