I don't think any of these decks will have more than one fetchland. If they are intended to be something that you can take to a Modern tournament and compete with, multiple fetchlands are the last inclusion your deck needs. They are only essential when you max out the cards that are dependent on them (Goyf, DRS) or are trying to maximize those final percentage points on your manabase consistency. Instead, we will see a good mix of rare lands that will be worth the MSRP alone (before they dip a little).
In turn, I think there will be well over $100 worth of value from the other rares. I highly doubt Tarmogoyf will be in a constructed deck. I believe the True-Name Nemesis fiasco was a test run for this sort of thing, to see how players/the market react. Having 4/5th of a release deemed crap by comparison wasn't a good thing for those commander decks. I think they will focus on deck balance and general playability in these precons, saving mega-bombs for another MM release.
They will likely sell for $90-120 dollars, but that will still be lower than the subjective value of it's contents. Like Modern Masters, fringe cards will become cheaper as they are practically free with the purchase of a fetchland.
It might appear that I get joy knowing that the cards will remain expensive...I just feel like advocating the truth. I didn't believe that my cards would be as expensive as they are. I bought them a little later than I should of. There is no reason to believe that things will become much cheaper when there is so much evidence presented by Wizards of the Coast to suggest that they will not. It's their intention to make money, not have every FNM taken over by a non-rotating format that's only profitable when they can charge you $75 for a precon or force a $40 pro-everything into your decks forever.
I was looking today and from the prices I was looking at a few months ago (when I was buying them) it looks like Wasteland has jumped between $10-20 more; which surprises me (as I don't imagine demand could really jump that much from before?)
Were there that many non-tempo decks switching to a TNN style?
I imagine it was the holiday season that brought prices up again. Some people buy Magic cards as gifts. When the holiday is over, some people have received money as gifts and turn them into Magic cards.
In less powered formats, Aether Vial has been good as a simple mana-advantage-generator and counterspell avoider. In a high power format like Legacy, mana-denial is essential wringing long-term advantage out of Vial.
On Merfolk's use of Aether Vial - early fish decks also ran x4 Rishadan Port. If Mutavault didn't exist. the archetype could possibly still play Ports...but Merfolk plays Daze which plays similarly with Aether Vial to the other 'manabase concessions' that Vial enables.
Aether Vial is very good at allowing decks to take risks with their mana-supply and can turn potentially shaky hands into explosive ones.
Legacy can be played casually if you have friend who own Legacy decks. I build up my modest Legacy collection as my friends were building their arsenals. It helped that we already had a lot of old cards and it helped that we started doing this five years ago and not today. People who play Legacy casually still exist.
I can understand how EDH killed 60 card Magic. Legacy might have played a part though. Common knowledge of Legacy made 60 casual almost too difficult to be played. When I was wrecking foes with a $100 Goblin deck, EDH seemed to be gaining ground due to an increasing over-poweredness within 60-card Magic. EDH grew to prevent Goblins and Zoo from destroying Magic (just theory).
When I go to a new game store, I try to bring a couple Legacy decks (Goblins/Burn) to demo with anyone in case no one there plays Legacy. Mind you, I am probably the on the lowest of the low tier on the Legacy power rankings, so I can hardly do the format true justice on my own.
Most of the time, people don't want to be introduced to my little version of Legacy. Too many obvious bad vibes go around when I show off my playsets that are worth more than people's decks or entire collections. I'm also strongly disinterested in the latest chase mythics, very few players decks/collections actually impress me, so I have to be careful not to make that obvious.
I've decided that if a store/casual environment cannot support Legacy, there is no reason to fight for it to be a thing there. Just do what the people who spend the most time and money there do and you'll probably have fun too.
I didn't spend a butt-load of money on lands to play in tournaments. I certainly want the ability to play in tournaments, but my primary motivation was to complete my end of the Legacy-arms-race and to own the finest iteration of the thing I love most about Magic cards.
I'd much rather sit down and play a dozen games against any one deck than play in a high-priced, day-long tournament full of professional Magic card players and wannabe professionals. Playing at a big tournament is a thing I'd like to do just to represent what I like about the game, but it just too cutthroat to be enjoyable unless you win games. That's a lot of pressure, without support from a friend or two also participating, I would have to win enough for me not to feel terrible about the experience.
At this point in time, Modern might as well be what Legacy was several years ago. People can get into that non-rotating format and play it casually and competitively. Eventually, maybe ten years or so, there can be a new format like it that serves the same purpose, and so on until Magic goes all digital or something.
Yay, banning fetchlands would be good. Separating Legacy from Modern gameplay-wise would be nice, creating more demand for duals besides fetches and shocks would be great. Unbanning Wild Nacatl in a format without fetches would be interesting. Tarmogoyf and DRS in a format without fetches would be sweet. Would anyone play Terramorphic Expanse? New mono-fetches maybe? The possibilities are more interesting than what Modern is now, but since a reasonable amount of people like Modern as is, they should have the format as they please.
That would interest me, but at this point it is clear that fetches will be reprinted and if they are in Modern Masters II, I don't see the price going lower than $30 each at this point, so if you want them, you might as well buy them now anyways. I feel like that is why the duck guy posted that leak - Wizards might want people to know that the economy is safe. If people know the fetchlands will be reprinted in a Standard set, why buy them now at grossly inflated priced? > They will always be at grossly inflated prices, whether you buy two boxes of MMII or wait and watch them Goyf-spike later on. The high price of MMII will keep their prices high.
I was raised in a Christian family, attended church every Sunday until the age of 15, but eventually lost my faith. There were very tumultuous times in my family, and God was something used to rationalize pain. I am an atheist now, but I still have a soft spot for Jesus and desire for the knowledge of the actual truths that happened during the foundation of Christianity.
