Since he's talking about economics I'm certain he's referring to economic casualties, i.e. people who lost their shirt either through worthless investments, hyperinflation, obsolescence of certain labor skillsets, or environmental damage.
Mind you, famine and disease are often caused by economics. So are wars. Gee, when you think about it, an awful lot of bad shit can happen. Us late-twencen Western babies sure have had it easy so far, haven't we! But this cosy world of television, leisure time and suburban homes for the masses has only been around for a very short time relatively speaking. The chances are still very strong that much of our future will look more like our past than our present. Be scared.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is Thought exists only as an abstraction
I find it utterly unbelievable that anybody would moderate this troll as "insightful". Shoeboy, you missed the point completely: Sterling isn't taking a swipe at capitalism per se, he's just warning us about change and reminding us that our narrow little late-twentieth-century perspective (for that is what it still is) must bear very little resemblance to the world as it will be in 35 years time. And he's even given us a little peek at what it might be like to live in a society whose equilibrium point is continual and rapid technological change - which does clearly seem to be exactly where we are heading.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is Thought exists only as an abstraction
Smashing it into pieces right where we can see it sounds just fine.
If we just let it zoom off into space it'll only get damaged by a meteor collision, get sucked through a black hole, drift aimlessly for two hundred years, get picked up and repaired by an race of alien robots and then return to destroy the Earth. And you know it.
PS. I know we have two Voyager craft that run a similar same risk. But one of those is bound to go through a wormhole and get lost in the Delta Quadrant. Or something.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is Thought exists only as an abstraction
KDE is a whole desktop environment INCLUDING a window manager. Thus, it's more than just a Window manager.
GNOME is also a desktop environment and currently lacks a window manager (people generally use Enlightment or Window Maker I think) but it will soon have one of it's own. Either way, you can say it's more than just a window manager.
Anyway, the issue as to which platform is best is completely moot - both environments are only as cool as the applications written for them. I don't have much experience with GNOME apps, but I feel justified in saying that many of the applications written for KDE are total crap and seem to have been written by kids without any sense of the importance of finishing anything. The offending apps are mainly GUI with fairly little functionality behind them, and come with poor or no documentation at all.
Maybe QT makes things too easy. Judging by the above characteristics, we seem to be looking at the OSS equivalent of a generation of self-taught VB programmers here (shudder).
Don't try to use KDE in a business environment or you'll probably get burned. I cite as particular hazards: Netscape's extra propensity to crash under KDE, Kmail's lack of IMAP support and KOrganizer's general bugginess and half-hearted implementation of a "to-do" list.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is Thought exists only as an abstraction
I don't understand what your argument with this guy is. He didn't denigrate female technologists, he simply observed (perfectly correctly) that they are massively outnumbered in the workplace by males. I'd guess that he (like most of us) would be delighted to have more female co-workers.
Remember that geeks' lives tend more than most to revolve around their work, and lack of peer-group females at work means a lack of opportunity to socialize with the said females. The gender ratio in Silicon Valley is said to be particularly extreme.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is Thought exists only as an abstraction
Muppets from Space had me in stitches. It had the genuine vintage muppet feel about it. It was great to see Fozzie again but I particularly loved the Hispanic-sounding prawn.
As for Bear in the Big Blue House...well it's strictly for toddlers. But it has such a cozy feel to it that I can't help watching if one of the kids has it on. The bear is somehow friendly and invitingly cuddly - yet without being cloying like "Barney" which by contrast always makes me want to puke. More than that, it makes me want to kill something. Something big and purple.
For the record, I'm also a fan of "Blue's Clues";o) although the UK version here has a different actor than the US version, he's a very intense-looking chap with a Scouse accent called Kevin Buala, IIRC.
Did you want to know all that? No, I think not. Sorry, too tired for anything more intellectual tonight. Hard day at work and all that.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is Thought exists only as an abstraction
Moderate up please. This point isn't being made often enough. Without organization all this ranting and preaching to the converted is getting us nowhere.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is Thought exists only as an abstraction
On two consecutive mornings this week, the morning news programme on BBC Radio 4 carried "reports" where BPI (British Phonographic Industry, i.e. the UK's record industry body) told how widespread piracy was putting everyone in the media industry out of business. Then they went on to interview senior police officers who verified this. There was an air of unreality about the whole thing, though. The people interviewed were hardly well-known; I guess you can always find someone to support your view whatevr it happens to be, especially if it means they get to go "gee, look ma, I was on the radio".
