You opt to drive, and the State and Federal Government (and your fellow citizen taxpayers) better bust their asses building roads to connect your house to your workplace, Walmart, and the beer store. WIth State workers who are legally prohibited from unionizing, to boot.
Except in this case there really would be 100 bitcoins because anyone could go look at the hash chain and discover exactly who (or which public key) has the bitcoins they just deposited in the bank. In one sense that's comforting because you can verify a certain fractional reserve in the bank. Over time, it would be possible to trace the inflation of the system and determine exactly how many original bitcoins a given "loaned bitcoin" would be worth; this would give an ultimate risk calculation of how much value could be lost from the economy in a loan-failure induced depression. It would also be easy to see who held the real wealth in the system; those who actually owned the private keys the real bitcoins were assigned to. If bitcoin were to become a worldwide currency it would be natural for governments and large banks to be in possession of the actual bitcoins (much like gold reserves) while the inflated currency derived from bitcoins was circulated. The other possibility is that some sort of exchange develops where real percentages of bitcoins are exchanged for the derived currency at a non 1-1 rate. If deflation is slow enough this could be accomplished through the bitcoin transaction fees. Since presumably lower fees could be charged on the derived currency it would eventually become economic to trade 1 real bitcoin for 1.01 or 1.001 derived unit of currency, cheaper than bitcoin transaction fees. This would tend to distribute supplies of actual bitcoins relatively uniformly and prevent a buildup of real bitcoins anywhere in the economy. While it's difficult to control demand for currency, a fully open economic model may actually control demand if everyone has full knowledge of the potential value of bitcoins versus a derived currency. There is no reason to receive (or issue) a loan for x derived bitcoins if that loan reduces the effective value of derived bitcoins relative to real bitcoins more than some percentage.
I imagine the percentage of Americans who are under the influence of drugs *right now* is about 5% to 10%. This is also apparently only self-reporting of drug influence, and I imagine quite a few people are arrested while legally under the influence of alcohol.
we have no hope at present to even reliably test for it
Are you conscious? Were you conscious last night when you were asleep? Are my questions not "tests" in some way? People have been experimenting with altering their state of consciousness since unrecorded history. My thought experiment is just much more radical and not yet possible with the technology we have. In fact, if my hypothesis that consciousness is perfectly natural and explainable is correct then my thought experiment would not even cause an altered state of consciousness. The only potential weakness is that our memory of being conscious may be faulty. Perhaps we only remember being conscious in the past but we never were. If that is the case then the entire question is moot because while we may currently have the sensation of consciousness there would be no guarantee that we were in the past or would be in the future. I don't think this is likely though, and I think the state of being conscious forms memories that we can trust as evidence that we were conscious in the past. Given that assumption, it is perfectly possible to test for consciousness during an experiment and remember the results later to verify it. There's also the fact that in certain cases one can be conscious and not remember it later due to either short term memory loss or simply the failure of short term memories to form, but those are generally understandable results of injury or drugs and can be controlled for in experiments.
This particular argument is called "circular reasoning". Not to mention that you are completely confused as to the meaning of "non deterministic". By this token placing bets on outcomes of individual quantum events makes them "deterministic" because you can place quite solidly determined (beforehand even!) bets on them and thus the events are "determined" by the contents of your wallet... no?
Non-deterministic in the strictest sense means that no possible prior observation can predict the outcome. In our world, this also means that no possible process can affect the outcome either, otherwise it would become predictable and non-deterministic. For instance, if you have a 50% probability of flipping a coin and getting heads and there is no possible way to influence or predict the outcome then it is non-deterministic. If you can flip the coin in a manner that shifts the probability then the outcome is less non-deterministic. Similarly if you can observe the coin as it's flipping and predict the outcome. If you want to be perfectly precise, even a completely deterministic but infinitely precise Universe would have an element of non-determinism because we wouldn't be able to model the interactions of all the particles deterministically with full resolution. At some point, however, the probability of being wrong about a fundamentally non-deterministic outcome is so small that it doesn't matter for practical purposes. If we have a 99.99999999999999% probability of getting heads for a given proverbial coin then almost certainly no one on earth who has ever lived has ever gotten tails. If "non-determinism" is necessary for consciousness then the probability for a series of non-deterministic outcomes that does *not* produce consciousness is less than 1 out of some 100 billion people who have been estimated to have ever lived. I'm not saying that the universe is necessarily deterministic, I'm saying that there's a very, very, very low probability that our consciousness actually requires the unpredictable results of non-deterministic events. There's also a problem with causation: If our consciousness required true non-deterministic events then what causes our consciousness to reflect things in the real world? Why am I thinking about slashdot right now instead of, say, a cat or a cream pie? If my consciousness relied on non-deterministic events then I should be conscious of whatever non-deterministic assortment of thoughts result from those events and not from the measurable physical events ar
Suppose that consciousness is a combination of natural and supernatural processes. Reversibly begin replacing neurons with equivalent electronic replacements until consciousness is lost, replace the neuron to restore consciousness, and continue replacing other neurons. If supernatural processes are required for consciousness a minimal set of neurons will be found that are required to interface with the supernatural. Use this minimal set of neurons as a testing device to explore the nature of the supernatural by manipulating the neurons themselves, or in other words our original premise was false and the supernatural is merely an undiscovered part of the natural world that can be repeatably tested by a finite set of neurons. I don't think there is any false dichotomy in my argument. The fact that we investigate consciousness proves that information flows from our consciousness to our physical minds and bodies to cause the physical act of investigation, and clearly information from the physical world must flow to our consciousness. This two-way interaction between consciousness and the natural world forces consciousness to also be testable as part of the natural world. It may turn out that consciousness is housed in some other dimension or in sub-quantum particles or whatever; that only means that we currently have a limited view of the natural world and not that consciousness is supernatural.
