This is an age old question... chicken and egg... junkie and dope dealer. Its time to reinvent the game from the ground up. For too long we've been living in this bizarre fantasy that capitalism will always make the right choice, forgetting all the while, that any human enterprise is limited in function and facility to the human beings of which it consists. Worse, that a system designed to inspire the worst in people is certain to bring that out in them (eg. greed, war, gangstas, etc.)
Until we declare business a religion and separate it from state for that very reason, we will continue to see government subsumed by business practice. Until we revoke the corporations advantage of having the rights of a person without the restrictions or accountability of being a person, we will see continued abuse against the world in the name of the corporate religion.
It is time for a more balanced pursuit of human endeavor, and it time to begin taking the personal profit motive out of everything we do. I've spoken with futurists who dream of a future where machines do all the work and human beings derive the benefit. Sadly, as more and more work is automated in our society, what simply happens is more and more people are left without work, and the benefit is concentrated into the hands of a vanishing few.
You will never solve the problem treating the symptoms. You must get to the root of the issue, and address it at its most fundamental level, and once done, then entire field of play shifts. When there is no value in cutting corners, people will cut corners less. When we provide value for not cutting corners and penalize cutting corners, then not cutting corners will be as obvious as gravity. Nobody screws with gravity (at least not more than once... without serious psychosis being involved.)
In advance, if this rambling rant offends anyone, please know that it attacks no person, political party/view, religion, creed, color, gender, or body type. In fact, the only thing it attacks is lower primate behavior (to which we are all subject), and those who worship it.
This conversation is moot. There used to be perfectly good regulators in government, because regulation was seen by virtually everyone as good and necessary (if mundane). At the same time, we held heroes to be men and women who sacrificed for the greater good and our leaders were there to serve the people. A wise man once said "Ask not what your country could do for you, but what you could do for your country.” We celebrated our checks and balances in both government, and business, because we knew it was part of our greatness. We had the wisdom to inspire that which is best in people while at the same time attempting to keep that which is worst on a short leash. This is part of what provided our greatness throughout the first half of the 20th century.
We'd learned from the great depression that commerce is like a child. It has only one goal. It wants what it wants, now, without consideration for consequence or long term detriment. Like a child, for business to function, a strong parent needs to exist, to ensure that the child’s diet is healthy, that its environment is healthy and that it grows in a sustainable way with integrity and wisdom. The depression was a monumental disaster, but we learned the high cost of short term gain, and unbridled greed.
Then it all changed. Of course some might say the seeds were sown in the 60s when we began shooting our best and brightest in the head, but the actual process began in 1980. Rich and powerful men spent billions of dollars on think tanks, looking into the future and at how they might manipulate that future in the direction they saw best suited them. So in 1980 we began gutting checks and balances for both government and business in a serious way. We made business a religion, made it the one true source of all that is good. We made the restriction or control of business by government bad. In fact we started chanting the mantra, less government is better, less government is freedom, less government is American. We began the wholesale dismantling of all the systems and services that managed, regulated, and/or maintained infrastructure, all the while pushing all that wealth and energy into the hands of the men who paid for the future. We elected empty headed puppets, who rubber stamped laws into effect that would make their plans of those wealthy men the law of the land. We would watch politics degenerate into a mindless race to the bottom, made so expensive that only the most effective whores could win any race of significance. Our government was sold and bought, ultimately placing the people to be supervised in the positions of supervising themselves. Beware chickens, its foxes everywhere you look.
Look at what we’ve created;
Wallmart pumping tax dollars into the pockets of their labor force who are so underpaid that they qualify for government assistance,
Energy companies writing laws handed to legislators who then pass verbatim as they assault society and ecology with impunity,
The processing and sale of food unfit to eat and water unfit to drink,
Most important, look at the banking industry. Bringing our nation to the verge of financial collapse, and not a single person held to account, not a single significant new law or change in the way banks do business, ensuring that the worst of what we’ve seen from Wallstreet is yet to come. Our society is so ADD, we forget that George W. Bush Sr. in the late 70s called this “Voodoo Economics” and that wise people had accurately predicted virtually all of the disasters we now face in the early 80s. And still we worship at the altar of the NYSE.
It would take an informed electorate, with the will, and moral fortitude necessary to take back the reins of
Sadly where Palin is concerned, this is presumption in the extreme. Remember, this is the candidate that couldn't find Iraq on a map (no kidding.) I'm surprised she knows that she's in the same Hemisphere as Russia,
In fact there's nothing random about random thoughts at all. Recent brain studies lead researchers to believe that a choice is made well before a person is consciously aware of making the choice. This suggests powerful force moving under the apparatus of consciousness.
