Ignoring the 'American Golden Rule: the one with the gold makes the rules'... The Golden Rule itself is just as outmoded, shortsighted, etc as an 'eye for an eye.' "Treating other's as you wish to be treated," stomps all over the concept of diversity. The Golden Rule basically says that I should treat others as if they have my values. (i say that's bunk). A much better rule is, "treat other's with respect." And the best rule of all is, "don't get caught.
You are missing the subtlety of the Golden Rule. How do you wish to be treated? You want others to figure out what you like, and then do it. Everyone wants this in one form or another. From your message, you want to be treated with respect. I hope I am doing that now. If you want to follow the Golden Rule, then you need to figure out how the other guy wants to be treated too.
As an aside, diversity is overrated. Some values are better than others.
Actually, for its time, "an eye for an eye" was a step forward from the previous primitive standard of "kill the dude, kill his family, and for good measure, kick his dog."
That is a truly ridiculous argument for "an- eye-for-an-eye", mate. Do you think it is ethical for you to go down to the market for a bottle of Pepsi? Well, according to the Categorical Imperitive, no, because if EVERYONE when down to the market anarchy would ensue with riots and murders leading to pitched battles as the supplies of Pepsi dwindled, and could eventually lead to the downfall of Western Civilization. Give a break.
I agree with you that the categorical imperative does not especially speak to the concept of an eye for an eye, but you throw up a strawman to discredit the C.I. unfairly. Kant wasn't saying you need to consider what happens if everyone does the same specific thing at the same time. Rather, he was saying, consider what would happen if everyone viewed an act as ethical and did it freely. So in your example, a better question would be, is it ethical to drink Pepsi? What if everyone drank Pepsi (not necessarily buying it all at the same instant)?
As for your, er, analysis of the Prisoner's dilemma, "tit for tat" maximizes only the two prisoner's COLLECTIVE expected utility. The best result for a given prisoner is to sell out the other prisoner given that the other prisoner doesn't talk. That's why it's called a dilemma, mate. Tit for Tat did NOT win, because if you believe the other prisoner is honest, you can screw him and do better for yourself than if you were honest.
You misunderstand the problem here. I am not familiar with the specific "tit for tat" reference, but the Prisoner's Dilemma is only interesting in its iterated form. In this kind of contest, the prisoners are forced to choose over and over again, and allowed to remember what other prisoners did on previous iterations. It is this memory that keeps "always screwing the other guy" from necessarily being the the best strategy.
...to say that games programming somehow transcends other software is wrong.
I don't think the man was making a statement about the social value of the software he writes. If you read the whole paragraph, you will see he was talking about what work made him the most happy.
And what of the ethics? Could this be used to reverse ageing? (unlikely, but if it could, what are the ethics of keeping entire generations around just so they can oppress their descendants).
I don't see a problem here. Do you think one has an ethical obligation to age and die? I'd be interested in hearing an argument for that.
If you assume some mystical problem in "messing with Mother Nature" or "playing God" then maybe you can get a start. But beware that down that road lie objections to vaccines, heart surgery, blood transfusions, etc.
Now, "oppressing one's descendants" is certainly not ethical. As something of a libertarian, I like to save my ethical condemnations for those acts which directly hurt someone.
We called it "tunneling"
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Our university campus was crisscrossed with these steam tunnels, with access to many interesting buildings. Tunnelers noticed that all the exits from the tunnels into the buildings had "panic doors" that could be opened from the tunnel side. I guess the idea was to keep someone from getting lost in the tunnels and not being able to get out.
One other interesting tidbit. (Warning, this is hearsay, and may even be a local urban legend.) Ronald Reagan came to our university to speak. Supposedly some hours before the speach, some students were caught in the tunnels. They ended up spending the day sitting in their rooms in the company of a humorless secret service agent. I guess the feds have gotten a bit more thorough since the grassy knoll.
They are not that obvious. All societies except anarchies limit "rights" to an extent. What is to decide is which to limit and by how much.
