WiFi doesn't obviate the need for some wireline networks. Living in the sticks will be less connected for a long time. It's a hard problem. It's not like you can get DSL anywhere you want it either.
Well, more to the point, they should call it Internet Explorer. Didn't Microsoft go to court and prove that "Internet Explorer" is a generic term and thus not subject to trademarking?
I've got a totally different problem with this...
on
Phreaking Not Dead Yet
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· Score: 1
Simply saying "Yes, yes I'll accept" is way, way not legally binding in the first place. There has got to be some kind of legislation that places liability on the consumer in this case, or no one would ever have any reason to ever pay a bill for a collect call.
Until someone explains the contractual obligation involved, we're just talking crap.
They also know exactly what graphics chipset they're targetting, what type of RAM, what FSB the processor has, etc. Carmack's.plan has commented on an interesting XBox-specific improvement in the past. Don't recall when.
Although the XBox is no longer top-of-the-line, it is a stable target. Given hard work, an XBox version could be tweaked until it performs fantastically well. This work would not necessarily apply to any other platform, even though it's PC-based.
I'd love to get into this with you in a real conversation. It'd be easier to nitpick.
Some things to think about:
There are a number of neurons in your temporal lobes that fire depending on how "face-like" the thing is that you are looking at.
There are people without the ability to imagine a sound, and few other disabilities: They cannot repeat things verbatim.
The Chalmers quote you paste seems completely false to me. Right where I'd love him to explain himself, he starts hand waving. He says these problems go beyond the performance of functions. TELL ME WHY! "Entertaining a mental image" is a function that a machine (our brain) already performs. Even this vague, undescribed, "experience", is a function that our brain already performs.
Your problem, "I can't know whether the color I see as red is the same color you see as red." is not necessarily mysterious at all. If we had a perfect understanding of the machinery between both of our ears, we could understand perfectly well how that machinery treats the color red. We could understand exactly how it derives its experience.
We could then (surprise) develop a test to ensure that we both experience "red" in the same way! We can test the effects of the color red on our other thoughts, spreading activation, linguistic abilities, or a million other things. We might need to test based on aspects of our mental state that we haven't even discovered yet.
The second portion of your Chalmers quote is particularly telling. Obviously, experience is entailed by the physical in one case: my brain. I have excellent evidence that I experience things. If my experience is not entailed by the physical existence of my brain, then this has become a religious discussion.
So, there is absolutely a process that entails experience. You may be witness to a similar process: your brain. When he goes saying, "it is conceptually coherent that any given process could exist without experience", he's going to need to prove it. If he is trying to show that it is conceptually coherent that I feel the way I do, and yet do not "experience" in the manner he means, then it is also conceptually coherent that this "experience" may not exist at all.
As convoluted as that point sounds, it works for me. Try to make it work for you, and we'll be even for me browsing the Chalmers article:)
I won't be connected over the weekend, but I will get back to you if you respond.
(Not to be mean: Britney Spears is charming in her way and nice to look at, but I really can't imagine that she is going to record 10 albums in her career.)
Jesus God, don't jinx us. Knock on wood when you say something like that.
See, that's exactly what I mean. Who takes Searle seriously? His point lasts 30 seconds in front of undergraduates, and a few minutes on/. before serious flaws are unearthed. So the real question is: Who cares what Searle thinks?
That article is going to take me a while to read. It's also pretty frustrating, as he states as fact many things that I either don't understand or don't agree with.
His description of the hard problem in defining consciousness has very few concrete examples, and the few I could find seem worthless:
It is undeniable that some organisms are subjects of experience. But the question of how it is that these systems are subjects of experience is perplexing. Why is it that when our cognitive systems engage in visual and auditory information-processing, we have visual or auditory experience: the quality of deep blue, the sensation of middle C? How can we explain why there is something it is like to entertain a mental image, or to experience an emotion? It is widely agreed that experience arises from a physical basis, but we have no good explanation of why and how it so arises. Why should physical processing give rise to a rich inner life at all? It seems objectively unreasonable that it should, and yet it does.
And he continues (but I'll cut him off):
If any problem qualifies as the problem of consciousness, it is this one. In this central sense of "consciousness", an organism is conscious if there is something it is like to be that organism, and a mental state is conscious if there is something it is like to be in that state.
"Entertaining a mental image" and "experiencing an emotion" are both very interesting subjects in cognition, but they are hardly any more abstract than any other brain function.
We can observe what happens to brains while they do these tasks. We can observe brains that are unable to perform these tasks. We can do all kinds of studies that will show us what mechanism our brain uses to do these things. Some day, we might nail it. There is nothing special about these tasks.
The question of sensory experience is also not so bad. We can observe what causes brains to do these things (experience their senses). We can observe the mechanisms they use. Some day, we might solve this problem as well.
