No it's an analogy. I don't know why you find it patronizing. If you think it's a bad analogy, then I would think you would make an argument of why you think it's a bad analogy.
If we need to wait to before we have a deep understanding of thought before we can say that something is thinking, it means it will be decades maybe centuries before we can say that humans are even thinking.
You've pushed the analogy way too far. I think you are not taking this seriously and just want to argue.
Can you please stop saying things like this. It's rude. I am absolutely saying this because I believe and not "just to argue". It's not like I'm making this stuff up. There is a whole field of philosophy called functionalism.
The real question is why you want to hold out for a definition of thought that may not even come within our lifetime, before we can be allowed to say that anyone or anything is thinking. Of course other people are thinking. We don't need to wait for any scientific research. We just need to define thinking as the thing that humans are doing right now (whatever that is).
Encryption is harder to crack than other ways of stealing from people. We use encryption for almost all e-commerce and banking right now. It's not impossible to circumvent it, but it's hard enough that it happens only rarely.
The best you can do is make the human the weakest link in the chain (i.e. everything else is stronger), and mitigate the number of things that a human must do correctly to achieve proper security.
You are supposed to encrypt your wallet. In fact you should be able to leave your encrypted wallet in a public place it doesn't need to be on a thumb drive. You can have it freely available on a website.
If you sell 20 bitcoins and use the money to buy 20 new bitcoins, I think this is untraceable from the info in the blockchain. That's because there is no link between the old bitcoins, the virtual dollars that existed (only in IOU form), and the new bitcoins (in the new wallet). The exchange has this information, but the exchange might not be in the jurisdiction of the FBI.
So let me pose another question. We all started as a single celled organism (a zygote), this eventually turns into a human being with a fully functioning brain. How is the zygote able to a create something so much more complicated. Clearly a zygote doesn't understand how a brain works. Even people with brains don't understand how brains work. Clearly it is possible to create a working brain without knowing how one works. Human beings do it all the time when they have children.
There is a way that brains develop on their own. Through embryonic development and in the bigger picture through evolution by natural selection. These are things that happen without anybody needing to understand how they work.
I am saying that in the same way that humans make embryos with proro-brains that then develop themselves into full human brains, we may be able to make a proto-artificial brain, that has similar basic properties, and the macro effect is that it can grow and learn in a process similar to human development.
We have to know what "flies just as good" means before we can tell. We are nowhere near that with thought.
We are no where near making something that "flies just as good". Even someone who knows nothing about advanced aviation or aerodynamics can tell you if an airplane can fly if they see it flying or actually go somewhere in the airplane.
The Wright brothers did not have the advanced aerodynamic models that we have now, but they were able to make a flying machine, and everyone (even laymen) were able to authoritatively claim that they had in fact made the first heavier than air flying machine. You don't need to know aerodynimcs for this. All you need to do is come up with a sensible definition for what "flying" is (not necessarily how it works), like "it stayed in the air for more than 1 minute and weighed more than air".
Maybe you say that the wright flier doesn't "fly as good" as an f-16. That's true. But it flies "good enough" to be flying. My definition of "flies as good" is just "it can fly by the same definition of flying".
There are probably higher levels of consciousness than what humans have. The Turing test is a measure that something "thinks as good as a human". Maybe humans are not perfect judges of thought. We are so far the best judges of thought. We can at least judge the consciousness of a machine to the same level that we can judge the consciousness of other humans (which we do all the time without knowing how consciousness works).
This is not true. One of the reasons we make models is *to* gain a deep understanding. We model complex collisions in physics simulators because we *don't* know what will happen. We know some basics about how things work at a low level and we run it through a computer simulation to figure out what the macro effects of large systems following simple rules will be.
It is going to be easier to figure out how a neuron works before we figure out how the brain works. In the same way that we can figure out how a a galaxy will collide with another galaxy just by plugging in simple rules for gravity and running a simulator, we may be able to make a virtual consciousness simply by modeling neurons good enough.
