Re: A unique number for every "person" - can it be done?

spinoza1111_at_yahoo.com
Date: 03/15/05 

Date: 15 Mar 2005 02:25:16 -0800

spinoza1111@yahoo.com wrote:
> Joseph Hertzlinger wrote:
> > On 13 Mar 2005 15:31:22 -0800, spinoza1111@yahoo.com
> > <spinoza1111@yahoo.com> wrote:
> >
> > > My experience in science and technology is that technically
> educated
> > > people, and many people labeled "scientists" in fact will know
less
> > > than many more broadly educated "critical theorists" about
Turing,
> > > Godel and even quantum theory to the extent those results and
> > > personalities are out of their specialty.
> >
> > In
>
<http://www.google.com/groups?selm=37BEFBA4.80E3C5D4%40sandpiper.net>,
> >
> > Jim Balter wrote:
> >
> > > I once met a person with a billion point IQ. Her father taught
> > > politics and she was a practice subject for people studying
> > > unsupported anecdotes.
> >
> > I was reminded somehow.
>
> Perhaps she retailed "unsupported anecdotes". Another possibility is
> that having a billion point IQ, she read books and was in general
open
> to more influences and facts.
>
> For example: it appears to be accepted in the US, even by "educated"
> people, that "global warming is at best a theory and not all the
> evidence is in". This factoid is a "fact" in the US because it is
> aligned with economic power, one powerful way in which group
> epistemology establishes claims, including "scientific" claims.
>
> But merely as a couch potato in the Hong Kong region, I noticed that
> Swiss Re, an international corporation, sponsors a programme,
narrated
> by Keanu Reaves and Alanis Morissette, which START from what is now
> accepted in East Asia and Australia: that global warming is a fact,
not
> one of a set of alternative programmes.
>
> Just as the intention of Nazi Germany to exterminate and not just
> relocate its Jews was, to American isolationists prior to Dec 7, just
a
> "theory", just "speculation", the brutal truth is that the mere
> commercial sponsorship (by a reinsurance firm which stands to make,
or
> to lose, billions from changes attendant on warming) makes warming
> "fact" for Australians, "theory" for people in the USA.
>
> Likewise, weather forecasters in these regions accept as fact the
> explanation for increasing storm activity human influence on climate
> change, something that the clowns who are "forecasters" in the USA
> manage to conceal through happytalk. Indeed, the clowns who are
> "forecasters" in the USA seem to be carefully selected from an elite
> who can be trusted to parrot the official line: the Chicago Tribune's
> forecaster is the brother of Ken Lay of Exxon and as such a Bush
> associate, therefore can be trusted to conceal human influence on
> climate change. When it's ninety degrees Fahreneit in February and
> elderly, poor and black Chicagoans (who I guess don't matter) are
being
> stacked like cordwood at the morgue (as they were in 1998), Skilling
> can be trusted to tell the bien-pensants with air conditioning that
> it's just nachul variation, because his big brudder has been in the
> sack with Bush and Big Energy for years.

Big mistake on my part here. The Tribune weather guy is named Tom
Skilling: cf.
http://weather.chicagotribune.com/US/IL/Chicago/KORD.html?main=1#forecast.
He is indeed the brother of an Enron perp, but his brother is Jeffrey
Skilling and NOT Ken Lay. Jeffrey Skilling is the former CEO of Enron,
which as a corporation was a major backer of Bush from his days as
Texas governor, but I do not know whether Jeff Skilling was like Ken
"Kenny Boy" Lay, a personal and long-time associate of the Bush crime
*famiglia*.

Sorry for not doing a better job of proof-reading and I will return to
my usual high standards from now on.
>
> Gerry Quinn's very idea that "quantum computing" violates the
> Church/Turing thesis shows that in all probability, the billion-point
> IQ woman's gender and IQ worked in tandem in male dominated societies
> to dismiss without argument or even listening to her claims, and to
> cause males, threatened by her intelligence, to close ranks and
exclude
> her from serious conversation.
>
> I can well imagine old Gerryman holding forth the proposition that
> Turing may be outdated now we gots dem quantum computers, and I can
> very well see this hypothetical gal saying "but Gerry dear, I worked
> for an Israeli firm where they used a Turing machine architecture,
> owing to its simplicity, to carry out biomedical calculations at
> nano-level. Doesn't this mean that far from refuting Turing, this
gives
> the old fruitcake new life?"

Here is one source for my claim that an Israeli researcher in fact uses
and thereby confirms the Turing paradigm in molecular (which is to say
rather close to quantum) computing:
http://graphics.stanford.edu/courses/cs528/previous/fall04/talk11.html.

The researcher is Ehud Shapiro of the Weizmann institute who combined
medical training with programmer insight to see that computing at the
molecular level is rather like Turing Machine operation, which can be
considered empirical confirmation of Chruch/Turing.

Gerry suggested that quantum computing might refute Turing and this
showed the lack of scientific insight which he accuses the decons of
having. For first scientific principles are less refutable synthetic a
posteriori and more synthetic apriori within their framework.

