Not necessarily a bad algorithm. This is possible if it uses your karma as a factor, which is in general not a bad idea (in this case countered by the collapsing negative scores thing)
harshhpareek
Karma: 190
To develop mathematics, one must always labor to substitute ideas for calculations.
-- Dirichlet
(Don’t have source, but the following paper quotes it : Prolegomena to Any Future Qualitative Physics )
Hi, I’ve been lurking on LessWrong for quite a while now—around a year -, but saw this post and decided to comment. I hope this is useful as feedback to the admins.
I’m a 22 year old student at UT Austin. As of last Fall, I’m pursuing a PhD in Computer Science. My specialization is Machine Learning. And I’m committed to doing everything in my power to hasten the Singularity :P. I have a BTech in CS from IIT Bombay, India.
I’ve considered myself a rationalist for as long as I can remember. I found less wrong through Overcoming Bias and from Elizier’s posts about Bayes’ Theorem and Decision Theory related posts which are linked around the internet. I stuck around because of the Rationality quotes threads and the relation to the Singularity Institute. I didn’t think of it as a community so much as a multiple-author blog back then. Then I came to Austin, and I started attending the weekly meetups here. We have a small group, but it’s great to find a set of like-minded people, and it’s an important part of my week. I’ve been following Less Wrong a lot more closely since then. The group also rekindled my interest in SciFi. I bought a kindle, and I’ve been reading a fair bit now, along with a healthy dose of Non-Fiction. I haven’t been writing in the comment threads, primarily out of laziness, but I’m trying to force myself out of it. I’m currently rereading Methods of Rationality ( I stopped somewhere in the middle last time), and I’m reading the sequences on my Kindle now (so thanks to whoever converted them to MOBI!)
I am a vegetarian being born into a pious Hindu family. Religion wore off as I became an atheist in my early teens. But I continue to be a vegetarian for moral and environmental reasons.
The Meander (aka Menderes) is a river in Turkey. As you might expect, it winds all over the place. But it doesn’t do this out of frivolity. The path it has discovered is the most economical route to the sea
-- Paul Graham, “The Age of the Essay” (http://www.paulgraham.com/essay.html)
(Assuming Mind=Brain, i.e. the entire mind is just the physical brain and no “soul” is involved. Also, Neurons aren’t really all that small, they’re quite macroscopic—though the processes in the neurons like chemical interactions need quantum mechanics for their description)
In Newtonian Mechanics, it is sufficient to know the positions and velocities (i.e. derivaties of position) of particles to determine future states. So, the world is Markov given this informatio.
In Schrodinger’s equation, you again only need to know \Psi and it’s time derivative to know all future states. I think the quantum properties of the brain are adequately described just with Schodinger’s equation. You do need to include nuclear forces etc in a description of the brain. You may need quantum electrodynamics, but I think Schrodinger’s equation is sufficient.
My physics education stopped before I got here, but Dirac’s equation which may be necessary to model the brain seems to require the second time-derivative of the wavefunction—so you may need the second order time-derivatives to make the model Markov. Can someone who knows a bit more quantum physics chime in here?
EDIT: Reading the wiki article more carefully, it seems Dirac’s equation is also first order