It's actually worse than that. I've been stuck defending shit I disagreed with (Citrix). Sometimes you gotta just pay the bills, and in those days I learned the importance of the follow-through. You're correct -- begin with a glad-handing statement like your example, and ramble on without saying anything substantive, just as you suggest. But the real trick is to wrap up by reminding people what the question was. You'll find that most people just assume you addressed the question, and that they're at fault for not really getting it, and you score bonus points for answering a "difficult" question.
I'm getting a huge kick out of these heated debates over such a tiny bit of crappy information. Sarandon says she doesn't understand it, then proceeds to give a really crappy description which amounts to "everything is in focus"... and suddenly the/. readership are experts on the subject (and why it has been done before, and how they'd do it better, and why one of the Wachowski brothers chopping his nuts off makes him a sister, etc etc etc).
Personally I couldn't glean almost anything useful from the article.
I VPN and stream radio all day, and so does my wife in her own office upstairs, and we've never had a bit of trouble. Heck, often times we'll literally stream radio all day since at least one computer is connected to the whole-house AV distribution system. On top of that somebody might be in the other room playing online with the 360.
Not a peep out of Comcast. And in my neighborhood, I would bet few people even have computers, let alone a high daily average bandwidth usage.
Not true, there is no such law on the books in Florida.
In fact, some areas have recently been designated "enhanced fine zones" or some such nonsense, in which the fines have been significantly increased and the cops are writing tickets for anything over the limit -- 1 MPH over is fair game.
Plus, anybody who has driven through Waldo, FL in the past 25 years knows this. AAA identifies Waldo as a speed trap, and has erected billboards outside of town warning people about it. They WILL ticket you for 1 MPH over -- it's how they pay all the bills in their little podunk village.
Only true from the most literal and technical standpoint, and certainly not an explanation for any leeway the police might give drivers. At these speeds, the difference from temperature and wear would be a very small fraction of 1 MPH, particularly just a few months later (versus the entire life of the tires).
Installing tires that are one inch larger in diameter will only add about 2 MPH around 70 MPH. A one inch change in diameter is a far bigger difference than you'll ever see due to wear and temperature. If you're bored, you can see this using a calculator here.
In fact, you can game the inputs to reflect changes due to tire wear. For instance, a regular new car tire's tread depth is typically about 10/32", and the legal minimum in most US states is 1/16" so at most your overall lifetime diameter change due to wear should vary about half an inch, which equates at most to a 1 MPH difference at 70 MPH.
I race cars for a hobby so I'm very aware of tire pressure and temperature changes and how they relate, and the change in the overall diameter of a tire because of these factors would be too small to warrant discussion. There are specialty racing tires made from very soft compounds that would create a small but measurable effect but a heavy steel-belted street radial isn't going to change enough to matter.
Re:What's with the militant terminology?
on
Network Warrior
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· Score: 1
Not all that surprising considering a huge percentage of wire-chasers are ex-military types who get into corporate IT because they're desperately scrambling for a job when their minimum enlistment suddenly expires. The petty-kingdom mindset of restricted access, password protection, and inflexible policy is practically custom-made to appeal to the barely-adult mind that has been carefully trained to worship at the feet of military-style absolute authority, to respect the chain of command, and above all else to Maintain Order.
Not that I have anything against the military, or that I intend disrepect those who volunteer -- I just think they make a damned shitty match for the IT environment. But now they're entrenched, and management loves nothing more than a bunch of drones who would never dare question Authority. The result is a weird kind of employment-history-based nepotism, at this point.
Our net-clowns actually produced a *12 page* document recently that told us how to send an e-mail to reserve time in the test lab. And lest you think this is reasonable, the "lab" in question is a closet with four ragged old PCs. But the best part was the document title: "QA TEST LAB RULES OF ENGAGEMENT"... I half-expected the machines to be named after aircraft carriers.
I'm sure it works great. Until a few years ago, I actually had it running on a frickin' 90 MHz Pentium with a mere 96 MB of memory. If you disable a few services, it cooks right along as well as any old OS did for the day, and all that box did was serve up a few hundred GB of MP3s on the household network, so why touch it?
