>>It would be nice if it were simple, wouldn't it? If we could just say "pollution bad, stopping pollution all good effects."
Indeed. When lecturing on AGW last Thursday, it was amusing when my students asked if the volcano erupting was good or bad for the environment.
The simple fact is that there's no simple answer. If you're an endangered bird who only nests on whatever-the-hell that volcano is, you're pretty much fucked. If contrails from airplanes have a cooling effect, then grounding a bunch of planes might warm the atmosphere. The particulate matter will slightly cool the atmosphere. If you're a specialized form of algae that eats volanic ash in saltwater, it might be great for you, but terrible for the fish nearby.
The really tragic fact about Greens, is that they're stupid. They simply don't understand that every choice is always a mixture of pros and cons, good effects and bad effects and side effects. Their mindset (based on the precautionary principle) is that if ANYTHING is negative about an option, they must file a lawsuit and get it banned.
This has led to: 1) A ban on nuclear power here in California. 40% of America's CO2 comes from coal and gas energy plants - if we'd gone nuclear since the 70s we'd have not killed tens of thousands of people (what? people die from coal?), and met every CO2 target out there, beyond Copenhagen or the farcical disaster that is Kyoto.
2) The Sierra Club successfully shutting down a massive solar plant. (What? Solar is a green energy? But think of all the DESERT that would be covered by those panels! 25 tortoises live there!) Good luck getting more companies to put money into proposing green power generators, assholes. Similar stories exist for wind and tidal projects across the country.
3) Demolition of hyrdoelectric dams. (What? Hydro is a green source of energy!? But fish are friends, not food!) Spending $300M to blow up two hydro plants seems like a good investment, right? (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elwha_Ecosystem_Restoration)
4) The introduction of the SUV. CAFE killed the station wagon, but idiot legislation can't kill demand for a product. So we no longer have the wood-paneled station wagon (1972 Country Squire: 18MPG) and now have the most Green-hated thing ever, the SUV (2009 Nissan Armada: 14 MPG).
5) The Clean Air Act lowering particulate counts, as the article says. Not that Clean Air is a bad thing - I certainly wouldn't want to live next to one of those belching, polluting smokestacks. (Like the cooling tower on a nuclear plant, like idiot wunderkind Al Gore showed in an Inconvenient Truth, but I digress.) But it does reduce the "protective" cooling effect particulate matter has in the atmosphere.
As long as idiot Greens continue thinking in all-or-nothing terms, they'll continue making decisions that are horribly bad both for the environment and for the economy.
>>However the current ecosystem is in a bit of peril, some say that we're currently living through the 6 great extinction of earth, but iirc the jury is still out on that one.
Yeah. While species are going extinct, it's not the "10,000 species a day going extinct" bullshit I heard every time I went to the San Diego Zoo back in the 1980s. The study for that number was based on insect surveys. They dug up a 10 meter square patch of earth, counted the species, then counted them again the next year. Stag horn beetles moved 30' away? They're extinct!
It's one of those memes that everyone knows, but doesn't know just how badly that number was derived.
The actual number of species going extinct is actually very hard to calculate, but it's nowhere near these humans-are-evil numbers tossed around by tree huggers. Just by way of reference, there's only a million animal species or ten on the planet. If these numbers were true, there'd be negative 90 million species left by today.
Seriously. Cleaner air is bad for the planet? Shut up. As someone who has asthma, this pisses me off. I like breathing, thanks. Stop wasting time blaming the Clean Air Act and look at practical ways to cut carbon emissions in ways that don't knock us back to the stone age.
Yeah, it is. I actually lectured on this last Thursday (and tomorrow). The Clean Air Act is responsible in part for the spike in temperatures we got after, well, the Clean Air Act. Particulate matter is responsible for about a -0.3c to -0.5c temperature forcing (though it varies quite a bit when you get things like Pinatubo blowing off), and have been decreasing steadily in the last 40 years. I'm not saying belching smokestacks were a good thing, but a lot of the bullshit worry over global warming came as a result of temperature reaching a higher equilibrium from lowered particulate count as well as forcing from higher CO2 levels (which have contributed about +0.8C in forcing since the late 1800s. The actual numbers are doubled, but the oceans act as a buffer for a lot of the heat, so you only expect to see about half the gain from the forcings.
