How, exactly, is it obvious that he doesn't? Where is this glaring evidence that there is no God?
If you're rational about it, that's like asking where is the glaring evidence that there is no tooth fairy. The obvious evidence that there is no god is the complete lack of evidence of any such entity. Why presuppose something that you can't see, touch, feel and that doesn't make itself known in any way? (rhetorical question) If you're religious you will probably argue the "feel" part of that based on subjective experience, but note that non-religious people assign the same subjective experience to rational causes. Science (rational explanation) and supernatutal explanation for the same phenomenon can't both be right. If something 100% correlates with predicted rational explanantion, then there is no need to suppose any other cause (other than personal irrational preference).
That makes no sense whatsoever. What experiment would you propose that falsifies god and what sort of god are you falsifying?
I'm not sure what you mean by "falsifying god", and that's not what I said. What I said was that any experiment to prove that god DOES exist will fail, and I'm specifically talking about a god that has any power over the physical world. i.e. any experiment where you look for a result not explicable by science - proof of action by a supernatural force - will fail.
Performing experiments can tell you nothing about God; all it can do is allow you to test a model that seems to produce the same results as the universe, but does not necessarily work in exactly the same way.
Fine, but that's really just a philosophical distinction. Space-time exists and evolves according to known rules (ultimately down to two - general relativity and quantum mechanics). If you want to ascribe the name of "god" to nature you can, but it makes no difference. Apples will still fall to the ground for explicable reasons, and wil never float off into space due to god having decided to take some action. This type of god is 100% impotent - his every action is proscribed (= the laws of nature), and there is no moral or spiritual dimension to it at all.
No doubt Jesus, the jewish preacher/militant who joinded the cult of John the Baptist, and stepped into his role after his death, only to then be executed himself, did exist. His "miracles" no doubt did NOT exist, and just reflect the lack of scientific knowledge of the day coupled with teaching by parable. "Miracle" workers were relatively common back then, and Jesus wasn't even the best known - he hardly (if at all) exists in contemporary history outside of the bible (rather like claiming someone was world famous, yet the only evidence of this is his closest friends diaries), and others such as Apollonius ere much better known and reflected in contemporary history (Christian appologists used to bemoan how Apollonia's deeds made Jesus seem feeble by comparison). I think many people today believe in things such as the resurrection of Jesus at least part based on thinking like "millions can't be wrong" or "Christianity could not have started if it was false" or "People at the time obviously knew it to be true", but maybe they'd be surprised that back in the day people did NOT believe it, and apologists has to use arguments (I'm not making this up) such as "we know the phoenix can resurrect, so it's reasonable to believe that Jesus could too"! For more on how such a small cult grew to what it is today, you can read another of my replies to the same parent post (with a book suggestion).
Actually studies have show that religions grow by way of social networks, not belief - people join a religion first for social reasons and then *later* buy into the belief system (partly I suppose to remove the irrational aspect and avoid cognitive dissonance). The most obvious example is the way children more often than not follow their parents religion and then embrace that specific doctrine.
I have always been interested in how Christianity (or any religion - but Christianity is a relatively new one, so the evidence is fresher) grew to become what is has when the basic tenents are so obviously false, and a book that lucidly explains this (based on it being about social network growth, not belief) is:
"The Rise of Christianity: How the Obscure, Marginal, Jesus Movement Became the Dominant Religious Force" by Rodney Stark.
FWIW this isn't an anti-Christian book by any means (neutral or pro-Christian if anything)- it's just a look at the growth phenomena from a respected social scientist.
Interestingly the growth rate of Christianity in the first few centuries was "only" 4% a year (about the same rate as Mormonism is growing in the US today, and has done since inception), which is an essentially universal figure based on the underlying growth mechanism. If you think about it, 4% is only 4 new recruits per 100 people a year - approximately the birth rate of those already part of the religion! Yet of course, with the power of compounding that 4% annual growth led to impressive abolute numbers and took Christianity from aroud 1000 followers at the time Jesus was alive to around 50% of the Roman population only 350 or so years later! If you want to know how a growth rate equal to a reasonable birth rate led to % growth in the population, then read the book!
As far as rational consistency being a factor, I don't think that it creates much problem for the majority of people - people anyways always compartmentalize (that's the way the brain works - by association - some groups of ideas being strongly connected, others not), and anyway most people are simply not aware of all the logical inconsistencies between science and religion, or are even willing to just flat out ignore them. People WANT to believe in things like life after death, karma, free will, etc, etc, and most are willing to relegate any facts (e.g. classical determinism) that get in the way of those beliefs to the back burner.
