That's more than al Qaeda. In Pakistan they've added another level. They send someone with a little care package to the hospital where the survivors are being treated as well.
Rather than pay officers to man the tip line, it's more effective to target your efforts to a small population, where the probabilities of finding a terrorist are much higher.
I agree with that, but knowledge of which groups are committing which crimes is obviously useful in helping find those choke points isn't it?
I mean, if you're looking for the seeds of terrorism, and you have limited resources, do you monitor a mosque or a synagogue? Do you monitor every website on the planet, or the ones where people are talking about Allah's plan for infidels?
Those are obvious. We (I do, anyway) know religious extremism is bad in all forms. But in America there are a lot more (by number) fundamentalist Christians than fundamentalist Muslims. And yet, in terms of monitoring, I would feel a lot better knowing that the fundamentalist Muslims have more security resources devoted to them than the fundamentalist Christians. Based on the statistics you acknowledge, does that make sense? Would the calculus change if you (or I) were an abortion doctor? Yes, but I'm not one. Most people aren't.
I don't know what you mean by "massacres" so let's make it a bit more clear. I'm also not sure if you're talking about number of massacres, or number of victims in massacres.
Certainly the majority of suicide bomb attacks have been carried out by Muslims. I'd also say the majority of religiously motivated violence has been carried out by Muslims as well.
I'll bite though. Who in your opinion has carried out most massacres in recent memory?
They use suicide bombs we use arial bombs. Which is more noble and just?
Nobility and justice don't come from the means but the motives.
We think its ok to kill civilians with drones or helicoptors but it is evil if these people carry out a suicide bombing.
God, dude. I know you don't really believe that. Let's do a little thought experiment. If a Muslim terrorist stole an F-16 from a hangar in Afghanistan, flew over the the US, and fired missiles at downtown New York, would evil Republican neo-cons (or whatever you think comprises most of America) start cheering and saying "Oh yay they're finally using modern methods that we approve of! Yay Islam!"
Seriously, get an argument that actually makes sense.
Then what was the point of the whole WMD thing? Even if you think it's lies, if Christians are so dangerous and war mongering, why didn't he just say "God wants us to invade, period!" and then do it? It's an obvious hole in your theory.
There are pretty significant differences that you're ignoring.
Of the Christian groups you mentioned, how many have stated aims of a global Christian theocracy? That's pretty common in Islamic groups and makes them far more dangerous. How many of the groups you mentioned have international allies? Think of al Qaeda working with al Shabaab and the Taliban. They are at work in dozens of countries around the world. Which Christian terrorist groups are similar in that regard?
And of course there's sheer size. Do you know the size of the Lord's Resistance Army? Wikipedia says less than 3000 soldiers. The Taliban is far larger than that.
No, it's not a coincidence. It's also not very useful.
It is useful though. What factors do you think should be taken into account in mass security screening? There's a low probability that any individual Muslim is a terrorist, but a number of plots have been discovered because the FBI has gone out of its way to monitor mosques where lots of Muslims meet. If they had spread the same resources to monitor every single sizable synagogue and church in addition to every single sizable mosque, what do you think would be the effect?
I guess I don't understand what you mean by "useful".
There are over a billion Muslims in the world. There is a 1/6 chance of any randomly selected person being Muslim.
If only 1 out of 6 suicide bombers were Muslim you would have a pretty good argument right there. Maybe you're not proving what you think you're proving.
I had Christians, Muslims, and Jews at my wedding... we got along then, and 10 years later we are still getting along!
That's nice, but were your wedding guests randomly selected from the entire world? No? Then what is your point? That your own close circle of friends has different dynamics than the societal thrusts of populations numbering in the hundreds of millions and billions spread across the entire globe?? Wow, I never would have guessed that.
That the separatists happen to be largely Muslim is inconsequential.
But as a consequence of the separatists being Muslim, their cause is taken up by supporters of global jihad throughout the Muslim world. Just like fighters in Kashmir and Palestine, they receive support from abroad solely due to their religion and the religion of their opponents.
How can you not call that a consequence?? Do you even know what "inconsequential" means?
