What's extremist about that? He is pointing out that global warming is a credible and potentially serious threat and to approach it in such a cavalier fashion is silly, irresponsible and reckless.
The scientific consensus is in and global warming needs to be dealt with. Those who want to wait until all the evidence is in are ignorant of the scientific process, the evidence will never all be in.
Would you care to explain? I know a lot of people that can do better than genocide. Me, for one. And these genocides were ordered by God himself, so in these cases it isn't supposed to be another example of the Israelites straying from God and messing up. These are examples of them actually doing what God asks of them.
The deterministic world is plenty interesting to me. Far more interesting than a random world, dare I say. How far do you suppose science would have gotten if people were not able to see patterns in the behavior of the physical world? We would still be all worshiping the gods and goddesses of the seasons, and the sun, and gravity.
That point is really not relevant though, since what we wish to be true isn't necessarily what is true. You are quite right that quantum randomness can propagate up to the macroscopic world, probably the most dramatic example of this would be the large-scale structure of the universe itself which it is believed to have originated from quantum fluctuations early on.
So, while it is true that this is possible in some cases, it is not always shown to be the case. Computers are quite deterministic. While it's theoretically possible that quantum fluctuations can cause random behavior in a CPU it does not happen (at the current scales of transistors, that is). If you look at the functioning of a single neuron it doesn't seem to be the case either.
Given a specific electrical stimulus, the neuron will respond the same way each time. If you scale this up to larger and larger clusters of neurons, their is no point where the neurons lose their reliably predictable behavior, however things still get less and less predictable as the number of neurons interacting increases. This is of course just a result of the complexity of the system and the inability to fully capture the exact state of all the neurons at one time. Quantum fluctuations are not needed, and to my knowledge not observed, but the result of all the interactions is still the wonderfully (and sometimes frustratingly) unpredictable human nature.
You're really being overly simplistic bandying about the word "believe" like it's some attribute only attributable to humans. Yes, my example with an if..then..else statement was also overly simplistic, but that's because it didn't need to be complicated to make the point I was trying to make.
Both of your examples about making assumptions about things that you know are likely even though you haven't directly observed them just require far, far greater levels of complexity. Again, there is no reason why a computer can not do these things, we just aren't there yet.
You have not shown any reason why free will is required or even useful to do these things. Part of the reason may be that free will is a fairly ill defined concept to begin with, but your definition of it I don't think is correct. Free will basically means that the decision making process of the mind is not deterministic. Your definition says nothing to support or deny that claim. An intelligent computer could be designed to figure things out that aren't explicit in its input, just as any human can.
Did you ever read past that in my post? If so you need to re-read it because I did not say that being_watched() is some magic function that someone could write but I have no idea how. It's not even hard, it's just a matter of computers having the correct inputs.
If I have to be more explicit fine. Put a camera on a computer and program it to recognize faces. Hard? Yes, but this isn't exactly Dr. Who type fantasy technology. It can in fact be done right now, although imperfectly.
Ok, so once you're computer can recognize faces, you just have it check if it sees any faces looking at it. Is that such an inconceivable task to you? We can put a microphone on the computer too so that it can listen for voices. Of course you can't tell if someone is watching you just from listening, but it does give you helpful clues about if someone else is present in the room.
Ok, so there you have it, my basic outline of how to implement being_watched(). What's your objection to that?
I don't get the sense we are in disagreement here.
You could also say that even if a person knows s/he is going to be punished they may still do it, if they think the costs of doing so is less than the rewards of doing it they may very well decide to do it. Cost/benefit analysis, no mysterious conceptions of free will required to do that, right?
Then there are others who don't even take into consideration the consequences of their actions But we agree there are reasons for their behavior even if we don't always understand them, right? People are either born with disorders or acquire them at some point in their lives.