I still believe there is something important about faith. Not necessarily faith in the literal existence of God, but appreciation for the legend of Jesus or whomever better represents your code of morality. Jesus is most effective for me because I was raised looking up to him and can still very easily sympathize with his historical character.
Nonetheless, literal faith still has value for:
Reducing fear of death. Makes it easier to sacrifice self to save lives (or destroy them). Also greatly reduces stress as you get older and know the lights will go out soon.
Belief in divine justice minimizes the need for revenge. It's easier to be forgiving when you know someone will dole out the punishment at a later time. Sometimes people think they are the executors of God's judgement on earth, which is bad.
Strong, moral codes can advantageous not only to oneself, but to those around them. It the morality is based on doing good for others, everyone within the religious community can have strong, healthy relationships thanks to the moral guidelines established in their faith. It yields more comfortable, positive lives for those involved. If the morality is based on doing good for God, things become more repressive as is we are all failures to the creator and must be hammered into shape.
Religious people are easier to control, either self-control or control by others. Belief in God makes it easier for people to minimize their sinning and even use of hard drugs. If someone puts God in control of their lives, it is easier to live the way they choose to live, which would be the way of God. On the other hand, religions have always been involved in state-politics thus the more tangible use of control by religion has been to strengthen the Warlord/Monarch/Despot/State.
I'm a fan of Your Move: with Andy Stanley. It comes on after Saturday Night Live in my region, a very unexpected time and region for a sermon. They are always slightly secular in nature, but get across a positive message themed to Jesus. Here is a clip on him speaking about giving sermons and why.
I accidentally voted yes. I think a block based on females or males would be a bad idea.
I wouldn't mind a set or block being being based on single girl character though...like an Alice in Wonderland themed set. Oh how I would enjoy such a thing.
Got to go with Zendikar. Fetchlands, full-art Lands, Jace, Stoneforge Mystic, and traditional Magic flavor (Goblins, Elves), as well as the bad-assery of the Eldrazi are all strong arguments for Zendikar.
I remember how the game continued to grow at my college environment at the time. Perhaps that growth was inevitable after Alara, but Zendikar convinced enough people to keep opening packs until people barely even valued fetchlands anymore. I was aghast, but couldn't really afford new Magic cards at the time.
There was simply too much goodness for me and everyone else going on in Zendikar - I phased out due to boredom during Scars block as a result. It took the Mental Misstep ban to bring me back.
I feel like the responses make my arguments look worse by only attacking the weakest points of my arguments.
Of course.
That's because if there is a single inconstancy anywhere in your theory, then the whole thing falls apart and needs to be reworked. Such is the nature of the Scientific method.
Anywho, I was hoping you could answer a few questions:
I am assuming brains are made of atoms, just like every thing else.
Thus, would everything be describable by this infinite complexity, or just brains? Does the computer I'm typing on have this same level of complexity? Does a rock?
If it's just brains, then where did brains get this quality // how did it evolve such capacity?
Sure, I understand scientific method. This is not intended to be a thesis paper...more intended to be a causal discussion on a topic that we will not likely live to see resolved. One cannot solve the hard problem of consciousness in a day, but I believe it will one day be solved, to some extent.
Everything is influenced by infinite complexity. I just happen to believe the mind exits on the edges of infinite complexity between one dimension and another. The matter in our dimensions generate the process, but it creates the sense of consciousness in a part of the universe that isn't contained by atoms. The 'infinity' found within these other dimensions give us the ability to make choices in a world otherwise governed by Newton's Laws of motion.
It's incorrect to say that a fractal is infinite, but it has an infinite extra-dimension that ours does not - infinite depth. It is impossible to create a Mandelbrot set using atoms because at a certain depth you just get individual atoms, but in a dimension not bound by atoms, it is completely possible. Also, it's thoroughly on my mind that what we identify as the Mandelbrot set's image is a 2D shadow of something of greater complexity. We cannot observe it's complexity in full, so what we see of it is not infinite.
Brains would have evolved the ability to reach in to the extra dimension by sheer chance of quantum mechanics. These are things I'd lie to be able to explain. I am not well versed on the chemical makeup of the brain, but I'm confident that all brains regardless of evolution have something in common atomically which brings about the conscious experience.
Regardless of whether I sound stupid or make incorrect analysis of what people know to be true, I'm pretty sure that when I am dead, there will be nothing else of my reality. I've been through religion for many years, but I feel like the conscious experience can be more thoroughly be explained through nature (ultimately, science must be used to prove nature, but that doesn't mean nature isn't doing it's thing until then, which is frustrating). I am just curious of this reality and would like to know more while I am still alive. There is no answer that will prevent the inevitable though, so maybe the whole search is pointless.
I'm willing to test these ideas for the rest of my life, hopefully it will lead to something. I'm sorry that I can't provide more evidence. It just fits all too well with my personal account of what it is like to experience consciousness.
I definitely do need to improve my arguments, that's why I expose them to sure criticism. I apologize for the unsophisticated nature of my 'studies'...but I feel like the responses make my arguments look worse by only attacking the weakest points of my arguments. I think the only way to truly explain why I jump to this conclusion, which requires a jump, is to explain what I do know to be true about the universe (but that might take time as I gather my opinions, but if this topic is so offensive I can leave it alone).
I think the Golden Rule comparison is favorable towards my argument. Many of the most complicated aspect of reality are represented in simple, aesthetically pleasing ways. Fractal geometry, particularly those discovered by Mandelbrot, is more significant than we are capable of fully digesting at the present time...but I've never experienced a shot in the dark that felt so much like a hit...just going to take a while to turn on the lights and inspect the results.
The fact that we can control whether we pick our arms up or put them down is a violation of the laws of physics. In physics, nothing can make a decision about what it is going to do, it is at the mercy of the forces around it. That in it self suggests that the mind is operating under different rules from what science considers law.
