We do not believe in science because of our science, we trust science DESPITE our sense, because we get repeatable results.
I thought the post was getting long , so I wasn't as clear as I could have been, You know about the results of your experiments via your senses, Ultimately, you trust them in this way- there is not a demon who makes you see the numeral 2 instead of the real 3 on your screens.
Although there is a copy machine that fits this description. See yesterday's slashdot story.
So at some point in the chain, you trust your senses, or someone's senses , or however round about that process becomes.
If you consider "systems" generally, as I think should be done, then the issues around consciousness get fuzzier, not more clear. If you want to build a theory of consciousness around the ideas of "complexity" and "systems" then this leads to pretty strange possibilities involving systems of systems being eligible for conscious .
With going all Descartes one of the basic problems is- consciousness is defined by those who have it and it's presence is only definitely confirmed subjectively, by the bearer. It's LIKE something to be at some basic level. Is it LIKE something to be a computer? Does the computer have to be programmed in a very "specific" way, then it's LIKE something be be a computer? Why can't it be LIKE something to be an inappropriately or un-programmed computer, say, something chaotic and unpleasant ?
I don't buy that, (why not Woofy Goofy? Can't say ) but my point is the follow on implications of this kind of (necessary) theorizing get bizarre fast. When things get like this, I take it to mean we lack the even the theoretical constructs and the discoveries of fact needed to form a proper framework. We lack the reifications. It's like Aristotle trying to account for observations that led top Heisenbergs Uncertainty Principle. He hasn't had those observations, and if he did a whole slew of prerequisite concepts each of which had their own experimental result as an impetus haven't been created and anyway none of this could have happened prior to technology advancing enough to grind glass into lens and melt ore into steel and so on and so forth.
We're just not there. Where? I don't know, but I know we're not there.
Consciousness is defined as, roughly, conscious personal experience. Nervous system-bearing organisms have it and tables don't.
The thing is, when considered as a phenomena itself, it's kind of weird.
It seems to inflict on some forms of matter (nervous systems) something non-corporeal and unnecessary. Newtons laws and QM don't need it to account for why anything at the particle level happens- we'd all be mouthing the same words, making the motions , living the same lives and generating the same collective world history without it according the our best developed theories of matter energy and causation.
In theory, we could all be as mindless and devoid of consciousness as tables and from an outside observer's POV, nothing would change in our lives, our speech or all of human history.
But it's not like that.
We *know* we have conscious experience. Suppose you're a well adjusted modern scientist who doesn't busy himself with fanciful notions of non-corporeal "stuff" (a contradiction in terms , in fact). You';re a thorough-going materialist. What does the fact of conscious experience imply for you?
It implies that conscious experience is a fact about material, perhaps suitably organized. Beyond the fact that *that is just weird* a basic question is- what characteristics of material organization gives rise to it ? Are there degrees of it. Minsky asserted (Society of Mind) that thermostats have a primitive form of it (they react to their environment in a feedbacky kind of way). This is not a far out thought and in fact seems to be even a necessity for materialists.
The point is, here is a guy talking about consciousness as though he knew what it was, and now we're going to learn more about it. He's not unusual, this is staple fare.
As if. The fact that conscious experience exists and we're all very familiar with it and infer its presence all the time in, say , dogs and cats, shouldn't be taken to mean that we understand it in any significant way, and when I say "it" I don't mean the biological underpinnings of it, I mean it as a phenomena , possibly disconnected from any kind of system specific underpinnings we're familiar with.
It may just be a fact about the universe that exists independently of what we call personal experience, just the way energy or other abstract, yet real *things* exist independently of any particular form, at least so far as our best current theories go.
Just saying. People throw this term "consciousness" around as if they know what it referred to. They don't. It's a a very basic, almost too basic, mystery. Mystery is where science begins, and you should not let yourself be separated from that feeling of the mysterious, the "out of our current conceptual grasp", by the self assured conceits of your time.
We believe in the results of science because, ultimately, we trust some combination of our senses and our brain based experience we call "thinking". We believe this combination gives us knowledge of things which are not our brains, but have an independent reality. I believe this. But this knowledge comes to us through consciousness and not through some other avenue.
One of the uncomfortable implications of this is people who claim to have a certain kind of universal knowledge or experience revealed to them by "spiritual or mystical" experience through which they come to know that the universe is somehow conscious can't just be poo pooed away. Considered in a certain way, that poo pooing would be one part of the brain, one function, one way of knowing, declaring its fiefdom of consciousness and understanding to be the ultimate judge of the reality of the outside world as processed by any other part.
Just saying- you need to be skeptical and realize that not everything someone claims is that deep a claim.
possible knowledge states by all parts of the brain
I agree with what you said, but it still leaves experience itself as a kind of weird thing. Even if experience is is dependent on brains or nervous systems as far as we can guess, what is it ? What else is there like it ?
1) the link between what they saw in rat's brains and any experience the rat may or may not have been having is merely inferred. All they actually have is an increase in activity, that's all. How or if that translates into the rat experiencing something specific and what it might be is pure conjecture. It is possible that the brain activates but the rat's consciousness or conscious awareness remains unawares. It may as well be terror the rat feels. We just don't know.