I agree there's no monolithic left, but that's not really the point. I'm not saying the Black Panthers are part of the left, just that the 'left' (as you called it, and I think we both understand that you meant it very loosely) approves of the Black Panthers even though they have some very strong, central themes that are not compatible with typical leftist ideology. Like racial superiority.
The paper I linked to talks about a similar phenomenon with the left's support of Islamic groups and the "confused leftists" who let little things like ideological differences get in the way of the bigger alliance. It's very interesting and well worth the time to read even if you aren't that type of leftist yourself.
Now I actually am confused. Did you mean that reply for me?
I'm saying, yes, the books you listed are enjoyed by leftists, despite your epithets of "anti-communist" and "pro-libertarian", so your comment did nothing to counter the idea that the shooter may be a leftist. It obviously was meant to since you ended with a sarcastic "what's your point".
Because words like "target" have obvious non-violent meanings. They are a call to focus. Saying things like "Let's hunger strike that guy!" don't make any sense unless you're actually talking about a hunger strike. Nobody's going to be like "Oh yeah that's just a playful way of saying we're going to engage in non-violent political action."
Because arguing that Islam is a religion of violence means the vast majority of Muslims are heretics
Many Muslims support violence without engaging in it. Look at what's going on in Pakistan with the murder of Salman Taseer. The majority of the country (in polls) support the murderer because Salman Taseer was a blasphemer.
Lawyers, the top rung of society, the ones who believe in the rule of law and the political process etc, the kind of moderate Muslim we're supposedly courting in our "#1 ally on terror", literally showered him with rose petals when he entered the courtroom.
If a huge number of Muslims (Pakistani Muslims alone are a huge number) support the death penalty for blasphemy, with scriptural support from the Koran and hadiths, doesn't that make it a religion of violence, even though 99.9% of Muslims may never personally act in violence?
(BTW, Black Panthers are a racially motivated group and have little to do with the 'left')
The left supports and loves the Black Panthers. They are an ally against the establishment and they speak truth to power etc.
I highly recommend this paper, which presents a leftist's views on the left's alliances with groups that "confused leftists" don't understand.
In fact there are plenty of examples of left wing organisation emerging from among people with Islamic beliefs. Malcolm X was a major influence on the leaders of the revolutionary Black Panther Party in the 1960s,
You're seriously underestimating the left. They absolutely love those books, just like they love talking about Stalin. They serve as tales of caution in how the true spirit of communism can be subverted by chauvinists eager on setting up new establishments. It's similar to how no matter how left-wing a politician, there's something that makes them illegitimate and not left-wing enough. Be vigilant comrade.
I do agree though, protest DDOS should be performed with protestors constantly clicking refresh.
Fair enough, if bank employees are personally typing up replies to each web request. But if it's computers vs. computers, why limit one side to manual processes?
The problem is we don't have articles about DDOS attacks against the KKK. Do you actively research things to speak up against, or do you just comment on the things presented? If so then while you may truly be fair and just at heart, the practical effect is that you are strengthening a less fair and less just position than you may think.
Personally I am much more bothered by real-life free speech that involves megaphones. It seems pretty similar to DDOS attacks in that you are drowning out others' equally legitimate speech. But the times I've been exposed to it, I actually felt injured and really pissed off by it. Not so much when I can't visit 4chan for a little while (and I'm banned anyway atm:).
Okay, you need to look at Searle's arguments a little more carefully.
True, I've only read a bit of the Wikipedia page but it seems like a pretty decent summary.
The Chinese Room is a direct response to the Turing Test, which says that an entity that talks like a human and thinks like a human is, in some sense, equivalent to a human.
It's the "in some sense" that matters. I have no problem accepting that a computer could one day pass the Turing Test and fully simulate human conversation. To me that does not show intelligence on its own though, any more than Deep Thought beating a chess grandmaster proves intelligence.
GP's use of "begging the question" is the older, more precise and meaningful, definition. Searle claims he has proved that the Chinese Room doesn't understand Chinese. He then entertains several possible objections to his proof, and "refutes" them by having already proved that the Chinese Room doesn't understand Chinese.
