>>Speaking of coal, all the minerals we depend upon for our way of life are provided to us by miners. They do dangerous work deep underground and, no matter how safe we make it, some of them will die. Our entire way of life is built on their blood; our lives are indebted to theirs.
We're "indebited" to miners?
I was just in Alaska - a starting gold miner makes $100k a year, moving up to $140k a year if you have a good safety record and the guys like you.
I think they're adequately compensated for their risk, so indebted is the wrong word.
>>Yeah but most of the time why would we care what person A thinks about person B even if they tell us?
Because even though you know both A and B, and are friends with them, they hate each other (A cheated on B back in the day), and so you know not to invite them both to the same dinner.
Or more importantly, those annoying group politics that every group of humans over the size of 10 inevitably develops.
Depends on your university. The CS program at UC San Diego took my existing talent, beat the stupid out of it, and took it to the next level. I worked as a coder before going there, but the amount of bugs I wrote plummeted after taking discrete math and having code audits on every line of code I wrote for two years.
Assuming the Dunbar limit is real, and not just hand-waving of the sort that appeals to Malcolm Gladwell, it applies to the exponential space needed to store the square of the relationships maintained, not the time spent maintaining the relationships themselves.
In other words, it's not that its hard to remember stuff about 150 people - I interact with thousands of people at my lectures every year and remember their personalities if not their names - but rather trying to remember what Person A thinks about Person B and so forth. This is much more difficult.
Because of that, I'm skeptical of this researcher's findings having anything to do with it. If I have 100 friends or 500, it is just as easy for me to do my updates. Reading them all also isn't terribly difficult, but there's a lot of people that post nothing interesting, and fewer worth replying to.
Stem cells are not "An affront to God." Have you read what the religious people opposed to the research have actually written?
The issue is about killing human life. People disagree upon when humans should be considered alive, which is why there's controversies over fetal stem cells and abortion - but don't pretend the issue is over the stem cells themselves. It just shows your ignorance.
Parallels, yes, but religious people don't think the world is perfect, or demand perfection from science.
The Precautionary Principle people, who reject all technology unless it is proven to be perfect, are the left-wing analogues to the crazy fundie right.
Anti-scientism comes from both sides (witness the GMO terrorists in the story below - they're eco-tards), it's silly to pretend it is simply a right wing religious problem.
I disagree with his assertion that a digital thermometer is "a little bit" conscious, but I suspect the secret to consciousness to indeed be related to information theory somehow.
Verizon also doesn't have data service north of Seattle. I just got back from a trip to Vancouver and Alaska, and it is all "extended network" which means voice-only even though you're in-network with a US-and-Canadia plan.
>>Consciousness results from the propagation of signals through extremely complex networks with extreme levels of feedback.
So the internet is conscious, then?
Be careful of making claims like this - handwaving ultimately is the basis for any theory of consciousness. I suspect the answer lies within information theory, but how or why is an absolute mystery to me.
Criticism of our government, presidents included, is the foundation of our free society.
I am just tired of people who bash on Bush but pretend their own guy is better. I haven't seen anything to support the notion that either Republicans or Democrats are better when privacy issues are concerned.
>>Using locks and the like make it very easy to do multithreaded and parallel programs.
Eh, the Dining Philosophers would like to ask you out to eat. Locks can introduce timing issues which can result in a program locking up at random.
The real difficulty of parallel programming comes from two things (speaking as someone who has a Master's in the subject): 1) The development environment isn't as well supported as single-threaded coding. 2) It requires a different mindset to write code solidly. Remember how it blew your mind the first time you learned how to write recursive functions? Parallel programming is like that.
There's a lot of clever hacks to exploit parallelism in code, but in general, learning how to decompose a program into parallel bits isn't really the hard part.
>>In a sane world, the criminal justice system would put the Bush-era TSA people who planned this scheme on the stand,
Thank goodness Obama has been dismantling the nudie-scanners and full-body gropes, eh?
Dude, seriously. It's 2011. You can stop the Bush-bashing already. Obama is just as bad when it comes to our privacy rights - assign blame where it's actually due. We didn't get our balls checked under GWB.
Not having an explanation for qualia is not evidence for the non-existence of qualia. Especially since we can all observe them.
Bad science. Shame on you, shoo.
A p-zombie that was atom-for-atom equivalent to a human probably *would* experience qualia. But a p-zombie that was just cleverly programmed to react in certain ways almost probably would not have qualia.
What's the key difference? The information processing system. I think information theory is the key to consciousness, honestly. Chalmers makes a good argument for this.
Wavefunction collapse obviously takes place faster than the speed of light, though since no information can be transmitted by it, it doesn't violate locality.
However, it does indicate to me that quantum effects can take place at superluminal speeds, and hence a non-local real universe really makes the most sense to me. Especially when you look at the delayed-choice quantum eraser experiments, where a collapsed wavefunction can be recovered, and a photon that might have just appeared on your photon detector actually ends up impacting on a moon around Jupiter.
