Messages

I like either of the first two.

Happy to see the forum has yet to vanish (kudos iago). This community has come up for me a few times in conversation with people I'm close to, and I generally refer to it as a "modern day gentleman's club of intellectuals." Basically calling all you dudes gentlemen and scholars, so cheers to being awesome. :)

on-topic: same ol' shit for me, just a pube more grand. Living up in North Hollywood now, no roommate. Still hitting Europe yearly with the band, expanding out into Finland and Sweden. I budgeted and produced a new music video with this super talented 19 year old director from Germany. Been jamming with many talented musicians, one being the lead guitarist from CKY - some really cool shit coming out of that. It ain't easy, but I'm thrilled with how I spend my time, and I've got solid momentum going for the bigger and better.

Anyone know of a cheap web service for making international calls? Been doing a lot of business in Europe, and Skype is too expensive per minute.

A couple months back, I released my first full-length album and built a website for us (with the ecommerce solution suggested by while1 - thanks!).
http://vaydenmusic.com/music/04.html

It's decent with some cool moments scattered throughout. Not bad for my first, but I've detached from it and moved on to writing better music. At this time in my life, I can do as I wish as I awake each day, without having to sell my time to anyone to sustain a living. This freedom is too good to last - if I don't take advantage of it, I may not have this opportunity again. Another tour is around the corner - this time Finland, Germany and possible Sweden. Then recording better music in a higher quality studio with a better producer.

I think in the long run you're going to save yourself time, frustration, and potentially loss of profits if you go with an existing, established e-commerce solution than attempt to roll out your own.  You're going to find that a lot of the popular open source e-commerce solutions have administrative and content management features which you won't have to write from scratch yourself.

Yeah, this is why I started looking into code repositories, just didn't know exactly what I was looking for. But thanks to yours and Sidoh's suggestions, I have somewhere to start. Thanks guys!

So I need to get a system like this finalized. There's too much money we've been missing out on by not having a way to sell downloads directly from our website, without using a middle man.

Someone pointed me in the direction of the PEAR code repository. I did a couple searches, but perhaps it was just my search terms that fell short. Any suggestions?

Overall, I plan on having a guest and login shopping cart system + the token system for downloads.

I enjoy how the shortened title of this thread on the main forum page reads: "Re: Where is Rule's anal..."

Thanks man! It's quite difficult not to have a great time on these trips.

I'll be on the road for a few dates starting this Thursday.

11/15 Rockbar Inc. - Scottsdale, AZ
11/16 Hooligans - Albuquerque, NM
11/17 Marquis Theater - Denver, CO
11/19 Liquid - Boise, ID
11/20 The Alley - Sparks, NV

There's also a possible, yet unlikely show in Vegas on the 21st. Lemme know if anyone will be coming out. After the 15th, I'd recommend contacting me on facebook.

Many more shows to come next year.

I don't have even a remote interest in this election. Nothing of significance is going to change. Also, unless something extreme happens between now and the election, I see Obama easily winning.

Cool, so I'm meeting up with iago at the San Jose airport at 9:40 in the morning tomorrow (Saturday), and will be hanging out prob at least till mid afternoon. All are invited, Quik, Newby, Sidoh, and whoever else in the area. :D

Cool, so I'll be in San Jose from July 6-7th (maybe the 5th as well). Probably gonna meet iago in San Jose, and I'm down to meet whoever is in/near San Francisco during that same time.

Do they have 1 week free trials for this game yet? I'd like to toy around with it when I get some free time in the near future.

"Consciousness is a mystery, and the association of consciousness with matter is even more mysterious."

Possibly like other members of this community, I've long been interested in how a particular collection of matter and energy combine to create awareness. While attempts to describe the human brain in relation to computers helped me understand some basic principles of the human brain, it fundamentally lacked in the field I was most interested: awareness, which modern computers clearly do not possess. Though without any other explanation, I felt forced to accept the idea that awareness is just a self-illusion, a product of very complex interactions of neurological systems exclusively within the brain, extending far beyond the capacity of modern computers.

Unknown to myself at the time, the discovery of quantum computing inspired dozens of brain models based upon quantum computational principles. Among them, the most elaborate is the Penrose-Hameroff model.

Gödel's theorem is central to this theory. In 1931, Gödel proved that any theory capable of expressing elementary arithmetic cannot be both consistent and complete. Further to that, for any consistent formal theory that proves certain basic arithmetic truths there is an arithmetical statement that is true, but not provable in theory.

The theorem is not in itself controversial, but what Penrose developed from it is. In his first book on consciousness, The Emperor's New Mind (1989), Penrose argued that the theorem showed that the brain had the ability to go beyond what could be achieved by axioms or formal systems. He argued that this meant that the brain had some additional function that was not based on algorithms (a system of calculations), whereas a computer is driven solely by algorithms. Penrose asserted that the brain could perform functions that no computer could perform. He called this type of processing non-computable.

Penrose went on to consider what it was in the human brain that was not driven by algorithms. Given the algorithm-based nature of most of physics, he decided that the random choice of position etc. that occurs when a quantum wave collapses into a particle was the only possibility for a non-computable process. However, Penrose admitted that the randomness of the wave function collapse, although free from algorithms, is not a basis for any useful form of human understanding.

Penrose now proposed a second form of wave function collapse that could apply where quanta did not interact with the environment, but might collapse on their own accord. He suggests that each quantum superposition has its own piece of spacetime curvature, and when these become separated by more than the Planck length of 10−35 metres, they become unstable and collapse. Penrose called this form of collapse objective reduction.

Penrose suggested that objective reduction represented neither randomness nor the algorithm based processing of most physics, but instead a non-computable influence embedded in the fundamental level of spacetime geometry from which mathematical understanding and, by later extension of the theory, consciousness derived.

This model has its flaws; Penrose states that his ideas on the nature of consciousness are speculative, and his thesis is considered erroneous by experts in the fields of philosophy, computer science, and robotics. Even more criticized was Hameroff's model of how the brain could function in such a quantum arrangement (more info here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orch-OR).

Though there is still much debate and research on the subject. According to this same wiki article,

In the last decade, some researchers who are sympathetic to Penrose's ideas have proposed an alternative scheme for quantum processing in microtubules based on the interaction of tubulin tails with microtubule-associated proteins, motor proteins and presynaptic scaffold proteins.

Even though I am skeptical of a quantum mind until further developments in research can prove otherwise, I find the idea very interesting.

I'm curious to hear the thoughts of those here interested in physics, as well as neuroscience (Rule), on the subject of the association of consciousness with matter.

and then there's new waves of Buddhist Atheism, like this book proposes, complete with a forward from Christopher Hitchens.