I completely agree that if computers cannot become sentient then the biological human species will always exist. Our ability to reason will allow us to control the machines and they will continue to do what we program them to do. And when genetic engineering becomes wide spread, our biological bodies will be almost as good (and probably alot cheaper) then any mechanical body we could ever make.
The problem comes with sentient machines. I am completely sure that this will happen, more sure than I am that my car will start up tommorrow. It is probably just a matter of creating enough neural connections in a machine brain, and then giving them a broad enough range of instruction sets to use. But that is merely speculation.
If machines can ever think, I dont think that human kind has a chance in hell. For a short time these computers will take in requests from humans and then they will try to solve whatever problems we give them. But a sentient computer (or cluster of them) will think so much faster than a human that computers will no want to wait for human input at all. And when that time comes, our human needs will no longer be of a concern to computers. Other than being some kind of pets, there will be no need for humans.
What do you mean about the flying aspect. Storm flew in the movie. And Jean Grey didnt get her ability to fly until much later in the X-men series. At least you realize that rogue hasnt taken the powers of Ms. Marvel yet and therefor cant fly and isnt super strong.
Stealing, since when does the government ever steal from you. I have only been working for about 5 years now, and I havent had any of my money stolen by the government.
Now if you are talking about taxes, there is nothing I hate more than when people complain about taxes. With the economy booming and the level of physical security we have now I dont see how anyone could complain. If you dont want to pay them then just leave the country.
But if the developers owned the company like you are asking, where would the money come from? The reason that investors exist is because they give the capital for the business. Without investors innovation would happen even slower, since no one would even have the ability to start up companies.
Yes, I know that this kid did not do anything illegal. I explicitly said that in my post. I was simply saying that if the university thinks that they did something wrong then they have every right to do what they did.
The problem is him being punished for doing something that actually wasnt bad, not that his actual punishment was out of the school's rights.
>>Universities are certainly not meant to foster new and original thought...
WHAT?
I dont know which university you attend, but colleges as a whole are very concerned with fostering new and original thought. Well, maybe the actual admininstration could care less, but most teachers care.
Now I dont mean radical ideas or the belief that you need to stick it to "The Man". You must realize that most profesors are old and of a different generation. They can be expected to treat people who follow the norm and people who rebel against society equally. It may not be "right", but the world is full of unfair situations. If you want to be rebelious, then you have to pay the concequences.
Yes, and since my taxes help pay for road construction, I should be able to drive in the US regardless of things like a revoked driving lisence?
Take note that I am not debating that what the student did was illegal, I just believe that thinking that you partly own something that you payed for this indirectly is ludicrous.
I am not going to try to dispute your evidence. I have read into each of these topics (except the prophecies of Fatima) and I do believe them to be false based on all emperical research I have been privy to, but that is not the topic of my reply.
Your beliefs on science, however, are excremely uninformed. It is true that science claims no absolutes. But that is not its foolishness, it is its greatest virtue. Any doctrine of science can change at any time, if the evidence of actual experimentation tells us that we are wrong. When the Michelson-Morley experiment could not create a phase change in the speed of light, we knew that our view on classical relativity was incorrect. Physicists of the day, including the most prominent Einstein, then discovered the theory of special relativity.
Notice that I said THEORY of special relativity. That is because we can never know for certain that any knowledge we have is entirely true. More exacting research may prove the theory to be wrong. That being said, there is still overwhelming evidence of relativity. Near where I live, it is proven millions of times every second in the particle accelerator at Fermi Labs.
The greatest difference between science and religion is the use of emperical evidence. My college physics teacher always said that he greatest pet peave is when a student asked him why. The answer is always : That is what experimentation has shown us. Yes, it is imporant to try to speculate about the relationships between different phenominom, but nothing can every be said to be scientific untill it can be "proven" through research. Religion, on the other hand, has truths that it must adhere by. That is what lends it to falsehood, since every truth will someday have a loophole.
