I've given this a fair amount of thought, and am frankly suspicious, nay, fairly certain, that uploading your mind to a machine isi mpossible. Actually, not impossible - inconceivable, one step above impossible.
Sure, it may be possible to upload the information "contained" in your mind - your declarative and procedural memories and so forth - to a machine to be used later in some practical fashion. However, I'm of the persuasion that individual consciousness is very much tied to the organizational structure of a particular set of atoms - namely, the atoms that compose our brain, and that thus there would be no way to "upload our mind" to a machine such that we would then be able to continue our life and experience things as ourselves beyond the death of our body.
I don't think "software" so much as runs on the brain as it is *hardwired* into the way the brain works - the computer/hardware/software model is not IMHO useful way of thinking about the brain. There are philosophers who would disagree with me, of course, and they have gained a certain amount of traction. I am not a neuroscientist, or a philosopher, just a lowly philosophy major writing a thesis on philosophy of mind, but I do have a brain disease, and this has given me first-hand insight into way our mental states relate to our physical brain states.
The brain is designed from the ground up to be an analog computer of sorts. It processes things the way it does because it is physically organized to do so, not because software was "written" for it that it somehow serves as the central processor for.
This is not to say that we can't create a sentient, intelligent machine using hardware/software. I believe that we can. At the basis of the brain there is still an algorithm that we can instantiate in software. But the consciousness we create would be a unique one, it might not be guaranteed to think the way we think, and there would be no way to verify that its "qualia"(qualitative experience) would 1) exist or if it does exist 2) be like ours in any way.
Yes, and that whole departure from Apple was just part of his plan. His founding of NeXT was solely for the purpose of inventing a computer that was filled with the kind of bugs that, later, when Apple acquired NeXT, would annoy Rush Limbaugh.
And Pixar? Well, we all know that the only reason that movies like "Ratatouille" and "The Incredibles" are made is to annoy, you guessed it, Rush Limbaugh.
It seems like Steve Jobs really has it out for the guy.
But not just Steve Jobs. The entire American electorate. Rush Limbaugh himself said that by not endorsing McCain, he was doing McCain a favor - because all the independents and moderates who like McCain would flee from him because they hate Rush so.
Your profiling of unionized groups is a tad bid racist. And I have a lack of confidence in your assertion that you or I could simply be "taught" skills like automobile assembly whereas we would have to be somehow uniquely talented to churn out some of the formulaic crap that (some, but not all) TV writers put out. Just like with anything else there are talented writers and there are talented automobile assembly-people. Degrading either group of people with your preconceptions about what their job entails is, in my mind, quite arrogant.
I'm not sure what you're arguing against. I'm not for mandated universal coverage that's completely owned by the government
As for your first argument, How can you have a right to something if you don't have the money to own it or buy it or otherwise have access to it?
Your thinking does not compute. By that rationale, what makes anything else being sold not "rightfully" ours if we can't afford it?
A right in this context is something to which you are entitled, to which you are ensured from your birth to be able to access. You are not entitled to access things that you can't afford.
So you agree that health care is a right, but that we must have to be able to buy it ourselves using only the money that we have gotten from our employers? What if we're unemployed? What if we are broke? We can't afford this health care. We can't access this health care. Therefore, health caare, according to you, is not a right.
As for the rest, I'm not for the government completely "owning" health care. I'm looking for a way to guarantee health care to everyone through a shared private/public system which reduces costs and subsidizes people who can't otherwise afford to buy into it.
Similarly to food. I believe everyone is entitled to food, and if they can't afford food, the government should be able to help them buy it. If someone can't afford food, he shouldn't starve to death. And so we have something called food stamps. But we still have private food suppliers. Food stamps don't destroy your precious free market. But they do help address issues of inequality that an unfettered free market would exacerbate.
A car is not a right. A car is a privilege. Driving is a privilege.
If you leave a free market to run unfettered, without any regulation whatsoever, you get exactly what we've been moving towards in the past few decades: corporatism. I'm for a *free and fair* market - one that rewards innovation and entrepeneurship but does not CRUSH people who have been disadvantaged or disenfranchised.
Moderators: Note that I object to this -1 Troll moderation. Think before you moderate.
When we refer to human rights, that's just what I (and I think everyone else who justifies their belief in human rights without recourse to a God that we don't all necessarily believe in) mean.
