If the farmer's acres are more useful than other plots for agriculture, then the other plots would be cheaper, and the real-estate developer would buy those. They can't buy _all_ land for developing, because then the food prises would rise, and at some point the farmer would be able to out-price them _on_ the plots that are fertile.
It doesn't work ad nauseam. Once you have, say, 100 million 1-acre plots, another 600 have negative value. Because you'd pay more taxes on them, but you can't sell them.
I imagine you were thinking about houses. How many new houses do you think you'd have to build and sell before everyone has a house? In the US, that would be on the order of tens or a hundred million. After that, the 600-acre agricultural plot becomes unlimitedly more valuable than 600 1-acre plots, because everyone has houses but no one has anything to eat. The point is that this would lead to an equilibrium price between land usage, and it would tend to be an efficient equilibrium.
Imagine two 500-acre plots of land. One is fertile, one is not. A house developer would value them the same (ie, they can produce X$ with them), but a farmer might value one at 0.5X$ and the other at 0.01X$. If those are the only two uses for the land, there would be a tendency for the land to be used efficiently: The housing developer would prefer the infertile land, because they'd pay tax for lower than 0.1X$ of property (the biggest offer someone else can do); if they got the fertile land, they'd pay tax for 0.5X$ (again, the largest value someone else is prepared to pay for it).
You ask what happens if the developer wants to buy both plots of land, and there are no other plots of land available? This means that food starts to cost +infinity $ (zero offer, inflexible demand), so the farmer's value for the fertile becomes +infinity$ (they can pay any amount of money, because then they can ask any amount of money for the food).
Of course in reality there will be many uses for many products (ie, other than land), but the same mechanism tends towards efficiency. The only missing item is that you have to consider friction, too (ie, the fact that it's not free to convert the land between uses), but that happens in any kind of free market.
After playing Black & White for a while I often tried raising the glass of water on my desk or batting away a fly on the screen with my mouse. As for keys, on several occasions I surprised myself raising my hand to press '9' while trying to check out a pretty girl (binoculars in Deus Ex, which I was playing at the time). I also sometime type Ctrl-Z on a piece of paper when I make a mistake.
On a higher level, I often think of processes in real life as procedure executions, especially cooking. (Function applications are rarer, since I learned about FP much later in life. Though continuations and closures do come up often enough.) And when having multi-threaded conversations with a certain friend we use topic stacks, with explicit verbal pushes and pops.
Heh. Well, do you think that anyone should be allowed to carry with them big shit-loads of TNT anywhere they want to?
A nuke blowing up at ground level (say, the Louvre, the Metropolitan Museum, a University, any hospital, even a mall) will certainly not destroy a city. But I won't call it ineffective, even in a war. It's might be actually efficient, depending on the underlying intent.
Also a nuke (even a huge one) is very portable relative to a big shit-load of TNT. And I'm sure modern ones could be moved with relative ease to the top floor of a sky-scraper, which would work similar to an airburst (probably not perfect, but still). In fact, once you have one nuke, it's probably easier to do that than to hijack a big plane and drive it into the same building.
Don't forget perspective. The grandparent opinionated that it would be OK for any ordinary citizen to have access to nuclear weapons. Even one nuke can have more nasty effects than all the planes used on 9/11. And that triggered two wars (that are still going on), turned the most successful democracy on Earth to a potential police state, and is indirectly responsible for a probably recession...
A nuke explosion alone would not directly destroy civilization. But the grandparent's opinion is ridiculous. Can you imagine the Columbine massacre with nukes? That wasn't terrorism, Muslims, political agendas, or conspiracies.
Actually, the nasty thing about nukes is that you don't need a very good delivery device. It doesn't matter that much where one goes off. Pretty much anywhere in an inhabited or industrialized place one could do a big mess. If anyone could have one, that's a lot of potential messes.
So a car or a backpack could be very good delivery devices for small enough nukes. You don't even need to be suicidal, you can just leave one somewhere. And suicidal people are not that rare; they weren't even before the current Muslim craze.
9/11 was such a big deal because it's hard to cause that much damage. You need a good plan and a lot of dedicated people to hijack plane and fly it into a building, even if you have access to guns or normal bombs.
Imagine for the sake of argument that a nuke was as easy to own as a gun is now. Of course, for rational people with something to loose they would be a good deterrent against aggression. Nukes work (almost) as an anti-aggression deterrent amongst the countries that have them, because the complexities of government tend to average out the crazies. But just barely. They don't stop anyone who doesn't care if they die, though, and there are plenty of crazies in the world.
No. Sorry, I didn't mention an essential element of the definition: Length is defined as the time light spends to cross that distance _in_a_void_. This is why in the detector we discuss the laser beams are sent through empty (ie, void) tubes.
This needs some careful consideration if it travels in mater. It's not impossible to calculate distance from time spent in mater, because the speed of light in a certain transparent medium is measurable. But it's probably not very useful, because of approximations. Mater is never really homogeneous; light travels slower in mater because photons interact complexly with electrons---and, to a much lesser degree, with nuclei---, so transmission is no longer a continuous process. Light is actually an electromagnetic wave, so you have to be very careful what you mean when you say "light travels through matter", which pretty much means a wave in the electromagnetic field travels through a sea of very agitated electrons, ie a very messy area of the electromagnetic field.
But that's not really a huge flaw in the definition. The difference between it and a "classical" length measurement (e.g., with a ruler) only appears in special cases (eg, huge speeds, very short or very long distances, gravity waves), where we need to be careful anyway.
Basically, if you need to really measure the length of an object (say, a long pole) as close as possible to the definition, you'd need to shine a laser beam _outside_ the object, through void. (Either do it in space, as it's done for astronomical distances, or build a really empty tunnel along side it. Though in space you still need to correct for interstellar gas and dust.)
In fact, I just realized that even my last definition is not correct. "Length" is the time spent by _something that travels at the speed of light in void_ to cross the distance (in natural units). The "c" in "E=mc^2", AKA "the speed of light" is simply the fastest speed something that caries information can travel in the Universe (according to relativity), doesn't have anything in particular to do with light. It just so happens that light in void travels at that maximum speed, and it was very convenient to use at the time relativity was created because it was relatively well understood. AFAIK, you can also call it "the speed of gravity", because it so happens that gravity (1) travels at the same speed, and (2) there's no third thing that does (I think). However, it's harder to use to measure things; that's why LIGO is such a big deal.
(Note that relativity doesn't prevent _space_ itself from deforming quicker than the "speed of light". So two objects can move away from one another faster that light-speed, from an initial relative stand-still, if something causes space to grow between them fast enough. If this happens forever (ie, the space doesn't slow down its growing), then according to the definition above the distance between the objects "becomes" infinite. Light can no longer reach from one to another, because space is created faster than light can cross it. But things get beyond my understanding of relativity way before this point.)
In fact the length of the space between the mirrors (and any length whatsoever) is _defined_ as the time light spends traveling between the two. This is the definition of distance in GR. It works because the speed of light is constant for everyone everywhere (in GR); the same thing causes all the other funny effects of relativity, for instance the same object having different lengths for different observers.
So, by the same definition, a piece of space is lengthened or shortened _iff_ light spends a longer or shorter time traveling it. The speed of light never changes, but due to conservation laws its _frequency_ changes.
Very approximately, imagine the pulse of light starting at the far mirror. The EM wave makes (say) 100 oscillations in 100 seconds (totally out of scale with the real experiment, but that's not important). If the length between the mirrors is constant, the 100 wave peaks will hit the close mirror in 100 seconds. But if the distance between mirrors changes (eg, due to a gravity wave compressing space) _during_ the 100-pulse emission, the last peaks will have less space to travel than the first peaks. This means that the close mirror will be hit by 100 peaks in, say, 90 seconds. So the frequency of the wave went from 1 Hz to 10/9=1.1Hz. The waveform was deformed (compressed), but its speed was constant. (Note that the effect happens _only_ if the space changes shape _during_ the pulse. If it changes, say, between two 100-oscillation pulses spaced apart, you'll still get the travel time difference, but not the frequency shift. LIGO uses continuous lasers, though.)
