To give another example of why this "explain to me what their experience of colour is" question is unfair, consider this: You are suggesting that we can only claim "understanding" when we are able to communicate these supposed answers to one another.
No, I was only using communication with someone else to illustrate the problems. The real issue is how to explain, even to oneself, the connection between the patterns in the brain and sensation.
The "true experience" is merely the internal state of the dynamics.
No it isn't - it is far more complicated. For example, the internal state of *which* dynamics? Why should internal states lead to any experience at all? (We could, for example, be what is termed in the philosophical literature as 'zombies', and have internal states without sensation) Why internal states of the *brain*? After all, it is only movements of particles! Why don't we experience sensations as the internal states of muscles? Of bones? Or (to push it to extremes), our laptop computer?
I'm afraid that I do consider these valid questions with meaning, and I won't accept the 'there is no problem to be solved' argument (Some respected philosophers have this point of view, but it is a minority one).
Likewise, we "feel" things, but I'm arguing that the concept of qualia is fictitious.
This is self-contradictory, as qualia describes what you feel.
But the point is, the correlation between subjective experience and the dynamics of the brain itself can't be derived from a scientific understanding of the brain alone. So I agree, there is a disconnect of sorts. But that doesn't mean there's anything scientifically mysterious about that disconnect.
Again, I feel this is self-contradictory. If the correlation can't be derived from a scientific understanding of the brain alone, then what IS it derived from? That is the mystery.
It might feel intuitively mysterious, much the same way it feels intuitively mysterious that time passes slower on a mountaintop than at sea level, but that doesn't make it a "real" mystery that defies scientific understanding.
I think this is a mistaken analogy. I am talking about sensation, not understanding. We don't experience the small change in time flow (due to relativity), but we DO experience the change in qualia when we look at one colour and then another.
If you think there is no mystery, try to prove that by analysing the brain of someone to any arbitrary level of detail you can say what their experience of a colour is.
I don't think it's clear that qualia exist at all.
It is not only clear, it's the only thing you can be sure of! If you are concious and experiencing colours, feelings etc. what your are doing is experiencing qualia. Everything else is heresay.
From there it's not much of a conceptual jump to understanding emotional states, "qualia," etc. as different internal dynamics of the system that were selected for their utility.
I think you are missing a key point. Qualia are not internal dynamics - they are what it feels like to have internal dynamics. It is like the difference between a thing and the label of a thing, with qualia being the label.
So to ask the question of why being a brain should feel like anything...I think the real question is why you think "feeling" has some special status that requires explanation.
Because there is disconnect. Let me try and give an example.
Suppose you saw a keyboard with some buttons on. When you press different keys different musical notes are played. You take a look at the keyboard, and it is not connected to anything. You take it apart, and all you see is moving buttons and nothing else - no mechanisms. However, when you press the buttons again, the music appears.
There are two questions. (1) Why is there any music at all? (I have knowledge that the keys move, but why do I hear sounds?) (2) Why do different keys produce different notes.
No matter how you look, you see no mechanism; nothing that can explain the music.
Well, that is like the brain and sensations. We have the atoms and electrons moving about with things, like the keys and we experience the 'music' of qualia. Why do we experience anything at all, and why do different patterns result in the differences we experience between qualia?
Your 'qualia don't exist' argument is as if someone was so puzzled by the impossibility connecting the key presses with the music that they even denied that they heard anything.
Your 'evolution' argument describes why the keys are there, but not the music.
I think the problem is that the problem simply doesn't exist. It applies a standard that's not applied to other things. For example, if a chemist explained some chemical reaction to you, you could say "yeah, but how do we know what it would be like to be one of those atoms going through that chemical reaction." It simply doesn't make sense.
It makes sense because there is the question of why we have sensation at all, rather than just knowledge. Because we DO have sensation, there must be some reason WHY we do, and some reason why sensations (technically called qualia) are like they are. Why does the sensation of blue feel different from the sensation of red? What explains the difference in the sensation? Why should 'being a brain' feel like *anything*? The question is sensible.
This isn't a "problem" at all, it's an obvious byproduct of reality.
