That was my first thought as well. There's an episode of Radiolab all about laughter, and they have a video on that page of a researcher tickling rats.
I understand your dislike of the word "impossible," as I tend to share it myself. I wish I knew a term that was better than "highly improbable" because it seems like that leaves a lot of wiggle room and doesn't carry enough weight when I intend to make a very strong statement. For now I stick with "impossible" and learn to be okay with the fact that I might be proven wrong. But I won't;)
I lack the ability to debate it with you since you clearly have more of an understanding than I do
For what it's worth, I'm not so much trying to have a debate as to share the knowledge I've encountered and the conclusions I've drawn from that. You thought I was contradicting myself not because you were trying to prove me wrong, I think, but because I wasn't clear enough in my explanation, resulting in the apparent contradiction. I appreciate replies like yours because they show the flaws in my logic or communication (along with a different perspective and other thoughts that I did not have). If I can fix them then I have a stronger position, and if I can't then I need to reevaluate it.
Also, my greater understanding of the topic came only recently, within the past two years or so and the process is ongoing. Before I started reading about classical psychology, I was a believer in the Singularity and mind uploads and all that stuff. I think that such optimism* comes from the relative isolation of the two disciplines of psychology and technology, and especially a lack of understanding by the latter of the knowledge collected by the former. The understanding of consciousness and experience that I am working from has been around for a hundred years and still stands strong, but I didn't know it existed either until I happened upon it due to my interest in the philosophy of William James, who also founded the field of psychology. So the last paragraph in my previous post is not a rebuke of you for not knowing that the mind is not a computer. The fact that you bothered to respond in the first place tells me you're interested in the pursuit of truth, which is what matters, and I can't blame you for not knowing something you've never encountered. It's really a criticism of the geek subculture (of which I am a part and am trying to change) for not being diligent when discussing the mind, and more specifically targets anyone who holds the "brain is computer" view, reads my post, and decides to disregard it without following the link or giving it further consideration. That attitude held by others, or perhaps just the isolation of disciplines, is likely one of the prevailing reasons that you never encountered the "brain is computer" debunking, because if more geeks had read about it instead of repeating the myth then they would have done what I am doing now and shared it, making it that much closer to general knowledge and that much likelier that you would have previously encountered it.
Personally I think it's a pretty strong argument against the Singularity, but it won't convince everybody. That's fine with me; I just think that these well-established facts ought to be taken under consideration. In the end, it's much more important to me to get the knowledge out there than to harangue people for ignoring it for so long, but the truth is that criticizing a geek is likely to get his blood up, and if his blood is up he is more likely to try and poke holes in my reasoning, and that means he'll follow the link and read my post with a hawkish eye, which ends up with him carefully considering what I wanted him to consider in the first place. It's diabolical, I know, but it works =)
*That is, optimism in the sense that we will be able to do such things, not in the sense that life would suck without them!
Another possibility to fight dragons and stuff that I surprisingly missed (considering I have, ahem, privately experimented with it) could be a combination of drugs and primitive VR--that is, not much more advanced than what we can do today. With the right psychoactive substance, the user could be wearing sensors and standing in front of a big screen, though glasses would be nicer, and essentially playing a video game while the drug made him feel like he was actually there, man. I don't know if an ideal drug exists, one that opens the mind up to suggestion enough that it fills in and enhances the details but isn't so powerful as to make you trip hard and freak out when you realize you're actually there, man.
For some people, hypnosis and a Playstation is enough to do the trick. But again the important factor is actually spending time doing something that is an analogue of the concrete experience, even if it's fairly abstract: our minds are powerful enough to take past experiences of being near or singed by a fire or what it feels like to chop at something (even if it's as mundane as wood) and, in the right state, attach those experiences to this new one so that we remember plunging the sword into the dragon's belly and feeling a spray of blood.
While intriguing, I doubt this would pass muster with the original poster, though, because my intuition tells me that it would feel very dreamlike when remembered because of the patchwork memories filling in for gaps in the true experience.
You have kind of contradicted yourself there. If we only know an infinitesimal small amount about how the brain works, it is kind of hard to definitely state the nature of consciousness.
On the contrary, we know a decent amount about how the brain works at a high level (brainwave patterns) and at the low level (neurons). What I wrote was that our sense of self and memory are poorly understood. In other words, we can see electrochemical waves flowing through the brain, and we can sometimes correlate changes in brain activity with physical or mental activity. However, the mental activity is only coarsely understood: your brain imagining an elephant looks very similar to your brain imagining a rocket ship, and my brain is the same way but will look different from yours. Imagining looks different from recalling past experience--actually, some research shows evidence that remembering something consists of the pattern of the original experience played back only weaker. In my view, this complexity and individuality coupled with the fact that our bodies and brains change continuously and in a chaotic manner precludes modeling accurate enough to forge memories. It took researchers a day and a half to model the sound of water hitting itself, and that's a relatively simple interaction compared to a process of consciousness that involves both billions of neurons and the waves they propagate.