Let's say we threw out all of our ethical frameworks, erased civilization and started over. Let's say we sat around a table to come up with a new set of rules for civilization.
Every rational person at the table would agree that a certain set of rights belongs to everyone at the table. We might have to perform the experiment to see, but to name a few that I think would probably come up, right to life, right to live without torture, right to pursue happiness). I think right to health care falls under "right to life," since not having health care could very well bring about your death.
When we refer to human rights, that's just what we mean. From an original position, these are the rights that would produce the stablest framework within which people are free to pursue their rational self-interest.
Human rights might not be a "thing out there in the world," but they exist insofar as they can be rationally discovered and they can be universally upheld.
While I agree that American culture revolves too much around television and other distractions, I think what this deal represents is much more than that. Organized labor has managed to mount an effective protest against executive management and work out a deal that favors both parties. That's the first time that's happened in awhile.
This should give organized labor across the country a little bit of confidence.
So it represents something big even if it is just the television and film writers.
I don't know much at all about molecular biology, but I wonder if this finding be used to develop a new method of DNA testing?
If two strands of DNA clump together under the right circumstances, then couldn't we decide whether a person's DNA is at a crime scene or not(for example) by putting that person's DNA in a dish with DNA from the crime scene and watching how well they clump together?
You would be right, and +1 Informative, if only from TFA:
""We wanted to make biologically contained Ebola virus so that we can drink it," said Yoshihiro Kawaoka.
And if you're going to point out that I simply added the part in bold myself, then I can onlly say in my defense that it is probably what Yoshihiro Kawoaka is thinking anyway.
Interesting point, and I agree. But the real reason this is a problem as it shows the growing influence of anti-intellectualism and religiosity in our country, and a diminishing understanding of what science is and what distinguishes it from religion.
This is a real, urgent problem - we are lagging behind other countries and losing our competitive edge, and we wonder why this is when our attitude towards science is: "The Bible is as good at scieence as peer-reviewed journals." As long as this attitude persists, we'll see people like George W. Bush and other anti-science evangelicals shaping our government's science policy, and that affects us all.
It also has to do with the kind of thinking this attitude promotes. Why critically analyze something when you can just think what you've been told to think by your elders? That's not good for democracy, that's not good for anyone.
How to fix? Just aggressively answer every anti-evolution statement, and help sponsor and support people fighting to keep evolution the ONLY scientific theory of the origin of life taught in schools.
Long-term memory is one of the most crucial parts of your overall cognitive repertoire. This drug helps restore overall cognitive functioning, which includes memory retrieval and working memory and all the important things that make you, you. Long-term memories are encoded into the very same neurons whose synapses this drug helps recover. So I suspect that long-term memory would be at least partially restored as well. But it only does this by reducing the inflammation that makes these cognitive impairments begin to worsen - if the patient has had Alzheimer's for a long time (i.e. there is a permanent cell damage and death in an elderly brain which is no longer very plastic) I doubt the drug would be as efficacious. But this is just me speculating.
Don't really see your point here. I can name lots of other 'government forces' that are much worse than the system we live/used to live under. Totalitarianism? Soviet-style communism? Nazism? Monarchy? Imperialism? You know, governments that actively rounded up and killed much of their populace as if the people themselves and any of their competing ideas are an existential threat?
In our society the reason we get so outraged about murder/torture/privacy invasion/etc etc is because, at least in our country, 1) we are allowed to be outraged, and 2) those things are the exception, not the rule.
For much of human history it was the other way around.
I'm not saying we're anywhere close to perfect(especially in recent history). I'd give us about a C. Our institutions may be eroding, but there still is something very much salvageable in this democracy we have.There is a mechanism by which we can turn things around. I just wish people would get on the ball and stop ignoring the fact that they still live in a society with civic responsibilities. They are obliged to learn something about the world in which they live and make responsible choices on each others' behalf.
Re:Strap a board to CowboyNeal's back?
on
Lap Desks
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· Score: 1
CowboyNeal was the star of "Brokeback Lapdesks". He doesn't need a board.
Distinction without a difference. Also, I did say that smoking is what causes someone to be underweight. This would produce a false correlation of underweight people who are more likely to die of coronary and lung disease.