All matter is entangled in all of the possible extra dimensions one way or another. The only way up is within. The subatomic particles that make up atoms, such as the Higgs boson, exist partly in our dimension and partly in another. That is how their mass is much greater than the proton itself.
The 'shape' of the Higgs boson will be up for debate for many, many years. I'm starting to believe that the Higgs boson is shaped as various Julia sets. Julia sets in particular correspond to wave-particle duality, given the open and closed nature of the sets.
Within each atom is a universe of extra dimensions upon extra dimensions...eleven dimensional hyper-space as Michio Kaku would like me to believe. They aren't necessarily alternate worlds where other things live, but rule-based dimensions that govern what is and isn't possible in the universe. I feel like what we are living in is just the culmination of what the other dimensions impose on reality. Since consciousness is dependent on those dimensions to be in place in order to exists, it cannot exists as we know it anywhere but here. But it has a very specific location 'here'.
An amazing thing about the brain is that it is made up of trillions of atoms, but they somehow communicate with each other in concert to create a mental image. If Julia-like quanta are associated with matter, being the Higgs boson, the Mandelbrot set would be the ideal composite of Julia sets acting together. The Mandelbrot set is the fully developed framework of where the mind resides, sort of like the shell the brain reverberates it.
Consciousness is such a unique, irreplaceable aspect of our universe that we know exists but cannot fully explain. Computational models of consciousness are insufficient. Computers require a separate, biological brain (i.e. human) in order to be relevant. A computer experiences nothing and is merely a set of switches and cables. No one with a brain can suggest that their brains do not experience anything - that their lives are simply one program after another. The idea of a 'digital mind' is the scourge of modern philosophy as far as I am concerned. Experience is far more complicated and involved than that.
If people want the thread to die, let it die, but I appreciate the responded because this is something I enjoy thinking about. I need to know what I need to know more about. The answers that are out there are inconclusive.
edit - I'm college drop out. I took a math class that revolved around the topic of infinity which forms the groundwork for much of my musings, but I can't exactly teach the class...this is MTG Salvation forums, we don't need PhDs to discuss the unknown here.
In case anyone reading this doesn't understand extra-dimensions, watch this. I paid a couple grand to learn this in college.
final cut: I wrote some wrong stuff here, particularly about wave/particle duality. I've forgotten how photons figure into the equation, since they, not atoms, are the limiting factors of our experience, although atoms are the limiting factors of our interaction, but they are not limiting factor in our composition.
There are a lot of people with videos and articles that explore the same territory I wish to explore. Perhaps I should seek out more of them, some have very deep and mathematical explanations for how we fit in with the other dimensions, but to tie them all together would be neat.
Also, no offensive intended with the PhD remarks. I'm on the lower tier of scholastic accomplishment compared to the greater body of people associated with MtG. I come here seeking greater mental processing power than my own, and if the answer is to go learn more, I accept.
Big Brother in business form. Google is competing with Facebook and others of the definitive profile of human beings on earth. There is probably a big NSA/FBI/CIA contract in it for both of them and they likely already get it.
If not, if Google really is 'don't be evil', then they are just improving what they do as a business...showing you ads for the things that you just looked up...showing you and people like you ads of similar content. The better Google gets to know you, the more accurately they feel they can distribute ads.
The problem is, long-term Google will continue to have all this data-power and who is to say what whom is capable of doing with it. A totalitarian regime can use information on people to punish them for crimes/thought-crimes committed in as far back as 2007 or earlier. Not to mention the police reports that are easy to bring up thanks to the Google search engine. Crimes committed as a minor and stricken from the record are available to anyone who knows you and where your from.
I suppose the real problem is tracking what kind of videos you are watching. Like if you're watching some serious radical violent Islamic stuff (just an example) on YouTube, does that put you in one of Google's categories? I happened to just go though a WWII phase so I ended up watching a lot of stuff about Hitler...now all I see are recommendations for more Hitler. I'm a fairly curious person and will look up many suspicious topics (though I avoid things that are gruesome/graphic), I don't see why they wouldn't classify me as a threat.
I miss 'Bob's Army'...they cracked down on him hard. You can only see him on gamer pages any more, basically the spam only sees the eyes of children.
Really, all Google+ is to me is an easier way for them to put all of my activities in one place for later access. I have no use for it as a platform unlike Facebook.
It seems you just have misconceptions of the actual literal meaning of these things. A dimension is an axis by which you can locate an object with specific coordinates. This is not an imagination. A mind is not a physical image, there is no way to quantify it or dimensionally measure it.
A Mandelbrot set is an indefinitely complex and infinitesimally small non-differentiable surface which physically does not exist because of the quantinization of matter and energy but that matter can exhibit properties of following the pattern.
You seem to just be attempted to make random connections between random things and I have no idea what model or theory you're really trying to suggest and what it's really modeling.
The various brains in different lifeforms, which mostly evolved from the original brains, are nature's attempts at recreating the Mandelbrot set in 3D physics.
What. Pretty sure mind evolved because other living things are delicious, and catching them often requires planning.
Well cognitive thinking processes perhaps, but not just for hunting but for generally surviving and moving about, not getting eaten yourself.
I believe the rules governing consciousness were always in place whether atoms were capable of supporting it or not. There is no better, more advantageous way for consciousness to exist that as it does. Life propagated with consciousness not because they determined it to be the best way to get food, but because the molecules randomly mutated into something that was really really good at getting food and doing other things as well. During the place and time when the little squigglies developed brains, they were sure to be successful because consciousness on any level of complexity is so much greater than any concept known in the universe.
The direction of the dimensions greater than ours is within. If people in Flatland are constrained by the dimension 'up', we are constrained by the dimensions 'within' the atoms. Therefor, the Mandelbrot set represents and object which is not limited by atomic constraints, as it would be in our dimensions. It operates under different rules.
