Mind Matters Natural and Artificial Intelligence News and Analysis

Monthly Archive December 2022

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Planets and exoplanets of unexplored galaxies. Sci-Fi. New worlds to discover. Colonization and exploration of nebulae and galaxies

The Search for Extraterrestrial Life 15

Recent news features Earth-like planets and water worlds — and how comet impacts may be providing Europa’s oceans with material

In our universe: Here are the James Webb Space Telescope’s best images from a spectacular year first year (it launched December 25, 2021). Could there be such a thing as “dark light?” Science writer Tibi Puiu tells us at ZME Science that some physicists think that the mysterious dark matter of the universe is made out of dark photons: “A new study found that hypothetical particles called dark photons can explain discrepencies in the ‘cosmic web’.” (December 14, 2022) “First introduced in 1986 by physicist Bob Holdom, dark photons, also known as ‘heavy photons’ or ‘hidden photons’, are supposed to be gauge bosons for dark matter. Dark photons and regular photons are expected to mix, such that the dark photons Read More ›

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Is It Technically Genocide If We Kill a Planetful of Robots?

Orville Season 3, Episode 9, features an EMP-like device that could wipe out the robotic Kaylon

This is the best episode of the third season, but there was still plenty to question about the ethical underpinnings. The first scene shows the Krill’s Supreme Chancellor, Teleya, forming an alliance with the Moclans, who have just been ousted from the Union. This doesn’t make any sense. The Moclans hate women. Teleya is a woman. Now, the writers do take the time to address this discrepancy, but it’s a superficial attempt, and therefore, not enough to convince the viewer that this alliance could really happen. Stop and consider who the Moclans are: They don’t just have a bias against women. They hate women. So much so that they turn every child on their planet into a man. There is Read More ›

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Time in space. 3d rendering illustration

Did Physicists Open a Portal to Extra Time Dimension, as Claimed?

That’s the way the story reads at Scientific American. But experimental physicist Rob Sheldon says not so fast…

This story was #8 in 2022 at Mind Matters News in terms of reader numbers. As we approach the New Year, we are rerunning the top ten Mind Matters News stories of 2022, based on reader interest. Here’s #8, from our news division, for those of us who wonder how best to interpret science news at the cutting edge: “Did physicists open a portal to an extra time dimension, as claimed?: An experimental physicist explains. (August 6, 2022) At Scientific American, we were told last month: “Physicists have devised a mind-bending error-correction technique that could dramatically boost the performance of quantum computers”: “It is very exciting to see this unusual phase of matter realized in an actual experiment, especially because the mathematical description Read More ›

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Spiral aloe vera with water drops, closeup

Our Physical Universe Is Based on Patterns in Mathematics

In that sense, the underlying basis of our universe is immaterial, not material

Sunny Labh, science writer and “budding astrophysicist,” reminds us that, in our universe, everything from snowflakes to black holes can be described by mathematics: To have a basic understanding of how accurate and loyal this universe is to math, we could visualize our solar system. Back in 1905, scientists discovered that the orbit of Uranus and Neptune was not following Newton’s Gravitational laws, and using mathematical expressions, predicted that there must be some other heavenly body that was influencing their orbit. In 1930 Clyde Tombaugh used the method of comparative plating of astronomical photographs also known as the blink comparator technique. The calculations were made precise to a point where we could even tell where to point our telescope in Read More ›

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A sheet of white paper is held by a protester in China.

China: Protesters Evade Censors and Confront State Surveillance

Chinese citizens are known for their clever plays on words to evade social media censors.

