Antichrist Predictions

Originally posted by inimalist
that is actually my point, it is not.

There are allusions one can make, Working memory as Ram, BUS speed as some type of gating mechanism between memory and attention, but the degree of interconnectedness and the importance of these back and forth connections between say, the visual cortex and emotional centers is not a matter of how fast and powerful the connections are, but of how robust and interconnected they are.

Instead of thinking of it as 1 huge computer, it is better envisioned as millions of even "morse code" powerful computers.

We might be able to simulate certain functions in other ways, and I would largely say looking to the human brain for inspiration for AI is barking up the wrong tree (the human brain evolved for certain functions, we could produce far more efficient intelligence systems designed for specific tasks), but to simulate human style intelligence is not going to be a matter of having enough processor speed.

The caveat to this is, I guess, if you are using software to simulate these billions of connections as I have heard of being done with mouse brain simulations.

I don't think your analogy works for multiple computers, the eyes are just a port for information to be sent to the brain such as a mouse, keyboard or camera but the brain or hard drive still does all of the computing of this new data.

So for the sake of the thread I could see an AI being the Antichrist more than anything else. Go T-100000000000000 😈

Originally posted by inimalist
sounds like a bad guess then

also, terrible thread

you just proving my guess is true with your unconditional devotion to him. thats why i think he is because ppl follow him and love him but do not know him. and i think he may just be full of s***

Originally posted by inimalist
blah, saw a kid at my school yesterday with an Obama t-shirt on, and like, ok, black identity politics and all, but he really isn't our president.

that and he wants to re-negotiate economic deals so that we just end up sucking America's cock and giving them softwood lumber as payment.

or, i mean, BARAK THE VOTE!!!!!11 Obama is like the greatest president of all time, I saw his inaugural address, and he was like, so, ummm, dark skinned, I was so wrapped up in how different he was, physically, and how he personally embodied the change I know will come from his cabinet picked of old guard washington insiders.

those are just shots at him being black tho and to that i am offended

Originally posted by Da Pittman
Basically you are duplicating the process of the brain, we currently do not have the memory space or processing power that they brain does but we can already map parts of the brain and duplicate or mimic the functions of this area.

No, I misunderstood you at first, you are totally right about the simulations. There are various labs around the world attempting this in different ways. Some are trying to build actual physical recreations of the brain, but most do go for the simulation.

I think I took it too literal when you mentioned making a computer fast enough to make it smarter than a human.

Originally posted by Da Pittman
We can not as of yet do this for the entire brain because of the current limits of speed and memory.

I would disagree. The rate limiter right now might be memory and speed, but we certainly don't understand enough about the function of intelligence and neuro connectivity to make sense of it.

Obviously it would be a remarkable tool, but there are theoretical limits to how helpful this simulation would be. For instance, each individual brain is formed in response to incoming stimuli from the world. A simulation of a visual cortex on a computer is useless unless you are also simulating all of the photons in the environment that are interacting with the cones and rods in the eyes. You might say that inputs like a keyboard or a mouse could be equivalent, but they are not. Even if keystrokes (a mixture of visual/abstract/somatic signals) could be broken down into "stimulus input", the researchers are now forced to build a new type of sensory cortex to interpret it, and somehow integrate this into a simulation of a human brain in such a way that it is still applicable for research purposes.

This is compounded with local plasticity in neuro functioning as well. The visual pathway is constantly rearranging the connections it makes in response to stimuli contrasts. This reorganization of cortical space is essential in our perception. A simulation would have to account for this. Obviously we don't have the power to do that computationally, but we also have no clue about how or why it works in the way it does. We can talk about the effects of pruning down pathways for efficiency, and constancy of certain types of stimuli, but we do not know, neuron for neuron, what is happening in the brain, which would be necessary for these types of simulations, especially once you try to simulate plasticity as I have mentioned, or incorporate new forms of stimuli.

Originally posted by Da Pittman
We can already have a two way street of a computer communicating to and from the brain and each one learning how each other responds and will change its "programing" in turn.

indeed, but the programmer will be at a loss when attempting to program various essential neurological functions right now.