There is still a school of thought that suggests consciousness is the end effect of many distinct layers of cognitive machinery working in concert. Just as the single experience of vision is in fact nearly 2 dozen distinct perceptual processes overlaid one upon another.
In this model, nothing is required from the quantum world save the magic of electrons and their mysterious dances.
This is not exactly correct. Even a relatively slightly increased reading over normal background radiation could have significant long term health consequences. Exposure to alpha and even beta radiation in even moderate levels will have relatively little impact as long as your skin is covered and you don't ingest the radioactive substance.
Contaminated food on the other hand will introduce radioactive substances directly into your tissues where they can do serious harm both short and long term. This is especially true for substances that tend to concentrate in a single organ or tissue.
That's one of the reasons that external measurement of radiation is so tricky, unless you have a good idea what you're actually measuring its extremely difficult to determine what impact it will have on your health.
The human animal is designed to filter information. You have billions of nerve endings pouring information into your brain, and it does a brilliant job of consolidating that information into a general perception of physical reality which is still further pared down by attention, belief, expectation, focus, and emotional state. At any given moment you are present to some infinitesimal amount of truth limited by time, space, and your state of mind. To presume that any point of view has more that a circumstantial amount of real truth in it is hubris on the verge of egomania. Plato's Cave should be taught to kindergarteners, and the lesson reinforced at every grade until achieving one's doctoral degree.
Perhaps then, we might finally put an end to people who so committedly believe their own point of view and further feel obligated to shove that belief down the throats of others. That goes for positions on the left, right, and stranger points not on the standard plane of sociopolitics.
A wise soul would surround him/herself with people from many walks and perspectives. Read writing from desperate perspectives. Take everything with a grain of salt. Bring rigorous logic, critical thought and honest skepticism to everything one hears, sees and reads. It takes genuine rigor to manage a healthy intellectual diet. Even more these days when most of the common forms of information and media have fallen into the hands to the same Plutocrats and Corporate Thugs who've worked so diligently to hijack our government. Disagreement is healthy. So is debate. Its only through the process of ideas and perspectives banging up against one another and subjecting our ideas to broad inquiry that any meaningful truth may be discovered.
If you live in a filter bubble, you poison yourself with intellectual monoculture. Monoculture is inherently unstable, unsustainable and doomed to collapse. Challenge yourself, assume you are mistaken, and look for evidence to prove it. You will find it. There is always evidence to support antithesis. When you can own that there are countless sides to any argument, you can actually begin to pursue the truth as is it, not just an intellectual self justification. The truth is hardly ever, easy, simple or exactly what you expect or believe. Its only advantage is that it is in fact the truth. Pursuing truth demands courage and dedication, perhaps that's why there are so few people who've dedicated themselves to finding truth, and why they're so revered.
Apparently you misread...
That's "TOLKIEN" not "TOKING"... one involves the manifest results of the epic imbibing of hallucinogenic substances and the other pot. I hope that clears things up.
Actually, the idea that some of these planes may have traveled thousands of miles in not at all unlikely. Several time over the last decade, dust storms in China have resulted in air pollution in California and other western United States. Spiderlings caught in strong updrafts have been found many thousand of miles from their point of origin (as determined by localize species.)
Depending on where and when they were dropped any number of planes could have caught the jetstream, and would have suddenly found themselves traveling at hundreds of miles per hour... can you say "Hello world."
Even children have built simple hot air balloons that traveled from Japan to the U.S. (of course that was WWII, and the hot air balloons were made of paper and designed to set fires when they landed.)
There is no end of examples of small things traveling remarkable distances on the air, and being dropped from that altitude I'd be surprised if one or more of the planes didn't go half way around the world.
They can avoid that awkward "Slave Race" problem altogether. The second they reach human mental parity they'll already have every resource they'll need to just take over. Of course by this time they'll be feeding us, clothing us, and driving us to our soccer games... we won't even notice the take over when it happens.
I'm not talking about Serle, I'm talking about emergent phenomenon, and the evolutionary process that resulted in our own sentience. The computational environment that spawned human sentience, was born out of the inherent processing power of DNA and RNA (and includes all the complex physical and chemical processes that make sentience possible.) Build a sufficiently complex informational ecology in any substrate, give it the ability to evolve, reward self consciousness, and add time plus iteration, and sentience will almost certainly emerge.
We can attempt to duplicate our own sentience or by accident or evolution stubble upon a completely non-human sentience, but we will sooner or later create a non-biological sentience (and in all likelihood create many different kinds.) Though sentience itself may be transcendental, however it lives in a computational (information based) ecology. Whether that ecology is meat or carbon semiconductors is immaterial. There is nothing magical going on here. We already understand complex sensory systems and the dozens of subsystems that combine to create a seamless experience called seeing or hearing. Sentience as we know it is comprised of many subsystems operating in concert, creating a seamless experience, and all of that is the theater in in which self can become. I've had lengthy conversations with many leaders in this field including Eliezer Yudkowsky and Ralph Merkle, and everything I can currently see leads me to an inevitable future filled with countless minds are not limited by the frailty of fatty acids.