I will agree with you that the "I know Kung-Fu" trick is many many orders more complicated then simply creating a virtual environment to interact with. However, why do we need to do that at all? If we have the technology to attempt something like that, why not just use the "fly-by-wire" concept? Create a wetware system capable of taking over your body and performing the kung-fu for you.
That's a clever, interesting option that I hadn't considered in the physical realm. Despite my kung-fu pop culture reference, I was thinking mostly of memorizing the LOC. The mental analogue to what you describe and which I forgot to mention was that instead of taking the time to memorize the LOC you would instead be able to query the network to get as much information about any book (or indeed any subject) that you wanted, negating the need for memorization. Your kung-fu solution is the same idea, operational knowledge streamed instead of stored, and is much more practical than the "Matrix download."
The brain is really nothing more than a computer.
This is a very modern idea that is quite simply wrong, just like all of the other historical brain analogies. See especially differences #6, #9, and the bonus. This myth has been debunked time and time again, but it seems that it's just something people (especially geeks) don't want to hear, and so the truth is drowned out by the fervor of the lie.
The way the brain works makes such experiences nearly impossible to encode and certainly impossible with drugs, as another poster pointed out. If we take "drugs" to include "nanomachines targeting the brain and disguised as a pill" then we enter the realm of the merely highly improbable. The machines would have to collectively be smart enough to override signals from and to the body while simultaneously generating the desired experience.
Another possibility would be a single device at the top of the spinal column and networked with lots of processing power, like a wireless Matrix or the Vertebrane system from Manna. This too requires advanced nanotech to implant, as it must splice every nerve in the spinal column plus the optic and aural nerves, and so is also highly improbable to occur at all, and certainly not for nearly a hundred years unless the Singularity frea--er, folks are right.
Given all that, the experiences you speak of (flying, fighting a dragon) could happen, but doing the "I know kung-fu!" thing is impossible due to the nature of consciousness. If you want to learn something, you're going to have to spend the time to learn it. Reshaping synapse connections and brainwave patterns to implant memories requires godlike knowledge of the individual's brain state and history. Let's not forget that we are messy meat machines (if machines we are) whose sense of self and memory is only infinitesimally less mysterious now as it has always been. Faking an external world and letting the brain experience it, hard as it is, is orders of magnitude simpler than fabricating a past experience, especially an intellectual one such as memorizing the LOC, out of whole cloth.
Shall we do that with robbery, burglary, murder, rape, child molestation, or just crimes you like commit?
Unlike smoking pot, none of those are victimless crimes. If anything, the marijuana laws under discussion are much closer (though not identical) to Jim Crow laws than to robbery or those others: you are not a victim if I smoke pot in the same way that you are not a victim if I am black and go to the same movie theater as you, assuming you're white.
Some people won't bother growing themselves because it may not be worth it. You have to use a lot of electricity, the right humidity, have space, not everyone will care enough to learn how to grow their own stuff.
Yep, a lot of people would rather pay for convenience, and there's a potential to take advantage of that. Pre-rolled optionally filtered joints and blunts, pre-formed plugs you just pop into a pipe, or even just the good stuff from the bottom of a grinder so you don't have to remove stems and seeds yourself.
And then there's the idea of mixing it with food, the pothead's dream come true! (It's been around for a long time, but there's all that work involved in baking brownies; it's much easier to wander down to the corner store for some "baked" goods.)
By the way, it's "as a US citizen" unless you are lumping Canada, Mexico, and all the nations in South America as countries that have it coming to them.
-1, Pedantry
I'm with you on the bizarreness of the OP, but you know exactly what he meant when he said American. It is accepted usage and there is no reason to change it. We've gotten along perfectly fine by saying "the Americas" or "North America" and "South America" to specify the continents.
"US citizen" is clunky and unnatural in everyday usage. It is not some sentiment that the USA is more important than the continent (though that attitude exists here in excess) but a consequence of having "America" in the name of both continent and country. A similar ambiguity exists with the term "South African" to denote citizens of the country rather than people in the region. "People of/in southern Africa" is used for the region and "South African" for the country, yet I never see a stink raised about that.
But surely the structure and characteristics of those cells, and the spatial connections between them, is strictly implied in the words 'nothing more than'?
That is exactly the gap in thinking that we can fill in for such a simple example but could easily miss in something more exotic or domain-specific, giving the layman a false impression that may lead to a false conclusion. Even here the act of making the implicate in your original statement explicate more than doubled the size of the original statement. I can imagine that an article on something more complex could grow fourfold or more if a meaningful level of accuracy was desired.
However, it seems to me that the mind-brain question is much more interestingly like asking whether the *thoughts* of Shakespeare can be limited to being 'nothing more than' or even 'precisely equal to' the *written works* of Shakespeare, which is a very different thing indeed.
I spend a fair amount of time going down that rabbit hole (and its connecting warrens) myself. It isn't limited to written works, either: even something as mundane as the Empire State Building exists simultaneously as a physical building as well as a concept or experience in the minds of millions of people, but how? Your original statement still stands: we are little closer to pulling that image from someone's head now than we were thirty or even a hundred years ago. Consciousness and self-awareness is the hardest thing we have attempted to understand, and it will likely retain that distinction far into the future.
