While I don't really disagree with you, I've got to wonder what would have happened if the gov't had just started carpet bombing TV with information about seatbelt safety (including those great gruesome car crash movies;-) but not actually implemented any regulations. If the Secretary of Transportation came on and told you flat out "If you don't wear a seatbelt you WILL die in an accident" and shown pictures, how many people would take him seriously?
I suppose we have evidence that this doesn't work in how many people still don't wear belts (and smoke, and eat fatty food...), but it would be interesting to really run some numbers and see how effective it is compared to regulations. Any countries out there that don't have any seatbelt laws on the books that we could use?
<flamebait> Then there's always the view the people who don't pay attention to warnings should sacrifice themselves for the good of the species. </flamebait>
Considering that ObjC was at the heart of OpenStep this isn't much of a suprise. However, Cocoa works with both Java and ObjC, as well as C, C++ and ObjC++.
Re:Selling philosophy disguised as science...
on
The Mind of God
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· Score: 1
Just once--once, in all of thousands of articles on/.--could we have a discussion of science without someone saying 'science good, philosophy bad'? Science and philosophy are entirely inseperable; in some places they are even starting to fuse. (E.g., quantum mechanics as a typically formulated is largely epistemological with a big scoop of ontology on the side.) People are just going to have to accept that philosophers have made tremendous contributions to science, and in all likelyhood will continue to do so, and that scientists rely on philosophy to ground their work, or occasionally to justify it. Even metaphysics, the black sheep of modern philosophy, has something to contribute to science.
How far would science have gone without materialism, or logic, or falsifiability itself? Or Occam's razor? (Though, IMO, neither materialism or Occam's razor are all that desirable.)
And religion is not part of philosophy, it's part of religion. The Philosophy of Religion is another matter.
In the interest of making this thread complete, I would like to point out that computer science doesn't have monopoly on AI-related research. Electrical/computer engineering is contributing as well, in the form of neuromorphic engineering (aka silicon neuroscience and dozen other cute names). Info can be found here and here, as can links to most of the other research sites.
In a nutshell, neuromorphic engineering involves modelling neural systems in analog hardware, starting with the neurons and moving up, hopefully to whole neurvous systems in the coming decades. The focus is one realism--this is modelling, after all--and replicating the physical properties of neurons as accurately as is possible in silicon VLSI. It is also home to a great deal of work on analog, and mixed analog-digital devices, as well as pure research on neural computation. (In a broad sense a 'computation'.)
Most relevent to this discussion is that we now have an AI proto-field that is completely different in its approach to the problem (so much so that I don't expect it to turn its attention toward AI, in the proper sense, for several years), far moreso than connectionism. As a happy coincidenece, it also overcomes many of the limitations of classical AI, both technical and ideological, by attacking the problem at the biophysical, instead of psychological, level and doing so in physical, instead of algorithmic, terms.
The problem with this analogy is that they aren't paying for content, they're paying for a service. It's like (YACA: Yet Another Cable Analogy) paying for cable and a single box, then buying a second box and hooking it up yourself in secret. The cable and first box is legit, but the second is illegal. (IMO, this is stupid, but that's the way it is.)
Copyrights can be abused like anything else, but that doesn't make them entirely evil. They do one thing that I think is very important: make clear who deserves credit for the creation of the work. I don't care what anyone does to my creations (er, those that I give away;-), but I damn well want them to know that I created it. I certainly wouldn't sue anybody over a copyright violation--they're either are within their rights, or the stole it and should be charged with theft, so to that extent, it's really not Law in any significant sense. But I still believe it's quite important.
As for the rest, I have two comments. (1) There aren't any natural rights, as history demonstrates quite nicely; and (2) the 'public interest', as embodied in your example, is not the best benchmark of Good and Evil. Racism may be a bad thing, but if the owner of the property doesn't want to sell to blacks or Jews, then I wouldn't simply invalidate his stupidity. If it's his property he can do what he wants with it, IMO. (OTOH, I might pay for a lawyer to look through the covenant for some way to sneak around the requirements without violating them. It's better to be clever than to sue.)