But in the second programme, things took a distinct turn for the worse. After a police officer spoke first, we heard somebody declaring that the same people running "piracy" operations on CD's were also dealing in arms, hard drugs and illegal hard pornography! They said it was a fact that the revenue from piracy of CD's and videos was financing arms for terrorist outfits.
But that's not all...immediately after that quote, they then had a guy come on who reiterated the arms connection, a guy speaking in an Irish accent.
I'm convinced by this that the BBC are seeking to manipulate public opinion on behalf of the BPI and other allied bodies. I suppose they think they are protecting their own interests since the BBC have a huge storehouse of recorded material that they see as "intellectual property" which can be ripped off.
It just saddens me to see the BBC stooping so low. Misinformation and cynical manipulation we might have expected from big business and politicians, but to see the BBC doing this just makes me sick to my stomach.
So the UK too is now at war. Only, most people don't know it and probably never will before those evil bastards manage to silence us forever.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is Thought exists only as an abstraction
It hardly matters. Netware may well be superior but Novell's share of the market is declining and will continue to do so, IMNSHO. Their turnaround came too late to save them. If Operating System choice was normally decided on logic alone, Microsoft would have gone bust just after the second time they released a buggy OS. The problem is *not* a technical one - Microsoft has won the hearts of the suits, Apple the hearts of the artists, and *nix hearts of the geeks. There's just not sufficient room left to Novell for them to survive in the long term.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is Thought exists only as an abstraction
True, but it doesn't save us really. If something like UCITA were passed here in the UK, or in the EU (and in the current climate I bet it would be), all that history of legal precedent would become meaningless.
The rot has already begun to set in here. Only yesterday morning I heard a report on BBC radio 4 news about how piracy of music CD's, videos and software CD-ROMs is on the increase, about how it was ruining media businesses and so on. The figures quoted by industry spokemen in support of these wild claims were so extreme as to be literally unbelievable.
Given the timing and the outrageously Geobbelsian "Big Lie" tactics, it's fairly obvious that this is just the opening salvo in the media industry's campaign to sew up the UK market just as they've done in the US.
But what is really shocking is that the BBC news service would sink so low. I used to believe they had a degree of integrity. I guess I was wrong.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is Thought exists only as an abstraction
the phenomenal experience of the bat (for some reason a common concern of philosophers!) is going to be determined by the inherently temporal/sequential nature of the echolocation process.
Possibly, but not so much as you might think. Our own eyes and brains do a lot of jiggery-pokery to smooth out the pecular limitations of our vision for example so that subjectively those limitations don't tend to get noticed. In terms of the whole sensorium, Ernst Poppel noted that it takes on the order of 3 seconds to integrate roughly co-temporal stimuli into a unified experience, thus (as a side effect perhaps) smoothing out any artefacts caused by temporal misbehaviour of our sensory equipment. It's generally agreed that what you consciously see isn't the raw light hitting your retinae anyway; instead you see an internal 3D reconstruction from those two flat, distorted scenes.
A bat's brain is likely to be organized along similar principles...the bat doesn't "see sound"; instead the feedback from the sonar pulses is used once again to construct a sort of 3D model of the environment and *that* is likely what the bat experiences. Of course, I'm not saying that there won't be differences between the sensoria of bat and human! Only that those temporal characteristics of the senses which are not themselves used for conscious perception of the passage of time will be eliminated at a preconscious stage.
The quale of consciousness is a result of it's inward looking and hence somewhat self-referential nature.
I agree, though it can be difficult to get people to see why. Have a look at this clumsy attempt and let me know what you think. If you even get to see this...
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is Thought exists only as an abstraction
Or, the program could be run through by someone with pen and paper - but how would that system be self-aware?
Ah, the infamous "Chinese Room" argument of the damnable John Searle.
It's no good looking for consciousness at the physical level. Of course the consciousness of the Chinese Room doesn't exist in the pen, paper or even the individual doing the writing. Nor does your consciousness reside in the electrons zipping around inside your head.
Many people accept this but then make an intuitive leap in assuming the existence of something like a soul...a thing that is mystically immaterial but still fundamentally physical. However the true answer to the riddle is at once both simpler and more subtle than that.
Any system may be viewed at different levels of abstraction. Different sets of axioms and rules of logic are approprate at each level. To illustrate this: imagine a team of trained scientists, each mostly ignorant outside of their own specialty (not so uncommon really:o).
The physicist looks at the brain and sees about 2kg of matter, a complex arrangement of interacting macromolecules directed by the laws of thermodynamics and, ultimately, quantum mechanics which is reponsible for all chemistry.
