It's not the plot summaries that make good storytelling.
Make a summary of the Iliad or Romeo and Juliette and you get nothing too interesting just as well.
It's HOW you write that matters - compelling dialogues, atmosphere, characterization, the buildup of the story, maintaining tension etc. etc.
In System Shock it was fun to read the records of the dying crew because it added so much to the atmosphere. In, say, Oblivion almost all of the dialogues are plain dull with everybody, be it mage or beggar talking exactly the same way.
What could we do with a living genome that we could not do with that genome in a comparative study?
Actually we could learn a lot. We don't know how the Neanderthals looked from their gene record - we know it from the fossils. We don't even know if their capability of speech was limited physically like that of a chimpanzee or whether they would be able to speak like we do. Soft things like vocal chords are not fossilized.
The problem is that genes don't work like recipes but rather like machines. There are genes affecting genes affecting genes. For instance we have the same gene defining the growth of the jaw bone as the chimpanzee. But the genes that affect the jaw gene in time during the embryonic stages are (slightly) different. We could only learn this by studying a living chimpanzee specimen. Cracking how the gene machine works is a lot of shooting in the dark and having a Homo Neanderthalensis would help A LOT.
Richard Feynman had a good story about this. Someone once published a paper that was supposed to have serious impact on his theory. The problem was, that when Feynman read through it he didn't understand it at all. He was all out of himself thinking his years as a researcher are over and he's just too old to understand the new stuff. Finally his wife talked him down and told him to try and go through the paper the old fashioned way - step by step, taking notes, just like when he was a student. And sure enough when he chewed through all the formulas slowly he understood it all.
The moral of the story is that we get too comfortable as we get older. We have more experience and our brains are trained cracking the hard stuff. You are used to understand complex things easily and you forget just how much energy it used to take when you were learning some fundamental ideas the first time. Just remember how much time you had to devote to understand calculus even though it's ideas may seem self-evidend now to you.
Now from time to time you encounter a problem that your brain will not crack right-away. You think you are too old for it but it is much more possible that you just don't have the patience to put as much effort into understanding it as you did when you were a student. And that is not a physical brain condition - it's just good old 'getting too comfortable'.
The article was not about the 'soul' at all. Kurzweil switched to talking about consciousness right at the beginning (which was good since he is no philosopher).
When you ask people (at least the western folks) about where their soul is they will point to a different part of their body (the chest) than when you ask them about the consciousness or mind (the head). People don't perceive the soul and consciousness as being the same.
On top of that there are perfectly sane people attributing a 'soul' to an inanimate object even now. Just ask a musician about his Stradivari's or an architect about the Notre-Dame.
I noticed in many high rated comments here that people didn't understand that the anthropic principle in this article is discussed on a new scale. It's not about whether the surrounding environment is composed of this chemicals and that thermal conditions etc (as in the Douglas Adams' puddle). It's about the fundamental laws themselves.
If they were a bit different it wouldn't just be about different environment - if the nuclear forces and/or dark energy influence were different the universe would have collapsed early after the Big Bang and there would not be any spacetime at all! Or in the other extreme (a slight deviation in the other direction) the universe would end up being hydrogen atoms floating around millions of light years apart from each other. From this point of view we have won the jackpot (million times over).
It's no surprise the scientists are asking themselves - are there some places (universes) that didn't win the jackpot? Are there some that won it in a different way than we did? It's not about asking 'why are we here' it's about 'what else is out there'.
The puddle in the Douglas Adams lecture was wrong about assuming it's in a unique place. Scientists contemplating the multiverse are trying to avoid exactly that kind of fallacy.
Slashdot Mirror
It's not the plot summaries that make good storytelling.
Make a summary of the Iliad or Romeo and Juliette and you get nothing too interesting just as well.
It's HOW you write that matters - compelling dialogues, atmosphere, characterization, the buildup of the story, maintaining tension etc. etc.
In System Shock it was fun to read the records of the dying crew because it added so much to the atmosphere. In, say, Oblivion almost all of the dialogues are plain dull with everybody, be it mage or beggar talking exactly the same way.
What could we do with a living genome that we could not do with that genome in a comparative study?
Actually we could learn a lot. We don't know how the Neanderthals looked from their gene record - we know it from the fossils. We don't even know if their capability of speech was limited physically like that of a chimpanzee or whether they would be able to speak like we do. Soft things like vocal chords are not fossilized.
The problem is that genes don't work like recipes but rather like machines. There are genes affecting genes affecting genes. For instance we have the same gene defining the growth of the jaw bone as the chimpanzee. But the genes that affect the jaw gene in time during the embryonic stages are (slightly) different. We could only learn this by studying a living chimpanzee specimen. Cracking how the gene machine works is a lot of shooting in the dark and having a Homo Neanderthalensis would help A LOT.
Moral considerations, however, remain.
Richard Feynman had a good story about this. Someone once published a paper that was supposed to have serious impact on his theory. The problem was, that when Feynman read through it he didn't understand it at all. He was all out of himself thinking his years as a researcher are over and he's just too old to understand the new stuff. Finally his wife talked him down and told him to try and go through the paper the old fashioned way - step by step, taking notes, just like when he was a student. And sure enough when he chewed through all the formulas slowly he understood it all.
The moral of the story is that we get too comfortable as we get older. We have more experience and our brains are trained cracking the hard stuff. You are used to understand complex things easily and you forget just how much energy it used to take when you were learning some fundamental ideas the first time. Just remember how much time you had to devote to understand calculus even though it's ideas may seem self-evidend now to you.
Now from time to time you encounter a problem that your brain will not crack right-away. You think you are too old for it but it is much more possible that you just don't have the patience to put as much effort into understanding it as you did when you were a student. And that is not a physical brain condition - it's just good old 'getting too comfortable'.
The article was not about the 'soul' at all. Kurzweil switched to talking about consciousness right at the beginning (which was good since he is no philosopher).
When you ask people (at least the western folks) about where their soul is they will point to a different part of their body (the chest) than when you ask them about the consciousness or mind (the head). People don't perceive the soul and consciousness as being the same.
On top of that there are perfectly sane people attributing a 'soul' to an inanimate object even now. Just ask a musician about his Stradivari's or an architect about the Notre-Dame.
So what 'soul' are you talking about?
Hopefully this will result in universities using more open source/copyleft stuff. Someone is shooting himself in the foot here.
I noticed in many high rated comments here that people didn't understand that the anthropic principle in this article is discussed on a new scale. It's not about whether the surrounding environment is composed of this chemicals and that thermal conditions etc (as in the Douglas Adams' puddle). It's about the fundamental laws themselves. If they were a bit different it wouldn't just be about different environment - if the nuclear forces and/or dark energy influence were different the universe would have collapsed early after the Big Bang and there would not be any spacetime at all! Or in the other extreme (a slight deviation in the other direction) the universe would end up being hydrogen atoms floating around millions of light years apart from each other. From this point of view we have won the jackpot (million times over). It's no surprise the scientists are asking themselves - are there some places (universes) that didn't win the jackpot? Are there some that won it in a different way than we did? It's not about asking 'why are we here' it's about 'what else is out there'. The puddle in the Douglas Adams lecture was wrong about assuming it's in a unique place. Scientists contemplating the multiverse are trying to avoid exactly that kind of fallacy.