As far as other creatures brains are concerned, many brains are similar to human brains because effective brains under certain atmospheric conditions should all be similar, because they all do similar things (as well as most successful brains evolved along the same line). Brains of other life forms are different, my lack the great repositories of gray matter, but the brain ultimately wishes to evolve into something with infinite memory like the mandelbrot set, but cannot because of atomic restrictions.
The mandelbrot set isn't the mind as we know it, we aren't mandelbrot sets, but just as other aspects of biology resemble simpler forms of fractal geometry, I believe the mind is modeled after the infinitely complex mandelbrot fractal geometry.
edit - I overstate the visual resemblance to brains, but I don't think it's entirely without foundation. Many things in nature tend to resemble arbitrary, fractal processes, so I don't consider it to far-fetched for something to imitate more complex fractals. To me, that thing must be the most complex biological object we know, the thing that allows us to know in the first place.
Just as it takes many iterations of a formula to create the Mandelbrot set mathematically, it takes many iterations of evolution to bring it closer to what it is intended to be.
DOUBLE EDIT: I'm not a super genius or anything...I am a Wikipedia who reads the darn site hours at a time on different topics, so I've learned many things but am a master of nothing. Evolution of the brain is so short, I know nothing but what I can infer.
I've dissected a squid. Insufficient brains remain insufficient because of the biological roles the lifeforms reside in. They are successful at doing what they are doing, but the ways that exist limit the growth-potential for their brains. Worms brains remain small because they live underground and don't acquire the nutrients to improve the brain further.
Part of evolution is chance of biological chemistry as well as victory over the environment. Where life is able to find a spot where conditions for brain development are good, the brain continues to improve. When life moved onto land, it found a better place to grow. Omnivores such as humans have the distinct advantage of being able to collect many different kinds of molecules to improve operation of the system.
See, there's no mathematical problem with having dimensions we can't see, but an imagination or a mind isn't a dimension, that just doesn't make any actual sense.
There's still no real 3D model of a mind or consciousness, so how is there any basis to say that a mind 3 dimension-ally is formed around them?
Also, what is the basis of the arbitrary judgement that squid's brains are "insufficient"? Why can't things go on living life without becoming more complex?
Right, a mind isn't a dimension, but it definitely exists within one. I argue that one's self of individuality is kind of locked within it's own slice of a larger dimension, some kind of extra-dimension by proxy. The ability to make observations and reason are kind of unique and unnatural to matter. Matter tends to only do what the laws of physics allow us to do. Consciousness give us control over matter in a way that just doesn't happen when atoms are randomly colliding. Much of evolution has to do with developing reflexive behavior, but the mind gives life a way to interact with the world in a proactive way.
There will probably never be a 3D model of the mind. In totality, it is too complex for our physics. It may be possible to make assumptions, and many tests have been run to try and map what people are imagining, but I feel many of the results are tainted by suggestion and are inconclusive. I consider true man-made-intelligence to be completely impossible unless it were brought about biologically, almost chemically identical to natural brains, essentially cloning. Otherwise, it would lack the interface with the quantum world that gives us presiding authority over a majority of our actions.
Squid brains aren't insufficient for what they are, as long as they are good at what they're doing, that's great, but the mind has much more potential than that. The human mind is clearly superior and more successfully evolves because we are able to better understand the laws of nature and practically everything else.
'We are a way for the Universe to know itself' - Carl Sagan.
Show me the sets of vectors that span this space and then we can start talking dimensions. Right now, this sounds like a bunch of metaphysical mumbo jumbo that attempts to make a mathematical idea and apply it to things it doesn't apply to.
It's exactly what people theorize it to be. In quantum physics, we do not observe entire sub-atomic particles at once, only traces of them that happen to be present at the moment. There is more complexity in the parts of the atom than we are capable from observing from our perspective. I guess I could say 'it's like a tesserect', but our reality isn't exclusive to cubes, so in appearance it would be more complicated than a tesserect.
The 2D print-out of the mandelbrot set itself is merely a segment of the complete image. A true mandelbrot...thing would be the '4D Mandelbrots', which would be slightly less comprehensible to people and our models are inaccurate.
Unfortunately, I have no hard numbers for this one, but I have read a lot of science stuff and have yet to prove myself wrong. I am looking at unknowns in science and trying to find an answer. Mankind couldn't pull away from the earth to prove it was round, but by looking along the edges they were able to make observations that suggested it did.
I'm purely non meta-physical though. If it can be proven that I am wrong I will gladly accept the truth about reality. New science always feels metaphysical though. String theory might as well be magic until we know more about it.
The Julia set is my avatar at the moment. I find it aesthetically pleasing, same with the Mandelbrot set. The infinity of the sets is the most defining expression of the modeling in my opinion.
I noticed and I think it's great. I'm aware that the Mandelbrot set is a result of some logarithm involving all possible Julia sets. Julia sets are either 'open' or 'closed' and this creates the mandelbrot image. I have a feeling that Julia sets have a slightly larger influence on reality by method of 'quantum signatures' that give matter it's qualities.
Final edit - OK, I'm reading up on the Quantum Mind now and I guess people have been writing it off as pseudoscience forever, maybe because people suggested telepathy stuff that obviously isn't real.
Well, people may not have proven it but they have yet to disprove it. I urge everyone to always be thinking about what we don't know...why not? I'm certainly not going after pseudoscience or physics-god or anything, but there are many explanations for our reality that have yet to be made, and I'd like to be alive for a few more of them.
So, I guess I'm not really debating right now. I'll just gather more ideas and read more stuff about science and remember to learn all that math I've been putting off...because life is narrow, brief, and unexplained and I want to know as much about it as I can while I am alive.
Everyone be on your toes for earth-shattering observations.
