The OP was saying how simple it is to test by simply placing the subject in a room and turning on and off the wifi, and I was rebutting that it isn't quite so simple as he's making it out to be.
Yeah not quite... you have to wait until their "symptoms" go away before doing the wi-fi on-off test. That's a trivial addition to the test that was described. It's still easy to test the claims of these people, it's been done, and none of them have ever actually had the problem they say they do.
Many allergic reactions (like my own seasonal allergies) don't come and go like a light switch in the presence or absence of the allergen.
Right, because your immune system is actually being agitated by the actual allergic response to the actual allergens, and it takes time to come down, plus there are probably still actual allergens like pollen stuck in your sinuses and continuing to irritate you.
Speaking of light switches, all I can think of is the case of a cell phone company that put up a new tower, and all the advanced folks in the neighborhood by it complained that the tower was irritating their EM allergies and giving them headaches and whatnot.
The company's response to their complaints? "Gee, we can only imagine how bad it's going to get when we actually turn the tower on!"
The tower wasn't on. There was no EM radiation that could have provoked any hypothetical allergy response. It was all in their extremely advanced heads.
The ultimate kicker to this story would be if the neighbor had actually turned off their wi-fi weeks ago but told the guy they hadn't just to keep cheesing them off and to show how the "allergy" only exists as long as they think there's evil wi-fi. Unfortunately I'm sure that's not true, because the neighbor probably finds their wi-fi useful and why the hell would you stop using a useful and harmless tool because the nutjob next door thinks it's bad for them?
As far as the "weird unexplained things happen!" reasoning... Yeah, weird things do happen, but it's not like wi-fi itself is some unexplained phenomenon. We know what the power densities of it are at any given range, and unless you believe in homeopathic E-M radiation, there's no way it's having the effects people claim. High voltage power lines? Maybe there's something to that. Wi-fi? Yeah fucking right.
DS9 was the only one of the Trek series to feature characters like Garek and Quark, who pointed out the absurdity and annoying self-righteousness of a goody-two-shoes Federation.
Indeed, both were great characters, and here was one of my favorite exchanges on that subject.
[Garak takes a drink of root beer]
Quark: What do you think?
Elim Garak: It's vile.
Quark: I know. It's so bubbly and cloying and happy.
Elim Garak: Just like the Federation.
Quark: And you know what's really frightening? If you drink enough of it, you begin to like it.
Elim Garak: It's insidious.
Quark: Just like the Federation.
You are making a very silly assumption. You assume the military budget just goes down a black hole.
And you seem to be assuming that "reduce military spending by 50%" is the same as "disband the military and leave the nation unguarded".
Can you see the Thousand Year Reich sending unmanned probes to the outer solar system?
Yes, I can definitely see that. I can see them aggressively pursuing manned missions as well. Probably with the benefit of lots of knowledge of things like the effects of radiation exposure or vacuum on human bodies, discovered via experiments on unwilling subjects.
The Nazis sucked, but they weren't "barbarians". Germans had a thirst for knowledge; part of why it was such a treasure trove of scientists for the U.S. after the war. Just while under Nazi rule, they were rather inhumane in their methods of acquiring knowledge. Oh and they didn't care how smart you were if you were a Jew or homosexual or other undesirable.
We are free to argue about these things and do basic science, safe under the protection of hard men walking the wall and beating back the unreasoning barbarian hordes who are always out there waiting for weakness.
I get your general point that military is necessary for the security of a democratic nation where science is valued... But seriously, what hordes? Al Qaeda's attack was nasty and worthy of retribution, but it didn't threaten the existence of our nation at all. Iraq wasn't a threat to us at all. So what exactly are we being protected from? Mexico? There's basically nobody even "walking the wall" there, and all that's happened as a result is a lot of people have come here to work shitty jobs for shitty pay. It's a problem, but its hardly a case of "barbarian hordes" threatening our existence.
The GP suggested taking 50% of the military's funding and doing something else with it. I would suggest that our military could easily do the job of keeping our country safe with that budget. We didn't even have a large standing army before WWII, and Eisenhower warned against keeping it. Military budgets continued to expand during the Cold War in the biggest military bluff operation ever... But now that is over. So why do we need such a huge budget anymore? Where are these hordes that require this amount of spending?