"Rights" are the core of the whole issue, where we might be able to come to an understanding. In common discussion, we throw around the term much too carelessly. To govern ourselves wisely and ethically, we instead need to carefully reason about what are and are not rights.
I don't claim that rights are obvious, but I do claim that they are absolute when they are properly and precisely expressed. We can debate whether something is a right, or whether we have described it precisely enough, but I won't debate whether it is ever OK to limit a right.
Here is the definition of "right" from Meriam Webster that underlies what I trying to say:
2 : something to which one has a just claim: as a : the power or privilege to which one is justly entitled
If one has a right, then one has a just claim to it. It is never OK to limit that right to get the results we might want. The ends never justify the means. This implies a couple of things.
First, rights are not granted or defined by man. They pre-exist. If you are a theist, then they are endowed by our creator. If you are not, then they spring from our value as human beings. Our job as ethical agents is to recognize and describe rights, not to create them.
Second, if we have properly described some set of pre-existing rights, then it must be true that the rights of two people can never be contradictory. Otherwise, one right or the other either isn't a right, or isn't described precisely enough.
All this said, I don't claim to have a monopoly on figuring out what is a right and what is not. I tend toward using libertarian (not anarchist) standards, but consider each case individually.
How do I apply this to the right to keep and bear arms?
Well, I start by assuming that every human being has the "right to life," that is, the right not to be killed or harmed unjustly. That is a very abbreviated statement of the right, and a lot is wrapped up in the word "unjustly." For example, if I initiate a physical attack on someone, I do not have the right not to be harmed by that person.
Also note that the right to life does not imply an obligation on others to feed me, clothe me, or otherwise keep me alive.
Because one has the right not to be killed or harmed, one has the right to get, possess, and use effective tools to keep from being killed or harmed. One of the most effective tools for personel defense is a firearm. That is why police in the US carry them, rather than buckets of hot grits. (grin)
Of course, one must not violate another's rights during this process, or the getting, possessing, and using a firearm cannot be a right. So one mustn't steal a firearm. One mustn't endanger others by negligently storing a firearm, just as one mustn't endanger others by negligently storing rat poison or any other potentially dangerous object. One must use a firearm responsibly, and may give up his right to possess a firearm permanently for gross misuse.
So in summary, I agree that rights are not always obvious. But I don't think that all societies other than anarchies must limit rights. In fact, an anarchy is no better than a tyranny with respect to rights. In such a society, every individual can violate your rights, without fear of organized reprisal from "society" at large. Society, at its best, exists to recognize and protect the rights of individuals.
Flat out wrong. Study adj., or criminal justice. By far the main power of the police is deterrent, which does not require them to be physically present everywhere all the time. And as for obligation, do you really think that a police officer is allowed to calmly ignore that your donut shop is being robbed while he is on duty?
Excuse me. Not being a lawyer, perhaps I am confused. Do you believe the deterrent effect of police is a sufficient protection against individual acts of violence? I guess the US must have had zero murders last year then? Do you really think that a police officer is going to keep me from being killed or injured in a holdup of my donut shop, when he happens to be chowing down in someone else's donut shop?
This is an aspect of conscription, it has nothing to do with civlian firearms ownership. If the government enlists you to fight, they will issue you a weapon.
Sorry, my failure to communicate here. I was not referring to military service, but to the duty of people to protect themselves, families, and neighbors from invaders. This is independent of any government action.
They have practically eliminated any sub-species of animal which is willing to prey upon man. Those that survive have a built in fear of us. Many people with guns are easily killed by bears. Many people without guns, avoid being killed without need of them. (A ten year old girl fended off a predatory black with a pot of boiling water). The parklands you are allowed to camp in are domesticated- nothing will try to eat you, normally. There is no strong argument for gun ownership here.
You contradict yourself in your first three sentences. Dangerous animals are either eliminated or too afraid of man to hurt us, but many people with guns are killed by bears. Which is it?