Oh, sure, in the case of a breakthrough that only makes sense. I guess I was thinking more along the lines of seeing an interesting/. comment and replying with a further exploration of the topic--agreement or disagreement with the comment's viewpoint naturally being part of that--or getting a new insight that isn't a breakthrough and wanting to discuss it with someone. The way I see it, there's not a great chance of good dialog, but I like to write anyway and there is a chance. Plus, there are certain topics in which I am interested that I know none of my real-life friends are, so taking a long shot with the greater internet population provides better odds for discussion, even if they're long.
If you roll with a crew that routinely keeps you stimulated, more power to you and congratulations. Mine is pretty active as well, but writing on the internet for me can be an outlet as well as a test bed for some ideas. I think my intent was to say "don't write it off completely," but the fact that you are posting in the first place shows that you haven't, so I may as well shut up now. =)
3) The brain is still nothing more than a mass of cells.
Careful.
I realize that you're probably speaking colloquially here, but you are taking abstraction too far. If the brain is nothing more than a mass of cells, you should have no problem with me scooping yours out of your skull and replacing it with a head of lettuce, which is also nothing more than a mass of cells and therefore equivalent by that standard.
The cells of the brain (and the entire human body) have characteristics that differ significantly from other kinds of cells, and the structure in which brain (and body) cells are organized is important as well. I think you'd be hard-pressed to find a philosopher arguing for (3) as it stands. Too much abstraction and generalization leads to absurd conclusions like mine in the paragraph above.
In fact, that is one of the issues discussed in the article. What I wrote above in the absence of common sense sounds perfectly plausible given your assertion. When people in advanced fields do the same thing we can't rely on common sense to show readers the possible flaws of logic, yet in the majority of cases they aren't given enough space to elaborate the concepts upon which they rely instead of glossing over them.
This answers all the posts above decrying that the article is BS because "you should be able to explain it to an interested party." Well, nobody is saying they couldn't if they were given sufficient time or space, but they're not. We should understand this well given the many, many, many instructions to RTFA instead of basing statements or arguments on the summary--the summary does not and often cannot tackle the subject with the same depth as the full article. In the same way, a one- or two-page writeup on global warming, for example, likely cannot convey enough information to inform the reader on which side of the debate has more supporting evidence. (And the fact that I was compelled to write "likely" shows that it is difficult for a layman to even determine the level of detail needed for a good analysis.)
What was the fourth pinball machine, and why did no one play it?
The upside of internet philosophizing is that you can take the time to order your thoughts and write exactly what you want to write. There is only a small chance that you'll get an intelligent response, but you are not compelled to continue conversing with the chest-pounding ninny.
It doesn't beat conversations with people you know and respect, but it can still be productive or at least entertaining.
...and upon hovering over a video still, I get this:
Error #2044: Unhandled AsyncErrorEvent:. text=Error #2095: SmartPreviewNetStream was unable to invoke callback onMetaData. error=ReferenceError: Error #1069: Property onMetaData not found on SmartPreviewNetStream and there is no default value.
at SmartPreview()
at SmartPreview_fla::MainTimeline/frame1()
I guess nobody at MS tested their results with the debug version of Flash Player?
All human decisions - even the most abstract or "rational" - have an emotional component; this has been experimentally measured.
Yes! I'm off-topic now but it is wonderful to see this assertion expressed on Slashdot. There's a tendency here to treat emotion as an uncomfortable byproduct of being a meat-sack.
In truth all the progress we have made is driven by emotion: we feel desire for some things (food, sex, Insightful moderations) and it gives us pleasure to try to figure other things out, which is really a desire for knowledge. We follow the creeds and models we do because we like them, and often the difference between philosophies comes down to which most emphasizes the parts of reality that each of us sees as being most important. This state of being engenders a lot of wrongheadedness--as current circumstances show--but without emotion we have no impetus to do anything at all.
All of those problems vanish if flying cars are powered by magic. It's not new, and we should have imported that shit from the Persians when we had the chance. If they could do it with carpets, we could do it with Cadillacs. Instead we took algebra...whoopee.
Zero emissions, zero collisions, zero maintenance (well, for the flying part--the heater is still going to break just before winter hits). I don't know why no one has looked into this.
Erm...you just said what I just said only more ranty.
Except for the "not Obama" part. Obama definitely plays a part, whether you and he realize it or not. (Though how could you not? I mean, he's in the Political Party...)
My use of "average" was misleading. I had in mind the well-to-do with carriages, those who had the right to travel.
There are a lot of advantages to being able to hop into a car and quickly drive a few hundred miles away. There are also advantages to having a close-knit community, and the ability to travel fast and far doesn't foster that sort of thing: most people learn to appreciate the company they keep if there is no alternative. It's good that those who need to get away can, but it takes more discipline to have a community due to the same ability.
I'm happy with the tech I grew up with, but I like to think about the tradeoffs we live with, too. There's a better chance that they can be improved if they are brought to light than if we rely on blind circumstance.
