Blasphemy is illegal in some countries. Why? Largely because Islam forbids reinterpretation and that's so much part of the system that it is law. You need to remember many take the religion seriously, as in they spend many hours reading the texts, and taking the authority of the religious leaders as truth. Yes there are many economic factors, but religion is a factor too, just like Western philosophers who were just writing some books and spreading ideas, were a factor in the development of Western modernity. Modernity says, choose Progress or choose God. So to some extent, when these guys hold up signs saying, "God is great, Islam will rule the world", that is literally what they intend. From a Moslem perspective, Christianity and Judaism got it wrong ––those religions turned out soft and undisciplined, and that's why the West is filled with godless pornography and women with jobs. A certain percentage of Muslims do not want to make that mistake again. They want a return to the Golden Age. That's why a principle like "free speech" which an English philosopher was writing about in 1870 or so, is seen as a mere "excuse" by Islamists. To some extent the religious thinking, is part of the cultural thinking and attitudes towards modernity, and they largely reject it. The question is how many? What percentage of Islamic countries are modernising, and what percentage are just biding their time until they can gain more power.
Yes design is a discipline and has its own way of thinking about problems. There is a lot of intuitive intelligence and that's just not expresible in words and logical argument. Your brain grasps the whole picture, often despite the details. So can a design be patented? Who knows, fashion designers and architects put up with constant blatant copying, and it is "oh I just saw a picture of it and I want to make mine look just like it" copying. Ie. the person did NOT got through the weeks of design and redesign and problem solving and toying with the impossible to try to make it work, they just saw, "oh look, it is possible to do it THAT way, and it is selling really well, LET'S MAKE ONE JUST THE SAME". Or try anyway. From a consumer point of view, it is great because you can go to Zara and buy cheap knock-offs of every recent design.
High street clothes stores will go out, buy a bunch of clothes from high end designers, and literally take the garment apart, measure it, and duplicate the pattern, perhaps adding a button or a belt. It is blatant copying, as in, they did not have to bother doing the design work themselves or trying to hire the most creative designers. (And if the designs are just overpriced rubbish with a label, why bother copying it anyway? Your copy doesn't carry the label. People are buying the design because they like it.) Now to any designer, that copying is going to feel bad somewhere on a scale of "cheap" to "evil". But it is copying. And if some stories are to be believed, Google got the heads up on the iPhone via insider info, decided they liked it more than a Blackberry, and chose to copy much of it. But that's life. Maybe there should be no laws against it, and people can keep shopping at Zara. But let's not forget that new designs are RISKS and the iPhone could have flopped massively. It is easier to sit back and let other companies do your market research for you.
More impressive would be any machine that is having an experience, regardless of whether in its experience it has a concept of itself or not. A digital camera can receive light, process the image and find patterns of faces. But it isn't experiencing the image, it isn't sentient. One wonders at what point sentience appears. Have to imagine a machine that's far more sophisticated than a human, able to behave in even more complex ways, tell jokes, make art, solve problems, yet be completely without experience/sentience. Why would it be sentient? Why do humans have to be sentient?
I was watching an interview with a Kenyan fundamentalist (can't remember which religion) and she said that it was better to kill the person because they were better off dead. It really is the principle that divides open societies from closed ones: can I question my own view, and can I see that others might have a different view? Can I self-question and can I entertain the notion that I might be fallible? So better not to try to impose what I think is right on everyone else, even if I believe it is for their own good and that if I don't they'll burn in hell forever? I'll bet a lot of terrorists are very softly spoken nice people who worry about whether they have tidied the house and sent money to their mother. "Peace" means, it'll be OK when everyone conforms. So we just have to make them. Closed versus open. Incidentally USA was closed minded about the whole Iraq WMDs thing and their right to act unilaterally. Much of the world is actually far worse but just to say, before anyone cries hypocrite.
smartPHONE or SMARTphone... that's the question. How deep do people want the software to go? Do they want to run OmniGraffle, or just share pics of parties on FB? Android and iOS are full blown OSs' capable of supporting a lot, but what are people using it for? So how much does the polish of the depth of software matter to them? And wanting to just upload pics is fine by the way. I guess the less depth, the less the ecosystem matters, the less advantage iOS could have, the more people will feel free to swap models every two years, even between platforms. What difference does it make if you're just getting on with your life, doing your diary and FB and stuff, which platform you use? Can be WP7 or iOS or Android or Bada or anything.
It is odd to complain about "lock-in" when the lock-in effect only comes into being if you're wanting a lot of depth for the software, wanting it to be an ecosystem. If someone wants an ecosystem, they'll get lock-in anyway (you're tied to Android, even if you can choose a handset). So then you want a good ecosystem, and problems like polish and availability and fragmentation and updates and... I'm really trying to think of an area where Android is a clear winner on this... ok you can choose hardware more... and maybe Google policies are better... but the lock-in comes from wanting an ecosystem. If you don't want an ecosystem then there is no lock-in. Who cares about iKitchenSync media libraries, you won't have a media library, you're not interested in unifying all your data in the cloud or your NAS or whatever. Lock-in means nothing to you because you can just as easily do a few things you need on any device.
But if people want a platform (nowadays called an ecosystem, bah!) then it is a marriage -- you commit to one thing to get the most out of it and yes you have lock-in. But Android is not free of lock-in... someone will dominate that. What if you decide you don't like some new Google policy about Android? People spend too much time arguing over whether Apple or Google are more evil, when it is really a case of, you know what, if you want to marry yourself to a platform, you are going to suffer from lock-in in one way or another, it limits your options in certain ways.
It is a compromise. Do I glance at a smaller widget, or do I tap an icon and get the whole screen devoted to that app and its abilities? For example weather. Maybe I most want to see the rain radar image, which is for the whole country so I want to zoom in to my area. Not really doable glancing at a widget, at some point I still go into the app. Any company could do widgets, the question from an Apple-design sorta mindset, if you believe such a thing exists, is why the didn't provide widgets. I dislike Metro tiles for the same reason -- they take up more space just to show a tiny bit of info when most of the time I'll want to go into the app anyway. Some like that compromise, some don't.
We already know that brain is a biological computer with multiple chemical and electrochemical interfaces to the rest of the body. This is understood very well, and was understood even before people had computers and therefore could not yet compress this explanation into such a short statement. The only things unknown about it are the structure and mechanisms, and it's extremely foolish to claim that it breaks the laws of nature known through Physics and Chemistry.
Any alternative to the above is LESS LIKELY TO BE TRUE than "we are all in The Matrix" or "We are in a dream of a sleeping God" hypotheses, what means that it can not be a part of any realistic philosophy and should be relegated to the realm of fiction. All support for this nonsense comes from superstition and nowhere else.
