A brain is a bunch of neurons connected to eachother. How does a brain that *is* connected to no nerves and sensory organs have any means of achieving consciousness? Until we can answer this question, we can't say that things like sensory organs are necessary for consciousness.
Consciousness (wakefulness) is a spectrum not a binary quality.
I am suggesting that until something perturbs the neural net from it's default state
I don't know why a neural net would need outside stimulus in order to progress beyond the initial state. This makes a lot of assumptions about the way that every neuron works. Computers don't need outside stimulus to operate, their "nerons" transistors can be triggered by the other transistors.
I suspect coordinated and consistent input would be required to get from sentience to intelligence.
This would certainly be useful in a consciousness learning about it's external environment, but I don't think comprehension of one's external environment is necessary for sentience. Just because we aren't familiar with having no sensory input, doesn't make it necessary.
In order to reason, there must be something to reason about.
This assumes the only thing to reason about is the external environment.
It is a collection of human brain cells and not a brain.
What do you think a brain is? IT may not be a brain, but the fact that it is a collection of human brain cells is certainly not what disqualifies it.
The inputs provide the growth and development of brain cells, so that collection of brain cells with no inputs will be hugely if not totally non-functional beyond the simplest biological processes.
Where is your proof that *only* inputs (as you describe them), can "provide growth".
Basically a whole bunch of areas of that brain would atrophy to nothing or more accurately never develop at all do to lack of stimulation.
Neurons are connected to other neurons. They can stimulate eachother.
I have no idea how close what they have is to a real brain. It has basically nothing to do with my comment.
I couldn't be offended by this if I tried. I hope you realize that if you actually claimed to be the 17th smartest person in this thread, only an idiot would accuse you of claiming to be exceptional.
We do know that significant sensory input is a requirement to be conscious.
How do you know that?
Even the really incomplete deprivation in a sensory deprivation tank results in a dream like state in short order.
You seem to be conflating "consciousness" (i.e. sentience) vs. "consciousness" (i.e. wakefulness).
Having no neural connection to sensory organs would be a much more complete deprivation.
I am not saying that a brain can be awake without sensory input (although I don't accept this as an absolute truth either). I am saying that sensory input is not strictly necessary for sentience.
Wasting time, money, and human effort merely to appease irrational people, pisses me off. I would rather we spend our resources on things that actually matter.
Yes, most things that "fly" have something *like* "wings".
What I am saying is that there is probably something *like* sensory input happening in a vat brain even if it doesn't have eyes, ears, nose, etc.
Neurons just need other neurons to make a functioning brain. They can get sensory input from optic nerves in the form of electrical signals, but they can also get electrical signals from artificial sources. The human brain is very plastic. It will adapt to whatever input it can find.
I don't expect a human brain that is intentionally denied external stimuli will flourish, but it can function pretty well on a lot less than perfectly functioning sensory organs (e.g. blindness, deafness, etc).
And as I said, I think it is possible for intelligence (a purely introspective one) to emerge even in the absence of external stimuli, although this is different from the route to intelligence we are most familiar with from our own experience.
Being a "biologically human (having human DNA)" is completely irrelevant. Skin cells have human DNA and are in the genetic sense "human". The more important sense of the word "human" is "personhood". Skin cells are not "people". Brain dead people are not even "people". Intelligent aliens (despite not having human DNA) are probably "people". Artificial intelligence (not having any DNA at all) when it happens will be "people".
Pro life people commonly use this equivocation. "Zygotes are human (genetic sense), and we protect human (personhood sense) life, so we should protect the life of zygotes."
Even the phrase "Life begins at conception" implies that "life" (i.e. the state of being alive) is what matters. Obviously a zygote is "alive". All cells that are not dead, are alive. But a cell is clearly not a person. Many cells such as zygotes, sperm, ova, etc have the potential to develop into a person, but most won't.
Sensory input is not the only stimuli. The neurons are connected to eachother, and can stimulate eachother. This is analogous to a computer that can run a program when started without the need for any keyboard/mouse/network/etc input. Transistors do not work without input either, but the transistors in the system do have input, they have eachother.
Could a brain without any sensory input ever develop intelligence?