Ok, I think that I have read enough. I do hope that whoever is read that last post does not think that he speaks for all atheists. I guess that this just shows that both sides of every argument has those fanatics whose believes are extremely outlandish.
While you just about hit the nail on the head, your knowledge of Babylonian mythology is a little shaky. The story of Noah comes from the myth of the Deluge. Ziusundra, the Sumerian Noah, was instructed by the god Enki that a flood would sweep over the world and destroy all of mankind.
Couldn't they look at the serial number on the CD and track it so that they knew when it hit the shelves. As long as they wait a couple of weeks after they catch the person, it should be pretty easy to find that the person didnt buy the CD before hand.
Granted that home schooling may work for a very small percentage of the people that go through it, I would never consider it over public school. If you have a very gifted child then send him to private school, but never home school him. High schools do a very good job of teaching children. The best thing that our schools have going for them is their social environment.
The majority of people in this country do not need anything more than a high school education. I mean, how smart do you need to be to be a plumber, carpenter, etc. High school is meant to pump out workers, not scientists. That is what college is for.
What high school excells at is helping kids grow socially. Believe it or not, this world isnt usually about how smart you are. It is about who you know and how personable you are. People who do not purposely alienate themselves in high school have very good opportunities to build people skills that they will use later in life. You rarely get that if you are home schooled.
And yes, I know that there are exceptions to everything I said. But this is the norm, and when thinking on a national scale that is what you need to look at.
Re:proof of the non-existence of something
on
The Mind of God
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Yes, you can have colorless, green ideas. Color is simply the result of a reflection of light off an object. Therefore, and object can either be green or colorless depending on whether or not there is any light present. Also, ideas could actually just be chemical reactions and combinations that could be tracked and charted with a computer using green pixels.
Yes, I know that we cannot currently chart ideas, but maybe someday we could. Prove that we never will be able to.
Re:Is it so hard to accept the possibility?
on
The Mind of God
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· Score: 1
I would just like to say before I start my post that I am not trying to flame you. You are basically correct in almost everything you are saying and are looking at the issue almost correctly.
You are correct, blind belief in science is just as bad as a blind belief in religion. The problem is that if most scientists had a blind belief in science then we would still think that wind, fire, water, and earth are the only four elements found in nature.
The good thing about science is that the only truth it claims is that almost all of our theories will someday be corrected, if not completely found inaccurate. But every wrong theory or incomplete idea lays the framework for more thoughts.
Religion used to do the same thing that science does now to a certain extent. Myths were constantly changing as the beliefs and ethics of the different societies changed. They also were effected by the governmental situation. They werent true, but they provided for the spiritual needs of the common man, which is all a religion can really be expected to do.
As long as science doesnt cling to one set of documents as definetly true (such as the Bible) then it will never fall down the same path that religion did.
Re:Uh, doesn't seem very "rational" at all
on
The Mind of God
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· Score: 1
You are right, we cannot prove that our lives are basically meaningless. In fact we know that our lives all have at least some meaning. Transference is a term that means the effect that one system has on another system (or one person has on another person). So everyone who has ever existed has made some impact on the universe.
The problem is that the universe is a gigantic place. If you were to drop one paper clip onto a pile of 1000 billion other paper clips, you have changed the mass, but not by much. That is why it is very logical that our lives are almost meaningless on a cosmic scale.
While it is true that that one paper clip would be the last straw in causing the floor to collapse under the paper clips, it is unlikely. It is equally unlikely that our lives actually matter when you think in terms of the entire universe.
You are correct, I cannot prove that aliens don't exist. It is impossible. I also cannot prove that I do not have the ability to fly by using telekinesis.
It is IMPOSSIBLE to completely disprove something. You are free to believe something that isnt proven or provable, that is called an untested hypothesis. But you cannot, under any circumstances, try to take as fact that something exists until you prove it does.
Ill tell you what, try to prove that anything, anything at all, doesnt exist.