I haven't read the work in question, but I don't think what you're talking about is the same as what I was responding to. The part about begging the question I responded to was "Chinese Room starts with begging the question: it assumes that syntax is insufficient for semantics, then goes on to try to prove that very thing."
I think he's talking about the initial setup of the thought experiment of the Chinese Room itself, not any followup commentary.
In any case, what you're describing doesn't sound like begging the question to me. Dismissing a later objection by showing that your original proof already addresses it is fine on the face of it. Maybe with more detail I'd see what you're talking about.
As far as incredulity goes, "I can't believe that!" is not a valid philosophical argument.
What! There we disagree. It's the only way to reject the assumptions in untestable philosophical arguments. You make a thought experiment (like Chinese Room) that appeals to very basic drives and emotions, and the conclusion is "Well that's dumb, I can't believe it." Then you go back and see what caused the problem.
Mine, in any scientific or philosophical field, doesn't include proof by blatant assertion, which pretty much sums up Searle's claims of biological specialness.
Proof by blatant assertion.. hmm.. I guess we see philosophy differently. There is no proof in philosophy *except* proof by blatant assertion. You assert some foundational principles. At that moment, every truth-preserving combination of those principles is there, waiting to be discovered. Every result you draw out was already in your assertions. Otherwise you didn't use logic.
The whole point of thought experiments, to me, is to convince people that your assertions are the right ones. If the conclusions drawn from them just seem to make sense to you, you've been convinced and you accept the assertions. If something just seems wrong, you say well that's interesting but your assertions don't make sense to me. Of course the real interesting ones are where the assertions do make sense to you but the conclusions don't.. but that's rare.
Searle is claiming that there is something biological about the human brain that makes it special, in a rather incoherent but dogmatic way.
From what I read, Searle is making that claim as a sort of Occam's razor appeal. The Chinese Room thought experiment shows (to some people, like me) the difference between the simulation of intelligence and real intelligence (or consciousness if you like). Taken with the further assumption (to some people, like me) that I, as a human, really am conscious in a way that the Chinese Room is not... you are left saying "Okay, so what's the cause of the difference?" One explanation is some mystery hardware. Maybe there are other explanations too, I haven't read them though.
What's the difference between, say, simulating addition and actual addition? Hint: whatever it is, you're doing the former whenever you need to add, since it's not a built-in capacity of human brain but needs to be learned.
There's no such thing as actual addition though. I'm not sure what simulating addition even means, to be honest. Numbers are theoretical and the relationships between them are theoretical and addition is a process of finding some of those relationships. But since "I" deal with representations of numbers, not theoretical numbers (and as you say we lack the hardware to even do that), and a simulation is also a representation of something else, and a representation of a representation is still a representation, in that particular case there's no difference between the process and the simulation of the process.
But there's a difference between simulating an avalanche in a supercomputer down to the most fundamental units of matter and an actual avalanche occurring in front of you right?
That's not okay. The reason we hold that notion is because other people behave like us. So does the Chinese room, that's the whole point of this thought experiment. On what basis does behaving like you had a mind lead to the conclusion of having a mind when talking of humans but not when talking of the Chinese Room?
The basis is that we don't know how brains or human consciousness work, we're not even sure of how the universe works on super fine levels. We do know how buildings and rooms within buildings are built, we know how paper and pencils work, and how a person could follow the steps of an algorithm. Those are large and stable processes. There's absolutely nothing unexplainable in the physical nature of the Chinese Room.
Searle is arguing that just because you behave intelligently doesn't mean that you are intelligent. That's all fine and good, but it also applies to humans. After all, since Searle didn't bother specifying what this "physical thing" is, it's impossible for me to say whether you have it or not.
Right but like I said, that's a widely held notion, and it's one we can comfortably hold onto because we can't explain the brain. We can explain the Chinese Room, so the "but maybe there's something we don't see yet" does not apply.