It makes sense up to a point. But here's a problem. If you are an organism, a biological computer, just a very sophisticated one, but a computer nonetheless, then your computer is able to get up, go to work, send messages to other biological computers, network and form societies of biological computers, and all of this computation can happen automatically. I don't mean to shout but, THERE IS NO NEED FOR YOU TO BE AWARE OF ANY OF THIS. In the biological computer model, consciousness has zero part to play. Consciousness has zero value, serves zero purpose, and simply doesn't need to exist.
The whole of the universe and all the organisms could just as easily be running IN THE DARK, computing, executing, interacting, evolving, without any awareness anywhere to experience any of the process. Consciousness, the experiencer, is totally unnecessary. For example, your fancy digital camera captures light, processes it and identifies faces and adjusts the focus on the faces. The camera doesn't experience doing this, the camera is not a "being".
Yet "being" is the single most irrefutable fact of your existence. You're a being. You are right now experiencing being. And that conscious experience is totally irrelevant to a biological computer. So why are you experiencing? It has no purpose to experience. Why be able to watch life? What is watching matter? Matter doesn't watch matter, matter reacts, processes, computes. Even "emotions" don't need to be experienced, they are chemical floods in the brain. They work perfectly well without anyone to "experience them. The message still gets there, it is physical.
At most you are along for the ride, but all the "choices" you make are being executed by the biological computer, so even being aware of choices has zero value. The system doesn't need "you" the conscious part. What could your brain possibly not be able to process on its own automatically and in the dark? Your brain can run all the processes that need to run. Why do you have to experience any of life? Why the awareness? Why consciousness? The brain could process information and make decisions and adapt and do all that stuff IN THE DARK. Matter exists. No reason for consciousness to exist. Yet it does. Or perhaps in some very strange way, the two are false categories, but that's taking us to the mind-body problem. If it is simple, if you are a biological computer, then you should be running in the dark, you shouldn't be experiencing your life. The simpler model and the only necessary model is that the brain runs in the dark. See we are not adding anything that isn't already forced upon us by the mere fact that we experience life as a conscious being.
I mean, yes we can forget the weird otherworldly ideas, because most people never see those anyway. (Some do, lately a neurosurgeon has an NDE and OBE and when he woke up, his understanding as a neurosurgeon, knowing his brain's condition at the time he was having these experiences, his understanding as a neurosurgeon was that he should not have been experiencing anything at all, so he wrote a book about it). But the point is, even being conscious as an experiencer, that is already strange, even though it is taken for granted when we say, oh the brain is a biological computer and nothing more. Everyone is conscious, yet the universe could work 100% without that. It would just run in the dark.
Great comment, especially and also about design. Design, be it a bridge or a house or a car seat, is a long hard process, involving lots of choice and compromise about how something works and what's possible. But it is really easy to make mistakes. Eg. a lot of well meaning social housing was built in the 60s that featured long corridors which, unlike a street where people's windows overlook the street, these corridors were just an anonymous row of doors, and isolated. Result, people felt unsafe, people got mugged in their own building. The designers were trying to invent a new better system for housing but they didn't realise something crucial that made space work: safety. Eventually a designer writes "Defensible Space" and everyone gets it. A lot of design is like that, which is why designers tend to be taught to try to imagine new problems arising. Even the design of a kettle is full of compromises, and the designer has to somehow find the right balance to make it work right and not be annoying to use and safe and so on. Many design problems involve dealing with opposing criteria. This is all part of the "give them what they never knew they wanted" because anything novel will have novel problems, and designers are supposed to try to anticipate, by looking for problems. This is why in a sense, Samsung "copied" Apple, not because designers don't copy, everyone copies, but they had a successful model to follow. Apple couldn't know the iPad would succeed, but Samsung could follow what had already proven to succeed. That's the only sense I'd say they "copied" Apple, but that slipstreaming is part of the design game anyway. But coming back to your point, you can give users choice, which is to say, you're telling them to be the designer, so welcome to a few years of practice of thinking about design. Or we can just notice that design is a speciality like many skills, and rather than spend the time learning it for myself, learning about all the choices, and compromises, and doing lots of problem solving, and lots of research to see what's possible, when the thing I'm needing, is needed actually for a task, and no I would rather make the cup of tea than spend a week researching how to build a kettle, then just try to find some products that have good design. I mean, some designers argued users should have more choice, so they invented and gave them the open plan office, which is basically, you're free to choose anything except quiet and focus.
Don't you mean, Global Climate Disruptive Uncertainty Heisenberg Principle of Precautionary Direct Action for the Projection of Greed and Sin on Human Species by Modelling of Chaos within Envelope of Creative Statistical Subjective Robust Confidence of Future Scenario-as-Predicion Caveat Reality?
ok I actually bored myself writing that. you point stands, it's already politically dead, the rest is just slow backtracking.
Personally, MS software brings memories of irritations. But I applauded their attempts to make stuff easier in XP and make stuff designed in Metro, except they just turned out to have even more irritations. Apple by contrast, may leave a lot of useful stuff out, but what they leave in isn't so irritating.
The damage from minor irritations isn't to be underestimated. It is like getting a tat, and people say "oh the pain is fine" until they reach a threshold a few hours later, and suddenly they want to punch the tattoo artist.
Plus, I note that as soon as Apple added iCloud, my iPad 1 started having noticeable lags. I wonder just how delicately each feature is balanced against what the hardware can manage. A little here a little there, Microsoft can market it as a PC, but how usable will it feel if developers try to treat it like a PC?
In the demo he said it has two touch screens, one for stylus and one for fingers, so that you can lean on it whist writing. But the first time he tried to lean on it, it didn't know he was about to write, and it took it as a gesture to zoom the screen. Then he tried again this time being careful not to lean before the stylus hit the screen, so that it knew he was writing and ignored the palm resting. Details, but basically, they affects the feel. Can a tablet really work as a PC?
How do you write apps that may or may not deal with touch, stylus, and keyboard in various combinations? How will people know what it is that each app assumes you should do?
I'd have thought the main limitation for tablets is the small screen size. I see people on the bus using their iPad, and I'm not even in a big city. It is only a PC if it has a big screen. The iPad was supposed to be a better solution to the notebook. Ie. still a small screen, but a new UI that's actually suited to a small screen.
Well in a way that problem's been solved with a good enough UI in iOS. Metro is kinda different, if you happen to be a fan of 1930s Swiss Style design, but the Swiss didn't design that stuff for interactive UIs, they designed it for static signage in the 1930s. It is tempting for newbie designers to come up with something that looks very different -- until they realise why most designs that work end up looking quite the same -- there are reasons why the stuff has to work the way it does. Tiles don't really give you much but they take up more space. They also end up looking very non-distinct and force people back to 1 bit iconography. Unless you break that rule and so now you've just got normal icons but on a gaudy box. There are very few apps that benefit from having a line of text for status on the icon. That's just one example. Plus they've loaded that onto the desktop for no good reason. I don't like LaunchPad on OS X either. It looks dumb.
Apart from note taking, what does Surface give people in mobile usage that they don't already get with other mobile OS's?