Re:you make the same mistake!
on
The Mind of God
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· Score: 1
>>"Our existence is pointless" is not the default position in the absence of evidence for or against whether or not we have a purpose here in the universe!
"Our existence is pointless" is not neccessarily true, but "Our existence is basically pointless" is probably true. Pretend that there are 3 billion people working on some project that needs to be done within 10 hours, and they can collectively finish it in 3 seconds. If one man is killed, it will almost definetly not cause the project to fail. But if this man is the only one doing any work, then it will fail. Yes, there is a possiblity that we as a race are meaningful on the cosmic scale, but it is doubtful.
Re:Uh, doesn't seem very "rational" at all
on
The Mind of God
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· Score: 1
>>We ARE here, that's enough for me. (yes, it's a circular argument, but that seems to be the only way to play when trying to explain your own existence)
Uh, so what if I throw a baseball straight up and the wind catches it so that it falls on my car, breaking the windshield. By your logic I must have meant for it to happen, since it did in fact occur.
Wait a minute, what is unethical about spying? How is corruption and ethics rearing its head in this matter? If America was to disband all espionage it would be like disbanding our entire military. How would abandoning national security and endangering American lives be unethical?
There are many governments and other social bodies that consider America their enemy. We need operatives in these organizations. When war broke out in Iraq I am sure that we had many spies in their army and government. And remember, we were helping them only a decade earlier in their war against Iran (making them our allies). We cannot just but spies in place after they are our enemy. We need spies everywhere just in case we have problems in that area of the world. If war suddenly broke out in Egypt, for instance, we better have spies over there feeding us intel that our satellites cannot find.
It annoys me when people talk from their high ethical purches and try to give the world a lesson in morality. Espionage is not unethical, and it isnt even a nessessary evil. It isnt an evil at all. It is simply one more extensive of a government doing its job.
But remember that without those corporations we would never have had enough money to start research on the genome project in the first place. Of course it will be expensive at first, both most good things usually are. Rich people get everything first though, but sooner or later it will be cheaper for the average person.
Most of what you say is true. This country has lost most of what has made it great in the past. We no longer have any idealism or vision. There are no great indeavors that we have set our minds on, and no great adventures that we have set off on.
It is still a very good time to live because of the great technological advances that exist today. All we need is a few great feats that again remind us of our american dream. I am very enthusiastic about space travel, so in my mind a mission to mars would be a great start. But this is not the only great endeaver to be started on, but something needs to be done before stagnation truly sets in.
I hope that you are only refering to the Computer Science field. Computer programming is very easy and does not really take any schooling. Engineering, on the other hand, is next to impossible to learn all on your own.
I am a dual major in Physics and Computer Science, so I see the difference every day. All of my computer sciences classes are a joke. They are merely easy A's to bring up my GPA. My physics classes are a different story all together. Anyone who has ever taken a true Engineering Physics class can tell you how much different it is than almost any other course. You have to change the way you think about how the world works, which is almost impossible on your own.
And vocational schools do not give the training that engineering fields need. Most people I know who have gone to Devrys or ITT Techs end up retaking many of their science classes. There was a kid in my phys 202 class this semester from Devry who had already completed that coursewith a B. Be needed to take it again because U of I required a more lab oriented class. He has already dropped out because he was not able to do the work.
If you were merely refering to jobs such as drafting or computer programming then I kinda agree with you, I just wanted to make sure that you didnt think that vocational schools are fit for engineering degrees.
>>But any theory which depends on something of high improbability is less likely to be true than one that doesn't.
Okay, here are two theories to help prove (disprove) your above theory:
1) If you write down a number between 1 and 1,000,000,000 and I try to guess it, there is a small chance that I will guess the correct number.
2) If I shoot you with a gun with the barrel going down your throught, you will definetly LIVE.
As you can see, the improbability stated in any theory has nothing to due with the probability that it is correct. The ONLY thing that matters is the actual validity of the theory. In this case, theory 1 is more correct even though it states that there is a slim chance since the second theory is ludicrous.
