It would take at least one second for your friend at the other side of the pole to register the movement
If your pole is made of conventional matter, the force you exert on it would on a microscopic scale be a pressure wave of electrons repulsing electrons all the way through your pole at close, but not quite, the speed of light.
I understand your frustration with the idea and I even share it to a point.
But it is my understanding that in the future, the parallel processing microchips will be so incredibly complex that "getting it right the first time" is an ideal that just isn't realistic.
Lithuania? How do you expect anyone to take your arguments seriously when you haven't even bothered to learn which country you're talking about? Hint: It starts with an 'E'
In my opinion, the meme-sphere is already exactly such a hive mind. The total of human knowledge exceeds the capacity of the individual by many orders of magnitude.
Hell, the technology required to build the computer I'm typing on from scratch is far beyond the ability of any human being of learning.
So the hive mind already exists. It's just not conscious yet.
Why not then argue that a household battery has a degree of sentience? After all, it has a reaction to its surroundings, in fundamentally the same way that a bacteria moves up into a glucose gradient. It's just chemistry, biophysically encoded programming, or in other words, a dynamic feedback system.
I don't necessarily see that we must find a cutoff point, because placing such definitions is always greedy reductionism: you can't really rate organisms on a one-dimensional sentience scale, or for that matter a one-dimensional *anything* scale.
But if pressed, I'd say that the US animal cruelty law has it down pretty well: the cutoff point is vertebrates, with a few notable exceptions like octopuses. The idea is that the complex central nervous systems such as those of vertebrates are required for the feedback necessary to give meaning at all to the concept of suffering.
This dialogue was taken from Charles Stross' "Accelerando", and takes on the point of the ethics of sentient military devices, though in this case, uploaded ones:
"Cats," says Pamela. "He was hoping to trade their uploads to the Pentagon as a new smart bomb guidance system in lieu of income tax payments. Something about remapping enemy targets to look like mice or birds or something before feeding it to their sensorium. The old kitten and laser pointer trick."
Manfred stares at her, hard. "That's not very nice. Uploaded cats are a bad idea."
"Thirty-million-dollar tax bills aren't nice either, Manfred. That's lifetime nursing-home care for a hundred blameless pensioners."
Franklin leans back, sourly amused, keeping out of the crossfire.
"The lobsters are sentient," Manfred persists. "What about those poor kittens? Don't they deserve minimal rights? How about you? How would you like to wake up a thousand times inside a smart bomb, fooled into thinking that some Cheyenne Mountain battle computer's target of the hour is your heart's desire? How would you like to wake up a thousand times, only to die again? Worse: The kittens are probably not going to be allowed to run. They're too fucking dangerous - they grow up into cats, solitary and highly efficient killing machines. With intelligence and no socialization they'll be too dangerous to have around. They're prisoners, Pam, raised to sentience only to discover they're under a permanent death sentence. How fair is that?"
"But they're only uploads." Pamela stares at him. "Software, right? You could reinstantiate them on another hardware platform, like, say, your Aineko. So the argument about killing them doesn't really apply, does it?"
"So? We're going to be uploading humans in a couple of years. I think we need to take a rain check on the utilitarian philosophy, before it bites us on the cerebral cortex. Lobsters, kittens, humans -- it's a slippery slope."
It reminds me of the old joke of the plumber and the math professor:
One professor of mathematics noticed that his kitchen sink at his home broke down. He called a plumber. The plumber came on the next day, sealed a few screws and everything was working as before.
The professor was delighted. However, when the plumber gave him the bill a minute later, he was shocked.
"This is one third of my monthly salary!" he yelled.
Well, all the same he paid it and then the plumber said to him:
"I understand your position as a professor. Why don't you come to our company and apply for a plumber position? You will earn three times as much as a professor. But remember, when you apply, tell them that you completed only seven elementary classes. They don't like educated people."
So it happened. The professor got a plumber job and his life significantly improved. He just had to seal a screw or two occasionally, and his salary went up significantly.
