[ExI] taxonomy for fermi paradox fans:

[Mike Dougherty]

On Fri, Jan 30, 2015 at 1:37 PM, spike <spike66 at att.net> wrote:
> No John the above makes perfect sense and ja it does worry me too.  Controls
> engineers such as Your Humble Servant tend to see everything in the world in
> terms of feedback control loops, everything.  If you really ponder it, every
> complex system can be viewed that way and can be modeled that way, and if
> so, why not intelligence in general, and if so, surely intelligence leads to
> more intelligence, and self-referencing paradox every time in every system
> as discovered by Godel, and if so, eventually the positive feedback loops
> dominate the negative, poles move into the right half plane, instability.
> Since intelligence begets intelligence, and if so then the singularity is
> inevitable and we have no idea what happens after a singularity.
>
> That notion of tweaking a knob to get more satisfaction is a good succinct
> way to state a real problem, or if not a problem certainly a… em… situation.
> Certainly it has gotten dramatically easier in our modern world to tweak the
> old happy-knob, and more and more people are opting to do it.  So now what?

Because if you've seen the long-term effects of heroine or crack or
whatever chemical equivalents of "tweak the old happy-knob" you know
that it's not sustainable.  There is a price to pay.

Even the benefit of tDCS (assuming you find the effect to be
beneficial) seems to accentuate some functionality at the expense of
others; I suspect attenuation reduces the effect over time too.

How does a controls engineer generically wrap a "knob" around a
chaotic function?   Even if you have a special control for when
attitude is each of several kinds of incorrect, you eventually have so
many controls that you can't control which control you are
controlling.  :)  [sounds like the inevitable feedback is the kind
that is both noise and regurgitation]