The people who think quantum mechanics is going to explain consciousness are making a category error. Epistemologically speaking, it may very well be that quantum mechanics explains certain aspects of our cognition. But these aspects - i.e. its features of memory, attention, selectivity, planning - are often referred to, particularly by Jeffrey Chalmers, the "easy" problem of consciousness. This is because, as cognitive science has already shown, cognition can usefully be broken down into modules and explained as information processing subsystems which themselves are explained by the structure of the neural tissue they reside in.
The hard problem of mind is another story altogether. This is the problem of phenomenal consciousness, the quality of "what is it like?" It is the problem of how experience arises at all. The problem is with saying that "Certain theories are insufficient for explaining consciousness, but if we just go *smaller*, i.e., add more detail to our theory, the mystery of how experience arises will be solved." I'm afraid this is not so, beecause we are trying to bridge the fundamental gap between two epistemological kinds: subject and object. Both subject and object may very well emerge from the same neural substrate, but exactly how they do so might also be empirically unverifiable. I cannot compare your subjective experience. I cannot connect our two brains together and examine your experience - as soon as it is in my brains it is my experience. And most importantly of all, I cannot ask a computer whether it feels certain things and be able to verify that its response is the truth. No matter how much physical detail is in our theory, I am afraid that a physical theory will always be in the realm of the objective, and the question we're asking is about subjective experience. And so this is a philosophical question, and I'm not even sure philosophy will ever have a suitable response.
In 0install, it seems like you still have multiple install points unless you enable the system-wide cache that lets any user install into it. Otherwise there might end up being multiple copies anyway.
as far as the lingering bugs go, this may be true. but if, for example, i'm writing a GUI front-end to a back-end library , it becomes my responsibility to update that package so that my own application is bug-free, no? and if there is no bug, then no harm, no foul in letting my library lag behind a little bit.
in other words, my interest as a developer in ensuring the smoothest experience possible for my users is enough to guarantee that i fix all the bugs that might impact that experience, including those in my dependencies.
i understand that, but on the mac project that i work on, we use an automated package management system to compile the dependencies, which we then include inside the app bundle. most of the time we don't have to patch anything, and if we do - to get something to compile - we just send the patch upstream. the main difference ends up being that we're the ones who run the compile/install command instead of our users. the benefit is that the user just drags and drops the application bundle into their applications folder and the install is complete
you're right about the application developer having to manage the dependencies - however, i guess i ask this: might that be a fair price to pay for the cleanest user-experience possible? package management of this kind seems to have making things easier for the developer, and not necessarily the user.
It seems to work very similarly to other package management systems. The main difference is that it stores the downloaded dependencies in a user-owned cache, and that the application developer, instead of the particular distribution, defines the publically metadata package definition that lists all the dependencies. Are there any other differences?
If this is right, I don't see wide adoption unless distributions start replacing their official package management systems with it. If you're trying to make a universal system that can be used everywhere, why not just make a universal, self-contained application bundle, similar to the Mac OS X.app bundle, that contains all necessary dependencies without having to download them separately? This way users drive adoption instead of distributions.
Or he should just get a Rackspace/Amazon/Azure cloud instance for $10 a month (Rackspace, don't know about the others) plus additional bandwidth use and have basically all the same things. He's not going to start with millions of user. Frankly, this whole thing "millions of users" seems a bit cavalier and kind of pie-in-the-sky without knowing what it is and who is backing it. I remember saying similar things to myself when I was a teenager - oh yeah, no problem, we'll have millions of users. Sigh.
Whatever he's doing, dedicated hardware is not necessary at this point. Since the point of clouds is that they are scalable, why not just go straight there? Not much money.
I disagree. Google Voice - although non-free - gives you a phone number that can map to your google talk account, and Google Talk servers are federated. This makes XMPP and Jingle a viable competitor to Skype with features analogous to Skype-to-Skype and Skype-In. You just need to be able to "Talk out" - which you can do from the Gmail interface. Call and video quality are comparable as well.