But in this day and age, with what is presently available, saying it's a viable desktop OS is pushing the boundaries of credibility. It's like going to forum for car guys and saying a '62 VW is a reasonable choice as a daily commuter. Sure it WORKS, but realistically there are better options. It's a generalization that just doesn't make much sense.
I called him an OSX troll because of his opening statements, not just because he uses OSX, and not even because he stated an opinion which differs from mine. I've run several flavors of Linux, at times for as long as a year or two, but when I need to get shit done, I just come back to Windows.
Since I've spent most of my life as a programmer and I prefer to build my own machines, I haven't had any interest in the expense, lock-in of the Apple world. I've used 'em, even recently, and I just wasn't that impressed. I suppose that's not especially relevant, but since we're signing off with resumes...:)
Grow up? Er, what? I'm pretty sure it wasn't my opening remarks which went straight for "UR OS SUX!!1!"
In large part I also find them very similar (I'd say identical is pushing it, but I do fairly low-level programming so my viewpoint is probably biased), but if nothing else, the almost complete lack of support for Win2K within the past couple years is fairly damning.
What confuses me about your response though, is that you appear to hold XP in slightly higher regard. I can't figure out why you'd even bother to mention Win2K in your earlier post.
LOL... Windows 2000 is OK? There was a time when Win2K was preferable to XP, and that time was called "2003"... around about 2004, Win2K was seriously showing it's age, and they had finally ironed enough of the kinks out of XP that it made a pretty good desktop OS by that point. Not that I expect to convince an OSX troll, but I find it hilarious that anybody would still describe Win2K as a viable desktop OS option.
I'm pretty sure my friends wouldn't be that excited about flying if all they did was hover in a helicopter, utterly motionless. That example is irrelevant and clearly isn't what I meant, but if I must be pedantic, the point is the sensation and experience of the act, part of which is being there, and part of which is the physicality of actually flying. Coincidentally, I had a friend who worked at the big Boeing flight sim center down in Orlando. He could fly some of the best simulators in the world all day, every day -- yet he still preferred the real thing. Even the simple knowledge that you're there and doing it for real has an impact. This is not a drill: if simulation was adequate, that phrase would be unnecessary. It's exactly the same with my hobby, which is sports car racing. I could save a hell of a lot of money by racing go-karts, for example, but it isn't remotely the same experience, even though mechanically the process is virtually identical, and the skillsets are directly comparable. "Going somewhere" or simply being somewhere is irrelevant. It's the sensations which make it worthwhile.
The sum total of the input of the world around you plays a major role in defining your world view, and without this common point of reference, it is my belief that the end-result won't be recognizably human, even if it is intelligent by some abstract measure. One can therefore conclude that you can't produce a human-like intelligence without the stimuli of the physical world. No, these experiences aren't the totality, but it's a critical part, and you can't simulate one without the other.
I had a feeling you'd go for the Helen Keller argument, and really, what is the point? She gained a profound understanding of the world around her through her sense of touch, and she still had many of the other human inputs which are a direct result of being a living person. She lacked the two most important senses, but she still had a tremendous range of physical interaction with the world. The important thing is that there were at least shreds of common ground with the experiences of other human beings, and many forms of constant physical contact with them and everything else in her world. She is clearly a human being. I do question how much difficulty someone might have in identifying her as a human being if all you had to interact with was a simulation of her brain -- you could probably conclude the simulation was intelligent, but the very unusual nature of her experiences would lead you to question whether she was human -- which ironically makes her a great argument for my position: the physical inputs of the real world have a profound effect on the nature of how the human mind works.
I didn't say the simulation needs a body, I said the simulation needs the inputs of a body in order to produce an intelligence we can recognize as human. That violates the original premise you support: that a brain simulation alone is adequate. Even though you claim that I don't, in my response I do proceed to allow methods for providing those inputs of the body. The point is not moot, because your premise was that the simulation of a brain alone was adequate. If you allow that it is inadequate, then we agree, and the exact means by which that input is simulated is irrelevant.
My premise isn't flawed. It's simple: we are not beings of pure thought. The rote physical activities of our brain are inadequate to reproduce or even maintain the sum total of what we are.
Consider it from another angle:
Either this simulation has to begin with the simulation of an immature brain and simulate the process of learning and growing, or the simulation has to begin with some kind of copy or image of an existing brain, and "run" from the point at which the copy was made. Either is plausible since the level of simulation being discussed should inevitably be capable of coping with learning and physical change.
I hold that an immature brain will not develop into a recognizably human intelligence without various physical
I'm glad you clarified that -- it always bothered me. I knew the Terrible Secret of the Photon was that it always travels at the speed of light, I just never happened across an explanation of what "speed" in a non-vacuum really meant. Thanks.
Interesting. I've been sidetracked from paying close attention to physics for so long now that I hadn't realized they were anything but sci-fi. Thanks.
No, truly, it won't. For them, point B is obviously in the sky, and they'd be the first to tell you so. And a flight simulator can't get them there.
My point was that flying isn't simply a mode of transport. It is also a form of recreation, and flight simulators are a form of recreation. We agree they share a similarity in kind, but not in quality. The simulation of a brain would have the same effect -- it might give all the appearances of being "the real thing" and yet lack certain fundamental elements which means it falls short. But I don't believe it would get even that far.
Why doesn't the flight sim yield the same experience as actual flight? Because being "in the sky" in real life is a visceral sensation -- it is a thing of the body, not the mind. Your brain might be the end-point, but the stimulus comes from the large, complex, disordered outside world. Any good-quality flight simulator will provide the mind with the exact same *intellectual* challenges that real-world flying would provide. If simulating the brain is all you need, then simulating flight is all you need, too -- yet the brains of my intelligent friends crave the physicality of flying in real life.
I therefore believe that if you lack these inputs to this brain-simulation, you lack the capacity to correctly and accurately simulate the human experience -- and by extension, the interaction you describe: intelligent answers, intelligent speculation. Yet you claim:
No need to simulate the body. At the most, you provide a specific stimulus to the system.
This is contradictory. Your body is the source of the stimulus received by your brain. Perhaps instead of simulating a body, you could wire the brain sim to some kind of robot that could interact with and experience the world, but again we've moved far beyond merely simulating the brain to support the emergence of an unarguably human intelligence.
All that being said, I can concede a very limited and specialized version of your assertions.
Getting a little closer to what I think you're trying to say, perhaps instead we'd simply replay sensory input that was recorded from a real person (ignoring the fact that everyone is quite different and the question of whether this would even be possible). Assuming also an adequately sophisticated simulation of the brain, I suppose that might work once or even a few times, but if a truly human-level and human-like intelligence is possible, I would think that a sim would realize the experiences were being repeated, and once again you'd rapidly diverge from human-like experiences.
In short, even the successful simulation of a human brain would not yield a human-like intelligence, because the experiences of that intellect would be dramatically different.
Another possibility would seem to be the recorded stimuli combined with endlessly resetting the simulation, not allowing it to remember those pre-recorded sensory inputs. It would be a kind of stunted intelligence, incapable of learning, but perhaps very human-like for the short period before you had to reset it and start over. The obvious question becomes, is this very human-like at all? I feel sure it isn't the kind of interaction you intended to describe.
If you ever have the opportunity to try a sensory deprivation tank, I urge you to give it a shot. I had some psych student friends in the college years and had the chance to participate in an experiment once. I was only in there for about an hour. It's fucked up and weird and unpleasant (I never met anyone who actually enjoyed it), but it'll quickly dispel any illusions that you're anything but a conglomeration of responses to varied and complex external stimuli.
If mass is the only problem in order to reach the speed of light or to go beyond it then,,,,, if,,,,,in a thousand year, they find that they can shield something so that there is no effect on the things inside so mass augmentation whatsoever is not a factor and that the engines used to propel this machine have sufficient power why then,,,could we not go beyond.
It's pointless to ask a question like that: you're asking people to argue against an imaginary technology.
This "mass augmentation" isn't some kind of field you're passing through, it's how the physical structure of space-time is made. It isn't an effect, it's how the fabric of reality actually works. There isn't anything to shield against or filter out, you would have to literally alter the most fundamental laws of the physical reality.
You speak as if somebody sat down and arbitrarily decided light was going to be the limit.
An extremely over-simplified explanation:
1. We can figure out how much energy it takes to accelerate a given amount of mass. This can be demonstrated to be true with very simple experiments.
2. Take those calculations and solve for acceleration to very high speeds.
3. The closer you get to the speed of light, the higher the energy requirement goes.
4. At the speed of light, the energy requirement becomes infinite.
This means you can't actually accelerate mass up to the speed of light (or presumably, beyond) because infinite energy is essentially meaningless -- there is no such thing.
Photons are an exception because they're already (and always) moving at the speed of light. There is no acceleration involved.
I've heard people say that it's theoretically possible for something to move faster than light if it has always moved faster than light (again, no acceleration), but I can't recall ever reading a real physicist's opinion on whether that's true, or if it's just somebody applying spoken-language rules to a mathematical equation.
Photons don't necessarily move at the speed of light. They can be slowed down by moving through a medium other than pure vacuum.
My limited understanding of relativity is that something can't accelerate to or beyond the speed of light, but technically nothing prohibits something that is already moving faster than the speed of light. However, this might just be a nonsensical Star Trek fanboy interpretation based on applying linguistic semantics of complex mathematical expressions -- I don't think I've heard an opinion on that either way from a real physicist.
The response from Steinberg seems to boil down to a claim that their technique for measuring the result is flawed, but I'm not sure I see the relationship to the uncertainty principle.
No. The objective of an actual aircraft is to get you from point A to point B. Really get you there, not just simulate the action while measuring human inputs against a known set of parameters.
That'll come as a surprise to a couple friends who spend their weekends flying around just for fun. And of course, it's directly comparable to how most people use a flight simulator.
I do agree we'll eventually wind up with machine intelligence of some kind, and after they achieve a certain level of sophistication it will be a mostly-pointless philosophical argument about whether they're "really" intelligent. I don't personally think we're anywhere close to that, and at age 37 I don't even expect to see it in my lifetime, but I say this simply to establish that I don't think machine intelligences are impossible.
What I do think is impossible, or at least very unlikely and not especially worthwhile, is simulating a human brain. I also don't think that merely simulating the brain can produce a human-like intelligence. People aren't just brains, after all -- we're a giant bag of weird chemicals and electrical networks and external stimuli -- and you'd have to simulate all of that crap, too, before you'd wind up with anything that you'd consider human. Look how quickly a real person "degrades" after just a few hours of total sensory isolation. Or heck, even simple physical/social isolation, in many cases.
So in that sense, the grandparent is correct. If you do produce a working simulation of a human brain, it probably has to be exactly that -- a simulation, not a human intelligence. In fact, you're just measuring human inputs (your conversation) against a larger, but still known set of parameters (how that brain functioned when it was mapped into a simulation). Here, I am also accepting the condition of the parent post, in that you're just simulating the brain. If you also simulated the whole person, and the effects of their environment (e.g. hunger) to give them urges and needs and wants -- then I suspect you might have a shot at simulating human intelligence.
"Participating in social process" probably wasn't the highlight of the publications' business plans, and it damned sure isn't the reason Joe Bob's Used RVs bought that full-page spread on page 7. The only perspective lost by copyright holders relates to outrageous expirations and draconian controls. It's people like you who have lost perspective by concluding that you are somehow entitled to something for nothing.
Besides, there wasn't anything related to a "social process" about this. It was a company's marketing department disseminating industry articles to their staff. It was pretty clearly a business activity -- you may rest assured that evil businessmen are being punished, even if they're not the ones who committed the unpardonable sin of attempting to profit from their labors.
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It's actually worse than that. I've been stuck defending shit I disagreed with (Citrix). Sometimes you gotta just pay the bills, and in those days I learned the importance of the follow-through. You're correct -- begin with a glad-handing statement like your example, and ramble on without saying anything substantive, just as you suggest. But the real trick is to wrap up by reminding people what the question was. You'll find that most people just assume you addressed the question, and that they're at fault for not really getting it, and you score bonus points for answering a "difficult" question.
