Ok, so what about, say, 500 years. Or how about 1,000, or 10,000? The choice of timescale is totally arbitrary. There may be decadal cycles, multi-decadal cycles, cycles over centuries, millenia, etc. Your 30 year significance test is local in time, isn't it? You can't establish a fact of the matter from that alone.
I totally disagree that this is a good idea. I prefer my current situation, where I'm in an open plan office and I can chat to all of the other developers. I have met some "autistic" developers before who want to be sealed off from everyone else so they never have to make eye contact, but to me communication with other members of the team is the most important thing. I don't mind if I have to walk around a few desks to get there either. The round table is ok, depending on how large the round table is (the bigger, the better). If I want to shut myself off to concentrate, I usually put my headphones on.
Which is more likely: that scientists got together and colluded to invent a crisis thinking it would make tons of money roll in, or that the wealthy are projecting their greed onto the less greedy? Occam's razor.
Please, you're abusing Occam's Razor with gay abandon. You've forgotten that a lot of energy companies, which also happen to be fossil fuel companies, are looking forward to all their new "green" subsidies. You're also forgetting that the bankers are rubbing their fat, bloated little hands with glee at the possibility of trading carbon permits. In fact that well know environmentalist organisation Goldman Sachs is taking the lead here. Yes, the great blood sucking vampire on the face of humanity is very enthusiastic about all of this global warming hysteria and is right behind you (bending you over).
But anyway, the point is quite a simple one: predictions of future catastrophe are based on models and those models didn't even last 10 years before they were shown to be wrong. So what are you doing supporting this hypothesis? I mean, put your Scientific hat on and ask yourself what has to happen in order to falsify it?
Indeed but one of the philosophical problems to overcome is the fact that our only means of enquiry here (the scientific method) may well preclude classes of hypothesis or conclusions it is incompatible with. What I mean to say is that given you can in principle discover all laws, particles, fields and forces in nature, it does not follow that once you have done so there is nothing left to explain. What you call superstition and mysticism can also be described as transcendent. It may well be that consciousness/mind falls into this class of problem.
Come on, that's disingenuous to say the least. The rising trend was the same in the 1930's as it is now. It was much warmer in the MWP than it is now. It was much, much warmer 1,000,000 years ago than it is now. There's no way it's caused by a tiny amount of CO2. Even a cretin like me can see that. The whole argument is completely insane, but very lucrative for funding bodies, the media and the Chicago Climate Exchange.
Who or whom marked this guy as a troll? He's absolutely spot on. The Unions see the public services as job creation schemes, rather than providers of useful facilities for citizens. This tells you all you need to know about why public services are so bloated and give poor value for money.
Again, that's a decision you make if you can't find a suitable framework. We developed our own framework recently for a specific product, using a few third parties libraries (which required modification). Part of the process of defining the requirements and specification for the product involves balancing time, the capabilities of available frameworks or libraries and the various skills you have within the team. If someone says to me, "I would like you to produce A, B and C and I'd like it in six months", it's perfectly acceptable for me to say, "I can give you A and B, but C will take a further six months". Defining requirements is often a kind of negotiation like that. People tend to come unstuck when those deciding what they want the product to do have no knowledge or understanding of what is required in order to do it.
Part of your skill as a developer is in applying the correct framework or library to the problem at hand. If your framework doesn't do the two or three critical things you want it to then I suggest you've chosen the wrong framework!
you're using that as an analogy for global warming, it corresponds to claiming that the laws of physics have changed. Fat luck with that.
I've been modded down enough for expressing scepticism on this issue here on slashdot, so I'm finding these stories extremely interesting (and may I say, amusing). The fact of the matter is that the hubris of those promoting the hypothesis seems to be inversely proportional to the facts of the matter. You can argue "first principles" until you're blue in the face and for as long as the facts on the ground contradict them, I would suggest the implausible chains of inference emanating from those first principles need a little work and a little humility is called for.
No, not dualism, just his insight that the only direct experience you can have of Consciousness is your own. I'm not a dualist as such (Chalmer's is, but only insofar as he believes there are properties that exist over and above purely Physical properties). I have a real problem with Functionalism, at least with our current mechanical and computational paradigms being able to generate Consciousness. Intuitively, I would say there is something missing in our understanding of the world around us - Penrose's "missing ingredient". But although Penrose thought that missing ingredient some physical property, it's not obvious how it can be. Hence, in a way I suppose, we end up with a kind-of property dualism.
That's precisely what all you zombies (ie. everyone other than myself) are programmed to say.
People laugh at Descartes today, but he wasn't entirely wrong to point out the fundamentally internal nature of conscious experience. There is of course the other problem: Consciousness is not Supervenient on the Physical. But then, any thing that doesn't exist would, by definition, not be supervenient on the physical, unless of course to exist physically isn't the only way an entity can exist. Given that Science is the Philosophy and Study of the physical, it is no surprise to see that Science has to dismiss Consciousness as an illusion.
I think Bell's theorem shows us that the Universe cannot be both local and deterministic. That being the case, he's on pretty shaky ground proposing in-principle deterministic computability, although he is not the first to do this. I like Penrose' ideas that there is an element of non-computability involved in Consciousness, not because there's any evidence for it (there isn't much "evidence" for Consciousness at all, apart from your first person experience of it), but because to me it's the difference between being Conscious and being one of David Chalmers' zombies. I like to think I'm mostly the former.
And he ultimately addresses the possibility that the entire Universe, including everyone in it, is in principle computable by a completely deterministic computer program.
