you read somewhere?
Where did you read this? In a scientific journal? In a science fiction story? In an anonymous post on another message board? I see no reason to consider the notion unless I know the source because the notiion just doesn’t make sense to me. I sometimes think of more than one thing at a time, I sometimes think of colors, sounds, smells and tastes without sounding them out using descriptive terms. I think of happy and/or sad times without sounding out the words “happy” and/or “sad” in my head, or think of the ocean breezes in Depoe Bay without thinking the words “Depoe”, “Bay” or “breeze”. When you decide to go up a set of stairs do you actually think out the words “I am going to go up the stairs”?
Anti-gravity is relatively easy. All you need is an equally strong, or stronger, gravitational force pulling you up, like another Earth mass planet. The tricky part is balancing them so they are only a wee bit apart.
If this little principle has already been stated elsewhere, I give credit to whoever stated it. Otherwise, I’m taking the credit. 
TANSTAAFL applies universally to all systems and all theories, even those that haven’t been discovered yet.
Let’s say you could invent antigravity. It’d have to come in one of two forms–“always on” (a substance always repelled by gravity) and “switchable” (an effect from a powered field that can be switched on and off.) “Always on” would be useful for things that work like blimps or hot-air ballons with enough normal matter mixed in to make it neuturally boyant. You could build almost arbritrarily large grounded buildings or floating cities. Switchable antigravity could be used for more mobile aircraft, switching the field on and off at the proper rate and duration to reach whatever altitude you want. Both types would make for lousy long-distance propulsion off-planet because the further you are away from a large mass the less push you get off it.
All of this is roughy as likely to happen as a flock of carrier pigeons flying out of my buttocks.
Would it not be trickier preventing them from tearing each other apart?
Should that happen, I hope someone is standing by to video and upload it.
Granted, the effect may be short lived.
ISTR that with artificial intelligence (strong AI), the big sticking point is understanding how consciousness works. If we knew that, we could *potentially *make real artificial intelligences. That’s not to say that it would be easy, but at least we’d know a lot more of how to go about doing it.
Right now, strong AI (conscious machines) is pretty much as far out of reach as warp drive. Weak AI is going strong though.
He’s talking about subvocalising. It’s not at all contentious as far as I know.
It isn’t contentious…but it isn’t exactly what he is talking about, either.
(bolding mine). Do you know what would be easier that developing a system that accurately uses this method to tell what someone is reading?
Looking at what they are reading.
It’s also something you do when you think of words without actually saying them. You don’t have to be reading anything.
AIUI, only if P = NP, and the general consensus is that it is not. If P does not equal NP then we’re more or less back at Square One.
I think the OP is salvageable.
In some cases there are known-unknowns with candidate explanations. So we can ask: if the mechanism of Phenomenon is indeed Hypothesis, and Hypothesis is fleshed out into a full Theory, what would the possible applications be?
Which is a valid question I think, although a very broad one.
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I can think of at least six reasons why that’s not 100%.
#1 You wouldn’t be detecting whether the suspect actually committed the crime, only whether the suspect believed he/she was guilty. As George Costanza once said “It’s not a lie if you believe it.” For a con artist who believes their own bullshit, you still need a trial.
#2 This would be useless for solving crimes where the suspect doesn’t remember what happened. cite: Argelius II vs Montgomery Scott. In fact, that could open up a whole new market for technology that erases your memory. Get into a fight, kill somebody, then immediately take a pill that erases all your memories from that day. They ask you if you killed anybody, you say with absolute honesty that you have no memory of killing anyone. The machine says you’re telling the truth. But the circumstantial evidence says you did it. They still need a trial.
#3 There are plenty of cases where the suspect admits the facts but the court has to decide whether the law applies to this situation, so you still need a trial. Take Trayvon Martin, for example. Asking George Zimmerman “Did you shoot Trayvon?” or even “Did you murder Trayvon?” would yield absolutely no useful information. He admitted he shot and killed Trayvon, but denied that it should count as “murder”. Even if you asked Zimmerman “Were you actually afraid Trayvon was going to kill you?”, that wouldn’t tell you whether Zimmerman’s fear was reasonable or not, and wouldn’t tell you how to apply a vaguely worded state law regarding self defense. A similar example would be a victim of domestic abuse who kills their abuser, and then their lawyer says it was justifiable homicide. You still need a trial.