Sure, you could say there is a god that created the laws of nature and has been hands off ever since. Kind of an impotent god though, despite that one super-cool deed! As far as the argument that "well, god wasn't there, then", you can flip that around by trying to experimentally prove that god DOES exist, and that will fail because god won't ever be there either.
I rather see it the other way around - there is no reason to presuppose that God exists when on the surface of it it's obvious that he does not, and any theory that a matter-affecting god exists would be repeatedly proved false by experiment.
Having said that, of course science can't prove that something doesn't exist (note this is not the same thing!), but given that no scientist has ever seen an atom or neuron behave other than as predicted by science, it does seem that the existing laws have it covered - no need (or room!) for an unnown force (whether natural or supernatural) to be assumed.
The idea of God is logically sound and will *never* be disproved, simply because it's not logically possible to do so.
That depends what kind of god you believe in. The existence of a god that has any power in the material world can easily be disproved because any experiment to show nature behaving counter to the predictions of science (i.e laws of nature) will fail.
I expect that the only "random" things in nature are the ones we don't understand, and much of what appears to be random anyways isn't - even discounting chaotic systems. Wolfram's "New kind of science" metions simple finite automata that generate output that passes all tests of randomess.
There's also a theory being developed by physicist Gerard 't Hooft of a deterministic layer below quantum physiscs:
Anyway, given the success of quantum mechanics, I'm not too concerned about the apparent randomess that underlies it - whether or not that turns out to be due to lack of current knowledge, as I expect it will.
I have to strongly disagree. The difference between science and religion is that science is based on falsifiable theories. If a theory makes predictions that don't fit experiment/facts, then it is rejected. Religion is instead based on faith, not proof, and faith that is usually maintained even in the face of direct disproof!(e.g. young earth fundamentalists).
As a well known example of a highly theoretical theory in this general area, there's the Big Bang theory which correctly predicted the cosmic background radiation (as later measured by the COBE satellite).
Can't be as black as a really black black pudding!
on
The Blackest Material
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· Score: 1
Black pudding is very black today, Mother. Yes, it is black today, dear. Aye, that's very black tha' tis'. Even the white bits are black!
There are many different types of DIY nested tag-value formats that are functionally equivalent to XML, but you do need nesting and tag-value so as to be able to represent arbitrarily structured data... Comma separated files is just a flat file format - no structure.
Nice library (Boost in general is amazing), but it does serve a different purpose. With the Boost library the XML format is dictated by the needs of the serialization archive, and is essentially a black box (one that you could modify, but only within the constraints of the archive representation requirements). My library OTOH is meant for reading/writing XML rather than serailization, and therefore gives you total control over the XML which in this case is very much not a constrained black box, but rather the directly controlled input/output of the library.
Sure XML is just a generic container format, but it's still very useful:
- Beats designing/implementing a custom format/API to manipulate every different type of text based data file - Easy to extend XML-based schemas in backwards compatible way - Cross platform - Cross language - Extensive tool support - Supported by browsers (parser, xslt)
I agree that the standard parsers are crap - horrible APIs - so I did write my own, including a higher level table based API for reading/writing C/C++ data structures to/from XML. The high level API is very cool, though I say so myself... For example you can read a repeated nested XML structure into a std::list of C++ structures in a single line of code, using tables of initialized data (using some preprocessor and RTTI magic) to desribe the mapping. The same table also lets you go in the opposite direction and generate the XML from the C++ data structure. It supports arbitrarily nested combinations of C/C++ arrays/lists/vectors, structures and basic types (incl. std::string). Sadly I wrote this for the company I work for, so I can't open source it.
Well, it's either true or not, so not much point arguing the undesireability of it! I don't think that this belief would in fact change anyones behaviour (it doesn't change mine!), since the illusion of free will is so strong... you may intellectually accept that whether you are going to acccept that donut is predetermined (or at least determined by your brain), but in the end you'll still have the feeeling of having chosen or rejected it based on desire (i.e "free will")... Apathy already exists, but someone with the intellect to truly believe that free will is an illusion is more likely to be the type of person to make their own decisions and therefore live/experience their life as if they had free will!