That's the beautiful thing about the Turing test. It is designed to detect whether we have solved these varieties of problems. If it fails in that regard, then either your observer is not critical enough (and then you aren't performing the Turing test properly), or you have invented criterion that do not really exist.
In defense of Dennett (whom I've never met nor read:), I can't imagine that he says you don't actually experience seeing the color red, but rather that what you feel when you see the color red is the same as running certain code. Might'n't computationalists only deny the existence of the gap between computation and experience?
I was trying to figure out what on earth "phenomenological" meant. So I went to Dictionary.com. They said phenomenology means:
A philosophy or method of inquiry based on the premise that reality consists of objects and events as they are perceived or understood in human consciousness and not of anything independent of human consciousness.
i.e. Reality is defined by our perception of it. That seems completely unrelated to the way that you use the word. What's your definition?
That's a sidebar. Back to the point. You say:
"Sentience" is a tricky word because it involves the capacity to feel...
I think "sentience" is a tricky word because it is completely meaningless. The Turing test was never meant to be an intelligence test for machines. It was meant to be a way to redefine "sentience" in a concrete manner.
You may feel that strictly computational models of mind have some failing (I don't understand the failing you describe.), but I do not. I challenge you to differentiate between a "zombie" and a person. The more I've learned about cognition and neuroanatomy, the less I believe that distinction exists.
The Turing test accomplishes perfectly its stated goal: giving an explicit definition to the human quality that many people insist a computer cannot have(AS, whatever).
AI is not being able to have a conversation with your computer, AI is just algorithms -- computing the right answer to complex problems as quickly as possible.
What most people think of as AI is really Artificial Sentience, and the more I learn about computer hardware the more I realize that it will not happen on my PC.
Learn more about cognitive neuroscience, and you may say the same thing about the human brain.
Searle's Chinese Room argument never makes it past the first room full of undergraduates. Once you outline the scenario, and ask the class, "Ok, does the man following the rules in the Chinese Room know Chinese?" ten hands spring up. The first answer:
"No, but the room knows Chinese."
Duh. I never really understood who takes his argument seriously.
Off the top of my head, if people can be held without the ability to contact anyone on the outside, then there is no way for us to ensure that human rights are not violated. It might not be made explicitly legal, but we could easily have gross violations of human rights due to these changes, legal or not.
An independant recount showed that Gore won by what margin? Given the incredibly tiny margins I've been told, you'd have to do about a hundred recounts to show anything statistically significant.
Oh, come off it. I voted for Gore. The election was, by all accounts, a tossup. You may at least thank half of the voting population for our current leadership. If half of us weren't brain-dead morons, then the supreme court and the FEC wouldn't have had the oportunity to fuck up so bad.
Sure, you could tell that it was all wire work because they weren't just doing exaggerated versions of something that stunt men could have done. It was all completely impossible in real physics.
I think what the dude (Graeme? What?) is saying is that they show you the actors in such high fidelity that you are more likely to believe the absurd shit that they're doing. For example, they do not blur; they do not make things so fast you can't see them; they do not cut away from action; they show you everyone's faces in close up. That's the part that's more real. The physics are jacked up. Agreed. It is not like Jackie Chan.
You'll also admit that there's a big difference between Ted's slow-mo flying gunfight in the subway and Jar-Jar's 25 foot flip in the air before he dives into the lake in Ep. 1. One is a revolution in action film making, and the other one has lower production value than a Road Runner cartoon. Right?
I agree. A much better example is that the USSR was pretty comfy for Communist Party officials, and Nazi Germany was plenty comfy for blue eyed blonds.
If, "To overrate" means "To rate or value too highly." (And it does), then "overrated" means "rated or valued too highly."
Agreed? He thinks Star Wars is valued too highly by the majority. If it were not valued highly by the majority, then it would not be possible for it to be overrated. His use of the word is completely proper, whether or not you agree.
BTW, some moderator is hilarious. You've been modded underrated.
The dojo scene in The Matrix looked fake because it was so stylish that it was impossible to believe that Ted and Larry Fishburne were really doing it.
But they were really doing it. And there were long cuts in there. They didn't do the zoomed-all-the-way-in-cut-cut-cut bullshit that you see in every other American action movie. Plus, as someone else has already pointed out, it was the same damn choreographer from those Jackie Chan movies you're raving about.
It *did* raise the bar. Admit it. The bullet-time sequence in the subway looked like it was really happening. They showed you the whole picture.
Slashdot Mirror
Wirelines and lasers?
WiFi doesn't obviate the need for some wireline networks. Living in the sticks will be less connected for a long time. It's a hard problem. It's not like you can get DSL anywhere you want it either.