You cannot "write a deterministic program that behaves in different ways depending" upon whether it THINKS someone is watching it. Don't be silly, of course you can.
if (me.being_watched() == true)
do_something(); else
do_something_else(); endif
Simple, right? So how do you implement being_watched()? For humans it's implemented by checking for the presence of other people with our senses. Granted, modern computers don't have the ability to get a good sense of when they are being watched since their "senses" are mostly limited to keyboard and mouse inputs and maybe some basic camera input processing, but there's certainly nothing about those limitations that is inherent to them.
I highly doubt that to be the case. Arguments have been made to that point in the past, but they all seem to have been concocted not to fit the evidence, but as an excuse to justify free will. To me, at least.
The behavior of living things is complicated, but no more than so than other complex systems. How easy is it for us to predict weather or the path of a leaf as it floats down from a branch?
There are better ways to demonstrate free will. Usually by noting behaviour that changes when the person believes someone else is watching them. What does this have to do with free will? Can you not write a deterministic program that behaves in different ways depending on context?
People seem to be getting the concept of determinism a little confused. It doesn't mean that we don't use information available to us from our senses and memories to make our decisions. On the contrary, absent some mysterious free-will, our senses and our memories are the only things we can base our decisions on.
It's not an artifact of religious thought, sure modern religious people (and people here) think it might be so because they are not well read historically or otherwise. It's an artifact of rational thinking. We hold people responsible for their actions because they have the intellectual power to know the consequences of their actions. You don't need free will to justify punishment. Assuming that we don't have free will, putting criminals in prison still server an obvious deterrent effect. A deterministic mind will use the knowledge of potential jail time when deciding to do something or not.
And from a non-deterministic viewpoint nothing has yet been determined...The problem is, we don't know which viewpoint the universe subscribes to... We don't? Sure at the quantum level and below things get pretty weird, but that randomness doesn't seem to work it's way into the functioning of our visible universe. The laws of chemistry and electronics that control the functioning of our mind work in very deterministic ways. I did a lot of reading on the subject in the past and the only realistic conclusion is that indeed free will is an illusion.
Of course you are right, from a practical matter it doesn't make a difference, it's really only a philosophical matter.
That's true. Criminal cases are weighed pretty heavily in favor of the defendant. Even so, I still suspect that litigators one side being dramatically better than the others does nothing for the overall quality of our legal system.
Probably. Having fairly evenly matched lawyers on each side, whether equally good or equally bad, would probably result in more cases being decided correctly.
The major takeway is that if we could barf up scheme and howtos on how open-ended thought works we would have done it by now. That sounds astoundingly presumptuous, what makes you so confident of that? We have just begun the task of designing intelligent machines in the past century. Like with the development of human intelligence, it is a slow and iterative process. There is no reason to believe an artificial intelligence equal or better than human intelligence is impossible to construct, and so there is no reason to believe one will not be constructed.
I guess it's hard for me to relate a programmed robot and its related ability to accept, interperet and react to stimulus and a sentient being that has an inherent ability to learn how to react to new situations. What if the robot was designed with an inherent ability to learn how to react to new situations? Then would you be able to relate it to a sentient being? How about if it was sentient? Then for sure you'd be able to relate it to other sentient beings, right?
Sentients is a natural result of intelligence. We aren't yet able to make machines that can learn and put ideas together in the way that people can but it's a certainty that one day we will. At that point we will have no choice but to treat them like we treat any other intelligent being.
And hopefully at that point humans will have reached the point where treating them like other beings will mean treating them well.
Then they won't be able to. And if we program them "open-ended" to discover how to WANT things, we'll lose the #1 reason we have robots...to send them unquestioningly into any job or situation... While that's true for many tasks we would want robots to do, I'm sure there will be uses for robots where we want them to be self sufficient and they will need intelligence for that. You wouldn't send something that had the intelligence of an automated vacuum cleaner out to save John Conner would you?
Well, if we're going by Old Testament standards of right and wrong, that would mean genocide is ok too:
Ezekiel 9:6 "Slay utterly old and young, both maids, and little children, and women"
1 Samuel 15:3 "Now go and smite Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have, and spare them not; but slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass."