The LIGO can't actually measure the change because it's much smaller than in this example. So it sends the lasers in perpendicular directions, and reflects them back. Because gravity waves stretch space differently in each direction (except if their direction happens to exactly bisect the angle between the arms), a passing gravity wave will force the two beams to go slightly out of phase. The difference between the two beams is (barely) detectable for big waves.
I didn't check either of the calculations, nor the source numbers, but aren't there many more cars than that already? The solar concentrators need more surface area than a car, but mass-wise (ie, how much material you need to build one) can be much lower.
The can also (a) use very lightweight mirrors (ie, sub-millimeter thin reflecting foil instead of sheet metal, it can even be semi-transparent so you can grow some things below, and thus can reuse the huge surfaces of agriculturally land) and (b) adapt catalysts and/or intricately-shaped (internally) reactors to increase efficiency of conversion, this could potentially become comparably efficient with the solar-to-electricity-to-batteries pathway. (Or even more efficient, if you factor in potential savings in material costs. Ie, batteries are costly, this seems relatively cheap.)
Also, if there's a push towards using solar power this way it can also potentially divert resources to directly using solar. Note that this idea involves power plants, not cars, so if we get really good at using solar power it might take power plants out of the loop, too. Then we'd only need the chemical link of the cycle for vehicles (assuming we can't get far enough with replacing internal combustion engines).
Note that the fact that this needs to add, and eventually replace, huge amounts of infrastructure is not an argument against it. Any method to remove the reliance on fossil fuels needs that, and one of them will eventually be necessary. Wind power is very hard to scale up (we still need to cover huge areas, but with precision-machined high-strength parts that need to work at high stresses and in wildly varying conditions). Hydro power--there just isn't enough of it except in the sea, which is a very unforgiving medium (chemical and sand corrosion), with the same technical problems as wind And both of them have ecological problems. Nuclear--I'm a huge supporter of it, but it's still expensive, and it doesn't (yet, probably never) work in small increments and small scales. Space-solar, fusion and conservation are still pipe-dreams I think, in increasing order of how long it will take before they're relevant IMO.
That leaves ground solar, which seems a very good idea. The entire ecosystem is based on it, for once, including all the fossil-spending we're doing. Photo-voltaics don't seem scalable to me, as they're kind of expensive to build, though some recent developments seem encouraging. But everything that involves covering big areas with mirrors (very low-tech) and concentrating the power in smallish elements that do the conversion work (efficient, since you also concentrate the technological parts there) seems very doable. You can start small and grow practically linearly. You can use almost any land area (and partially, see the half-mirror idea above). It seems very eco-friendly (few chemicals involved, relatively simple technologically); this one pretty much uses rust as the basic material. It scales easily once you find out how to use it in small tests (and you can do _lots_ of those). The power is there anyway, heating the Earth, we might as well use it. It's quite dependable--you have some of it every day between the polar circles, even with cloud cover. And the lots of it is in places where you can't use the land for much else (deserts). And as a bonus, we gather know-how for space-based solar power, when we'll finally be able to use it.
So I'm quite sure solar is going to be a big part of what we're going to use for much of this century, alongside as many nuclear plants as we'll be able to make.
The "do we really want to do this?" question is for another discussion, as are the other ethical ones.
As for the rest: As I see it, there are two possibilities: Either (1) every little detail, down to the quantum behavior of atoms inside the neuron, are _necessary_ for intelligent behavior, or (2) there is one higher-level description of a neuron that is sufficient, and the lower-level (quantum, chemical, proteic, etc) behavior is just implementation detail. I'm rather sure (2) is true, mostly because of the huge variability of neurons, which implies that many variations can in fact be abstracted away.
Note that this doesn't mean that a "sufficient" approximation of a neuron is simple (e.g., a biased, weighted dot-product of the inputs, like a perceptron). It can be a very complex function, I'm just sure that it's much simpler than a physical neuron. Which supports the assumption at the thread's beginning, i.e. that we can probably implement it in hardware that is complex, but still much simpler than a simulation of the entire biological neuron, what with the life-support details and all. In short, it's probably hard, but many orders of magnitude easier than you'd think by looking at the physical complexity of a neuron.
On the other hand, I don't agree with the "before taking this route" part: in fact, I think we're taking this route precisely to help answer these questions. We know that the brain is, at a certain level of approximation, a very complex network of neurons. We have never built anything like that, and it's not currently feasible to study it dynamically (ie, while a brain is working, at synapse-level of detail). The obvious path is to study it statically (eg, what the article describes) and build a network that simulates the _structure_. Once we do that (either with a 300-neuron worm nervous system or with something bigger), the differences of behavior are caused by the _nodes_, i.e. neurons. So then we can focus on them.
(Of course, this doesn't mean that we can't study it in the other direction, e.g. by studying individual neurons, which is also done in other research.)
The summary of this part is that we don't need to know the _necessary_ complexity of the neuron simulation (as per my third paragraph) _before_ this research, but rather it will be the _result_ of the research.
The hope is that these two approaches (and others) will at one point converge and give us something that is reasonably intelligent. Which brings us to your other question, "how do we know when a system is behaving intelligently?" Well, we don't know that yet for every system (there's no good definition) but there are cases where we can tell. For instance, as humans we generally agree that most other humans act intelligently (not smart, just intelligently). And we can do that, despite the fact that we don't know how we work. Which, of course, leaves us with some variant of the Turing test.
(Note that the Turing test was designed for human-level intelligence. But it can be extended for some other cases. For instance, if we replace the brain of a worm/fly with an artificial one, and then we can't tell that worm/fly from a natural one just from their behaviors, we can reasonably argue that the artificial brain simulates the organic one well enough. This doesn't necessarily mean that we can easily extend that to a human brain, but it's already a great advancement.)
You're assuming that the neuron's complexity must necessarily be simulated exactly. Artificial heart valves, hip replacements and even blood (this one is still in prototype phase) are much less complex then the organs they replace (they don't even have cell-scale features, let alone imitate those of the replaced organ) but can simulate their function very well in many respects.
So it's reasonably probable that a neuron's functions can be simulated with useful accuracy without going into nasty details like protein synthesis, electron transport, the quantum aspects of synapse chemistry and whatever else you were thinking of.
And it caught on very well in at least some parts of the UK.
I agree that not _everywhere_, and most kinds of public transport aren't well suited to many common situations, but it can work very well. It doesn't have to replace all uses of cars, just many of them.
What if it was from an automated source, but sent to, say, four recipients? That's not spam.
What if it is from an actual human being, who just imitated or copied&modified an automatically-generated message? (Why? Maybe he doesn't speak English very well, and he just thinks that's how a formal message should read like.) That's not spam.
What if someone wrote that on purpose as a joke? It might be annoying, but not spam.
OK, so what if it was spam? As long as the claimant didn't prove it, the Judge took the correct decision. (And an far as I know it's not really his job to try to "improve" the claimant's case. He's actually forbidden to do that in most cases.)
So the question is, did Haselton _prove_ it was bulk email? No. If the Judge ruled that way, it would be the same as saying "you have encryption software, you must be hiding something", or any of the other crap we get angry about here all the time.
It's biologically sterile, but doesn't that urea and other toxins get re-absorbed in your body? If you only drink urine you're essentially in the same condition you'd be without kidneys. Sure, in the very short term dehydration can be the bigger problem, but if you only drink urine you'll die of renal insufficiency (or an equivalent of it) within a few days. (BTW, your kidneys will get overloaded by the toxins, so this is not only short-term.)
While this can't be used for sending info superluminarily, you can use a pool of entangled particles the same way as a one-time-pad. You entangle the particle before leaving, you measure them later (in parallel), and use the bits to encrypt communication. The communication still happens at light-speed, but it's quantum-encrypted without having to _send_ entangled particles between the two parts. (This is pretty much equivalent to how (I think) quantum encryption works, but you don't need to send the entangled particles over the air, you take them with you. Which I _think_ might be easier to do.)
I can't tell if this is in any way superior to a normal one-time pad, though. You can destroy it easily by breaking the containment of any of the two particle stores, but you can also burn one of the one-time pads as well.