That's like asking "Could an airplane without wings ever fly". It depends on your specific definition of "flying" and "wings". I suspect that even a brain in a vat has *some* input, whether or not you want to label that input "sensory" is another matter. Furthermore, I don't think sensory input is necessary for intelligence in general, even if it may incidentally be necessary for human intelligence as we know it.
And if a brain had no motor outputs, how could we ever tell?
Motor functionality (i.e. movement) is not necessary for intelligence. If we hooked up a serial cable to the brain in a vat, and it was able to learn english via 2-way communication through this serial cable and have conversations, it would definitely be intelligent while having no motor functionality.
I don't think this is likely any time soon, especially with a 5 week old human brain. But I could see a grown human brain being kept alive in a vat, able to communicate with morse code or something similar as a first step. My point being that movement can be indicative of intelligence but it is not the only possible indication. You do need some way to measure the results of any experiment, and presumably these scientists are indeed measuring something from this brain they have, even if it isn't currently measuring intelligence.
I never said that a 5 week baby brain is a person. Regardless of whether a 5 week old baby brain is a person, growing a brain in a vat to do experiments on is stupid. It's either a morally abhorrent thing to do in the case of personhood, or completely pointless in the case of non-personhood (i.e. just use a regular 5 week old non-person fetus).
Everywhere I look these past few days there is nothing but piling on Trump. Honestly, I never expected him to bring the country together like this. Both left wing and right wing media alike really have it in for him.
Yeah it's weird. Usually republicans will reflexively support anything the democrats oppose. Democrats hate Putin? Well then republicans love him. He is a strong leader, not like Obama (who is like a very weak Stalin and Hitler).
You are supposed to create headless bodies to perform experiments on and harvest organs from. The living brain is the *only* part we can't ethically do this kind of shit to, because it's the part that makes each of us a person.
If we stop and think – was it really such a ridiculous reaction from the teacher and the police in the first place?
Yes.
How many school shootings and incidents of violence have we had, where we hear afterwards “this could have been prevented, if only we paid more attention to the signs!”
Well there are actually not that many school shootings period, as tragic as the ones that do occur are. Furthermore, people generally have a better idea of what a gun looks like than what a bomb looks like.
Teachers are taught to be suspicious and vigilant.
They are also apprently very stupid in that not only do they not know what a bomb looks like, they also don't know that they don't know what a bomb looks like. If we are going to call the cops every time a kid has something that *could* be a bomb, we are going to arrest every kid with a possible cell phone IED detonator, and blow up every backpack with a bomb squad robot. It seems the suspicion and vigilance teachers actually have is very selective and misguided.
Ahmed wasn’t accused of making a bomb – he was accused of making a look-alike, a hoax.
I didn't realize the police were required to deal with known hoaxes. IT seems pretty obvious that the accusation was switched to that of a hoax after it was discovered that it wasn't a real bomb.
And be honest with yourself, a big red digital display with a bunch of loose wires in a brief-case looking box is awful like a Hollywood-style representation of a bomb.
There are a bunch of kids we could probably arrest for being hackers because they match the Hollywood-style representation of a hacker. I don't know why adults are not held to the standard of knowing that reality is different than TV.
Everyone jumped to play the race and religion cards and try and paint the teachers and police as idiots and bigots
Because many of us are pretty sure we (if not muslim looking) could have (and did) bring/make similar looking things to school without issue.
, but in my mind, they were probably acting responsibly and erring on the side of caution to protect the rest of their students, just in case.
I don't think it's reasonable or responsible to assume that a bunch of electronics is a bomb, any more than it is reasonable or responsible to assume that a cell phone is an IED detonator.
“This wouldn’t have happened if Ahmed were white,” they say.
I agree
We’re supposed to be sensitive to school violence, but apparently religious and racial sensitivity trumps that.
You can and should be sensitive to school violence. You should also know your own limitations in discerning the credibility of potential threats. And if your sensitivity to potential bombs is heavily affected by the way the the kid holding the bomb looks or what his name is, then you are probably a bigot. Just like if your sensitivity to gang violence causes you to only suspect blacks and mexicans, you are still a racist even if you hide your racism behind the pretense of violence mitigation.
At least we have another clue about how the sensitivity and moral outrage pecking order lies.
When non-muslim looking/named kids start being suspected of making bombs simply for being interested in electronics, then maybe the conversation will be different.
