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The Advancing Technology/Singularity Thread

Do Not Sell My Personal Information
Isn't it, though. Our priorities as a species can be so messed up sometimes.

Established energy companies have a vested interest to fight against renewable energy
Established pharmaceutical companies have a vested interest to fight against actual cures for the chronic diseases they sell recurring treatments for.

I don't believe that to be true at all.

Most of those industries have competition - multiple companies selling fuel/drugs and competing against each other to produce fuel or treat diseases.

The company that makes major advances in renewables or in a cure has a massive advantage over the competition, and the ability to charge monopoly pricing for the life of a patent. Stock prices would explode.

Moreover, neither of those endeavors is single-faceted. Alternative fuels likely would require multiple such advances for different applications, and companies could still sell the fossil fuels they still have and make money. It's just that they'd invest differently moving forward.

And as for drugs, each individual company always runs the risk that a competitor will make something better and drive their drug out of business. Plus, there are legions of different drugs/diseases, and they're not all going to be cured simultaneously by a single advance anyway.

Point is, the "we don't want to out ourselves out of business" disincentive really doesn't exist. Certainly not to the point where it would outweigh the gain to the actual company making the breakthrough.

Plus, they're all at risk for some "outsider" making the progress anyway. Much better to be working in that direction yourself as well so as to mitigate the risk that you'll be left behind by an advancement.
 
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New Study Links Human Consciousness to a Law That Governs the Universe

Human Entropy

Our species has long agonized over the concept of human consciousness. What exactly causes it, and why did we evolve to experience consciousness? Now, a new study has uncovered a clue in the hunt for answers, and it reveals that the human brain might have more in common with the universe than we could have imagined.

According to a team of researchers from France and Canada, our brains might produce consciousness as something of a side effect of increasing entropy, a process that has been taking place throughout the universe since the Big Bang.

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Their study has been accepted for publication in the journal Physical Review E.

The concept of entropy is famously confusing, and the definition has evolved over time. Essentially, entropy is a thermodynamic property that refers to the degree of disorder or randomness in a system. It can be summed up as the description of a system’s progression from order to disorder.

The second law of thermodynamics states that entropy can only remain constant or increase within a closed system — a system cannot move from high entropy to low entropy without outside interference. A common example that demonstrates entropy is an ice cube melting — the cube is in a state of low entropy, but as it melts and disorder grows, entropy increases.

Many physicists think that the universe itself is in a constant state of increasing entropy. When the Big Bang occurred, the universe was in a state of low entropy, and as it continues to gradually spread out, it is growing into a higher entropy system. Based on this new study, our brain may be undergoing something similar, and consciousness happens to be a side effect of the process.

The Brain and Disorder
To see how the concept of entropy could be applied to the human brain, the researchers analyzed the amount of order in our brains while we’re conscious compared to when we’re not. They did this by modeling the networks of neurons in the brains of nine participants, seven of whom had epilepsy.

They looked at whether or not neurons were oscillating in phase with one another as this could tell them if the brain cells were linked. They compared observations from when patients were awake, when they were asleep, and when patients with epilepsy were having seizures.

The researchers found that the participants’ brains displayed higher entropy when fully conscious. “We find a surprisingly simple result: normal wakeful states are characterized by the greatest number of possible configurations of interactions between brain networks, representing highest entropy values,” the team wrote in the study.

This finding prompted the researchers to suggest that consciousness might be a side effect of a system working to maximize information exchange. In other words, human consciousness emerges due to increasing entropy.

While the team’s theory is exciting and will likely lead to further research exploring a potential link between human consciousness and entropy, it is far from conclusive. The study’s sample size was exceptionally small, so they’ll need to replicate their results on larger groups and different types of brain states. Still, it provides a fascinating explanation for human consciousness and may be the clue that eventually helps us fully understand the strange phenomenon.

This sounds...backwards to me. Or at least orthogonal.

The basis of entropy is randomness -- a less ordered system. But equating increased brain activity with less order seem like a pretty massive leap. If that activity was truly random or less ordered, it wouldn't be linked to ordered, conscious thought. So it may be "ordered" on a level that the researches simply can't detect/comprehend.
 
I don't believe that to be true at all.

Most of those industries have competition - multiple companies selling fuel/drugs and competing against each other to produce fuel or treat diseases.

The company that makes major advances in renewables or in a cure has a massive advantage over the competition, and the ability to charge monopoly pricing for the life of a patent. Stock prices would explode.