Jingle needs clients on more platforms, but I can see it as a viable competitor to Skype.
Wow, that's not true at all. In the worst case scenario of human deadliness, they're about equal. In any other case, I'd put my money on nature for mass destruction every time.
World War II killed over 60 million people. The 1918 flu epidemic killed between 50 and 100 million people. Bacterial infections can be equivalently (or more) deadly: The bubonic plague in Europe killed 75 million people. If you add up all of the dead from all of the military conflicts in history and compare it to "acts of God" , I'm pretty sure nature would come out on top (it would have had to, in order for us to evolve so quickly.)
I'd say we should be putting at least the same amount of money into pathogen defense as we do into military defense.
I agree, and honestly, I was mostly kidding. Having a sense of humor doesn't necessarily detract from the seriousness of people doing their jobs (although it can), and I obviously doubt that the people writing their web content have a direct hand in level 4 bio-containment anyway. That said, I would like seriousness to be maintained in whatever form most guarantees our safety.
I don't give a shit about Gtk+. However, Glib is critical to my ability to port certain software to other OS's; lots of Unix software uses a Glib event loop, GObject's, GModule's, and GThread's underneath. If Gtk+ goes Linux only, how long until Glib also does?
The tribunals only gave that to the Nazi's the Allies didn't kill during the war. If you forget, America is still at war (with Terror, not sure how we can battle and abstract concept, but hey). Therefore, Bin Laden was a war combatant, and assuming he didn't surrender (do you think he would have?), the American soldiers who shot him were under no obligation to read him his rights and take him, unharmed, into custody.
I tend to think, unless he had a suicide vest or a gun or another potentially lethal weapon (knife), that if it was possible to subdue him without being seriously injured or killed he should have been subdued. Interestingly, the President announced that bin Laden had been "captured and killed." Well, that's a problem - if he had been captured, he should have been tried, and then killed. If he was killed because he resisted or because he might have had a suicide vest on, that's another story altogether. Since we don't know all the details of this mission and we might never know them, I can't really evaluate what happened. Until I hear more details about how bin Laden resisted, I'm inclined to believe he should have been subdued and arrested as a POW or international criminal.
I know American's do a lot of shit to earn a bad reputation, but for your anti-American sentiment to be so strong that you would actually support Bin Laden rather than admit that America might have done the right thing in this instance is disgusting.
Where did I say I support bin Laden? Because I said he was a war criminal and murderer who deserves a trial? I support a rapist's right to a trial, too, but I do not support rape. These are the critical distinctions made by the bill of rights. We can be civil and just at the same time. People should be able to have reasonable disagreements about issues of law and constitutional protections without calling each other un-American or anti-American. In fact,I'm arguing this because I believe the U.S. Constitution derives its power from being universalizable. So it's because I believe in America and the U.S. that I'm arguing bin Laden should have had his day in court before being executed, if he was in fact captured before he was killed.
That's not really the point or what he's arguing. The presumption of innocence is something we give to our worst, our very, very, very worst, most obviously guilty criminals. It was also something tribunals gave to the Nazis, some of the very worst criminals in all of world history. It is a bedrock prinicple of Western society. But we didn't give it here. Why? Well, we still don't know all the details. But if he resisted in a way where he couldn't be subdued, they sure haven't told us. It looks, from the information we do have, that he was simply assassinated, without due process of any kind.
Look, almost every single one of us thinks Osama bin Laden was responsible to murdering 3,000 people on 9/11. But the court of public opinion doesn't have legal standing. Someone isn't exempt from due process simply because we all think he's very, very, very bad as opposed to merely very, very bad. The only legal way that we have for establishing Osama bin Laden's guilt as a legal fact is through a trial. And we didn't do that.
I wouldn't be too alarmed. I'm sure an iOS App will be forthcoming to replace any lost Flash functionality. If not they risk losing the entire block of iOS users when Apple releases its own cloud service.