Kudos for figuring out that the clock was actually just an existing clock taken out of it's original housing. But to me this illustrates even more how ridiculous it is to overreact to this "bomb". Maybe we need the teachers to be trained on "what the insides of common things look like", so they don't need to freak out that something is a bomb just because it's not in it's original housing.
I don't want to fault people for being cautious in dealing with a potential bomb. I am criticizing people for being incompetent and racist in their method of determining which potential bombs are credible.
It has nothing to do with the fact that some channels can't survive on their own. This implies that the cable companies are taking a loss but keep them anyway to benefit the customer (which is obviously bullshit).
The actual reason for selling cable channels in bundles is that it is more efficient in a broadcast model. Cables companies could generate one (or a few) datastream(s) and simply send them to everyone (similar to OTA broadcast). If a customer doesn't want the Oprah channel, it's not as if any resources can be saved by not sending them this channel (it's broadcast), it's actually extra work to develop a system to disable specific channels.
Even as we switch to an on demand model, you can only watch one program at a time on your television. So it doesn't really save the cable companies any money if you restrict the number of channels you watch. If anything it makes more sense for the cable companies to charge for the amount of time spent watching TV (or the amount of data transferred) rather than the number of channels you subscribe to.
Yes T-Mobile coverage is worse, but even at 1/4 the coverage, that only translates to about 2 times a year on average where I don't have service when someone with ATT or Verizon does.
I am willing to save hundreds of dollars a year if the only downside is being minimally inconvenienced. The yearly savings for me is more than the cost of a new phone (~$720).
What makes you think anybody's trying to regulate Bitcoin?
What makes you think that I think anybody is trying to regulate bitcoin?
If you had read the post I was responding to, you'd see that that person was specifically asking if it would be possible for the government to do this.
Slashdot Mirror
A brain is a bunch of neurons connected to eachother. How does a brain that *is* connected to no nerves and sensory organs have any means of achieving consciousness? Until we can answer this question, we can't say that things like sensory organs are necessary for consciousness.
I am suggesting that until something perturbs the neural net from it's default state
I don't know why a neural net would need outside stimulus in order to progress beyond the initial state. This makes a lot of assumptions about the way that every neuron works. Computers don't need outside stimulus to operate, their "nerons" transistors can be triggered by the other transistors.
I suspect coordinated and consistent input would be required to get from sentience to intelligence.
This would certainly be useful in a consciousness learning about it's external environment, but I don't think comprehension of one's external environment is necessary for sentience. Just because we aren't familiar with having no sensory input, doesn't make it necessary.
In order to reason, there must be something to reason about.
This assumes the only thing to reason about is the external environment.
Is a car not a collection of car parts?
It is a collection of human brain cells and not a brain.
What do you think a brain is? IT may not be a brain, but the fact that it is a collection of human brain cells is certainly not what disqualifies it.
The inputs provide the growth and development of brain cells, so that collection of brain cells with no inputs will be hugely if not totally non-functional beyond the simplest biological processes.
Where is your proof that *only* inputs (as you describe them), can "provide growth".
Basically a whole bunch of areas of that brain would atrophy to nothing or more accurately never develop at all do to lack of stimulation.
Neurons are connected to other neurons. They can stimulate eachother.
I have no idea how close what they have is to a real brain. It has basically nothing to do with my comment.
I am not even going to bother trying to explain anything to you until you can demonstrate you even know what I am arguing.
I couldn't be offended by this if I tried. I hope you realize that if you actually claimed to be the 17th smartest person in this thread, only an idiot would accuse you of claiming to be exceptional.
We do know that significant sensory input is a requirement to be conscious.
How do you know that?
Even the really incomplete deprivation in a sensory deprivation tank results in a dream like state in short order.
You seem to be conflating "consciousness" (i.e. sentience) vs. "consciousness" (i.e. wakefulness).
Having no neural connection to sensory organs would be a much more complete deprivation.
I am not saying that a brain can be awake without sensory input (although I don't accept this as an absolute truth either). I am saying that sensory input is not strictly necessary for sentience.
This may very well solve a technical problem. I'm not disputing that.
Wasting time, money, and human effort merely to appease irrational people, pisses me off. I would rather we spend our resources on things that actually matter.
The article is about the former not latter.