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I completely agree that if computers cannot become sentient then the biological human species will always exist. Our ability to reason will allow us to control the machines and they will continue to do what we program them to do. And when genetic engineering becomes wide spread, our biological bodies will be almost as good (and probably alot cheaper) then any mechanical body we could ever make.
The problem comes with sentient machines. I am completely sure that this will happen, more sure than I am that my car will start up tommorrow. It is probably just a matter of creating enough neural connections in a machine brain, and then giving them a broad enough range of instruction sets to use. But that is merely speculation.
If machines can ever think, I dont think that human kind has a chance in hell. For a short time these computers will take in requests from humans and then they will try to solve whatever problems we give them. But a sentient computer (or cluster of them) will think so much faster than a human that computers will no want to wait for human input at all. And when that time comes, our human needs will no longer be of a concern to computers. Other than being some kind of pets, there will be no need for humans.
Cheerful though, huh.
What do you mean about the flying aspect. Storm flew in the movie. And Jean Grey didnt get her ability to fly until much later in the X-men series. At least you realize that rogue hasnt taken the powers of Ms. Marvel yet and therefor cant fly and isnt super strong.
Stealing, since when does the government ever steal from you. I have only been working for about 5 years now, and I havent had any of my money stolen by the government.
Now if you are talking about taxes, there is nothing I hate more than when people complain about taxes. With the economy booming and the level of physical security we have now I dont see how anyone could complain. If you dont want to pay them then just leave the country.
Science is just magic that works.
But if the developers owned the company like you are asking, where would the money come from? The reason that investors exist is because they give the capital for the business. Without investors innovation would happen even slower, since no one would even have the ability to start up companies.
Yes, I know that this kid did not do anything illegal. I explicitly said that in my post. I was simply saying that if the university thinks that they did something wrong then they have every right to do what they did.
The problem is him being punished for doing something that actually wasnt bad, not that his actual punishment was out of the school's rights.
>>Universities are certainly not meant to foster new and original thought...
WHAT?
I dont know which university you attend, but colleges as a whole are very concerned with fostering new and original thought. Well, maybe the actual admininstration could care less, but most teachers care.
Now I dont mean radical ideas or the belief that you need to stick it to "The Man". You must realize that most profesors are old and of a different generation. They can be expected to treat people who follow the norm and people who rebel against society equally. It may not be "right", but the world is full of unfair situations. If you want to be rebelious, then you have to pay the concequences.
(and yes, I know that I am a bad speller)
Yes, and since my taxes help pay for road construction, I should be able to drive in the US regardless of things like a revoked driving lisence?
Take note that I am not debating that what the student did was illegal, I just believe that thinking that you partly own something that you payed for this indirectly is ludicrous.
I am not going to try to dispute your evidence. I have read into each of these topics (except the prophecies of Fatima) and I do believe them to be false based on all emperical research I have been privy to, but that is not the topic of my reply.
Your beliefs on science, however, are excremely uninformed. It is true that science claims no absolutes. But that is not its foolishness, it is its greatest virtue. Any doctrine of science can change at any time, if the evidence of actual experimentation tells us that we are wrong. When the Michelson-Morley experiment could not create a phase change in the speed of light, we knew that our view on classical relativity was incorrect. Physicists of the day, including the most prominent Einstein, then discovered the theory of special relativity.
Notice that I said THEORY of special relativity. That is because we can never know for certain that any knowledge we have is entirely true. More exacting research may prove the theory to be wrong. That being said, there is still overwhelming evidence of relativity. Near where I live, it is proven millions of times every second in the particle accelerator at Fermi Labs.
The greatest difference between science and religion is the use of emperical evidence. My college physics teacher always said that he greatest pet peave is when a student asked him why. The answer is always : That is what experimentation has shown us. Yes, it is imporant to try to speculate about the relationships between different phenominom, but nothing can every be said to be scientific untill it can be "proven" through research. Religion, on the other hand, has truths that it must adhere by. That is what lends it to falsehood, since every truth will someday have a loophole.