It is not a meaningless assertion. If you took modern society and jerked the rug of technology out from under it, the majority of people on earth would die
Of course they would. I'm saying that if today's tech had developed differently, that is if cars were never invented, our lifestyles would be radically different. Arguing that "cars have done a lot" by showing problems that would arise from replacing them with old tech (horses) is specious and irrelevant.
I don't disagree with the conclusion that modern tech has made life relatively abundant, easy, painless and long--that's made quite clear by just looking at a history book or statistics. I only disagree with the argument that jadavis used to support the conclusion. Treating cars as some abstract thing separate from the environment that spurred their development and then doing a thought experiment in which everything they have in turn affected still exists as-is is a perfectly rational thing to do. It's a good argument for why we ought to keep improving the current system instead of abandoning it. It is not a good argument for showing the advantages of having it in the first place. Zogger's comment above is a better analysis of the situation because he takes the wider environment into account and extrapolates the consequences of a different path of development.
If we want to keep increasing the abundance of life, we have to make sure that the conclusions we reach are from genuine reasoning. In pointing out the error in the argument my sole intent is to emphasize the importance of clear thought.
Take any city (even small ones), look at the traffic, and imagine if it was entirely horse traffic. There would be more pollution (although it would take a different form), more traffic (because horses are slower), more maintenance, and it would take people longer to get where they are going.
You're neglecting the effects that the automobile has had on the growth of cities and even the entire human population as well as our perception of travel. I don't think we would have had such a growth explosion without the ability to move people and goods quickly and in bulk.
I have read (probably here, actually) that the average person with a car today spends more time in transit than did people of antiquity, and this fits in with the general rush of modern life. So you can say "if we replaced cars with horses now, it would be a mess," and you're be right, but it is a meaningless assertion.
Excellent points. I think a lot of the jargon has to do with the increased value our culture has placed on specialism: we've got it so drummed into our heads that society works best when it is compartmentalized that we like to make our areas of expertise (note the possessive) incomprehensible to the uninitiated.
I say "like to" but it really tends to creep in unintentionally, and it's often the result of convenient abstraction. Nobody wants to say "move the mouse until the onscreen arrow is covering the underlined text that says 'read more' and then quickly press and release the left button on the mouse" all the time, so we shortened it to "click the 'read more' link." There are a lot of concepts embedded in the shorter phrase, many more than I elaborated, yet even a novice fully understands clicking links after a day or two, so we can clearly handle a lot of concepts. Yet I recently attempted to read a book about Godel, whose incompleteness theorem I have a decent grasp of thanks to Hofstadter, which contains numerous sentences like the following:
It is not obvious either that there cannot be methods of proof that go beyond first-order logic and enable us to prove the consistency of arithmetic but which can be argued to be constructive, finitistic, or otherwise compatible with Hilbert's requirements. Hilbert's own first reaction was to rely on certain mildly infinitistic methods. Later, Gerhard Gentzen actually proved the consistency of arithmetic by using transfinite induction up to the first undefinable ordinal.
Admittedly mathematics is one of the most abstract of pursuits to begin with, but unlike Hofstadter's lucid incremental building of concepts and his constant return to layman's terms through his dialogues, with this author I am constantly bombarded with jargon that even Wikipedia can't properly sort out. Not only does he begin high up the ladder of abstraction, he rarely climbs down to Earth to show some concrete effects of all this concept-work, making it even harder to discern the value of the work discussed.
And I wonder if that isn't part of the issue, too: that if unmasked, some of these lingo-laced papers actually say nothing at all of value, merely restate common knowledge, or contain glaring errors. We know that the bulk of marketing lingo says nothing, and that the bulk of 20C philosophy is hair-splitting dressed up as groundbreaking. Why should scientific papers be any different?
Even if that were the case (instead of being a gross overstatement), shouldn't you be happy that they're actually making their grievance known instead of just sitting in front of the tube or dispensing "wisdom" on the internet? Or has wanting to choose what one does with more of one's own money already become a faux pas after only half a decade of vast government expansion? Or is it simply that Fox News jumped on the idea (first promoted IIRC by Ron Paul's people) and made it somehow illegitimate through their very presence?
Or are you just a troll who fails to recognize that there are different ways to look at things, and so you believe that everyone who doesn't see things exactly as you do must be illiterate?
You're correct as far as Wikipedia's actions go. This thread however is based on these statements by noundi:
I for one thank wikipedia to use their stance and point out that this shit is not tolerable. Next up, christianity, islam, judaism. Way to go wiki.
There's a difference between free speach [sic] and encouraging insanity.
Now, if other religious groups/people are engaging in edit wars, those groups/people open themselves up to edit bans as well, but noundi is promoting a point of view that clearly qualifies as anti-religion, especially in his second post. Unless you can find a different way to spin his unsupported statement that religion is insanity or a mental illness?
Slashdot Mirror
Yes. Yes it was.
That was my first thought as well. There's an episode of Radiolab all about laughter, and they have a video on that page of a researcher tickling rats.