No, the mission was designed to last 90 days (and probably more for budgetary reasons than anything else)... I'm not saying 7 years on Mars isn't impressive, but the idea that engineers expected the rovers to drop dead after 90 days is inaccurate.
Actually it kinda is, not because they engineered the rover to only last that long (obviously you're right and they engineered it to be as robust as possible to survive on Mars), but because they thought the rover's solar panels would be too covered in dust to operate after that.
I still remember NASA putting out releasing saying how pleasantly surprised they were that the Martian wind turned out to be substantial enough to blow dust off the panels, and so the mission could extend past its original 90 day scope.
The fact that they continued the mission shows it wasn't budget constraints that limited it to 90 days... at least not the operations budget. I guess it was related to budget in the sense that this constrained them to only using solar power, and 90 days was just how long they thought a solar-powered rover could run.
Pretty much any theory where your solution to time travel paradoxes isn't the Time Cops going around preventing them from happening, or worse, "fixing" them once they've already occurred.
"Oh no, someone changed history so the Nazis won the war and the Federation never came to be!" "Then how the fuck are us Federation Time Cops still here?" "We won't be unless we fix the time line, and fast!" "That doesn't even make sense..."
Then, at the end the family butler comes out and says "I happen to know your father died by his own hands, but I've waited all this years and allowed you to foster notions of revenge that tore apart your friendship. I hope you don't mind that I waited several years to speak up."
So basically the butler manipulated Harry by withholding that information. And thus the true villain of the Spiderman trilogy is revealed. I bet he was the one who convinced Harry's dad it was a good idea to take his super-soldier serum. Everyone always underestimates... The Butler!
Makes no sense, why would he say "Eric Banna not Nick Cage" to distinguish which movie he was talking about when Bana was in the same movie as Nick Nolte? I think he just got Cage confused with Norton.
But yeah, it was a brain fart, nothing to see here move along...
We're talking a punch from a super-human should cause the head to shatter like a melon dropped from a six story building, a red mist everywhere, the now mostly headless body dropping while blood goes squirting everywhere. Ok, so that would completely screw the PG-13 rating but c'mon, seeing a podgy scientist shrug off those punches makes spiderman look lamer than Toby himself is managing.
Not exactly on-topic, but this kinda reminds me of how excited I am that James Cameron is directing the Battle Angel Alita movie. It's a world where cyborgs are common, and normal humans are exactly as squishy as they should be when manhandled by a cyborg. Like getting partially decapitated when a cyborg knocks off the top half of someone's skull. I really hope he keeps that aspect, it would necessarily mean an R rating, but if anyone can include that kind of realistic violence without making it seem over the top (as I think some of the comic panels do), it would be him.
Hulk was never really about mass destruction,as awesome as it is to watch, but his inner conflict.
Strangely that's why I much prefer the recent Ed Norton film. I didn't see any inner conflict in the first one. For a guy who is supposed to be full of barely suppressed rage and constantly wrestling with inner demons, Eric Bana's Bruce Banner sure looked placid. It was like his solution to the whole Hulking-out problem was lots and lots of Valium. Even when being provoked into becoming the Hulk, he didn't look like he was actually upset until he was big and green. Norton's Bruce Banner on the other hand was shown to actually have the emotion of anger, and to have to fight to suppress it and keep himself calm.
Eh, sure, I understand where you're coming from. It only really bothers me when it's a prequel situation. Normally, you know the hero isn't going to die no matter how imminent it might seem because if they did the series would end (or drastically morph). And when you are watching a series that's been out and see all the cast alive in season 3, well, all you really know then is that they didn't kill anyone off in season 2, but you can still put yourself in the shoes of someone watching it for the first time who didn't know that for sure.
But in a prequel, it just feels so contrived. Imagine watching a series that took place after Firefly but before Serenity. Everyone on the crew would be clinically immortal, since it's not just that the writers choose to keep everyone alive, they have to be alive to be in the movie. So how can you watch it knowing that even as it was being produced, much less aired, there was zero chance that any of the crew could bite it? It'd be like the Star Wars prequels, where there were literally two characters who we didn't already know exactly what was going to happen to them. That's boring.
