I have no idea what they actually did, but I assume you could set up a remote x-ray to be taken while nobody was near the bomb. Doctors do something similar in their offices to avoid radiation exposure to themselves.
I suppose a trigger could have been set to activate 10 minutes after exposure to x-rays, but at some point you need to take some calculated risks.
Intentionally leaving a backpack unattended at a sports event (or an airport) is sufficient to cause alarm. It doesn't need to look like a bomb to be suspicious. This is why the Boston bomb hoax LED signs were suspicious. If they weren't deposited all over the city they would be about as mundane as Ahmed's clock.
On Friday, embattled HP was hit with a new lawsuit filed by the state of Michigan over a 10-year-old, $49 million project that called for HP to replace a legacy mainframe-based system built in the 1960s.
I am OK with people waiving around cell phones in public. If someone doesn't know what a gun looks like, but thinks someone is waiving a gun "in their face", and calls the cops on their own gun (or cell phone), then they are a fucking idiot. The person waiving a cell phone should not have any legal consequences, and the person who called the cops and those that defend him should be publicly ridiculed.
Unless you make it to not look like a lump. That's the point. You can't tell just by looking.
You can't always, but this is one of the few cases where you could.
A bit of explosive the size of a 45 will do a good job of dispersing a biological agent in a room, and the fleeing people will do a good job of dispersing it further.
How do you know a high school kid doesn't have weaponized anthrax hidden in a.45 round? Because it's fucking retarded.
The claim that you can see it isn't a bomb because you can see it doesn't have any explosive is just silly.
The standard of proof isn't "Could the CIA make a bomb that looks like this common object". The standard of proof is "Does it make sense for a high school kid to have a bomb that looks like this. Because if that's not your standard of proof, then you will be calling the bomb squad hundreds of times a day.
What, specifically, does "explosive" look like? Or more important, what would you LIKE it to look like?
Do explosives ever just look like bare electronics? There's not a lot of room to hide explosives on PCBs. Not to mention it will draw a lot of unwanted suspicion from idiot teachers.
You have specific evidence that he was singled out because of his race? Or is that your own bias showing?
Everyone is biased. So I am biased into thinking other people are biased, and that's probably a good thing.
You can call it bias, or just intuition. I think pretty much everyone had the same intuition that these teachers factored in Ahmed's race/religion/name/etc into their internal calculation of whether what he had was a bomb.
The courts can weigh the evidence. I think people are totally justified in having their own intuition and expressing their beliefs until the evidence is properly weighed.
If so, why then so much less outrage & support for the kid who pointed a chicken finger at another student [www.cbc.ca], or the pop-tart gun kid [huffingtonpost.com], or the kid who wrote a story about shooting a dinosaur [examiner.com]? I don't think any of them got invited to the White House.
Those are not the same. Those are instances of ridiculous zero tolerance policies gone amok. I don't think anyone involved in those incidents sensed a hint of danger. I don't doubt that some of these teachers really thought this clock was a bomb. But it's just very easy for everyone who is actually aware of typical biases to see how Ahmed was probably treated differently than if some nerdy white or asian kid had a bunch of electronics, and pointing out this double standard.
Telling people what bombs really look like is misleading.
I suppose it would be misleading to tell really dumb people (the ones who are prone to thinking *all* bombs look the same) this is was *a* real bomb looks like). But telling a dumb person pretty much anything will typically mislead them.
So apparently Ahmed didn't even build this clock. He just took the electronics from an old 70's alarm clock out of it's housing, and put it in another case.
I don't think you could get passed a whitehouse security checkpoint with a backpack containing an unaltered 70's alarm clock.
But I would expect Whitehouse (where the president of the United States lives and works) security to be more strict than at a high school (which is a target for almost no one).
However, if sentience, consciousness, and intelligence have any sort of meaning that at all coincides with commonly accepted definitions, please do explain scientifically how a neural net might have those traits if it has never had connections to the outside world and doesn't even show signs of oscillation.
I didn't say that this neural net had *no* connections to the outside world. I said it would be lacking external sensory inputs. The outputs are the only way you *could* measure anything, including sentience, consciousness, etc.
