The American segment has a Water Recovery System installed during STS-126 in Destiny that can process water vapour collected from the atmosphere, waste water from showers, sinks, and other crew systems, and also urine into water that is intended for drinking.
Though I'm sure the astronauts always tell themselves that they water they happen to be drinking came from recycling sink and shower water, not the toilet.:)
Uh, well it depends on something that isn't clear to me: Is >canvas< and the specific features thereof they're talking about IE9 specific, or is it part of the html5 standard? If it's part of the standard, but hardware accelerated through IE9, then that's probably okay. Even if it means developers assume an IE9 target and do more with the tag than would be practical to do on non-accelerated browsers. I mean sure IE has a, shall we say, privileged position on Windows, but it's not like other apps can't access the graphics hardware.
If it's IE9-specific extensions to html5, then yeah, that's bullshit.
You'd think the difference would have been obvious to Mr. AC when he decided to stick his foot into his mouth and couldn't get it a whole foot in there.
That's not even close to true. There are plenty of people that are quite "relevant" to policy changes, typically referred to as "swing voters" and there are those that encourage that belief, as long as it provides them with the votes to gain power.
I was wondering how on earth you could believe that, but then I realized...
I don't think there are any more people that think that way than there are that think changing to CFL bulbs and switching to a hybrid can control the climate.
...that you equate thinking that changing our behavior can impact the global climate is the same as thinking only our behavior impacts the climate.
It's the same binary thinking as SuperKendall's post, where he too equated advocating for changing industry to reduce greenhouse gasses with saying only human industry was relevant to the climate.
Nobody thinks only human activity affects the climate. Plenty of people think human activity does not affect the climate. The "two extremes" Pojut was talking about only exist because the "humans only" extreme was created as a strawman by those members of the "nature only" extreme who can only think in binary terms.
I have this perverse urge to call him up once a week, claiming to be from a different foundation seeking to give him an award for his contributions to math. Maybe get really elaborate, have different people calling him, set up websites for each of these foundations to make them seem legit. I bet we could really drive him up the wall.
Heh. It's a good thing I'm not as big a jerk in real life as I am in my imagination. Or maybe it's just a good thing that I'm too lazy to pull off a prank like that.:P
Anyone who has ever said that expensive changes in industry will result in significant change in global warming.
Really? So by saying that changing human industry will affect global warming, that implies that only human industry affects global warming?
Hey, my solution that includes HCL and H2SO4 is too acidic! I claim that if I decrease the amount of HCL, it will be less acidic. Ergo I am implying that H2SO4 does not affect the pH of the solution.
Wow. Pojut complained about people at the two extremes, but what about people who think only the two extremes exist?
Heh. Well I salute you for your defense of the noble Common Raven, even if it wasn't really needed. Lots of birds have "Common" in their name to distinguish them from similar species. Sometimes the species called "Common" is even actually more common (as in frequent) than the others!:)
There are some names I think are unfair, though. Like there's the American Goldfinch, and the Lesser Goldfinch. Lesser?! If I'm generous, I'd assume it's because the Lesser is slightly smaller, but if I'm not, it's because whoever named it was making an unfair judgment on their relative beauty!
Believe that we are the only thing impacting the climate is fucking stupid.
Nobody relevant believes that. Even the most basic presentation of climate science is of studying natural climate change and establishing humanity's role within it.
I never understood why it's so hard to find other people who don't subscribe to one extreme or the other when it comes to climate change.
I don't believe for a second it's hard to find those people. In a town where I'm surrounded by drama-loving enviro-hippies, I rarely find anyone who is anywhere close to the "only human activity matters" extreme.
People in the "human activity can't change the global climate, it's all natural" extreme, however...
No it doesn't. You would have to have an incredibly bad mental handicap to not be able to put batteries in a device correctly.
I'll grant that this is not exactly a pressing issue.
If it isn't done with a few diodes (see the linked comment)
Of course it isn't just a rectifier done with diodes. Nobody wants to use extra electronics just to avoid the issue of battery polarity, and nobody wants to have to potentially use extra batteries to achieve the same voltage. Read some of the other comments here or just google it if you don't remember how diodes work.
it's a Rube Goldberg kludge and could be patented, but a Graetz bridge rectifier would be elegant, cheap, and completely unpatentable.
Cheap is relative, and a couple extra diodes per battery that have to be soldered on is going to be more expensive than just another piece of conductive metal.
As far as elegance, I can imagine a device that is simpler than a diode bridge that is purely mechanical, and low and behold, the actual invention is even simpler and more elegant than what I imagined.
There's a reason nobody has used a rectifier to solve this minor problem, but people may use Microsoft's invention to solve it.
There's a big difference between a virtual world implemented as software and possibly populated by software AIs (Neuromancer, Snow Crash, Matrix), and postulating that non-AI software and even bits themselves are sentient entities that roam about in a world that isn't simulated on a computer, but is the computer.
It's no more fantasy than Hellraiser is because of the mechanical puzzle box, or Her Majesty's Wizard is sci-fi because the protagonist creates a monofilament blade with poetry. The mere presence of technology in some form doesn't make it sci-fi.
Unless we just want to erase all distinction, in which case, fine, it's sci-fi, but which should be approached in a materially different way than most.
Man, and all this time I thought the USA was a leader in high-tech silicon production, but it turns out the USA isn't making any microprocessors at all.
The one thing exobiologists are convinced of is that we would NOT be able to identify alien intelligence. It is on this basis that I am taking it that if we can recognize it, it cannot be truly alien.
Well first, of course they're not "truly" alien because they use biological neuron-based brains.
Second, we may not be able to recognize an arbitrary alien intelligence like a Star Trek energy being or something. But if we saw something moving around and consuming things, and then we put one of the things it seems to want to consume into a container which it couldn't easily reach into and grab, and it picked up a piece of wire, bent it, and used it to grab the thing out of the container and consume it, we would say "That looks like intelligence."
That is basically what we're doing with ravens. It is both something we could in fact identify in (some) aliens, and which it is incredibly premature to say is so close to our intelligence not just in appearance but in underlying implementation that the "primitives" must have been inherited from a common ancestor.
Hello World does not involve or include a Turing-Complete set of functions.
I assure you that if you disassembled the dynamic instruction stream for "Hello World", you would find memory reads and writes, logical operations (not strictly necessary), and at least one conditional jump. Bada-bing, bada-boom, all the components of a Turing Complete system.
Of course I recognize that your suggested primitives are supposed to be more complicated than this. The reason I brought up Hello World was to say your hypothesis could be considered correct if you were talking about much more simple mechanisms, like just neurons. Obviously some parts of brain structure were passed down to mammals and birds by their common ancestor.
To be equivalent, you must meet ALL the criteria. In case you have forgotten them, they are as follows:
Well gee, if I crafted an equivalent scenario where the common ancestor of various intelligent species had primitives which are by definition the common denominator of all intelligence, then I would necessarily have to conclude that the descendant species were using the same primitives, which is your hypothesis.
All that shows is that you can craft a circular argument.
The primitives are assumed, in this argument, to be wired by means of other mechanisms to produce actual intelligence and actual empathy - something you ignore in favor of sneering.
Ignore? I accepted it as part of your premise without argument. Obviously you weren't saying a brain is composed only of these elements. It is in the same way that "Hello World" involves the basic Turing Complete elements wired together, and I thought you would understand that.
And I'm sure not sneering, I'm telling you your hypothesis is completely unsupported. Sorry if that offends you.
I would appreciate it if you could put your ego to one side for a moment, look at what I am saying, and comment on what is said rather than what you would like me to say because it's easier to poke holes in.
Same to ya, bucky. I know what you're saying, you're saying raven and human intelligence is so similar they must be derived from mechanisms inherited from a common ancestor. You can describe that hypothetical mechanism as precisely as you want, and I don't care, because that's not where the holes are in your argument.
The problem is that there is no evidence that such a set of primitives meeting all those criterion exists. Your sole evidence, that both ravens and humans can be described by the same vague term "intelligent", doesn't come close to necessitating the existence of such primitives.
I do not say I'm "right", but I do say that I deserve better than to be walked over.
Pretty much, you said that this is what this research "means", without qualification. Try "I think it is interesting to hypothesize that..." or "I imagine it is possible that..." next time. I accepted that it is hypothetically possible in my first reply. I do not accept that it is likely, and definitely not the what this research "means". This research does not imply that.
Forgot to deal with this. Simply put, I'm referring to primitives. I don't need to consider more space than is needed to have ALL the building-blocks needed to form intelligence and empathy, of sufficient complexity that intelligence and empathy can be implemented essentially only one way. I do NOT need any of the space needed to cover the actual implementation of either.
But you DO if you actually want to get the result. You said we should be able to achieve basic skills like empathy using current AI tools, by just simulating the "primitives", but in reality you have to actually simulate the aggregation of primitives necessary to implement empathy. And they have to be aggregated correctly. Which is what the problem already is -- simulating enough of the brain's structure, and with the correct organization.
I could put the whole of a Turing-complete microprocessor, C library and even the Linux kernel all on one chip. Slashdot has covered web servers running on smaller systems than a matchbox. You couldn't run a decent Enterprise-scale database on anything that small. But there is absolutely nothing in the larger systems that does not exist in the smaller ones, at the primitives level.
The C library and kernel contain no primitives that aren't in the ISA level, so why bring them up? Because you're arguing for a higher-level set of primitives that are shared. Yet a database implemented in C on Linux would look very different under the hood than one implemented in Java on Mach, despite producing similar results.
And that's without even getting into the fact that there are multiple implementations of the C library from different sources. Assuming two application binaries have a common ancestor because they were both written in C (the ancestor being via the C library) would be silly.
My argument is that there is a segment of the brain, more substantial than an individual neuron, that performs key operations that are so absolutely fundamental to what we mean by intelligence and empathy that ALL intelligence and empathy built from those operations will be virtually the same across all animals.
Yes that was clear.
The variations in animal intelligence we are seeing are small, implying constraints in the system that keep those variations small.
There is absolutely no way you can justify the first half of that sentence with a sufficiently narrow definition of "small". Our definition of intelligence is extremely general and vague. "Two species are able to solve problems" is not a specific enough observation that you can infer that the mechanisms producing those results are anywhere similar.
In another post where you argued against convergent evolution, you brought up flukes and fins. They are different, but they both let the animal swim. For observations of swimming as general and abstract as those we have for intelligence, they are indistinguishable. You have no way of knowing that the "primitives" behind human empathy aren't analogous to flukes while the "primitives" behind raven empathy are analogous to fins. Hell, if swimming were as poorly defined as intelligence, then you'd be arguing that whales, tuna, squids, and nuclear submarines must all be using the same mechanism to swim because the result is so similar.
To summarize, you're claiming that: 1) Closely similar results must be using the the same mechanisms -- not just the same, but both inherited from the same common ancestor. Which is wrong. 2) The observed similarity in intelligence between animals is close enough that it implies they must be using the same inherited mechanism due to (1). Which, even given (1), is laughably wrong in the basic observation.
No, a working implementation of "Hello World" is NOT a primitive. You could never call Hello World in any arrangement to build another arrangement. The C language plus the standard C99 library would be primitives.
Yes, obviously. "Hello World" is the brain of the ancient reptile ancestor of birds and mammals, a working program. It contains the primitives necessary to make "Hello World". You aren't suggesting that you could assemble reptile brains together to create a human brain, you're suggesting it contained the necessary components. Just like "hello world" contains components, "primitives" as you'd call them.
And it's still an apt analogy. You're basically hypothesizing that because there are two instances of enterprise database servers, both distant descendants of a "Hello World" code base, that the "Hello World" code base contained all the necessary components to create those database servers and the necessary components weren't added separately to the two distinct development trees.
That hypothesis is utterly unsupported.
In the case of intelligence or empathy, clearly the primitives being used are complex enough that despite a total lack of any definition of intelligence (or, indeed, empathy), we have analytical tools capable of identifying intelligence and empathy in crows. They should be almost as alien as life on another planet.
That the end result can be identified as similar between mammals and birds using such ill-defined and general terms as "intelligence" and "empathy" implies nothing about the underlying "primatives" used to achieve them. Even if the basic structures are similar, which is quite possible since they were starting from the same neuron-based brain, that still does not mean that they must have existed in a common ancestor.
Hell, I'm certain that given sufficient study we could identify intelligence in alien life forms, and probably empathy too, if it existed. That's the whole point -- we're evaluating a high-level behavior, not the mechanism behind it. Many completely different mechanisms can result in the same high-level behavior.
Tron wasn't sci-fi, and wasn't trying to be. It was pure fantasy. It was based on the idea that there is a whole world inside of computers where programs interact like people and bits float around saying "yes" and "no". Worrying about things like how an accounting program can be made to compete in gladiatorial games without being modified, or how bits could be floating around individually when every program would have to be made of bits and there'd need to be more of them than existed in computers of the day is besides the point. It'd be like having a movie where you can go to a magical school for wizards after walking through the wall at the subway, then worrying about how they can make brooms fly.
The fantasy nature of the movie really struck me when I re-watched it for the first time in 20 years. Sure I remembered liking the movie as a kid but I had very little in the way of expectations. And I found that because of its fantasy nature it worked way better than just about any sci-fi movie that tried to show computers "realistically" and utterly failed*.
Once I accepted that it was a fantasy world, I found it fascinating. Especially the idea of the programs having a religion based on the "user" as their gods (little did they know what an unworthy god they worshiped), and even more fascinating an "atheist" movement which denied that the "user" and the world outside of the computer even existed. Also interesting was how outside of the digitizing machine, everything shown about computers in the real world was completely normal. The giant spinning vortex of the MCP inside the computer was just a simple text interface on the outside. It'd be kinda like Harry Potter if magic simply didn't exist outside of Hogwarts.
Anyway, I say give it a another shot, and go in realizing you're watching computer-based fantasy, not sci-fi.
To me, it seems logical that empathy is a social behavior. Perhaps it's game theory, where helping out a fellow costs you relatively little at that moment but can net you help when you need it. Aesop's fable about the Lion and the Mouse nicely illustrates and exaggerates the point.
Surely it's a social behavior, but whether social groups will naturally have it or not is I think an open, and interesting, question.
The game theory advantage is definitely there, though. For example, Chickadees, Titmice, and some other birds will form mixed big species flocks (with the tiny chickadees usually taking the role of leader, kinda amusingly). When one of them finds food, they'll lead the rest of the flock to it. Even in the winter when food is scarce and you might think a bird would horde the food to itself or just a couple members of its own species, they will bring the whole flock to share. Research has shown that such flocks are actually more successful than lone birds, because while the individual bird might lose out by sharing the limited food supply it finds, it (or other members of its species) will benefit from the other flock member's sharing.
I think it would be interesting to study chickadees and look for indications of empathy. Is it simply an advantageous learned behavior the birds follow by instinct? Or is there an element of "my flock mates are hungry, I should share this food I found with them"?
This research is a long, long way from meaning any of the things you said.
Unless by underlying mechanism you just meant basically a functioning brain that could, with many millions of years of evolution, adapt to have empathy. Essentially in the same way having a working "Hello World" program in C could be considered the "underlying mechanism" for an enterprise database server.
But beyond that, while it's hypothetically possible that empathy and toolmaking abilities existed in the ancient reptile that is the common ancestor of birds and mammals, much more likely is that the only "common mechanism" is the extremely flexible base design of the brain, and it took both birds and mammals much evolution to develop larger brains abilities that do not appear to be present in modern reptiles, which have much simpler brains.
More to the point: If empathy and toolmaking are possible in extremely simple brains that we could hypothetically simulate, why do they only appear in species with significantly larger brains? Why do ravens have such large brains if they could get away with simple, tiny ones and perform the same tasks? It seems to me that many of the features you're hoping are simple, like tool making, are actually side effects of a general abstract reasoning ability, and that this ability requires a relatively large and complex brain to achieve.
Why did you put Common in Common Raven in quotes? Because you thought it was intended in a pejorative sense, like "the mere common Raven", when they're anything but "mere", or as a hint to others who may have thought this that it isn't the case?
In any event, just to clarify, Common Raven is the common (heh) name for the species Corvus corax.
Probability is always conditional based on knowledge available at the time.
You may as well have said that the probabilities of a and b are the same by revealing the sex of the other child to be female in both cases. That would fix the probability of a second boy at 0, but that doesn't mean it was the answer to a or b, because it's a different problem.
Similarly, you can't say the answer to "what are the odds that I rolled a 1 on this fair six-sided die?" isn't 1/6 by then revealing that you'd already rolled the die and gotten a 2.
Slashdot Mirror
The American segment has a Water Recovery System installed during STS-126 in Destiny that can process water vapour collected from the atmosphere, waste water from showers, sinks, and other crew systems, and also urine into water that is intended for drinking.
Though I'm sure the astronauts always tell themselves that they water they happen to be drinking came from recycling sink and shower water, not the toilet. :)
Uh, well it depends on something that isn't clear to me: Is >canvas< and the specific features thereof they're talking about IE9 specific, or is it part of the html5 standard? If it's part of the standard, but hardware accelerated through IE9, then that's probably okay. Even if it means developers assume an IE9 target and do more with the tag than would be practical to do on non-accelerated browsers. I mean sure IE has a, shall we say, privileged position on Windows, but it's not like other apps can't access the graphics hardware.
If it's IE9-specific extensions to html5, then yeah, that's bullshit.
I can see lots of things around me that would make very poor standards for measurement. :)
You'd think the difference would have been obvious to Mr. AC when he decided to stick his foot into his mouth and couldn't get it a whole foot in there.
Well, Houston, the good news is that we received the supply capsule...
That's not even close to true. There are plenty of people that are quite "relevant" to policy changes, typically referred to as "swing voters" and there are those that encourage that belief, as long as it provides them with the votes to gain power.
I was wondering how on earth you could believe that, but then I realized...
I don't think there are any more people that think that way than there are that think changing to CFL bulbs and switching to a hybrid can control the climate.
It's the same binary thinking as SuperKendall's post, where he too equated advocating for changing industry to reduce greenhouse gasses with saying only human industry was relevant to the climate.
Nobody thinks only human activity affects the climate. Plenty of people think human activity does not affect the climate. The "two extremes" Pojut was talking about only exist because the "humans only" extreme was created as a strawman by those members of the "nature only" extreme who can only think in binary terms.
I have this perverse urge to call him up once a week, claiming to be from a different foundation seeking to give him an award for his contributions to math. Maybe get really elaborate, have different people calling him, set up websites for each of these foundations to make them seem legit. I bet we could really drive him up the wall.
Heh. It's a good thing I'm not as big a jerk in real life as I am in my imagination. Or maybe it's just a good thing that I'm too lazy to pull off a prank like that. :P
Anyone who has ever said that expensive changes in industry will result in significant change in global warming.
Really? So by saying that changing human industry will affect global warming, that implies that only human industry affects global warming?
Hey, my solution that includes HCL and H2SO4 is too acidic! I claim that if I decrease the amount of HCL, it will be less acidic. Ergo I am implying that H2SO4 does not affect the pH of the solution.
Wow. Pojut complained about people at the two extremes, but what about people who think only the two extremes exist?
Heh. Well I salute you for your defense of the noble Common Raven, even if it wasn't really needed. Lots of birds have "Common" in their name to distinguish them from similar species. Sometimes the species called "Common" is even actually more common (as in frequent) than the others! :)
There are some names I think are unfair, though. Like there's the American Goldfinch, and the Lesser Goldfinch. Lesser?! If I'm generous, I'd assume it's because the Lesser is slightly smaller, but if I'm not, it's because whoever named it was making an unfair judgment on their relative beauty!
Believe that we are the only thing impacting the climate is fucking stupid.
Nobody relevant believes that. Even the most basic presentation of climate science is of studying natural climate change and establishing humanity's role within it.
I never understood why it's so hard to find other people who don't subscribe to one extreme or the other when it comes to climate change.
I don't believe for a second it's hard to find those people. In a town where I'm surrounded by drama-loving enviro-hippies, I rarely find anyone who is anywhere close to the "only human activity matters" extreme.
People in the "human activity can't change the global climate, it's all natural" extreme, however...
It's little more than an ad hominem attack.
It may be insulting, but it's not ad hominem.
No it doesn't. You would have to have an incredibly bad mental handicap to not be able to put batteries in a device correctly.
I'll grant that this is not exactly a pressing issue.
If it isn't done with a few diodes (see the linked comment)
Of course it isn't just a rectifier done with diodes. Nobody wants to use extra electronics just to avoid the issue of battery polarity, and nobody wants to have to potentially use extra batteries to achieve the same voltage. Read some of the other comments here or just google it if you don't remember how diodes work.
it's a Rube Goldberg kludge and could be patented, but a Graetz bridge rectifier would be elegant, cheap, and completely unpatentable.
Cheap is relative, and a couple extra diodes per battery that have to be soldered on is going to be more expensive than just another piece of conductive metal.
As far as elegance, I can imagine a device that is simpler than a diode bridge that is purely mechanical, and low and behold, the actual invention is even simpler and more elegant than what I imagined.
There's a reason nobody has used a rectifier to solve this minor problem, but people may use Microsoft's invention to solve it.
There's a big difference between a virtual world implemented as software and possibly populated by software AIs (Neuromancer, Snow Crash, Matrix), and postulating that non-AI software and even bits themselves are sentient entities that roam about in a world that isn't simulated on a computer, but is the computer.
It's no more fantasy than Hellraiser is because of the mechanical puzzle box, or Her Majesty's Wizard is sci-fi because the protagonist creates a monofilament blade with poetry. The mere presence of technology in some form doesn't make it sci-fi.
Unless we just want to erase all distinction, in which case, fine, it's sci-fi, but which should be approached in a materially different way than most.
Man, and all this time I thought the USA was a leader in high-tech silicon production, but it turns out the USA isn't making any microprocessors at all.
Now I'm depressed!
The one thing exobiologists are convinced of is that we would NOT be able to identify alien intelligence. It is on this basis that I am taking it that if we can recognize it, it cannot be truly alien.
Well first, of course they're not "truly" alien because they use biological neuron-based brains.
Second, we may not be able to recognize an arbitrary alien intelligence like a Star Trek energy being or something. But if we saw something moving around and consuming things, and then we put one of the things it seems to want to consume into a container which it couldn't easily reach into and grab, and it picked up a piece of wire, bent it, and used it to grab the thing out of the container and consume it, we would say "That looks like intelligence."
That is basically what we're doing with ravens. It is both something we could in fact identify in (some) aliens, and which it is incredibly premature to say is so close to our intelligence not just in appearance but in underlying implementation that the "primitives" must have been inherited from a common ancestor.
Hello World does not involve or include a Turing-Complete set of functions.
I assure you that if you disassembled the dynamic instruction stream for "Hello World", you would find memory reads and writes, logical operations (not strictly necessary), and at least one conditional jump. Bada-bing, bada-boom, all the components of a Turing Complete system.
Of course I recognize that your suggested primitives are supposed to be more complicated than this. The reason I brought up Hello World was to say your hypothesis could be considered correct if you were talking about much more simple mechanisms, like just neurons. Obviously some parts of brain structure were passed down to mammals and birds by their common ancestor.
To be equivalent, you must meet ALL the criteria. In case you have forgotten them, they are as follows:
Well gee, if I crafted an equivalent scenario where the common ancestor of various intelligent species had primitives which are by definition the common denominator of all intelligence, then I would necessarily have to conclude that the descendant species were using the same primitives, which is your hypothesis.
All that shows is that you can craft a circular argument.
The primitives are assumed, in this argument, to be wired by means of other mechanisms to produce actual intelligence and actual empathy - something you ignore in favor of sneering.
Ignore? I accepted it as part of your premise without argument. Obviously you weren't saying a brain is composed only of these elements. It is in the same way that "Hello World" involves the basic Turing Complete elements wired together, and I thought you would understand that.
And I'm sure not sneering, I'm telling you your hypothesis is completely unsupported. Sorry if that offends you.
I would appreciate it if you could put your ego to one side for a moment, look at what I am saying, and comment on what is said rather than what you would like me to say because it's easier to poke holes in.
Same to ya, bucky. I know what you're saying, you're saying raven and human intelligence is so similar they must be derived from mechanisms inherited from a common ancestor. You can describe that hypothetical mechanism as precisely as you want, and I don't care, because that's not where the holes are in your argument.
The problem is that there is no evidence that such a set of primitives meeting all those criterion exists. Your sole evidence, that both ravens and humans can be described by the same vague term "intelligent", doesn't come close to necessitating the existence of such primitives.
I do not say I'm "right", but I do say that I deserve better than to be walked over.
Pretty much, you said that this is what this research "means", without qualification. Try "I think it is interesting to hypothesize that..." or "I imagine it is possible that..." next time. I accepted that it is hypothetically possible in my first reply. I do not accept that it is likely, and definitely not the what this research "means". This research does not imply that.
Forgot to deal with this. Simply put, I'm referring to primitives. I don't need to consider more space than is needed to have ALL the building-blocks needed to form intelligence and empathy, of sufficient complexity that intelligence and empathy can be implemented essentially only one way. I do NOT need any of the space needed to cover the actual implementation of either.
But you DO if you actually want to get the result. You said we should be able to achieve basic skills like empathy using current AI tools, by just simulating the "primitives", but in reality you have to actually simulate the aggregation of primitives necessary to implement empathy. And they have to be aggregated correctly. Which is what the problem already is -- simulating enough of the brain's structure, and with the correct organization.
I could put the whole of a Turing-complete microprocessor, C library and even the Linux kernel all on one chip. Slashdot has covered web servers running on smaller systems than a matchbox. You couldn't run a decent Enterprise-scale database on anything that small. But there is absolutely nothing in the larger systems that does not exist in the smaller ones, at the primitives level.
The C library and kernel contain no primitives that aren't in the ISA level, so why bring them up? Because you're arguing for a higher-level set of primitives that are shared. Yet a database implemented in C on Linux would look very different under the hood than one implemented in Java on Mach, despite producing similar results.
And that's without even getting into the fact that there are multiple implementations of the C library from different sources. Assuming two application binaries have a common ancestor because they were both written in C (the ancestor being via the C library) would be silly.
My argument is that there is a segment of the brain, more substantial than an individual neuron, that performs key operations that are so absolutely fundamental to what we mean by intelligence and empathy that ALL intelligence and empathy built from those operations will be virtually the same across all animals.
Yes that was clear.
The variations in animal intelligence we are seeing are small, implying constraints in the system that keep those variations small.
There is absolutely no way you can justify the first half of that sentence with a sufficiently narrow definition of "small". Our definition of intelligence is extremely general and vague. "Two species are able to solve problems" is not a specific enough observation that you can infer that the mechanisms producing those results are anywhere similar.
In another post where you argued against convergent evolution, you brought up flukes and fins. They are different, but they both let the animal swim. For observations of swimming as general and abstract as those we have for intelligence, they are indistinguishable. You have no way of knowing that the "primitives" behind human empathy aren't analogous to flukes while the "primitives" behind raven empathy are analogous to fins. Hell, if swimming were as poorly defined as intelligence, then you'd be arguing that whales, tuna, squids, and nuclear submarines must all be using the same mechanism to swim because the result is so similar.
To summarize, you're claiming that:
1) Closely similar results must be using the the same mechanisms -- not just the same, but both inherited from the same common ancestor.
Which is wrong.
2) The observed similarity in intelligence between animals is close enough that it implies they must be using the same inherited mechanism due to (1).
Which, even given (1), is laughably wrong in the basic observation.
No, a working implementation of "Hello World" is NOT a primitive. You could never call Hello World in any arrangement to build another arrangement. The C language plus the standard C99 library would be primitives.
Yes, obviously. "Hello World" is the brain of the ancient reptile ancestor of birds and mammals, a working program. It contains the primitives necessary to make "Hello World". You aren't suggesting that you could assemble reptile brains together to create a human brain, you're suggesting it contained the necessary components. Just like "hello world" contains components, "primitives" as you'd call them.
And it's still an apt analogy. You're basically hypothesizing that because there are two instances of enterprise database servers, both distant descendants of a "Hello World" code base, that the "Hello World" code base contained all the necessary components to create those database servers and the necessary components weren't added separately to the two distinct development trees.
That hypothesis is utterly unsupported.
In the case of intelligence or empathy, clearly the primitives being used are complex enough that despite a total lack of any definition of intelligence (or, indeed, empathy), we have analytical tools capable of identifying intelligence and empathy in crows. They should be almost as alien as life on another planet.
That the end result can be identified as similar between mammals and birds using such ill-defined and general terms as "intelligence" and "empathy" implies nothing about the underlying "primatives" used to achieve them. Even if the basic structures are similar, which is quite possible since they were starting from the same neuron-based brain, that still does not mean that they must have existed in a common ancestor.
Hell, I'm certain that given sufficient study we could identify intelligence in alien life forms, and probably empathy too, if it existed. That's the whole point -- we're evaluating a high-level behavior, not the mechanism behind it. Many completely different mechanisms can result in the same high-level behavior.
I thought the Battlestar Galactica movie (which I saw for the first time only a couple years ago) is actually pretty good.
Tron wasn't sci-fi, and wasn't trying to be. It was pure fantasy. It was based on the idea that there is a whole world inside of computers where programs interact like people and bits float around saying "yes" and "no". Worrying about things like how an accounting program can be made to compete in gladiatorial games without being modified, or how bits could be floating around individually when every program would have to be made of bits and there'd need to be more of them than existed in computers of the day is besides the point. It'd be like having a movie where you can go to a magical school for wizards after walking through the wall at the subway, then worrying about how they can make brooms fly.
The fantasy nature of the movie really struck me when I re-watched it for the first time in 20 years. Sure I remembered liking the movie as a kid but I had very little in the way of expectations. And I found that because of its fantasy nature it worked way better than just about any sci-fi movie that tried to show computers "realistically" and utterly failed*.
Once I accepted that it was a fantasy world, I found it fascinating. Especially the idea of the programs having a religion based on the "user" as their gods (little did they know what an unworthy god they worshiped), and even more fascinating an "atheist" movement which denied that the "user" and the world outside of the computer even existed. Also interesting was how outside of the digitizing machine, everything shown about computers in the real world was completely normal. The giant spinning vortex of the MCP inside the computer was just a simple text interface on the outside. It'd be kinda like Harry Potter if magic simply didn't exist outside of Hogwarts.
Anyway, I say give it a another shot, and go in realizing you're watching computer-based fantasy, not sci-fi.
* Major contemporaneous exception: Wargames!
To me, it seems logical that empathy is a social behavior. Perhaps it's game theory, where helping out a fellow costs you relatively little at that moment but can net you help when you need it. Aesop's fable about the Lion and the Mouse nicely illustrates and exaggerates the point.
Surely it's a social behavior, but whether social groups will naturally have it or not is I think an open, and interesting, question.
The game theory advantage is definitely there, though. For example, Chickadees, Titmice, and some other birds will form mixed big species flocks (with the tiny chickadees usually taking the role of leader, kinda amusingly). When one of them finds food, they'll lead the rest of the flock to it. Even in the winter when food is scarce and you might think a bird would horde the food to itself or just a couple members of its own species, they will bring the whole flock to share. Research has shown that such flocks are actually more successful than lone birds, because while the individual bird might lose out by sharing the limited food supply it finds, it (or other members of its species) will benefit from the other flock member's sharing.
I think it would be interesting to study chickadees and look for indications of empathy. Is it simply an advantageous learned behavior the birds follow by instinct? Or is there an element of "my flock mates are hungry, I should share this food I found with them"?
This research is a long, long way from meaning any of the things you said.
Unless by underlying mechanism you just meant basically a functioning brain that could, with many millions of years of evolution, adapt to have empathy. Essentially in the same way having a working "Hello World" program in C could be considered the "underlying mechanism" for an enterprise database server.
But beyond that, while it's hypothetically possible that empathy and toolmaking abilities existed in the ancient reptile that is the common ancestor of birds and mammals, much more likely is that the only "common mechanism" is the extremely flexible base design of the brain, and it took both birds and mammals much evolution to develop larger brains abilities that do not appear to be present in modern reptiles, which have much simpler brains.
More to the point: If empathy and toolmaking are possible in extremely simple brains that we could hypothetically simulate, why do they only appear in species with significantly larger brains? Why do ravens have such large brains if they could get away with simple, tiny ones and perform the same tasks? It seems to me that many of the features you're hoping are simple, like tool making, are actually side effects of a general abstract reasoning ability, and that this ability requires a relatively large and complex brain to achieve.
Why did you put Common in Common Raven in quotes? Because you thought it was intended in a pejorative sense, like "the mere common Raven", when they're anything but "mere", or as a hint to others who may have thought this that it isn't the case?
In any event, just to clarify, Common Raven is the common (heh) name for the species Corvus corax.
Probability is always conditional based on knowledge available at the time.
You may as well have said that the probabilities of a and b are the same by revealing the sex of the other child to be female in both cases. That would fix the probability of a second boy at 0, but that doesn't mean it was the answer to a or b, because it's a different problem.
Similarly, you can't say the answer to "what are the odds that I rolled a 1 on this fair six-sided die?" isn't 1/6 by then revealing that you'd already rolled the die and gotten a 2.
Dr. Jonas Venture was smart enough to do that when he took over Spider Skull Island.
I'll forgive you then, since after all if I was on the jury for your murder trial I'd let you off with the "lack of coffee defense".