There is (was?) a Logitech keyboard, the creatively named "Internet Keyboard", that includes 16 buttons (and 1 rocker for volume) and a nifty little piece of software for doing something like that. You can't remap any of the keys, but one of them, the "Logitech" button, calls up a little app that is nothing but slots to which you can assign programs (or files, links, etc). You get a nice little menu listing everything you have set and, IIRC, a choice of clicking or doing a Logitech-[0-9] combo.
Of course, I didn't use the feature more than once, and didn't bother attaching the keyboard to my current machine, but if you into that sort of thing, it's really quite OK.
Hard to see that working for Disney offers much opportunity to change the world.
Well, for what it's worth Alan Kay and the rest of the Smalltalk designers are there, too, and they've always been trying to change the world. Disney seems to be collecting brilliant people and letting them play on Disney's buck, without too much concern for whether they do anything useful. AFAIK, none of them do any real work for the company. (Hillis is what, 'Head Imagineer'? Sounds important;-)
Rather, it appears to be the move of a man who found that his doctoral work was not wanted by the market.
The idea of emotionless androids is good for Star Trek plots, but it doesn't work in the real world. You would end up with an andriod with virtually no ability to select among goals (e.g., "duck!" or "charge!"), and less ability to create novel goals (e.g., blow up the bridge to stop the tanks). It would be nice if pop science to catch up to at least late-60's AI in this regard.
An android will not become a spy for a foreign and perhaps potentially hostile regime.
The same has been said of computers. Hopefully it would be a little less false in this case.
If an android is "killed", it is just a broken machine.
People get quite attached to their machines; cars have provided ample opportunity to study this in the wild. The situation would probably be worse with such a intimate relationship between the operator and the machine. Plus, if the cost of the machine is too high, it would be cheaper to lose soldiers (though it would have to be very high--I'm always suprised when I see how much it costs to train a grunt, let alone a technically adept grunt).
Perception-wise, it is no different from a human operator in remote location, controlling the exo-droid via virtual-reality.
Not quite. Visual and auditory feeds can be recreated faithfully, but balance and, to some extent, posture and other body-centered senses are more tricky. In fact, I'm not sure how balance could be recreated without actually knocking the operater on the floor when the suit fell over, which IMO is not terribly desirable. (OK, that inner-ear thing from a month or so ago would work, but that would require the operator to be seated, which would mean off-loading all of the details of navigating terrain to the robot itself.)
If there is an "open-window" interface for the operator, then the human operator inside the exo-droid will be vulnerable to bio and/or chemical attacks.
How? What's wrong with a transparent sheet of glass or one of those nifty LCD window-with-HUDs they were thinking of using on tanks a few years back? I consider a car a pretty open interface, but it can sealed against bio/chem weapons without impairing your view any.
A person inside an exo-droid will be feeling like a person with VERY, VERY THICK cloths on. You can't move as easily, you don't feel that you are as agile as before, and each and every movement you make will be a chore.
This is an assumption. A major part of this project seems to be retaining, or even enhancing, the agility of he user. If the net result was what you described, why in God's name would DARPA be working on it as an infantry rig? Infantry lives on mobility, not armor, and trying to reverse that would be a death sentence. DARPA isn't stupid, you know; they aren't going to ask soldiers to wear tanks everywhere they go.
And you left out the problem of lag. I can tell you from personal experience that even a hundred milliseconds makes a big difference in 'combat' situations (like Quake;-). You would probably pick up that much just in the transition from the operater's controls to transmitter, let alone the time it takes for the stupid mech to interpret the message, act on it and respond. If you're fighting a live opponent (e.g., a TOW) and lose, say, 500msec, it could ruin you whole day. (Apparently tanks can dodge anti-tank rockets if they see them coming and have time to move; there was something about it on some.mil site I passed through several months ago. Very cool.)
All of that said, I do think that unmanned is the wave of the future. However, I'm betting on semi-autonomous vehicles where humans 'crews' are, at most, offering tactical and strategic advise to the drones. (Though I do think they will be in the field, for practical reasons.) Deathmatches are great fun, but if I need to get something done give me good old-fashioned real-time strategy;-)
It's not at all suitable for Real Work. Sure it can climb stairs, very slowly, and walk around looking at things, very slowly, but it that's it. No running, no unstable surfaces, no getting up and at the moment, no heavy lifting.
