Yoruichi-san

Okay, in case anyone actually wants to solve this:

Sry about the dbl post. Actually, most things 'robot' humans do are directed by their feelings, in an endeavor to attain their desires, i.e. go to work to earn money to have a house, car, 2.5 kids, etc. If I didn't have feelings I'd be better equipped to be a perfect Machiavellian prince...like Adrian Viedt ;P. Lol...next you'll be wishing that I gave birth to myself...(btw, I'm actually allergic to cats, so thanks...I'm now allergic to myself XP) I wish for a clone of me to take my place in my life and responsibilities so that I could go out and have adventures .

You have it, but the grammar nazis led by phaze come confiscate it as punishment for poor sentence structure. I wish to be unable to feel without loss of consciousness, mobility, functionality, or vitality. (and don't try saying I'll not be able to feel good feelings either...as far as I'm concerned, all feelings are a nuisance ;P)

You have it, but the grammar nazis led by phaze come confiscate it as punishment for poor sentence structure. I wish to be unable to feel without loss of consciousness, mobility, functionality, or vitality. (and don't try saying I'll not be able to feel good feelings either...as far as I'm concerned, all feelings are a nuisance ;P)

"Hello, my name is Inigo Montoya. And now you have the honor of my daughter. Prepare to die." -Inigo Montoya, The Swordsman's Guide to Parenting.

Well then, guess Stewie will have to fail... I wish to be to jump into and out of any TV show I want to at any time I want to and to have whatever abilities I want while in the TV show .

Oh sweet...now I have an excuse to 'borrow' *cough* any body I want. Hmm...so many choices ! Okay, I admit, I'm a little bummed...my last body was pretty nice, with the ability to run a 3:12 marathon without really training and all, but the knees were starting to complain, so maybe I'll go for a younger model. I seem to burn them out fast so I guess I'll need to change often. Oh well, maybe I'll 'test-drive' a few first ;P. Anyways, after I borrowed Matt Smith's body I went back in time in my Tardis and ungranted your wish, which created a paradox, and apparently (as per today's Doctor Who...you do learn something new every day!), paradoxes kill evil beings. Bye bye evil genie... I wish phaze would finally pass on the One Me Up reins...*cough*... Okay, for the rest of you: I wish everyone learned calculus in kindergarten.

Villains? Why would I know anything about villains? *whistling* http://dc.wikia.com/wiki/File:Doctor_NoFace.png There's also Question, but he's not a villain.

It's an interesting game, but I think a lot of people already knew the general strategy, hence it would of seemed unfair to answer and ruin the fun for everyone else. *shrugs*

It does not get granted...it has been granted all along...you just didn't know it . @Phil: As long as you leave the element song alone, I don't really care...;P I wish to be able to astral-project.

Well, since I'm blind, I have no idea what phaze just wrote, but unfortunately he wasn't able to reap the benefits long, seeing as how I ran him over right after he made the wish with my peeling bumper sticker car. Hey, don't blame me for not being able to see where I'm going! I wish for a Tardis (that I have complete control over, including when and where it appears ) (hey, someone had to do it...)

Alright...however your wish has become known to the world via the internet and now the people who were protesting outside that one senator's office for his "legitimate rape" comments are now barricading your house for implying that rapists are not as bad as thieves . And I do already speak Chinglish, mon ami ;P. I wish I could learn to do anything by seeing it done and have complete control over when, where, and if I do it.

Is it a commentary on human nature that people seem to be more eager to crush the wishes of others than to venture their own? I wish that I could speak, read, write, and understand every language that exists in the world.

You gleefully control electricity now, which does not harm you... ...however, you soon realize the magnetic fields it induce don't agree with you...;P I wish to be the one to find the elusive Higgs boson .

That's pretty good. In case my example confused anyone, you can also use things besides exponents (including operators), and you can use non-integers in exponents. Heck, go ahead and throw in pi (it can count as one character) and e if you want for fun .

Alright, I'll let the horse rest since you will, but just in case anyone else is actually reading this and is curious (or if you're curious), it's worthwhile to take a look into the evolutionary and neuroscience perspectives of why humans develop/use the concept of cause and effect .

