Illusions is too strong a word and has the wrong connotations. It's my fault since I injected it into the conversation. Without working too hard thinking about it, a better idea might be *degree of reality*. Not everything is real to the same degree. This would be lunatic territory except when you compare it to the alternatives (which I will cite); it's not any more weird than those . For the record, I have the same "illusions" as everyone else wrt the physical world. We all do. I don't doubt the "existence" of the armchair as you mean those words, I do doubt the armchair's "final reality" as an object. It exists in one sense but in another it is just a partial description of something which is only experience.
I had to think about this:
..."it's impossible because the material world, including all robots, is basically ontologically inferior to 'experience' and since robots might all be an illusion anyway, there's no way they could have true 'experience' or 'intelligence' or 'consciousness' or whatever."
I am saying that computers can't auto-generate a class of (real, actual) thing via "emergent properties" by dint of being "sufficiently complex". That's pholigston-level hand waving and appeal-to-noun-phrase. It's like the old arguments about there being a special "life force", some quality that living things possessed which distinguished them from inanimate matter. It reeks of that. I deny- and so do most sufficiently scientifically educated people- there is a ontologically substantive difference between live and dead things, that one has a "thing" the other does not. By the same token, I also deny there is a difference between "conscious" and "non-conscious" things since the thing-iness of anything is in question while the fact of consciousness (experience) is not. So it's not that "consciousness arises" from (suitably complex) things. It's that things arise from consciousness, but their ontological status is not the same as consciousness (experience) . Experience is real first and foremost. Other things are not. In the mind-matter debate you could say I say everything is mind, except I deny the thing in "everything". At any rate, it is false to claim that consciousness is caused by or arises from complex arrangements of things.
So the specific picture of reality - the claim - I am trying to argue against is just that above- the one of emergent properties or life forces possessed by or emanating from things which things are, it turn, the ultimate source of those emergent properties. Those properties don't exist, they are illusions or, more precisely, false beliefs about existence (of a thing). It's Bad Science.
But we are left with the undeniable fact that there IS experience and this makes it subtly different from the life / non-life debate in that we aren't *inferring* the existence of the thing in question - a life force on the one hand and experience on the other. We cannot reject the base fact of experience although we can (and should- we all agree on this.. experience is not proof of existence, there are illusions and hallucinations and errors in thinking etc etc ) reject or at least doubt the objects in our minds which are *inferred* from our experience . I infer the existence of my hand from the experience of looking at my hand. The (ontological existence or reality) of my hand is questionable, the experience is not.
It's not solipsism because solipsism means the only thing I know for sure is my own self and my own thoughts. That is subtly (depending on whose thinking about it) a very different statement than "there is only experience", or experience is ontologically superior or the only "real" or "ontologically most real" thing. Hopefully those two things are clearly distinguishable from each other.
The idea is kooky, that there are not things only experiences, but not less kooky than the alternatives which the scientific community lives easily with for some reason.
If someone accuses for no reason accuses my ordinary backpack of being a bomb (sold with a convenient bomb-holder!) I'm going to say , "that's right, it's a bomb" and then think "idiot".
Now I go to jail? And I am, what, 12?
At what point does this obsession with controlling people's speech for fear of bombings and mass murder start to shade into a violation of the 1st Amendment right to be fucking sarcastic, ironic and otherwise you know, conscious?
You know how many people died due to acts of terrorism and mass shootings compared to falling in the fucking tub ? Know what your odds are wrt getting shot / bombed by strangers anywhere in America?
I know both sides are rolling around in th mud of current events in order to achieve their desired legislative ends - the left gun control and the right cessation of Muslim immigration but to both sides I say, in the spirit of Madison and Jefferson- fucking blow me.
Fucking wake the fuck up and see how you're both being played for goddamn fools by the people who want to have more control over your speech , your privacy, YOUR KIDS and all your "inalienable" rights.
You are talking about direct experience. While irreftuable, it is also unprovable (like most everything else really).
I understand the meaning of irrefutable to be essentially "provable". You may wonder as to the"reality"of what you experience, but the fact that you have an experience requires no proof since a thing which is (and is in the proof-theoretical sense, true) requires no (further) proof. If by proof you mean "elaboration", then sure, experience may be something which cannot be "reduced" or elaborated on any further. It just is.
Logically, science can really never settle the matter. Yet if you ask someone if it's OK to end their experience, they magically start to appreciate it somewhat, regardless how little respect they have for life in general.
It is possible that some true "facts" cannot be represented by logical thought but are not outside the realm of knowability. That is not an unreasonable hypothesis for someone to hold.
It must be unsettling, for the dogmatic scientific mind, that what they seek, can only be obtained through direct experience of second-hand phenomena. It's like shadows in the cave, only worse: to the n-th degree at all times. Yogis call them worlds within worlds, but it might just be an excuse to keep all options open in an uncertain world too.
Our entire history is largely defined by a certain "kind" of thinking and the various systems of belief that kind of thinking gives rise to. That's an encompassing truth so vast that almost no one sees it.
The only refuge for the unsettled and smallish mind, is to start believing that nothing is truly real, alive or great, so as to protect its already established convictions and conditionings. Because, it's usually the prejudice and ego that feels threatened, history shows it always will have to yield to more illumination, knowledge, and ironically enough: science.
Reductionsim as a form of escapism.
Maybe everything is just clockworks all the way down. If it is, it'll truly always remain the most magnificent clockwork of them all!
Do you believe that? Is that what you're deepest instinct tells you is true? It's your life. Are you going to let someone separate you from your own knowledge?
there is no reason to believe that consciousness or experience falls out of machines,
You replied:
There is also no reason to believe that they cannot.
Strong AI are the ones hypothesizing a relationship and capability of a thing - the brain- here. The burden falls squarely on you, not me. Prove it.
Earlier, I said:
Consider that anything which can be modeled with a computer can be modeled with something much more primitive, albeit in a cumbersome way, for example, a Turing tape or a even a very fancy abacus made of wood, wires, beads. Yes you definitely want to keep that fact in mind before you pin that Strong AI Booster pin on your lapel.
You replied:
Turing proved that anything that is calculable, could be calculated in a turing machine. So, either thought lies completely outside the realm of calculable mathematics, or it can be modeled exactly by a sufficiently complex computer.
Consider this. Conscious thought is a kind of experience. You know this is true. If you mimic the results of thought and claim therefore the thing which mimicked the thought must also therefore have experiences, then you're just defining thought downwards, to fit your accomplishments.
Plato used to point to calculating students as proof man was rational and had a soul. That became less convincing with the advent of calculating machines. A calculation is just that, the movement of matter causing other matter to assume some form in a deterministic fashion. Considered in this way, all the material universe is a gigantic calculator. By your own argument then, the universe is conscious.
I know I have dropped you off in a unpleasant neighborhood, but, Sir, it's only where you told me to drive you.
Earlier I said:
If anything, consciousness gives rise to matter (as an illusion or particular way of thinking) and also all the laws of physics and everything that flows therefrom. Given the absolute non-reputability of the existence of experience it's more likely that consciousness is the "fundamental" stuff of the universe than matter or that consciousness arises from sufficiently complex arrangements of non-conscience matter.
You replied:
This is just nonsense quackery, the same idea that people can change reality based on thought alone. It has never been proven, and every single one of those 'psychics' and 'telekinetics' and 'healers' have all been proven to be frauds be the likes of James Randi.