Bipedal movement is very hard to pull off. It's also inefficient at low speed, unstable, and complex. If I was making a combat bot, I'd probably stick to quads or wheels--the advantages of bipeds are far outweighed by the complexity imposed in all but a very few situations. (Of course, Murphy dictates that those will be the situations you end up in, but presumably there would be a range of bots available.)
If I could run it on IA-32 stuff...I'd be all over that.
Take a look at MacOSRumors (and if you have, assume I addressing/. as a whole;-): Rumor has it that Apple's been talking to some PC manufacturers about porting OSX to their wares. They had an Intel version of OSX, and the current version is supposed to be sync'ed with FreeBSD, so this probably could be accomplished relatively easily. I never really understood why FreeBSD would be their compatability target, instead of, say, NetBSD, if they weren't planning an Intel port, or even abandoning the PowerPC, so making that move would seem to make sense. Of course, we are talking about Apple, so....
There's also a related rumor that Apple may Open Source (please, no flames about APSL) enough of the remaining closed portions of OSX and Carbon to enable third-parties (can't imagine who that would be;-) to port it for them.
Am I the only one who thinks that this sounds somewhat fishy?
Absolutely. There are several projects underway (and completed) to do this, and all of them are well into the multi-thousand dollar range, AFAIK. The silicon visual system constructed at, IIRC, Georgia Tech, is supposed to be most complex VLSI device ever created (or was when their page was last updated;-). I suspect that you won't be buying one for for $50.
(Incidentally, my favorite hardware vision project is here. This guy building most of a primate visual system (retina to cortex) to model attention and tracking. Who needs a silicon retina when you can get a silicon cortex;-)
You can defend yourself, fine. Just don't use a gun.
But that offers me the best chance to successfully defend myself (note: avioding contact is very definitely preferrable (I'm a coward at heart;-), but that's not really defense, per se). It would be uterly irrational for me to chose any other weapon. The fact that my attacker may have a gun removes all doubt.
Most people are way more likely to kill/injure themselves (or other people, besides the attacker) with a gun when trying to defend themselves.
But I'm not. I've always said that if you don't want to learn to use your gun you may as well just shoot yourself and get it over with. OTOH, if you are willing to learn I don't see a problem.
Most people do not know how to use guns, and in a dark alley anything is possible.
As I said, if you can't use it, don't. That this fact escapes many people does not mean *all* of us are clueless.
why guns are evil.
*snicker*
No guns and he'd still be alive.
And? That was a Bad Thing, no doubt, but if the cops didn't have guns we'd have a shitload of dead cops every year instead.
You're really not too bright are you? Has anyone *ever* exercised sufficient control over a technology to simply remove it from the world? You can confiscate all the guns you want, but *I* can still make more (albeit fairly poor examples). Are you planning on making it illegal to descibe the process of constructing a gun as well? Maybe we can write OED and have 'gun' removed from the English language.
Free clue: as long as *anyone* knows who to make guns, someone will. Pass all the laws you want, but you simply can't win.
Would it be possible to get a copy of this discussion without any mention of memes? I realize we're a minority, but there are still people out here who believe that "meme" has roughly the explanatory power of "thingy", and somewhat less psychological relevance than the Ether. (And saying I have a 'no-meme' meme doesn't count as an explanation.)
(Note: the above statement is an example of criticism, not flamebait. Or at least not very good flamebait.)
How can *anything*[0] be conscious is a better question. Quantum mechanics adds exactly nothing to answering that question; instead Penrose and his ilk let the mathematics, the often bizarre conclusions and experiments, act as a giant handwave. "Golly it's *so* weird and he has *so much* math, he must be right!".
There's no real reason why computers can't be conscious, though I agree that it's difficult to see how an algorithm could be.[1] Luckily, there's more to computers than algorithms. The conscious mind could, for example, the *result* of computations, instead of the computations themselves.[2] This wouldn't give conscious much leverage in the grand scheme of things, but that's a secondary concern.
In any case, the problem is that we have no working (or even broken) definitions of quale, consciousness, mind, intentionality (not mentioned elsewhere, but it should have been), or even brain, computer and quantum mechanics. It is extremely easy to explain to things we don't understand in terms of one another, and make it look like an Absolute Truth dropped from above.
[0] Hmm, Extrans doesn't seem to be working for me; my post is previewing as is via Plain Text (visible tags and all). Anyone else having this problem?
[1] Where consciousness == qualia.