Let me add: the brain is so complex that it's not really amenable to generalizations. Therefore, I was mistaken in generalizing or seeming to speak for others, and I apologize.
Ok. Well, I wasn't going to say this, but it's not just people I know. I have a brain disease, myself. It's not schizophrenia or being eidetic but it's very much a perceptual/memory problem.
I would not consider it a gift. I'm not by any means arguing on behalf of discriminating against the neurologically ill. What I am for is recognizing that these illnesses do have a negative impact on quality of life (though this is not to say for everyone, but I do speak for myself in this regard.)
That's not the same thing as determining relevance.
I think it pretty much is. 'Forgetting/remembering' at the neurological level is an emergent property of millions of neurons selecting salient information from their incident stimuli. What ends up being encoded into long term memory is a collaboration of each of these neural networks working on their piece of the 'salience' puzzle. The salience can be evaluated in a number of different ways - is it emotionally significant? is it practical information? But, actually, this research concerns even more basic evaluations, such as 'What are the basic grammatical structures in this sentence? What are the words, what are their meanings and how are they arranged? What is the content of the sentence as a whole?" If the wrong information is thrown out *or* remembered, it becomes very difficult for the brain to make sense of it.
So forgetting/remembering are, in many ways, the same thing. In the process of remembering, we have to forget, or our memories quickly become incoherent.
I don't think that they're saying that episodic memory improves from hyper-learning. A 'normal' brain throws out most of the information it receives in the process of highlighting the important, useful information that's incident on the brain's circuitry. Because of this ability, the brain is able to create a coherent narrative for itself.
The scientists are saying that, in schizophrenic brains, what ends up being remembered is not this useful information. Instead, the wrong information is selected by the neural circuits such that the wrong information ends up encoded in long-term memory. This information is selected as being just as important, or even more important, in the episodic 'story' than practical information, such as, for example, the reminders that you point out they forget. The end result is that the long-term memories end up being incoherent.
So it's an issue of hyper-learning everything, not just what's important. If it was simply increased salience for what was important, that would be usefully improved memory. Also, while the symptoms of schizophrenia that you point out are correct, those are the outward psychological symptoms. These scientists are exploring what happens neurologically, at the level of individual neurons.
This is not a positive trait or a gift. It's a brain disease, and brain diseases produce lots of suffering at the deepest possible level. As someone who knows people with brain diseases I can tell you that "hyperlearning", in the same sense of "hyperlexia" do not qualify as gifts, even though they might seem to because they have the prefix 'hyper-' in them. The brain's ability to detect the salience of certain information, while throwing out other, less salient information, is central to its ability to function and perform basic tasks in the world. Without these abilities self-sufficiency and quality of life diminish precipitously.
Because it's easier to install a desktop system and figure out what you don't want then install a generic distribution and figure out what you do want. I think it comes down to the fact that what I do want numbers in the thousands of packages and what I don't want numbers....10.
This is all just to say that i agree with what the above parent was saying. Perhaps I should add some transclusions where my argument here is redundant:-)
It seems like he's not just trying to change the structure of computer documents - he's also trying to change the structure of human creativity. Because human thought is actually quite linear - it progresses through logical sequences, and attends to one conceptual unit or task at one time. It can switch pretty quickly between different streams of thought, but not without a cognitive cost. So it seems like when we create something we usually wish to do so with as few interruptions as possible, or else we risk cluttering up our working memory. For example, when I write an analytical paper, I write all of my argument's 'original' ideas down in the most uninterrupted fashion first. Only then do I add all the supporting quotes I collected from source works.
It seems like he's trying to invert this process. He's trying to make the way in which our document is derived from other documents central to the process of creating it. I guess his argument is that the mode of creation I'm talking about here (linear) is merely an artifact of having used paper for so many millenia. However, I don't think so. I think it's pretty central to the way our cognition works, and the fact that we found paper so useful is merely a symptom of that.