Moreover, neither of those endeavors is single-faceted. Alternative fuels likely would require multiple such advances for different applications, and companies could still sell the fossil fuels they still have and make money. It's just that they'd invest differently moving forward.

And as for drugs, each individual company always runs the risk that a competitor will make something better and drive their drug out of business. Plus, there are legions of different drugs/diseases, and they're not all going to be cured simultaneously by a single advance anyway.

Point is, the "we don't want to out ourselves out of business" disincentive really doesn't exist. Certainly not to the point where it would outweigh the gain to the actual company making the breakthrough.

Plus, they're all at risk for some "outsider" making the progress anyway. Much better to be working in that direction yourself as well so as to mitigate the risk that you'll be left behind by an advancement.

for pharmaceuticals, if a company can make $1k/month per person for the life of that person, selling them insulin, what interest do they have in developing a one time cure that eliminates that revenue stream.

This lab has a potential cure for Type 1 diabetes, and had positive phase 1 results, they've spent 6 years now raising $25 million to fund phase 2 trials.

http://www.faustmanlab.org/index.html

Meanwhile pharmaceuticals keep jacking up insulin prices simply because they can.
 
This sounds...backwards to me. Or at least orthogonal.

The basis of entropy is randomness -- a less ordered system. But equating increased brain activity with less order seem like a pretty massive leap. If that activity was truly random or less ordered, it wouldn't be linked to ordered, conscious thought. So it may be "ordered" on a level that the researches simply can't detect/comprehend.

I think you're misunderstanding the measurement a bit; and if you think about this it actually makes sense intuitively. It's not that the activity itself was totally random, but the underlying network topology was in a less ordered, higher entropy state.

With regards to the specific measurement, the researchers were studying the degree of synchronicity between neural networks within the brain, and found that higher levels of awareness and consciousness were associated with a higher degree of entropy (or greater degree of random variance in the rate of synchronicity between systems).

So it may be "ordered" on a level that the researches simply can't detect/comprehend.

What do you mean by this?
 

A naive measurement would suggest that this system's entropy increases and decreases at different times, but really its entropy is (nearly) constant. The underlying order is always there, just not always visible to the naked eye.
 

It's also bullshit media hype unfortunately....

I had a venture capitalist client of mine ask me about this a few weeks ago.. The device doesn't actually read his mind..

Here's a snippet from the device's FAQ:

  1. What exactly is “silent speech”? Does the user have to move his or her face or mouth to use the system?
    Silent speech is different from either thinking of words or saying words out loud. Remember when you first learned to read? At first, you spoke the words you read out loud, but then you learned to voice them internally and silently. In order to then proceed to faster reading rates, you had to unlearn the “silent speaking” of the words you read. Silent speaking is a conscious effort to say a word, characterized by subtle movements of internal speech organs without actually voicing it. The process results in signals from your brain to your muscles which are picked up as neuromuscular signals and processed by our device.

  2. Can this device read my mind? What about privacy?
    No, this device cannot read your mind. The novelty of this system is that it reads signals from your facial and vocal cord muscles when you intentionally and silently voice words. The system does not have any direct and physical access to brain activity, and therefore cannot read a user's thoughts. It is crucial that the control over input resides absolutely with the user in all situations, and that such an interface not have access to a user's thoughts. The device only reads words that are deliberately silently spoken as inputs.
 
PM me when they find a way to tell the body to self heal/restore the tissues and the bones to their original shape.
 
It's also bullshit media hype unfortunately....

I had a venture capitalist client of mine ask me about this a few weeks ago.. The device doesn't actually read his mind..

Here's a snippet from the device's FAQ:

  1. What exactly is “silent speech”? Does the user have to move his or her face or mouth to use the system?
    Silent speech is different from either thinking of words or saying words out loud. Remember when you first learned to read? At first, you spoke the words you read out loud, but then you learned to voice them internally and silently. In order to then proceed to faster reading rates, you had to unlearn the “silent speaking” of the words you read. Silent speaking is a conscious effort to say a word, characterized by subtle movements of internal speech organs without actually voicing it. The process results in signals from your brain to your muscles which are picked up as neuromuscular signals and processed by our device.

  2. Can this device read my mind? What about privacy?
    No, this device cannot read your mind. The novelty of this system is that it reads signals from your facial and vocal cord muscles when you intentionally and silently voice words. The system does not have any direct and physical access to brain activity, and therefore cannot read a user's thoughts. It is crucial that the control over input resides absolutely with the user in all situations, and that such an interface not have access to a user's thoughts. The device only reads words that are deliberately silently spoken as inputs.

Party pooper.
 

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