You need to check yourself here. Nowhere did I make even one of those claims and in fact I disavow them all. They may "feel ' like the same "kind" of thing to you,but that means nothing to me and means nothing to this discussion. You need to be more careful is what your reply really means.
You said:
We may be pretty darn wrong in our current theories, but here is the thing: Science is simply generalized models about reality that have been proven repeatedly through experimentation. When a new model, even a radically new model, comes along, it does not suddenly make all those old reasonably proven theories useless. It just further refines and corrects what was already mostly correct.
I am not saying science is wrong or the results of science are wrong. This is not what this discussion is about. This discussion is about Strong AI and is it a correct model of consciousness? Everything that is true in science is true. But those truths can also exist in a larger context which casts everything in a completely new light without overturning anything per se. If you've lost that spark of a possibility in your mind, then that's a statement about you. But anyways, the topics are Strong AI consciousness and the ultimate "stuff" of the universe and how we get something of one kind- experience- out of a Turning machine or if we are perhaps thinking about things all wrong.
I agree with you in spirit. I am also I don't know-er, but in a specific way I won't get into. Anyways I am not saying that the physical world doesn't exist at all in any sense; I am saying it's exact nature and relation to "consciousness" or what I would rather call "experience" is not explained by strong AI and I am making the case for experience as the preferred fundamental "stuff" of the universe, which resolves the so called "mind-body" or "consciousness-brain" "experience-matter" problem in favor of the existence of the thing we know exists, experience; this is an approach which seems nothing but reasonable to me.
You can say that but it's not true. Literally, you know there is experiences. Literally, everything else is in doubt. Literally.
As to your "not any reason to believe" comment, this is just an unsupported assertion on your part. You have a BIG problem- how a Turing machine composed of tape and a reader can display every form of consciousness possible. It so absurd on the face of it that you have to resort to phlogiston -like theories of "emergent properties". You know what "emergent properties" are? A noun phrase without a referent. They're a whatever-you-want-to-to-put-in-here trashcan of hand-waving bullshit
Literally here is your reasoning:
The brain gives rise to consciousness because it manifests (or contains or supports) complex networks of electrical impulses which have "emergent properties" one of which is consciousness.
Do you know how how much that \smells like classic bullshit "I don't know what's going on, but here's a noun phrase" scienci-ness. Did you take a class on the theory of science? I mean do you know what does or does not qualify for a scientific theory?
It's not what I am saying that has got your panties in a bunch; it's what I am not saying. I am not saying I buy into department approved, career advancing, conformist philosophical bullshit. I am not saying anything more than what I know. and certainly I have not said anything as weird and unsupported as "emergent properties".
Emergent properties is what you say when you don't know what to say about what you don't understand. You can apply it to literally anything to frame as actual the existence of "things" which do not and never did exist. Get a hold of yourself man, it's the magical pixie dust of science.
It's more dignified by orders of magnitude to just say "I have no fucking idea; it's a mystery to me." when your theories lead you to the edge of ridiculousness.
You said: How is it "overwhelmingly likely"? Because you say so? Do you have some way of estimating that probability? Or do you really just mean, "I think it is thus!"
No, it's for the reason I said- our deliriously sparse knowledge of the brain itself. See my post.
Too bad FBI director James Comey doesn't read/. He'd see how insecure even the most thuoght to be secure secure things - like backdoors - are and perhaps lose the impulse to make things even less secure and start moving in the other direction.
You know, it's possible that somewhere in the FBI there's one highly capable James Corney who is right now mopping floors in the basement because every time he and James Comey were evaluated by their superiors, personnel mixed up their reviews, owing to an unfortunate choice of fonts on the review forms.
Sure, but this is the path to solipsism. If you can't prove the material world exists, you can't even prove that other people or other minds exist. So, actually, it's inaccurate to say that the "one thing we have irrefutable evidence for is just experience itself." Rather, you should have said, "the one thing *I* have irrefutable evidence for is just my own experience -- I don't know that anything outside of my own thoughts exists, and I could be participating in a pseudo-masturbatory exercise of pretending that there is an external world and other people out there and this imaginary place called Slashdot where I pretend to communicate with these figments of my imagination."
Well this is exactly backwards. I am not saying I actually exist- in words that's a contradiction but being a fair fellow you will admit my meaning- it's just what I said. The "I" is one of those things which could be an illusion like any other form of matter.
Whose illusion? *Just an illusion owned by no-one.* Just an experience, which is an illusion which exists and stop right there.
I am not saying "people have experiences" I am saying "there is experience". Out of cogito ergo sum take away cogito and replace it with experience. Experience, ergo experience. Anything else is an assumption.
When I say (all material) things could exist the way illusions exist, there IS an existence to illusions, but it's not a "full existence" if you get my meaning. And you do get my meaning. For example, if you go crazy and believe you see the ghost of Blackbeard telling you to quit this science thing, find yourself a seaworthy ship and start living life, there is a sense in which you DID see the specter and another one in which the specter was an illusion. This is a state of affairs, assigning different levels of reality to phenomena, that is not confusing or controversial in the least.Certainly it's not less weird than Minsky assigning degrees of consciousness to increasingly complex cybernetic feedback loops or you assigning increasingly "emergent properties" to increasingly complex systems.
So my statements are clear and any contradiction involving the word "I" ( i.e. I doubt the ultimate reality of my personal identity ) is an unfortunate byproduct of language, and this little quirk of language is a separate issue from the truthfulness and accuracy of my statements, which are of course fairly dubitable, but I don't think , wrong.
Anyways...the larger point is, that there is no reason to believe that consciousness or experience falls out of machines, no matter how wet or complex they are.
You said:
Sure there is, if you actually believe in the empirical world. And that's all you're "evidence" is that you're discussing -- the physical stuff you see and can measure and dissect. There's no way currently to "prove" that consciousness emerges from the physical stuff of the brain, but the burden of proof is on your side to prove that there's "something else" there, because the rest of physical reality as we sense it seems logically consistent with materialism.
No I only affirm what I know with certainty- that there IS experience. You know there is also, and so does everyone else. The "something else" is something your side owns completely. You believe you know there's a physical world and you believe you know of it's characteristics only because of experience- the experience of looking in a microscope or out the window or reading a book or thinking. But the experience here is absolutely primary and cannot be disputed; you cannot say it does not exist.
Now that we know with 100% absolute certainty that experience exists and no skeptic can meaningfully deny it, let's take a good look at material substance. We have chased that stuff for thousands of years and each time we have been certain we have gotten to the irreducible and final form it, except for currently. While we may believe in quarks, in whatever sense a wriggling bit of string theory exists, researchers, chastened by experience, also allow that this might not be the final stopping point. So Experience: 1 matter: TBD, possibly eternally.
I am not making the above up, that is actually the way things are. I am not distorting the record, not in the least.
So it is on this basis that I claim that something which IS is more likely to be the basis for something which MAY BE than the other way around.
It is also the basis by which I conclude that it's more likely to be the fundamental stuff of the universe than, say, the equations of String Theory, even more so since, uh actually, equations are purely the product of a kind of experience, an experience we call logical thought.