The problem area I imagine is most critical is somehow turning all those desktop Office documents into something you can use from anywhere and from any device. That's a cloud problem. Maybe MS will conquer that totally. But office documents are a pain on a small screen, ergo don't make a small screen device for them. Office is like MS's biggest cash cow. Yet they seem to be ignoring the issue. Office doesn't work on a small screen but people want to be mobile. Hmmm....
The ideal office might be one where you have a small box the size of a thick iPod but that doesn't have a screen. It's purpose is that it acts as your personal cloud and with ubiquitous computing you carry it everywhere and your IT department sets it up for you and it can connect to any screen and network anywhere and you can use it as your own personal really personal secure PC preset with all the arcane VPN settings and all that which lets you be corporate anywhere. All your weird custom software and encryptions and keys are on it. You just need to wirelessly be near a keyboard and screen and maybe a network. A completely different class of product that truly replaces the PC because it really allows you to be in your office anywhere. If you're on a building site you can stand next to a 50" screen and pull up your architectural drawings, because the thing is running AutoCAD or ArchiCAD or whatever. If you're in a cafe you can pull up your Microsoft office documents on the 20" courtesy displays. If you're just out and about it can relay your email to your phone's display. Instead of the battery driving a screen, it drives the CPU, so can run stuff a tablet never could. Ba
I agree although perhaps it isn't outages that'll put people off. Just musing this as I once again waited for the very unreliable bus this morning -- yet I still use public transport.
I think the cloud needs to do something that can't be done any other way, and that's the reason people would use it, and even depend on it. Like syncing stuff because it is too much hassle trying to remember which docs I copied to which piece of hardware, or like setting my device at home to record a show using my mobile, or using my mobile as a boarding pass. These are all new applications that people find handy. And sometimes they don't work, but they're still handy.
But putting it all in the cloud just for the sake of it? Why? What's the point? You'll need some IT people on site, if only to plug in those wires to the cloud, or show people how to login to the cloud, or decide which cloud to use.
Not that these are the best examples, but like, Apple: yes you can reinstall your whole operating system from the cloud if you need to in a disaster. Google: your whole system is just a local cache and really it is all in the cloud which you need most of the time. The first is something new you couldn't do before. The latter is kinda, well, why? The latter would make sense if laptop hard drives were still tiny. Instead they just give you a tiny hard drive, because well, why?
If I removed the kitchen and bathroom I could live in a smaller cheaper house. But again, why? It isn't so expensive to add a kitchen and bathroom, and they're very handy.
Physical or empirical, that still doesn't save you from the headache of trying to understand feedbacks.
With feedbacks in a system, a cause can look exactly like an effect and vice versa.
CO2 on its own is only credited with up to a degree of warming. After that all the additional rises, be it 2C or 8C, is all up to feedbacks.
And given the wide range of things they can't rule out -- can't rule out 8C rise -- there's obviously a lot of head scratching going on trying to understand what this "physical model" can propose as scenarios. Remember the IPCC calls them scenarios, not predictions.
At this point most invoke the Precautionary Principle, but that itself needs caution, because action or no action, there are consequences and risks whatever you do or don't do. So at this point most invoke their gut and start calling someone a denier. But that's prejudice.
The people who interpret the books literally and ignore reason, they look at the world as simply about being a good believer. They're extreme and can be usually ignored. They're also who people tend to think of when they think of "creationists". Let me ignore them here for now, as I don't live in USA so don't have them making laws and stuff. Sorry USA, that's your problem, sorta like Iran.
Then there's the people who within reason, wonder, gee, the universe is "creating" all this new stuff, how does that work?
And here you have two sorts of "answers".
First there's the idea that pure randomness combined with having to survive in the environment, has generated life.
Then there's the idea that, um, no, pure randomness alone is not enough, even with natural selection weeding out the failures. Within reason, some people wonder that, somehow, there's additional physical mechanisms going on that we haven't detected, which are somehow generating better solutions.
Both sides would agree that evolution has happened. But whether randomness+selection is enough all on its own to account for all the life that's appeared, is a question, and it is here that it becomes more controversial, because many maintain that randomness+selection is enough, even though they can't actually prove that by running a universe forward on this principle. It sorta just becomes an opinion that's strongly held.
Part of the reason that it becomes such a strong opinion is that many reasonably feel that if you let in the idea that randomness+selection on its own isn't enough, then you open the door to the fundamentalist extremist irrational people who simply believe books literally. Well that is a problem. But so is figuring out how life works. And if there are additional mechanisms going on –– mutations are not random -- and after all, a ball doesn't bounce randomly, it obeys physical laws -- maybe there are laws governing what's created that somehow make it already predisposed to be adapted to the environment. Whatever. IANAB but as I say, who can prove it has to be random?
As bad as that is, it was apparently far worse in the past. See "The Better Angels of Our Nature: The Decline of Violence In History And Its Causes" by Pinker.
The need to go to space is because life has to outgrow this little rock.
If we stay here we will, eventually, die out. "Sustainability" is a myth.
If we had the resources to build giant contained cities, we could let the planet go back to nature. Urbanisation reduces cruelty and violence and civilises people. But we are not even half urbanised. We need more resources, be it using space rocks, to build the giant self contained cities. Then you can let nature flourish undisturbed.
The alternative is we go back to burning dung in mud huts and slaughtering every animal we can get our hands on. That's what we used to do. We were very good at it, hence our numbers grew and grew and we came to dominate the planet. Dismantling industrial society would only send us back to that, and we'd have to tear up the planet again a second time, because the mentality of people living in villages and tribes is much more brutal than what modern people have, and once your situation is back to that, your mentality goes back to that too in a dozen generations. There's a reason the "desert religions" were so brutal -- people were tribal and killing others was basically the only way to resolve things.
We have one chance now, in the 21st century, one window to get to space for real. If we don't do it now it is a downward spiral, and we won't have the resources from this planet to try industrialising again, so we will all hit the wall again, and slowly we'll poison everything, in our millions of warring tribes, and even nature won't really survive.
Either we get off this planet and figure out how to grab our materials from the lifeless solar system, or we slowly perish in a downward spiral of crises, violence, competition, wars, pollution and global extinction, taking this garden of nature down with us.
It seems rational but the causality is not simple. Your body can "decide" what to do with the energy you eat. It can burn it or store it. If it decides to burn it, your metabolic rate goes up (in my case I felt hot a lot) and you can have more impulse to move around. But equally your body could decide to store that energy, in which case you get fat, you feel tired (the energy has been stored already) and you metabolism goes down. That's what confuses a lot of the arguments, which direction does the causality go? Imagine you have a machine that has a chip that runs a program that decides whether to feed the fuel to the engine or to the batteries for charging. If the program is in "charge" mode then your batteries will get fat and you won't move no matter how much fuel you put in. That's the point about the "child eats more because he's growing" rather than "child grows because he eats more".
Your example with lab rats is very misleading because in the experiment the own control mechanism of rat's organism was artificially overridden. This matters to healthy organisms who don't receive additional insulin exactly how? Right, not at all.
