You can say the freedom is in which of the worlds your consciousness chooses to be. But I agree, it's silly. It's a desperate attempt to preserve the belief that the world(s) out there exist(s) objectively, solidly, and independently of observers.
Correct, but remember that all we already known of all the related phenomena point to the extremely strong possibility that both are different stages of the same process. The possibility they aren't exists, in a mathematical sense of the probability not being null, but is basically negligible.
It's a good point, the processes are related, and maybe we'll learn to predictably map changes in one process that correspond to changes in the other, without really needing to understand the causal relationship, if it is even understandable in principle. E.g. we may develop, through simulation or machine learning, a brain stimulating device where, say, if you press button X the image of your car pops in your mind, with 99.99% chance. (One can think of juicier examples.) I still believe (from the heart, without proof) that consciousness is not the mind, e.g. you'd still be aware that the car image showed up in "your" mind when you pressed the button.
But that's speculating too far. I've searched a bit on the original article and they say the method described is not very useful in most real cases yet. We'll see... Thanks for the link.
That's interesting, although for the purposes of our discussion it just shifts the problem: do we have a way to tell objectively i.e. with measurements if a lump of matter is in that process of living? My impression is, still no.
I do agree with the definition though. In fact you could say that there are no "things"; everything is a process. Even an atom is a process of interacting subatomic particles, which themselves are not really "things." A glass on the table, though it appears solid, is a process of molecules very slowly drifting in and binding to the surface of the table. The dirty dish on the kitchen counter is a process -- you leave it there after lunch with those molecules binding to the surface, much faster this time, food particles being carried away by the fungus spores for reuse somewhere else, and a few hours later it's a very different thing, at least as far as the amount of work needed to clean it is concerned.
And to go back to our original discussion, brain is the name we give to one process, mind is the name of another, and the manner of their connectedness is far from understood.
The book is not released yet...? Can you quote its physical/objective/materialistic definition of life (and some proof of consensus)? You realize of course that in order to make such an attempt a valid scientific theory, experiments must be designed that prove or disprove it.
There is none that proves the brain is a machine -- it's a living organ of which we have limited understanding. There is no proof in fact that anything living is a machine, even a simple bacteria -- we don't know what the thing that makes it "alive" is as we don't even know what "alive" means. There is no (agreed upon) theoretical model of what life is, and certainly there are no instruments that can measure if something is alive or not.
On top of it all, we know even less what mind (i.e. what you likely meant by the "you" in "you are") is. One hypothesis is that the mind is an emergent property of the brain, which so far hasn't been proven, only that the mind is conditioned by the brain.
So to conclude from that meager foundation that the brain is a machine and the person is an AI running on the hardware is based on faith and not science. Nothing wrong with that, but it should be acknowledged as such.
You *believe*, from your heart, without proof, in the idea that the brain is a machine, he may believe, from his heart, without proof, in the idea of a soul. Whose is to say that one religion is better than the other?
I've seen enough Forbes articles to know that their predictions are complete useless BS. They only write about what everyone uninformed is thinking and then turn it up a notch. That's the entertainment they sell. So if a Forbes commentary says X should be done, it's a pretty sure sign that X won't be done.
Same goes for Motley Fool for finance, CNN for politics, etc.
> based on some stupid assumption that a naturally derived chemical is different than a synthetically derived one
People don't eat chemicals -- synthetic or "natural" -- in isolation, they eat food. The stupidest assumption of all is that complex systems can be reduced to a collection of individual chemical reactions that are the "same" in the lab and in the body.
But forget theory. Just ask yourself, what do we have to show for decades of tampering with food sources, inventing new kinds of fats and sweeteners and adding chemicals to food?
Well he said "I know that he should take the job." Should -- in order to what? Be happy according to the OP's view of the world? IMO, he can say "if you take the job, so and so is likely to happen; if you go into gaming, so and so is likely to happen." That is all. The choice of one or the other (or something else) is only his friend's to make.
Because the book is now always with you (on your phone and your Kindle). That said, I think Amazon should do with books what they do with CDs: if you buy a physical book, you should get the digital version for free.
I disagree they have settled. Rage may not have been that well received, but ID have an expertise and interest in certain aspects of gameplay and they are pushing it with their new work. IMO anyone working to go deeper in the area they are best at isn't settling.
I completely agree with you on that one: such outlook is a poor fit for technology development. It's just that you're operating under assumption that technology development is the most important thing. I used to, too, and it's still my first impulse, but now I believe health and sanity are primary and technology is at best secondary. So in that sense I'm in favor of using risky technology where it improves health and sanity -- if you are somewhere far away and your life is danger, printing that gun is way more important than worrying about inhaling potentially toxic nanoparticles. And likewise I have become cautious towards technology if it doesn't benefit health and sanity: if you are printing cool coffee mugs and risk terminal respiratory illness because of it, it's not worth it.
But I stand corrected: I can't say in general that being healthy and sane at the cost of some technology slowdown is "better" than being technologically advanced at the cost of some health and sanity. If the majority in society values one over the other, than they should pick actions consistent with that belief. I was assuming that the majority prefers the former but I may be wrong.
> But I'll note here that no one has actually shown a need for such. Merely saying that nanoparticles are produced tells us nothing about the concentration or toxicity of whatever that happens to be.
Suppose those nanoparticles acts as a catalyst for some dreadful consequences to show in 10 years in the future. If it happens to be so, how can anyone show a need for protection from them now?
Of course you will say that it is pure speculation that there may be consequences in 10 or 5 or 1 year. But ask yourself, why did some people -- scientists, nonetheless -- even raise the possibility of danger? This is *their* intuition. They have maybe seen in their lifetimes cases of tiny small things getting in places in sensitive tissues and staying there and doing damage, and are extrapolating it to nanoparticles. Or they have seen nanoparticles behave elsewhere in a way that looks like it would be a pain to deal with; check out the article and the Wikipedia references.
What you're doing is you are weighing the intuitive, as-of-yet-unproveable understanding and pattern recognition of a group of experts against the logical thinking and ideas of another group of experts and non-experts, and you're choosing the latter. So much for your considerable knowledge of risk.
Well then, what can I say. If you have no intuitive understanding of risk, no logical argument will change your assumptions. I am not saying that new technology should not be used anywhere, on the contrary, there are situations that desperately need new technology, but consumer 3D printing isn't one. If the idea of possibly inflicting horrible damage to your body for the sake of generating plastic trinkets in your home doesn't concern you, then by all means go for it. In fact you will directly help the research showing whether 3D printing is harmful for the health, the only way to know is to have volunteers like you doing it. Remember only that it may take 10-20 years for the consequences to show, so make sure you don't expose anyone else in your family to it.
> I see no evidence of any "consequences" to breathing in small amounts of small particles of plastics
This is is the single most dangerous error in thinking when dealing with new technologies. It is the person who introduces the unnatural who needs to have the burden of proof, as Nassim Taleb says in Antifragile. Logically it is wrong to claim there is no evidence of consequences to a complex system -- our bodies and the environment -- that we don't and probably never will understand. In a complex system, the only evidence o lack of consequences is time -- a very long time.
Absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence. So if you're dealing with something that has potential large, hidden, and delayed costs, your first question should be, does the perceived benefit outweigh the risk? Sometimes yes, and sometimes -- most 3D printing uses, seems to me -- no.
Also I imagine the final Kinect 2 for Windows will surely be less expensive than the new XBox. If I buy the XBox One just for the Kinect, everybody loses -- I pay extra for a console I won't use, and MS loses money on subsidizing unused hardware.
Logically -- and scientifically -- the only way to claim that "there are no meaningful differences between GM foods and non-GM foods" is to have people GM foods for a *very* long time and to observe no signs of harm from the GM foods.
There is no absolutely, positively, no other way.
Without that, you need accept that there is a certain level of risk with GM foods that may show up in years to come. Then the question is, do the perceived immediate benefits outweigh possible large, hidden, and delayed costs? Sometimes, the answer may be yes (e.g. people starving and no non-GM food can be made -- don't know if that's a real case though). Most of the time however I suspect the answer will be a clear no.
Love is openness, fear is tightness and closeness in a battle for survival. Besides the complementary brain chemicals involved, remember Machiavelli's question to a prince: would you rather be loved or feared?
I understand it doesn't make sense when one is caught up in words.
I'll agree. It is a pain to simply copy mp3 files from my PC to my iPhone -- everything has to go through iTunes, which I never use, and which threatens to erase all music if you "sync", and when I did sync in order to copy those few songs I needed for a demo it erased a bunch of contacts from my phone.
I just googled for how you copy mp3s to Android and it's a simple file copy. If you go outside the use style Apple designed for you, you'll pay the price, and don't think it's worth it any longer.
Giving birth is a major strain on the person's body. It is only normal that the person who goes through that strain gets more time to recover than the person who's merely emotionally involved.
This is why I like Slashdot! After reading "inklings of the battle" I opened the post just to see if people will take the bait or if they'll see it as empty. Glad to see it's the latter.
Slashdot Mirror
You can say the freedom is in which of the worlds your consciousness chooses to be. But I agree, it's silly. It's a desperate attempt to preserve the belief that the world(s) out there exist(s) objectively, solidly, and independently of observers.
Correct, but remember that all we already known of all the related phenomena point to the extremely strong possibility that both are different stages of the same process. The possibility they aren't exists, in a mathematical sense of the probability not being null, but is basically negligible.
It's a good point, the processes are related, and maybe we'll learn to predictably map changes in one process that correspond to changes in the other, without really needing to understand the causal relationship, if it is even understandable in principle. E.g. we may develop, through simulation or machine learning, a brain stimulating device where, say, if you press button X the image of your car pops in your mind, with 99.99% chance. (One can think of juicier examples.) I still believe (from the heart, without proof) that consciousness is not the mind, e.g. you'd still be aware that the car image showed up in "your" mind when you pressed the button.
But that's speculating too far. I've searched a bit on the original article and they say the method described is not very useful in most real cases yet. We'll see... Thanks for the link.
That's interesting, although for the purposes of our discussion it just shifts the problem: do we have a way to tell objectively i.e. with measurements if a lump of matter is in that process of living? My impression is, still no.
I do agree with the definition though. In fact you could say that there are no "things"; everything is a process. Even an atom is a process of interacting subatomic particles, which themselves are not really "things." A glass on the table, though it appears solid, is a process of molecules very slowly drifting in and binding to the surface of the table. The dirty dish on the kitchen counter is a process -- you leave it there after lunch with those molecules binding to the surface, much faster this time, food particles being carried away by the fungus spores for reuse somewhere else, and a few hours later it's a very different thing, at least as far as the amount of work needed to clean it is concerned.
And to go back to our original discussion, brain is the name we give to one process, mind is the name of another, and the manner of their connectedness is far from understood.
The book is not released yet...? Can you quote its physical/objective/materialistic definition of life (and some proof of consensus)? You realize of course that in order to make such an attempt a valid scientific theory, experiments must be designed that prove or disprove it.
There is none that proves the brain is a machine -- it's a living organ of which we have limited understanding. There is no proof in fact that anything living is a machine, even a simple bacteria -- we don't know what the thing that makes it "alive" is as we don't even know what "alive" means. There is no (agreed upon) theoretical model of what life is, and certainly there are no instruments that can measure if something is alive or not.
On top of it all, we know even less what mind (i.e. what you likely meant by the "you" in "you are") is. One hypothesis is that the mind is an emergent property of the brain, which so far hasn't been proven, only that the mind is conditioned by the brain.
So to conclude from that meager foundation that the brain is a machine and the person is an AI running on the hardware is based on faith and not science. Nothing wrong with that, but it should be acknowledged as such.
You *believe*, from your heart, without proof, in the idea that the brain is a machine, he may believe, from his heart, without proof, in the idea of a soul. Whose is to say that one religion is better than the other?
I've seen enough Forbes articles to know that their predictions are complete useless BS. They only write about what everyone uninformed is thinking and then turn it up a notch. That's the entertainment they sell. So if a Forbes commentary says X should be done, it's a pretty sure sign that X won't be done.
Same goes for Motley Fool for finance, CNN for politics, etc.
> based on some stupid assumption that a naturally derived chemical is different than a synthetically derived one
People don't eat chemicals -- synthetic or "natural" -- in isolation, they eat food. The stupidest assumption of all is that complex systems can be reduced to a collection of individual chemical reactions that are the "same" in the lab and in the body.
But forget theory. Just ask yourself, what do we have to show for decades of tampering with food sources, inventing new kinds of fats and sweeteners and adding chemicals to food?
Well he said "I know that he should take the job." Should -- in order to what? Be happy according to the OP's view of the world? IMO, he can say "if you take the job, so and so is likely to happen; if you go into gaming, so and so is likely to happen." That is all. The choice of one or the other (or something else) is only his friend's to make.
Yeah like he would have had the urgency to accomplish more.
Because the book is now always with you (on your phone and your Kindle). That said, I think Amazon should do with books what they do with CDs: if you buy a physical book, you should get the digital version for free.
I disagree they have settled. Rage may not have been that well received, but ID have an expertise and interest in certain aspects of gameplay and they are pushing it with their new work. IMO anyone working to go deeper in the area they are best at isn't settling.
I completely agree with you on that one: such outlook is a poor fit for technology development. It's just that you're operating under assumption that technology development is the most important thing. I used to, too, and it's still my first impulse, but now I believe health and sanity are primary and technology is at best secondary. So in that sense I'm in favor of using risky technology where it improves health and sanity -- if you are somewhere far away and your life is danger, printing that gun is way more important than worrying about inhaling potentially toxic nanoparticles. And likewise I have become cautious towards technology if it doesn't benefit health and sanity: if you are printing cool coffee mugs and risk terminal respiratory illness because of it, it's not worth it.
But I stand corrected: I can't say in general that being healthy and sane at the cost of some technology slowdown is "better" than being technologically advanced at the cost of some health and sanity. If the majority in society values one over the other, than they should pick actions consistent with that belief. I was assuming that the majority prefers the former but I may be wrong.
> But I'll note here that no one has actually shown a need for such. Merely saying that nanoparticles are produced tells us nothing about the concentration or toxicity of whatever that happens to be.
Suppose those nanoparticles acts as a catalyst for some dreadful consequences to show in 10 years in the future. If it happens to be so, how can anyone show a need for protection from them now?
Of course you will say that it is pure speculation that there may be consequences in 10 or 5 or 1 year. But ask yourself, why did some people -- scientists, nonetheless -- even raise the possibility of danger? This is *their* intuition. They have maybe seen in their lifetimes cases of tiny small things getting in places in sensitive tissues and staying there and doing damage, and are extrapolating it to nanoparticles. Or they have seen nanoparticles behave elsewhere in a way that looks like it would be a pain to deal with; check out the article and the Wikipedia references.
What you're doing is you are weighing the intuitive, as-of-yet-unproveable understanding and pattern recognition of a group of experts against the logical thinking and ideas of another group of experts and non-experts, and you're choosing the latter. So much for your considerable knowledge of risk.
Well then, what can I say. If you have no intuitive understanding of risk, no logical argument will change your assumptions. I am not saying that new technology should not be used anywhere, on the contrary, there are situations that desperately need new technology, but consumer 3D printing isn't one. If the idea of possibly inflicting horrible damage to your body for the sake of generating plastic trinkets in your home doesn't concern you, then by all means go for it. In fact you will directly help the research showing whether 3D printing is harmful for the health, the only way to know is to have volunteers like you doing it. Remember only that it may take 10-20 years for the consequences to show, so make sure you don't expose anyone else in your family to it.
> I see no evidence of any "consequences" to breathing in small amounts of small particles of plastics
This is is the single most dangerous error in thinking when dealing with new technologies. It is the person who introduces the unnatural who needs to have the burden of proof, as Nassim Taleb says in Antifragile. Logically it is wrong to claim there is no evidence of consequences to a complex system -- our bodies and the environment -- that we don't and probably never will understand. In a complex system, the only evidence o lack of consequences is time -- a very long time.
Absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence. So if you're dealing with something that has potential large, hidden, and delayed costs, your first question should be, does the perceived benefit outweigh the risk? Sometimes yes, and sometimes -- most 3D printing uses, seems to me -- no.
Also I imagine the final Kinect 2 for Windows will surely be less expensive than the new XBox. If I buy the XBox One just for the Kinect, everybody loses -- I pay extra for a console I won't use, and MS loses money on subsidizing unused hardware.
Anyone care to say more about this? I can understand the reasons, but was wondering what real-life experiences people had on this topic. Thanks.
Kickass explanation. When someone asks about HFT, I'll send them the link to your post.
Logically -- and scientifically -- the only way to claim that "there are no meaningful differences between GM foods and non-GM foods" is to have people GM foods for a *very* long time and to observe no signs of harm from the GM foods.
There is no absolutely, positively, no other way.
Without that, you need accept that there is a certain level of risk with GM foods that may show up in years to come. Then the question is, do the perceived immediate benefits outweigh possible large, hidden, and delayed costs? Sometimes, the answer may be yes (e.g. people starving and no non-GM food can be made -- don't know if that's a real case though). Most of the time however I suspect the answer will be a clear no.
Love is openness, fear is tightness and closeness in a battle for survival. Besides the complementary brain chemicals involved, remember Machiavelli's question to a prince: would you rather be loved or feared?
I understand it doesn't make sense when one is caught up in words.
I'll agree. It is a pain to simply copy mp3 files from my PC to my iPhone -- everything has to go through iTunes, which I never use, and which threatens to erase all music if you "sync", and when I did sync in order to copy those few songs I needed for a demo it erased a bunch of contacts from my phone.
I just googled for how you copy mp3s to Android and it's a simple file copy. If you go outside the use style Apple designed for you, you'll pay the price, and don't think it's worth it any longer.
No, the opposite of Love is Fear.
Giving birth is a major strain on the person's body. It is only normal that the person who goes through that strain gets more time to recover than the person who's merely emotionally involved.
This is why I like Slashdot! After reading "inklings of the battle" I opened the post just to see if people will take the bait or if they'll see it as empty. Glad to see it's the latter.