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Randomness, Life and Intelligence

contact@ducnn.com (Duc Nguyen) — Wed, 18 Jan 2023 00:00:00 +0000

The Concept of Life

What has soul in it differs from what has not, in that the former displays life … Living, that is, may mean thinking or perception or local movement and rest, or movement in the sense of nutrition, decay, and growth … This power of self-nutrition … is the originative power, the possession of which leads us to speak of things as living. - Aristole

Why should we have a category of things we call “alive” and another category for which the word is inappropriate? As we know, biological organisms act like parts in machines. The operation of muscle, neuron, … can be explainable in technological term. Cognitive scientists believe that each region of our brain is correlated with a certain kind of mental activity. Therefore, the human brain is also called the machinery of the mind. With the creation of adaptive robots and lifelike beings in computer programs, the division between living and nonliving systems is blurred. However, there may be reasons to draw a line between living things and inanimate matters. Whatever, we humans develop an empathic relationship with particular objects in the world, and the concept of “living” then is hopelessly bound up in these empathic relations. Additionally:

The most humble organism is something much higher than the inorganic dust under our feet; and no one with an unbiased mind can study any living creature, however humble, without being struck with enthusiasm at its marvelous structure and properties. - Charles Darwin

There is a critical word used to distinguish between animate and inanimate things that is “adaptation”. Adaptation in nature is almost always a stochastic process. But almost always, things that appear random turn out to be deterministic:

God does not play dice. - Albert Eistein

Life has evolved in such a different and innovative way that beyond human imagination, even if we know this is true.

Is There Such Thing as Random?

If there exists a random mapping, it is not random.

Of course, “random numbers” in a computer are not random at all. Given the same random seed, any number generators will produce the same series of numbers. For most 20th, human believed that randomness existed at the subatomic level. According to Werner Heisenberg and Niels Bohr, it is in general not possible to predict the value of a quantity with arbitrary certainty, even if all initial conditions are specified. Quantum events were considered being perhaps the only example of true stochasticity in the universe. But in 1998, physicists Dürr, Nonn, and Rempe (1998) disproved Bohr’s theorizing. The real source of quantum “randomness” is now believed to be the “entanglements” of particles, whose behavior is in fact deterministic.

Then what is random? It is clear that human knowledge about this world still doesn’t allow us to define the basis of randomness. We use the word “randomness” to talking about something that is unpredictable. This kind of randomness is corresponding to unexpected challenges of environment that life and intelligence must be able to respond to.

The Human Mind, A Great Stochastic System

Stochastic adaptation is the great ability of a living entity that allows creative and innovative problem-solving for complex changes of the environment. Gregory Bateson (1979) called the evolution and mind are the “two great stochastic systems”. The brain is an excellent exemplar of the concept of a complex adaptive system. But we should not confuse brain and mind. Theorists argue that mental processes are very similar to evolutionary ones. Human brain provides a host environment for “knowledge” evolution. The ancient question is, what, really is knowledge? Knowledge exists somewhere, independent of minds. No one has proposed that knowledge evolve, and truth itself changes over time. Mathematical facts, for instance, that were true thousands of years ago are equally true today, and if they are not true now, they never were. But human ideas evolve in the minds of human, in other words, “our knowledge” not “knowledge” grows.

Knowledge is not a result merely of filtering or algorithms. It results from a far more complex process that is social, goal-driven, contextual, and culturally-bound. We get to knowledge — especially ‘actionable’ knowledge — by having desires and curiosity, through plotting and play, by being wrong more often than right, by talking with others and forming social bonds, by applying methods and then backing away from them, by calculation and serendipity, by rationality and intuition, by institutional processes and social roles. Most important in this regard, where the decisions are tough and knowledge is hard to come by, knowledge is not determined by information, for it is the knowing process that first decides which information is relevant, and how it is to be used. - David Weinberger

Cognition is an adaptation process. The ideas expressed by people certainly change over time. The evolution of ideas is a change of states of individuals “to fit to” the environment (or the culture of where we live). Biological evolutionary processes can be implemented in the form of computer programs used to solve many kinds of problems. As Weinberger detailed, human knowledge is a phenomenon that occurs when living beings coexist in societies. If we can have a sufficiently rich system of interactions going in a computer like a human society, we might be able to reproduce something like intelligence.