Sure we do, if you actually care and want it. All you need is a source of true entropy.
I have yet to see a true random number generator.
BAM! And as of clicking that link, you can no longer say that.
Note that the actual implementation doesn't use a lava lamp anymore. For a general discussion of sources of true randomness, see here. The number generated from these devices are as random as the physical processes behind them.
Our algorithms are VERY deterministic. Lets say there is a purple car, but in my memory I remember it as blue.
Not always. Genetic algorithms (and quite a few other heuristic algorithms) are based on randomness. Even a simple neural network with feedback will exhibit the behavior of "remembered" values changing over time. You can easily combine the two techniques as well to create a very potent "fuzzy logic" system that's only as deterministic as your random number stream, minus that you can be pretty sure that it will converge on a solution to your problem (much like natural selection driven by random changes converges on solutions to the problem of survival).
Lets say for the sake of arguement you put it in your algorithm to on occaison 'randomly' alter data when its transfered to long term memory, and/or when it sits in long term memory. How often do you execute this? Is that up to 'random' chance? And how much gets altered? Is that random too? Could not my entire memory become distorted? Would that be the same thing as a mental disease - the computer happens to get a bad long series of random?
Well that depends on the algorithm, now doesn't it? If it's some kind of genetic algorithm, then randomness is introduced in things like the mutation rate. In real life, mutations are random, but the mutation rate itself is not a random variable (though it does change depending on environment).
If we're talking about something like brute-force simulation of the brain, then the randomness would only be introduced at those points where it must in physics, like qm waveform collapses.
If your point is that we don't know the proper algorithms yet, then I'm in total agreement. But we're talking about why a computer can't be intelligent, not why we're unlikely to make one that is any time soon.
The way to achieve true randomness, (From the article): One measures some physical phenomenon that is expected to be random and then compensates for possible biases in the measurement process.
So you knew about these techniques, but for some reason think they're cheating or something? If the computer has a sensor reading thermal noise and it uses that to produce Intelligence, suddenly it doesn't count as the computer being intelligence? Like what, the little sensor or the hot piece of metal is intelligent but the computer isn't? Come on.
Okay, assume the computer has a source of true randomness. NOW why can't it be intelligent but chemicals can?
Had they stuck with the Trek story, and had the Temporal Integrity Commission go back and set things right, again, great movie.
No, that would have been awful, because it would have meant we're stuck with the forty years of canon that has been bogging the series down so badly. The series was toppling under its own weight, but trekkies wouldn't let go of a single scrap of that history. Such that their opinion of any Star Trek media is based almost entirely on how well it sticks to that history to a tee. Ugh.
Splitting off the timeline, freeing the series from that history while simultaneously respecting it, was the best thing that could have happened to Trek. And if doing that means going against Trek's standard temporal theory where time is linear and the Time Cops come around and "fix" it whenever someone mucks with it, then so be it. Actually, expunging that piece of Trek canon was in and of itself a great move by itself. Because when your sci-fi series shares the same theory of time travel as a Van Damme movie, that's a hint that your theory is dumb.
Thank God JJ Abrams came along and saved the series from the Trekkies.
It's probably somewhere in between (if understanding "constituent components" as relatively simple blocks giving particular functionality, each "generation" building on simpler blocks).
Take it more to mean the functionality itself, as opposed to the molecules that provide that functionality. Basically, however neurons etc work together to make a working brain, why is it so essential that it be physical potassium ions and physical neurotransmitters to create that functionality, rather than electronic equivalents? If you simulate the flow of ions, what's the difference? That's the basic question I'm asking here.
And...our current evidence suggests it's most likely incorrect.:(
I don't really understand... How can intelligence not be an emergent property? A neuron, though fairly complex, isn't intelligent. 2 tied together isn't either...
Chemical reactions have a sort of random-ness to them that electricity through a wire can't duplicate.
Why can't "a wire" duplicate them? A single wire in a computer doesn't, but that's by design, not fundamental nature.