So yeah, the Greens are responsible for Global Warming: the Clean Air Act, the SUV, and the massive CO2 output from energy production are all so-called "environmentalists" fault.
Citations available upon request. My presentation is about 60 slides, for two days of lecture.
I've never understood anyone that says they dig spirituality but hate "organized religion". Fuck it dude, all religion is organized at some level unless you're just making stuff up in your basement. It's a modern trope that annoys the shit out of me, because it is self-contradictory.
And yeah, his theology is pretty good. As I said above, have you actually bothered reading anything the man has said, instead of media soundbites? I'm no Catholic, hold no especial love for the church, but what the pope said to, say, Ireland in his letter is very different from what the hysterical media has been reporting.
>>Has anyone thought of a RICO charge against the church? I mean they organized to conceal their criminal acts.
They have, IIRC.
But the last thing we need is the government expanding RICO even further. It's currently been mutated and abused far beyond its original intent and boundaries.
Using the RICO statutes to take down organized religion *really* isn't a good thing.
>>Ugh, there goes my karma. But fuck it, eh. It's a downhill battle regardless.
Yes, it is truly heroic to bash the pope on Slashdot. All of the raving Christian moderators will flush your karma down the intertubes.
I mean, seriously. Yeah, he does look like Emperor Palpatine. But have you read anything he's written? As opposed to catching soundbites about him from the media? The "Pope makes fun of Islam" bit a year or three back was an especially demonstrative example of media bias against the church.
I'm a protestant, and think that Catholics go a little nutty with their theology, but I've taken the time to read one of his books, and several of his statements, and guess what? He's actually a pretty smart guy, with good theology, and philosophical stances that even atheists should be able to get behind.
Except on sex. The Catholic Church has kind of fucked itself on that one, painting themselves into a corner that has no basis in theology.
Considering that Apple has people and a process in place for officially unofficially leaking things to the press (story was on/. a while back), it was a reasonable suspicion. But you're right, they probably wouldn't involve the police if it was an official unofficial leak.
That said, I have to say my grammar nazi side has been pleased by all the idiots unintentionally and hilariously confusing losing and loosing. As in, "Surely, Apple was behind this guy loosing the phone."
>>Why hasn't anyone introduced this into a game yet?
Hell, in the mid 90s I was playing on ElendorMUSH that had something called dynamic space which was essentially a procedurally generated world for Middle Earth. The entire world took up something like 40k of memory or less. If you wanted to, you could add anchors to a spot to put something there, like a road blockade or something, but by and large they got a whole world made without having to handcraft everything.
>>BTW your wife sounds spoiled. (And not just her, but Americans in general.) She ought to try living in Pakistan sometime.
She grew up in Hong Kong and Malaysia, which is both hotter and more humid than Pakistan, but thanks for playing. (I grew up in San Diego without AC.)
She simply dislikes the notion that the gov't could turn off her AC, and I'm with her on that. I have nothing against the program in general, as it might prevent rolling brownouts, but the real problem in California is environmentalists.
Sierra Club is pretty mainstream, and they've been shutting down alternative power generators for environmental reasons. The Green Party in Germany (pretty mainstream) was/is opposed to nuclear power (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alliance_%2790/The_Greens). They have 10% of the votes in their parliament, and celebrate nuclear plants shutting down.
Believe me, man, I'm with you. I think anyone that calls themselves an environmentalist and is opposed to nuclear power is a hypocrite. I'm just saying the reality of the situation is that leading environmentalists tend to be, well, ignorant hypocrites.
>>Here's the problem I have, PGE here. I kept my house at 82degrees last July. "1800sq ft house" 847.00 electric bill"so called smart metering".
PG&E's smart metering program is something like a 10% discount for the ability to disable your AC system. I turned it down after a lot of swearing by my wife (something along the lines of hell no, over my dead body will we let them kill our AC).
I don't believe it will move your thermostat *down*, ever.
It was mainly implemented to help prevent rolling brownouts, because our state hasn't build any fucking power plants in 30 years.
>>I don't particularly care if AGW is real, but if it speeds up solar and nuclear energy research and deployment than I'm all for it.