Slashdot Mirror
Here's a shot:
The people who think quantum mechanics is going to explain consciousness are making a category error. Epistemologically speaking, it may very well be that quantum mechanics explains certain aspects of our cognition. But these aspects - i.e. its features of memory, attention, selectivity, planning - are often referred to, particularly by Jeffrey Chalmers, the "easy" problem of consciousness. This is because, as cognitive science has already shown, cognition can usefully be broken down into modules and explained as information processing subsystems which themselves are explained by the structure of the neural tissue they reside in.
The hard problem of mind is another story altogether. This is the problem of phenomenal consciousness, the quality of "what is it like?" It is the problem of how experience arises at all. The problem is with saying that "Certain theories are insufficient for explaining consciousness, but if we just go *smaller*, i.e., add more detail to our theory, the mystery of how experience arises will be solved." I'm afraid this is not so, beecause we are trying to bridge the fundamental gap between two epistemological kinds: subject and object. Both subject and object may very well emerge from the same neural substrate, but exactly how they do so might also be empirically unverifiable. I cannot compare your subjective experience. I cannot connect our two brains together and examine your experience - as soon as it is in my brains it is my experience. And most importantly of all, I cannot ask a computer whether it feels certain things and be able to verify that its response is the truth. No matter how much physical detail is in our theory, I am afraid that a physical theory will always be in the realm of the objective, and the question we're asking is about subjective experience. And so this is a philosophical question, and I'm not even sure philosophy will ever have a suitable response.
(but point taken about multiple copies in memory.)
In 0install, it seems like you still have multiple install points unless you enable the system-wide cache that lets any user install into it. Otherwise there might end up being multiple copies anyway.
as far as the lingering bugs go, this may be true. but if, for example, i'm writing a GUI front-end to a back-end library , it becomes my responsibility to update that package so that my own application is bug-free, no? and if there is no bug, then no harm, no foul in letting my library lag behind a little bit.
in other words, my interest as a developer in ensuring the smoothest experience possible for my users is enough to guarantee that i fix all the bugs that might impact that experience, including those in my dependencies.
i understand that, but on the mac project that i work on, we use an automated package management system to compile the dependencies, which we then include inside the app bundle. most of the time we don't have to patch anything, and if we do - to get something to compile - we just send the patch upstream. the main difference ends up being that we're the ones who run the compile/install command instead of our users. the benefit is that the user just drags and drops the application bundle into their applications folder and the install is complete
you're right about the application developer having to manage the dependencies - however, i guess i ask this: might that be a fair price to pay for the cleanest user-experience possible? package management of this kind seems to have making things easier for the developer, and not necessarily the user.
It seems to work very similarly to other package management systems. The main difference is that it stores the downloaded dependencies in a user-owned cache, and that the application developer, instead of the particular distribution, defines the publically metadata package definition that lists all the dependencies. Are there any other differences?
If this is right, I don't see wide adoption unless distributions start replacing their official package management systems with it. If you're trying to make a universal system that can be used everywhere, why not just make a universal, self-contained application bundle, similar to the Mac OS X .app bundle, that contains all necessary dependencies without having to download them separately? This way users drive adoption instead of distributions.
Uhm. I was talking about Rackspace, like I said. And a single instance is $10.95.
Or he should just get a Rackspace/Amazon/Azure cloud instance for $10 a month (Rackspace, don't know about the others) plus additional bandwidth use and have basically all the same things. He's not going to start with millions of user. Frankly, this whole thing "millions of users" seems a bit cavalier and kind of pie-in-the-sky without knowing what it is and who is backing it. I remember saying similar things to myself when I was a teenager - oh yeah, no problem, we'll have millions of users. Sigh.
Whatever he's doing, dedicated hardware is not necessary at this point. Since the point of clouds is that they are scalable, why not just go straight there? Not much money.
Why even introduce a whole bunch of bureaucratic red-tape to enforce such a provision?
Just be even more on-point: Pass a law that bans rapture.
