I fail to see an ethical difference between actively doing something and passively allowing something. The concept of saying that in one case, it is Google's fault and in the other case it is China's fault seems infantile. In both situations, Google is involved. In order to be "not evil," you need to take into account not only the consequences of your actions, but also the consequences of your passivity.
At the same time, of course I realize that there's something certainly ethically unsavory about censoring your website. But I don't see how you can consider something to be evil if you are making life better for people than it otherwise would be.
To be fair, I have absolutely no idea what he does when he's not writing cartoons centered around twenty year old pop culture references. For all we know, he could be a leading scholar on philosophy of mind during hiatuses.
I fail to see how this is evil. Google had two options. They could either censor some of their results, or China would censor all of their results. If censoring is bad, logically more censoring is worse than less censoring. Google thus is not doing evil, they are making the best of an inherently evil situation. If this is evil, then "doing no evil" is impossible, because no matter what they did, evil would have been done.
Some might argue that Google could have simply held their ground and China would have eventually caved. I doubt this. There are plenty of search engines out there, and although they might not be quite as good as Google, they're not bad or anything. If popular demand for Google is big enough to make China give up their censoring, then China's censorship laws can't be that strict if something as trivial as Google versus Yahoo is willing to make them cave.
Yes, but another reason (which is sort of relevant to the subject of genius) is that America is a fairly large country. The more populous your country is, the better your top N people will (on average) be, because the "top N" will be a smaller percentage. In addition, America has an additional advantage over other populous countries like Indonesia or India because we have better faculties to find the smart people.
Yes, but he's not talking about the mid and late nineties. He's talking about the Internet's earlier growth in the eighties and early nineties. Usenet got things started and then WWW took things to the next level.
No, it's saying that that story was posted at some point between "the distant future" and when the last front page story was printed. Similarly, the front page currently says "Windows Vista x64 to require signed drivers" between "The Distant Future" and "Supreme Court spurns RIM," because the story was posted after the Supreme Court article, but before the future.
I am my mind. An internal sensation such as "the feeling of blue" is nothing more than how my mind procceses some visual input.
The problem is that people have what might be called an epistemological bias. People see their mental states from the "inside," and thus when they see how my mental states look from the "outside," as just a bunch of neurons flashing around, they can't help but feel that there's something missing. But ultimately I think that the evidence suggests that there is an exact one to one correspondance between mental phenomena and physical phenomena. As such, the only difference between a bunch of neurons zapping at each other and a mind thinking abstract concepts is simply a matter of flavor: our brain interprets data which comes from the outside quite differently from how it interprets data from the inside.
And for that matter, how does the concept of "free will" promote or protect the concept of freedom? Free will just means that people are the Ultimate Source of their actions. Why should a person respect the rights of a person who is the source of his actions more than the rights of a person whose actions are determined by various mechanisms? What makes machines so bad?
What do you mean? I'm aware that philosophers tend to think the problem of assigning meaning to symbols is a big deal, but how are they right? When a symbol has meaning all that means is that some mind (a human, for example) associates one idea (the visual stimuli of the character '3') with another idea (the mental concept of the number three). One thing associates a second thing with a third. Nothing which can't be trivially duplicated in an arbitrary mechanism.
That said, you're right that this review is silly. He took some book and then grabbed a random article so he could make a vaguely misinformed rant about philosophy of mind. Not that I mind. I read Slashdot for the discussions, and all this review says is "Go rant about Philosophy of Mind for a while, kay?" which is an interesting topic for discussion.
Just because something is illegal does not neccesarily mean that you are exposing yourself to liability. If you speed on an empty highway, you are not exposing yourself to punishment because nobody's gonna catch you.
Of course, that doesn't mean that their argument has any legal validity (it probably doesn't) but it's still an important clarification to make.
Slashdot is not proffessional. It's just some overgrown blog. People who feel that Slashdot should be held to a proffessional standard are like people who claim that retarded kindergarteners should have an advanced understanding of Non-linear Differential Equations. It's absurd.
Slashdot is a silly place where silly people come together to talk about silly things.
There's a difference between copyright infringement and plagiarization. Copyright infringement is when you copy something that you're not legally allowed to copy. Plagiarization is when you claim someone else's work as your own. The GFDL means that you can copy Wikipedia, but that doesn't mean much if the newspaper wants the journalist to actually do what he's paid to do.