Indeed. Nuclear is currently the only cost effective alternative to coal. If any of these solar breakthroughs on/. ever come true, then maybe solar will be cost competitive in the future. Right now, the gov't has to heavily subsidize solar.
But Greens hate nuclear power. California has a ban on new nuke plants (and are working to shut the existing ones down). They've blocked tidal and wind development. Hell, the Sierra Club shut down a large solar installation in the desert here.
Something seriously needs to be done in terms of lawsuit reform before we can get anywhere near sanity with our energy policies.
Greens are more responsible for global warming than any other group on the planet.
>>It's a statistical science. But then again, so is radioactive decay.
Bad analogy.
In terms of what they do, Climate science is closer to Economics than probably any other discipline. They don't really do science in the traditional sense, of empirical observation of controlled experiments and hypothesis testing. There's no control for our environment (unless there is a Douglass Adams Earth-2 lying around in storage somewhere), and they don't really test hypotheses, but rather backfit their models to existing data, which is very easy to become very accurate on. (Hell, I could write a model that was 100% accurate for the last 100 years, and would have no predictive power at all.)
Climate Scientists, like at RC.org, like to pretend they're real scientists - they even posted a rather defensive article on it here: http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2005/01/is-climate-modelling-science/, but even in that article they admit they can't validate their work, nor can they control their experiments, and these are the two things that make a discipline science.
So RC.org is full of shit. Though anyone familiar with them knows this already - they're anti-scientific partisan hacks who love to hide beneath the mantle of science.
>>Sorry, this statement is incoherent - if the future "us" doesn't resemble the current "us", in what sense can it even be suggested that both share some form of identity? You've failed to provide any meaningful sort of continuity between these two hypothetical "consciousness" events.
There doesn't need to be continuity, merely that the "us" that is experiencing this conscious life appears again on the stage.
Since you mentioned Tipler in the other thread, let's consider the fact that all of this could just be a giant simulated reality, as various other philosophers (like David Chalmers) have speculated.
Let's say there's a certain number of consciousnesses the computer is simulating at any one time (somehow), perhaps a thousand. Only these thousand people have an inner life, the rest are p-zombies. When you, #745, die, the computer frees up the pointer to your current life, waits a while, and then tosses you into the body of a dog or cat, or sends you to computer heaven, or whatever. Or it could do nothing at all, and condemn you to non-existence.
The question of what happens to you after you die is therefore awfully important to you, consciousness #745. All you know within the simulation (this reality) is that the computer has spawned an instance of you at least one time.
>>It seems to me that parsimony/Occam's razor leads us to accept...
This is a logical fallacy that atheists always tend to fall into. Occam's Razor is not a law, nor a scientific rule, nor is even right a good amount of the time. For example, French Academy Scientists used it to rule out the existence of meteors as being rocks from outer space until the early 1900s. At best, it's a guideline for developing hypotheses. It certainly doesn't allow us to reject evidence.
As I said, atheists have a terrible time dealing with existence. Atheism implies non-existence (in various ways and meanings of the word). The very simple, very unarguable fact that we exist is therefore grounds for rejecting atheism.
>>You're going well beyond the evidence (again).
Not at all. Unlike atheists, who have no evidence at all for their claim that death = non-existence for eternity, I'm dealing with the one data point that we can all agree upon: at one point or another, we all transitioned from non-existence to existence. Nothing more.
Therefore the claim that non-existence must necessarily be the end of us is against the evidence.
>>some other consciousness might (will?) come into being, and that there is some means of assigning identity between it
There's several analogies that might make sense. Star Trek, right? Teleporters work (according to at least one explanation, the show has given several) by essentially scanning your body, then making a duplicate copy on the spaceship, and then annihilating the original body in a burst of electricity.
Question: Would you use such a device? Why or why not? Would "you" expect to suddenly wake up on the Enterprise after beaming up?
Question 2: There's a teleporter accident, and while the teleporter on the Enterprise created a copy of you (except with a goatee), it failed to annihilate you. The teleporter chief works out the bug, and then asks you to step into the teleporter so he can annihilate you. Would you do so?