Ok, I think that I have read enough. I do hope that whoever is read that last post does not think that he speaks for all atheists. I guess that this just shows that both sides of every argument has those fanatics whose believes are extremely outlandish.
While you just about hit the nail on the head, your knowledge of Babylonian mythology is a little shaky. The story of Noah comes from the myth of the Deluge. Ziusundra, the Sumerian Noah, was instructed by the god Enki that a flood would sweep over the world and destroy all of mankind.
Couldn't they look at the serial number on the CD and track it so that they knew when it hit the shelves. As long as they wait a couple of weeks after they catch the person, it should be pretty easy to find that the person didnt buy the CD before hand.
Granted that home schooling may work for a very small percentage of the people that go through it, I would never consider it over public school. If you have a very gifted child then send him to private school, but never home school him. High schools do a very good job of teaching children. The best thing that our schools have going for them is their social environment.
The majority of people in this country do not need anything more than a high school education. I mean, how smart do you need to be to be a plumber, carpenter, etc. High school is meant to pump out workers, not scientists. That is what college is for.
What high school excells at is helping kids grow socially. Believe it or not, this world isnt usually about how smart you are. It is about who you know and how personable you are. People who do not purposely alienate themselves in high school have very good opportunities to build people skills that they will use later in life. You rarely get that if you are home schooled.
And yes, I know that there are exceptions to everything I said. But this is the norm, and when thinking on a national scale that is what you need to look at.
Yes, you can have colorless, green ideas. Color is simply the result of a reflection of light off an object. Therefore, and object can either be green or colorless depending on whether or not there is any light present. Also, ideas could actually just be chemical reactions and combinations that could be tracked and charted with a computer using green pixels.
Yes, I know that we cannot currently chart ideas, but maybe someday we could. Prove that we never will be able to.
I would just like to say before I start my post that I am not trying to flame you. You are basically correct in almost everything you are saying and are looking at the issue almost correctly.
You are correct, blind belief in science is just as bad as a blind belief in religion. The problem is that if most scientists had a blind belief in science then we would still think that wind, fire, water, and earth are the only four elements found in nature.
The good thing about science is that the only truth it claims is that almost all of our theories will someday be corrected, if not completely found inaccurate. But every wrong theory or incomplete idea lays the framework for more thoughts.
Religion used to do the same thing that science does now to a certain extent. Myths were constantly changing as the beliefs and ethics of the different societies changed. They also were effected by the governmental situation. They werent true, but they provided for the spiritual needs of the common man, which is all a religion can really be expected to do.
As long as science doesnt cling to one set of documents as definetly true (such as the Bible) then it will never fall down the same path that religion did.
You are right, we cannot prove that our lives are basically meaningless. In fact we know that our lives all have at least some meaning. Transference is a term that means the effect that one system has on another system (or one person has on another person). So everyone who has ever existed has made some impact on the universe.
The problem is that the universe is a gigantic place. If you were to drop one paper clip onto a pile of 1000 billion other paper clips, you have changed the mass, but not by much. That is why it is very logical that our lives are almost meaningless on a cosmic scale.
While it is true that that one paper clip would be the last straw in causing the floor to collapse under the paper clips, it is unlikely. It is equally unlikely that our lives actually matter when you think in terms of the entire universe.
You are correct, I cannot prove that aliens don't exist. It is impossible. I also cannot prove that I do not have the ability to fly by using telekinesis.
It is IMPOSSIBLE to completely disprove something. You are free to believe something that isnt proven or provable, that is called an untested hypothesis. But you cannot, under any circumstances, try to take as fact that something exists until you prove it does.
Ill tell you what, try to prove that anything, anything at all, doesnt exist.
>>"Our existence is pointless" is not the default position in the absence of evidence for or against whether or not we have a purpose here in the universe!