So yes, I am saying that the world you take to be "out there" may be nothing but experience and all the things you think are properties of that world- time, quarks, space, all of it is possibly not real, possibly real in the sense of being a compelling illusion of thought and possibly "composed" of experience in some way no weirder than a cat is "composed" of the non-corporeal wriggling strings of string theory- which, please keep in mind, it literally true.
Observe that I am not playing games of any kind here. I am only stating the facts as they are.
The Turing tape remark of mine is meant to jar the reader out of what I call "wetworld handwaving" that Strong AI gets into. That's a trick of the mind whereby complex systems, if they're made of wet biological stuff, get infused with a magical quality which permits the leap from "complex machine" to "consciousness".
On this point, you can take a lesson from Marvin Minsky, who admits that if very complex systems give rise to consciousness because of "ether", er, I mean "emergent properties" then it must admit of degrees. So it follows that, and he says this explicitly, simple feedback loops like oh, your house's thermostat, actually possess a rudimentary form of consciousness.
It's fun to think about the implications of this imminently reasonable and completely defensible corollary of Strong AI and the 'emergent property" theory you espouse. What else might be conscious by dint of complexity- the weather? Perhaps we the Ancients were, perhaps crudely, really onto something with their Gods of the Wind and Fire and War and the Sea.
Once you open the door to the "emergent properties of complex systems" you're going to find yourself working overt
It's obvious that our simplified mental model of how roads and drivers work bears little semblance to how they actually DO work, at least to anyone who has ever modeled any part of reality. To NOT have studied this, not to seen it as something which is properly the subject of a possibly long , expensive and anyway open-ended scientific investigation implies you're the (autisitc) type who mistakes systems of rules for reality, and perhaps enjoys doing so; someone who loves maps more than hiking. PRIOR to programming self driving cars, or at least expecting them to succeed and be marketable (maybe SDCs are a useful tool in this needing-to-be-done study of drivers and roads) you needed to know a whole lot more about how people make their cars behave in reality.
See my reply above scentcone. It's very different and the reason the guy in your scenario gets away with it is because no one can prove he did it. It's the same with employee blacklisting. There are laws to protect people, but employers sneak around those laws- at their own peril.
In principle it's different because its intent is different. My family album is not the moral equivalent to a DIY Most Wanted List generated by whatever goon wants to generate it then shared as fact with other goons. If the intent of tendering the video is to imply the people on the video have committed some crime or are likely to or have some other moral flaw, then that goes by another name of slander.
IF the intent of the video is to pass around the time and location of babes, then that goes by the name of stalking.
If the intent of the video is to target people you don't like in some way, then that goes by a lot of busy sounding names and into a lot of areas of law which may presently see an uptick in their activity levels- negligent infliction of emotional distress, defamation, tort of false light https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
tortious interference with economic gain, intentional interference with contractual relations- if it interferes now or any time in the future with their employability....
FTA: "'Deep learning is a computational system employing a multi-layered neural net...the brain's processing dynamic is far richer and less constrained because it has recurrent interconnection, sometimes called feedback loops.' Her lab is now creating a 'massively recurrent deep learning network,' she says, for a more brain-like and superior learning AI.""
But this is not new. This is connectionism and all its descendants. Anyways...the larger point is, that there is no reason to believe that consciousness or experience falls out of machines, no matter how wet or complex they are. Consider that anything which can be modeled with a computer can be modeled with something much more primitive, albeit in a cumbersome way, for example, a Turing tape or a even a very fancy abacus made of wood, wires, beads. Yes you definitely want to keep that fact in mind before you pin that Strong AI Booster pin on your lapel.
If we want to get down to brass tacks and go really hardcore the one thing we have absolute irrefutable evidence for is just experience itself. Everything else is possibly a chimera based on a re-construction of experience-as-thought; material substance is real the same way a false belief or an illusion is real.
If anything, consciousness gives rise to matter (as an illusion or particular way of thinking) and also all the laws of physics and everything that flows therefrom. Given the absolute non-reputability of the existence of experience it's more likely that consciousness is the "fundamental" stuff of the universe than matter or that consciousness arises from sufficiently complex arrangements of non-conscience matter.
Anyway, it is overwhelmingly likely that at this stage of our knowledge and scientific inquiry we just radically and fundamentally misunderstand the nature of matter and consciousness. People still think about densely packed protons and neutrons but in fact there are only quarks (at least so far) and a quark is a "thing" oh, about the size of a virus, which is contained in a sphere of emptiness- just nothing- the diameter of Neptune's yearly orbit around the sun. So there's your "material stuff". Last seen receding ever further into purely mathematical constructs....
We specialize because we have to with the result that we just don't think big enough or more accurately closely and precisely enough about what the Big Picture is telling us. Science slowly grinds down, or more charitably "hones", your imagination in a particular way so as to make you a successful researcher or current theorist.
Whatever framework we are using to try to understand consciousness - call it reductionism to material- is most likely as wrong as voodoo for reasons which will later be shown to have been hidden to us now. If that doesn't just immediately strike you as most likely correct, then consider the argument has inductive support: that's been the historical tale of the tape when we are in the same state of ignorance with respect to a subject matter as we are with respect to the brain.
AI researchers who start quacking on making big, definitive statements about consciousness and the brain are just marking themselves as lesser lights and can always count on a round of ridicule, at least from me, on/.
Terrorism now or in the near technological future has the power to deconstruct human civilization. That's the Irresistible Force and it's real.
Democratic nations who in practice abandon their liberty securing foundations will devolve into corrupt autocratic regimes of the very worst sort and likely stay there forever. This true fact makes those liberty securing foundations an Immovable Object- an object which must at all costs resist disintegrating forces, both from within and without.
Clearly, the US Government has, in practice, thrown the US Fourth Amendment in the garbage. I don't think anyone can argue otherwise with a straight face. These devices are some of the gory details of how they do this.
It's a slippery slope into an corrupt autocratic regime and we're sliding down it. We just are./.ers don't need me to prove this to them but there are many things to think about which have not been properly teased out of the headlines. This is just one of them:
For decades, the police have been using the NSA as the actual source of their knowledge of drug smugglers' (and other criminals) travel itineraries. Using this knowledge, they have pretexted pulling those smugglers over, for say failure to signal, and then searched the car for drugs. The fact that the NSA was the real ultimate source of the tip was deliberately and systematically withheld not just from the defense, but from the entire judicial system - judges grand juries and sometimes prosecutors alike.
Now what this implies is it possible to rely on just the average local cop and apparently prosecutor to withhold knowledge of mass, ongoing Constitutional violations. This is a big deal because it is proof of a conspiracy, a conspiracy of silence, sustained for decades by thousands of the very people sworn to uphold and defend the laws and the Constitution. A conspiracy not to keep secret things secret but to keep unconstitutional processes a secret from the American system of justice.
It has been normalized to the point where veteran officers consider both the use of this technique and the hiding of its use from courts to be "bedrock police technique".
The easy conclusion, that cops are bad, has to be false. Cops are (self) drawn from the general population and if there's any reason to think they're non-representative, it's probably to the better side of non-representative with respect to rule following and lawfulness; they are likely better than you would get from just a random draw of citizens.
So it has to be something else. Group dynamics, identification with a group, loyalty, etc. are all at play, but it's also possible that they rationally -and correctly- judge themselves to have been forced into an untenable position where they cannot do their larger job - keep society safe- and also abide by the rules we have set out for them. Giving up the NSA program would result in a worse outcome for the nation overall and giving up using the NSA information would result in a worse outcome for their communities.
