You don't know that. Assange said it, but I think he was lying. His actions look to me inconsistent with fearing being sent to the US, and consistent with being a rapist who wants to avoid punishment.
You do not know that Assange didn't commit rape. The basis for the extradition order still exists, I believe, although some charges have reached their statute of limitations age. In any case, he fled from a valid warrant, and is a fugitive from justice.
If he were innocent, he'd have done better to show it in court.
Apparently, Swedish law isn't exactly like US law, and apparently he'd have to be arrested to be charged (presumably there's a lesser level of charge that allows the arrest warrant). There was and is evidence to bring charges. Whether it's enough to convict not something I'm going to speculate on, but both the UK and Sweden agreed that what Assange was accused of is rape, and that there was sufficient evidence to warrant going forward.
That scenario (CIA kidnapping in Sweden) happened once, and caused a political uproar. It's unlikely to happen again.
The UK extradites people to the US for crimes that can be punished by execution all the time. The UK gets assurances that the prosecution will not ask for the death sentence.
Except that I've seen no good evidence that the US wants him for anything. There are, of course, people in the US with their own opinions, but they don't represent the US. The only possible charge would be if it were found that he actively collaborated with Manning to get the data out of classified systems, since publishing classified information somebody has leaded to you is legal.
I've seen a lot of claims by Assange fans. However, Assange's actions are those of someone who wanted to dodge Swedish rape charges, not someone who feared the US. If Sweden was so dangerous, why did he go there in the first place? If he feared extradition to the US, well, the UK is well known for extraditing people to the US.
Assange was never convicted of any sort of sex charge. However, he is a fugitive from justice. One reason he was never convicted is that he is a fugitive from justice, and nobody wants to allow an alleged criminal complete amnesty if said criminal evades the legal system and becomes a fugitive.
Actually, I am a dualist. I believe in hardware and software.
Consider a C program. It may be in the form of ink on paper, oriented magnetic domains, levels of charge, transistor settings, or pulses of electricity (and I'm probably missing some). It's all the same program. Now, we compile it using several compilers that have different targets, so the program is now in the form of x86, ARM, 680x0, and Power executables. Then we say we run that program, which means we have varying patterns of electricity in different forms, and we still refer to it as "the program". We add C++ constructs to simplify it, and now we have the program, only in C++, and the executables will be different yet.
Books can similarly be in various forms. When we translate a book, we refer to it as the same book. I might read Kafka's "Trial" in English and in German.
We see the same thing converted into a much different physical form over and over, and the configuration is still precise; changing a small physical detail would make that thing different.
Therefore, the brain is hardware, and the mind is software. Consciousness is not so much the physical form of the brain as what it's running at the moment. (This implies the possibility of strong AI, since there's no reason that software can't run on some other physical substrate.)
You're not going to find absolute truth in science. What science has to offer, besides megatons or gigatons of recorded observations and experiments, is the best guess so far. We're very sure that some of these guesses are accurate, but we know some are going to fail and be replaced by new guesses.
We have assorted senses. One of them is a sense of consciousness. Many people have a sense of God. We divide these into external (based on the fact that they seem consistent with a physical universe, and our apparent communications with other beings that look kinda like us confirm that) and internal. We generally trust internal states when we can agree on them. Pretty much everyone reports that pain occurs, and that they're conscious. Reports about God come from some people and not others, and aside from a few basics the perception (if it is one) varies widely. Therefore, we believe that there is pain, and can't agree on God.
Similarly, we should believe that there is consciousness, although we don't know quite what it is, because everybody reports it.
You said there was no way to begin. You were asked a question that shows where to begin.. Therefore, GP provided a valid argument to refute what you said.
There's a very real advantage to materialism as a dogma. It leads to science. The idea behind science is that, given objective observations, the scientist can try to find reasons for the observations, make some sort of mental model, and test it against more observations. Therefore, science has had a tremendous and positive effect on the world. People who attributed things to magic and the gods do not have anywhere near that track record.
Most materialists are materialists because there's nothing more convincing available. Currently, there is no rational argumetn against them.
There's no actual conflict between materialists and magic. Given elves with magical abilities, a materialist would try to study them and figure out the general principles they operate on. In the Harry Potter books, the study of some forms of magic are at least proto-scientific, and one has the feeling that Hermione could push it the rest of the way to science.
There are limits to science (there is no prospect of a scientific approach to ethics - Sam Harris rather assumes utilitarianism, and promotes scientific inquiry into what is good for us). There is no reason to think that consciousness lies beyond science.
Technically, there's no guarantee that anything that we don't know can be scientific The oh-my-god particle) and friends could be a divine joke, for example. Historically, assuming otherwise has led to very good results, so that's not the way we go.