That's the point –– eating carbs artificially drives up your insulin.
We never used to have access to pasta and bread. But you could bring down an animal and gorge on its substantial fat tissue.
Anyway there are lots of details in the information and arguments both ways. Only reason I'm posting it here is because I found in the last 3 years it has worked so well for me, and that's not just an anecdote, at some point any doctor has to ask the patient, how are you feeling? I eat less than 40 gm of carbs a day and my energy and mental clarity and weight and sound sleep has never been so good. It really amazed me as I wasn't expecting it. Of course your body may be different. The Taubes arguments are interesting but I only took interest because they proved to have effect with my body.
The energy balance equation of, food eaten equals fat stored minus exercise, is used in a very misleading way. Most assume you can manipulate it yourself by eating less and exercising more. But that ignores entirely the body's own control system. There are some lab rats that were starved to death by underfeeding, in an experiment, and whilst they starved to death they were gaining fat and died obese. Why? Because they were also receiving insulin and this told their bodies to store fat no matter what, even if they were not being fed, so they converted their muscle and organs into fat and stored that instead. They died of weak heart mucles and heart failure.
It is like a child eats extra to grow but he doesn't grow because he's eating extra, he eats extra and grows because the body's hormones are controlling things and telling the body to eat more and grow. It is all about hormones. Why do diabetics take insulin? To CONTROL their blood sugar. That's what insulin does. Insulin decides that you have to lower that blood sugar. And how does it control it and get it out of the blood stream? It tells fat cells to open up and absorb it. That's what "lowers" your blood sugar. The insulin decides to store it. And as it is storing it, your normal metabolism is still hungry. So the energy equation is used wrong. You don't get fat because you overeat, you overeat because you're getting fat.
What drives up insulin levels beyond normal, beyond what our 100,000 year old bodies are used to? Carbohydrates. You can eat fat and that'll be converted to energy and you'll want to move more. But eat carbs in the massive unusual quantities that we do, like pasta, pizza, bread, potatoes, and sugared drinks, and it all turns to sugar and insulin has to be produced in huge quantities to deal with it. Your normal blood sugar is one teaspoon of sugar. That's it. That's all we're made to deal with. So insulin goes nuts trying to deal with all that "healthy slow release energy" and eventually you get obese and you get diabetes.
The food pyramid was a huge shift towards grains (bird food) and away from fat. The fat / heart disease / lipid hypothesis was wrong 50 years ago and by committee "we have to tell the politicians what to regulate even if we aren't sure ourselves" consensus opinion ended up dominating and it is still wrong today. Eating a low fat high carb diet is a recipe not only for obesity but also depression. Just try switching to a genuine low carb high fat diet (see Sweden's latest magazine, "LCHF") and try it for yourself. After a month carbs just don't look like food anymore. Sleep better, feel lighter, feel satiated all the time (fat is filling, whilst carbs increase appetite or make you sleepy) and have more mental clarity. YMMV but that's been my experience to my surprise.
There are so many things wrong with the current dogma around the food pyramid that you have to undo many issues before you can wade your way to some clarity. But the best thing is to actually try it for a period, and see if what the proponents of LCHF and paleo say is true. Your own body can tell you.
Go and check what that research about bad fat and heart disease was actually based on, how they've repeatedly failed to show in good controlled studies that eating low fat is good for you, or that counting calories and exercising lets you lose wight. Those studies keep failing but the advocates keep hoping the next big study will show it. The start in rise in obesity coincided with the start of that advice about fat being the devil and to make most of your food plate carbs (sugar) instead. It has been a massive experiment on the public and it has gone catastrophically wrong, but rather than say that they just call people weak willed and lazy. All those carbs and sugar simply drive up your hunger whilst storing it as fat and keeping you tired.
My point is, I think a highly sophisticated enough robot could function at 100% human level. Therefore humans as we are, don't neeeeed to be sentient to be humans.
My point is, nature could have humans doing human stuff, like chimps and dogs do their stuff, without humans needing any sentience, or anything needing any sentience -- everything could just process data inputs and run sophisticated behaviour programs. As I said, a sophisticated camera could process images and identify objects and speak words.
Yet we are ALSO sentient. Matter doesn't need sentience.
Yeah, I'm fairly atheist myself, it is the materialist side that I'm questioning. The thread is sorta, we might be living in The Matrix, and how could we tell? How do we know our memories are not implanted, as you say. That's what makes consciousness itself quite different, and not easily reducible to being a "side effect" of matter. Descartes sorta did this questioning, he thought that everything could be The Matrix and his senses could be entirely a simulation, the whole reality fed to him as a simulation, so he could not truly trust any of out, but what he could not doubt was that he was aware, that existence was happening, that he was experiencing. (He's usually quoted as "I think therefore I am" but apparently the proper translation was "Existence, therefore being") If consciousness was a side effect of the simulation, we could't even trust consciousness, yet, you are aware, and there is no denying that. I experience. I am present. It is beyond any question. That's what makes consciousness so irreducible to anything else. Even notions about God and souls and all that, they are just thoughts and beliefs and they are equally just as suspect as anything else that happens to be coming up within the simulation. But the awareness itself, the feeling of existing, simply knowing you exist, that isn't reducible to anything else. It is very simple but often overlooked. But of course, we know the brain is a material phenomenon and it seems to affect what people experience, like losing memories, vision loss, etc. But awareness itself, that seems to be in a category of its own.
I think the real trouble and problem comes up considering consciousness. The eye and brain are analogous to a camera with a lens, a CCD and a CPU processing images. A really advanced CPU could even start describing in words what it is looking at. But at no point does the camera experience the image it is capturing. That's the difficult issue with sentience. What is this ability to experience, as opposed to just mechanistically reacting by processing inputs and outputs? Why are we not just human robots, acting in an environment -- a sophisticated robot could act behaviourally in complex ways that match human complexity, yet would not require sentience, it can just process data on a high enough level -- but no sentience would be needed -- it would be 100% asleep, just a sophisticated "sleepwalking" robot -- so why do we, in addition to being biological human machines, also sentiently experience? And as you say, the hallucination starts right from the beginning, although we might not remember a lot, and who knows, at that point why limit the dream to one instant, or one day, or one lifetime? Our everyday consciousness is beyond weird. Yet the ability to create experience is the most basic nature of our existence. It isn't just "self-awareness" in the sense of having a mental concept of myself as a human with a name. It is sentience that is experiencing everything, whether I know my name or not. Plus, we seem to acknowledge that there are many many sentient beings, all experiencing their own hallucination but nevertheless, interconnected in some way, which is in some way the physical reality, even though, each of us only creates our own dream of that reality -- for is there an objective thing called "red" ? or is "red" a dream phenomenon, whereas in reality "out there" there is merely some sort of vibration -- so how does a vibration become "redness"? how do beings convert that vibration into experiences of "pink" and "red" and "the aroma of roses"?
