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Construction begins on Jeff Bezos' $42 million 10,000-year clock
Installation has finally begun on Jeff Bezos' 10,000-year clock, a project that the Amazon CEO has invested $42 million in (along with a hollowed-out mountain in Texas that Bezos intends for a Blue Origin spaceport), with the goal of building a mechanical clock that will run for 10 millennia.
It's a monumental undertaking that Bezos and the crew of people designing and building the clock repeatedly compare to the Egyptian pyramids. And as with the pharaohs, it takes a certain amount of ego — even hubris — to consider building such a monument. But it's also an unparalleled engineering problem, challenging its makers to think about how to keep a machine intact, operational and accurate over a time span longer than most human-made objects have even existed.
Consider this: 10,000 years ago, our ancestors had barely begun making the transition from hunting and gathering to simple agriculture, and had just figured out how to cultivate gourds to use as bottles. What if those people had built a machine, set it in motion, and it was still running today? Would we understand how to use it? What would it tell us about them?
The actual idea for the clock comes from Danny Hillis, who originally proposed a 10,000-year clock in 1995 in Wired as a way to think about the long-term future of humanity and the planet. That idea grew into the Clock of the Long Now, a project by the Long Now Foundation, which Hillis went on to co-found to build an actual, working version of the proposed clock.
Also at CNBC.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Azuma Hazuki on Monday February 26 2018, @10:09PM (15 children)
The central insight of, among others, Buddhism, is that all conditioned ("contingent" might be a better word here) things are not first-order phenomena, and therefore destructible. All that has form will cease to exist someday. Don't fret over it; even the fretting is one of those conditioned things.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Tuesday February 27 2018, @01:00AM (6 children)
Specifically she said that "When you're dead you won't know whether anyone remembers you."
I replied "It would comfort me a great deal when the end is near to know that I will be remembered".
I'm not clear how long it will be, but when the Sun's hydrogen is depleted it will become a Red Giant, with the result that it will swell up to engulf the earth's entire orbit.
When that happens very little of humanity's works will remain. Hopefully we will have reached the stars by then.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Tuesday February 27 2018, @03:18AM (4 children)
Why? At any given moment, there is no future yet, and the past is just a way we have of describing states of lesser entropy. None of this is first-order; it's ALL conditioned, ALL contingent. Just be in the now; that's really all there is.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 3, Interesting) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Tuesday February 27 2018, @03:51AM (3 children)
While time changes when one observes fundamental particles, it is not possible to determine the direction in which time changes. Time only has a definite direction when one observes particle systems that are large enough to have measurable entropy.
That time increases in the direction of increasing entropy is known as The Arrow Of Time.
When this was discussed in my graduate thermodynamics class, I asked the instructor "We do not yet know whether the Universe is open, flat or closed," - at least we didn't know back when I pointed that out - "Suppose the Universe is closed, and so will eventually collapse back on in itself in The Bug Crunch."
"Will the people who live at that time" - during the collapse - "experience time going forward or backward?"
A classmate quietly said "That's very insightful", then the room fell so quite you could hear a pin dropped.
No one attempted to answer my question.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 3, Insightful) by maxwell demon on Tuesday February 27 2018, @06:25AM
Well, the answer is simple: People will experience time as going forward. They still will have memories of lower entropy times, not of higher-entropy times. It's just like people will always find that gravitation points down, no matter whether they are in Europe or Australia.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 3, Funny) by deimtee on Tuesday February 27 2018, @11:59AM
The Bug Crunch. I like that. There are entirely too many nasty bugs here in Oz. The Bug Crunch would be welcomed by most aussies.
If you cough while drinking cheap red wine it really cleans out your sinuses.
(Score: 3, Informative) by fritsd on Tuesday February 27 2018, @07:08PM
Ilya Prigogine [wikipedia.org] wrote a book "Order out of Chaos" [goodreads.com] about the Arrow of Time, together with Isabelle Stengers [wikipedia.org]. Their works are mostly popular science, but somewhere between chemistry and philosophy: an unusual field. Very fascinating.