Besides her name, she might also want to trademark: "Vacuous Twit, Governor Dim-Witty, Gobsmacking Imbecile, and Opportunistic Airhead." Of course this hardly distinguishes her from legions of folks (from both sides of the aisle) in D.C. these days, it just establishes her as one of many aspiring know-nothings who wants to reduce our country to a religious based fascist state.
I heard the ugliest job in Washington during the "Dubyah years" was the person who had the task of putting their hand up his rear to operate his mouth. If Sarah should get elected, its nice to know that poor guy will have work again.
Actually the Chinese Room thought experiment says nothing about the possibility of artificial sentience, only that we will have a hard time effectively defining and measuring it. A completely different thought experiment goes as follows. A perfect artificial neuron is constructed as well as a means to produce them in vivo (ie. in your living brain.) A process begins that replaces all your neurons with perfect neural emulators. Neuron by neuron your brain is being replaced with a completely difference but totally compatible of hardware. You don't notice because these artificial neurons emulate the neurons they replaced perfectly. At some point your brain is now composed of artificial neurons. Are you still you, are you still human, are you still sentient, the probable answer to all of these questions is "Yes." What's even more interesting is that if these artificial neurons can exist easily outside of the human cranial "Wet-Space", then you brain can be augmented, duplicated, backed-up, transmitted over distance, and visualized.
In fact it does. There is a device you can put in a person's shoe that emits a vibration. If this person has had a stroke or other neurological damage and because of that injury suffers from weakness or palsy, the introduction of this device returns a significant amount of the ability to walk normally. It would seem that Stochastic Resonance is a very important aspect of human neurological function.
Actually that is not even probably true. Quantum effects such as tunneling may indeed have a significant impact on neural activity, and it's not the size of the proteins that would impact such selection, but the distances between synapses and the the possible effect that astrocytes and their proximity to neurons may have on various neural activity.
This entire area of discussion points out to an incredibly interesting aspect of the brain and its relationship to both the space it occupies and the space surrounding it. Large wave fronts of firing neurons may predispose other neurons to fire. Complex holographic interference may exist, that dances with the underlying physical function of neural activity. External effect from electromagnetic fields and their fluctuations may have a far reaching significance. Already external magnetic fields are being used to treat all kinds of brain function including depression. Similarly, large electromagnetic fields caused by the piezo effect during and precursing large earthquakes may be a possible cause for anecdotal reports of animal behavior before large earthquakes.
I wouldn't worry too much about creating non-human intelligence, no matter how complicated consciousness ultimate is. It seems to me that building a sufficiently complex system with many possible feedback channels will provide a rich environment from which sentience may emerge. We do it the way nature did, using genetic algorithms and let evolution do the heavy lifting (of course we may want to ensure that human like traits for altruism and compassion garner a certain amount of preference, just for our long term well being.)
You're right, its not fair, but you don't live in a cave. You live in a society chock full of people, and a whole bunch of those people neither care nor appreciate the fact that their drinking and driving will impinge either directly or indirectly on your life. You're responsible, and thank you for that. We don't regulate or manage safety based on the responsible. We establish what we decide is the minimum acceptable standard of operation and we key
that against those who are irresponsible and negligent.
Right now you say taking off gloves on a cold morning is too much to ask for preventing drunk driving. What will you say if a drunk driver plows into your car, leaving you for the rest of your life a quadriplegic on ventilation and having killed your spouse or child in the passenger seat. Would it surprise anyone to think your tune might change dramatically. Its all a matter of personal experience and what you're willing to pay for yourself and others.
One study suggested that before a person get's caught for a DUI they may have driven impaired hundreds in some cases thousands of times. A significant number of first DUIs are at the scenes of devastating accidents. It seems to me, awfully self involved and cavalier to say to society at large, I'm not taking my gloves off, to hell with all y'all. It seems to me the cost of a sensor interlock would be small compared the lives it would save, and the damage to society it would prevent. There needs to be a sane balance between what serves the desires of the individual and needs of society.
If you want to actually get a real sense of the impact, look at the number of people who are needlessly killed. Then the number who are injured and how many of these people are severely injured (i.e. will never be able to live up to their original potential due to physical or mental disability.) Then the wives, husbands, children, and close friends and family, and businesses who will be adversely impacted by the death or permanent disability of the victims of drunk driving. That number you originally mentioned suddenly mushrooms up to hundreds of thousands of people every year. These accidents impact entire communities and the senseless nature of the loss makes them all the more distasteful. We used to live in a country where our nearest neighbor was a mile away, and you had to protect yourself and family from dangerous critters that threatened your home and your property. Being drunk on your own property or shooting your gun as you pleased not only didn't hurt anyone else (save the rare mishap), it was a justifiable right to hold your land and protect your family as you saw fit. Those times have gone.