If I go around saying offensive things, there will be serious social repercussions. I'm not going to go to jail, but a whole lot of people aren't going to like me and my life will be worse off because of it. If I did it at work I'd probably be fired.
This guy makes millions to shoot ducks and advertise his duck shootin equipment. He operates on the grandest scale of social interaction - mass media. Everything he does to interact with the public is practically part of his job and as though he is talking to each and every member of his social circle at once.
So it is only fair that if I can ruin my life by saying offensive things, so should he. He has a deserved level of scrutiny on him now so he can go sob on his millions until the poor geezer is dead.
The same goes for anyone else who work a public profession (government, law enforcement, etc.)
It seems you just have misconceptions of the actual literal meaning of these things. A dimension is an axis by which you can locate an object with specific coordinates. This is not an imagination. A mind is not a physical image, there is no way to quantify it or dimensionally measure it.
A Mandelbrot set is an indefinitely complex and infinitesimally small non-differentiable surface which physically does not exist because of the quantinization of matter and energy but that matter can exhibit properties of following the pattern.
You seem to just be attempted to make random connections between random things and I have no idea what model or theory you're really trying to suggest and what it's really modeling.
The various brains in different lifeforms, which mostly evolved from the original brains, are nature's attempts at recreating the Mandelbrot set in 3D physics.
What. Pretty sure mind evolved because other living things are delicious, and catching them often requires planning.
Well cognitive thinking processes perhaps, but not just for hunting but for generally surviving and moving about, not getting eaten yourself.
I believe the rules governing consciousness were always in place whether atoms were capable of supporting it or not. There is no better, more advantageous way for consciousness to exist that as it does. Life propagated with consciousness not because they determined it to be the best way to get food, but because the molecules randomly mutated into something that was really really good at getting food and doing other things as well. During the place and time when the little squigglies developed brains, they were sure to be successful because consciousness on any level of complexity is so much greater than any concept known in the universe.
The direction of the dimensions greater than ours is within. If people in Flatland are constrained by the dimension 'up', we are constrained by the dimensions 'within' the atoms. Therefor, the Mandelbrot set represents and object which is not limited by atomic constraints, as it would be in our dimensions. It operates under different rules.
As far as other creatures brains are concerned, many brains are similar to human brains because effective brains under certain atmospheric conditions should all be similar, because they all do similar things (as well as most successful brains evolved along the same line). Brains of other life forms are different, my lack the great repositories of gray matter, but the brain ultimately wishes to evolve into something with infinite memory like the mandelbrot set, but cannot because of atomic restrictions.
The mandelbrot set isn't the mind as we know it, we aren't mandelbrot sets, but just as other aspects of biology resemble simpler forms of fractal geometry, I believe the mind is modeled after the infinitely complex mandelbrot fractal geometry.
edit - I overstate the visual resemblance to brains, but I don't think it's entirely without foundation. Many things in nature tend to resemble arbitrary, fractal processes, so I don't consider it to far-fetched for something to imitate more complex fractals. To me, that thing must be the most complex biological object we know, the thing that allows us to know in the first place.
Just as it takes many iterations of a formula to create the Mandelbrot set mathematically, it takes many iterations of evolution to bring it closer to what it is intended to be.
DOUBLE EDIT: I'm not a super genius or anything...I am a Wikipedia who reads the darn site hours at a time on different topics, so I've learned many things but am a master of nothing. Evolution of the brain is so short, I know nothing but what I can infer.
I've dissected a squid. Insufficient brains remain insufficient because of the biological roles the lifeforms reside in. They are successful at doing what they are doing, but the ways that exist limit the growth-potential for their brains. Worms brains remain small because they live underground and don't acquire the nutrients to improve the brain further.
Part of evolution is chance of biological chemistry as well as victory over the environment. Where life is able to find a spot where conditions for brain development are good, the brain continues to improve. When life moved onto land, it found a better place to grow. Omnivores such as humans have the distinct advantage of being able to collect many different kinds of molecules to improve operation of the system.
Sorry, it's really confusing. I'm still putting my own thoughts together. Whenever I try to explain them to someone it comes out wrong. It's not like I'm at CERN smashing neutrions together.
What I'm suggesting is that still, very little is known about the nature of consciousness and the organ, the brain. I personally think there is a strong connection between the Mandelbrot fractal and the physics of thought. It might take over 100 years to fully flesh out the rational.
This might have been the wrong forum for this, but it is pertinent to any discussion revolving around the mind.
As far as black holes, that's another one of my theroies that might take hundreds of thousands to millions of years to prove. We are still apes as far as the total sum of knowledge there is to learn is concerned.
edit - about light escaping from black hole's pull - BIG CRUNCH - when enough of the universe's matter is clumped together...maybe.
In turn, I think there will be well over $100 worth of value from the other rares. I highly doubt Tarmogoyf will be in a constructed deck. I believe the True-Name Nemesis fiasco was a test run for this sort of thing, to see how players/the market react. Having 4/5th of a release deemed crap by comparison wasn't a good thing for those commander decks. I think they will focus on deck balance and general playability in these precons, saving mega-bombs for another MM release.
They will likely sell for $90-120 dollars, but that will still be lower than the subjective value of it's contents. Like Modern Masters, fringe cards will become cheaper as they are practically free with the purchase of a fetchland.
It might appear that I get joy knowing that the cards will remain expensive...I just feel like advocating the truth. I didn't believe that my cards would be as expensive as they are. I bought them a little later than I should of. There is no reason to believe that things will become much cheaper when there is so much evidence presented by Wizards of the Coast to suggest that they will not. It's their intention to make money, not have every FNM taken over by a non-rotating format that's only profitable when they can charge you $75 for a precon or force a $40 pro-everything into your decks forever.