One day, the board of the plumbing company decided that every plumber has to go to evening classes to complete the eight grade. So, our professor had to go there too. It just happened that the first class was math. The evening teacher, to check students' knowledge, asked for a formula for the area of the circle. The person asked was the professor. He jumped to the board, and then he realized that he had forgotten the formula. He started to reason it, he filled the white board with integrals, differentials and other advanced formulas to conclude the result he forgot. As a result he got "minus pi r squared".
He didn't like the minus, so he started all over again. He got the minus again. No matter how many times he tried, he always got a minus. He was frustrated. He looked a bit scared at the class and saw all the plumbers whisper:
The idea behind representative democracy is to avoid the "heat of the movement" decisions.
I'd say it's more so the country isn't run by the silent majority who have absolutely no idea what's best for them. Then again, maybe we wouldn't be in Iraq if many of the people making the decisions don't even know where that is...
I'd say it's even worse than that. The study concludes that the US is the only real contender in this race for Nobel Prizes. Of course, the only way that a nation even gets its institutes considered is by winning at least three Nobels in a given period(which BTW seem pretty arbitrary). Well, last time i checked, the US has 300 million inhabitants, compared to the minuscule populations in many European countries that do first class research.
And I don't buy the Nobel prize argument for a second. First of all, real revolutionary science in Kuhn's definition does not get recognized by the Nobel committee until it is no longer revolutionary, but normal. Most Nobel Laureates by far are geriatrics that did their research 20 years before the fact. Einstein, the most revolutionary scientist in the last century, received his Nobel for the explanation of the Photoelectric effect, not relativity, which you must agree is the most revolutionary of his discoveries.
IMHO, the correlation between Nobel prizes and revolutionary science in the Kuhnian sense of a paradigmatic catalyst is over simplistic and perhaps even self-contradictory.
Gravitons or no gravitons, general relativity states that gravity will propagate at the speed of light. (Indirect) measurements of gravitational radiation from (among others) the double pulsar PSR1913+16 indicates this.
All that Kyoto buys is more coal-powered plants for third world nations.
Please supply a reference which concludes that the Kyoto Treaty is the direct cause for the building of third-world coal plants.
If anything Kyoto is more likely to harm the environment, and is, in any event, more of a wealth redistribution scheme than it is an environmental management plan.
Sustainable environmental management is wealth redistribution. No one said that it was going to be easy. And the nation which would be hit the hardest is not surprisingly the nation whose energy glutton dwarfs all others. And you have to start somewhere. Environmental management needs a big policy push for everyone. The US(government) has shown very little will to do this.
It's also funny to note that the country which "hates the worlds children" has made bigger strides in combating GHG emissions than several Kyoto signatories.
It's great, and the ozone layer is closing. But that's not what we're talking about - the ice is still melting...
But hey, who needs facts and logic when you can get all your opinions from the "down with HaliBusHitler" maniacs, eh?
Your own post shows a shaky logic at best and has facts that read more like talking points on Fox News.
But suppose it's somewhere near the front, except there's a speling mistake every place "speling" occurs. Would that be proof that God isn't infallible?
Though I'm not very crypto-savvy, there's one thing that I've learned from hard experience about mobile devices and hard drives: they have a very short life span.
Anything with moving parts is bound to break, and if you move it about it'll just break all the faster.
So can't it be a serious problem if your data is encrypted and bytes get knocked out here and there?
Also, mobile devices are usually much slower than stationary ones and will only get slower if it has to apply complex algorithms to all data that goes in and out. And that would probably also put a real big penalty on your battery life.
It boils down to one thing: You have to select a cost-effective level of paranoia. It would make your life infinitely complex to secure yourself against every possible scenario. How important is the secrecy of your data?
Slashdot Mirror
Really?Are you talking about a fictional country called Europe here, or the moon orbiting Jupiter?
I would submit that rigidity is a ideal construct that doesn't apply to physics at all, except in the cases where it simplifies equations.
Just like particles don't really exist, but are simply(or maybe not so simply) expressions of the underlying quantum fields.
It would take at least one second for your friend at the other side of the pole to register the movement
If your pole is made of conventional matter, the force you exert on it would on a microscopic scale be a pressure wave of electrons repulsing electrons all the way through your pole at close, but not quite, the speed of light.