If the judicial system ever came to be based on the idea that people's actions are a function of who they are rather than chosen in the free will sense, then it probably would really make much difference.. this is already they way the criminally insane are regarded, and all it means is that we lock them up in mental institutes (on the assumption they are "broken" and can't be fixed) rather than prisons (where we believe the punishment will make them change their chosen ways).
I agree with the sentiment, but in fact I'm pretty sure that if pidgeons could talk they'd report the remote control directions as being due to their own free will, just as hypnotized humnan subjects "programmed" to stand up/open the window/etc on cue have in experiments reported their actions as being of their own free will (or rather offerered explanations of their own behavior - I wanted to stretch, it was stuffy in here, etc - when asked why they did it). Similarly humans report reactions (e.g. take hand away from something hot, swerve to avoid an accident) that from neural propagation times we know never involved rational thought as being of their own free will, and again offer explanations of why "they" did it.
Free will is an illusion/misnomer... trivially obvious unless you think there's somthing supernatural going on in the brain vs a bunch of neurons at work, but still a powerful subjective feeling. People's explanations of their own "free will" decisions and actions are essentially an after the fact rationalization of what they did/thought - giving a causal explanation based on the fictitious "self" that we invent to explain our own actions as opposed to the mechanical "my brain did this/that, based on the neural connections I've built up in my lifetime of experience" which is the truth.
Making a higher quality, more expensive, lower volume, product isn't a mistake - it's called market segmentation. Not everybody wants to buy a Yugo - some people are willing to pay for Mercedes and Ferraris.
If Apple didn't differentiate themselves on quality/features then they'd just be a competitor to Windows which wouldn't seem to be very smart. Instead, Apples have positioned themselves in a different up-market segment, and despite continual rumour of them going out of business appear to be doing quite well as a result.
Consciousness is just an effect of architecture - the ability of parts of the brain to monitor what some (but not all) other parts are doing... an inward looking sense if you want to think of it in that way. Evolutionally useful since it provides the ability to override and control earlier simpler behaviours / portions of the brain, giving us greater flexibility. Certain types of brain injury support the architectural nature of consciousness - it's possible for example to lose consciousness of vision (i.e. the feedback paths) without having lost vision itself (the subjective experience is of being blind, but being told that one's "guesses" are mostly correct!).
The "feeling" / qualia of consciousness (maybe more what people think of as consciousness) is really nothing at all! The feeling of color vision, for example, is just what you'd expect of a surface attribute (how else can differently colored spatial areas be experienced other than by having a differing surface attribute!), but subjectively complicated by the addition of memory (some emotional) of previously experienced colors.
The feeling of "free will" is just our normal causal association at work - attributing the thoughts/actions caused by our brain (a neural net = machine) to itself/ourself due to association with the preceding thoughts... But while this final causal association is correct, the connection from one brain state/thought to the next is often obscured by complexity/chaos so that we usually fail to see the infinite regress and instead see the precursor to action as being pseudo-spontaneous (free will) rather than similarly causally determined. Of course people usually see each others lack of free will rather better than their own, except perhaps when later in life, with the benefit of extended self-observation, we partially come to realize how predictable our own actions are.
Any machines we build in our own image, with a similar brain architecture, will experience the exact same consciousness and free will that we do. Just as real. Just as deceptive.
GMail seems to do a pretty good job of spam filtering - I can't recall getting any spam that wasn't detected and put into my spam folder, although I have to say that Optimum Online (having been though a couple of spam filtering revisions) now do a very good job also. The worst spam filter is Mozilla mail, which despite my "training" it daily since day one still lets large volumes of spam though every day.
I guess being a giant provider of e-mail puts you in a good position to do filtering since you could (in theory at least - don't know if Google is doing it) simply see if the same mail/mail template is being sent to very many accounts and reasonably classify it as spam based purely on that.
I'm sure people also download shows / series from channels that they don't get, and don't use enough to make it worthwhile subscribing, and I think this is the future.. People will a la carte subscribe to / download (and even pay for once the content producers get their act together!) the individual shows they want rather than the current model of subscribing to whole "channels" (a rather odd concept, when you think about it!) or worse yet bundles of channels per the current distribution model.
It's not too hard to see a future where TV as we know it is replaced with a fast network connection to a Tivo-like "set" top box and a video display device (no more analog TV or tuners of any kind), with shows individually selected and downloaded from iTunes/Amazon unbox like services. It's a transition that could really happen quite fast, especially with companies like Google building the massive distrubuted server systems that could handle the load as usage scales up.