I imagine it was the holiday season that brought prices up again. Some people buy Magic cards as gifts. When the holiday is over, some people have received money as gifts and turn them into Magic cards.
On Merfolk's use of Aether Vial - early fish decks also ran x4 Rishadan Port. If Mutavault didn't exist. the archetype could possibly still play Ports...but Merfolk plays Daze which plays similarly with Aether Vial to the other 'manabase concessions' that Vial enables.
Aether Vial is very good at allowing decks to take risks with their mana-supply and can turn potentially shaky hands into explosive ones.
I can understand how EDH killed 60 card Magic. Legacy might have played a part though. Common knowledge of Legacy made 60 casual almost too difficult to be played. When I was wrecking foes with a $100 Goblin deck, EDH seemed to be gaining ground due to an increasing over-poweredness within 60-card Magic. EDH grew to prevent Goblins and Zoo from destroying Magic (just theory).
When I go to a new game store, I try to bring a couple Legacy decks (Goblins/Burn) to demo with anyone in case no one there plays Legacy. Mind you, I am probably the on the lowest of the low tier on the Legacy power rankings, so I can hardly do the format true justice on my own.
Most of the time, people don't want to be introduced to my little version of Legacy. Too many obvious bad vibes go around when I show off my playsets that are worth more than people's decks or entire collections. I'm also strongly disinterested in the latest chase mythics, very few players decks/collections actually impress me, so I have to be careful not to make that obvious.
I've decided that if a store/casual environment cannot support Legacy, there is no reason to fight for it to be a thing there. Just do what the people who spend the most time and money there do and you'll probably have fun too.
I didn't spend a butt-load of money on lands to play in tournaments. I certainly want the ability to play in tournaments, but my primary motivation was to complete my end of the Legacy-arms-race and to own the finest iteration of the thing I love most about Magic cards.
I'd much rather sit down and play a dozen games against any one deck than play in a high-priced, day-long tournament full of professional Magic card players and wannabe professionals. Playing at a big tournament is a thing I'd like to do just to represent what I like about the game, but it just too cutthroat to be enjoyable unless you win games. That's a lot of pressure, without support from a friend or two also participating, I would have to win enough for me not to feel terrible about the experience.
At this point in time, Modern might as well be what Legacy was several years ago. People can get into that non-rotating format and play it casually and competitively. Eventually, maybe ten years or so, there can be a new format like it that serves the same purpose, and so on until Magic goes all digital or something.
That would interest me, but at this point it is clear that fetches will be reprinted and if they are in Modern Masters II, I don't see the price going lower than $30 each at this point, so if you want them, you might as well buy them now anyways. I feel like that is why the duck guy posted that leak - Wizards might want people to know that the economy is safe. If people know the fetchlands will be reprinted in a Standard set, why buy them now at grossly inflated priced? > They will always be at grossly inflated prices, whether you buy two boxes of MMII or wait and watch them Goyf-spike later on. The high price of MMII will keep their prices high.
I still believe there is something important about faith. Not necessarily faith in the literal existence of God, but appreciation for the legend of Jesus or whomever better represents your code of morality. Jesus is most effective for me because I was raised looking up to him and can still very easily sympathize with his historical character.
Nonetheless, literal faith still has value for:
I'm a fan of Your Move: with Andy Stanley. It comes on after Saturday Night Live in my region, a very unexpected time and region for a sermon. They are always slightly secular in nature, but get across a positive message themed to Jesus. Here is a clip on him speaking about giving sermons and why.
I wouldn't mind a set or block being being based on single girl character though...like an Alice in Wonderland themed set. Oh how I would enjoy such a thing.
I remember how the game continued to grow at my college environment at the time. Perhaps that growth was inevitable after Alara, but Zendikar convinced enough people to keep opening packs until people barely even valued fetchlands anymore. I was aghast, but couldn't really afford new Magic cards at the time.
There was simply too much goodness for me and everyone else going on in Zendikar - I phased out due to boredom during Scars block as a result. It took the Mental Misstep ban to bring me back.
Sure, I understand scientific method. This is not intended to be a thesis paper...more intended to be a causal discussion on a topic that we will not likely live to see resolved. One cannot solve the hard problem of consciousness in a day, but I believe it will one day be solved, to some extent.
Everything is influenced by infinite complexity. I just happen to believe the mind exits on the edges of infinite complexity between one dimension and another. The matter in our dimensions generate the process, but it creates the sense of consciousness in a part of the universe that isn't contained by atoms. The 'infinity' found within these other dimensions give us the ability to make choices in a world otherwise governed by Newton's Laws of motion.
It's incorrect to say that a fractal is infinite, but it has an infinite extra-dimension that ours does not - infinite depth. It is impossible to create a Mandelbrot set using atoms because at a certain depth you just get individual atoms, but in a dimension not bound by atoms, it is completely possible. Also, it's thoroughly on my mind that what we identify as the Mandelbrot set's image is a 2D shadow of something of greater complexity. We cannot observe it's complexity in full, so what we see of it is not infinite.
Brains would have evolved the ability to reach in to the extra dimension by sheer chance of quantum mechanics. These are things I'd lie to be able to explain. I am not well versed on the chemical makeup of the brain, but I'm confident that all brains regardless of evolution have something in common atomically which brings about the conscious experience.
Regardless of whether I sound stupid or make incorrect analysis of what people know to be true, I'm pretty sure that when I am dead, there will be nothing else of my reality. I've been through religion for many years, but I feel like the conscious experience can be more thoroughly be explained through nature (ultimately, science must be used to prove nature, but that doesn't mean nature isn't doing it's thing until then, which is frustrating). I am just curious of this reality and would like to know more while I am still alive. There is no answer that will prevent the inevitable though, so maybe the whole search is pointless.