The molecular biologist looks at the brain and sees only electrochemical potentials and cell transport mechanisms fashioned out of phospholipid membranes and glycoproteins.
The neuroanatomist looks at the brain and sees only cell assemblies and neural pathways fashioned out of neurons connected via different types of synapse.
The cognitive neuroscientist looks at the brain and observes the spatiotemporal firing patterns which play over the neural cell assemblies, and correlates such activity in one brain region with activity in another.
These four perspectives examine four different levels of implementation, abstraction or organization. And then, as they say, "a miracle occurs" - because this is the end of the physical trail; there are no more physical phenomena to take into account. This is commonly referred to as the "explanatory gap": our failure to relate brain correlates of consciousness to our subjective experience of it, owing to our lack of any direct objective means of measuring the non-physical.
And yet, we know for a fact that the brain routinely represents higher levels of abstraction because we can form ideas about all sorts of unseen and intangible things and use language skills to discuss them. So there must be, ipso facto, further layers.
The next level of abstraction beyond firing patterns is what I'd refer to as the object content of those firing patterns. For example, one particular unique firing pattern in some location within one specific brain will represent the concept of a tree branch with all its attributes. You'll note, by the way, that this is a purely abstract informational representation of a tree branch. It has no physical existence and there are no woody, leafy "tree-branchy" properties to be found either here or in the supporting firing patterns or cell assemblies. But it can in principle be shown in the lab that this firing pattern occurs in this particular cortical location whenever the image is evoked in the mind of the subject and we would infer that this pattern intentionally represents that object.
Let's now make the reasonable supposition that all objects which the mind can contemplate must have such internal representations (this isn't proven of course but if anyone thinks it might not be true I'd be intrigued to hear why). Now guess which of all the objects present must be modelled by your brain in the most excruciating detail? None other than yourself. For you are also an object in your own environment.
The next level pertains to the semantic relationships between these mental objects, e.g. a chimp sitting on the tree branch. Yourself eating a banana. Or your attitude towards a simple object such as the chimp, or the banana. We can be certain that "higher" animals (particularly primates) can form representations at this level at least, because Gorillas and chimps taught to communicate with humans using sign language or symbols intentionally and routinely create meaningful, relevant sentences at this level of complexity.
At the next level beyond that, it gets more interesting because this is the level that deals with complex interrelationships. Concepts such as: that nonchalant-looking chimp's possible attitude toward you hogging the banana all to yourself. Or your attitude toward him as a potential threat. It's thought by many that primates were forced to develop this level of consciousness in order to be able to survive and compete within tightly bound social groups in a resource-limited environment. The ones with insufficient brain organization to be able to support such nested concepts would have been mercilessly excluded and exploited because you need this level of mental organization to be capable of social tricks like deception. This is a very fertile area of research for behavioural psychologists.
And finally we come to the level of abstraction that I think defines us as conscious humans. If your enjoyment of the banana is a first-order relationship, and your speculation about another's attitude toward your banana eating is second-order, then this third-order level of abstraction would allow you to have an attitude about his attitude. You might feel suspicious about his motives for spying on you. Or sympathetic about his hungry discomfort.
Remember that all these attributes - "suspicious", "motivation", "sympathetic" - pertain not to the brain itself but to these abstract models of individuals; even the attributes associated with the model of the self. Instinct provides a bias. Emotion adds colour and intensity. The model of the self is necessarily more detailed than the models of other individuals, and it enjoys a privileged status with regard to the body it inhabits because that's its particular job in your internal virtual reality. But in all other respects, it's just as separate and distinct from the physical brain as all the other models with which it shares the mental landscape.
The third-order abstraction, in supporting attitudes about attitudes, is what makes us conscious. In part, it's special because it allows us to form moral judgements about the hidden mental world of other individuals and no other animals seem to be capable of this. But primarily it's because it allows us to ponder our own mental and emotional states. In other words: self-reflection, a full awareness of self. This is the unique identifying feature of human consciousness as most people understand it.
Searle was barking up the wrong tree when he concocted the Chinese Room to "prove" that consciousness couldn't be present in an AI. If the system has enough degrees of freedom that a higher level of abstraction can model third-order relationships between objects, and given that one of the objects may be a token for the system itself, then the system as a whole can think about its own thoughts and is ipso facto conscious. What else would you call it?
The conclusion of many physicists is that some fundamental physical thing(s) is going on. Hence electron tunneling etc.