And originally this meant a brain that lacked traditional sensory organs (e.g. eyes, ears, etc). In fact in my original reply to drinkypoo, I references a two way communication line to the brain. But I actually don't think 2 way communication is necessary for sentience, intelligence, consciousness, although I think it would be very helpful in more accurately determining of those properties are really there. The only objective way I know of to determine if something is conscious is a Turing test. There are however numerous ways in which conscious beings would be unable to pass the Turing test.
Oscillations are not even a direct measure of consciousness anyway. Something that passes the Turing test is no doubt conscious regardless of what other observations can be made about it's oscillations.
I imagine that even without 2-way commutation, it is conceivable to detect convincing evidence of intelligence, sentience, consciousness, etc, if the brain is able to produce signals that would be unlikely to be produced by a non-conscious, non-intelligent, non-sentient, thing. This would be akin to the way in which we try to send information to other civilizations beyond earth, and the kinds of things we are looking for from those other possible civilizations.
Otherwise, I declare that rocks are intelligent, sentient, and conscious and you just lack the imagination to see it. We must therefor cease all quarrying immediately.
I am pretty sure we (myself included) eat sentient beings for food already.
No. If the net has learned nothing, it's behavior will remain indistinguishable from the default state.
It's behavior could be indistinguishable even if it has learned something. Or it's behavior could be distinguishable even if it hasn't learned anything. It all depends on what you consider to be learning, what you consider a distinguishable difference, and how good you are at distinguishing that difference.
Random static electricity can cause a neon tube to fire as well, but that doesn't mean it's conscious, even if another tube fires due to the stimulus.
I never said that neurons firing implies consciousness. I said that I haven't seen any evidence that external sensory stimulus is a per-requisite for consciousness.
Certainly, no matter how many neurons randomly fire, it is not going to learn self vs. not-self.
Who says the neuron firings are random? I don't think you actually need to know the difference between self and not-self. I think this distinction is just an evolutionary adaptation that is useful in a competitive environment. There is no reason that a conscious being need to be aware of the concept of non-self.
Sentience is generally believed to be required for suffering to exist. Where there is no possibility of suffering, there is no ethical or moral duty to not cause that suffering.
You seem to be making the jump from "P implies Q" to "!Q implies !P". I do agree that suffering implies sentience. I don't agree that sentience implies suffering nor that non-suffering implies non-sentience.
If you prefer to argue for consciousness, please see this. [google.com] I see no definition there that can be satisfied without at least a history of external stimulus of some sort.
You seem to be suffering from what Dan Dennett calls "Philosophers' Syndrome" (i.e. mistaking a failure of imagination for an insight into necessity).
It's as if you're saying "Steering wheels are required for a car." and I say "Despite the fact that we are quite familiar with cars having steering wheels, I don;t think they are absolutely necessary for carness" and you say "We examined lots of cars and they all had steering wheels, and when we removed the steering wheels, they stopped working".
Intelligence is a slippery term to be sure. However, I would say that certainly sentience does not imply intelligence. Depending on your favorite definition, intelligence doesn't require sentience. For example, artificial image classification nets don't likely have any sense of self or subjective experience. Nor do expert systems
I agree that intelligence doesn't imply sentience. I am saying sentience implies intelligence.
The default state of a neural net is untrained, without memories. Fresh from the vat in the case of an organic one.
And as soon as one neuron fires, it is no longer in the same state.
None of your confusion between the computer analogy you introduced and organic neural nets alters the fact that the fetal neural net does not oscillate before week 25. It shows only random spikes that damp to nothing in short order.
I don't see how this is relevant.
I am well aware of the history of computing and the halting problem, but I'm not sure how the halting problem or batch vs interactive computing has any bearing on the question at hand.
It is an example of how something can "think" in the absence of external input.
Regardless of the philosophy, the techniques provide experience that may have bearing on the question at hand.
They certainly show us that some things are possible. They do not show us what is impossible.
I invoke Buddhist thought primarily because meditation is the only way we are likely to experience a self-less state without very dangerous physical experimentation on the brain.
