This brings up an interesting point -- I think that even if you had a game of circles vs. triangles, people would naturally anthropomorphize them ("My circles are attacking the triangle base"). There was an experiment where children where shown a film of circles being knocked around like billiard balls. When asked what when on, they gave responses like "The ball got hit" or "the ball bounced". Another group was shown a film of circles moving on thier own, knocking each other, knocking back, etc. All of a sudden, the balls had personalities, wills, emotions: "The balls were scared of the big ball", "The red ball hit the green ball back", etc.
The weirdest thing for me was returning to the States after spending about a year in Finland. I heard a 3 year old throwing a tantrum in a store and though, "Oh, my God, what is wrong with that kid?". I though he was mentally ill. Then I realized I just spent a year in a country where I never heard a kid cry in public. Not even a baby.
I'm questioning why we need the opposition in the first place. If it isn't warranted, and the discussion doesn't make sense, then maybe that's the way it should be;)
You see -- it's called NATURAL SELECTION for a reason.
Who calls it that? Are we unnatural? At what point did natural selection stop being natural when it comes to us? Isn't everything we do inherently natural? Or are we gods who are totally seperate from the processes that created us?
Godel's theorem is not a 'fuzzy logic' or 'partially-true' kind of thing. It's regular, good ol' logic. It states that for every axiomatic set powerful enough to describe integers, there are true statements that cannot be proven within that system. Of course, you can construct a yet more powerful axiomatic system, but the same holds for that newer, more powerful system -- there are yet more truths that the new system can't prove.
No one has yet made a machine prove Goedel's theorem.
You are talking out of your arse, to put it kindly.
"And Sun still managed to have 3x as much hear spectacularly fail.We had no less then eight Sun 6500 machines blackbirded in 6 months... Net result: no change in the rate chip were blown."
What lingo are/you/ using!? "Hear spectacularly fail"? "Blackbirded"? What the heck is a "rate chip"?
So saying you can't model brain which is simply more complex without stating a reason seems silly.
"Simply more complex" sounds like an oxymoron.
But anyway, here is the reason why the brain can't be modeled: Goedel's incompleteness theorem. I can't claim to fully understand it, but basically it says this: there are some truths that a turing machine can not prove, but people can recognize as true. It doesn't matter how large or complex a computer you build, it's no different than a small, simple turing machine. This shows that computers are qualitatively different than a mind.
Check out this and this wikipedia article about it.
There are areas of the brain which when stimulated produce sensations in a repeatable pattern. So yes there is evidence that The sensation of Blue IS the activity that's going on.
Except for the inconvienent fact that we can't find any repeatable pattern for one person experiencing blue, much less two or more people experiencing blue when they look at a blue object. Sorry, but the science currently does not support your position. You might be right, but there is no evidence at the current time.
And was the Matrix oracle inhaling fumes from the gas range like the oracle of Delphi was? (Blatantly stolen from another poster).
Re:If you REALLY want to know yourself,...
on
Mapping the Mind
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· Score: 1
If you want a take on consciouess and who you are from the other side of the world, I suggest two books: _Zen Action/Zen Person_ by Kasulis, and _What the Buddha Taught_ by Rahula.
I had the honor of taking several classes with Kasulis at OSU. His PhD is in Philosophy, and he's done a lot with eastern and western philosophy.
The one great story that he tells is when he first walked into the Zen monastery to ask to study with the abbott. The abbott asked him, "What is Zen". Kasulis mumbled something about Zen being a way of life instead of a belief system. The abbott responded "Zen is -- knowing onesself." The same quest we inheried from the Greek philosophers.
Anyway, _What the Buddha Taught_ is another kind of buddhism -- not zen, but I forget which branch. But it's still similiar. The basic philosophy seems to be that there is no self, no soul, other than collections or heaps of experiences.
Let's say you're looking at an EEG of a brain, and the doctor says, "This person is angry. Look at all the anger there," and points to certain lit up parts of the brain. If you had never felt anger, what in the heck would that doctor be talking about? Yet, however, you and I both know what anger 'feels' like, and most people agree that anger is a sensation, something you perceive, just like heat or light. Scientifically, we have defined heat and light, but what is anger, or any other emotion or experience, such as the sensation of redness?
If you counter argue that redness or anger is just the activity of a certain part of the brain, that begs the question, why would activity of that part of the brain be 'redness'? How am 'I' feeling 'anger' when a certain part of my brain lights up?
Re:Next round in: free will vs. biological machine
on
Mapping the Mind
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· Score: 1
"Either our actions are entirely predictable (in principle) from a set of physical laws, or our actions are controlled by fundamentally random processes (which means our actions are not controlled by us!).
Aren't there other types of action, such as something like in chaos theory? think, for example, of weather prediction. It follows laws, but the end result is highly sensitive to initial conditions. There are no shortcuts to prediciting the outcome, you just have to run the whole calculation. I think will and emotions are not like a watch, but rather like a storm system, with complex feedback loops.
If we presume there was more hydrogen then than there is now, what happened to it? Or, on what basis would you assume that the past would be different than the present?
They probably were 'shrewlike' *morphologically*, but genetically they can be very different. It could be an example of convergent evolution (I think) -- that the 'immediate' ancestors of the shrew evolved to exploit the ecological niche that the 'first' mammal exploited, thus they developed similar features.