Slashdot Mirror
Ok, so what about, say, 500 years. Or how about 1,000, or 10,000? The choice of timescale is totally arbitrary. There may be decadal cycles, multi-decadal cycles, cycles over centuries, millenia, etc. Your 30 year significance test is local in time, isn't it? You can't establish a fact of the matter from that alone.
What about it not rising in the face of rising greenhouse gases say, for 10 years?
I totally disagree that this is a good idea. I prefer my current situation, where I'm in an open plan office and I can chat to all of the other developers. I have met some "autistic" developers before who want to be sealed off from everyone else so they never have to make eye contact, but to me communication with other members of the team is the most important thing. I don't mind if I have to walk around a few desks to get there either. The round table is ok, depending on how large the round table is (the bigger, the better). If I want to shut myself off to concentrate, I usually put my headphones on.
Mod this guy up. Insightful!
Please, you're abusing Occam's Razor with gay abandon. You've forgotten that a lot of energy companies, which also happen to be fossil fuel companies, are looking forward to all their new "green" subsidies. You're also forgetting that the bankers are rubbing their fat, bloated little hands with glee at the possibility of trading carbon permits. In fact that well know environmentalist organisation Goldman Sachs is taking the lead here. Yes, the great blood sucking vampire on the face of humanity is very enthusiastic about all of this global warming hysteria and is right behind you (bending you over).
But anyway, the point is quite a simple one: predictions of future catastrophe are based on models and those models didn't even last 10 years before they were shown to be wrong. So what are you doing supporting this hypothesis? I mean, put your Scientific hat on and ask yourself what has to happen in order to falsify it?
Did they use some fantastical optimisation algorithm to find the optimal path? I would be curious to know how they did this.
I was just about to make this very point. Could life on Titan have established itself in those conditions? The question seems to have been missed.
Indeed but one of the philosophical problems to overcome is the fact that our only means of enquiry here (the scientific method) may well preclude classes of hypothesis or conclusions it is incompatible with. What I mean to say is that given you can in principle discover all laws, particles, fields and forces in nature, it does not follow that once you have done so there is nothing left to explain. What you call superstition and mysticism can also be described as transcendent. It may well be that consciousness/mind falls into this class of problem.
He's wrong.
Come on, that's disingenuous to say the least. The rising trend was the same in the 1930's as it is now. It was much warmer in the MWP than it is now. It was much, much warmer 1,000,000 years ago than it is now. There's no way it's caused by a tiny amount of CO2. Even a cretin like me can see that. The whole argument is completely insane, but very lucrative for funding bodies, the media and the Chicago Climate Exchange.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=smqIGrVmu0c&feature=SeriesPlayList&p=0ADB6202C567524A
Who or whom marked this guy as a troll? He's absolutely spot on. The Unions see the public services as job creation schemes, rather than providers of useful facilities for citizens. This tells you all you need to know about why public services are so bloated and give poor value for money.
Again, that's a decision you make if you can't find a suitable framework. We developed our own framework recently for a specific product, using a few third parties libraries (which required modification). Part of the process of defining the requirements and specification for the product involves balancing time, the capabilities of available frameworks or libraries and the various skills you have within the team. If someone says to me, "I would like you to produce A, B and C and I'd like it in six months", it's perfectly acceptable for me to say, "I can give you A and B, but C will take a further six months". Defining requirements is often a kind of negotiation like that. People tend to come unstuck when those deciding what they want the product to do have no knowledge or understanding of what is required in order to do it.
Part of your skill as a developer is in applying the correct framework or library to the problem at hand. If your framework doesn't do the two or three critical things you want it to then I suggest you've chosen the wrong framework!
Common fallacy: person A believes X, group B believes X and Y, therefore person A believes Y.
Dude, you missed out the denial about smoking causing lung cancer meme? Sorry to break it to you, but you're either bad, or mad.
Haha. Actually after posting that did occur to me ;).
In other news, Fox to launch investigation into Hen-House raid.
I've been modded down enough for expressing scepticism on this issue here on slashdot, so I'm finding these stories extremely interesting (and may I say, amusing). The fact of the matter is that the hubris of those promoting the hypothesis seems to be inversely proportional to the facts of the matter. You can argue "first principles" until you're blue in the face and for as long as the facts on the ground contradict them, I would suggest the implausible chains of inference emanating from those first principles need a little work and a little humility is called for.
No, not dualism, just his insight that the only direct experience you can have of Consciousness is your own. I'm not a dualist as such (Chalmer's is, but only insofar as he believes there are properties that exist over and above purely Physical properties). I have a real problem with Functionalism, at least with our current mechanical and computational paradigms being able to generate Consciousness. Intuitively, I would say there is something missing in our understanding of the world around us - Penrose's "missing ingredient". But although Penrose thought that missing ingredient some physical property, it's not obvious how it can be. Hence, in a way I suppose, we end up with a kind-of property dualism.
I prefer the Kantian term transcendental.
People laugh at Descartes today, but he wasn't entirely wrong to point out the fundamentally internal nature of conscious experience. There is of course the other problem: Consciousness is not Supervenient on the Physical. But then, any thing that doesn't exist would, by definition, not be supervenient on the physical, unless of course to exist physically isn't the only way an entity can exist. Given that Science is the Philosophy and Study of the physical, it is no surprise to see that Science has to dismiss Consciousness as an illusion.
No more ridiculous than the idea that Consciousness is reducible to basic, known, physical laws.