[Recording Start] Scott Douglas Jacobsen: American morale; that'd be good. Rick Rosner: Two of me yammering ago, I talked about how Trump's rhetoric has gotten uglier and Republican party rhetoric, generally, has just gotten more divorced from reality and aggressive. We're talking about American morale, and I told my wife that the people interested in non-normal government …
Continue reading Ask A Genius 908: American Morale and “Trump is a fucking idiot”
[Recording Start] Rick Rosner: Some people say, or at least one person I read, that AI is a misnomer; it's just high technology. Calling it intelligence, artificial, or whatever you want to call it, it's just increasingly powerful technology. We have the same genetics as humans did 100,000 years ago. We're not getting any smarter biologically, …
Continue reading Ask A Genius 907: Simulations of Consciousness Before Consciousness
[Recording Start] Rick Rosner: So, you've been away for a couple months and plus you're up in Canada, so you don't get the daily barrage of awfulness that is US News. My wife Carole just had to turn off the news and leave the room yesterday, I think. Experts on cyber-attack and propaganda say that …
Continue reading Ask A Genius 906: The Funk in Daily Life from Trump
[Recording Start] Rick Rosner: We haven't talked about anything in a couple months because you've been away but among the things we haven't talked about is AI which is all anybody thinks about anymore. I think in the future, people will have to define themselves in some way relative to AI the same way almost …
[Recording Start] Scott Douglas Jacobsen: I took a long ride from New Orleans to Chicago and Chicago to Los Angeles. Rick Rosner: We were saying making distinctions in quantum mechanics is a big deal. You would have virtual landscapes of possible things happening and, occasionally, things changing in the quantum mechanical characterization of a system reflecting that …
Continue reading Ask A Genius 904: Travel, “Valence,” and Abstractions
[Recording Start] Rick Rosner: We are 99 days away from the 2022 midterm elections in America, which hold comparable importance to the 2020 election that was pivotal in removing Trump from office. The current political climate remains tense, with Trumpian forces still active. If Republicans gain control of both the House and the Senate, they …
Continue reading Ask A Genius 772: 99 Days from the Mid-Term Elections
[Recording Start] Scott Douglas Jacobsen: This is on the Turing test. Go ahead. Rick Rosner: So I mentioned I wanted to talk about the Turing test and we did get around to it but you did tell me you read Hawkins’s paper on it. You told me to read it and I didn't get around …
[Recording Start] Scott Douglas Jacobsen: This is the other topic of consciousness. Go ahead. Rick Rosner: All right. We know that existence is inevitable because the rules of existence, the rules that prohibit certain kinds of existence, particularly contradictory existence aren't all encompassing enough to stop existence. We've postulated that anything that can exist does …
Continue reading Ask A Genius 770: Consciousness and the Rules of Existence
[Recording Start] Scott Douglas Jacobsen: You wanted to talk about consciousness in two different kinds of contexts. What do you think about it? Rick Rosner: All right. So, I just got done talking about our hopelessly divided country which includes a third of the country being persuaded to believe that any fertilized human egg deserves …
Continue reading Ask A Genius 769: Hopelessly Divided Consciousness
[Recording Start] Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Richard Feynman – “The Nature's imagination far surpasses our own.” Rick Rosner: Yeah, scientists especially scientists who become quotable by being recognized as great scientists have lots of aphorisms. Sometimes you can appreciate them as themselves. Einstein talked about ‘God doesn't play dice with the universe’, ‘If this Theory isn't …
Continue reading Ask A Genius 768: Another Richard Feynman Quote
Rick Rosner 