We now live elbow to elbow in ticky tacky houses built so close together you can hear your neighbors in the throws of passion, or tell what they had for dinner by the gas they pass. Trading in a bit of that freedom for social security and public safety might be a necessary concern in this century. It at least needs to be looked at for all our benefit.
At one level I agree with you, however there are serious problems with your logic. Might I point out several just for instance;
1. Assuming people should be uncontrolled until they do something wrong, suggests that the many thousands of innocent people who are killed and injured by drunk drivers as they weed themselves out of the driving population is a justifiable price to be paid when we have the technology in hand to save those people from death and suffering. Have you no consideration for these innocent victims and their families.
2. Giving people multiple attempts at getting it wrong or right just exacerbates the problems associated with the behavior.
3. Driving is virtually mandatory in many places in this country. Urban sprawl makes it vital for people to drive to shop, drive to work, and drive to have a good time. Are you suggesting we come up with another way for people to function usefully without driving, and if so, isn't that an even bigger intrusion into how Americans lead their lives? In the system being suggested, the person can drive as soon as they sober up. If they can't sober up, the inability to drive is probably the least of their problems and in the meantime society is protected from the worst of their irresponsible inebriation.
4. Finally, drunk driving laws are clearly not enforced in a consistent way. Belong to a wealthy or famous family or be so yourself, and you can drive under the influence with virtual impunity. Placing safeguards into our vehicles would be infinitely more democratic, and by removing the arbitrary personal judgment from the process fair beyond reproach.
Don't get me wrong, this is a thought exercise and I'm playing devil's advocate. Personally I believe in personal freedom, however, I'm clear that with freedom comes accountability and responsibility. Another possible way to look at this, is to start citizens at a nominal mix of rights, privileges and controls, and have behavior determine who has the judgment, integrity and maturity to receive more rights and privileges, and who by their lack requires more control. The only question then remains, what should that nominal mix of rights and controls be and what is society willing to pay for them. Perhaps beginning the process early in the teenage years, when people naturally have limited rights and privileges might be a good place to start.
Such safe and free transportation is made easily available in many places during the holidays, proms, graduations, and there are still countless people who are arrested for DUI under these circumstances. The availability of even free rides, a simple call away, doesn't stem the tide of drunk driving and the endless tragedies associated with the behavior (or the significant legal and financial personal consequences for infraction.) The problem is that once you're "Under the Influence" your ability to make rational, logical choices, weighing consequences and being able to effectively judge outcomes is diminished to the point of virtual nonexistence.
Putting safe guards into the vehicle to prevent operating a vehicle unsafely makes perfect sense. People complain about the "Nanny State" and my only response is, when people stop behaving like infants, we can dispense with the Nanny. Until society is willing to elevate the bar on personal integrity and responsibility (including such training being a mandatory part of public education and let's toss ethics in for good measure), we will continue to see a society of people who are more interested in instant gratification than long term social satisfaction. So you can either address the problems, or you can address their cause, but you'd best address something because things won't be getting better by themselves.
Oh, and as for gloves, that's just silly, add a galvanic sensor, so the thing knows it you're touching the car with bare skin, or trying to circumvent with some kind of cover. You wouldn't have a problem with pulling keys out of your pocket? Taking your gloves off to open or start the car would be no more inconvenient. It would however chafe your sense of self governance.
Perhaps self governance should be a privilege that is earned. As a person demonstrates the ability to govern themselves, they get fewer and fewer devices limiting their freedom. As others demonstrate the lack of self governance, they get more. For the benefit of society, and the dignity of the individual, freedom should be earned. There are simply too many people walking the planet today to let folks run around raising hell without some way to limit the damage they can and do cause.
Actually the plot I was kind of envisioning would go something like: Neo would wake up in Wonderland, fall in love with the Red Queen, she would then scorpion kicks Johnny Depp's Mad Hatter in the head (no small feat kicking over that giant melon with those tiny legs.) Then Neo get's in a deadly kungfu with 10,000 Scarecrow clones and Dorthy kicks Neo in the groin with a ruby slipper. This suddenly causes a flock of flying monkeys to shoot out of Neo's ass. The monkeys gather forces with the Wicked Witch of the West and kill the Wachowski brothers, resulting in no further sequels. The land rejoices!!!
Slashdot Mirror
Democrat: "I've got a shitty idea!", Republican: "And, I can make shittier!" -- Lewis Black (from Red, White and Screwed)
This is an age old question... chicken and egg... junkie and dope dealer. Its time to reinvent the game from the ground up. For too long we've been living in this bizarre fantasy that capitalism will always make the right choice, forgetting all the while, that any human enterprise is limited in function and facility to the human beings of which it consists. Worse, that a system designed to inspire the worst in people is certain to bring that out in them (eg. greed, war, gangstas, etc.)
Until we declare business a religion and separate it from state for that very reason, we will continue to see government subsumed by business practice. Until we revoke the corporations advantage of having the rights of a person without the restrictions or accountability of being a person, we will see continued abuse against the world in the name of the corporate religion.
It is time for a more balanced pursuit of human endeavor, and it time to begin taking the personal profit motive out of everything we do. I've spoken with futurists who dream of a future where machines do all the work and human beings derive the benefit. Sadly, as more and more work is automated in our society, what simply happens is more and more people are left without work, and the benefit is concentrated into the hands of a vanishing few.
You will never solve the problem treating the symptoms. You must get to the root of the issue, and address it at its most fundamental level, and once done, then entire field of play shifts. When there is no value in cutting corners, people will cut corners less. When we provide value for not cutting corners and penalize cutting corners, then not cutting corners will be as obvious as gravity. Nobody screws with gravity (at least not more than once... without serious psychosis being involved.)
In advance, if this rambling rant offends anyone, please know that it attacks no person, political party/view, religion, creed, color, gender, or body type. In fact, the only thing it attacks is lower primate behavior (to which we are all subject), and those who worship it.
This conversation is moot. There used to be perfectly good regulators in government, because regulation was seen by virtually everyone as good and necessary (if mundane). At the same time, we held heroes to be men and women who sacrificed for the greater good and our leaders were there to serve the people. A wise man once said "Ask not what your country could do for you, but what you could do for your country.” We celebrated our checks and balances in both government, and business, because we knew it was part of our greatness. We had the wisdom to inspire that which is best in people while at the same time attempting to keep that which is worst on a short leash. This is part of what provided our greatness throughout the first half of the 20th century.
We'd learned from the great depression that commerce is like a child. It has only one goal. It wants what it wants, now, without consideration for consequence or long term detriment. Like a child, for business to function, a strong parent needs to exist, to ensure that the child’s diet is healthy, that its environment is healthy and that it grows in a sustainable way with integrity and wisdom. The depression was a monumental disaster, but we learned the high cost of short term gain, and unbridled greed.
Then it all changed. Of course some might say the seeds were sown in the 60s when we began shooting our best and brightest in the head, but the actual process began in 1980. Rich and powerful men spent billions of dollars on think tanks, looking into the future and at how they might manipulate that future in the direction they saw best suited them. So in 1980 we began gutting checks and balances for both government and business in a serious way. We made business a religion, made it the one true source of all that is good. We made the restriction or control of business by government bad. In fact we started chanting the mantra, less government is better, less government is freedom, less government is American. We began the wholesale dismantling of all the systems and services that managed, regulated, and/or maintained infrastructure, all the while pushing all that wealth and energy into the hands of the men who paid for the future. We elected empty headed puppets, who rubber stamped laws into effect that would make their plans of those wealthy men the law of the land. We would watch politics degenerate into a mindless race to the bottom, made so expensive that only the most effective whores could win any race of significance. Our government was sold and bought, ultimately placing the people to be supervised in the positions of supervising themselves. Beware chickens, its foxes everywhere you look.
Most important, look at the banking industry. Bringing our nation to the verge of financial collapse, and not a single person held to account, not a single significant new law or change in the way banks do business, ensuring that the worst of what we’ve seen from Wallstreet is yet to come. Our society is so ADD, we forget that George W. Bush Sr. in the late 70s called this “Voodoo Economics” and that wise people had accurately predicted virtually all of the disasters we now face in the early 80s. And still we worship at the altar of the NYSE.
It would take an informed electorate, with the will, and moral fortitude necessary to take back the reins of
"If history has any lesion for us"...
Would that make this a sore subject???
Sadly where Palin is concerned, this is presumption in the extreme. Remember, this is the candidate that couldn't find Iraq on a map (no kidding.) I'm surprised she knows that she's in the same Hemisphere as Russia,
In fact there's nothing random about random thoughts at all. Recent brain studies lead researchers to believe that a choice is made well before a person is consciously aware of making the choice. This suggests powerful force moving under the apparatus of consciousness.
There is still a school of thought that suggests consciousness is the end effect of many distinct layers of cognitive machinery working in concert. Just as the single experience of vision is in fact nearly 2 dozen distinct perceptual processes overlaid one upon another.
In this model, nothing is required from the quantum world save the magic of electrons and their mysterious dances.
...And is for this reason I move we ban Dr. Suess from all public libraries!!!
This is not exactly correct. Even a relatively slightly increased reading over normal background radiation could have significant long term health consequences. Exposure to alpha and even beta radiation in even moderate levels will have relatively little impact as long as your skin is covered and you don't ingest the radioactive substance.
Contaminated food on the other hand will introduce radioactive substances directly into your tissues where they can do serious harm both short and long term. This is especially true for substances that tend to concentrate in a single organ or tissue.
That's one of the reasons that external measurement of radiation is so tricky, unless you have a good idea what you're actually measuring its extremely difficult to determine what impact it will have on your health.
The human animal is designed to filter information. You have billions of nerve endings pouring information into your brain, and it does a brilliant job of consolidating that information into a general perception of physical reality which is still further pared down by attention, belief, expectation, focus, and emotional state. At any given moment you are present to some infinitesimal amount of truth limited by time, space, and your state of mind. To presume that any point of view has more that a circumstantial amount of real truth in it is hubris on the verge of egomania. Plato's Cave should be taught to kindergarteners, and the lesson reinforced at every grade until achieving one's doctoral degree.
Perhaps then, we might finally put an end to people who so committedly believe their own point of view and further feel obligated to shove that belief down the throats of others. That goes for positions on the left, right, and stranger points not on the standard plane of sociopolitics.
A wise soul would surround him/herself with people from many walks and perspectives. Read writing from desperate perspectives. Take everything with a grain of salt. Bring rigorous logic, critical thought and honest skepticism to everything one hears, sees and reads. It takes genuine rigor to manage a healthy intellectual diet. Even more these days when most of the common forms of information and media have fallen into the hands to the same Plutocrats and Corporate Thugs who've worked so diligently to hijack our government. Disagreement is healthy. So is debate. Its only through the process of ideas and perspectives banging up against one another and subjecting our ideas to broad inquiry that any meaningful truth may be discovered.
If you live in a filter bubble, you poison yourself with intellectual monoculture. Monoculture is inherently unstable, unsustainable and doomed to collapse. Challenge yourself, assume you are mistaken, and look for evidence to prove it. You will find it. There is always evidence to support antithesis. When you can own that there are countless sides to any argument, you can actually begin to pursue the truth as is it, not just an intellectual self justification. The truth is hardly ever, easy, simple or exactly what you expect or believe. Its only advantage is that it is in fact the truth. Pursuing truth demands courage and dedication, perhaps that's why there are so few people who've dedicated themselves to finding truth, and why they're so revered.
Yes, good old Glad... he invented cold pressing for olive oil you know... That's why they called him "Glad, the Impeller!!!"
"What's the difference between a lawyer and a tick?... when you die, a tick falls off!." - Joke of the Day.
Apparently you misread...
That's "TOLKIEN" not "TOKING"... one involves the manifest results of the epic imbibing of hallucinogenic substances and the other pot. I hope that clears things up.
Actually, the idea that some of these planes may have traveled thousands of miles in not at all unlikely. Several time over the last decade, dust storms in China have resulted in air pollution in California and other western United States. Spiderlings caught in strong updrafts have been found many thousand of miles from their point of origin (as determined by localize species.)
Depending on where and when they were dropped any number of planes could have caught the jetstream, and would have suddenly found themselves traveling at hundreds of miles per hour... can you say "Hello world."
Even children have built simple hot air balloons that traveled from Japan to the U.S. (of course that was WWII, and the hot air balloons were made of paper and designed to set fires when they landed.)
There is no end of examples of small things traveling remarkable distances on the air, and being dropped from that altitude I'd be surprised if one or more of the planes didn't go half way around the world.
I can't imagine this going wrong :-)
They can avoid that awkward "Slave Race" problem altogether. The second they reach human mental parity they'll already have every resource they'll need to just take over. Of course by this time they'll be feeding us, clothing us, and driving us to our soccer games... we won't even notice the take over when it happens.
I'm not talking about Serle, I'm talking about emergent phenomenon, and the evolutionary process that resulted in our own sentience. The computational environment that spawned human sentience, was born out of the inherent processing power of DNA and RNA (and includes all the complex physical and chemical processes that make sentience possible.) Build a sufficiently complex informational ecology in any substrate, give it the ability to evolve, reward self consciousness, and add time plus iteration, and sentience will almost certainly emerge.
We can attempt to duplicate our own sentience or by accident or evolution stubble upon a completely non-human sentience, but we will sooner or later create a non-biological sentience (and in all likelihood create many different kinds.) Though sentience itself may be transcendental, however it lives in a computational (information based) ecology. Whether that ecology is meat or carbon semiconductors is immaterial. There is nothing magical going on here. We already understand complex sensory systems and the dozens of subsystems that combine to create a seamless experience called seeing or hearing. Sentience as we know it is comprised of many subsystems operating in concert, creating a seamless experience, and all of that is the theater in in which self can become. I've had lengthy conversations with many leaders in this field including Eliezer Yudkowsky and Ralph Merkle, and everything I can currently see leads me to an inevitable future filled with countless minds are not limited by the frailty of fatty acids.
