General subjects with a focus on philosophy, morals, epistemology, basic income, the singularity, transhuman
Phil Osborn's Articles In Everything Else
October 22, 2017 by Phil Osborn
A note to God...
April 5, 2017 by Phil Osborn
(170812)  Yesterday spent at work correcting product listings on the website.  Some 40 entries, three of which were corrupted, yielding nonsense on the front end, and blank data entry forms on the back end.  This followed several months now of correcting links to the newest version manuals, doing a poor job because of conflicting source material.  The company hardly has any real web presence any more, as measured by Google's keyword page return.  Two years ago, they ...
March 1, 2017 by Phil Osborn
http://www.kurzweilai.net/neural-networks-promise-sharpest-ever-images Imagine applying this to everyday audio/video via something like Google Glass. Imagine refining huge samples such as a novel or a physics compendium. Maybe we already have enough data, given this methodology, to describe and extract a full blown universal TOE.  If so, why do anything more?  In general, if we know that this is theoretically possible then what incentive remains, of any kind?  Do we ha...
January 29, 2017 by Phil Osborn
  03/05/2017 I've decided to take the plunge and go positive for a change.  Other people will pick up the negative slack, I'm sure...  With regard to the depressing coverage below, numerous researchers in fields such as neuro-psychology have pointed out that the evidence strongly suggests that empathy is and has been for several decades on the decline. Anecdotal evidence abounds for this position, although usually other kinds of causes are flagged. And, if my theory...
November 7, 2015 by Phil Osborn
So, everything appeared to be normal today at the library's public computer section.  For once, even the perpetually Screaming Baby was quiet. (Perhaps GOD finally took pity on the rest of humanity and gave the kid a strep throat - or diverted a truck.  Or perhaps it was some one's idea of a phone prank all along.  I never actually saw the kid, but you couldn't escape the sound, every few minutes, full operatic volume.  Maybe he or she matured?) And b...
July 23, 2015 by Phil Osborn
Has anyone seen a good explanation or even just a decent discussion about "time?" I have read that the current popular scientific view of time is that the past has no more "existence" than the future.  Is time like the pages of a book, that we could potentially re-read, as in "time travel?"  Are there some huge number of quantized pasts?   Or is it something altogether different in kind?  I've read or heard about as much on this foundational subject as I have o...
July 21, 2015 by Phil Osborn
I loved the movie, despite its disjointedness, and it was only today, over a week later, that I realized why the scenes were set up that way.  The entire movie was IMHO shot to match up with a planned theme park.  Too many mis-mixed pure fantasies with hard science. Way too many scenes clearly shot with something other than the plot in mind. But the thing that really caught my attention was when I typed "to" into Google and got back a whole set of "TomorrowLand" ...