The graffiti on the bathroom wall at the university said there would be a gathering in honor of the people who had died in an apartment fire in Urumqi, Xinjiang. Bathrooms usually do not have surveillance cameras, so this announcement would probably go unnoticed by censors. It is better than risking punishment by posting on social media. In another city, Chinese citizens discretely shared information about the location of a vigil for the Urumqi victims on WeChat in the guise of dinner plans. A number of people died in the fire, whose toll was likely inflated because emergency vehicles were unable to access the building due to zero-Covid measures. Social media posts showed doors that were barred shut and barricades Read More ›

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Crystal Prism

Schrödinger Believed That There Was Only One Mind in the Universe

The quantum physicist and author of the famous Cat Paradox believed that our individual minds are not unique but rather like the reflected light from prisms

This story was #9 in 2022 at Mind Matters News in terms of reader numbers. As we approach the New Year, we are rerunning the top ten Mind Matters News stories of 2022, based on reader interest. Here’s #9, from our news division, for those of us who like pondering the deeper things: Schrödinger believed that there was only one Mind in the universe: Consciousness researcher Robert Prentner and cognitive psychologist will tell a prestigious music and philosophy festival in London next month that great physicist Donald Hoffman, quantum physicist Erwin Schrödinger (1887–1961) believed that “The total number of minds in the universe is one.” That is, a universal Mind accounts for everything. In a world where many scientists strive mightily to explain how the human Read More ›

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Washington DC - FBI Building on Pennsylvania Street

Three More Key Takeaways From the Twitter Files and Their Fallout

The FBI responds to the Twitter files: “Conspiracy theorists” are feeding the public “misinformation.” This isn't helping its reputation

Key takeaways 1–3 are here. 4.Yes, the FBI finally responded to the Twitter files revelations about its cozy relationship with Twitter. And the response could be straight out of a bent cop novel: The Federal Bureau of Investigation is responding to Twitter Files revealing that the agency regularly contacted employees at the social media giant to notify them of accounts that “may” constitute violations of the company’s terms of service. FBI officials told Fox News that the agency didn’t ask Twitter employees to “take action” based on the information provided, and said the information was provided so that Twitter employees can make a determination on whether to take action. “We are providing it so that they can take whatever action Read More ›

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online payments. Girl holds a smartphone and a credit card. European woman shopping online. Beautiful young woman using a credit card and mobile phone for online shopping.

PayPal Today Betrays Its Founders’ Vision for Democratizing Money

The payments processor, famously, now often drops customers for what appear to be political reasons, as Indian economist Rupa Subramanya explains

Earlier this year, we wrote about PayPal starting to “fine” users for “misinformation” and wrongthink. While there is certainly misinformation out there, the alarming Disinformation Governance Board proposal and the Twitter files revelations underline the limits of what Big Government, Big Tech, or Big Business can do beyond simply imposing an official opinion. Of course, the official opinion may be based on a faulty understanding of the problem. The banned individuals may merely be better informed. PayPal, famously, now often drops customers for what appear to be political reasons, as Indian economist Rupa Subramanya explains: One by one, they go to start their business day only to find a baffling message from their payments app informing them: “You can no Read More ›

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Power outage. Electricity missing. Blackout concept.

What Would It Take to Survive an EMP Attack?

Remember, almost all conventional power sources and the entire internet would be knocked out and might take many months to replace

As we approach the New Year, we are rerunning the top ten Mind Matters News stories of 2022, based on reader interest. Let’s start with #10, electronics expert Forrest M. Mims III on “What would it take to survive an EMP attack?“ We are increasingly vulnerable to both natural disruptions and military attacks on our power grids. Earlier this month I wrote about electromagnetic pulse impulses (EMPs), which would destroy your electronics, leaving you and your surroundings intact — but without easy means of survival. Force of nature: Sometimes the sun is to blame for knocking out the power supply Natural disruptions can give us some idea what to expect. When lightning destroys a transformer atop a power pole, nearby Read More ›

Artificial Intelligence Playing Go

The Game-Playing AI Does Not Always Win, It Turns Out

Enterprising researchers beat KataGo at Go by taking advantage of its known blind spots

At Vice, science writer Tatyana Woodall tells us that clever researchers developed a rival adversarial AI to trick KataGo into losing games: Players have often used KataGo to test their skills, train for other matches, and even analyze past games, yet in a study posted recently on the preprint server arXiv, researchers report that by using an adversarial policy—a kind of machine-learning algorithm built to attack or learn weaknesses in other systems—they’ve been able to beat KataGo at its own game between 50 to 99 percent of the time, depending on how much “thinking ahead” the AI does. Funnily enough, the new system doesn’t win by trumping KataGo all out, but instead by forcing KataGo into a corner, essentially tricking Read More ›

