I'm not sure how you got the idea that GP is blaming Bush. Looks to me like he's implicitly faulting Obama for this particular expansion of government, and putting him in the same boat as the Bushes. He could have just as easily said, "Preparation for the next Clinton administration. Hillary will love this when it's her turn at the wheel."
If you think that the differences between the mainstream Democratic and Republican parties run deep below the surface, you are grossly misinformed. For reference, see: most legislation passed in the US Congress for the past two decades.
This doesn't mean that nonlocality is impossible, but it does mean it creates enormous practical problems for physics that no one knows how to approach, much less solve.
Forgive me for such a glib remark, but it's a shame that we're so afraid of entering new territory nowadays. It seems to me that the way things have worked historically is that each generation soaked up the knowledge of the old guard, then poked holes in the existing theories that revealed vast new lands to explore.
Indeed, this appears to be what Bohm did to the work of Einstein and Bohr with his willingness to explore non-locality, but the rest of his colleagues for whatever reason were unwilling to join him in ousting the old guard. As a result, the pioneering work he performed, culminating in Wholeness and the Implicate Order, has lain dormant for thirty years. It is my hope that some genius of our time takes an interest in Bohm's work and brings it back into focus, especially with news of possible holographic noise in Geo600.
There is no distance, since the coupled particles are, in fact, the same "particle". Then the problem of "information transfer"
This is indeed the end result of this line of thinking and is the conclusion reached by Bohm. I didn't want to take it that far in my post because a) without presenting the steps to reach that point it sounds like hippie bullshit, and b) since we experience "distance" in day-to-day living, it made sense to me to frame the concept as "non-locality" rather than "identity."
Here's a question for you along with some personal history to give you an idea of why I am asking it.
I have found myself increasingly believing that there is a huge swath of reality that the system of western science is either ignoring or is incapable of comprehending. This includes things like ESP, telekineses, the human energy field (aura), out of body experiences, and other things in the vein we tend to call "paranormal." This interest was sparked when, during college, I connected with a pastor of a house church where they believed in and practiced the spiritual gifts outlined in the Bible (healing, prophecy, tongues, etc.). I experienced some things while there that felt genuinely, unarguably true and spiritual in a way that I don't remember having felt before. I have since wandered away from Christianity as a life framework, but that experience is not diminished in hindsight.
Some years later I came across "The Holographic Universe," a book by Michael Talbot that is based on the work of David Bohm and Karl Pribam. The book claims that if the universe is indeed holographic, there's plenty of room for all that stuff that western science wants to shove under the rug (the commonplace example being the placebo effect). Reading all those credible examples of the paranormal makes it seem very plausible that it exists, and indeed if asked about it I will affirm as much.
But.
My own experience has been much more mundane. Aside from the handful of times I mentioned during college, I have not seen any firsthand evidence of this stuff, and what little I have was quite minor in comparison to the incredible experience of, say, an accurate aura reading (where the viewer may express knowledge that he could not otherwise possess) or even seeing a pen leap off the table. My hypothesis is that due to my perceptive/intuitive nature I won't be able to generate any "psychic activity" without having personally experienced it and perhaps having been taught how to grasp it.
So the question is, for someone such as myself who is definitely interested in what you are talking about and who has book knowledge of it but is, shall we say, a reluctant skeptic, what is the next step in the process? If it is finding someone to learn from who is psychic, how do I find someone genuinely psychic instead of a run-of-the-mill, cold-reading palmist? If it is "rewriting the programming in my own mind," where can I find more information about doing so?
Or am I way off-base in my estimation of what you are talking about to begin with?
I'm continually surprised at how things are explained away by the scientific establishment as being "the placebo effect," because the placebo effect is really quite extraordinary, and only seems otherwise because of its prevalence. I mean, really, if someone takes sugar pills not knowing that they are just sugar pills and experiences the painkiller effects of morphine or cancer remission, or even side effects like nausea and headaches (all of which are documented examples), how is it even acceptable to just wave your hand and say that it's "just" the placebo effect? There's some serious mind-over-matter shit going on, and I want to know more about it.
In a related experiment (for which I can look up the source if need be, when I get home) the experimenters had twenty people divided into two groups of ten, each group occupying a room. In the first room, nine people were given amphetamines and the tenth a sedative, while in the second the situation was reversed. I don't recall if each group was told what they were being given or not (the odd man out obviously being lied to if they were), but either way you should be able to guess the outcome: despite taking a sedative, the loner in the speed room was bouncing off the walls, and the amphetamine taker in the sedative room fell asleep. This goes beyond placebo into something even stranger: the counteracting of chemical changes by (we must assume) the conscious mind based on its perceptions.