The leap into computers is a bit problematic. Computers are harder to understand than rooms. By the time we have a computer that really is capable of simulating human thought, it may be beyond our understanding because maybe it uses organic components, or some currently unknown properties of matter. But if we had every computer on the planet, including all the supercomputers, all running a human simulation, at the current level of technology, we could understand the hardware and so most people would be comfortable extending the Chinese Room analogy to it.
It also shows that with current technology the problem is the algorithm, not the hardware. We do not have computers that are 1/1000000 "as smart" as we are, whatever that even means. Certainly putting a million computers on a network together does not spontaneously create a believable chat partner. It's the algorithms that are missing, not the performance. But what if intelligence is uncomputable, like the halting problem? What if we need new hardware, some kind of hypercomputer, to be able to simulate thinking? If so, and if we ever find it, it's probably something we won't be able to understand.
If a Turing machine is capable of replicating your behaviour completely - as it is in the Chinese Room argument - then you are a type of Turing machine, completely independent on what's the actual basis of your mind.
Hmm that's another problem. How can you tell if something is replicating your behavior completely? There are more possible actions for you to take than you would ever have time to actually do, let alone monitor someone else doing them and verifying it all.
I would say in the interests of the greater good, no -- Comcast or some other ISP should not be allowed to do anything. You're getting into a very sticky and uncommon situation and as they say, hard cases make bad law.
Anyway, even if a handful of end-users were sacrificial goats as you say, what is stopping Comcast from disconnecting them entirely and saying they went way over general resource usage limits?
Net neutrality doesn't say that you get unlimited bandwidth and unlimited service with no consequences. It just means if you get 100GB/month, Comcast doesn't get a say in how you use those 100GB/month. If you want to waste them receiving garbage data from your friends, great. Then after 100GB is up, you're done.
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Man, you think that because Russian people are able to pick up the pieces and carry on that they don't *care* that the airport was blown up? Wow.
That's more than al Qaeda. In Pakistan they've added another level. They send someone with a little care package to the hospital where the survivors are being treated as well.
Rather than pay officers to man the tip line, it's more effective to target your efforts to a small population, where the probabilities of finding a terrorist are much higher.
I agree with that, but knowledge of which groups are committing which crimes is obviously useful in helping find those choke points isn't it?
I mean, if you're looking for the seeds of terrorism, and you have limited resources, do you monitor a mosque or a synagogue? Do you monitor every website on the planet, or the ones where people are talking about Allah's plan for infidels?
Those are obvious. We (I do, anyway) know religious extremism is bad in all forms. But in America there are a lot more (by number) fundamentalist Christians than fundamentalist Muslims. And yet, in terms of monitoring, I would feel a lot better knowing that the fundamentalist Muslims have more security resources devoted to them than the fundamentalist Christians. Based on the statistics you acknowledge, does that make sense? Would the calculus change if you (or I) were an abortion doctor? Yes, but I'm not one. Most people aren't.
I don't know what you mean by "massacres" so let's make it a bit more clear. I'm also not sure if you're talking about number of massacres, or number of victims in massacres.
Certainly the majority of suicide bomb attacks have been carried out by Muslims. I'd also say the majority of religiously motivated violence has been carried out by Muslims as well.
I'll bite though. Who in your opinion has carried out most massacres in recent memory?
They use suicide bombs we use arial bombs. Which is more noble and just?
Nobility and justice don't come from the means but the motives.
We think its ok to kill civilians with drones or helicoptors but it is evil if these people carry out a suicide bombing.
God, dude. I know you don't really believe that. Let's do a little thought experiment. If a Muslim terrorist stole an F-16 from a hangar in Afghanistan, flew over the the US, and fired missiles at downtown New York, would evil Republican neo-cons (or whatever you think comprises most of America) start cheering and saying "Oh yay they're finally using modern methods that we approve of! Yay Islam!"
Seriously, get an argument that actually makes sense.
Then what was the point of the whole WMD thing? Even if you think it's lies, if Christians are so dangerous and war mongering, why didn't he just say "God wants us to invade, period!" and then do it? It's an obvious hole in your theory.
There are pretty significant differences that you're ignoring.