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White laboratory mouse (Mus musculus ) crawling on a clay pot. Uttarakhand India

Mice Can’t Do Calculus But Their Brains Can

Neuroimaging and mathematics showed that a simple Stop! signal in the brain would not allow a mouse to stop as quickly as it in fact did

Science writer Kevin Hartnett tells us that, based on experiments with mice, the brain sharpens control of precise maneuvers by using comparisons between control signals rather than the signals themselves: [The research] explores a simple question: How does the brain — in mice, humans and other mammals — work quickly enough to stop us on a dime? The new work reveals that the brain is not wired to transmit a sharp “stop” command in the most direct or intuitive way. Instead, it employs a more complicated signaling system based on principles of calculus. This arrangement may sound overly complicated, but it’s a surprisingly clever way to control behaviors that need to be more precise than the commands from the brain Read More ›

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Evolution theory on old paper

When Scholars Simply Don’t Want To Believe Something Obvious…

… they are very good at developing clever arguments to avoid seeing it

This article was originally published in Salvo 62 (Fall 2022) under the title “The Whitewashing.” In Hitler’s Ethic: The Nazi Pursuit of Evolutionary Progress (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), University of California historian Richard Weikart demonstrated painstakingly that the Nazis had developed an ethic based largely on applying Darwinian evolution principles to government. Scholars have since tried hard to obscure the connection, most likely because they believe in Darwinism and see it as science. Any suggestion that the Nazis were avid Darwinists too is unseemly and must be refuted by any and all means. With racism very much in current news, Weikart has focusing in Darwinian Racism: How Darwinism Influenced Hitler, Nazism, and White Nationalism (Discovery Institute Press, 2022) on the way Read More ›

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Waiting for inspiration!

Will Chatbots Put Writers out of Business?

Some writers are saying yes. Machines can now do mediocre, run of the mill writing

As chatbots become more sophisticated, some writers predict that they will take over run-of-the-mill writing jobs that don’t need or attract much creativity. For example, copyright and plagiarism consultant Jonathan Bailey points out, “AI doesn’t have to be great, just good enough.” In 2017, five years ago, the Washington Post revealed that an AI bot named Heliograph had produced some 850 articles for the paper. However, those stories were for things such as local high school football games and financial reports. They were all short, formulaic and not worth sending a human reporter to. At the time, the stories had generated more than 500,000 clicks. In short, they were ridiculously successful, delivering information that was important and sought after, but Read More ›

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Flying bird of prey golden eagle with large wingspan, photo with snowflakes during winter, stone mountain, Rhodope Mountains, Bulgaria wildlife. Eagle sunset. Eastern Rhodopes rock with eagle.

Neanderthal Man Had a Thing for Big Eagles — and Hyenas

But we haven’t found evidence that Neanderthals were much interested in dogs

Although technically a dog expert, Mark Derr has given some thought since the 1990s to Neanderthal man who seems to get smarter each time we study him: For instance, Neanderthal appears to have mastered and used fire for a variety of purposes including cooking after their appearance in Eurasia some 300,000 or more years ago. They also made carvings into ivory, and they almost certainly communicated using speech. To show how slowly attitudes change, I have recently seen people speculate that Neanderthal may have only seasonally had fire, but in general were incapable of igniting tinder on their own. This view recently received what would appear to be a mortal blow when Ceren Kabukcu and colleagues revealed that Neanderthal not Read More ›

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An internet email symbol and a group of people are separated by a red prohibitory symbol No. restrictions on access to the global Internet. Censorship. Information control, society isolation policy

Three Key Takeaways From the Twitter Files and Their Fallout

Twitter Files 7 dropped yesterday and it features the close relationship between Twitter and the FBI

From the news: Do you think the pandemic response might have gone differently if voices such as yours were not suppressed? Yes… I do really believe censorship kills, and censorship killed during this pandemic. The policies could have been so much better… The policies that were adopted were incredibly damaging to the lives and livelihoods of so many people. 100million people thrown into poverty worldwide: that’s the estimate from the World Bank. Just the consequences of that itself are going to have tremendous effects on the lives and livelihoods of people going forward. And of course, all these children were robbed of an education for years. Those are absolutely monumental outcomes of the policies we adopted during the pandemic, and Read More ›

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Black and white computer keyboard keys close-up. Concept of unstructured big data that need to be sorted ready to be consumed by machine learning model for deep learning.