You also mentioned non-determinism as a possible source of consciousness. If consciousness requires non-deterministic changes in the universe in order to exist then it would imply that those changes are not actually non-deterministic; they are determined by the requirements of consciousness. This would mean the universe has some extra laws we didn't know about but by using the above procedure we could almost certainly determine what they are. Another possibility is that consciousness only happens as a result of the anthropic principle; in the Many Worlds interpretation every possible non-deterministic event actually occurs and in a subset of worlds those events could induce consciousness. This is statistically unlikely because it would tend to create individual worlds where at most a single person was conscious. It is far more likely that the necessary non-deterministic events happen in only a single mind than in 6.5 billion minds. This discussion is strong evidence that more than one individual experiences consciousness.
What we can know is limited by the nature of the universe. To the best of my understanding knowledge is best represented as a model of some part of the Universe. The model can be used to predict the state of the Universe at a particular time and place, and the requirements for the model are information and computing ability. Information is directly related to the representation of quantum states of matter. The more ordered a given physical state, the more information necessary to represent it. Human brains are very good at predicting the future state of the local Universe for survival, and science is a rigorous extension of the modeling ability we possess. By creating scientific tools we can extend our ability to model to almost limitless precision and accuracy and extend our knowledge of the Universe. With sufficient tools we may be able to model the human mind directly instead of resorting to picking it apart neuron by neuron as I described above. I don't know where the practical limits on our ability to model lie but they appear to be limited by computational power and not by epistemology. Ultimately I am a behavioralist and so I believe that if our models are accurate enough that we can't distinguish the model from the real thing then we have a perfect model. If such a perfect model exists for human consciousness then I will consider consciousness to be a solved problem regardless of philosophical arguments about the lack of ultimate truth. At that point our minds would have the same epistemological limits as the models and it becomes a moot point.
Consciousness is either a product of the natural physical world or it is supernatural. If it is supernatural then it is very surprising that things like sleep, injury, drugs, and electromagnetic fields have such great (if not total) control over it and we would do well to simply study it as if it were only natural until we discover the ways it actually differs from natural processes. If consciousness is natural then it almost certainly arises solely from the interaction of the matter and energy in the brain and nervous system. If the definition of cognition is a complete theory of the operation of the brain and nervous system (something which we obviously don't have yet) then that model would also describe consciousness. I understand the distinction between merely calculating a result (cognition) and being aware of performing the calculation (consciousness). I think it's obvious that our consciousness is the direct cause of much of our cognition and as such a complete model of human cognition must necessarily include consciousness.
Classical physics describes a mechanical universe in which everything is fully pre-determined, such that conscious awareness of things can make no difference at all in outcomes and actions. As such, there would be no basis for consciousness to be selected for by evolution. As such, there would be no reason to expect consciousness to be part of biological creatures.
Your definition of consciousness is inherently non-deterministic. Of course non-deterministic consciousness will not evolve in a deterministic universe. But deterministic consciousness is perfectly possible. You make it sound as if being consciously aware of things is entirely separated from any physical action, but that is simply not the case. Our conscious thoughts, even if they are fully deterministic, alter the state of the universe in ways that would not happen if we did not have consciousness.
You don't have to sign anything to be treated if the facility accepts Medicare or Medicaid. Generally if you have to sign anything it is an authorization to use your personal information to bill you or your insurance company and not an agreement to pay.