2) the link between this rat brain electrical activity and a specific human experience whose experiencers claim is not chaotic but has semantic meaning is the purest of pure conjecture. There is nothing, no-thing, linking these findings and this specific human experience but the sheerest of sheer conjecture, teetering daintily on the flimisiest of extrapolations.
3) it dodges the entire issue of what consciousness, conscious experience as opposed to things bumping into each other or chemically reacting, is. We don't suppose other compositions of matter - chairs, light switches, my computer- possess it, yet there it appears to be.
Thinking that consciousness is worth thinking about about goes in and out of fashion in academic and scientific circles.The glib answer offered up from some interpretations of materialism is- it's an epiphenomena of brains and nervous systems, on whom it appears to depend (how do we know that?).
The problem with that answer is it's a form of hand waving , of assuming the consequent (all consciousness "needs" matter), a defining away with words or in this case, referencing a process- neural activity. Instead of telling us what the thing is, it "explains" it away.
The real spooky implication of materialism is that consciousness may be omnipresent or exists sui generis in the universe. It's possible that it is the first among things and somehow gives rise to material in ways which are unknown.
We're stuck as a species of implicitly paradoxical materialists, who not only know for a fact that know we have conscious experience and thought but know further that this conscious experience and thought is the only means we have at discerning the material scientific truth about the world.
Chairs and tables which lack this also know nothing, or at least it seems that way.
I assert that the fact of conscious experience is the final frontier. Hypotheses non fingo. However, only someone with no scientific imagination supposes that the concepts and scientific frameworks known to her at the time she lives necessarily contain within them all the ideas needed to explain everything in the world, that there's not something which will come only later with the power to encompass all previous explanations, and extend them in a direction unimaginable by previous centuries of scientists, even into the realm of science fiction of "spirituality" .
Occam's razor is a proper thinking tool to decide between competing explanations, not defining ultimate scientific horizons.
People who have these experiences insist their nature is essentially *knowetic*, that they bear *meaning* and reveal a factual aspect of reality which was previously hidden.
This is the same "meaning" by the way that all semantic-bearing constructs in our environs - pictures, symbols, words, x-rays, scientific theories- are said to convey.
Many scientists equate these experiences with hallucinations. I submit that anyone making this certain, authoritative categorization is indulging in the priggish, short-sighted, self-satisfied kind of thinking that amuses us about long distant generations of 'scientists" and "doctors" with their clever, but technically constricted and ultimately wrong-headed theories of "stuff".
THE OP says that the FBI was looking at Schwartz since 2008 b/c of his manifesto. If you follow the link, it refers you to Wired. The Wired article does not say this. It says they were going to use that 2008 manifesto against him when they prosecuted him.
If I am mistaken on this, please link me, but I don't think I am.
It's a big diff. In one case the feds are building a (pathetic) case. In the other one, the feds are starting to track people for exercising their 1st Amendment rights.
Maybe they do. They have in the past. But this is not an instance of it.
Everything wireless is less secure than its wired counterpart. Always prefer wired if given an option.
The only question to ask yourself is how bad is the potential downside?
Just think of the most basic aspects. Wireless by definition means *direct these signals through the air in all directions and receive signals from the air in all directions*
What could possibly go right?
Wireless communication between car components? No thanks! Wireless lights everywhere? No thanks!
It's what is incentivize when you count no results as non-knowledge. That's a large part of the problem. No results are information too, Unfortunately just anyone can produce unlimited amounts on demand.
There should be (and the idea is not original to me) and perhaps is now a journal of interesting no-effects, non-results.
The lying is pandemic in academia, and it's not just PIs lying about their results, it's everywhere.. sorry to say it's a culture which tolerates lying at every level. At our university, TAs openly threatened students with being graded down for doing stuff like showing up to the TAs office hours if they missed class for any reason, then followed through on those threats. The profs knew about it and looked the other way.
I know PIs in our department were said to fake results and it was unofficially encouraged via the grapevine. In theory it gets discovered, but as far as I know no one has ever systematically gone through with the required statistical tools and correlated unrepeatedable results with PIs or departments, or more subtly, contraindicated results , results that could not be true if a wealth of other results of seemingly unrelated experiments were true. Sure some high focus pursuits like climate change and alternative energy get properly and excruciatingly scrutinized and rescrutinized, but the low level chemical pathway shit this guy is slogging around in? Not so much. He knows he's out of the spotlight.
Here's a tip for young idealists of the sort I was. Every power hierarchy has a disproportionate number of sociopaths at the top and academia is no exception. The dishonest, law-breaking, libelous and slandering political maneuvering that spoils other ventures spoils academic pursuits at least as much.
It was Henry Kissinger who noted that department politics are so vicious just because there is so little to fight over and he may be right. The monetary rewards are marginal, the job security is gone and work environment is bone grinding and relentless all the while it's demanded that you get positive results so you get funding.
We need a kind of policing function in academia. We need people whose specific job it is to use what methods they can think of to catch cheaters. There mere presence of such an entity would be a huge deterrent by itself.