Large Learning Models Are An Unfortunate Detour in AI

Gary Smith: Even though LLMs have no way of assessing the truth or falsity of the text they generate, the responses sound convincing

For decades, computer scientists have struggled to construct systems possessing artificial general intelligence (AGI) that rivals the human brain—including the ability to use analogies, take into account context, and understand cause-and-effect. Marvin Minsky (1927–2016) was hardly alone in his overly optimistic 1970 prediction that, “In from three to eight years we will have a machine with the general intelligence of an average human being.” AGI turned out to be immensely more difficult than imagined and researchers turned their attention to bite-size projects that were doable (and profitable). Recently, large language models (LLMs) — most notably OpenAI’s GPT-3 — have fueled a resurgence of hope that AGI is almost here. GPT-3 was trained by breaking 450 gigabytes of text data into Read More ›

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Man is using laptop with black keys, Social media and social networking. Marketing concept

Musk’s Tyrannical Turn With Twitter

While the political bias is gone, the ego bias seems to have just begun

I was hopeful when Elon Musk took control of Twitter. As a longtime Musk skeptic in many areas, I thought that his move into Twitter would actually be a good thing. First of all, it matches his background better than Tesla. Twitter is a software play, and Musk’s actual expertise is in building software. Second, Twitter is just about software, not artificial intelligence, which tends to be where Musk gets into trouble. Finally, Musk has at least claimed to be a libertarian, though this seems to be limited to situations where he simply decides that he doesn’t want to do what is required of everyone else. When Musk first took control, it looked positive. Despite the incessant screaming of the Read More ›

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Congress Spending Your Money.

Celebrating My 2 Billionth Birth-Second: What Big Numbers Mean

Let’s see if we can give a clearer, sharper personality to these big numbers

I have lived for over two billion seconds. In 2013, I celebrated my 2 billionth birth-second. The party did not last long. Today US spending and deficits are going through the roof. References to billions and trillions of dollars of spending and deficit are everywhere. The late US Senator Everett Dirksen of Illinois is purported to have said “A billion here, a billion there; pretty soon you’re talking about real money.” He said this in the middle of the last century. Today we can replace “billion” in Dirksen’s quote with “trillion.” Let’s see if we can give a clearer, sharper personality to these big numbers. A trillion is a thousand times bigger than a billion. If we scale a trillion Read More ›

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Dog does trick for treats

Researchers: Dogs Evaluate How Competent Humans Are

Provided that a treat is involved. Females pay more attention to competence in humans than males, they say

At Scientific American’s “60-Second Science” podcast (with transcript), science writer Karen Hopkin interviewed Kyoto University psychologist Hitomi Chijiiwa on her team’s recent finding that female dogs actively evaluate human competence. Because one their previous studies showed that dogs avoid people who refuse to help their human friends, the team decided to also test whether dogs form judgments about people based on their apparent skilfulness or competence: Chijiiwa: We showed 60 dogs two persons manipulating transparent containers. One person is competent. Hopkin: That person was able to pop open the top after just a couple of twists. Chijiiwa: Whereas the other person is incompetent and they failed at this task. Hopkin: That person tried to open the lid, then gave up. Read More ›

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Chat bot Robot Online Chatting Communication Business Internet Technology Concept

Why We Should Not Trust Chatbots As Sources of Information

A linguist and an information theorist say that chatbots lack any awareness of the information they provide — and that matters

Linguist Emily M. Bender and information theorist Chirag Shah, both of the University of Washington, have a message for those who think that the chatbot they are talking to is morphing into a real person: No. Not only that but there are good reasons to be very cautious about trusting chatbots as sources of information, all the more so because they sound so natural and friendly. First, decades of science fiction, the authors point out, have taught us to expect computer scientists to develop a machine like that: However, we must not mistake a convenient plot device — a means to ensure that characters always have the information the writer needs them to have — for a roadmap to how Read More ›