I understand your frustration with the idea and I even share it to a point.
But it is my understanding that in the future, the parallel processing microchips will be so incredibly complex that "getting it right the first time" is an ideal that just isn't realistic.
Is that you, dad?
Lithuania? How do you expect anyone to take your arguments seriously when you haven't even bothered to learn which country you're talking about?
Hint: It starts with an 'E'
If at first you don't succeed, redefine success!
In my opinion, the meme-sphere is already exactly such a hive mind. The total of human knowledge exceeds the capacity of the individual by many orders of magnitude.
Hell, the technology required to build the computer I'm typing on from scratch is far beyond the ability of any human being of learning.
So the hive mind already exists. It's just not conscious yet.
Why not then argue that a household battery has a degree of sentience? After all, it has a reaction to its surroundings, in fundamentally the same way that a bacteria moves up into a glucose gradient. It's just chemistry, biophysically encoded programming, or in other words, a dynamic feedback system.
I don't necessarily see that we must find a cutoff point, because placing such definitions is always greedy reductionism: you can't really rate organisms on a one-dimensional sentience scale, or for that matter a one-dimensional *anything* scale.
But if pressed, I'd say that the US animal cruelty law has it down pretty well: the cutoff point is vertebrates, with a few notable exceptions like octopuses. The idea is that the complex central nervous systems such as those of vertebrates are required for the feedback necessary to give meaning at all to the concept of suffering.
This dialogue was taken from Charles Stross' "Accelerando", and takes on the point of the ethics of sentient military devices, though in this case, uploaded ones:
"Cats," says Pamela. "He was hoping to trade their uploads to the Pentagon as a new smart bomb guidance system in lieu of income tax payments. Something about remapping enemy targets to look like mice or birds or something before feeding it to their sensorium. The old kitten and laser pointer trick."
Manfred stares at her, hard. "That's not very nice. Uploaded cats are a bad idea."
"Thirty-million-dollar tax bills aren't nice either, Manfred. That's lifetime nursing-home care for a hundred blameless pensioners."
Franklin leans back, sourly amused, keeping out of the crossfire.
"The lobsters are sentient," Manfred persists. "What about those poor kittens? Don't they deserve minimal rights? How about you? How would you like to wake up a thousand times inside a smart bomb, fooled into thinking that some Cheyenne Mountain battle computer's target of the hour is your heart's desire? How would you like to wake up a thousand times, only to die again? Worse: The kittens are probably not going to be allowed to run. They're too fucking dangerous - they grow up into cats, solitary and highly efficient killing machines. With intelligence and no socialization they'll be too dangerous to have around. They're prisoners, Pam, raised to sentience only to discover they're under a permanent death sentence. How fair is that?"
"But they're only uploads." Pamela stares at him. "Software, right? You could reinstantiate them on another hardware platform, like, say, your Aineko. So the argument about killing them doesn't really apply, does it?"
"So? We're going to be uploading humans in a couple of years. I think we need to take a rain check on the utilitarian philosophy, before it bites us on the cerebral cortex. Lobsters, kittens, humans -- it's a slippery slope."
It reminds me of the old joke of the plumber and the math professor:
One professor of mathematics noticed that his kitchen sink at his home broke down. He called a plumber. The plumber came on the next day, sealed a few screws and everything was working as before.
The professor was delighted. However, when the plumber gave him the bill a minute later, he was shocked.
"This is one third of my monthly salary!" he yelled.
Well, all the same he paid it and then the plumber said to him:
"I understand your position as a professor. Why don't you come to our company and apply for a plumber position? You will earn three times as much as a professor. But remember, when you apply, tell them that you completed only seven elementary classes. They don't like educated people."
So it happened. The professor got a plumber job and his life significantly improved. He just had to seal a screw or two occasionally, and his salary went up significantly.
One day, the board of the plumbing company decided that every plumber has to go to evening classes to complete the eight grade. So, our professor had to go there too. It just happened that the first class was math. The evening teacher, to check students' knowledge, asked for a formula for the area of the circle. The person asked was the professor. He jumped to the board, and then he realized that he had forgotten the formula. He started to reason it, he filled the white board with integrals, differentials and other advanced formulas to conclude the result he forgot. As a result he got "minus pi r squared".
