Huh? The Mars claim is used to discredit causality ("Maybe it's not us, maybe it's just the sun"), and it has no substance. The point about "global cooling" implies that we cannot depend on the media for forthcoming disasters, so because they extensively cover Global Warming we should be more skeptical than usual. But the rebuttal I posted states that alarm over Global Warming is also supported by a large consensus of climate scientists while the Global Cooling fad was not. These are direct challenges to your original claim and its intent.
Though I must say it does irk me when after every single natural disaster (flood, hurricane, whatever) the media likes to ask "Is this from Global Warming?" It might have been made more likely due to the warmth of the planet, but it takes a whole lot of such cases to determine trends.
Let's ignore that CO2 is not the largest part of our atmosphere, and something else (say methane) may be responsible. Let's ignore the fact we're coming off an ice age. Let's the history of "science facts" that the media has trumpeted in the last 40 years or so (remember when we would all die in a massive world-wide starvation as foretold in "The Population Bomb"?, the new ice age they said would come in the by the 80s? The mass extinction caused by DDT?) Let's ignore the fact that Mars is getting hotter too and that it seems to be the Sun's fault. How about that acid rain that would become a blight on the planet making it impossible to go outside while it was raining in the US? And where are those empty south american countries that lost so many trees the planet can't produce enough oxygen to supply all the people in the world.
Sigh...
The "new ice age" thing was believed by very few scientists, unlike the consensus regarding anthropomorphic global warming by climate scientists now. The "Mars getting hotter" thing is supported by very very little evidence in comparison to the evidence for what's going on with the Earth's climate. Also, the sun is being watched very closely and it is not sufficent to explain the warming trend of our planet. Please look here for more details. You'll find other myths regarding climate change debunked there and at realclimate.org as well. The same ones that are repeated over and over here and often modded up by the ignorant.
The thing is there are plenty of such sites that like to showcase natural beauty. (DOMAI and ATK spring to mind). I never got the appeal of fake tans, fake t1ts and gobs of makeup. Here's a hint - if a woman needs all of that crap to make herself "beautiful" then she just isn't.
It seems that increasingly these days, people are becoming incapable of appreciating natural beauty. I don't know whether it's a cultural phenomenon or what. Quite sad really...
Just to follow up what you just said, one of the arguments people give against socialized medicine is that it would be such a troublesome bureaucracy. The funny thing is, there is no greater possible bureaucracy I can think of than trying to navigate the perverse loopholes health insurance companies pull out to avoid paying out.
Wow, that's pretty good. You managed to take an article regarding resuscitating an ancient bacteria and then launch into an emotional, off-topic screed against the whole Global Warming movement. Got some karma points off of it too. Congratulations.
Same here. I had to look up the chain rule and the derivative of cosine (it's been years), but it's good to know I'm not totally out of the loop. I still wish I was a lot more knowledgeable regarding calc, though.
It's nice to see that John Katz is still contributing.
More like someone copying and pasting the story "Guts" by Chuck Palahniuk (author of "Fight Club"). Supposedly some people faint when listening to him perform readings of it. I have no idea why the GP posted it here, though.
E.g. while I'm a film buff and love "Citizen Kane", I know that many regular movie watchers have trouble realizing its greatness, because much of the techniques it pioneered are standard practice nowadays. You can't go back and watch it with the fresh eyes and minds of those who'd only seen the movies made before it.
That's funny, because my impression after watching "Citizen Kane" was much different. It seemed to me that the cinematography/direction was considerably *more* advanced than any other movie I had ever seen. I remember thinking, "Wow, they were doing all of that back then! Hollywood really dropped the ball."
Bush does not believe that science has demonstrated a significant human contribution or significant human risk related to global climate change, and his policies are consistent with this view. This puts him in alignment with significant percentages of both the American public and the scientific community.
When given the set of climate scientists, the number of them that do not believe that humans significantly contribute to global warming is insignificant. As far as establishing what is or isn't happening is concerned, nobody else matters all that much. The only place politics should play a part is how to deal with their well-established conclusion.
The only semantics involved is the definition of "consciousness." And if you're going to claim that a thing does not exist, it's kind of important to pin down what people mean by that thing in the first place. "Consciousness" is most commonly thought of as awareness, especially of one's own existence but also of one's surroundings. I don't think it's too big of a leap to consider this awareness to be equivalent to the self.