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Blasphemy is illegal in some countries. Why? Largely because Islam forbids reinterpretation and that's so much part of the system that it is law. You need to remember many take the religion seriously, as in they spend many hours reading the texts, and taking the authority of the religious leaders as truth. Yes there are many economic factors, but religion is a factor too, just like Western philosophers who were just writing some books and spreading ideas, were a factor in the development of Western modernity. Modernity says, choose Progress or choose God. So to some extent, when these guys hold up signs saying, "God is great, Islam will rule the world", that is literally what they intend. From a Moslem perspective, Christianity and Judaism got it wrong ––those religions turned out soft and undisciplined, and that's why the West is filled with godless pornography and women with jobs. A certain percentage of Muslims do not want to make that mistake again. They want a return to the Golden Age. That's why a principle like "free speech" which an English philosopher was writing about in 1870 or so, is seen as a mere "excuse" by Islamists. To some extent the religious thinking, is part of the cultural thinking and attitudes towards modernity, and they largely reject it. The question is how many? What percentage of Islamic countries are modernising, and what percentage are just biding their time until they can gain more power.
Yes design is a discipline and has its own way of thinking about problems. There is a lot of intuitive intelligence and that's just not expresible in words and logical argument. Your brain grasps the whole picture, often despite the details. So can a design be patented? Who knows, fashion designers and architects put up with constant blatant copying, and it is "oh I just saw a picture of it and I want to make mine look just like it" copying. Ie. the person did NOT got through the weeks of design and redesign and problem solving and toying with the impossible to try to make it work, they just saw, "oh look, it is possible to do it THAT way, and it is selling really well, LET'S MAKE ONE JUST THE SAME". Or try anyway. From a consumer point of view, it is great because you can go to Zara and buy cheap knock-offs of every recent design.
High street clothes stores will go out, buy a bunch of clothes from high end designers, and literally take the garment apart, measure it, and duplicate the pattern, perhaps adding a button or a belt. It is blatant copying, as in, they did not have to bother doing the design work themselves or trying to hire the most creative designers. (And if the designs are just overpriced rubbish with a label, why bother copying it anyway? Your copy doesn't carry the label. People are buying the design because they like it.) Now to any designer, that copying is going to feel bad somewhere on a scale of "cheap" to "evil". But it is copying. And if some stories are to be believed, Google got the heads up on the iPhone via insider info, decided they liked it more than a Blackberry, and chose to copy much of it. But that's life. Maybe there should be no laws against it, and people can keep shopping at Zara. But let's not forget that new designs are RISKS and the iPhone could have flopped massively. It is easier to sit back and let other companies do your market research for you.
More impressive would be any machine that is having an experience, regardless of whether in its experience it has a concept of itself or not. A digital camera can receive light, process the image and find patterns of faces. But it isn't experiencing the image, it isn't sentient. One wonders at what point sentience appears. Have to imagine a machine that's far more sophisticated than a human, able to behave in even more complex ways, tell jokes, make art, solve problems, yet be completely without experience/sentience. Why would it be sentient? Why do humans have to be sentient?
And "America" often means USA.
I was watching an interview with a Kenyan fundamentalist (can't remember which religion) and she said that it was better to kill the person because they were better off dead. It really is the principle that divides open societies from closed ones: can I question my own view, and can I see that others might have a different view? Can I self-question and can I entertain the notion that I might be fallible? So better not to try to impose what I think is right on everyone else, even if I believe it is for their own good and that if I don't they'll burn in hell forever? I'll bet a lot of terrorists are very softly spoken nice people who worry about whether they have tidied the house and sent money to their mother. "Peace" means, it'll be OK when everyone conforms. So we just have to make them. Closed versus open. Incidentally USA was closed minded about the whole Iraq WMDs thing and their right to act unilaterally. Much of the world is actually far worse but just to say, before anyone cries hypocrite.
smartPHONE or SMARTphone... that's the question. How deep do people want the software to go? Do they want to run OmniGraffle, or just share pics of parties on FB? Android and iOS are full blown OSs' capable of supporting a lot, but what are people using it for? So how much does the polish of the depth of software matter to them? And wanting to just upload pics is fine by the way. I guess the less depth, the less the ecosystem matters, the less advantage iOS could have, the more people will feel free to swap models every two years, even between platforms. What difference does it make if you're just getting on with your life, doing your diary and FB and stuff, which platform you use? Can be WP7 or iOS or Android or Bada or anything.
It is odd to complain about "lock-in" when the lock-in effect only comes into being if you're wanting a lot of depth for the software, wanting it to be an ecosystem. If someone wants an ecosystem, they'll get lock-in anyway (you're tied to Android, even if you can choose a handset). So then you want a good ecosystem, and problems like polish and availability and fragmentation and updates and... I'm really trying to think of an area where Android is a clear winner on this... ok you can choose hardware more... and maybe Google policies are better... but the lock-in comes from wanting an ecosystem. If you don't want an ecosystem then there is no lock-in. Who cares about iKitchenSync media libraries, you won't have a media library, you're not interested in unifying all your data in the cloud or your NAS or whatever. Lock-in means nothing to you because you can just as easily do a few things you need on any device.
But if people want a platform (nowadays called an ecosystem, bah!) then it is a marriage -- you commit to one thing to get the most out of it and yes you have lock-in. But Android is not free of lock-in... someone will dominate that. What if you decide you don't like some new Google policy about Android? People spend too much time arguing over whether Apple or Google are more evil, when it is really a case of, you know what, if you want to marry yourself to a platform, you are going to suffer from lock-in in one way or another, it limits your options in certain ways.
It is a compromise. Do I glance at a smaller widget, or do I tap an icon and get the whole screen devoted to that app and its abilities? For example weather. Maybe I most want to see the rain radar image, which is for the whole country so I want to zoom in to my area. Not really doable glancing at a widget, at some point I still go into the app. Any company could do widgets, the question from an Apple-design sorta mindset, if you believe such a thing exists, is why the didn't provide widgets. I dislike Metro tiles for the same reason -- they take up more space just to show a tiny bit of info when most of the time I'll want to go into the app anyway. Some like that compromise, some don't.
We already know that brain is a biological computer with multiple chemical and electrochemical interfaces to the rest of the body. This is understood very well, and was understood even before people had computers and therefore could not yet compress this explanation into such a short statement. The only things unknown about it are the structure and mechanisms, and it's extremely foolish to claim that it breaks the laws of nature known through Physics and Chemistry.
Any alternative to the above is LESS LIKELY TO BE TRUE than "we are all in The Matrix" or "We are in a dream of a sleeping God" hypotheses, what means that it can not be a part of any realistic philosophy and should be relegated to the realm of fiction. All support for this nonsense comes from superstition and nowhere else.
