You hit the nail right on the head. It really irks me that someone could get away with patenting such a trivial idea.
At the end of the patent description you can clearly see Ms Svevad's moneygrubbing attempts at making this worthless patent broad enough to scam royalties off the rather more significant work of other software authors. Because inevitably one day there will be human emulations convincing enough to pass the Turing Test, and perhaps even go beyond that to apparent self-awareness.
The mere thought that the person who eventually makes that incredible breakthrough might have to pay royalties to this creep makes me sick to my stomach.
I'm not a US resident but I wish to hell you'd get your patent laws sorted out before they infect the rest of the world with this nonsense.
No grades or tests, eh? Sounds like disneyland. But for precisely that reason a mickey mouse degree diploma from there probably won't buy you much out in the real world.
Who cares if patents on these quantum computers expire before they get built? Hell, that's not the worst of it. There's a small but finite probability that the WARRANTY will expire before the thing is built.
Your fears are based upon illogical, quasi-mystical thinking.
The mistakes which almost everybody makes in thinking about this subject, are in believing:
(1) that the 'self' is in the physical matter of your body rather than in the pattern in which it is arranged, or
(2) that the 'self' is some kind of unique thing physically separate from the brain (a soul) rather than just a complex pattern of different kinds of synapses, or
(3) that physical continuity of the medium that carries the pattern that constitutes the self is necessary for preservation of identity.
The first is patently ludicrous. The atoms in your body are being exchanged with the outside world continually. Any human body is literally not made of the same matter as it was a few years before. No-one is suggesting however that we are continually exchanging our 'self' with our inanimate surroundings. Exept Yoda, maybe.
The second is without any grounds whatever. Some philosphers have attempted to formulate some non-physical theory to support the concept of the self, mind or soul instead of just accepting it as axiomatic, as most have done. But they fail because the phenomenon we call 'self' has no observable effects not ialready explained or theoretically explicable by ordinary neurobiology, and no such theory has ever been able to make unique testable predictions. The standard response to a situation like this is to discard the theory as effectively meaningless and accept that there probably is no such thing as the 'self' in the metaphysical sense of the word. Please read Daniel C. Dennett's Consciousness Explained for a very comprehensive and readable account of the consequences of this argument.
As for the third objection: the usual reason why people equate continuity with identity is this: if there is no continuity, they argue, then where is the 'self' during the transition? How could it get from the old brain into the new one? 'You' are 'you' only inside the one head and when that head is dead your 'self' is dead with it.
Expressed in this way you can see that it is just a reformulation of the first and second objections, the belief that the self is an objectively real thing trapped within, but somehow separate from, the physical matter of the body.
Both formulations can be disproved by reductio ad absurdem arguments in the form of thought experiments.
Suppose that while you slept after a heavy night of beer drinking, a stray transporter beam snaked down and disassembled your body right down to it's constituent atoms. The transporter chief realised his mistake right away and sent the particles back, reconstructing them into a new copy right there in your bed. The new 'you' would just wake up in the morning as usual, with the appropriate hangover and sense of guilt and self-pity. It could have happened to you every night of your life and neither you nor the people you meet would ever know or be affected by it (remember we are talking about a complete and perfect copy right down to the quantum level).
Perhaps this example has insufficient force for some people as it may well be physically impossible to ever construct a perfect copy in this way. So be it; let me consider a slightly more down-to-earth analogy that doesn't contravene what are currently thought of in this century as immutable laws of physics.
It is the midwinter in the year 2099. You are trudging through the snow just outside a hospital in Inverness, Scotland during a vicious blizzard when a sudden gust blows a metal sign off its mountings and it hits you in the face. Your head is sliced neatly in half and your brain flies right out of your head in two sections to land softly in separate snowdrifts. It's so cold that the bits quickly cool to a low enough temperature to forestall cell death, and as it has stopped snowing, paramedics manage to collect the pieces before any ice crystals form within the delicate tissues.
However the senior consultant feels they can't afford to wait; while the paramedics are still outside digging up the snow looking for your brain, the helicopter arrives to fly you to a waiting team of expert neurosurgons 100 miles away in Edinburgh. They put you, minus brain, on the chopper and it takes off.
While you are en route the half of your brain they managed to find so far is cleaned and packed in one of those little cool boxes they put donor organs in. Another helicopter arrives and flies this grisly package to your new hospital.
Thirty minutes later a third helicopter is in the air; they found the rest of your brain.
Both packages arrive safely and the surgeons reassemble your brain using late 21st-century medical technology and pump you full of drugs. A few months later you emerge from coma feeling, well, pretty awful but that's only to be expected. After a year of physiotherapy and further neurological treatment you've begin to live a fairly normal life again. Thank heavens for modern medicine.
You reflect on your experiences. The accident has changed you in some ways; yourcapabilities are diminished somewhat, you feel differently about some things and you sometimes suspect a touch of amnesia. But hey, other patients in the neurology ward with much less severe injuries said the same thing about themselves. And age does those things to everybody anyway. You still have (most of) your memories and inside your own head you're still you. Yep, you say to yourself: I'm still the same person, just a little the worse for wear. As far as your wife and children are concerned it's not even an issue. They're just glad to have you back.
There's just one little thing that leaves you wondering. For a little while back there your body was in Edinburgh, the right hemisphere of your brain was ina a helicopter, and the left hemisphere was back in Inverness. So where were you? Where was your 'self' during that time?
This shows that in theory, an individual could survive with what he thinks of as his 'self' intact even if there was for a time no single location where a whole self could exist.
Anyway as I say, read Daniel Dennett. He explains this stuff much more lucidly and convincingly than I ever could.
I don't mean this unkindly, but you just demonstrated that you don't understand anything about relativity at all even at the simplest level.
1) Special Relativity (which is about motion) assumes a classically flat spacetime so it doesn't take account of an expanding Universe at all. To deal with that you'd need Einstein's later General Theory of Relativity (which is about the geometry of spacetime as well and is a superset of the original theory).
2) The whole point of special relativity is that (in that flat spacetime) whenever you measure or calculate the velocity of an object relative to your own position, it can never exceed the speed of light. To achieve this it is clear that you cannot simply add velocities together as one does in Newtonian Mechanics. Moreover it implies that time and distance measurements will differ depending on how fast you are moving (moving clocks go slow).
3) The Hubble expansion of the universe makes it appear as if some very remote objects must have a velocity relative to us that exceeds 'c' (these are by definition beyond the event horizon of the visible universe). However, the observed relative motion due to expansion does not involve anything really moving through space; instead space itself is expanding between the galaxies (i.e. spacetime is not flat). Therefore any measurement of velocity is affected by geometry and you need to use formulae from General Relativity to account for it.
BTW, the original version of the General theory was 'wrong' from our current point of view because Einstein couldn't bring himself to believe the Universe was expanding. To correct for the anomaly he introduced the infamous 'cosmological constant' (i.e. he inserted a bugger factor to make his incomplete equations balance). Eventually though Hubble's observations were accepted and Einstein later referred to the cosmological constant as the greatest mistake of his career.
PS. Actually it was really his rejection of Quantum Mechanics that was the greatest mistake of his career. He wasted the last years of his life trying to think up a Grand Unified Theory that didn't take account of Quantum Physics. D'Oh!!
Coward, you and the other fellow who answered me both missed the point. I am demanding the birth of a democratic organisation based on consensus and compromise. There shall be no leaders! Only an elected body of representatives who shall answer to the membership, and whose responsibility it is to promote a single policy synthesized from the collective vision of the membership.
The Internet makes such a thing possible without leaders, had you not noticed? Electronic democracy makes us all equal, all members of parliament. Just look here on slashdot. When all parties' views are set out against each other in writing and all can reflect iteratively on each side of the argument, the signal stands out from the background noise. Consensus emerges from the text if you are prepared to look for it.
Only stubborn iconoclasts will be dissatisfied, but then, no-one can ever help the willingly ignorant. The rest will find their goals and concerns reflected in the organisation's.
An excellent idea. I think you are right. Many programmers will in effect be odd-job men, trawling the net from site to site looking for a little bit of work here and there.
Bruce Perens suggests that ESR should be replaced by (or become one of) 10 spokesmen who would share the load of spreading the word, and perform their duties in a less demagoguic manner.
This is a fundamentally logical thing to do. However we must avoid the danger of plural agendas. Things are bad enough already with the OSI going off half-cocked and the FSF and SPI sitting at home ranting and wringing their hands. If there were ten separate spokesmen (however they were appointed), each pursuing their own individual policy then the business community would see no advantage in talking to any of them and we'd no longer have any control over the evolution of the open source concept.
On another subject, many people in the hacker community were dissatisfied with the appointment of Eric Raymond and the other board members of the OSI. Members of the hacker community want the right to choose their own representatives.
If free and open source movement is to seize the day then we must gather our forces under the same flag. And this must be a flag of democratic consensus.
It is now time for the formation of a new broader church, a body with an executive comprising representatives from both the FSF/SPI and the OSI and other prominent figures in the hacker community. Membership however must be available to a much wider range of people.
The members of this body would elect Perens' ten spokesmen (speakers not leaders!), and its constitution would require that these representatives jointly formulate and promote the group's official policy as assisted by open vote or whatever democratic mechanisms are in place. If these representatives find themselves in disagreement with policy they can either swallow it, resign or attempt to force a debate within the group's membership only.
Everyone who supports the above idea should petition Bruce Perens, Eric Raymond and Richard Stallman to get this done for us. We will only have one crack at this and if the pre-launch publicity machine Windows 2000 is to signal the end of our hold on the public's attention then we have less than a year left to set our house in order.
Now fire up your email client and do your duty. Democracy and Unity for the Revolution!
This is likely to incense a lot of people. I believe Apple could be prevailed upon either to change their minds or to release a Linux port of Quicktime. If they don't, I imagine an open source project to reverse engineer the Sorenson codec would receive a lot of support. Heck, that'll probably happen sooner or later anyway.
Would anyone who happens to know Steve Jobs' email address please get CmdrTaco to put it up on the front page? An immediate deluge of angry email to the right mailbox would probably be the quickest way round this.
Richard Stallman might be a hippie but he is not a panhandler. Since their earliest days the FSF have sold media distributions of their software and printed documentation for those who wanted it.
You should visit their web site and read the _facts_.
Stallman's outspoken opinions make some people uncomfortable but he is mroe of a pragmatist than the press give him credit for. Don't fall for the FUD.
Slashdot Mirror
You hit the nail right on the head. It really irks me that someone could get away with patenting such a trivial idea.
At the end of the patent description you can clearly see Ms Svevad's moneygrubbing attempts at making this worthless patent broad enough to scam royalties off the rather more significant work of other software authors. Because inevitably one day there will be human emulations convincing enough to pass the Turing Test, and perhaps even go beyond that to apparent self-awareness.
The mere thought that the person who eventually makes that incredible breakthrough might have to pay royalties to this creep makes me sick to my stomach.
I'm not a US resident but I wish to hell you'd get your patent laws sorted out before they infect the rest of the world with this nonsense.
No grades or tests, eh? Sounds like disneyland. But for precisely that reason a mickey mouse degree diploma from there probably won't buy you much out in the real world.
Who cares if patents on these quantum computers expire before they get built? Hell, that's not the worst of it. There's a small but finite probability that the WARRANTY will expire before the thing is built.
This will happen to Slashdot too one day.
Your fears are based upon illogical, quasi-mystical thinking.
The mistakes which almost everybody makes in thinking about this subject, are in believing:
(1) that the 'self' is in the physical matter of your body rather than in the pattern in which it is arranged, or
(2) that the 'self' is some kind of unique thing physically separate from the brain (a soul) rather than just a complex pattern of different kinds of synapses, or
(3) that physical continuity of the medium that carries the pattern that constitutes the self is necessary for preservation of identity.
The first is patently ludicrous. The atoms in your body are being exchanged with the outside world continually. Any human body is literally not made of the same matter as it was a few years before. No-one is suggesting however that we are continually exchanging our 'self' with our inanimate surroundings. Exept Yoda, maybe.
The second is without any grounds whatever. Some philosphers have attempted to formulate some non-physical theory to support the concept of the self, mind or soul instead of just accepting it as axiomatic, as most have done. But they fail because the phenomenon we call 'self' has no observable effects not ialready explained or theoretically explicable by ordinary neurobiology, and no such theory has ever been able to make unique testable predictions. The standard response to a situation like this is to discard the theory as effectively meaningless and accept that there probably is no such thing as the 'self' in the metaphysical sense of the word. Please read Daniel C. Dennett's Consciousness Explained for a very comprehensive and readable account of the consequences of this argument.
As for the third objection: the usual reason why people equate continuity with identity is this: if there is no continuity, they argue, then where is the 'self' during the transition? How could it get from the old brain into the new one? 'You' are 'you' only inside the one head and when that head is dead your 'self' is dead with it.
Expressed in this way you can see that it is just a reformulation of the first and second objections, the belief that the self is an objectively real thing trapped within, but somehow separate from, the physical matter of the body.
Both formulations can be disproved by reductio ad absurdem arguments in the form of thought experiments.
Suppose that while you slept after a heavy night of beer drinking, a stray transporter beam snaked down and disassembled your body right down to it's constituent atoms. The transporter chief realised his mistake right away and sent the particles back, reconstructing them into a new copy right there in your bed. The new 'you' would just wake up in the morning as usual, with the appropriate hangover and sense of guilt and self-pity. It could have happened to you every night of your life and neither you nor the people you meet would ever know or be affected by it (remember we are talking about a complete and perfect copy right down to the quantum level).
Perhaps this example has insufficient force for some people as it may well be physically impossible to ever construct a perfect copy in this way. So be it; let me consider a slightly more down-to-earth analogy that doesn't contravene what are currently thought of in this century as immutable laws of physics.
It is the midwinter in the year 2099. You are trudging through the snow just outside a hospital in Inverness, Scotland during a vicious blizzard when a sudden gust blows a metal sign off its mountings and it hits you in the face. Your head is sliced neatly in half and your brain flies right out of your head in two sections to land softly in separate snowdrifts. It's so cold that the bits quickly cool to a low enough temperature to forestall cell death, and as it has stopped snowing, paramedics manage to collect the pieces before any ice crystals form within the delicate tissues.
However the senior consultant feels they can't afford to wait; while the paramedics are still outside digging up the snow looking for your brain, the helicopter arrives to fly you to a waiting team of expert neurosurgons 100 miles away in Edinburgh. They put you, minus brain, on the chopper and it takes off.
While you are en route the half of your brain they managed to find so far is cleaned and packed in one of those little cool boxes they put donor organs in. Another helicopter arrives and flies this grisly package to your new hospital.
Thirty minutes later a third helicopter is in the air; they found the rest of your brain.
Both packages arrive safely and the surgeons reassemble your brain using late 21st-century medical technology and pump you full of drugs. A few months later you emerge from coma feeling, well, pretty awful but that's only to be expected. After a year of physiotherapy and further neurological treatment you've begin to live a fairly normal life again. Thank heavens for modern medicine.
You reflect on your experiences. The accident has changed you in some ways; yourcapabilities are diminished somewhat, you feel differently about some things and you sometimes suspect a touch of amnesia. But hey, other patients in the neurology ward with much less severe injuries said the same thing about themselves. And age does those things to everybody anyway. You still have (most of) your memories and inside your own head you're still you. Yep, you say to yourself: I'm still the same person, just a little the worse for wear. As far as your wife and children are concerned it's not even an issue. They're just glad to have you back.
There's just one little thing that leaves you wondering. For a little while back there your body was in Edinburgh, the right hemisphere of your brain was ina a helicopter, and the left hemisphere was back in Inverness. So where were you? Where was your 'self' during that time?
This shows that in theory, an individual could survive with what he thinks of as his 'self' intact even if there was for a time no single location where a whole self could exist.
Anyway as I say, read Daniel Dennett. He explains this stuff much more lucidly and convincingly than I ever could.
I don't mean this unkindly, but you just demonstrated that you don't understand anything about relativity at all even at the simplest level.
1) Special Relativity (which is about motion) assumes a classically flat spacetime so it doesn't take account of an expanding Universe at all. To deal with that you'd need Einstein's later General Theory of Relativity (which is about the geometry of spacetime as well and is a superset of the original theory).
2) The whole point of special relativity is that (in that flat spacetime) whenever you measure or calculate the velocity of an object relative to your own position, it can never exceed the speed of light. To achieve this it is clear that you cannot simply add velocities together as one does in Newtonian Mechanics. Moreover it implies that time and distance measurements will differ depending on how fast you are moving (moving clocks go slow).
3) The Hubble expansion of the universe makes it appear as if some very remote objects must have a velocity relative to us that exceeds 'c' (these are by definition beyond the event horizon of the visible universe). However, the observed relative motion due to expansion does not involve anything really moving through space; instead space itself is expanding between the galaxies (i.e. spacetime is not flat). Therefore any measurement of velocity is affected by geometry and you need to use formulae from General Relativity to account for it.
BTW, the original version of the General theory was 'wrong' from our current point of view because Einstein couldn't bring himself to believe the Universe was expanding. To correct for the anomaly he introduced the infamous 'cosmological constant' (i.e. he inserted a bugger factor to make his incomplete equations balance). Eventually though Hubble's observations were accepted and Einstein later referred to the cosmological constant as the greatest mistake of his career.
PS. Actually it was really his rejection of Quantum Mechanics that was the greatest mistake of his career. He wasted the last years of his life trying to think up a Grand Unified Theory that didn't take account of Quantum Physics. D'Oh!!
I really thought you were stupid until I read the bit at the end:
I'm really an Anonymous Coward, but I forgot how not to log in
Gee that's really funny!
Hello? Anybody still here?
Coward, you and the other fellow who answered me both missed the point. I am demanding the birth of a democratic organisation based on consensus and compromise. There shall be no leaders! Only an elected body of representatives who shall answer to the membership, and whose responsibility it is to promote a single policy synthesized from the collective vision of the membership.
The Internet makes such a thing possible without leaders, had you not noticed? Electronic democracy makes us all equal, all members of parliament. Just look here on slashdot. When all parties' views are set out against each other in writing and all can reflect iteratively on each side of the argument, the signal stands out from the background noise. Consensus emerges from the text if you are prepared to look for it.
Only stubborn iconoclasts will be dissatisfied, but then, no-one can ever help the willingly ignorant. The rest will find their goals and concerns reflected in the organisation's.
An excellent idea. I think you are right. Many programmers will in effect be odd-job men, trawling the net from site to site looking for a little bit of work here and there.
It seems almost Gibsonian doesn't it?
Nice post, Martijn.
Bruce Perens suggests that ESR should be replaced by (or become one of) 10 spokesmen who would share the load of spreading the word, and perform their duties in a less demagoguic manner.
This is a fundamentally logical thing to do. However we must avoid the danger of plural agendas. Things are bad enough already with the OSI going off half-cocked and the FSF and SPI sitting at home ranting and wringing their hands. If there were ten separate spokesmen (however they were appointed), each pursuing their own individual policy then the business community would see no advantage in talking to any of them and we'd no longer have any control over the evolution of the open source concept.
On another subject, many people in the hacker community were dissatisfied with the appointment of Eric Raymond and the other board members of the OSI. Members of the hacker community want the right to choose their own representatives.
If free and open source movement is to seize the day then we must gather our forces under the same flag. And this must be a flag of democratic consensus.
It is now time for the formation of a new broader church, a body with an executive comprising representatives from both the FSF/SPI and the OSI and other prominent figures in the hacker community. Membership however must be available to a much wider range of people.
The members of this body would elect Perens' ten spokesmen (speakers not leaders!), and its constitution would require that these representatives jointly formulate and promote the group's official policy as assisted by open vote or whatever democratic mechanisms are in place. If these representatives find themselves in disagreement with policy they can either swallow it, resign or attempt to force a debate within the group's membership only.
Everyone who supports the above idea should petition Bruce Perens, Eric Raymond and Richard Stallman to get this done for us. We will only have one crack at this and if the pre-launch publicity machine Windows 2000 is to signal the end of our hold on the public's attention then we have less than a year left to set our house in order.
Now fire up your email client and do your duty. Democracy and Unity for the Revolution!
This is likely to incense a lot of people. I believe Apple could be prevailed upon either to change their minds or to release a Linux port of Quicktime. If they don't, I imagine an open source project to reverse engineer the Sorenson codec would receive a lot of support. Heck, that'll probably happen sooner or later anyway.
Would anyone who happens to know Steve Jobs' email address please get CmdrTaco to put it up on the front page? An immediate deluge of angry email to the right mailbox would probably be the quickest way round this.
I'll be writing to Lucasfilm to complain too.
Richard Stallman might be a hippie but he is not a panhandler. Since their earliest days the FSF have sold media distributions of their software and printed documentation for those who wanted it.
You should visit their web site and read the _facts_.
Stallman's outspoken opinions make some people uncomfortable but he is mroe of a pragmatist than the press give him credit for. Don't fall for the FUD.