It feels a bit as if we are talking at cross purposes. I am here hoping to spur new ideas on the subject in myself and perhaps you. I may be miss-perceiving, but you seem to be here expecting to win an argument?
I am disputing the specific claim that external sensory input is necessary for consciousness. I don't think there is any conclusive evidence to suggest this. Simply pointing out that "we have external sensory input and we also have consciousness", is not sufficient to prove that it is necessary (i.e. something without external sensory input could never be conscious).
I don't typically like to claim that things are the *only* anything unless I am fairly sure.
You don't even need an actual device to give a polygraph test. You can hook up a to a waffle iron. It is only important that the subject believes the machine is accurate. The test administrator asks you a bunch of questions and then tells you you failed the polygraph test and asks you if there is anything you want to come clean about. Often people (who desperately want to be regarded as honest) will admit to other things they may have done in order to explain why they might have failed the polygraph test.
In other words, development of sentience doesn't necessarily require coordinated input but intelligence does.
Everyone seems to have their own definition of intelligence. The one I default to, assumes sentience. You can't be sentient and not intelligent.
Also, note that I said DEFAULT state, not INITIAL state.
I don't know what the "default state" of a complex system even is. I know what an initial state is. It seems you can define any state you want to be the default.
As to the computer analogy, pull the boot rom and turn it on, the clock ticks, but nothing useful happens. Power on an untrained artificial neural net, at most you get a meaningless oscillation (but if there is no form of output, you won't see it).
Consider, how can there be self if there isn't not-self? While Buddhism suggests there is a self-less state of being, it also indicates that there is no suffering in that state.
I don't accept Buddhism as evidence of anything scientific. And I don;t find anything particularly compelling in a philosophical sense with Buddhism either.
A little googling shows [brainblogger.com] that in fact, before week 25, the fetal neural net does not oscillate. Going back to the computer analogy, imagine an old mini where the power is on but the CPU clock hasn't been started. The potential is there but it isn't actualized. Of course, a neural net is asynchronous (or at least can be), but some stimulus is still needed to get it going. Note too that the normal fetal brain is not completely sensory deprived once the peripheral nervous system begins to develop.
I think you are taking an example of the way one thing works as evidence that all things must work the same way.
That's how *some* (i.e. modern desktops) work. It's not how all computers work. Older computers would boot, run a program and halt (or maybe run forever). This is where the name of Turing's halting problem comes from. Nowadays computers are designed not to halt, and are perpetually reacting to internal and external events. But this is not the only way things can work.
Power on an untrained artificial neural net, at most you get a meaningless oscillation (but if there is no form of output, you won't see it).
I think you are assuming that all possible neural networks work a particular way.
I don't see how I went far out of my way to avoid anything. I already said that potential people (sperm, ova, zygotes) shouldn't count as people. So why would I have a different answer for skin cell that *could* be used to clone somebody. People are people whose lives must be protected. Potential people need not be protected. So you can kill a skin cell but not a mature human clone made from a skin cell.
so people that are not "perfect" or have some minor disability, do not get to live.
No, because they aren't people yet. They are potential people just like the billions of sperm I will produce in my life. There are already countless "perfect" potential humans that don't get to become people either. This is just the way biology works.
My define personhood at conception? Why not define sperms and ova to be people as well? They also have the potential to become people.
You could even do genocide by embryo selection.
It's not genocide (because it's not murder). It's a broader category eugenics (one type of which is genocide). But you are also practicing eugenics by choosing to only start a family with an attractive partner. Think of all the other babies that could have been born with uglier partners, whose existence you are denying.
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the KKK mainly focused on attacking Jews and Roman Catholics.
Do you have any proof that they were attacked because of their religion?
I have no idea what they actually did, but I assume you could set up a remote x-ray to be taken while nobody was near the bomb. Doctors do something similar in their offices to avoid radiation exposure to themselves.
I suppose a trigger could have been set to activate 10 minutes after exposure to x-rays, but at some point you need to take some calculated risks.
