I think that whether we think of consciousness in terms of dualism, or if we think of it as emergent from natural behavior, it really doesn't matter functionally. Either way we are positioning it as something inaccessible from our realm or control.
I believe that we can at least posit some kind of mechanism through which emergence can happen. In my opinion we should look at language and how language evolved. However, i also believe we should expand our study of natural language to things like network protocols, and observe the "protocol hourglass" structure that has emerged from the internet protocol stack.
In my mind, the concepts of control and autonomy are what need to be revisited. We conflate the two: we are autonomous IF we are able to exert control on the environment. However, I think the reality might be that autonomous systems are more similar to an API in the sense that we can interact along the boundary but through the API we cannot exert control over the internal structure of the system (through knowledge or physical control).
I wonder if a solution for higher education is to enforce access to technology both inside and outside of the classroom? I've been teaching math at various institutions for the past 8 years after getting my PhD, and the conversation among my friends and peers has become increasingly bleak over the years. At first LLMs were not great at math, but at this point they can reliably solve the majority of problems one might see in an undergraduate math course. Recently I interviewed for a position at a university and spoke to the Dean of Arts and Sciences who admitted to me candidly that the university didn't really know how to handle AI.
Teachers increasingly must assume that students will not learn on their own outside of the time spent in class. This is difficult because we only see students for a handful of contact hours every week, and there is not enough time to both lecture AND ensure that a student has attained thorough understanding of the material. Teachers have adapted to this in various ways, but another stressor is that students are coming into college much less prepared. When I teach precalc I essentially have to assume that I will need to teach students how fractions work. The current system is not built to support this kind of learning. In order to make sure students are really learning, I now have to cut out major portions of the curriculum to make sure I have time to do active learning during class. It's obvious through students' performance that their understanding of things we work on in class is much more internalized and sophisticated than things I lecture about but assume they will learn on homework problems.
A novel I really love is Anathem by Neal Stephenson. While Anathem is an admittedly goofy work of fiction, I do think Stephenson's vision of the future is compelling: the purity of mathematics education and research must be protected from the hyper-technological outside world. In reality I'm not anti-technology of course, I feel like access to a non-internet-connected computer is fine. But, I wonder if such a model would work for an educational institution?
This is really awesome! I've been really interested in creating an interactive introduction to basic algebra where parts of the equation can be manipulated using drag-and-drop, but I couldn't really figure out the best way to do it. Maybe using Katex is the way to go?
This is a pretty amazing setup! I think in 2025 I would definitely prefer something like this. However, I think back in "the day" part of what made LAN parties fun was that everyone's PC was so individualized. I remember all of my high school friends and I coming of age and building our PCs. I helped a lot of my friends build their PCs and we all chose different things (such as the amount of RGB LEDs, which I thought were tacky...). I remember a friend of a friend had a water cooling system and I was so excited about checking it out. Also, things like the desktop wallpaper you chose, etc, contributed to this. There was something very magical about it all. Lugging our PCs to each others houses was a real labor of love.
And a real risk of a shattered CRT screen! I remember carting my bougie 17” Viewsonic around in the back of my Hyundai Excel and wondering if it would pick up a crack along the voyage…
CRTs might tougher than we gave them credit for. I once dropped a Sony Trinitron from shoulder height when it hit a low ceiling. Didn't crack. Still worked. (And yes, this was at a LAN party.)
When I was a kid we threw out our old B&W tv. I wanted to smash the CRT but had heard that they could explode so from a distance I fired several .22 bullets at the screen. They had no effect. IIRC the screen wasn't damaged at all? I can hardly believe what I'm writing but it was true
CRTs have to maintain a near-vacuum inside IIRC. So it's probably a matter of safety to make them strong; if they're too delicate and get mishandled, they implode and some hapless consumer gets a face full of glass.
Wouldn't imploding rather than exploding prevent the face full of glass? But I suppose it has to be pretty strong to maintain that vacuum even if they assumed no one ever touched, moved, or got near it.
Back in the hayday of lan parties in like 1995-1997 my only monitor was a absolute boulder of a 21" viewsonic (this is pre flatscreen or rather pre decent flatscreens, you could get like 15-17s but they were expensive and absolute trash). One night coming home from the bars, half drunk, in an alley my friend and I found an abandoned (maybe..) horizontal-able handtruck. Made the lan party load unload so much better.
In the previous century i visited many lan parties with my absolute beast of a pc case (an old Siemens 4U 19" metal monster where i stuffed an Amd Athlon setup in with a bunch of harddrives) that i got for free from somewhere. Then carried the huge CRT screen and placed it on top of it. It was insane, i was young (and insane), but i got it all dirt cheap. Most people loved it. And even back then repurposing discarded or super cheap hardware for as long as possible for as many functions as possible gave me much joy and saved me a great bunch of money.
If i had to do a "lan party" these days i'd just connect my Steam Deck to some hdmi beamer and play Jackbox games with a bunch of people.
yes - the sample app has demo of single resonator (so frequency bin equivalent) frequency estimation/tracking based on phase shift and also Doppler velocity computation (the code for these is in the Swift package, equations in the upcoming paper...).
this video is from an older version of the demo app (less efficient implementation but same principle): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iQCPDJ8L_ao
Cool, thanks! I'm currently building a eurorack module where I need to estimate the frequency and phase of a sequence of input gate signals, and an issue I've run into is the delay inherent in the STFT algorithm. This seems like it might work better!
The utility behind complex numbers (for physicists at least) is really that they are a model for certain algebraic and geometric properties that are together very useful.
I believe that we can at least posit some kind of mechanism through which emergence can happen. In my opinion we should look at language and how language evolved. However, i also believe we should expand our study of natural language to things like network protocols, and observe the "protocol hourglass" structure that has emerged from the internet protocol stack.
In my mind, the concepts of control and autonomy are what need to be revisited. We conflate the two: we are autonomous IF we are able to exert control on the environment. However, I think the reality might be that autonomous systems are more similar to an API in the sense that we can interact along the boundary but through the API we cannot exert control over the internal structure of the system (through knowledge or physical control).
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