The problem with that is that fundamental physics is hard enough that its practioners need serious tunnel vision to get anywhere. The unfortunate corollary is that physicists (of that genre of whoch you speak) generally know very little about neurobiology or psychology. They can't even cope with the idea of multilayered levels of abstraction (maybe because they are so used to seeing everything directly in terms of fundamental particles and forces). Just about the only exception is the chaos guys with their theory of emergent complexity, and you won't hear them talking about quantum consciousness.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is Thought exists only as an abstraction
That's the same as arguing for security through obscurity. It doesn't work for software when a cracker is determined to break in (see DeCSS for example!) so why should it work in law? If both sides' lawyers are equally competent, they should both be aware of all the arguments for and against, and should both be equally adept at presenting their own side. Given a fair and intelligent Judge and Jury as well, justice should prevail.
That is how the law is *supposed* to work, but rarely does in practice, because one side can usually afford more and/or better lawyers. This is surely the precise issue that efforts like OpenLaw are meant to address. Eyeballs. Bugs. Shallow.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is Thought exists only as an abstraction
many people associate capitalism with corporatism and government favours for large businesses, which is not free market economics.</i> <br><br> Indeed. It's nothing more than feudalism: Barons and serfs. Funny to see that nothing has really changed in a thousand years:o\ <br><br> I'm just hoping that the organizing potential of the internet will change the rules sufficiently to enable us finally to build our own castles so that we can at last compete on their terms. That's why I have great hopes for movements like Open Source, Open Law, and whatever comes out of www.cluetrain.org.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is Thought exists only as an abstraction
Absolutely. William Calvin's brilliant mosaic theory explains many of the phenomenal features of consciousness, especially why thinking and experiencing feels like it does (though not, of course, why we feel it at all). *Everybody* should read about it. If anyone is curious, the full text of his books How Brains Think and The Cerebral Code are available online at his web site.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is Thought exists only as an abstraction
Do you people realise the degree to which you are just buying into the zeitgeist?
Well, absolutely, of course. But that doesn't invalidate an idea all by itself, whichever side of the fence you happen to stand. It's all about competing paradigms, innit? Meme competition. May the best idea win.
In any case, while the sheep argument might apply to most people I'm inclined to believe that Slashdot posters are on average much more intelligent than the average. These are the people who are leading the creation of that particular zeitgeist (and many others besides).
Unlike the bulk of the population, many of us here arrived at our particular belief systems by our own rational means rather than by the more common method of just swallowing the first thing we're told or succumbing to peer pressure. For example, you yourself are a Christian but you didn't get there by the traditional route although many still do. The same might be said of me.
The above is true regardless of which zeitgeist you were referring to. (I'm not sure if you meant logical positivist reductionism or New Age quantum mindism. It doesn't matter anyway.)
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is Thought exists only as an abstraction
I think you missed Dennett's point. i.e., what he's saying is that you can't devise a test for the existence of an immaterial self because there is no immaterial self to test for. <br><br> The line of reasoning presented in the book shows by a series of thought experiments that the idea of there being some kind of ghost in the machine is a logical absurdity. Since there is no evidence for that ghost beyond the reader's own subjective (unreliable, irreproducible, untestable) experience, and since its existence would be logically absurd, and since human behaviour can be explained without it, then it isn't likely to exist at all.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is Thought exists only as an abstraction
You're absolutely correct. It's just that Penrose et al can't stand the idea that we might be essentially deterministic, material beings no matter how unpredictable.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is Thought exists only as an abstraction
Eloquently expressed, SpinyNorman. IMO, Penrose's book should rather have been titled "The Emperor Has No Clothes".
The only caveat I'd interpose is that where you say...
there's nothing more mysterious about the way it does feel to be conscious than the way green appears as a color
...you neglect to ask the question why do we "feel" anything at all? This is the so-called "hard problem" or "explanatory gap" of consciousness research: how do we get from the brain correlates of consciousness to the raw, phenomenal experience of consciousness itself (i.e qualia)?
I tend to agree with Daniel Dennett. He believes that those who imagine they experience consciousness differently than a suitably sensate machine-emulated human (a "zombie") could, are deluding themselves. He's not alone either; Kurthen, Grunwald and Elger of the University of Bonn argue in their 1998 paper Will there be a Neuroscientific Theory of Consciousness? that the whole idea of consciousness as we currently perceive it, is just a cultural construct that will eventually disappear as advances in cognitive neuroscientific understanding filter out to the world in general. In other words, the explanatory gap is really just a fiction created by the particularly weird way in which we view ourselves.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is Thought exists only as an abstraction
I thought I might have accidentally connected to the Stapp-Penrose-Sarfatti Unified Fanclub for the Advancement of Mental Illness
ROTFLMAO! Has that asshole Sarfatti been winding you up too? If you've escaped that fate so far, just make sure you don't attempt to write to him or reply to one of his posts...