The placebo effect is the most obvious dark, unexplored corner of the scientific establishment. I have a feeling that if it is ever explored, we'll find that it's not even a corner but a hallway that leads to greater mysteries and a probable re-evaluation of modern scientific theory to more fully include the role of consciousness in shaping the physical universe.
No physical theory of local hidden variables can ever reproduce all of the predictions of quantum mechanics.
Personally, I don't see why people have such an issue with the existence of non-locality. David Bohm did a lot of work in this area, much of which is admittedly over my head but compelling nonetheless. Interestingly, he was drawn towards non-local hidden variables after working with plasmas, whose electrons act as a unified whole instead of individually. To my knowledge, no satisfactory explanation other than non-locality has been offered up for such behavior.
And now I'm stepping out on a limb and will probably be torn to pieces, but it just occurred to me that at its birth, our universe was essentially a point of infinite density, or something very like it. With the knowledge of such a beginning, it seems probable to me that there would be some degree of interconnectedness and therefore non-locality should not be written off so quickly.
You are absolutely correct. I had a post replying to a Singularitarian (those who believe that we will be able to "upload" our selves) in the poll which covered the chemical soup modeling problem you've described as well as the I/O problem that I believe is fundamentally related. Since the other post wouldn't submit (had to re-login) I'll do some editing and put it here instead, since it is happily more topical overall.
Another thing that Singularitarians overlook is I/O. It's great that we may be able to model the structure of the human brain, but consciousness arises from and is continually affected by signals received from and sent to our sensing organs.
A human mind "trapped" in silicon would have to be somehow modified to accept an environment so utterly alien to its native one as to be likely perceived as noise, if indeed it perceived anything at all. Eyeballs work nothing like video cameras; they're much closer to specialized frequency analyzers. It would probably be less work to recreate the eyeball than to attempt to convert a video camera signal into something useful to the brain model, and the same goes for all of the other senses. A brain without a body simply isn't going to be very functional, especially when all that messy biological stuff that goes on in the chemical soup in which neurons are immersed has yet to be fully understood or modeled. Additionally, the brain's neural connections shift, shrink and grow constantly. Can a non-biological neural network do the same? (This is not a rhetorical question; I do not know the answer.)
I get the feeling that a lot of folks think we'll be able to just set up a mind, start typing questions at it, and receive answers. This view is simplistic in that it views the neural network of the brain as the only important bit of existence, when in reality we are complex patterns fully immersed and in many ways inseparable from our environment.
I used to be a Singularitarian myself (and I still enjoy fiction such as Charles Stross's Accelerando) until I read up on the fundamentals of psychology as described by William James in the late 1800s. Nearly everything in that field even today is consistent with James's discoveries in its infancy, and despite tremendous pressure to the contrary it demands that the separation of mind and body is little more than a sometimes useful fiction. Consciousness, like all sufficiently complex physical phenomena, is a dynamic process that is far too fluid for us to accurately model.
I suppose that if, as [the poster in the other thread suggests], technology will keep getting harder better faster stronger, it is conceivable that humans will eventually be able to succeed in modeling everything necessary to create a virtual environment for uploaded people to exist in, for without an environment they won't really be people (IMO they won't exhibit signs of consciousness at all). However, in addition to the hurdles I mentioned above that aren't being tackled, I have a hard time believing that technology will indeed keep getting harder better faster stronger. Maybe that's just because I'm 27 and, according to Slashdot, entering old age, but I have my reasons (see link in sig for a bunch of them). I also personally believe that following such a route is not a good idea even if possible, because we would become slaves to technology rather than using technology to better understand the mysteries of the wide reality which we confront daily.
I recall reading somewhere, I believe it was something by Bruce Schneier linked here, actually, that calls bullshit on the liquid ban as well. The problem is that although small volumes of fluids can be used to cause catastrophic damage, the chances of someone doing so on a plane are practically zero in the proper sense, meaning although it is theoretically possible it cannot be done in practice. The liquid chemical mixing bombs like in Die Hard 3 are notoriously difficult to get a reaction from, and it's not as simple as "put chemical A in a bottle with chemical B, shake well." They had people trying to do this stuff in labs with fancy equipment designed for the purpose, and even they failed more often than not to get something explodey.
In order to do it on a plane, the guy would have to go to the restroom and by all accounts remain there for half an hour, and also have with him some specialized tools that would never get through security on his person or in a carry-on.
Even if all this were not the case, I'd rather be able to simply get on a plane knowing the risks anyway. I guess that's unamerican nowadays.