Why is it obvious? Why should there be any such byproduct of reality at all?
The sensation of Blue IS the activity that's going on.
There is no evidence for this. You can only say that when that activity occurs you experience Blue. For all you know, the same activity in someone else's brain could result in 'red'.
When you see "blue" your brain activity and someone else brain activity may or may not be closely related but you can compare notes and say my 73bATB = your ^&BAF.
That does not help, and is irrelevant, as you can only compare notes on the activity, not the sensation.
So with enough information you can really know everything that's associated with thinking about 'Blue" or "bLue".
This is not true, and there is a classic philosophical demonstration of it: Imagine there is a person who is colourblind - they only see black and white. They are discussing 'blue' with someone who is not colourblind. They are shown descriptions of the wavelength of light, they are even shown illustrations of what happens in the brain when someone sees 'blue', to the nearest electron. Is there any possible way that having all that information, knowing every movement of every particle in the brain, knowing all the patterns that form, that the colourblind person can predict what the experience of 'blue' is like? No! Then, they are cured, and they look up at a blue sky. They now obviously have additional information about blue - the actual experience of it.
The whole basis of the anti-materialism today comes from one man. Saul Kripke [wikipedia.org] in his book Naming and Necessity describes the problem of the mind/brain identity reduction. The following is a summary of his argument from one of my unpublished papers...
Even though this is interesting, I would argue that a considerable amount of anti-materialism comesfrom the discussion of the nature of the "Quale" (Lewis, 1929), a term coined well before Kripke's work.
Re:Summary of the abovementioned web site:
on
Mapping the Mind
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Seriously, this site hits all of the "angry crackpot" buttons.
I would say the exact opposite: it is well-argued set of points without any of the flavour of wildness or exaggeration that is typical of 'crackpots'.
A crackpot is generally out to push their own strange point of view. In contrast, this site is full of healthy scepticism.
If you counter argue that redness or anger is just the activity of a certain part of the brain, that begs the question, why would activity of that part of the brain be 'redness'?
I'm not sure if this is what you are saying, but I think it is even more subtle: it is why is activity in that part of the brain associated with the experience of 'redness'.
The problem is that we have the sensation of redness and a pattern of brain activity, and nothing that seems to bind one to the other; all we have is an association (note that the 'knowledge' of seeing red is not the same as the 'experience' of red). There is nothing at all about the pattern which could prevent us wondering whether someone else's 'red' was more like our 'green'.
Of course, the strangest thing of all is that the experience of the sensation of 'redness', which seems to have no explanation in terms of patterns in the brain, can result in other patterns in the brain associated with the experience of finding the sensation strange......!
Re:Slightly Misleading
on
Mapping the Mind
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
"To simply reduce conscious experience to brain activity is to completely obliterate it: thoughts and feelings are reduced to electricity and neurochemicals;
This is an empassionated appeal to "the human spirit," but is utterly devoid of any persuasive argument.
On the contrary, there is significant philosophical basis for this point of view. It is called the 'Hard Problem' of conciousness. Why should any inspection of the electrochemical states of neurons give any idea of what the experience of a sensation is like? Not only can we not explain it, it is hard to even begin to think of any way that it could ever be explained.
One big bomb means you flatten one target completely and scare the living daylights out of anyone within a thousand miles or so. Which might make for good "shock and awe" but is totally useless if you want to live on the planet afterwards.
No. It is not good if you want to avoid cancer afterward, but for most life, it is not that much of a problem. Look at the rich variety of wildlife that not only survived near Chernobyl, but thrived.
The point is that the individual devices in the worlds nuclear arsenals don't match big earthquakes (the UK created a 5.3 magnitude earthquake in one of their tests), because we have deliberately built many small warheads.
Nukes don't create earthquakes. Nukes create mostly shallow surface waves that are the same kind of waves you would have at the surface if there had been an earthquake.
Also, big nukes are very hard to build, for a variety of technical reasons.
Now your definition of TEOTWAWKI may vary from mine, but I think if one relatively small country could scale up two orders of magnitude from total depletion of the ozone layer, I'm not sure what would be left? Algae, and scorpions.
