thorny issue, but here's one, imho relevant, distinction to be made.
you know how to walk. you know how to do long division.
you don't "understand" how to walk (i.e., it is unconscious, you don't think, "now I must contract my gluteus medius to this extent, while flexing my quadriceps...")
You do understand how to do long division.
what we mean by understanding is having reflexive knowledge of the algorithm we're using and some model of how its components interact to provide the solution.
in searle's chinese room, the person performing the algorithm does not "understand" chinese.
i agree with a previous poster who argues that the algorithm used in searle's chinese room *does* "understand* chinese. i.e., such an algorithm would have to have a supervisory reflective component that attached semantics to the individual sub-programs of the algorithm, and "understood" how they relate to each other, and how, together, they produce the correct response.
Your confusing subset with subclass. POSIX is a subset of UNIX features, so it is possible for an OS to implement that POSIX subset and still not implement all the other features that would make it a UNIX.
POSIX is *not* a subclass of UNIX, so all POSIX oses are not thereby UNIX oses.
By analogy, flight is a subset of the capabilities of birds, so it is possible for an animal to have flight capabilities and still not be a bird (bats, flying insects). "Animal with flight" is *not* a subset of "birds."
"the analysis has revealed that the child exhibits distinctive characteristics of both contemporaneous European early modern humans and preceding Neandertals. It therefore provides evidence of previous admixture between Neandertals and early modern humans in southwestern Europe."
Actually during the time neanderthals lived alongside the real human ancestors, they were the smarter species of the two
Not so. During the time when both Modern Humans and Neanderthals coexisted, Modern Humans, by and large, showed evidence of the more sophisticated material culture (tools, art,etc.). Maybe you're thinking of the fact that, on average, Neanderthals had larger brains? Larger brain size does not = more intelligent. It's quite likely that Neanderthals had larger brains for the same reason that they had short, thick limbs: an evolved adaptation to the extreme cold of glacial eurasia. Neanderthal body proportions were most likely an example of Allen's Rule.
By definition, two species are distinct if they cannot breed and produce fertile offspring. The whole point of this research is to determine whether this is true or not. So this:
The fact that there is a difference at all shows we and they were two distinct species.
misses the point entirely. You and I have different dna. Does the fact that there is a difference at all make us separate species? I very much doubt it.
The whole question being researched is precisely this: how much difference was there between neanderthals and modern humans, and was it enough of a difference that they could not have interbred. It is the inability to interbreed and produce fertile offspring, not the presence of any difference at all, that determines separate species status.
MS acts like the whole shebang is not infrastructure/commodity. Apple acts like kernel + file system + compiler + utils are infrastructure/commodity but *not* the desktop and applications. Linux/*bsd acts like the whole shebang is infrastructure/commodity.
The real question is where do we draw this line between standard/infrastructure and proprietary value-add.
A significant problem with this model is that businesses with the resources to hire developers to program custom solutions often consider software, such as the custom solution they just paid for, to be competitive assets.
Businesses rightly consider it foolish to give assets that they paid for away to their competitors. As a result, they will often be reluctant to pay for a custom solution only to have their competitors receive it for free.
Consequently, they often choose to pay for custom solutions that are proprietary, so that their important IT business assets remain theirs and theirs alone. Alternatively, they will reach for proprietary, paid solutions ensuring that competitors who wish to use the same will incur the same costs. They'll then pay their own people or contractors to customize the proprietary solution, again, ensuring that the fruits of their investment in software accrue to them only and not their competitors.
Yet the vast majority of Western legal systems are based on Christian principles.
This is really not true. Stealing is considered wrong in both non-christian and christian societies, so having laws against stealing is not evidence of a specifically christian legal system. Similarly murder, adultery, etc.
This is the broken argument that religious apologists always trot out. The fact is that religious people are no more likely to be moral than others (and probably quite likely to be less moral - see next paragraph). People share common moral values whether they are christian or not.
On the down side however, christians are responsible for numerous and well documented heinous atrocities specifically due to their religion (crusades, inquisition, witch burning, annihilation of heretics, etc.).
On balance, christianity has been a net cause of significant evil in the world. For more detail see Dawkins The God Delusion
I choose not to enrich them and buy a faster competitor that will run all of the programs/games/etc that I want, which the Apple won't, for a fraction of the cost.
Not only that, but if your faster competitor is a Windows machine, it will run all sorts of experiments in artificial computer life that the Mac won't run at all (I think the kids call these "viruses" nowadays, or maybe "malware")
"installing" it on a blank disk is simply making a copy. This is covered by copyright law. I.e., Apple holds the copyright, you may not make copies of it except for backup purposes or pursuant to the normal operation of the software. Speaking of which...
*Using* it from said blank disk "installation" now falls under Apple's license which clearly states that it may only be run on Apple hardware. However, as has been pointed out, all Macs come with a version of Mac OS, so actually running your blank disk "installation" of necessity constitutes an upgrade.
Of course you could make your 1 copy onto a blank disk and never run it (legal because copyright law allows back up) but you could never legally *run* your blank disk "installation" on anything other than Apple hardware.
I recommend soot black, resin, and beeswax ink on papyrus for truly archival purposes. Should get you several millenia quite easily if stored in a cool, dry location.
If the hypothetical "caveman baby" does die of a disease we're all immune to now then there most certainly has been significant evolution of the human immune system and/or cell surface proteins, etc. since the time of the "caveman baby."
Similarly if the "caveman baby" fails to marry and/or reproduce because s/he isn't well adapted to modern social systems and interactions then there certainly has been significant evolution of the human brain since "caveman baby" times, in particular evolution of social cognitive skills.
Not all significant evolution involves visible change in gross external anatomy.
You really need to read Stephen J. Gould's essay on the panda's thumb. The ad hoc, opportunistic nature of evolution is abundantly clear to those with the intellectual courage to actually look at the evidence.
No intelligent designer would craft the poorly functional panda's thumb from a wrist bone if that intelligent designer knew the "final form" beforehand. Evolution on the other hand would and did. Faced with only wrist bones to work with, evolution did the best with available material which resulted in an awkward and far from well designed result.
This is exactly what an intelligent designer who knew in advance the "final form" would not do. Such an intelligent designer would provide the necessary proto thumb in ancestors so that it was available for panda thumb evolution when needed. But evolution doesn't know the future in advance, doesn't know the "final form" (because there is none). So evolution doesn't provide handy proto organs, proto limbs, etc. to pick up and use as needed down the road. Evolution merely mutates whatever is to hand even if it results in an awkward "design."
Your "social selection" is a straw man. Human society is itself a product of natural selection. What human society does is itself the both the result of and fodder for natural selection.
You can't point at some some actions (social interaction) of a particular species (humans) and say they are somehow magically beyond the scope of natural selection. If a thing can result in differential reproductive success (and social interactions certainly can) then that thing is a basis for natural selection.
Indeed evolutionary psychologists base much of their discipline on the notion that adaptation to the human social landscape has been one of the primary driving forces in human evolution for many thousands of years.
(HINT: No, not even that. We just don't understand quantum physics yet.)
Hmm, lets see...
quantum physics: better part of a century of experimental confirmation in thousands of independent tests with accuracy exceeding any other scientific theory.
your assertion: just your say so.
Yeah, gotta go with quantum physics here.
Executive summary: The physical world really is inherently random. Deal.
Reflexes happen outside the brain proper. Instincts involve the brain (not merely a reflex arc between the peripheral nervous system and the spinal cord).
This being the distinction, any unlearned, inherited fixed response to stimulus that is mediated by the brain (not merely a reflex arc) is an instinct.
The wikipedia article on instinct gives the following (among others) as human instincts:
face recognition and perception, disgust at noxious stimuli, language acquisition, so called "fight or flight" response, sex drive, aggression, and others.
There is some purely definitional disagreement as to whether an unlearned inherited behavior can be called an instinct if it can be overridden by higher (i.e., cortical) brain processes, but this is just quibbling over terms, since even supposedly "lower" animals can be trained to override some instincts.
Human beings have much more powerful abilities to use cortical processes to override lower brain impulses and we are therefore less bound by instinct than other species. This does not mean that we don't have instincts, but rather that we are much more accomplished at suppressing them with cortical processing.
Slashdot Mirror
the possibility exists that the human brain is a hypercomputer
neurological evidence indicates that we only have "free won't" not "free will."
thorny issue, but here's one, imho relevant, distinction to be made.
you know how to walk. you know how to do long division.
you don't "understand" how to walk (i.e., it is unconscious, you don't think, "now I must contract my gluteus medius to this extent, while flexing my quadriceps...")