I made a spelling mistake and then here's your insult:
The fact that you think philosophy is about "wondering if the universe is real or imagined" just shows me that you don;t really know what philosophy is.
I'm sorry you feel insulted by this, but I think it is true that you do not have a good understanding of the role of philosophy in this discussion.
I do not think it is the correct tool for anything other than a very elaborate (and probably very useful) mechanical turk - a cargo cult idol of thought and not the real thing and pone to failures not exhibited by the real thing.
So lets use a cargo cult as an example. Lets say some island natives make fake airplanes in order to try to get more cargo. The airplanes don't fly because they only look like airplanes. They are obvious fakes. You are saying the cargo cultists could never make a a real airplane. What I am saying is that if their copy of an airplane actually flies then it is a real airplane (even if it's a cargo cult "copy").
What is the difference between a real airplane and a fake airplane if the fake airplane flies just as good as the real one?
Enough protection to provide enough of a financial incentive to actually still make the design. If it cost $100 million in R&D to come up with the iphone, then ideally they would be able to make this much money + more as a reward for coming up with a good design. I don't see any reason to give them much more than that. The ultimate goal of patents is to drive innovation, not reward people for their hard work. The reward is a means to an end.
I'm pretty sure you can trace cash if you really wanted to. I think it's probably harder in some ways than tracing bitcoin, but it's easier in other ways. With bitcoin it's trivially easy to create new wallets and transfer money between them. Trying to figure out who owns which wallet might be possible in a lot of circumstances, but you can exchange money between different wallets orders of magnitude more time with bitcoin than would be practical with real money.
You could sell 20 bitcoins on an exchange and use that money to buy 20 new bitcoins under a different wallet. This would be pretty hard for the FBI to trace because the $1000 that temporarily existed in your escrow account may have never really existed except as an IOU from the exchange. And now you have 20 different bitcoins in a different wallet, that is untraceable by anyone looking only at the blockchain.
Taking someone from 'running the worlds dirtiest power producing technology' to suddenly 'caring about the planet' may be harder than it sounds unless its actually written into the contract or something else is made to look like a lot better investment. The filthy rich have a tendency to love money unfortunately.
You have a few options. You can buy them out. If they only care about money, then they shouldn't care if it comes from being paid to run a coal plant or from being paid *not* to run a coal plant. The other thing you can do is force the coal plant owner to pay for the cost of the mitigating the pollution and greenhouse gases, which will in turn be passed on to customers. It may turn out not to be profitable to run a coal plant if they do this.
More expensive energy might not be such a bad thing. I probably wouldn't shutdown all the coal plants simultaneously. But I think having energy be gradually more expensive as we replace coal with alternatives will encourage people to be more energy efficient.
If we were going to opt for a completely free market approach, we would probably add a carbon/pollution tax on energy made from coal (i.e. fixing this externality), which would also make energy more expensive.
So if someone is not opposed to murder (e.g. murderers), then they shouldn't have to pay for the police to conduct murder investigations?
I'm cool with making people who want a library to pay for a library, but there are some things that really are for the greater public good, and it just makes sense to use tax money for those things (e.g. roads, military, law enforcement, fire department, pollution mitigation, etc).
I fully support making this change in a way that makes everyone better off. I don't think the people running coal power plants are necessarily evil or deserve to lose their livelihood, but we find ourselves in a position where coal is just not a good thing to be doing.
Bitcoins are not different from every other asset that can be converted to cash (for this case). Bitcoins are different than money in a bank account in terms of the ability of a government with regulatory power over a bank to freeze a persons assets.
The government can't call up a bank somewhere and pressure them into taking away your bitcoins. Like cash in your physical possession, if the government wants it, they have to come and get it from you (or hack into your computer).
You are supposed to be a citizen of your state first, and then a citizen of the United States second.