Intentionally leaving a backpack unattended at a sports event (or an airport) is sufficient to cause alarm. It doesn't need to look like a bomb to be suspicious. This is why the Boston bomb hoax LED signs were suspicious. If they weren't deposited all over the city they would be about as mundane as Ahmed's clock.
On Friday, embattled HP was hit with a new lawsuit filed by the state of Michigan over a 10-year-old, $49 million project that called for HP to replace a legacy mainframe-based system built in the 1960s.
$49 million is pretty expensive for a low end PC.
I am OK with people waiving around cell phones in public. If someone doesn't know what a gun looks like, but thinks someone is waiving a gun "in their face", and calls the cops on their own gun (or cell phone), then they are a fucking idiot. The person waiving a cell phone should not have any legal consequences, and the person who called the cops and those that defend him should be publicly ridiculed.
Unless you make it to not look like a lump. That's the point. You can't tell just by looking.
You can't always, but this is one of the few cases where you could.
A bit of explosive the size of a 45 will do a good job of dispersing a biological agent in a room, and the fleeing people will do a good job of dispersing it further.
How do you know a high school kid doesn't have weaponized anthrax hidden in a .45 round? Because it's fucking retarded.
The claim that you can see it isn't a bomb because you can see it doesn't have any explosive is just silly.
The standard of proof isn't "Could the CIA make a bomb that looks like this common object". The standard of proof is "Does it make sense for a high school kid to have a bomb that looks like this. Because if that's not your standard of proof, then you will be calling the bomb squad hundreds of times a day.
What, specifically, does "explosive" look like? Or more important, what would you LIKE it to look like?
Do explosives ever just look like bare electronics? There's not a lot of room to hide explosives on PCBs. Not to mention it will draw a lot of unwanted suspicion from idiot teachers.
I am not even sure you can prove that lynchings were based on race by your standards. Afterall there were lots of black people that weren't lynched.
You have specific evidence that he was singled out because of his race? Or is that your own bias showing?
Everyone is biased. So I am biased into thinking other people are biased, and that's probably a good thing.
You can call it bias, or just intuition. I think pretty much everyone had the same intuition that these teachers factored in Ahmed's race/religion/name/etc into their internal calculation of whether what he had was a bomb.
The courts can weigh the evidence. I think people are totally justified in having their own intuition and expressing their beliefs until the evidence is properly weighed.
If so, why then so much less outrage & support for the kid who pointed a chicken finger at another student [www.cbc.ca], or the pop-tart gun kid [huffingtonpost.com], or the kid who wrote a story about shooting a dinosaur [examiner.com]? I don't think any of them got invited to the White House.
Those are not the same. Those are instances of ridiculous zero tolerance policies gone amok. I don't think anyone involved in those incidents sensed a hint of danger. I don't doubt that some of these teachers really thought this clock was a bomb. But it's just very easy for everyone who is actually aware of typical biases to see how Ahmed was probably treated differently than if some nerdy white or asian kid had a bunch of electronics, and pointing out this double standard.
Except maybe a bunch of bare electronics in an otherwise empty box.
Real bombs can look like anything.M
I think the reader was intended to infer this.
Telling people what bombs really look like is misleading.
I suppose it would be misleading to tell really dumb people (the ones who are prone to thinking *all* bombs look the same) this is was *a* real bomb looks like). But telling a dumb person pretty much anything will typically mislead them.
So apparently Ahmed didn't even build this clock. He just took the electronics from an old 70's alarm clock out of it's housing, and put it in another case.
I don't think you could get passed a whitehouse security checkpoint with a backpack containing an unaltered 70's alarm clock.
But I would expect Whitehouse (where the president of the United States lives and works) security to be more strict than at a high school (which is a target for almost no one).
Boy: It's not a bomb. Teacher: That's 1 of 2 possible answers that a bombmaker would say about his bomb.
So if some people aren't racist, then nobody is racist?
eventually... Usually you don't need to involve law enforcement to discipline nerdy high school kids.
So you are saying that these claims are made up? Or that if VW wasn't #1 (not even sure if this is true), that they wouldn't be held accountable?
