I'm pretty happy with emacs. Some of my cow orkers use vi. We're highly productive in these environments. I've tried using various IDE editors, and have yet to find one that isn't extremely slow and painful for me to use. Any plan that depends on getting people to agree on what editor is modern and what is a crappy, ancient piece of junk is doomed from the start. When you've brokered a lasting peace in the Middle East, get back to us on this and we'll trust you to finally end the great editor wars.
You _can't_ agree on tabs and not spaces, because there is no way to look at a piece of text and see that there are no spaces. Believe me, I've tried working with people who think that this isn't a problem, and it quickly becomes one. Editors will insert spaces for you instead of tabs, so even if you never hit the space bar, there's still no guarantee of anything. The only way you can have visual consistency between users is to agree on what width a tab has.
Right, what happens if you do this is that the bozo that has tabs=4 sometimes uses tabs and sometimes uses spaces, and then when you try to load it into an editor with 8-character tabs, the indentation is all screwy. Whereas if everybody uses 8-character tabs, which is the usual meaning of ascii character number 9, then this never happens.
The bottom line, though, is that this is a religious war, and as the person who's currently at the top of the list said, it's better for a team to just agree on what the indentation style is going to be, and stick with it. Otherwise you wind up with non-terminating flame wars (or terminated team members).
You can use it to google for other ISPs that have less annoying policies. I'm quite happy with speakeasy's policies, for example, if you're in a city they support. I agree that VPNing out is inefficient, although if you can't change providers it may be your only option.:'(
Remember the National Motor Speed Law? 55mph everywhere, including on I-10 between Lordsburg, NM and Bowie, AZ? That law is dead now. What do you think killed it?
My personal opinion on this, for what it's worth, is that what killed it was excessive enforcement as a result of lower taxes. When you don't have enough tax revenue, you make it up somewhere else, and the police departments made it up by issuing more tickets. And because the speed limits were unreasonably low, this was an excellent revenue source - people were obeying the de-facto law instead of the de-jure law.
This is less true now - speed limits are much more sensible. In general, you can get where you want to go without worrying about getting arrested. This is because once the de-jure law started being enforced, the populace started writing letters and voting, and the law got changed.
So I would argue that black boxes are actually a *good* idea if you like your privacy, because if every car had a black box, and you got a ticket for going over the speed limit, the speed limits would be set reasonably. So you wouldn't have to look over your shoulder as you drove to work, and you wouldn't worry about getting pulled over by a cop and having your privacy massively violated by the state for being the unlucky bastard that they decided had to pay the tax.
Consistent enforcement is a _good_ thing, not a _bad_ thing.
...that's only usefully true if (1) you can guarantee that the columns end at the bottom of the visible screen, so that you don't have to scroll around to move from column to column, and (2) there is more than one column.
Paul's a really smart guy. I enjoy his writing, and I always read it. But it feels like reading text on an 80-column screen written by someone on an Atari 800. When you resize the screen, the text doesn't get wider. There's a huge whitespace gap to the right of the text.
This probably seems somewhat irrelevant, but I'm saying it here because I'm hoping that Paul or someone who knows him will notice and fix it - it's a shame to have this writing presented in such a difficult-to-read fashion.
Good article, by the way. I don't entirely agree with what's being said here, but I think it's an excellent tangent to a core idea the circumference of which one might better grasp, having read it.
The reason why it is worth reasoning about these things (if it is) is not for the joy of abstract discussion. It is because life is dissatisfactory. I do not tend to react to the things that happen to me in the way that is most likely to produce happiness for me - my natural tendency seems to be react in the opposite way. So if I want to be happy, I have to go against my natural tendency. The thing that allows me to do that is reason - reason that allows me to decide what I think the correct thing is to do, and reason that lets me decide, knowing what the correct thing to do is, to actually do it, based on reasoned knowledge of a future reward. I know that it is not my nature to act this way because unless I deliberately choose to act this way, I tend not to.
You ask if a penecillin shot is pain or pleasure. The pain of having to have a needle in your arm is pain. The experience of having the penecillin cure what ails you is, if not pleasure, then at least a temporary cessation of pain. The pleasure of eating a twinkie is pleasure. The feeling of being too full is pain.
It can be useful to divide things up this way, the same way you seperate terms when doing algebra, because it allows you to consider the terms seperately. Does the twinkie cause pleasure? Does it cause pain? Or do the pleasure and pain come from seperate causes? If they do, then I can eliminate the cause of pain, and keep the cause of pleasure, and this will tend to make life less dissatisfactory, and more satisfactory.