It's about time TV went digital.
Reusing random crap found on the internet..
on
Finding New Code
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· Score: 1
... sounds to me like a thoroughly bad idea.
There's a reason for things like specifications, documentation, source control, testing, etc.
Maybe you'd rather google for popular home remedies rather than consult a professional doctor?
I'd google for *algorithms* if I was at a loss, but I'd certainly want to implement them myself.
What is useful in terms of code reuse is more controlled coherent collections of code that are highly tested, documented and generally controlled, such as the C++ Boost collection, but even there while I'd use it for a hobby project, I'd want to throroughly vet it for eror handling etc and run it through my own test suite before I'd consider using it professionally (assuming that it wasn't against company policy to do so).
There's also the whole issue of Copyright and patents. Nowadays there's no legal need to add a copyright notice to code - it's automatically copyright protected by default, so you could only reuse code that explicity grants a licence on terms that are suitable to your use (presumably including the separate right to modify as well as merely use). Patents are more tricky... At least if you unknowingly reimplement some patented algorithm yourself there's less liability than if you deliberately reused a patented algorithm, but grabbing stuff off the internet would seem to blow away any "clean room" type defense. Not that I support software patents, but unfortunately, in the US at least, they are a reality.
Unfortunately, as Bush has demonstrated, in the US the president can still do way more to affect your life than local politicians, and yet due to the electoral college system most Americans (all those not living in the handful of swing states) have ZERO say in national elections.
If your state can't muster more than 49% opposition to the governemt, then your votes will instead be turned around and cast as a vote FOR the party you were attempting to oppose!!! How's that for (American style) "democracy"?!
Give me the UK system any day - at least they get to vote for their leaders in a meaningful way.
Slashdot Mirror
How, exactly, is it obvious that he doesn't? Where is this glaring evidence that there is no God?
If you're rational about it, that's like asking where is the glaring evidence that there is no tooth fairy. The obvious evidence that there is no god is the complete lack of evidence of any such entity. Why presuppose something that you can't see, touch, feel and that doesn't make itself known in any way? (rhetorical question) If you're religious you will probably argue the "feel" part of that based on subjective experience, but note that non-religious people assign the same subjective experience to rational causes. Science (rational explanation) and supernatutal explanation for the same phenomenon can't both be right. If something 100% correlates with predicted rational explanantion, then there is no need to suppose any other cause (other than personal irrational preference).
That makes no sense whatsoever. What experiment would you propose that falsifies god and what sort of god are you falsifying?
I'm not sure what you mean by "falsifying god", and that's not what I said. What I said was that any experiment to prove that god DOES exist will fail, and I'm specifically talking about a god that has any power over the physical world. i.e. any experiment where you look for a result not explicable by science - proof of action by a supernatural force - will fail.
Performing experiments can tell you nothing about God; all it can do is allow you to test a model that seems to produce the same results as the universe, but does not necessarily work in exactly the same way.
Fine, but that's really just a philosophical distinction. Space-time exists and evolves according to known rules (ultimately down to two - general relativity and quantum mechanics). If you want to ascribe the name of "god" to nature you can, but it makes no difference. Apples will still fall to the ground for explicable reasons, and wil never float off into space due to god having decided to take some action. This type of god is 100% impotent - his every action is proscribed (= the laws of nature), and there is no moral or spiritual dimension to it at all.
No doubt Jesus, the jewish preacher/militant who joinded the cult of John the Baptist, and stepped into his role after his death, only to then be executed himself, did exist. His "miracles" no doubt did NOT exist, and just reflect the lack of scientific knowledge of the day coupled with teaching by parable. "Miracle" workers were relatively common back then, and Jesus wasn't even the best known - he hardly (if at all) exists in contemporary history outside of the bible (rather like claiming someone was world famous, yet the only evidence of this is his closest friends diaries), and others such as Apollonius ere much better known and reflected in contemporary history (Christian appologists used to bemoan how Apollonia's deeds made Jesus seem feeble by comparison). I think many people today believe in things such as the resurrection of Jesus at least part based on thinking like "millions can't be wrong" or "Christianity could not have started if it was false" or "People at the time obviously knew it to be true", but maybe they'd be surprised that back in the day people did NOT believe it, and apologists has to use arguments (I'm not making this up) such as "we know the phoenix can resurrect, so it's reasonable to believe that Jesus could too"! For more on how such a small cult grew to what it is today, you can read another of my replies to the same parent post (with a book suggestion).
Actually studies have show that religions grow by way of social networks, not belief - people join a religion first for social reasons and then *later* buy into the belief system (partly I suppose to remove the irrational aspect and avoid cognitive dissonance). The most obvious example is the way children more often than not follow their parents religion and then embrace that specific doctrine.
I have always been interested in how Christianity (or any religion - but Christianity is a relatively new one, so the evidence is fresher) grew to become what is has when the basic tenents are so obviously false, and a book that lucidly explains this (based on it being about social network growth, not belief) is:
"The Rise of Christianity: How the Obscure, Marginal, Jesus Movement Became the Dominant Religious Force" by Rodney Stark.
FWIW this isn't an anti-Christian book by any means (neutral or pro-Christian if anything)- it's just a look at the growth phenomena from a respected social scientist.
Interestingly the growth rate of Christianity in the first few centuries was "only" 4% a year (about the same rate as Mormonism is growing in the US today, and has done since inception), which is an essentially universal figure based on the underlying growth mechanism. If you think about it, 4% is only 4 new recruits per 100 people a year - approximately the birth rate of those already part of the religion! Yet of course, with the power of compounding that 4% annual growth led to impressive abolute numbers and took Christianity from aroud 1000 followers at the time Jesus was alive to around 50% of the Roman population only 350 or so years later! If you want to know how a growth rate equal to a reasonable birth rate led to % growth in the population, then read the book!
As far as rational consistency being a factor, I don't think that it creates much problem for the majority of people - people anyways always compartmentalize (that's the way the brain works - by association - some groups of ideas being strongly connected, others not), and anyway most people are simply not aware of all the logical inconsistencies between science and religion, or are even willing to just flat out ignore them. People WANT to believe in things like life after death, karma, free will, etc, etc, and most are willing to relegate any facts (e.g. classical determinism) that get in the way of those beliefs to the back burner.
Sure, you could say there is a god that created the laws of nature and has been hands off ever since. Kind of an impotent god though, despite that one super-cool deed! As far as the argument that "well, god wasn't there, then", you can flip that around by trying to experimentally prove that god DOES exist, and that will fail because god won't ever be there either.
I rather see it the other way around - there is no reason to presuppose that God exists when on the surface of it it's obvious that he does not, and any theory that a matter-affecting god exists would be repeatedly proved false by experiment.
Having said that, of course science can't prove that something doesn't exist (note this is not the same thing!), but given that no scientist has ever seen an atom or neuron behave other than as predicted by science, it does seem that the existing laws have it covered - no need (or room!) for an unnown force (whether natural or supernatural) to be assumed.
The idea of God is logically sound and will *never* be disproved, simply because it's not logically possible to do so.
That depends what kind of god you believe in. The existence of a god that has any power in the material world can easily be disproved because any experiment to show nature behaving counter to the predictions of science (i.e laws of nature) will fail.
I expect that the only "random" things in nature are the ones we don't understand, and much of what appears to be random anyways isn't - even discounting chaotic systems. Wolfram's "New kind of science" metions simple finite automata that generate output that passes all tests of randomess.
m g19025504.000
There's also a theory being developed by physicist Gerard 't Hooft of a deterministic layer below quantum physiscs:
http://www.newscientist.com/channel/fundamentals/
Anyway, given the success of quantum mechanics, I'm not too concerned about the apparent randomess that underlies it - whether or not that turns out to be due to lack of current knowledge, as I expect it will.
I have to strongly disagree. The difference between science and religion is that science is based on falsifiable theories. If a theory makes predictions that don't fit experiment/facts, then it is rejected. Religion is instead based on faith, not proof, and faith that is usually maintained even in the face of direct disproof!(e.g. young earth fundamentalists).
As a well known example of a highly theoretical theory in this general area, there's the Big Bang theory which correctly predicted the cosmic background radiation (as later measured by the COBE satellite).
Black pudding is very black today, Mother.
Yes, it is black today, dear.
Aye, that's very black tha' tis'. Even the white bits are black!
There are many different types of DIY nested tag-value formats that are functionally equivalent to XML, but you do need nesting and tag-value so as to be able to represent arbitrarily structured data... Comma separated files is just a flat file format - no structure.
Nice library (Boost in general is amazing), but it does serve a different purpose. With the Boost library the XML format is dictated by the needs of the serialization archive, and is essentially a black box (one that you could modify, but only within the constraints of the archive representation requirements). My library OTOH is meant for reading/writing XML rather than serailization, and therefore gives you total control over the XML which in this case is very much not a constrained black box, but rather the directly controlled input/output of the library.
Sure XML is just a generic container format, but it's still very useful:
- Beats designing/implementing a custom format/API to manipulate every different type of text based data file
- Easy to extend XML-based schemas in backwards compatible way
- Cross platform
- Cross language
- Extensive tool support
- Supported by browsers (parser, xslt)
I agree that the standard parsers are crap - horrible APIs - so I did write my own, including a higher level table based API for reading/writing C/C++ data structures to/from XML. The high level API is very cool, though I say so myself... For example you can read a repeated nested XML structure into a std::list of C++ structures in a single line of code, using tables of initialized data (using some preprocessor and RTTI magic) to desribe the mapping. The same table also lets you go in the opposite direction and generate the XML from the C++ data structure. It supports arbitrarily nested combinations of C/C++ arrays/lists/vectors, structures and basic types (incl. std::string). Sadly I wrote this for the company I work for, so I can't open source it.
Well, it's either true or not, so not much point arguing the undesireability of it! I don't think that this belief would in fact change anyones behaviour (it doesn't change mine!), since the illusion of free will is so strong... you may intellectually accept that whether you are going to acccept that donut is predetermined (or at least determined by your brain), but in the end you'll still have the feeeling of having chosen or rejected it based on desire (i.e "free will")... Apathy already exists, but someone with the intellect to truly believe that free will is an illusion is more likely to be the type of person to make their own decisions and therefore live/experience their life as if they had free will!
If the judicial system ever came to be based on the idea that people's actions are a function of who they are rather than chosen in the free will sense, then it probably would really make much difference.. this is already they way the criminally insane are regarded, and all it means is that we lock them up in mental institutes (on the assumption they are "broken" and can't be fixed) rather than prisons (where we believe the punishment will make them change their chosen ways).
I agree with the sentiment, but in fact I'm pretty sure that if pidgeons could talk they'd report the remote control directions as being due to their own free will, just as hypnotized humnan subjects "programmed" to stand up/open the window/etc on cue have in experiments reported their actions as being of their own free will (or rather offerered explanations of their own behavior - I wanted to stretch, it was stuffy in here, etc - when asked why they did it). Similarly humans report reactions (e.g. take hand away from something hot, swerve to avoid an accident) that from neural propagation times we know never involved rational thought as being of their own free will, and again offer explanations of why "they" did it.
Free will is an illusion/misnomer... trivially obvious unless you think there's somthing supernatural going on in the brain vs a bunch of neurons at work, but still a powerful subjective feeling. People's explanations of their own "free will" decisions and actions are essentially an after the fact rationalization of what they did/thought - giving a causal explanation based on the fictitious "self" that we invent to explain our own actions as opposed to the mechanical "my brain did this/that, based on the neural connections I've built up in my lifetime of experience" which is the truth.
Making a higher quality, more expensive, lower volume, product isn't a mistake - it's called market segmentation. Not everybody wants to buy a Yugo - some people are willing to pay for Mercedes and Ferraris.
If Apple didn't differentiate themselves on quality/features then they'd just be a competitor to Windows which wouldn't seem to be very smart. Instead, Apples have positioned themselves in a different up-market segment, and despite continual rumour of them going out of business appear to be doing quite well as a result.
I saw the movie, but never realized until now that Reed was even in it, let alone died...
Anyway, interesting explanation here of how Reed's role was completed after he died in real life.
http://www.thebigpicturedvd.com/bigreport8.shtml
.. that maybe Chewbacca wasn't a real Wookie?
Consciousness is just an effect of architecture - the ability of parts of the brain to monitor what some (but not all) other parts are doing... an inward looking sense if you want to think of it in that way. Evolutionally useful since it provides the ability to override and control earlier simpler behaviours / portions of the brain, giving us greater flexibility. Certain types of brain injury support the architectural nature of consciousness - it's possible for example to lose consciousness of vision (i.e. the feedback paths) without having lost vision itself (the subjective experience is of being blind, but being told that one's "guesses" are mostly correct!).