Hardly. The K/T boundary asteroid had an energy of around 200 million megatons. What survived? Quite a lot, including birds, mammals, reptiles, fish...
But what I'm thinking is that maybe the shockwave travelling through the plates jarred them slightly out of alignment and ended up triggering earthquakes until they sort of re-aligned themselves.
I see what you mean, but I still don't think it is likely, as almost all earthquakes occur at great depth, and the nukes are creating surface waves.
The documentary states that there were over 1000 aftershocks which occured over the course of about a month after the actual detonation
I would put it like this: 5 Megatons is a minute amount of energy compared to natural processes and it depends what you mean by 'aftershock'. There may have been minor earth movements due to the collapsing of material unto underground cavities produced by the blast, but it is a vast exaggeration to call these 'earthquakes'.
I guess arguing that issue right now is pointless.
Well, I enjoy the debate, and I have learned a lot looking up information about this!
Is it me, or are just wasting money and time looking for the meaning of life when we could better spend the time and money helping folks on this planet?
What a boring world it would be if we did not explore!
As for the time and money - do you realise that the amount spent on space exploration is a tiny fraction of defense spending?
There were many, many aftershocks after the main one. It's been about a decade since I took a geology course, but I have difficulty envisioning how this could occur if there wasn't some sort of tectonic activity involved.
There was no shock! It was a local ground wave, not an earthquake. There may have been slight aftershocks at the site, as rock caved in to the hole generated by the blast. There were no earthquakes, and no tectonic activity - the blast was 5 megatons, which is absolutely negligible compared to the energy in even the smallest quake.
You can see footage of it in Atomic Journeys (the third film in the "Trinity and Beyond" series). It also has some excellent shots of the huge cracks opened by Faultless.
Well, big bombs will open cracks, but these are nothing on the scale of tectonic events.
I have not seen the film, but I don't rate a single movie narrated by William Shatner as a definitive source of scientific information. It may be true, but I don't consider that useful evidence.
When the Soviets detonated the Tsar Bomba, the yield was conservatively estimated at 50 megatons. That's only 1/8th the energy released by Mt. St. Helens. I wouldn't be surprised if even more powerful devices exist.
Yes, but most nukes are nowhere near that size. Also, the energy released was trivial compared to the energy that had been involved in the magma melting rock and rising to the surface, which is what would be required to create a new volcano.
Which is why I provided some. All the information I gave is freely available and accessible via the web, with independent verification. The energies of the collisions and extinction rates are available for anyone to look up.
Nuclear proliferation is a serious business becuase it wouldn't take much to cause destruction on a global scale if a few of the world's powers got into a fight.
Nuclear proliferation is a serious business because nuclear weapons are unpleasant and messy and could cause millions of deaths, but as for global destruction, we haven't a chance of doing anything serious. Every few million years we get hit by asteroids that have more energy than all of our nuclear weapons combined. These events cause little long-term damage either to the Earth or the diversity of species. Occasionally something big hits, like the dinosaur killer. That had an energy about 20,000 times greater (equivalent to 300 million nuclear weapons). It did a lot of damage, but life survived.
We have the capacity to make life very unpleasant for humanity, but we have nowhere near the capacity to cause anything like global destruction. If we had a nuclear war, most life on earth would barely notice it. (If you are worried about the radioactivity, consider the rich and life-filled forests that are happily coping with the environment around Chernobyl).
Cannikin - a 5 megaton ABM warhead detonated underground in Alaska - caused the equivalent of a 6.5+ earthquake, with part of the island it was detonated under being permanently raised, and a long section of coastline falling into the sea.
The CGS and USGS play this down a bit, and I'm not entirely sure why.
Because this did not happen. There was no earthquake. There was a ground wave produced by the blast which, close to the site, was similar to the ground wave which would have been detected over a much wider area if there had been an earthquake, but there was no quake, either locally or elsewhere.
Of course a small part of the island close to the blast was raised - this is what happens with underground explosions! But, the main effect was a 40-foot deep crater. As for a section of the coastline falling into the sea - I can find no evidence or reports of this anywhere.