It makes sense up to a point. But here's a problem. If you are an organism, a biological computer, just a very sophisticated one, but a computer nonetheless, then your computer is able to get up, go to work, send messages to other biological computers, network and form societies of biological computers, and all of this computation can happen automatically. I don't mean to shout but, THERE IS NO NEED FOR YOU TO BE AWARE OF ANY OF THIS. In the biological computer model, consciousness has zero part to play. Consciousness has zero value, serves zero purpose, and simply doesn't need to exist.
The whole of the universe and all the organisms could just as easily be running IN THE DARK, computing, executing, interacting, evolving, without any awareness anywhere to experience any of the process. Consciousness, the experiencer, is totally unnecessary. For example, your fancy digital camera captures light, processes it and identifies faces and adjusts the focus on the faces. The camera doesn't experience doing this, the camera is not a "being".
Yet "being" is the single most irrefutable fact of your existence. You're a being. You are right now experiencing being. And that conscious experience is totally irrelevant to a biological computer. So why are you experiencing? It has no purpose to experience. Why be able to watch life? What is watching matter? Matter doesn't watch matter, matter reacts, processes, computes. Even "emotions" don't need to be experienced, they are chemical floods in the brain. They work perfectly well without anyone to "experience them. The message still gets there, it is physical.
At most you are along for the ride, but all the "choices" you make are being executed by the biological computer, so even being aware of choices has zero value. The system doesn't need "you" the conscious part. What could your brain possibly not be able to process on its own automatically and in the dark? Your brain can run all the processes that need to run. Why do you have to experience any of life? Why the awareness? Why consciousness? The brain could process information and make decisions and adapt and do all that stuff IN THE DARK. Matter exists. No reason for consciousness to exist. Yet it does. Or perhaps in some very strange way, the two are false categories, but that's taking us to the mind-body problem. If it is simple, if you are a biological computer, then you should be running in the dark, you shouldn't be experiencing your life. The simpler model and the only necessary model is that the brain runs in the dark. See we are not adding anything that isn't already forced upon us by the mere fact that we experience life as a conscious being.
I mean, yes we can forget the weird otherworldly ideas, because most people never see those anyway. (Some do, lately a neurosurgeon has an NDE and OBE and when he woke up, his understanding as a neurosurgeon, knowing his brain's condition at the time he was having these experiences, his understanding as a neurosurgeon was that he should not have been experiencing anything at all, so he wrote a book about it). But the point is, even being conscious as an experiencer, that is already strange, even though it is taken for granted when we say, oh the brain is a biological computer and nothing more. Everyone is conscious, yet the universe could work 100% without that. It would just run in the dark.
Great comment, especially and also about design. Design, be it a bridge or a house or a car seat, is a long hard process, involving lots of choice and compromise about how something works and what's possible. But it is really easy to make mistakes. Eg. a lot of well meaning social housing was built in the 60s that featured long corridors which, unlike a street where people's windows overlook the street, these corridors were just an anonymous row of doors, and isolated. Result, people felt unsafe, people got mugged in their own building. The designers were trying to invent a new better system for housing but they didn't realise something crucial that made space work: safety. Eventually a designer writes "Defensible Space" and everyone gets it. A lot of design is like that, which is why designers tend to be taught to try to imagine new problems arising. Even the design of a kettle is full of compromises, and the designer has to somehow find the right balance to make it work right and not be annoying to use and safe and so on. Many design problems involve dealing with opposing criteria. This is all part of the "give them what they never knew they wanted" because anything novel will have novel problems, and designers are supposed to try to anticipate, by looking for problems. This is why in a sense, Samsung "copied" Apple, not because designers don't copy, everyone copies, but they had a successful model to follow. Apple couldn't know the iPad would succeed, but Samsung could follow what had already proven to succeed. That's the only sense I'd say they "copied" Apple, but that slipstreaming is part of the design game anyway. But coming back to your point, you can give users choice, which is to say, you're telling them to be the designer, so welcome to a few years of practice of thinking about design. Or we can just notice that design is a speciality like many skills, and rather than spend the time learning it for myself, learning about all the choices, and compromises, and doing lots of problem solving, and lots of research to see what's possible, when the thing I'm needing, is needed actually for a task, and no I would rather make the cup of tea than spend a week researching how to build a kettle, then just try to find some products that have good design. I mean, some designers argued users should have more choice, so they invented and gave them the open plan office, which is basically, you're free to choose anything except quiet and focus.
Don't you mean, Global Climate Disruptive Uncertainty Heisenberg Principle of Precautionary Direct Action for the Projection of Greed and Sin on Human Species by Modelling of Chaos within Envelope of Creative Statistical Subjective Robust Confidence of Future Scenario-as-Predicion Caveat Reality?
ok I actually bored myself writing that. you point stands, it's already politically dead, the rest is just slow backtracking.
Personally, MS software brings memories of irritations. But I applauded their attempts to make stuff easier in XP and make stuff designed in Metro, except they just turned out to have even more irritations. Apple by contrast, may leave a lot of useful stuff out, but what they leave in isn't so irritating.
The damage from minor irritations isn't to be underestimated. It is like getting a tat, and people say "oh the pain is fine" until they reach a threshold a few hours later, and suddenly they want to punch the tattoo artist.
Yeah but they want our money.
Later when they've grown a middle class, they can demand more like we do.
Plus, I note that as soon as Apple added iCloud, my iPad 1 started having noticeable lags. I wonder just how delicately each feature is balanced against what the hardware can manage. A little here a little there, Microsoft can market it as a PC, but how usable will it feel if developers try to treat it like a PC?
In the demo he said it has two touch screens, one for stylus and one for fingers, so that you can lean on it whist writing. But the first time he tried to lean on it, it didn't know he was about to write, and it took it as a gesture to zoom the screen. Then he tried again this time being careful not to lean before the stylus hit the screen, so that it knew he was writing and ignored the palm resting. Details, but basically, they affects the feel. Can a tablet really work as a PC?
How do you write apps that may or may not deal with touch, stylus, and keyboard in various combinations? How will people know what it is that each app assumes you should do?
I'd have thought the main limitation for tablets is the small screen size. I see people on the bus using their iPad, and I'm not even in a big city. It is only a PC if it has a big screen. The iPad was supposed to be a better solution to the notebook. Ie. still a small screen, but a new UI that's actually suited to a small screen.
Well in a way that problem's been solved with a good enough UI in iOS. Metro is kinda different, if you happen to be a fan of 1930s Swiss Style design, but the Swiss didn't design that stuff for interactive UIs, they designed it for static signage in the 1930s. It is tempting for newbie designers to come up with something that looks very different -- until they realise why most designs that work end up looking quite the same -- there are reasons why the stuff has to work the way it does. Tiles don't really give you much but they take up more space. They also end up looking very non-distinct and force people back to 1 bit iconography. Unless you break that rule and so now you've just got normal icons but on a gaudy box. There are very few apps that benefit from having a line of text for status on the icon. That's just one example. Plus they've loaded that onto the desktop for no good reason. I don't like LaunchPad on OS X either. It looks dumb.
Apart from note taking, what does Surface give people in mobile usage that they don't already get with other mobile OS's?