I still hate Citrix, and we'll still have DRM.
Bob assigns sexuality according to His plan.
If you need to know more, you will be enlightened through the proper channels.
I'm getting a huge kick out of these heated debates over such a tiny bit of crappy information. Sarandon says she doesn't understand it, then proceeds to give a really crappy description which amounts to "everything is in focus" ... and suddenly the /. readership are experts on the subject (and why it has been done before, and how they'd do it better, and why one of the Wachowski brothers chopping his nuts off makes him a sister, etc etc etc).
Personally I couldn't glean almost anything useful from the article.
As a side question, when refering to a trans-gender indvidiual in the past tense, which pronoun do you use?
The correct answer is "whatever sex they actually are," since no amount of self-mutilation actually changes their sex.
I VPN and stream radio all day, and so does my wife in her own office upstairs, and we've never had a bit of trouble. Heck, often times we'll literally stream radio all day since at least one computer is connected to the whole-house AV distribution system. On top of that somebody might be in the other room playing online with the 360.
Not a peep out of Comcast. And in my neighborhood, I would bet few people even have computers, let alone a high daily average bandwidth usage.
Not true, there is no such law on the books in Florida.
In fact, some areas have recently been designated "enhanced fine zones" or some such nonsense, in which the fines have been significantly increased and the cops are writing tickets for anything over the limit -- 1 MPH over is fair game.
Plus, anybody who has driven through Waldo, FL in the past 25 years knows this. AAA identifies Waldo as a speed trap, and has erected billboards outside of town warning people about it. They WILL ticket you for 1 MPH over -- it's how they pay all the bills in their little podunk village.
Only true from the most literal and technical standpoint, and certainly not an explanation for any leeway the police might give drivers. At these speeds, the difference from temperature and wear would be a very small fraction of 1 MPH, particularly just a few months later (versus the entire life of the tires).
Installing tires that are one inch larger in diameter will only add about 2 MPH around 70 MPH. A one inch change in diameter is a far bigger difference than you'll ever see due to wear and temperature. If you're bored, you can see this using a calculator here.
In fact, you can game the inputs to reflect changes due to tire wear. For instance, a regular new car tire's tread depth is typically about 10/32", and the legal minimum in most US states is 1/16" so at most your overall lifetime diameter change due to wear should vary about half an inch, which equates at most to a 1 MPH difference at 70 MPH.
I race cars for a hobby so I'm very aware of tire pressure and temperature changes and how they relate, and the change in the overall diameter of a tire because of these factors would be too small to warrant discussion. There are specialty racing tires made from very soft compounds that would create a small but measurable effect but a heavy steel-belted street radial isn't going to change enough to matter.
Not all that surprising considering a huge percentage of wire-chasers are ex-military types who get into corporate IT because they're desperately scrambling for a job when their minimum enlistment suddenly expires. The petty-kingdom mindset of restricted access, password protection, and inflexible policy is practically custom-made to appeal to the barely-adult mind that has been carefully trained to worship at the feet of military-style absolute authority, to respect the chain of command, and above all else to Maintain Order.
Not that I have anything against the military, or that I intend disrepect those who volunteer -- I just think they make a damned shitty match for the IT environment. But now they're entrenched, and management loves nothing more than a bunch of drones who would never dare question Authority. The result is a weird kind of employment-history-based nepotism, at this point.
Our net-clowns actually produced a *12 page* document recently that told us how to send an e-mail to reserve time in the test lab. And lest you think this is reasonable, the "lab" in question is a closet with four ragged old PCs. But the best part was the document title: "QA TEST LAB RULES OF ENGAGEMENT"... I half-expected the machines to be named after aircraft carriers.
I'm sure it works great. Until a few years ago, I actually had it running on a frickin' 90 MHz Pentium with a mere 96 MB of memory. If you disable a few services, it cooks right along as well as any old OS did for the day, and all that box did was serve up a few hundred GB of MP3s on the household network, so why touch it?
:)
But in this day and age, with what is presently available, saying it's a viable desktop OS is pushing the boundaries of credibility. It's like going to forum for car guys and saying a '62 VW is a reasonable choice as a daily commuter. Sure it WORKS, but realistically there are better options. It's a generalization that just doesn't make much sense.
I called him an OSX troll because of his opening statements, not just because he uses OSX, and not even because he stated an opinion which differs from mine. I've run several flavors of Linux, at times for as long as a year or two, but when I need to get shit done, I just come back to Windows.
Since I've spent most of my life as a programmer and I prefer to build my own machines, I haven't had any interest in the expense, lock-in of the Apple world. I've used 'em, even recently, and I just wasn't that impressed. I suppose that's not especially relevant, but since we're signing off with resumes...
Grow up? Er, what? I'm pretty sure it wasn't my opening remarks which went straight for "UR OS SUX!!1!"
In large part I also find them very similar (I'd say identical is pushing it, but I do fairly low-level programming so my viewpoint is probably biased), but if nothing else, the almost complete lack of support for Win2K within the past couple years is fairly damning.
What confuses me about your response though, is that you appear to hold XP in slightly higher regard. I can't figure out why you'd even bother to mention Win2K in your earlier post.
LOL... Windows 2000 is OK? There was a time when Win2K was preferable to XP, and that time was called "2003"... around about 2004, Win2K was seriously showing it's age, and they had finally ironed enough of the kinks out of XP that it made a pretty good desktop OS by that point. Not that I expect to convince an OSX troll, but I find it hilarious that anybody would still describe Win2K as a viable desktop OS option.
Where is there any indication those publications were "given to the public"?
Addressing what people do with a particular work is precisely the point of copyright.
I'm pretty sure my friends wouldn't be that excited about flying if all they did was hover in a helicopter, utterly motionless. That example is irrelevant and clearly isn't what I meant, but if I must be pedantic, the point is the sensation and experience of the act, part of which is being there, and part of which is the physicality of actually flying. Coincidentally, I had a friend who worked at the big Boeing flight sim center down in Orlando. He could fly some of the best simulators in the world all day, every day -- yet he still preferred the real thing. Even the simple knowledge that you're there and doing it for real has an impact. This is not a drill: if simulation was adequate, that phrase would be unnecessary. It's exactly the same with my hobby, which is sports car racing. I could save a hell of a lot of money by racing go-karts, for example, but it isn't remotely the same experience, even though mechanically the process is virtually identical, and the skillsets are directly comparable. "Going somewhere" or simply being somewhere is irrelevant. It's the sensations which make it worthwhile.
The sum total of the input of the world around you plays a major role in defining your world view, and without this common point of reference, it is my belief that the end-result won't be recognizably human, even if it is intelligent by some abstract measure. One can therefore conclude that you can't produce a human-like intelligence without the stimuli of the physical world. No, these experiences aren't the totality, but it's a critical part, and you can't simulate one without the other.
I had a feeling you'd go for the Helen Keller argument, and really, what is the point? She gained a profound understanding of the world around her through her sense of touch, and she still had many of the other human inputs which are a direct result of being a living person. She lacked the two most important senses, but she still had a tremendous range of physical interaction with the world. The important thing is that there were at least shreds of common ground with the experiences of other human beings, and many forms of constant physical contact with them and everything else in her world. She is clearly a human being. I do question how much difficulty someone might have in identifying her as a human being if all you had to interact with was a simulation of her brain -- you could probably conclude the simulation was intelligent, but the very unusual nature of her experiences would lead you to question whether she was human -- which ironically makes her a great argument for my position: the physical inputs of the real world have a profound effect on the nature of how the human mind works.
I didn't say the simulation needs a body, I said the simulation needs the inputs of a body in order to produce an intelligence we can recognize as human. That violates the original premise you support: that a brain simulation alone is adequate. Even though you claim that I don't, in my response I do proceed to allow methods for providing those inputs of the body. The point is not moot, because your premise was that the simulation of a brain alone was adequate. If you allow that it is inadequate, then we agree, and the exact means by which that input is simulated is irrelevant.
My premise isn't flawed. It's simple: we are not beings of pure thought. The rote physical activities of our brain are inadequate to reproduce or even maintain the sum total of what we are.
Consider it from another angle:
Either this simulation has to begin with the simulation of an immature brain and simulate the process of learning and growing, or the simulation has to begin with some kind of copy or image of an existing brain, and "run" from the point at which the copy was made. Either is plausible since the level of simulation being discussed should inevitably be capable of coping with learning and physical change.
I hold that an immature brain will not develop into a recognizably human intelligence without various physical
I'm glad you clarified that -- it always bothered me. I knew the Terrible Secret of the Photon was that it always travels at the speed of light, I just never happened across an explanation of what "speed" in a non-vacuum really meant. Thanks.
Interesting. I've been sidetracked from paying close attention to physics for so long now that I hadn't realized they were anything but sci-fi. Thanks.
No, truly, it won't. For them, point B is obviously in the sky, and they'd be the first to tell you so. And a flight simulator can't get them there.
My point was that flying isn't simply a mode of transport. It is also a form of recreation, and flight simulators are a form of recreation. We agree they share a similarity in kind, but not in quality. The simulation of a brain would have the same effect -- it might give all the appearances of being "the real thing" and yet lack certain fundamental elements which means it falls short. But I don't believe it would get even that far.
Why doesn't the flight sim yield the same experience as actual flight? Because being "in the sky" in real life is a visceral sensation -- it is a thing of the body, not the mind. Your brain might be the end-point, but the stimulus comes from the large, complex, disordered outside world. Any good-quality flight simulator will provide the mind with the exact same *intellectual* challenges that real-world flying would provide. If simulating the brain is all you need, then simulating flight is all you need, too -- yet the brains of my intelligent friends crave the physicality of flying in real life.
I therefore believe that if you lack these inputs to this brain-simulation, you lack the capacity to correctly and accurately simulate the human experience -- and by extension, the interaction you describe: intelligent answers, intelligent speculation. Yet you claim:
No need to simulate the body. At the most, you provide a specific stimulus to the system.
This is contradictory. Your body is the source of the stimulus received by your brain. Perhaps instead of simulating a body, you could wire the brain sim to some kind of robot that could interact with and experience the world, but again we've moved far beyond merely simulating the brain to support the emergence of an unarguably human intelligence.
All that being said, I can concede a very limited and specialized version of your assertions.
Getting a little closer to what I think you're trying to say, perhaps instead we'd simply replay sensory input that was recorded from a real person (ignoring the fact that everyone is quite different and the question of whether this would even be possible). Assuming also an adequately sophisticated simulation of the brain, I suppose that might work once or even a few times, but if a truly human-level and human-like intelligence is possible, I would think that a sim would realize the experiences were being repeated, and once again you'd rapidly diverge from human-like experiences.
In short, even the successful simulation of a human brain would not yield a human-like intelligence, because the experiences of that intellect would be dramatically different.
Another possibility would seem to be the recorded stimuli combined with endlessly resetting the simulation, not allowing it to remember those pre-recorded sensory inputs. It would be a kind of stunted intelligence, incapable of learning, but perhaps very human-like for the short period before you had to reset it and start over. The obvious question becomes, is this very human-like at all? I feel sure it isn't the kind of interaction you intended to describe.
If you ever have the opportunity to try a sensory deprivation tank, I urge you to give it a shot. I had some psych student friends in the college years and had the chance to participate in an experiment once. I was only in there for about an hour. It's fucked up and weird and unpleasant (I never met anyone who actually enjoyed it), but it'll quickly dispel any illusions that you're anything but a conglomeration of responses to varied and complex external stimuli.
If mass is the only problem in order to reach the speed of light or to go beyond it then,,,,, if,,,,,in a thousand year, they find that they can shield something so that there is no effect on the things inside so mass augmentation whatsoever is not a factor and that the engines used to propel this machine have sufficient power why then,,,could we not go beyond.
It's pointless to ask a question like that: you're asking people to argue against an imaginary technology.
