Life is a Pit

Life is a pit. You are thrown in. You slide down from one steep end. Then the slope becomes gradual and you reach the bottom point. After that you walk upward. Then climb. The further, the steeper. Until you push so hard that either you are too tired or you hit the wall, the other side of the pit. That is it. The life is all what’s behind you. And there is nothing more. Appreciate your pit. And fill it with love.

Simple Questions of Nature

Life and Nature consists of simple questions and simple answers. Its only their mosaic makes them look complex.

Copyright Is Greed

"...my objection to copyright of any kind..."

Leo Tolstoy, "Letter to the Free Age Press", 1900

Copyright protection is greed. Much can be said about the usefulness of copyright protection, but nevertheless it is greed. Greed can be basis for some aspects of society. Societies with a focus on greed are often more effective in achieving superiority over other societies, and as a consequence obtaining power over them. However getting the supremacy is also the aim of a society based on greed. So the usefulness of greed is measured by the effectiveness of achieving aims of the very same greed.

Law of Truth Conservation

Truth is conserved in consistent systems. Consistent systems are those which do not produce any contradictions by internal logical inference. It is obvious that any consistent axiomatic base produce a consistent theory in which true statements remain true regardless of new theorems and conclusions. Less obvious but still easy to see that true statements remain true even if the system is expanded by new axioms or other statements that are not derived within the current theory as far as the expanded system remains consistent.

Interesting implication of this line of thought is that a person retaining consistency of hir views is not able to learn new facts contradicting hir system of beliefs even if the facts seems to be true. To change view one has to accept many contradicting to the current beliefs facts in order to build a new consistent outlook and reject or reassess old known facts. For example, if a particular view is supported by ten known facts, another hundred new facts are not able to flip over the view because each of new facts is rejected due to contradicting to the current view hence breaking the consistency.

Therefore as long as one maintains hir set of beliefs in consistency, truth is never going to change.

How you know that others have consciousness

First let’s ask a question how do you know that another person understands a particular concept in the same way as you do? You ask about different aspects of the concept and see if the answers correlate with your own answers to the same questions. It is possible that up to a point the answers may correlate well, but the person still has misunderstanding of the concept. If you realize this possibility you ask more questions to eliminate such case. Theoretically it is possible that after any length of communication the person still misunderstand the concept. But this would be highly impossible for long enough conversation. One can say that the assurance of mutual understanding asymptotically approaches to the full confidence (but never reaches it) to any upfront desirable level. In this sense it is valid to say that it is possible that one can be “completely” sure that there is no misunderstanding between communicating parties.

Secondly, having consciousness assumes a specific type of behaviour of a person or animal. When you realize correspondence between your own conscious behaviour and your behaviour perceived by others, you can project this correspondence on other people. Here I do not distinguish behaviour of a person and hir answers to questions. Now just by seeing the behaviour of another person for long enough time you may come to a conclusion that the other person has consciousness similarly as you do.

Finally, since the correlation between the reaction of a real person and the reaction of an imaginary conscious person making conscious decisions takes us to any degree of confidence that the real person has consciousness, it is impossible to create a zombie like mind mimicking conscious behaviour while lacking consciousness. In other words Searly’s weak AI is impossible and cannot exist.

Same files in OS

How long we have to wait until OS developers finally implement shared storage of duplicate files? Just imagine your OS without app installations and system rotting.

CapsLock and Password

This is a pretty stupid problem to me. All people suffer from it and will be suffering for a long time. Why not to allow both passwords to match: normal and CapsLocked? The only downside in this case is that brute force cracking time is halved. On the other hand, how many (in percentage) create passwords with capital letters! With the exponential complexity growth the register switch does make difference at all. Programmers of secure systems, please, be kind to their users!