However, if sentience, consciousness, and intelligence have any sort of meaning that at all coincides with commonly accepted definitions, please do explain scientifically how a neural net might have those traits if it has never had connections to the outside world and doesn't even show signs of oscillation.
I didn't say that this neural net had *no* connections to the outside world. I said it would be lacking external sensory inputs. The outputs are the only way you *could* measure anything, including sentience, consciousness, etc.
And originally this meant a brain that lacked traditional sensory organs (e.g. eyes, ears, etc). In fact in my original reply to drinkypoo, I references a two way communication line to the brain. But I actually don't think 2 way communication is necessary for sentience, intelligence, consciousness, although I think it would be very helpful in more accurately determining of those properties are really there. The only objective way I know of to determine if something is conscious is a Turing test. There are however numerous ways in which conscious beings would be unable to pass the Turing test.
Oscillations are not even a direct measure of consciousness anyway. Something that passes the Turing test is no doubt conscious regardless of what other observations can be made about it's oscillations.
I imagine that even without 2-way commutation, it is conceivable to detect convincing evidence of intelligence, sentience, consciousness, etc, if the brain is able to produce signals that would be unlikely to be produced by a non-conscious, non-intelligent, non-sentient, thing. This would be akin to the way in which we try to send information to other civilizations beyond earth, and the kinds of things we are looking for from those other possible civilizations.
Otherwise, I declare that rocks are intelligent, sentient, and conscious and you just lack the imagination to see it. We must therefor cease all quarrying immediately.
I am pretty sure we (myself included) eat sentient beings for food already.
No. If the net has learned nothing, it's behavior will remain indistinguishable from the default state.
It's behavior could be indistinguishable even if it has learned something. Or it's behavior could be distinguishable even if it hasn't learned anything. It all depends on what you consider to be learning, what you consider a distinguishable difference, and how good you are at distinguishing that difference.
Random static electricity can cause a neon tube to fire as well, but that doesn't mean it's conscious, even if another tube fires due to the stimulus.
I never said that neurons firing implies consciousness. I said that I haven't seen any evidence that external sensory stimulus is a per-requisite for consciousness.
Certainly, no matter how many neurons randomly fire, it is not going to learn self vs. not-self.
Who says the neuron firings are random? I don't think you actually need to know the difference between self and not-self. I think this distinction is just an evolutionary adaptation that is useful in a competitive environment. There is no reason that a conscious being need to be aware of the concept of non-self.
Sentience is generally believed to be required for suffering to exist. Where there is no possibility of suffering, there is no ethical or moral duty to not cause that suffering.
You seem to be making the jump from "P implies Q" to "!Q implies !P". I do agree that suffering implies sentience. I don't agree that sentience implies suffering nor that non-suffering implies non-sentience.
If you prefer to argue for consciousness, please see this. [google.com] I see no definition there that can be satisfied without at least a history of external stimulus of some sort.
You seem to be suffering from what Dan Dennett calls "Philosophers' Syndrome" (i.e. mistaking a failure of imagination for an insight into necessity).
It's as if you're saying "Steering wheels are required for a car." and I say "Despite the fact that we are quite familiar with cars having steering wheels, I don;t think they are absolutely necessary for carness" and you say "We examined lots of cars and they all had steering wheels, and when we removed the steering wheels, they stopped working".
Intelligence is a slippery term to be sure. However, I would say that certainly sentience does not imply intelligence. Depending on your favorite definition, intelligence doesn't require sentience. For example, artificial image classification nets don't likely have any sense of self or subjective experience. Nor do expert systems
I agree that intelligence doesn't imply sentience. I am saying sentience implies intelligence.
The default state of a neural net is untrained, without memories. Fresh from the vat in the case of an organic one.
And as soon as one neuron fires, it is no longer in the same state.
None of your confusion between the computer analogy you introduced and organic neural nets alters the fact that the fetal neural net does not oscillate before week 25. It shows only random spikes that damp to nothing in short order.
I don't see how this is relevant.