We also need to detach course grading and degree granting from the university. There's nothing at the university, no particular resource anyone needs access to in order to learn to the undergrad or even masters degree level. It's overpriced, it under delivers it's causing the next financial (aid) bubble and it subjects students to a time consuming, humiliating and demeaning process of vying to be liked personally by people who have despotic-level power over their futures. Enough.
yeah you and everyone else who has ever pursued strong AI. And? And? And so what you're as far away from that as anyone else is. This is the same hype that went around about neural nets some decades ago . So you brought a SHARPENED flint rock to the nuclear armed war this time. And?
There are parts of the human brain the size of your fist we know about as much as we did the heart when we finally figured out hey *it's a pump ! *.
Apparently only holy grail level aspirations are lofty enough to inspire researchers.
Utterances as macho and vaporish as this guy's are deserving of their own "Cock In a Box" style mockery :
---It's you who's confused because I wasn't considering her mind, not even for a second. This is purely about physical biology.
You score one point of a total inability to follow an argument. I was pointing out that YOUR IMPLICIT CRITERIA was such. Not that you consciously realized what you were implying.
That whizzing sound is points going over your head.
--They were not exactly "her cells"; they were a freak combination of partly her cells and partly something else that resulted in something that was neither of the two (demonstrating this fact neatly with killing her so that would be no confusion about that).
Score one point for total biological ignorance. MOST of anyone's healthy body is FOREIGN ORGANISMS, mostly bacteria, which are practically inseparable from "our cells".
So by your scientifically illiterate standards , none of our bodies can ever really be considered as ours and the state or scientists should be able to treat us like it treated Lack.
Getting the theme here? No? You're ignorant !
--Actually, no. I don't think anyone has been "fruitlessly searching for a long time" for this.
Yeah, it's just a fact about history that you're wrong. Nothing more to say there, except that not only do you know zero about the history of HeLa cells, but you don't think you need to to hold forth on the subject.
--That makes "white irreligious people of European descent" smart, because it's the reasonable thing to do. Worrying about things you can't affect is a waste of time.
Score a point for using self validating arguments ! Thanks for saying this actually because it proves you're exactly what I implied- an ignorant narcissist who doesn't even understand the idea of "a limited culturally bound perspective." Your POV is just the the turth, even when the truths we're talking about are not scientific, but only human values which vary across cultures. You're values are right and you don't need to respect other people's values.
Hey low IQ asswipe, the world is sick of fighting wars started by people like you and bin Laden, who agrees with you about not respecting other people's cultures and the "being right" part especially, so do the world a favor-fav and leave the thinking to others.
--That's not only impractical but utterly impossible. First, I really hope you collect all your skin flakes as you're walking around spreading them.
Well the laws of every state in this nation and all other nations say the dead do get to specify what is to be done with their bodies, one option of which is to donate it to science, so you must wonder what all those billions of people are talking about.
Guess that's the state you walk around in most of the time.
You're confused . No one is saying the ( volitional )contents of Lack's mind were special, which is basically for some reason where you're putting the bar for the intersection of "special" and "person".
They're saying her cells were special- and they did act in a way that researchers had been frutilessly searching for for a long time. If you follow the link, you'll see what the whole thing is about.
White irreligious people of European descent may not care about what does or does not happen with or without their knowledge and permission to their bodies after death, but not everyone is a white, irreligious person of European descent, and what those other people think, matters.
You get the idea of a private citizen owning their own body after death and having the right to direct how it will be disposed of, I'll bet I mean, you'd scream bloody murder if the state started disposing of dead people's effects as the state saw fit.
Now perhaps you people mean when they say your perspective is narrow and "culture bound" .
It's interesting Michael Hayden feels free to hold forth as an authority on the presumably private lives of his fellow American citizen's, specifically their sex lives.
Does anyone seriously doubt that this is Hayden accidentally -and very publicly- accessing and referencing the very thing he denies the NSA is doing- watching, cataloging , storing (and sniggering at) the most deeply personal and intimate details of people's everyday affairs, in this case their masturbation habits and likely frequency of sexual intercourse?
It's hard to keep clear the boundaries between what you know and can talk about and what you know and aren't supposed to talk about, isn't it Michael? It requires constant vigilance, doesn't it? You never know when you're going to let something slip.
I am asking the president of the United States to relieve General Hayden of his responsibilities for conduct unbecoming, gross negligence in his public utterances, and failure to uphold the high standards of the US military.
I call bullshit. I have seen those "documentaries" that purport to expose Bush Sr.'s father as funding the Nazis and in fact, it's total bullshit and 20/20 hindsite. This is the same kind of crap as the 9-11 truthers. It's not an accurate portrayal of history. I am perfectly willing to believe that there are conspiracies and when 9-11 happened, I seriously considered if a Cheney type sociopath in the WH might have had a LIHJOP or even a MIHOP type involvement. You can't immediatlely count this kind of thing out.