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is Thought exists only as an abstraction
Slashdot Mirror
Since he's talking about economics I'm certain he's referring to economic casualties, i.e. people who lost their shirt either through worthless investments, hyperinflation, obsolescence of certain labor skillsets, or environmental damage.
Mind you, famine and disease are often caused by economics. So are wars. Gee, when you think about it, an awful lot of bad shit can happen. Us late-twencen Western babies sure have had it easy so far, haven't we! But this cosy world of television, leisure time and suburban homes for the masses has only been around for a very short time relatively speaking. The chances are still very strong that much of our future will look more like our past than our present. Be scared.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
I find it utterly unbelievable that anybody would moderate this troll as "insightful". Shoeboy, you missed the point completely: Sterling isn't taking a swipe at capitalism per se, he's just warning us about change and reminding us that our narrow little late-twentieth-century perspective (for that is what it still is) must bear very little resemblance to the world as it will be in 35 years time. And he's even given us a little peek at what it might be like to live in a society whose equilibrium point is continual and rapid technological change - which does clearly seem to be exactly where we are heading.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
Smashing it into pieces right where we can see it sounds just fine.
If we just let it zoom off into space it'll only get damaged by a meteor collision, get sucked through a black hole, drift aimlessly for two hundred years, get picked up and repaired by an race of alien robots and then return to destroy the Earth. And you know it.
PS. I know we have two Voyager craft that run a similar same risk. But one of those is bound to go through a wormhole and get lost in the Delta Quadrant. Or something.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
Duh, that's what he just said more or less.
KDE is a whole desktop environment INCLUDING a window manager. Thus, it's more than just a Window manager.
GNOME is also a desktop environment and currently lacks a window manager (people generally use Enlightment or Window Maker I think) but it will soon have one of it's own. Either way, you can say it's more than just a window manager.
Anyway, the issue as to which platform is best is completely moot - both environments are only as cool as the applications written for them. I don't have much experience with GNOME apps, but I feel justified in saying that many of the applications written for KDE are total crap and seem to have been written by kids without any sense of the importance of finishing anything. The offending apps are mainly GUI with fairly little functionality behind them, and come with poor or no documentation at all.
Maybe QT makes things too easy. Judging by the above characteristics, we seem to be looking at the OSS equivalent of a generation of self-taught VB programmers here (shudder).
Don't try to use KDE in a business environment or you'll probably get burned. I cite as particular hazards: Netscape's extra propensity to crash under KDE, Kmail's lack of IMAP support and KOrganizer's general bugginess and half-hearted implementation of a "to-do" list.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
Juvenile funny is the best kind. BG eats BS!
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
The only surprise I could find was that some of the stories have disappeared leaving just the comments by themselves. What surprise did *you* mean?
Anyone have any other early screenshots of Slashdot? I want to remember what it *looked* like.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
And as we all know, even Jar-Jar Binks can defeat an army of lethally-armed battle droids almost single handed ;o)
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
I don't understand what your argument with this guy is. He didn't denigrate female technologists, he simply observed (perfectly correctly) that they are massively outnumbered in the workplace by males. I'd guess that he (like most of us) would be delighted to have more female co-workers.
Remember that geeks' lives tend more than most to revolve around their work, and lack of peer-group females at work means a lack of opportunity to socialize with the said females. The gender ratio in Silicon Valley is said to be particularly extreme.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
Muppets from Space had me in stitches. It had the genuine vintage muppet feel about it. It was great to see Fozzie again but I particularly loved the Hispanic-sounding prawn.
;o) although the UK version here has a different actor than the US version, he's a very intense-looking chap with a Scouse accent called Kevin Buala, IIRC.
As for Bear in the Big Blue House...well it's strictly for toddlers. But it has such a cozy feel to it that I can't help watching if one of the kids has it on. The bear is somehow friendly and invitingly cuddly - yet without being cloying like "Barney" which by contrast always makes me want to puke. More than that, it makes me want to kill something. Something big and purple.
For the record, I'm also a fan of "Blue's Clues"
Did you want to know all that? No, I think not. Sorry, too tired for anything more intellectual tonight. Hard day at work and all that.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
Moderate up please. This point isn't being made often enough. Without organization all this ranting and preaching to the converted is getting us nowhere.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
Gerald Holmes, is that you?