Just a thought: According to the graph in the first link, underweight people have a greater chance than overweight people of dying of lung diseases and coronary heart disease. However, smoking, a major causative factor in both groups of diseases, also suppresses the appetite and causes people who would normally be normal or overweight to become underweight. Thus, underweight people might be more likely to die from lung disease and heart disease, but this may just be becaquse underweight people are more likely to smoke.
So, even if smoking isn't actually a major factor int he result, one has to look at the lifestyles that each weight group is likely to lead in order to determine what the important relationships are. Causations are what's important, not correlations.
You forgot some stage directions. Here, I'll fix it for you.
Scott: ...Er...It's only running Vista, if that helps. I erased that...oh-so-lovely (whoops) Mac operating system...Mac X, or whatever it's called...
Ballmer unhinges his shoulder, grabs Scott's dome, and rubs his moist armpit up and down Scott's pouting face, while screaming,
Ballmer: You fucking fuck! Get the fuck out of my fucking face!
Ballmer grabs a chair. Scott exits quickly stage left. As he leaves, he hears the loud, anguished wails of Ballmer, crooning like a beached orca: "DEVELOPERS!!!!" For this is the mourning call of Ballmer.
Yeah, totally unprofessional. He mentioned that he was working for a Fortune 500 company. That narrows down the number of companies he could possibly work for to.......500....
It's amazing the company you can't identify doesn't fire him right now for violating the unspecified NDA you don't know he's under.
I don't know what you're trying to say. What areas do you think are altered when you learn to be optimistic 'through experience and practice'? The rostral anterior cingulate and the amygdala, the areas responsible for optimism, of course.
Slashdot Mirror
I've given this a fair amount of thought, and am frankly suspicious, nay, fairly certain, that uploading your mind to a machine isi mpossible. Actually, not impossible - inconceivable, one step above impossible.
Sure, it may be possible to upload the information "contained" in your mind - your declarative and procedural memories and so forth - to a machine to be used later in some practical fashion. However, I'm of the persuasion that individual consciousness is very much tied to the organizational structure of a particular set of atoms - namely, the atoms that compose our brain, and that thus there would be no way to "upload our mind" to a machine such that we would then be able to continue our life and experience things as ourselves beyond the death of our body.
I don't think "software" so much as runs on the brain as it is *hardwired* into the way the brain works - the computer/hardware/software model is not IMHO useful way of thinking about the brain. There are philosophers who would disagree with me, of course, and they have gained a certain amount of traction. I am not a neuroscientist, or a philosopher, just a lowly philosophy major writing a thesis on philosophy of mind, but I do have a brain disease, and this has given me first-hand insight into way our mental states relate to our physical brain states.
The brain is designed from the ground up to be an analog computer of sorts. It processes things the way it does because it is physically organized to do so, not because software was "written" for it that it somehow serves as the central processor for.
This is not to say that we can't create a sentient, intelligent machine using hardware/software. I believe that we can. At the basis of the brain there is still an algorithm that we can instantiate in software. But the consciousness we create would be a unique one, it might not be guaranteed to think the way we think, and there would be no way to verify that its "qualia"(qualitative experience) would 1) exist or if it does exist 2) be like ours in any way.
Yes, and that whole departure from Apple was just part of his plan. His founding of NeXT was solely for the purpose of inventing a computer that was filled with the kind of bugs that, later, when Apple acquired NeXT, would annoy Rush Limbaugh.
And Pixar? Well, we all know that the only reason that movies like "Ratatouille" and "The Incredibles" are made is to annoy, you guessed it, Rush Limbaugh.
It seems like Steve Jobs really has it out for the guy.
But not just Steve Jobs. The entire American electorate. Rush Limbaugh himself said that by not endorsing McCain, he was doing McCain a favor - because all the independents and moderates who like McCain would flee from him because they hate Rush so.
The guy can't catch a break.
Your profiling of unionized groups is a tad bid racist. And I have a lack of confidence in your assertion that you or I could simply be "taught" skills like automobile assembly whereas we would have to be somehow uniquely talented to churn out some of the formulaic crap that (some, but not all) TV writers put out. Just like with anything else there are talented writers and there are talented automobile assembly-people. Degrading either group of people with your preconceptions about what their job entails is, in my mind, quite arrogant.