The problem area I imagine is most critical is somehow turning all those desktop Office documents into something you can use from anywhere and from any device. That's a cloud problem. Maybe MS will conquer that totally. But office documents are a pain on a small screen, ergo don't make a small screen device for them. Office is like MS's biggest cash cow. Yet they seem to be ignoring the issue. Office doesn't work on a small screen but people want to be mobile. Hmmm....
The ideal office might be one where you have a small box the size of a thick iPod but that doesn't have a screen. It's purpose is that it acts as your personal cloud and with ubiquitous computing you carry it everywhere and your IT department sets it up for you and it can connect to any screen and network anywhere and you can use it as your own personal really personal secure PC preset with all the arcane VPN settings and all that which lets you be corporate anywhere. All your weird custom software and encryptions and keys are on it. You just need to wirelessly be near a keyboard and screen and maybe a network. A completely different class of product that truly replaces the PC because it really allows you to be in your office anywhere. If you're on a building site you can stand next to a 50" screen and pull up your architectural drawings, because the thing is running AutoCAD or ArchiCAD or whatever. If you're in a cafe you can pull up your Microsoft office documents on the 20" courtesy displays. If you're just out and about it can relay your email to your phone's display. Instead of the battery driving a screen, it drives the CPU, so can run stuff a tablet never could. Ba
I agree although perhaps it isn't outages that'll put people off. Just musing this as I once again waited for the very unreliable bus this morning -- yet I still use public transport.
I think the cloud needs to do something that can't be done any other way, and that's the reason people would use it, and even depend on it. Like syncing stuff because it is too much hassle trying to remember which docs I copied to which piece of hardware, or like setting my device at home to record a show using my mobile, or using my mobile as a boarding pass. These are all new applications that people find handy. And sometimes they don't work, but they're still handy.
But putting it all in the cloud just for the sake of it? Why? What's the point? You'll need some IT people on site, if only to plug in those wires to the cloud, or show people how to login to the cloud, or decide which cloud to use.
Not that these are the best examples, but like, Apple: yes you can reinstall your whole operating system from the cloud if you need to in a disaster. Google: your whole system is just a local cache and really it is all in the cloud which you need most of the time. The first is something new you couldn't do before. The latter is kinda, well, why? The latter would make sense if laptop hard drives were still tiny. Instead they just give you a tiny hard drive, because well, why?
If I removed the kitchen and bathroom I could live in a smaller cheaper house. But again, why? It isn't so expensive to add a kitchen and bathroom, and they're very handy.
Physical or empirical, that still doesn't save you from the headache of trying to understand feedbacks.
With feedbacks in a system, a cause can look exactly like an effect and vice versa.
CO2 on its own is only credited with up to a degree of warming. After that all the additional rises, be it 2C or 8C, is all up to feedbacks.
And given the wide range of things they can't rule out -- can't rule out 8C rise -- there's obviously a lot of head scratching going on trying to understand what this "physical model" can propose as scenarios. Remember the IPCC calls them scenarios, not predictions.
At this point most invoke the Precautionary Principle, but that itself needs caution, because action or no action, there are consequences and risks whatever you do or don't do. So at this point most invoke their gut and start calling someone a denier. But that's prejudice.
The people who interpret the books literally and ignore reason, they look at the world as simply about being a good believer. They're extreme and can be usually ignored. They're also who people tend to think of when they think of "creationists". Let me ignore them here for now, as I don't live in USA so don't have them making laws and stuff. Sorry USA, that's your problem, sorta like Iran.
Then there's the people who within reason, wonder, gee, the universe is "creating" all this new stuff, how does that work?
And here you have two sorts of "answers".
First there's the idea that pure randomness combined with having to survive in the environment, has generated life.
Then there's the idea that, um, no, pure randomness alone is not enough, even with natural selection weeding out the failures. Within reason, some people wonder that, somehow, there's additional physical mechanisms going on that we haven't detected, which are somehow generating better solutions.
Both sides would agree that evolution has happened. But whether randomness+selection is enough all on its own to account for all the life that's appeared, is a question, and it is here that it becomes more controversial, because many maintain that randomness+selection is enough, even though they can't actually prove that by running a universe forward on this principle. It sorta just becomes an opinion that's strongly held.
Part of the reason that it becomes such a strong opinion is that many reasonably feel that if you let in the idea that randomness+selection on its own isn't enough, then you open the door to the fundamentalist extremist irrational people who simply believe books literally. Well that is a problem. But so is figuring out how life works. And if there are additional mechanisms going on –– mutations are not random -- and after all, a ball doesn't bounce randomly, it obeys physical laws -- maybe there are laws governing what's created that somehow make it already predisposed to be adapted to the environment. Whatever. IANAB but as I say, who can prove it has to be random?
As bad as that is, it was apparently far worse in the past. See "The Better Angels of Our Nature: The Decline of Violence In History And Its Causes" by Pinker.
The need to go to space is because life has to outgrow this little rock.
If we stay here we will, eventually, die out. "Sustainability" is a myth.
If we had the resources to build giant contained cities, we could let the planet go back to nature. Urbanisation reduces cruelty and violence and civilises people. But we are not even half urbanised. We need more resources, be it using space rocks, to build the giant self contained cities. Then you can let nature flourish undisturbed.
The alternative is we go back to burning dung in mud huts and slaughtering every animal we can get our hands on. That's what we used to do. We were very good at it, hence our numbers grew and grew and we came to dominate the planet. Dismantling industrial society would only send us back to that, and we'd have to tear up the planet again a second time, because the mentality of people living in villages and tribes is much more brutal than what modern people have, and once your situation is back to that, your mentality goes back to that too in a dozen generations. There's a reason the "desert religions" were so brutal -- people were tribal and killing others was basically the only way to resolve things.
We have one chance now, in the 21st century, one window to get to space for real. If we don't do it now it is a downward spiral, and we won't have the resources from this planet to try industrialising again, so we will all hit the wall again, and slowly we'll poison everything, in our millions of warring tribes, and even nature won't really survive.
Either we get off this planet and figure out how to grab our materials from the lifeless solar system, or we slowly perish in a downward spiral of crises, violence, competition, wars, pollution and global extinction, taking this garden of nature down with us.
Like an oil rig on top of government owned land or sea? Anyway, it may be something about energy density.
It seems rational but the causality is not simple. Your body can "decide" what to do with the energy you eat. It can burn it or store it. If it decides to burn it, your metabolic rate goes up (in my case I felt hot a lot) and you can have more impulse to move around. But equally your body could decide to store that energy, in which case you get fat, you feel tired (the energy has been stored already) and you metabolism goes down. That's what confuses a lot of the arguments, which direction does the causality go? Imagine you have a machine that has a chip that runs a program that decides whether to feed the fuel to the engine or to the batteries for charging. If the program is in "charge" mode then your batteries will get fat and you won't move no matter how much fuel you put in. That's the point about the "child eats more because he's growing" rather than "child grows because he eats more".