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
The rot has spread to the UK too.
On two consecutive mornings this week, the morning news programme on BBC Radio 4 carried "reports" where BPI (British Phonographic Industry, i.e. the UK's record industry body) told how widespread piracy was putting everyone in the media industry out of business. Then they went on to interview senior police officers who verified this. There was an air of unreality about the whole thing, though. The people interviewed were hardly well-known; I guess you can always find someone to support your view whatevr it happens to be, especially if it means they get to go "gee, look ma, I was on the radio".
But in the second programme, things took a distinct turn for the worse. After a police officer spoke first, we heard somebody declaring that the same people running "piracy" operations on CD's were also dealing in arms, hard drugs and illegal hard pornography! They said it was a fact that the revenue from piracy of CD's and videos was financing arms for terrorist outfits.
But that's not all...immediately after that quote, they then had a guy come on who reiterated the arms connection, a guy speaking in an Irish accent.
I'm convinced by this that the BBC are seeking to manipulate public opinion on behalf of the BPI and other allied bodies. I suppose they think they are protecting their own interests since the BBC have a huge storehouse of recorded material that they see as "intellectual property" which can be ripped off.
It just saddens me to see the BBC stooping so low. Misinformation and cynical manipulation we might have expected from big business and politicians, but to see the BBC doing this just makes me sick to my stomach.
So the UK too is now at war. Only, most people don't know it and probably never will before those evil bastards manage to silence us forever.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
It hardly matters. Netware may well be superior but Novell's share of the market is declining and will continue to do so, IMNSHO. Their turnaround came too late to save them. If Operating System choice was normally decided on logic alone, Microsoft would have gone bust just after the second time they released a buggy OS. The problem is *not* a technical one - Microsoft has won the hearts of the suits, Apple the hearts of the artists, and *nix hearts of the geeks. There's just not sufficient room left to Novell for them to survive in the long term.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
True, but it doesn't save us really. If something like UCITA were passed here in the UK, or in the EU (and in the current climate I bet it would be), all that history of legal precedent would become meaningless.
The rot has already begun to set in here. Only yesterday morning I heard a report on BBC radio 4 news about how piracy of music CD's, videos and software CD-ROMs is on the increase, about how it was ruining media businesses and so on. The figures quoted by industry spokemen in support of these wild claims were so extreme as to be literally unbelievable.
Given the timing and the outrageously Geobbelsian "Big Lie" tactics, it's fairly obvious that this is just the opening salvo in the media industry's campaign to sew up the UK market just as they've done in the US.
But what is really shocking is that the BBC news service would sink so low. I used to believe they had a degree of integrity. I guess I was wrong.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
the phenomenal experience of the bat (for some reason a common concern of philosophers!) is going to be determined by the inherently temporal/sequential nature of the echolocation process.
Possibly, but not so much as you might think. Our own eyes and brains do a lot of jiggery-pokery to smooth out the pecular limitations of our vision for example so that subjectively those limitations don't tend to get noticed. In terms of the whole sensorium, Ernst Poppel noted that it takes on the order of 3 seconds to integrate roughly co-temporal stimuli into a unified experience, thus (as a side effect perhaps) smoothing out any artefacts caused by temporal misbehaviour of our sensory equipment. It's generally agreed that what you consciously see isn't the raw light hitting your retinae anyway; instead you see an internal 3D reconstruction from those two flat, distorted scenes.
A bat's brain is likely to be organized along similar principles...the bat doesn't "see sound"; instead the feedback from the sonar pulses is used once again to construct a sort of 3D model of the environment and *that* is likely what the bat experiences. Of course, I'm not saying that there won't be differences between the sensoria of bat and human! Only that those temporal characteristics of the senses which are not themselves used for conscious perception of the passage of time will be eliminated at a preconscious stage.
The quale of consciousness is a result of it's inward looking and hence somewhat self-referential nature.
I agree, though it can be difficult to get people to see why. Have a look at this clumsy attempt and let me know what you think. If you even get to see this...
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
Or, the program could be run through by someone with pen and paper - but how would that system be self-aware?
:o).
Ah, the infamous "Chinese Room" argument of the damnable John Searle.
It's no good looking for consciousness at the physical level. Of course the consciousness of the Chinese Room doesn't exist in the pen, paper or even the individual doing the writing. Nor does your consciousness reside in the electrons zipping around inside your head.
Many people accept this but then make an intuitive leap in assuming the existence of something like a soul...a thing that is mystically immaterial but still fundamentally physical. However the true answer to the riddle is at once both simpler and more subtle than that.