References

James Kennedy and Russell C. Eberhart, with Yuhui Shi (2009) - Swarm Intelligence

Cryptocurrency and the biggest problem of all time

contact@ducnn.com (Duc Nguyen) — Tue, 07 Jun 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Bitcoin and its inventor

There are lots of ways to make money: You can earn it, find it, counterfeit it, steal it. Or, if you’re Satoshi Nakamoto⁠ you can invent it. - Gwern

Bitcoin is a digital currency, the result of putting together old pieces of cryptographic in an extremely unpopular way https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf . The first thing people should know is: “It was all bit but no coin!”. In a period of time, something called coin would be distributed through a process that resembled a lottery The mining process . The main purpose of Bitcoin, according to its creator - Nakamoto is to create a currency that is immune to the predations of banker and politicians.

But the important thing is: Every currency in human history has been totally private.

When people hear the word “cryptocurrency”, they will assume in their mind it was something “cryptic” or “privacy”. Perhaps, it is the hugest misunderstanding and the cause of the biggest consequences of all time.

The disaster of Bitcoin

With Bitcoin, each person has his/her own signature and when it comes to privacy, Bitcoin is a true disaster: everyone’s wallet balance and transactions will be shown on the public blockchain. It means that if somebody knows your signature, they certainly know all about your finance. You can expect from the world that run Bitcoin:

Everyone budget, income and bank account is public information.
Everyone in the world knows how much every other one makes, there is no such thing called trade secrets, employee privacy.
Everyone knows how much, when and where every other one spends money.

If you still keep thinking: “It does not matter to me, I am not doing illegal things”, you should rethink about it. Your uses of money can be used to inferred your behaviors, your lifestyle. You can become a target for blackmail, rumors, robberies or more serious terrors and wars. Privacy is the bare minimum for any currency and there is no existed currency that can function without it.

A premature currency is the root of all evil.

In regards to anonymity, Bitcoin was claim anonymous by the fact that the signature cannot easily be linked to identity. In my opinion, it can not be applied at this time. Companies can easily track and collect people internet activities by their “fingerprint” You can easily check if you are tracked by you-know-who in this web site . “Pseudonymity” is not enough to truly pay anonymously, if you give your customers or your friends your Bitcoin wallet address so that they can send you payments, you immediately compromise your privacy.

Why use cryptocurrencies at all?

Despite all the bad things, cryptocurrencies also have advantages. They allow fast payments from anywhere in the world, there are no check clearing fees, no holding periods and no risk of chargebacks. In addition, due to the “federated" I mean "true" federated not "you-know-who federated" nature, they can not be shut down by powerful entities (you know who are being mentioned here). Furthermore, in some countries such as Denmark, Japan, Sweden and Switzerland, negative interest rates are applied, which means that if you hold their currencies in a bank account instead of as cash, the bank can charge you interest instead of paying you interest! There is a war on cash and deposits which are making traditional currencies increasingly less useful.

The privacy coin Monero

If you care about privacy and want to pay anonymously, you should use Monero Attention! I am not encouraging you to invest in cryptocurrencies . Monero is a digital currency that has a huge advantage over other cryptocurrencies whose privacy features are only optional Optional privacy is no privacy at all - Luke Smith . The major advantages of Monero over Bitcoin in terms of privacy:

Stealth addresses: When you give out an address, and someone sends you the coins, it’s not actually send to the address itself. Technically, the sender creates a brand-new one-time container for the funds. The address of that container is random, but there’s a cryptographic “trick” allow verifying it as yours. Moreover, the funds did not come from someone’s address, but another container just like all the others. There’s no way to tell what address some funds belong.
Ring signature: Any amount of Monero will be stored across one or more containers, your wallet controls them. To hide which container are being used, instead of just visiting the container which belongs to you to take the money and put it in a new one, you actually visit randomly 5 different containers (one of them must belong to you), and take from only the one which is actually yours. If there is someone watching, he can not know which container you took from! Not only that, each time you move funds you increase the number of possibilities for the source and if someone pretends to have visited your container, he increases the privacy as well.
Ring Confidential Transactions: hides the amount involved.