Why debate about this? Mostly because you seemed not to have understood my point, and so I was making second and third attempts to communicate it. I don't mind if you disagree with me, but I feel I have to a large degree failed to communicate, and I think this is an interesting topic, and you seem like someone who, if you understood the point I was making, might be able to help me to see what is true about the point I am making, and what is not true about it. But we didn't really follow the rules of formal debate, either of us, and as a result we got way too deep way too fast, and I don't think much was accomplished other than a (hopefully amusing) conversation.
Taking refuge in etymology isn't a good way to debate - you are just redefining words so that the way I am using them seems nonsensical, when we really know that the words I am using do not refer to the concepts to which you have assigned them.
There are three kinds of objects that you can perceive. There are the objects that are obvious. For example, if I see a fire burning, I don't have to reason about it - I just know that there is a fire burning.
Then there are hidden objects. These are objects that we do not see directly. We perceive these objects through reasoning. For example, if you are looking at me, and I have a pencil in my hand, and then I put my hand behind my back, and you don't hear a sound, you can perceive that I am holding a pencil, because you haven't heard it drop. Even though you are not seeing it directly, you are still able to perceive it, using logic.
Then there are deeply hidden objects. These are objects that you can't see, and you can't discover through reasoning. In order to perceive an object like this, you need to take it on faith. For example, if I were congenitally blind, and I had a good friend who had sight, and I handed an object to my friend and said "what color is this object," my friend would tell me the color, and I would know the color of the object, even though I had never seen it and had no logical basis for thinking it was a particular color. I still wouldn't know what the color looked like, having never perceived it directly, but I would have had a valid perception about the object based on my friend's assistance.
So the point is that logic isn't a quality that things have. Something isn't logical or illogical, really. If you express a logical statement, it can be valid or invalid, but generally when you perceive hidden objects, you are doing so based on logic. The nice thing about this is that if we want to be careful not to have incorrect perceptions, we can frequently examine our reasoning to see whether each step is valid or invalid, and if we find steps that are invalid, then we can reject the conclusion we have drawn, or we can try to find some better basis to support that conclusion.
So what does this have to do with good and bad? The only basis we have for thinking a thing is good or bad is, does it help us to avoid pain or experience pleasure. It is nonsensical to ask the question "is pain really bad?" It is a fact that, for most of us, we do not want to experience pain. It is equally nonsensical to ask, "is pleasure really good?" All we have are our direct perceptions of obvious objects, and our indirect perception of hidden objects, through chains of reasoning.
So we do have a drive to avoid killing ourselves, although I think we also have a drive to self-sacrifice for the good of the group - we are social animals. These drives are not rational - they are drives. The evidence suggests that they come to us through evolution. Wolves are like us in this way - they are pack animals, who will sacrifice for the good of the pack, and who tend otherwise to want to stay alive as long as possible.
The difference is that we aren't slaves to our drives, because we have a capacity that wolves have to a lesser degree - the capacity for abstract reasoning. It doesn't make sense to try to get a wolf to stop killing - wolves don't have the capacity to overcome their drives using their reasoning, at least to that extent.
So it is not because killing is okay for the wolf and not okay for us that when we kill, it is murder, and when a wolf kills, it is killing. I am sure you are no more willing to be killed by a wolf than by a human. The difference is that we can teach a human not to kill, and we cannot teach a wolf not to kill. We are able to create a meme "it is not okay to kill" and follow that meme.
When I look at another person and see them not as a source of food, or a source of pleasure, but rather as a creature like myself, this is not a direct perception.
Everything so far indicates all brain functions are localized in the physical brain.
You are implicitly asserting that brain function and consciousness are not merely related, but one and the same. This is an assertion that is not supported by known facts, other than the old "I can't think of any other way for it to be." This is fine as long as nobody else can either, but it is no good when you are using it as a reason in a logical argument.
Your MRI experiment, for example, shows that a stimulus produces a result that is more spread out than the original stimulus, and of course it looks simultaneous - the results come from a single cause. This is interesting, and clearly shows a connection between the senses and the cognitive faculties of the brain, but all you've done so far is illustrate Plato's cave - you haven't yet shown what's looking at the image in the cave.
