That's no troll - I've had similar problems with my (heavily patched) SuSE 8.1 system (Athlon 1.2GHz/256MB on a KT7A-RAID mobo, with the two 40GB IBM 60GXP disks on separate channels of the HPT370 controller and a 128MB swap file on each disk) running a recent Hubert Mantel 2.4.21 kernel. hdparms has both DMA and LBA enabled.
Performance is never better than mediocre under KDE but that's not the real problem. The real problem is that it frequently seizes up completely.
On many occasions it coincided with memory usage going through the roof for no apparent reason, and swapping like mad. The memory problem appears to be down to either X, KDE or mozilla and I suspect mozilla is the usual culprit. Those moz developers just don't seem to take care of garbage collection in a reliable way.
On other occasions "top" appears to show X taking up an awful lot of memory (up to 50%).
In some cases killing all moz processes makes the problem go away but because of gui unresponsiveness its often easier just to keep hammering on Ctrl-Alt-Backspace until X reboots. Sometimes it is so solidy frozen that I can't even ping it from nearby. And sometimes the box is so totally hosed there's no response even after an hour so I'm left with no option but to cycle the power and hope reiserfs will be able to contain the damage.
*sigh* guess I'll give it one more try with SuSE 9.0. If they don't stay on top of the quality thing this time though I'll be switching distros.
Differing philosophies, my foot! To label your statements unscientific would be generous. It sounds like the sort of thing liberal arts undergraduates say to each other when they're stoned out of their minds on weed and amphetamines.
Look, if you want to advance a hypothesis you need to at least frame it in a scientific way - otherwise, it is just vague, meaningless handwaving.
Not me. I've just seen far too much internet porn and it's put me off. It never ceases to amaze me just how many women are willing to subject themselves to all that objectification subjugation and degradation for a few hundred bucks. And the thought that they might even actually enjoy it is even more depressing.
You know, that flattening of affect seems to happen to most people in the long run, just through the normal process of ageing.
Or maybe its not the ageing itself but just the fact of having had a shitty life. Either way, the dulling of sensation is a normal habituation response to prolonged stress.
If they just took a slice off the top that would remove a large chunk of the sensory and motor cortex, IIRC. Not a very useful part of the brain to replace. But then again you did say it was a cartoon.
Yes and I do like Moravec's thinking on this - it's a good "existence proof" for continuity naysayers - but it's also kind of a cheap distraction in that it simply sidesteps the important point that human minds or "selves", being essentially information, are at least in theory fundamentally copiable (DRM issues notwithstanding).
I won't argue with this. The point I've been making is that selfhood is preserved *if* the copying process were sufficiently accurate (and if we're talking about restoring a software backup of the human brain into a physical replacement, that requires guarantees about the quality of the replacement hardware too).
As to whether it can actually be done, all we can say at present is that we know of nothing in Physics that says a completely accurate emulation of a given human mind is impossible. As to what the minimum enabling technology would have to look like - who can say.
BTW, wrt. flattening of affect: a person who has suffered brain damage may well exhibit something similar (I suspect this is what you actually had in mind when you mentioned it).
But although we might *say* "he's not himself", we do still tend to behave as if the patient were in fact the same individual as he was before his injury. So we do in practice use rather broad definitions of "self" and "identity" when discussing different information patterns who just happen to be impressed upon the same lump of physical matter.
Why should it be any different for information patterns which are *as* similar - or even identical - just because they are impressed upon different lumps of matter which might even themselves be effectively indistinguishable?
Your definition of the self or "soul" isn't very durable; it doesn't retain its identity for longer than a few moments for the very reason that the "dynamic data" is in fact as dynamic as it is.
To put it bluntly - suppose I get hold of a human Xerox machine that makes perfectly faithful copies of living humans. I now use this to make a copy of myself.
You argue that the copy is sufficiently different from me after some arbitrarily short period just long enough to establish its own separate history that it cannot actually be me.
But now suppose that the copier is faulty and instead of making two copies there are actually three of me - but one of us gets stuck in the machine in a state of suspended animation and isn't rescued and reawakened until the following day.
