Best song ever!Ibix said:
Yeah. My wife's Spanish and I've spent quite a lot of time in Spain. There are huge differences from English culture (rules are much more like guidelines, deadlines aren't really, they are LOUD, children are accepted anywhere at any time but nowhere has a baby change table, they drive on the wrong side of the road). But so much is the same - the humour, the music, stories, TV, selfish politicians, getting together for a meal... The differences are mostly stylistic, not really substantive. IMO.fresh_42 said:
True.WWGD said:
Although Spanish beer comes in very small servings. I miss pints when I'm there...I was lucky when in Madrid. They had a Hard Rock Cafe next to the hotelIbix said:True.
How I imagine discussing politics goes for people:WWGD said:
What's really sad is, that certain unpleasant phenomena seem to appear at very different places on this globe, and all of which have been unexpected by the values they claimed to follow.WWGD said:
I don't recall where I read it, but on computer vision someone once said that we'll know we've cracked it when a system can look at an image and say "that's a brown cow with five legs". A system, in other words, that fits a new object into a classification scheme (cow), recognising subclasses (brown cows) and flagging oddities (five legs). I think the same applies to parsing natural language. I mean, just go and read the Lame Jokes thread. About 50% of it is posters deliberately invoking confusion of the kind you're making here.WWGD said:
Yes, god point. But I see a problem is "size": there are infinitely-many types of situations that are not likely to fit within a finite set of premises/rules. It may be a good idea if someone could address this satisfactorily ( I will keep to the lame jokes for now -- meaning any and all jokes coming from me :) ). EDIT: There is a parallel to this: the need for a Supreme Court because , I posit, no finite collection of laws can cover/describe any possible situation that may arise in the interactions between people.Ibix said:
Doesn't this just boil down to whether you think humans are computers with delusions of grandeur or not? If we are then it must be possible to write a computer program to do the same - to be able to generate new classifications and new rules when the existing ones don't work, or can only be regarded as guidelines. If not, then possibly not.WWGD said:
Unfortunately I never finished "The Emperor's New Mind" nor "Godel, Escher Bach" , nor related books, but I think you did get to the meat of the issue, but unfortunately I don't have a good answer at this point EDIT .<Sigh> I miss the days of undergrad where you could afford to spend days thinking about this type of questions.Ibix said:
I think it's an xkcd cartoon that proposes a six-word biography of Hofstadter - "I'm So Meta Even This Acronym".WWGD said:
Yes, maybe it is just us Math, Physics people who understand the need to fix definitions while having discussions of this sort, and adjusting them as needed or face wasting time endlessly getting nowhere. Hey, seems like a good idea for a Monte Python skit; too bad I am some 30 years late for that.Ibix said:I think it's an xkcd cartoon that proposes a six-word biography of Hofstadter - "I'm So Meta Even This Acronym".
I don't think anyone has a complete answer to the question yet. And I suspect that even if we built AIs that produce grand symphonies, beautiful paintings, and a rigorous proof of the Riemann Hypothesis, you'd still find people arguing that they aren't really thinking. And yes, "they" can be read two ways in that last sentence...
Probably better so. I don't think that the Belgians would have had a good chance against Croatia ...WWGD said:
