I'm not sure what you're trying to say here. "Questioning the existence of the holocaust" should be something which is socially frowned upon, and should have some sort of repercussions, such as a mandatory visit to a Holocaust museum. I also don't see what's wrong with punishing "efforts to incite racial hatred and violence".
Now, Kennedy is also in the middle of a wildlife preserve, as is the Stennis Space Center where they do engine testing. Animals don't have the heck scared out of them at either location. Nor are their noxious chemicals spread all over.
Actually, they do spread noxious chemicals all over. Such as those caused by the shuttle. I'm not saying it is something that can't be controlled with a little regulation, and besides, Brownsville is kind of a shit hole anyways. Nevertheless, launching rockets into space DOES spew large amounts of toxic chemicals all over the place.
If there's so many collisions, it just means that many many people are using the same password. The statement "it would only take around 1000 attempts to try every possible password" is misleading and ridiculous. A more accurate statement is that it would only take 1000 attempts to try the 1000 most common hashes. No shit, Sherlock.
Here in Germany the old drive just as fast as the young. Getting passed while going 160 (like you're standing still) by some grey-hairded fella in an M5 is a daily occurrence on the autobahn. Maybe old Americans are just sissies.
I don't know about you, but I don't pay much, if anything, for my credit cards. If I do pay anything, it's well worth it to get an interest free up to 30 day loan. Heck, on one of my cards I don't pay any fees at all.
The level playing field for carbon neutrality is a sham designed to do nothing more than transfer wealth from first-world economies to third-world economies.
Actually, I think the idea is to put a monetary cost on things which currently have no cost, namely, emission of gasses which may have a negative effect on climate. I think thinking that there is some conspiracy here is kind of ridiculous. One side wants to implement government regulations to reduce carbon emissions. The other side believes the market will solve these problems. So we arrive at a compromise where we attempt to achieve our goal (reducing emissions) by using the market (make it have a cost). This seems entirely reasonable. Why shouldn't we attach a cost to pollution?
If the mind is purely the result of physical processes, how does that in any way diminish the self? I don't need ghost to call "I" after all! I really don't follow your reasoning here.
I suppose my question is simply "Are consciousness and the self simply emergent phenomena?". It seems that they must be, as they seem to be the result of "simple" neurons and synapses. For instance, one can vastly alter the conscious state, destroy the sense of self, and even eliminate the belief in one's own existence, through chemical or electrical interference in the brain. If consciousness is simply something that emerges, a ghost in the machine, then it seems (to me anyway) that it is just as illusory as the "invisible hand". In other words one doesn't control how their neurons fire, rather, the firing of the neurons controls how one thinks. Just as the market doesn't control how people act, the actions of people determine how the market behaves... but enough with that analogy, as you don't seem to like it. Perhaps this is a pointless line of thought anyways, since the only thing it concludes is that there is no soul. It doesn't establish what consciousness is, just what it is not, namely, a magical entity.
I wish I had found your criticism of Metzinger before I bought his book. The ideas appealed to me at first, but as you say, I'm slowly coming to the realization that all he is denying is the existence of the soul.
I admit that my knowledge of philosophy is very limited, I have only dabbled in it by reading a few books. I'm a computational neuroscientist by day (vision), and this is what led me to Metzinger, since he claims that he is trying to reconcile philosophy with neuroscience.
Perhaps you could suggest a few titles that might be more worthwhile?
Oh, and what do YOU think consciousness is? You've made many statements about what it is not, but haven't made any claims as to what it is.
It is theoretically impossible for this to broken.
According to current theory, yes. I agree that it is impossible, as far as we understand things. If faster then light communication was found to be possible, then it seems that this would no longer be secure.
I don't agree that there is a guarantee that consciousness equates to existence. Descartes makes the assumption that he has a self, that it is conscious, and therefore he exists. One could argue that consciousness (whatever that constitutes) does not require, or imply, a self, but instead is a by-product of mechanical processes, such as the firing of neurons in the brain.
Take, for instance, the "invisible hand" of economics. One could argue that it is consciously making decisions about how to efficiently allocate resources, but what exactly is conscious in the system is somewhat difficult to determine. The individuals within the system certainly appear to be conscious (to us), individually, but their individual decisions do not directly determine the overall outcome of the system. They each act independently, interacting with others locally, yet this results in globally "intelligent" behavior. This occurs, even though there really is no "invisible hand" which one can point to.
Perhaps it is so with human consciousness. There is no global ego, determining what decisions a person will make. Rather, the global decisions are merely a result of the many individual neurons acting independently, or in local cooperation. Perhaps then, one can deconstruct conscious thought into the series of electric and chemical state of billions of neurons and synapses. If this is possible, then it might also be that consciousness is merely a construct of these neurons, a byproduct of evolution, which allows the billions of neurons to act in a more cohesive and intelligent way (ie a way that is advantageous in terms of survival).
This is what I really meant (even if I expressed it poorly); that simply being conscious does not mean that one's sense of self, or of existence, is anything more than an illusion. Perhaps the "invisible hand" is also conscious on some level, composed, as it is, of us billions of "neurons".
I'm starting to confuse myself. There seems to be a logical loop somewhere here, but I can't quite get my head around it. I'll have to give it some more thought.
More seriously, if I'm conscious, it seems obvious that I'm not being fooled about being conscious.
There is no guarantee that consciousness equates to existence. There is still an assumption that Descartes makes that conscious beings have to exist. One could argue that consciousness (whatever that constitutes) does not require a self. This is what I really meant (even if I expressed it poorly); that simply being conscious does not mean that one's sense of self, or of existence, is anything more than an illusion. Nietzsche demonstrated this flaw in Descartes pretty clearly, showing how the cogito argument makes many unproven - perhaps unprovable - assumptions:
...the philosopher must say to himself: "When I analyze the process that is expressed in the sentence, 'I think,' I find a whole series of daring assertions, the argumentative proof of which would be difficult, perhaps impossible: for instance, that it is _I_ who think, that there must necessarily be something that thinks, that thinking is an activity and operation on the part of a being who is thought of as a cause, that there is an 'ego,' and finally, that it is already determined what is to be designated by thinking--that I KNOW what thinking is."
More seriously, if I'm conscious, it seems obvious that I'm not being fooled about being conscious.
Again, just because you keep saying over and over again that something is obvious, simple, or basic, does not make it so, and does not make your understanding correct. Anyway, I never said you were being fooled about being conscious, that was your statement. I said consciousness is an illusion. By this, I meant that one is being fooled by their phenomenological experience into constructing a "reality" - within which consciousness resides. There's nothing revolutionary about that at all... the idea goes back to Plato.
Also this is not a philosophical debate.
Agreed... after all, you haven't said anything other than "No, you're an idiot, this is obvious to everyone" . Why are you wasting your time writing these posts if all you're going to do is insult me and tell me I'm wrong? You could at least tell me WHY you believe I'm wrong.
If you can't handle Descartes, I doubt you could handle anything modern. We're talking about the basics of modern philosophy and you give me a hack like Metzinger? Why not just tell me to read Dennett?
No wonder you're so confused! Metzinger's popular garbage is at least as bad as Dennett's.
Well, at least I'm not the only one you look down on.
You can't fool me in to thinking I'm conscious because that necessitates that I'm conscious. This isn't exactly complicated!
It actually IS deceptively complicated. You seem to think that bootstrapping is impossible. I'm not saying that you are not experiencing consciousness, because clearly you are. I'm simply saying that it is nothing more then an internal construct of your mind, a tunnel through reality created by your phenomenological experience.
I don't even know how to begin explaining to you how incredibly wrong you are here. Descartes dealt with this in the meditation I refer to earlier. Fuck, the movie The Matrix dealt with this. Perception is not the same as consciousness.
Honestly, get any text -- even a laypersons text -- and do some reading.
Thanks, I've read Meditations. I don't know why you're pointing to the Matrix as proof that you're right... It's a good movie, but certainly not something to bring into a philosophical debate. I've also read some things which are a little more up to date, such as "Being No One" by Metzinger. Try "The Ego Tunnel" for a short primer if you're interested.
Again though, and I can't stress this enough... simply telling someone they're stupid over and over again while pointing to a 400 year old text as "proof" is just silly.
What is it that breathes life and sentience into these computations (more on that later)?
Of course my intuition could be wrong. Maybe it's just that sentience appears to have a different quality but that is just because it is so infinitely complex that our intuition has no grasp of such complexity.
It's not that it is infinitely complex, but rather that from within one's own experience, it is difficult, if not impossible, to conceive of one's own existence, and the true nature of one's thought. Just think of how difficult it would be for a computer based in silicon to move to our "level" of thought. We exist within our own conception of reality, just as a computer must exist within its own. To conceive of concepts outside of the conception of reality is inherently abhorrent, if not impossible. Just as a computer finds it difficult to conceive of "thoughts" not defined in its boolean world, we find it impossible to think of things defined outside of our conception of reality, defined by our ego tunnel. This is perhaps an evolutionary trait, as our minds proved good enough for survival, without going outside the bounds of what is possible for neuronal circuits to realize.
And that if it did, we would be able to see how sentience can be developed just from the standard properties of physical matter.
But clearly sentience must be developed from the properties of physical matter, for that is exactly what we are... physical matter. As I said, sentience is just an incredibly complex, if not impossible, concept for us to grasp, as our only observations of it are from within.
So to me it seems that if you go along the mechanistic route, you have to accept that sentience could occur even on the simplest of CPU's (or any kind of Turing machine in fact) just given the right program. Of course the program might execute at a slow speed, but it should be totally equivalent. And this is why I find the premise of "sentience is just complex computation" unappealing.
I agree that it is an unappealing notion. At the same time, I find it difficult to believe that it is impossible to simulate a brain in its entirety, given a sufficiently long amount of time or computational power. To believe that it is impossible is simply to believe that there is some "magic" going on which is impossible to simulate... and it seems that such "magic" is only magic due to insufficient observational capacity.
While computation is well-defined at the "input/output" level, the actual computation process is not. It's usually just abstracted away. And sentience must be a property of the computation process itself and not a property of the actual I/O (after all, I still feel sentient when no one is looking).
Why can't contagiousness be an abstraction? Waking dreams are a clear example of where the mind originally feels like it is experiencing reality, and then, suddenly, conceives that it is being fooled, that its sensory inputs are an illusion. Why is it implausible to think that this is all we ever experience, but with a set of inputs that is impossible for us to invalidate, because our sensory apparatus cannot experience anything beyond it? Clearly there are things which exist which we cannot directly observe, such as the rest of the electromagnetic spectrum, why do we believe that our dream state is so different from our waking state? One is observing signals generated by our mind, while the other is observing signals generated by our sensory organs.
If I look at a Turing-machine made of organ-pipes, it's essentially just my interpretation that these organ pipes are operating as a Turing machine executing on some piece of information. You have to look at the system at just the right level and type of abstraction to see it's a Turing machines. To someone not "in" on it, it would just seem like a weird spectacle. The individual physical components are operating e
You think Descartes was right? I'm the one with some catching up to do?
Apply it to you and see how absurd what you're saying actually is: "I'm conscious of the fact that I'm being fooled about being conscious."
How is that an absurd statement in any way? Don't we realize we have been fooled about our awareness and our consciousness every night? Isn't that exactly what dreaming is?
Anyone who has ever had a waking dream will recognize that the statement "I'm conscious of the fact that I'm being fooled about being conscious." is an entirely reasonable thing to say. The only difference is that it is difficult, if not impossible, to wake up from one's "waking dream", ie, one's experiencing of the physical universe. This isn't a statement about the nature of reality, but merely one about how we experience it. Phenomenologically, there is no difference between a vivid dream and waking thought, other then that the sensory inputs from one are derived from the physical universe, while the inputs for the other are derived from memory.
You're missing the point here. You want to elevate sentience to some mythical level, but really it is an illusion. Your mind is creating an elaborate internal representation of "reality", and living within it. I see no reason why one couldn't do the same with a sufficiently complex "computer" - of course such a "computer" would necessarily be vastly different from modern silicon; it would need to exhibit properties such as plasticity, extreme parallelism, and feedback.
But there is essentially no reason to believe your brain is doing something magical that cannot be replicated using different hardware. After all, your "sentience" is something you learned through the sensory inputs provided to your brain. If one provided similar inputs to a sufficiently plastic organism of similar composition, it seems reasonable that it would develop a similar (though perhaps different) concept of the ego.
The continuing cry from the MPAA really is nonsense, especially with the alleged hypothetical loss of revenue. If this guy did not do what he did, these troops would not have gone and purchased DVDs.
Just to play Devil's advocate... the MPAA would claim that the loss of revenue is from the families of the troops not going out and buying the DVDs and mailing them. I know, they're assholes... but it's a "valid" claim.
It actually makes sense to use "them" in this case, because the gender is, in fact, not known. All that is known is the "gender" of the nom de plume, which is inherently suspect. The gender of the author is unknown, thus a gender-neutral pronoun is appropriate.
Mass killings are much more political than they are religious. That is, in fact, the truth.
Political beliefs motivated, or justified, by religion, are indistinguishable from religious beliefs.
Anyways, forget about the numbers. The point is, saying atheism is bad because of Stalin is just as invalid as saying Christianity is bad because of the Crusades, Inquisition, or many of the countless wars Catholics/Protestants waged on one another. Religion is fine, when kept to oneself. The problem is that most religions refuse to be a solitary thing, and only feel validated when they can be spread, and their values enforced, on others. Maybe that's because one person believing in an invisible all-powerful being that controls everything is a lunatic, while a billion people who believe the exact same thing are "the faithful".
Yes, and millions of people have also died in the name of god... so that means Stalin and Mao are the same as *insert religious leader*, right? Just a slightly different message?
Could it just be that murderers are bad, regardless of their religious beliefs? Saying that trying to limit the scope of religion is bad because of Stalin is the same as saying the teachings of Jesus are bad because of the Crusades & Inquisition. Both are simply stupid.
Right, because nobody has EVER died in the name of religion, right? I would venture to say that the number of people killed in the name of one god or another absolutely dwarfs the number of people killed by those attempting to end religion.
Anyways, I don't mind religion being in the minds of the feeble people. I just mind those people being bale to dictate what I can do, and what my government does. Besides, the real problem isn't the flocks of idiots, it's the somewhat clever people leading those flocks.
Slashdot Mirror
"Why would anyone qualified be interested in that?". Sure, 29 months sounds long, but if you have to leave at the end, it is basically wasted time.
It buys you time to get in on three more visa lotteries, and it also gives you 29 months to try to find an employer that can get you an H-1B.
I'm not sure what you're trying to say here. "Questioning the existence of the holocaust" should be something which is socially frowned upon, and should have some sort of repercussions, such as a mandatory visit to a Holocaust museum. I also don't see what's wrong with punishing "efforts to incite racial hatred and violence".
Now, Kennedy is also in the middle of a wildlife preserve, as is the Stennis Space Center where they do engine testing. Animals don't have the heck scared out of them at either location. Nor are their noxious chemicals spread all over.
Actually, they do spread noxious chemicals all over. Such as those caused by the shuttle. I'm not saying it is something that can't be controlled with a little regulation, and besides, Brownsville is kind of a shit hole anyways. Nevertheless, launching rockets into space DOES spew large amounts of toxic chemicals all over the place.
If there's so many collisions, it just means that many many people are using the same password. The statement "it would only take around 1000 attempts to try every possible password" is misleading and ridiculous. A more accurate statement is that it would only take 1000 attempts to try the 1000 most common hashes. No shit, Sherlock.
Here in Germany the old drive just as fast as the young. Getting passed while going 160 (like you're standing still) by some grey-hairded fella in an M5 is a daily occurrence on the autobahn. Maybe old Americans are just sissies.
You wouldn't need to change tablets. There are many iphone charging usb pass-through cables available.
I don't know about you, but I don't pay much, if anything, for my credit cards. If I do pay anything, it's well worth it to get an interest free up to 30 day loan. Heck, on one of my cards I don't pay any fees at all.
That's not true at all. For instance, I've seen Ritalin cause people who definitely don't have ADHD to become focused on studying for hours on end.
The level playing field for carbon neutrality is a sham designed to do nothing more than transfer wealth from first-world economies to third-world economies.
Actually, I think the idea is to put a monetary cost on things which currently have no cost, namely, emission of gasses which may have a negative effect on climate. I think thinking that there is some conspiracy here is kind of ridiculous. One side wants to implement government regulations to reduce carbon emissions. The other side believes the market will solve these problems. So we arrive at a compromise where we attempt to achieve our goal (reducing emissions) by using the market (make it have a cost). This seems entirely reasonable. Why shouldn't we attach a cost to pollution?
If the mind is purely the result of physical processes, how does that in any way diminish the self? I don't need ghost to call "I" after all! I really don't follow your reasoning here.
I suppose my question is simply "Are consciousness and the self simply emergent phenomena?". It seems that they must be, as they seem to be the result of "simple" neurons and synapses. For instance, one can vastly alter the conscious state, destroy the sense of self, and even eliminate the belief in one's own existence, through chemical or electrical interference in the brain. If consciousness is simply something that emerges, a ghost in the machine, then it seems (to me anyway) that it is just as illusory as the "invisible hand". In other words one doesn't control how their neurons fire, rather, the firing of the neurons controls how one thinks. Just as the market doesn't control how people act, the actions of people determine how the market behaves... but enough with that analogy, as you don't seem to like it. Perhaps this is a pointless line of thought anyways, since the only thing it concludes is that there is no soul. It doesn't establish what consciousness is, just what it is not, namely, a magical entity.
I wish I had found your criticism of Metzinger before I bought his book. The ideas appealed to me at first, but as you say, I'm slowly coming to the realization that all he is denying is the existence of the soul.
I admit that my knowledge of philosophy is very limited, I have only dabbled in it by reading a few books. I'm a computational neuroscientist by day (vision), and this is what led me to Metzinger, since he claims that he is trying to reconcile philosophy with neuroscience.
Perhaps you could suggest a few titles that might be more worthwhile?
Oh, and what do YOU think consciousness is? You've made many statements about what it is not, but haven't made any claims as to what it is.
It is theoretically impossible for this to broken.
According to current theory, yes. I agree that it is impossible, as far as we understand things. If faster then light communication was found to be possible, then it seems that this would no longer be secure.
Hey! Gotye isn't THAT bad... Someone I used to know is pretty catchy.
Take, for instance, the "invisible hand" of economics. One could argue that it is consciously making decisions about how to efficiently allocate resources, but what exactly is conscious in the system is somewhat difficult to determine. The individuals within the system certainly appear to be conscious (to us), individually, but their individual decisions do not directly determine the overall outcome of the system. They each act independently, interacting with others locally, yet this results in globally "intelligent" behavior. This occurs, even though there really is no "invisible hand" which one can point to.
Perhaps it is so with human consciousness. There is no global ego, determining what decisions a person will make. Rather, the global decisions are merely a result of the many individual neurons acting independently, or in local cooperation. Perhaps then, one can deconstruct conscious thought into the series of electric and chemical state of billions of neurons and synapses. If this is possible, then it might also be that consciousness is merely a construct of these neurons, a byproduct of evolution, which allows the billions of neurons to act in a more cohesive and intelligent way (ie a way that is advantageous in terms of survival).
This is what I really meant (even if I expressed it poorly); that simply being conscious does not mean that one's sense of self, or of existence, is anything more than an illusion. Perhaps the "invisible hand" is also conscious on some level, composed, as it is, of us billions of "neurons".
I'm starting to confuse myself. There seems to be a logical loop somewhere here, but I can't quite get my head around it. I'll have to give it some more thought.
More seriously, if I'm conscious, it seems obvious that I'm not being fooled about being conscious.
There is no guarantee that consciousness equates to existence. There is still an assumption that Descartes makes that conscious beings have to exist. One could argue that consciousness (whatever that constitutes) does not require a self. This is what I really meant (even if I expressed it poorly); that simply being conscious does not mean that one's sense of self, or of existence, is anything more than an illusion. Nietzsche demonstrated this flaw in Descartes pretty clearly, showing how the cogito argument makes many unproven - perhaps unprovable - assumptions:
...the philosopher must say to himself: "When I analyze the process that is expressed in the sentence, 'I think,' I find a whole series of daring assertions, the argumentative proof of which would be difficult, perhaps impossible: for instance, that it is _I_ who think, that there must necessarily be something that thinks, that thinking is an activity and operation on the part of a being who is thought of as a cause, that there is an 'ego,' and finally, that it is already determined what is to be designated by thinking--that I KNOW what thinking is."
More seriously, if I'm conscious, it seems obvious that I'm not being fooled about being conscious.
Again, just because you keep saying over and over again that something is obvious, simple, or basic, does not make it so, and does not make your understanding correct. Anyway, I never said you were being fooled about being conscious, that was your statement. I said consciousness is an illusion. By this, I meant that one is being fooled by their phenomenological experience into constructing a "reality" - within which consciousness resides. There's nothing revolutionary about that at all... the idea goes back to Plato.
Also this is not a philosophical debate.
Agreed... after all, you haven't said anything other than "No, you're an idiot, this is obvious to everyone" . Why are you wasting your time writing these posts if all you're going to do is insult me and tell me I'm wrong? You could at least tell me WHY you believe I'm wrong.
If you can't handle Descartes, I doubt you could handle anything modern. We're talking about the basics of modern philosophy and you give me a hack like Metzinger? Why not just tell me to read Dennett? No wonder you're so confused! Metzinger's popular garbage is at least as bad as Dennett's.
Well, at least I'm not the only one you look down on.
You can't fool me in to thinking I'm conscious because that necessitates that I'm conscious. This isn't exactly complicated!
It actually IS deceptively complicated. You seem to think that bootstrapping is impossible. I'm not saying that you are not experiencing consciousness, because clearly you are. I'm simply saying that it is nothing more then an internal construct of your mind, a tunnel through reality created by your phenomenological experience.
I don't even know how to begin explaining to you how incredibly wrong you are here. Descartes dealt with this in the meditation I refer to earlier. Fuck, the movie The Matrix dealt with this. Perception is not the same as consciousness. Honestly, get any text -- even a laypersons text -- and do some reading.
Thanks, I've read Meditations. I don't know why you're pointing to the Matrix as proof that you're right... It's a good movie, but certainly not something to bring into a philosophical debate. I've also read some things which are a little more up to date, such as "Being No One" by Metzinger. Try "The Ego Tunnel" for a short primer if you're interested.
Again though, and I can't stress this enough... simply telling someone they're stupid over and over again while pointing to a 400 year old text as "proof" is just silly.
contagiousness == consciousness, DAMN YOU AUTOCORRECT
What is it that breathes life and sentience into these computations (more on that later)? Of course my intuition could be wrong. Maybe it's just that sentience appears to have a different quality but that is just because it is so infinitely complex that our intuition has no grasp of such complexity.
It's not that it is infinitely complex, but rather that from within one's own experience, it is difficult, if not impossible, to conceive of one's own existence, and the true nature of one's thought. Just think of how difficult it would be for a computer based in silicon to move to our "level" of thought. We exist within our own conception of reality, just as a computer must exist within its own. To conceive of concepts outside of the conception of reality is inherently abhorrent, if not impossible. Just as a computer finds it difficult to conceive of "thoughts" not defined in its boolean world, we find it impossible to think of things defined outside of our conception of reality, defined by our ego tunnel. This is perhaps an evolutionary trait, as our minds proved good enough for survival, without going outside the bounds of what is possible for neuronal circuits to realize.
And that if it did, we would be able to see how sentience can be developed just from the standard properties of physical matter.
But clearly sentience must be developed from the properties of physical matter, for that is exactly what we are... physical matter. As I said, sentience is just an incredibly complex, if not impossible, concept for us to grasp, as our only observations of it are from within.
So to me it seems that if you go along the mechanistic route, you have to accept that sentience could occur even on the simplest of CPU's (or any kind of Turing machine in fact) just given the right program. Of course the program might execute at a slow speed, but it should be totally equivalent. And this is why I find the premise of "sentience is just complex computation" unappealing.