If the problem with our algorithms is that they're too deterministic, why can't we introduce randomness? Some exceedingly successful algorithms already do.
I surely believe that our current algorithms are not sufficient to produce the kind of "intelligence" we're talking about. However I can't see any compelling reason why it should be impossible.
James Brownatron, Godfatherbot of Soul, disagrees! He stays on the scene like a sex machine with 99.99999999% uptime!
I doubt however that's what someone saying "thought is just an electrochemical process" was going for. I mean, I even believe in souls, but I think they're a cop-out for explaining how brains produce intelligence. The question is what does produce intelligence, and I have a hard time believing it's the constituent components, and not the emergent pattern. The issue with AI is one of algorithms, not something that only chemicals can do and computers can't.
A chemical based computer could possibly become intelligent. After all, thought itself is only an electrochemical process.
If you believe that thought/sentience/intelligence is only an electrochemical process, then why do you believe that the same effect can't be achieved from a purely electrical process?
Imagine a computer no different than those we have today, but arbitrarily more powerful. On this computer is running a perfect simulation of the human brain, down to modeling every quark. Every process, chemical, electrical, and otherwise that takes place in the brain takes place in the simulation. We can already do this for small numbers of molecules; the only thing missing is the processing power. Why exactly could this simulation not exhibit the same intelligence as you or I? What is it missing, and why can what is missing not be added to the model?
Since you Niven to the discussion, I should point out that the General Products hull could survive anything except collision with antimatter, but the I wonder about a black hole?
And I have to wonder if that wasn't just the Puppeteer marketing department.:P
Slashdot Mirror
The OP was saying how simple it is to test by simply placing the subject in a room and turning on and off the wifi, and I was rebutting that it isn't quite so simple as he's making it out to be.
Yeah not quite... you have to wait until their "symptoms" go away before doing the wi-fi on-off test. That's a trivial addition to the test that was described. It's still easy to test the claims of these people, it's been done, and none of them have ever actually had the problem they say they do.
The "Let the rabbits wear glasses!" line always cracks me up. :)
Many allergic reactions (like my own seasonal allergies) don't come and go like a light switch in the presence or absence of the allergen.
Right, because your immune system is actually being agitated by the actual allergic response to the actual allergens, and it takes time to come down, plus there are probably still actual allergens like pollen stuck in your sinuses and continuing to irritate you.
Speaking of light switches, all I can think of is the case of a cell phone company that put up a new tower, and all the advanced folks in the neighborhood by it complained that the tower was irritating their EM allergies and giving them headaches and whatnot.
The company's response to their complaints? "Gee, we can only imagine how bad it's going to get when we actually turn the tower on!"
The tower wasn't on. There was no EM radiation that could have provoked any hypothetical allergy response. It was all in their extremely advanced heads.
The ultimate kicker to this story would be if the neighbor had actually turned off their wi-fi weeks ago but told the guy they hadn't just to keep cheesing them off and to show how the "allergy" only exists as long as they think there's evil wi-fi. Unfortunately I'm sure that's not true, because the neighbor probably finds their wi-fi useful and why the hell would you stop using a useful and harmless tool because the nutjob next door thinks it's bad for them?
As far as the "weird unexplained things happen!" reasoning... Yeah, weird things do happen, but it's not like wi-fi itself is some unexplained phenomenon. We know what the power densities of it are at any given range, and unless you believe in homeopathic E-M radiation, there's no way it's having the effects people claim. High voltage power lines? Maybe there's something to that. Wi-fi? Yeah fucking right.
DS9 was the only one of the Trek series to feature characters like Garek and Quark, who pointed out the absurdity and annoying self-righteousness of a goody-two-shoes Federation.
Indeed, both were great characters, and here was one of my favorite exchanges on that subject.
[Garak takes a drink of root beer]
Quark: What do you think?
Elim Garak: It's vile.
Quark: I know. It's so bubbly and cloying and happy.
Elim Garak: Just like the Federation.
Quark: And you know what's really frightening? If you drink enough of it, you begin to like it.
Elim Garak: It's insidious.
Quark: Just like the Federation.
Hehe.
You are making a very silly assumption. You assume the military budget just goes down a black hole.