I understand your dislike of the word "impossible," as I tend to share it myself. I wish I knew a term that was better than "highly improbable" because it seems like that leaves a lot of wiggle room and doesn't carry enough weight when I intend to make a very strong statement. For now I stick with "impossible" and learn to be okay with the fact that I might be proven wrong. But I won't ;)
I lack the ability to debate it with you since you clearly have more of an understanding than I do
For what it's worth, I'm not so much trying to have a debate as to share the knowledge I've encountered and the conclusions I've drawn from that. You thought I was contradicting myself not because you were trying to prove me wrong, I think, but because I wasn't clear enough in my explanation, resulting in the apparent contradiction. I appreciate replies like yours because they show the flaws in my logic or communication (along with a different perspective and other thoughts that I did not have). If I can fix them then I have a stronger position, and if I can't then I need to reevaluate it.
Also, my greater understanding of the topic came only recently, within the past two years or so and the process is ongoing. Before I started reading about classical psychology, I was a believer in the Singularity and mind uploads and all that stuff. I think that such optimism* comes from the relative isolation of the two disciplines of psychology and technology, and especially a lack of understanding by the latter of the knowledge collected by the former. The understanding of consciousness and experience that I am working from has been around for a hundred years and still stands strong, but I didn't know it existed either until I happened upon it due to my interest in the philosophy of William James, who also founded the field of psychology. So the last paragraph in my previous post is not a rebuke of you for not knowing that the mind is not a computer. The fact that you bothered to respond in the first place tells me you're interested in the pursuit of truth, which is what matters, and I can't blame you for not knowing something you've never encountered. It's really a criticism of the geek subculture (of which I am a part and am trying to change) for not being diligent when discussing the mind, and more specifically targets anyone who holds the "brain is computer" view, reads my post, and decides to disregard it without following the link or giving it further consideration. That attitude held by others, or perhaps just the isolation of disciplines, is likely one of the prevailing reasons that you never encountered the "brain is computer" debunking, because if more geeks had read about it instead of repeating the myth then they would have done what I am doing now and shared it, making it that much closer to general knowledge and that much likelier that you would have previously encountered it.
Personally I think it's a pretty strong argument against the Singularity, but it won't convince everybody. That's fine with me; I just think that these well-established facts ought to be taken under consideration. In the end, it's much more important to me to get the knowledge out there than to harangue people for ignoring it for so long, but the truth is that criticizing a geek is likely to get his blood up, and if his blood is up he is more likely to try and poke holes in my reasoning, and that means he'll follow the link and read my post with a hawkish eye, which ends up with him carefully considering what I wanted him to consider in the first place. It's diabolical, I know, but it works =)
*That is, optimism in the sense that we will be able to do such things, not in the sense that life would suck without them!
Another possibility to fight dragons and stuff that I surprisingly missed (considering I have, ahem, privately experimented with it) could be a combination of drugs and primitive VR--that is, not much more advanced than what we can do today. With the right psychoactive substance, the user could be wearing sensors and standing in front of a big screen, though glasses would be nicer, and essentially playing a video game while the drug made him feel like he was actually there, man. I don't know if an ideal drug exists, one that opens the mind up to suggestion enough that it fills in and enhances the details but isn't so powerful as to make you trip hard and freak out when you realize you're actually there, man.
For some people, hypnosis and a Playstation is enough to do the trick. But again the important factor is actually spending time doing something that is an analogue of the concrete experience, even if it's fairly abstract: our minds are powerful enough to take past experiences of being near or singed by a fire or what it feels like to chop at something (even if it's as mundane as wood) and, in the right state, attach those experiences to this new one so that we remember plunging the sword into the dragon's belly and feeling a spray of blood.
While intriguing, I doubt this would pass muster with the original poster, though, because my intuition tells me that it would feel very dreamlike when remembered because of the patchwork memories filling in for gaps in the true experience.
You have kind of contradicted yourself there. If we only know an infinitesimal small amount about how the brain works, it is kind of hard to definitely state the nature of consciousness.
On the contrary, we know a decent amount about how the brain works at a high level (brainwave patterns) and at the low level (neurons). What I wrote was that our sense of self and memory are poorly understood. In other words, we can see electrochemical waves flowing through the brain, and we can sometimes correlate changes in brain activity with physical or mental activity. However, the mental activity is only coarsely understood: your brain imagining an elephant looks very similar to your brain imagining a rocket ship, and my brain is the same way but will look different from yours. Imagining looks different from recalling past experience--actually, some research shows evidence that remembering something consists of the pattern of the original experience played back only weaker. In my view, this complexity and individuality coupled with the fact that our bodies and brains change continuously and in a chaotic manner precludes modeling accurate enough to forge memories. It took researchers a day and a half to model the sound of water hitting itself, and that's a relatively simple interaction compared to a process of consciousness that involves both billions of neurons and the waves they propagate.
I will agree with you that the "I know Kung-Fu" trick is many many orders more complicated then simply creating a virtual environment to interact with. However, why do we need to do that at all? If we have the technology to attempt something like that, why not just use the "fly-by-wire" concept? Create a wetware system capable of taking over your body and performing the kung-fu for you.