Any system may be viewed at different levels of abstraction. Different sets of axioms and rules of logic are approprate at each level. To illustrate this: imagine a team of trained scientists, each mostly ignorant outside of their own specialty (not so uncommon really
The physicist looks at the brain and sees about 2kg of matter, a complex arrangement of interacting macromolecules directed by the laws of thermodynamics and, ultimately, quantum mechanics which is reponsible for all chemistry.
The molecular biologist looks at the brain and sees only electrochemical potentials and cell transport mechanisms fashioned out of phospholipid membranes and glycoproteins.
The neuroanatomist looks at the brain and sees only cell assemblies and neural pathways fashioned out of neurons connected via different types of synapse.
The cognitive neuroscientist looks at the brain and observes the spatiotemporal firing patterns which play over the neural cell assemblies, and correlates such activity in one brain region with activity in another.
These four perspectives examine four different levels of implementation, abstraction or organization. And then, as they say, "a miracle occurs" - because this is the end of the physical trail; there are no more physical phenomena to take into account. This is commonly referred to as the "explanatory gap": our failure to relate brain correlates of consciousness to our subjective experience of it, owing to our lack of any direct objective means of measuring the non-physical.
And yet, we know for a fact that the brain routinely represents higher levels of abstraction because we can form ideas about all sorts of unseen and intangible things and use language skills to discuss them. So there must be, ipso facto, further layers.
The next level of abstraction beyond firing patterns is what I'd refer to as the object content of those firing patterns. For example, one particular unique firing pattern in some location within one specific brain will represent the concept of a tree branch with all its attributes. You'll note, by the way, that this is a purely abstract informational representation of a tree branch. It has no physical existence and there are no woody, leafy "tree-branchy" properties to be found either here or in the supporting firing patterns or cell assemblies. But it can in principle be shown in the lab that this firing pattern occurs in this particular cortical location whenever the image is evoked in the mind of the subject and we would infer that this pattern intentionally represents that object.
Let's now make the reasonable supposition that all objects which the mind can contemplate must have such internal representations (this isn't proven of course but if anyone thinks it might not be true I'd be intrigued to hear why). Now guess which of all the objects present must be modelled by your brain in the most excruciating detail? None other than yourself. For you are also an object in your own environment.
The next level pertains to the semantic relationships between these mental objects, e.g. a chimp sitting on the tree branch. Yourself eating a banana. Or your attitude towards a simple object such as the chimp, or the banana. We can be certain that "higher" animals (particularly primates) can form representations at this level at least, because Gorillas and chimps taught to communicate with humans using sign language or symbols intentionally and routinely create meaningful, relevant sentences at this level of complexity.
At the next level beyond that, it gets more interesting because this is the level that deals with complex interrelationships. Concepts such as: that nonchalant-looking chimp's possible attitude toward you hogging the banana all to yourself. Or your attitude toward him as a potential threat. It's thought by many that primates were forced to develop this level of consciousness in order to be able to survive and compete within tightly bound social groups in a resource-limited environment. The ones with insufficient brain organization to be able to support such nested concepts would have been mercilessly excluded and exploited because you need this level of mental organization to be capable of social tricks like deception. This is a very fertile area of research for behavioural psychologists.
And finally we come to the level of abstraction that I think defines us as conscious humans. If your enjoyment of the banana is a first-order relationship, and your speculation about another's attitude toward your banana eating is second-order, then this third-order level of abstraction would allow you to have an attitude about his attitude. You might feel suspicious about his motives for spying on you. Or sympathetic about his hungry discomfort.
Remember that all these attributes - "suspicious", "motivation", "sympathetic" - pertain not to the brain itself but to these abstract models of individuals; even the attributes associated with the model of the self. Instinct provides a bias. Emotion adds colour and intensity. The model of the self is necessarily more detailed than the models of other individuals, and it enjoys a privileged status with regard to the body it inhabits because that's its particular job in your internal virtual reality. But in all other respects, it's just as separate and distinct from the physical brain as all the other models with which it shares the mental landscape.
The third-order abstraction, in supporting attitudes about attitudes, is what makes us conscious. In part, it's special because it allows us to form moral judgements about the hidden mental world of other individuals and no other animals seem to be capable of this. But primarily it's because it allows us to ponder our own mental and emotional states. In other words: self-reflection, a full awareness of self. This is the unique identifying feature of human consciousness as most people understand it.