This "mass augmentation" isn't some kind of field you're passing through, it's how the physical structure of space-time is made. It isn't an effect, it's how the fabric of reality actually works. There isn't anything to shield against or filter out, you would have to literally alter the most fundamental laws of the physical reality.
You speak as if somebody sat down and arbitrarily decided light was going to be the limit.
An extremely over-simplified explanation:
1. We can figure out how much energy it takes to accelerate a given amount of mass. This can be demonstrated to be true with very simple experiments.
2. Take those calculations and solve for acceleration to very high speeds.
3. The closer you get to the speed of light, the higher the energy requirement goes.
4. At the speed of light, the energy requirement becomes infinite.
This means you can't actually accelerate mass up to the speed of light (or presumably, beyond) because infinite energy is essentially meaningless -- there is no such thing.
Photons are an exception because they're already (and always) moving at the speed of light. There is no acceleration involved.
I've heard people say that it's theoretically possible for something to move faster than light if it has always moved faster than light (again, no acceleration), but I can't recall ever reading a real physicist's opinion on whether that's true, or if it's just somebody applying spoken-language rules to a mathematical equation.
At least now I understand why Kosh said, "I have always been here." :)
Photons don't necessarily move at the speed of light. They can be slowed down by moving through a medium other than pure vacuum.
My limited understanding of relativity is that something can't accelerate to or beyond the speed of light, but technically nothing prohibits something that is already moving faster than the speed of light. However, this might just be a nonsensical Star Trek fanboy interpretation based on applying linguistic semantics of complex mathematical expressions -- I don't think I've heard an opinion on that either way from a real physicist.
The response from Steinberg seems to boil down to a claim that their technique for measuring the result is flawed, but I'm not sure I see the relationship to the uncertainty principle.
NR Nick needs to get out more often.
No. The objective of an actual aircraft is to get you from point A to point B. Really get you there, not just simulate the action while measuring human inputs against a known set of parameters.
That'll come as a surprise to a couple friends who spend their weekends flying around just for fun.
And of course, it's directly comparable to how most people use a flight simulator.
I do agree we'll eventually wind up with machine intelligence of some kind, and after they achieve a certain level of sophistication it will be a mostly-pointless philosophical argument about whether they're "really" intelligent. I don't personally think we're anywhere close to that, and at age 37 I don't even expect to see it in my lifetime, but I say this simply to establish that I don't think machine intelligences are impossible.
What I do think is impossible, or at least very unlikely and not especially worthwhile, is simulating a human brain. I also don't think that merely simulating the brain can produce a human-like intelligence. People aren't just brains, after all -- we're a giant bag of weird chemicals and electrical networks and external stimuli -- and you'd have to simulate all of that crap, too, before you'd wind up with anything that you'd consider human. Look how quickly a real person "degrades" after just a few hours of total sensory isolation. Or heck, even simple physical/social isolation, in many cases.
So in that sense, the grandparent is correct. If you do produce a working simulation of a human brain, it probably has to be exactly that -- a simulation, not a human intelligence. In fact, you're just measuring human inputs (your conversation) against a larger, but still known set of parameters (how that brain functioned when it was mapped into a simulation). Here, I am also accepting the condition of the parent post, in that you're just simulating the brain. If you also simulated the whole person, and the effects of their environment (e.g. hunger) to give them urges and needs and wants -- then I suspect you might have a shot at simulating human intelligence.
"Participating in social process" probably wasn't the highlight of the publications' business plans, and it damned sure isn't the reason Joe Bob's Used RVs bought that full-page spread on page 7. The only perspective lost by copyright holders relates to outrageous expirations and draconian controls. It's people like you who have lost perspective by concluding that you are somehow entitled to something for nothing.
Besides, there wasn't anything related to a "social process" about this. It was a company's marketing department disseminating industry articles to their staff. It was pretty clearly a business activity -- you may rest assured that evil businessmen are being punished, even if they're not the ones who committed the unpardonable sin of attempting to profit from their labors.
That is one of the saddest things I have ever read. And I read slashdot fairly often.
You have illuminated my light bulb. Thank you, sir.