Let's review a few Key Facts. You have to find oil before you can produce it, and Key Fact #1 is that world oil discoveries peaked in 1964. US discoveries peaked in 1930, and 40 years later production peaked. We are now 44 years after the global discovery peak.
Key Fact #2 is that world production of conventional crude has been flat for the past four years, even as prices have increased by 140%. Taken together, Key Facts #1 and #2 suggest the possibility that Peak Oil is already upon us. If true, then we are going to wish with all our hearts that we had begun preparing for this moment a decade or more ago.
Key Fact #3 is that the US oil imports are the energy equivalent of more than 750 nuclear power plants, which is seven times as many nuclear plants as currently exist here, and nearly twice the total number of nuclear plants in the entire world..
Key Concept #9 of the Crash Course is that Peak Oil is a well defined process that is nothing more than a physical description of how oil fields age. We have literally thousands of studied examples under our belts and this is not open to debate. Only when the peak might arrive is up for discussion.
Mostly hidden from us in plain sight is Key Concept #10: The amount of work that oil performs for you is equivalent to having hundreds of slaves. It is this work that makes our lives what they are - staggeringly comfortable by historical standards. The average middle class life in western society would be the envy of kings in times past.
Key Concept #11 is that Oil is a magical substance of finite supply but of unlimited importance. This cannot be overstated. [...] And finally, what we need to keep a careful eye out for is the supply of oil being exceeded by demand, and this raises Key Concept # 12: Oil exports are being hit two ways - by rising demand and declining production. This raises the prospect that the moment when the world's nations finally realize that there is not enough oil to supply everybody may come much sooner than most suspect. Exponential functions are hard for most humans to grasp, and oil exports are being doubly squeezed, subjecting them to a surprisingly high rate of decline.
The charts he's referring to are in the video on the linked page, of which all the quoted text above is a transcript.
That quote is the summarization of the topic of peak oil. The video is worth watching (or at least the rest of the transcript worth reading) because the details are sordid and hard to argue with. One of them is that we tend to fail to account for the oil-producing countries' increased use of oil internally, another curve that tends toward the exponential, and the effects that will have on their oil exports. If Mexico, #3 supplier to the US, continues on its current path of production and usage, their exports will stop by 2012. That's a big void to fill.
Other chapters there discuss alternative energy and how, even if we can do more than break even, the energy returns (what we get out minus what we put in) are much, much smaller than with oil. I don't think we're 10 years away from peak; I think it's happening now and we'll have big problems less than 5 years down the road as prices skyrocket due to increasing scarcity and demand.
You really think Obama doesn't come certified and approved by the Great Old Ones? Look at what he has done and look at who he has appointed. Lizards, every one.
Wow, that's...one of the most convoluted solutions I have ever heard. Why not just get used to the fact that software on its own is as unacceptable for handling elections as it is for building houses?
Please tell me what the word indicate means. I always assumed that it meant demonstrating to others what you are about to do. What is the point of indicating if there is no-one there to indicate to ? [...] Plainly people regard rules as actions to be complied with regardless of the situation you are in. That causes more accidents than anything else in my experience. [...] Which demonstrates the idiotic position we find ourselves in, where the rules trump common sense.
If you are certain that no one else is around, then signaling is unnecessary. However you must keep in mind that it's almost always the one that you weren't aware of that gets you, be it in a game, war, or crashes. Now, your Florida example could have been somewhere in the countryside at a naked crossroads; no buildings or trees or sight-blocking hills, just a clearly visible deserted road, so I'm not calling into question your judgment there. That environment is pretty rare in most driving situations, though. I believe that it is better to simply get into the habit of signaling my intentions no matter what because it eliminates an unnecessary decision process that could slow me down by that fraction of a second I might need to react in an emergency. YMMV.
I'm not sure how you got the idea that following the rules in every situation causes more accidents than anything else, because statistically many, many more accidents are caused by someone choosing to disobey the rules at an inappropriate time; your description of being cut off is one instance of that. This is not to say that the rules should be followed in every situation or that no accidents are caused by people doing just that, but you appear to have blown those incidents way out of proportion.
The rest of your comment (passing quickly, the problem of braking, cutting people off, drivers' test as a low bar for entry) I fully agree with. I would certainly feel safe driving near you in traffic. Hell, I'd even run interference for you if you were in a big rig.
Speeding == a way to generate revenue for the state while talking a good game about safety. Failure to yield, following too closely == two things that receive very little emphasis which cause a hell of a lot more preventable accidents that speeding could ever cause.
Indeed! A friend of mine who is a police officer doesn't pull people over for speeding unless it is actually dangerous, like 55 in a 35 residential zone (or when he occasionally has to man one of the speed traps in the area; most officers don't do those by choice--it's boring). Now, failure to yield, failure to signal, tailgating, hanging out in a blind spot, hanging out in the passing lane without passing anyone, etc. he targets aggressively.
"Basically, if it pisses me off as a driver and there's a rule for it, I will pull you over and I won't be happy about it. And I guarantee that there's a rule for it." Which I believe, having seen him lugging around my state's two-and-a-half-inch thick vehicle code book.
"If I'm on my way to Arby's and I see someone doing 80, 90 on the bypass, fuck that--I'm going to Arby's. I see someone slow down and make a turn without signaling, I will turn around and hunt you down for that shit."
And you know what? Those people won't like it (or him) and they'll rant to their friends about the bullshit ticket they got, but all tickets are described as bullshit and I bet they'll start making sure to signal.
I agree with you almost completely except for who to blame. It wasn't Mom and Dad who told everyone they were special, it was that evil, evil man Mr. Rogers.
If I say the sky is red, and grass is purple, because I was honestly raised to believe these things, does that mean that a debate over whether clear daytime sky on Earth is blue or red is merely a difference of opinion? I'm fine with you thinking the sky is red, but if you claim that you are mindful of science in the same breath, I'll laugh myself to death.
Okay, I won't call it a strawman, but it is certainly a questionable example.
A better one would be if you were raised to believe that at some point in the past, the sky was red. (Purple grass currently exists, native to northern Africa I believe, so makes for a bad example.) The plain truth is that neither you nor I have any direct experience of what the sky looked like millions of years ago, and a red sky is an entirely plausible concept. There may be a total lack of evidence for both cases, in which case it is obviously a matter of opinion. There may be more evidence for a red sky in the past than a blue sky, in which case it is a matter of how much faith one places in the evidence, and thus at its root still a matter of opinion.
Let's say for example that a series of dreadfully ancient cave paintings were found and all of them that had sky in the background showed it as being red. This is still not a lot of evidence to go on, but it is again plausible to believe that the sky was (at least local to the cave painters) red. It is also plausible to believe that sunset had a special significance for the painters' culture, so they depicted only sunsets (sans sun, naturally, because that would make it too easy...er, i mean, it was too holy to make an image of) in their paintings, and the limited set of colors they had to work with resulted in a uniform red.
Which of these is more plausible? I don't know. I don't know if the chemical makeup of the atmosphere would permit a red sky while supporting human life, but that would be another source of evidence for or against its existence. Your opinion will be swayed by the amount of evidence that you see for each side, and what you count as "evidence" rests on the amount of trust you place in whoever did the calculations or found the paintings or what have you. The whole point of this example is to demonstrate that yes, the past really is a matter of opinion or, if you prefer, "open to interpretation." Witness the revisionist histories and continuing debates of the US: was Lincoln a great liberator or a strong authoritarian? What does the 2nd Amendment really mean? What caused the beginning and end of the Great Depression?
Now, back to dinosaurs. We have a lot of fossil evidence pointing to dinosaurs and man being separated by great gulfs of time. This evidence relies upon our geological model of strata, carbon dating, and likely a bunch of other things that I'm too ignorant to know about--I was never very interested in dinosaurs. However, there is also evidence, including cave paintings amusingly enough, of dinosaurs coexisting and interacting with man. See the images here; I am aware that the page is advocating coexistence due to creationism but the evidence stands on its own. It is possible that each and every painting, relief, and figurine could be explained away and require no coexistence, but it is statistically unlikely. Yet nobody but the Creationists ever mentions this evidence; because it doesn't fit the standard model it simply gets pushed aside.
This is not the scientific method at work.
In conclusion, we know less than we think we know, only fools are positive, facts are rarely as solid as they appear, etc. It's not as cut-and-dry as you have been led to believe, as is the case for several other fields of science that I've looked into.
I also wonder why it is perfectly acceptable to be excited over the possibility of not finding the Higgs Boson which, to my understanding, would invalidate the standard model, yet it is not accepta
Slashdot Mirror
Hackers should play corewar.
I'm not sure how you got the idea that GP is blaming Bush. Looks to me like he's implicitly faulting Obama for this particular expansion of government, and putting him in the same boat as the Bushes. He could have just as easily said, "Preparation for the next Clinton administration. Hillary will love this when it's her turn at the wheel."
