2014-01-26 at

Neuroscience: Definitely Not Yet

God, I wish I had more time for neuroscience. I can't even find enough time for math yet. Which reminds me. It's time to stop dicking around at the office and go home to get some sleep before tomorrow's shift. Sleep. Friend, or foe? Usually, friend, I find.

(I was reading up old and new articles, and it made me a bit introspective - then again, when am I not introspective?)

I spend most of my time these days working as a barista in a third-wave coffee shop. I spend most of my spare time outside of work, studying math. Some time is spent on recreation of course: random job shopping, and other socio-economic affairs. What seems to surprise many people is hearing this: I'm not even interested in math for math's sake. I'm studying math because I need to understand the outer limits in a certain dimension of the human experience. I'm learning how math works, so that I can figure out exactly how smart an information system has to be so that it can intuit, and rediscover, mathematics - whether or not it is the same mathematics that is currently accepted as 'standard theory'. In other words, I'm motivated to study math due to my interest in machine intelligence.

And I'm not even that interested in machine intelligence. I'm working in machine intelligence because I generally have an intuition that people are simple things - or at least, simpler than most people think. Sometimes I am more capable of demonstrating the simplicity that I intuit, but ultimately a good demonstration would be the machination of a software system with anthropomorphic personality, including subsystems of emotion, intuition, and consciousness, all aspects of human experience which I understand to be computationally delineable. In computing, the Turing Test, and Immortality Test are good nominal targets for that sort of thing. In other words, I'm motivated to study machine intelligence due to my boredom with people.

Well that's me in a nutshell.

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