The difference between me and a wolf is in degrees. A wolf is less intelligent than I am (although wolves are quite intelligent in comparison to many other animals), and so has less choice. I can choose to eat a rabbit, or not. The wolf has no choice - it has to eat the rabbit. The reason why we can call an act of killing murder is precisely because we have this choice, and the choice is based on our intelligence.
Why should I find my own happiness worth some effort? This is a somewhat silly question. Everybody wants to be happy. Everybody wants to escape pain. We don't always believe we have any right to escape our pain, or to be happy, and we often torture ourselves as a result, but I have never met someone who would, in the abstract, prefer being unhappy to being happy.
Is that logical? Logic is based on valid perceptions. If you can observe something directly, you don't really need to reason about it with logic, except to question whether your observation is accurate. So if I can observe directly that I prefer being happy to being unhappy (and indeed, I do observe that this is my preference) it is meaningless to construct a logical argument about it. However, it is quite useful to use logic to combat my tendency to make myself unhappy despite my desire to be happy.
A logical basis for wanting others to be happy? In real-world terms, if everybody in the world is happy, then I don't have to worry about them killing me. When we are unhappy, we look for ways to become happy. Quite frequently, the ways that we identify involve harming others. So out of pure self-interest, I might want to ensure the happiness of others.
Going beyond that, I have found, again from my own personal experience, that having everything I need isn't enough to make me happy. Having a nice place to stay, enough food, a kind and loving wife - none of this is enough to make me happy. Why? Because as my lacks become less, my ability to see lacks in others - to turn my mental eye outward - becomes greater.
I've experienced great unhappiness in my life. I grew up a nerd, a social outcast. I know what it feels like. I know what it feels like to think nobody cares about me. It's awful. So when I see that in someone else, it's impossible for me to say to myself "it's okay that they are feeling pain directly, because I am not feeling their pain directly."
I think you are arguing that it is human nature to react in this way. But in fact it is not. I am sure you are aware of people in the world around you who have everything they need - food, shelter, a loving family - and yet who are not able to turn their mental eye outward and see the pain of others. Who may even destroy everything that makes them happy because they are unable to have compassion for the ones who love them.
So what's the difference? Is it human nature? No. It's reason. It's a meme, if you will. If you have the meme that looking out for number one, getting ahead in the world, and so on, are necessary for happiness, then because you want to be happy, you will pursue these doggedly. If you have the meme that by helping others to become happy, you will be happier, then you will try to help others to become happy.
I don't hate myself. I rejoice in the fact that I have the capacity to reason, and that I have been given good reasons in my life to act for the benefit of others. Because it is my impression, based on personal experience, that this meme is an accurate reflection of reality. But it is definitely not built in - it is not "human nature."
When you say that neuroscience is going to find the basis for consciousness, you are stating a prejudice. Once the research has been done, perhaps the facts will support this prejudice, but until there is some experimental evidence to support it, it's just a prejudice.
You've got a lot of work in front of you. For example, how does consciousness get around locality? It must do so, in order to produce the consciousness that you and I experience. Otherwise, every experience we have would have to be experienced in one place in the brain, and as a computer geek with some understanding of how computer vision and computer reasoning happen, that just doesn't sound plausible. Does this happen through some kind of quantum entanglement? What's the physical process that makes this possible?
Being able to clearly observe what consciousness is isn't something you should just dismiss as uninteresting - how can you know the origins of a thing if you don't know what the thing is?
Cleaning up any nuclear plant site is a disaster. If you can, you're better off just encasing the damned thing in concrete and walking away. Of course, the liquid waste will probably come through the concrete a few hundred years later, so this isn't as comforting as it could be, but anything you do to try to break the plant up and ship it somewhere is just going to release the radioactivity sooner, when it's hotter. In the case of stuff with a long half-life, it may not make any difference, but in the case of stuff with a short half-life, of course it does.
Animals do all of these things. No, they don't shoot people, but they do kill their rivals. They do cheat. It's part of evolution. Male cats are cute, and they also engage in infanticide. There are birds that lay their eggs in other birds' nests and let the other bird raise them. Stealing the eggs another creature has laid and eating them is par for the course. Nature may be beautiful, but it is not virtuous.
Sympathy, empathy, pity and love, when they aren't just evolutionary drives, are based on reason, not endocrine glands. You're sympathetic to someone else because you see them as like you, and you see their situation as like your situation, or like a situation you could be in, and you see their happiness as something worth some effort on your part, again because you see that they are like you. This is all logic and reasoning - it's not glands.
The difference between "cold logic" and compassion is not that one is logical and the other is not. It's that one is based on false premises, and the other is not.