Return to figures 1&2: There are two entangled electrons, which means they share a common (or opposite) trait (spin, in our case). However, and this is important, _we don't know that state_. It may be weird, or up, or down, or whatever.
fig.5a: ]^[ ]v[ or fig.5b: ]v[ ]^[
Those are the only two possible outputs of the experiment (assuming we measure one trait, eg. spin; the explanation is equivalent for more traits). In practice, what we have is fig.6: ]^v[ & ]^v[ --- the particles are both "sharing", but we don't know what.
What happens if we "disturb" the particle on Earth? Assuming that the disturbance breaks the entanglement, what will happen is two things: (first) the two particles "decide" their state, ie. they pick between fig.5a and fig.5b, which breaks the entanglement, and (second) the first particle gets disturbed, ie. its state is measurably changed. The important thing is that the entanglement was broken, so no matter what we do to the first particle, it doesn't get propagated to the other one. Assume that we can perturb the first particle in two ways, a and b, and that each perturbation turns the particle to a different wild state depending on which state the particles decided when breaking the entanglement; we'll use a capital letter if the initial state was ^ and lower-case if the state was v. So:
Initial entangled state: ]^v[ ]^v[ (The first is the particle on Earth, the second on the spaceship; two symbols between the mirrors means the particle has both states simultaneously.)
Now assume that Earth perturbs its particle with a, or it perturbs its particle with b, or it doesn't perturb its particle; then the spaceship measures its particle:
If Earth perturbs its particle with a, either we get: ]a[ ]^[ or we get: ]A[ ]v[ with equal probability.
If Earth perturbs its particle with b, either we get: ]b[ ]^[ or we get: ]B[ ]v[ with equal probability.
If Earth doesn't perturb its particle, either we get: ]v[ ]^[ or we get: ]^[ ]v[ with equal probability, because when the spaceship has measured its particle (trying to see what Earth did), it also broke the entanglement!
Notice how no matter what perturbation we picked on Earth, the spaceship can still measure either of the states, with equal probability. Thus, no matter what Earth does, the spaceship can't actually tell. Eg, assuming the spaceship measured a ]^[, it can only deduce that Earth has either an ]a[ or a ]b[ or a ]v[. Which doesn't tell it what Earth actually did.
This goes further: even if Earth tries to measure its particle now, with or without "major disturbance", it still can't tell if the spaceship did or didn't measure the other particle. Notice that every possible outcome of the measurement on Earth can happen _no matter whether or not the spaceship did the measurement_.
Note that it is possible to _correlate_ behavior instantaneously using this system: Earth and the spaceship could decide, for example, to dance at a certain moment in the future, using either of two dance moves according to the result of measuring the particles. If they have several pairs of entangled particles, the dance can be: spaceship: aAAaaaAaAAaaAaAAAa Earth: BbbBBBbBbbBBbBbbbB
When they return home, they'll be happy to notice that they danced together, at the same time (*), despite being separated by an arbitrary distance, without picking a dance sequence in advance. The only catch is that _neither_ can pick the dance. (You could say that the particles did, or the Universe.) Note that theoretically a robot-dancer pair can be built; assuming that (a) both the users and the robots are perfect dancers and (b) they follow the instructions of the particles, the end result is equivalent to dancing with each-other a dance decided by dice.
(*: I don't know enough physics to define that, but I think they can pick any pair of moments within their respective light-cones. So one can actually dance together with "future-other" by some definitions.)
The trouble with prophecies and prophets is that they either don't work, or they're unverifiable.
The first kind is easy to understand: I prophesize that "on August the 3rd, 2007 the world will end", then on August the 4th, if the world didn't end, it's quite clear I wasn't a prophet. The prophesy was testable, and it failed the test. What if on August the 3rd the world ended?
Here we get to the subtle part: First, verification can't prove a theory, it can only disprove one. (Here, the theory was that my statement was prophetic, ie, I knew a future fact, explicitly by supernatural means.) The reason is that predicting a future fact (meaning "claiming it will happen before it does") doesn't automatically imply supernatural knowledge.
There are many other possible cases: (a) Logical deduction from known facts: if the world ended by "natural" means, say an atomic war (as opposed to unnatural ones, like demons sprawling forth from the Earth), then it might simply have been a deduction. I could have known (or suspected) one of the atomic powers intended to attack on that date. (b) Statistical almost-certainty: if every person was asked to predict the date of the end of the world, and six billion different dates were picked, and one of them happened to be true, is that person a prophet? Hard to argue, right? Of course, we don't need all six billion people to make a prediction on the same date; predicting the end of the world (or whatever) is a popular past-time, some of these predictions are bound to happen by sheer chance. (c) Self-fulfilling: if there is widespread belief that my prophecy is true (but unsupported, as my prophecy is the only reason to trust it before verification), in some cases it is possible for people to make it happen; in our example, a leader might start an atomic war because either (i) he thinks he is destined to or (ii) he thinks his "adversary" believes nr(i), and tries to preempt him (this works best if the prophecy says "before August 3rd" instead of "on August 3rd").
These can become even more complicated for more complex prophecies. (d) If I say "the world will end before August 3rd, unless enough people [pray|stop fornicating|kill Muslims|whatever]", and then nothing happens until that date, is this proof of anything? Of course not? I can say "enough people did it, great!", which can't be tested if I didn't put a limit to the condition. Imagine I had put a limit on the condition, and say we counted them. If the limit was reached, there's no way to tell if that's why the world didn't end, right? Because it was expected not to end if the prophecy was fake, too. If the limit wasn't reached, I can always wiggle out with "the count didn't work right", or "God is merciful", or "[I|the angels|President Bush] averted the end by [praying real hard|defeating the Evil|banning abortions]".
Bible prophecies are affected by all these problems in some amount, but mostly by this one:
(e) Ambiguous prophecy: Either (A) the exact fact is not well defined, or (B) there's no time limit given to the prophecy.
The "mark of the Beast" prophecy falls in part (e/A), with a bit of (e/B); the "state of Israel" is in part (e/B), mixed with a healthy amount of (c).
-I- Take the "mark of the Beast". It was claimed to apply to anything from Nero's head on the gold coins during the Roman empire to bar-codes, RFIDs and credit cards. I'm sure someone somewhere refused to use banknotes because they had a serial number on them. You can't claim that the prophecy being applied to a new technology is proof of supernatural anticipation, because the prophecy was already applied to many things. It could be next applied to some other future technology, unimagined today, when bar-codes/RFIDs/credit cards will be antiquities. Would that be proof of a vision? No, simply because _it is impossible to tell exactly what the prophecy refers to_. Anything can be construed as a "mark".
Of course, this is amplified because the prophecy regards money. (Note that desp
I read your post in two parts. First, an assertion that certain arguments support the truthfulness of the Bible (truth in the sense of "real fact" rather than "not a lie"; the two senses are not logically related). Among these arguments are the internal unity of the document, despite it being of complex origin, and the apparent confirmation from world facts, as is the apparent hardwiring of humans towards religiousness.
The second part is an interpretation and discussion of the Bible, assuming that the first assertion is accepted. Though this is not without merits, I am more interested in the first part; the rest of my answer concerns thus the first part. I'm sorry, I'm sure you have seen already most of what I'm about to say, but I'm curious of the answers.
In the interest of clarity I'll restate the subject: whether the existing evidence favors or not the hypothesis that the Bible is true, ie there exists a God, transcending, all-powerful and loving, which has manifested itself as stated in the Bible histories.
I include in the "existing evidence" only objective facts: observations that can be confirmed today, logic and to some extents philosophy (eg, epistemology). Items of faith (prophecies and personal revelations) can not be argued against rationally because they are self-proving. (Ie, it's impossible to prove someone's revelation is false, except by showing that the revelation is the <i>only</i> proof of its truthfulness. Which gets messy quick.)
So, let's see:
(1) The internal unity of the Bible is an argument to its "higher origin". (The alternative, that it is purely a human work, without any transcendent input, ie fiction (excepting, of course, the historical parts), is usually not stated because it's often offensive to believers.) This is because without a supernatural guidance a work assembled by dozens of people over thousands of years it would not be possible---the argument goes---for the result to be consistent.
However: (a) the authors were parts of a continuous culture (b) each author was aware of much of the rest of the text, in tradition if not copies of it (c) the author of most if not all parts can be assumed to have been a believer the preceding parts and to have been educated in its spirit, or (d) would have been a recent convert, thus also very motivated to have faith in the texts (e) additions diverging strongly from the precedent would be usually eliminated as heresy.
