Individual freedom requires not just political liberty and equality before the law, but actual independence in a material, financial sense, and to that end homeownership is very much a part of it. If you're stuck living on someone else's property and paying them a big chunk of your income every month for the privilege of not being homeless, you're little better off then a serf working his lord's land to pay for his tenancy there (you can work a different lord's land than the one you live on, but otherwise you're still a serf). In fact, we even call them landlords still...
At the time in question, Windows was not an operating system. It was a windowing system that ran on their operating system, which contrary to popular usage was not just called "DOS" because that's also a generic descriptor of any disk operating system -- it was specifically MS-DOS, like Apple's app stores are specifically the iOS App Store and the Mac App Store.
So Windows was software which gave your computer windows, in the same way that The App Store (whichever one) is a store where you buy apps. Both equally generic in their respective timeframes.
To say someone has a right is to say that they deserve something, not that they get it. If they deserve it but don't get it, their right hasn't been taken away -- as they still deserve whatever they have the right to -- but it has been violated.
I invite you to update your knowledge on how the brain works with more recent research. From what I gather (mind you, I'm not a scientist in this area) the brain is not just a powerful computer. It is not running software of any kind. It's not a matter of programming language, but of completely different concepts.
The brain may not be a turing machine like our current computers are, but it is still a physical thing carrying out a function that can be mathematically described, and there is no reason in principle why a different thing cannot be built to carry out that same function.
There is also the question of what level of function we even care about. Addition is a function. Turing machines can carry out that function. Analogue computers which operate on completely different principles can also carry out that function. And human brains can carry out that function. Completely different kinds of low-level functionality are involved, but on the level of abstraction we are concerned about, those low-level functions of different kinds can all be arranged so that when two numbers are put in the correct sum of them comes out. Likewise, whatever function it is that constitutes "feeling" may be an abstract enough function that it doesn't really matter what low-level functions are getting chained together to carry it out. We know a human brain can carry out that function. We don't know for certain whether a turing machine can carry out that function. But even if we know that on the lowest level a brain and a turing machine function very differently, that doesn't tell us that a more abstract function, if feeling is so abstract, can only be carried out by one and not the other. To know that we'd first need to properly analyze exactly what it means to feel, before we can know if such a function can be implemented on a turing machine or not.
And worse come to worse, to the best of my knowledge turing machines can simulate any currently theorized physical system, if augmented with a true random number generator at least, so if all else fails a turing machine definitely can emulate a physical brain or whatever it is that's so special about one that's necessary to carry out the function of feeling. So if we really wanted to, we could in principle build feeling turning machines just by perfectly simulating feeling organisms on those machines.
The question for Star Wars is why would we want to go to all that effort to build something that genuinely feels, if we could just as well accomplish everything we want in a machine that doesn't genuinely feel. Or why would we even want to simulate the feelings that are of concern in the article. Programming a protocol droid to fake tact with gestures and tone of voice, as a non-verbal language, just as part of its job, makes perfect sense. Programming it to act distressed about the possibility of its own deactivation -- why would anyone do that? That implausibility of doing so lends credence to the idea that droids like 3PO genuinely feel (perhaps because to do so is an inevitable byproduct of the level of intelligence they need to have), and express such fears spontaneously and genuinely, not just because they were programmed to fake them.
For a while, the thought that brains are just highly sophisticated computers was "in". Then additional research found that brains are quite unlike computers in almost every way. Both do process and store information, but the how is about as different as it gets. Dyson, Bennett, Jaynes, Rucker, Stapp, Hawkins et al have all written interesting books about fragments of this larger body of knowledge.
Ok, so you're just talking about how the brain is not just a turing machine. That's still somewhat tangential to the point at hand, which is that feeling is just something that the body (or some part thereof, like the brain) does, and there's no reason in principle why something else couldn't do the same thing, but I will address that later in your reply to another reply further down this thread.
Uh, no. A sufficiently good map of an area is still a map. Unless you re-define "sufficiently perfect emulation" to mean "exact copy", at which point it ceases to be an emulation.
The limit of a map as accuracy approaches unity is an exact copy of the territory, and there is still some leeway in which it's more accurate to say you've built a new territory (even if it's not an exact copy of another territory) rather than that you've built a map. If I build a 1:1 scale 3D map of New York City, and it's not quite perfectly accurate but it's just as detailed as the real thing (even if some of the details are different), then it's more fitting to say I've built a new city, rather than just a map.
Likewise, whatever function it is that constitutes "feeling", if we built something that perfectly carried out that function, or a function sufficiently similar to it, then it's more accurate to say that we built a thing that feels (perhaps not exactly like a human feels, but feeling nonetheless), than merely a thing that simulates feeling.
consciousness is - to the best of our knowledge - an emergent property
Last I checked, the so-called "hard problem" of "phenomenal consciousness", to which the question of emergence applies, was still an open issue, with competing answers to emergentism ranging from total skepticism (there really is no such thing, it's a confused idea) to refinements of panpsychism (such as panexperientialism, panprotopsychism, and panprotoexperientialism); and the easier problem of "access consciousness" was considered a mere triviality now, easily understood in mechanistic terms.
Care to post a link to this revolutionary new research debunking physicalism? I'd have thought it'd have made the news.
If you can't cite such a thing, then GP's point stands: humans are physical things executing certain functions some of which constitute the state we call "feeling", and a sufficiently perfect emulation of such functions would constitute "feeling" just as much if carried out by a physical thing made of metal as they would when carried out by our brains.
The problem in that case is that it's not the government's land. The problem there is the government thinking it is their land, rather than them being employed by the people to enforce their (those peoples') rights to that land.