Meditators have been studying consciousness for millennia - asserting that what they know about it is mysticism may be comforting for you, in that it supports your hopes for a transhuman future, but that doesn't make your theories about it correct.
As a scientist, you really have two choices: you can repeat the experiments the meditators have done and see if you get the same results, or you can come up with a competing theory that is falsifiable, and design an experiment that will test your theory. If you do neither of these things, then any assertions you make about consciousness are superstition, not scientific.
If you really want to decant your consciousness, you'd better start going down one of these paths, because you're not getting any younger. There's this religion that the singularity is coming, and that all this stuff will just magically appear, but it's nonsense - technology is hard, and we have yet to produce any machines that think usefully, and it's _not_ because we don't have decent computer hardware - Drexler's molecular computers are not going to solve this problem. If it is possible to produce such software, someone is going to have to do it - it won't design itself.
Um, overpasses aren't _that_ expensive to construct. Putting special machinery in every car to do traffic planning, including control of the accelerator, steering and brakes, and making sure these controls don't accidentally kill someone, would probably be substantially more expensive.
In addition, this is going down the same stupid planning rathole that's made cities into kill zones for over the past century, and made cars a must-have item for most people in the U.S. instead of a nice-to-have luxury. We already know how to make transportation problems less bad.
We don't need scary killer future traffic control - we need less stupid urban planning, and fatter, cheaper network pipes to the home to make telepresence more satisfying.
What exactly are you "overcoming" when you overcome "primate programming"?
The tendency to react according to your primate instincts. To shoot your girlfriend and her lover when you discover them in bed together. To steal what belongs to someone else because you want it. To respond without thinking, in a way that you later regret. To cheat in school, when the whole point of school is to learn, and cheating simply impoverishes you. To act like an animal would act, instead of acting in a way that is consistent with how you think you should act.
Okay, so you can imagine constructing a repository for consciousness that would not have human instincts, like the fear reaction. Now, can you imagine more people being willing to decant their consciousnesses into such a vessel than are willing to undertake Zen discipline?
Sure, maybe it's possible, but you can do Zen now. There's no evidence to suggest that it's even possible to transfer your consciousness into a mechanical construct. So which are you going to do, the thing you can do now, or the thing your great grandkids may be able to do if your speculation turns out to be something other than crazed imaginings.
BTW, consciousness is a very precise term. What is imprecise is the evidence connecting consciousness to a physical process. Lacking evidence, suggesting that a technological mechanism for transferring consciousness is a practical solution to a present real-world problem is absurd.
Seriously, overcoming primate programming in the sense of not being controlled by it is perfectly possible. It's just difficult, and required concentrated daily practice, for more than an hour a day, in addition to ongoing mindfulness practice throughout the day. Very few people ever even attempt it, and fewer stick with it. So in the aggregate sense you could argue that it's impossible, but it would be more accurate to say that it's not easy.
I see no reason to think that replacing the monkey brain/endocrine system with some other system would not simply replace one set of problems with another, even if such a consciousness transfer were possible. And since currently there's no evidence to suggest that such a transfer is possible, I think we should probably put some effort into dealing with the situation as it is, rather than as we might like it to be.
They score some points with me on a first skim...
on
Securing Mac OS X
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· Score: 4, Interesting
...because they mention antivirus software and do not claim that it will be of any value other than possibly satisfying corporate IS requirements.
No offense, but that's not even the real issue. The real issue is, once I have purchased a DVD, do I have the right to play it on the device of my choice, or not? They are saying "we'll let you play it on this one type of device, if you use our DRM". So basically, they are saying "no." It's that simple.
Somewhere.com is a domain that was registered by a friend of mine long long ago back before spam and web sites and all that crap ruined the beauty that was the Old Internet. (I'm being ironic here, by the way). I think he registered it because he thought it was kind of funny, but unfortunately he pointed it at his mail server.
It turns out that as the internet became more and more popular, more and more people started using someone@somewhere.com as the address they'd put into email when they didn't want the originator of the email to be known. For example, forwarded mail where you don't want the person who forwarded it to get mad at you for publishing their email address.
So he started getting a lot of crank email to somewhere.com - people complaining that he shouldn't send them mail about Jesus' third coming in a UFO, and stuff like that. For a while he tried sending mail to these people to clue them in, but of course they were un-cluable.