See the disparity between Judaism and Christianity; the former is a culture of believers, rejecting the New Testament as too strong a difference; the addition was strong enough to attract converts from outside it and separated into a new culture. Christianity in turn became an "established culture", which again rejects strong changes, like Mormonism. Of course, I ignore many schisms inside each, and the roots are close enough that, after a long time of cohabitation, the different "versions" can see each other as very close.
What I'm getting at is that a certain amount of self-consistency is a natural property of a religion. Pretty much all religions exhibit it, including the Abrahamic religions, Nordic (Odin/Thor) ones, Buddhism, the Greek/Roman polytheistic religions, old Amerindian religions---despite, all of them, being accumulated over very long periods of time, though contributions by many people.
(2) Man's apparent hardwiring to religion is indicative of the existence of a God who desires to interact, thus, with Man.
First of all, the sheer vastness of the number of very incompatible religions that have existed throughout the ages would indicate that man, <i>IF</i> indeed has a predisposition towards religion, arrive to believe in staggeringly different things. Don't be fooled by the fact that <i>some</i> religions are partly compatible, or have kernels that might be interpreted as similar. Reconciling the differences requires answers so evasive as to be useless.
Well, the patterns on the disk _together_ with the computer's build will make some sense, because the result is an interactive machine. You can poke it and see what happens, though of course that's pretty hard for someone who has no inkling of current languages.
Anyway, you're right, I did miss out the point of your post. I've read it again, carefully, and I think I get it. What you're talking about is a version of the trans-humanist idea of downloading a complete, living consciousness (a person's mind) into a newer, more advanced brain (and body) that, even though it may have nothing in common with the original in construction, it is still "compatible" with the older one, perhaps with a few more features.
The only difference I see from the trans-humanist thing is that you claim to believe that some passages from the Bible (might?) indicate that there exist already some physical parallel universes that just happen to be organized such that the advanced hardware exists already (or would "assemble" at some moment) and will accept the minds of (at least some of) the dead persons in this universe. (Not sure what you make of believers, non believers, hell and sin and all that, in this context.) Also, apparently, Jesus is (or might be, I'm not sure of the tone of your post, bear with me) a being that originates in such a parallel universe, could touch this universe and did so in the shape of a man, and occasionally did some miracles.
(Miracles of which we heard from old, unreliable and uneducated sources, but we're supposed to take as accurately described and wonder at their impossibility. And their complex layers of meaning. It's funny how people can draw the most complicated conclusions from texts like the bible, insist they're right about interpreting God's words, and when asked about "why are there all these metaphors and incongruities and contradictions and missing facts?" they serenely reply that "God works in mysterious ways", which sort of means "we can't know what and how".)
Anyway, back to your post. The mind-moving thing is quite plausible, though it does seem quite difficult. The Jesus from a parallel universe is of course quite possible in a multi-verse, but then again, so is the Invisible Pink Unicorn. The only difference is there's an old book we don't quite know who wrote it that _might_ imply the former, and apparently not the later (though I'm sure it depends on who you ask).
(I'm not being sarcastic here, sorry if that's how it sounds. Religion is very important for some people, and I respect it as such. But any discussion depends on the premises, and I think it's important to remind that (any) religious view is a very subjective premise; religion allows any number of interpretations one might want to give. Science---the view that things exists, and observation/theory/verification allows us to know some of them---is an arbitrary view, of course, but it does allow much less wiggle room. I don't mean anyone must subscribe to that view, just that it should be remembered, simply because its premises (sensations and logical reasoning) are shared more universally than beliefs.)
However, even a computer has this thing called software, an immaterial product of mind. No matter how minutely you examine the physical hardware of a computer, you learn little or nothing about its software until you turn it on.
That's not really true. Consider two cases:
(1) The computer on your desk. (This works for any computer that reads its program off a separate media, be it a Turing-machine tape or a magnetic hard drive, and runs the program on a "processor".)
If you examine the hardware minutely, you can notice the patterns on the media (say, the symbols drawn/carved/whatever on the tape, or the orientation of magnetic moments of different areas on the magnetic disk platter; in your computer you'll also have to look at which fuses are burned in the ROM chips and what's the charge of every cell in the FLASH chips.) Using that information, you can tell what the computer would do when you run it. (With as much precision as you can simulate it, of course.)
(2) Most "interesting" computers, and what we do with them, are "general-purpose"; that is, they receive any number of programs and they work as the loaded programs instruct them. However, that's not the "basic" description of a (non-general purpose) computer; a computer that only runs a single program is still a computer, albeit a non-general-purpose one.
The easiest thing to imagine is this: take any general purpose computing architecture (your computer, or---easier to understand---the computer inside a digital camera). Load the hard-drive with an OS & programs that adhere to the Harvard architecture (that is, the IP never points to code that was not on the hard drive, and the hard drive is never written to; assume there's no way to boot except from that drive).
Right now, your computer is no longer general purpose. Without changing the hard-drive, it can only do a single thing. (But that can be very complicated; it _can_ contain a web browser with a JavaScript interpreter, as long as it doesn't compile it to machine code and jumps to it; it can even download a program (for the same architecture) and _interpret_ it, as long as it doesn't JMP to or CALL that code. No, it can't patch the interrupts table either). If you're still not convinced, you can replace _all_ RAM that the IP can ever point to (program correctness is your responsibility!) with (fast) ROM. Everything will run the same, even though the computer can _never_ load modifiable instructions into the processor.
OK, you'll say, the program is still visible in the ROM to someone who looks closely.
True, but imagine that you can (re-)write the _entire_ programs you have loaded into the ROM in VHDL, together with the VHDL description of the processor and the rest of the machine. Then run the VHDL code through an obfuscator, a compiler and an optimizer, then (several years later, I suppose) implement the resulting machine in a single chip (with the necessary IO ports). The resulting thing is computationally equivalent to your computer above (it _is_ a computer), but it's practically impossible to decipher its programming.
You can examine how the various logic gates work, you can find correlations between the inputs and the outputs (eg, when you type the address of a web page it tries to load it, and if connected to the internet it will display it), but you can't _see_ the program.
(OK, you can reverse-engineer it in about a million years, but who says you can't do that to brains, too?)
However, steel isn't a very good choice because of weight [...] With the best technology we have now it is still probably doable within a reasonable multiple of the world's GDP.
Steel is an extreme example of what we could do with low-tech. I haven't made the calculations, so I don't know how much steel (and energy for smelting it) this would need, my estimate might be off by a couple orders of magnitude. But it doesn't matter, because using steel is not the point.
The point is that we have materials good enough to build one today, if every nation on Earth would try very hard. (Actually, the US defense budget is probably enough.) I doubt we can build it in a year, I think that was a slight exaggeration. Maybe he meant he could start building it this year, or he has very different estimates than mine. (I'm guessing a lot here, and he's been actually researching.) But a decade is probably doable with current world resources and current technology.
Yeah, right, good thinking. If I'd build a one hundred thousand kilometers long ribbon of the strongest materials known to man and place it in geostationary orbit, I'd damn right make sure it's safely attached to the ground.
I mean, a boat could... rock around? drift away? you're afraid the space elevator would sink? get lost? got wet? Think, people!
I don't AGREE with this claim.. I've seen no study which shows this to be the case, and all the other problems other than the material to use are not solved.. but he has already addressed the objection that you NEED carbon nanotubes.
That's because you didn't read enough. Most contemporary studies only deal with economically-feasible designs, which is why they only mention very-high-strength materials. This is because using lower-strength materials requires hugely more material, which is simply very hard to send up to orbit.
I have seen calculations for a steel elevator. Yes, it's physically possible with a very tappered design, but it would have a diameter of several hundred kilometers at the thickest part. (Given that its several hundred thousand kilometers long, that's rather thin if you think about it.) However it would need the entire Earth's steel production for a few thousand years, probably, and even longer for rocket fuel to get things started.
However, steel isn't a very good choice because of weight (and it's not that strong, either). The optimal diameter at the thickest point is an exponential of density/tensile strength (with a pretty big constant). This means that even small (relatively) advances in that component will greatly decrease the cost, and we have materials much, much better than steel in that respect.