Most people seem to believe that their consciousness demonstrates that they are special and have a supernatural soul that will have an afterlife.
Maybe, but it's possible to believe that consciousness is special without also thinking that it is supernatural, or a soul, or entails an afterlife.
The block diagram for the "it's an illusion" theory of consciousness doesn't have a big box in the middle of it labelled "Magic happens here". All other theories of consciousness do.
Not necessarily. I remember talking to a strict materialist who felt that a thermostat was a simple form of awareness as it could detect and appropriately affect its environment. Our awareness was simply a much more complex version of this. There are other more metaphysical interpretations of consciousness that hold it cannot be explained for self-referential reasons. Consciousness trying to comprehend consciousness. Neither of these involve "magic".
Suppose that we could program a computer to believe that it was experiencing consciousness.
Belief requires awareness, so if the computer has belief then it is necessarily conscious.
This would be an especially remarkable thing.
Absolutely.
However, would its consciousness be something 'real', some new part of reality, or would it simply be a computational process in-flight like your web browser is now?
Couldn't it be both be something "real" in the way you mean and a computational process? Like a special case of computational process?
Descartes was a smart guy, but he didn't know what we know today. Would he have a different opinion today?
Descartes' argument was an a priori argument, and those things aren't changed by new observations. He's not just arguing against the statement "We cannot be certain of our existence". He's saying that by its nature the words are contradictory and isn't really a statement of anything at all.
However, you are a faulty witness to your own consciousness.
For that sentence to have any meaning whatsoever there has to be a "witness" in the first place, meaning consciousness. Whether it all actually comes down to programming or not is completely irrelevant. No matter how you slice it, that the tiny subset of nature that is us is able to comprehend nature itself is pretty remarkable.
Not only is there a reason for me to believe that my own consciousness exists, but (according to Descartes) it is the only thing I can be certain exists.* I can't posit that someone/something is lying to me about the existence of my own consciousness because without it there is no me to be lying to in the first place. I do consider it a fairly tiny and useful leap of faith to believe in the objective reality I observe, though.
That being said, I don't buy that consciousness is required for a collapse in QM.
*No I don't have to be certain that Descartes exists for the argument to be valid.
When Judges usurp political power from the elected branches, they usurp it from the people. Which, for example, is why we needed a war to resolve the slavery issue, because the S.C. took it upon itself to decide it for the people, leaving the people no peaceful or democratic recourse for change.
Slavery was a violation of civil liberties. In a liberal democracy such as the US the protection of individuals' civil liberties trump the will of the people to prevent a tyranny of the majority. Sometimes it takes a war to convince the ignorant of this fact.
Walking long distances is not "complicated" as it is simply the repetition of putting one foot in front of the other. Hell, it might not even be difficult if you are used to doing it.
I'm curious where you get your little factoids regarding the difficulties of living in the old old days. Imagine you have much fewer human beings around and a bounty of edible plants and animals surrounding them. How does this become a difficult life?
Yeah, you know you're in trouble when you start taking Slashdot too seriously. Not that *I'd* do anything stupid like that, of course. Naaaaahhhhhhhh...
Try/finally sucks, but C++ has RAII and thus doesn't so much need try/finally. It has better syntax, and it works. Now go write "C++ is not Java, thankfully" a hundred times on the blackboard. No looping.:P
I was a QA intern at Fujitsu working on the WorldsAway chat world when I discovered a rare crash bug with a new artist tool that I could reproduce successfully but my boss couldn't.
I'm sorry, but you did not reproduce the bug successfully if you couldn't present it to your boss in a way that he could reproduce it as well.
Also, what did you mean by a "rare crash bug" in the artist tool? That sounds like just the tool executable would die abruptly, but it was actually brining the server it was running on down? Why was this happening?
I'm not a big fan of fancy physics to explain consciousness. It's like someone saying, "Consciousness seems mystical. Quantum mechanics seems mystical. So it looks like QM effects bring about consciousness." Ugh.
I am pretty partial to the qualia argument of the dualists, though. Consciousness trying to figure out the nature of consciousness seems a bit too self-referential to come up with a satisfying, materialist explanation without a lot of hand-waving. Probably the best understanding of consciousness is, well, simply the state of being conscious.
One of my favorite quotes goes, "If the brain were simple enough for us to understand, we'd be too simple to understand it."