In a certain sense it's our fault because we Americans cannot, in the words of Nathan R. Jessep, handle the truth.
I am not saying I agree with this reasoning, I don't but for complex reasons having to do with human psychology and the dangerous dynamics of "the broken window" phenomena where a little bit of bad, seen to be unanswered, brings on an avalanche of Very Bad. Still the cop's position (as guessed at by me) is rational and motivated by a desire to do good, and moreover it may accurately describe the reality of what has to be done in order for policing to be effective. That may just be the truth of the situation.
Going on 15 years after 9-11 and 3 years after Snowden, I still see no dedicated widely
Look this U of Chicago, so what do you expect, a celebration of the Bill of Rights? It's a goddamn fascist idea incubator and hatchery. People from there are paid to float completely fascist ideas as weather balloons and to inject the idea into the national conversation generally.
Strategically, the difference between voicing the idea to widespread ridicule and never floating the idea at all is huge in favor of the idea eventually being taken seriously, despite the ridicule. That's what we're seeing here. Yes, the idea is soundly rejected at this time; but now that it's been floated, it's not going away. To be adopted, first you have to have been born. This idea has now been born. Mission accomplished for the fascists.
Best post on the thread. Probably too late to be properly modded up.
There are some things I always think when I read threads like this. One is the American public's horror at surveillance is a kind of induction-from-introspection. They know themselves and what they might be tempted to do. They know how blase they are about The Lives Of Other People ( also the title of a great movie on just this subject and not a waste of your time should you make an effort to find it) . So they can infer what goes on.
They also know some history both American and foreign and they know as one poster said, it all starts with lists.
Another thing think influences their reaction is how they're treated by private entities, not the government. That might best be described as "extremely unfairly". In companies, at school, even in friendships, what is true and real, the actual facts of a matter rarely count for much. Instead, it's some kind of autocratic and often despotic process with some HR-type fig leaf thrown over it.
Read the headlines about what corporations do to their employees, their customers, they government and then realize that this same corporate culture is the hand that feeds these Americans. Corporations aren't just places we go to work like restaurants are places we go to eat and theaters are places we go to see movies; they're more like pirate ships we are sworn to for a time and we continue to eat and live another day only at the captains pleasure. It's more like that.
So of course they carry that despotic model of authority into their reasoning about terror watchlists and the like. How we are treated and how we treat each other in daily life has big implications for how we perceive the world around us, at least, barring an aggressive and sustained effort by an individual to eschew anything but well-founded facts when reasoning about, say, the government. A national security lawyer is going to fall into the later category, but most people never will.
On top of all this, there does seem to be an out-of-control element to the CI behavior, a perception shared by many in the IC community itself BTW. The most obvious example is the parsing of the Fourth Amendment to mean you can collect everyone's "papers" but you haven't "searched" it until a human has peaked at it. That's the most charitable way to describe their legal viewpoint.
Now clearly, their fears about terrorism are more specific, more graphic and more realistic and occupy more of their waking moments than non-CI population. It may be a matter of fact- it may be reality- that to protect the nation against a devastating and destabilizing terrorist attack, doing what they're doing is an obvious necessity. That may actually be the case. The problem is, just because the IC community has such a well developed map of the threat matrix, they are out of touch with the prevailing American's perception of how to deal with terrorism. That and of course they can't tell the public what they're doing, for obvious reasons.
But it could also be that they are erring on a dangerous side of caution, and accidentally laying the foundation for a future, unusurpable fascism. This is nothing to dismiss.
But in either case, the IC leadership are so out of sync with the public that even seasoned senators and members of the IC community itself are at odds with them. This and , quite frankly, they're massive liars. James Clappers bald-faced lying to Congress followed on by his bald-faced lying about why he lied to Congress (claiming he was forced to because they were in open session, which is a point blank, no-shades-of-gray lie for reasons I won't go into right now ) was a hugely damaging event to the nation. Trust in the IC community by large segments of people in this nation and other nations went to zero and has stayed there. And yet, he (with the blessings of the Obama administration) carries on, which itself is a kind of slap in the face to the American public.
The paranoia and loathing expressed in this thread is not w
Reposting under my name./. forgets my login in some browsers
One of the most dangerous things you can do on a road is to be stopped dead at a long-been-green stoplight, say playing with your phone. That's because *no one sees you as stopped*, specifically the car coming up to the light going 50. No one looks for it. People glance at the light, it's green, keep going at speed. What sort of idiot is stopped at a green light, your big chance to go? It's in the same category as saying "no" to free money. Being stopped at a green light is a nearly invisible event.
So let's talk about how dangerous going too slow is because your algorithm encountered a novel traffic situation (aren't a majority of them novel, really?) and urged caution to the accelerator. It's nearly as bad as being stopped at a green light, especially if you're the only one *reasoning* the way you reason about things, rightly or wrongly. In fact, this may be their fallback tactic- when confused, slow down. That way Google doesn't have any high-speed accidents that actually kill people. That would be bad, and bad press, too.
This is another thing about Google cars and self driving cars generally. They're safer *if they're in the majority*. They all know what each other is likely to do and can take account of it in their own behavior. They can coordinate. It's sort of the opposite effect of the Wall Street bots. They all know do the same thing, and then crater the market on account of it.
So here is a thing to think about. Self driving cars may have real trouble as an incremental approach. I have to think that it's a self conscious part of Google's game plan to reach a tipping point of self-driving cars where they are a significant minority. Until then, the project is a financial loss. Past that point, and working in tandem with insurance companies, expect to pay a first a little then a LOT more for insurance to drive regular cars. This will force the market (that means you) towards self-driving cars, if only for economic reasons. Somewhere along the way to this tipping point, the government will subsidize the purchase of self driving cars using the argument that that money comes back to them and more in the cost savings realized by fewer accidents, less healthcare costs associated with accidents, less police and emergency costs etc etc.
It's interesting to think that owning a car with self driving features is a status symbol now, reflecting wealth and prestige but in the future, driving a regular car will be the status symbol, signalling wealth and the freedom and autonomy it brings.
Google must be reasoning all this through even as they try to get self-driving car technology working. The players- insurance companies, the government the regulators, are all talking about these kinds of things- how they can economically *flip* everyone onto self-driving cars. They also have to be thinking about the popular perception and possible resistance to the technology. Obviously, cars are a form of individual autonomy. The government can't remotely pull the plug on your driving or automatically track your whereabouts. But with self-driving cars, expect to see them demand these *features* and Google *begrudgingly* go along with it.
When we switched from horses to cars, there were obviously numerous social issues that got dragged along. There was a large popular resistance because with a horse, you went where you wanted, the way you wanted. With a car, you could only go where what roads there were were. One of the things that made cars popular was amusingly enough, sex. A car was a kind of rolling bed, a possibly subversive dual purpose technology with a respectable side. The very first porn movie features a man and two women driving in an car in the country. The woman says she has to get out and pee. The car stops and woman gets out and after a little while the man follows. Pants-down embarrassment is followed by flirting which leads to fucking, of course. The other woman follows onto the scene and the gates o
Slashdot Mirror
Illusions is too strong a word and has the wrong connotations. It's my fault since I injected it into the conversation. Without working too hard thinking about it, a better idea might be *degree of reality*. Not everything is real to the same degree. This would be lunatic territory except when you compare it to the alternatives (which I will cite); it's not any more weird than those . For the record, I have the same "illusions" as everyone else wrt the physical world. We all do. I don't doubt the "existence" of the armchair as you mean those words, I do doubt the armchair's "final reality" as an object. It exists in one sense but in another it is just a partial description of something which is only experience.