He didn't like the minus, so he started all over again. He got the minus again. No matter how many times he tried, he always got a minus. He was frustrated. He looked a bit scared at the class and saw all the plumbers whisper:
"Switch the limits of the integral!!"
The idea behind representative democracy is to avoid the "heat of the movement" decisions.
I'd say it's more so the country isn't run by the silent majority who have absolutely no idea what's best for them. Then again, maybe we wouldn't be in Iraq if many of the people making the decisions don't even know where that is...
The way tags are used around here, they're just one-word comments you can make if you're a subscriber.
In Post-Apocalyptic Soviet Russia, giant cockroaches eat the mutant birds!
I'd say it's even worse than that. The study concludes that the US is the only real contender in this race for Nobel Prizes. Of course, the only way that a nation even gets its institutes considered is by winning at least three Nobels in a given period(which BTW seem pretty arbitrary). Well, last time i checked, the US has 300 million inhabitants, compared to the minuscule populations in many European countries that do first class research.
And I don't buy the Nobel prize argument for a second. First of all, real revolutionary science in Kuhn's definition does not get recognized by the Nobel committee until it is no longer revolutionary, but normal. Most Nobel Laureates by far are geriatrics that did their research 20 years before the fact. Einstein, the most revolutionary scientist in the last century, received his Nobel for the explanation of the Photoelectric effect, not relativity, which you must agree is the most revolutionary of his discoveries.
IMHO, the correlation between Nobel prizes and revolutionary science in the Kuhnian sense of a paradigmatic catalyst is over simplistic and perhaps even self-contradictory.
Gravitons or no gravitons, general relativity states that gravity will propagate at the speed of light. (Indirect) measurements of gravitational radiation from (among others) the double pulsar PSR1913+16 indicates this.
All that Kyoto buys is more coal-powered plants for third world nations.
Please supply a reference which concludes that the Kyoto Treaty is the direct cause for the building of third-world coal plants.
If anything Kyoto is more likely to harm the environment, and is, in any event, more of a wealth redistribution scheme than it is an environmental management plan.
Sustainable environmental management is wealth redistribution. No one said that it was going to be easy. And the nation which would be hit the hardest is not surprisingly the nation whose energy glutton dwarfs all others. And you have to start somewhere. Environmental management needs a big policy push for everyone. The US(government) has shown very little will to do this.
It's also funny to note that the country which "hates the worlds children" has made bigger strides in combating GHG emissions than several Kyoto signatories.
It's great, and the ozone layer is closing. But that's not what we're talking about - the ice is still melting...
But hey, who needs facts and logic when you can get all your opinions from the "down with HaliBusHitler" maniacs, eh?
Your own post shows a shaky logic at best and has facts that read more like talking points on Fox News.
Cryptozoology, n.: The study of animals that don't exist.
"Well, as much as Kasparov is complaining about the democratic process, it seems to me..."
Ahh, but isn't that just what he wants you to think?
"I can calculate the possibilities as a chess player and I have to be honest and say that our chances are not high."
This guy's been going downhill in the strategy game since Deep Blue.
Someone is either seriously paranoid or is abusing his right to tag the summaries.
What's the point with those tags anyway? Are they mini-posts or what? They certainly can't be used for searching...
Torrent, please?
But suppose it's somewhere near the front, except there's a speling mistake every place "speling" occurs. Would that be proof that God isn't infallible?
Though I'm not very crypto-savvy, there's one thing that I've learned from hard experience about mobile devices and hard drives: they have a very short life span.
Anything with moving parts is bound to break, and if you move it about it'll just break all the faster.
So can't it be a serious problem if your data is encrypted and bytes get knocked out here and there?
Also, mobile devices are usually much slower than stationary ones and will only get slower if it has to apply complex algorithms to all data that goes in and out. And that would probably also put a real big penalty on your battery life.
It boils down to one thing: You have to select a cost-effective level of paranoia. It would make your life infinitely complex to secure yourself against every possible scenario. How important is the secrecy of your data?
Is the juice worth the squeeze?
YouTube just jumped the shark!