If you're going to read history , then read it. Don't pick and choose parts of it to serve as a filler for your preferred political narrative and be eternally vigilant against the productions of people who do do that.
oI am not launching a "you're bad" post here. I am saying that you need to examine the criteria by which you're assigning truth values to narratives ; those criteria are too low.
You want to know the truth- that's got to be your goal. It can't be wanting to "prove" something you feel strongly is true and you have to develop the discipline to see that errant impulse in yourself and check it. This is not a human's natural state- it's a learned set of skills that needs constant maintenance.
*Everyone you despise is despicable precisely because they failed in this basic task*.
Honor reality above all else. The documentation that the Bush's family was pro-Nazi and supported them is gutter level bullshit.
If you want we can take up the details of this.. I'm in and out all day.
Again I am not saying you're a bad or intellectually slovenly person. i am saying that 1) you're factually incorrect and 2) you got that way by permitting your standards for truth to be too low.
You're interested in history and prepare to reject pat answers. That's to your credit,
Lesson- don't comment on article without first reading- they were grabbing anyone with anything to grab...nothing to do with drugs . The person with pipe wasn't smoking crack and was never charged with any offense. I don't own a glass pipe (as called in the article) either, but they aren't illegal either. Laws have to mean something more than "I need cash, you look weak".
Yeah if you're in business for yourself and competing on product quality, then your competitions H1Bs are a boon. It's just true. In Indiana, they tried to revamp the welfare system using IBM, which basically means H1B. After a billion dollars, the whole thing wouldn't fly. Now everyone is suing everyone. If you set up a google alert for "failed IT project" you'll see what goes down all the time everywhere. So you have a state tax payers footing the bill for their universities sending their kids to that university but they can't get a job because the state hires companies that hire H1Bs
Any state decision maker from the Gov on down who hires an IT money pit company like IBM or INFOSYS or any of the other body shoppers ought to be removed from office by the taxpayers
This is a slow train that's been coming for a long time. Richly deserved, by any measure. the US is not India, and isn't going to allow for flagrant, over the top wholesale discrimination. We've already been there, done that, and we're not going back.
If you read the article, they're pressing the NSA to let them rifle through the NSA database and avail themselves of NSA technical resources. They're using reasoning like "this drug money could be supporting terrorists ! " Well, just anything could be supporting terrorists; terrorists get their cash from legit enterprises (bin Laden) and unwitting customers to other legal enterprises (Hawala etc. ).
The problem is, the wider the access to that kind of deeply personal information, the greater the likelihood it will be abused.
Take for example the jaw-dropping abuse present within the asset forfeiture programme- reader alert- if you're inclined to high blood pressure when totally and finally morally outraged , you actually may not want to follow this link:
Americans WILL turn on the love affair they have with law enforcement if law enforcement oversteps its bounds. If I were a seasoned DEA vet heading a department, I'd run like hell away from my agents being able to access NSA style information about common Americans. My reasoning would be, given the potential applications of this information and my lack of real detailed control over the individual actions by each member of army of people under my charge, it's going to blow up in my our face and the backlash will be crippling.
Have we not learned that even heavily vetted people can't be trusted ? Think of the applications readily available information about your searches could yield.
Realistic example: Harkening back to the article I linked to, what if citizens' became so angry, some of them formed a nascent movement to repeal civil forfeiture laws. From the POV of some law enforcement, that is literally am mortal threat to their existence. People who mortally threaten my police department with financial extinction , whether they mean to be or not, are a threat to public safety. Therefore, I am interested to know exactly who those citizens are. I will then instruct my officers to pretext them (think up a false excuse to pull them over) when they're driving and take things from there.Perhaps they'll make it easy on us and prove to have an attitude. Perhaps their internet activity can be construed to be suspicious. Perhaps I know their employer...
Someone (can't remember who) has pointed out that anonymity begets respect between people who are otherwise strangers because you instinctively aren't sure what sort of resources or connections the stranger has available to them. If that is removed because of unilateral, intimate and omniscient knowledge, then all respect and constraint is lost and people are effectively deprived of their humanity. They become objects instead of equals, observed, known, measured, their foibles exposed for the observers amusement, ridicule and ultimately unbridled contempt. See- NSA analysts passing around audio recordings of overseas military personnel having phone sex with their spouses:
This is where this goes. This is a psychological fact about humans. This kind of invasion, like the abuse of civil forfeiture laws, has the power, that is it carries sufficient emotional charge, to tear this nation apart. The government can't kid themselves that this is just a technical issue looking for a technical solution, or that the most abusive and corrosive applications of this kind of power won't materialize and be fully realized.
No WMD is soon going threaten Western civilization unless it also unleashes a real widespread loss of faith government and government's motivations. Unleashing NSA -style surveillance on the average citizen is the fast track, the force multiplier to any WMD attack that al Queda wants.
Slashdot Mirror
If you consider "systems" generally, as I think should be done, then the issues around consciousness get fuzzier, not more clear. If you want to build a theory of consciousness around the ideas of "complexity" and "systems" then this leads to pretty strange possibilities involving systems of systems being eligible for conscious .