I suspect at some point we will come to terms with the fact that what we call "consciousness" is an emergent phenomenon of the brain, and that it is no more free than a glider in Conway's Game of Life.
Bingo.
Awesome. Now please explain the base element of the emergent property.
In other words, ants and birds all follow a simple pattern, which leads to the sophisticated trailing/flocking behavior.
But nobody knows what the most basic element of consciousness is. Calling it an emergent property adds absolutely nothing to the discussion... it's just kicking a ball further down the road.
>>People want to be an uncaused cause. That's what the concept of free will boils down to.
Eh, that doesn't really follow. Nobody wants free will to be an uncaused cause, or worse, a random one. That's not free will.
Free will is easier to define by it's opposite: the notion that the pre-existing state of the universe will guide your actions for the rest of your life, and you have no say in the matter. Since this can be proven to be false by the halting problem, free will must be true. Somehow.
>>Well, what a blast from my college past. I vividly recall all the late night manic chat sessions trying to decode Patricia and Paul Churchland's Neurophilosophy and Daniel Dennets Conciousness Explained.
Ugh. I had the Churchlands for some philosophy classes. Dennett's book is just terrible, too.
If you haven't read Searle or Chalmers I'd recommend picking some of their books up to balance out all the eliminative materialism you got in college.
>>Wrong again. Dennett demonstrates that there is no explanatory gap
Wrong. Dennett explains absolutely nothing. Denying that consciousness exists is not an explanation for consciousness.
It's a very weird stance for someone to take, especially since we all (presumably) are experiencing consciousness as we read this. Whatever it is.
He takes our failure to explain something and use it as proof that the something doesn't exist.
Searle has some devastating counterarguments to Dennett. If you pinch yourself and feel pain, but watch your brain under a microscope, all you see are voltage potentials running around. Where is the feeling of pain? Or redness?
>>There is no evidence of the existence of things called "transistors" from my personal study of the outside of my computer, either.
And yet you can see them when you put them under a microscope (albeit a very powerful one these days). The studies I was talking about were examinations of neuron structure and the like.
There's no evidence for Penrose's theory of consciousness.
At least it puts him in good company - with every other person that has developed a theory of consciousness, ever. =)
Slashdot Mirror
He only stole the source code because he wasn't being paid enough.
>>Speaking of coal, all the minerals we depend upon for our way of life are provided to us by miners. They do dangerous work deep underground and, no matter how safe we make it, some of them will die. Our entire way of life is built on their blood; our lives are indebted to theirs.
We're "indebited" to miners?
I was just in Alaska - a starting gold miner makes $100k a year, moving up to $140k a year if you have a good safety record and the guys like you.
I think they're adequately compensated for their risk, so indebted is the wrong word.
Getting lunch with A automatically puts you on the shit list with B.
*That's* why it's so important.
In a broader sense, you can see people tracking all of this stuff across the board, like with the endless spirals of celebrity romances and breakups.
>>Yeah but most of the time why would we care what person A thinks about person B even if they tell us?
Because even though you know both A and B, and are friends with them, they hate each other (A cheated on B back in the day), and so you know not to invite them both to the same dinner.
Or more importantly, those annoying group politics that every group of humans over the size of 10 inevitably develops.
France is the size of Texas, but has *three times* as many people.
Even still, in regions like the Perignord that I visited two years ago, it is tough to get around without a car.
Depends on your university. The CS program at UC San Diego took my existing talent, beat the stupid out of it, and took it to the next level. I worked as a coder before going there, but the amount of bugs I wrote plummeted after taking discrete math and having code audits on every line of code I wrote for two years.
Assuming the Dunbar limit is real, and not just hand-waving of the sort that appeals to Malcolm Gladwell, it applies to the exponential space needed to store the square of the relationships maintained, not the time spent maintaining the relationships themselves.
In other words, it's not that its hard to remember stuff about 150 people - I interact with thousands of people at my lectures every year and remember their personalities if not their names - but rather trying to remember what Person A thinks about Person B and so forth. This is much more difficult.
Because of that, I'm skeptical of this researcher's findings having anything to do with it. If I have 100 friends or 500, it is just as easy for me to do my updates. Reading them all also isn't terribly difficult, but there's a lot of people that post nothing interesting, and fewer worth replying to.
Cars make more sense in low density environments and less sense in high density ones.
I'll let you use your big brain, Brad, and figure out which better matches America vs. Europe.
He's most likely making the number up or not using Americans for his population.
In America, the average time between cars is ~five years, according to insurance company and EPA estimates.
So I think the GP is trying to say we live only 20 years after we start driving.
You honestly think land 20 miles from Fukushima will have "deadly" levels of radiation in hundreds of thousands of years??
Mr Inverse-Square and Exponential-Decay would like to have a word with you. They're lawyers for common sense.
Stem cells are not "An affront to God." Have you read what the religious people opposed to the research have actually written?
The issue is about killing human life. People disagree upon when humans should be considered alive, which is why there's controversies over fetal stem cells and abortion - but don't pretend the issue is over the stem cells themselves. It just shows your ignorance.