I had to think about this:
I am saying that computers can't auto-generate a class of (real, actual) thing via "emergent properties" by dint of being "sufficiently complex". That's pholigston-level hand waving and appeal-to-noun-phrase. It's like the old arguments about there being a special "life force", some quality that living things possessed which distinguished them from inanimate matter. It reeks of that. I deny- and so do most sufficiently scientifically educated people- there is a ontologically substantive difference between live and dead things, that one has a "thing" the other does not. By the same token, I also deny there is a difference between "conscious" and "non-conscious" things since the thing-iness of anything is in question while the fact of consciousness (experience) is not. So it's not that "consciousness arises" from (suitably complex) things. It's that things arise from consciousness, but their ontological status is not the same as consciousness (experience) . Experience is real first and foremost. Other things are not. In the mind-matter debate you could say I say everything is mind, except I deny the thing in "everything". At any rate, it is false to claim that consciousness is caused by or arises from complex arrangements of things.
So the specific picture of reality - the claim - I am trying to argue against is just that above- the one of emergent properties or life forces possessed by or emanating from things which things are, it turn, the ultimate source of those emergent properties. Those properties don't exist, they are illusions or, more precisely, false beliefs about existence (of a thing). It's Bad Science.
But we are left with the undeniable fact that there IS experience and this makes it subtly different from the life / non-life debate in that we aren't *inferring* the existence of the thing in question - a life force on the one hand and experience on the other. We cannot reject the base fact of experience although we can (and should- we all agree on this.. experience is not proof of existence, there are illusions and hallucinations and errors in thinking etc etc ) reject or at least doubt the objects in our minds which are *inferred* from our experience . I infer the existence of my hand from the experience of looking at my hand. The (ontological existence or reality) of my hand is questionable, the experience is not.
It's not solipsism because solipsism means the only thing I know for sure is my own self and my own thoughts. That is subtly (depending on whose thinking about it) a very different statement than "there is only experience", or experience is ontologically superior or the only "real" or "ontologically most real" thing. Hopefully those two things are clearly distinguishable from each other.
The idea is kooky, that there are not things only experiences, but not less kooky than the alternatives which the scientific community lives easily with for some reason.
One of the alternatives is Minsky's "degree of
please tell me you're some sophomore's robot project.
If someone accuses for no reason accuses my ordinary backpack of being a bomb (sold with a convenient bomb-holder!) I'm going to say , "that's right, it's a bomb" and then think "idiot".
Now I go to jail? And I am, what, 12?
At what point does this obsession with controlling people's speech for fear of bombings and mass murder start to shade into a violation of the 1st Amendment right to be fucking sarcastic, ironic and otherwise you know, conscious?
You know how many people died due to acts of terrorism and mass shootings compared to falling in the fucking tub ? Know what your odds are wrt getting shot / bombed by strangers anywhere in America?
I know both sides are rolling around in th mud of current events in order to achieve their desired legislative ends - the left gun control and the right cessation of Muslim immigration but to both sides I say, in the spirit of Madison and Jefferson- fucking blow me.
Fucking wake the fuck up and see how you're both being played for goddamn fools by the people who want to have more control over your speech , your privacy, YOUR KIDS and all your "inalienable" rights.
You are talking about direct experience. While irreftuable, it is also unprovable (like most everything else really).
I understand the meaning of irrefutable to be essentially "provable". You may wonder as to the"reality"of what you experience, but the fact that you have an experience requires no proof since a thing which is (and is in the proof-theoretical sense, true) requires no (further) proof. If by proof you mean "elaboration", then sure, experience may be something which cannot be "reduced" or elaborated on any further. It just is.
Logically, science can really never settle the matter. Yet if you ask someone if it's OK to end their experience, they magically start to appreciate it somewhat, regardless how little respect they have for life in general.
It is possible that some true "facts" cannot be represented by logical thought but are not outside the realm of knowability. That is not an unreasonable hypothesis for someone to hold.
It must be unsettling, for the dogmatic scientific mind, that what they seek, can only be obtained through direct experience of second-hand phenomena. It's like shadows in the cave, only worse: to the n-th degree at all times. Yogis call them worlds within worlds, but it might just be an excuse to keep all options open in an uncertain world too.
Our entire history is largely defined by a certain "kind" of thinking and the various systems of belief that kind of thinking gives rise to. That's an encompassing truth so vast that almost no one sees it.
The only refuge for the unsettled and smallish mind, is to start believing that nothing is truly real, alive or great, so as to protect its already established convictions and conditionings. Because, it's usually the prejudice and ego that feels threatened, history shows it always will have to yield to more illumination, knowledge, and ironically enough: science.
Reductionsim as a form of escapism.
Maybe everything is just clockworks all the way down. If it is, it'll truly always remain the most magnificent clockwork of them all!
Do you believe that? Is that what you're deepest instinct tells you is true? It's your life. Are you going to let someone separate you from your own knowledge?
See my reply to the solipsism charge below. I am not saying anything like this.
Earlier I said:
there is no reason to believe that consciousness or experience falls out of machines,
You replied:
There is also no reason to believe that they cannot.
Strong AI are the ones hypothesizing a relationship and capability of a thing - the brain- here. The burden falls squarely on you, not me. Prove it.
Earlier, I said:
Consider that anything which can be modeled with a computer can be modeled with something much more primitive, albeit in a cumbersome way, for example, a Turing tape or a even a very fancy abacus made of wood, wires, beads. Yes you definitely want to keep that fact in mind before you pin that Strong AI Booster pin on your lapel.
You replied:
Turing proved that anything that is calculable, could be calculated in a turing machine. So, either thought lies completely outside the realm of calculable mathematics, or it can be modeled exactly by a sufficiently complex computer.
Consider this. Conscious thought is a kind of experience. You know this is true. If you mimic the results of thought and claim therefore the thing which mimicked the thought must also therefore have experiences, then you're just defining thought downwards, to fit your accomplishments.
Plato used to point to calculating students as proof man was rational and had a soul. That became less convincing with the advent of calculating machines. A calculation is just that, the movement of matter causing other matter to assume some form in a deterministic fashion. Considered in this way, all the material universe is a gigantic calculator. By your own argument then, the universe is conscious.
I know I have dropped you off in a unpleasant neighborhood, but, Sir, it's only where you told me to drive you.
Earlier I said:
If anything, consciousness gives rise to matter (as an illusion or particular way of thinking) and also all the laws of physics and everything that flows therefrom. Given the absolute non-reputability of the existence of experience it's more likely that consciousness is the "fundamental" stuff of the universe than matter or that consciousness arises from sufficiently complex arrangements of non-conscience matter.
You replied:
This is just nonsense quackery, the same idea that people can change reality based on thought alone. It has never been proven, and every single one of those 'psychics' and 'telekinetics' and 'healers' have all been proven to be frauds be the likes of James Randi.
You need to check yourself here. Nowhere did I make even one of those claims and in fact I disavow them all. They may "feel ' like the same "kind" of thing to you,but that means nothing to me and means nothing to this discussion. You need to be more careful is what your reply really means.