I agree that it is an unappealing notion. At the same time, I find it difficult to believe that it is impossible to simulate a brain in its entirety, given a sufficiently long amount of time or computational power. To believe that it is impossible is simply to believe that there is some "magic" going on which is impossible to simulate... and it seems that such "magic" is only magic due to insufficient observational capacity.
While computation is well-defined at the "input/output" level, the actual computation process is not. It's usually just abstracted away. And sentience must be a property of the computation process itself and not a property of the actual I/O (after all, I still feel sentient when no one is looking).
Why can't contagiousness be an abstraction? Waking dreams are a clear example of where the mind originally feels like it is experiencing reality, and then, suddenly, conceives that it is being fooled, that its sensory inputs are an illusion. Why is it implausible to think that this is all we ever experience, but with a set of inputs that is impossible for us to invalidate, because our sensory apparatus cannot experience anything beyond it? Clearly there are things which exist which we cannot directly observe, such as the rest of the electromagnetic spectrum, why do we believe that our dream state is so different from our waking state? One is observing signals generated by our mind, while the other is observing signals generated by our sensory organs.
If I look at a Turing-machine made of organ-pipes, it's essentially just my interpretation that these organ pipes are operating as a Turing machine executing on some piece of information. You have to look at the system at just the right level and type of abstraction to see it's a Turing machines. To someone not "in" on it, it would just seem like a weird spectacle. The individual physical components are operating e
Apply it to you and see how absurd what you're saying actually is: "I'm conscious of the fact that I'm being fooled about being conscious."
How is that an absurd statement in any way? Don't we realize we have been fooled about our awareness and our consciousness every night? Isn't that exactly what dreaming is?
Anyone who has ever had a waking dream will recognize that the statement "I'm conscious of the fact that I'm being fooled about being conscious." is an entirely reasonable thing to say. The only difference is that it is difficult, if not impossible, to wake up from one's "waking dream", ie, one's experiencing of the physical universe. This isn't a statement about the nature of reality, but merely one about how we experience it. Phenomenologically, there is no difference between a vivid dream and waking thought, other then that the sensory inputs from one are derived from the physical universe, while the inputs for the other are derived from memory.
But there is essentially no reason to believe your brain is doing something magical that cannot be replicated using different hardware. After all, your "sentience" is something you learned through the sensory inputs provided to your brain. If one provided similar inputs to a sufficiently plastic organism of similar composition, it seems reasonable that it would develop a similar (though perhaps different) concept of the ego.
The continuing cry from the MPAA really is nonsense, especially with the alleged hypothetical loss of revenue. If this guy did not do what he did, these troops would not have gone and purchased DVDs.
Just to play Devil's advocate... the MPAA would claim that the loss of revenue is from the families of the troops not going out and buying the DVDs and mailing them. I know, they're assholes... but it's a "valid" claim.
It actually makes sense to use "them" in this case, because the gender is, in fact, not known. All that is known is the "gender" of the nom de plume, which is inherently suspect. The gender of the author is unknown, thus a gender-neutral pronoun is appropriate.
Mass killings are much more political than they are religious. That is, in fact, the truth.
Political beliefs motivated, or justified, by religion, are indistinguishable from religious beliefs.
Anyways, forget about the numbers. The point is, saying atheism is bad because of Stalin is just as invalid as saying Christianity is bad because of the Crusades, Inquisition, or many of the countless wars Catholics/Protestants waged on one another. Religion is fine, when kept to oneself. The problem is that most religions refuse to be a solitary thing, and only feel validated when they can be spread, and their values enforced, on others. Maybe that's because one person believing in an invisible all-powerful being that controls everything is a lunatic, while a billion people who believe the exact same thing are "the faithful".
Could it just be that murderers are bad, regardless of their religious beliefs? Saying that trying to limit the scope of religion is bad because of Stalin is the same as saying the teachings of Jesus are bad because of the Crusades & Inquisition. Both are simply stupid.
Anyways, I don't mind religion being in the minds of the feeble people. I just mind those people being bale to dictate what I can do, and what my government does. Besides, the real problem isn't the flocks of idiots, it's the somewhat clever people leading those flocks.