That's a clever, interesting option that I hadn't considered in the physical realm. Despite my kung-fu pop culture reference, I was thinking mostly of memorizing the LOC. The mental analogue to what you describe and which I forgot to mention was that instead of taking the time to memorize the LOC you would instead be able to query the network to get as much information about any book (or indeed any subject) that you wanted, negating the need for memorization. Your kung-fu solution is the same idea, operational knowledge streamed instead of stored, and is much more practical than the "Matrix download."
The brain is really nothing more than a computer.
This is a very modern idea that is quite simply wrong, just like all of the other historical brain analogies. See especially differences #6, #9, and the bonus. This myth has been debunked time and time again, but it seems that it's just something people (especially geeks) don't want to hear, and so the truth is drowned out by the fervor of the lie.
Basically, so much is illegal now that if the government really wants to put you in prison it probably can.
Yep. But if you call the US a police state people call you crazy just because we still have free speech.
The way the brain works makes such experiences nearly impossible to encode and certainly impossible with drugs, as another poster pointed out. If we take "drugs" to include "nanomachines targeting the brain and disguised as a pill" then we enter the realm of the merely highly improbable. The machines would have to collectively be smart enough to override signals from and to the body while simultaneously generating the desired experience.
Another possibility would be a single device at the top of the spinal column and networked with lots of processing power, like a wireless Matrix or the Vertebrane system from Manna. This too requires advanced nanotech to implant, as it must splice every nerve in the spinal column plus the optic and aural nerves, and so is also highly improbable to occur at all, and certainly not for nearly a hundred years unless the Singularity frea--er, folks are right.
Given all that, the experiences you speak of (flying, fighting a dragon) could happen, but doing the "I know kung-fu!" thing is impossible due to the nature of consciousness. If you want to learn something, you're going to have to spend the time to learn it. Reshaping synapse connections and brainwave patterns to implant memories requires godlike knowledge of the individual's brain state and history. Let's not forget that we are messy meat machines (if machines we are) whose sense of self and memory is only infinitesimally less mysterious now as it has always been. Faking an external world and letting the brain experience it, hard as it is, is orders of magnitude simpler than fabricating a past experience, especially an intellectual one such as memorizing the LOC, out of whole cloth.
Sorry I'm such a party pooper =(
Shall we do that with robbery, burglary, murder, rape, child molestation, or just crimes you like commit?
Unlike smoking pot, none of those are victimless crimes. If anything, the marijuana laws under discussion are much closer (though not identical) to Jim Crow laws than to robbery or those others: you are not a victim if I smoke pot in the same way that you are not a victim if I am black and go to the same movie theater as you, assuming you're white.
Some people won't bother growing themselves because it may not be worth it. You have to use a lot of electricity, the right humidity, have space, not everyone will care enough to learn how to grow their own stuff.
Yep, a lot of people would rather pay for convenience, and there's a potential to take advantage of that. Pre-rolled optionally filtered joints and blunts, pre-formed plugs you just pop into a pipe, or even just the good stuff from the bottom of a grinder so you don't have to remove stems and seeds yourself.
And then there's the idea of mixing it with food, the pothead's dream come true! (It's been around for a long time, but there's all that work involved in baking brownies; it's much easier to wander down to the corner store for some "baked" goods.)
By the way, it's "as a US citizen" unless you are lumping Canada, Mexico, and all the nations in South America as countries that have it coming to them.
-1, Pedantry
I'm with you on the bizarreness of the OP, but you know exactly what he meant when he said American. It is accepted usage and there is no reason to change it. We've gotten along perfectly fine by saying "the Americas" or "North America" and "South America" to specify the continents.
"US citizen" is clunky and unnatural in everyday usage. It is not some sentiment that the USA is more important than the continent (though that attitude exists here in excess) but a consequence of having "America" in the name of both continent and country. A similar ambiguity exists with the term "South African" to denote citizens of the country rather than people in the region. "People of/in southern Africa" is used for the region and "South African" for the country, yet I never see a stink raised about that.
But surely the structure and characteristics of those cells, and the spatial connections between them, is strictly implied in the words 'nothing more than'?
That is exactly the gap in thinking that we can fill in for such a simple example but could easily miss in something more exotic or domain-specific, giving the layman a false impression that may lead to a false conclusion. Even here the act of making the implicate in your original statement explicate more than doubled the size of the original statement. I can imagine that an article on something more complex could grow fourfold or more if a meaningful level of accuracy was desired.
However, it seems to me that the mind-brain question is much more interestingly like asking whether the *thoughts* of Shakespeare can be limited to being 'nothing more than' or even 'precisely equal to' the *written works* of Shakespeare, which is a very different thing indeed.
I spend a fair amount of time going down that rabbit hole (and its connecting warrens) myself. It isn't limited to written works, either: even something as mundane as the Empire State Building exists simultaneously as a physical building as well as a concept or experience in the minds of millions of people, but how? Your original statement still stands: we are little closer to pulling that image from someone's head now than we were thirty or even a hundred years ago. Consciousness and self-awareness is the hardest thing we have attempted to understand, and it will likely retain that distinction far into the future.