[2] Conveniently explaining the well known delay between mental processing and awareness of said processing. Still, this certainly isn't the only explanation that fits, by any means.
I don't mean to be critical of the moderators, but it would be nice if someone who doesn't buy the quantum explanation were bumped up a few points up. Until I reached this comment I thought I might have accidentally connected to the Stapp-Penrose-Sarfatti Unified Fanclub for the Advancement of Mental Illness.
Neat, Reformation the Home Game! I call Luther! Lesse, 8th level priest, 17 Wisdom....WOOHOO a 19! If he doesn't believe in Jesus he has to make a save against Eternal Damnation; act's my ass!
Metaphysically, this is a pretty tenuous position.
Less tenuous, though, than the alternative. Truely free will requires an entity that is outside of causality, an unmoved mover. Aside from being physically impossible, this is not what most people consider 'free will'. I drink because I am thirsty, yet if there was free will my being thirsty couldn't have influenced my decision to drink, because there could be no causal connection between my will and my bodies need for fluids. The primary argument to weasel out of this problem--that our will is influenced but not determined--collapses under close inspection.
It throws any attempt at rationality right out the window
If I live to be uploaded, I'll never understand why people believe (a) they are rational, and (b) rationality requires consciousness. The former is plainly false; the entire history of psychology and centuries of philosophy before will attest to that. The latter has been disproven time and again: Turing did a fairly good job, IMO.
(In a hurry, no spellchecking, no well considered arguments....)
1,000 words of english...then its probably not a consept that All japanese hold in common.
This is very off-topic and somewhat spurious, but express the idea of blue in 1000 words or less. If you can't most people are probably colorblind. There's a problem in there somewhere....
Anyway, back on track. I'm not saying you can't express it, I saying that on a semantic level it won't be the same. I could probably descibe kami in a few dozen words, but then my knowledge of kami would be of the concept represented by a few dozen English words, not the single Japanese word and the centuries of cultural baggage it carries with it. That baggage counts, even for little kids.
Here's another example: imagine a ball, roughly a foot in diameter, made up even sized pentagonal or hexagonal panels, colored black or white according to a consistent pattern. Now imagine a {soccer,football} ball. It's just not the same experience if you have any idea what soccer is, let alone if you play. The explanation would be identical, but the meaning would be tremendously different for an Englishman versus, well, an averge American, let alone a Pygmi. (They don't play, do they?) To put it poorly, someone who's never experienced soccer has never experienced soccer.
those probably vary from person to person anyway
Right, except I'm saying that many of them are cultural, rather than individual.
posible for a little japanese kid to learn what that word means, it should be posible for you as well.
Not at all. First, he's a Japanese kid, immearsed in Japan's culture in a way I can never imagine. Second, no matter how much I practice, my first language will get in the way, as will my Northwest upbringing. As I said above, those Japanese words may very well be nothing but pointers to English words and American meanings in my mind.
Incidentally, the reason I chose Japanese was that I read a few months ago a paper on just this subject. The example there was a word, which I can't remember, naturally, the means, roughly, a sort of joyous deference to an other's will, somewhat like how very small children feel around there mothers. Except that this is how grown men feel around their bosses. Intellectually I could understand the idea (or rather, I could understand the underlying logic in a very abstract way), but the point of the paper was that most Westerners simply can't get a feel for the what is being expressed with that word. In English, the feeling would translate to 'toadying' or something similar, which is mostly correct, but with the opposite connotation. Western culture simply doesn't include this idea, even though the language can probably express it. Thus the term is expressible, but effectively meaningless.
True enough. The analogy does break down if you look at the languages closely. However, my point was that no matter how the languages differ--in any respect--they must be equivalent if they are Turing complete. The details, or even gross structures, may be utterly dissimilar, but computation, taken abstractly, requires that they be the same on some primordial level. 'Turing completeness' is such an abstract idea (classical particles in physics have been demonstrated to be Turing complete) that from a concrete language standpoint it's nearly meaningless, thus my comment about having to remind myself. Nevertheless, it's there, and makes excellent analogy fodder.
Human languages are considerably different, so much so that I think the analogy would do more harm here. However, I believe that basic thrust--that human thought, semantics, may be the same regardless of how deep or shallow the syntactic differences may be--holds up quite well, and if I'm reading you correctly, you seem to agree. As it turns out human languages are probably more alike than they are different, which makes me think a better analogy would be, e.g., Classic C vs. ANSI C, or Lisp 1.5 vs. MacLisp vs. Common Lisp. Using C and Lisp was probably too strong.