I don't think that *opening a passport* qualifies as jumping through a hoop. Have you been through customs? You go up to the agent and hand them your passport. They open it, read it, look at you, and hand it back. The RFID tags with a farraday cover makes RFID work with *no change in the current procedure* while still protecting your personal information from listening attacks.
If you want speed and don't care about some integrty features, install or keep 4.1 or 3.23. If you already have a mysql installation and want enterprise level features, but don't want to learn/pay for a new system, install 5.x.
Bottom line, 3.23 and 4.1 are stuck to what they are good at.
Slashdot Mirror
Why not just call it a script or screenplay?
This brings up an interesting point -- I think that even if you had a game of circles vs. triangles, people would naturally anthropomorphize them ("My circles are attacking the triangle base"). There was an experiment where children where shown a film of circles being knocked around like billiard balls. When asked what when on, they gave responses like "The ball got hit" or "the ball bounced". Another group was shown a film of circles moving on thier own, knocking each other, knocking back, etc. All of a sudden, the balls had personalities, wills, emotions: "The balls were scared of the big ball", "The red ball hit the green ball back", etc.
Yes, I am not making a counter argument. You deserve to be dissed for a lousy counter argument.
The weirdest thing for me was returning to the States after spending about a year in Finland. I heard a 3 year old throwing a tantrum in a store and though, "Oh, my God, what is wrong with that kid?". I though he was mentally ill. Then I realized I just spent a year in a country where I never heard a kid cry in public. Not even a baby.
Seriously I've spent about a year and a half in Finland and they are emotional zombies.
Interesting how your 'counter-argument' consists of nothing more than ad-hominem attacks, straw men, and factless assertions.
Despite being a Finn he is experiencing something called "emotion."
Yes, he is a Finn, but his native language is Swedish, so that might explain some of the feelings he is... feeling.
Maybe 'Conscious Selection'?
Who calls it that? Are we unnatural? At what point did natural selection stop being natural when it comes to us? Isn't everything we do inherently natural? Or are we gods who are totally seperate from the processes that created us?
Godel's theorem is not a 'fuzzy logic' or 'partially-true' kind of thing. It's regular, good ol' logic. It states that for every axiomatic set powerful enough to describe integers, there are true statements that cannot be proven within that system. Of course, you can construct a yet more powerful axiomatic system, but the same holds for that newer, more powerful system -- there are yet more truths that the new system can't prove.
No one has yet made a machine prove Goedel's theorem.
You are talking out of your arse, to put it kindly.
A shell called fish? Can you call it shellfish for short? Did you make it GPL? If so, thanks for not being selfish with shellfish!
What lingo are /you/ using!? "Hear spectacularly fail"? "Blackbirded"? What the heck is a "rate chip"?
"Simply more complex" sounds like an oxymoron.
But anyway, here is the reason why the brain can't be modeled: Goedel's incompleteness theorem. I can't claim to fully understand it, but basically it says this: there are some truths that a turing machine can not prove, but people can recognize as true. It doesn't matter how large or complex a computer you build, it's no different than a small, simple turing machine. This shows that computers are qualitatively different than a mind.
Check out this and this wikipedia article about it.
Except for the inconvienent fact that we can't find any repeatable pattern for one person experiencing blue, much less two or more people experiencing blue when they look at a blue object. Sorry, but the science currently does not support your position. You might be right, but there is no evidence at the current time.
And was the Matrix oracle inhaling fumes from the gas range like the oracle of Delphi was? (Blatantly stolen from another poster).
I had the honor of taking several classes with Kasulis at OSU. His PhD is in Philosophy, and he's done a lot with eastern and western philosophy.
The one great story that he tells is when he first walked into the Zen monastery to ask to study with the abbott. The abbott asked him, "What is Zen". Kasulis mumbled something about Zen being a way of life instead of a belief system. The abbott responded "Zen is -- knowing onesself." The same quest we inheried from the Greek philosophers.
Anyway, _What the Buddha Taught_ is another kind of buddhism -- not zen, but I forget which branch. But it's still similiar. The basic philosophy seems to be that there is no self, no soul, other than collections or heaps of experiences.
If you counter argue that redness or anger is just the activity of a certain part of the brain, that begs the question, why would activity of that part of the brain be 'redness'? How am 'I' feeling 'anger' when a certain part of my brain lights up?
Aren't there other types of action, such as something like in chaos theory? think, for example, of weather prediction. It follows laws, but the end result is highly sensitive to initial conditions. There are no shortcuts to prediciting the outcome, you just have to run the whole calculation. I think will and emotions are not like a watch, but rather like a storm system, with complex feedback loops.
So how about wispering? No vocalization there, and you can understand it pretty well!
Rye ergot, the fungus that creates the chemical precursor to LSD
They probably were 'shrewlike' *morphologically*, but genetically they can be very different. It could be an example of convergent evolution (I think) -- that the 'immediate' ancestors of the shrew evolved to exploit the ecological niche that the 'first' mammal exploited, thus they developed similar features.
Yeah, well I have to live here and it *is* that bad.
I don't think that *opening a passport* qualifies as jumping through a hoop. Have you been through customs? You go up to the agent and hand them your passport. They open it, read it, look at you, and hand it back. The RFID tags with a farraday cover makes RFID work with *no change in the current procedure* while still protecting your personal information from listening attacks.
Bottom line, 3.23 and 4.1 are stuck to what they are good at.