It's perfectly doable technically, without any major breakthroughs, it's just because of economics that you've never heard of that. With the best technology we have now it is still probably doable within a reasonable multiple of the world's GDP.
We need breakthroughs not to build it, but to build it with less than a country's GDP.
Slashdot Mirror
If the farmer's acres are more useful than other plots for agriculture, then the other plots would be cheaper, and the real-estate developer would buy those. They can't buy _all_ land for developing, because then the food prises would rise, and at some point the farmer would be able to out-price them _on_ the plots that are fertile.
It doesn't work ad nauseam. Once you have, say, 100 million 1-acre plots, another 600 have negative value. Because you'd pay more taxes on them, but you can't sell them.
I imagine you were thinking about houses. How many new houses do you think you'd have to build and sell before everyone has a house? In the US, that would be on the order of tens or a hundred million. After that, the 600-acre agricultural plot becomes unlimitedly more valuable than 600 1-acre plots, because everyone has houses but no one has anything to eat. The point is that this would lead to an equilibrium price between land usage, and it would tend to be an efficient equilibrium.
Imagine two 500-acre plots of land. One is fertile, one is not. A house developer would value them the same (ie, they can produce X$ with them), but a farmer might value one at 0.5X$ and the other at 0.01X$. If those are the only two uses for the land, there would be a tendency for the land to be used efficiently: The housing developer would prefer the infertile land, because they'd pay tax for lower than 0.1X$ of property (the biggest offer someone else can do); if they got the fertile land, they'd pay tax for 0.5X$ (again, the largest value someone else is prepared to pay for it).
You ask what happens if the developer wants to buy both plots of land, and there are no other plots of land available? This means that food starts to cost +infinity $ (zero offer, inflexible demand), so the farmer's value for the fertile becomes +infinity$ (they can pay any amount of money, because then they can ask any amount of money for the food).
Of course in reality there will be many uses for many products (ie, other than land), but the same mechanism tends towards efficiency. The only missing item is that you have to consider friction, too (ie, the fact that it's not free to convert the land between uses), but that happens in any kind of free market.
After playing Black & White for a while I often tried raising the glass of water on my desk or batting away a fly on the screen with my mouse. As for keys, on several occasions I surprised myself raising my hand to press '9' while trying to check out a pretty girl (binoculars in Deus Ex, which I was playing at the time). I also sometime type Ctrl-Z on a piece of paper when I make a mistake. On a higher level, I often think of processes in real life as procedure executions, especially cooking. (Function applications are rarer, since I learned about FP much later in life. Though continuations and closures do come up often enough.) And when having multi-threaded conversations with a certain friend we use topic stacks, with explicit verbal pushes and pops.
We have a saying about our country: Great country, too bad it's inhabited. It seems it applies to other places, too :)
Heh. Well, do you think that anyone should be allowed to carry with them big shit-loads of TNT anywhere they want to?
A nuke blowing up at ground level (say, the Louvre, the Metropolitan Museum, a University, any hospital, even a mall) will certainly not destroy a city. But I won't call it ineffective, even in a war. It's might be actually efficient, depending on the underlying intent.
Also a nuke (even a huge one) is very portable relative to a big shit-load of TNT. And I'm sure modern ones could be moved with relative ease to the top floor of a sky-scraper, which would work similar to an airburst (probably not perfect, but still). In fact, once you have one nuke, it's probably easier to do that than to hijack a big plane and drive it into the same building.
Don't forget perspective. The grandparent opinionated that it would be OK for any ordinary citizen to have access to nuclear weapons. Even one nuke can have more nasty effects than all the planes used on 9/11. And that triggered two wars (that are still going on), turned the most successful democracy on Earth to a potential police state, and is indirectly responsible for a probably recession...
A nuke explosion alone would not directly destroy civilization. But the grandparent's opinion is ridiculous. Can you imagine the Columbine massacre with nukes? That wasn't terrorism, Muslims, political agendas, or conspiracies.
Actually, the nasty thing about nukes is that you don't need a very good delivery device. It doesn't matter that much where one goes off. Pretty much anywhere in an inhabited or industrialized place one could do a big mess. If anyone could have one, that's a lot of potential messes.
So a car or a backpack could be very good delivery devices for small enough nukes. You don't even need to be suicidal, you can just leave one somewhere. And suicidal people are not that rare; they weren't even before the current Muslim craze.
9/11 was such a big deal because it's hard to cause that much damage. You need a good plan and a lot of dedicated people to hijack plane and fly it into a building, even if you have access to guns or normal bombs.
Imagine for the sake of argument that a nuke was as easy to own as a gun is now. Of course, for rational people with something to loose they would be a good deterrent against aggression. Nukes work (almost) as an anti-aggression deterrent amongst the countries that have them, because the complexities of government tend to average out the crazies. But just barely. They don't stop anyone who doesn't care if they die, though, and there are plenty of crazies in the world.
No. Sorry, I didn't mention an essential element of the definition: Length is defined as the time light spends to cross that distance _in_a_void_. This is why in the detector we discuss the laser beams are sent through empty (ie, void) tubes.
This needs some careful consideration if it travels in mater. It's not impossible to calculate distance from time spent in mater, because the speed of light in a certain transparent medium is measurable. But it's probably not very useful, because of approximations. Mater is never really homogeneous; light travels slower in mater because photons interact complexly with electrons---and, to a much lesser degree, with nuclei---, so transmission is no longer a continuous process. Light is actually an electromagnetic wave, so you have to be very careful what you mean when you say "light travels through matter", which pretty much means a wave in the electromagnetic field travels through a sea of very agitated electrons, ie a very messy area of the electromagnetic field.
But that's not really a huge flaw in the definition. The difference between it and a "classical" length measurement (e.g., with a ruler) only appears in special cases (eg, huge speeds, very short or very long distances, gravity waves), where we need to be careful anyway.
Basically, if you need to really measure the length of an object (say, a long pole) as close as possible to the definition, you'd need to shine a laser beam _outside_ the object, through void. (Either do it in space, as it's done for astronomical distances, or build a really empty tunnel along side it. Though in space you still need to correct for interstellar gas and dust.)
In fact, I just realized that even my last definition is not correct. "Length" is the time spent by _something that travels at the speed of light in void_ to cross the distance (in natural units). The "c" in "E=mc^2", AKA "the speed of light" is simply the fastest speed something that caries information can travel in the Universe (according to relativity), doesn't have anything in particular to do with light. It just so happens that light in void travels at that maximum speed, and it was very convenient to use at the time relativity was created because it was relatively well understood. AFAIK, you can also call it "the speed of gravity", because it so happens that gravity (1) travels at the same speed, and (2) there's no third thing that does (I think). However, it's harder to use to measure things; that's why LIGO is such a big deal.
(Note that relativity doesn't prevent _space_ itself from deforming quicker than the "speed of light". So two objects can move away from one another faster that light-speed, from an initial relative stand-still, if something causes space to grow between them fast enough. If this happens forever (ie, the space doesn't slow down its growing), then according to the definition above the distance between the objects "becomes" infinite. Light can no longer reach from one to another, because space is created faster than light can cross it. But things get beyond my understanding of relativity way before this point.)
In fact the length of the space between the mirrors (and any length whatsoever) is _defined_ as the time light spends traveling between the two. This is the definition of distance in GR. It works because the speed of light is constant for everyone everywhere (in GR); the same thing causes all the other funny effects of relativity, for instance the same object having different lengths for different observers.
So, by the same definition, a piece of space is lengthened or shortened _iff_ light spends a longer or shorter time traveling it. The speed of light never changes, but due to conservation laws its _frequency_ changes.
Very approximately, imagine the pulse of light starting at the far mirror. The EM wave makes (say) 100 oscillations in 100 seconds (totally out of scale with the real experiment, but that's not important). If the length between the mirrors is constant, the 100 wave peaks will hit the close mirror in 100 seconds. But if the distance between mirrors changes (eg, due to a gravity wave compressing space) _during_ the 100-pulse emission, the last peaks will have less space to travel than the first peaks. This means that the close mirror will be hit by 100 peaks in, say, 90 seconds. So the frequency of the wave went from 1 Hz to 10/9=1.1Hz. The waveform was deformed (compressed), but its speed was constant. (Note that the effect happens _only_ if the space changes shape _during_ the pulse. If it changes, say, between two 100-oscillation pulses spaced apart, you'll still get the travel time difference, but not the frequency shift. LIGO uses continuous lasers, though.)
