i'm trying out a new drug - gingko biloba - see if that expands my horizons... :)

"...dude, its like totally not a drug, man, its an herb, and like the man says: "whats from the earth is of the greatest worth.""

driving up from oregon was fucking fucktarded - slow spots everywhere, humble folks without temptation ( which i kept thinking was "homophobes without temptation" until benzino corrected me), then the snow and sleet, trucks passing my slow ass, spraying the goddam sleet all over the windshield so i couldnt see anything, then accidents and jack-knifed semi's turning the I-5 into a friggin' parking lot back-to-back-to friggin' back, so we didnt get home till 2 am or so. even on the way down there was a few serious bog-downs, one of which turned out to be a friggin' burning minivan on the side of the highway! the heat was very noticeable even thru the closed windows. kinda reminded me of the treasure island show they used to have in vegas - really surprising how much you felt the heat of the explosions from such a distance. too bad they killed it.

listening to another story by william gibson - "pattern recognition". still having the same problem with the density of information sometimes - the dude packs so much info into a phrase, i cant do anything else while listening to it. well, i do anyways, cause i mostly listen while driving, but i often regret it because i miss stuff at times and have to rewind if i can. was happy to hear that the main character dislikes those square-toed shoes - i dont like them either! was happy for a moment in knowing that i'm not alone in this, until it dawned on me that, after all, it is a fictitious character. hrrumpf...
it was cool to find out that gibson lives around these parts. wonder if i'll ever run into him while doing a service call. might already have, before i knew who it was... i also just found out the other day that tom selleck - the dude that played magnum - also apparently lives around these parts! i was also surprised to find that apparently he is NOT gay.

i was really miffed today at the apparent disappeareance (hehe :D) of free wifi at coffee places around where i worked. i had to drive down a back alley to where i thought there used to be a weak signal as barely detected from a little coffee place before, opened my laptop, and found a weak-ass connection - free! kept my fingers crossed that the battery would last long enough for me to go to hotmail, login, attach my time sheet and email it to my office so i could get paid tomorrow! :O to my relief, it showed that it went thru... :)
felt like a bit of a back-alley techno-cowboy though - what a rush! :)

ok - gats ta git to sleep. shower first.

i think intelligence is the ability to solve new problems. hmm, maybe its more like intelligence can be measured by the ability to solve new problems. of course an intelligence may choose not to solve problems, therefore scoring poorly on our little test. maybe intelligence is too clumped a concept. i think it should be mostly about learning and applying new knowledge. making guesses. guesses that have a good chance of being correct. i've noticed that iq tests seem to often include questions on "classical" knowledge. knowledge of facts. knowledge and understanding of the pythagorean theorem. i'd level the field by giving the test takers new rules to solve problems with.

i like the idea that the internet, being the massively interconnected network that it is, with memory, might one day just spontaneously achieve consciousness. but it must have been something mark pesce might have said, that got me thinking that it might actually never happen spontaneously.
do we know any other intelligence than human? well, animals have intelligence - which we can see by observing them as they try to solve some kind of problem - like get to food. but then you see your dog barking at his own reflection, and your illusions of ur pooch's intelligence get rudely shattered. nevertheless - there's some intelligence there. but we're looking for conscious, sentient intelligence, arent we. if we're looking to create an intelligence that we could "hang out" with, then maybe we should try following the path we took to get here. who knows how life started, but maybe we could start at some kind of "thing" that would somehow react to stimuli. i guess we might be aiming at something like having a child - something in the end autonomous, that we could co-operate with, and be proud of its achievements. autonomy would be a life of its own. it would pursue its own goals. if we're looking at the internet achieving conscious intelligence that we could relate to, it would need goals. at least something to fear, something to work away from and something to work towards, a reward, a pleasure. a fear could be the threat of ceasing to exist, and a pleasure would be something that would be a plus towards survival. and perhaps as a strategy to ensure survival in face of changing conditions of life, environments - an interest in things "different", an exploring streak. and ensure the exploring streak is different in strength in the different representatives of the species, so that if curiosity kills one cat, it wont kill them all. i guess we could wait until something we do with the web unexpectedly gives it a purpose, a vector, or construct something like that on purpose. but maybe the web itself should be viewed more like the environment rather than the entity. i mean, there are people who personify the earth, but i dont know. well, if the earth gets wired enough with the net, it will be like its nervous sytem. its kinda like terence mckenna's idea, which i think he'd developed on someone else's - that the earth is like an embryo, still evolving, and the net is its nervous sytem, made out of the raw materials of the earth. that kind of scenario i could kinda see... and when the net is configured to manage itself, and figure out for itself how to solve its problems, thats when things might start looking interesting. until it figures out that we're a pest that needs to be gotten rid of. hopefully we're viewed as at least maintenance bugs, and just our population and exploits need to be curtailed a bit. but i cant see the net itself being configured to manage itself. it would be a maintenance program. actually, probably every part of the net would get its own, proprietary kind. it would be like multiple personalities. in the end they'd probably duke it out leaving a single one. unless they're created in a "flock", to have to cooperate with one another. but over time the different individuals of the flock might become integrated parts of the flock itself as an individual, for the sake of efficiency. i guess we'll have to see. we should probably run simulations of all these scenarios in isolated sytems, that the programs inside it would think that was the world. and we'd see from the outcome which programs are worthy. hehe - an eerily familiar scenario - i knew god was testing us! but for what purpose? what are we gonna be worthy of? or not...