0) Okay I use examples that are often gross oversimplifications/idealizations to try to better explain my point, like using the idea of an 'ideal gas' to try to explain how gases work, or modeling a particle in an infinite box to model potential. Please don't get too caught up in the example itself, the point is the point . 1) No, you misunderstand me, I am not implying what you think I am implying you are saying . My original statement was that generalization can lead to more information being, not that it in itself provides more information. I.e. the theory of gravity allows us (humankind) to gain a lot of information. If I don't generalize I can't propose the theory of gravity, since it (and all other theory/theorems) are generalizations themselves. Sure there is information that I did not gain by not looking at specifics, but generalizing in this case leads to more information overall. 2) It's alright, my point in pointing out the differences in our definitions is that I think mine is a more accurate description of how people typically use the concept of sameness. 3) I disagree. By leaving open-ended I mean, like, allocate a variable to it, which is allocating a bit if I understand the computer terminology correctly. That's why I included the example, I was not saying that a horse can be defined by four aspects, but I was grossly simplifying to simply try to demonstrate the difference between how we think people think. The difference is that you think they use a specific value that is some kind of average or mode or last-seen or something for the things that differ from horse to horse, where as I think they leave it as a variable, i.e." the horse could be any of brown or white or tan or black or red or...but cannot be blue or purple or green..." or "the horses in the north of the state are usually brown, but the horses in the south are usually white, but they could also be..." this is information, just not specific information, that they attach to 'horse'. Or they could have, like, something akin to a probability density function relating, say, the breed of horse and where it would be found. 4) I don't think you can lose something you never had. I think what you mean is that there is a loss of the opportunity to have gained information, which I will agree with. However, an opportunity is just that: an opportunity, a chance. That information might have been gained had the person not generalized, but it also might not have, if the person wouldn't have gone through the effort if he had not been allowed to generalize. So to evaluate the expected information difference from generalizing and not generalizing on a particular thing, then you have to consider (amount of information not gained by generalizing)*(probability information would have been sought out if not generalizing). To evaluate the overall (net) expected change in information in the system, you also have to consider (information gained by time/effort saved by generalizing so that it could be spent elsewhere). I argue that generalizing gives a net increase. 5) I see. But again I argue the difference between data flow and possible data flow. The information had by people in the world will never be one continuous data flow, it is actually physically impossible for every piece of information to be passed on continuously, since data transfer is not instantaneous, human lives are finite, and so are resources (bandwidth, pencils, etc). I would agree with you that some specific pieces of data are dropped from the data flow, but it allows for more new pieces of data to enter into the flow. And I would argue that the process of generalization allows for more efficient data flow, allowing more data to flow per unit time/effort. So to answer your general question, I would say, making exception for those cases where generalizing is abused, that generalizing is good thing, that recognizing what characteristics are the same in things is useful to allow us to compare and contrast things as well as to make correlations that allow us to understand the workings of the world better, and pining for an ideal world in which data flow was instantaneous, took zero effort, and could be continuous is kinda pointless ;P.

1) What about theories? How do you classify them in your depiction of information? I.e. no many how many times you drop a ball it will not give you the theory of gravity as information unless you generalize and make the correlation and come up with the theory. Then the theory allows you to draw further conclusions etc, giving you information about the world. Rather than dropping 200 balls and gaining useless information, if I drop 2 and come up with the theory of gravity I would say that is overall more information. 2) Stop not taking account my symbols, please . I said ~50% (as in approximately), it's just an example of how sameness comes in degrees. My sameness is not any less valid than yours and I think is more common. 3) We disagree on the way we think people think, I think . The difference in our definition of definition comes in that you think the characteristics are an average of the traits of, say, a horse, where I think there are the specification of necessary and sufficient traits. Hence by your definition of definition, information is lost, since information is always lost in averaging. In my definition, information is not lost, it is recognized that there are things (color, mass, dimensions, etc) that are not specified in the definition and that those things could be anything. The information is not lost, rather, it is left open-ended. I.e. if we pretend 'horse' is a described by the variables W,X,Y,Z, where W and X are the necessary and sufficient biological classification, and Y and Z are the things that can differ and still allow the object to be classified as a horse, and let's pretend the mean of Y is 5 and Z is 6, then you would say people mentally use horse = (W,X,5,6), and I would say people mentally use horse=(W,X,y,z), where they recognize that y and z are variable and differ from each horse. No information is lost, it is only not specified when thinking of the general concept of horse. Sure, a lot of times if you say 'horse' people will visualize a horse and they'll visualize the average, but they recognize conceptually that that is only an imaginary average and understand that those traits are actually variable in real horses. The general concept of 'horse' and the mental visualization of 'horse' are not the same thing. 4) I still do not see how information is necessarily lost, especially using my above definition of definition. I don't think something can be lost that would never have been given in the first place. If I see a horse and it is brown and I tell my friend and do not tell him it is brown, is that loss of information? I still know the horse is brown, and the horse does not cease being brown, the only thing is that the information was not propagated. However, if I was not allowed to generalize, and was required to describe the horse as "a four-legged mammal with brown fur, with mass ______ , length from head to tail _____, height from ground ______, etc..." I very well might not choose to convey the information that I saw the animal, in which case, net information was increased by allowing for generalizations. Also, maybe, instead of saying "I saw a horse, it was brown", I say "I saw a horse, I also saw a donkey", which takes about the same time and effort. I pass on more information, since the 'donkey' contains more information as a generalization than specifying the color of a horse. Some information might be excluded, i.e. the color of the horse, but there is a net increase in the information gained by my friend in me using the second than the first. 5) How is information being lost outside a subjective perspective? The horse does not cease having its properties if I do not specify them, it does not cease to exist. The only difference in information is what is inside the heads of people, how is that not subjective?

