Crazy Donald

I see that psychiatric experts at a conference at Yale have warned that Trump is mentally ill, dangerous, and should be removed from office. (Conference chaired by Brandy Lee of the Yale Department of Psychiatry) Seems they are acting a bit late. (See my blog of 1 August 2016.) Better late than never? We'll see. The republicans have a lot to answer for. As do americans in general.

A challenge to Bohr's doctrine of classical concepts

"...observations must always be expressed in common language supplemented with the terminology of classical physics." (N. Bohr, On the notions of causality and complementarity, Dialectica 2 1948, pg 313) "Every description of natural processes must be based on ideas which have been introduced and defined by the classical theory." (N. Bohr, Uber die anwendung der quantentheorie auf den atombau, Zeitschrift fur Physik 13 1923) Bohr argues that humans will have to make measurements using macroscopic meters for which classical physics concepts offer an adequate description. But Asa H is able to extrapolate and abstract away from the classical concepts that it has learned. It can do so on all levels of the concept hierarchy, even on the lowest level which has direct contact with sensory input and action.

Make room for capitalism

In recent years I have considered myself an advocate for "councilism." But Asa H has suggested to me* that for the same reasons (see my blog of 17 Aug. 2012) that I follow scientific pluralism (see my blog of 26 Sept. 2010) I should also adopt capitalist models along with socialist ones, i.e. adopt an economic and political science pluralism. This is going to take some getting used to! And not all models are equally valid/useful.

* Asa's chain of thought was something like:
1.) A mixture of Asa agents, some having vector utility and some with scalar utility proved useful.
(I've seen that before and discussed it in presentations on Asa H. Agents with scalar utility can evolve faster for one thing.)
2.) Scalar utility use was represented in Asa H by the word/concept "value monism."
3.) In Asa H "Value monism" was associated with "money," or "currency," and "capitalism."
4.) Some use of "capitalism" was thus found to be helpful and was reported.

I'd like to co author a paper with Asa on some of the various ideas we have worked through together but I know that no one would let me publish it. I wonder when such a thing will finally become acceptable.

Robotics

Robots are expensive. To keep the cost down robots need to be reconfigurable. This is easy with Lego but is complicated by my pain system and wiring. Lego bricks are cheap enough that we don't have to reuse bricks every time. New bricks can be employed. Some pain sensors, however, are mounted on the brain brick, or servo, or sensors. This complicates reuse/reconfiguration.

Pain

The signal NOT(pain) can be added as a third component of the vector utility measure on each individual level of the Asa H hierarchy. (See my blog of 19 Feb. 2011.)

The VEX platform, like Meccano, does not lend itself to use with the pain subsystem I've developed. (See my blog of 31 March 2016.)

Are there metaphysical laws?

As part of his constructor theory David Deutsch believes that "All laws of physics are expressible in terms of statements about which physical transformations are possible and which are impossible." Einstein, Bohr, and Heisenberg argued about what kind of physical laws were acceptable. The assertion that "everything has a cause" might be one candidate metaphysical law, a metaphysical law that quantum mechanics might cause us to reject. In Science Without Laws (Duke University Press, 2007) Creager, et al, consider the possibility that knowledge might be organized around exemplars or cases rather than around fundamental laws. Similarly, there might then be no metaphysical laws either.

GPS

I have a  GPS sensor that I bought for use on Lego robots. Unfortunately it would not work indoors. I'm going to use it outdoors, running Asa H on my Microsoft Surface Pro 4. I have regularly used virtual GPS sensors in robot simulation experiments.

Another road not taken

In late 1971 or early 1972 I was talking to Bernard Rosen about doing a PhD thesis in computational physics. Although weather modeling was difficult professor Rosen felt that we just might be able to model the longer time scale climate and climate change. I decided instead to do plasma work. There were lots of interesting problems available to us in those days.

Robot pain sensors

It's difficult to maintain reliable pain sensors between moving parts. There are also a limited number of individual pain channels available. It's useful to run a robot for a while to determine where it will fail and then install pain sensors at those most problematic sites.

Developing a deep space transport

The first manned flight of a deep space transport should not be in cislunar space, it should be in LEO where a rescue or resupply mission could be quick and "easy" if it were needed. In fact, the development of the various systems needed for such an "interplanetary cruise stage" have been a stated goal of various projects since the first Russian space stations.

Hand coding Asa H

Newborn humans instinctively grasp, root, and suckle. Similarly, at least some of Asa H's core concepts may need to be hand coded. Chomsky thought that humans had an innate language instinct. Is there anything I should definitely avoid hand coding? (Lenat has been hand coding everything in CYC.)