Don't get me wrong, I have no problem with Scheme per se, and many of implementations are excellent. I'd take any of the Lisp dialects over most other languages. I just don't think that Scheme is the best Lisp has the offer; the same goes for Common Lisp, EuLisp or any of the other current standards. Looking at some of the more arcane versions (I'm trying to find BC Smith's {2,3}-Lisp at the moment), I can see a lot of room for improvement (or perfection; whatever).
Anyhoo, it wasn't my intention to start a language war, so I'm just going to shut up now.
I doubt it. Too much of Japanese--or most languages for that matter--are tied up the culture, in the way you learn, etc. While I could certainly learn to use the language correctly, I wouldn't really understand the meaning of the words in the same way as a native speaker. Saying that kami are kinda like gods but not quite may allow me to use the word in conversation, but it doesn't mean that I'll really understand what they are. That difference has nothing to do with language and everything to do with culture.
Sorry, I'm in a hurry to get to dinner, so I'll just use TUNES review: go here and read "Cons" (ironic, eh?). If it's not there, add "no decent object system" (AFAIK).
Slashdot Mirror
I suppose we have evidence that this doesn't work in how many people still don't wear belts (and smoke, and eat fatty food...), but it would be interesting to really run some numbers and see how effective it is compared to regulations. Any countries out there that don't have any seatbelt laws on the books that we could use?
<flamebait>
Then there's always the view the people who don't pay attention to warnings should sacrifice themselves for the good of the species.
</flamebait>
Considering that ObjC was at the heart of OpenStep this isn't much of a suprise. However, Cocoa works with both Java and ObjC, as well as C, C++ and ObjC++.
How far would science have gone without materialism, or logic, or falsifiability itself? Or Occam's razor? (Though, IMO, neither materialism or Occam's razor are all that desirable.)
And religion is not part of philosophy, it's part of religion. The Philosophy of Religion is another matter.
In a nutshell, neuromorphic engineering involves modelling neural systems in analog hardware, starting with the neurons and moving up, hopefully to whole neurvous systems in the coming decades. The focus is one realism--this is modelling, after all--and replicating the physical properties of neurons as accurately as is possible in silicon VLSI. It is also home to a great deal of work on analog, and mixed analog-digital devices, as well as pure research on neural computation. (In a broad sense a 'computation'.)
Most relevent to this discussion is that we now have an AI proto-field that is completely different in its approach to the problem (so much so that I don't expect it to turn its attention toward AI, in the proper sense, for several years), far moreso than connectionism. As a happy coincidenece, it also overcomes many of the limitations of classical AI, both technical and ideological, by attacking the problem at the biophysical, instead of psychological, level and doing so in physical, instead of algorithmic, terms.
The problem with this analogy is that they aren't paying for content, they're paying for a service. It's like (YACA: Yet Another Cable Analogy) paying for cable and a single box, then buying a second box and hooking it up yourself in secret. The cable and first box is legit, but the second is illegal. (IMO, this is stupid, but that's the way it is.)
As for the rest, I have two comments. (1) There aren't any natural rights, as history demonstrates quite nicely; and (2) the 'public interest', as embodied in your example, is not the best benchmark of Good and Evil. Racism may be a bad thing, but if the owner of the property doesn't want to sell to blacks or Jews, then I wouldn't simply invalidate his stupidity. If it's his property he can do what he wants with it, IMO. (OTOH, I might pay for a lawyer to look through the covenant for some way to sneak around the requirements without violating them. It's better to be clever than to sue.)
Of course, I didn't use the feature more than once, and didn't bother attaching the keyboard to my current machine, but if you into that sort of thing, it's really quite OK.
Well, for what it's worth Alan Kay and the rest of the Smalltalk designers are there, too, and they've always been trying to change the world. Disney seems to be collecting brilliant people and letting them play on Disney's buck, without too much concern for whether they do anything useful. AFAIK, none of them do any real work for the company. (Hillis is what, 'Head Imagineer'? Sounds important ;-)
Rather, it appears to be the move of a man who found that his doctoral work was not wanted by the market.
