Is every choice we make an inevitable outcome, that could be predicted with 100% accuracy if (Huge, huge IF there) every variable could be accounted for?
I don't think predictability has to be at odds with free will. Again, for me, it's all wrapped up in the idea of identity.
Think of a choice you made once, a choice you'd like a chance to relive, and perhaps choose differently this time around. Think about the thoughts you had at the time that made you choose the way you did.
Now, if you'd had different thoughts, you would have chosen differently, but what gets lost in the reverie is that that person wouldn't be you, but someone very like you. You made the choice you did because of who you were, and you couldn't have chosen differently. Your choice was a function of your identity. To choose differently, you would have to have had a different identity. You would have to have been someone else.
In other words, you can say, "Knowing what I knew then, being who I was then, that was the choice I was going to make." Does that mean you didn't freely make the choice? No. It may have been predictable, given who you were at the time, but that doesn't mean it wasn't your choice.
Do we really have any say in who we become, or is it a set of dominoes falling since before we are even born, that build who we are?
Well, there is still some randomness in the universe, so I don't think the question of what we're going to do with our lives is settled from the moment of our births.
And I think the domino metaphor isn't the right one to use, because dominoes have no will at all. Our will is constructed at a level far beyond that. If you could take trillions of dominoes and create a machine out of them, a machine that made choices, and felt, and lived -- a machine with an identity of its own -- well, then the falling dominoes would be a different level of describing those choices, but they wouldn't be controlling those choices. Make sense?
For shits and giggles I played devil's advocate and argued that it's an unproven conjecture that our consciousness cannot influence quantum events. Could free will manifest itself by altering quantum probabilities?
Even if it could, it still wouldn't get you out of the dilemma you pose. A probabilistic consciousness doesn't provide you any more agency than a random consciousness. Let me go nuts here and engage in a little late night Slashdot philosophizing.:)
Obviously, deterministic events do not demonstrate free will, so we can safely disregard these.
Why? Personally, I think the crux of the free will conundrum is found in the fear and misunderstanding people have of determinism.
Obviously, none of us get special exemption from the laws of physics. The atoms inside your skull follow the same rules as the atoms outside your skull. Does that mean you have no choice as to how you live your life? Obviously not -- you're a choosing machine. You can make choices based on incredibly subtle distinctions. Being a machine isn't at odds with making choices.
"But what good is my 'choice' if it's forced upon me by the laws of physics?", you ask? I think that dilemma is imaginary. Your will and the laws of physics are totally in sync. There's no dissonance between them, and there cannot ever be. The laws of physics are the building blocks of your identity. They are the alphabet that describes you.
Taken another way: If I said, "Your identity determines the choices you make," most people wouldn't disagree, or even find this troubling.
But your identity is nothing more than the particles that create you.
So what will those particles do? Whatever you want them to. Your will is an expression of the laws of physics. There is no outside force controlling you. You can do anything that is in concert with your nature.
At least, that's how I've come to terms with the problem of free will.:)
Three words: Lunar solar power. From a long term perspective, lunar solar power is the only idea that makes sense. (It also has the virtue of being the only method we've yet discovered that would allow 1st world levels of energy consumption for everyone on Earth.)
Space exploration has languished without a raison d'etre for decades now. What better motivation could there be than eliminating the largest source of pollution on Earth, providing for the energy needs of the entire planet in the process? More info here, if you're interested.)
Dr. Dill argued, however, that if voting machines were really secure, then voters would be able to see the insides of their "proprietary" technology. "If someone really has a tamper-resistant machine, they should tell you enough about how the machine works so you can assure yourself that the machine works," he said. "We don't know what the weaknesses are. We don't know who the people are that control that stuff."
Mr. Terwilliger said that Sequoia was willing to share its source code, provided viewers sign nondisclosure agreements.
So if I look at the code, I can't talk about it? Grrrreat.
I'd like to see someone file a Freedom of Information Act request to see the code. The FOIA applies to the following documents:
552. Public information; agency rules, opinions, orders, records, and proceedings
(a) Each agency shall make available to the public information as follows:
(1) Each agency shall separately state and currently publish in the Federal Register for the guidance of the public--
(A) descriptions of its central and field organization and the established places at which, the employees (and in the case of a uniformed service, the members) from whom, and the methods whereby, the public may obtain information, make submittals or requests, or obtain decisions;
(B) statements of the general course and method by which its functions are channeled and determined, including the nature and requirements of all formal and informal procedures available;
(C) rules of procedure, descriptions of forms available or the places at which forms may be obtained, and instructions as to the scope and contents of all papers, reports, or examinations;
(D) substantive rules of general applicability adopted as authorized by law, and statements of general policy or interpretations of general applicability formulated and adopted by the agency; and
(E) each amendment, revision, or repeal of the foregoing.
I know there are arguments against this, specifically that the code is the intellectual property of a private business, and that it is protected by both US Copyright laws and the Berne Convention, but I'd like to see the courts wrestle with this one just the same. Knowing how our votes are counted is one of the sacred founding principles of democracy, and personally, I think it trumps any other interests in this case.
Unfortunately, this has little to no chance of succeeding while Ashcroft is Attorney General, since he's declared an effective moratorium on FOIA requests while he is in office.
We don't have to fantasize about what an FCC-less radio market would look like. Once upon a time, there was no FCC. We did live in a libertarian radio utopia. Anyone who wanted to could build a transmitter and broadcast freely.
What happened in this magical free market? Well, since everyone could broadcast, there was so much interference that radio became useless as a medium. To save the medium, radio manufacturers and large commercial broadcasters lobbied for the creation of the FCC and the system of regulation and allocation we use today.
So, to sum up, we tried a free market solution and it didn't work. That's why the FCC exists.
It's been 9 years since that critique. Since then, lots of people have been trying Cyc themselsves, and having quite a bit of success. OpenCyc is the open source version of Cyc, which differs from the commercial version mainly in that it includes a fraction of the assertions in the commercial product. I'm surprised that we haven't yet seen a community effort to create an equivalent assertion database, but I imagine it's only a matter of time.
No one, not even Lenat, expects Cyc to become the humanlike AI that sci-fi authors have written about for decades, but I think it's becoming increasingly clear that Cyc is finally beginning to prove its worth. Cyc-enabled derivative projects like CycSecure will likely become much more important in the near future, and I suspect that the next decade will vindicate Lenat's approach to creating software that we can legitmately label "intelligent".
The only fair way to do it (in my opinion) is to take the total amount of money it takes to run the government, and divide it equally among the entire population.
The U.S. Budget for 2004 is $2,229,000,000,000 ($2.2 trillion). The most current estimate of the U.S. population is 290,895,573 people. Divide budget by population and your share equals $7662.55. If you are married, simply double this amount. Please make your check payable to Uncle Sam. Thank you!
"Entertaining a mental image" and "experiencing an emotion" are both very interesting subjects in cognition, but they are hardly any more abstract than any other brain function.
I believe they are.
Chalmers gets at the problem here:
What makes the hard problem hard and almost unique is that it goes beyond problems about the performance of functions. To see this, note that even when we have explained the performance of all the cognitive and behavioral functions in the vicinity of experience - perceptual discrimination, categorization, internal access, verbal report - there may still remain a further unanswered question: Why is the performance of these functions accompanied by experience? A simple explanation of the functions leaves this question open.
There is no analogous further question in the explanation of genes, or of life, or of learning.
He goes on to give a version of my initial argument here:
The facts about experience cannot be an automatic consequence of any physical account, as it is conceptually coherent that any given process could exist without experience. Experience may arise from the physical, but it is not entailed by the physical.
All this is a way of saying that the problems of experiential phenomena are very hard, and not like the so-called "easy" problems of intelligence, which can be explained functionally.
Where you and I disagree is that you believe functions are enough to explain experiences, even colors. How does one get the color red from an algorithm? I don't see how one can. So I think something more is needed. (Perhaps it is found in the properties of the substrate the algorithm is run on.)
That's the beautiful thing about the Turing test. It is designed to detect whether we have solved these varieties of problems.
Well, strictly speaking, it don't think it can. The same way I can't know whether the color I see as red is the same color you see as red. Since I don't have access to your mental states, Turing's test is designed to do the next best thing: infer them.
Turing's test is predicated on the idea that we can infer mental states from behavior. I don't think we necessarily can. (Although I do believe we can attribute intelligence this way.)
So how can we justify attributing mental states to others? I think the largest factor in our willingness to attribute mental states to others is their biological similarity to ourselves. This is the reason we're willing to assume the person sitting next to us on the bus has a conscious existence of their own, even without administering a Turing test to them.
We're hardwired for this, and for even more basic kinds of animism, which helped us succeed evolutionarily. It's hard to look at an electrical outlet, for instance, and not see a tiny little face staring back at you in horror.
The Turing test has a number of other problems of its own, but, really, that's a whole different post, and I've already gone on way too long.:)
At any rate, thanks for your honesty and for actually looking into the Chalmers article. If you've got a similarly longwinded article for your position, I'd be glad to return the favor.
Well, by phenomenology I mean the mechanism or mechanisms by which the experiential phenomena of consciousness are created. A better introduction than I can give is given by Chalmers here.
I think "sentience" is a tricky word because it is completely meaningless.
The language we use to talk about consciousness is notoriously inexact and ambiguous, but there is something I mean by sentience that is different than what I mean by intelligence. I think the Chalmers article does a decent job of getting at it.
The Turing test was never meant to be an intelligence test for machines. It was meant to be a way to redefine "sentience" in a concrete manner.
Well, my first objection is that the Turing test isn't a test; it's a game. There's nothing scientific about it. But beyond that, I don't think that the sum of my existence is only what others can observe about me.
I challenge you to differentiate between a "zombie" and a person.
No, I challenge you!:)
The idea of the zombie is to point out the gap between syntax and sensation. Any computational model of mind has to bridge that gap, has to say how we get from code to subjective experience and qualia. Like seeing the color red, as I mentioned earlier.
But they don't attempt to bridge the gap, they just deny that one exists. Computationalists like Dennett believe that I don't really see the color red, I just run code that tells me I do. In other words, red is just symbols, and not an experience.
I respectfully disagree.
The more I've learned about cognition and neuroanatomy, the less I believe that distinction exists.
Well, to be just a tiny bit clearer, I'm not saying humans aren't machines. I believe we are. We just haven't explained exactly how we work yet.
The idea of an "intelligence test" for computers is obsolete. We interact with intelligent artifacts each day, and can reasonably expect them to get more and more intelligent as time goes on.
But Artificial Sentience would be another question entirely.
"Sentience" is a tricky word because it involves the capacity to feel, and I don't believe that computation alone can grant that capacity.
Strictly computational models of mind don't entail a phenomenological response -- that is, they work just as well describing "zombies" as they do describing people -- so computation alone does not explain the phenomenology of consciousness.
If we someday understand the physical principles that enable our brains to generate the phenomenology of consciousness -- i.e. where the red in red comes from, and other types of qualia -- then I believe we could also create conscious machines, according to those principles. But just because we can devise a Turing machine out of a given set of widgets does not make that set of widgets able to generate the phenomenology of consciousness.
Even if it were to be a multinational effort, a moonbase facility would be difficult to secure.
Actually, a multinational presence would tend to reduce and stabilize any military tensions. Each nation would be a minority; no one nation would have enough members to "seize control". This dynamic would also serve to eliminate the "weaponization" scenario you mentioned, although of course, there would be a thousand more elements to assure security, too. These astronauts would be among the most monitored and controlled people in history.
As instruments of the largest humanitarian project mankind has ever undertaken, they would also be some of the most admired. The risk is minimal, but the rewards are fantastic. At the very least, lunar solar power deserves high level investigation by NASA.
A cool concept, but the nations of the earth would be too fearful of weaponization to allow any one group the chance to control something like that.
We don't have to do it alone. We could just as well lead a partnership of world space agencies to accomplish the same goal. I'd prefer this, actually.
Aside from the ongoing dispute as to the feasibility of assembling a solar-panel whose total potential energy output will exceed that used to construct it.
In the 1970s that might have been the case, but it's demonstrably false today. From an energy payback perspective, most panels reach their break-even point in a little over three years, some in as short as 6 months. Photovoltaic modules have been shown in the real world to produce up to 17 times more energy during their lifetime then used in their construction, and that number is increasing rapidly. More info here and here. (The first is a PDF.)
You should also keep in mind that lunar solar power would be significantly more efficient than terrestrial solar power because the Moon simply receives much more intense sunlight than we do on Earth. You can read more about it in an article Criswell wrote for The Industrial Physicist.
As far as new goal for NASA for the 21st century, I would shoot for lunar solar power. From a long term perspective, lunar solar power is the only idea that makes sense. (It also has the virtue of being the only method we've yet discovered that would allow 1st world levels of energy consumption for everyone on Earth.)
Space exploration has languished without a raison d'etre for decades now. What better motivation could there be than eliminating the largest source of pollution on Earth, providing for the energy needs of the entire planet in the process?
Mars is a great place to go, but we ought to go to back to the Moon first. Not because it's closer, but because there's one primary benefit colonizing the Moon can give us that colonizing Mars won't -- free, nearly unlimited power.
From a long term perspective, lunar solar power is the only idea that makes sense. (It also has the virtue of being the only method we've yet discovered that would allow 1st world levels of energy consumption for everyone on Earth.)
Space exploration has languished without a raison d'etre for decades now. Lack of continued political will is the biggest threat to long term projects like Mars colonization. But what better motivation could there be than eliminating the largest source of pollution on Earth, providing for the energy needs of the entire planet in the process?
The price tag for such a project is estimated at $150 billion. Sound steep? It's not any steeper than the cost of war with Iraq. Add the cost of the Gulf War with the cost of our new upcoming sequel, and we could have bases on the Moon beaming clean power down to every nation on Earth instead of bombing them. (And then there are the billions of dollars we would save by reducing the need for mining and transporting fossil fuels, and lowering the energy cost of all products.)
Until campaigns are publicly funded, this will only get worse. The difference between our future and that in Orwell's 1984 is that it will not be a monolithic govrenment running our lives. It will be a government granting the power to corporations to run our lives.
What's even more disturbing is the symbotic relationship between the two. Total Information Awareness, for instance, shores up the US government's power to spy on its citizenry, and is really only effective because of the millions of tiny daily invasions of our privacy corporations have subtly introduced into our lives. Every day they come up with more.
I don't agree with all of McCain's ideas by any stretch of the imagination, but I would love to see him elected because his is the only guy with the balls and the clout to give the government back to the people.
I'd vote for McCain, too. Honestly, I'd love it if he ran as an Independent. You're right when you say he's not perfect, but he's something no other candidate seems to be: electable.
I actually think the CueCat would've been a pretty cool idea if they'd sold the thing for $19.95 with some decent software for cataloguing your CDs and other home items. You'd have a permanent list, perfect for insurance companies, finding out product information, etc. Another natural partnership might have been with Webvan or one of the other grocery-delivery companies -- scan a package when you run out and have it added automatically to your next grocery list.
The idea wasn't stupid, just their marketing and business plan.
Avoid? They are very happy to charge you $50 to change to another server.
I meant "lock-in" in the sense of being locked into EverQuest. They'll gladly take your money to switch you to another EQ server, but there's no incentive for them to enable you to switch between competing virtual worlds as easily as you can currently switch between competing websites.
Neverwinter Nights looks like a great step towards the ideal of the Metaverse. We just need to broaden the scope beyond D&D.
I totally agree -- what's missing in virtual worlds right now is the ability for players to travel between them. Obviously, Stormtroopers shouldn't be invading the Sims Online, but there should be a virtual "border crossing" where you can step into the guise of a new character, appropriate to the realm you're traveling to, even exchanging coin of one realm for coin of another if both realms can agree on an exchange rate.
For megaMMORPGs like EverQuest, this is something they want to avoid, since lock-in is an important part of their business strategy. But I think this leaves a large niche open for new competitors. Ideally, individual users should be able to design their own virtual worlds and host them in the Metaverse, with the revenue generated in a given virtual world being split between the creator of the world and the corporation doing the hosting and designing the software.
Design an exciting, intriguing world and make a living off it. That's what I'd like to see.
Yeah, William Gibson is just an incredibly approachable guy. When he was giving a signing a few years back, I stood at the back of the line so I could talk to him longer and interview him for my zine without disrupting anyone waiting to have their books signed. He spent a little over half an hour with me, talking about the script to Neuromancer, William Burroughs, Bruce Sterling, and everything else under the sun. I left feeling great, knowing I'd connected with an author whose works I really enjoyed.
I had pretty much the opposite experience with Douglas Coupland, who rather testily blew off a small crowd of people (including me) after a reading, even though I'd already confirmed the post-reading interview with his publicist. Maybe Doug was just having a bad day, but it says a lot for Gibson that nearly every story I've heard about him casts him in a positive light. It's good to know that nice guys occasionally do finish first. If Gibson makes a visit to your town, I highly recommend attending.
Well, the one way of earning money that's obviously missing from your list is investing, which how most of the rich earn theirs. This is not to say many of them don't work hard, too -- but their salaries pale in comparison to their investments.
Investing isn't limited to the rich, either. Everyone who buys a house in investing in it. Where I live, most homeowners are earning $20,000 in equity each year, the equivalent of an entry level full time salary.
I think one of the roots of poverty is that investing isn't really understood very well by poor people. The most valuable thing you have when you graduate high school is your unblemished credit rating -- keep it sterling, and you'll have the ability to get loans down the road when a good investment (like starting your own business, or buying a house) comes your way. Tarnish your credit rating with late payments or destroy it by overborrowing on credit cards, and you'll chain yourself to poverty for years -- maybe the rest of your life. The simple act of buying an expensive sweater you know you can't afford can create an incredible disaster down the road.
If it were up to me, I'd require some knowledge of real world investing and small business planning to graduate from high school. We'd all be a lot better off if we did.
Slashdot Mirror
Is every choice we make an inevitable outcome, that could be predicted with 100% accuracy if (Huge, huge IF there) every variable could be accounted for?
:)
I don't think predictability has to be at odds with free will. Again, for me, it's all wrapped up in the idea of identity.
Think of a choice you made once, a choice you'd like a chance to relive, and perhaps choose differently this time around. Think about the thoughts you had at the time that made you choose the way you did.
Now, if you'd had different thoughts, you would have chosen differently, but what gets lost in the reverie is that that person wouldn't be you, but someone very like you. You made the choice you did because of who you were, and you couldn't have chosen differently. Your choice was a function of your identity. To choose differently, you would have to have had a different identity. You would have to have been someone else.
In other words, you can say, "Knowing what I knew then, being who I was then, that was the choice I was going to make." Does that mean you didn't freely make the choice? No. It may have been predictable, given who you were at the time, but that doesn't mean it wasn't your choice.
Do we really have any say in who we become, or is it a set of dominoes falling since before we are even born, that build who we are?
Well, there is still some randomness in the universe, so I don't think the question of what we're going to do with our lives is settled from the moment of our births.
And I think the domino metaphor isn't the right one to use, because dominoes have no will at all. Our will is constructed at a level far beyond that. If you could take trillions of dominoes and create a machine out of them, a machine that made choices, and felt, and lived -- a machine with an identity of its own -- well, then the falling dominoes would be a different level of describing those choices, but they wouldn't be controlling those choices. Make sense?
Maybe not, but I hope so.
For shits and giggles I played devil's advocate and argued that it's an unproven conjecture that our consciousness cannot influence quantum events. Could free will manifest itself by altering quantum probabilities?
:)
:)
Even if it could, it still wouldn't get you out of the dilemma you pose. A probabilistic consciousness doesn't provide you any more agency than a random consciousness. Let me go nuts here and engage in a little late night Slashdot philosophizing.
Obviously, deterministic events do not demonstrate free will, so we can safely disregard these.
Why? Personally, I think the crux of the free will conundrum is found in the fear and misunderstanding people have of determinism.
Obviously, none of us get special exemption from the laws of physics. The atoms inside your skull follow the same rules as the atoms outside your skull. Does that mean you have no choice as to how you live your life? Obviously not -- you're a choosing machine. You can make choices based on incredibly subtle distinctions. Being a machine isn't at odds with making choices.
"But what good is my 'choice' if it's forced upon me by the laws of physics?", you ask? I think that dilemma is imaginary. Your will and the laws of physics are totally in sync. There's no dissonance between them, and there cannot ever be. The laws of physics are the building blocks of your identity. They are the alphabet that describes you.
Taken another way: If I said, "Your identity determines the choices you make," most people wouldn't disagree, or even find this troubling.
But your identity is nothing more than the particles that create you.
So what will those particles do? Whatever you want them to. Your will is an expression of the laws of physics. There is no outside force controlling you. You can do anything that is in concert with your nature.
At least, that's how I've come to terms with the problem of free will.
Three words: Lunar solar power. From a long term perspective, lunar solar power is the only idea that makes sense. (It also has the virtue of being the only method we've yet discovered that would allow 1st world levels of energy consumption for everyone on Earth.)
Space exploration has languished without a raison d'etre for decades now. What better motivation could there be than eliminating the largest source of pollution on Earth, providing for the energy needs of the entire planet in the process? More info here, if you're interested.)
I'd like to see someone file a Freedom of Information Act request to see the code. The FOIA applies to the following documents:
I know there are arguments against this, specifically that the code is the intellectual property of a private business, and that it is protected by both US Copyright laws and the Berne Convention, but I'd like to see the courts wrestle with this one just the same. Knowing how our votes are counted is one of the sacred founding principles of democracy, and personally, I think it trumps any other interests in this case.
Unfortunately, this has little to no chance of succeeding while Ashcroft is Attorney General, since he's declared an effective moratorium on FOIA requests while he is in office.
We don't have to fantasize about what an FCC-less radio market would look like. Once upon a time, there was no FCC. We did live in a libertarian radio utopia. Anyone who wanted to could build a transmitter and broadcast freely.
What happened in this magical free market? Well, since everyone could broadcast, there was so much interference that radio became useless as a medium. To save the medium, radio manufacturers and large commercial broadcasters lobbied for the creation of the FCC and the system of regulation and allocation we use today.
So, to sum up, we tried a free market solution and it didn't work. That's why the FCC exists.
It's been 9 years since that critique. Since then, lots of people have been trying Cyc themselsves, and having quite a bit of success. OpenCyc is the open source version of Cyc, which differs from the commercial version mainly in that it includes a fraction of the assertions in the commercial product. I'm surprised that we haven't yet seen a community effort to create an equivalent assertion database, but I imagine it's only a matter of time.
No one, not even Lenat, expects Cyc to become the humanlike AI that sci-fi authors have written about for decades, but I think it's becoming increasingly clear that Cyc is finally beginning to prove its worth. Cyc-enabled derivative projects like CycSecure will likely become much more important in the near future, and I suspect that the next decade will vindicate Lenat's approach to creating software that we can legitmately label "intelligent".
The only fair way to do it (in my opinion) is to take the total amount of money it takes to run the government, and divide it equally among the entire population.
The U.S. Budget for 2004 is $2,229,000,000,000 ($2.2 trillion). The most current estimate of the U.S. population is 290,895,573 people. Divide budget by population and your share equals $7662.55. If you are married, simply double this amount. Please make your check payable to Uncle Sam. Thank you!
Wish I had mod points.
I believe they are.
Chalmers gets at the problem here:
He goes on to give a version of my initial argument here:
All this is a way of saying that the problems of experiential phenomena are very hard, and not like the so-called "easy" problems of intelligence, which can be explained functionally.
Where you and I disagree is that you believe functions are enough to explain experiences, even colors. How does one get the color red from an algorithm? I don't see how one can. So I think something more is needed. (Perhaps it is found in the properties of the substrate the algorithm is run on.)
That's the beautiful thing about the Turing test. It is designed to detect whether we have solved these varieties of problems.
Well, strictly speaking, it don't think it can. The same way I can't know whether the color I see as red is the same color you see as red. Since I don't have access to your mental states, Turing's test is designed to do the next best thing: infer them.
Turing's test is predicated on the idea that we can infer mental states from behavior. I don't think we necessarily can. (Although I do believe we can attribute intelligence this way.)
So how can we justify attributing mental states to others? I think the largest factor in our willingness to attribute mental states to others is their biological similarity to ourselves. This is the reason we're willing to assume the person sitting next to us on the bus has a conscious existence of their own, even without administering a Turing test to them.
We're hardwired for this, and for even more basic kinds of animism, which helped us succeed evolutionarily. It's hard to look at an electrical outlet, for instance, and not see a tiny little face staring back at you in horror.
The Turing test has a number of other problems of its own, but, really, that's a whole different post, and I've already gone on way too long.
At any rate, thanks for your honesty and for actually looking into the Chalmers article. If you've got a similarly longwinded article for your position, I'd be glad to return the favor.
What's your definition?
:)
Well, by phenomenology I mean the mechanism or mechanisms by which the experiential phenomena of consciousness are created. A better introduction than I can give is given by Chalmers here.
I think "sentience" is a tricky word because it is completely meaningless.
The language we use to talk about consciousness is notoriously inexact and ambiguous, but there is something I mean by sentience that is different than what I mean by intelligence. I think the Chalmers article does a decent job of getting at it.
The Turing test was never meant to be an intelligence test for machines. It was meant to be a way to redefine "sentience" in a concrete manner.
Well, my first objection is that the Turing test isn't a test; it's a game. There's nothing scientific about it. But beyond that, I don't think that the sum of my existence is only what others can observe about me.
I challenge you to differentiate between a "zombie" and a person.
No, I challenge you!
The idea of the zombie is to point out the gap between syntax and sensation. Any computational model of mind has to bridge that gap, has to say how we get from code to subjective experience and qualia. Like seeing the color red, as I mentioned earlier.
But they don't attempt to bridge the gap, they just deny that one exists. Computationalists like Dennett believe that I don't really see the color red, I just run code that tells me I do. In other words, red is just symbols, and not an experience.
I respectfully disagree.
The more I've learned about cognition and neuroanatomy, the less I believe that distinction exists.
Well, to be just a tiny bit clearer, I'm not saying humans aren't machines. I believe we are. We just haven't explained exactly how we work yet.
The idea of an "intelligence test" for computers is obsolete. We interact with intelligent artifacts each day, and can reasonably expect them to get more and more intelligent as time goes on.
But Artificial Sentience would be another question entirely.
"Sentience" is a tricky word because it involves the capacity to feel, and I don't believe that computation alone can grant that capacity.
Strictly computational models of mind don't entail a phenomenological response -- that is, they work just as well describing "zombies" as they do describing people -- so computation alone does not explain the phenomenology of consciousness.
If we someday understand the physical principles that enable our brains to generate the phenomenology of consciousness -- i.e. where the red in red comes from, and other types of qualia -- then I believe we could also create conscious machines, according to those principles. But just because we can devise a Turing machine out of a given set of widgets does not make that set of widgets able to generate the phenomenology of consciousness.
Omnipresent dirt? They do news stories about that?
Here.
I'll take the overnight shift. Seriously.
Even if it were to be a multinational effort, a moonbase facility would be difficult to secure.
Actually, a multinational presence would tend to reduce and stabilize any military tensions. Each nation would be a minority; no one nation would have enough members to "seize control". This dynamic would also serve to eliminate the "weaponization" scenario you mentioned, although of course, there would be a thousand more elements to assure security, too. These astronauts would be among the most monitored and controlled people in history.
As instruments of the largest humanitarian project mankind has ever undertaken, they would also be some of the most admired. The risk is minimal, but the rewards are fantastic. At the very least, lunar solar power deserves high level investigation by NASA.
A cool concept, but the nations of the earth would be too fearful of weaponization to allow any one group the chance to control something like that.
We don't have to do it alone. We could just as well lead a partnership of world space agencies to accomplish the same goal. I'd prefer this, actually.
Aside from the ongoing dispute as to the feasibility of assembling a solar-panel whose total potential energy output will exceed that used to construct it.
In the 1970s that might have been the case, but it's demonstrably false today. From an energy payback perspective, most panels reach their break-even point in a little over three years, some in as short as 6 months. Photovoltaic modules have been shown in the real world to produce up to 17 times more energy during their lifetime then used in their construction, and that number is increasing rapidly. More info here and here. (The first is a PDF.)
You should also keep in mind that lunar solar power would be significantly more efficient than terrestrial solar power because the Moon simply receives much more intense sunlight than we do on Earth. You can read more about it in an article Criswell wrote for The Industrial Physicist.
As far as new goal for NASA for the 21st century, I would shoot for lunar solar power. From a long term perspective, lunar solar power is the only idea that makes sense. (It also has the virtue of being the only method we've yet discovered that would allow 1st world levels of energy consumption for everyone on Earth.)
Space exploration has languished without a raison d'etre for decades now. What better motivation could there be than eliminating the largest source of pollution on Earth, providing for the energy needs of the entire planet in the process?
Mars is a great place to go, but we ought to go to back to the Moon first. Not because it's closer, but because there's one primary benefit colonizing the Moon can give us that colonizing Mars won't -- free, nearly unlimited power.
From a long term perspective, lunar solar power is the only idea that makes sense. (It also has the virtue of being the only method we've yet discovered that would allow 1st world levels of energy consumption for everyone on Earth.)
Space exploration has languished without a raison d'etre for decades now. Lack of continued political will is the biggest threat to long term projects like Mars colonization. But what better motivation could there be than eliminating the largest source of pollution on Earth, providing for the energy needs of the entire planet in the process?
The price tag for such a project is estimated at $150 billion. Sound steep? It's not any steeper than the cost of war with Iraq. Add the cost of the Gulf War with the cost of our new upcoming sequel, and we could have bases on the Moon beaming clean power down to every nation on Earth instead of bombing them. (And then there are the billions of dollars we would save by reducing the need for mining and transporting fossil fuels, and lowering the energy cost of all products.)
There's more here, if you're interested.
You can already watch Hollywood movies on your PC legally.
Top 5 Downloads on Movielink.com:
1. Men In Black 2
2. The Sum Of All Fears
3. Changing Lanes
4. 13 Conversations About One Thing
5. Death to Smoochy
It's not consumer demand for movies driving TCPA/Palladium.
Until campaigns are publicly funded, this will only get worse. The difference between our future and that in Orwell's 1984 is that it will not be a monolithic govrenment running our lives. It will be a government granting the power to corporations to run our lives.
What's even more disturbing is the symbotic relationship between the two. Total Information Awareness, for instance, shores up the US government's power to spy on its citizenry, and is really only effective because of the millions of tiny daily invasions of our privacy corporations have subtly introduced into our lives. Every day they come up with more.
I don't agree with all of McCain's ideas by any stretch of the imagination, but I would love to see him elected because his is the only guy with the balls and the clout to give the government back to the people.
I'd vote for McCain, too. Honestly, I'd love it if he ran as an Independent. You're right when you say he's not perfect, but he's something no other candidate seems to be: electable.
I actually think the CueCat would've been a pretty cool idea if they'd sold the thing for $19.95 with some decent software for cataloguing your CDs and other home items. You'd have a permanent list, perfect for insurance companies, finding out product information, etc. Another natural partnership might have been with Webvan or one of the other grocery-delivery companies -- scan a package when you run out and have it added automatically to your next grocery list.
The idea wasn't stupid, just their marketing and business plan.
Avoid? They are very happy to charge you $50 to change to another server.
I meant "lock-in" in the sense of being locked into EverQuest. They'll gladly take your money to switch you to another EQ server, but there's no incentive for them to enable you to switch between competing virtual worlds as easily as you can currently switch between competing websites.
Neverwinter Nights looks like a great step towards the ideal of the Metaverse. We just need to broaden the scope beyond D&D.
I totally agree -- what's missing in virtual worlds right now is the ability for players to travel between them. Obviously, Stormtroopers shouldn't be invading the Sims Online, but there should be a virtual "border crossing" where you can step into the guise of a new character, appropriate to the realm you're traveling to, even exchanging coin of one realm for coin of another if both realms can agree on an exchange rate.
For megaMMORPGs like EverQuest, this is something they want to avoid, since lock-in is an important part of their business strategy. But I think this leaves a large niche open for new competitors. Ideally, individual users should be able to design their own virtual worlds and host them in the Metaverse, with the revenue generated in a given virtual world being split between the creator of the world and the corporation doing the hosting and designing the software.
Design an exciting, intriguing world and make a living off it. That's what I'd like to see.
Yeah, William Gibson is just an incredibly approachable guy. When he was giving a signing a few years back, I stood at the back of the line so I could talk to him longer and interview him for my zine without disrupting anyone waiting to have their books signed. He spent a little over half an hour with me, talking about the script to Neuromancer, William Burroughs, Bruce Sterling, and everything else under the sun. I left feeling great, knowing I'd connected with an author whose works I really enjoyed.
I had pretty much the opposite experience with Douglas Coupland, who rather testily blew off a small crowd of people (including me) after a reading, even though I'd already confirmed the post-reading interview with his publicist. Maybe Doug was just having a bad day, but it says a lot for Gibson that nearly every story I've heard about him casts him in a positive light. It's good to know that nice guys occasionally do finish first. If Gibson makes a visit to your town, I highly recommend attending.
Well, the one way of earning money that's obviously missing from your list is investing, which how most of the rich earn theirs. This is not to say many of them don't work hard, too -- but their salaries pale in comparison to their investments.
Investing isn't limited to the rich, either. Everyone who buys a house in investing in it. Where I live, most homeowners are earning $20,000 in equity each year, the equivalent of an entry level full time salary.
I think one of the roots of poverty is that investing isn't really understood very well by poor people. The most valuable thing you have when you graduate high school is your unblemished credit rating -- keep it sterling, and you'll have the ability to get loans down the road when a good investment (like starting your own business, or buying a house) comes your way. Tarnish your credit rating with late payments or destroy it by overborrowing on credit cards, and you'll chain yourself to poverty for years -- maybe the rest of your life. The simple act of buying an expensive sweater you know you can't afford can create an incredible disaster down the road.
If it were up to me, I'd require some knowledge of real world investing and small business planning to graduate from high school. We'd all be a lot better off if we did.