There's similar parallels to a lot of other sci-fi works of fiction, like Altered Carbon (by Richard Morgan), Accelerando (by Charlie Strauss), etc. The only such device that I'd actually use would be the one in Old Man's War (by John Scalzi) which works by putting your consciousness in two duplicate brains at the same time (via quantum entangling magic) and then killing off your original body, snapping you into the other body. It's not used as a teleportation device in the book, but it could be.
If you look at the neural correlates of consciousness, you see a bunch of wiggles. You never see the inner life of a person, you never know if his "red" is your red. Hell, you could even hook up his V1 cortex to your own and see what he's seeing, as Ramachandran suggests, but you still have no idea if his red is your red. To use the famous example.
>>We know that it's "like something" to have experiences. That doesn't mean out "folk" conceptions of consciousness are correct:-)
No. And if you've ever been to a science museum, you'll have seen the illusions that they can create with mirrors. For example, you could see a spring floating in the air in front of you, that isn't there.
Both our conception of consciousness and the floating spring may be illusions, but the *illusions* are real. You cannot dismiss someone who experiences consciousness as being crazy, just as you can't dismiss someone who sees a spring as being crazy. They're both valid data points.
>>Your case seems to hinge on us being unable to understand it
To the contrary, really. I said we can black box the entire process. We have no idea how we have gone from being a meaningless collection of atoms to entities with an inner life, but we don't need to. The fact that this process is possible means that it is possible to happen to us again, even if the future us won't have any knowledge of our current life, or even resemble us in remotely similar ways.
>>I understand what you're claiming, it's just that it seems nonsensical, incoherent and lacking correspondence with reality.
Indeed. The fact that we could go from a meaningless collection of atoms to a conscious entity with an inner life seems nonsensical, incoherent, and lacking correspondence with science.
But it's happened to all of us. So we MUST reject the notion that once we become a meaningless collection of atoms again after we die, that we'll never reappear, so to speak.
There can be a lot of problems even still. I can see the local box from my window (well, I could if there wasn't a house in the way), and I had the damndest time getting VDSL installed. DSL had problems too, but the higher bitrate of VDSL caused the problems to get a lot worse.
Had intermittent outages from February through November. Called 9 times for AT&T guys to come out and look at it, but it always started working again before they got here, so they'd just kind of dick around, proclaim it fixed, and make me repeat the process a week later when it went down again.
Finally, it went down for an entire week last Thanksgiving. This was bad because I'd just bought Dragon Age: Origins on Steam and couldn't play it (because Steam sucks - if it knows there's an update available, it won't download it, but will refuse to run in offline mode until you get it), but was also a good thing because the techs could finally find out what the problem was - moisture getting in the conduit between my apartment building and the box a couple hundred feet away. (Before that, they just kept "fixing" the wiring in my apartment over and over and over again.) Took them about a week to get a construction team out, but it's been working perfectly since then.
Just ran a Speakeasy speed test: Download Speed: 22398 kbps (2799.8 KB/sec transfer rate) Upload Speed: 2895 kbps (361.9 KB/sec transfer rate)
>>Well, since "I" relies rather heavily upon the physical brain, there seems to be no evidence that this "I" will come back again, and you've offered none to support that contention.
Indeed. It does sounds quite implausible! Except that we know that we've already gone from not existing to existing once. Therefore claiming that having it happen to us again is impossible, as atheists do, is contrary to the known evidence.
>>From what I've read of your claims so far, I unfortunately put you in the former category, not the latter.
It's actually very simple and easy to understand - atheists just tend to will themselves to not believe it because it's rather unarguable, and casts everything they know into doubt. In fact, I think existence at all provides a very serious problem for atheists, in several areas.
NCCs are not consciousness. We have an ever expanding understanding of NCCs. Consciousness itself is still just as mysterious to modern science as it was to the ancients. That's why neuroscience tries to ignore it, and focus instead just on NCCs. But we all know that consciousness exists. It's quite possible we'll never understand it.
Slashdot Mirror
>>It would be nice if it were simple, wouldn't it? If we could just say "pollution bad, stopping pollution all good effects."
Indeed. When lecturing on AGW last Thursday, it was amusing when my students asked if the volcano erupting was good or bad for the environment.