And what is this about programming having a strong mathematical foundation?? It's a list of things to do, about the only math needed is some understanding of Boolean algebra, which should only take an hour to learn.
Formal mathematics is ultimately done with sets of symbols and rules for building formulas from axiomatic sequences of symbols. In essence it's string processing with a few special rules about the symbols that represent variables. Getting to arithmetic from that point is a long road, but once you realize that mathematics is just formal rules it's no surprise that a subset of formal mathematics is the context free languages used for programming. This is important when you need to prove things about classes of programs or transform programs from one programming language into another or prove that all programming languages can compute the same things as a Universal Turing Machine.
Look at metamath for an interactive bottom-up approach to constructing mathematics and I think you'll see the similarity to programming.
You seriously haven't used calculus and physics for controlling the motion of robots? You didn't use Fourier analysis when doing speech recognition? Discrete mathematics and linear algebra may play a bigger role in day-to-day programming but that's no reason to hate calculus.
Of course the sad thing is that one can probably program a robot or a speech recognition system using libraries someone else wrote without knowing how they work. I think that makes one an "operator" rather than a "programmer", however.
Apprenticeship is the only way to create competent programmers. The "somewhat functional" careers you mentioned; doctors, lawyers, and financial managers; all spend several years during and after their education in a highly controlled and structured apprenticeship where their responsibilities grow with their experience. Programmers fresh out of college are lucky if they find an actual programming job, and even luckier if they experience worthwhile guided apprenticeship. There are probably two main reasons: The software industry is so fast-paced that investing several years in a programmer is virtual suicide and the historical nature of programming is to be mostly self-taught.
The limited number of nuclear plants that have been built combined with changing regulatory requirements seems to account for a large portion of the cost, especially cost overruns. Wikipedia claims that China is building many plants significantly cheaper than other nations and hopes to build 1.7-GW plants at roughly the cost of coal plants.
There is no fly ash anymore in a modern plant since 15 - 20 years
Surprise, surprise, there are no nuclear plants operating commercially that were designed within the last 15 to 20 years. It's all old reactor designs without passive safety. Thanks to the insane selective fear of physics that some people have, it's far too expensive (in the short term) to test and build the new reactors.
One could argue that it's streaming if you're transferring data over the wire from a location outside your legal ownership.
You can play a rented DVD on a rented DVD player connected to a rented television in a rented apartment. Taken to the extreme it would be "streaming" for Amazon to transfer data to you in the form of a plastic disc, unless you want the government to start deciding which methods of wired (and wireless) communications count for the purposes of streaming. Given the wave/particle duality of light you could argue that a completely optical network actually does distribute physical photons just like Amazon ships DVDs.
I've always thought it would be nice if the russians or nigerians or chinese would just run Tor on their botnets. I know they probably don't really care for freedom of speech or privacy (in fact, they would like to reduce most people's privacy in terms of financial credentials...) but that is the level of distribution necessary to thwart network analysis. Store-and-forward of all anonymized traffic with random delays and random traffic bursts generated to mask legitimate traffic is essentially the only way to go. Even better if your local gateway just "happens" to be infected with such a botnet client, generating its own stream of random anonymized traffic for plausible deniability.
Alas, it's probably up to some grey-hat hackers to care enough to put something like this together and implement it and keep it running.
Using a physical device to evaluate an arbitrary mathematical function is at least as old as Babbage. A formal model of computation generic enough to be called Universal is as old as Turing. If a patent application claims nothing more than a physical device for evaluating a particular mathematical function then how can there be any merit in the claims? All the merit must rest in the mathematical function itself because Babbage and Turing provided prior art; and if the mathematical function has no relevance to a physical or useful process then the only claims of the application are for pure mathematics.
I did not see any reference in the patent claims to any method or physical process, only references to the information storage and retrieval system. Maybe I'm wrong, but I understood that the claims are what matters; not the accompanying description and exposition.
The claims require a physical implementation (e.g. "An information storage and retrieval system"). No amount of math will produce such a system out of the aether. Nor does thinking about the math or the formulas on pen & paper infringe the patent. The specification makes it clear that "information storage and retrieval system" refers to a computer system. Thus, the patent was not actually reduced to pure mathematics.
Here's a useful test to see if "an information storage and retrieval system" (ISRS) is bullshit or not. If there exists an isomorphism between every element in the claim and a Turing Machine (TM) then the patent is pure bullshit. I see nothing in any of the 8 claims that makes a reference to any physical system that does not have a very simple mapping to a TM. Just define a bijection between "random access memory" and "disk storage unit" in the ISRS and the tape of the TM, and a bijection between the other elements of the claim and the state machine of the TM. If there's only a homomorphism because the set of possible TMs is larger than the set of possible ISRS in the patent, then it's double bullshit.