The LIGO can't actually measure the change because it's much smaller than in this example. So it sends the lasers in perpendicular directions, and reflects them back. Because gravity waves stretch space differently in each direction (except if their direction happens to exactly bisect the angle between the arms), a passing gravity wave will force the two beams to go slightly out of phase. The difference between the two beams is (barely) detectable for big waves.
I didn't check either of the calculations, nor the source numbers, but aren't there many more cars than that already? The solar concentrators need more surface area than a car, but mass-wise (ie, how much material you need to build one) can be much lower.
The can also (a) use very lightweight mirrors (ie, sub-millimeter thin reflecting foil instead of sheet metal, it can even be semi-transparent so you can grow some things below, and thus can reuse the huge surfaces of agriculturally land) and (b) adapt catalysts and/or intricately-shaped (internally) reactors to increase efficiency of conversion, this could potentially become comparably efficient with the solar-to-electricity-to-batteries pathway. (Or even more efficient, if you factor in potential savings in material costs. Ie, batteries are costly, this seems relatively cheap.)
Also, if there's a push towards using solar power this way it can also potentially divert resources to directly using solar. Note that this idea involves power plants, not cars, so if we get really good at using solar power it might take power plants out of the loop, too. Then we'd only need the chemical link of the cycle for vehicles (assuming we can't get far enough with replacing internal combustion engines).
Note that the fact that this needs to add, and eventually replace, huge amounts of infrastructure is not an argument against it. Any method to remove the reliance on fossil fuels needs that, and one of them will eventually be necessary. Wind power is very hard to scale up (we still need to cover huge areas, but with precision-machined high-strength parts that need to work at high stresses and in wildly varying conditions). Hydro power--there just isn't enough of it except in the sea, which is a very unforgiving medium (chemical and sand corrosion), with the same technical problems as wind And both of them have ecological problems. Nuclear--I'm a huge supporter of it, but it's still expensive, and it doesn't (yet, probably never) work in small increments and small scales. Space-solar, fusion and conservation are still pipe-dreams I think, in increasing order of how long it will take before they're relevant IMO.
That leaves ground solar, which seems a very good idea. The entire ecosystem is based on it, for once, including all the fossil-spending we're doing. Photo-voltaics don't seem scalable to me, as they're kind of expensive to build, though some recent developments seem encouraging. But everything that involves covering big areas with mirrors (very low-tech) and concentrating the power in smallish elements that do the conversion work (efficient, since you also concentrate the technological parts there) seems very doable. You can start small and grow practically linearly. You can use almost any land area (and partially, see the half-mirror idea above). It seems very eco-friendly (few chemicals involved, relatively simple technologically); this one pretty much uses rust as the basic material. It scales easily once you find out how to use it in small tests (and you can do _lots_ of those). The power is there anyway, heating the Earth, we might as well use it. It's quite dependable--you have some of it every day between the polar circles, even with cloud cover. And the lots of it is in places where you can't use the land for much else (deserts). And as a bonus, we gather know-how for space-based solar power, when we'll finally be able to use it.
So I'm quite sure solar is going to be a big part of what we're going to use for much of this century, alongside as many nuclear plants as we'll be able to make.
Yeah, but if the doctype is not declared the document is by definition not standard-compliant.
The "do we really want to do this?" question is for another discussion, as are the other ethical ones.
As for the rest: As I see it, there are two possibilities: Either (1) every little detail, down to the quantum behavior of atoms inside the neuron, are _necessary_ for intelligent behavior, or (2) there is one higher-level description of a neuron that is sufficient, and the lower-level (quantum, chemical, proteic, etc) behavior is just implementation detail. I'm rather sure (2) is true, mostly because of the huge variability of neurons, which implies that many variations can in fact be abstracted away.
Note that this doesn't mean that a "sufficient" approximation of a neuron is simple (e.g., a biased, weighted dot-product of the inputs, like a perceptron). It can be a very complex function, I'm just sure that it's much simpler than a physical neuron. Which supports the assumption at the thread's beginning, i.e. that we can probably implement it in hardware that is complex, but still much simpler than a simulation of the entire biological neuron, what with the life-support details and all. In short, it's probably hard, but many orders of magnitude easier than you'd think by looking at the physical complexity of a neuron.
On the other hand, I don't agree with the "before taking this route" part: in fact, I think we're taking this route precisely to help answer these questions. We know that the brain is, at a certain level of approximation, a very complex network of neurons. We have never built anything like that, and it's not currently feasible to study it dynamically (ie, while a brain is working, at synapse-level of detail). The obvious path is to study it statically (eg, what the article describes) and build a network that simulates the _structure_. Once we do that (either with a 300-neuron worm nervous system or with something bigger), the differences of behavior are caused by the _nodes_, i.e. neurons. So then we can focus on them.
(Of course, this doesn't mean that we can't study it in the other direction, e.g. by studying individual neurons, which is also done in other research.)
The summary of this part is that we don't need to know the _necessary_ complexity of the neuron simulation (as per my third paragraph) _before_ this research, but rather it will be the _result_ of the research.
The hope is that these two approaches (and others) will at one point converge and give us something that is reasonably intelligent. Which brings us to your other question, "how do we know when a system is behaving intelligently?" Well, we don't know that yet for every system (there's no good definition) but there are cases where we can tell. For instance, as humans we generally agree that most other humans act intelligently (not smart, just intelligently). And we can do that, despite the fact that we don't know how we work. Which, of course, leaves us with some variant of the Turing test.
(Note that the Turing test was designed for human-level intelligence. But it can be extended for some other cases. For instance, if we replace the brain of a worm/fly with an artificial one, and then we can't tell that worm/fly from a natural one just from their behaviors, we can reasonably argue that the artificial brain simulates the organic one well enough. This doesn't necessarily mean that we can easily extend that to a human brain, but it's already a great advancement.)
You're assuming that the neuron's complexity must necessarily be simulated exactly. Artificial heart valves, hip replacements and even blood (this one is still in prototype phase) are much less complex then the organs they replace (they don't even have cell-scale features, let alone imitate those of the replaced organ) but can simulate their function very well in many respects.
So it's reasonably probable that a neuron's functions can be simulated with useful accuracy without going into nasty details like protein synthesis, electron transport, the quantum aspects of synapse chemistry and whatever else you were thinking of.
And it caught on very well in at least some parts of the UK. I agree that not _everywhere_, and most kinds of public transport aren't well suited to many common situations, but it can work very well. It doesn't have to replace all uses of cars, just many of them.
What if it was from an automated source, but sent to, say, four recipients? That's not spam.
What if it is from an actual human being, who just imitated or copied&modified an automatically-generated message? (Why? Maybe he doesn't speak English very well, and he just thinks that's how a formal message should read like.) That's not spam.
What if someone wrote that on purpose as a joke? It might be annoying, but not spam.
OK, so what if it was spam? As long as the claimant didn't prove it, the Judge took the correct decision. (And an far as I know it's not really his job to try to "improve" the claimant's case. He's actually forbidden to do that in most cases.)
So the question is, did Haselton _prove_ it was bulk email? No. If the Judge ruled that way, it would be the same as saying "you have encryption software, you must be hiding something", or any of the other crap we get angry about here all the time.
It's biologically sterile, but doesn't that urea and other toxins get re-absorbed in your body? If you only drink urine you're essentially in the same condition you'd be without kidneys. Sure, in the very short term dehydration can be the bigger problem, but if you only drink urine you'll die of renal insufficiency (or an equivalent of it) within a few days. (BTW, your kidneys will get overloaded by the toxins, so this is not only short-term.)
While this can't be used for sending info superluminarily, you can use a pool of entangled particles the same way as a one-time-pad. You entangle the particle before leaving, you measure them later (in parallel), and use the bits to encrypt communication. The communication still happens at light-speed, but it's quantum-encrypted without having to _send_ entangled particles between the two parts. (This is pretty much equivalent to how (I think) quantum encryption works, but you don't need to send the entangled particles over the air, you take them with you. Which I _think_ might be easier to do.) I can't tell if this is in any way superior to a normal one-time pad, though. You can destroy it easily by breaking the containment of any of the two particle stores, but you can also burn one of the one-time pads as well.