And you seem to be assuming that "reduce military spending by 50%" is the same as "disband the military and leave the nation unguarded".
Can you see the Thousand Year Reich sending unmanned probes to the outer solar system?
Yes, I can definitely see that. I can see them aggressively pursuing manned missions as well. Probably with the benefit of lots of knowledge of things like the effects of radiation exposure or vacuum on human bodies, discovered via experiments on unwilling subjects.
The Nazis sucked, but they weren't "barbarians". Germans had a thirst for knowledge; part of why it was such a treasure trove of scientists for the U.S. after the war. Just while under Nazi rule, they were rather inhumane in their methods of acquiring knowledge. Oh and they didn't care how smart you were if you were a Jew or homosexual or other undesirable.
We are free to argue about these things and do basic science, safe under the protection of hard men walking the wall and beating back the unreasoning barbarian hordes who are always out there waiting for weakness.
I get your general point that military is necessary for the security of a democratic nation where science is valued... But seriously, what hordes? Al Qaeda's attack was nasty and worthy of retribution, but it didn't threaten the existence of our nation at all. Iraq wasn't a threat to us at all. So what exactly are we being protected from? Mexico? There's basically nobody even "walking the wall" there, and all that's happened as a result is a lot of people have come here to work shitty jobs for shitty pay. It's a problem, but its hardly a case of "barbarian hordes" threatening our existence.
The GP suggested taking 50% of the military's funding and doing something else with it. I would suggest that our military could easily do the job of keeping our country safe with that budget. We didn't even have a large standing army before WWII, and Eisenhower warned against keeping it. Military budgets continued to expand during the Cold War in the biggest military bluff operation ever... But now that is over. So why do we need such a huge budget anymore? Where are these hordes that require this amount of spending?
I assume defecation is a suitable substitute for urination?
If not... well, too late.
While budget constraints didn't limit it to 90 days, ongoing operations do impact the budget.
Yeah "operations budget" kinda implies that operations are not free.
..how will you feel when they tell you -- it wasn't a game!
So wait... That Bajoran transvestite I was Britishing with...
No, the mission was designed to last 90 days (and probably more for budgetary reasons than anything else)... I'm not saying 7 years on Mars isn't impressive, but the idea that engineers expected the rovers to drop dead after 90 days is inaccurate.
Actually it kinda is, not because they engineered the rover to only last that long (obviously you're right and they engineered it to be as robust as possible to survive on Mars), but because they thought the rover's solar panels would be too covered in dust to operate after that.
I still remember NASA putting out releasing saying how pleasantly surprised they were that the Martian wind turned out to be substantial enough to blow dust off the panels, and so the mission could extend past its original 90 day scope.
The fact that they continued the mission shows it wasn't budget constraints that limited it to 90 days... at least not the operations budget. I guess it was related to budget in the sense that this constrained them to only using solar power, and 90 days was just how long they thought a solar-powered rover could run.
Pretty much any theory where your solution to time travel paradoxes isn't the Time Cops going around preventing them from happening, or worse, "fixing" them once they've already occurred.
"Oh no, someone changed history so the Nazis won the war and the Federation never came to be!"
"Then how the fuck are us Federation Time Cops still here?"
"We won't be unless we fix the time line, and fast!"
"That doesn't even make sense..."
I don't recognise most of that, but what I didn't recognise smells an awful lot like Twilight, which I wouldn't recognise because I haven't seen...
You recognize a concept you aren't even familiar with by its smell?!
My God! That is a power only the Wolf Spider clan has! You must be the ChubbyHaidude, the Chosen Spider Shaman.
It wouldn't surprise me one bit if a Hulk reboot was announced next year.
Can't happen until after the Avengers movie, but yeah, I get what you're saying.
Then, at the end the family butler comes out and says "I happen to know your father died by his own hands, but I've waited all this years and allowed you to foster notions of revenge that tore apart your friendship. I hope you don't mind that I waited several years to speak up."
So basically the butler manipulated Harry by withholding that information. And thus the true villain of the Spiderman trilogy is revealed. I bet he was the one who convinced Harry's dad it was a good idea to take his super-soldier serum. Everyone always underestimates... The Butler!