I specifically said "Such a being could actively thwart scientific investigation and only reward blind obedience" and that's what I meant. You could still interact with the world so long as it was via prescribed "holy" methods. You could still have autonomy to choose from a well defined set of holy actions every day or suffer the consequences. Should I play my harp today or walk on the clouds? You would probably be required to wear pants every day, or they might just come permanently attached to your body. Only actions that were specifically disallowed would be thwarted. This does not make questions or information gathering impossible, it merely makes them superfluous because presumably all allowable actions would have already been instructed to you as you grew up. A simple form of science would still be possible though; attempt an action and if the result is incomprehensible then it's "unholy" or otherwise disallowed. Otherwise it's holy. In that sense, the set of holy actions is recursively enumerable. To fully destroy science would require either the destruction of sufficient intellect to recognize cause and effect or to eliminate cause and effect altogether. Science could, however, be reduced to "if you want an effect, pray for it." and it would be granted based on divine whim rather than comprehensible rules.
In short it would make human life extremely simple and one-dimensional; you could essentially dispense with all modern medicine and technology because bodies would either work or they would not and there would be nothing (short of prayer) that anyone could do about it.
I think you are incorrect about such an existence negating free will any more than a deterministic or uncertain universe does. At best, a naturalistic viewpoint can only grant random or non-deterministic free will; there's nothing magical about the atoms in our brains that lets them behave any differently than any other atoms in the universe. Dualists have a similar (generally unrecognized) problem in that free will ends up being just the mind of god causing everything to happen as planned.
I think suicide is probably the best option for such a world too, but now perhaps you understand why many christians are quite unhappy about the prospect of their worldview evaporating. To them it's a permanent and eternal suicide.
If the scientific method no longer worked, religion wouldn't either.
That's not necessarily true: an all-powerful being could arbitrarily change the universe on a whim and leave religious experience as the only reliable way to survive. Such a being could actively thwart scientific investigation and only reward blind obedience. What would Dawkins' do then?
I only have personal experience with Evangelical and Catholic Christians, but the general belief I have seen is that the same Bible is taken as canonical by almost all Protestant branches of Christianity. Several branches and individuals question textual accuracy and the metaphorical or literal nature of the text, but I am not aware of any Christian branches that treat the Bible the same way they would treat Justinian, Augustine, Luther, or C. S. Lewis. For the Catholic and other early rites it makes sense because they performed the canonization themselves, but it's interesting that almost all the latter branches have adopted exactly the same 66 (or 67 when they add the Book of Mormon or another revealed text) Biblical books that are each considered dogmatic.
Probably the most intellectual argument you will get from any Christian in response to the "what if I'm wrong?" question is nihilism. I don't think most Christians are interested in the next best philosophy if their own beliefs turns out to be wrong.
Dawkins' answer skirts the true answer to the question "What if science is wrong?" by simply replaying Hume's argument about the fallibility of every philosophy and essentially appealing to the current success that science enjoys. He does not answer what, personally, he would do if the scientific method no longer worked as an effective means of interacting with the world. Personally, I think most people dumped into an utterly incomprehensible universe would just go completely insane or die due to mishap.
For most people their choice of religion works well enough so as to be indistinguishable from a correct theory of the universe. They live, they breed, and their children survive to breeding age. That vast simplification subsumes all the internal mental and emotional conditions necessary for the human brain to continue believing that what it's doing is appropriate and meaningful. If the brain decides that its future possible actions have no meaning, failure of the organism generally results. As such, it's not likely to find an organism that really, truly believes that everything is completely meaningless and nothing is worth attaining. Even the strictest possible skeptical nihilist possible would feel some meaning to their actions even if the only meaning was the instinctual avoidance of pain.
I don't know the mind of Richard Dawkins', but I'm assuming that his philosophy is not simply to take the easiest actions that avoid pain. He has some beliefs for why he speaks at conferences, for why he pursues a scientific understanding of the universe, for why he continues to feed himself. What would happen if those beliefs were shown to be utterly worthless? That is the question which Dawkins' does not answer, and essentially the question for which you desire an intellectual answer from Christians. I think the only reasonable answer is nihilism.
Slashdot Mirror
You opt to drive, and the State and Federal Government (and your fellow citizen taxpayers) better bust their asses building roads to connect your house to your workplace, Walmart, and the beer store. WIth State workers who are legally prohibited from unionizing, to boot.
I like the way you think.
Java? ;)
Except in this case there really would be 100 bitcoins because anyone could go look at the hash chain and discover exactly who (or which public key) has the bitcoins they just deposited in the bank. In one sense that's comforting because you can verify a certain fractional reserve in the bank. Over time, it would be possible to trace the inflation of the system and determine exactly how many original bitcoins a given "loaned bitcoin" would be worth; this would give an ultimate risk calculation of how much value could be lost from the economy in a loan-failure induced depression. It would also be easy to see who held the real wealth in the system; those who actually owned the private keys the real bitcoins were assigned to. If bitcoin were to become a worldwide currency it would be natural for governments and large banks to be in possession of the actual bitcoins (much like gold reserves) while the inflated currency derived from bitcoins was circulated. The other possibility is that some sort of exchange develops where real percentages of bitcoins are exchanged for the derived currency at a non 1-1 rate. If deflation is slow enough this could be accomplished through the bitcoin transaction fees. Since presumably lower fees could be charged on the derived currency it would eventually become economic to trade 1 real bitcoin for 1.01 or 1.001 derived unit of currency, cheaper than bitcoin transaction fees. This would tend to distribute supplies of actual bitcoins relatively uniformly and prevent a buildup of real bitcoins anywhere in the economy. While it's difficult to control demand for currency, a fully open economic model may actually control demand if everyone has full knowledge of the potential value of bitcoins versus a derived currency. There is no reason to receive (or issue) a loan for x derived bitcoins if that loan reduces the effective value of derived bitcoins relative to real bitcoins more than some percentage.
Note: IANAE.
I imagine the percentage of Americans who are under the influence of drugs *right now* is about 5% to 10%. This is also apparently only self-reporting of drug influence, and I imagine quite a few people are arrested while legally under the influence of alcohol.
we have no hope at present to even reliably test for it
... no?
Are you conscious? Were you conscious last night when you were asleep? Are my questions not "tests" in some way? People have been experimenting with altering their state of consciousness since unrecorded history. My thought experiment is just much more radical and not yet possible with the technology we have. In fact, if my hypothesis that consciousness is perfectly natural and explainable is correct then my thought experiment would not even cause an altered state of consciousness. The only potential weakness is that our memory of being conscious may be faulty. Perhaps we only remember being conscious in the past but we never were. If that is the case then the entire question is moot because while we may currently have the sensation of consciousness there would be no guarantee that we were in the past or would be in the future. I don't think this is likely though, and I think the state of being conscious forms memories that we can trust as evidence that we were conscious in the past. Given that assumption, it is perfectly possible to test for consciousness during an experiment and remember the results later to verify it. There's also the fact that in certain cases one can be conscious and not remember it later due to either short term memory loss or simply the failure of short term memories to form, but those are generally understandable results of injury or drugs and can be controlled for in experiments.
This particular argument is called "circular reasoning". Not to mention that you are completely confused as to the meaning of "non deterministic". By this token placing bets on outcomes of individual quantum events makes them "deterministic" because you can place quite solidly determined (beforehand even!) bets on them and thus the events are "determined" by the contents of your wallet
Non-deterministic in the strictest sense means that no possible prior observation can predict the outcome. In our world, this also means that no possible process can affect the outcome either, otherwise it would become predictable and non-deterministic. For instance, if you have a 50% probability of flipping a coin and getting heads and there is no possible way to influence or predict the outcome then it is non-deterministic. If you can flip the coin in a manner that shifts the probability then the outcome is less non-deterministic. Similarly if you can observe the coin as it's flipping and predict the outcome. If you want to be perfectly precise, even a completely deterministic but infinitely precise Universe would have an element of non-determinism because we wouldn't be able to model the interactions of all the particles deterministically with full resolution. At some point, however, the probability of being wrong about a fundamentally non-deterministic outcome is so small that it doesn't matter for practical purposes. If we have a 99.99999999999999% probability of getting heads for a given proverbial coin then almost certainly no one on earth who has ever lived has ever gotten tails. If "non-determinism" is necessary for consciousness then the probability for a series of non-deterministic outcomes that does *not* produce consciousness is less than 1 out of some 100 billion people who have been estimated to have ever lived. I'm not saying that the universe is necessarily deterministic, I'm saying that there's a very, very, very low probability that our consciousness actually requires the unpredictable results of non-deterministic events. There's also a problem with causation: If our consciousness required true non-deterministic events then what causes our consciousness to reflect things in the real world? Why am I thinking about slashdot right now instead of, say, a cat or a cream pie? If my consciousness relied on non-deterministic events then I should be conscious of whatever non-deterministic assortment of thoughts result from those events and not from the measurable physical events ar
Suppose that consciousness is a combination of natural and supernatural processes. Reversibly begin replacing neurons with equivalent electronic replacements until consciousness is lost, replace the neuron to restore consciousness, and continue replacing other neurons. If supernatural processes are required for consciousness a minimal set of neurons will be found that are required to interface with the supernatural. Use this minimal set of neurons as a testing device to explore the nature of the supernatural by manipulating the neurons themselves, or in other words our original premise was false and the supernatural is merely an undiscovered part of the natural world that can be repeatably tested by a finite set of neurons. I don't think there is any false dichotomy in my argument. The fact that we investigate consciousness proves that information flows from our consciousness to our physical minds and bodies to cause the physical act of investigation, and clearly information from the physical world must flow to our consciousness. This two-way interaction between consciousness and the natural world forces consciousness to also be testable as part of the natural world. It may turn out that consciousness is housed in some other dimension or in sub-quantum particles or whatever; that only means that we currently have a limited view of the natural world and not that consciousness is supernatural.