I wasn't trying to make the end-all argument for gun ownership here, merely responding to the original poster's claim that park rangers and the such were sufficient protection against wild animals.
What people have a right to do or not do is not always obvious. Perhaps in 100 or so years, the tech for building thermonuclear devices will be accesible to high school students. Should anyone have the right to bear enough firepower to end life on a planet at a whim? The argument clearly doesnt scale as clearly as freedom of speech for example.
This is a classic strawman argument. Thermonuclear devices are not effective tools for personal preservation of the right to life. If I wanted to argue for the freedom to own them, I would use different argument.
Firearms, however, are particularly good tools for the defense of one's own life against attack, and the lives of folks nearby. If you don't believe me, ask a beat cop. I have asked the several in my own immediate family.
What is obvoius is that in order to have a strong functioning society, you need to limit people rights in certain ways. Conversly to have a productive and vibrant one, you need to give individuals as many rights and freedoms as possible. Anarchies work no better than Utopias.
NO! Properly and carefully expressed, rights are just that, right. That is, it is ethically wrong to infringe upon them. Now if you want to be a crass utilitarian, and allow your society to "limit rights" and do other ethically questionable things because of some concept of greater good, then you can do that. I will oppose you.
BTW, I don't want anarchy. There are many legitimate uses of the force of government. One is incarcerating violent criminals. In fact, putting him in prison is one of the most effective ways to keep a criminal from getting a gun.
the argument that guns are to protect you from other citizens is mistaken. The police and FBI do that.
As pointed out elsewhere in this thread, police have no obligation to protect you from anything. As a practical matter, they have no ability to do so. To be effective protection, they have to be with you.
They are not to protect you from foreigners. The DoD and CIA do that.
Unless those foreigners invade the USA. Then citizens are obliged to help protect their homeland.
They are not to protect you from animals or natural disasters, the park service and national guard handle that.
Again, unless he goes hiking with you, a park service employee is going to be little protection against the occasional cougar or bear.
Well, what are guns for? They are to protect you from the police, the DoD, the CIA, etc... in short the freedom to bear arms was created as insurance against bad goverment. Its basically to help enable revolution more easily, should it be needed.
This part has a kernel of truth.
The best reason to preserve the freedom to keep and bear arms is that each person has an innate right to keep and bear arms, a right that springs from his right to life. It is only ethical to infringe on that right when a person has demonstrated that he cannot responsibly exercise that right, as in the case of a convicted violent felon.
But Amazon seems like it is trying to skew the equation, thus depriving those writers of their bread and butter.
No one is depriving anyone of anything, in the sense of wrongly taking something away from them. Author sells book new, gets his bread and butter. Author does not then have an ethical claim that the book owner not resell the book, or even that Amazon not make it easy for book owners to resell books.
Equations get skewed over time. Get over it; the carriage makers did.
It may or may not be in Amazon's self-interest to restrict used book sales, but...
...and it is generally considered morally questionable to benefit from an institution and to undermine it at the same time.
Not so fast! When Amazon sells a new book, Amazon benefits, the publisher benefits, the author benefits, and the buyer benefits. All participate voluntarily. When the sale is over, none of these participants are ethically indebted to any of the others.
So whether used book sales undermine the publishing industry or not is irrelevant. Amazon does not owe the publishing industry the favor of not competing with its new book sales.
ChipWits was a simple "construct a flowchart to make the robot to survive and thrive" game on the Mac circa 1985. Robots had to find food, avoid hazards, etc. The playing field was only maybe 10 or 15 tiles in either direction. But if memory serves, the view was a 3/4 overhead, much like today's RTS or Diablo games.
Even before that, does anyone remember an old Apple II game that involved programming battle robots using a simple assembly language? Can't even remember the name of that one.
Under the natural selection model, there is no obvious reproductive advantage to living beyond what it takes to get offspring raised to self-sufficiency.
Disclaimer: I am not a paleontologist. In fact, I am rather a fan of Michael Behe....
Re:You always give up a right in a contract.
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Our civilization hasn't begun to come to terms with this split. Panicked moralists, pundits and authority figures point to all sorts of reasons, from the decline in the authority of parental figures to the influence of new media to the lack of discipline in schools, but the truth is there is no real understanding either of this widening chasm in our politics, or in our social and cultural consciousness.
This is not a new story. It is not the end of the world. It is not even that big a deal.
Many "older people" don't understand or appreciate the same things that "younger people" do. So what?
Elvis Presley was only shown from the waist up on Ed Sullivan because his gyrating freaked out oldsters. So what? He still became a millionaire and "The King."
Gaming is the "scourge of society" and going to ruin a generation. Every parent knows it!
Yeah, right. Have you tried buying a PS2 lately? Do you think they have all been bought by kids who "get it," or have many been bought by parent who don't?
How many preteens have some kind of gaming console? Do you think they all bought them themselves? Or did some of those panicked parents buy them for their kids?
I am one of those "oldsters" raising the next generation. I have a circle of friends, most of whom are also raising kids. None of us are panicking about gaming, even those if us (unlike me) who have never been into it themselves.
Maybe I'll change my tune when my kids grow into teenagers. But it seems to me that every generation panics about their teenagers. I'll panic too, I'm sure, but probably not about gaming, because I'll be right there with my kids, enjoying the latest and greatest.
Basically C++, C#, Java and Smalltalk (even Perl, CLOS and php,) as languages are roughly equivalent and its possible to write translators between them.
Well, yes, they are equivalent at the most fundamental level. So is any programming system that at least allows for some kind of branch and goto instructions! So what? A more important question is whether Java nicely supports good software design.
I argue that Java's support of things like real interfaces and simple memory management, and its lack of support of things like macro processing and global functions, encourage good object-oriented design.
The IDEs are what make the difference...
No, no, no! As long as implementation means writing source code, IDE's will be nothing but glorified editors and build/run shells. Some are prettier or more convenient than others, but none affect whether you can produce a nicely designed and implemented application. (Unless of course by application, you mean a dog and pony show GUI that you could whip out in VB in ten minutes.)
Use whatever IDE you thinks sucks least, or just use vi and make.
Disclaimer #1: I haven't touched Smalltalk in 15 years. Maybe it's neat too.
Disclaimer #2: If down-to-the-metal performance is more important than support of good design, then use C or assembler.
Disclaimer #3: Java is not perfect. Some things, like its definition of protected, are just broken, IMHO.
A turing machine can emulate any other finite state system.
A Turing machine is NOT a finite state system, because it has an infinite tape. But it can certainly emulate any finite state machine. As for whether a cluster of Turing machines is equivalent to a single Turing machine...
Theorem: A Turing machine has the same computational power as n turing machines (called M1...Mn) running in parallel.
Informal Proof:
1. M1...Mn can trivially simulate a single Turing machine, by choosing n=1. So n Turing machines running in parallel have as much computational power as one Turing machine.
2. An n-tape Turing machine has the same computational power as a 1-tape Turing machine. (I don't have my theory textbook here...look it up.) Therefore, with no loss of generality, assume that the M1...Mn are all 1-tape machines.
3. Consider an n-tape Turing machine called M. M's set of states are such that each state corresponds to one possible permutation of states from M1...Mn. For each state, M has a transition that corresponds to each possible permutation of transitions of the states being modeled from M1...Mn, where the symbol that would have been read from each Mi's tape is read from tape i of M. For each tape i on each such transition, M moves and writes the same as in the corresponding transition in Mi.
4. Consider what happens when the inputs to M1...Mn are placed on tapes 1...n of M. From 2., each state change in M corresponds to n state changes in M1...Mn, and writes to each tape i the same value that would be written by Mi. Therefore, M produces the same output on tapes 1...n that M1...Mn would have produced on their tapes. M computes the same result as M1...Mn. Therefore M, a single Turing machine has as much computational power as n Turing machines running in parallel.
You can take the behaviorist approach to explaining my input/output, if that satisfies you. I am not satisfied with the black box approach.
"Personally" is the magic word. I can't look inside my head as 3rd person...I'm in here. I don't claim it is soul necessarily, and am certainly not trying to argue for or against the existence of God here. There could be some purely mechanistic, computational explanation for my awareness/sentience/whatever. I just haven't seen one yet I think is correct.
Almost certainly it is possible to build a machine that reacts sufficiently like me that an observer could not tell the difference. But then the interesting question to me would be one that the behaviorist would never ask. Would that machine experience the same sensation of I-ness that I do? Perhaps it is implementation dependent. Perhaps some implementations of my behavior are "conscious" and some are not.
Fair enough. I have not described I-ness accurately. I don't understand it well enough to describe it. But, don't you think you know what I mean? Do you not have a sense of identity, of you being more than a pattern of computation? Isn't there anything going on in your head that seems qualitatively different from what you know of the operation of a digital system?
I'm really not being argumentative here. I really do want to understand what kind of computation (or whatever) is going on in my mind, to make me, me.
By the way, I do not say computers can't be intelligent/conscious/sentient.
If you think it is anachronistic, then get your butt in gear and promote an amendment to the Constitution to change things. Until then, the USA still has a federal form of government, and the states still retain some sovereignty.
When you start promoting your amendment, expect me and many others to oppose it. Coming from Kansas, right in the center of "flyover land," I don't want my fate decided by folks in California and New York. Heck, I resent the amount of influence they have over my fate now!
There are real differences from state to state. And if you don't like one state, you are free to vote with your feet. Don't be so eager to give up that option.
I don't believe consciencenous is anything special.
I have read a few "explanations of consciousness" but none of them explain to my satisfaction that I-ness that I feel in my head. I'm sorry, but a handwaving invocation of "superposition of neural networks" just doesn't cut it. Please explain my sense of identity, my presence in the moment. I'm not saying it is unexplainable, or even too complicated to understand...just that I have not so far seen a convincing explanation.
If I don't spend the time to understand the ballot for a particular election, and ask questions if necessary, then I don't deserve to have my vote counted for that election.
If I am mentally incapable of understanding the ballot, even after asking questions, then my vote should not be counted in this election, or any other election for that matter.
The electoral college would be unfair if the states were merely a convenient partitioning of land and people within a monolithic country. However, the United States has a federal government. The various states give up absolute sovereignty, but retain many powers of government. (Hint: That is why our country is called The United States of America.)
Within the federal system, the electoral college is fair, and makes sense. Be aware that deciding the president by popular vote heads us toward a form of government with all sovereignty vested at the national level. If you want that, you might as well suggest proportional representation in the Senate too.
Slashdot Mirror
As an aside, diversity is overrated. Some values are better than others.
Actually, for its time, "an eye for an eye" was a step forward from the previous primitive standard of "kill the dude, kill his family, and for good measure, kick his dog."
Now, "oppressing one's descendants" is certainly not ethical. As something of a libertarian, I like to save my ethical condemnations for those acts which directly hurt someone.
One other interesting tidbit. (Warning, this is hearsay, and may even be a local urban legend.) Ronald Reagan came to our university to speak. Supposedly some hours before the speach, some students were caught in the tunnels. They ended up spending the day sitting in their rooms in the company of a humorless secret service agent. I guess the feds have gotten a bit more thorough since the grassy knoll.
I don't claim that rights are obvious, but I do claim that they are absolute when they are properly and precisely expressed. We can debate whether something is a right, or whether we have described it precisely enough, but I won't debate whether it is ever OK to limit a right.
Here is the definition of "right" from Meriam Webster that underlies what I trying to say:
If one has a right, then one has a just claim to it. It is never OK to limit that right to get the results we might want. The ends never justify the means. This implies a couple of things.First, rights are not granted or defined by man. They pre-exist. If you are a theist, then they are endowed by our creator. If you are not, then they spring from our value as human beings. Our job as ethical agents is to recognize and describe rights, not to create them.
Second, if we have properly described some set of pre-existing rights, then it must be true that the rights of two people can never be contradictory. Otherwise, one right or the other either isn't a right, or isn't described precisely enough.
All this said, I don't claim to have a monopoly on figuring out what is a right and what is not. I tend toward using libertarian (not anarchist) standards, but consider each case individually.
How do I apply this to the right to keep and bear arms?
Well, I start by assuming that every human being has the "right to life," that is, the right not to be killed or harmed unjustly. That is a very abbreviated statement of the right, and a lot is wrapped up in the word "unjustly." For example, if I initiate a physical attack on someone, I do not have the right not to be harmed by that person. Also note that the right to life does not imply an obligation on others to feed me, clothe me, or otherwise keep me alive.
Because one has the right not to be killed or harmed, one has the right to get, possess, and use effective tools to keep from being killed or harmed. One of the most effective tools for personel defense is a firearm. That is why police in the US carry them, rather than buckets of hot grits. (grin)
Of course, one must not violate another's rights during this process, or the getting, possessing, and using a firearm cannot be a right. So one mustn't steal a firearm. One mustn't endanger others by negligently storing a firearm, just as one mustn't endanger others by negligently storing rat poison or any other potentially dangerous object. One must use a firearm responsibly, and may give up his right to possess a firearm permanently for gross misuse.
So in summary, I agree that rights are not always obvious. But I don't think that all societies other than anarchies must limit rights. In fact, an anarchy is no better than a tyranny with respect to rights. In such a society, every individual can violate your rights, without fear of organized reprisal from "society" at large. Society, at its best, exists to recognize and protect the rights of individuals.
I wasn't trying to make the end-all argument for gun ownership here, merely responding to the original poster's claim that park rangers and the such were sufficient protection against wild animals.
This is a classic strawman argument. Thermonuclear devices are not effective tools for personal preservation of the right to life. If I wanted to argue for the freedom to own them, I would use different argument.Firearms, however, are particularly good tools for the defense of one's own life against attack, and the lives of folks nearby. If you don't believe me, ask a beat cop. I have asked the several in my own immediate family.
NO! Properly and carefully expressed, rights are just that, right. That is, it is ethically wrong to infringe upon them. Now if you want to be a crass utilitarian, and allow your society to "limit rights" and do other ethically questionable things because of some concept of greater good, then you can do that. I will oppose you.BTW, I don't want anarchy. There are many legitimate uses of the force of government. One is incarcerating violent criminals. In fact, putting him in prison is one of the most effective ways to keep a criminal from getting a gun.
The best reason to preserve the freedom to keep and bear arms is that each person has an innate right to keep and bear arms, a right that springs from his right to life. It is only ethical to infringe on that right when a person has demonstrated that he cannot responsibly exercise that right, as in the case of a convicted violent felon.
Equations get skewed over time. Get over it; the carriage makers did.
So whether used book sales undermine the publishing industry or not is irrelevant. Amazon does not owe the publishing industry the favor of not competing with its new book sales.
Even before that, does anyone remember an old Apple II game that involved programming battle robots using a simple assembly language? Can't even remember the name of that one.
Disclaimer: I am not a paleontologist. In fact, I am rather a fan of Michael Behe....
Or print the EULA on the box.
Elvis Presley was only shown from the waist up on Ed Sullivan because his gyrating freaked out oldsters. So what? He still became a millionaire and "The King."
Gaming is the "scourge of society" and going to ruin a generation. Every parent knows it! Yeah, right. Have you tried buying a PS2 lately? Do you think they have all been bought by kids who "get it," or have many been bought by parent who don't? How many preteens have some kind of gaming console? Do you think they all bought them themselves? Or did some of those panicked parents buy them for their kids?