I'm willing to test these ideas for the rest of my life, hopefully it will lead to something. I'm sorry that I can't provide more evidence. It just fits all too well with my personal account of what it is like to experience consciousness.
I think the Golden Rule comparison is favorable towards my argument. Many of the most complicated aspect of reality are represented in simple, aesthetically pleasing ways. Fractal geometry, particularly those discovered by Mandelbrot, is more significant than we are capable of fully digesting at the present time...but I've never experienced a shot in the dark that felt so much like a hit...just going to take a while to turn on the lights and inspect the results.
The fact that we can control whether we pick our arms up or put them down is a violation of the laws of physics. In physics, nothing can make a decision about what it is going to do, it is at the mercy of the forces around it. That in it self suggests that the mind is operating under different rules from what science considers law.
All matter is entangled in all of the possible extra dimensions one way or another. The only way up is within. The subatomic particles that make up atoms, such as the Higgs boson, exist partly in our dimension and partly in another. That is how their mass is much greater than the proton itself.
The 'shape' of the Higgs boson will be up for debate for many, many years. I'm starting to believe that the Higgs boson is shaped as various Julia sets. Julia sets in particular correspond to wave-particle duality, given the open and closed nature of the sets.
Within each atom is a universe of extra dimensions upon extra dimensions...eleven dimensional hyper-space as Michio Kaku would like me to believe. They aren't necessarily alternate worlds where other things live, but rule-based dimensions that govern what is and isn't possible in the universe. I feel like what we are living in is just the culmination of what the other dimensions impose on reality. Since consciousness is dependent on those dimensions to be in place in order to exists, it cannot exists as we know it anywhere but here. But it has a very specific location 'here'.
An amazing thing about the brain is that it is made up of trillions of atoms, but they somehow communicate with each other in concert to create a mental image. If Julia-like quanta are associated with matter, being the Higgs boson, the Mandelbrot set would be the ideal composite of Julia sets acting together. The Mandelbrot set is the fully developed framework of where the mind resides, sort of like the shell the brain reverberates it.
Consciousness is such a unique, irreplaceable aspect of our universe that we know exists but cannot fully explain. Computational models of consciousness are insufficient. Computers require a separate, biological brain (i.e. human) in order to be relevant. A computer experiences nothing and is merely a set of switches and cables. No one with a brain can suggest that their brains do not experience anything - that their lives are simply one program after another. The idea of a 'digital mind' is the scourge of modern philosophy as far as I am concerned. Experience is far more complicated and involved than that.
If people want the thread to die, let it die, but I appreciate the responded because this is something I enjoy thinking about. I need to know what I need to know more about. The answers that are out there are inconclusive.
edit - I'm college drop out. I took a math class that revolved around the topic of infinity which forms the groundwork for much of my musings, but I can't exactly teach the class...this is MTG Salvation forums, we don't need PhDs to discuss the unknown here.
In case anyone reading this doesn't understand extra-dimensions, watch this. I paid a couple grand to learn this in college.
final cut: I wrote some wrong stuff here, particularly about wave/particle duality. I've forgotten how photons figure into the equation, since they, not atoms, are the limiting factors of our experience, although atoms are the limiting factors of our interaction, but they are not limiting factor in our composition.
There are a lot of people with videos and articles that explore the same territory I wish to explore. Perhaps I should seek out more of them, some have very deep and mathematical explanations for how we fit in with the other dimensions, but to tie them all together would be neat.
Also, no offensive intended with the PhD remarks. I'm on the lower tier of scholastic accomplishment compared to the greater body of people associated with MtG. I come here seeking greater mental processing power than my own, and if the answer is to go learn more, I accept.
If not, if Google really is 'don't be evil', then they are just improving what they do as a business...showing you ads for the things that you just looked up...showing you and people like you ads of similar content. The better Google gets to know you, the more accurately they feel they can distribute ads.
The problem is, long-term Google will continue to have all this data-power and who is to say what whom is capable of doing with it. A totalitarian regime can use information on people to punish them for crimes/thought-crimes committed in as far back as 2007 or earlier. Not to mention the police reports that are easy to bring up thanks to the Google search engine. Crimes committed as a minor and stricken from the record are available to anyone who knows you and where your from.
I suppose the real problem is tracking what kind of videos you are watching. Like if you're watching some serious radical violent Islamic stuff (just an example) on YouTube, does that put you in one of Google's categories? I happened to just go though a WWII phase so I ended up watching a lot of stuff about Hitler...now all I see are recommendations for more Hitler. I'm a fairly curious person and will look up many suspicious topics (though I avoid things that are gruesome/graphic), I don't see why they wouldn't classify me as a threat.
I miss 'Bob's Army'...they cracked down on him hard. You can only see him on gamer pages any more, basically the spam only sees the eyes of children.
Really, all Google+ is to me is an easier way for them to put all of my activities in one place for later access. I have no use for it as a platform unlike Facebook.
Right, a mind isn't a dimension, but it definitely exists within one. I argue that one's self of individuality is kind of locked within it's own slice of a larger dimension, some kind of extra-dimension by proxy. The ability to make observations and reason are kind of unique and unnatural to matter. Matter tends to only do what the laws of physics allow us to do. Consciousness give us control over matter in a way that just doesn't happen when atoms are randomly colliding. Much of evolution has to do with developing reflexive behavior, but the mind gives life a way to interact with the world in a proactive way.
There will probably never be a 3D model of the mind. In totality, it is too complex for our physics. It may be possible to make assumptions, and many tests have been run to try and map what people are imagining, but I feel many of the results are tainted by suggestion and are inconclusive. I consider true man-made-intelligence to be completely impossible unless it were brought about biologically, almost chemically identical to natural brains, essentially cloning. Otherwise, it would lack the interface with the quantum world that gives us presiding authority over a majority of our actions.