Geeze, you made him sound kinda pathetic.
An android will not get emotional.
The idea of emotionless androids is good for Star Trek plots, but it doesn't work in the real world. You would end up with an andriod with virtually no ability to select among goals (e.g., "duck!" or "charge!"), and less ability to create novel goals (e.g., blow up the bridge to stop the tanks). It would be nice if pop science to catch up to at least late-60's AI in this regard.
An android will not become a spy for a foreign and perhaps potentially hostile regime.
The same has been said of computers. Hopefully it would be a little less false in this case.
If an android is "killed", it is just a broken machine.
People get quite attached to their machines; cars have provided ample opportunity to study this in the wild. The situation would probably be worse with such a intimate relationship between the operator and the machine. Plus, if the cost of the machine is too high, it would be cheaper to lose soldiers (though it would have to be very high--I'm always suprised when I see how much it costs to train a grunt, let alone a technically adept grunt).
Perception-wise, it is no different from a human operator in remote location, controlling the exo-droid via virtual-reality.
Not quite. Visual and auditory feeds can be recreated faithfully, but balance and, to some extent, posture and other body-centered senses are more tricky. In fact, I'm not sure how balance could be recreated without actually knocking the operater on the floor when the suit fell over, which IMO is not terribly desirable. (OK, that inner-ear thing from a month or so ago would work, but that would require the operator to be seated, which would mean off-loading all of the details of navigating terrain to the robot itself.)
If there is an "open-window" interface for the operator, then the human operator inside the exo-droid will be vulnerable to bio and/or chemical attacks.
How? What's wrong with a transparent sheet of glass or one of those nifty LCD window-with-HUDs they were thinking of using on tanks a few years back? I consider a car a pretty open interface, but it can sealed against bio/chem weapons without impairing your view any.
A person inside an exo-droid will be feeling like a person with VERY, VERY THICK cloths on. You can't move as easily, you don't feel that you are as agile as before, and each and every movement you make will be a chore.
This is an assumption. A major part of this project seems to be retaining, or even enhancing, the agility of he user. If the net result was what you described, why in God's name would DARPA be working on it as an infantry rig? Infantry lives on mobility, not armor, and trying to reverse that would be a death sentence. DARPA isn't stupid, you know; they aren't going to ask soldiers to wear tanks everywhere they go.
And you left out the problem of lag. I can tell you from personal experience that even a hundred milliseconds makes a big difference in 'combat' situations (like Quake ;-). You would probably pick up that much just in the transition from the operater's controls to transmitter, let alone the time it takes for the stupid mech to interpret the message, act on it and respond. If you're fighting a live opponent (e.g., a TOW) and lose, say, 500msec, it could ruin you whole day. (Apparently tanks can dodge anti-tank rockets if they see them coming and have time to move; there was something about it on some .mil site I passed through several months ago. Very cool.)
All of that said, I do think that unmanned is the wave of the future. However, I'm betting on semi-autonomous vehicles where humans 'crews' are, at most, offering tactical and strategic advise to the drones. (Though I do think they will be in the field, for practical reasons.) Deathmatches are great fun, but if I need to get something done give me good old-fashioned real-time strategy ;-)
Bipedal movement is very hard to pull off. It's also inefficient at low speed, unstable, and complex. If I was making a combat bot, I'd probably stick to quads or wheels--the advantages of bipeds are far outweighed by the complexity imposed in all but a very few situations. (Of course, Murphy dictates that those will be the situations you end up in, but presumably there would be a range of bots available.)
Take a look at MacOSRumors (and if you have, assume I addressing /. as a whole ;-): Rumor has it that Apple's been talking to some PC manufacturers about porting OSX to their wares. They had an Intel version of OSX, and the current version is supposed to be sync'ed with FreeBSD, so this probably could be accomplished relatively easily. I never really understood why FreeBSD would be their compatability target, instead of, say, NetBSD, if they weren't planning an Intel port, or even abandoning the PowerPC, so making that move would seem to make sense. Of course, we are talking about Apple, so....
There's also a related rumor that Apple may Open Source (please, no flames about APSL) enough of the remaining closed portions of OSX and Carbon to enable third-parties (can't imagine who that would be ;-) to port it for them.
Either way, we win.
