Wheaties

joined 4 years ago
[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 months ago (2 children)

new phones look goofy with all the extra cameras and circles of dubious functionality

i want a phon with no cameras cus i never uses em so why should i pay for hardware i don't need?

 

(id look up the quote, but it's funner to butcher ideas and re-arrange them in new language)

i feel like that's not just the US as a nation state, but Yankee culture and society in general. Like, I'm starting to think we're just not capable of incorporating new experience into our collective learned behaviors. Not even after COVID - the polite thing isn't to mask up or even hand-sanitize when you have cold or flu symptoms, it's to pretend like nothing happened (and AIDS barely gets talked about and only in the past-tense...)

Most of the art and music and literature getting remixed remade and referenced is from the 20th century, or has roots beginning in that time. In terms of infrastructure, very little built this century seems to have any amount of longevity in mind.

Geopolitically we're still doing Cold Wars and proxy-conflicts -- even when those have been rendered obsolete by our own fucking actions the previous (and first...) time there was a big Cold War. And we never stopped funding and arming settler colonialism, even with practically unanimous condemnation in the UN (take away our VETO for the love of all things good TAKE IT AWAY)

i don't know that i have a conclusion for this. On a personal level, living in the 20th century US but having 21st century tech reminds me way too much of Fahrenheit 451. It's maddening. Like I'm trying not to notice the great big Amygdalae on the Healing Church; there's no outlet for the Insight so it's just hovering there and i'm scared to walk too close to it for fear of how others respond.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago (1 children)

I agree that there are similarities in how groups of nerve cells process information and how neural networks are trained, but I'm hesitant to say that's a whole picture of the human mind. Modern anesthesiology suggests microtubuals, structures within cells, also play a function in cognition.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 10 months ago (3 children)

My definition of a Turing machine? I'm not sure you know what Turing machines are. It's a general purpose computer, described in principle. And, in principle, a computer can only carry out one task at a time. Modern computers are fast, they may have several CPUs stitched together and operating in tandem, but they are still fundamentally limited by this. Bodies don't work like that. Every part of them is constantly reacting to it's environment and it's neighboring cells - concurrently.

You are essentially saying, "Well, the hardware of the human body is very complex, and this software is(n't quite as) complex; so the same sort of phenomenon must be taking place." That's absurd. You're making a lopsided comparison between two very different physical systems. Why should the machine we built for doing sums just so happen to reproduce a phenomena we still don't fully understand?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago (5 children)

You are ~30 trillion cells all operating concurrently with one another. Are you suggesting that is in any way similar to a Turing machine?

[–] [email protected] 35 points 1 year ago (3 children)

that's a lot of storage

too bad I don't have a sound card