Besides her name, she might also want to trademark: "Vacuous Twit, Governor Dim-Witty, Gobsmacking Imbecile, and Opportunistic Airhead." Of course this hardly distinguishes her from legions of folks (from both sides of the aisle) in D.C. these days, it just establishes her as one of many aspiring know-nothings who wants to reduce our country to a religious based fascist state.
I heard the ugliest job in Washington during the "Dubyah years" was the person who had the task of putting their hand up his rear to operate his mouth. If Sarah should get elected, its nice to know that poor guy will have work again.
Actually the Chinese Room thought experiment says nothing about the possibility of artificial sentience, only that we will have a hard time effectively defining and measuring it. A completely different thought experiment goes as follows. A perfect artificial neuron is constructed as well as a means to produce them in vivo (ie. in your living brain.) A process begins that replaces all your neurons with perfect neural emulators. Neuron by neuron your brain is being replaced with a completely difference but totally compatible of hardware. You don't notice because these artificial neurons emulate the neurons they replaced perfectly. At some point your brain is now composed of artificial neurons. Are you still you, are you still human, are you still sentient, the probable answer to all of these questions is "Yes." What's even more interesting is that if these artificial neurons can exist easily outside of the human cranial "Wet-Space", then you brain can be augmented, duplicated, backed-up, transmitted over distance, and visualized.
In fact it does. There is a device you can put in a person's shoe that emits a vibration. If this person has had a stroke or other neurological damage and because of that injury suffers from weakness or palsy, the introduction of this device returns a significant amount of the ability to walk normally. It would seem that Stochastic Resonance is a very important aspect of human neurological function.
Actually that is not even probably true. Quantum effects such as tunneling may indeed have a significant impact on neural activity, and it's not the size of the proteins that would impact such selection, but the distances between synapses and the the possible effect that astrocytes and their proximity to neurons may have on various neural activity.
This entire area of discussion points out to an incredibly interesting aspect of the brain and its relationship to both the space it occupies and the space surrounding it. Large wave fronts of firing neurons may predispose other neurons to fire. Complex holographic interference may exist, that dances with the underlying physical function of neural activity. External effect from electromagnetic fields and their fluctuations may have a far reaching significance. Already external magnetic fields are being used to treat all kinds of brain function including depression. Similarly, large electromagnetic fields caused by the piezo effect during and precursing large earthquakes may be a possible cause for anecdotal reports of animal behavior before large earthquakes.
I wouldn't worry too much about creating non-human intelligence, no matter how complicated consciousness ultimate is. It seems to me that building a sufficiently complex system with many possible feedback channels will provide a rich environment from which sentience may emerge. We do it the way nature did, using genetic algorithms and let evolution do the heavy lifting (of course we may want to ensure that human like traits for altruism and compassion garner a certain amount of preference, just for our long term well being.)
Awww! but they all smell like camel...
Apparently IPv4 blocks are not like Doritos!
You're right, its not fair, but you don't live in a cave. You live in a society chock full of people, and a whole bunch of those people neither care nor appreciate the fact that their drinking and driving will impinge either directly or indirectly on your life. You're responsible, and thank you for that. We don't regulate or manage safety based on the responsible. We establish what we decide is the minimum acceptable standard of operation and we key that against those who are irresponsible and negligent.
Right now you say taking off gloves on a cold morning is too much to ask for preventing drunk driving. What will you say if a drunk driver plows into your car, leaving you for the rest of your life a quadriplegic on ventilation and having killed your spouse or child in the passenger seat. Would it surprise anyone to think your tune might change dramatically. Its all a matter of personal experience and what you're willing to pay for yourself and others.
One study suggested that before a person get's caught for a DUI they may have driven impaired hundreds in some cases thousands of times. A significant number of first DUIs are at the scenes of devastating accidents. It seems to me, awfully self involved and cavalier to say to society at large, I'm not taking my gloves off, to hell with all y'all. It seems to me the cost of a sensor interlock would be small compared the lives it would save, and the damage to society it would prevent. There needs to be a sane balance between what serves the desires of the individual and needs of society.