The "feeling" / qualia of consciousness (maybe more what people think of as consciousness) is really nothing at all! The feeling of color vision, for example, is just what you'd expect of a surface attribute (how else can differently colored spatial areas be experienced other than by having a differing surface attribute!), but subjectively complicated by the addition of memory (some emotional) of previously experienced colors.
The feeling of "free will" is just our normal causal association at work - attributing the thoughts/actions caused by our brain (a neural net = machine) to itself/ourself due to association with the preceding thoughts... But while this final causal association is correct, the connection from one brain state/thought to the next is often obscured by complexity/chaos so that we usually fail to see the infinite regress and instead see the precursor to action as being pseudo-spontaneous (free will) rather than similarly causally determined. Of course people usually see each others lack of free will rather better than their own, except perhaps when later in life, with the benefit of extended self-observation, we partially come to realize how predictable our own actions are.
Any machines we build in our own image, with a similar brain architecture, will experience the exact same consciousness and free will that we do. Just as real. Just as deceptive.
You got a better idea?
Sure.
Ask someone with almost unlimited money who cares about public health, especially in third world countries, to fund development of a vaccine.
Anyone come to mind?
GMail seems to do a pretty good job of spam filtering - I can't recall getting any spam that wasn't detected and put into my spam folder, although I have to say that Optimum Online (having been though a couple of spam filtering revisions) now do a very good job also. The worst spam filter is Mozilla mail, which despite my "training" it daily since day one still lets large volumes of spam though every day.
I guess being a giant provider of e-mail puts you in a good position to do filtering since you could (in theory at least - don't know if Google is doing it) simply see if the same mail/mail template is being sent to very many accounts and reasonably classify it as spam based purely on that.
Can't you imagine a Beowulf cluster of these?
Don't you wonder if it runs linux, or it powered by hot grits?
Get with the program please!
I'm sure people also download shows / series from channels that they don't get, and don't use enough to make it worthwhile subscribing, and I think this is the future.. People will a la carte subscribe to / download (and even pay for once the content producers get their act together!) the individual shows they want rather than the current model of subscribing to whole "channels" (a rather odd concept, when you think about it!) or worse yet bundles of channels per the current distribution model.
It's not too hard to see a future where TV as we know it is replaced with a fast network connection to a Tivo-like "set" top box and a video display device (no more analog TV or tuners of any kind), with shows individually selected and downloaded from iTunes/Amazon unbox like services. It's a transition that could really happen quite fast, especially with companies like Google building the massive distrubuted server systems that could handle the load as usage scales up.
It's about time TV went digital.
... sounds to me like a thoroughly bad idea.
There's a reason for things like specifications, documentation, source control, testing, etc.
Maybe you'd rather google for popular home remedies rather than consult a professional doctor?
I'd google for *algorithms* if I was at a loss, but I'd certainly want to implement them myself.
What is useful in terms of code reuse is more controlled coherent collections of code that are highly tested, documented and generally controlled, such as the C++ Boost collection, but even there while I'd use it for a hobby project, I'd want to throroughly vet it for eror handling etc and run it through my own test suite before I'd consider using it professionally (assuming that it wasn't against company policy to do so).
There's also the whole issue of Copyright and patents. Nowadays there's no legal need to add a copyright notice to code - it's automatically copyright protected by default, so you could only reuse code that explicity grants a licence on terms that are suitable to your use (presumably including the separate right to modify as well as merely use). Patents are more tricky... At least if you unknowingly reimplement some patented algorithm yourself there's less liability than if you deliberately reused a patented algorithm, but grabbing stuff off the internet would seem to blow away any "clean room" type defense. Not that I support software patents, but unfortunately, in the US at least, they are a reality.
How about suing your old company for hiring you in the first place?! :-)
Unfortunately, as Bush has demonstrated, in the US the president can still do way more to affect your life than local politicians, and yet due to the electoral college system most Americans (all those not living in the handful of swing states) have ZERO say in national elections.
If your state can't muster more than 49% opposition to the governemt, then your votes will instead be turned around and cast as a vote FOR the party you were attempting to oppose!!! How's that for (American style) "democracy"?!
Give me the UK system any day - at least they get to vote for their leaders in a meaningful way.
Why not - isn't that essentially what YouTube did - then sell the whole mess for $1B or so and pass the legal trouble on to someone else!