Let's not play coy: There isn't a "strong hint" of a one-to-one correspondence; There is exactly a one-to-one correspondence. Let's not pretend like we're giving something, when we're not. I'm a realist here, arguing in realistic terms. Yes, there is exactly a one-to-one correspondence. And I fully grant determinism as well. We should go with everything we understand from science.
Okay, I misunderstood you, sorry. But if two things have an exact one-to-one correspondance with each other, such that if you do something to one of the things, the other thing changes accordingly, then logically, they are the same thing. Considering consciousness and the meat the brain is made out of to be different is like saying that the United States is different from the 300 million-ish people who live in it. Conceptually they're different ideas, (our brains store the data differently), but in reality they're the same thing. Two halves of the same coin or whatever. So the difference between experience and how programs run in the brain is just semantic quibbling which doesn't really tell us anything about how reality is.
So, are you a panpsychist?
Looking up what that word means, I think I'd probably be better classified as an emergentist maybe? Not everything thinks, thinking is just something matter can do if it happens to get in the right mood. I'm not entirely opposed to the idea, although it seems to have slightly silly elements to it.
Simple. Intelligence is just the ability to proccess information. If an intelligence can do anything a human can do, then logically it must have just as much ability (if not more) than a human being. Thus, the Turing Test (if properly conducted) can show if a computer is as intelligent as a human.
As for wondering... I think it's possible in principle, although only to a point. You wouldn't be able to duplicate the exact emotion of wonder because (unless you copied the brain neuron-for-neuron) the minds would be completely different, so it would be nearly impossible to compare how an emotion feels to the computer to how it feels to the human. It might be possible to program an internal state which shared the same sort of complexity and depth as human emotions, but I don't think you'd be able to say they were the same thing.
Curiosity seems like an easier goal to aspire to. Curiosity is simply the desire for knowledge. Desire is simply a drive towards some goal. So just write a machine which goes through its possible options and "somehow" determines what path will maximize its ability to learn, and then does it.
Contemplation could similarly be implemented by simply having the ability to run little semi-simulations, whereby the system by which the machine interacts with the world is applied to hypothetical systems.
Yes, but it does mean god from the machine. My interpretation is that it's sort of a bad joke. That is, the writer knew what he was saying, he was just trying to be cute.
Yes, there's experience. Obviously, as "experience" is ultimately the only really epistemologically certain thing out there, everything else is just an interpretation of those experiences.
But why cannot these experiences be simply machines? When you look at a brain, there is a strong hint there this is a one-to-one correspondance between the firing of chemicals between neurons and the experiences which the person is feeling. Thus, it makes sense to say that in fact the "experience" of thought is merely what that machine is doing, and we happen to "be" that experience.
It's weird and non-intuitive, yes. But so is the idea of Cartesian Dualism, that Experience is the result of some kind of peculiar second substance completely distinct from the material world but which interacts with it through the brain. I fail to see why it is not possible to simply say "the experience of thought is merely the higher-level proccess at work in such-and-such a material mechanism." It's certainly a hell of a lot more elegant, and I don't see why you need to suppose the existance of some mystical second substance to explain the "feeliness" of experience. Why can't matter be feely on its own?
You make some good points, but I think you make some assumptions.
You said you've only submitted ten or fifteen articles to Slashdot in your entire lifetime. To contrast, I wouldn't be surprised if Beatles Beatles submits at least fifteen articles every week. (He makes money off of it, so it's worth it for him to spend a couple hours every week trolling the Internet for stories.) If that is the case, his success in getting articles submitted would be perfectly sensible.
That said, the fact that the person who posts his articles is consistantly ScuttleMonkey is intensely suspicious. It is possible that there are other reasons, but we are right to be suspicious.
That said, I'm not sure if we are right to care. It's not a big deal. Beatles beatles's articles are generally neat little links.
The sole function of editors at Slashdot is to prevent stuff like Goatse from getting posted. In the years I've been here (less than yours, admittingly) editors have never done anything vaguely editorial. All they do is look in the editor's queue, and post whatever catches their eye. They do not edit the posts for grammar, or check if the article has been posted before, or check if the article is true or not. They are not journalists, they are merely a rudimentary filter. Thus, until Beatles Beatles posts Goatse, ScuttleMonkey is performing his job perfectly.