At the point of awakening this version of me is identical with the me that walked into the copier at the time I did so. But *both* of the other copies are as different from this pristine version as they are from each other.
Don't you see? The problem here is with our very notion of self. In reality, individual humans aren't self-similar even over relatively brief periods of time. The you that will wake tomorrow morning isn't the same you that is sitting here now. But once we acknowledge this fuzziness of personal identity, the edges become blurred enough to encompass not only our future self on one timeline but also all our future selves on all possible timelines (you can consider this a fundamentally abstract mathematical statement; it doesn't depend on any particular interpretation of quantum mechanics). And a machine or process that makes perfect copies of you is *exactly* equivalent to a process that produces two timelines for you in one contiguous region of spacetime.
So, all the copies are you. It's just that you need to take a broader view of what "you" actually means.
I've always subscribed to (A) - and if you ever see one of my old slashdot comments from a few years ago you'll even see it in my sig (try googling for the phrase "Consciousness is not what it thinks it is").
That's the wrinkly bit at the top of the brain stem which co-ordinates movement. It's one of the oldest parts of the brain and is something we have in common with reptiles and fish. If you even removed it completely there should be no effect on higher brain functions like abstract thought or emotion. Apart from the complete downer of having no cerebellum and being effectively paralysed, that is.
and so I believe that all human life is equally valuable
But you have to draw a sensible threshold somewhere or else you come up with the ludicrous situation where a fertilized egg cell - a mere blob of jelly - is considered equal in value to a living, conscious person. Whether you're "pro-choice" or "pro-life", that's just daft.
The paradox arises because we just *can't* think logically about it. We shy away from attempting to evaluate the worth of one human being against another, for a lot of good reasons. However, a blanket rule that all biologically active human DNA is *equally* sacrosanct right down to a conceptus, brings problems of its own. Such as, for example, when considering whether to allow early termination of a pregnancy that would be life-threatening for the mother.
So I say we do need to bring practicality into our thinking somehere along the line and stop thinking in terms of black and white. Black and white is not an accurate reflection of reality.
Jizz-soaked nightclub floozies - yeeuch!! Positively appropriate for a sleazy spam merchant maybe - but I'd much rather have a geek grrl: someone with personality, taste and intelligence. Not to mention a degree of sexual continence.
By the time that happens I would expect to see some people using the same hardware/wetware interface technology to provide upgraded "online" brain functionality in their daily lives.
The advantages this would confer in the wearer (mental access to internet and telecommunications, i.e. effective omniscience via mental googling, telepathy via the telephone network, telekinetic control of devices around you etc.) would be considerable. The pressures upon people to adopt mobile phones and domestic broadband internet are minuscule by comparison.
Then it's only a matter of time before there are "humans" walking around who have finally abandoned the last vestiges of organic matter inside their skulls. Initially perhaps because of injury, disease, old age or just plain inconvenience; but eventually such a complete upgrade might be considered desirable in itself. It might come to be regarded as the final hurdle to be crossed before true adulthood is reached. Organic brain tissue would be just the cradle within which human consciousnesses are born and developed.
Imagine never having to sleep; imagine having a full range of human emotions yet being able to turn them on and off at will. Imagine having access to all the knowledge of mankind just by thinking about it, being able to communicate with anyone just by wishing it.
Imagine finding out then that we all have clipper chips, V chips, DRM technology and the like in our heads. Imagine finding out that the government has remote write access to the technology in our heads, with root privileges. It can be done so it will be done.
I'm not as comfortable with abortion as some in the "pro-choice" camp are but even so, "unborn people" hardly matter in this particular case; they don't have minds.
This argument is about sentient beings, and a human foetus is hardly sentient. It has no memory or experience worth mentioning, it has no repertoire beyond a few instinctive reflexes shared with foetuses of simpler animals, and many major brain functions required for more complex behaviour do not even finish getting wired up until after birth.
Having said all that, I do still have serious personal misgivings about abortion, especially in the last trimester of pregnancy (except when granted for truly urgent medical reasons).
(eg. see Leibniz' "Principle of Indescernibles" for a more general discussion of the topic).