The simple fact is that there's no simple answer. If you're an endangered bird who only nests on whatever-the-hell that volcano is, you're pretty much fucked. If contrails from airplanes have a cooling effect, then grounding a bunch of planes might warm the atmosphere. The particulate matter will slightly cool the atmosphere. If you're a specialized form of algae that eats volanic ash in saltwater, it might be great for you, but terrible for the fish nearby.
The really tragic fact about Greens, is that they're stupid. They simply don't understand that every choice is always a mixture of pros and cons, good effects and bad effects and side effects. Their mindset (based on the precautionary principle) is that if ANYTHING is negative about an option, they must file a lawsuit and get it banned.
This has led to:
1) A ban on nuclear power here in California. 40% of America's CO2 comes from coal and gas energy plants - if we'd gone nuclear since the 70s we'd have not killed tens of thousands of people (what? people die from coal?), and met every CO2 target out there, beyond Copenhagen or the farcical disaster that is Kyoto.
2) The Sierra Club successfully shutting down a massive solar plant. (What? Solar is a green energy? But think of all the DESERT that would be covered by those panels! 25 tortoises live there!) Good luck getting more companies to put money into proposing green power generators, assholes. Similar stories exist for wind and tidal projects across the country.
3) Demolition of hyrdoelectric dams. (What? Hydro is a green source of energy!? But fish are friends, not food!) Spending $300M to blow up two hydro plants seems like a good investment, right? (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elwha_Ecosystem_Restoration)
4) The introduction of the SUV. CAFE killed the station wagon, but idiot legislation can't kill demand for a product. So we no longer have the wood-paneled station wagon (1972 Country Squire: 18MPG) and now have the most Green-hated thing ever, the SUV (2009 Nissan Armada: 14 MPG).
5) The Clean Air Act lowering particulate counts, as the article says. Not that Clean Air is a bad thing - I certainly wouldn't want to live next to one of those belching, polluting smokestacks. (Like the cooling tower on a nuclear plant, like idiot wunderkind Al Gore showed in an Inconvenient Truth, but I digress.) But it does reduce the "protective" cooling effect particulate matter has in the atmosphere.
As long as idiot Greens continue thinking in all-or-nothing terms, they'll continue making decisions that are horribly bad both for the environment and for the economy.
>>However the current ecosystem is in a bit of peril, some say that we're currently living through the 6 great extinction of earth, but iirc the jury is still out on that one.
Yeah. While species are going extinct, it's not the "10,000 species a day going extinct" bullshit I heard every time I went to the San Diego Zoo back in the 1980s. The study for that number was based on insect surveys. They dug up a 10 meter square patch of earth, counted the species, then counted them again the next year. Stag horn beetles moved 30' away? They're extinct!
It's one of those memes that everyone knows, but doesn't know just how badly that number was derived.
The actual number of species going extinct is actually very hard to calculate, but it's nowhere near these humans-are-evil numbers tossed around by tree huggers. Just by way of reference, there's only a million animal species or ten on the planet. If these numbers were true, there'd be negative 90 million species left by today.
Seriously. Cleaner air is bad for the planet? Shut up. As someone who has asthma, this pisses me off. I like breathing, thanks. Stop wasting time blaming the Clean Air Act and look at practical ways to cut carbon emissions in ways that don't knock us back to the stone age.
Yeah, it is. I actually lectured on this last Thursday (and tomorrow). The Clean Air Act is responsible in part for the spike in temperatures we got after, well, the Clean Air Act. Particulate matter is responsible for about a -0.3c to -0.5c temperature forcing (though it varies quite a bit when you get things like Pinatubo blowing off), and have been decreasing steadily in the last 40 years. I'm not saying belching smokestacks were a good thing, but a lot of the bullshit worry over global warming came as a result of temperature reaching a higher equilibrium from lowered particulate count as well as forcing from higher CO2 levels (which have contributed about +0.8C in forcing since the late 1800s. The actual numbers are doubled, but the oceans act as a buffer for a lot of the heat, so you only expect to see about half the gain from the forcings.
So yeah, the Greens are responsible for Global Warming: the Clean Air Act, the SUV, and the massive CO2 output from energy production are all so-called "environmentalists" fault.
Citations available upon request. My presentation is about 60 slides, for two days of lecture.