IANAQP, but I don't think that would work.
Return to figures 1&2: There are two entangled electrons, which means they share a common (or opposite) trait (spin, in our case). However, and this is important, _we don't know that state_. It may be weird, or up, or down, or whatever.
fig.5a: ]^[ ]v[ or fig.5b: ]v[ ]^[
Those are the only two possible outputs of the experiment (assuming we measure one trait, eg. spin; the explanation is equivalent for more traits). In practice, what we have is fig.6: ]^v[ & ]^v[ --- the particles are both "sharing", but we don't know what.
What happens if we "disturb" the particle on Earth? Assuming that the disturbance breaks the entanglement, what will happen is two things: (first) the two particles "decide" their state, ie. they pick between fig.5a and fig.5b, which breaks the entanglement, and (second) the first particle gets disturbed, ie. its state is measurably changed. The important thing is that the entanglement was broken, so no matter what we do to the first particle, it doesn't get propagated to the other one. Assume that we can perturb the first particle in two ways, a and b, and that each perturbation turns the particle to a different wild state depending on which state the particles decided when breaking the entanglement; we'll use a capital letter if the initial state was ^ and lower-case if the state was v. So:
Initial entangled state:
]^v[ ]^v[
(The first is the particle on Earth, the second on the spaceship; two symbols between the mirrors means the particle has both states simultaneously.)
Now assume that Earth perturbs its particle with a, or it perturbs its particle with b, or it doesn't perturb its particle; then the spaceship measures its particle:
If Earth perturbs its particle with a, either we get:
]a[ ]^[
or we get:
]A[ ]v[
with equal probability.
If Earth perturbs its particle with b, either we get:
]b[ ]^[
or we get:
]B[ ]v[
with equal probability.
If Earth doesn't perturb its particle, either we get:
]v[ ]^[
or we get:
]^[ ]v[
with equal probability, because when the spaceship has measured its particle (trying to see what Earth did), it also broke the entanglement!
Notice how no matter what perturbation we picked on Earth, the spaceship can still measure either of the states, with equal probability. Thus, no matter what Earth does, the spaceship can't actually tell. Eg, assuming the spaceship measured a ]^[, it can only deduce that Earth has either an ]a[ or a ]b[ or a ]v[. Which doesn't tell it what Earth actually did.
This goes further: even if Earth tries to measure its particle now, with or without "major disturbance", it still can't tell if the spaceship did or didn't measure the other particle. Notice that every possible outcome of the measurement on Earth can happen _no matter whether or not the spaceship did the measurement_.
Note that it is possible to _correlate_ behavior instantaneously using this system: Earth and the spaceship could decide, for example, to dance at a certain moment in the future, using either of two dance moves according to the result of measuring the particles. If they have several pairs of entangled particles, the dance can be:
spaceship: aAAaaaAaAAaaAaAAAa
Earth: BbbBBBbBbbBBbBbbbB
When they return home, they'll be happy to notice that they danced together, at the same time (*), despite being separated by an arbitrary distance, without picking a dance sequence in advance. The only catch is that _neither_ can pick the dance. (You could say that the particles did, or the Universe.) Note that theoretically a robot-dancer pair can be built; assuming that (a) both the users and the robots are perfect dancers and (b) they follow the instructions of the particles, the end result is equivalent to dancing with each-other a dance decided by dice.
(*: I don't know enough physics to define that, but I think they can pick any pair of moments within their respective light-cones. So one can actually dance together with "future-other" by some definitions.)
:)
The trouble with prophecies and prophets is that they either don't work, or they're unverifiable.
The first kind is easy to understand: I prophesize that "on August the 3rd, 2007 the world will end", then on August the 4th, if the world didn't end, it's quite clear I wasn't a prophet. The prophesy was testable, and it failed the test. What if on August the 3rd the world ended?
Here we get to the subtle part: First, verification can't prove a theory, it can only disprove one. (Here, the theory was that my statement was prophetic, ie, I knew a future fact, explicitly by supernatural means.) The reason is that predicting a future fact (meaning "claiming it will happen before it does") doesn't automatically imply supernatural knowledge.
There are many other possible cases:
(a) Logical deduction from known facts: if the world ended by "natural" means, say an atomic war (as opposed to unnatural ones, like demons sprawling forth from the Earth), then it might simply have been a deduction. I could have known (or suspected) one of the atomic powers intended to attack on that date.
(b) Statistical almost-certainty: if every person was asked to predict the date of the end of the world, and six billion different dates were picked, and one of them happened to be true, is that person a prophet? Hard to argue, right? Of course, we don't need all six billion people to make a prediction on the same date; predicting the end of the world (or whatever) is a popular past-time, some of these predictions are bound to happen by sheer chance.
(c) Self-fulfilling: if there is widespread belief that my prophecy is true (but unsupported, as my prophecy is the only reason to trust it before verification), in some cases it is possible for people to make it happen; in our example, a leader might start an atomic war because either (i) he thinks he is destined to or (ii) he thinks his "adversary" believes nr(i), and tries to preempt him (this works best if the prophecy says "before August 3rd" instead of "on August 3rd").
These can become even more complicated for more complex prophecies.
(d) If I say "the world will end before August 3rd, unless enough people [pray|stop fornicating|kill Muslims|whatever]", and then nothing happens until that date, is this proof of anything? Of course not? I can say "enough people did it, great!", which can't be tested if I didn't put a limit to the condition. Imagine I had put a limit on the condition, and say we counted them. If the limit was reached, there's no way to tell if that's why the world didn't end, right? Because it was expected not to end if the prophecy was fake, too. If the limit wasn't reached, I can always wiggle out with "the count didn't work right", or "God is merciful", or "[I|the angels|President Bush] averted the end by [praying real hard|defeating the Evil|banning abortions]".
Bible prophecies are affected by all these problems in some amount, but mostly by this one:
(e) Ambiguous prophecy: Either (A) the exact fact is not well defined, or (B) there's no time limit given to the prophecy.
The "mark of the Beast" prophecy falls in part (e/A), with a bit of (e/B); the "state of Israel" is in part (e/B), mixed with a healthy amount of (c).
-I- Take the "mark of the Beast". It was claimed to apply to anything from Nero's head on the gold coins during the Roman empire to bar-codes, RFIDs and credit cards. I'm sure someone somewhere refused to use banknotes because they had a serial number on them. You can't claim that the prophecy being applied to a new technology is proof of supernatural anticipation, because the prophecy was already applied to many things. It could be next applied to some other future technology, unimagined today, when bar-codes/RFIDs/credit cards will be antiquities. Would that be proof of a vision? No, simply because _it is impossible to tell exactly what the prophecy refers to_. Anything can be construed as a "mark".
Of course, this is amplified because the prophecy regards money. (Note that desp
You're welcome, and thank you for the debate!
I read your post in two parts. First, an assertion that certain arguments support the truthfulness of the Bible (truth in the sense of "real fact" rather than "not a lie"; the two senses are not logically related). Among these arguments are the internal unity of the document, despite it being of complex origin, and the apparent confirmation from world facts, as is the apparent hardwiring of humans towards religiousness.
The second part is an interpretation and discussion of the Bible, assuming that the first assertion is accepted. Though this is not without merits, I am more interested in the first part; the rest of my answer concerns thus the first part. I'm sorry, I'm sure you have seen already most of what I'm about to say, but I'm curious of the answers.
In the interest of clarity I'll restate the subject: whether the existing evidence favors or not the hypothesis that the Bible is true, ie there exists a God, transcending, all-powerful and loving, which has manifested itself as stated in the Bible histories.
I include in the "existing evidence" only objective facts: observations that can be confirmed today, logic and to some extents philosophy (eg, epistemology). Items of faith (prophecies and personal revelations) can not be argued against rationally because they are self-proving. (Ie, it's impossible to prove someone's revelation is false, except by showing that the revelation is the <i>only</i> proof of its truthfulness. Which gets messy quick.)
