listening to your toaster

I brought  up free will in the context of conscious computers.  There may be some controversy as to whether our minds are subject to the laws of physics, but certainly our computers must be, otherwise they would be useless.  I suppose they could be conscious and just do what they are supposed to do, but then of course we could never know that they are conscious, and that would be pretty boring too, because the only reason we are interested in computers becoming conscious is because they might be TAKING OVER.  The whole action in a computer is the flow of electrons and if they should suddenly divert from their ordained paths to say, Whazzup Doc, why the laws of physics would be tossed into that handbasket going you know where..

Ticka, ticka?  Why yes, now that Beagles brings up the subject I do remember that sound, kind of comforting in the morning against the sound of the coffeepot bubbling up into that little glass knob at the top, and let's throw in the spatter of bacon grease in the frying pan.  What a way to greet the day.  I'm not good at mechanical stuff, but my guess is when you shove that handle down you are turning a cogged wheel which afterwards tika tikas through every cog until when its circuit is run it frees some lever that pops the bread out of the slot and the aroma of burnt toast commingles with freshly brewed coffee and crisp bacon.  How nice.

But what is this, modern toasters don't tika tika anymore?  I hadn't noticed.  I just now went into the kitchen and shoved down the handle and put my ear down where those deadly filaments glow, and nada.  What the fuck?  Already I am nostalgic for the good old days of tika tika, oh life was sweet then, anymore it is silent and soulless.

But wait what is this about  the toast not coming out the same way every time?  What if it came out just fine the first three times, but not the fourth, then okay again on the fifth, but not the sixth, good on the seventh, but not good again until the eleventh time, and henceforth less and less often, good on the thirteenth, the seventeenth, the nineteenth, and twenty third?  Do you see the pattern Junior Mathematician?  Prime numbers!  The very thing we print on our space probes to prove to the aliens that we are intelligent.  Your toaster, your new modern tika tika less device, most likely containing some kind of chip was telling you that it was alive.

Well you know, so are mice, but  that doesn't mean we want them in our houses does it?


Barton Fink was a great movie, but I don't know what it has to do with OR.  Well John Goodman's character is nuts, and there is some kind of murder I think, some woman and some kind of coverup, and there is a William Faulkner character, but no Descartes or Spinoza as I recall.

I never quite got dialectical materialism.  I'm all for matter being objective reality but what does that have to do with communism?