Author: Charles Douglas Wehner

Article:
I have taught many things to idiots. I showed them how to calculate sines and cosines (http;//wehner.org/fpoint ), how to make animate pictures (http://www.wehner.org/tools/animate ) and 3D (http://wehner.org/tools/anna ).

The idiots were made of STONE.

Yes - they were silicon chips. They were "Central Processing Units" (CPUs). They were so dumb that they gave me no help. They just sat there waiting for me to tell them what to do - and I had to understand the procedures down to the finest detail in order to teach them.

If I told them wrong, they would obediently follow the wrong instruction. Then the computer would "hang", or do crazy things.

So I learned patience.

Given enough understanding, there is virtually nothing you cannot do with silicon. In the future there may be other semiconductors - possibly boron trinitride - but for now, silicon is king.

The methods used on one kind of semiconductor, however, will be valid for all time. It is not the details of the program on a specific chip that are important, but the ideas behind them.

Inevitably, we analyse our own minds as we work. We have to learn to distinguish belief from knowledge. Belief is a "feeling" in what Freud called the "Preconscious" (Vorbewußtsein). Knowledge is the set of solid ideas that have been tested and proven over and over again.

One cannot program a "conscious mind" into a silicon chip, when one only has a "feeling" of what a conscious mind is.

Mohammed ibn Musa abu Jafar al Khwarismi wrote a book. He said that numbers are made of parts, and can be divided into their parts... and so he went on. It was an excruciatingly slow process of reasoning - designed to avoid errors or omissions. It became a style known as "Al-Kwarisms".

According to Professor Donald E. Knuth, European professors with their European accents were teaching in the States. The students thought they were saying "ALGORITHM" - and a new technical term was born in 1956.

You need an "algorithm" when you want silicon to come to life. You need to think like a Greek philosopher - to question the nature of "me". You need to distill the very essence of awareness from your knowledge of the world. Unless you find it - and unless the finding is TRUE - you will never reach the point of rousing the silicon imbecile.

I spent my life conjecturing about the nature of conscious life. The new revolution of data theory helped me. Computers became abundant, and information technology was going into realms like the neural net. As we learned about silicon, we also learned about ourselves.

I considered that we have just one-and-a-half kilogrammes (about three pounds) of brain. All the data of our lives is stored inside it. There must be data compression.

My studies showed that there are mechanisms that refine the data from the eyes (http://wehner.org/3d ) and from the ears (http://wehner.org/honk ). There are mechanical things like the basilar membrane, and neurological things like the auditory and visual cortices. That means that the brain is being fed with refined data.

With the help of Martin Wilsher, I had also updated Aristotle's five senses. There are, in fact SEVEN senses - as told on the page about the honky-tonk piano (last page mentioned above).

What goes on BEYOND the data-refinement? What happens when data
- generically - is being analysed?

I found a new variant on DIFFERENTIATION. It is not a mathematical process. It is a LOGICAL process. It is the logical parallel of the calculus. I call it the new calculus of sets.

This process - DIFFERATION - seeks out anything NEW. New data cannot be compressed. It is passed on unchanged.

Old data can be defined by a coding system which states that it has been seen before. In the BINARY calculus of sets, if TWO old sets of data repeat, they become ONE new set. So the amount of data shrinks whilst the data is flowing in.

If the two sets are of the same size, sixty-four items may become thirty-two, which become sixteen, then eight, then four, then two, then one.

This is a phenomenon. It is a sensation in the world of data compression. Never before was there a system that thrives on abundant data, and consumes it with exponentially improving efficiency.

Or perhaps Nature got there first. Perhaps that is how we store our lives in such tiny brains.

However, the compression system is unstable. A tiny change to the data, and a flood of output occurs. It is exactly like the "THETA STORM" of the roused human or animal mind.

On my new page, you can see it all: