"...the fact that secular humanism is a theological proposition..."
So far you've sounded quite rational, but to call this a fact without any backup seems quite the opposite to me.
Just to make sure I knew what I was talking about, I took a look at www.secularhumanism.org. Here's a quote from the site:
"Secular humanists accept a world view or philosophy called naturalism, in which the physical laws of the universe are not superseded by non-material or supernatural entities such as demons, gods, or other 'spiritual' beings outside the realm of the natural universe."
If this is a theological proposition, it is only weakly so. It really doesn't ask whether God or gods exist, it just refuses the occurrence of miracles. How much less theological could one be? How could one be much less theological? I don't mean those as rhetorical questions.
"You say that as far as you're concerned, no death has occurred. This is not correct. You have in fact died, and your copy is unaware of it (until he wakes up - and what might be the psychological effect on that copy of realizing that his original self has in fact died.)"
But when my copy wakes up, his last memory is of going to sleep as a human. You can say the human died if you want, but as far as the machine copy is concerned he *was* that human. He remembers being that human and living through the events that led up to the transfer. If you tell him the human died, he'll say, "But *I'm* the human!" The human didn't truly die because the machine copy has picked up where he left off.
So yes, I assume that identity is not local to the brain. I assume that internal, personal identity consists of a person's memory and associations. It just so happens that the brain is what we use to store and process these things. Other people might identify you in different ways, but in a dark, quiet room where you have nothing but your thoughts, you have no other way of distinguishing yourself from, say, Russell Crowe.
This isn't scientific but I don't think it's possible to measure the difference between a truly conscious mind and a faithful simulation. I accept as an axiom the notion that the subjective experience of consciousness is an artifact of the kind of information processing our brains perform, and that the computing machinery, be it organic or not, doesn't matter.
I know you mentioned two possibilities: a move and a copy. You seemed to liken the move operation to murder, and that's what I disagreed with. If you put me to sleep, upload my mind, destroying my brain in the process, and then awaken my mind as it resides in whatever machinery we're using, that's fine with me. As far as I'm concerned, no death has occurred.
I agree that I *don't* want to wake up during the upload process, if that's possible while my brain is evaporating, liquifying, having its synapses pulled apart, etc. I don't want two of me to be awake if one of them is going to be destroyed. In other words, I want the mind that awakens after the upload process to be exactly the one that resided in my brain beforehand.
I sense that we actually agree but are using slightly different language.
"If the process is destructive of the human brain from which the mind is uploaded, then you've killed the human mind you're supposed to be preserving."
No. By suggesting that a mind *can* be uploaded, you've already rejected the possibility that the brain *is* the mind. Given that, since the mind that has been uploaded still exists after the original brain has been destroyed, no one has been killed. It works best if the mind is not conscious during the upload process. That way you're not trying to upload a dynamic object.
Actually, a good number of science fiction writers are scientists. Gregory Benford, David Brin, and Alastair Reynolds are all currently employed as scientists, for example. Isaac Asimov was a scientist as well.
Furthermore, any novelist worth his/her salt does a lot of research to make sure they know what they're talking about. So when they get the future right, it's a well-informed guess, not so much a fluke.
I'll agree that they aren't necessarily brilliant geniuses, though.
The joke would have been more effective if you had actually used milliseconds:
Pinging aliens with 32 bytes of data:
Ping statistics for aliens:
Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 4, Lost = 0 (0% loss), Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
Minimum = 4667328853423, Maximum = 4997329136475, Average = 4997328994949
Not quite. Even without the presence of other stars to mitigate the Sun's gravitational field, the escape velocity of the Sun two light years away is only about 100 m/s. I don't have exact data on how fast things move out there, but I know that stars often travel past each other at relative velocities on the order of 1 or 10 km/s. I think we can expect most other interstellar bodies to do likewise.
To see a tenfold increase in escape velocity, we need to cut the distance to 0.02 light year. This is about 1250 AU or 1.9e11 km.
In any case, astronomers consider the heliopause to be the edge of the solar system. (Google "voyager heliopause".) This boundary is thought to lie between 90 and 150 AU from the Sun.
Hear, hear. I've run into a brutish cop or two, but most of them have been very civilized and professional despite the abuse they experience from some people. Sadly, the job of a police officer is usually a thankless one. Here are my thanks, too, to help balance that condition.
"Methinks the language can be and is limiting. If you lack the words and grammar, you can have the thought but it is extremely difficult to do much more than that with it. Analysis or expression of the thought is difficult to impossible."
"I think this analogy is flawed.. I may be able to see a whole world full of colour, but without words to describe it, how do I share those thoughts?"
Both of you need to go back and actually read NTiOzymandias' post. S/He never said that expression didn't rely on language, s/he was talking about the independence of *thought* from language.
There's the classic DJ that just spins records, and there's the musical DJ that makes an artform of manipulating the turntables and knobs to musical effect. I can't suggest that the DJ is as skilled as the classical musician because I don't know, but your post does miss this important and respectable part of DJing. For all intents and purposes, the DJ's dual turntable (plus record selection) is a musical instrument.
We already see synth programmers in concert, just to let you know. (I'm just making the point here, not disagreeing with anything you said.) Erasure, for example, make a show of dancing and singing to preprogrammed music. Andy Bell and the backup singers prance around to the beat and make a reasonably good show of it. Vincent Clarke just sits there, last time I checked, and occasionally climbs his tower of synth machinery to make some manual change, presumably because it's something that can't be controlled via MIDI. The contrast is a bit odd.
In my personal opinion, producers and directors will do what they've always done. They'll settle for "good enough" when it's cheaper and practical to do so.
I don't believe these posts are trolls, either. I believe these posters genuinely believe that the guy's girlfriend is cheating on him.
However, they're probably wrong. The truth is, most women aren't like that. It's easy to think they are when we learn that they tend to misrepresent their desires to pollsters who ask, "What do you look for in a man?" And it's tempting to attribute to evil what is more likely the result of mere mediocrity. It's tempting to get angry and think**, "These bitches must be lying about what they want," especially after hearing all these stories about women who pass up the "nice guy", only to call him up on the phone for solace when her asshole boyfriend mistreats her.
It's true that there are a lot of uncivilized idiots out there, and that about half of them are women. But a good portion of people, including women, aren't like that. If you disagree, I respectfully suggest you consider what you might do to improve your own situation.
On the other hand, if she's not getting what she needs from her own boyfriend, she might very well become emotionally involved with someone more local. Sometimes she'll end up going to bed with the guy instead of just breaking up with her boyfriend. That's truly shitty but it usually comes more from selfishness or anger than an actual lack of caring for her boyfriend's feelings.
The poster who suggested asking the girlfriend what she wants was right on. The thing is, we're not getting the entire story in this case. Maybe this guy has already discussed this with his girlfriend. Maybe he was exaggerating about his three-minute limit on the telephone. Or maybe he truly is a dork who deserves whatever he gets. Anyway, let's just answer his question instead of jumping to conclusions about the level of his girlfriend's fidelity.
** Especially when you're not getting any. I know this from experience.
This is one of the few ways you can actually get caught committing sodomy. So if you live somewhere with medieval sex laws, watch out.
Can I use FuckU-FuckMe for anal or oral sex?
Certainly! But be sure to set the preferences to oral/anal for best results. Ensure first that these acts are legal in your state. We cannot be held responsible for the legal consequences of extracoital use.
Awwww, too bad you didn't get the joke. Don't you look silly. No one here is going to call you names like "buttwad" or "retard" because of it, though. They'd just be making themselves look bad. Get it?
I happen to think my fear of "all things nuclear" is eminently rational, thank you very much.
Chernobyl? No cause for alarm... Three Mile Island? Hiroshima anyone? What about a "dirty bomb?"
So you list Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, Hiroshima, and dirty bombs. That's not "all things nuclear", that's "a few things nuclear, carefully selected by an alarmist to sound as scary as possible."
I'm sick to death of hearing people use logical fallacies to support their opinions, thus abusing their right to be speak, especially when they're trying to constrain other people's actions.
An unfalsifiable hypothesis will never be proven wrong; that doesn't make it true in the eyes of a scientist.
However, I'll assume that you were speaking in the context of serious science. A theory doesn't become "truth" until the amount of existing corroborating evidence and fruitless searches for refutative evidence is appropriate for the strength of the claim.
It is true that scientists measure the strength of a prediction by asking, "What is the probability that random chance could produce this level of agreement between theory and experiment?" But nobody does this by dividing the number of successful experiments by the number of possible unconducted experiments. This is as it should be because scientists assume that the universe is subject to understandable rules.
If a repeated experiment has been devised and carried out carefully enough, it is safe to assume that the outcome of that experiment will always be the same.
Now, a theory basically says, "The relationship between parameter X and parameter Y is Z." So an experiment varies parameter X and looks at parameter Y. To evaluate how close the prediction is to the outcome, scientists use the Chi-Squared Test, which returns a probability that random chance could produce such a good fit. So when you read a paper describing some study and it reports something like "p=0.03", that's saying that there's a three per cent chance that the positive outcome was just lucky. In general, a publishable study should achieve p<0.05.
I'd be vastly surprised if any serious philosopher put that argument forth. I'd be even more surprised if anyone who knew something about the philosophy of science had trouble trying to answer it. I'd be even more surprised if anyone bothered to write about it in a book except to comment about how surprising it is that any serious philosopher put that argument forth.
Hm, perhaps I'm missing something here. I disagree that anything more than common sense is missing in our current attempts to automate NLP. Now, in the term "common sense" I include the ability to employ context in the interpretation of natural language. I also exclude those texts that are not straightforward. For example, the text of a news report is something I'd label "straightforward", while good poetry and certain fictional works (like _Ulysses_) are more in my "oblique" category.
Perhaps the difference in our points of view lies in what we think computerized NLP must do in order to be considered a success. I would be thoroughly thrilled if we got a computer to read USA Today. This is what I mean when I say that deconstruction is unnecessary in this case. I think you'll agree that people don't deconstruct the news, they just read it.
Slashdot Mirror
If you're interested in continuing this discussion you'll answer the questions I posed, which I said were not rhetorical.
"...the fact that secular humanism is a theological proposition..."
So far you've sounded quite rational, but to call this a fact without any backup seems quite the opposite to me.
Just to make sure I knew what I was talking about, I took a look at www.secularhumanism.org. Here's a quote from the site:
"Secular humanists accept a world view or philosophy called naturalism, in which the physical laws of the universe are not superseded by non-material or supernatural entities such as demons, gods, or other 'spiritual' beings outside the realm of the natural universe."
If this is a theological proposition, it is only weakly so. It really doesn't ask whether God or gods exist, it just refuses the occurrence of miracles. How much less theological could one be? How could one be much less theological? I don't mean those as rhetorical questions.
"You say that as far as you're concerned, no death has occurred. This is not correct. You have in fact died, and your copy is unaware of it (until he wakes up - and what might be the psychological effect on that copy of realizing that his original self has in fact died.)"
But when my copy wakes up, his last memory is of going to sleep as a human. You can say the human died if you want, but as far as the machine copy is concerned he *was* that human. He remembers being that human and living through the events that led up to the transfer. If you tell him the human died, he'll say, "But *I'm* the human!" The human didn't truly die because the machine copy has picked up where he left off.
So yes, I assume that identity is not local to the brain. I assume that internal, personal identity consists of a person's memory and associations. It just so happens that the brain is what we use to store and process these things. Other people might identify you in different ways, but in a dark, quiet room where you have nothing but your thoughts, you have no other way of distinguishing yourself from, say, Russell Crowe.
This isn't scientific but I don't think it's possible to measure the difference between a truly conscious mind and a faithful simulation. I accept as an axiom the notion that the subjective experience of consciousness is an artifact of the kind of information processing our brains perform, and that the computing machinery, be it organic or not, doesn't matter.
I know you mentioned two possibilities: a move and a copy. You seemed to liken the move operation to murder, and that's what I disagreed with. If you put me to sleep, upload my mind, destroying my brain in the process, and then awaken my mind as it resides in whatever machinery we're using, that's fine with me. As far as I'm concerned, no death has occurred.
I agree that I *don't* want to wake up during the upload process, if that's possible while my brain is evaporating, liquifying, having its synapses pulled apart, etc. I don't want two of me to be awake if one of them is going to be destroyed. In other words, I want the mind that awakens after the upload process to be exactly the one that resided in my brain beforehand.
I sense that we actually agree but are using slightly different language.