In terms of mechanics for making transactions:

Mining algorithm: “Mining” is the name given to running a program on a computer which verifies and processes the cryptocurrency transactions that other people announce to the worldwide network. The Bitcoin algorithm runs dramatically faster on custom made mining chips (known as ASICs) than on standard PCs and laptops. This means it is almost completely pointless for any ordinary computer user to attempt to participate in the mining process for Bitcoin. In contrast, the Monero mining algorithm was specifically designed such that ASICs will not have too much of an advantage over ordinary computers.
Adaptive blocksize limit: When transactions are announced to the cryptocurrency networks, they appear as part of a “block”. Bitcoin blocks have a maximum size, so if there is no room then your transaction will be delayed. If you are desperate to have your transaction included in a Bitcoin block promptly, you will have to increase the transaction fees that you pay to the Bitcoin network. Monero, has been designed to have an automatically adaptive block size limit, it will automatically expanding the size of blocks to accommodate higher transaction volumes.

In conclusion, for people who can not understand technical explanations above, Monero is:

Actually private.
Decentralize and can not be controlled by you-know-who.
Fair mining algorithm for everyone.
Scale better than Bitcoin.

Note that, I am not into valuing a cryptocurrency and will not write something about it. Do not contact me for anything like that!

References

https://www.monero.how/why-monero-vs-bitcoin

My thoughts about Artificial Intelligence

contact@ducnn.com (Duc Nguyen) — Tue, 12 Apr 2022 00:00:00 +0000

How did Artificial Intelligence change human life?

People said: “Soon, the machines that powered by Artifical Intelligence (AI) will rule the world.” Seem like an imaginary statement; but for me, this is true. We are living in a giant Skinner’s box which is the most advanced compulsion system invented by human. People are changed their beliefs by organizations in a genius way. Instead of brutal policies that controlling people by punishment, the Walden Two system use a much better way to make people do exactly what they want without the whip but some forms of sugar coated candy. And, that make people think that they are actually enjoying every moment of it.

Which is the best kind of candy they should give each person? The AI technology will give you the suitable answer. What is causing problem here are those greedy AI systems, they need a lot of food to function properly. What kind of food do they need? Simple, to give you the most suitable candy they feed those systems with your personal data. But, how to collect people personal data? Organizations will ask you: “Hey what are you doing yesterday, last two days, last week, last year, etc?” Nope, they keep track of you everywhere and every time that you are on the internet. People are provided with “free in charge” but not free programs, influenced and turned into the products. The distance between the user and the program is so great that people do not even know what program is using for. You are even being tracked while using open source programs (Chromium allows sites secretly record audio/video and of course, those data appeared in big data breaches) There are many more evidences that you can find out on https://www.gnu.org/proprietary/proprietary.html . Let’s imagine that a dozen of people follow you every day, and they can publish your personal daily life globally!

Studying Artificial Intelligence

The tendency of modern scientific teaching is to neglect the great books, to lay far too much stress upon relatively unimportant modern work, and to present masses of detail of doubtful truth and questionable weight in such a way as to obscure principles. - Ronald Fisher

In 2016, you-know-who introduced a modern learning system called “Federated Learning”. The benefit of federated architecture is being as independent of a global authority as possible. You-know-who called their distributed system which aggregates data and controls the whole learning process by a central server (run proprietary source code) with the more privacy-friendly name “federated”, this system absolutely does not respect user’s privacy in any way. Researchers are trying to build true federated and more over zero-trust systems that can help utilize people personal data without revealing them. However, with the power of you-know-who, I do not think those works will receive attention. The genius Fisher, the giant shoulder of modern science knew it from 100 years ago.