If you think that the differences between the mainstream Democratic and Republican parties run deep below the surface, you are grossly misinformed. For reference, see: most legislation passed in the US Congress for the past two decades.
over the next several years, I met at random people who were similarly tuned to this kind of stuff
Hah! I should have seen that one coming. I had forgotten that a friend of mine met a teacher that way.
Thank you for the response.
That's easy.
Or maybe they are ALSO infected with Conficker, and it causes news about itself to be riddled with "April Fools!" disclaimers...
o_O
This doesn't mean that nonlocality is impossible, but it does mean it creates enormous practical problems for physics that no one knows how to approach, much less solve.
Forgive me for such a glib remark, but it's a shame that we're so afraid of entering new territory nowadays. It seems to me that the way things have worked historically is that each generation soaked up the knowledge of the old guard, then poked holes in the existing theories that revealed vast new lands to explore.
Indeed, this appears to be what Bohm did to the work of Einstein and Bohr with his willingness to explore non-locality, but the rest of his colleagues for whatever reason were unwilling to join him in ousting the old guard. As a result, the pioneering work he performed, culminating in Wholeness and the Implicate Order, has lain dormant for thirty years. It is my hope that some genius of our time takes an interest in Bohm's work and brings it back into focus, especially with news of possible holographic noise in Geo600.
There is no distance, since the coupled particles are, in fact, the same "particle". Then the problem of "information transfer"
This is indeed the end result of this line of thinking and is the conclusion reached by Bohm. I didn't want to take it that far in my post because a) without presenting the steps to reach that point it sounds like hippie bullshit, and b) since we experience "distance" in day-to-day living, it made sense to me to frame the concept as "non-locality" rather than "identity."
Here's a question for you along with some personal history to give you an idea of why I am asking it.
I have found myself increasingly believing that there is a huge swath of reality that the system of western science is either ignoring or is incapable of comprehending. This includes things like ESP, telekineses, the human energy field (aura), out of body experiences, and other things in the vein we tend to call "paranormal." This interest was sparked when, during college, I connected with a pastor of a house church where they believed in and practiced the spiritual gifts outlined in the Bible (healing, prophecy, tongues, etc.). I experienced some things while there that felt genuinely, unarguably true and spiritual in a way that I don't remember having felt before. I have since wandered away from Christianity as a life framework, but that experience is not diminished in hindsight.
Some years later I came across "The Holographic Universe," a book by Michael Talbot that is based on the work of David Bohm and Karl Pribam. The book claims that if the universe is indeed holographic, there's plenty of room for all that stuff that western science wants to shove under the rug (the commonplace example being the placebo effect). Reading all those credible examples of the paranormal makes it seem very plausible that it exists, and indeed if asked about it I will affirm as much.
But.
My own experience has been much more mundane. Aside from the handful of times I mentioned during college, I have not seen any firsthand evidence of this stuff, and what little I have was quite minor in comparison to the incredible experience of, say, an accurate aura reading (where the viewer may express knowledge that he could not otherwise possess) or even seeing a pen leap off the table. My hypothesis is that due to my perceptive/intuitive nature I won't be able to generate any "psychic activity" without having personally experienced it and perhaps having been taught how to grasp it.
So the question is, for someone such as myself who is definitely interested in what you are talking about and who has book knowledge of it but is, shall we say, a reluctant skeptic, what is the next step in the process? If it is finding someone to learn from who is psychic, how do I find someone genuinely psychic instead of a run-of-the-mill, cold-reading palmist? If it is "rewriting the programming in my own mind," where can I find more information about doing so?
Or am I way off-base in my estimation of what you are talking about to begin with?
I'm continually surprised at how things are explained away by the scientific establishment as being "the placebo effect," because the placebo effect is really quite extraordinary, and only seems otherwise because of its prevalence. I mean, really, if someone takes sugar pills not knowing that they are just sugar pills and experiences the painkiller effects of morphine or cancer remission, or even side effects like nausea and headaches (all of which are documented examples), how is it even acceptable to just wave your hand and say that it's "just" the placebo effect? There's some serious mind-over-matter shit going on, and I want to know more about it.
In a related experiment (for which I can look up the source if need be, when I get home) the experimenters had twenty people divided into two groups of ten, each group occupying a room. In the first room, nine people were given amphetamines and the tenth a sedative, while in the second the situation was reversed. I don't recall if each group was told what they were being given or not (the odd man out obviously being lied to if they were), but either way you should be able to guess the outcome: despite taking a sedative, the loner in the speed room was bouncing off the walls, and the amphetamine taker in the sedative room fell asleep. This goes beyond placebo into something even stranger: the counteracting of chemical changes by (we must assume) the conscious mind based on its perceptions.