Calling something an emergent property means that some sort of arrangement of whatever has properties that its components don't have. Salt behaves neither like sodium nor like chlorine. It doesn't mean that we understand everything about the components or the rules of interactions. In the human brain, neurons are very, very complicated, and we don't understand all the interactions. That doesn't mean that, if you put a lot of neurons into some arrangement, you don't get emergent behavior.
We have numerous cases of brain injuries of various sorts, including deliberately inflicted ones. Many people with neuron communication screwed up (possibly because of the neurons not being there anymore) remain conscious. Many go into more or less temporary periods of unresponsiveness, so we consider them unconscious, and then appear to be conscious later, not necessarily with physical changes inside the brain (Actually, we all go into unconscious states, typically once a day.). Many just die, and we don't expect consciousness to persist (at least not in that body; I'm not getting into religious beliefs here).
If we had hard results in philosophy, we'd split that part off and call it some sort of science or math. We've done that enough times throughout history.
We don't know what consciousness is. We experience it. It exists in some form or another.
If there is no such thing, then our subjective experience is seriously wrong, and there's no way to trust anything. My experience of dealing with other people may be an illusion based on something (at this point, we can't conclude there's any such thing as neurons).
We know about the physical world because of our subjective experiences and our way of communicating them. It turns out that lots of our subjective experiences agree and map well onto a model of the Universe that we call science. This is cool. However, we also have a subjective experience of consciousness, and by communicating with other humans we find that that exists also, and we know some things about it.
It's not like gravity. We can objectively observe what gravity does. We can't objectively observe consciousness or free will. Both of those are things we experience directly, and any explanation has to be compatible with the apparently universal subjective feelings.
The universe is random, and when viewed on a large enough scale that the law of large numbers removes most of the randomness, it's deterministic. That's what we've figured out, anyway.
Do my decisions have to be random for me to have free will? Is it free will if it can be predicted?
When we get takeout from a certain restaurant, my fish and chips order is entirely predictable. I also experience it as free will.
I am serious. I've found examples of people who deliberately mishandled classified information and were prosecuted, often spending years in prison, and people who mishandled classified information without intent, and were not prosecuted. Petraeus appears to have intentionally sent classified documents to his mistress. That falls into the first category. He received a large fine and two years of probation.
It doesn't appear that the Obama administration went to any lengths to avoid prosecuting Clinton. People who did what she did have not been prosecuted.
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You don't know that. Assange said it, but I think he was lying. His actions look to me inconsistent with fearing being sent to the US, and consistent with being a rapist who wants to avoid punishment.
You do not know that Assange didn't commit rape. The basis for the extradition order still exists, I believe, although some charges have reached their statute of limitations age. In any case, he fled from a valid warrant, and is a fugitive from justice.
If he were innocent, he'd have done better to show it in court.
Apparently, Swedish law isn't exactly like US law, and apparently he'd have to be arrested to be charged (presumably there's a lesser level of charge that allows the arrest warrant). There was and is evidence to bring charges. Whether it's enough to convict not something I'm going to speculate on, but both the UK and Sweden agreed that what Assange was accused of is rape, and that there was sufficient evidence to warrant going forward.
That scenario (CIA kidnapping in Sweden) happened once, and caused a political uproar. It's unlikely to happen again.
The UK extradites people to the US for crimes that can be punished by execution all the time. The UK gets assurances that the prosecution will not ask for the death sentence.
Except that I've seen no good evidence that the US wants him for anything. There are, of course, people in the US with their own opinions, but they don't represent the US. The only possible charge would be if it were found that he actively collaborated with Manning to get the data out of classified systems, since publishing classified information somebody has leaded to you is legal.
I've seen a lot of claims by Assange fans. However, Assange's actions are those of someone who wanted to dodge Swedish rape charges, not someone who feared the US. If Sweden was so dangerous, why did he go there in the first place? If he feared extradition to the US, well, the UK is well known for extraditing people to the US.
Assange was never convicted of any sort of sex charge. However, he is a fugitive from justice. One reason he was never convicted is that he is a fugitive from justice, and nobody wants to allow an alleged criminal complete amnesty if said criminal evades the legal system and becomes a fugitive.
Actually, I am a dualist. I believe in hardware and software.
Consider a C program. It may be in the form of ink on paper, oriented magnetic domains, levels of charge, transistor settings, or pulses of electricity (and I'm probably missing some). It's all the same program. Now, we compile it using several compilers that have different targets, so the program is now in the form of x86, ARM, 680x0, and Power executables. Then we say we run that program, which means we have varying patterns of electricity in different forms, and we still refer to it as "the program". We add C++ constructs to simplify it, and now we have the program, only in C++, and the executables will be different yet.
Books can similarly be in various forms. When we translate a book, we refer to it as the same book. I might read Kafka's "Trial" in English and in German.
We see the same thing converted into a much different physical form over and over, and the configuration is still precise; changing a small physical detail would make that thing different.