The idea that we, humans, are thermodynamical systems far out of equilibrium, is way cool, I think.
Their books from the '80s were during the time that everybody including Jeff Goldblum became interested in chaos theory; however, their work is not just another popscience handwavy "it's all chaos!" book but a quite deep investigation into why the Arrow of Time is important for living systems such as we.
If I remember correctly (long time ago since I read it even though I have it on the shelf), it covers the Belousov-Zhabotinsky "traffic light" reaction, time reversal, Bénard cells when you boil an egg, and embryology (how does the ovum know what has to become top and tail??).
Enjoy!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 27 2018, @05:09PM
>she
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Tuesday February 27 2018, @12:17PM (7 children)
I'm glad you bring this up, Azuma, because something I've been wondering about lately is whether the most fundamental aspects of the self, like for example the first person perspective or (perhaps even more fundamentally) personal identity, can possibly be destroyed. I know a key aim of Buddhism is to try to attain release from the self but I don't know whether they believe it is somehow destroyed -- either way I'm much more interested in the philosophical aspects than the religious ones of this.
I wonder whether personal identity is so fundamental and indivisible that it can never be destroyed. My favorite philosopher, Chalmers argues that first person consciousness can't be reductively explained. Most things that can be reductively explained can also be broken apart into simpler physical bits. If something can't be broken up then it can't really be destroyed, can it?
If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Tuesday February 27 2018, @08:29PM (6 children)
Not so. Something that's irreducible isn't necessarily indestructible. Also...are we *sure* first-person consciousness is irreducible? The entire point of the above is that this is emphatically and manifestly *not* the case, that the ego is an emergent phenomenon.
Buddhists refer to it as emerging from the aggregates or "skandhas," if I remember right, one of those being physical matter. The others are things like perception and sensation, which are themselves epiphenomena of that same matter if you ask me. When you think about it this way, the ego is a fourth- or fifth-order phenomenon at most.
A lot of Buddhism contradicts itself or is a cultural holdover--the idea of people spending quintillions of years or even eternity in the worst hell, Avici, for example, and even "Avici" was just one of the Hindu hells (means "without waves") before Buddhism co-opted it. There's plenty of the usual universal social control mechanisms in there. But I am overall very impressed with them and how they've managed to make a practical (if sometimes extremely metaphorical...) guide to human consciousness so long ago.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Thursday March 01 2018, @06:15PM (5 children)
You might be right but when I thought really hard about this in the past, I couldn't think of anything irreducible in the universe that can be destroyed. I don't count anything that's a high level human linguistic shorthand for a particular configuration of particles (for example a liquid state or the color or mass of an object). Similarly, regarding emergence, I can't think of anything emergent that isn't one of these aforementioned shorthand human labels. Can you give me any examples? Obviously I won't allow consciousness as the only example!
Generally, fundamental things in the universe can't be destroyed. For example it's commonly held that energy can be neither created nor destroyed, although it can be converted into matter. It's conceivable that consciousness is a similar fundamental property of the universe.
In The Conscious Mind, Chalmers argues at length why it cannot be reductively explained. A good way he illustrates it is the Philosophical Zombie Argument. It roughly states that you can imagine an exact physical copy of a conscious human individual, so their body, brain and neural states are identical, with one important difference that this zombie twin has no first person conscious experience. As you can imagine, any physical examination or objective experiment performed on the two twins would find them to be physically identical therefore subjective first person consciousness cannot be explained by any objective third person analysis. Chalmers goes on to explain (as far as I can remember) how this is equivalent to any Reductionist analysis (so no matter how finely grained your analysis of the physics of the brain, there's always subjective experience left over, unexplained).
Of course, the above argument doesn't mean subjective experience can't be reduced into component parts. It just means that the knowledge is apparently unreachable to us through any conventional, objective analysis.
If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Friday March 02 2018, @03:32AM (4 children)
I've been wondering about P-zombies and the Chinese Room gedanken for years too, and not gotten too far, but one thing does occur: just because we can imagine a P-zombie doesn't mean it's possible for P-zombies to actually exist. We need to be careful not to commit the same epistemological sins Christian and Muslim apologists do when they attempt an ontological argument (yes, Plantinga, that includes your bullshit Modal version; leave axiom S5 the hell alone, you pervert).