You also mentioned non-determinism as a possible source of consciousness. If consciousness requires non-deterministic changes in the universe in order to exist then it would imply that those changes are not actually non-deterministic; they are determined by the requirements of consciousness. This would mean the universe has some extra laws we didn't know about but by using the above procedure we could almost certainly determine what they are. Another possibility is that consciousness only happens as a result of the anthropic principle; in the Many Worlds interpretation every possible non-deterministic event actually occurs and in a subset of worlds those events could induce consciousness. This is statistically unlikely because it would tend to create individual worlds where at most a single person was conscious. It is far more likely that the necessary non-deterministic events happen in only a single mind than in 6.5 billion minds. This discussion is strong evidence that more than one individual experiences consciousness.
What we can know is limited by the nature of the universe. To the best of my understanding knowledge is best represented as a model of some part of the Universe. The model can be used to predict the state of the Universe at a particular time and place, and the requirements for the model are information and computing ability. Information is directly related to the representation of quantum states of matter. The more ordered a given physical state, the more information necessary to represent it. Human brains are very good at predicting the future state of the local Universe for survival, and science is a rigorous extension of the modeling ability we possess. By creating scientific tools we can extend our ability to model to almost limitless precision and accuracy and extend our knowledge of the Universe. With sufficient tools we may be able to model the human mind directly instead of resorting to picking it apart neuron by neuron as I described above. I don't know where the practical limits on our ability to model lie but they appear to be limited by computational power and not by epistemology. Ultimately I am a behavioralist and so I believe that if our models are accurate enough that we can't distinguish the model from the real thing then we have a perfect model. If such a perfect model exists for human consciousness then I will consider consciousness to be a solved problem regardless of philosophical arguments about the lack of ultimate truth. At that point our minds would have the same epistemological limits as the models and it becomes a moot point.
Regarding "cl
Consciousness is either a product of the natural physical world or it is supernatural. If it is supernatural then it is very surprising that things like sleep, injury, drugs, and electromagnetic fields have such great (if not total) control over it and we would do well to simply study it as if it were only natural until we discover the ways it actually differs from natural processes. If consciousness is natural then it almost certainly arises solely from the interaction of the matter and energy in the brain and nervous system. If the definition of cognition is a complete theory of the operation of the brain and nervous system (something which we obviously don't have yet) then that model would also describe consciousness. I understand the distinction between merely calculating a result (cognition) and being aware of performing the calculation (consciousness). I think it's obvious that our consciousness is the direct cause of much of our cognition and as such a complete model of human cognition must necessarily include consciousness.
Classical physics describes a mechanical universe in which everything is fully pre-determined, such that conscious awareness of things can make no difference at all in outcomes and actions. As such, there would be no basis for consciousness to be selected for by evolution. As such, there would be no reason to expect consciousness to be part of biological creatures.
Your definition of consciousness is inherently non-deterministic. Of course non-deterministic consciousness will not evolve in a deterministic universe. But deterministic consciousness is perfectly possible. You make it sound as if being consciously aware of things is entirely separated from any physical action, but that is simply not the case. Our conscious thoughts, even if they are fully deterministic, alter the state of the universe in ways that would not happen if we did not have consciousness.
Aging is a general result of the laws of thermodynamics, however, so it has quite a lot going for it. The *universe* ages. Hard to avoid that.
You don't have to sign anything to be treated if the facility accepts Medicare or Medicaid. Generally if you have to sign anything it is an authorization to use your personal information to bill you or your insurance company and not an agreement to pay.