With going all Descartes one of the basic problems is- consciousness is defined by those who have it and it's presence is only definitely confirmed subjectively, by the bearer. It's LIKE something to be at some basic level. Is it LIKE something to be a computer? Does the computer have to be programmed in a very "specific" way, then it's LIKE something be be a computer? Why can't it be LIKE something to be an inappropriately or un-programmed computer, say, something chaotic and unpleasant ?
I don't buy that, (why not Woofy Goofy? Can't say ) but my point is the follow on implications of this kind of (necessary) theorizing get bizarre fast. When things get like this, I take it to mean we lack the even the theoretical constructs and the discoveries of fact needed to form a proper framework. We lack the reifications. It's like Aristotle trying to account for observations that led top Heisenbergs Uncertainty Principle. He hasn't had those observations, and if he did a whole slew of prerequisite concepts each of which had their own experimental result as an impetus haven't been created and anyway none of this could have happened prior to technology advancing enough to grind glass into lens and melt ore into steel and so on and so forth.
We're just not there. Where? I don't know, but I know we're not there.
Consciousness is defined as, roughly, conscious personal experience. Nervous system-bearing organisms have it and tables don't.
The thing is, when considered as a phenomena itself, it's kind of weird.
It seems to inflict on some forms of matter (nervous systems) something non-corporeal and unnecessary. Newtons laws and QM don't need it to account for why anything at the particle level happens- we'd all be mouthing the same words, making the motions , living the same lives and generating the same collective world history without it according the our best developed theories of matter energy and causation.
In theory, we could all be as mindless and devoid of consciousness as tables and from an outside observer's POV, nothing would change in our lives, our speech or all of human history.
But it's not like that.
We *know* we have conscious experience. Suppose you're a well adjusted modern scientist who doesn't busy himself with fanciful notions of non-corporeal "stuff" (a contradiction in terms , in fact). You';re a thorough-going materialist. What does the fact of conscious experience imply for you?
It implies that conscious experience is a fact about material, perhaps suitably organized. Beyond the fact that *that is just weird* a basic question is- what characteristics of material organization gives rise to it ? Are there degrees of it. Minsky asserted (Society of Mind) that thermostats have a primitive form of it (they react to their environment in a feedbacky kind of way). This is not a far out thought and in fact seems to be even a necessity for materialists.
The point is, here is a guy talking about consciousness as though he knew what it was, and now we're going to learn more about it. He's not unusual, this is staple fare.
As if. The fact that conscious experience exists and we're all very familiar with it and infer its presence all the time in, say , dogs and cats, shouldn't be taken to mean that we understand it in any significant way, and when I say "it" I don't mean the biological underpinnings of it, I mean it as a phenomena , possibly disconnected from any kind of system specific underpinnings we're familiar with.
It may just be a fact about the universe that exists independently of what we call personal experience, just the way energy or other abstract, yet real *things* exist independently of any particular form, at least so far as our best current theories go.
Just saying. People throw this term "consciousness" around as if they know what it referred to. They don't. It's a a very basic, almost too basic, mystery. Mystery is where science begins, and you should not let yourself be separated from that feeling of the mysterious, the "out of our current conceptual grasp", by the self assured conceits of your time.
We believe in the results of science because, ultimately, we trust some combination of our senses and our brain based experience we call "thinking". We believe this combination gives us knowledge of things which are not our brains, but have an independent reality. I believe this. But this knowledge comes to us through consciousness and not through some other avenue.
One of the uncomfortable implications of this is people who claim to have a certain kind of universal knowledge or experience revealed to them by "spiritual or mystical" experience through which they come to know that the universe is somehow conscious can't just be poo pooed away. Considered in a certain way, that poo pooing would be one part of the brain, one function, one way of knowing, declaring its fiefdom of consciousness and understanding to be the ultimate judge of the reality of the outside world as processed by any other part.
Just saying- you need to be skeptical and realize that not everything someone claims is that deep a claim.
possible knowledge states by all parts of the brain
I agree with what you said, but it still leaves experience itself as a kind of weird thing. Even if experience is is dependent on brains or nervous systems as far as we can guess, what is it ? What else is there like it ?
Where to begin...
1) the link between what they saw in rat's brains and any experience the rat may or may not have been having is merely inferred. All they actually have is an increase in activity, that's all. How or if that translates into the rat experiencing something specific and what it might be is pure conjecture. It is possible that the brain activates but the rat's consciousness or conscious awareness remains unawares. It may as well be terror the rat feels. We just don't know.
2) the link between this rat brain electrical activity and a specific human experience whose experiencers claim is not chaotic but has semantic meaning is the purest of pure conjecture. There is nothing, no-thing, linking these findings and this specific human experience but the sheerest of sheer conjecture, teetering daintily on the flimisiest of extrapolations.
3) it dodges the entire issue of what consciousness, conscious experience as opposed to things bumping into each other or chemically reacting, is. We don't suppose other compositions of matter - chairs, light switches, my computer- possess it, yet there it appears to be.
Thinking that consciousness is worth thinking about about goes in and out of fashion in academic and scientific circles.The glib answer offered up from some interpretations of materialism is- it's an epiphenomena of brains and nervous systems, on whom it appears to depend (how do we know that?).