More specifically:
If you copy your brain state at the point it shuts down so that all memories of the original are retrievable, and subsequently transfer those memories into a functionally identical set of hardware which is then activated with all memories intact, it's no different than waking up after being deeply asleep.
If you activate an older backup so that some memories are lost, it's no different than waking up with amnesia such as one typically suffers after a blow to the head or other traumatic accident.
In any of these cases the person waking up will identify himself using whatever memories are accessible to him. That's how you know who you are when you wake up in the morning.
To express it very conservatively indeed, there would be more fundamental differences between you as the person you are now versus you as the person you were two years ago, than there would be between you as you are now and a faithful copy of you made at this very same instant. And yet you would doubtless feel happy identifying yourself and the younger version of you as the same person.
I don't expect everybody to buy this: it's philosophically sound but still many people regard it as counterintuitive. Even William Gibson has admitted to the same misgivings as you have.
The same principle applies to teleportation, as it's most commonly envisaged; and I suspect that if teleportation of macroscopic objects ever becomes possible in the distant future, there will still be people who, like Star Trek's Dr McCoy, feel uncomfortable about the idea. But I'm not bothered; as long as the implementation was good enough I'd be quite happy to be restored from backup - especially if it was that or nothing.
The Japanese don't spell it with an 'a'. Or any other roman letter either.
'o' pronounced by a US person sounds like 'a' pronounced by a British speaker. Hence British English/Japanese dictionaries might spell it with an 'o' anyway.
Sorry if that sounds pedantic. Anyway it looks like spelling is the least of wildBlueSkies' problems.
Why don't they just write up the allegations in the form of a song (popular music, i.e. "folk" music, *used* to be used to transmit stories after all) and stick it out on kazaa etc.
Angry music and properly satirical lyrics... hmm, that *would* be an improvement on the usual dull droning on and on about sex like 90% of the crap the listening public has to endure.
Slashdot Mirror
That's no troll - I've had similar problems with my (heavily patched) SuSE 8.1 system (Athlon 1.2GHz/256MB on a KT7A-RAID mobo, with the two 40GB IBM 60GXP disks on separate channels of the HPT370 controller and a 128MB swap file on each disk) running a recent Hubert Mantel 2.4.21 kernel. hdparms has both DMA and LBA enabled.
Performance is never better than mediocre under KDE but that's not the real problem. The real problem is that it frequently seizes up completely.
On many occasions it coincided with memory usage going through the roof for no apparent reason, and swapping like mad. The memory problem appears to be down to either X, KDE or mozilla and I suspect mozilla is the usual culprit. Those moz developers just don't seem to take care of garbage collection in a reliable way.
On other occasions "top" appears to show X taking up an awful lot of memory (up to 50%).
In some cases killing all moz processes makes the problem go away but because of gui unresponsiveness its often easier just to keep hammering on Ctrl-Alt-Backspace until X reboots. Sometimes it is so solidy frozen that I can't even ping it from nearby. And sometimes the box is so totally hosed there's no response even after an hour so I'm left with no option but to cycle the power and hope reiserfs will be able to contain the damage.
*sigh* guess I'll give it one more try with SuSE 9.0. If they don't stay on top of the quality thing this time though I'll be switching distros.
Differing philosophies, my foot! To label your statements unscientific would be generous. It sounds like the sort of thing liberal arts undergraduates say to each other when they're stoned out of their minds on weed and amphetamines.
Look, if you want to advance a hypothesis you need to at least frame it in a scientific way - otherwise, it is just vague, meaningless handwaving.
Yeah, right. "Anecdotal" being the key operative term here. I hope you're joking.
Not me. I've just seen far too much internet porn and it's put me off. It never ceases to amaze me just how many women are willing to subject themselves to all that objectification subjugation and degradation for a few hundred bucks. And the thought that they might even actually enjoy it is even more depressing.
You know, that flattening of affect seems to happen to most people in the long run, just through the normal process of ageing.
Or maybe its not the ageing itself but just the fact of having had a shitty life. Either way, the dulling of sensation is a normal habituation response to prolonged stress.
I feel exactly the same way!
Yes. The self as many people think of it is more closely analogous to an executing process, than the program.