The placebo effect is the most obvious dark, unexplored corner of the scientific establishment. I have a feeling that if it is ever explored, we'll find that it's not even a corner but a hallway that leads to greater mysteries and a probable re-evaluation of modern scientific theory to more fully include the role of consciousness in shaping the physical universe.
Placebo effect.
Bell's Theorem states:
No physical theory of local hidden variables can ever reproduce all of the predictions of quantum mechanics.
Personally, I don't see why people have such an issue with the existence of non-locality. David Bohm did a lot of work in this area, much of which is admittedly over my head but compelling nonetheless. Interestingly, he was drawn towards non-local hidden variables after working with plasmas, whose electrons act as a unified whole instead of individually. To my knowledge, no satisfactory explanation other than non-locality has been offered up for such behavior.
And now I'm stepping out on a limb and will probably be torn to pieces, but it just occurred to me that at its birth, our universe was essentially a point of infinite density, or something very like it. With the knowledge of such a beginning, it seems probable to me that there would be some degree of interconnectedness and therefore non-locality should not be written off so quickly.
It's like a stimulus plan for the Ocean!
You are absolutely correct. I had a post replying to a Singularitarian (those who believe that we will be able to "upload" our selves) in the poll which covered the chemical soup modeling problem you've described as well as the I/O problem that I believe is fundamentally related. Since the other post wouldn't submit (had to re-login) I'll do some editing and put it here instead, since it is happily more topical overall.
Another thing that Singularitarians overlook is I/O. It's great that we may be able to model the structure of the human brain, but consciousness arises from and is continually affected by signals received from and sent to our sensing organs.
A human mind "trapped" in silicon would have to be somehow modified to accept an environment so utterly alien to its native one as to be likely perceived as noise, if indeed it perceived anything at all. Eyeballs work nothing like video cameras; they're much closer to specialized frequency analyzers. It would probably be less work to recreate the eyeball than to attempt to convert a video camera signal into something useful to the brain model, and the same goes for all of the other senses. A brain without a body simply isn't going to be very functional, especially when all that messy biological stuff that goes on in the chemical soup in which neurons are immersed has yet to be fully understood or modeled. Additionally, the brain's neural connections shift, shrink and grow constantly. Can a non-biological neural network do the same? (This is not a rhetorical question; I do not know the answer.)
I get the feeling that a lot of folks think we'll be able to just set up a mind, start typing questions at it, and receive answers. This view is simplistic in that it views the neural network of the brain as the only important bit of existence, when in reality we are complex patterns fully immersed and in many ways inseparable from our environment.
I used to be a Singularitarian myself (and I still enjoy fiction such as Charles Stross's Accelerando) until I read up on the fundamentals of psychology as described by William James in the late 1800s. Nearly everything in that field even today is consistent with James's discoveries in its infancy, and despite tremendous pressure to the contrary it demands that the separation of mind and body is little more than a sometimes useful fiction. Consciousness, like all sufficiently complex physical phenomena, is a dynamic process that is far too fluid for us to accurately model.
I suppose that if, as [the poster in the other thread suggests], technology will keep getting harder better faster stronger, it is conceivable that humans will eventually be able to succeed in modeling everything necessary to create a virtual environment for uploaded people to exist in, for without an environment they won't really be people (IMO they won't exhibit signs of consciousness at all). However, in addition to the hurdles I mentioned above that aren't being tackled, I have a hard time believing that technology will indeed keep getting harder better faster stronger. Maybe that's just because I'm 27 and, according to Slashdot, entering old age, but I have my reasons (see link in sig for a bunch of them). I also personally believe that following such a route is not a good idea even if possible, because we would become slaves to technology rather than using technology to better understand the mysteries of the wide reality which we confront daily.
Warning: I know nothing about this sort of thing.
I recall reading somewhere, I believe it was something by Bruce Schneier linked here, actually, that calls bullshit on the liquid ban as well. The problem is that although small volumes of fluids can be used to cause catastrophic damage, the chances of someone doing so on a plane are practically zero in the proper sense, meaning although it is theoretically possible it cannot be done in practice. The liquid chemical mixing bombs like in Die Hard 3 are notoriously difficult to get a reaction from, and it's not as simple as "put chemical A in a bottle with chemical B, shake well." They had people trying to do this stuff in labs with fancy equipment designed for the purpose, and even they failed more often than not to get something explodey.
In order to do it on a plane, the guy would have to go to the restroom and by all accounts remain there for half an hour, and also have with him some specialized tools that would never get through security on his person or in a carry-on.
