calling all athiests...

Obi Once wrote:

Alright I'm trying to remember where I saw this, but don't. Still it made sense to me since in a very intense dream involving lots of e.g. running one can wake of tired and strained. Maybe I don't understand your words correctly, the study was crap and that isn't nearly true? The mind does not have any influence outside the body it's in, besides influencing other by speech, art, whatever is obvious to me, tho I never claimed anything in the contrary and don't see how that could be egocentric, conceited or selfish.

They used non-dominant littel finger strength on the "assumption" it is not used for anything else, and therefore felt they were controlling for confounding variables. Assumptions have no place in science, and in this case, was very wrong, as I know for a damn fact that my littel finger plays guitar for several hours a day. They the had one group of people think about exercise, and another group do nothing. Unsurprisingly, the "think group" little fingers got stronger. However, it's pretty damn easy to exercise a little finger while you are doing anything. Hell, I'm flexing mine a lot now just thinking about it.
The narcism bit was not directed at you.
Actually, it was a thought about myself.
When I was younger, I believed in "magic", and part of the reason, apart from that it's a very attractive notion, was that I wanted to believe that I was capable of it myself. That is a narcissistic thought. People who believe that their mind can control physical things through non-physical or psychic means are being seduced by teh same idea. All claims of "Psychic" ability invollve an element of "I'm special" thinking.
Physiological dreams are very common. They tend to incorporate physical feelings into a dream scenario, rather then the dream causing the physical feelingds. The commonest ones are the "need to piss" dream, which happen often, and you wake up needing to piss. Sex dreams are common, apparently men and women have them with similar frequency. Sex deprived men, esp teenage boys may ejaculate, as you know.
Another form is the dream which culminates in a loud noise, then you wake up to find a door has slammed, or the bloody cat has knocked over the crockery. So, you were going to awake tired anyway.

First you have to quantify intelligence. Which we never end up doing in the thread "What is "Intelligence"?"

For that I respond with a study on prayer and heart surgery
http://www.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2006/03/31/no_benefit_of_prayer_found_after_surgery/

Obi Once wrote:

Nope, natural selection is pre-determined in our brain and the mutations occur randomly so there's really not much intelligent about it, it has had very interesting, remarkable and perhaps intelligent results.

How is natural selection predetermined in our brains?

ClimberInOz wrote:

From my own perspective I would actually just clarify the above statement a little- it comes from people thinking or wanting to think that their life has meaning or signifigance beyond their signifigance to friends, family, themselves etc. And I would also say good luck to them, if that is what works.

As a passionate atheist, I would not deny that life has meaning. But I would suggest that the meaning in our lives comes from the accumulated experiences of our lives, and that we matter diddly-squat to the 'greater universe'.

Ya I shoulda said that. My life has tons of meaning to the people around me.

69charger wrote:

Do you think a computer is intelligent?

Are you comparing a computer to evolution?

In my view, evolution is a process. Where does this process start and finish?

Intelligence is connected to patterns. When patterns develop, I see intelligence in existence.

angelica wrote:

Are you comparing a computer to evolution?

In my view, evolution is a process. Where does this process start and finish?

Intelligence is connected to patterns. When patterns develop, I see intelligence in existence.

evolution starts where and when it is required for survival. and when the opportunity and right conditions arise.

where does evolution end? it doesn't. not until the conditions in which it would occur are terminated. then one cycle of evolution ends and another manifests itself at a later date.

69charger wrote:

Do you think a computer is intelligent?

The ADIOS project addresses the problem, fundamental to linguistics, bioinformatics and certain other disciplines, of using corpora of raw symbolic sequential data to infer underlying rules that govern their production. Given a corpus of strings (such as text, transcribed speech, nucleotide base pairs, amino acid sequence data, musical notation, etc.), our unsupervised algorithm recursively distills from it hierarchically structured patterns. The ADIOS (Automatic DIstillation of Structure) algorithm relies on a statistical method for pattern extraction (The MEX algorithm) and on structured generalization, two processes that have been implicated in language acquisition. It has been evaluated on artificial context-free grammars with thousands of rules, on natural languages as diverse as English and Chinese, on coding regions in DNA sequences, and on protein data correlating sequence with function. This is the first time an unsupervised algorithm is shown capable of learning complex syntax, generating grammatical novel sentences, scoring well in standard language proficiency tests, and proving useful in other fields that call for structure discovery from raw data, such as bioinformatics

http://adios.tau.ac.il/


This is basically what human intelligence is. An algorithm for pattern recognition. I'm willing to bet this program run on a cellphone processor would smoke the human capacity. Of course, we have a lot of threads, otherwise our 10^14 ops would probably win. Although as far as hardware is concerned, the human brain probably has several "processors" dedicated to different functions, many more bridges and a faster bus speed. Then again, we are bottlenecked at the nerve cells, they only fire at 500 hz.

catefrances wrote:

evolution starts where and when it is required for survival. and when the opportunity and right conditions arise.

where does evolution end? it doesn't. not until the conditions in which it would occur are terminated. then one cycle of evolution ends and another manifests itself at a later date.

So evolution was somehow coded to arise when the right conditions arise?

When certain variables come into play? Again, to me patterns are intelligent. Particularly purposeful patterns.

Ahnimus wrote:

The ADIOS project addresses the problem, fundamental to linguistics, bioinformatics and certain other disciplines, of using corpora of raw symbolic sequential data to infer underlying rules that govern their production. Given a corpus of strings (such as text, transcribed speech, nucleotide base pairs, amino acid sequence data, musical notation, etc.), our unsupervised algorithm recursively distills from it hierarchically structured patterns. The ADIOS (Automatic DIstillation of Structure) algorithm relies on a statistical method for pattern extraction (The MEX algorithm) and on structured generalization, two processes that have been implicated in language acquisition. It has been evaluated on artificial context-free grammars with thousands of rules, on natural languages as diverse as English and Chinese, on coding regions in DNA sequences, and on protein data correlating sequence with function. This is the first time an unsupervised algorithm is shown capable of learning complex syntax, generating grammatical novel sentences, scoring well in standard language proficiency tests, and proving useful in other fields that call for structure discovery from raw data, such as bioinformatics

http://adios.tau.ac.il/


This is basically what human intelligence is. An algorithm for pattern recognition. I'm willing to bet this program run on a cellphone processor would smoke the human capacity. Of course, we have a lot of threads, otherwise our 10^14 ops would probably win. Although as far as hardware is concerned, the human brain probably has several "processors" dedicated to different functions, many more bridges and a faster bus speed. Then again, we are bottlenecked at the nerve cells, they only fire at 500 hz.

If an "algorithm is this (as per the dictionary):

"A step-by-step problem-solving procedure, especially an established, recursive computational procedure for solving a problem in a finite number of steps."

...that sounds very intelligent and "designed" to me. So human intelligence, by your view sounds very intelligent, complex, and meaningfully patterned to me. I wonder how it got "programmed".

The bottom line is that nothing just spontaneously arose of its own accord. Everything operates by invisible universal laws and we all know this. I realize to break any part of the complex universe down, we like to think we understand it. And some of us certainly understand our theories of it. So, we break it down and try to make sense of it. The problem with such views is that people are missing huge gaps of knowledge, and therefore don't get the big picture. And it shows.