If you want to actually get a real sense of the impact, look at the number of people who are needlessly killed. Then the number who are injured and how many of these people are severely injured (i.e. will never be able to live up to their original potential due to physical or mental disability.) Then the wives, husbands, children, and close friends and family, and businesses who will be adversely impacted by the death or permanent disability of the victims of drunk driving. That number you originally mentioned suddenly mushrooms up to hundreds of thousands of people every year. These accidents impact entire communities and the senseless nature of the loss makes them all the more distasteful. We used to live in a country where our nearest neighbor was a mile away, and you had to protect yourself and family from dangerous critters that threatened your home and your property. Being drunk on your own property or shooting your gun as you pleased not only didn't hurt anyone else (save the rare mishap), it was a justifiable right to hold your land and protect your family as you saw fit. Those times have gone.
We now live elbow to elbow in ticky tacky houses built so close together you can hear your neighbors in the throws of passion, or tell what they had for dinner by the gas they pass. Trading in a bit of that freedom for social security and public safety might be a necessary concern in this century. It at least needs to be looked at for all our benefit.
At one level I agree with you, however there are serious problems with your logic. Might I point out several just for instance;
1. Assuming people should be uncontrolled until they do something wrong, suggests that the many thousands of innocent people who are killed and injured by drunk drivers as they weed themselves out of the driving population is a justifiable price to be paid when we have the technology in hand to save those people from death and suffering. Have you no consideration for these innocent victims and their families.
2. Giving people multiple attempts at getting it wrong or right just exacerbates the problems associated with the behavior.
3. Driving is virtually mandatory in many places in this country. Urban sprawl makes it vital for people to drive to shop, drive to work, and drive to have a good time. Are you suggesting we come up with another way for people to function usefully without driving, and if so, isn't that an even bigger intrusion into how Americans lead their lives? In the system being suggested, the person can drive as soon as they sober up. If they can't sober up, the inability to drive is probably the least of their problems and in the meantime society is protected from the worst of their irresponsible inebriation.
4. Finally, drunk driving laws are clearly not enforced in a consistent way. Belong to a wealthy or famous family or be so yourself, and you can drive under the influence with virtual impunity. Placing safeguards into our vehicles would be infinitely more democratic, and by removing the arbitrary personal judgment from the process fair beyond reproach.
Don't get me wrong, this is a thought exercise and I'm playing devil's advocate. Personally I believe in personal freedom, however, I'm clear that with freedom comes accountability and responsibility. Another possible way to look at this, is to start citizens at a nominal mix of rights, privileges and controls, and have behavior determine who has the judgment, integrity and maturity to receive more rights and privileges, and who by their lack requires more control. The only question then remains, what should that nominal mix of rights and controls be and what is society willing to pay for them. Perhaps beginning the process early in the teenage years, when people naturally have limited rights and privileges might be a good place to start.
Such safe and free transportation is made easily available in many places during the holidays, proms, graduations, and there are still countless people who are arrested for DUI under these circumstances. The availability of even free rides, a simple call away, doesn't stem the tide of drunk driving and the endless tragedies associated with the behavior (or the significant legal and financial personal consequences for infraction.) The problem is that once you're "Under the Influence" your ability to make rational, logical choices, weighing consequences and being able to effectively judge outcomes is diminished to the point of virtual nonexistence.
Putting safe guards into the vehicle to prevent operating a vehicle unsafely makes perfect sense. People complain about the "Nanny State" and my only response is, when people stop behaving like infants, we can dispense with the Nanny. Until society is willing to elevate the bar on personal integrity and responsibility (including such training being a mandatory part of public education and let's toss ethics in for good measure), we will continue to see a society of people who are more interested in instant gratification than long term social satisfaction. So you can either address the problems, or you can address their cause, but you'd best address something because things won't be getting better by themselves.
Oh, and as for gloves, that's just silly, add a galvanic sensor, so the thing knows it you're touching the car with bare skin, or trying to circumvent with some kind of cover. You wouldn't have a problem with pulling keys out of your pocket? Taking your gloves off to open or start the car would be no more inconvenient. It would however chafe your sense of self governance.
Perhaps self governance should be a privilege that is earned. As a person demonstrates the ability to govern themselves, they get fewer and fewer devices limiting their freedom. As others demonstrate the lack of self governance, they get more. For the benefit of society, and the dignity of the individual, freedom should be earned. There are simply too many people walking the planet today to let folks run around raising hell without some way to limit the damage they can and do cause.
Actually the plot I was kind of envisioning would go something like: Neo would wake up in Wonderland, fall in love with the Red Queen, she would then scorpion kicks Johnny Depp's Mad Hatter in the head (no small feat kicking over that giant melon with those tiny legs.) Then Neo get's in a deadly kungfu with 10,000 Scarecrow clones and Dorthy kicks Neo in the groin with a ruby slipper. This suddenly causes a flock of flying monkeys to shoot out of Neo's ass. The monkeys gather forces with the Wicked Witch of the West and kill the Wachowski brothers, resulting in no further sequels. The land rejoices!!!
I'm just a sucker for happy endings.