Oh, sure, in the case of a breakthrough that only makes sense. I guess I was thinking more along the lines of seeing an interesting /. comment and replying with a further exploration of the topic--agreement or disagreement with the comment's viewpoint naturally being part of that--or getting a new insight that isn't a breakthrough and wanting to discuss it with someone. The way I see it, there's not a great chance of good dialog, but I like to write anyway and there is a chance. Plus, there are certain topics in which I am interested that I know none of my real-life friends are, so taking a long shot with the greater internet population provides better odds for discussion, even if they're long.
If you roll with a crew that routinely keeps you stimulated, more power to you and congratulations. Mine is pretty active as well, but writing on the internet for me can be an outlet as well as a test bed for some ideas. I think my intent was to say "don't write it off completely," but the fact that you are posting in the first place shows that you haven't, so I may as well shut up now. =)
3) The brain is still nothing more than a mass of cells.
Careful.
I realize that you're probably speaking colloquially here, but you are taking abstraction too far. If the brain is nothing more than a mass of cells, you should have no problem with me scooping yours out of your skull and replacing it with a head of lettuce, which is also nothing more than a mass of cells and therefore equivalent by that standard.
The cells of the brain (and the entire human body) have characteristics that differ significantly from other kinds of cells, and the structure in which brain (and body) cells are organized is important as well. I think you'd be hard-pressed to find a philosopher arguing for (3) as it stands. Too much abstraction and generalization leads to absurd conclusions like mine in the paragraph above.
In fact, that is one of the issues discussed in the article. What I wrote above in the absence of common sense sounds perfectly plausible given your assertion. When people in advanced fields do the same thing we can't rely on common sense to show readers the possible flaws of logic, yet in the majority of cases they aren't given enough space to elaborate the concepts upon which they rely instead of glossing over them.
This answers all the posts above decrying that the article is BS because "you should be able to explain it to an interested party." Well, nobody is saying they couldn't if they were given sufficient time or space, but they're not. We should understand this well given the many, many, many instructions to RTFA instead of basing statements or arguments on the summary--the summary does not and often cannot tackle the subject with the same depth as the full article. In the same way, a one- or two-page writeup on global warming, for example, likely cannot convey enough information to inform the reader on which side of the debate has more supporting evidence. (And the fact that I was compelled to write "likely" shows that it is difficult for a layman to even determine the level of detail needed for a good analysis.)
What was the fourth pinball machine, and why did no one play it?
The upside of internet philosophizing is that you can take the time to order your thoughts and write exactly what you want to write. There is only a small chance that you'll get an intelligent response, but you are not compelled to continue conversing with the chest-pounding ninny.
It doesn't beat conversations with people you know and respect, but it can still be productive or at least entertaining.
...and upon hovering over a video still, I get this:
Error #2044: Unhandled AsyncErrorEvent:. text=Error #2095: SmartPreviewNetStream was unable to invoke callback onMetaData. error=ReferenceError: Error #1069: Property onMetaData not found on SmartPreviewNetStream and there is no default value.
at SmartPreview()
at SmartPreview_fla::MainTimeline/frame1()
I guess nobody at MS tested their results with the debug version of Flash Player?
All human decisions - even the most abstract or "rational" - have an emotional component; this has been experimentally measured.
Yes! I'm off-topic now but it is wonderful to see this assertion expressed on Slashdot. There's a tendency here to treat emotion as an uncomfortable byproduct of being a meat-sack.
In truth all the progress we have made is driven by emotion: we feel desire for some things (food, sex, Insightful moderations) and it gives us pleasure to try to figure other things out, which is really a desire for knowledge. We follow the creeds and models we do because we like them, and often the difference between philosophies comes down to which most emphasizes the parts of reality that each of us sees as being most important. This state of being engenders a lot of wrongheadedness--as current circumstances show--but without emotion we have no impetus to do anything at all.
All of those problems vanish if flying cars are powered by magic. It's not new, and we should have imported that shit from the Persians when we had the chance. If they could do it with carpets, we could do it with Cadillacs. Instead we took algebra...whoopee.
Zero emissions, zero collisions, zero maintenance (well, for the flying part--the heater is still going to break just before winter hits). I don't know why no one has looked into this.
Erm...you just said what I just said only more ranty.
Except for the "not Obama" part. Obama definitely plays a part, whether you and he realize it or not. (Though how could you not? I mean, he's in the Political Party...)
My use of "average" was misleading. I had in mind the well-to-do with carriages, those who had the right to travel.
There are a lot of advantages to being able to hop into a car and quickly drive a few hundred miles away. There are also advantages to having a close-knit community, and the ability to travel fast and far doesn't foster that sort of thing: most people learn to appreciate the company they keep if there is no alternative. It's good that those who need to get away can, but it takes more discipline to have a community due to the same ability.
I'm happy with the tech I grew up with, but I like to think about the tradeoffs we live with, too. There's a better chance that they can be improved if they are brought to light than if we rely on blind circumstance.