Even if all this were not the case, I'd rather be able to simply get on a plane knowing the risks anyway. I guess that's unamerican nowadays.
that was damaged by the flood that I sometimes walk on
Jesus? Is that you?
From Chris Martenson
Let's review a few Key Facts. You have to find oil before you can produce it, and Key Fact #1 is that world oil discoveries peaked in 1964. US discoveries peaked in 1930, and 40 years later production peaked. We are now 44 years after the global discovery peak.
Key Fact #2 is that world production of conventional crude has been flat for the past four years, even as prices have increased by 140%. Taken together, Key Facts #1 and #2 suggest the possibility that Peak Oil is already upon us. If true, then we are going to wish with all our hearts that we had begun preparing for this moment a decade or more ago.
Key Fact #3 is that the US oil imports are the energy equivalent of more than 750 nuclear power plants, which is seven times as many nuclear plants as currently exist here, and nearly twice the total number of nuclear plants in the entire world..
Key Concept #9 of the Crash Course is that Peak Oil is a well defined process that is nothing more than a physical description of how oil fields age. We have literally thousands of studied examples under our belts and this is not open to debate. Only when the peak might arrive is up for discussion.
Mostly hidden from us in plain sight is Key Concept #10: The amount of work that oil performs for you is equivalent to having hundreds of slaves. It is this work that makes our lives what they are - staggeringly comfortable by historical standards. The average middle class life in western society would be the envy of kings in times past.
Key Concept #11 is that Oil is a magical substance of finite supply but of unlimited importance. This cannot be overstated.
[...]
And finally, what we need to keep a careful eye out for is the supply of oil being exceeded by demand, and this raises Key Concept # 12: Oil exports are being hit two ways - by rising demand and declining production. This raises the prospect that the moment when the world's nations finally realize that there is not enough oil to supply everybody may come much sooner than most suspect. Exponential functions are hard for most humans to grasp, and oil exports are being doubly squeezed, subjecting them to a surprisingly high rate of decline.
The charts he's referring to are in the video on the linked page, of which all the quoted text above is a transcript.
That quote is the summarization of the topic of peak oil. The video is worth watching (or at least the rest of the transcript worth reading) because the details are sordid and hard to argue with. One of them is that we tend to fail to account for the oil-producing countries' increased use of oil internally, another curve that tends toward the exponential, and the effects that will have on their oil exports. If Mexico, #3 supplier to the US, continues on its current path of production and usage, their exports will stop by 2012. That's a big void to fill.
Other chapters there discuss alternative energy and how, even if we can do more than break even, the energy returns (what we get out minus what we put in) are much, much smaller than with oil. I don't think we're 10 years away from peak; I think it's happening now and we'll have big problems less than 5 years down the road as prices skyrocket due to increasing scarcity and demand.
You really think Obama doesn't come certified and approved by the Great Old Ones? Look at what he has done and look at who he has appointed. Lizards, every one.
Wow, that's...one of the most convoluted solutions I have ever heard. Why not just get used to the fact that software on its own is as unacceptable for handling elections as it is for building houses?
Please tell me what the word indicate means. I always assumed that it meant demonstrating to others what you are about to do. What is the point of indicating if there is no-one there to indicate to ? [...] Plainly people regard rules as actions to be complied with regardless of the situation you are in. That causes more accidents than anything else in my experience. [...] Which demonstrates the idiotic position we find ourselves in, where the rules trump common sense.
If you are certain that no one else is around, then signaling is unnecessary. However you must keep in mind that it's almost always the one that you weren't aware of that gets you, be it in a game, war, or crashes. Now, your Florida example could have been somewhere in the countryside at a naked crossroads; no buildings or trees or sight-blocking hills, just a clearly visible deserted road, so I'm not calling into question your judgment there. That environment is pretty rare in most driving situations, though. I believe that it is better to simply get into the habit of signaling my intentions no matter what because it eliminates an unnecessary decision process that could slow me down by that fraction of a second I might need to react in an emergency. YMMV.
I'm not sure how you got the idea that following the rules in every situation causes more accidents than anything else, because statistically many, many more accidents are caused by someone choosing to disobey the rules at an inappropriate time; your description of being cut off is one instance of that. This is not to say that the rules should be followed in every situation or that no accidents are caused by people doing just that, but you appear to have blown those incidents way out of proportion.
The rest of your comment (passing quickly, the problem of braking, cutting people off, drivers' test as a low bar for entry) I fully agree with. I would certainly feel safe driving near you in traffic. Hell, I'd even run interference for you if you were in a big rig.