Squid brains aren't insufficient for what they are, as long as they are good at what they're doing, that's great, but the mind has much more potential than that. The human mind is clearly superior and more successfully evolves because we are able to better understand the laws of nature and practically everything else.
'We are a way for the Universe to know itself' - Carl Sagan.
It's exactly what people theorize it to be. In quantum physics, we do not observe entire sub-atomic particles at once, only traces of them that happen to be present at the moment. There is more complexity in the parts of the atom than we are capable from observing from our perspective. I guess I could say 'it's like a tesserect', but our reality isn't exclusive to cubes, so in appearance it would be more complicated than a tesserect.
The 2D print-out of the mandelbrot set itself is merely a segment of the complete image. A true mandelbrot...thing would be the '4D Mandelbrots', which would be slightly less comprehensible to people and our models are inaccurate.
Unfortunately, I have no hard numbers for this one, but I have read a lot of science stuff and have yet to prove myself wrong. I am looking at unknowns in science and trying to find an answer. Mankind couldn't pull away from the earth to prove it was round, but by looking along the edges they were able to make observations that suggested it did.
I'm purely non meta-physical though. If it can be proven that I am wrong I will gladly accept the truth about reality. New science always feels metaphysical though. String theory might as well be magic until we know more about it.
I noticed and I think it's great. I'm aware that the Mandelbrot set is a result of some logarithm involving all possible Julia sets. Julia sets are either 'open' or 'closed' and this creates the mandelbrot image. I have a feeling that Julia sets have a slightly larger influence on reality by method of 'quantum signatures' that give matter it's qualities.
4D set. I mean, a 3D shadow of a 4D set.
Final edit - OK, I'm reading up on the Quantum Mind now and I guess people have been writing it off as pseudoscience forever, maybe because people suggested telepathy stuff that obviously isn't real.
Well, people may not have proven it but they have yet to disprove it. I urge everyone to always be thinking about what we don't know...why not? I'm certainly not going after pseudoscience or physics-god or anything, but there are many explanations for our reality that have yet to be made, and I'd like to be alive for a few more of them.
So, I guess I'm not really debating right now. I'll just gather more ideas and read more stuff about science and remember to learn all that math I've been putting off...because life is narrow, brief, and unexplained and I want to know as much about it as I can while I am alive.
Everyone be on your toes for earth-shattering observations.
This guy makes millions to shoot ducks and advertise his duck shootin equipment. He operates on the grandest scale of social interaction - mass media. Everything he does to interact with the public is practically part of his job and as though he is talking to each and every member of his social circle at once.
So it is only fair that if I can ruin my life by saying offensive things, so should he. He has a deserved level of scrutiny on him now so he can go sob on his millions until the poor geezer is dead.
The same goes for anyone else who work a public profession (government, law enforcement, etc.)
I believe the rules governing consciousness were always in place whether atoms were capable of supporting it or not. There is no better, more advantageous way for consciousness to exist that as it does. Life propagated with consciousness not because they determined it to be the best way to get food, but because the molecules randomly mutated into something that was really really good at getting food and doing other things as well. During the place and time when the little squigglies developed brains, they were sure to be successful because consciousness on any level of complexity is so much greater than any concept known in the universe.
The direction of the dimensions greater than ours is within. If people in Flatland are constrained by the dimension 'up', we are constrained by the dimensions 'within' the atoms. Therefor, the Mandelbrot set represents and object which is not limited by atomic constraints, as it would be in our dimensions. It operates under different rules.
As far as other creatures brains are concerned, many brains are similar to human brains because effective brains under certain atmospheric conditions should all be similar, because they all do similar things (as well as most successful brains evolved along the same line). Brains of other life forms are different, my lack the great repositories of gray matter, but the brain ultimately wishes to evolve into something with infinite memory like the mandelbrot set, but cannot because of atomic restrictions.
The mandelbrot set isn't the mind as we know it, we aren't mandelbrot sets, but just as other aspects of biology resemble simpler forms of fractal geometry, I believe the mind is modeled after the infinitely complex mandelbrot fractal geometry.
edit - I overstate the visual resemblance to brains, but I don't think it's entirely without foundation. Many things in nature tend to resemble arbitrary, fractal processes, so I don't consider it to far-fetched for something to imitate more complex fractals. To me, that thing must be the most complex biological object we know, the thing that allows us to know in the first place.
Just as it takes many iterations of a formula to create the Mandelbrot set mathematically, it takes many iterations of evolution to bring it closer to what it is intended to be.
DOUBLE EDIT: I'm not a super genius or anything...I am a Wikipedia who reads the darn site hours at a time on different topics, so I've learned many things but am a master of nothing. Evolution of the brain is so short, I know nothing but what I can infer.
*sigh* triple edit...
I've dissected a squid. Insufficient brains remain insufficient because of the biological roles the lifeforms reside in. They are successful at doing what they are doing, but the ways that exist limit the growth-potential for their brains. Worms brains remain small because they live underground and don't acquire the nutrients to improve the brain further.
Part of evolution is chance of biological chemistry as well as victory over the environment. Where life is able to find a spot where conditions for brain development are good, the brain continues to improve. When life moved onto land, it found a better place to grow. Omnivores such as humans have the distinct advantage of being able to collect many different kinds of molecules to improve operation of the system.
What I'm suggesting is that still, very little is known about the nature of consciousness and the organ, the brain. I personally think there is a strong connection between the Mandelbrot fractal and the physics of thought. It might take over 100 years to fully flesh out the rational.
This might have been the wrong forum for this, but it is pertinent to any discussion revolving around the mind.
As far as black holes, that's another one of my theroies that might take hundreds of thousands to millions of years to prove. We are still apes as far as the total sum of knowledge there is to learn is concerned.
edit - about light escaping from black hole's pull - BIG CRUNCH - when enough of the universe's matter is clumped together...maybe.