Of the Christian groups you mentioned, how many have stated aims of a global Christian theocracy? That's pretty common in Islamic groups and makes them far more dangerous. How many of the groups you mentioned have international allies? Think of al Qaeda working with al Shabaab and the Taliban. They are at work in dozens of countries around the world. Which Christian terrorist groups are similar in that regard?
And of course there's sheer size. Do you know the size of the Lord's Resistance Army? Wikipedia says less than 3000 soldiers. The Taliban is far larger than that.
No, it's not a coincidence. It's also not very useful.
It is useful though. What factors do you think should be taken into account in mass security screening? There's a low probability that any individual Muslim is a terrorist, but a number of plots have been discovered because the FBI has gone out of its way to monitor mosques where lots of Muslims meet. If they had spread the same resources to monitor every single sizable synagogue and church in addition to every single sizable mosque, what do you think would be the effect?
I guess I don't understand what you mean by "useful".
So, your problem is with the fact that crazy fucker kills himself too?
Yes clearly that is the part of the behavior OP has a problem with.
There are over a billion Muslims in the world. There is a 1/6 chance of any randomly selected person being Muslim.
If only 1 out of 6 suicide bombers were Muslim you would have a pretty good argument right there. Maybe you're not proving what you think you're proving.
I had Christians, Muslims, and Jews at my wedding... we got along then, and 10 years later we are still getting along!
That's nice, but were your wedding guests randomly selected from the entire world? No? Then what is your point? That your own close circle of friends has different dynamics than the societal thrusts of populations numbering in the hundreds of millions and billions spread across the entire globe?? Wow, I never would have guessed that.
Since when is suicide the ultimate act of bravery?
That the separatists happen to be largely Muslim is inconsequential.
But as a consequence of the separatists being Muslim, their cause is taken up by supporters of global jihad throughout the Muslim world. Just like fighters in Kashmir and Palestine, they receive support from abroad solely due to their religion and the religion of their opponents.
How can you not call that a consequence?? Do you even know what "inconsequential" means?
I agree there's no monolithic left, but that's not really the point. I'm not saying the Black Panthers are part of the left, just that the 'left' (as you called it, and I think we both understand that you meant it very loosely) approves of the Black Panthers even though they have some very strong, central themes that are not compatible with typical leftist ideology. Like racial superiority.
The paper I linked to talks about a similar phenomenon with the left's support of Islamic groups and the "confused leftists" who let little things like ideological differences get in the way of the bigger alliance. It's very interesting and well worth the time to read even if you aren't that type of leftist yourself.
Now I actually am confused. Did you mean that reply for me?
I'm saying, yes, the books you listed are enjoyed by leftists, despite your epithets of "anti-communist" and "pro-libertarian", so your comment did nothing to counter the idea that the shooter may be a leftist. It obviously was meant to since you ended with a sarcastic "what's your point".
Because words like "target" have obvious non-violent meanings. They are a call to focus. Saying things like "Let's hunger strike that guy!" don't make any sense unless you're actually talking about a hunger strike. Nobody's going to be like "Oh yeah that's just a playful way of saying we're going to engage in non-violent political action."
Because arguing that Islam is a religion of violence means the vast majority of Muslims are heretics
Many Muslims support violence without engaging in it. Look at what's going on in Pakistan with the murder of Salman Taseer. The majority of the country (in polls) support the murderer because Salman Taseer was a blasphemer.
Lawyers, the top rung of society, the ones who believe in the rule of law and the political process etc, the kind of moderate Muslim we're supposedly courting in our "#1 ally on terror", literally showered him with rose petals when he entered the courtroom.
If a huge number of Muslims (Pakistani Muslims alone are a huge number) support the death penalty for blasphemy, with scriptural support from the Koran and hadiths, doesn't that make it a religion of violence, even though 99.9% of Muslims may never personally act in violence?
(BTW, Black Panthers are a racially motivated group and have little to do with the 'left')
The left supports and loves the Black Panthers. They are an ally against the establishment and they speak truth to power etc.