It is not a meaningless assertion. If you took modern society and jerked the rug of technology out from under it, the majority of people on earth would die
Of course they would. I'm saying that if today's tech had developed differently, that is if cars were never invented, our lifestyles would be radically different. Arguing that "cars have done a lot" by showing problems that would arise from replacing them with old tech (horses) is specious and irrelevant.
I don't disagree with the conclusion that modern tech has made life relatively abundant, easy, painless and long--that's made quite clear by just looking at a history book or statistics. I only disagree with the argument that jadavis used to support the conclusion. Treating cars as some abstract thing separate from the environment that spurred their development and then doing a thought experiment in which everything they have in turn affected still exists as-is is a perfectly rational thing to do. It's a good argument for why we ought to keep improving the current system instead of abandoning it. It is not a good argument for showing the advantages of having it in the first place. Zogger's comment above is a better analysis of the situation because he takes the wider environment into account and extrapolates the consequences of a different path of development.
If we want to keep increasing the abundance of life, we have to make sure that the conclusions we reach are from genuine reasoning. In pointing out the error in the argument my sole intent is to emphasize the importance of clear thought.
Take any city (even small ones), look at the traffic, and imagine if it was entirely horse traffic. There would be more pollution (although it would take a different form), more traffic (because horses are slower), more maintenance, and it would take people longer to get where they are going.
You're neglecting the effects that the automobile has had on the growth of cities and even the entire human population as well as our perception of travel. I don't think we would have had such a growth explosion without the ability to move people and goods quickly and in bulk.
I have read (probably here, actually) that the average person with a car today spends more time in transit than did people of antiquity, and this fits in with the general rush of modern life. So you can say "if we replaced cars with horses now, it would be a mess," and you're be right, but it is a meaningless assertion.
I agree. This is a lot like Roman bread and circuses, but we've advanced a lot since then.
Ladies and gentlemen, may I present to you the Meta-Circus.
Excellent points. I think a lot of the jargon has to do with the increased value our culture has placed on specialism: we've got it so drummed into our heads that society works best when it is compartmentalized that we like to make our areas of expertise (note the possessive) incomprehensible to the uninitiated.
I say "like to" but it really tends to creep in unintentionally, and it's often the result of convenient abstraction. Nobody wants to say "move the mouse until the onscreen arrow is covering the underlined text that says 'read more' and then quickly press and release the left button on the mouse" all the time, so we shortened it to "click the 'read more' link." There are a lot of concepts embedded in the shorter phrase, many more than I elaborated, yet even a novice fully understands clicking links after a day or two, so we can clearly handle a lot of concepts. Yet I recently attempted to read a book about Godel, whose incompleteness theorem I have a decent grasp of thanks to Hofstadter, which contains numerous sentences like the following:
It is not obvious either that there cannot be methods of proof that go beyond first-order logic and enable us to prove the consistency of arithmetic but which can be argued to be constructive, finitistic, or otherwise compatible with Hilbert's requirements. Hilbert's own first reaction was to rely on certain mildly infinitistic methods. Later, Gerhard Gentzen actually proved the consistency of arithmetic by using transfinite induction up to the first undefinable ordinal.
Admittedly mathematics is one of the most abstract of pursuits to begin with, but unlike Hofstadter's lucid incremental building of concepts and his constant return to layman's terms through his dialogues, with this author I am constantly bombarded with jargon that even Wikipedia can't properly sort out. Not only does he begin high up the ladder of abstraction, he rarely climbs down to Earth to show some concrete effects of all this concept-work, making it even harder to discern the value of the work discussed.
And I wonder if that isn't part of the issue, too: that if unmasked, some of these lingo-laced papers actually say nothing at all of value, merely restate common knowledge, or contain glaring errors. We know that the bulk of marketing lingo says nothing, and that the bulk of 20C philosophy is hair-splitting dressed up as groundbreaking. Why should scientific papers be any different?
Even if that were the case (instead of being a gross overstatement), shouldn't you be happy that they're actually making their grievance known instead of just sitting in front of the tube or dispensing "wisdom" on the internet? Or has wanting to choose what one does with more of one's own money already become a faux pas after only half a decade of vast government expansion? Or is it simply that Fox News jumped on the idea (first promoted IIRC by Ron Paul's people) and made it somehow illegitimate through their very presence?
Or are you just a troll who fails to recognize that there are different ways to look at things, and so you believe that everyone who doesn't see things exactly as you do must be illiterate?
You're correct as far as Wikipedia's actions go. This thread however is based on these statements by noundi:
I for one thank wikipedia to use their stance and point out that this shit is not tolerable. Next up, christianity, islam, judaism. Way to go wiki.
There's a difference between free speach [sic] and encouraging insanity.
Now, if other religious groups/people are engaging in edit wars, those groups/people open themselves up to edit bans as well, but noundi is promoting a point of view that clearly qualifies as anti-religion, especially in his second post. Unless you can find a different way to spin his unsupported statement that religion is insanity or a mental illness?