I've never understood anyone that says they dig spirituality but hate "organized religion". Fuck it dude, all religion is organized at some level unless you're just making stuff up in your basement. It's a modern trope that annoys the shit out of me, because it is self-contradictory.
And yeah, his theology is pretty good. As I said above, have you actually bothered reading anything the man has said, instead of media soundbites? I'm no Catholic, hold no especial love for the church, but what the pope said to, say, Ireland in his letter is very different from what the hysterical media has been reporting.
>>Has anyone thought of a RICO charge against the church? I mean they organized to conceal their criminal acts.
They have, IIRC.
But the last thing we need is the government expanding RICO even further. It's currently been mutated and abused far beyond its original intent and boundaries.
Using the RICO statutes to take down organized religion *really* isn't a good thing.
>>Ugh, there goes my karma. But fuck it, eh. It's a downhill battle regardless.
Yes, it is truly heroic to bash the pope on Slashdot. All of the raving Christian moderators will flush your karma down the intertubes.
I mean, seriously. Yeah, he does look like Emperor Palpatine. But have you read anything he's written? As opposed to catching soundbites about him from the media? The "Pope makes fun of Islam" bit a year or three back was an especially demonstrative example of media bias against the church.
I'm a protestant, and think that Catholics go a little nutty with their theology, but I've taken the time to read one of his books, and several of his statements, and guess what? He's actually a pretty smart guy, with good theology, and philosophical stances that even atheists should be able to get behind.
Except on sex. The Catholic Church has kind of fucked itself on that one, painting themselves into a corner that has no basis in theology.
Considering that Apple has people and a process in place for officially unofficially leaking things to the press (story was on /. a while back), it was a reasonable suspicion. But you're right, they probably wouldn't involve the police if it was an official unofficial leak.
That said, I have to say my grammar nazi side has been pleased by all the idiots unintentionally and hilariously confusing losing and loosing. As in, "Surely, Apple was behind this guy loosing the phone."
>>Soooo not news.
Indeed. I even recall people hacking flatbed scanners or something to a camera for ghetto large format photography, and that was also in the '90s.
>>Why hasn't anyone introduced this into a game yet?
Hell, in the mid 90s I was playing on ElendorMUSH that had something called dynamic space which was essentially a procedurally generated world for Middle Earth. The entire world took up something like 40k of memory or less. If you wanted to, you could add anchors to a spot to put something there, like a road blockade or something, but by and large they got a whole world made without having to handcraft everything.
>>BTW your wife sounds spoiled. (And not just her, but Americans in general.) She ought to try living in Pakistan sometime.
She grew up in Hong Kong and Malaysia, which is both hotter and more humid than Pakistan, but thanks for playing. (I grew up in San Diego without AC.)
She simply dislikes the notion that the gov't could turn off her AC, and I'm with her on that. I have nothing against the program in general, as it might prevent rolling brownouts, but the real problem in California is environmentalists.
Sierra Club is pretty mainstream, and they've been shutting down alternative power generators for environmental reasons. The Green Party in Germany (pretty mainstream) was/is opposed to nuclear power (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alliance_%2790/The_Greens). They have 10% of the votes in their parliament, and celebrate nuclear plants shutting down.
Believe me, man, I'm with you. I think anyone that calls themselves an environmentalist and is opposed to nuclear power is a hypocrite. I'm just saying the reality of the situation is that leading environmentalists tend to be, well, ignorant hypocrites.
>>Here's the problem I have, PGE here. I kept my house at 82degrees last July. "1800sq ft house" 847.00 electric bill"so called smart metering".
PG&E's smart metering program is something like a 10% discount for the ability to disable your AC system. I turned it down after a lot of swearing by my wife (something along the lines of hell no, over my dead body will we let them kill our AC).
I don't believe it will move your thermostat *down*, ever.
It was mainly implemented to help prevent rolling brownouts, because our state hasn't build any fucking power plants in 30 years.
>>How do you define "green"?
Let's call it Greenpeace and/or the Sierra Club, or some intersection thereof.
>>I don't particularly care if AGW is real, but if it speeds up solar and nuclear energy research and deployment than I'm all for it.