Well, more to the point, they should call it Internet Explorer. Didn't Microsoft go to court and prove that "Internet Explorer" is a generic term and thus not subject to trademarking?
Simply saying "Yes, yes I'll accept" is way, way not legally binding in the first place. There has got to be some kind of legislation that places liability on the consumer in this case, or no one would ever have any reason to ever pay a bill for a collect call.
Until someone explains the contractual obligation involved, we're just talking crap.
I'm sorry, when was "All your base are belong to us" a phrase only known by an elite few hackers?
They also know exactly what graphics chipset they're targetting, what type of RAM, what FSB the processor has, etc. Carmack's .plan has commented on an interesting XBox-specific improvement in the past. Don't recall when.
FPS is a vantage point, not an input device. Halo, with the possible exception of Half-Life, is the best single player FPS ever made.
Perhaps. I'll find out when I can play it conveniently on a decent display with nice inputs...
Although the XBox is no longer top-of-the-line, it is a stable target. Given hard work, an XBox version could be tweaked until it performs fantastically well. This work would not necessarily apply to any other platform, even though it's PC-based.
Some things to think about:
There are a number of neurons in your temporal lobes that fire depending on how "face-like" the thing is that you are looking at.
There are people without the ability to imagine a sound, and few other disabilities: They cannot repeat things verbatim.
:)
The Chalmers quote you paste seems completely false to me. Right where I'd love him to explain himself, he starts hand waving. He says these problems go beyond the performance of functions. TELL ME WHY! "Entertaining a mental image" is a function that a machine (our brain) already performs. Even this vague, undescribed, "experience", is a function that our brain already performs.
Your problem, "I can't know whether the color I see as red is the same color you see as red." is not necessarily mysterious at all. If we had a perfect understanding of the machinery between both of our ears, we could understand perfectly well how that machinery treats the color red. We could understand exactly how it derives its experience.
We could then (surprise) develop a test to ensure that we both experience "red" in the same way! We can test the effects of the color red on our other thoughts, spreading activation, linguistic abilities, or a million other things. We might need to test based on aspects of our mental state that we haven't even discovered yet.
The second portion of your Chalmers quote is particularly telling. Obviously, experience is entailed by the physical in one case: my brain. I have excellent evidence that I experience things. If my experience is not entailed by the physical existence of my brain, then this has become a religious discussion.
So, there is absolutely a process that entails experience. You may be witness to a similar process: your brain. When he goes saying, "it is conceptually coherent that any given process could exist without experience", he's going to need to prove it. If he is trying to show that it is conceptually coherent that I feel the way I do, and yet do not "experience" in the manner he means, then it is also conceptually coherent that this "experience" may not exist at all.
As convoluted as that point sounds, it works for me. Try to make it work for you, and we'll be even for me browsing the Chalmers article
I won't be connected over the weekend, but I will get back to you if you respond.
(Not to be mean: Britney Spears is charming in her way and nice to look at, but I really can't imagine that she is going to record 10 albums in her career.)
Jesus God, don't jinx us. Knock on wood when you say something like that.
Yet another example of how Philip K. Dick writes about subjects with many interesting facets and ignores all of them. Or misunderstands them.
See, that's exactly what I mean. Who takes Searle seriously? His point lasts 30 seconds in front of undergraduates, and a few minutes on /. before serious flaws are unearthed. So the real question is: Who cares what Searle thinks?
That article is going to take me a while to read. It's also pretty frustrating, as he states as fact many things that I either don't understand or don't agree with.
:), I can't imagine that he says you don't actually experience seeing the color red, but rather that what you feel when you see the color red is the same as running certain code. Might'n't computationalists only deny the existence of the gap between computation and experience?
His description of the hard problem in defining consciousness has very few concrete examples, and the few I could find seem worthless:
It is undeniable that some organisms are subjects of experience. But the question of how it is that these systems are subjects of experience is perplexing. Why is it that when our cognitive systems engage in visual and auditory information-processing, we have visual or auditory experience: the quality of deep blue, the sensation of middle C? How can we explain why there is something it is like to entertain a mental image, or to experience an emotion? It is widely agreed that experience arises from a physical basis, but we have no good explanation of why and how it so arises. Why should physical processing give rise to a rich inner life at all? It seems objectively unreasonable that it should, and yet it does.
And he continues (but I'll cut him off):
If any problem qualifies as the problem of consciousness, it is this one. In this central sense of "consciousness", an organism is conscious if there is something it is like to be that organism, and a mental state is conscious if there is something it is like to be in that state.
"Entertaining a mental image" and "experiencing an emotion" are both very interesting subjects in cognition, but they are hardly any more abstract than any other brain function.
We can observe what happens to brains while they do these tasks. We can observe brains that are unable to perform these tasks. We can do all kinds of studies that will show us what mechanism our brain uses to do these things. Some day, we might nail it. There is nothing special about these tasks.