You do understand how to do long division.
what we mean by understanding is having reflexive knowledge of the algorithm we're using and some model of how its components interact to provide the solution.
in searle's chinese room, the person performing the algorithm does not "understand" chinese.
i agree with a previous poster who argues that the algorithm used in searle's chinese room *does* "understand* chinese. i.e., such an algorithm would have to have a supervisory reflective component that attached semantics to the individual sub-programs of the algorithm, and "understood" how they relate to each other, and how, together, they produce the correct response.
or...
the plural of "anecdote" is not "data."
Your confusing subset with subclass. POSIX is a subset of UNIX features, so it is possible for an OS to implement that POSIX subset and still not implement all the other features that would make it a UNIX.
POSIX is *not* a subclass of UNIX, so all POSIX oses are not thereby UNIX oses.
By analogy, flight is a subset of the capabilities of birds, so it is possible for an animal to have flight capabilities and still not be a bird (bats, flying insects). "Animal with flight" is *not* a subset of "birds."
that's because
Linux
Is
Not
U
n
i
X
and Mac OS X is UNIX
Some of the world's leading authorities on Neanderthals disagree with your "no."
In particular, they point to the Lagar Velho skeleton.
"the analysis has revealed that the child exhibits distinctive characteristics of both contemporaneous European early modern humans and preceding Neandertals. It therefore provides evidence of previous admixture between Neandertals and early modern humans in southwestern Europe."
Actually during the time neanderthals lived alongside the real human ancestors, they were the smarter species of the two
Not so. During the time when both Modern Humans and Neanderthals coexisted, Modern Humans, by and large, showed evidence of the more sophisticated material culture (tools, art,etc.). Maybe you're thinking of the fact that, on average, Neanderthals had larger brains? Larger brain size does not = more intelligent. It's quite likely that Neanderthals had larger brains for the same reason that they had short, thick limbs: an evolved adaptation to the extreme cold of glacial eurasia. Neanderthal body proportions were most likely an example of Allen's Rule.
By definition, two species are distinct if they cannot breed and produce fertile offspring. The whole point of this research is to determine whether this is true or not. So this:
The fact that there is a difference at all shows we and they were two distinct species.
misses the point entirely. You and I have different dna. Does the fact that there is a difference at all make us separate species? I very much doubt it.
The whole question being researched is precisely this: how much difference was there between neanderthals and modern humans, and was it enough of a difference that they could not have interbred. It is the inability to interbreed and produce fertile offspring, not the presence of any difference at all, that determines separate species status.
The important question here is this:
At what level is software the standard component/commodity like a standard screw?
IOW, what is the standard infrastructure level of software?
kernel + filesystem + compiler?
+ desktop?
+ applications?
MS acts like the whole shebang is not infrastructure/commodity.
Apple acts like kernel + file system + compiler + utils are infrastructure/commodity but *not* the desktop and applications.
Linux/*bsd acts like the whole shebang is infrastructure/commodity.
The real question is where do we draw this line between standard/infrastructure and proprietary value-add.
A significant problem with this model is that businesses with the resources to hire developers to program custom solutions often consider software, such as the custom solution they just paid for, to be competitive assets.
Businesses rightly consider it foolish to give assets that they paid for away to their competitors. As a result, they will often be reluctant to pay for a custom solution only to have their competitors receive it for free.
Consequently, they often choose to pay for custom solutions that are proprietary, so that their important IT business assets remain theirs and theirs alone. Alternatively, they will reach for proprietary, paid solutions ensuring that competitors who wish to use the same will incur the same costs. They'll then pay their own people or contractors to customize the proprietary solution, again, ensuring that the fruits of their investment in software accrue to them only and not their competitors.
Noah Wylie is already being prepped for the role.
Hard to kill someone at ten yards with a hammer
Don't read too often about the 7 year old who accidentally killed his playmate when he found his dad's toolbox unlocked.
school children are almost never killed in the crossfire in drive by nailings
so guns are in fact more dangerous than hammers.
Yet the vast majority of Western legal systems are based on Christian principles.
This is really not true. Stealing is considered wrong in both non-christian and christian societies, so having laws against stealing is not evidence of a specifically christian legal system. Similarly murder, adultery, etc.
This is the broken argument that religious apologists always trot out. The fact is that religious people are no more likely to be moral than others (and probably quite likely to be less moral - see next paragraph). People share common moral values whether they are christian or not.
On the down side however, christians are responsible for numerous and well documented heinous atrocities specifically due to their religion (crusades, inquisition, witch burning, annihilation of heretics, etc.).