Look up the word beg. Now look up the word question. Now, admittingly, it might be more grammatically correct to say "begs for the question," but is not that a valid interpretation of the words "begs the question?" That there happens to be another meaning of that phrase which originates from an archaic translation of a latin phrase should be irrelevant. When I talk about a slippery slope, I am not always referring to a hasty generalization, sometimes I'm talking about inclined surfaces with minimal friction. Similarly, when I'm talking about begging a question, sometimes I'm talking about when you implicitly assume the conclusion, but other times I'm merely talking about a situation which begs for a question to be asked.
(Although admittingly, the reason why people say "begs the question" instead of "begs for the question" (or "demands the question") is because the new phrase is trying to ride on the coattails of its noble ancestor, but I see no harm in this.)
Wait... are you implying that there are people who don't bring their accordian when they hunt deer? But doesn't that make render the zydeco rather ineffective?
The First Amendment, as much as it is my favorite part of the Bill of Rights, is the sort of thing which is inherently prone to restriction. After all, copyright is technically a restriction of free speech, and it was in the constitution from day one. Plus, there's all sorts of other restrictions which I can think of off the top of my head. (Libel, and "yelling fire in a crowded theater," for instance.)
And of course the Ninth Amendment is a bit of a difficult thing to get anything tangible out of. All it says is that there exist unenumerated rights which the government can't infringe either. But it doesn't give any hint on figuring out how to distinguish between unenumerated rights and non-rights, so the business of telling the difference falls to the rather fragile realm of precedent. The Ninth Amendment is really more of a vague warning to Congress, "Don't think the Bill of Rights gives you an excuse to stomp on the rights we forgot to mention."
I agree with you that porn should be a form of protected speech. But the Constitution is a slippery mistress.
What I found interesting was that on the Wikipedia chart, the "daytime" value of Wikipedia has growing been noticably faster than the "nighttime" value. I really don't know what that means, but... it's interesting.
Slashdot Mirror
I fail to see an ethical difference between actively doing something and passively allowing something. The concept of saying that in one case, it is Google's fault and in the other case it is China's fault seems infantile. In both situations, Google is involved. In order to be "not evil," you need to take into account not only the consequences of your actions, but also the consequences of your passivity.
At the same time, of course I realize that there's something certainly ethically unsavory about censoring your website. But I don't see how you can consider something to be evil if you are making life better for people than it otherwise would be.
To be fair, I have absolutely no idea what he does when he's not writing cartoons centered around twenty year old pop culture references. For all we know, he could be a leading scholar on philosophy of mind during hiatuses.
I fail to see how this is evil. Google had two options. They could either censor some of their results, or China would censor all of their results. If censoring is bad, logically more censoring is worse than less censoring. Google thus is not doing evil, they are making the best of an inherently evil situation. If this is evil, then "doing no evil" is impossible, because no matter what they did, evil would have been done.
Some might argue that Google could have simply held their ground and China would have eventually caved. I doubt this. There are plenty of search engines out there, and although they might not be quite as good as Google, they're not bad or anything. If popular demand for Google is big enough to make China give up their censoring, then China's censorship laws can't be that strict if something as trivial as Google versus Yahoo is willing to make them cave.
Yes, but another reason (which is sort of relevant to the subject of genius) is that America is a fairly large country. The more populous your country is, the better your top N people will (on average) be, because the "top N" will be a smaller percentage. In addition, America has an additional advantage over other populous countries like Indonesia or India because we have better faculties to find the smart people.
Yes, but he's not talking about the mid and late nineties. He's talking about the Internet's earlier growth in the eighties and early nineties. Usenet got things started and then WWW took things to the next level.
No, it's saying that that story was posted at some point between "the distant future" and when the last front page story was printed. Similarly, the front page currently says "Windows Vista x64 to require signed drivers" between "The Distant Future" and "Supreme Court spurns RIM," because the story was posted after the Supreme Court article, but before the future.
Po-tay-to, po-tah-to. ^_^
Er, what's the difference between identity and sameness then?