Someone exercising their rights over their own property is perfectly fine. Someone else attempting to claim rights over someone else's property is a problem. Government censorship is a problem in principle (consequential problems aside) because it claims a right for the government to control what other people can do with their own property.
The difference is that if you find bones you are required to have them dug up and investigated and then turn them over to the public, whereas if you find gold you can dig it up if you want to (you probably do) and then it's yours to do with as you please, but if you really want to you can just throw it away or rebury it or anything you like.
If property owners were not under any obligation to do anything one way or another with the bones, but the state (or other parties like private universities etc) were standing around with an offer to investigate and buy any such artifacts discovered, then that would encourage preservation of the artifacts and not infringe any property rights. This would be the analog of the finding-gold case.
An obligation to allow the state of dig the bones up and take them away (at their own expense, not yours) is perhaps a small violation of property rights, but not all that bad: it's basically a claim that the state already owns any such artifacts, and an obligation to step aside and let them take their property if you come across it. That would be an acceptable solution: if you find bones, you have to let the state investigate and dig them up, but you don't have to do it yourself.
At my father's old house in California, the area that would normally be a sidewalk between the state road our private driveway was an atrocious no-mans-land of responsibility. CalTrans would not maintain it, and would not let us fix it either. It was their property and they were determined to let it (and the what-should-have-been-a-sidewalk all along that road) deteriorate, and to hell with us if we wanted to fix it up; we could only pave our private driveway up to about a sidewalk's width away from the road, and then had to stop, so to pull off the road into our driveway, we'd always have to drive across a sidewalk's width of effectively unpaved crumbled concrete and asphalt left over from whenever that area was first built up.
You are confusing authority with power. "Authority" does not just mean power; it means the normatively legitimate right to exercise power. You could have all the power you wanted and if it was wrong for you to use any of it you would have no authority.
You seem to mean to say effectively "people will get away with what they get away with", but what you're literally saying is "there's nothing wrong with doing anything so long as you can get away with it". The former is trivially true, but the latter is to dismiss any basis of ever criticizing anyone for anything beyond "that's not going to work out for you because you're not powerful enough to get away with it".
Any since power lies in numbers, the ultimate power is always with the people. Individuals with more power have that power because they have influence over more people. Criticizing someone's actions (on grounds other than "that won't be allowed", but rather normative grounds, "that shouldn't be allowed") is a way of exercising influence over other people. So saying "might makes right" dismisses any possibility of the people deciding that they should change whose influence they follow, and thus who has power; it says merely "whoever has power and however they use it it is fine, no need to worry about it". It is to discharge much of your own power be giving up on any attempt to influence anyone.
Might makes might. Right makes right. It's entirely possible, and frequently true, that those with the might may not be in the right, and those in the right may have no might.
There are new computer-controlled Coca-Cola machines which dispense a huge variety of sodas through a touch-screen interface.
Apparently, the way of accessing the back-end of that interface is going to the 'water' screen and touching the right combination of bubbles/droplets on the background graphic.
I'm not certain exactly what can be done from that back-end interface besides read supply levels, but I've seen several employees openly access it right in front of the customer (me), and I'm pretty sure I could walk up to any such machine and log into that back-end at a whim now, with no further access control.
Pressure is force over area, and it takes energy to apply force. I'm simply pointing out that the pressure that instigates fusion in the sun doesn't come from nowhere. It takes some kind of energy to apply that pressure, that energy being the kinetic energy of the particles making up the sun, that kinetic energy coming largely from the particles falling in toward each other under the influence of gravity, and they didn't magically get more energetic while falling, they merely converted potential energy into kinetic energy.
You're right that at no point is any energy "consumed" in a sense that it is destroyed or any such thing. It is merely converted. Potential energy to kinetic energy (which in aggregate can be treated as thermal energy), which then does work in compressing the gasses of the sun, in turn igniting fusion which (among other things) converts some energy from rest mass to radiant energy, much of which in turn is converted back into kinetic energy of the atoms which absorb those photons, some of which in turn is converted back into potential energy as the gas expands, and so on in a cycle slowly converting much of both the potential energy and rest mass of the loose gasses the sun formed from into radiant energy until there's eventually nothing but a small, cold, dense stellar remnant, and a bunch of photons scattered about the universe, which all sums up to exactly the same energy as the rest mass, thermal energy, and potential energy of the gas we started with. Ignore the potential energy in that equation and it looks like we magically got energy from nowhere.
Even without fusion, the potential energy of the loose gasses would be converted into radiant energy as they collapsed, heating in the process, and radiated away that heat. What fusion adds is that we get a lot more radiant energy out of the sun than just the potential energy that was present in the loose gasses: we also get energy that was bound up in rest mass. Likewise, artificial fusion becomes useful to us when we can press atoms together efficiently enough that the rest mass that gets converted to radiant energy is greater than the energy wasted in the process of doing that -- energy which is not destroyed, but merely lost to heat, exactly like a collapsing gas that doesn't ignite fusion.
We can pump a bunch of energy into system and get a hot system that can then do work to generate more energy, but that's a waste unless in the process we somehow liberate energies that were previously stored in the system greater than the inefficiencies of that process. (Like what happens when we liberate the chemical energy stored in fossil fuels by heating them to the point of combustion). So we are looking for more efficient processes of liberating energy from rest mass; right now the energy wasted is greater than that liberated with any known method. A new method may tip those scales. But in any case, in order to liberate energy from the rest mass in a system, we will have to do something to that system, and doing something, no matter what that something is, requires energy be input into the system from somewhere. Not even the sun just magically spontaneously starts fusing, which was my original point.
no one or nothing puts energy into the sun to make fusion possible
The energy that drives the sun's fusion is the gravitational potential energy of its spread-out mass being converted into kinetic energy as it collapses in on itself. It's little different than if there were a huge endorheic lake high atop a mountain somewhere, then we let the water escape downhill to power a hydroelectic generator that we used to ignite a fusion reaction.