I get that the purpose of simulating the brain is a form of near reverse engineering, but the "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic" idea is applicable here, imho.

Originally posted by Da Pittman
I don't think your analogy works for multiple computers,

I agree, I just think it is better than the comparison of the brain to a single computer

Originally posted by Da Pittman
[B]the eyes are just a port for information to be sent to the brain such as a mouse, keyboard or camera but the brain or hard drive still does all of the computing of this new data.

This is entirely untrue. The cones and rods in the eyes each provide specific visual information to the visual system. Patterns of cone and rod activation can send signals of motion and other "featural" information to the visual system before it has been processed by any brain areas. Immediately preceding the eye, retinal ganglion cells interpret and send a variety of signals, contrast (blue-yellow, red-green, black-white) sensitive, through a pathway to the LGN, which has constantly reorganizing pathways of communication with the visual cortex. Another reason the computer metaphor fails is because of its conceptualization of information processing as being this passive and localized process. Every cell, every pathway, is essential in building a representation. Your eye is certainly no less involved in vision than your visual cortex is.

Originally posted by Da Pittman
[B]So for the sake of the thread I could see an AI being the Antichrist more than anything else. Go T-100000000000000 😈

****, I can write 12 thousand pages about perception, but a witty comeback, HA

this thread is good as s*** also so any1 who differs can suck on it

Originally posted by punkkaveman
you just proving my guess is true with your unconditional devotion to him. thats why i think he is because ppl follow him and love him but do not know him. and i think he may just be full of s***

I'm not an American but I wouldn't have voted for Obama.

However, I could give you probably 5-10 reasons why I would be absolutely against his domestic and foreign policies. You couldn't give me one reason why you think he is the anti-christ.

Originally posted by punkkaveman
those are just shots at him being black tho and to that i am offended

if you don't think Obama being black was crucial to his election, you are retarded. His skin colour was a physical manifestation of "change", it is why the message was so powerful. For instance, all politicians promise change, McCain promised change, but for Obama, people perceived it as real. Why? Because he represented, physically, the change that had been fought for during the 60s. That his policies wont do anything to create actual change for black communities is moot, because he is a physical manifestation of those ideas, not the actual change they were looking for.

There are T-shirts at our local Zellers (basically a K-mart/Target) that have Obama and MLK with "dream realized" or some other BS written under them. I am certainly not the one who is racializing the Obama presidency.

also, be less sensitive.

Originally posted by inimalist
I'm not an American but I wouldn't have voted for Obama.

However, I could give you probably 5-10 reasons why I would be absolutely against his domestic and foreign policies. You couldn't give me one reason why you think he is the anti-christ.

if you don't think Obama being black was crucial to his election, you are retarded. His skin colour was a physical manifestation of "change", it is why the message was so powerful. For instance, all politicians promise change, McCain promised change, but for Obama, people perceived it as real. Why? Because he represented, physically, the change that had been fought for during the 60s. That his policies wont do anything to create actual change for black communities is moot, because he is a physical manifestation of those ideas, not the actual change they were looking for.

There are T-shirts at our local Zellers (basically a K-mart/Target) that have Obama and MLK with "dream realized" or some other BS written under them. I am certainly not the one who is racializing the Obama presidency.

also, be less sensitive.

That was a major grip of his election but still BS if you think that that's why he won. Its deeper than that. And as an American I see ppl's reaction to him and it is way to much devotion. They see him as a savior of sorts and it is unhealthy. Do your research about the interpretation of the book of Revelations and then tell me I'm completely wrong. I may not be right but you cannot say I'm wrong.

Originally posted by punkkaveman
And as an American I see ppl's reaction to him and it is way to much devotion. They see him as a savior of sorts and it is unhealthy.

Then again that is also good evidence that Obama is really Jesus . . .

Originally posted by inimalist
No, I misunderstood you at first, you are totally right about the simulations. There are various labs around the world attempting this in different ways. Some are trying to build actual physical recreations of the brain, but most do go for the simulation.

I think I took it too literal when you mentioned making a computer fast enough to make it smarter than a human.