In other words, it may be the case that a P-zombie can't exist because the condition stipulating that its brain states be identical would logically necessarily give rise to consciousness.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Friday March 02 2018, @11:11AM (3 children)
Yes, I think that's one of the common objections to the P-zombie argument. Personally, I think that's an extraordinary claim and extraordinary claims need extraordinary evidence. It just seems to me that no matter how complex the logic, true first person experience isn't ever suddenly going to pop out of the manipulation of third person axioms. If it is, then that's a step that needs explaining. It's possible that humans just lack the intelligence, by many orders of magnitude. to grasp this, but it does seem unlikely to me.
If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Friday March 02 2018, @10:29PM (2 children)
I don't think it's any more or less extraordinary than saying that producing something with the exact same brain states, right down to the quantum superpositions of the electric flows, would *not* produce consciousness.
Too many people try and use this as "consciousness is sooooo mysterious, I bet it's irreducible, therefore Yahweh!" in their apologetics that I'm immediately suspicious of it. They don't even consider the idea that consciousness and first-person experience could be emergent properties, epiphenomena of pre-existing and ultimately non-conscious entities.
If anything, the data from split-brain patients and the results of very specific localized brain lesions on peoples' personalities should be a very large series of very strong checkmarks in favor of this hypothesis. Consciousness seems very ad-hoc and complex in the sense of having a lot of parts.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Friday March 02 2018, @11:59PM (1 child)
I disagree. There's no mechanism recognized in currently accepted physics for first person experience to arise from what is essentially just collections of particles and forces interacting and moving about. As far as we know so far, there's also nothing in the rules of logic or mathematics that can cook up first person experience from the physics either. Indeed, without our own private evidence for the existence of subjective experience, there's no scientific reason to believe it exists at all.*
In this universe, I can certainly argue that since I seem to have subjective experience that by symmetry it seems plausible that a copy of myself, or indeed another human, also has subjective experience. However, according to Chalmers (again I'm going from memory here), it only needs to be logically possible for any universe to exist containing my P-zombie twin. The zombie twin doesn't need to be physically possible in this universe. If this holds, then any tacked on hypothesis about epiphenomenalism or emergentism is irrelevant, because we can still logically conceive of a universe where those extra hypothetical rules do not apply.
That sounds to me like you're considering the third person components of consciousness (behavior and the psychology and information processessing of the brain) which are all things that could still go on "in the dark" without any conscious experiencer, or to put it another way, they're all things that could be observed in a P-zombie.
*OK, the Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum mechanics gives a role to the observer but that still provides no mechanism or conditions for first person experience to exist.
If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Saturday March 03 2018, @05:05AM
It's the ontological argument trap again...we can imagine lightsabers too, and we did, in Star Wars, but that doesn't mean a lightsaber could exist in our universe or any other possible universe either.
The strongest tell for me that consciousness is likely an epiphenomenon is that it needs a substrate--we've yet to see a freestanding mind, one without *some* sort of substrate somewhere. And that's not even getting into all the stuff I mentioned before about the split-brain cases, which is an even stronger tell for our specific type of consciousness. Basically, if first-person consciousness were irreducible *and* a first-order phenomenon, there wouldn't be a need for brains, bodies, etc. We'd have basically Platonic forms.
Emergent behaviors can be irreducible. "Emerges from" isn't the same thing as "made of." A table is made of a bunch of wood, but there is no table-ness in the wood. There isn't even "potential table-ness" in the wood. It is possible for wood to be arranged in such a way that it has all the properties of a table, but to then call it not-a-table seems rather disingenuous.
Or take glucose. Glucose is six carbons, twelve hydrogens, and six oxygens arranged just so. Nowhere in the individual atoms will you find any hint of glucose-ness; it's the particular arrangement of said atoms that give rise to glucose. Be careful not to fallaciously reify concepts.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...