God will obey, but I doubt Blondie will.
I disagree. Google Voice - although non-free - gives you a phone number that can map to your google talk account, and Google Talk servers are federated. This makes XMPP and Jingle a viable competitor to Skype with features analogous to Skype-to-Skype and Skype-In. You just need to be able to "Talk out" - which you can do from the Gmail interface. Call and video quality are comparable as well.
Jingle needs clients on more platforms, but I can see it as a viable competitor to Skype.
Wow, that's not true at all. In the worst case scenario of human deadliness, they're about equal. In any other case, I'd put my money on nature for mass destruction every time.
World War II killed over 60 million people. The 1918 flu epidemic killed between 50 and 100 million people. Bacterial infections can be equivalently (or more) deadly: The bubonic plague in Europe killed 75 million people. If you add up all of the dead from all of the military conflicts in history and compare it to "acts of God" , I'm pretty sure nature would come out on top (it would have had to, in order for us to evolve so quickly.)
I'd say we should be putting at least the same amount of money into pathogen defense as we do into military defense.
I agree, and honestly, I was mostly kidding. Having a sense of humor doesn't necessarily detract from the seriousness of people doing their jobs (although it can), and I obviously doubt that the people writing their web content have a direct hand in level 4 bio-containment anyway.
That said, I would like seriousness to be maintained in whatever form most guarantees our safety.
It doesn't matter how it happens; it shouldn't be. Not if KDE intends to draw a little bit of desktop market share its way.
I'm reminded of this guy: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yo3uxqwTxk0
I don't give a shit about Gtk+. However, Glib is critical to my ability to port certain software to other OS's; lots of Unix software uses a Glib event loop, GObject's, GModule's, and GThread's underneath. If Gtk+ goes Linux only, how long until Glib also does?
I tend to think, unless he had a suicide vest or a gun or another potentially lethal weapon (knife), that if it was possible to subdue him without being seriously injured or killed he should have been subdued. Interestingly, the President announced that bin Laden had been "captured and killed." Well, that's a problem - if he had been captured, he should have been tried, and then killed. If he was killed because he resisted or because he might have had a suicide vest on, that's another story altogether. Since we don't know all the details of this mission and we might never know them, I can't really evaluate what happened. Until I hear more details about how bin Laden resisted, I'm inclined to believe he should have been subdued and arrested as a POW or international criminal.
Where did I say I support bin Laden? Because I said he was a war criminal and murderer who deserves a trial? I support a rapist's right to a trial, too, but I do not support rape. These are the critical distinctions made by the bill of rights. We can be civil and just at the same time. People should be able to have reasonable disagreements about issues of law and constitutional protections without calling each other un-American or anti-American. In fact,I'm arguing this because I believe the U.S. Constitution derives its power from being universalizable. So it's because I believe in America and the U.S. that I'm arguing bin Laden should have had his day in court before being executed, if he was in fact captured before he was killed.
That's not really the point or what he's arguing. The presumption of innocence is something we give to our worst, our very, very, very worst, most obviously guilty criminals. It was also something tribunals gave to the Nazis, some of the very worst criminals in all of world history. It is a bedrock prinicple of Western society. But we didn't give it here. Why? Well, we still don't know all the details. But if he resisted in a way where he couldn't be subdued, they sure haven't told us. It looks, from the information we do have, that he was simply assassinated, without due process of any kind.
Look, almost every single one of us thinks Osama bin Laden was responsible to murdering 3,000 people on 9/11. But the court of public opinion doesn't have legal standing. Someone isn't exempt from due process simply because we all think he's very, very, very bad as opposed to merely very, very bad. The only legal way that we have for establishing Osama bin Laden's guilt as a legal fact is through a trial. And we didn't do that.
I wouldn't be too alarmed. I'm sure an iOS App will be forthcoming to replace any lost Flash functionality. If not they risk losing the entire block of iOS users when Apple releases its own cloud service.