You missed the part explaining that the temperature increase and the amount of CO2 it would release from the ocean is not sufficient to account for the increased amount of CO2 now present in the atmosphere. Namely...
Correlation does not necessarily imply causation (although it may provide support for a quantitative and plausible mechanism of the causal linkage). However, the glacial-interglacial temperature difference is estimated to have been only about 5 C, so this effect would only explain a 20% increase (5 times 4%) in CO2 during warm interglacial periods like the present one. The observed increase from the pre-industrial level was actually about 55% (280 ppm compared to 180 ppm) so this simple temperature effect is only about one third of the size needed to provide an adequate explanation of the increase.
I encourage you to read the whole article as well as some of the references it gives as they contest claims made on "The Great Global Warming Swindle", which you have cited elsewhere.
Slashdot Mirror
Huh? The Mars claim is used to discredit causality ("Maybe it's not us, maybe it's just the sun"), and it has no substance. The point about "global cooling" implies that we cannot depend on the media for forthcoming disasters, so because they extensively cover Global Warming we should be more skeptical than usual. But the rebuttal I posted states that alarm over Global Warming is also supported by a large consensus of climate scientists while the Global Cooling fad was not. These are direct challenges to your original claim and its intent.
Though I must say it does irk me when after every single natural disaster (flood, hurricane, whatever) the media likes to ask "Is this from Global Warming?" It might have been made more likely due to the warmth of the planet, but it takes a whole lot of such cases to determine trends.
Sigh...
The "new ice age" thing was believed by very few scientists, unlike the consensus regarding anthropomorphic global warming by climate scientists now. The "Mars getting hotter" thing is supported by very very little evidence in comparison to the evidence for what's going on with the Earth's climate. Also, the sun is being watched very closely and it is not sufficent to explain the warming trend of our planet. Please look here for more details. You'll find other myths regarding climate change debunked there and at realclimate.org as well. The same ones that are repeated over and over here and often modded up by the ignorant.
The thing is there are plenty of such sites that like to showcase natural beauty. (DOMAI and ATK spring to mind). I never got the appeal of fake tans, fake t1ts and gobs of makeup. Here's a hint - if a woman needs all of that crap to make herself "beautiful" then she just isn't.
It seems that increasingly these days, people are becoming incapable of appreciating natural beauty. I don't know whether it's a cultural phenomenon or what. Quite sad really...
Just to follow up what you just said, one of the arguments people give against socialized medicine is that it would be such a troublesome bureaucracy. The funny thing is, there is no greater possible bureaucracy I can think of than trying to navigate the perverse loopholes health insurance companies pull out to avoid paying out.
Not really.
Wow, that's pretty good. You managed to take an article regarding resuscitating an ancient bacteria and then launch into an emotional, off-topic screed against the whole Global Warming movement. Got some karma points off of it too. Congratulations.
Same here. I had to look up the chain rule and the derivative of cosine (it's been years), but it's good to know I'm not totally out of the loop. I still wish I was a lot more knowledgeable regarding calc, though.
More like someone copying and pasting the story "Guts" by Chuck Palahniuk (author of "Fight Club"). Supposedly some people faint when listening to him perform readings of it. I have no idea why the GP posted it here, though.
That's funny, because my impression after watching "Citizen Kane" was much different. It seemed to me that the cinematography/direction was considerably *more* advanced than any other movie I had ever seen. I remember thinking, "Wow, they were doing all of that back then! Hollywood really dropped the ball."
When given the set of climate scientists, the number of them that do not believe that humans significantly contribute to global warming is insignificant. As far as establishing what is or isn't happening is concerned, nobody else matters all that much. The only place politics should play a part is how to deal with their well-established conclusion.
The only semantics involved is the definition of "consciousness." And if you're going to claim that a thing does not exist, it's kind of important to pin down what people mean by that thing in the first place. "Consciousness" is most commonly thought of as awareness, especially of one's own existence but also of one's surroundings. I don't think it's too big of a leap to consider this awareness to be equivalent to the self.
Most people seem to believe that their consciousness demonstrates that they are special and have a supernatural soul that will have an afterlife.
Maybe, but it's possible to believe that consciousness is special without also thinking that it is supernatural, or a soul, or entails an afterlife.
The block diagram for the "it's an illusion" theory of consciousness doesn't have a big box in the middle of it labelled "Magic happens here". All other theories of consciousness do.