Makes no sense, why would he say "Eric Banna not Nick Cage" to distinguish which movie he was talking about when Bana was in the same movie as Nick Nolte? I think he just got Cage confused with Norton.
But yeah, it was a brain fart, nothing to see here move along...
We're talking a punch from a super-human should cause the head to shatter like a melon dropped from a six story building, a red mist everywhere, the now mostly headless body dropping while blood goes squirting everywhere. Ok, so that would completely screw the PG-13 rating but c'mon, seeing a podgy scientist shrug off those punches makes spiderman look lamer than Toby himself is managing.
Not exactly on-topic, but this kinda reminds me of how excited I am that James Cameron is directing the Battle Angel Alita movie. It's a world where cyborgs are common, and normal humans are exactly as squishy as they should be when manhandled by a cyborg. Like getting partially decapitated when a cyborg knocks off the top half of someone's skull. I really hope he keeps that aspect, it would necessarily mean an R rating, but if anyone can include that kind of realistic violence without making it seem over the top (as I think some of the comic panels do), it would be him.
Hulk was never really about mass destruction,as awesome as it is to watch, but his inner conflict.
Strangely that's why I much prefer the recent Ed Norton film. I didn't see any inner conflict in the first one. For a guy who is supposed to be full of barely suppressed rage and constantly wrestling with inner demons, Eric Bana's Bruce Banner sure looked placid. It was like his solution to the whole Hulking-out problem was lots and lots of Valium. Even when being provoked into becoming the Hulk, he didn't look like he was actually upset until he was big and green. Norton's Bruce Banner on the other hand was shown to actually have the emotion of anger, and to have to fight to suppress it and keep himself calm.
And in modern times, this is the model for Hezbollah, Sadr's militia in Iraq, and Hamas.
Eh, sure, I understand where you're coming from. It only really bothers me when it's a prequel situation. Normally, you know the hero isn't going to die no matter how imminent it might seem because if they did the series would end (or drastically morph). And when you are watching a series that's been out and see all the cast alive in season 3, well, all you really know then is that they didn't kill anyone off in season 2, but you can still put yourself in the shoes of someone watching it for the first time who didn't know that for sure.
But in a prequel, it just feels so contrived. Imagine watching a series that took place after Firefly but before Serenity. Everyone on the crew would be clinically immortal, since it's not just that the writers choose to keep everyone alive, they have to be alive to be in the movie. So how can you watch it knowing that even as it was being produced, much less aired, there was zero chance that any of the crew could bite it? It'd be like the Star Wars prequels, where there were literally two characters who we didn't already know exactly what was going to happen to them. That's boring.
But we don't actually have true randomness
Sure we do, if you actually care and want it. All you need is a source of true entropy.
I have yet to see a true random number generator.
BAM! And as of clicking that link, you can no longer say that.
Note that the actual implementation doesn't use a lava lamp anymore. For a general discussion of sources of true randomness, see here. The number generated from these devices are as random as the physical processes behind them.
Our algorithms are VERY deterministic. Lets say there is a purple car, but in my memory I remember it as blue.
Not always. Genetic algorithms (and quite a few other heuristic algorithms) are based on randomness. Even a simple neural network with feedback will exhibit the behavior of "remembered" values changing over time. You can easily combine the two techniques as well to create a very potent "fuzzy logic" system that's only as deterministic as your random number stream, minus that you can be pretty sure that it will converge on a solution to your problem (much like natural selection driven by random changes converges on solutions to the problem of survival).
Lets say for the sake of arguement you put it in your algorithm to on occaison 'randomly' alter data when its transfered to long term memory, and/or when it sits in long term memory. How often do you execute this? Is that up to 'random' chance? And how much gets altered? Is that random too? Could not my entire memory become distorted? Would that be the same thing as a mental disease - the computer happens to get a bad long series of random?
Well that depends on the algorithm, now doesn't it? If it's some kind of genetic algorithm, then randomness is introduced in things like the mutation rate. In real life, mutations are random, but the mutation rate itself is not a random variable (though it does change depending on environment).