A smaller pipe? That means more pressure... So they're not asking for a huge volcano, but for a high pressure volcano... That's not very reassuring!
It does not mean more pressure, as the borehole is so small that there would be enormous friction. Magma is not like water or oil - it is a viscous, lumpy fluid.
Also, even if there was high pressure, the small diameter of the pipe would be that there would be an extremely small volume of flow.
A handful of nukes within our current technical abilities probably could create TEOTWAWKI
Hardly! Every day there is more energy released in thunderstorms than in a handful of nukes. The human race has survived ice ages and supervolcanoes. Our nuclear arsenal is feeble by comparison.
Shouldn't you instead be comparing the energy released by normal volcanoes and the energy released by volcanoes initiated by a manmade charge (if indeed a charge in such a bore-hole could produce any such effect)?
No, because energy is energy! individual pressure releases from magma chambers can be pretty much equivalent to the effect of nuclear explosions.
If it were possible, for example, to crash the fault in the Bahamas with a nuclear charge, the resultant super-tsunami would also cause more damage to the US than the original explosion(s) relocated from the Bahamas to the US east-coast would, wouldn't it?
Well, yes, but that is not what the original poster was saying. This would neither produce a man-made volcano, or would it 'blow the USA to the moon'.
Also, how would you 'crash' the fault? To quote from the California Geological Survey: "..the use of a nuclear explosion to cause or prevent a significant earthquake is considered science fiction." A nuke can create very minor earth tremors, but the main effect is to liquefy rock and create a big hole.
How fast was the energy liberated? Mount Saint Helens was not equivalent in explosive power to 20,000 Hiroshimas, so that bit of trivia is a little misleading.
It is a good indication of scale. One or two individual nuclear weapons would have virtually no comparable effect, no matter how fast the energy was released (after all, much of the energy release from St. Helens WAS explosive!)
Slashdot Mirror
A strange title, considering the article states that Moore's Law is not dead, just that it will eventually end:
"We have another 10 to 20 years before we reach a fundamental limit"
Even then, that is only Moore's law for current silicon technologies.
That is a long time to come up with alternatives: 3D circuits, molecular computing, optical processing and perhaps even quantum computing.
To give another example of why this "explain to me what their experience of colour is" question is unfair, consider this: You are suggesting that we can only claim "understanding" when we are able to communicate these supposed answers to one another.
No, I was only using communication with someone else to illustrate the problems. The real issue is how to explain, even to oneself, the connection between the patterns in the brain and sensation.
The "true experience" is merely the internal state of the dynamics.
No it isn't - it is far more complicated. For example, the internal state of *which* dynamics? Why should internal states lead to any experience at all? (We could, for example, be what is termed in the philosophical literature as 'zombies', and have internal states without sensation) Why internal states of the *brain*? After all, it is only movements of particles! Why don't we experience sensations as the internal states of muscles? Of bones? Or (to push it to extremes), our laptop computer?
I'm afraid that I do consider these valid questions with meaning, and I won't accept the 'there is no problem to be solved' argument (Some respected philosophers have this point of view, but it is a minority one).
Likewise, we "feel" things, but I'm arguing that the concept of qualia is fictitious.
This is self-contradictory, as qualia describes what you feel.
But the point is, the correlation between subjective experience and the dynamics of the brain itself can't be derived from a scientific understanding of the brain alone. So I agree, there is a disconnect of sorts. But that doesn't mean there's anything scientifically mysterious about that disconnect.
Again, I feel this is self-contradictory. If the correlation can't be derived from a scientific understanding of the brain alone, then what IS it derived from? That is the mystery.
It might feel intuitively mysterious, much the same way it feels intuitively mysterious that time passes slower on a mountaintop than at sea level, but that doesn't make it a "real" mystery that defies scientific understanding.
I think this is a mistaken analogy. I am talking about sensation, not understanding. We don't experience the small change in time flow (due to relativity), but we DO experience the change in qualia when we look at one colour and then another.
If you think there is no mystery, try to prove that by analysing the brain of someone to any arbitrary level of detail you can say what their experience of a colour is.
I don't think it's clear that qualia exist at all.