On balance, christianity has been a net cause of significant evil in the world. For more detail see Dawkins The God Delusion
I choose not to enrich them and buy a faster competitor that will run all of the programs/games/etc that I want, which the Apple won't, for a fraction of the cost.
Not only that, but if your faster competitor is a Windows machine, it will run all sorts of experiments in artificial computer life that the Mac won't run at all (I think the kids call these "viruses" nowadays, or maybe "malware")
"installing" it on a blank disk is simply making a copy. This is covered by copyright law. I.e., Apple holds the copyright, you may not make copies of it except for backup purposes or pursuant to the normal operation of the software. Speaking of which...
*Using* it from said blank disk "installation" now falls under Apple's license which clearly states that it may only be run on Apple hardware. However, as has been pointed out, all Macs come with a version of Mac OS, so actually running your blank disk "installation" of necessity constitutes an upgrade.
Of course you could make your 1 copy onto a blank disk and never run it (legal because copyright law allows back up) but you could never legally *run* your blank disk "installation" on anything other than Apple hardware.
I recommend soot black, resin, and beeswax ink on papyrus for truly archival purposes. Should get you several millenia quite easily if stored in a cool, dry location.
If the hypothetical "caveman baby" does die of a disease we're all immune to now then there most certainly has been significant evolution of the human immune system and/or cell surface proteins, etc. since the time of the "caveman baby."
Similarly if the "caveman baby" fails to marry and/or reproduce because s/he isn't well adapted to modern social systems and interactions then there certainly has been significant evolution of the human brain since "caveman baby" times, in particular evolution of social cognitive skills.
Not all significant evolution involves visible change in gross external anatomy.
You really need to read Stephen J. Gould's essay on the panda's thumb. The ad hoc, opportunistic nature of evolution is abundantly clear to those with the intellectual courage to actually look at the evidence.
No intelligent designer would craft the poorly functional panda's thumb from a wrist bone if that intelligent designer knew the "final form" beforehand. Evolution on the other hand would and did. Faced with only wrist bones to work with, evolution did the best with available material which resulted in an awkward and far from well designed result.
This is exactly what an intelligent designer who knew in advance the "final form" would not do. Such an intelligent designer would provide the necessary proto thumb in ancestors so that it was available for panda thumb evolution when needed. But evolution doesn't know the future in advance, doesn't know the "final form" (because there is none). So evolution doesn't provide handy proto organs, proto limbs, etc. to pick up and use as needed down the road. Evolution merely mutates whatever is to hand even if it results in an awkward "design."
Your "social selection" is a straw man. Human society is itself a product of natural selection. What human society does is itself the both the result of and fodder for natural selection.
You can't point at some some actions (social interaction) of a particular species (humans) and say they are somehow magically beyond the scope of natural selection. If a thing can result in differential reproductive success (and social interactions certainly can) then that thing is a basis for natural selection.
Indeed evolutionary psychologists base much of their discipline on the notion that adaptation to the human social landscape has been one of the primary driving forces in human evolution for many thousands of years.
(HINT: No, not even that. We just don't understand quantum physics yet.)
Hmm, lets see...
quantum physics: better part of a century of experimental confirmation in thousands of independent tests with accuracy exceeding any other scientific theory.
your assertion: just your say so.
Yeah, gotta go with quantum physics here.
Executive summary: The physical world really is inherently random. Deal.
In Soviet Russia, organism encodes DNA!
Not so very funny, but it does match the meme's regex.
If you meet the FSM on the road...
kill him!
sincerely,
the Buddha
Reflexes happen outside the brain proper. Instincts involve the brain (not merely a reflex arc between the peripheral nervous system and the spinal cord).
This being the distinction, any unlearned, inherited fixed response to stimulus that is mediated by the brain (not merely a reflex arc) is an instinct.
The wikipedia article on instinct gives the following (among others) as human instincts:
face recognition and perception,
disgust at noxious stimuli,
language acquisition,
so called "fight or flight" response,
sex drive,
aggression,
and others.
There is some purely definitional disagreement as to whether an unlearned inherited behavior can be called an instinct if it can be overridden by higher (i.e., cortical) brain processes, but this is just quibbling over terms, since even supposedly "lower" animals can be trained to override some instincts.
Human beings have much more powerful abilities to use cortical processes to override lower brain impulses and we are therefore less bound by instinct than other species. This does not mean that we don't have instincts, but rather that we are much more accomplished at suppressing them with cortical processing.
if something is partially visible, it's visible.
If I put my hands in my pockets, thus obscuring them, it doesn't make me invisible.