I am well aware of the history of computing and the halting problem, but I'm not sure how the halting problem or batch vs interactive computing has any bearing on the question at hand.
It is an example of how something can "think" in the absence of external input.
Regardless of the philosophy, the techniques provide experience that may have bearing on the question at hand.
They certainly show us that some things are possible. They do not show us what is impossible.
I invoke Buddhist thought primarily because meditation is the only way we are likely to experience a self-less state without very dangerous physical experimentation on the brain.
It feels a bit as if we are talking at cross purposes. I am here hoping to spur new ideas on the subject in myself and perhaps you. I may be miss-perceiving, but you seem to be here expecting to win an argument?
I am disputing the specific claim that external sensory input is necessary for consciousness. I don't think there is any conclusive evidence to suggest this. Simply pointing out that "we have external sensory input and we also have consciousness", is not sufficient to prove that it is necessary (i.e. something without external sensory input could never be conscious).
I don't typically like to claim that things are the *only* anything unless I am fairly sure.
You don't even need an actual device to give a polygraph test. You can hook up a to a waffle iron. It is only important that the subject believes the machine is accurate. The test administrator asks you a bunch of questions and then tells you you failed the polygraph test and asks you if there is anything you want to come clean about. Often people (who desperately want to be regarded as honest) will admit to other things they may have done in order to explain why they might have failed the polygraph test.
Do you have *any* original thoughts?
In other words, development of sentience doesn't necessarily require coordinated input but intelligence does.
Everyone seems to have their own definition of intelligence. The one I default to, assumes sentience. You can't be sentient and not intelligent.
Also, note that I said DEFAULT state, not INITIAL state.
I don't know what the "default state" of a complex system even is. I know what an initial state is. It seems you can define any state you want to be the default.
As to the computer analogy, pull the boot rom and turn it on, the clock ticks, but nothing useful happens. Power on an untrained artificial neural net, at most you get a meaningless oscillation (but if there is no form of output, you won't see it).
Consider, how can there be self if there isn't not-self? While Buddhism suggests there is a self-less state of being, it also indicates that there is no suffering in that state.
I don't accept Buddhism as evidence of anything scientific. And I don;t find anything particularly compelling in a philosophical sense with Buddhism either.
A little googling shows [brainblogger.com] that in fact, before week 25, the fetal neural net does not oscillate. Going back to the computer analogy, imagine an old mini where the power is on but the CPU clock hasn't been started. The potential is there but it isn't actualized. Of course, a neural net is asynchronous (or at least can be), but some stimulus is still needed to get it going. Note too that the normal fetal brain is not completely sensory deprived once the peripheral nervous system begins to develop.
I think you are taking an example of the way one thing works as evidence that all things must work the same way.
That's how *some* (i.e. modern desktops) work. It's not how all computers work. Older computers would boot, run a program and halt (or maybe run forever). This is where the name of Turing's halting problem comes from. Nowadays computers are designed not to halt, and are perpetually reacting to internal and external events. But this is not the only way things can work.
Power on an untrained artificial neural net, at most you get a meaningless oscillation (but if there is no form of output, you won't see it).
I think you are assuming that all possible neural networks work a particular way.
I don't see how I went far out of my way to avoid anything. I already said that potential people (sperm, ova, zygotes) shouldn't count as people. So why would I have a different answer for skin cell that *could* be used to clone somebody. People are people whose lives must be protected. Potential people need not be protected. So you can kill a skin cell but not a mature human clone made from a skin cell.
so people that are not "perfect" or have some minor disability, do not get to live.
No, because they aren't people yet. They are potential people just like the billions of sperm I will produce in my life. There are already countless "perfect" potential humans that don't get to become people either. This is just the way biology works.
My define personhood at conception? Why not define sperms and ova to be people as well? They also have the potential to become people.
You could even do genocide by embryo selection.
It's not genocide (because it's not murder). It's a broader category eugenics (one type of which is genocide). But you are also practicing eugenics by choosing to only start a family with an attractive partner. Think of all the other babies that could have been born with uglier partners, whose existence you are denying.
Are you assuming that the only thing one can be conscious of is sensory input?