RE: JOINING posts

From: Colin Hales <colin.domain.name.hidden>
Date: Mon, 17 Jun 2002 22:29:14 +1000

> Ok, who wants to go next?

Hello,

In the spirit of recent posts:

Colin Hales
Electrical Engineer 1979.
My professional history is in business, not academia.
Privately, two things have preoccupied me ever since I can remember
(I mean literally).

1) How brains/minds work.
2) Why there is no Nothing.

My Mathematics and Quantum Mechanics/Physics are vintage undergraduate
but revised roughly through skirmish and dabble. I find I
can follow if I am pointed at relevant background info and
have time. Feed me the links!

Reading: Whew.Lots. I see old friends in the books lists of
previous posts.... I think you get the picture. Currently I'm chewing
philosophy of mind. Dennett/Intentional Stance is where I'm at.

My passion: Artificial Intelligence. Build a brain and all that.

Not sure I can contribute much, but very interested. We'll see.

Colin



> -----Original Message-----
> From: Fred Chen [mailto:flipsu5.domain.name.hidden]
> Sent: Monday, 17 June 2002 4:59 PM
> To: everything-list.domain.name.hidden
> Subject: Re: JOINING posts
>
>
> Hello,
>
> Here is my brief introduction to the list. I received my PhD
> in applied
> physics in 1996. Started working in the beleaguered
> semiconductor industry
> right after graduation. Reading material that got me interested in
> everything discussions: the New Scientist article on
> Tegmark's all-universes
> with self-aware structures, Mind of God by Paul Davies, and Anthropic
> Cosmological Principle, by Barrow and Tipler. Related interests since
> college and perhaps earlier have been cosmology, dark matter.
> In addition, I
> currently work on computer simulations of diffraction of
> electromagnetic
> waves and optical lithography (these are related to my career but are
> actually outside my official job scope).
>
> Fred
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Wei Dai" <weidai.domain.name.hidden>
> To: <everything-list.domain.name.hidden>
> Sent: Thursday, May 23, 2002 10:47 AM
> Subject: JOINING posts
>
>
> > I find that I often have trouble understanding posts on
> this mailing list,
> > given the wide range of intellectual ground that it covers.
> It seems that
> > people sometimes assume a background in an academic field,
> and I'm not
> > even sure what the field is, or how to get up to date or at
> least familiar
> > with it. On the other hand, sometimes a poster is just a
> crank and isn't
> > making any sense at all. It can be hard to tell the difference.
> >
> > Perhaps it would help if list members each posts a short
> biography of
> > themselves, and tell us their intellectual backgrounds.
> What fields are
> > you familiar with, what relevant books/papers have you
> read, etc.? This
> > way, if you don't understand someone's post, you can look
> up his JOINING
> > post in the archive and figure out what background he is
> assuming. I got
> > this idea from the SL4 mailing list; maybe it will work
> here as well.
> >
> > To begin with myself, I work as a cryptographic engineer,
> which means I
> > design and implement computer security mechanisms, with a
> focus on the
> > cryptographic parts. I have a BA in computer science, and have taken
> > courses in linguistics, theory of computation, number
> theory, algebra,
> > probability theory, and game theory.
> >
> > I think I first encountered the idea that all possible
> universes exist in
> > the novel _Permutation City_ by Greg Egan, and then in Tegmark and
> > Schmidhuber's papers. I started this mailing list after
> reading both of
> > those papers.
> >
> > I've scanned through _An Introduction to Kolmogorov
> Complexity and Its
> > Applications_, Ming Li and Paul Vitanyi, and read parts of
> it in enough
> > detail to have found several previously unreported errors.
> It's about
> > algorithmic information theory, and I personally think it
> is the single
> > most important book for list members to read.
> >
> > Here are some other books that I've read outside of formal
> education that
> > seem relevant.
> >
> > _The Selfish Gene_, Richard Dawkins. Theory of evolution.
> > _Gödel, Escher, Bach - an Eternal Golden Braid_, Douglas
> Hofstadter. On
> > self-reference.
> > _Maxwell's Demon: Entropy, Information, Computation_.
> Entropy and the
> > physics of computation.
> > _Philosophy of Mathematics: Structure and Ontology_,
> Stewart Shapiro.
> >
> > I'm finding that I don't have enough knowledge about foundations of
> > mathematics, foundations of decision theory, and quantum
> mechanics. I'm
> > currently reading the following books to rectify the situation:
> >
> > _The Foundations of Causal Decision Theory_, James Joyce
> > _A Modern Approach to Quantum Mechanics_, John S. Townsend
> > _Foundations Without Foundationalism : A Case for
> Second-Order Logic_,
> > Stewart Shapiro
> >
> > Ok, who wants to go next?
> >
>
>
Received on Mon Jun 17 2002 - 05:33:27 PDT