And yet the point I am making (that the age of the brain doesn't matter) still holds.
Yes, most things that "fly" have something *like* "wings".
What I am saying is that there is probably something *like* sensory input happening in a vat brain even if it doesn't have eyes, ears, nose, etc.
Neurons just need other neurons to make a functioning brain. They can get sensory input from optic nerves in the form of electrical signals, but they can also get electrical signals from artificial sources. The human brain is very plastic. It will adapt to whatever input it can find.
I don't expect a human brain that is intentionally denied external stimuli will flourish, but it can function pretty well on a lot less than perfectly functioning sensory organs (e.g. blindness, deafness, etc).
And as I said, I think it is possible for intelligence (a purely introspective one) to emerge even in the absence of external stimuli, although this is different from the route to intelligence we are most familiar with from our own experience.
Being a "biologically human (having human DNA)" is completely irrelevant. Skin cells have human DNA and are in the genetic sense "human". The more important sense of the word "human" is "personhood". Skin cells are not "people". Brain dead people are not even "people". Intelligent aliens (despite not having human DNA) are probably "people". Artificial intelligence (not having any DNA at all) when it happens will be "people".
Pro life people commonly use this equivocation. "Zygotes are human (genetic sense), and we protect human (personhood sense) life, so we should protect the life of zygotes."
Even the phrase "Life begins at conception" implies that "life" (i.e. the state of being alive) is what matters. Obviously a zygote is "alive". All cells that are not dead, are alive. But a cell is clearly not a person. Many cells such as zygotes, sperm, ova, etc have the potential to develop into a person, but most won't.
Sensory input is not the only stimuli. The neurons are connected to eachother, and can stimulate eachother. This is analogous to a computer that can run a program when started without the need for any keyboard/mouse/network/etc input. Transistors do not work without input either, but the transistors in the system do have input, they have eachother.
Could a brain without any sensory input ever develop intelligence?
That's like asking "Could an airplane without wings ever fly". It depends on your specific definition of "flying" and "wings". I suspect that even a brain in a vat has *some* input, whether or not you want to label that input "sensory" is another matter. Furthermore, I don't think sensory input is necessary for intelligence in general, even if it may incidentally be necessary for human intelligence as we know it.
And if a brain had no motor outputs, how could we ever tell?
Motor functionality (i.e. movement) is not necessary for intelligence. If we hooked up a serial cable to the brain in a vat, and it was able to learn english via 2-way communication through this serial cable and have conversations, it would definitely be intelligent while having no motor functionality.
I don't think this is likely any time soon, especially with a 5 week old human brain. But I could see a grown human brain being kept alive in a vat, able to communicate with morse code or something similar as a first step. My point being that movement can be indicative of intelligence but it is not the only possible indication. You do need some way to measure the results of any experiment, and presumably these scientists are indeed measuring something from this brain they have, even if it isn't currently measuring intelligence.
I never said that a 5 week baby brain is a person. Regardless of whether a 5 week old baby brain is a person, growing a brain in a vat to do experiments on is stupid. It's either a morally abhorrent thing to do in the case of personhood, or completely pointless in the case of non-personhood (i.e. just use a regular 5 week old non-person fetus).
There are no ethical dilemmas solved by this.
Everywhere I look these past few days there is nothing but piling on Trump. Honestly, I never expected him to bring the country together like this. Both left wing and right wing media alike really have it in for him.
Yeah it's weird. Usually republicans will reflexively support anything the democrats oppose. Democrats hate Putin? Well then republicans love him. He is a strong leader, not like Obama (who is like a very weak Stalin and Hitler).
He will still be looking into getting rid of all the Muslims regardless though, right?
You are supposed to create headless bodies to perform experiments on and harvest organs from. The living brain is the *only* part we can't ethically do this kind of shit to, because it's the part that makes each of us a person.
She said someone tried to make 13 withdrawals from her husband's account. After the first six charges went through, the account was almost empty.
That's because her husband is a loser, and doesn't have many billions of dollars from doing very well in his many business deals.
If we stop and think – was it really such a ridiculous reaction from the teacher and the police in the first place?
Yes.
How many school shootings and incidents of violence have we had, where we hear afterwards “this could have been prevented, if only we paid more attention to the signs!”