I'm not sure what you're arguing against. I'm not for mandated universal coverage that's completely owned by the government
As for your first argument,
How can you have a right to something if you don't have the money to own it or buy it or otherwise have access to it?
Your thinking does not compute. By that rationale, what makes anything else being sold not "rightfully" ours if we can't afford it?
A right in this context is something to which you are entitled, to which you are ensured from your birth to be able to access. You are not entitled to access things that you can't afford.
So you agree that health care is a right, but that we must have to be able to buy it ourselves using only the money that we have gotten from our employers? What if we're unemployed? What if we are broke? We can't afford this health care. We can't access this health care. Therefore, health caare, according to you, is not a right.
As for the rest, I'm not for the government completely "owning" health care. I'm looking for a way to guarantee health care to everyone through a shared private/public system which reduces costs and subsidizes people who can't otherwise afford to buy into it.
Similarly to food. I believe everyone is entitled to food, and if they can't afford food, the government should be able to help them buy it. If someone can't afford food, he shouldn't starve to death. And so we have something called food stamps. But we still have private food suppliers. Food stamps don't destroy your precious free market. But they do help address issues of inequality that an unfettered free market would exacerbate.
A car is not a right. A car is a privilege. Driving is a privilege.
If you leave a free market to run unfettered, without any regulation whatsoever, you get exactly what we've been moving towards in the past few decades: corporatism. I'm for a *free and fair* market - one that rewards innovation and entrepeneurship but does not CRUSH people who have been disadvantaged or disenfranchised.
Moderators: Note that I object to this -1 Troll moderation. Think before you moderate.
To correct myself,
When we refer to human rights, that's just what I (and I think everyone else who justifies their belief in human rights without recourse to a God that we don't all necessarily believe in) mean.
Let's say we threw out all of our ethical frameworks, erased civilization and started over. Let's say we sat around a table to come up with a new set of rules for civilization.
Every rational person at the table would agree that a certain set of rights belongs to everyone at the table. We might have to perform the experiment to see, but to name a few that I think would probably come up, right to life, right to live without torture, right to pursue happiness). I think right to health care falls under "right to life," since not having health care could very well bring about your death.
When we refer to human rights, that's just what we mean. From an original position, these are the rights that would produce the stablest framework within which people are free to pursue their rational self-interest.
Human rights might not be a "thing out there in the world," but they exist insofar as they can be rationally discovered and they can be universally upheld.
While I agree that American culture revolves too much around television and other distractions, I think what this deal represents is much more than that. Organized labor has managed to mount an effective protest against executive management and work out a deal that favors both parties. That's the first time that's happened in awhile.
This should give organized labor across the country a little bit of confidence.
So it represents something big even if it is just the television and film writers.
I don't surmise to know what the BIll-HIllary relationship is like behind the scenes.
All I know is that there seems to be a lot of quid pro quo. Both sides are benefitting.
Remember, Clinton used "Two for the price of one" during his own campaign, too.
It's a power marriage. They both benefit because they are both savvy, brilliant politicians.
I'm voting for Obama because I don't think ruling families are what the founding fathers envisioned.
House is an exception, not the rule.
And it's too bad. Doctors don't spend all day on a case. They are in and out in 20 minutes.
I wish more people were as competent as House, M.D. was, even if it meant being more paternalistic.
But not everybody is brilliant, and so we can't afford to have a system which allows the kind of paternalistic medicine House practices.
I don't know much at all about molecular biology, but I wonder if this finding be used to develop a new method of DNA testing?
If two strands of DNA clump together under the right circumstances, then couldn't we decide whether a person's DNA is at a crime scene or not(for example) by putting that person's DNA in a dish with DNA from the crime scene and watching how well they clump together?
Or is this just too inexact?
You would be right, and +1 Informative, if only from TFA:
""We wanted to make biologically contained Ebola virus so that we can drink it," said Yoshihiro Kawaoka.
And if you're going to point out that I simply added the part in bold myself, then I can onlly say in my defense that it is probably what Yoshihiro Kawoaka is thinking anyway.
Interesting point, and I agree. But the real reason this is a problem as it shows the growing influence of anti-intellectualism and religiosity in our country, and a diminishing understanding of what science is and what distinguishes it from religion.