If we're talking about something like brute-force simulation of the brain, then the randomness would only be introduced at those points where it must in physics, like qm waveform collapses.
If your point is that we don't know the proper algorithms yet, then I'm in total agreement. But we're talking about why a computer can't be intelligent, not why we're unlikely to make one that is any time soon.
The way to achieve true randomness, (From the article): One measures some physical phenomenon that is expected to be random and then compensates for possible biases in the measurement process.
So you knew about these techniques, but for some reason think they're cheating or something? If the computer has a sensor reading thermal noise and it uses that to produce Intelligence, suddenly it doesn't count as the computer being intelligence? Like what, the little sensor or the hot piece of metal is intelligent but the computer isn't? Come on.
Okay, assume the computer has a source of true randomness. NOW why can't it be intelligent but chemicals can?
Had they stuck with the Trek story, and had the Temporal Integrity Commission go back and set things right, again, great movie.
No, that would have been awful, because it would have meant we're stuck with the forty years of canon that has been bogging the series down so badly. The series was toppling under its own weight, but trekkies wouldn't let go of a single scrap of that history. Such that their opinion of any Star Trek media is based almost entirely on how well it sticks to that history to a tee. Ugh.
Splitting off the timeline, freeing the series from that history while simultaneously respecting it, was the best thing that could have happened to Trek. And if doing that means going against Trek's standard temporal theory where time is linear and the Time Cops come around and "fix" it whenever someone mucks with it, then so be it. Actually, expunging that piece of Trek canon was in and of itself a great move by itself. Because when your sci-fi series shares the same theory of time travel as a Van Damme movie, that's a hint that your theory is dumb.
Thank God JJ Abrams came along and saved the series from the Trekkies.
It's probably somewhere in between (if understanding "constituent components" as relatively simple blocks giving particular functionality, each "generation" building on simpler blocks).
Take it more to mean the functionality itself, as opposed to the molecules that provide that functionality. Basically, however neurons etc work together to make a working brain, why is it so essential that it be physical potassium ions and physical neurotransmitters to create that functionality, rather than electronic equivalents? If you simulate the flow of ions, what's the difference? That's the basic question I'm asking here.
And...our current evidence suggests it's most likely incorrect. :(
I don't really understand... How can intelligence not be an emergent property? A neuron, though fairly complex, isn't intelligent. 2 tied together isn't either...
Chemical reactions have a sort of random-ness to them that electricity through a wire can't duplicate.
Why can't "a wire" duplicate them? A single wire in a computer doesn't, but that's by design, not fundamental nature.
If the problem with our algorithms is that they're too deterministic, why can't we introduce randomness? Some exceedingly successful algorithms already do.
I surely believe that our current algorithms are not sufficient to produce the kind of "intelligence" we're talking about. However I can't see any compelling reason why it should be impossible.
Soul, naturally ;)
James Brownatron, Godfatherbot of Soul, disagrees! He stays on the scene like a sex machine with 99.99999999% uptime!
I doubt however that's what someone saying "thought is just an electrochemical process" was going for. I mean, I even believe in souls, but I think they're a cop-out for explaining how brains produce intelligence. The question is what does produce intelligence, and I have a hard time believing it's the constituent components, and not the emergent pattern. The issue with AI is one of algorithms, not something that only chemicals can do and computers can't.
A chemical based computer could possibly become intelligent. After all, thought itself is only an electrochemical process.
If you believe that thought/sentience/intelligence is only an electrochemical process, then why do you believe that the same effect can't be achieved from a purely electrical process?
Imagine a computer no different than those we have today, but arbitrarily more powerful. On this computer is running a perfect simulation of the human brain, down to modeling every quark. Every process, chemical, electrical, and otherwise that takes place in the brain takes place in the simulation. We can already do this for small numbers of molecules; the only thing missing is the processing power. Why exactly could this simulation not exhibit the same intelligence as you or I? What is it missing, and why can what is missing not be added to the model?
Since you Niven to the discussion, I should point out that the General Products hull could survive anything except collision with antimatter, but the I wonder about a black hole?
And I have to wonder if that wasn't just the Puppeteer marketing department. :P