You said:
We may be pretty darn wrong in our current theories, but here is the thing: Science is simply generalized models about reality that have been proven repeatedly through experimentation. When a new model, even a radically new model, comes along, it does not suddenly make all those old reasonably proven theories useless. It just further refines and corrects what was already mostly correct.
I am not saying science is wrong or the results of science are wrong. This is not what this discussion is about. This discussion is about Strong AI and is it a correct model of consciousness? Everything that is true in science is true. But those truths can also exist in a larger context which casts everything in a completely new light without overturning anything per se. If you've lost that spark of a possibility in your mind, then that's a statement about you. But anyways, the topics are Strong AI consciousness and the ultimate "stuff" of the universe and how we get something of one kind- experience- out of a Turning machine or if we are perhaps thinking about things all wrong.
I agree with you in spirit. I am also I don't know-er, but in a specific way I won't get into. Anyways I am not saying that the physical world doesn't exist at all in any sense; I am saying it's exact nature and relation to "consciousness" or what I would rather call "experience" is not explained by strong AI and I am making the case for experience as the preferred fundamental "stuff" of the universe, which resolves the so called "mind-body" or "consciousness-brain" "experience-matter" problem in favor of the existence of the thing we know exists, experience; this is an approach which seems nothing but reasonable to me.
Your post is just mysticism dressed up as reason.
You can say that but it's not true. Literally, you know there is experiences. Literally, everything else is in doubt. Literally.
As to your "not any reason to believe" comment, this is just an unsupported assertion on your part. You have a BIG problem- how a Turing machine composed of tape and a reader can display every form of consciousness possible. It so absurd on the face of it that you have to resort to phlogiston -like theories of "emergent properties". You know what "emergent properties" are? A noun phrase without a referent. They're a whatever-you-want-to-to-put-in-here trashcan of hand-waving bullshit
Literally here is your reasoning:
The brain gives rise to consciousness because it manifests (or contains or supports) complex networks of electrical impulses which have "emergent properties" one of which is consciousness.
Do you know how how much that \smells like classic bullshit "I don't know what's going on, but here's a noun phrase" scienci-ness. Did you take a class on the theory of science? I mean do you know what does or does not qualify for a scientific theory?
It's not what I am saying that has got your panties in a bunch; it's what I am not saying. I am not saying I buy into department approved, career advancing, conformist philosophical bullshit. I am not saying anything more than what I know. and certainly I have not said anything as weird and unsupported as "emergent properties".
Emergent properties is what you say when you don't know what to say about what you don't understand. You can apply it to literally anything to frame as actual the existence of "things" which do not and never did exist. Get a hold of yourself man, it's the magical pixie dust of science.
It's more dignified by orders of magnitude to just say "I have no fucking idea; it's a mystery to me." when your theories lead you to the edge of ridiculousness.
You said: How is it "overwhelmingly likely"? Because you say so? Do you have some way of estimating that probability? Or do you really just mean, "I think it is thus!"
No, it's for the reason I said- our deliriously sparse knowledge of the brain itself. See my post.
Too bad FBI director James Comey doesn't read /. He'd see how insecure even the most thuoght to be secure secure things - like backdoors - are and perhaps lose the impulse to make things even less secure and start moving in the other direction.
You know, it's possible that somewhere in the FBI there's one highly capable James Corney who is right now mopping floors in the basement because every time he and James Comey were evaluated by their superiors, personnel mixed up their reviews, owing to an unfortunate choice of fonts on the review forms.
You said:
Sure, but this is the path to solipsism. If you can't prove the material world exists, you can't even prove that other people or other minds exist. So, actually, it's inaccurate to say that the "one thing we have irrefutable evidence for is just experience itself." Rather, you should have said, "the one thing *I* have irrefutable evidence for is just my own experience -- I don't know that anything outside of my own thoughts exists, and I could be participating in a pseudo-masturbatory exercise of pretending that there is an external world and other people out there and this imaginary place called Slashdot where I pretend to communicate with these figments of my imagination."
Well this is exactly backwards. I am not saying I actually exist- in words that's a contradiction but being a fair fellow you will admit my meaning- it's just what I said. The "I" is one of those things which could be an illusion like any other form of matter. Whose illusion? *Just an illusion owned by no-one.* Just an experience, which is an illusion which exists and stop right there.
I am not saying "people have experiences" I am saying "there is experience". Out of cogito ergo sum take away cogito and replace it with experience. Experience, ergo experience. Anything else is an assumption.
When I say (all material) things could exist the way illusions exist, there IS an existence to illusions, but it's not a "full existence" if you get my meaning. And you do get my meaning. For example, if you go crazy and believe you see the ghost of Blackbeard telling you to quit this science thing, find yourself a seaworthy ship and start living life, there is a sense in which you DID see the specter and another one in which the specter was an illusion. This is a state of affairs, assigning different levels of reality to phenomena, that is not confusing or controversial in the least.Certainly it's not less weird than Minsky assigning degrees of consciousness to increasingly complex cybernetic feedback loops or you assigning increasingly "emergent properties" to increasingly complex systems.
So my statements are clear and any contradiction involving the word "I" ( i.e. I doubt the ultimate reality of my personal identity ) is an unfortunate byproduct of language, and this little quirk of language is a separate issue from the truthfulness and accuracy of my statements, which are of course fairly dubitable, but I don't think , wrong.
I said:
Anyways...the larger point is, that there is no reason to believe that consciousness or experience falls out of machines, no matter how wet or complex they are.
You said:
Sure there is, if you actually believe in the empirical world. And that's all you're "evidence" is that you're discussing -- the physical stuff you see and can measure and dissect. There's no way currently to "prove" that consciousness emerges from the physical stuff of the brain, but the burden of proof is on your side to prove that there's "something else" there, because the rest of physical reality as we sense it seems logically consistent with materialism.
No I only affirm what I know with certainty- that there IS experience. You know there is also, and so does everyone else. The "something else" is something your side owns completely. You believe you know there's a physical world and you believe you know of it's characteristics only because of experience- the experience of looking in a microscope or out the window or reading a book or thinking. But the experience here is absolutely primary and cannot be disputed; you cannot say it does not exist.
Now that we know with 100% absolute certainty that experience exists and no skeptic can meaningfully deny it, let's take a good look at material substance. We have chased that stuff for thousands of years and each time we have been certain we have gotten to the irreducible and final form it, except for currently. While we may believe in quarks, in whatever sense a wriggling bit of string theory exists, researchers, chastened by experience, also allow that this might not be the final stopping point. So Experience: 1 matter: TBD, possibly eternally.
I am not making the above up, that is actually the way things are. I am not distorting the record, not in the least.
So it is on this basis that I claim that something which IS is more likely to be the basis for something which MAY BE than the other way around.
It is also the basis by which I conclude that it's more likely to be the fundamental stuff of the universe than, say, the equations of String Theory, even more so since, uh actually, equations are purely the product of a kind of experience, an experience we call logical thought.
So yes, I am saying that the world you take to be "out there" may be nothing but experience and all the things you think are properties of that world- time, quarks, space, all of it is possibly not real, possibly real in the sense of being a compelling illusion of thought and possibly "composed" of experience in some way no weirder than a cat is "composed" of the non-corporeal wriggling strings of string theory- which, please keep in mind, it literally true.