This is a real, urgent problem - we are lagging behind other countries and losing our competitive edge, and we wonder why this is when our attitude towards science is: "The Bible is as good at scieence as peer-reviewed journals." As long as this attitude persists, we'll see people like George W. Bush and other anti-science evangelicals shaping our government's science policy, and that affects us all.
It also has to do with the kind of thinking this attitude promotes. Why critically analyze something when you can just think what you've been told to think by your elders? That's not good for democracy, that's not good for anyone.
How to fix? Just aggressively answer every anti-evolution statement, and help sponsor and support people fighting to keep evolution the ONLY scientific theory of the origin of life taught in schools.
Long-term memory is one of the most crucial parts of your overall cognitive repertoire. This drug helps restore overall cognitive functioning, which includes memory retrieval and working memory and all the important things that make you, you. Long-term memories are encoded into the very same neurons whose synapses this drug helps recover. So I suspect that long-term memory would be at least partially restored as well. But it only does this by reducing the inflammation that makes these cognitive impairments begin to worsen - if the patient has had Alzheimer's for a long time (i.e. there is a permanent cell damage and death in an elderly brain which is no longer very plastic) I doubt the drug would be as efficacious. But this is just me speculating.
Don't try this with your Powerbook G4 Titanium.
Don't really see your point here. I can name lots of other 'government forces' that are much worse than the system we live/used to live under. Totalitarianism? Soviet-style communism? Nazism? Monarchy? Imperialism? You know, governments that actively rounded up and killed much of their populace as if the people themselves and any of their competing ideas are an existential threat?
In our society the reason we get so outraged about murder/torture/privacy invasion/etc etc is because, at least in our country, 1) we are allowed to be outraged, and 2) those things are the exception, not the rule.
For much of human history it was the other way around.
I'm not saying we're anywhere close to perfect(especially in recent history). I'd give us about a C. Our institutions may be eroding, but there still is something very much salvageable in this democracy we have.There is a mechanism by which we can turn things around. I just wish people would get on the ball and stop ignoring the fact that they still live in a society with civic responsibilities. They are obliged to learn something about the world in which they live and make responsible choices on each others' behalf.
CowboyNeal was the star of "Brokeback Lapdesks". He doesn't need a board.
Distinction without a difference. Also, I did say that smoking is what causes someone to be underweight. This would produce a false correlation of underweight people who are more likely to die of coronary and lung disease.
Just a thought: According to the graph in the first link, underweight people have a greater chance than overweight people of dying of lung diseases and coronary heart disease. However, smoking, a major causative factor in both groups of diseases, also suppresses the appetite and causes people who would normally be normal or overweight to become underweight. Thus, underweight people might be more likely to die from lung disease and heart disease, but this may just be becaquse underweight people are more likely to smoke.
So, even if smoking isn't actually a major factor int he result, one has to look at the lifestyles that each weight group is likely to lead in order to determine what the important relationships are. Causations are what's important, not correlations.
Which raises the (perhaps even more important) question: If an astronaut soils his/her Depends, which country is most responsible for changing it?
You forgot some stage directions. Here, I'll fix it for you.
...Er...It's only running Vista, if that helps. I erased that...oh-so-lovely (whoops) Mac operating system...Mac X, or whatever it's called...
Scott:
Ballmer unhinges his shoulder, grabs Scott's dome, and rubs his moist armpit up and down Scott's pouting face, while screaming,
Ballmer: You fucking fuck! Get the fuck out of my fucking face!
Ballmer grabs a chair. Scott exits quickly stage left. As he leaves, he hears the loud, anguished wails of Ballmer, crooning like a beached orca: "DEVELOPERS!!!!" For this is the mourning call of Ballmer.
Yeah, totally unprofessional. He mentioned that he was working for a Fortune 500 company. That narrows down the number of companies he could possibly work for to.......500....
It's amazing the company you can't identify doesn't fire him right now for violating the unspecified NDA you don't know he's under.
Maybe you should consider trolling as an AC.
The White House fires the entire Justice Department.
I don't know what you're trying to say. What areas do you think are altered when you learn to be optimistic 'through experience and practice'? The rostral anterior cingulate and the amygdala, the areas responsible for optimism, of course.
So once someone commits a crime - that's it for them, no chance for redemption, no opportunity to repent, no way to earn back trustworthiness?
Knowledge is valuable, no matter where it comes from.
That's quite charitable. It might be equally likely that he does know, and is lying outright.