I am my mind. An internal sensation such as "the feeling of blue" is nothing more than how my mind procceses some visual input.
The problem is that people have what might be called an epistemological bias. People see their mental states from the "inside," and thus when they see how my mental states look from the "outside," as just a bunch of neurons flashing around, they can't help but feel that there's something missing. But ultimately I think that the evidence suggests that there is an exact one to one correspondance between mental phenomena and physical phenomena. As such, the only difference between a bunch of neurons zapping at each other and a mind thinking abstract concepts is simply a matter of flavor: our brain interprets data which comes from the outside quite differently from how it interprets data from the inside.
10 PRINT "I EXIST!"
And for that matter, how does the concept of "free will" promote or protect the concept of freedom? Free will just means that people are the Ultimate Source of their actions. Why should a person respect the rights of a person who is the source of his actions more than the rights of a person whose actions are determined by various mechanisms? What makes machines so bad?
What do you mean? I'm aware that philosophers tend to think the problem of assigning meaning to symbols is a big deal, but how are they right? When a symbol has meaning all that means is that some mind (a human, for example) associates one idea (the visual stimuli of the character '3') with another idea (the mental concept of the number three). One thing associates a second thing with a third. Nothing which can't be trivially duplicated in an arbitrary mechanism.
That said, you're right that this review is silly. He took some book and then grabbed a random article so he could make a vaguely misinformed rant about philosophy of mind. Not that I mind. I read Slashdot for the discussions, and all this review says is "Go rant about Philosophy of Mind for a while, kay?" which is an interesting topic for discussion.
Just because something is illegal does not neccesarily mean that you are exposing yourself to liability. If you speed on an empty highway, you are not exposing yourself to punishment because nobody's gonna catch you.
Of course, that doesn't mean that their argument has any legal validity (it probably doesn't) but it's still an important clarification to make.
Slashdot is not proffessional. It's just some overgrown blog. People who feel that Slashdot should be held to a proffessional standard are like people who claim that retarded kindergarteners should have an advanced understanding of Non-linear Differential Equations. It's absurd.
Slashdot is a silly place where silly people come together to talk about silly things.
There's a difference between copyright infringement and plagiarization. Copyright infringement is when you copy something that you're not legally allowed to copy. Plagiarization is when you claim someone else's work as your own. The GFDL means that you can copy Wikipedia, but that doesn't mean much if the newspaper wants the journalist to actually do what he's paid to do.
Okay, I misunderstood you, sorry. But if two things have an exact one-to-one correspondance with each other, such that if you do something to one of the things, the other thing changes accordingly, then logically, they are the same thing. Considering consciousness and the meat the brain is made out of to be different is like saying that the United States is different from the 300 million-ish people who live in it. Conceptually they're different ideas, (our brains store the data differently), but in reality they're the same thing. Two halves of the same coin or whatever. So the difference between experience and how programs run in the brain is just semantic quibbling which doesn't really tell us anything about how reality is.
Looking up what that word means, I think I'd probably be better classified as an emergentist maybe? Not everything thinks, thinking is just something matter can do if it happens to get in the right mood. I'm not entirely opposed to the idea, although it seems to have slightly silly elements to it.
Simple. Intelligence is just the ability to proccess information. If an intelligence can do anything a human can do, then logically it must have just as much ability (if not more) than a human being. Thus, the Turing Test (if properly conducted) can show if a computer is as intelligent as a human.
As for wondering... I think it's possible in principle, although only to a point. You wouldn't be able to duplicate the exact emotion of wonder because (unless you copied the brain neuron-for-neuron) the minds would be completely different, so it would be nearly impossible to compare how an emotion feels to the computer to how it feels to the human. It might be possible to program an internal state which shared the same sort of complexity and depth as human emotions, but I don't think you'd be able to say they were the same thing.
Curiosity seems like an easier goal to aspire to. Curiosity is simply the desire for knowledge. Desire is simply a drive towards some goal. So just write a machine which goes through its possible options and "somehow" determines what path will maximize its ability to learn, and then does it.
Contemplation could similarly be implemented by simply having the ability to run little semi-simulations, whereby the system by which the machine interacts with the world is applied to hypothetical systems.
Yes, but it does mean god from the machine. My interpretation is that it's sort of a bad joke. That is, the writer knew what he was saying, he was just trying to be cute.
Here's why that makes no sense to me.
Yes, there's experience. Obviously, as "experience" is ultimately the only really epistemologically certain thing out there, everything else is just an interpretation of those experiences.
But why cannot these experiences be simply machines? When you look at a brain, there is a strong hint there this is a one-to-one correspondance between the firing of chemicals between neurons and the experiences which the person is feeling. Thus, it makes sense to say that in fact the "experience" of thought is merely what that machine is doing, and we happen to "be" that experience.
It's weird and non-intuitive, yes. But so is the idea of Cartesian Dualism, that Experience is the result of some kind of peculiar second substance completely distinct from the material world but which interacts with it through the brain. I fail to see why it is not possible to simply say "the experience of thought is merely the higher-level proccess at work in such-and-such a material mechanism." It's certainly a hell of a lot more elegant, and I don't see why you need to suppose the existance of some mystical second substance to explain the "feeliness" of experience. Why can't matter be feely on its own?
No, an orbit is when you fall sideways.
You make some good points, but I think you make some assumptions.
You said you've only submitted ten or fifteen articles to Slashdot in your entire lifetime. To contrast, I wouldn't be surprised if Beatles Beatles submits at least fifteen articles every week. (He makes money off of it, so it's worth it for him to spend a couple hours every week trolling the Internet for stories.) If that is the case, his success in getting articles submitted would be perfectly sensible.
That said, the fact that the person who posts his articles is consistantly ScuttleMonkey is intensely suspicious. It is possible that there are other reasons, but we are right to be suspicious.
That said, I'm not sure if we are right to care. It's not a big deal. Beatles beatles's articles are generally neat little links.
The sole function of editors at Slashdot is to prevent stuff like Goatse from getting posted. In the years I've been here (less than yours, admittingly) editors have never done anything vaguely editorial. All they do is look in the editor's queue, and post whatever catches their eye. They do not edit the posts for grammar, or check if the article has been posted before, or check if the article is true or not. They are not journalists, they are merely a rudimentary filter. Thus, until Beatles Beatles posts Goatse, ScuttleMonkey is performing his job perfectly.
Look up the word beg. Now look up the word question. Now, admittingly, it might be more grammatically correct to say "begs for the question," but is not that a valid interpretation of the words "begs the question?" That there happens to be another meaning of that phrase which originates from an archaic translation of a latin phrase should be irrelevant. When I talk about a slippery slope, I am not always referring to a hasty generalization, sometimes I'm talking about inclined surfaces with minimal friction. Similarly, when I'm talking about begging a question, sometimes I'm talking about when you implicitly assume the conclusion, but other times I'm merely talking about a situation which begs for a question to be asked.
(Although admittingly, the reason why people say "begs the question" instead of "begs for the question" (or "demands the question") is because the new phrase is trying to ride on the coattails of its noble ancestor, but I see no harm in this.)
No it doesn't. That is one way of interpreting the concept of wavefunctions, but there are others.
Wait... are you implying that there are people who don't bring their accordian when they hunt deer? But doesn't that make render the zydeco rather ineffective?
The First Amendment, as much as it is my favorite part of the Bill of Rights, is the sort of thing which is inherently prone to restriction. After all, copyright is technically a restriction of free speech, and it was in the constitution from day one. Plus, there's all sorts of other restrictions which I can think of off the top of my head. (Libel, and "yelling fire in a crowded theater," for instance.)
And of course the Ninth Amendment is a bit of a difficult thing to get anything tangible out of. All it says is that there exist unenumerated rights which the government can't infringe either. But it doesn't give any hint on figuring out how to distinguish between unenumerated rights and non-rights, so the business of telling the difference falls to the rather fragile realm of precedent. The Ninth Amendment is really more of a vague warning to Congress, "Don't think the Bill of Rights gives you an excuse to stomp on the rights we forgot to mention."
I agree with you that porn should be a form of protected speech. But the Constitution is a slippery mistress.
What I found interesting was that on the Wikipedia chart, the "daytime" value of Wikipedia has growing been noticably faster than the "nighttime" value. I really don't know what that means, but... it's interesting.