Absolutely. There are several projects underway (and completed) to do this, and all of them are well into the multi-thousand dollar range, AFAIK. The silicon visual system constructed at, IIRC, Georgia Tech, is supposed to be most complex VLSI device ever created (or was when their page was last updated ;-). I suspect that you won't be buying one for for $50.
(Incidentally, my favorite hardware vision project is here. This guy building most of a primate visual system (retina to cortex) to model attention and tracking. Who needs a silicon retina when you can get a silicon cortex ;-)
But that offers me the best chance to successfully defend myself (note: avioding contact is very definitely preferrable (I'm a coward at heart ;-), but that's not really defense, per se). It would be uterly irrational for me to chose any other weapon. The fact that my attacker may have a gun removes all doubt.
Most people are way more likely to kill/injure themselves (or other people, besides the attacker) with a gun when trying to defend themselves.
But I'm not. I've always said that if you don't want to learn to use your gun you may as well just shoot yourself and get it over with. OTOH, if you are willing to learn I don't see a problem.
Most people do not know how to use guns, and in a dark alley anything is possible.
As I said, if you can't use it, don't. That this fact escapes many people does not mean *all* of us are clueless.
why guns are evil.
*snicker*
No guns and he'd still be alive.
And? That was a Bad Thing, no doubt, but if the cops didn't have guns we'd have a shitload of dead cops every year instead.
*sigh*
You're really not too bright are you? Has anyone *ever* exercised sufficient control over a technology to simply remove it from the world? You can confiscate all the guns you want, but *I* can still make more (albeit fairly poor examples). Are you planning on making it illegal to descibe the process of constructing a gun as well? Maybe we can write OED and have 'gun' removed from the English language.
Free clue: as long as *anyone* knows who to make guns, someone will. Pass all the laws you want, but you simply can't win.
(Note: the above statement is an example of criticism, not flamebait. Or at least not very good flamebait.)
How can *anything*[0] be conscious is a better question. Quantum mechanics adds exactly nothing to answering that question; instead Penrose and his ilk let the mathematics, the often bizarre conclusions and experiments, act as a giant handwave. "Golly it's *so* weird and he has *so much* math, he must be right!".
There's no real reason why computers can't be conscious, though I agree that it's difficult to see how an algorithm could be.[1] Luckily, there's more to computers than algorithms. The conscious mind could, for example, the *result* of computations, instead of the computations themselves.[2] This wouldn't give conscious much leverage in the grand scheme of things, but that's a secondary concern.
In any case, the problem is that we have no working (or even broken) definitions of quale, consciousness, mind, intentionality (not mentioned elsewhere, but it should have been), or even brain, computer and quantum mechanics. It is extremely easy to explain to things we don't understand in terms of one another, and make it look like an Absolute Truth dropped from above.
[0] Hmm, Extrans doesn't seem to be working for me; my post is previewing as is via Plain Text (visible tags and all). Anyone else having this problem?
[1] Where consciousness == qualia.
[2] Conveniently explaining the well known delay between mental processing and awareness of said processing. Still, this certainly isn't the only explanation that fits, by any means.
I don't mean to be critical of the moderators, but it would be nice if someone who doesn't buy the quantum explanation were bumped up a few points up. Until I reached this comment I thought I might have accidentally connected to the Stapp-Penrose-Sarfatti Unified Fanclub for the Advancement of Mental Illness.
Neat, Reformation the Home Game! I call Luther! Lesse, 8th level priest, 17 Wisdom....WOOHOO a 19! If he doesn't believe in Jesus he has to make a save against Eternal Damnation; act's my ass!
;-)
(Crap, I guess I'll be going with him
Metaphysically, this is a pretty tenuous position.
Less tenuous, though, than the alternative. Truely free will requires an entity that is outside of causality, an unmoved mover. Aside from being physically impossible, this is not what most people consider 'free will'. I drink because I am thirsty, yet if there was free will my being thirsty couldn't have influenced my decision to drink, because there could be no causal connection between my will and my bodies need for fluids. The primary argument to weasel out of this problem--that our will is influenced but not determined--collapses under close inspection.
It throws any attempt at rationality right out the window
If I live to be uploaded, I'll never understand why people believe (a) they are rational, and (b) rationality requires consciousness. The former is plainly false; the entire history of psychology and centuries of philosophy before will attest to that. The latter has been disproven time and again: Turing did a fairly good job, IMO.