I highly recommend this paper, which presents a leftist's views on the left's alliances with groups that "confused leftists" don't understand.
In fact there are plenty of examples of left wing organisation emerging from among people with Islamic beliefs. Malcolm X was a major influence on the leaders of the revolutionary Black Panther Party in the 1960s,
You're seriously underestimating the left. They absolutely love those books, just like they love talking about Stalin. They serve as tales of caution in how the true spirit of communism can be subverted by chauvinists eager on setting up new establishments. It's similar to how no matter how left-wing a politician, there's something that makes them illegitimate and not left-wing enough. Be vigilant comrade.
I do agree though, protest DDOS should be performed with protestors constantly clicking refresh.
Fair enough, if bank employees are personally typing up replies to each web request. But if it's computers vs. computers, why limit one side to manual processes?
Terry Jones was denied a burn permit when he announced he would burn the Koran.
That was a sad day in the history of American free speech.
The problem is we don't have articles about DDOS attacks against the KKK. Do you actively research things to speak up against, or do you just comment on the things presented? If so then while you may truly be fair and just at heart, the practical effect is that you are strengthening a less fair and less just position than you may think.
Personally I am much more bothered by real-life free speech that involves megaphones. It seems pretty similar to DDOS attacks in that you are drowning out others' equally legitimate speech. But the times I've been exposed to it, I actually felt injured and really pissed off by it. Not so much when I can't visit 4chan for a little while (and I'm banned anyway atm :).
Okay, you need to look at Searle's arguments a little more carefully.
True, I've only read a bit of the Wikipedia page but it seems like a pretty decent summary.
The Chinese Room is a direct response to the Turing Test, which says that an entity that talks like a human and thinks like a human is, in some sense, equivalent to a human.
It's the "in some sense" that matters. I have no problem accepting that a computer could one day pass the Turing Test and fully simulate human conversation. To me that does not show intelligence on its own though, any more than Deep Thought beating a chess grandmaster proves intelligence.
GP's use of "begging the question" is the older, more precise and meaningful, definition. Searle claims he has proved that the Chinese Room doesn't understand Chinese. He then entertains several possible objections to his proof, and "refutes" them by having already proved that the Chinese Room doesn't understand Chinese.
I haven't read the work in question, but I don't think what you're talking about is the same as what I was responding to. The part about begging the question I responded to was "Chinese Room starts with begging the question: it assumes that syntax is insufficient for semantics, then goes on to try to prove that very thing."
I think he's talking about the initial setup of the thought experiment of the Chinese Room itself, not any followup commentary.
In any case, what you're describing doesn't sound like begging the question to me. Dismissing a later objection by showing that your original proof already addresses it is fine on the face of it. Maybe with more detail I'd see what you're talking about.
As far as incredulity goes, "I can't believe that!" is not a valid philosophical argument.
What! There we disagree. It's the only way to reject the assumptions in untestable philosophical arguments. You make a thought experiment (like Chinese Room) that appeals to very basic drives and emotions, and the conclusion is "Well that's dumb, I can't believe it." Then you go back and see what caused the problem.
Mine, in any scientific or philosophical field, doesn't include proof by blatant assertion, which pretty much sums up Searle's claims of biological specialness.
Proof by blatant assertion.. hmm.. I guess we see philosophy differently. There is no proof in philosophy *except* proof by blatant assertion. You assert some foundational principles. At that moment, every truth-preserving combination of those principles is there, waiting to be discovered. Every result you draw out was already in your assertions. Otherwise you didn't use logic.
The whole point of thought experiments, to me, is to convince people that your assertions are the right ones. If the conclusions drawn from them just seem to make sense to you, you've been convinced and you accept the assertions. If something just seems wrong, you say well that's interesting but your assertions don't make sense to me. Of course the real interesting ones are where the assertions do make sense to you but the conclusions don't.. but that's rare.
Searle is claiming that there is something biological about the human brain that makes it special, in a rather incoherent but dogmatic way.