In both cases, the hydroelectric fusion reactor and the sun, there was potential energy sitting somewhere in the form of mass separated from other mass, then that potential was collapsed and the energy used to convert some mass into even more energy, which could then be fed back into the system.
In the sun's case, a lot of the energy output naturally goes to lifting the mass back up the gravitational potential, from which point it continues falling and driving the reaction more. Our hypothetical hydroelectric fusion reactor could likewise store its energy output by pumping water back up into the lake, where it could be fed back into the fusion reactor again.
In both cases, the output is higher than the input, so some energy output can go to something other than just continuing the reaction, such as shining light down on Earth and powering all light here (in the case of the sun), or keeping the lights on in our homes at night (in the case of our fusion reactor).
"Quantum" means "discrete", as opposed to continuous. A quantum leap is a sudden leap as opposed to a gradual one. A discrete quantity does mean that there is such a thing as a smallest possible unit, and a quantum leap is a change by exactly one such unit, but the intended connotation is the suddenness of the change, not the magnitude of it.
The law only has power over criminals. If those who control the law want more power, they need to make more people into criminals.
Also (really a subset of the above): you can extract money from people by declaring them criminals and demanding fines or else you'll abduct them and lock them in a concrete room (or shoot them if they don't come along nicely).
Quick - define "moderate" without using your own ideology as a guide, and be intellectually honest when you try.
Being willing to consider all ideas regardless of whose "side" those ideas are associated with, and being willing to move incrementally forward and make improvements to the country (i.e. progressive, not reactionary), but unwilling to rush big changes and break what already works without a secure alternative already in place (i.e. conservative, not radical).
A further problem with the "if it's listed in the DSM it's a real disease" attitude is the conflation of conditions with disorders. Just because someone has a particular, identifiable pattern of thought and behavior, which may be useful to name and document, does not mean that that person has something wrong with them that they need fixed. I'm thinking in particular here of conditions frequently found in members of the neurodiversity movement, who may very well have some identifiable distinct difference from your typical person, but who would deny vehemently that it is a problem that needs correction.
There's definitely some use in a patient being able to say "I notice that I tend to do this that and the other thing and they're making my life problematic, can you help me change" and being able to put a name to that pattern and apply techniques known to alter it. It's another thing entirely for a doctor to say "I notice you seem to do this that and the other thing, you have a disease and I can treat it and make you better". Identifying and naming the patterns is great. Calling them disorder or diseases or something that implies a defect in need of correction, instead of a perfectly benign difference that doesn't necessarily need treatment, is a problem.
I'd argue that on a very fundamental level we always have had democracy everywhere, because no form of government will remain in place unless enough people support it and few enough people oppose it: a state with more people actively (keyword: actively) fighting it than actively supporting it will inevitably fail.
The question is simply to whom do the masses delegate their power, whether by active support or passive acceptance. A king or dictator? An oligarchy or aristocracy? Some more directly accountable, short-term representatives in a parliament or congress? Or do they keep it all to themselves like in ancient Athens?
And then the more important question is, whoever that power is delegated to, what terms are attached to it? What will the people let those granted power get away with before they take it back?
The reason we have a tiny power elite doing whatever the hell they want is because most people either support or at least accept a system which allows them to get away with that. The ultimate power, and thus the ultimate responsibility, always lies directly with the people: if we want to get rid of the tiny power elite, enough of us have to publicly declare that we're not going to put up with their shit any more (by means of elections and legislation), and then stop putting up with their shit (appeal to the new legal structure that says we don't have to), and watch each other's backs (in the courts and at the polls again, or if we are blatantly ignored there, in the streets) to make sure that nobody's going to get steamrolled and forced to put up with it.
If we were not a democracy, that would just mean the election and legislation, courts and polls, would be out of the question, and our only recourse would be taking directly to the streets. And yes, I mean the torches-and-pitchforks (i.e. guns) kind of taking to the streets. Thankfully we are ostensibly a democracy, we have other recourse before it comes to that, and hopefully it will never come to that unless we all do get up off our collective asses, avail ourselves of those avenues of recourse, and still get ignored. But so far we're still at the "get people off their asses" stage. Until that happens, we're stuck with what the ignorant masses want: tyranny.
$50k/yr is above the median personal income. According to this about 75% of Americans make under $50k. I'm not finding it now on a cursory search but the figure I'm recalling for the median income was $44k, although this same chart I just linked says 48% of Americans make under $25k so that would seem to be even lower. Perhaps the $44k figure I'm recalling is median household income, not personal income, which would include many two-income households and exclude anyone who isn't a householder (like me).
Either way, $200k will get you a nice mobile home in a park paying $800/mo rent on top of your mortgage around these parts (Ventura/Santa Barbara area). $1000/mo will get you a 1br apartment in the cheaper parts like Oxnard. From what I hear most of the Bay Area is the same. I'm sure Oklahoma City is a lot cheaper, but that's what I'm talking about having to move to Bumfuck Idaho if I want to live like a real adult. Staying where I was born and raised apparently isn't an option; only rich people get to live in decent places, eh? (I'd be happy in a 500sqft 1br shotgun shack if it were even legal to build such things in ways that didn't leave you still paying rent on them, defeating half the point of home ownership in the first place. Only options like that here are condos -- with HOA fees comparable to rent -- and mobile homes, with land rent comparable to apartments).
And don't fucking talk to me about having myself to blame or needing help with financial planning. I came from nothing, I lived in a literal goddamn toolshed next to my dad's trailer until I moved out on my own, my father was a bricklayer, my mom is disabled, neither of them had any college education or provided any financial support or even guidance to get me out on my feet, and despite all that I still got myself a four-year degree, am 100% debt-free, and working a middle-class job now. And I just told you in my last post that I hardly spend a fucking cent on anything but necessities; my only irregular expenses are the odd automotive or medical/dental repair and maintenance, the rest goes straight to cost of living or savings. All my non-rent expenses combined amount to the typical rent for this area, and I'm putting up with an intolerable living situation to get about half the average rent so I can put the savings toward a down payment on something eventually. I don't drink or party, I don't buy toys, I don't travel; all I want is to be left the fuck alone in a space of my own, and I'm pouring every goddamn ounce of effort I have into that endeavor and it's still looking more impossible every day.
And apparently that's true, from your own statistics, of almost half the people my age. A 30 year old man still living like a kid in someone else's spare bedroom would be a laughing stock in 1960, but he's just about average today apparently.
The real world doesn't work that way. You can live a decent 1960's middle-class lifestyle on an income around the poverty line today
Hah. I'm a 30 year old man making almost exactly the national median income, and still living little different from how I did when I was in college. (Which I worked my way through, mind you, having parents who are both completely destitute). The only things I spend money on are rent, utilities, food, gas, and occasionally a movie or something. I don't buy toys or gadgets and I almost never travel (rarely even an afternoon's drive away for a weekend camping trip or something). Everything else I make beyond those expenses is going toward desperately trying to claw my way out of merely renting a room in someone else's house full of other people, which is looking more and more like a futile prospect unless I move to Bumfuck Idaho or the middle of the desert or something. And no way in hell could I ever support any dependents.
Meanwhile, a college-educated middle-class man my age in 1960 would be married with kids and living in a real family house, all on his own income. If I wanted anything close to that, I'd have to find a girl to makes more than I do to split the expenses with, and even then we'd be pushing it unless she was filthy stinking rich. Yeah, our technology has improved, but my computer is the modern equivalent of the television that my 1960 counterpart would likely have owned, my cell phone is the modern equivalent of the phone he would have had, and my car is little different from his would be. They're all fancier and higher-tech than things were then, but they're the standard lower-end options available today. Meanwhile, real substantial living conditions like the ability to live alone or support a family are drastically diminished.
No matter the size of a black hole, gravitational acceleration at the event horizon is c per Planck time. That's not "infinite", but it is maximal. Anything at the event horizon of a black hole will have its velocity increased by c toward the singularity as quickly as theoretically possible. You cannot build a rocket to put out that kind of acceleration in the other direction to keep you in place, because you cannot build a rocket to get you up to c at all, in any amount of time. Your talk about time axes sounds like it's an echo of a description of why you can't build a rocket to get up to c. It has nothing to do with black holes specifically, other than that you would need to get that fast to escape the event horizon of one.
If you were made of light, however, you would be moving at c, and you could orbit at the event horizon. If you're just above the event horizon, you could in theory get moving fast enough to orbit just outside of it. And in orbit, you don't feel any acceleration from gravity; you are free-falling around the black hole, and continually missing it. You could also have some flight path requiring 1g of constant acceleration to keep you from falling in. The size of the black hole doesn't matter for any of that; if you are anywhere outside the event horizon, you can find a flight path that will make you feel any amount of acceleration you want, for as long as you have fuel to maintain that kind of acceleration. (For an orbit, you feel zero acceleration, and so need no fuel and can maintain it indefinitely).
Where the size of a black hole does matter, and what I think you were thinking of in your earlier post about black holes of 100 solar masses or such, is tidal forces. These are the forces which pinch and stretch your body in uneven ways. Imagine you had a tetherball pole in the middle of a schoolyard. You stand far off to the east of it, facing it, with your arms outstretched. The lines from both of your hands, and your elbows, and your nose, toward the tetherball pole, are all roughly westward, so if you were to be pulled toward it, your whole body would be pulled more or less evenly. But if you stand right next to it, with your arms stretched out, your nose is pulled west, but your right hand is now north of it, and your left hand is south of it, so they get pulled south and north respectively, and the pole pulls your hands toward each other. If, like gravity, it also pulls harder the closer to it you are, it will pull your face toward it much harder than it will your hands, and make you smack your nose into it and then hit yourself as your hands fall in behind your head; while from a long ways away, all your body parts are pulled with about the same force.
Likewise with black holes. The closer you are to one, the more the different parts of your body (and spaceship, etc) are pulled in different directions and with different magnitudes. The farther you are from it, the more evenly everything is pulled. A very massive black hole has a very large event horizon, so at the event horizon, you are very far from the center of the black hole, and even though you are still experiencing the same acceleration you would feel at the event horizon of any black hole, it's all pulling you in more or less the same direction, so you could orbit there and suffer no ill effects. Around a small black hole though, even if you were orbiting just above its black hole and feeling no acceleration overall, the parts of you closer to it would need to orbit faster to maintain that effect and so would feel pulled and pinchedcompared to the parts of you further away from it, which would have more speed than they need to orbit and so tend to drift away from it. All in all you would feel pulled in every different direction and your body would be ripped apart. Around a larger black hole, even moving at the same speed to maintain orbit the same distance from the event horizon, all of you would feel roughly the same effects, so you wouldn't even notice them.
Disclaimer: I think airport security is security theater which provides no benefit aside from keeping the masses calm
It doesn't even provide that benefit. It keeps the masses afraid and feeling dependent. That's only benefit to the people who want to leverage that for their own power, not to the people such measures are purported to benefit.
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Individual freedom requires not just political liberty and equality before the law, but actual independence in a material, financial sense, and to that end homeownership is very much a part of it. If you're stuck living on someone else's property and paying them a big chunk of your income every month for the privilege of not being homeless, you're little better off then a serf working his lord's land to pay for his tenancy there (you can work a different lord's land than the one you live on, but otherwise you're still a serf). In fact, we even call them landlords still...
At the time in question, Windows was not an operating system. It was a windowing system that ran on their operating system, which contrary to popular usage was not just called "DOS" because that's also a generic descriptor of any disk operating system -- it was specifically MS-DOS, like Apple's app stores are specifically the iOS App Store and the Mac App Store.
So Windows was software which gave your computer windows, in the same way that The App Store (whichever one) is a store where you buy apps. Both equally generic in their respective timeframes.
I'm a little more hesitant to offer my mitt to a vagrant person who's just popped out a discrete alleyway...
Yeah, I only shake hands with vagrants who live in nice continuous alleyways. ;)
It doesn't take them away, it violates them.
To say someone has a right is to say that they deserve something, not that they get it. If they deserve it but don't get it, their right hasn't been taken away -- as they still deserve whatever they have the right to -- but it has been violated.
I invite you to update your knowledge on how the brain works with more recent research. From what I gather (mind you, I'm not a scientist in this area) the brain is not just a powerful computer. It is not running software of any kind. It's not a matter of programming language, but of completely different concepts.
The brain may not be a turing machine like our current computers are, but it is still a physical thing carrying out a function that can be mathematically described, and there is no reason in principle why a different thing cannot be built to carry out that same function.
There is also the question of what level of function we even care about. Addition is a function. Turing machines can carry out that function. Analogue computers which operate on completely different principles can also carry out that function. And human brains can carry out that function. Completely different kinds of low-level functionality are involved, but on the level of abstraction we are concerned about, those low-level functions of different kinds can all be arranged so that when two numbers are put in the correct sum of them comes out. Likewise, whatever function it is that constitutes "feeling" may be an abstract enough function that it doesn't really matter what low-level functions are getting chained together to carry it out. We know a human brain can carry out that function. We don't know for certain whether a turing machine can carry out that function. But even if we know that on the lowest level a brain and a turing machine function very differently, that doesn't tell us that a more abstract function, if feeling is so abstract, can only be carried out by one and not the other. To know that we'd first need to properly analyze exactly what it means to feel, before we can know if such a function can be implemented on a turing machine or not.
And worse come to worse, to the best of my knowledge turing machines can simulate any currently theorized physical system, if augmented with a true random number generator at least, so if all else fails a turing machine definitely can emulate a physical brain or whatever it is that's so special about one that's necessary to carry out the function of feeling. So if we really wanted to, we could in principle build feeling turning machines just by perfectly simulating feeling organisms on those machines.
The question for Star Wars is why would we want to go to all that effort to build something that genuinely feels, if we could just as well accomplish everything we want in a machine that doesn't genuinely feel. Or why would we even want to simulate the feelings that are of concern in the article. Programming a protocol droid to fake tact with gestures and tone of voice, as a non-verbal language, just as part of its job, makes perfect sense. Programming it to act distressed about the possibility of its own deactivation -- why would anyone do that? That implausibility of doing so lends credence to the idea that droids like 3PO genuinely feel (perhaps because to do so is an inevitable byproduct of the level of intelligence they need to have), and express such fears spontaneously and genuinely, not just because they were programmed to fake them.
For a while, the thought that brains are just highly sophisticated computers was "in". Then additional research found that brains are quite unlike computers in almost every way. Both do process and store information, but the how is about as different as it gets. Dyson, Bennett, Jaynes, Rucker, Stapp, Hawkins et al have all written interesting books about fragments of this larger body of knowledge.
Ok, so you're just talking about how the brain is not just a turing machine. That's still somewhat tangential to the point at hand, which is that feeling is just something that the body (or some part thereof, like the brain) does, and there's no reason in principle why something else couldn't do the same thing, but I will address that later in your reply to another reply further down this thread.
Uh, no. A sufficiently good map of an area is still a map. Unless you re-define "sufficiently perfect emulation" to mean "exact copy", at which point it ceases to be an emulation.
The limit of a map as accuracy approaches unity is an exact copy of the territory, and there is still some leeway in which it's more accurate to say you've built a new territory (even if it's not an exact copy of another territory) rather than that you've built a map. If I build a 1:1 scale 3D map of New York City, and it's not quite perfectly accurate but it's just as detailed as the real thing (even if some of the details are different), then it's more fitting to say I've built a new city, rather than just a map.
Likewise, whatever function it is that constitutes "feeling", if we built something that perfectly carried out that function, or a function sufficiently similar to it, then it's more accurate to say that we built a thing that feels (perhaps not exactly like a human feels, but feeling nonetheless), than merely a thing that simulates feeling.
consciousness is - to the best of our knowledge - an emergent property
Last I checked, the so-called "hard problem" of "phenomenal consciousness", to which the question of emergence applies, was still an open issue, with competing answers to emergentism ranging from total skepticism (there really is no such thing, it's a confused idea) to refinements of panpsychism (such as panexperientialism, panprotopsychism, and panprotoexperientialism); and the easier problem of "access consciousness" was considered a mere triviality now, easily understood in mechanistic terms.
Care to post a link to this revolutionary new research debunking physicalism? I'd have thought it'd have made the news.
If you can't cite such a thing, then GP's point stands: humans are physical things executing certain functions some of which constitute the state we call "feeling", and a sufficiently perfect emulation of such functions would constitute "feeling" just as much if carried out by a physical thing made of metal as they would when carried out by our brains.
The problem in that case is that it's not the government's land. The problem there is the government thinking it is their land, rather than them being employed by the people to enforce their (those peoples') rights to that land.
Someone exercising their rights over their own property is perfectly fine. Someone else attempting to claim rights over someone else's property is a problem. Government censorship is a problem in principle (consequential problems aside) because it claims a right for the government to control what other people can do with their own property.
The difference is that if you find bones you are required to have them dug up and investigated and then turn them over to the public, whereas if you find gold you can dig it up if you want to (you probably do) and then it's yours to do with as you please, but if you really want to you can just throw it away or rebury it or anything you like.
If property owners were not under any obligation to do anything one way or another with the bones, but the state (or other parties like private universities etc) were standing around with an offer to investigate and buy any such artifacts discovered, then that would encourage preservation of the artifacts and not infringe any property rights. This would be the analog of the finding-gold case.
An obligation to allow the state of dig the bones up and take them away (at their own expense, not yours) is perhaps a small violation of property rights, but not all that bad: it's basically a claim that the state already owns any such artifacts, and an obligation to step aside and let them take their property if you come across it. That would be an acceptable solution: if you find bones, you have to let the state investigate and dig them up, but you don't have to do it yourself.
At my father's old house in California, the area that would normally be a sidewalk between the state road our private driveway was an atrocious no-mans-land of responsibility. CalTrans would not maintain it, and would not let us fix it either. It was their property and they were determined to let it (and the what-should-have-been-a-sidewalk all along that road) deteriorate, and to hell with us if we wanted to fix it up; we could only pave our private driveway up to about a sidewalk's width away from the road, and then had to stop, so to pull off the road into our driveway, we'd always have to drive across a sidewalk's width of effectively unpaved crumbled concrete and asphalt left over from whenever that area was first built up.
You mean give them a lifetime (i.e. short-term) license to use a copy of a gas chamber for limited purposes.
You are confusing authority with power. "Authority" does not just mean power; it means the normatively legitimate right to exercise power. You could have all the power you wanted and if it was wrong for you to use any of it you would have no authority.
You seem to mean to say effectively "people will get away with what they get away with", but what you're literally saying is "there's nothing wrong with doing anything so long as you can get away with it". The former is trivially true, but the latter is to dismiss any basis of ever criticizing anyone for anything beyond "that's not going to work out for you because you're not powerful enough to get away with it".
Any since power lies in numbers, the ultimate power is always with the people. Individuals with more power have that power because they have influence over more people. Criticizing someone's actions (on grounds other than "that won't be allowed", but rather normative grounds, "that shouldn't be allowed") is a way of exercising influence over other people. So saying "might makes right" dismisses any possibility of the people deciding that they should change whose influence they follow, and thus who has power; it says merely "whoever has power and however they use it it is fine, no need to worry about it". It is to discharge much of your own power be giving up on any attempt to influence anyone.
Might makes might. Right makes right. It's entirely possible, and frequently true, that those with the might may not be in the right, and those in the right may have no might.
There are new computer-controlled Coca-Cola machines which dispense a huge variety of sodas through a touch-screen interface.
Apparently, the way of accessing the back-end of that interface is going to the 'water' screen and touching the right combination of bubbles/droplets on the background graphic.
I'm not certain exactly what can be done from that back-end interface besides read supply levels, but I've seen several employees openly access it right in front of the customer (me), and I'm pretty sure I could walk up to any such machine and log into that back-end at a whim now, with no further access control.
Pressure is force over area, and it takes energy to apply force. I'm simply pointing out that the pressure that instigates fusion in the sun doesn't come from nowhere. It takes some kind of energy to apply that pressure, that energy being the kinetic energy of the particles making up the sun, that kinetic energy coming largely from the particles falling in toward each other under the influence of gravity, and they didn't magically get more energetic while falling, they merely converted potential energy into kinetic energy.
You're right that at no point is any energy "consumed" in a sense that it is destroyed or any such thing. It is merely converted. Potential energy to kinetic energy (which in aggregate can be treated as thermal energy), which then does work in compressing the gasses of the sun, in turn igniting fusion which (among other things) converts some energy from rest mass to radiant energy, much of which in turn is converted back into kinetic energy of the atoms which absorb those photons, some of which in turn is converted back into potential energy as the gas expands, and so on in a cycle slowly converting much of both the potential energy and rest mass of the loose gasses the sun formed from into radiant energy until there's eventually nothing but a small, cold, dense stellar remnant, and a bunch of photons scattered about the universe, which all sums up to exactly the same energy as the rest mass, thermal energy, and potential energy of the gas we started with. Ignore the potential energy in that equation and it looks like we magically got energy from nowhere.
Even without fusion, the potential energy of the loose gasses would be converted into radiant energy as they collapsed, heating in the process, and radiated away that heat. What fusion adds is that we get a lot more radiant energy out of the sun than just the potential energy that was present in the loose gasses: we also get energy that was bound up in rest mass. Likewise, artificial fusion becomes useful to us when we can press atoms together efficiently enough that the rest mass that gets converted to radiant energy is greater than the energy wasted in the process of doing that -- energy which is not destroyed, but merely lost to heat, exactly like a collapsing gas that doesn't ignite fusion.
We can pump a bunch of energy into system and get a hot system that can then do work to generate more energy, but that's a waste unless in the process we somehow liberate energies that were previously stored in the system greater than the inefficiencies of that process. (Like what happens when we liberate the chemical energy stored in fossil fuels by heating them to the point of combustion). So we are looking for more efficient processes of liberating energy from rest mass; right now the energy wasted is greater than that liberated with any known method. A new method may tip those scales. But in any case, in order to liberate energy from the rest mass in a system, we will have to do something to that system, and doing something, no matter what that something is, requires energy be input into the system from somewhere. Not even the sun just magically spontaneously starts fusing, which was my original point.
no one or nothing puts energy into the sun to make fusion possible
The energy that drives the sun's fusion is the gravitational potential energy of its spread-out mass being converted into kinetic energy as it collapses in on itself. It's little different than if there were a huge endorheic lake high atop a mountain somewhere, then we let the water escape downhill to power a hydroelectic generator that we used to ignite a fusion reaction.
In both cases, the hydroelectric fusion reactor and the sun, there was potential energy sitting somewhere in the form of mass separated from other mass, then that potential was collapsed and the energy used to convert some mass into even more energy, which could then be fed back into the system.
In the sun's case, a lot of the energy output naturally goes to lifting the mass back up the gravitational potential, from which point it continues falling and driving the reaction more. Our hypothetical hydroelectric fusion reactor could likewise store its energy output by pumping water back up into the lake, where it could be fed back into the fusion reactor again.
In both cases, the output is higher than the input, so some energy output can go to something other than just continuing the reaction, such as shining light down on Earth and powering all light here (in the case of the sun), or keeping the lights on in our homes at night (in the case of our fusion reactor).
"Quantum" means "discrete", as opposed to continuous. A quantum leap is a sudden leap as opposed to a gradual one. A discrete quantity does mean that there is such a thing as a smallest possible unit, and a quantum leap is a change by exactly one such unit, but the intended connotation is the suddenness of the change, not the magnitude of it.
Or is there a reason "they" want more criminals?
The law only has power over criminals. If those who control the law want more power, they need to make more people into criminals.
Also (really a subset of the above): you can extract money from people by declaring them criminals and demanding fines or else you'll abduct them and lock them in a concrete room (or shoot them if they don't come along nicely).
Quick - define "moderate" without using your own ideology as a guide, and be intellectually honest when you try.
Being willing to consider all ideas regardless of whose "side" those ideas are associated with, and being willing to move incrementally forward and make improvements to the country (i.e. progressive, not reactionary), but unwilling to rush big changes and break what already works without a secure alternative already in place (i.e. conservative, not radical).
A further problem with the "if it's listed in the DSM it's a real disease" attitude is the conflation of conditions with disorders. Just because someone has a particular, identifiable pattern of thought and behavior, which may be useful to name and document, does not mean that that person has something wrong with them that they need fixed. I'm thinking in particular here of conditions frequently found in members of the neurodiversity movement, who may very well have some identifiable distinct difference from your typical person, but who would deny vehemently that it is a problem that needs correction.
There's definitely some use in a patient being able to say "I notice that I tend to do this that and the other thing and they're making my life problematic, can you help me change" and being able to put a name to that pattern and apply techniques known to alter it. It's another thing entirely for a doctor to say "I notice you seem to do this that and the other thing, you have a disease and I can treat it and make you better". Identifying and naming the patterns is great. Calling them disorder or diseases or something that implies a defect in need of correction, instead of a perfectly benign difference that doesn't necessarily need treatment, is a problem.
That's liberty, and it can come with or without democracy. There can be liberal non-democracies, and illiberal democracies as well.
I'd argue that on a very fundamental level we always have had democracy everywhere, because no form of government will remain in place unless enough people support it and few enough people oppose it: a state with more people actively (keyword: actively) fighting it than actively supporting it will inevitably fail.
The question is simply to whom do the masses delegate their power, whether by active support or passive acceptance. A king or dictator? An oligarchy or aristocracy? Some more directly accountable, short-term representatives in a parliament or congress? Or do they keep it all to themselves like in ancient Athens?
And then the more important question is, whoever that power is delegated to, what terms are attached to it? What will the people let those granted power get away with before they take it back?
The reason we have a tiny power elite doing whatever the hell they want is because most people either support or at least accept a system which allows them to get away with that. The ultimate power, and thus the ultimate responsibility, always lies directly with the people: if we want to get rid of the tiny power elite, enough of us have to publicly declare that we're not going to put up with their shit any more (by means of elections and legislation), and then stop putting up with their shit (appeal to the new legal structure that says we don't have to), and watch each other's backs (in the courts and at the polls again, or if we are blatantly ignored there, in the streets) to make sure that nobody's going to get steamrolled and forced to put up with it.
If we were not a democracy, that would just mean the election and legislation, courts and polls, would be out of the question, and our only recourse would be taking directly to the streets. And yes, I mean the torches-and-pitchforks (i.e. guns) kind of taking to the streets. Thankfully we are ostensibly a democracy, we have other recourse before it comes to that, and hopefully it will never come to that unless we all do get up off our collective asses, avail ourselves of those avenues of recourse, and still get ignored. But so far we're still at the "get people off their asses" stage. Until that happens, we're stuck with what the ignorant masses want: tyranny.
$50k/yr is above the median personal income. According to this about 75% of Americans make under $50k. I'm not finding it now on a cursory search but the figure I'm recalling for the median income was $44k, although this same chart I just linked says 48% of Americans make under $25k so that would seem to be even lower. Perhaps the $44k figure I'm recalling is median household income, not personal income, which would include many two-income households and exclude anyone who isn't a householder (like me).
Either way, $200k will get you a nice mobile home in a park paying $800/mo rent on top of your mortgage around these parts (Ventura/Santa Barbara area). $1000/mo will get you a 1br apartment in the cheaper parts like Oxnard. From what I hear most of the Bay Area is the same. I'm sure Oklahoma City is a lot cheaper, but that's what I'm talking about having to move to Bumfuck Idaho if I want to live like a real adult. Staying where I was born and raised apparently isn't an option; only rich people get to live in decent places, eh? (I'd be happy in a 500sqft 1br shotgun shack if it were even legal to build such things in ways that didn't leave you still paying rent on them, defeating half the point of home ownership in the first place. Only options like that here are condos -- with HOA fees comparable to rent -- and mobile homes, with land rent comparable to apartments).