If they just took a slice off the top that would remove a large chunk of the sensory and motor cortex, IIRC. Not a very useful part of the brain to replace. But then again you did say it was a cartoon.
Yes and I do like Moravec's thinking on this - it's a good "existence proof" for continuity naysayers - but it's also kind of a cheap distraction in that it simply sidesteps the important point that human minds or "selves", being essentially information, are at least in theory fundamentally copiable (DRM issues notwithstanding).
Nice clear thinking. I like it. Are you *sure* you haven't uploaded already? ;o)
I won't argue with this. The point I've been making is that selfhood is preserved *if* the copying process were sufficiently accurate (and if we're talking about restoring a software backup of the human brain into a physical replacement, that requires guarantees about the quality of the replacement hardware too).
As to whether it can actually be done, all we can say at present is that we know of nothing in Physics that says a completely accurate emulation of a given human mind is impossible. As to what the minimum enabling technology would have to look like - who can say.
BTW, wrt. flattening of affect: a person who has suffered brain damage may well exhibit something similar (I suspect this is what you actually had in mind when you mentioned it).
But although we might *say* "he's not himself", we do still tend to behave as if the patient were in fact the same individual as he was before his injury. So we do in practice use rather broad definitions of "self" and "identity" when discussing different information patterns who just happen to be impressed upon the same lump of physical matter.
Why should it be any different for information patterns which are *as* similar - or even identical - just because they are impressed upon different lumps of matter which might even themselves be effectively indistinguishable?
Your definition of the self or "soul" isn't very durable; it doesn't retain its identity for longer than a few moments for the very reason that the "dynamic data" is in fact as dynamic as it is.
To put it bluntly - suppose I get hold of a human Xerox machine that makes perfectly faithful copies of living humans. I now use this to make a copy of myself.
You argue that the copy is sufficiently different from me after some arbitrarily short period just long enough to establish its own separate history that it cannot actually be me.
But now suppose that the copier is faulty and instead of making two copies there are actually three of me - but one of us gets stuck in the machine in a state of suspended animation and isn't rescued and reawakened until the following day.
At the point of awakening this version of me is identical with the me that walked into the copier at the time I did so. But *both* of the other copies are as different from this pristine version as they are from each other.
Don't you see? The problem here is with our very notion of self. In reality, individual humans aren't self-similar even over relatively brief periods of time. The you that will wake tomorrow morning isn't the same you that is sitting here now. But once we acknowledge this fuzziness of personal identity, the edges become blurred enough to encompass not only our future self on one timeline but also all our future selves on all possible timelines (you can consider this a fundamentally abstract mathematical statement; it doesn't depend on any particular interpretation of quantum mechanics). And a machine or process that makes perfect copies of you is *exactly* equivalent to a process that produces two timelines for you in one contiguous region of spacetime.
So, all the copies are you. It's just that you need to take a broader view of what "you" actually means.
I've always subscribed to (A) - and if you ever see one of my old slashdot comments from a few years ago you'll even see it in my sig (try googling for the phrase "Consciousness is not what it thinks it is").
Replacing the cerebellum would be no big deal.
That's the wrinkly bit at the top of the brain stem which co-ordinates movement. It's one of the oldest parts of the brain and is something we have in common with reptiles and fish. If you even removed it completely there should be no effect on higher brain functions like abstract thought or emotion. Apart from the complete downer of having no cerebellum and being effectively paralysed, that is.
But you have to draw a sensible threshold somewhere or else you come up with the ludicrous situation where a fertilized egg cell - a mere blob of jelly - is considered equal in value to a living, conscious person. Whether you're "pro-choice" or "pro-life", that's just daft.
The paradox arises because we just *can't* think logically about it. We shy away from attempting to evaluate the worth of one human being against another, for a lot of good reasons. However, a blanket rule that all biologically active human DNA is *equally* sacrosanct right down to a conceptus, brings problems of its own. Such as, for example, when considering whether to allow early termination of a pregnancy that would be life-threatening for the mother.
So I say we do need to bring practicality into our thinking somehere along the line and stop thinking in terms of black and white. Black and white is not an accurate reflection of reality.