From what I read, Searle is making that claim as a sort of Occam's razor appeal. The Chinese Room thought experiment shows (to some people, like me) the difference between the simulation of intelligence and real intelligence (or consciousness if you like). Taken with the further assumption (to some people, like me) that I, as a human, really am conscious in a way that the Chinese Room is not... you are left saying "Okay, so what's the cause of the difference?" One explanation is some mystery hardware. Maybe there are other explanations too, I haven't read them though.
Therefore, while we haven'
The government also makes a lot of money off of roads by playing with the laws. Speed traps, traffic cameras, etc.
Sir you were downloading at 16mbps, that's irresponsible and endangers your neighborhood node! $165 plus $110 court costs.
What's the difference between, say, simulating addition and actual addition? Hint: whatever it is, you're doing the former whenever you need to add, since it's not a built-in capacity of human brain but needs to be learned.
There's no such thing as actual addition though. I'm not sure what simulating addition even means, to be honest. Numbers are theoretical and the relationships between them are theoretical and addition is a process of finding some of those relationships. But since "I" deal with representations of numbers, not theoretical numbers (and as you say we lack the hardware to even do that), and a simulation is also a representation of something else, and a representation of a representation is still a representation, in that particular case there's no difference between the process and the simulation of the process.
But there's a difference between simulating an avalanche in a supercomputer down to the most fundamental units of matter and an actual avalanche occurring in front of you right?
That's not okay. The reason we hold that notion is because other people behave like us. So does the Chinese room, that's the whole point of this thought experiment. On what basis does behaving like you had a mind lead to the conclusion of having a mind when talking of humans but not when talking of the Chinese Room?
The basis is that we don't know how brains or human consciousness work, we're not even sure of how the universe works on super fine levels. We do know how buildings and rooms within buildings are built, we know how paper and pencils work, and how a person could follow the steps of an algorithm. Those are large and stable processes. There's absolutely nothing unexplainable in the physical nature of the Chinese Room.
Searle is arguing that just because you behave intelligently doesn't mean that you are intelligent. That's all fine and good, but it also applies to humans. After all, since Searle didn't bother specifying what this "physical thing" is, it's impossible for me to say whether you have it or not.
Right but like I said, that's a widely held notion, and it's one we can comfortably hold onto because we can't explain the brain. We can explain the Chinese Room, so the "but maybe there's something we don't see yet" does not apply.
The leap into computers is a bit problematic. Computers are harder to understand than rooms. By the time we have a computer that really is capable of simulating human thought, it may be beyond our understanding because maybe it uses organic components, or some currently unknown properties of matter. But if we had every computer on the planet, including all the supercomputers, all running a human simulation, at the current level of technology, we could understand the hardware and so most people would be comfortable extending the Chinese Room analogy to it.
It also shows that with current technology the problem is the algorithm, not the hardware. We do not have computers that are 1/1000000 "as smart" as we are, whatever that even means. Certainly putting a million computers on a network together does not spontaneously create a believable chat partner. It's the algorithms that are missing, not the performance. But what if intelligence is uncomputable, like the halting problem? What if we need new hardware, some kind of hypercomputer, to be able to simulate thinking? If so, and if we ever find it, it's probably something we won't be able to understand.
If a Turing machine is capable of replicating your behaviour completely - as it is in the Chinese Room argument - then you are a type of Turing machine, completely independent on what's the actual basis of your mind.
Hmm that's another problem. How can you tell if something is replicating your behavior completely? There are more possible actions for you to take than you would ever have time to actually do, let alone monitor someone else doing them and verifying it all.
I see what you're saying now.
I would say in the interests of the greater good, no -- Comcast or some other ISP should not be allowed to do anything. You're getting into a very sticky and uncommon situation and as they say, hard cases make bad law.
Anyway, even if a handful of end-users were sacrificial goats as you say, what is stopping Comcast from disconnecting them entirely and saying they went way over general resource usage limits?
Net neutrality doesn't say that you get unlimited bandwidth and unlimited service with no consequences. It just means if you get 100GB/month, Comcast doesn't get a say in how you use those 100GB/month. If you want to waste them receiving garbage data from your friends, great. Then after 100GB is up, you're done.