Observe that I am not playing games of any kind here. I am only stating the facts as they are.
The Turing tape remark of mine is meant to jar the reader out of what I call "wetworld handwaving" that Strong AI gets into. That's a trick of the mind whereby complex systems, if they're made of wet biological stuff, get infused with a magical quality which permits the leap from "complex machine" to "consciousness".
On this point, you can take a lesson from Marvin Minsky, who admits that if very complex systems give rise to consciousness because of "ether", er, I mean "emergent properties" then it must admit of degrees. So it follows that, and he says this explicitly, simple feedback loops like oh, your house's thermostat, actually possess a rudimentary form of consciousness.
It's fun to think about the implications of this imminently reasonable and completely defensible corollary of Strong AI and the 'emergent property" theory you espouse. What else might be conscious by dint of complexity- the weather? Perhaps we the Ancients were, perhaps crudely, really onto something with their Gods of the Wind and Fire and War and the Sea.
Once you open the door to the "emergent properties of complex systems" you're going to find yourself working overt
if it implies something negative, then it falls within the sphere of 'negative light'
in the case of crime, it's not true until the jury says it is.
It's obvious that our simplified mental model of how roads and drivers work bears little semblance to how they actually DO work, at least to anyone who has ever modeled any part of reality. To NOT have studied this, not to seen it as something which is properly the subject of a possibly long , expensive and anyway open-ended scientific investigation implies you're the (autisitc) type who mistakes systems of rules for reality, and perhaps enjoys doing so; someone who loves maps more than hiking. PRIOR to programming self driving cars, or at least expecting them to succeed and be marketable (maybe SDCs are a useful tool in this needing-to-be-done study of drivers and roads) you needed to know a whole lot more about how people make their cars behave in reality.
See my reply above scentcone. It's very different and the reason the guy in your scenario gets away with it is because no one can prove he did it. It's the same with employee blacklisting. There are laws to protect people, but employers sneak around those laws- at their own peril.
In principle it's different because its intent is different. My family album is not the moral equivalent to a DIY Most Wanted List generated by whatever goon wants to generate it then shared as fact with other goons. If the intent of tendering the video is to imply the people on the video have committed some crime or are likely to or have some other moral flaw, then that goes by another name of slander.
IF the intent of the video is to pass around the time and location of babes, then that goes by the name of stalking.
If the intent of the video is to target people you don't like in some way, then that goes by a lot of busy sounding names and into a lot of areas of law which may presently see an uptick in their activity levels- negligent infliction of emotional distress, defamation, tort of false light https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
tortious interference with economic gain, intentional interference with contractual relations- if it interferes now or any time in the future with their employability....
Shall I go on about how they're different?
FTA:
"'Deep learning is a computational system employing a multi-layered neural net...the brain's processing dynamic is far richer and less constrained because it has recurrent interconnection, sometimes called feedback loops.' Her lab is now creating a 'massively recurrent deep learning network,' she says, for a more brain-like and superior learning AI.""
But this is not new. This is connectionism and all its descendants. Anyways...the larger point is, that there is no reason to believe that consciousness or experience falls out of machines, no matter how wet or complex they are. Consider that anything which can be modeled with a computer can be modeled with something much more primitive, albeit in a cumbersome way, for example, a Turing tape or a even a very fancy abacus made of wood, wires, beads. Yes you definitely want to keep that fact in mind before you pin that Strong AI Booster pin on your lapel.
If we want to get down to brass tacks and go really hardcore the one thing we have absolute irrefutable evidence for is just experience itself. Everything else is possibly a chimera based on a re-construction of experience-as-thought; material substance is real the same way a false belief or an illusion is real.
If anything, consciousness gives rise to matter (as an illusion or particular way of thinking) and also all the laws of physics and everything that flows therefrom. Given the absolute non-reputability of the existence of experience it's more likely that consciousness is the "fundamental" stuff of the universe than matter or that consciousness arises from sufficiently complex arrangements of non-conscience matter.
Anyway, it is overwhelmingly likely that at this stage of our knowledge and scientific inquiry we just radically and fundamentally misunderstand the nature of matter and consciousness. People still think about densely packed protons and neutrons but in fact there are only quarks (at least so far) and a quark is a "thing" oh, about the size of a virus, which is contained in a sphere of emptiness- just nothing- the diameter of Neptune's yearly orbit around the sun. So there's your "material stuff". Last seen receding ever further into purely mathematical constructs....
We specialize because we have to with the result that we just don't think big enough or more accurately closely and precisely enough about what the Big Picture is telling us. Science slowly grinds down, or more charitably "hones", your imagination in a particular way so as to make you a successful researcher or current theorist.
Whatever framework we are using to try to understand consciousness - call it reductionism to material- is most likely as wrong as voodoo for reasons which will later be shown to have been hidden to us now. If that doesn't just immediately strike you as most likely correct, then consider the argument has inductive support: that's been the historical tale of the tape when we are in the same state of ignorance with respect to a subject matter as we are with respect to the brain.
AI researchers who start quacking on making big, definitive statements about consciousness and the brain are just marking themselves as lesser lights and can always count on a round of ridicule, at least from me, on /.
I smell a double agent.
Terrorism now or in the near technological future has the power to deconstruct human civilization. That's the Irresistible Force and it's real.
Democratic nations who in practice abandon their liberty securing foundations will devolve into corrupt autocratic regimes of the very worst sort and likely stay there forever. This true fact makes those liberty securing foundations an Immovable Object- an object which must at all costs resist disintegrating forces, both from within and without.
Clearly, the US Government has, in practice, thrown the US Fourth Amendment in the garbage. I don't think anyone can argue otherwise with a straight face. These devices are some of the gory details of how they do this.
It's a slippery slope into an corrupt autocratic regime and we're sliding down it. We just are. /.ers don't need me to prove this to them but there are many things to think about which have not been properly teased out of the headlines. This is just one of them:
For decades, the police have been using the NSA as the actual source of their knowledge of drug smugglers' (and other criminals) travel itineraries. Using this knowledge, they have pretexted pulling those smugglers over, for say failure to signal, and then searched the car for drugs. The fact that the NSA was the real ultimate source of the tip was deliberately and systematically withheld not just from the defense, but from the entire judicial system - judges grand juries and sometimes prosecutors alike.
Now what this implies is it possible to rely on just the average local cop and apparently prosecutor to withhold knowledge of mass, ongoing Constitutional violations. This is a big deal because it is proof of a conspiracy, a conspiracy of silence, sustained for decades by thousands of the very people sworn to uphold and defend the laws and the Constitution. A conspiracy not to keep secret things secret but to keep unconstitutional processes a secret from the American system of justice.
It has been normalized to the point where veteran officers consider both the use of this technique and the hiding of its use from courts to be "bedrock police technique".
http://www.reuters.com/article...
The easy conclusion, that cops are bad, has to be false. Cops are (self) drawn from the general population and if there's any reason to think they're non-representative, it's probably to the better side of non-representative with respect to rule following and lawfulness; they are likely better than you would get from just a random draw of citizens.
So it has to be something else. Group dynamics, identification with a group, loyalty, etc. are all at play, but it's also possible that they rationally -and correctly- judge themselves to have been forced into an untenable position where they cannot do their larger job - keep society safe- and also abide by the rules we have set out for them. Giving up the NSA program would result in a worse outcome for the nation overall and giving up using the NSA information would result in a worse outcome for their communities.