Jizz-soaked nightclub floozies - yeeuch!! Positively appropriate for a sleazy spam merchant maybe - but I'd much rather have a geek grrl: someone with personality, taste and intelligence. Not to mention a degree of sexual continence.
By the time that happens I would expect to see some people using the same hardware/wetware interface technology to provide upgraded "online" brain functionality in their daily lives.
The advantages this would confer in the wearer (mental access to internet and telecommunications, i.e. effective omniscience via mental googling, telepathy via the telephone network, telekinetic control of devices around you etc.) would be considerable. The pressures upon people to adopt mobile phones and domestic broadband internet are minuscule by comparison.
Then it's only a matter of time before there are "humans" walking around who have finally abandoned the last vestiges of organic matter inside their skulls. Initially perhaps because of injury, disease, old age or just plain inconvenience; but eventually such a complete upgrade might be considered desirable in itself. It might come to be regarded as the final hurdle to be crossed before true adulthood is reached. Organic brain tissue would be just the cradle within which human consciousnesses are born and developed.
Imagine never having to sleep; imagine having a full range of human emotions yet being able to turn them on and off at will. Imagine having access to all the knowledge of mankind just by thinking about it, being able to communicate with anyone just by wishing it.
Imagine finding out then that we all have clipper chips, V chips, DRM technology and the like in our heads. Imagine finding out that the government has remote write access to the technology in our heads, with root privileges. It can be done so it will be done.
I'm not as comfortable with abortion as some in the "pro-choice" camp are but even so, "unborn people" hardly matter in this particular case; they don't have minds.
This argument is about sentient beings, and a human foetus is hardly sentient. It has no memory or experience worth mentioning, it has no repertoire beyond a few instinctive reflexes shared with foetuses of simpler animals, and many major brain functions required for more complex behaviour do not even finish getting wired up until after birth.
Having said all that, I do still have serious personal misgivings about abortion, especially in the last trimester of pregnancy (except when granted for truly urgent medical reasons).
(eg. see Leibniz' "Principle of Indescernibles" for a more general discussion of the topic).
More specifically:
If you copy your brain state at the point it shuts down so that all memories of the original are retrievable, and subsequently transfer those memories into a functionally identical set of hardware which is then activated with all memories intact, it's no different than waking up after being deeply asleep.
If you activate an older backup so that some memories are lost, it's no different than waking up with amnesia such as one typically suffers after a blow to the head or other traumatic accident.
In any of these cases the person waking up will identify himself using whatever memories are accessible to him. That's how you know who you are when you wake up in the morning.
To express it very conservatively indeed, there would be more fundamental differences between you as the person you are now versus you as the person you were two years ago, than there would be between you as you are now and a faithful copy of you made at this very same instant. And yet you would doubtless feel happy identifying yourself and the younger version of you as the same person.
I don't expect everybody to buy this: it's philosophically sound but still many people regard it as counterintuitive. Even William Gibson has admitted to the same misgivings as you have.
The same principle applies to teleportation, as it's most commonly envisaged; and I suspect that if teleportation of macroscopic objects ever becomes possible in the distant future, there will still be people who, like Star Trek's Dr McCoy, feel uncomfortable about the idea. But I'm not bothered; as long as the implementation was good enough I'd be quite happy to be restored from backup - especially if it was that or nothing.
Or vice versa or something, you know what I mean.
The Japanese don't spell it with an 'a'. Or any other roman letter either.
'o' pronounced by a US person sounds like 'a' pronounced by a British speaker. Hence British English/Japanese dictionaries might spell it with an 'o' anyway.
Sorry if that sounds pedantic. Anyway it looks like spelling is the least of wildBlueSkies' problems.
ROTFLMAO!
Proof, if it were ever needed, that scores should be able to go higher than 5...
Huh? "Thank you" in Japanese? I don't get it.
(Score:0, Paleolithic)
Why don't they just write up the allegations in the form of a song (popular music, i.e. "folk" music, *used* to be used to transmit stories after all) and stick it out on kazaa etc.
... hmm, that *would* be an improvement on the usual dull droning on and on about sex like 90% of the crap the listening public has to endure.
Angry music and properly satirical lyrics
Like I say, kill two birds with one stone.