And don't fucking talk to me about having myself to blame or needing help with financial planning. I came from nothing, I lived in a literal goddamn toolshed next to my dad's trailer until I moved out on my own, my father was a bricklayer, my mom is disabled, neither of them had any college education or provided any financial support or even guidance to get me out on my feet, and despite all that I still got myself a four-year degree, am 100% debt-free, and working a middle-class job now. And I just told you in my last post that I hardly spend a fucking cent on anything but necessities; my only irregular expenses are the odd automotive or medical/dental repair and maintenance, the rest goes straight to cost of living or savings. All my non-rent expenses combined amount to the typical rent for this area, and I'm putting up with an intolerable living situation to get about half the average rent so I can put the savings toward a down payment on something eventually. I don't drink or party, I don't buy toys, I don't travel; all I want is to be left the fuck alone in a space of my own, and I'm pouring every goddamn ounce of effort I have into that endeavor and it's still looking more impossible every day.
And apparently that's true, from your own statistics, of almost half the people my age. A 30 year old man still living like a kid in someone else's spare bedroom would be a laughing stock in 1960, but he's just about average today apparently.
The real world doesn't work that way. You can live a decent 1960's middle-class lifestyle on an income around the poverty line today
Hah. I'm a 30 year old man making almost exactly the national median income, and still living little different from how I did when I was in college. (Which I worked my way through, mind you, having parents who are both completely destitute). The only things I spend money on are rent, utilities, food, gas, and occasionally a movie or something. I don't buy toys or gadgets and I almost never travel (rarely even an afternoon's drive away for a weekend camping trip or something). Everything else I make beyond those expenses is going toward desperately trying to claw my way out of merely renting a room in someone else's house full of other people, which is looking more and more like a futile prospect unless I move to Bumfuck Idaho or the middle of the desert or something. And no way in hell could I ever support any dependents.
Meanwhile, a college-educated middle-class man my age in 1960 would be married with kids and living in a real family house, all on his own income. If I wanted anything close to that, I'd have to find a girl to makes more than I do to split the expenses with, and even then we'd be pushing it unless she was filthy stinking rich. Yeah, our technology has improved, but my computer is the modern equivalent of the television that my 1960 counterpart would likely have owned, my cell phone is the modern equivalent of the phone he would have had, and my car is little different from his would be. They're all fancier and higher-tech than things were then, but they're the standard lower-end options available today. Meanwhile, real substantial living conditions like the ability to live alone or support a family are drastically diminished.
No matter the size of a black hole, gravitational acceleration at the event horizon is c per Planck time. That's not "infinite", but it is maximal. Anything at the event horizon of a black hole will have its velocity increased by c toward the singularity as quickly as theoretically possible. You cannot build a rocket to put out that kind of acceleration in the other direction to keep you in place, because you cannot build a rocket to get you up to c at all, in any amount of time. Your talk about time axes sounds like it's an echo of a description of why you can't build a rocket to get up to c. It has nothing to do with black holes specifically, other than that you would need to get that fast to escape the event horizon of one.
If you were made of light, however, you would be moving at c, and you could orbit at the event horizon. If you're just above the event horizon, you could in theory get moving fast enough to orbit just outside of it. And in orbit, you don't feel any acceleration from gravity; you are free-falling around the black hole, and continually missing it. You could also have some flight path requiring 1g of constant acceleration to keep you from falling in. The size of the black hole doesn't matter for any of that; if you are anywhere outside the event horizon, you can find a flight path that will make you feel any amount of acceleration you want, for as long as you have fuel to maintain that kind of acceleration. (For an orbit, you feel zero acceleration, and so need no fuel and can maintain it indefinitely).
Where the size of a black hole does matter, and what I think you were thinking of in your earlier post about black holes of 100 solar masses or such, is tidal forces. These are the forces which pinch and stretch your body in uneven ways. Imagine you had a tetherball pole in the middle of a schoolyard. You stand far off to the east of it, facing it, with your arms outstretched. The lines from both of your hands, and your elbows, and your nose, toward the tetherball pole, are all roughly westward, so if you were to be pulled toward it, your whole body would be pulled more or less evenly. But if you stand right next to it, with your arms stretched out, your nose is pulled west, but your right hand is now north of it, and your left hand is south of it, so they get pulled south and north respectively, and the pole pulls your hands toward each other. If, like gravity, it also pulls harder the closer to it you are, it will pull your face toward it much harder than it will your hands, and make you smack your nose into it and then hit yourself as your hands fall in behind your head; while from a long ways away, all your body parts are pulled with about the same force.
Likewise with black holes. The closer you are to one, the more the different parts of your body (and spaceship, etc) are pulled in different directions and with different magnitudes. The farther you are from it, the more evenly everything is pulled. A very massive black hole has a very large event horizon, so at the event horizon, you are very far from the center of the black hole, and even though you are still experiencing the same acceleration you would feel at the event horizon of any black hole, it's all pulling you in more or less the same direction, so you could orbit there and suffer no ill effects. Around a small black hole though, even if you were orbiting just above its black hole and feeling no acceleration overall, the parts of you closer to it would need to orbit faster to maintain that effect and so would feel pulled and pinchedcompared to the parts of you further away from it, which would have more speed than they need to orbit and so tend to drift away from it. All in all you would feel pulled in every different direction and your body would be ripped apart. Around a larger black hole, even moving at the same speed to maintain orbit the same distance from the event horizon, all of you would feel roughly the same effects, so you wouldn't even notice them.
Disclaimer: I think airport security is security theater which provides no benefit aside from keeping the masses calm
It doesn't even provide that benefit. It keeps the masses afraid and feeling dependent. That's only benefit to the people who want to leverage that for their own power, not to the people such measures are purported to benefit.