Searle was barking up the wrong tree when he concocted the Chinese Room to "prove" that consciousness couldn't be present in an AI. If the system has enough degrees of freedom that a higher level of abstraction can model third-order relationships between objects, and given that one of the objects may be a token for the system itself, then the system as a whole can think about its own thoughts and is ipso facto conscious. What else would you call it?
The conclusion of many physicists is that some fundamental physical thing(s) is going on. Hence electron tunneling etc.
The problem with that is that fundamental physics is hard enough that its practioners need serious tunnel vision to get anywhere. The unfortunate corollary is that physicists (of that genre of whoch you speak) generally know very little about neurobiology or psychology. They can't even cope with the idea of multilayered levels of abstraction (maybe because they are so used to seeing everything directly in terms of fundamental particles and forces). Just about the only exception is the chaos guys with their theory of emergent complexity, and you won't hear them talking about quantum consciousness.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
That's the same as arguing for security through obscurity. It doesn't work for software when a cracker is determined to break in (see DeCSS for example!) so why should it work in law? If both sides' lawyers are equally competent, they should both be aware of all the arguments for and against, and should both be equally adept at presenting their own side. Given a fair and intelligent Judge and Jury as well, justice should prevail.
That is how the law is *supposed* to work, but rarely does in practice, because one side can usually afford more and/or better lawyers. This is surely the precise issue that efforts like OpenLaw are meant to address. Eyeballs. Bugs. Shallow.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
many people associate capitalism with corporatism and government favours for large :o\
businesses, which is not free market economics.</i>
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Indeed. It's nothing more than feudalism: Barons and serfs. Funny to see that nothing has really changed in a thousand years
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I'm just hoping that the organizing potential of the internet will change the rules sufficiently to enable us finally to build our own castles so that we can at last compete on their terms. That's why I have great hopes for movements like Open Source, Open Law, and whatever comes out of www.cluetrain.org.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
Absolutely. William Calvin's brilliant mosaic theory explains many of the phenomenal features of consciousness, especially why thinking and experiencing feels like it does (though not, of course, why we feel it at all). *Everybody* should read about it. If anyone is curious, the full text of his books How Brains Think and The Cerebral Code are available online at his web site.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
Do you people realise the degree to which you are just buying into the zeitgeist?
Well, absolutely, of course. But that doesn't invalidate an idea all by itself, whichever side of the fence you happen to stand. It's all about competing paradigms, innit? Meme competition. May the best idea win.
In any case, while the sheep argument might apply to most people I'm inclined to believe that Slashdot posters are on average much more intelligent than the average. These are the people who are leading the creation of that particular zeitgeist (and many others besides).
Unlike the bulk of the population, many of us here arrived at our particular belief systems by our own rational means rather than by the more common method of just swallowing the first thing we're told or succumbing to peer pressure. For example, you yourself are a Christian but you didn't get there by the traditional route although many still do. The same might be said of me.
The above is true regardless of which zeitgeist you were referring to. (I'm not sure if you meant logical positivist reductionism or New Age quantum mindism. It doesn't matter anyway.)
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
Yes, but apparently Sagan did prefer a puff of smoke ;o)
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
I think you missed Dennett's point. i.e., what he's saying is that you can't devise a test for the existence of an immaterial self because there is no immaterial self to test for.
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The line of reasoning presented in the book shows by a series of thought experiments that the idea of there being some kind of ghost in the machine is a logical absurdity. Since there is no evidence for that ghost beyond the reader's own subjective (unreliable, irreproducible, untestable) experience, and since its existence would be logically absurd, and since human behaviour can be explained without it, then it isn't likely to exist at all.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
You're absolutely correct. It's just that Penrose et al can't stand the idea that we might be essentially deterministic, material beings no matter how unpredictable.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
The only caveat I'd interpose is that where you say...
I tend to agree with Daniel Dennett. He believes that those who imagine they experience consciousness differently than a suitably sensate machine-emulated human (a "zombie") could, are deluding themselves. He's not alone either; Kurthen, Grunwald and Elger of the University of Bonn argue in their 1998 paper Will there be a Neuroscientific Theory of Consciousness? that the whole idea of consciousness as we currently perceive it, is just a cultural construct that will eventually disappear as advances in cognitive neuroscientific understanding filter out to the world in general. In other words, the explanatory gap is really just a fiction created by the particularly weird way in which we view ourselves.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
I thought I might have accidentally connected to the Stapp-Penrose-Sarfatti Unified Fanclub for the Advancement of Mental Illness
ROTFLMAO! Has that asshole Sarfatti been winding you up too? If you've escaped that fate so far, just make sure you don't attempt to write to him or reply to one of his posts...
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction