Gotta disagree with you saying that 88% isn't good enough.
1) If current measures are reducing transmission of HIV to R values (new cases per existing case) of something like 1.2 or lower, this could bring it below the threshold of being able to increase in numbers and thus speed eradication.
2) If 88% of CURRENT HIV+ are completely cured, drugs and resources saved can be concentrated on the remaining 12%, thus reducing R values even further, speeding eradication.
3) 88% cure rate is a pretty massive reduction in human suffering, isn't it?
I'm not claiming that the journalists got it right, but there is such a thing as an anti-reflective coating. It's routinely put on glasses to reduce reflections.
At least on the face of it, it's possible that the metallic glass can form an anti-reflective coating on the windows.
Reducing reflections isn't hard at all, in fact, it's done routinely.
Seems like the broadcasters are shooting themselves in the foot! If you can't record, you can't store up a bunch of shows to watch later.
This means that people won't watch broadcast at all, but rather will default to streaming services for convenience of watching when they want.
Seems like they've got the wrong solution. Instead of "do not record", it should be "do not copy the recording you make to other media"--which, guess what, is what most people do anyway with their DVRs.
It never bothered me much, frankly, but my arms would itch every time I would mountain bike going over washboarded paths. Usually I was hanging on too hard to the handlebars to really pay much attention to it.....
Er, the existence of God can absolutely be proven scientifically. All that has to happen is that He has to show up and unequivocally say He does indeed exist, or in some other unequivocal way manifest His existence.
I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader to speculate as to why there is a lack of unequivocal scientific evidence that God exists.
Basically, fusion will always fail on economics. Unless someone comes up with a way to do fusion of species that produce energetic charged particles, which will allow direct conversion. And to do that, you probably need a non-equilibrium plasma, because equilibrium thermal plasmas that aren't optically dense: someone proved these cool faster via bremsstrahlung than they self-heat via fusions. And non-equilibrium plasmas, those are hard to sustain--nature abhors moving fluids that are of different velocities (or more generally, whose distributions are non-Maxwellian).
After learning these things I greatly fear that economical fusion just isn't going to happen--don't get me wrong, I'd love for someone to succeed at it and provide clean cheap energy--but I think the capital investment will always make fusion more expensive than alternatives.
If Rossi's or anyone's claim that cold fusion (or some other power generation technique) worked was real, then they don't need anyone to believe them. They could just sell power and bootstrap themselves to millions/billions.
For example, if I could produce a few MW of electricity cheap, with a compact form factor, I'd just go to Hawaii (which has really expensive electricity) and undercut the price of electricity there and sell the power to a datacenter or a high rise building. With the profits, I could bootstrap and make more power generators, and displace more competing capacity.
And with generators that were powering MWs of buildings/datacenters, with no visible fuel inputs other than deuterium, I think credibility would soon be a non-issue.
Your proposal to give people without jobs/wealth AIs to trade for them and make them money won't work.
The rich will have better AIs, and the net effect will be to transfer wealth from the poor to the rich via stock trades.
Seriously, d'you think your AI sitting on your slow computer at home is going to beat the AI that's running in a co-located supercomputer center just a few ns away from the trade house? With special hardware that allows microsecond response times to shifts in stock prices?
There's plenty to criticize about Obama's administration and policies without making up lies. Please don't do it. it discredits and drowns those who are have legitimate beefs.
At least so far as I've been able to determine, these cost from 25% to 50% as much as a natural diamond.
I won't buy one, due to cost, but I would if they were as cheap as artificial rubies and artificial sapphires: you can get really good sized ones for $10.
>You sound like all your knowledge of opioid treatment comes exclusively from anti-drug propaganda sources. It sure as hell didn't come from the medical community.
Actually, the knowledge comes from my friend, who suffers from chronic pain, and who quit opiods cold turkey and now lives with the pain (though it's less now), the depression, and is recovering mentally slowly. He's been doing heavy research on the effects opiod use has on people, as he tries to find his way back to relative mental normalcy.
He was on opiods for years and would withdraw peroidically so he could keep the dose he was taking small and still be effective. His pain doctors complimented him on how well he managed his opiod use. It still became problematic for him and now he's quit for good, and quitting has been a painful struggle for him.
Believe it or not, I'm actually pro legalization for most drugs. I don't think the drug war has done much good or been successful.
That said, opiods are dangerous, should be legal, and should be used where compassionately necessary, but it'd be WAY better if this new treatment would work instead. I'd rather see people not suffering from pain OR from the problems opiods can cause.
> Well you're into that whole drug war propaganda thing where you believe everyone prescribed some Vicodin for a toothache is shooting up heroin with dirty needles while homeless in an alley a few months later.
Actually, I was very careful what I said. I said "too long". I said "long term use". Opiods seem pretty OK for people who are using them for short term acute pain. It's chronic pain sufferers who are more at risk, and I really hope this new treatment works to completely kill their pain. I also hope it can replace standard opiod treatment for acute pain. It'd work better and it would be safer.
As I said, the world is crying out for better painkillers.
There's a good reason why doctors are hostile to analgesics. They can cause damage that lasts far longer than the acute pain, and can cause effects in the long term that are worse than the chronic pain, in many cases.
For many cases of chronic pain, the relatively harmless stuff like NSAIDs, aspirin, and acetaminophen don't really work well enough, and in high doses all of these are toxic. So out come the opiates, however, opiates quickly induce tolerance so larger and larger doses are required. And the tolerance becomes addiction, and the brain starts getting re-wired. Not to mention the side effects of opiates, which aren't all that nice either.
It can take *years* for a brain re-wired by long term use of opiates can return to "sort of" normal, if ever. And the return to normal has nasty psychological effects, such as depression, OCD-like symptoms, suicidal tendencies, and an inability to be happy or experience joy.
It's much more than "moral panic" over opiates. The drugs are frankly dangerous, and even with the very best management practices, they will spin out of control if a person is on them too long.
I'd only want to be on large amounts of opiates if I were terminally ill.
It is a bacterial disease that is wiping out citrus in many places worldwide. It's spread by a sap sucking insect.
There is NO non GMO citrus plant that is resistant. Lemons, limes, oranges, tangerines, kumquats, pommelos, buddha's hands, every single citrus is in the process of being wiped out.
So far, the only resistant citrus plants are ones that have had spinach genes grafted in.
Citrus greening is rampant in Florida, and many areas worldwide, but is spreading somewhat slower in California because citrus areas tend to be separated by ridges of hills.
Infected plants only survive, for a while, if they're given antibiotics.
It's looking awfully like it's soon going to be a choice of GMO citrus or NO citrus.
And while you're GMO-ing citrus, how about removing or reducing the fumarins which cause skin cancer? http://www.nbcnews.com/health/...
(A swipe at nature nutjobs, "natural" doesn't mean "good" every time--citrus might be better if it didn't cause cancer, right?)
However, in a work situation where productivity is more the goal, you should do things as efficiently as possible MOST of the time.
And that means leveraging the best of what's known.
I've been aggravated a great deal by one of my co-workers who WOULD NOT use data analysis scripts developed by others, more or less because he didn't write them and "didn't understand them" and "wanted to learn". Basically, "not invented by me."
I told him to USE the work that's already been done and focus on developing NEW tools that we don't already have and/or improve the existing stuff. These could be his learning examples (and yes, there were plenty of things to do that were easy enough to be learning examples.) Stand on others' shoulders so that you can climb higher. Develop new work so that others can stand on your shoulders!
There's a time and a place to struggle learning the already-invented, for pedagogical purposes, but in a productivity environment, you leverage the best of human knowledge to get the job done as fast and well as possible.
You don't waste your time and genius re-inventing the wheel, you develop NEW things. You also don't waste your co-worker's time and genius re-doing what they've done. It detracts from their productivity (because helping you makes them more productive) and disrespects their accomplishments.
And it really drove me batty that the stuff this guy re-wrote was inferior to what others had already done.
In my opinion, CS is about the easiest of the technical topics to learn from books and via direct work with computers.
See, computers are *designed* by humans. At some level, they *make sense* because they're a man-made creation. Algorithms designed by someone else are similar, they make sense. Computer languages are also of human design, and are made to make sense.
Designing *new* algorithms that aren't derivative of already-invented ones, *that* is hard, but there's not much need of that for most programmers.
Quantum mechanics? That's *hard*. That's the type of thing that a university education is useful to me for. It makes no damn sense at all. All the physical sciences are what they are, and they're not of human invention and are often not terribly intuitive.
I used my time at the University, for the most part, to learn stuff that I couldn't readily teach myself.
These co-workers of yours? They didn't need a university education. They needed to have read a few books!
In short, fission and fusion will both always cost significantly more than the alternatives, because alternatives require less capital and do direct conversion of energy to electricity.
The problem is that so much capital will be tied up in the reactor + thermal conversion, that an equivalent capacity of solar/wind will always cost less. Lots less.
Nice essay, well worth reading, thanks. I'm going to refer it to others, specifically a guy who claims that thought/brain/mind are quantum in nature. I tried to tell him essentially what your quantum passage says, but you do it a lot better.
Also, you obviously have thought in much greater depth.
Interesting post. I just wanted to make a point about the existence of general intelligence: it turns out that the human brain is actually a stack of many "special purpose" computational systems. That doesn't mean that there isn't a general intelligence portion as well, but we're DEFINITELY composed, at least to some degree, of stacks of special skills.
Examples: 1) Vision and object recognition. There's a whole subsystem of the brain dedicated to decoding light signals into a representation your consciousness can use. There's even a special subsystem for recognizing faces--they even know its location in the brain.
2) Audio: similar to vision, there's specialized decoding brain circuits.
Those are the two biggies, but we also have special hardware for processing/controlling speech, spatial reasoning, body control, and others. What's more, there are people who have *developed* special purpose brain circuitry for playing the violin, for example, and savant-like mathematical computation. For people who have done that, it is as easy to do a square root to N digits as it is for you and me to walk.
Because of that, it's NOT clear to me that a general purpose intelligence can be made without assembling a sufficient number of special-purpose intelligence. It's NOT clear to me, in fact, that there are unknown forms of special purpose intelligence that humans are lacking that wouldn't transform our general intelligence. (People are prone to making certain logical errors, even the brightest of us, because of in-born holes in our mentalities!)
A dolphin might look at us as crippled mentalities because we can't construct a spatial model of our surroundings from sound, for example. What other mental abilities COULD exist, that we don't have, that could expand our mental potential in outrageously powerful ways? People typically aren't able to fork their consciousnesses into solving two problems at once independently, there's one I'd like!
But the point I'm trying to make is that the stacking approach might be NECESSARY to compose a mind capable of general intelligence that we'd recognize. It might not need ALL our special purpose skills, but it's not obvious to me that a composition isn't necessary.
Does knowing birthdays, names, addresses, SSN's prove that a person *is* the person with that name, birthday and SSN?
Not anymore! All that information has been stolen so many times.
So any lender, or banker, who gives out money (loan or otherwise) to a person based solely on birthday, name, address and SSN has NOT done due diligence, and the bank should have FULL liability for any theft that occurs, NOT the poor unfortunate that rightfully owns the identity.
We badly need to reform this system that uses such weak proofs of identity as "knowing' something. And we badly need to start blaming lenders/bankers for fraud that occurs because they are too stupid to realize that the data I mentioned isn't proof of identity.
Actually, it is stupid. It is equating a whole integrated system with its parts. It is saying that since the parts can't function as the whole integrated system, then the whole integrated system can't work.
Can a pile of disassembled car parts drive? Nope. But assembled they can.
Can a disassembled brain think? Nope. Can any individual neuron in your brain claim to "understand" a thought? Nope. But your entire assembled brain can.
So why couldn't the Chinese room be an intelligence? It's true that no individual part of the room is intelligent. But the room, the man and the instructions are simply machinery. My brain is also simply machinery, at a low enough level. Searle argues that since the guy in the room, or any other part of the room, doesn't understand what is happening during execution of the program, then the whole system can't be intelligent, can't understand. The fallacy is in equating the parts to the system. Which is an oversimplification, as you say, but it is a stupid and obvious one, that once made, destroys the validity of the argument.
And if I can see it for BS so clearly and easily, and I have NO training in philosophy, and therefore I'm pretty much an idiot, then the Chinese Room argument room is even more stupid.
In fact, the Chinese Room argument is so stupid that it should be held up as example of a stupid argument, instead of being taken seriously as saying anything about AI.
Slashdot Mirror
Gotta disagree with you saying that 88% isn't good enough.
1) If current measures are reducing transmission of HIV to R values (new cases per existing case) of something like 1.2 or lower, this could bring it below the threshold of being able to increase in numbers and thus speed eradication.
2) If 88% of CURRENT HIV+ are completely cured, drugs and resources saved can be concentrated on the remaining 12%, thus reducing R values even further, speeding eradication.
3) 88% cure rate is a pretty massive reduction in human suffering, isn't it?
--PM
I'm not claiming that the journalists got it right, but there is such a thing as an anti-reflective coating. It's routinely put on glasses to reduce reflections.
At least on the face of it, it's possible that the metallic glass can form an anti-reflective coating on the windows.