So, let's see:
(1) The internal unity of the Bible is an argument to its "higher origin". (The alternative, that it is purely a human work, without any transcendent input, ie fiction (excepting, of course, the historical parts), is usually not stated because it's often offensive to believers.) This is because without a supernatural guidance a work assembled by dozens of people over thousands of years it would not be possible---the argument goes---for the result to be consistent.
However: (a) the authors were parts of a continuous culture (b) each author was aware of much of the rest of the text, in tradition if not copies of it (c) the author of most if not all parts can be assumed to have been a believer the preceding parts and to have been educated in its spirit, or (d) would have been a recent convert, thus also very motivated to have faith in the texts (e) additions diverging strongly from the precedent would be usually eliminated as heresy.
See the disparity between Judaism and Christianity; the former is a culture of believers, rejecting the New Testament as too strong a difference; the addition was strong enough to attract converts from outside it and separated into a new culture. Christianity in turn became an "established culture", which again rejects strong changes, like Mormonism. Of course, I ignore many schisms inside each, and the roots are close enough that, after a long time of cohabitation, the different "versions" can see each other as very close.
What I'm getting at is that a certain amount of self-consistency is a natural property of a religion. Pretty much all religions exhibit it, including the Abrahamic religions, Nordic (Odin/Thor) ones, Buddhism, the Greek/Roman polytheistic religions, old Amerindian religions---despite, all of them, being accumulated over very long periods of time, though contributions by many people.
(2) Man's apparent hardwiring to religion is indicative of the existence of a God who desires to interact, thus, with Man.
First of all, the sheer vastness of the number of very incompatible religions that have existed throughout the ages would indicate that man, <i>IF</i> indeed has a predisposition towards religion, arrive to believe in staggeringly different things. Don't be fooled by the fact that <i>some</i> religions are partly compatible, or have kernels that might be interpreted as similar. Reconciling the differences requires answers so evasive as to be useless.
Well, the patterns on the disk _together_ with the computer's build will make some sense, because the result is an interactive machine. You can poke it and see what happens, though of course that's pretty hard for someone who has no inkling of current languages.
Anyway, you're right, I did miss out the point of your post. I've read it again, carefully, and I think I get it. What you're talking about is a version of the trans-humanist idea of downloading a complete, living consciousness (a person's mind) into a newer, more advanced brain (and body) that, even though it may have nothing in common with the original in construction, it is still "compatible" with the older one, perhaps with a few more features.
The only difference I see from the trans-humanist thing is that you claim to believe that some passages from the Bible (might?) indicate that there exist already some physical parallel universes that just happen to be organized such that the advanced hardware exists already (or would "assemble" at some moment) and will accept the minds of (at least some of) the dead persons in this universe. (Not sure what you make of believers, non believers, hell and sin and all that, in this context.) Also, apparently, Jesus is (or might be, I'm not sure of the tone of your post, bear with me) a being that originates in such a parallel universe, could touch this universe and did so in the shape of a man, and occasionally did some miracles.
(Miracles of which we heard from old, unreliable and uneducated sources, but we're supposed to take as accurately described and wonder at their impossibility. And their complex layers of meaning. It's funny how people can draw the most complicated conclusions from texts like the bible, insist they're right about interpreting God's words, and when asked about "why are there all these metaphors and incongruities and contradictions and missing facts?" they serenely reply that "God works in mysterious ways", which sort of means "we can't know what and how".)
Anyway, back to your post. The mind-moving thing is quite plausible, though it does seem quite difficult. The Jesus from a parallel universe is of course quite possible in a multi-verse, but then again, so is the Invisible Pink Unicorn. The only difference is there's an old book we don't quite know who wrote it that _might_ imply the former, and apparently not the later (though I'm sure it depends on who you ask).
(I'm not being sarcastic here, sorry if that's how it sounds. Religion is very important for some people, and I respect it as such. But any discussion depends on the premises, and I think it's important to remind that (any) religious view is a very subjective premise; religion allows any number of interpretations one might want to give. Science---the view that things exists, and observation/theory/verification allows us to know some of them---is an arbitrary view, of course, but it does allow much less wiggle room. I don't mean anyone must subscribe to that view, just that it should be remembered, simply because its premises (sensations and logical reasoning) are shared more universally than beliefs.)
However, even a computer has this thing called software, an immaterial product of mind. No matter how minutely you examine the physical hardware of a computer, you learn little or nothing about its software until you turn it on.
That's not really true. Consider two cases:
(1) The computer on your desk. (This works for any computer that reads its program off a separate media, be it a Turing-machine tape or a magnetic hard drive, and runs the program on a "processor".)
If you examine the hardware minutely, you can notice the patterns on the media (say, the symbols drawn/carved/whatever on the tape, or the orientation of magnetic moments of different areas on the magnetic disk platter; in your computer you'll also have to look at which fuses are burned in the ROM chips and what's the charge of every cell in the FLASH chips.) Using that information, you can tell what the computer would do when you run it. (With as much precision as you can simulate it, of course.)
(2) Most "interesting" computers, and what we do with them, are "general-purpose"; that is, they receive any number of programs and they work as the loaded programs instruct them. However, that's not the "basic" description of a (non-general purpose) computer; a computer that only runs a single program is still a computer, albeit a non-general-purpose one.
The easiest thing to imagine is this: take any general purpose computing architecture (your computer, or---easier to understand---the computer inside a digital camera). Load the hard-drive with an OS & programs that adhere to the Harvard architecture (that is, the IP never points to code that was not on the hard drive, and the hard drive is never written to; assume there's no way to boot except from that drive).
Right now, your computer is no longer general purpose. Without changing the hard-drive, it can only do a single thing. (But that can be very complicated; it _can_ contain a web browser with a JavaScript interpreter, as long as it doesn't compile it to machine code and jumps to it; it can even download a program (for the same architecture) and _interpret_ it, as long as it doesn't JMP to or CALL that code. No, it can't patch the interrupts table either). If you're still not convinced, you can replace _all_ RAM that the IP can ever point to (program correctness is your responsibility!) with (fast) ROM. Everything will run the same, even though the computer can _never_ load modifiable instructions into the processor.
OK, you'll say, the program is still visible in the ROM to someone who looks closely.
True, but imagine that you can (re-)write the _entire_ programs you have loaded into the ROM in VHDL, together with the VHDL description of the processor and the rest of the machine. Then run the VHDL code through an obfuscator, a compiler and an optimizer, then (several years later, I suppose) implement the resulting machine in a single chip (with the necessary IO ports). The resulting thing is computationally equivalent to your computer above (it _is_ a computer), but it's practically impossible to decipher its programming.
You can examine how the various logic gates work, you can find correlations between the inputs and the outputs (eg, when you type the address of a web page it tries to load it, and if connected to the internet it will display it), but you can't _see_ the program.
(OK, you can reverse-engineer it in about a million years, but who says you can't do that to brains, too?)
Hey, it worked!
The point is that we have materials good enough to build one today, if every nation on Earth would try very hard. (Actually, the US defense budget is probably enough.) I doubt we can build it in a year, I think that was a slight exaggeration. Maybe he meant he could start building it this year, or he has very different estimates than mine. (I'm guessing a lot here, and he's been actually researching.) But a decade is probably doable with current world resources and current technology.
I mean, a boat could... rock around? drift away? you're afraid the space elevator would sink? get lost? got wet? Think, people!
I have seen calculations for a steel elevator. Yes, it's physically possible with a very tappered design, but it would have a diameter of several hundred kilometers at the thickest part. (Given that its several hundred thousand kilometers long, that's rather thin if you think about it.) However it would need the entire Earth's steel production for a few thousand years, probably, and even longer for rocket fuel to get things started.
However, steel isn't a very good choice because of weight (and it's not that strong, either). The optimal diameter at the thickest point is an exponential of density/tensile strength (with a pretty big constant). This means that even small (relatively) advances in that component will greatly decrease the cost, and we have materials much, much better than steel in that respect.
It's perfectly doable technically, without any major breakthroughs, it's just because of economics that you've never heard of that. With the best technology we have now it is still probably doable within a reasonable multiple of the world's GDP.
We need breakthroughs not to build it, but to build it with less than a country's GDP.