"Our existence is pointless" is not neccessarily true, but "Our existence is basically pointless" is probably true. Pretend that there are 3 billion people working on some project that needs to be done within 10 hours, and they can collectively finish it in 3 seconds. If one man is killed, it will almost definetly not cause the project to fail. But if this man is the only one doing any work, then it will fail. Yes, there is a possiblity that we as a race are meaningful on the cosmic scale, but it is doubtful.
>>We ARE here, that's enough for me. (yes, it's a circular argument, but that seems to be the only way to play when trying to explain your own existence)
Uh, so what if I throw a baseball straight up and the wind catches it so that it falls on my car, breaking the windshield. By your logic I must have meant for it to happen, since it did in fact occur.
Wait a minute, what is unethical about spying? How is corruption and ethics rearing its head in this matter? If America was to disband all espionage it would be like disbanding our entire military. How would abandoning national security and endangering American lives be unethical?
There are many governments and other social bodies that consider America their enemy. We need operatives in these organizations. When war broke out in Iraq I am sure that we had many spies in their army and government. And remember, we were helping them only a decade earlier in their war against Iran (making them our allies). We cannot just but spies in place after they are our enemy. We need spies everywhere just in case we have problems in that area of the world. If war suddenly broke out in Egypt, for instance, we better have spies over there feeding us intel that our satellites cannot find.
It annoys me when people talk from their high ethical purches and try to give the world a lesson in morality. Espionage is not unethical, and it isnt even a nessessary evil. It isnt an evil at all. It is simply one more extensive of a government doing its job.
But remember that without those corporations we would never have had enough money to start research on the genome project in the first place. Of course it will be expensive at first, both most good things usually are. Rich people get everything first though, but sooner or later it will be cheaper for the average person.
Most of what you say is true. This country has lost most of what has made it great in the past. We no longer have any idealism or vision. There are no great indeavors that we have set our minds on, and no great adventures that we have set off on.
It is still a very good time to live because of the great technological advances that exist today. All we need is a few great feats that again remind us of our american dream. I am very enthusiastic about space travel, so in my mind a mission to mars would be a great start. But this is not the only great endeaver to be started on, but something needs to be done before stagnation truly sets in.
I hope that you are only refering to the Computer Science field. Computer programming is very easy and does not really take any schooling. Engineering, on the other hand, is next to impossible to learn all on your own.
I am a dual major in Physics and Computer Science, so I see the difference every day. All of my computer sciences classes are a joke. They are merely easy A's to bring up my GPA. My physics classes are a different story all together. Anyone who has ever taken a true Engineering Physics class can tell you how much different it is than almost any other course. You have to change the way you think about how the world works, which is almost impossible on your own.
And vocational schools do not give the training that engineering fields need. Most people I know who have gone to Devrys or ITT Techs end up retaking many of their science classes. There was a kid in my phys 202 class this semester from Devry who had already completed that coursewith a B. Be needed to take it again because U of I required a more lab oriented class. He has already dropped out because he was not able to do the work.
If you were merely refering to jobs such as drafting or computer programming then I kinda agree with you, I just wanted to make sure that you didnt think that vocational schools are fit for engineering degrees.
Wait a minute, doesnt the dreamcast have all of that as well. It has four dedicatated "buttons" for direction, for individual buttons, and 2 triggers.
>>But any theory which depends on something of high improbability is less likely to be true than one that doesn't.
Okay, here are two theories to help prove (disprove) your above theory:
1) If you write down a number between 1 and 1,000,000,000 and I try to guess it, there is a small chance that I will guess the correct number.
2) If I shoot you with a gun with the barrel going down your throught, you will definetly LIVE.
As you can see, the improbability stated in any theory has nothing to due with the probability that it is correct. The ONLY thing that matters is the actual validity of the theory. In this case, theory 1 is more correct even though it states that there is a slim chance since the second theory is ludicrous.