Indeed. Nuclear is currently the only cost effective alternative to coal. If any of these solar breakthroughs on /. ever come true, then maybe solar will be cost competitive in the future. Right now, the gov't has to heavily subsidize solar.
But Greens hate nuclear power. California has a ban on new nuke plants (and are working to shut the existing ones down). They've blocked tidal and wind development. Hell, the Sierra Club shut down a large solar installation in the desert here.
Something seriously needs to be done in terms of lawsuit reform before we can get anywhere near sanity with our energy policies.
Greens are more responsible for global warming than any other group on the planet.
>>It's a statistical science. But then again, so is radioactive decay.
Bad analogy.
In terms of what they do, Climate science is closer to Economics than probably any other discipline. They don't really do science in the traditional sense, of empirical observation of controlled experiments and hypothesis testing. There's no control for our environment (unless there is a Douglass Adams Earth-2 lying around in storage somewhere), and they don't really test hypotheses, but rather backfit their models to existing data, which is very easy to become very accurate on. (Hell, I could write a model that was 100% accurate for the last 100 years, and would have no predictive power at all.)
Climate Scientists, like at RC.org, like to pretend they're real scientists - they even posted a rather defensive article on it here: http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2005/01/is-climate-modelling-science/, but even in that article they admit they can't validate their work, nor can they control their experiments, and these are the two things that make a discipline science.
So RC.org is full of shit. Though anyone familiar with them knows this already - they're anti-scientific partisan hacks who love to hide beneath the mantle of science.
>>What problem is this actually trying to solve?
I don't know what the problem was, but the "solution" will be people driving into women with large breasts.
>>Sorry, this statement is incoherent - if the future "us" doesn't resemble the current "us", in what sense can it even be suggested that both share some form of identity? You've failed to provide any meaningful sort of continuity between these two hypothetical "consciousness" events.
There doesn't need to be continuity, merely that the "us" that is experiencing this conscious life appears again on the stage.
Since you mentioned Tipler in the other thread, let's consider the fact that all of this could just be a giant simulated reality, as various other philosophers (like David Chalmers) have speculated.
Let's say there's a certain number of consciousnesses the computer is simulating at any one time (somehow), perhaps a thousand. Only these thousand people have an inner life, the rest are p-zombies. When you, #745, die, the computer frees up the pointer to your current life, waits a while, and then tosses you into the body of a dog or cat, or sends you to computer heaven, or whatever. Or it could do nothing at all, and condemn you to non-existence.
The question of what happens to you after you die is therefore awfully important to you, consciousness #745. All you know within the simulation (this reality) is that the computer has spawned an instance of you at least one time.
>>It seems to me that parsimony/Occam's razor leads us to accept...
This is a logical fallacy that atheists always tend to fall into. Occam's Razor is not a law, nor a scientific rule, nor is even right a good amount of the time. For example, French Academy Scientists used it to rule out the existence of meteors as being rocks from outer space until the early 1900s. At best, it's a guideline for developing hypotheses. It certainly doesn't allow us to reject evidence.
As I said, atheists have a terrible time dealing with existence. Atheism implies non-existence (in various ways and meanings of the word). The very simple, very unarguable fact that we exist is therefore grounds for rejecting atheism.
>>You're going well beyond the evidence (again).
Not at all. Unlike atheists, who have no evidence at all for their claim that death = non-existence for eternity, I'm dealing with the one data point that we can all agree upon: at one point or another, we all transitioned from non-existence to existence. Nothing more.
Therefore the claim that non-existence must necessarily be the end of us is against the evidence.
>>some other consciousness might (will?) come into being, and that there is some means of assigning identity between it
There's several analogies that might make sense. Star Trek, right? Teleporters work (according to at least one explanation, the show has given several) by essentially scanning your body, then making a duplicate copy on the spaceship, and then annihilating the original body in a burst of electricity.
Question: Would you use such a device? Why or why not? Would "you" expect to suddenly wake up on the Enterprise after beaming up?
Question 2: There's a teleporter accident, and while the teleporter on the Enterprise created a copy of you (except with a goatee), it failed to annihilate you. The teleporter chief works out the bug, and then asks you to step into the teleporter so he can annihilate you. Would you do so?