Parallels, yes, but religious people don't think the world is perfect, or demand perfection from science.
The Precautionary Principle people, who reject all technology unless it is proven to be perfect, are the left-wing analogues to the crazy fundie right.
Anti-scientism comes from both sides (witness the GMO terrorists in the story below - they're eco-tards), it's silly to pretend it is simply a right wing religious problem.
Yeah, I've read his stuff.
I disagree with his assertion that a digital thermometer is "a little bit" conscious, but I suspect the secret to consciousness to indeed be related to information theory somehow.
Verizon also doesn't have data service north of Seattle. I just got back from a trip to Vancouver and Alaska, and it is all "extended network" which means voice-only even though you're in-network with a US-and-Canadia plan.
>>Consciousness results from the propagation of signals through extremely complex networks with extreme levels of feedback.
So the internet is conscious, then?
Be careful of making claims like this - handwaving ultimately is the basis for any theory of consciousness. I suspect the answer lies within information theory, but how or why is an absolute mystery to me.
Criticism of our government, presidents included, is the foundation of our free society.
I am just tired of people who bash on Bush but pretend their own guy is better. I haven't seen anything to support the notion that either Republicans or Democrats are better when privacy issues are concerned.
>>Using locks and the like make it very easy to do multithreaded and parallel programs.
Eh, the Dining Philosophers would like to ask you out to eat. Locks can introduce timing issues which can result in a program locking up at random.
The real difficulty of parallel programming comes from two things (speaking as someone who has a Master's in the subject):
1) The development environment isn't as well supported as single-threaded coding.
2) It requires a different mindset to write code solidly. Remember how it blew your mind the first time you learned how to write recursive functions? Parallel programming is like that.
There's a lot of clever hacks to exploit parallelism in code, but in general, learning how to decompose a program into parallel bits isn't really the hard part.
>>In a sane world, the criminal justice system would put the Bush-era TSA people who planned this scheme on the stand,
Thank goodness Obama has been dismantling the nudie-scanners and full-body gropes, eh?
Dude, seriously. It's 2011. You can stop the Bush-bashing already. Obama is just as bad when it comes to our privacy rights - assign blame where it's actually due. We didn't get our balls checked under GWB.
Not having an explanation for qualia is not evidence for the non-existence of qualia. Especially since we can all observe them.
Bad science. Shame on you, shoo.
A p-zombie that was atom-for-atom equivalent to a human probably *would* experience qualia. But a p-zombie that was just cleverly programmed to react in certain ways almost probably would not have qualia.
What's the key difference? The information processing system. I think information theory is the key to consciousness, honestly. Chalmers makes a good argument for this.
Wavefunction collapse obviously takes place faster than the speed of light, though since no information can be transmitted by it, it doesn't violate locality.
However, it does indicate to me that quantum effects can take place at superluminal speeds, and hence a non-local real universe really makes the most sense to me. Especially when you look at the delayed-choice quantum eraser experiments, where a collapsed wavefunction can be recovered, and a photon that might have just appeared on your photon detector actually ends up impacting on a moon around Jupiter.
Awesome. Now please explain the base element of the emergent property.
In other words, ants and birds all follow a simple pattern, which leads to the sophisticated trailing/flocking behavior.
But nobody knows what the most basic element of consciousness is. Calling it an emergent property adds absolutely nothing to the discussion... it's just kicking a ball further down the road.
>>People want to be an uncaused cause. That's what the concept of free will boils down to.
Eh, that doesn't really follow. Nobody wants free will to be an uncaused cause, or worse, a random one. That's not free will.
Free will is easier to define by it's opposite: the notion that the pre-existing state of the universe will guide your actions for the rest of your life, and you have no say in the matter. Since this can be proven to be false by the halting problem, free will must be true. Somehow.
>>Well, what a blast from my college past. I vividly recall all the late night manic chat sessions trying to decode Patricia and Paul Churchland's Neurophilosophy and Daniel Dennets Conciousness Explained.
Ugh. I had the Churchlands for some philosophy classes. Dennett's book is just terrible, too.
If you haven't read Searle or Chalmers I'd recommend picking some of their books up to balance out all the eliminative materialism you got in college.
>>Wrong again. Dennett demonstrates that there is no explanatory gap
Wrong. Dennett explains absolutely nothing. Denying that consciousness exists is not an explanation for consciousness.
It's a very weird stance for someone to take, especially since we all (presumably) are experiencing consciousness as we read this. Whatever it is.
He takes our failure to explain something and use it as proof that the something doesn't exist.
Searle has some devastating counterarguments to Dennett. If you pinch yourself and feel pain, but watch your brain under a microscope, all you see are voltage potentials running around. Where is the feeling of pain? Or redness?
>>There is no evidence of the existence of things called "transistors" from my personal study of the outside of my computer, either.
And yet you can see them when you put them under a microscope (albeit a very powerful one these days). The studies I was talking about were examinations of neuron structure and the like.
There's no evidence for Penrose's theory of consciousness.
At least it puts him in good company - with every other person that has developed a theory of consciousness, ever. =)