Let me add: the brain is so complex that it's not really amenable to generalizations. Therefore, I was mistaken in generalizing or seeming to speak for others, and I apologize.
Ok. Well, I wasn't going to say this, but it's not just people I know. I have a brain disease, myself. It's not schizophrenia or being eidetic but it's very much a perceptual/memory problem.
I would not consider it a gift. I'm not by any means arguing on behalf of discriminating against the neurologically ill. What I am for is recognizing that these illnesses do have a negative impact on quality of life (though this is not to say for everyone, but I do speak for myself in this regard.)
That's not the same thing as determining relevance.
I think it pretty much is. 'Forgetting/remembering' at the neurological level is an emergent property of millions of neurons selecting salient information from their incident stimuli. What ends up being encoded into long term memory is a collaboration of each of these neural networks working on their piece of the 'salience' puzzle. The salience can be evaluated in a number of different ways - is it emotionally significant? is it practical information? But, actually, this research concerns even more basic evaluations, such as 'What are the basic grammatical structures in this sentence? What are the words, what are their meanings and how are they arranged? What is the content of the sentence as a whole?" If the wrong information is thrown out *or* remembered, it becomes very difficult for the brain to make sense of it.
So forgetting/remembering are, in many ways, the same thing. In the process of remembering, we have to forget, or our memories quickly become incoherent.
I don't think that they're saying that episodic memory improves from hyper-learning. A 'normal' brain throws out most of the information it receives in the process of highlighting the important, useful information that's incident on the brain's circuitry. Because of this ability, the brain is able to create a coherent narrative for itself.
The scientists are saying that, in schizophrenic brains, what ends up being remembered is not this useful information. Instead, the wrong information is selected by the neural circuits such that the wrong information ends up encoded in long-term memory. This information is selected as being just as important, or even more important, in the episodic 'story' than practical information, such as, for example, the reminders that you point out they forget. The end result is that the long-term memories end up being incoherent.
So it's an issue of hyper-learning everything, not just what's important. If it was simply increased salience for what was important, that would be usefully improved memory. Also, while the symptoms of schizophrenia that you point out are correct, those are the outward psychological symptoms. These scientists are exploring what happens neurologically, at the level of individual neurons.
This is not a positive trait or a gift. It's a brain disease, and brain diseases produce lots of suffering at the deepest possible level. As someone who knows people with brain diseases I can tell you that "hyperlearning", in the same sense of "hyperlexia" do not qualify as gifts, even though they might seem to because they have the prefix 'hyper-' in them. The brain's ability to detect the salience of certain information, while throwing out other, less salient information, is central to its ability to function and perform basic tasks in the world. Without these abilities self-sufficiency and quality of life diminish precipitously.
Because it's easier to install a desktop system and figure out what you don't want then install a generic distribution and figure out what you do want. I think it comes down to the fact that what I do want numbers in the thousands of packages and what I don't want numbers....10.
That some of my mid-2000s-era cat videos might disappear into oblivion.
This is all just to say that i agree with what the above parent was saying. Perhaps I should add some transclusions where my argument here is redundant :-)
It seems like he's not just trying to change the structure of computer documents - he's also trying to change the structure of human creativity. Because human thought is actually quite linear - it progresses through logical sequences, and attends to one conceptual unit or task at one time. It can switch pretty quickly between different streams of thought, but not without a cognitive cost. So it seems like when we create something we usually wish to do so with as few interruptions as possible, or else we risk cluttering up our working memory. For example, when I write an analytical paper, I write all of my argument's 'original' ideas down in the most uninterrupted fashion first. Only then do I add all the supporting quotes I collected from source works.
It seems like he's trying to invert this process. He's trying to make the way in which our document is derived from other documents central to the process of creating it. I guess his argument is that the mode of creation I'm talking about here (linear) is merely an artifact of having used paper for so many millenia. However, I don't think so. I think it's pretty central to the way our cognition works, and the fact that we found paper so useful is merely a symptom of that.