Thus Einstein didn't refute Newton's laws, he confirmed them within a
framework. Thus Shapiro didn't discover a REPLACEMENT for
Church/Turing, he had the insight that its truth is rugged enough to in
fact be a guide to a radically new form of computing.

Contrast the typical experience in a corporation that has funded
"advanced research" but in which the careerist researchers are so
terrified of management that they dare not actually innovate (lest they
disrupt another ricebowl or (horrors) reinvent the wheel).

It becomes very difficult in such an environment to make scientific
progress by using, as Shapiro used, a well-known paradigm as a lamp in
the darkness.

Because in the corporation, the first thing that happens is that the
simplicity and transparency of the tentative guiding paradigm becomes a
fault, and the result is more often a great deal of loose, and
ungrounded, talk, about new directions with no code...vaporware.

Science-worshipers are paradoxically ready to be skeptical about
results and to fancy their replacement, but even NASA uses Newton, and
modern computers are Turing machines in the sense that the TM
represents an absolute, conceptual horizon and as much empowers as
limits.

Only outside science, and in the peanut gallery represented by Asimov's
rather ignorant comment "sufficiently advanced technology is
indistinguishable from magic" do we think that paradigms are replaced
rather than extended.

It is EMPOWERING in the political sense to actually learn that "the
computer is nothing more than this game with symbols, which you can
perform on the bus with pencil and paper", which is why the poor are
systematically trained, in computers, not in symbolic manipulation but
instead in gestures which, for them, take place in a space undefined by
knowledge of Turing or "programming", infinite in all directions and
filled with unnamed terrors...which can be conveniently enough
manipulated by unprincipled politicians and managers.

Before his death, Carl Sagan entitled a book about prescientific
thinking "A Demon Haunted World". Sagan MEANT the world of medieval
holdovers including Islam, and his adepts ignorantly conflate this
"demon haunted" world with a world of "deconstruction" about which they
know, literally, nothing.

But another form of "demon-haunted" world exists in the most advanced
and technological societies...including both America, and also the
Islamic metropolis.

In this world, people trained by a class-stratified educational system
(in which the wealthy go to Ivy League schools or the "best" Islamic
schools, and the not so well off to technical institutes and
*madrassahs*) in different ways and from my experience as a teacher,
the lower you go the less emphasis there is on mastery of a symbolic
calculus of any sort.

Thus in computer training students from the underclass are taught,
systematically, that "programmers" are white geeks who don't know how
to do the funky chicken and that instead they should aspire to become
midlevel managers who don't have to know "programming".

The result is indeed a "demon haunted world" in which people who don't
know the limits of computation, or the materiality of software, have to
cultivate authoritarian attitudes because their work gestures are
conducted in a vacuum, out of which at any time may emerge something
they did not anticipate.

The result is indeed a "demon haunted world" in which the lack of
closure principles means that we must be on guard against the Other at
all times, whether the Other is mathematical or political.

Sagan's "demon haunted world" was one of NO rationality at all. But the
message I get from Adorno is that what's worse is a world (like that of
National Socialism) where rationality is instrumentalized and told to
stay within irrational bounds constructed of surplus repression.

The Israeli settler who is very rational at the Weizmann institute but
maintains at home an irrational hope of reviving an extinct kingdom,
and who refers to modern day Palestinian engineers as "Canaanites" is
far more frightening than some *felahin*.

Politically, the result is the "demon haunted world" of the Bush voter
who believes still that Saddam MIGHT have had WMDs, or troops of evil
monkey men, and who doesn't understand how and why the key state in the
2004 election was stolen by programmers working for John Diebold.
Moreover, the lack of any chance to master a symbol system means our
boy doesn't believe that anybody has, in reality, and he concludes
after a few brewskis that them intelectuls are stupid like him.

What's most amusing would be the reception, any speculation that Turing
machines might actually be useful in quantum or molecular computing,
would receive in this ng. Chances are it would attract the usual
ignorant flames, because usenet has become so dominated by the need to
propagate and preserve ignorance, xenophobia in various forms, and
science worship as opposed to actually performing science.

I totally forgive Doctor Shapiro for being (from his biographical
details) a settler in "Judea". That's because like Steven Wolfram and
Dijkstra himself, he's made genuine progress in his field which may
lead to medical advances in the form of smart drugs, controlled by
Turing machines.

>
> I can well imagine the Gerryman then giving the gal the cold shoulder
> the rest of the evening.
>
> The problem is that epistemology still functions: we can know what we
> know, and we can also know that our "knowledge" isn't knowledge until
> we persuade others of its truth. The US has become since Sep 11 an
> epistemologically isolated system, in which large numbers of both the
> "educated" and the uneducated subscribe to a world view that is
simply
> not shared by the rest of the world.
>
> Starting with the fact that the rest of the world seems to me in my
> travels to agree that Bush took office in 2000 as the result of a
> peaceful coup d'etat no different from that which takes place world
> wide, and to have been re-elected by EITHER manipulating stupid
> Americans, OR by stealing Ohio or both.
> >
> > --
> > http://hertzlinger.blogspot.com

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