i just saw my baby kick! :D
not only finally felt it for sure, but even saw phx' tummy move! :D
that was cool :)
my lil' baby is gonna be a boxer, or a vault-polist 'er 'izer 'person :)
apparently i was an active lil' fetus too :)

now it feels all too mundane to write a thunk i had a bout "artificial" sentience. well, it wasnt even a whole thunk. i was just on one of my kicks (that i hope something will come of some day) about how i should really strive for self-realisation. figure out what i really want, but - then just do a little self-check just to see why i think i want each one of those things, just to weed out stuff that might prove to really have been just a hype, and not something i'd personally really want. then figure out ways to achieve these goals, and get on doin', stopping to re-evaluate once in a while, but not too often, so that something actually gets done. unlike my side job - which has been with me for an eternity now, and just when i thought i got the bitch working, turns out the bloody thing crapped out over the weekend. too bad i didnt have the clarity of mind to think to do the calculations before i overloaded the goddam power supply. i guess its a tribute to its resilience that it worked a few times for an hour or 2 at a time before. it just couldnt handle it long term. i hope i dont have to cough up for a new one - i dont really wanna put any more into this.

so anywho - goals and achieving them. some peeps have posited that the web might achieve sentience some day. but what does that mean - awareness? out of what? why? i can see something of an evolution though. wonder if i should post my idea or might it not matter because someone else will soon enough..? maybe this already exists - viruses seem to have been pretty "stupid" bots till now, or so i think. but would programmers make a virus that would "work" with information available off the net? in what way? i suppose data extraction programs already do that. i guess to be more like life, it needs to get out of control, have some kinda morphing built into it. but that would be so random. wouldnt it be more elegant to give it intelligence to try and improve itself in some kinda reasoned way rather than purely by chance? hmm, but would it actually be more efficient..? i sometimes think that evolution seems to be working "vectorally" somehow - i guess mutations or differences seem to be thrown up pretty randomly, but then once a mutation seems to work, more changes seem to then happen in that "direction". but maybe its not really like that either - maybe its only that after a mutation establishes itself, it then limits the possible mutations that may happen after it. like a pair of gills might be an awesome mutation in the water, but once ur living on land, its kinda useless, and it just wont survive. but the gills in water may get constantly refined . until theres no more food in the water, and then it would pay to be able to breathe at least a bit above water.
i once read somewhere that british telecom was developing programs that route telephone network traffic, and they would actually like "mate" 2 diff progs, and a 3rd one would be made, and then it would be allowed to work, but if it didnt do a better job than its parents, then it would be terminated by its parent. something like that. they were hoping to get the programs to evolve themselves. i wonder where they're at with that now...
but anyways - the web is full of info, u'd just have too have a pretty good program with a goal, and it would do its thing, but then if it could actually set its own goals, and what would we think of those goals, and would it piss us off if we couldnt do anything about them? :) i guess it would take a good programmer to start with, to write a program that would survive the longest, or forever... :) including something that would let the goals vary, so that if survival is a priority, the chances of survival are actually good :)
i bet there's programs like that already... :)