That's the point –– eating carbs artificially drives up your insulin.
We never used to have access to pasta and bread. But you could bring down an animal and gorge on its substantial fat tissue.
Anyway there are lots of details in the information and arguments both ways. Only reason I'm posting it here is because I found in the last 3 years it has worked so well for me, and that's not just an anecdote, at some point any doctor has to ask the patient, how are you feeling? I eat less than 40 gm of carbs a day and my energy and mental clarity and weight and sound sleep has never been so good. It really amazed me as I wasn't expecting it. Of course your body may be different. The Taubes arguments are interesting but I only took interest because they proved to have effect with my body.
The energy balance equation of, food eaten equals fat stored minus exercise, is used in a very misleading way. Most assume you can manipulate it yourself by eating less and exercising more. But that ignores entirely the body's own control system. There are some lab rats that were starved to death by underfeeding, in an experiment, and whilst they starved to death they were gaining fat and died obese. Why? Because they were also receiving insulin and this told their bodies to store fat no matter what, even if they were not being fed, so they converted their muscle and organs into fat and stored that instead. They died of weak heart mucles and heart failure.
It is like a child eats extra to grow but he doesn't grow because he's eating extra, he eats extra and grows because the body's hormones are controlling things and telling the body to eat more and grow. It is all about hormones. Why do diabetics take insulin? To CONTROL their blood sugar. That's what insulin does. Insulin decides that you have to lower that blood sugar. And how does it control it and get it out of the blood stream? It tells fat cells to open up and absorb it. That's what "lowers" your blood sugar. The insulin decides to store it. And as it is storing it, your normal metabolism is still hungry. So the energy equation is used wrong. You don't get fat because you overeat, you overeat because you're getting fat.
What drives up insulin levels beyond normal, beyond what our 100,000 year old bodies are used to? Carbohydrates. You can eat fat and that'll be converted to energy and you'll want to move more. But eat carbs in the massive unusual quantities that we do, like pasta, pizza, bread, potatoes, and sugared drinks, and it all turns to sugar and insulin has to be produced in huge quantities to deal with it. Your normal blood sugar is one teaspoon of sugar. That's it. That's all we're made to deal with. So insulin goes nuts trying to deal with all that "healthy slow release energy" and eventually you get obese and you get diabetes.
The food pyramid was a huge shift towards grains (bird food) and away from fat. The fat / heart disease / lipid hypothesis was wrong 50 years ago and by committee "we have to tell the politicians what to regulate even if we aren't sure ourselves" consensus opinion ended up dominating and it is still wrong today. Eating a low fat high carb diet is a recipe not only for obesity but also depression. Just try switching to a genuine low carb high fat diet (see Sweden's latest magazine, "LCHF") and try it for yourself. After a month carbs just don't look like food anymore. Sleep better, feel lighter, feel satiated all the time (fat is filling, whilst carbs increase appetite or make you sleepy) and have more mental clarity. YMMV but that's been my experience to my surprise.
There are so many things wrong with the current dogma around the food pyramid that you have to undo many issues before you can wade your way to some clarity. But the best thing is to actually try it for a period, and see if what the proponents of LCHF and paleo say is true. Your own body can tell you.
Go and check what that research about bad fat and heart disease was actually based on, how they've repeatedly failed to show in good controlled studies that eating low fat is good for you, or that counting calories and exercising lets you lose wight. Those studies keep failing but the advocates keep hoping the next big study will show it. The start in rise in obesity coincided with the start of that advice about fat being the devil and to make most of your food plate carbs (sugar) instead. It has been a massive experiment on the public and it has gone catastrophically wrong, but rather than say that they just call people weak willed and lazy. All those carbs and sugar simply drive up your hunger whilst storing it as fat and keeping you tired.
My point is, I think a highly sophisticated enough robot could function at 100% human level. Therefore humans as we are, don't neeeeed to be sentient to be humans.
My point is, nature could have humans doing human stuff, like chimps and dogs do their stuff, without humans needing any sentience, or anything needing any sentience -- everything could just process data inputs and run sophisticated behaviour programs. As I said, a sophisticated camera could process images and identify objects and speak words.
Yet we are ALSO sentient. Matter doesn't need sentience.
Yeah, I'm fairly atheist myself, it is the materialist side that I'm questioning. The thread is sorta, we might be living in The Matrix, and how could we tell? How do we know our memories are not implanted, as you say. That's what makes consciousness itself quite different, and not easily reducible to being a "side effect" of matter. Descartes sorta did this questioning, he thought that everything could be The Matrix and his senses could be entirely a simulation, the whole reality fed to him as a simulation, so he could not truly trust any of out, but what he could not doubt was that he was aware, that existence was happening, that he was experiencing. (He's usually quoted as "I think therefore I am" but apparently the proper translation was "Existence, therefore being") If consciousness was a side effect of the simulation, we could't even trust consciousness, yet, you are aware, and there is no denying that. I experience. I am present. It is beyond any question. That's what makes consciousness so irreducible to anything else. Even notions about God and souls and all that, they are just thoughts and beliefs and they are equally just as suspect as anything else that happens to be coming up within the simulation. But the awareness itself, the feeling of existing, simply knowing you exist, that isn't reducible to anything else. It is very simple but often overlooked. But of course, we know the brain is a material phenomenon and it seems to affect what people experience, like losing memories, vision loss, etc. But awareness itself, that seems to be in a category of its own.
I think the real trouble and problem comes up considering consciousness. The eye and brain are analogous to a camera with a lens, a CCD and a CPU processing images. A really advanced CPU could even start describing in words what it is looking at. But at no point does the camera experience the image it is capturing. That's the difficult issue with sentience. What is this ability to experience, as opposed to just mechanistically reacting by processing inputs and outputs? Why are we not just human robots, acting in an environment -- a sophisticated robot could act behaviourally in complex ways that match human complexity, yet would not require sentience, it can just process data on a high enough level -- but no sentience would be needed -- it would be 100% asleep, just a sophisticated "sleepwalking" robot -- so why do we, in addition to being biological human machines, also sentiently experience? And as you say, the hallucination starts right from the beginning, although we might not remember a lot, and who knows, at that point why limit the dream to one instant, or one day, or one lifetime? Our everyday consciousness is beyond weird. Yet the ability to create experience is the most basic nature of our existence. It isn't just "self-awareness" in the sense of having a mental concept of myself as a human with a name. It is sentience that is experiencing everything, whether I know my name or not. Plus, we seem to acknowledge that there are many many sentient beings, all experiencing their own hallucination but nevertheless, interconnected in some way, which is in some way the physical reality, even though, each of us only creates our own dream of that reality -- for is there an objective thing called "red" ? or is "red" a dream phenomenon, whereas in reality "out there" there is merely some sort of vibration -- so how does a vibration become "redness"? how do beings convert that vibration into experiences of "pink" and "red" and "the aroma of roses"?