What does this even mean? Whenever the interests of the state oppose the interests of the country you are supposed to say "fuck the country", and do what's best for your state?
When a relatively small number of voters decide the election in the case where most voters don't care enough to vote, the local politician is certainly accountable to the few people that actually vote, but he/she is not accountable to the population as a whole.
Maybe the people who didn't vote don't deserve to be heard since they didn't care enough to vote. I wouldn't disagree with this. But I think it is easy for the government to be hijacked by a vocal minority, and this is still a bad outcome for everybody but the minority.
If only a few hundred of us agree that he needs to go, he's gone.
That trick works against good representatives as well as bad ones.
If you look at primaries in this country, they are dominated by the extreme wings of the democrat and republican parties. Only about 5% of the people that vote in the general election also vote in the primaries. It is the extremists who decide the primary candidates, who are then forced to try to court the middle after winning a primary. It is pretty hard for a true centrist candidate to win a primary.
Given the fact that our election system seems perfectly designed to polarize people into left or right, I don't think something as simple as giving state governments more control is going to have much of an effect on improving things.
accountability != getting to talk to your representative on the phone
I think it's great if you can do that. I think contributes to the potential for accountability. But it takes more than just this.
I would argue that the single biggest enemy to accountability is an apathetic electorate. A state senator can't talk to 60,000 people (approximately how many people they represent). The reason you can call your state senator is because almost nobody else in the state is. And the reason that they talk to you is because they know that a few hundred votes could sway an election (because very few of the 60,000 people they represent are even going to vote).
If we had an engaged electorate, you would never be able to get a hold of your state senator. They would be just as busy as national senators are now. That wouldn't make them less accountable, it would make them more accountable
Slashdot Mirror
No it's an analogy. I don't know why you find it patronizing. If you think it's a bad analogy, then I would think you would make an argument of why you think it's a bad analogy.
But about thought? No.
YES ABOUT THOUGHT!
If we need to wait to before we have a deep understanding of thought before we can say that something is thinking, it means it will be decades maybe centuries before we can say that humans are even thinking.
You've pushed the analogy way too far. I think you are not taking this seriously and just want to argue.
Can you please stop saying things like this. It's rude. I am absolutely saying this because I believe and not "just to argue". It's not like I'm making this stuff up. There is a whole field of philosophy called functionalism.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Functionalism_%28philosophy_of_mind%29
The real question is why you want to hold out for a definition of thought that may not even come within our lifetime, before we can be allowed to say that anyone or anything is thinking. Of course other people are thinking. We don't need to wait for any scientific research. We just need to define thinking as the thing that humans are doing right now (whatever that is).
Encryption is harder to crack than other ways of stealing from people. We use encryption for almost all e-commerce and banking right now. It's not impossible to circumvent it, but it's hard enough that it happens only rarely.
The best you can do is make the human the weakest link in the chain (i.e. everything else is stronger), and mitigate the number of things that a human must do correctly to achieve proper security.
You are supposed to encrypt your wallet. In fact you should be able to leave your encrypted wallet in a public place it doesn't need to be on a thumb drive. You can have it freely available on a website.
If you sell 20 bitcoins and use the money to buy 20 new bitcoins, I think this is untraceable from the info in the blockchain. That's because there is no link between the old bitcoins, the virtual dollars that existed (only in IOU form), and the new bitcoins (in the new wallet). The exchange has this information, but the exchange might not be in the jurisdiction of the FBI.
So let me pose another question. We all started as a single celled organism (a zygote), this eventually turns into a human being with a fully functioning brain. How is the zygote able to a create something so much more complicated. Clearly a zygote doesn't understand how a brain works. Even people with brains don't understand how brains work. Clearly it is possible to create a working brain without knowing how one works. Human beings do it all the time when they have children.
There is a way that brains develop on their own. Through embryonic development and in the bigger picture through evolution by natural selection. These are things that happen without anybody needing to understand how they work.
