From: Forrest Bishop (forrestb@ix.netcom.com)
Date: Sun Apr 07 2002 - 03:34:26 MDT
----- Original Message -----
From: Sean Williams <lad@seanwilliams.com.au>
To: <extropians@extropy.org>
Sent: Saturday, April 06, 2002 4:31 PM
Subject: [MURG] meets [POLITICS]
> As an observer to the list, I'm getting a weird sense of double vision
> while trying to assimilate the two current main topics of
> conversation: (1) the difficulty of simulating the behaviour of a
> single neuron and (2) the cause and effects of conflicts present and
> past. It seems to me that if even extraordinarily powerful computers
> are having difficulty accomplishing the former, how can we expect any
> genuine accuracy to creep into our personal models of the behaviour of
> immensely large numbers of neurons far removed from us (i.e.
> politicians past and present, from our cultures and others)? I know
> that the brain is a powerful neural net designed, in part, to
> recognise emergent properties in other such nets (i.e. the behaviour
> of
> people around us), but I think it's worth bearing in mind that no
> simulation we can run is likely to tease out the motives or
> aspirations of anyone in the Palestine/Israeli conflict with any great
> accuracy. It's all guesswork, and getting incensed because someone
> else's guesswork disagrees with yours seems no different (to me) to
> two neuron modellers bickering over the outputs of their
> simulations -- especially when neither model may in fact bear much
> resemblance to what occurs in a real neuron itself.
A very nice synthesis! Fwiw, I haven't seen much on this list that closely resembles 'my' model(s) of geopolitical reality, though
it intersects in various ways. All such models are the result of projection, of course.
Forrest
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