I would disagree. The rate limiter right now might be memory and speed, but we certainly don't understand enough about the function of intelligence and neuro connectivity to make sense of it.

Obviously it would be a remarkable tool, but there are theoretical limits to how helpful this simulation would be. For instance, each individual brain is formed in response to incoming stimuli from the world. A simulation of a visual cortex on a computer is useless unless you are also simulating all of the photons in the environment that are interacting with the cones and rods in the eyes. You might say that inputs like a keyboard or a mouse could be equivalent, but they are not. Even if keystrokes (a mixture of visual/abstract/somatic signals) could be broken down into "stimulus input", the researchers are now forced to build a new type of sensory cortex to interpret it, and somehow integrate this into a simulation of a human brain in such a way that it is still applicable for research purposes.

This is compounded with local plasticity in neuro functioning as well. The visual pathway is constantly rearranging the connections it makes in response to stimuli contrasts. This reorganization of cortical space is essential in our perception. A simulation would have to account for this. Obviously we don't have the power to do that computationally, but we also have no clue about how or why it works in the way it does. We can talk about the effects of pruning down pathways for efficiency, and constancy of certain types of stimuli, but we do not know, neuron for neuron, what is happening in the brain, which would be necessary for these types of simulations, especially once you try to simulate plasticity as I have mentioned, or incorporate new forms of stimuli.

indeed, but the programmer will be at a loss when attempting to program various essential neurological functions right now.

I get that the purpose of simulating the brain is a form of near reverse engineering, but the "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic" idea is applicable here, imho.

I agree, I just think it is better than the comparison of the brain to a single computer

This is entirely untrue. The cones and rods in the eyes each provide specific visual information to the visual system. Patterns of cone and rod activation can send signals of motion and other "featural" information to the visual system before it has been processed by any brain areas. Immediately preceding the eye, retinal ganglion cells interpret and send a variety of signals, contrast (blue-yellow, red-green, black-white) sensitive, through a pathway to the LGN, which has constantly reorganizing pathways of communication with the visual cortex. Another reason the computer metaphor fails is because of its conceptualization of information processing as being this passive and localized process. Every cell, every pathway, is essential in building a representation. Your eye is certainly no less involved in vision than your visual cortex is.

****, I can write 12 thousand pages about perception, but a witty comeback, HA

In many ways even when we duplicate a brain and all of its functions and abilities it may very well be smarter than what was copied. What I mean is that unlike the brain the computer doesn't forget, it will have the total sum of all the memories and everything that it has ever learned where the human brain can only hold so much information at any time.

Originally posted by Symmetric Chaos
Then again that is also good evidence that Obama is really Jesus . . .

All the more to prove the point that he is the Anti-christ because the Bible states that Jesus never really died because he was Resurrected and then taken straight up to Heaven. So there is no way that he would come in the form of another man other than himself. Plus it also says he won't return until the moment of Judgement so again your just proving my point more and more

Originally posted by punkkaveman
All the more to prove the point that he is the Anti-christ because the Bible states that Jesus never really died because he was Resurrected and then taken straight up to Heaven. So there is no way that he would come in the form of another man other than himself. Plus it also says he won't return until the moment of Judgement so again your just proving my point more and more

Do you really think that Obama is the Antichrist? Do you believe everything in the bible?

If you answer yes, then you should check out this web site:

http://www.skepticsannotatedbible.com/

Originally posted by punkkaveman
All the more to prove the point that he is the Anti-christ because the Bible states that Jesus never really died because he was Resurrected and then taken straight up to Heaven. So there is no way that he would come in the form of another man other than himself. Plus it also says he won't return until the moment of Judgement so again your just proving my point more and more

You've seen Jesus? How do you know he didn't look like Obama?

So the all powerful god can only be in one form???

Originally posted by Da Pittman
So the all powerful god can only be in one form???

He is a very limited god.

Originally posted by Shakyamunison
He is a very limited god.

He can do anything . . . except the things he can't do.

Originally posted by Symmetric Chaos
He can do anything . . . except the things he can't do.