In a certain sense it's our fault because we Americans cannot, in the words of Nathan R. Jessep, handle the truth.
http://www.americanrhetoric.co...
I am not saying I agree with this reasoning, I don't but for complex reasons having to do with human psychology and the dangerous dynamics of "the broken window" phenomena where a little bit of bad, seen to be unanswered, brings on an avalanche of Very Bad. Still the cop's position (as guessed at by me) is rational and motivated by a desire to do good, and moreover it may accurately describe the reality of what has to be done in order for policing to be effective. That may just be the truth of the situation.
Going on 15 years after 9-11 and 3 years after Snowden, I still see no dedicated widely
Look this U of Chicago, so what do you expect, a celebration of the Bill of Rights? It's a goddamn fascist idea incubator and hatchery. People from there are paid to float completely fascist ideas as weather balloons and to inject the idea into the national conversation generally.
Strategically, the difference between voicing the idea to widespread ridicule and never floating the idea at all is huge in favor of the idea eventually being taken seriously, despite the ridicule. That's what we're seeing here. Yes, the idea is soundly rejected at this time; but now that it's been floated, it's not going away. To be adopted, first you have to have been born. This idea has now been born. Mission accomplished for the fascists.
Because oil companies and the trolls they pay to write articles hate it?
Best post on the thread. Probably too late to be properly modded up.
There are some things I always think when I read threads like this. One is the American public's horror at surveillance is a kind of induction-from-introspection. They know themselves and what they might be tempted to do. They know how blase they are about The Lives Of Other People ( also the title of a great movie on just this subject and not a waste of your time should you make an effort to find it) . So they can infer what goes on.
They also know some history both American and foreign and they know as one poster said, it all starts with lists.
Another thing think influences their reaction is how they're treated by private entities, not the government. That might best be described as "extremely unfairly". In companies, at school, even in friendships, what is true and real, the actual facts of a matter rarely count for much. Instead, it's some kind of autocratic and often despotic process with some HR-type fig leaf thrown over it.
Read the headlines about what corporations do to their employees, their customers, they government and then realize that this same corporate culture is the hand that feeds these Americans. Corporations aren't just places we go to work like restaurants are places we go to eat and theaters are places we go to see movies; they're more like pirate ships we are sworn to for a time and we continue to eat and live another day only at the captains pleasure. It's more like that.
So of course they carry that despotic model of authority into their reasoning about terror watchlists and the like.
How we are treated and how we treat each other in daily life has big implications for how we perceive the world around us, at least, barring an aggressive and sustained effort by an individual to eschew anything but well-founded facts when reasoning about, say, the government. A national security lawyer is going to fall into the later category, but most people never will.
On top of all this, there does seem to be an out-of-control element to the CI behavior, a perception shared by many in the IC community itself BTW. The most obvious example is the parsing of the Fourth Amendment to mean you can collect everyone's "papers" but you haven't "searched" it until a human has peaked at it. That's the most charitable way to describe their legal viewpoint.
Now clearly, their fears about terrorism are more specific, more graphic and more realistic and occupy more of their waking moments than non-CI population. It may be a matter of fact- it may be reality- that to protect the nation against a devastating and destabilizing terrorist attack, doing what they're doing is an obvious necessity. That may actually be the case. The problem is, just because the IC community has such a well developed map of the threat matrix, they are out of touch with the prevailing American's perception of how to deal with terrorism. That and of course they can't tell the public what they're doing, for obvious reasons.
But it could also be that they are erring on a dangerous side of caution, and accidentally laying the foundation for a future, unusurpable fascism. This is nothing to dismiss.
But in either case, the IC leadership are so out of sync with the public that even seasoned senators and members of the IC community itself are at odds with them. This and , quite frankly, they're massive liars. James Clappers bald-faced lying to Congress followed on by his bald-faced lying about why he lied to Congress (claiming he was forced to because they were in open session, which is a point blank, no-shades-of-gray lie for reasons I won't go into right now ) was a hugely damaging event to the nation. Trust in the IC community by large segments of people in this nation and other nations went to zero and has stayed there. And yet, he (with the blessings of the Obama administration) carries on, which itself is a kind of slap in the face to the American public.
The paranoia and loathing expressed in this thread is not w
Reposting under my name. /. forgets my login in some browsers
One of the most dangerous things you can do on a road is to be stopped dead at a long-been-green stoplight, say playing with your phone. That's because *no one sees you as stopped*, specifically the car coming up to the light going 50. No one looks for it. People glance at the light, it's green, keep going at speed. What sort of idiot is stopped at a green light, your big chance to go? It's in the same category as saying "no" to free money. Being stopped at a green light is a nearly invisible event.
So let's talk about how dangerous going too slow is because your algorithm encountered a novel traffic situation (aren't a majority of them novel, really?) and urged caution to the accelerator. It's nearly as bad as being stopped at a green light, especially if you're the only one *reasoning* the way you reason about things, rightly or wrongly. In fact, this may be their fallback tactic- when confused, slow down. That way Google doesn't have any high-speed accidents that actually kill people. That would be bad, and bad press, too.
This is another thing about Google cars and self driving cars generally. They're safer *if they're in the majority*. They all know what each other is likely to do and can take account of it in their own behavior. They can coordinate. It's sort of the opposite effect of the Wall Street bots. They all know do the same thing, and then crater the market on account of it.
So here is a thing to think about. Self driving cars may have real trouble as an incremental approach. I have to think that it's a self conscious part of Google's game plan to reach a tipping point of self-driving cars where they are a significant minority. Until then, the project is a financial loss. Past that point, and working in tandem with insurance companies, expect to pay a first a little then a LOT more for insurance to drive regular cars. This will force the market (that means you) towards self-driving cars, if only for economic reasons. Somewhere along the way to this tipping point, the government will subsidize the purchase of self driving cars using the argument that that money comes back to them and more in the cost savings realized by fewer accidents, less healthcare costs associated with accidents, less police and emergency costs etc etc.
It's interesting to think that owning a car with self driving features is a status symbol now, reflecting wealth and prestige but in the future, driving a regular car will be the status symbol, signalling wealth and the freedom and autonomy it brings.
Google must be reasoning all this through even as they try to get self-driving car technology working. The players- insurance companies, the government the regulators, are all talking about these kinds of things- how they can economically *flip* everyone onto self-driving cars. They also have to be thinking about the popular perception and possible resistance to the technology. Obviously, cars are a form of individual autonomy. The government can't remotely pull the plug on your driving or automatically track your whereabouts. But with self-driving cars, expect to see them demand these *features* and Google *begrudgingly* go along with it.
When we switched from horses to cars, there were obviously numerous social issues that got dragged along. There was a large popular resistance because with a horse, you went where you wanted, the way you wanted. With a car, you could only go where what roads there were were. One of the things that made cars popular was amusingly enough, sex. A car was a kind of rolling bed, a possibly subversive dual purpose technology with a respectable side. The very first porn movie features a man and two women driving in an car in the country. The woman says she has to get out and pee. The car stops and woman gets out and after a little while the man follows. Pants-down embarrassment is followed by flirting which leads to fucking, of course. The other woman follows onto the scene and the gates o
Sikhs wear turbans, not Muslims