And what is this about programming having a strong mathematical foundation?? It's a list of things to do, about the only math needed is some understanding of Boolean algebra, which should only take an hour to learn.
Formal mathematics is ultimately done with sets of symbols and rules for building formulas from axiomatic sequences of symbols. In essence it's string processing with a few special rules about the symbols that represent variables. Getting to arithmetic from that point is a long road, but once you realize that mathematics is just formal rules it's no surprise that a subset of formal mathematics is the context free languages used for programming. This is important when you need to prove things about classes of programs or transform programs from one programming language into another or prove that all programming languages can compute the same things as a Universal Turing Machine.
Look at metamath for an interactive bottom-up approach to constructing mathematics and I think you'll see the similarity to programming.
You seriously haven't used calculus and physics for controlling the motion of robots? You didn't use Fourier analysis when doing speech recognition? Discrete mathematics and linear algebra may play a bigger role in day-to-day programming but that's no reason to hate calculus.
Of course the sad thing is that one can probably program a robot or a speech recognition system using libraries someone else wrote without knowing how they work. I think that makes one an "operator" rather than a "programmer", however.
Apprenticeship is the only way to create competent programmers. The "somewhat functional" careers you mentioned; doctors, lawyers, and financial managers; all spend several years during and after their education in a highly controlled and structured apprenticeship where their responsibilities grow with their experience. Programmers fresh out of college are lucky if they find an actual programming job, and even luckier if they experience worthwhile guided apprenticeship. There are probably two main reasons: The software industry is so fast-paced that investing several years in a programmer is virtual suicide and the historical nature of programming is to be mostly self-taught.
The limited number of nuclear plants that have been built combined with changing regulatory requirements seems to account for a large portion of the cost, especially cost overruns. Wikipedia claims that China is building many plants significantly cheaper than other nations and hopes to build 1.7-GW plants at roughly the cost of coal plants.
Radioisotope-sequestering cement used to plug the bottoms of deep-sea wells in a subduction zone sounds good to me.
There is no fly ash anymore in a modern plant since 15 - 20 years
Surprise, surprise, there are no nuclear plants operating commercially that were designed within the last 15 to 20 years. It's all old reactor designs without passive safety. Thanks to the insane selective fear of physics that some people have, it's far too expensive (in the short term) to test and build the new reactors.
One could argue that it's streaming if you're transferring data over the wire from a location outside your legal ownership.
You can play a rented DVD on a rented DVD player connected to a rented television in a rented apartment. Taken to the extreme it would be "streaming" for Amazon to transfer data to you in the form of a plastic disc, unless you want the government to start deciding which methods of wired (and wireless) communications count for the purposes of streaming. Given the wave/particle duality of light you could argue that a completely optical network actually does distribute physical photons just like Amazon ships DVDs.
I've always thought it would be nice if the russians or nigerians or chinese would just run Tor on their botnets. I know they probably don't really care for freedom of speech or privacy (in fact, they would like to reduce most people's privacy in terms of financial credentials...) but that is the level of distribution necessary to thwart network analysis. Store-and-forward of all anonymized traffic with random delays and random traffic bursts generated to mask legitimate traffic is essentially the only way to go. Even better if your local gateway just "happens" to be infected with such a botnet client, generating its own stream of random anonymized traffic for plausible deniability.
Alas, it's probably up to some grey-hat hackers to care enough to put something like this together and implement it and keep it running.
Using a physical device to evaluate an arbitrary mathematical function is at least as old as Babbage. A formal model of computation generic enough to be called Universal is as old as Turing. If a patent application claims nothing more than a physical device for evaluating a particular mathematical function then how can there be any merit in the claims? All the merit must rest in the mathematical function itself because Babbage and Turing provided prior art; and if the mathematical function has no relevance to a physical or useful process then the only claims of the application are for pure mathematics.
I did not see any reference in the patent claims to any method or physical process, only references to the information storage and retrieval system. Maybe I'm wrong, but I understood that the claims are what matters; not the accompanying description and exposition.
Yes, only off by 66 years! That will seem like nothing to conspiracy theorists in 26302 AD!
The claims require a physical implementation (e.g. "An information storage and retrieval system"). No amount of math will produce such a system out of the aether. Nor does thinking about the math or the formulas on pen & paper infringe the patent. The specification makes it clear that "information storage and retrieval system" refers to a computer system. Thus, the patent was not actually reduced to pure mathematics.