There's similar parallels to a lot of other sci-fi works of fiction, like Altered Carbon (by Richard Morgan), Accelerando (by Charlie Strauss), etc. The only such device that I'd actually use would be the one in Old Man's War (by John Scalzi) which works by putting your consciousness in two duplicate brains at the same time (via quantum entangling magic) and then killing off your original body, snapping you into the other body. It's not used as a teleportation device in the book, but it could be.
>>And you know this how?
If you look at the neural correlates of consciousness, you see a bunch of wiggles. You never see the inner life of a person, you never know if his "red" is your red. Hell, you could even hook up his V1 cortex to your own and see what he's seeing, as Ramachandran suggests, but you still have no idea if his red is your red. To use the famous example.
>>We know that it's "like something" to have experiences. That doesn't mean out "folk" conceptions of consciousness are correct :-)
No. And if you've ever been to a science museum, you'll have seen the illusions that they can create with mirrors. For example, you could see a spring floating in the air in front of you, that isn't there.
Both our conception of consciousness and the floating spring may be illusions, but the *illusions* are real. You cannot dismiss someone who experiences consciousness as being crazy, just as you can't dismiss someone who sees a spring as being crazy. They're both valid data points.
>>Your case seems to hinge on us being unable to understand it
To the contrary, really. I said we can black box the entire process. We have no idea how we have gone from being a meaningless collection of atoms to entities with an inner life, but we don't need to. The fact that this process is possible means that it is possible to happen to us again, even if the future us won't have any knowledge of our current life, or even resemble us in remotely similar ways.
>>I understand what you're claiming, it's just that it seems nonsensical, incoherent and lacking correspondence with reality.
Indeed. The fact that we could go from a meaningless collection of atoms to a conscious entity with an inner life seems nonsensical, incoherent, and lacking correspondence with science.
But it's happened to all of us. So we MUST reject the notion that once we become a meaningless collection of atoms again after we die, that we'll never reappear, so to speak.
There can be a lot of problems even still. I can see the local box from my window (well, I could if there wasn't a house in the way), and I had the damndest time getting VDSL installed. DSL had problems too, but the higher bitrate of VDSL caused the problems to get a lot worse.
Had intermittent outages from February through November. Called 9 times for AT&T guys to come out and look at it, but it always started working again before they got here, so they'd just kind of dick around, proclaim it fixed, and make me repeat the process a week later when it went down again.
Finally, it went down for an entire week last Thanksgiving. This was bad because I'd just bought Dragon Age: Origins on Steam and couldn't play it (because Steam sucks - if it knows there's an update available, it won't download it, but will refuse to run in offline mode until you get it), but was also a good thing because the techs could finally find out what the problem was - moisture getting in the conduit between my apartment building and the box a couple hundred feet away. (Before that, they just kept "fixing" the wiring in my apartment over and over and over again.) Took them about a week to get a construction team out, but it's been working perfectly since then.
Just ran a Speakeasy speed test:
Download Speed: 22398 kbps (2799.8 KB/sec transfer rate)
Upload Speed: 2895 kbps (361.9 KB/sec transfer rate)
Is not bad.
Yeah, it has nothing to do with Ultima. But I'm not so much of a grognard that I ignore the game that it is.
It looks like the pay to win system is going to be really annoying, though.
It's fun so far, though I'm most looking forward to Stronghold Kingdoms (www.strongholdkingdoms.com/) when it enters beta.
>>Well, since "I" relies rather heavily upon the physical brain, there seems to be no evidence that this "I" will come back again, and you've offered none to support that contention.
Indeed. It does sounds quite implausible! Except that we know that we've already gone from not existing to existing once. Therefore claiming that having it happen to us again is impossible, as atheists do, is contrary to the known evidence.
>>From what I've read of your claims so far, I unfortunately put you in the former category, not the latter.
It's actually very simple and easy to understand - atheists just tend to will themselves to not believe it because it's rather unarguable, and casts everything they know into doubt. In fact, I think existence at all provides a very serious problem for atheists, in several areas.
NCCs are not consciousness. We have an ever expanding understanding of NCCs. Consciousness itself is still just as mysterious to modern science as it was to the ancients. That's why neuroscience tries to ignore it, and focus instead just on NCCs. But we all know that consciousness exists. It's quite possible we'll never understand it.