Just being a "he" shows how limited he is. 😉

Originally posted by Shakyamunison
Just being a "he" shows how limited he is. 😉

Or perhaps how limited language is. There is no concise word for someone/thing that contains all possible everythings.

Originally posted by Symmetric Chaos
Or perhaps how limited language is. There is no concise word for someone/thing that contains all possible everythings.

😄 Yes, the problem is us. But you know what that means, don't you? It means the bible can't be taken literally. Because it is just as flawed as our understanding of a god that we cannot understand.

Originally posted by punkkaveman
That was a major grip of his election but still BS if you think that that's why he won. Its deeper than that.

I don't want to resort to someone else's authority on this, but I'm taking a course on the African Diaspora, and I asked my prof, a person who has studied black culture for like 12 years, about this.

We had a good conversation about it, but essentially it boiled down to the fact he was black, in her opinion as well.

This isn't to say people were like "I'm going to vote for the black man", it is sort of 2 things. The more that the failure in America has become so associated with "rich-white-men", he symbolized the opposite of this in the most drastic of ways. It didn't matter that other democrats in the race had more leftist or progressive views than Obama, or that Obama constantly chose old time Washington vets (hardly the image of change) to be his policy advisors, people, especially youth, began to associate him with their beliefs. Political commentators have often said that there is going to be a day of realization when the people who most expected the change from Obama are going to be disappointed that he is as mainstream of a politician as he is.

The other reason is that, for the older generation, who lived through the civil rights era, he represented a long held dream. To see a black president. Tupac has lyrics about it, it is a symbol that, for a portion of society, means something just in the fact that it happened. This is likely the more important reason of the two, as mass youth sort of celebrity worship can't get you everywhere, ie: Ron Paul.

I think you might be buying too much into this change rhetoric my friend.

Originally posted by punkkaveman
And as an American I see ppl's reaction to him and it is way to much devotion. They see him as a savior of sorts and it is unhealthy.

Indeed, but there was also a minority of people who believed that George W Bush was ordained by God to be president.

There are crazies all around 🙂

Originally posted by punkkaveman
Do your research about the interpretation of the book of Revelations and then tell me I'm completely wrong.

no, that isn't how it works. I don't have to prove your points for you. You opened the thread, I asked you to explain what you meant, and you have since begun hurling accusations at me about nonsense (ie. "devotional... unconditional", you know).

It is your burden to at least explain what it is you are presenting. Obama is the anti-christ, I'm all ears.

Originally posted by punkkaveman
I may not be right but you cannot say I'm wrong.

I don't really care to, I'm genuinely curious how you come to this conclusion.

Originally posted by Da Pittman
While I do understand what you are saying but I disagree, yes the eye plays a critical part as to how we see the world but so does a camera or lens attached to the computer. It receives the information and transmits it to the computer which then process the information but the eye just as the camera is not needed. If the information is passed directly to the brain or hard drive it can still process that information and both will "see" what it was given. Even in a hard drive it is not just a single processor, just like the brain there are different parts that do different functions. A sector of a drive can go bad but the computer still work just as the brain can.

yes, that works on the level you are explaining it at, but not when it comes down to the actual neurological representation of information.

like all good analogies, there is a point where the computer metaphor breaks down. The retina in the eye, literally, is processing visual information, at a cellular level, in the exact same way that the visual cortex is. The plasticity of neural connections also is not accounted for, a computer does not rearrange its connections based on incoming stimuli.

I don't deny, a powerful computer could run software that simulates the billions of neurons in a brain (to some degree, though as I pointed out above, there is reason to think this is going to be very difficult), but that computer is really nothing like a brain as far as the processing of information is concerned.

Originally posted by Da Pittman
In many ways even when we duplicate a brain and all of its functions and abilities it may very well be smarter than what was copied. What I mean is that unlike the brain the computer doesn't forget, it will have the total sum of all the memories and everything that it has ever learned where the human brain can only hold so much information at any time.

I tend not to speculate on this kind of stuff...

If the history of the future has told us anything, we probably don't get the most obvious things (cure for cancer, flying cars, robot butlers)