You think maybe we can do a little better than that?
Like how you should accept people, whether they be black, white, Klingon or even female. What, even lawayers? My word, Jeeves, these chaps know how to push the envelope too far.
Hold on there! He said people. I don't know where you're getting that lawyers business from.
Maybe there is currently a finite amount of material. Who says that material can't get relatively further apart from itself?
Not many physicists I presume. That's basically the reason why distant galaxies are redshifted, space expands over the time the light is traveling and thus the wavelength is longer by the time the light reaches us.
With Firefox and Opera, one is able to open a link in a new tab by middle clicking on it. But unfortunately, many AJAX-enabled Web apps disallow such functionality, for whatever reason.
GMail is a major culprit. Being able to open a number of messages simultaneously is essential....
I've had that problem with some AJAX pages too, thought it only rarely bothers me in gmail. Flash sites have the same problem, and I actually am annoyed by it in them way more than in the AJAX ones.
And for viewing multiple gmail messages at a time, did you try the open in a separate window button? It works even thought it isn't tabs. Either that or you can go through the unwieldy process of opening a message, copy the URI, past into a new tab, go back to first tab, repeat....
There actually a difference between obscenity and indecency. I believe pornography is considered obscene and thus there are laws that prevent its distribution to minors where an R rated movie would not have such legal restrictions.
This is just what I think is the case based on what I've heard, I may very well be all wrong.
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What's extremist about that? He is pointing out that global warming is a credible and potentially serious threat and to approach it in such a cavalier fashion is silly, irresponsible and reckless.
The scientific consensus is in and global warming needs to be dealt with. Those who want to wait until all the evidence is in are ignorant of the scientific process, the evidence will never all be in.
That's not so far fetched. After all, Microsoft is an enemy to many of the worlds pirates.
Would you care to explain? I know a lot of people that can do better than genocide. Me, for one. And these genocides were ordered by God himself, so in these cases it isn't supposed to be another example of the Israelites straying from God and messing up. These are examples of them actually doing what God asks of them.
The deterministic world is plenty interesting to me. Far more interesting than a random world, dare I say. How far do you suppose science would have gotten if people were not able to see patterns in the behavior of the physical world? We would still be all worshiping the gods and goddesses of the seasons, and the sun, and gravity.
That point is really not relevant though, since what we wish to be true isn't necessarily what is true. You are quite right that quantum randomness can propagate up to the macroscopic world, probably the most dramatic example of this would be the large-scale structure of the universe itself which it is believed to have originated from quantum fluctuations early on.
So, while it is true that this is possible in some cases, it is not always shown to be the case. Computers are quite deterministic. While it's theoretically possible that quantum fluctuations can cause random behavior in a CPU it does not happen (at the current scales of transistors, that is). If you look at the functioning of a single neuron it doesn't seem to be the case either.
Given a specific electrical stimulus, the neuron will respond the same way each time. If you scale this up to larger and larger clusters of neurons, their is no point where the neurons lose their reliably predictable behavior, however things still get less and less predictable as the number of neurons interacting increases. This is of course just a result of the complexity of the system and the inability to fully capture the exact state of all the neurons at one time. Quantum fluctuations are not needed, and to my knowledge not observed, but the result of all the interactions is still the wonderfully (and sometimes frustratingly) unpredictable human nature.
You're really being overly simplistic bandying about the word "believe" like it's some attribute only attributable to humans. Yes, my example with an if..then..else statement was also overly simplistic, but that's because it didn't need to be complicated to make the point I was trying to make.
Both of your examples about making assumptions about things that you know are likely even though you haven't directly observed them just require far, far greater levels of complexity. Again, there is no reason why a computer can not do these things, we just aren't there yet.
You have not shown any reason why free will is required or even useful to do these things. Part of the reason may be that free will is a fairly ill defined concept to begin with, but your definition of it I don't think is correct. Free will basically means that the decision making process of the mind is not deterministic. Your definition says nothing to support or deny that claim. An intelligent computer could be designed to figure things out that aren't explicit in its input, just as any human can.