Why would people study Artificial Intelligence? The best goal that you can achieve when studying AI is to know better about those complex and devil systems, stay away and more over build your own zero-trust and federated platform. But you should be careful when using AI, avoid being trapped in your own lifestyle bubble. Choosing where, when and who will teach you is also important. There are many “so-called non-profit” organizations that provide artificial intelligence and machine learning courses that cost you one-year salary for only one course. Yeah, you were not wrong, they are non-profit, some of them even sell translated books for AI future. They want to help people use “free in charge” program to draw their names on the World AI Map, working for a better world where everyone live happily and sell future to people before they know they are there.

Good news

Good news for privacy concern people that there are many open source federated and zero-trust systems exist. It is really cheap and easy for you to host your own messaging and meeting server with secured communications between people by using Matrix protocol or XMPP. You can also host your own email service or send E2E emails with open source email clients. Even using public zero-trust federated instances is far better than you-know-who services. Own a land on the internet and start your own platform now!

About this website

contact@ducnn.com (Duc Nguyen) — Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Preface

This website was created when I found out that some of the biggest social and cloud service providers For writing convenience, from now on I will call them you-know-who modified, deleted, and moreover, sold my account credential globally on the internet. To take one step towards the internet freedom and stay away from the Walden Two Another name of Hell compulsion system, I bought a domain and selfhost necessary services for my daily life.

Content

People who are doing things for fun do things the right way by themself. - Linus Torvald

Trust me, I am not into this guy Don't get me wrong, it does not mean I hate him . I believe that out of control anger is the symptom of a weak mind. However, sometimes he is right. The articles here will be mainly from my inspirations and not focus on some particular topics.

Design

Almost all the websites in the world are linked to you-know-who (by advertisements, analytics, fonts, proprietary scripts, etc), and it is a real disaster. You-know-who can keep track of you everywhere, every times on the internet You can find more information on gnu.org . Keep in mind that information about internet activities is valuable and can be used to control human behaviours Skinner Box - conditioning users to behaviors desired.
You should watch “Stare into the light my pretties” for better details. . My website is designed with a simple appearance and implemented without any “non-free” scripts Free software is software that respects your freedom and the social solidarity of your community. So it's free as in freedom. - Richard Stallman that can track your activities. All the connections are encrypted over HTTPS/SSL, nobody can snoop on what are you doing on my site.

License

This site is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. It seems that I would not sell anything on this website, but I believe this license can encourage copying and gives back to Free Content. Besides, releasing free contents with no requirement can be dangerous. People can violate the Data Quality Principle Accurate, complete, and up to date and make use of the contents against me and others.

Contact

contact@ducnn.com (Duc Nguyen) — Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Contact Information

If you know my website, you know my name. There is no more information about my personal credential you should know than that. If you have interesting things (opensource projects, etc) and you want to work with me, contact me via email: contact@ducnn.com.

All emails from me will be signed with my PGP key Please encrypt, sign, and attach your public key in your emails before sending to me! That is the right way people should communicating with each other via email : 5090 F537 CF37 B56B 60F1 610E C10A 27C3 46AB 8D9F

I often get sick and suffer from terrible headaches. Besides, I am a full-time employee. Don’t get offended if I do not reply your emails, may be I do not have time.

Personality

To be honest, I think that I know nothing about my personality. Even me can be surprised by myself occasionally. For a brief description: kind of a diehard and unpredictable person. Anyway:

I don’t speak, I operate a machine called language. It creaks and groans, but is mine own. - Frank Herbert, Dune Messiah

Work

I do not have connections with any “journalists” as well as any “so-called non-profit organizations”. I do not offer or sell any “free in charge” services. Do not contact me for any boring things or ask me to share any kinds of products unless they are free and support for internet freedom.

Search

contact@ducnn.com (Duc Nguyen) — Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000