Not necessarily. I remember talking to a strict materialist who felt that a thermostat was a simple form of awareness as it could detect and appropriately affect its environment. Our awareness was simply a much more complex version of this. There are other more metaphysical interpretations of consciousness that hold it cannot be explained for self-referential reasons. Consciousness trying to comprehend consciousness. Neither of these involve "magic".
Suppose that we could program a computer to believe that it was experiencing consciousness.
Belief requires awareness, so if the computer has belief then it is necessarily conscious.
This would be an especially remarkable thing.
Absolutely.
However, would its consciousness be something 'real', some new part of reality, or would it simply be a computational process in-flight like your web browser is now?
Couldn't it be both be something "real" in the way you mean and a computational process? Like a special case of computational process?
Descartes was a smart guy, but he didn't know what we know today. Would he have a different opinion today?
Descartes' argument was an a priori argument, and those things aren't changed by new observations. He's not just arguing against the statement "We cannot be certain of our existence". He's saying that by its nature the words are contradictory and isn't really a statement of anything at all.
For that sentence to have any meaning whatsoever there has to be a "witness" in the first place, meaning consciousness. Whether it all actually comes down to programming or not is completely irrelevant. No matter how you slice it, that the tiny subset of nature that is us is able to comprehend nature itself is pretty remarkable.
That being said, I don't buy that consciousness is required for a collapse in QM.
*No I don't have to be certain that Descartes exists for the argument to be valid.
Slavery was a violation of civil liberties. In a liberal democracy such as the US the protection of individuals' civil liberties trump the will of the people to prevent a tyranny of the majority. Sometimes it takes a war to convince the ignorant of this fact.
The only place I've heard of an average life expectancy of 20 is from you. What is your source?
Walking long distances is not "complicated" as it is simply the repetition of putting one foot in front of the other. Hell, it might not even be difficult if you are used to doing it.
I'm curious where you get your little factoids regarding the difficulties of living in the old old days. Imagine you have much fewer human beings around and a bounty of edible plants and animals surrounding them. How does this become a difficult life?
Yes. Yes. Dear God, yes.
First of all, Tesla is played brilliantly by David Bowie. But, more importantly than that, the movie... fucking... rocks...
"You're familiar with the phrase 'man's reach exceeds his grasp'? It's a lie: man's grasp exceeds his nerve." -Tesla from the film
Yeah, you know you're in trouble when you start taking Slashdot too seriously. Not that *I'd* do anything stupid like that, of course. Naaaaahhhhhhhh...
Uh, just a joke. How much effort do you put into being such a dick?
Try/finally sucks, but C++ has RAII and thus doesn't so much need try/finally. It has better syntax, and it works. Now go write "C++ is not Java, thankfully" a hundred times on the blackboard. No looping. :P
I'm sorry, but you did not reproduce the bug successfully if you couldn't present it to your boss in a way that he could reproduce it as well.
Also, what did you mean by a "rare crash bug" in the artist tool? That sounds like just the tool executable would die abruptly, but it was actually brining the server it was running on down? Why was this happening?
Was that before or after they released 'Hurt'? Trent really topped the emo crowd with that whine-fest of a song.
I'm not a big fan of fancy physics to explain consciousness. It's like someone saying, "Consciousness seems mystical. Quantum mechanics seems mystical. So it looks like QM effects bring about consciousness." Ugh.
I am pretty partial to the qualia argument of the dualists, though. Consciousness trying to figure out the nature of consciousness seems a bit too self-referential to come up with a satisfying, materialist explanation without a lot of hand-waving. Probably the best understanding of consciousness is, well, simply the state of being conscious.
One of my favorite quotes goes, "If the brain were simple enough for us to understand, we'd be too simple to understand it."
Correlation does not necessarily imply causation (although it may provide support for a quantitative and plausible mechanism of the causal linkage). However, the glacial-interglacial temperature difference is estimated to have been only about 5 C, so this effect would only explain a 20% increase (5 times 4%) in CO2 during warm interglacial periods like the present one. The observed increase from the pre-industrial level was actually about 55% (280 ppm compared to 180 ppm) so this simple temperature effect is only about one third of the size needed to provide an adequate explanation of the increase.
I encourage you to read the whole article as well as some of the references it gives as they contest claims made on "The Great Global Warming Swindle", which you have cited elsewhere.