(In a hurry, no spellchecking, no well considered arguments....)
1,000 words of english...then its probably not a consept that All japanese hold in common.
This is very off-topic and somewhat spurious, but express the idea of blue in 1000 words or less. If you can't most people are probably colorblind. There's a problem in there somewhere....
Anyway, back on track. I'm not saying you can't express it, I saying that on a semantic level it won't be the same. I could probably descibe kami in a few dozen words, but then my knowledge of kami would be of the concept represented by a few dozen English words, not the single Japanese word and the centuries of cultural baggage it carries with it. That baggage counts, even for little kids.
Here's another example: imagine a ball, roughly a foot in diameter, made up even sized pentagonal or hexagonal panels, colored black or white according to a consistent pattern. Now imagine a {soccer,football} ball. It's just not the same experience if you have any idea what soccer is, let alone if you play. The explanation would be identical, but the meaning would be tremendously different for an Englishman versus, well, an averge American, let alone a Pygmi. (They don't play, do they?) To put it poorly, someone who's never experienced soccer has never experienced soccer.
those probably vary from person to person anyway
Right, except I'm saying that many of them are cultural, rather than individual.
posible for a little japanese kid to learn what that word means, it should be posible for you as well.
Not at all. First, he's a Japanese kid, immearsed in Japan's culture in a way I can never imagine. Second, no matter how much I practice, my first language will get in the way, as will my Northwest upbringing. As I said above, those Japanese words may very well be nothing but pointers to English words and American meanings in my mind.
Incidentally, the reason I chose Japanese was that I read a few months ago a paper on just this subject. The example there was a word, which I can't remember, naturally, the means, roughly, a sort of joyous deference to an other's will, somewhat like how very small children feel around there mothers. Except that this is how grown men feel around their bosses. Intellectually I could understand the idea (or rather, I could understand the underlying logic in a very abstract way), but the point of the paper was that most Westerners simply can't get a feel for the what is being expressed with that word. In English, the feeling would translate to 'toadying' or something similar, which is mostly correct, but with the opposite connotation. Western culture simply doesn't include this idea, even though the language can probably express it. Thus the term is expressible, but effectively meaningless.
True enough. The analogy does break down if you look at the languages closely. However, my point was that no matter how the languages differ--in any respect--they must be equivalent if they are Turing complete. The details, or even gross structures, may be utterly dissimilar, but computation, taken abstractly, requires that they be the same on some primordial level. 'Turing completeness' is such an abstract idea (classical particles in physics have been demonstrated to be Turing complete) that from a concrete language standpoint it's nearly meaningless, thus my comment about having to remind myself. Nevertheless, it's there, and makes excellent analogy fodder.
Human languages are considerably different, so much so that I think the analogy would do more harm here. However, I believe that basic thrust--that human thought, semantics, may be the same regardless of how deep or shallow the syntactic differences may be--holds up quite well, and if I'm reading you correctly, you seem to agree. As it turns out human languages are probably more alike than they are different, which makes me think a better analogy would be, e.g., Classic C vs. ANSI C, or Lisp 1.5 vs. MacLisp vs. Common Lisp. Using C and Lisp was probably too strong.
Don't get me wrong, I have no problem with Scheme per se, and many of implementations are excellent. I'd take any of the Lisp dialects over most other languages. I just don't think that Scheme is the best Lisp has the offer; the same goes for Common Lisp, EuLisp or any of the other current standards. Looking at some of the more arcane versions (I'm trying to find BC Smith's {2,3}-Lisp at the moment), I can see a lot of room for improvement (or perfection; whatever).
Anyhoo, it wasn't my intention to start a language war, so I'm just going to shut up now.
I doubt it. Too much of Japanese--or most languages for that matter--are tied up the culture, in the way you learn, etc. While I could certainly learn to use the language correctly, I wouldn't really understand the meaning of the words in the same way as a native speaker. Saying that kami are kinda like gods but not quite may allow me to use the word in conversation, but it doesn't mean that I'll really understand what they are. That difference has nothing to do with language and everything to do with culture.
Sorry, I'm in a hurry to get to dinner, so I'll just use TUNES review: go here and read "Cons" (ironic, eh?). If it's not there, add "no decent object system" (AFAIK).