Did you ever read past that in my post? If so you need to re-read it because I did not say that being_watched() is some magic function that someone could write but I have no idea how. It's not even hard, it's just a matter of computers having the correct inputs.
If I have to be more explicit fine. Put a camera on a computer and program it to recognize faces. Hard? Yes, but this isn't exactly Dr. Who type fantasy technology. It can in fact be done right now, although imperfectly.
Ok, so once you're computer can recognize faces, you just have it check if it sees any faces looking at it. Is that such an inconceivable task to you? We can put a microphone on the computer too so that it can listen for voices. Of course you can't tell if someone is watching you just from listening, but it does give you helpful clues about if someone else is present in the room.
Ok, so there you have it, my basic outline of how to implement being_watched(). What's your objection to that?
if (me.being_watched() == true)
do_something();
else
do_something_else();
endif
Simple, right? So how do you implement being_watched()? For humans it's implemented by checking for the presence of other people with our senses. Granted, modern computers don't have the ability to get a good sense of when they are being watched since their "senses" are mostly limited to keyboard and mouse inputs and maybe some basic camera input processing, but there's certainly nothing about those limitations that is inherent to them.
I highly doubt that to be the case. Arguments have been made to that point in the past, but they all seem to have been concocted not to fit the evidence, but as an excuse to justify free will. To me, at least.
The behavior of living things is complicated, but no more than so than other complex systems. How easy is it for us to predict weather or the path of a leaf as it floats down from a branch?
People seem to be getting the concept of determinism a little confused. It doesn't mean that we don't use information available to us from our senses and memories to make our decisions. On the contrary, absent some mysterious free-will, our senses and our memories are the only things we can base our decisions on.
Of course you are right, from a practical matter it doesn't make a difference, it's really only a philosophical matter.
That's true. Criminal cases are weighed pretty heavily in favor of the defendant. Even so, I still suspect that litigators one side being dramatically better than the others does nothing for the overall quality of our legal system.
Probably. Having fairly evenly matched lawyers on each side, whether equally good or equally bad, would probably result in more cases being decided correctly.
Sentients is a natural result of intelligence. We aren't yet able to make machines that can learn and put ideas together in the way that people can but it's a certainty that one day we will. At that point we will have no choice but to treat them like we treat any other intelligent being.
And hopefully at that point humans will have reached the point where treating them like other beings will mean treating them well.
You think maybe we can do a little better than that?
Hold on there! He said people. I don't know where you're getting that lawyers business from.Thunderbird also freezes up while auto saving drafts to a remote server. That annoys me to no end.
Not to mention that irresponsible voting is a hell of a lot more dangerous then irresponsible drinking.
Maybe there is currently a finite amount of material. Who says that material can't get relatively further apart from itself?
Not many physicists I presume. That's basically the reason why distant galaxies are redshifted, space expands over the time the light is traveling and thus the wavelength is longer by the time the light reaches us.
With Firefox and Opera, one is able to open a link in a new tab by middle clicking on it. But unfortunately, many AJAX-enabled Web apps disallow such functionality, for whatever reason.
GMail is a major culprit. Being able to open a number of messages simultaneously is essential....
I've had that problem with some AJAX pages too, thought it only rarely bothers me in gmail. Flash sites have the same problem, and I actually am annoyed by it in them way more than in the AJAX ones.
And for viewing multiple gmail messages at a time, did you try the open in a separate window button? It works even thought it isn't tabs. Either that or you can go through the unwieldy process of opening a message, copy the URI, past into a new tab, go back to first tab, repeat....
And yet if he were alive today, he'd probably need a bigger security detail than even George W. Bush to keep himself safe.
There actually a difference between obscenity and indecency. I believe pornography is considered obscene and thus there are laws that prevent its distribution to minors where an R rated movie would not have such legal restrictions.
This is just what I think is the case based on what I've heard, I may very well be all wrong.