Speeding == a way to generate revenue for the state while talking a good game about safety. Failure to yield, following too closely == two things that receive very little emphasis which cause a hell of a lot more preventable accidents that speeding could ever cause.
Indeed! A friend of mine who is a police officer doesn't pull people over for speeding unless it is actually dangerous, like 55 in a 35 residential zone (or when he occasionally has to man one of the speed traps in the area; most officers don't do those by choice--it's boring). Now, failure to yield, failure to signal, tailgating, hanging out in a blind spot, hanging out in the passing lane without passing anyone, etc. he targets aggressively.
"Basically, if it pisses me off as a driver and there's a rule for it, I will pull you over and I won't be happy about it. And I guarantee that there's a rule for it." Which I believe, having seen him lugging around my state's two-and-a-half-inch thick vehicle code book.
"If I'm on my way to Arby's and I see someone doing 80, 90 on the bypass, fuck that--I'm going to Arby's. I see someone slow down and make a turn without signaling, I will turn around and hunt you down for that shit."
And you know what? Those people won't like it (or him) and they'll rant to their friends about the bullshit ticket they got, but all tickets are described as bullshit and I bet they'll start making sure to signal.
Duly noted and tagged "idlenotscience"
Now I know someone is going to come up with a long list of "important services"
That or you'll just be modded flamebait for expressing an unpopular view. Groupthink FTW!
I agree with you almost completely except for who to blame. It wasn't Mom and Dad who told everyone they were special, it was that evil, evil man Mr. Rogers.
But I thought we wanted change? ;)
If I say the sky is red, and grass is purple, because I was honestly raised to believe these things, does that mean that a debate over whether clear daytime sky on Earth is blue or red is merely a difference of opinion? I'm fine with you thinking the sky is red, but if you claim that you are mindful of science in the same breath, I'll laugh myself to death.
Okay, I won't call it a strawman, but it is certainly a questionable example.
A better one would be if you were raised to believe that at some point in the past, the sky was red. (Purple grass currently exists, native to northern Africa I believe, so makes for a bad example.) The plain truth is that neither you nor I have any direct experience of what the sky looked like millions of years ago, and a red sky is an entirely plausible concept. There may be a total lack of evidence for both cases, in which case it is obviously a matter of opinion. There may be more evidence for a red sky in the past than a blue sky, in which case it is a matter of how much faith one places in the evidence, and thus at its root still a matter of opinion.
Let's say for example that a series of dreadfully ancient cave paintings were found and all of them that had sky in the background showed it as being red. This is still not a lot of evidence to go on, but it is again plausible to believe that the sky was (at least local to the cave painters) red. It is also plausible to believe that sunset had a special significance for the painters' culture, so they depicted only sunsets (sans sun, naturally, because that would make it too easy...er, i mean, it was too holy to make an image of) in their paintings, and the limited set of colors they had to work with resulted in a uniform red.
Which of these is more plausible? I don't know. I don't know if the chemical makeup of the atmosphere would permit a red sky while supporting human life, but that would be another source of evidence for or against its existence. Your opinion will be swayed by the amount of evidence that you see for each side, and what you count as "evidence" rests on the amount of trust you place in whoever did the calculations or found the paintings or what have you. The whole point of this example is to demonstrate that yes, the past really is a matter of opinion or, if you prefer, "open to interpretation." Witness the revisionist histories and continuing debates of the US: was Lincoln a great liberator or a strong authoritarian? What does the 2nd Amendment really mean? What caused the beginning and end of the Great Depression?
Now, back to dinosaurs. We have a lot of fossil evidence pointing to dinosaurs and man being separated by great gulfs of time. This evidence relies upon our geological model of strata, carbon dating, and likely a bunch of other things that I'm too ignorant to know about--I was never very interested in dinosaurs. However, there is also evidence, including cave paintings amusingly enough, of dinosaurs coexisting and interacting with man. See the images here; I am aware that the page is advocating coexistence due to creationism but the evidence stands on its own. It is possible that each and every painting, relief, and figurine could be explained away and require no coexistence, but it is statistically unlikely. Yet nobody but the Creationists ever mentions this evidence; because it doesn't fit the standard model it simply gets pushed aside.
This is not the scientific method at work.
In conclusion, we know less than we think we know, only fools are positive, facts are rarely as solid as they appear, etc. It's not as cut-and-dry as you have been led to believe, as is the case for several other fields of science that I've looked into.
I also wonder why it is perfectly acceptable to be excited over the possibility of not finding the Higgs Boson which, to my understanding, would invalidate the standard model, yet it is not accepta