"If the process is destructive of the human brain from which the mind is uploaded, then you've killed the human mind you're supposed to be preserving."
No. By suggesting that a mind *can* be uploaded, you've already rejected the possibility that the brain *is* the mind. Given that, since the mind that has been uploaded still exists after the original brain has been destroyed, no one has been killed. It works best if the mind is not conscious during the upload process. That way you're not trying to upload a dynamic object.
This is all very hypothetical, of course.
Actually, a good number of science fiction writers are scientists. Gregory Benford, David Brin, and Alastair Reynolds are all currently employed as scientists, for example. Isaac Asimov was a scientist as well.
Furthermore, any novelist worth his/her salt does a lot of research to make sure they know what they're talking about. So when they get the future right, it's a well-informed guess, not so much a fluke.
I'll agree that they aren't necessarily brilliant geniuses, though.
Juice.
It's about a two-hundredth of a football field.
Argghhhhhh! I got the numbers wrong! Must...wash...hands!!! 1...2...3...4...5...
The joke would have been more effective if you had actually used milliseconds:
Pinging aliens with 32 bytes of data:
Ping statistics for aliens:
Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 4, Lost = 0 (0% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
Minimum = 4667328853423, Maximum = 4997329136475, Average = 4997328994949
+5 Something, I'm Not Sure What. You said exactly what I was thinking except for the Air Wolf thing, which surprised me but is true nonetheless.
However, I must point out that you put "its" where you should have put "it's", making you equally guilty of failing to proofread your post.
And everyone really should go and download the Air Wolf theme right now -- it truly is fucking brilliant. The same goes for the Knight Rider theme.
Most people are, so I'd say it's a safe bet.
Not quite. Even without the presence of other stars to mitigate the Sun's gravitational field, the escape velocity of the Sun two light years away is only about 100 m/s. I don't have exact data on how fast things move out there, but I know that stars often travel past each other at relative velocities on the order of 1 or 10 km/s. I think we can expect most other interstellar bodies to do likewise.
To see a tenfold increase in escape velocity, we need to cut the distance to 0.02 light year. This is about 1250 AU or 1.9e11 km.
In any case, astronomers consider the heliopause to be the edge of the solar system. (Google "voyager heliopause".) This boundary is thought to lie between 90 and 150 AU from the Sun.
Yeah, I was thinking, "Who would steal a laptop alarm?"
Then I thought, "Oh, someone was alarmed by a stolen laptop." I'd find that pretty alarming.
But seriously, I can see how an alarm would be useful for a stolen laptop. I mean, whoever took it knows that you can't trust anyone.
Last year I chipped a store with a microwave.
Hear, hear. I've run into a brutish cop or two, but most of them have been very civilized and professional despite the abuse they experience from some people. Sadly, the job of a police officer is usually a thankless one. Here are my thanks, too, to help balance that condition.
"Methinks the language can be and is limiting.
If you lack the words and grammar, you can have the thought but it is extremely difficult to do much more than that with it. Analysis or expression of the thought is difficult to impossible."
"I think this analogy is flawed.. I may be able to see a whole world full of colour, but without words to describe it, how do I share those thoughts?"
Both of you need to go back and actually read NTiOzymandias' post. S/He never said that expression didn't rely on language, s/he was talking about the independence of *thought* from language.
There's the classic DJ that just spins records, and there's the musical DJ that makes an artform of manipulating the turntables and knobs to musical effect. I can't suggest that the DJ is as skilled as the classical musician because I don't know, but your post does miss this important and respectable part of DJing. For all intents and purposes, the DJ's dual turntable (plus record selection) is a musical instrument.
We already see synth programmers in concert, just to let you know. (I'm just making the point here, not disagreeing with anything you said.) Erasure, for example, make a show of dancing and singing to preprogrammed music. Andy Bell and the backup singers prance around to the beat and make a reasonably good show of it. Vincent Clarke just sits there, last time I checked, and occasionally climbs his tower of synth machinery to make some manual change, presumably because it's something that can't be controlled via MIDI. The contrast is a bit odd.
In my personal opinion, producers and directors will do what they've always done. They'll settle for "good enough" when it's cheaper and practical to do so.