Lol...you're the one who keeps beating it with massive posts bringing up new points . Speaking of blindly following...that's exactly what determinism is. We are taught as a kid that cause and effect operate one way, and we blindly accept. There is no, and has never been, any evidence that causation is necessarily one-to-one and onto. In fact, in experimental results, there is always a degree of error, which people try to explain with various things, but could this error not be caused by the inherent randomness of the universe? Phenomena such as Brownian motion and spontaneous photonic emission also pose questions that determinism cannot answer other than to use the circular argument that there has to be an underlying cause we don't understand yet because everything has a cause. In the end whether you want to believe in determinism is a choice, one that you make based on your personality and beliefs. Many good people (including Einstein) choose to subscribe to it, but to think that "it sucks" not to be able to prove causation bespeaks an underlying fear of uncertainty, which is a very human trait. Everyone likes to be in control.

Your purpose is become the first human lightning rod, by having the molecules of your body become positively charged at the same time. I wish for a bumper sticker for my front bumper that says, in reverse lettering, "If you can read this: go faster." ;P

Lol...why? The puzzle is solved, the state of existence is not ;P. (If you want something to do you could always try your hand at the latest Chromatic Witch segment, links on my 'About Me' page )

(Okay yes, this was inspired by an xkcd comic...) Find the most accurate approximation (for the the units given) that has 5 characters or less (not counting negative sign or decimal point) for the following: 1) Gravitational constant: 6.673x10^-11 (m^3/kg/s) 2) Avogadro's number: 6.022x10^23 3) Planck's constant: 6.026x10^-34 (m^2*kg/s) 4) Electron mass: 9.109x10^-31 (kg) 5) Boltzmann constant: 8.617x10^-5 (eV/K) 6) Permittivity of free space: 8.854x10^-12 (F/m) 7) Elementary charge: 1.602x10^-19 C I.e. you could approximate a light-year as 99^8 (m).

Okay,.but you forgot to turn the stove off before you took the nap and you wake up to your house on fire. I wish every day were Saturday.

Ah...I think I see now. You're one of the many people who fear uncertainty (the general concept, not the scientific principle). You believe in determinism because you want to, even though none of it, not even the one-to-one and onto nature of cause and effect, can be proven. (The below is not directed at you, you are personally much more articulate than this, but general arguments with determinists who fear uncertainty and are not so articulate go like this) "There is an exact one-to-one correlated cause for everything." "Okay, what about spontaneous photonic emission. Why does a particular event happen at that exact time and produce a photon of that exact trajectory?" "Because of reasons we cannot understand yet." "Why does there have to be a reason?" "Because everything has an exact one-to-one correlated cause." *Sigh* Personally, I like a little adventure, a little not-knowing what's to come. What it amounts to in the end, I suppose, is a matter of personality and belief system. *shrugs*

Thirdly, I definitely don't define "sameness" as you. I would say sameness is the sharing of characteristics itself, not the state of sharing all exactly identical characteristics. Hence I would say sameness is a matter of degree rather than black/white or 1/0 (i.e. my DNA has sameness with my mom's to a degree of ~50%) and is inherently context dependent, since it requires a comparison. I think this, or something similar, is what people usually consider when they're applying the abstract principles you mention. They are not deluding themselves into thinking that, say, one horse is [your definition of sameness] as another, or ignoring the differences or the effects of those differences (well, okay, some people do...but that's called denial ), rather they take in that information (i.e. one horse is brown, the other black, etc) and store that information (not taking into account memory loss...that's a whole different topic) , but they're recognizing that one horse shares the same characteristics that define it as being a horse. Reporting it to someone else as simply "a horse" rather than "a brown horse of exactly X mass...dimensions...history..." etc is not removing information. The person doesn't lose that information, rather he is not passing on that information to a different source. Then we get into the "glass half full or half empty" argument. By generalizing the object as "a horse", it allows an efficient passing on of certain pieces of information while not specifying others. Would that person have passed on that information anyways without the concept of sameness? I.e. if you had to specify exactly what characteristics every object you want to talk about in a conversation, would you talk about that object? If the idea of "sameness" allows information to be passed on that otherwise that would not have been, then I would say that is not a loss. Also, the passing of information is not instantaneous, hence by using the idea of sameness you are improving the efficiency of information passage, i.e. trying to maximize the function of (information passed) per unit time. This allows you to pass more information overall (i.e. if you integrate the function of (information passed) over time, you get a higher value), hence I would say it is increasing information, not decreasing it.