I am one of those "oldsters" raising the next generation. I have a circle of friends, most of whom are also raising kids. None of us are panicking about gaming, even those if us (unlike me) who have never been into it themselves.
Maybe I'll change my tune when my kids grow into teenagers. But it seems to me that every generation panics about their teenagers. I'll panic too, I'm sure, but probably not about gaming, because I'll be right there with my kids, enjoying the latest and greatest.
I argue that Java's support of things like real interfaces and simple memory management, and its lack of support of things like macro processing and global functions, encourage good object-oriented design.
No, no, no! As long as implementation means writing source code, IDE's will be nothing but glorified editors and build/run shells. Some are prettier or more convenient than others, but none affect whether you can produce a nicely designed and implemented application. (Unless of course by application, you mean a dog and pony show GUI that you could whip out in VB in ten minutes.)Use whatever IDE you thinks sucks least, or just use vi and make.
Disclaimer #1: I haven't touched Smalltalk in 15 years. Maybe it's neat too.
Disclaimer #2: If down-to-the-metal performance is more important than support of good design, then use C or assembler.
Disclaimer #3: Java is not perfect. Some things, like its definition of protected, are just broken, IMHO.
Sorry, the tape is not infinite, but merely unbounded.
Theorem: A Turing machine has the same computational power as n turing machines (called M1...Mn) running in parallel.
Informal Proof:
1. M1...Mn can trivially simulate a single Turing machine, by choosing n=1. So n Turing machines running in parallel have as much computational power as one Turing machine.
2. An n-tape Turing machine has the same computational power as a 1-tape Turing machine. (I don't have my theory textbook here...look it up.) Therefore, with no loss of generality, assume that the M1...Mn are all 1-tape machines.
3. Consider an n-tape Turing machine called M. M's set of states are such that each state corresponds to one possible permutation of states from M1...Mn. For each state, M has a transition that corresponds to each possible permutation of transitions of the states being modeled from M1...Mn, where the symbol that would have been read from each Mi's tape is read from tape i of M. For each tape i on each such transition, M moves and writes the same as in the corresponding transition in Mi.
4. Consider what happens when the inputs to M1...Mn are placed on tapes 1...n of M. From 2., each state change in M corresponds to n state changes in M1...Mn, and writes to each tape i the same value that would be written by Mi. Therefore, M produces the same output on tapes 1...n that M1...Mn would have produced on their tapes. M computes the same result as M1...Mn. Therefore M, a single Turing machine has as much computational power as n Turing machines running in parallel.
QED.
"Personally" is the magic word. I can't look inside my head as 3rd person...I'm in here. I don't claim it is soul necessarily, and am certainly not trying to argue for or against the existence of God here. There could be some purely mechanistic, computational explanation for my awareness/sentience/whatever. I just haven't seen one yet I think is correct.
Almost certainly it is possible to build a machine that reacts sufficiently like me that an observer could not tell the difference. But then the interesting question to me would be one that the behaviorist would never ask. Would that machine experience the same sensation of I-ness that I do? Perhaps it is implementation dependent. Perhaps some implementations of my behavior are "conscious" and some are not.
I'm really not being argumentative here. I really do want to understand what kind of computation (or whatever) is going on in my mind, to make me, me.
By the way, I do not say computers can't be intelligent/conscious/sentient.
When you start promoting your amendment, expect me and many others to oppose it. Coming from Kansas, right in the center of "flyover land," I don't want my fate decided by folks in California and New York. Heck, I resent the amount of influence they have over my fate now!
There are real differences from state to state. And if you don't like one state, you are free to vote with your feet. Don't be so eager to give up that option.
If I am mentally incapable of understanding the ballot, even after asking questions, then my vote should not be counted in this election, or any other election for that matter.
Within the federal system, the electoral college is fair, and makes sense. Be aware that deciding the president by popular vote heads us toward a form of government with all sovereignty vested at the national level. If you want that, you might as well suggest proportional representation in the Senate too.
Moderators, if you get the joke, please moderate this post's parent FUNNY!