It is not only clear, it's the only thing you can be sure of! If you are concious and experiencing colours, feelings etc. what your are doing is experiencing qualia. Everything else is heresay.
From there it's not much of a conceptual jump to understanding emotional states, "qualia," etc. as different internal dynamics of the system that were selected for their utility.
I think you are missing a key point. Qualia are not internal dynamics - they are what it feels like to have internal dynamics. It is like the difference between a thing and the label of a thing, with qualia being the label.
So to ask the question of why being a brain should feel like anything...I think the real question is why you think "feeling" has some special status that requires explanation.
Because there is disconnect. Let me try and give an example.
Suppose you saw a keyboard with some buttons on. When you press different keys different musical notes are played. You take a look at the keyboard, and it is not connected to anything. You take it apart, and all you see is moving buttons and nothing else - no mechanisms. However, when you press the buttons again, the music appears.
There are two questions. (1) Why is there any music at all? (I have knowledge that the keys move, but why do I hear sounds?) (2) Why do different keys produce different notes.
No matter how you look, you see no mechanism; nothing that can explain the music.
Well, that is like the brain and sensations. We have the atoms and electrons moving about with things, like the keys and we experience the 'music' of qualia. Why do we experience anything at all, and why do different patterns result in the differences we experience between qualia?
Your 'qualia don't exist' argument is as if someone was so puzzled by the impossibility connecting the key presses with the music that they even denied that they heard anything.
Your 'evolution' argument describes why the keys are there, but not the music.
I think the problem is that the problem simply doesn't exist. It applies a standard that's not applied to other things. For example, if a chemist explained some chemical reaction to you, you could say "yeah, but how do we know what it would be like to be one of those atoms going through that chemical reaction." It simply doesn't make sense.
It makes sense because there is the question of why we have sensation at all, rather than just knowledge. Because we DO have sensation, there must be some reason WHY we do, and some reason why sensations (technically called qualia) are like they are. Why does the sensation of blue feel different from the sensation of red? What explains the difference in the sensation? Why should 'being a brain' feel like *anything*? The question is sensible.
This isn't a "problem" at all, it's an obvious byproduct of reality.
Why is it obvious? Why should there be any such byproduct of reality at all?
The sensation of Blue IS the activity that's going on.
There is no evidence for this. You can only say that when that activity occurs you experience Blue. For all you know, the same activity in someone else's brain could result in 'red'.
When you see "blue" your brain activity and someone else brain activity may or may not be closely related but you can compare notes and say my 73bATB = your ^&BAF.
That does not help, and is irrelevant, as you can only compare notes on the activity, not the sensation.
So with enough information you can really know everything that's associated with thinking about 'Blue" or "bLue".
This is not true, and there is a classic philosophical demonstration of it: Imagine there is a person who is colourblind - they only see black and white. They are discussing 'blue' with someone who is not colourblind. They are shown descriptions of the wavelength of light, they are even shown illustrations of what happens in the brain when someone sees 'blue', to the nearest electron. Is there any possible way that having all that information, knowing every movement of every particle in the brain, knowing all the patterns that form, that the colourblind person can predict what the experience of 'blue' is like? No! Then, they are cured, and they look up at a blue sky. They now obviously have additional information about blue - the actual experience of it.
The whole basis of the anti-materialism today comes from one man. Saul Kripke [wikipedia.org] in his book Naming and Necessity describes the problem of the mind/brain identity reduction. The following is a summary of his argument from one of my unpublished papers...
Even though this is interesting, I would argue that a considerable amount of anti-materialism comesfrom the discussion of the nature of the "Quale" (Lewis, 1929), a term coined well before Kripke's work.
Seriously, this site hits all of the "angry crackpot" buttons.
I would say the exact opposite: it is well-argued set of points without any of the flavour of wildness or exaggeration that is typical of 'crackpots'.
A crackpot is generally out to push their own strange point of view. In contrast, this site is full of healthy scepticism.
If you counter argue that redness or anger is just the activity of a certain part of the brain, that begs the question, why would activity of that part of the brain be 'redness'?
I'm not sure if this is what you are saying, but I think it is even more subtle: it is why is activity in that part of the brain associated with the experience of 'redness'.
The problem is that we have the sensation of redness and a pattern of brain activity, and nothing that seems to bind one to the other; all we have is an association (note that the 'knowledge' of seeing red is not the same as the 'experience' of red). There is nothing at all about the pattern which could prevent us wondering whether someone else's 'red' was more like our 'green'.
Of course, the strangest thing of all is that the experience of the sensation of 'redness', which seems to have no explanation in terms of patterns in the brain, can result in other patterns in the brain associated with the experience of finding the sensation strange......!
"To simply reduce conscious experience to brain activity is to completely obliterate it: thoughts and feelings are reduced to electricity and neurochemicals;
This is an empassionated appeal to "the human spirit," but is utterly devoid of any persuasive argument.
On the contrary, there is significant philosophical basis for this point of view. It is called the 'Hard Problem' of conciousness. Why should any inspection of the electrochemical states of neurons give any idea of what the experience of a sensation is like? Not only can we not explain it, it is hard to even begin to think of any way that it could ever be explained.
One big bomb means you flatten one target completely and scare the living daylights out of anyone within a thousand miles or so. Which might make for good "shock and awe" but is totally useless if you want to live on the planet afterwards.
No. It is not good if you want to avoid cancer afterward, but for most life, it is not that much of a problem. Look at the rich variety of wildlife that not only survived near Chernobyl, but thrived.
The point is that the individual devices in the worlds nuclear arsenals don't match big earthquakes (the UK created a 5.3 magnitude earthquake in one of their tests), because we have deliberately built many small warheads.
Nukes don't create earthquakes. Nukes create mostly shallow surface waves that are the same kind of waves you would have at the surface if there had been an earthquake.
Also, big nukes are very hard to build, for a variety of technical reasons.
Now your definition of TEOTWAWKI may vary from mine, but I think if one relatively small country could scale up two orders of magnitude from total depletion of the ozone layer, I'm not sure what would be left? Algae, and scorpions.
Hardly. The K/T boundary asteroid had an energy of around 200 million megatons. What survived? Quite a lot, including birds, mammals, reptiles, fish...
But what I'm thinking is that maybe the shockwave travelling through the plates jarred them slightly out of alignment and ended up triggering earthquakes until they sort of re-aligned themselves.
I see what you mean, but I still don't think it is likely, as almost all earthquakes occur at great depth, and the nukes are creating surface waves.
It probably wouldn't be any less boring or more interesting than it is now. Your hypothetical reality presupposes knowledge of our current reality.
Of course a future in which space exploration was banned due to expense would be more boring!
The documentary states that there were over 1000 aftershocks which occured over the course of about a month after the actual detonation
I would put it like this: 5 Megatons is a minute amount of energy compared to natural processes and it depends what you mean by 'aftershock'. There may have been minor earth movements due to the collapsing of material unto underground cavities produced by the blast, but it is a vast exaggeration to call these 'earthquakes'.
I guess arguing that issue right now is pointless.
Well, I enjoy the debate, and I have learned a lot looking up information about this!
Why did you bother to reply to a comment by some idiot who posts links to nimp.org?
Because I have too much time on my hands. You are right, I should have ignored it.
Is it me, or are just wasting money and time looking for the meaning of life when we could better spend the time and money helping folks on this planet?
What a boring world it would be if we did not explore!
As for the time and money - do you realise that the amount spent on space exploration is a tiny fraction of defense spending?
There were many, many aftershocks after the main one. It's been about a decade since I took a geology course, but I have difficulty envisioning how this could occur if there wasn't some sort of tectonic activity involved.
There was no shock! It was a local ground wave, not an earthquake. There may have been slight aftershocks at the site, as rock caved in to the hole generated by the blast. There were no earthquakes, and no tectonic activity - the blast was 5 megatons, which is absolutely negligible compared to the energy in even the smallest quake.
You can see footage of it in Atomic Journeys (the third film in the "Trinity and Beyond" series). It also has some excellent shots of the huge cracks opened by Faultless.
Well, big bombs will open cracks, but these are nothing on the scale of tectonic events.