The question of sensory experience is also not so bad. We can observe what causes brains to do these things (experience their senses). We can observe the mechanisms they use. Some day, we might solve this problem as well.
That's the beautiful thing about the Turing test. It is designed to detect whether we have solved these varieties of problems. If it fails in that regard, then either your observer is not critical enough (and then you aren't performing the Turing test properly), or you have invented criterion that do not really exist.
In defense of Dennett (whom I've never met nor read
I was trying to figure out what on earth "phenomenological" meant. So I went to Dictionary.com. They said phenomenology means:
A philosophy or method of inquiry based on the premise that reality consists of objects and events as they are perceived or understood in human consciousness and not of anything independent of human consciousness.
i.e. Reality is defined by our perception of it. That seems completely unrelated to the way that you use the word. What's your definition?
That's a sidebar. Back to the point. You say:
"Sentience" is a tricky word because it involves the capacity to feel...
I think "sentience" is a tricky word because it is completely meaningless. The Turing test was never meant to be an intelligence test for machines. It was meant to be a way to redefine "sentience" in a concrete manner.
You may feel that strictly computational models of mind have some failing (I don't understand the failing you describe.), but I do not. I challenge you to differentiate between a "zombie" and a person. The more I've learned about cognition and neuroanatomy, the less I believe that distinction exists.
Colin. His name was Colin.
I'd settle for the Flatline, but Colin would be neato.
The Turing test accomplishes perfectly its stated goal: giving an explicit definition to the human quality that many people insist a computer cannot have(AS, whatever).
AI is not being able to have a conversation with your computer, AI is just algorithms -- computing the right answer to complex problems as quickly as possible.
What most people think of as AI is really Artificial Sentience, and the more I learn about computer hardware the more I realize that it will not happen on my PC.
Learn more about cognitive neuroscience, and you may say the same thing about the human brain.
Searle's Chinese Room argument never makes it past the first room full of undergraduates. Once you outline the scenario, and ask the class, "Ok, does the man following the rules in the Chinese Room know Chinese?" ten hands spring up. The first answer:
"No, but the room knows Chinese."
Duh. I never really understood who takes his argument seriously.
Off the top of my head, if people can be held without the ability to contact anyone on the outside, then there is no way for us to ensure that human rights are not violated. It might not be made explicitly legal, but we could easily have gross violations of human rights due to these changes, legal or not.
An independant recount showed that Gore won by what margin? Given the incredibly tiny margins I've been told, you'd have to do about a hundred recounts to show anything statistically significant.
Oh, come off it. I voted for Gore. The election was, by all accounts, a tossup. You may at least thank half of the voting population for our current leadership. If half of us weren't brain-dead morons, then the supreme court and the FEC wouldn't have had the oportunity to fuck up so bad.
And that is un-American. Period.
And anything that is un-American shouldn't be allowed in America!
Uh... I think there are better descriptions of the reasons those things are bad. For example, they allow for violations of basic human rights.
Sure, you could tell that it was all wire work because they weren't just doing exaggerated versions of something that stunt men could have done. It was all completely impossible in real physics.
I think what the dude (Graeme? What?) is saying is that they show you the actors in such high fidelity that you are more likely to believe the absurd shit that they're doing. For example, they do not blur; they do not make things so fast you can't see them; they do not cut away from action; they show you everyone's faces in close up. That's the part that's more real. The physics are jacked up. Agreed. It is not like Jackie Chan.
You'll also admit that there's a big difference between Ted's slow-mo flying gunfight in the subway and Jar-Jar's 25 foot flip in the air before he dives into the lake in Ep. 1. One is a revolution in action film making, and the other one has lower production value than a Road Runner cartoon. Right?
I agree. A much better example is that the USSR was pretty comfy for Communist Party officials, and Nazi Germany was plenty comfy for blue eyed blonds.
Nice job. You just redefined "overrated".
If, "To overrate" means "To rate or value too highly." (And it does), then "overrated" means "rated or valued too highly."
Agreed? He thinks Star Wars is valued too highly by the majority. If it were not valued highly by the majority, then it would not be possible for it to be overrated. His use of the word is completely proper, whether or not you agree.
BTW, some moderator is hilarious. You've been modded underrated.
The dojo scene in The Matrix looked fake because it was so stylish that it was impossible to believe that Ted and Larry Fishburne were really doing it.
But they were really doing it. And there were long cuts in there. They didn't do the zoomed-all-the-way-in-cut-cut-cut bullshit that you see in every other American action movie. Plus, as someone else has already pointed out, it was the same damn choreographer from those Jackie Chan movies you're raving about.
It *did* raise the bar. Admit it. The bullet-time sequence in the subway looked like it was really happening. They showed you the whole picture.