#4 Suppose a delusional schizophrenic has a hallucination about committing a murder, confesses to the police, and is shown by the mind reading device to be telling the truth. But the real killer is someone else, or maybe the victim died of natural causes. This is one way to interpret the movie Amadeus. Salieri says he killed Mozart but maybe Salieri is insane; the entire movie is being told from Salieri’s point of view.
#5 What if the machine says you did it, but you are actually being framed by the person who operates the machine, who is under pressure from the DA’s office to secure a conviction? They send you to prison without a trial but you’re actually innocent.
#6 Suppose two different suspects named John Smith get arrested on the same day. One of them tests guilty for murder, the other tests guilty for speeding. Due to a paperwork mixup, the murderer is fined and released but the speeder goes to prison. The prisoner’s lawyer files a motion claiming mistaken identity. The police insist that the prisoner is lying and there was no mistake. You need a trial to sort it out.
“is solved”? Note there are multiple possible answers to the question. If the answer is no, they are provably different, then this is good news for cryptography. If the answer is yes, they are the same, it depends on how the “yes” goes. If there is a construction that shows how to solve an NP-Complete problem in reasonable time then it opens up a ton of things to be more easily solvable. The thing that concerns people is what if the answer is “yes” but it’s a non-constructive proof. I.e., no actual method is given. This is unlikely and there’s some methods to derive polynomial time algorithms from some types of non-constructive proofs, but until we see the actual method we might be no better off than we are now. (Except to know that we have issues with popular cryptographic systems.)
Another thing that can happen is that a poly time algorithm for SAT or some such is found but it’s running time is n^100. I.e., it’s useless. Generally we have found that Nature is not that pathological. Sometimes the first poly time algorithm for a problem is kind of slow, but once known poly time, then more reasonable ones are found.
Something along a similar vein are expander graphs. Being able to come up with good (constant degree) expander graphs is useful for things like networks and data coding problems.
Fun fact: a graph with randomly chosen edges is quite likely to be an expander graph. Not-so-fun fact: Proving a graph is an expander graph is NP-Complete.
So you know that there’s a lot of easy to produce expander graphs. But you can’t easily prove any one of them actually is.
So, if someone came up with a good method for generating provably good expander graphs, the world is their oyster.
Sorry, but as I said above this is an engineering question not a theory question. Any group of imaginations on message boards can come up with applications. They are as meaningless as asking them what life would look like on an alien planet. Without the exact parameters, the answers are merely wild guesses extremely unlikely to have any basis in reality.
Yes, but the claim is that if you’re thinking, you’re using words, which is sometimes true, but certainly not always. I’m sure all of us think through visualization or similar without the use of interfering language. I would be surprised if language is absolutely necessary for thought, which is what I understood the original claim was: “I read something like if you think, you are using words.”
scientific unknown #22-b - what is a complete inventory of all living things at the bottom of the oceans? Could the answer lead to solutions of other scientific problems?
Just the inventory of creatures would give us very little. But actually finding the creatures (which is probably how we would create the inventory, in practice) could tell us a lot: What techniques do they use to survive the extreme conditions? How do they deal with more mundane problems like pathogens-- maybe a substance they use to kill bacteria is good for a human antibiotic, too. What ecological niche do they fill, and so on.
As an example of the sort of thing we could find, except that this one is already found: Every organism must have enzymes for processing DNA (enabling copying of it, reading from it, etc.). Most of these enzymes break down at high temperatures, which is inconvenient, because the easiest way of artificially copying DNA involves repeatedly heating and cooling it, and this meant we needed to replace the enzymes every cycle. But the things that live in the boiling hot springs in Yellowstone have enzymes which can survive those temperatures, and DNA is DNA, so we can use those in our artificial replication techniques. That’s PCR, and it was worth a Nobel prize back in the 90s.