Here's a useful test to see if "an information storage and retrieval system" (ISRS) is bullshit or not. If there exists an isomorphism between every element in the claim and a Turing Machine (TM) then the patent is pure bullshit. I see nothing in any of the 8 claims that makes a reference to any physical system that does not have a very simple mapping to a TM. Just define a bijection between "random access memory" and "disk storage unit" in the ISRS and the tape of the TM, and a bijection between the other elements of the claim and the state machine of the TM. If there's only a homomorphism because the set of possible TMs is larger than the set of possible ISRS in the patent, then it's double bullshit.
I specifically said "Such a being could actively thwart scientific investigation and only reward blind obedience" and that's what I meant. You could still interact with the world so long as it was via prescribed "holy" methods. You could still have autonomy to choose from a well defined set of holy actions every day or suffer the consequences. Should I play my harp today or walk on the clouds? You would probably be required to wear pants every day, or they might just come permanently attached to your body. Only actions that were specifically disallowed would be thwarted. This does not make questions or information gathering impossible, it merely makes them superfluous because presumably all allowable actions would have already been instructed to you as you grew up. A simple form of science would still be possible though; attempt an action and if the result is incomprehensible then it's "unholy" or otherwise disallowed. Otherwise it's holy. In that sense, the set of holy actions is recursively enumerable. To fully destroy science would require either the destruction of sufficient intellect to recognize cause and effect or to eliminate cause and effect altogether. Science could, however, be reduced to "if you want an effect, pray for it." and it would be granted based on divine whim rather than comprehensible rules.
In short it would make human life extremely simple and one-dimensional; you could essentially dispense with all modern medicine and technology because bodies would either work or they would not and there would be nothing (short of prayer) that anyone could do about it.
I think you are incorrect about such an existence negating free will any more than a deterministic or uncertain universe does. At best, a naturalistic viewpoint can only grant random or non-deterministic free will; there's nothing magical about the atoms in our brains that lets them behave any differently than any other atoms in the universe. Dualists have a similar (generally unrecognized) problem in that free will ends up being just the mind of god causing everything to happen as planned.
I think suicide is probably the best option for such a world too, but now perhaps you understand why many christians are quite unhappy about the prospect of their worldview evaporating. To them it's a permanent and eternal suicide.
If the scientific method no longer worked, religion wouldn't either.
That's not necessarily true: an all-powerful being could arbitrarily change the universe on a whim and leave religious experience as the only reliable way to survive. Such a being could actively thwart scientific investigation and only reward blind obedience. What would Dawkins' do then?
I only have personal experience with Evangelical and Catholic Christians, but the general belief I have seen is that the same Bible is taken as canonical by almost all Protestant branches of Christianity. Several branches and individuals question textual accuracy and the metaphorical or literal nature of the text, but I am not aware of any Christian branches that treat the Bible the same way they would treat Justinian, Augustine, Luther, or C. S. Lewis. For the Catholic and other early rites it makes sense because they performed the canonization themselves, but it's interesting that almost all the latter branches have adopted exactly the same 66 (or 67 when they add the Book of Mormon or another revealed text) Biblical books that are each considered dogmatic.
Probably the most intellectual argument you will get from any Christian in response to the "what if I'm wrong?" question is nihilism. I don't think most Christians are interested in the next best philosophy if their own beliefs turns out to be wrong.
Dawkins' answer skirts the true answer to the question "What if science is wrong?" by simply replaying Hume's argument about the fallibility of every philosophy and essentially appealing to the current success that science enjoys. He does not answer what, personally, he would do if the scientific method no longer worked as an effective means of interacting with the world. Personally, I think most people dumped into an utterly incomprehensible universe would just go completely insane or die due to mishap.
For most people their choice of religion works well enough so as to be indistinguishable from a correct theory of the universe. They live, they breed, and their children survive to breeding age. That vast simplification subsumes all the internal mental and emotional conditions necessary for the human brain to continue believing that what it's doing is appropriate and meaningful. If the brain decides that its future possible actions have no meaning, failure of the organism generally results. As such, it's not likely to find an organism that really, truly believes that everything is completely meaningless and nothing is worth attaining. Even the strictest possible skeptical nihilist possible would feel some meaning to their actions even if the only meaning was the instinctual avoidance of pain. I don't know the mind of Richard Dawkins', but I'm assuming that his philosophy is not simply to take the easiest actions that avoid pain. He has some beliefs for why he speaks at conferences, for why he pursues a scientific understanding of the universe, for why he continues to feed himself. What would happen if those beliefs were shown to be utterly worthless? That is the question which Dawkins' does not answer, and essentially the question for which you desire an intellectual answer from Christians. I think the only reasonable answer is nihilism.