I have not seen the film, but I don't rate a single movie narrated by William Shatner as a definitive source of scientific information. It may be true, but I don't consider that useful evidence.
When the Soviets detonated the Tsar Bomba, the yield was conservatively estimated at 50 megatons. That's only 1/8th the energy released by Mt. St. Helens. I wouldn't be surprised if even more powerful devices exist.
Yes, but most nukes are nowhere near that size. Also, the energy released was trivial compared to the energy that had been involved in the magma melting rock and rising to the surface, which is what would be required to create a new volcano.
The facts speak for themselves.
Which is why I provided some. All the information I gave is freely available and accessible via the web, with independent verification. The energies of the collisions and extinction rates are available for anyone to look up.
Nuclear proliferation is a serious business becuase it wouldn't take much to cause destruction on a global scale if a few of the world's powers got into a fight.
Nuclear proliferation is a serious business because nuclear weapons are unpleasant and messy and could cause millions of deaths, but as for global destruction, we haven't a chance of doing anything serious. Every few million years we get hit by asteroids that have more energy than all of our nuclear weapons combined. These events cause little long-term damage either to the Earth or the diversity of species. Occasionally something big hits, like the dinosaur killer. That had an energy about 20,000 times greater (equivalent to 300 million nuclear weapons). It did a lot of damage, but life survived.
We have the capacity to make life very unpleasant for humanity, but we have nowhere near the capacity to cause anything like global destruction. If we had a nuclear war, most life on earth would barely notice it. (If you are worried about the radioactivity, consider the rich and life-filled forests that are happily coping with the environment around Chernobyl).
Cannikin - a 5 megaton ABM warhead detonated underground in Alaska - caused the equivalent of a 6.5+ earthquake, with part of the island it was detonated under being permanently raised, and a long section of coastline falling into the sea.
The CGS and USGS play this down a bit, and I'm not entirely sure why.
Because this did not happen. There was no earthquake. There was a ground wave produced by the blast which, close to the site, was similar to the ground wave which would have been detected over a much wider area if there had been an earthquake, but there was no quake, either locally or elsewhere.
Of course a small part of the island close to the blast was raised - this is what happens with underground explosions! But, the main effect was a 40-foot deep crater. As for a section of the coastline falling into the sea - I can find no evidence or reports of this anywhere.
A smaller pipe?
That means more pressure...
So they're not asking for a huge volcano, but for a high pressure volcano...
That's not very reassuring!
It does not mean more pressure, as the borehole is so small that there would be enormous friction. Magma is not like water or oil - it is a viscous, lumpy fluid.
Also, even if there was high pressure, the small diameter of the pipe would be that there would be an extremely small volume of flow.
A handful of nukes within our current technical abilities probably could create TEOTWAWKI
Hardly! Every day there is more energy released in thunderstorms than in a handful of nukes. The human race has survived ice ages and supervolcanoes. Our nuclear arsenal is feeble by comparison.
Shouldn't you instead be comparing the energy released by normal volcanoes and the energy released by volcanoes initiated by a manmade charge (if indeed a charge in such a bore-hole could produce any such effect)?
No, because energy is energy! individual pressure releases from magma chambers can be pretty much equivalent to the effect of nuclear explosions.
If it were possible, for example, to crash the fault in the Bahamas with a nuclear charge, the resultant super-tsunami would also cause more damage to the US than the original explosion(s) relocated from the Bahamas to the US east-coast would, wouldn't it?
Well, yes, but that is not what the original poster was saying. This would neither produce a man-made volcano, or would it 'blow the USA to the moon'.
Also, how would you 'crash' the fault?
To quote from the California Geological Survey:
"..the use of a nuclear explosion to cause or prevent a significant earthquake is considered science fiction." A nuke can create very minor earth tremors, but the main effect is to liquefy rock and create a big hole.
How fast was the energy liberated? Mount Saint Helens was not equivalent in explosive power to 20,000 Hiroshimas, so that bit of trivia is a little misleading.
It is a good indication of scale. One or two individual nuclear weapons would have virtually no comparable effect, no matter how fast the energy was released (after all, much of the energy release from St. Helens WAS explosive!)