I don't believe these posts are trolls, either. I believe these posters genuinely believe that the guy's girlfriend is cheating on him.
However, they're probably wrong. The truth is, most women aren't like that. It's easy to think they are when we learn that they tend to misrepresent their desires to pollsters who ask, "What do you look for in a man?" And it's tempting to attribute to evil what is more likely the result of mere mediocrity. It's tempting to get angry and think**, "These bitches must be lying about what they want," especially after hearing all these stories about women who pass up the "nice guy", only to call him up on the phone for solace when her asshole boyfriend mistreats her.
It's true that there are a lot of uncivilized idiots out there, and that about half of them are women. But a good portion of people, including women, aren't like that. If you disagree, I respectfully suggest you consider what you might do to improve your own situation.
On the other hand, if she's not getting what she needs from her own boyfriend, she might very well become emotionally involved with someone more local. Sometimes she'll end up going to bed with the guy instead of just breaking up with her boyfriend. That's truly shitty but it usually comes more from selfishness or anger than an actual lack of caring for her boyfriend's feelings.
The poster who suggested asking the girlfriend what she wants was right on. The thing is, we're not getting the entire story in this case. Maybe this guy has already discussed this with his girlfriend. Maybe he was exaggerating about his three-minute limit on the telephone. Or maybe he truly is a dork who deserves whatever he gets. Anyway, let's just answer his question instead of jumping to conclusions about the level of his girlfriend's fidelity.
** Especially when you're not getting any. I know this from experience.
Can I use FuckU-FuckMe for anal or oral sex?
Certainly! But be sure to set the preferences to oral/anal for best results. Ensure first that these acts are legal in your state. We cannot be held responsible for the legal consequences of extracoital use.
Awwww, too bad you didn't get the joke. Don't you look silly. No one here is going to call you names like "buttwad" or "retard" because of it, though. They'd just be making themselves look bad. Get it?
Chernobyl? No cause for alarm... Three Mile Island? Hiroshima anyone? What about a "dirty bomb?"
So you list Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, Hiroshima, and dirty bombs. That's not "all things nuclear", that's "a few things nuclear, carefully selected by an alarmist to sound as scary as possible."
I'm sick to death of hearing people use logical fallacies to support their opinions, thus abusing their right to be speak, especially when they're trying to constrain other people's actions.
Wouldn't these things just make it famous?
However, I'll assume that you were speaking in the context of serious science. A theory doesn't become "truth" until the amount of existing corroborating evidence and fruitless searches for refutative evidence is appropriate for the strength of the claim.
It is true that scientists measure the strength of a prediction by asking, "What is the probability that random chance could produce this level of agreement between theory and experiment?" But nobody does this by dividing the number of successful experiments by the number of possible unconducted experiments. This is as it should be because scientists assume that the universe is subject to understandable rules. If a repeated experiment has been devised and carried out carefully enough, it is safe to assume that the outcome of that experiment will always be the same.
Now, a theory basically says, "The relationship between parameter X and parameter Y is Z." So an experiment varies parameter X and looks at parameter Y. To evaluate how close the prediction is to the outcome, scientists use the Chi-Squared Test, which returns a probability that random chance could produce such a good fit. So when you read a paper describing some study and it reports something like "p=0.03", that's saying that there's a three per cent chance that the positive outcome was just lucky. In general, a publishable study should achieve p<0.05.
I'd be vastly surprised if any serious philosopher put that argument forth. I'd be even more surprised if anyone who knew something about the philosophy of science had trouble trying to answer it. I'd be even more surprised if anyone bothered to write about it in a book except to comment about how surprising it is that any serious philosopher put that argument forth.
Hm, perhaps I'm missing something here. I disagree that anything more than common sense is missing in our current attempts to automate NLP. Now, in the term "common sense" I include the ability to employ context in the interpretation of natural language. I also exclude those texts that are not straightforward. For example, the text of a news report is something I'd label "straightforward", while good poetry and certain fictional works (like _Ulysses_) are more in my "oblique" category.
Perhaps the difference in our points of view lies in what we think computerized NLP must do in order to be considered a success. I would be thoroughly thrilled if we got a computer to read USA Today. This is what I mean when I say that deconstruction is unnecessary in this case. I think you'll agree that people don't deconstruct the news, they just read it.