Therefore, the brain is hardware, and the mind is software. Consciousness is not so much the physical form of the brain as what it's running at the moment. (This implies the possibility of strong AI, since there's no reason that software can't run on some other physical substrate.)
You're not going to find absolute truth in science. What science has to offer, besides megatons or gigatons of recorded observations and experiments, is the best guess so far. We're very sure that some of these guesses are accurate, but we know some are going to fail and be replaced by new guesses.
We have assorted senses. One of them is a sense of consciousness. Many people have a sense of God. We divide these into external (based on the fact that they seem consistent with a physical universe, and our apparent communications with other beings that look kinda like us confirm that) and internal. We generally trust internal states when we can agree on them. Pretty much everyone reports that pain occurs, and that they're conscious. Reports about God come from some people and not others, and aside from a few basics the perception (if it is one) varies widely. Therefore, we believe that there is pain, and can't agree on God. Similarly, we should believe that there is consciousness, although we don't know quite what it is, because everybody reports it.
We were made from stars. Except for the hydrogen, which was already around when the stars started up.
You said there was no way to begin. You were asked a question that shows where to begin.. Therefore, GP provided a valid argument to refute what you said.
There's a very real advantage to materialism as a dogma. It leads to science. The idea behind science is that, given objective observations, the scientist can try to find reasons for the observations, make some sort of mental model, and test it against more observations. Therefore, science has had a tremendous and positive effect on the world. People who attributed things to magic and the gods do not have anywhere near that track record.
Most materialists are materialists because there's nothing more convincing available. Currently, there is no rational argumetn against them.
There's no actual conflict between materialists and magic. Given elves with magical abilities, a materialist would try to study them and figure out the general principles they operate on. In the Harry Potter books, the study of some forms of magic are at least proto-scientific, and one has the feeling that Hermione could push it the rest of the way to science.
There are limits to science (there is no prospect of a scientific approach to ethics - Sam Harris rather assumes utilitarianism, and promotes scientific inquiry into what is good for us). There is no reason to think that consciousness lies beyond science.
Technically, there's no guarantee that anything that we don't know can be scientific The oh-my-god particle) and friends could be a divine joke, for example. Historically, assuming otherwise has led to very good results, so that's not the way we go.
I find the Force much more believable than midichlorians.
You don't know that. There are plenty of people who will report observations consistent with parts of the portrayal of the Force.
Calling something an emergent property means that some sort of arrangement of whatever has properties that its components don't have. Salt behaves neither like sodium nor like chlorine. It doesn't mean that we understand everything about the components or the rules of interactions. In the human brain, neurons are very, very complicated, and we don't understand all the interactions. That doesn't mean that, if you put a lot of neurons into some arrangement, you don't get emergent behavior.
We have numerous cases of brain injuries of various sorts, including deliberately inflicted ones. Many people with neuron communication screwed up (possibly because of the neurons not being there anymore) remain conscious. Many go into more or less temporary periods of unresponsiveness, so we consider them unconscious, and then appear to be conscious later, not necessarily with physical changes inside the brain (Actually, we all go into unconscious states, typically once a day.). Many just die, and we don't expect consciousness to persist (at least not in that body; I'm not getting into religious beliefs here).
How do we tell whether something has consciousness? We can't rely on it saying so, because that's so easy to write into the programming.
If we had hard results in philosophy, we'd split that part off and call it some sort of science or math. We've done that enough times throughout history.
We don't know what consciousness is. We experience it. It exists in some form or another.
If there is no such thing, then our subjective experience is seriously wrong, and there's no way to trust anything. My experience of dealing with other people may be an illusion based on something (at this point, we can't conclude there's any such thing as neurons).
We know about the physical world because of our subjective experiences and our way of communicating them. It turns out that lots of our subjective experiences agree and map well onto a model of the Universe that we call science. This is cool. However, we also have a subjective experience of consciousness, and by communicating with other humans we find that that exists also, and we know some things about it.
It's not like gravity. We can objectively observe what gravity does. We can't objectively observe consciousness or free will. Both of those are things we experience directly, and any explanation has to be compatible with the apparently universal subjective feelings.
The universe is random, and when viewed on a large enough scale that the law of large numbers removes most of the randomness, it's deterministic. That's what we've figured out, anyway.
Do my decisions have to be random for me to have free will? Is it free will if it can be predicted?
When we get takeout from a certain restaurant, my fish and chips order is entirely predictable. I also experience it as free will.
He may not have been using MS Windows and Windows software.
I am serious. I've found examples of people who deliberately mishandled classified information and were prosecuted, often spending years in prison, and people who mishandled classified information without intent, and were not prosecuted. Petraeus appears to have intentionally sent classified documents to his mistress. That falls into the first category. He received a large fine and two years of probation.
It doesn't appear that the Obama administration went to any lengths to avoid prosecuting Clinton. People who did what she did have not been prosecuted.