I am saying that in the same way that humans make embryos with proro-brains that then develop themselves into full human brains, we may be able to make a proto-artificial brain, that has similar basic properties, and the macro effect is that it can grow and learn in a process similar to human development.
We have to know what "flies just as good" means before we can tell. We are nowhere near that with thought.
We are no where near making something that "flies just as good". Even someone who knows nothing about advanced aviation or aerodynamics can tell you if an airplane can fly if they see it flying or actually go somewhere in the airplane.
The Wright brothers did not have the advanced aerodynamic models that we have now, but they were able to make a flying machine, and everyone (even laymen) were able to authoritatively claim that they had in fact made the first heavier than air flying machine. You don't need to know aerodynimcs for this. All you need to do is come up with a sensible definition for what "flying" is (not necessarily how it works), like "it stayed in the air for more than 1 minute and weighed more than air".
Maybe you say that the wright flier doesn't "fly as good" as an f-16. That's true. But it flies "good enough" to be flying. My definition of "flies as good" is just "it can fly by the same definition of flying".
There are probably higher levels of consciousness than what humans have. The Turing test is a measure that something "thinks as good as a human". Maybe humans are not perfect judges of thought. We are so far the best judges of thought. We can at least judge the consciousness of a machine to the same level that we can judge the consciousness of other humans (which we do all the time without knowing how consciousness works).
We need a deep understanding to model it.
This is not true. One of the reasons we make models is *to* gain a deep understanding. We model complex collisions in physics simulators because we *don't* know what will happen. We know some basics about how things work at a low level and we run it through a computer simulation to figure out what the macro effects of large systems following simple rules will be.
It is going to be easier to figure out how a neuron works before we figure out how the brain works. In the same way that we can figure out how a a galaxy will collide with another galaxy just by plugging in simple rules for gravity and running a simulator, we may be able to make a virtual consciousness simply by modeling neurons good enough.
I made a spelling mistake and then here's your insult:
The fact that you think philosophy is about "wondering if the universe is real or imagined" just shows me that you don;t really know what philosophy is.
I'm sorry you feel insulted by this, but I think it is true that you do not have a good understanding of the role of philosophy in this discussion.
I do not think it is the correct tool for anything other than a very elaborate (and probably very useful) mechanical turk - a cargo cult idol of thought and not the real thing and pone to failures not exhibited by the real thing.
So lets use a cargo cult as an example. Lets say some island natives make fake airplanes in order to try to get more cargo. The airplanes don't fly because they only look like airplanes. They are obvious fakes. You are saying the cargo cultists could never make a a real airplane. What I am saying is that if their copy of an airplane actually flies then it is a real airplane (even if it's a cargo cult "copy").
What is the difference between a real airplane and a fake airplane if the fake airplane flies just as good as the real one?
Enough protection to provide enough of a financial incentive to actually still make the design. If it cost $100 million in R&D to come up with the iphone, then ideally they would be able to make this much money + more as a reward for coming up with a good design. I don't see any reason to give them much more than that. The ultimate goal of patents is to drive innovation, not reward people for their hard work. The reward is a means to an end.
I'm pretty sure you can trace cash if you really wanted to. I think it's probably harder in some ways than tracing bitcoin, but it's easier in other ways. With bitcoin it's trivially easy to create new wallets and transfer money between them. Trying to figure out who owns which wallet might be possible in a lot of circumstances, but you can exchange money between different wallets orders of magnitude more time with bitcoin than would be practical with real money.
You could sell 20 bitcoins on an exchange and use that money to buy 20 new bitcoins under a different wallet. This would be pretty hard for the FBI to trace because the $1000 that temporarily existed in your escrow account may have never really existed except as an IOU from the exchange. And now you have 20 different bitcoins in a different wallet, that is untraceable by anyone looking only at the blockchain.
Are you also a member of your city 1st and a member of your state 2nd?