The problem with that answer is it's a form of hand waving , of assuming the consequent (all consciousness "needs" matter), a defining away with words or in this case, referencing a process- neural activity. Instead of telling us what the thing is, it "explains" it away.
The real spooky implication of materialism is that consciousness may be omnipresent or exists sui generis in the universe. It's possible that it is the first among things and somehow gives rise to material in ways which are unknown.
We're stuck as a species of implicitly paradoxical materialists, who not only know for a fact that know we have conscious experience and thought but know further that this conscious experience and thought is the only means we have at discerning the material scientific truth about the world.
Chairs and tables which lack this also know nothing, or at least it seems that way.
I assert that the fact of conscious experience is the final frontier. Hypotheses non fingo. However, only someone with no scientific imagination supposes that the concepts and scientific frameworks known to her at the time she lives necessarily contain within them all the ideas needed to explain everything in the world, that there's not something which will come only later with the power to encompass all previous explanations, and extend them in a direction unimaginable by previous centuries of scientists, even into the realm of science fiction of "spirituality" .
Occam's razor is a proper thinking tool to decide between competing explanations, not defining ultimate scientific horizons.
People who have these experiences insist their nature is essentially *knowetic*, that they bear *meaning* and reveal a factual aspect of reality which was previously hidden.
This is the same "meaning" by the way that all semantic-bearing constructs in our environs - pictures, symbols, words, x-rays, scientific theories- are said to convey.
Many scientists equate these experiences with hallucinations. I submit that anyone making this certain, authoritative categorization is indulging in the priggish, short-sighted, self-satisfied kind of thinking that amuses us about long distant generations of 'scientists" and "doctors" with their clever, but technically constricted and ultimately wrong-headed theories of "stuff".
From what? Where you get to be if you spend 15 hours a day playing other video games? Great.
THE OP says that the FBI was looking at Schwartz since 2008 b/c of his manifesto. If you follow the link, it refers you to Wired. The Wired article does not say this. It says they were going to use that 2008 manifesto against him when they prosecuted him.
If I am mistaken on this, please link me, but I don't think I am.
It's a big diff. In one case the feds are building a (pathetic) case. In the other one, the feds are starting to track people for exercising their 1st Amendment rights.
Maybe they do. They have in the past. But this is not an instance of it.
Everything wireless is less secure than its wired counterpart. Always prefer wired if given an option.
The only question to ask yourself is how bad is the potential downside?
Just think of the most basic aspects. Wireless by definition means *direct these signals through the air in all directions and receive signals from the air in all directions*
What could possibly go right?
Wireless communication between car components? No thanks!
Wireless lights everywhere? No thanks!
Must learn enough about cars to disable all this stuff when I buy a new one.
That's 3 more than anyone else needs.
It's what is incentivize when you count no results as non-knowledge. That's a large part of the problem. No results are information too, Unfortunately just anyone can produce unlimited amounts on demand.
There should be (and the idea is not original to me) and perhaps is now a journal of interesting no-effects, non-results.
The lying is pandemic in academia, and it's not just PIs lying about their results, it's everywhere .. sorry to say it's a culture which tolerates lying at every level. At our university, TAs openly threatened students with being graded down for doing stuff like showing up to the TAs office hours if they missed class for any reason, then followed through on those threats. The profs knew about it and looked the other way.
I know PIs in our department were said to fake results and it was unofficially encouraged via the grapevine. In theory it gets discovered, but as far as I know no one has ever systematically gone through with the required statistical tools and correlated unrepeatedable results with PIs or departments, or more subtly, contraindicated results , results that could not be true if a wealth of other results of seemingly unrelated experiments were true. Sure some high focus pursuits like climate change and alternative energy get properly and excruciatingly scrutinized and rescrutinized, but the low level chemical pathway shit this guy is slogging around in? Not so much. He knows he's out of the spotlight.
Here's a tip for young idealists of the sort I was. Every power hierarchy has a disproportionate number of sociopaths at the top and academia is no exception. The dishonest, law-breaking, libelous and slandering political maneuvering that spoils other ventures spoils academic pursuits at least as much.
It was Henry Kissinger who noted that department politics are so vicious just because there is so little to fight over and he may be right. The monetary rewards are marginal, the job security is gone and work environment is bone grinding and relentless all the while it's demanded that you get positive results so you get funding.
We need a kind of policing function in academia. We need people whose specific job it is to use what methods they can think of to catch cheaters. There mere presence of such an entity would be a huge deterrent by itself.
We also need to detach course grading and degree granting from the university. There's nothing at the university, no particular resource anyone needs access to in order to learn to the undergrad or even masters degree level. It's overpriced, it under delivers it's causing the next financial (aid) bubble and it subjects students to a time consuming, humiliating and demeaning process of vying to be liked personally by people who have despotic-level power over their futures. Enough.
yeah you and everyone else who has ever pursued strong AI. And? And? And so what you're as far away from that as anyone else is. This is the same hype that went around about neural nets some decades ago . So you brought a SHARPENED flint rock to the nuclear armed war this time. And?