Reducing reflections isn't hard at all, in fact, it's done routinely.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
--PM
Seems like the broadcasters are shooting themselves in the foot! If you can't record, you can't store up a bunch of shows to watch later.
This means that people won't watch broadcast at all, but rather will default to streaming services for convenience of watching when they want.
Seems like they've got the wrong solution. Instead of "do not record", it should be "do not copy the recording you make to other media"--which, guess what, is what most people do anyway with their DVRs.
Best,
--PeterM
It never bothered me much, frankly, but my arms would itch every time I would mountain bike going over washboarded paths. Usually I was hanging on too hard to the handlebars to really pay much attention to it.....
--PM
I won't upgrade on a 2-year schedule--and I also won't buy from a manufacturer that doesn't support their hardware.
So the manufacturers have went from something to nothing from me.
--PM
Er, the existence of God can absolutely be proven scientifically. All that has to happen is that He has to show up and unequivocally say He does indeed exist, or in some other unequivocal way manifest His existence.
I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader to speculate as to why there is a lack of unequivocal scientific evidence that God exists.
--PM
At least DT fusion of thermal plasmas that are magnetically confined.
Most of the energy comes out as fast neutrons or gammas, and getting energy from those requires a large thermal conversion plant (steam generator).
Check out this link, where it is argued that direct electric conversion technologies will win on cost vs. thermal conversion plants:
https://matter2energy.wordpres...
Basically, fusion will always fail on economics. Unless someone comes up with a way to do fusion of species that produce energetic charged particles, which will allow direct conversion. And to do that, you probably need a non-equilibrium plasma, because equilibrium thermal plasmas that aren't optically dense: someone proved these cool faster via bremsstrahlung than they self-heat via fusions. And non-equilibrium plasmas, those are hard to sustain--nature abhors moving fluids that are of different velocities (or more generally, whose distributions are non-Maxwellian).
After learning these things I greatly fear that economical fusion just isn't going to happen--don't get me wrong, I'd love for someone to succeed at it and provide clean cheap energy--but I think the capital investment will always make fusion more expensive than alternatives.
--PM
If Rossi's or anyone's claim that cold fusion (or some other power generation technique) worked was real, then they don't need anyone to believe them. They could just sell power and bootstrap themselves to millions/billions.
For example, if I could produce a few MW of electricity cheap, with a compact form factor, I'd just go to Hawaii (which has really expensive electricity) and undercut the price of electricity there and sell the power to a datacenter or a high rise building. With the profits, I could bootstrap and make more power generators, and displace more competing capacity.
And with generators that were powering MWs of buildings/datacenters, with no visible fuel inputs other than deuterium, I think credibility would soon be a non-issue.
--PM
Hello,
When $$ is involved, people can be hopelessly apathetic, willfully ignorant, utterly selfish, blind, even.
--PeterM
Your proposal to give people without jobs/wealth AIs to trade for them and make them money won't work.
The rich will have better AIs, and the net effect will be to transfer wealth from the poor to the rich via stock trades.
Seriously, d'you think your AI sitting on your slow computer at home is going to beat the AI that's running in a co-located supercomputer center just a few ns away from the trade house? With special hardware that allows microsecond response times to shifts in stock prices?
--PeterM
--PM
I don't like rule by diktat, however, at least on immigration, Obama is doing a better job of removing illegals than Bush ever did.
http://dailycaller.com/2014/02...
There's plenty to criticize about Obama's administration and policies without making up lies. Please don't do it. it discredits and drowns those who are have legitimate beefs.
--PM
At least so far as I've been able to determine, these cost from 25% to 50% as much as a natural diamond.
I won't buy one, due to cost, but I would if they were as cheap as artificial rubies and artificial sapphires: you can get really good sized ones for $10.
I hope this new treatment works and then people who just want to be free of pain aren't at risk of becoming slaves to opiates.
--PM
>You sound like all your knowledge of opioid treatment comes exclusively from anti-drug propaganda sources. It sure as hell didn't come from the medical community.
Actually, the knowledge comes from my friend, who suffers from chronic pain, and who quit opiods cold turkey and now lives with the pain (though it's less now), the depression, and is recovering mentally slowly. He's been doing heavy research on the effects opiod use has on people, as he tries to find his way back to relative mental normalcy.
He was on opiods for years and would withdraw peroidically so he could keep the dose he was taking small and still be effective. His pain doctors complimented him on how well he managed his opiod use. It still became problematic for him and now he's quit for good, and quitting has been a painful struggle for him.
Believe it or not, I'm actually pro legalization for most drugs. I don't think the drug war has done much good or been successful.