Taking someone from 'running the worlds dirtiest power producing technology' to suddenly 'caring about the planet' may be harder than it sounds unless its actually written into the contract or something else is made to look like a lot better investment. The filthy rich have a tendency to love money unfortunately.
You have a few options. You can buy them out. If they only care about money, then they shouldn't care if it comes from being paid to run a coal plant or from being paid *not* to run a coal plant. The other thing you can do is force the coal plant owner to pay for the cost of the mitigating the pollution and greenhouse gases, which will in turn be passed on to customers. It may turn out not to be profitable to run a coal plant if they do this.
More expensive energy might not be such a bad thing. I probably wouldn't shutdown all the coal plants simultaneously. But I think having energy be gradually more expensive as we replace coal with alternatives will encourage people to be more energy efficient.
If we were going to opt for a completely free market approach, we would probably add a carbon/pollution tax on energy made from coal (i.e. fixing this externality), which would also make energy more expensive.
So if someone is not opposed to murder (e.g. murderers), then they shouldn't have to pay for the police to conduct murder investigations?
I'm cool with making people who want a library to pay for a library, but there are some things that really are for the greater public good, and it just makes sense to use tax money for those things (e.g. roads, military, law enforcement, fire department, pollution mitigation, etc).
Seems like the obvious move.
I fully support making this change in a way that makes everyone better off. I don't think the people running coal power plants are necessarily evil or deserve to lose their livelihood, but we find ourselves in a position where coal is just not a good thing to be doing.
Bitcoins are not different from every other asset that can be converted to cash (for this case). Bitcoins are different than money in a bank account in terms of the ability of a government with regulatory power over a bank to freeze a persons assets.
The government can't call up a bank somewhere and pressure them into taking away your bitcoins. Like cash in your physical possession, if the government wants it, they have to come and get it from you (or hack into your computer).
If only his assets were all in bitcoins, then the US government wouldn't be able to freeze them.
You figured I was someone who would tell a pretentious prick to go fuck themselves? Congratulations!
The way politicians are answerable is through voting. I don't need my representative to live near me. I need them to do their job well.
You are supposed to be a citizen of your state first, and then a citizen of the United States second.
What does this even mean? Whenever the interests of the state oppose the interests of the country you are supposed to say "fuck the country", and do what's best for your state?
When a relatively small number of voters decide the election in the case where most voters don't care enough to vote, the local politician is certainly accountable to the few people that actually vote, but he/she is not accountable to the population as a whole.
Maybe the people who didn't vote don't deserve to be heard since they didn't care enough to vote. I wouldn't disagree with this. But I think it is easy for the government to be hijacked by a vocal minority, and this is still a bad outcome for everybody but the minority.
If only a few hundred of us agree that he needs to go, he's gone.
That trick works against good representatives as well as bad ones.
If you look at primaries in this country, they are dominated by the extreme wings of the democrat and republican parties. Only about 5% of the people that vote in the general election also vote in the primaries. It is the extremists who decide the primary candidates, who are then forced to try to court the middle after winning a primary. It is pretty hard for a true centrist candidate to win a primary.
Given the fact that our election system seems perfectly designed to polarize people into left or right, I don't think something as simple as giving state governments more control is going to have much of an effect on improving things.
Go fuck yourself
accountability != getting to talk to your representative on the phone
I think it's great if you can do that. I think contributes to the potential for accountability. But it takes more than just this.
I would argue that the single biggest enemy to accountability is an apathetic electorate. A state senator can't talk to 60,000 people (approximately how many people they represent). The reason you can call your state senator is because almost nobody else in the state is. And the reason that they talk to you is because they know that a few hundred votes could sway an election (because very few of the 60,000 people they represent are even going to vote).
If we had an engaged electorate, you would never be able to get a hold of your state senator. They would be just as busy as national senators are now. That wouldn't make them less accountable, it would make them more accountable