There are parts of the human brain the size of your fist we know about as much as we did the heart when we finally figured out hey *it's a pump ! *.
Apparently only holy grail level aspirations are lofty enough to inspire researchers.
Utterances as macho and vaporish as this guy's are deserving of their own "Cock In a Box" style mockery :
http://www.funnyordie.com/videos/7cd2e1d8f0/dick-in-a-box-uncensored
http://www.rollingstone.com/movies/videos/walter-white-interviews-bryan-cranston-on-fallon-20130803
just sayin'.
---It's you who's confused because I wasn't considering her mind, not even for a second. This is purely about physical biology.
You score one point of a total inability to follow an argument. I was pointing out that YOUR IMPLICIT CRITERIA was such. Not that you consciously realized what you were implying.
That whizzing sound is points going over your head.
--They were not exactly "her cells"; they were a freak combination of partly her cells and partly something else that resulted in something that was neither of the two (demonstrating this fact neatly with killing her so that would be no confusion about that).
Score one point for total biological ignorance. MOST of anyone's healthy body is FOREIGN ORGANISMS, mostly bacteria, which are practically inseparable from "our cells".
So by your scientifically illiterate standards , none of our bodies can ever really be considered as ours and the state or scientists should be able to treat us like it treated Lack.
Getting the theme here? No? You're ignorant !
--Actually, no. I don't think anyone has been "fruitlessly searching for a long time" for this.
Yeah, it's just a fact about history that you're wrong. Nothing more to say there, except that not only do you know zero about the history of HeLa cells, but you don't think you need to to hold forth on the subject.
--That makes "white irreligious people of European descent" smart, because it's the reasonable thing to do. Worrying about things you can't affect is a waste of time.
Score a point for using self validating arguments ! Thanks for saying this actually because it proves you're exactly what I implied- an ignorant narcissist who doesn't even understand the idea of "a limited culturally bound perspective." Your POV is just the the turth, even when the truths we're talking about are not scientific, but only human values which vary across cultures. You're values are right and you don't need to respect other people's values.
Hey low IQ asswipe, the world is sick of fighting wars started by people like you and bin Laden, who agrees with you about not respecting other people's cultures and the "being right" part especially, so do the world a favor-fav and leave the thinking to others.
--That's not only impractical but utterly impossible. First, I really hope you collect all your skin flakes as you're walking around spreading them.
Well the laws of every state in this nation and all other nations say the dead do get to specify what is to be done with their bodies, one option of which is to donate it to science, so you must wonder what all those billions of people are talking about.
Guess that's the state you walk around in most of the time.
You're confused . No one is saying the ( volitional )contents of Lack's mind were special, which is basically for some reason where you're putting the bar for the intersection of "special" and "person".
They're saying her cells were special- and they did act in a way that researchers had been frutilessly searching for for a long time. If you follow the link, you'll see what the whole thing is about.
White irreligious people of European descent may not care about what does or does not happen with or without their knowledge and permission to their bodies after death, but not everyone is a white, irreligious person of European descent, and what those other people think, matters.
You get the idea of a private citizen owning their own body after death and having the right to direct how it will be disposed of, I'll bet I mean, you'd scream bloody murder if the state started disposing of dead people's effects as the state saw fit.
Now perhaps you people mean when they say your perspective is narrow and "culture bound" .
what do you mean 'goes bad' ? Roberts IS bad.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C0lMrp_ySg8
Look who's talking..
http://www.democraticunderground.com/10023414198
he looks like a fucking human tick that's just finished gorging itself ...
i'm huntin... wabbits...
Kill da wabitt !
Kill da wa-bbit !!!!
It's interesting Michael Hayden feels free to hold forth as an authority on the presumably private lives of his fellow American citizen's, specifically their sex lives.
Does anyone seriously doubt that this is Hayden accidentally -and very publicly- accessing and referencing the very thing he denies the NSA is doing- watching, cataloging , storing (and sniggering at) the most deeply personal and intimate details of people's everyday affairs, in this case their masturbation habits and likely frequency of sexual intercourse?
It's hard to keep clear the boundaries between what you know and can talk about and what you know and aren't supposed to talk about, isn't it Michael? It requires constant vigilance, doesn't it? You never know when you're going to let something slip.
I am asking the president of the United States to relieve General Hayden of his responsibilities for conduct unbecoming, gross negligence in his public utterances, and failure to uphold the high standards of the US military.
I call bullshit. I have seen those "documentaries" that purport to expose Bush Sr.'s father as funding the Nazis and in fact, it's total bullshit and 20/20 hindsite. This is the same kind of crap as the 9-11 truthers. It's not an accurate portrayal of history. I am perfectly willing to believe that there are conspiracies and when 9-11 happened, I seriously considered if a Cheney type sociopath in the WH might have had a LIHJOP or even a MIHOP type involvement. You can't immediatlely count this kind of thing out.