Well there are actually not that many school shootings period, as tragic as the ones that do occur are. Furthermore, people generally have a better idea of what a gun looks like than what a bomb looks like.
Teachers are taught to be suspicious and vigilant.
They are also apprently very stupid in that not only do they not know what a bomb looks like, they also don't know that they don't know what a bomb looks like. If we are going to call the cops every time a kid has something that *could* be a bomb, we are going to arrest every kid with a possible cell phone IED detonator, and blow up every backpack with a bomb squad robot. It seems the suspicion and vigilance teachers actually have is very selective and misguided.
Ahmed wasn’t accused of making a bomb – he was accused of making a look-alike, a hoax.
I didn't realize the police were required to deal with known hoaxes. IT seems pretty obvious that the accusation was switched to that of a hoax after it was discovered that it wasn't a real bomb.
And be honest with yourself, a big red digital display with a bunch of loose wires in a brief-case looking box is awful like a Hollywood-style representation of a bomb.
There are a bunch of kids we could probably arrest for being hackers because they match the Hollywood-style representation of a hacker. I don't know why adults are not held to the standard of knowing that reality is different than TV.
Everyone jumped to play the race and religion cards and try and paint the teachers and police as idiots and bigots
Because many of us are pretty sure we (if not muslim looking) could have (and did) bring/make similar looking things to school without issue.
, but in my mind, they were probably acting responsibly and erring on the side of caution to protect the rest of their students, just in case.
I don't think it's reasonable or responsible to assume that a bunch of electronics is a bomb, any more than it is reasonable or responsible to assume that a cell phone is an IED detonator.
“This wouldn’t have happened if Ahmed were white,” they say.
I agree
We’re supposed to be sensitive to school violence, but apparently religious and racial sensitivity trumps that.
You can and should be sensitive to school violence. You should also know your own limitations in discerning the credibility of potential threats. And if your sensitivity to potential bombs is heavily affected by the way the the kid holding the bomb looks or what his name is, then you are probably a bigot. Just like if your sensitivity to gang violence causes you to only suspect blacks and mexicans, you are still a racist even if you hide your racism behind the pretense of violence mitigation.
At least we have another clue about how the sensitivity and moral outrage pecking order lies.
When non-muslim looking/named kids start being suspected of making bombs simply for being interested in electronics, then maybe the conversation will be different.
Kudos for figuring out that the clock was actually just an existing clock taken out of it's original housing. But to me this illustrates even more how ridiculous it is to overreact to this "bomb". Maybe we need the teachers to be trained on "what the insides of common things look like", so they don't need to freak out that something is a bomb just because it's not in it's original housing.
I don't want to fault people for being cautious in dealing with a potential bomb. I am criticizing people for being incompetent and racist in their method of determining which potential bombs are credible.
It has nothing to do with the fact that some channels can't survive on their own. This implies that the cable companies are taking a loss but keep them anyway to benefit the customer (which is obviously bullshit).
The actual reason for selling cable channels in bundles is that it is more efficient in a broadcast model. Cables companies could generate one (or a few) datastream(s) and simply send them to everyone (similar to OTA broadcast). If a customer doesn't want the Oprah channel, it's not as if any resources can be saved by not sending them this channel (it's broadcast), it's actually extra work to develop a system to disable specific channels.
Even as we switch to an on demand model, you can only watch one program at a time on your television. So it doesn't really save the cable companies any money if you restrict the number of channels you watch. If anything it makes more sense for the cable companies to charge for the amount of time spent watching TV (or the amount of data transferred) rather than the number of channels you subscribe to.
There was only one version of US Nexus 5. They were all unlocked even if sold by a carrier.
Yes T-Mobile coverage is worse, but even at 1/4 the coverage, that only translates to about 2 times a year on average where I don't have service when someone with ATT or Verizon does.
I am willing to save hundreds of dollars a year if the only downside is being minimally inconvenienced. The yearly savings for me is more than the cost of a new phone (~$720).
I just went into a store and asked them, and they did it. It was about the farthest thing from "damn near impossible".
What makes you think anybody's trying to regulate Bitcoin?
What makes you think that I think anybody is trying to regulate bitcoin?
If you had read the post I was responding to, you'd see that that person was specifically asking if it would be possible for the government to do this.