That said, opiods are dangerous, should be legal, and should be used where compassionately necessary, but it'd be WAY better if this new treatment would work instead. I'd rather see people not suffering from pain OR from the problems opiods can cause.
> Well you're into that whole drug war propaganda thing where you believe everyone prescribed some Vicodin for a toothache is shooting up heroin with dirty needles while homeless in an alley a few months later.
Actually, I was very careful what I said. I said "too long". I said "long term use". Opiods seem pretty OK for people who are using them for short term acute pain. It's chronic pain sufferers who are more at risk, and I really hope this new treatment works to completely kill their pain. I also hope it can replace standard opiod treatment for acute pain. It'd work better and it would be safer.
As I said, the world is crying out for better painkillers.
--PM
That's why this story is so cool.
There's a good reason why doctors are hostile to analgesics. They can cause damage that lasts far longer than the acute pain, and can cause effects in the long term that are worse than the chronic pain, in many cases.
For many cases of chronic pain, the relatively harmless stuff like NSAIDs, aspirin, and acetaminophen don't really work well enough, and in high doses all of these are toxic. So out come the opiates, however, opiates quickly induce tolerance so larger and larger doses are required. And the tolerance becomes addiction, and the brain starts getting re-wired. Not to mention the side effects of opiates, which aren't all that nice either.
It can take *years* for a brain re-wired by long term use of opiates can return to "sort of" normal, if ever. And the return to normal has nasty psychological effects, such as depression, OCD-like symptoms, suicidal tendencies, and an inability to be happy or experience joy.
It's much more than "moral panic" over opiates. The drugs are frankly dangerous, and even with the very best management practices, they will spin out of control if a person is on them too long.
I'd only want to be on large amounts of opiates if I were terminally ill.
Unfortunately, several varieties of something isn't always a protection. Citrus greening is wiping out all citrus, not just a single variety.
--PM
At least there are some varieties of banana that are resistant to this strain of Panama disease.
Citrus greening:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
It is a bacterial disease that is wiping out citrus in many places worldwide. It's spread by a sap sucking insect.
There is NO non GMO citrus plant that is resistant. Lemons, limes, oranges, tangerines, kumquats, pommelos, buddha's hands, every single citrus is in the process of being wiped out.
So far, the only resistant citrus plants are ones that have had spinach genes grafted in.
Citrus greening is rampant in Florida, and many areas worldwide, but is spreading somewhat slower in California because citrus areas tend to be separated by ridges of hills.
Infected plants only survive, for a while, if they're given antibiotics.
It's looking awfully like it's soon going to be a choice of GMO citrus or NO citrus.
And while you're GMO-ing citrus, how about removing or reducing the fumarins which cause skin cancer?
http://www.nbcnews.com/health/...
(A swipe at nature nutjobs, "natural" doesn't mean "good" every time--citrus might be better if it didn't cause cancer, right?)
--PeterM
However, in a work situation where productivity is more the goal, you should do things as efficiently as possible MOST of the time.
And that means leveraging the best of what's known.
I've been aggravated a great deal by one of my co-workers who WOULD NOT use data analysis scripts developed by others, more or less because he didn't write them and "didn't understand them" and "wanted to learn". Basically, "not invented by me."
I told him to USE the work that's already been done and focus on developing NEW tools that we don't already have and/or improve the existing stuff. These could be his learning examples (and yes, there were plenty of things to do that were easy enough to be learning examples.) Stand on others' shoulders so that you can climb higher. Develop new work so that others can stand on your shoulders!
There's a time and a place to struggle learning the already-invented, for pedagogical purposes, but in a productivity environment, you leverage the best of human knowledge to get the job done as fast and well as possible.
You don't waste your time and genius re-inventing the wheel, you develop NEW things. You also don't waste your co-worker's time and genius re-doing what they've done. It detracts from their productivity (because helping you makes them more productive) and disrespects their accomplishments.
And it really drove me batty that the stuff this guy re-wrote was inferior to what others had already done.
--PM
Didn't need a CS education to learn *that*.
In my opinion, CS is about the easiest of the technical topics to learn from books and via direct work with computers.
See, computers are *designed* by humans. At some level, they *make sense* because they're a man-made creation. Algorithms designed by someone else are similar, they make sense. Computer languages are also of human design, and are made to make sense.
Designing *new* algorithms that aren't derivative of already-invented ones, *that* is hard, but there's not much need of that for most programmers.
Quantum mechanics? That's *hard*. That's the type of thing that a university education is useful to me for. It makes no damn sense at all. All the physical sciences are what they are, and they're not of human invention and are often not terribly intuitive.
I used my time at the University, for the most part, to learn stuff that I couldn't readily teach myself.
These co-workers of yours? They didn't need a university education. They needed to have read a few books!
--PM
In short, fission and fusion will both always cost significantly more than the alternatives, because alternatives require less capital and do direct conversion of energy to electricity.
Citations:
http://web.ornl.gov/~webworks/...
https://matter2energy.wordpres...
The economic case for fusion is just too weak.
The problem is that so much capital will be tied up in the reactor + thermal conversion, that an equivalent capacity of solar/wind will always cost less. Lots less.
Citations:
http://web.ornl.gov/~webworks/...
https://matter2energy.wordpres...
--PM
Nice essay, well worth reading, thanks. I'm going to refer it to others, specifically a guy who claims that thought/brain/mind are quantum in nature. I tried to tell him essentially what your quantum passage says, but you do it a lot better.
Also, you obviously have thought in much greater depth.
--PM
Hello,
Interesting post. I just wanted to make a point about the existence of general intelligence: it turns out that the human brain is actually a stack of many "special purpose" computational systems. That doesn't mean that there isn't a general intelligence portion as well, but we're DEFINITELY composed, at least to some degree, of stacks of special skills.
Examples:
1) Vision and object recognition. There's a whole subsystem of the brain dedicated to decoding light signals into a representation your consciousness can use. There's even a special subsystem for recognizing faces--they even know its location in the brain.
2) Audio: similar to vision, there's specialized decoding brain circuits.
Those are the two biggies, but we also have special hardware for processing/controlling speech, spatial reasoning, body control, and others. What's more, there are people who have *developed* special purpose brain circuitry for playing the violin, for example, and savant-like mathematical computation. For people who have done that, it is as easy to do a square root to N digits as it is for you and me to walk.
Because of that, it's NOT clear to me that a general purpose intelligence can be made without assembling a sufficient number of special-purpose intelligence. It's NOT clear to me, in fact, that there are unknown forms of special purpose intelligence that humans are lacking that wouldn't transform our general intelligence. (People are prone to making certain logical errors, even the brightest of us, because of in-born holes in our mentalities!)
A dolphin might look at us as crippled mentalities because we can't construct a spatial model of our surroundings from sound, for example. What other mental abilities COULD exist, that we don't have, that could expand our mental potential in outrageously powerful ways? People typically aren't able to fork their consciousnesses into solving two problems at once independently, there's one I'd like!
But the point I'm trying to make is that the stacking approach might be NECESSARY to compose a mind capable of general intelligence that we'd recognize. It might not need ALL our special purpose skills, but it's not obvious to me that a composition isn't necessary.
--PM
Does knowing birthdays, names, addresses, SSN's prove that a person *is* the person with that name, birthday and SSN?
Not anymore! All that information has been stolen so many times.
So any lender, or banker, who gives out money (loan or otherwise) to a person based solely on birthday, name, address and SSN has NOT done due diligence, and the bank should have FULL liability for any theft that occurs, NOT the poor unfortunate that rightfully owns the identity.
We badly need to reform this system that uses such weak proofs of identity as "knowing' something. And we badly need to start blaming lenders/bankers for fraud that occurs because they are too stupid to realize that the data I mentioned isn't proof of identity.
--PM
Actually, it is stupid. It is equating a whole integrated system with its parts. It is saying that since the parts can't function as the whole integrated system, then the whole integrated system can't work.
Can a pile of disassembled car parts drive? Nope. But assembled they can.
Can a disassembled brain think? Nope. Can any individual neuron in your brain claim to "understand" a thought? Nope. But your entire assembled brain can.
So why couldn't the Chinese room be an intelligence? It's true that no individual part of the room is intelligent. But the room, the man and the instructions are simply machinery. My brain is also simply machinery, at a low enough level. Searle argues that since the guy in the room, or any other part of the room, doesn't understand what is happening during execution of the program, then the whole system can't be intelligent, can't understand. The fallacy is in equating the parts to the system. Which is an oversimplification, as you say, but it is a stupid and obvious one, that once made, destroys the validity of the argument.
And if I can see it for BS so clearly and easily, and I have NO training in philosophy, and therefore I'm pretty much an idiot, then the Chinese Room argument room is even more stupid.
In fact, the Chinese Room argument is so stupid that it should be held up as example of a stupid argument, instead of being taken seriously as saying anything about AI.
-PM