If you're going to read history , then read it. Don't pick and choose parts of it to serve as a filler for your preferred political narrative and be eternally vigilant against the productions of people who do do that.
oI am not launching a "you're bad" post here. I am saying that you need to examine the criteria by which you're assigning truth values to narratives ; those criteria are too low.
You want to know the truth- that's got to be your goal. It can't be wanting to "prove" something you feel strongly is true and you have to develop the discipline to see that errant impulse in yourself and check it. This is not a human's natural state- it's a learned set of skills that needs constant maintenance.
*Everyone you despise is despicable precisely because they failed in this basic task*.
Honor reality above all else. The documentation that the Bush's family was pro-Nazi and supported them is gutter level bullshit.
If you want we can take up the details of this .. I'm in and out all day.
Again I am not saying you're a bad or intellectually slovenly person. i am saying that 1) you're factually incorrect and 2) you got that way by permitting your standards for truth to be too low.
You're interested in history and prepare to reject pat answers. That's to your credit,
Lesson- don't comment on article without first reading- they were grabbing anyone with anything to grab ...nothing to do with drugs . The person with pipe wasn't smoking crack and was never charged with any offense. I don't own a glass pipe (as called in the article) either, but they aren't illegal either. Laws have to mean something more than "I need cash, you look weak".
Yeah if you're in business for yourself and competing on product quality, then your competitions H1Bs are a boon. It's just true. In Indiana, they tried to revamp the welfare system using IBM, which basically means H1B. After a billion dollars, the whole thing wouldn't fly. Now everyone is suing everyone. If you set up a google alert for "failed IT project" you'll see what goes down all the time everywhere. So you have a state tax payers footing the bill for their universities sending their kids to that university but they can't get a job because the state hires companies that hire H1Bs
http://www.cio.com/article/712259/IBM_Beats_Indiana_in_Outsourcing_Case_No_One_Deserves_to_Win_
Any state decision maker from the Gov on down who hires an IT money pit company like IBM or INFOSYS or any of the other body shoppers ought to be removed from office by the taxpayers
This is a slow train that's been coming for a long time. Richly deserved, by any measure. the US is not India, and isn't going to allow for flagrant, over the top wholesale discrimination. We've already been there, done that, and we're not going back.
Infosys is fucked.
Sell.
If you read the article, they're pressing the NSA to let them rifle through the NSA database and avail themselves of NSA technical resources. They're using reasoning like "this drug money could be supporting terrorists ! " Well, just anything could be supporting terrorists; terrorists get their cash from legit enterprises (bin Laden) and unwitting customers to other legal enterprises (Hawala etc. ) .
The problem is, the wider the access to that kind of deeply personal information, the greater the likelihood it will be abused.
Take for example the jaw-dropping abuse present within the asset forfeiture programme- reader alert- if you're inclined to high blood pressure when totally and finally morally outraged , you actually may not want to follow this link:
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2013/08/12/130812fa_fact_stillman
Americans WILL turn on the love affair they have with law enforcement if law enforcement oversteps its bounds. If I were a seasoned DEA vet heading a department, I'd run like hell away from my agents being able to access NSA style information about common Americans. My reasoning would be, given the potential applications of this information and my lack of real detailed control over the individual actions by each member of army of people under my charge, it's going to blow up in my our face and the backlash will be crippling.
Have we not learned that even heavily vetted people can't be trusted ? Think of the applications readily available information about your searches could yield.
Realistic example: Harkening back to the article I linked to, what if citizens' became so angry, some of them formed a nascent movement to repeal civil forfeiture laws. From the POV of some law enforcement, that is literally am mortal threat to their existence. People who mortally threaten my police department with financial extinction , whether they mean to be or not, are a threat to public safety. Therefore, I am interested to know exactly who those citizens are. I will then instruct my officers to pretext them (think up a false excuse to pull them over) when they're driving and take things from there.Perhaps they'll make it easy on us and prove to have an attitude. Perhaps their internet activity can be construed to be suspicious. Perhaps I know their employer...
Someone (can't remember who) has pointed out that anonymity begets respect between people who are otherwise strangers because you instinctively aren't sure what sort of resources or connections the stranger has available to them. If that is removed because of unilateral, intimate and omniscient knowledge, then all respect and constraint is lost and people are effectively deprived of their humanity. They become objects instead of equals, observed, known, measured, their foibles exposed for the observers amusement, ridicule and ultimately unbridled contempt. See- NSA analysts passing around audio recordings of overseas military personnel having phone sex with their spouses:
http://www.guernicamag.com/daily/trevor-paglen-turnkey-tyranny-surveillance-and-the-terror-state/
This is where this goes. This is a psychological fact about humans. This kind of invasion, like the abuse of civil forfeiture laws, has the power, that is it carries sufficient emotional charge, to tear this nation apart. The government can't kid themselves that this is just a technical issue looking for a technical solution, or that the most abusive and corrosive applications of this kind of power won't materialize and be fully realized.
No WMD is soon going threaten Western civilization unless it also unleashes a real widespread loss of faith government and government's motivations. Unleashing NSA -style surveillance on the average citizen is the fast track, the force multiplier to any WMD attack that al Queda wants.
One day, it may c