Eventially, it got to the point where he was mostly getting the kind of stuff you get when you've been joe-jobbed - angry replies to actual spam of the kind to which we've sadly become accustomed. It was then that he started analyzing the responses, and I'm pretty sure this is what inspired his anti-spam work.
Messagefire, the anti-spam service he started, really rocks. It's too bad that they've stopped accepting new customers. Sigh. Because I know him, I got in on the ground floor, and am still using it to filter my spam. It's wildly successful, and I'm very grateful to him for setting it up. I hope at some point they start selling service again.:'}
It seems like one benefit of a system like this would be that staff abuse would be caught on video. I really don't know much about what goes on in nursing homes nowadays, although my grandmother used to run one. But I have heard that there is a lot of abuse by staff on residents in poorly-run nursing homes. Having a disinterested electronic witness to that abuse might help, although of course it doesn't address the underlying cause.
...but I think that you have to look at few things. First of all, are you running a spam filter with auto-delete enabled? Are _any_ of the people in your company? Are you running your own mail server, or is someone else running it? Do you have enough bandwidth? Are you subscribed to any RBLs?
The biggest thing that's changed in the age of spam is that a lot of people now install spam and virus filters that do not have a 0% false positive rate. If your filter scores attachments higher, it may be dropping email that has attachments.
Another possibility is that you have a virus filter on your mail server, and you have a bunch of infected machines talking to it. If some significant percentage of the mail you send has viruses on it, the virus filter may be blocking otherwise legitimate mail because it's infected. To you this would appear as lost mail.
In answer to your question, no, mail is not dead. I have met other people who are having the same sort of problems you are, but I haven't been having problems like that, either at home or at work. Something about your mail setup is genuinely borken, and needs fixing.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm pretty happy with emacs. Some of my cow orkers use vi. We're highly productive in these environments. I've tried using various IDE editors, and have yet to find one that isn't extremely slow and painful for me to use. Any plan that depends on getting people to agree on what editor is modern and what is a crappy, ancient piece of junk is doomed from the start. When you've brokered a lasting peace in the Middle East, get back to us on this and we'll trust you to finally end the great editor wars.
You _can't_ agree on tabs and not spaces, because there is no way to look at a piece of text and see that there are no spaces. Believe me, I've tried working with people who think that this isn't a problem, and it quickly becomes one. Editors will insert spaces for you instead of tabs, so even if you never hit the space bar, there's still no guarantee of anything. The only way you can have visual consistency between users is to agree on what width a tab has.
Right, what happens if you do this is that the bozo that has tabs=4 sometimes uses tabs and sometimes uses spaces, and then when you try to load it into an editor with 8-character tabs, the indentation is all screwy. Whereas if everybody uses 8-character tabs, which is the usual meaning of ascii character number 9, then this never happens.
The bottom line, though, is that this is a religious war, and as the person who's currently at the top of the list said, it's better for a team to just agree on what the indentation style is going to be, and stick with it. Otherwise you wind up with non-terminating flame wars (or terminated team members).
You can use it to google for other ISPs that have less annoying policies. I'm quite happy with speakeasy's policies, for example, if you're in a city they support. I agree that VPNing out is inefficient, although if you can't change providers it may be your only option. :'(
Remember the National Motor Speed Law? 55mph everywhere, including on I-10 between Lordsburg, NM and Bowie, AZ? That law is dead now. What do you think killed it?
My personal opinion on this, for what it's worth, is that what killed it was excessive enforcement as a result of lower taxes. When you don't have enough tax revenue, you make it up somewhere else, and the police departments made it up by issuing more tickets. And because the speed limits were unreasonably low, this was an excellent revenue source - people were obeying the de-facto law instead of the de-jure law.
This is less true now - speed limits are much more sensible. In general, you can get where you want to go without worrying about getting arrested. This is because once the de-jure law started being enforced, the populace started writing letters and voting, and the law got changed.
So I would argue that black boxes are actually a *good* idea if you like your privacy, because if every car had a black box, and you got a ticket for going over the speed limit, the speed limits would be set reasonably. So you wouldn't have to look over your shoulder as you drove to work, and you wouldn't worry about getting pulled over by a cop and having your privacy massively violated by the state for being the unlucky bastard that they decided had to pay the tax.
Consistent enforcement is a _good_ thing, not a _bad_ thing.
I keep my phone list on my Mac and use iSync to dump it on my phone. Works very nicely. I'm pretty sure you can iSync to a Palm as well.
...that's only usefully true if (1) you can guarantee that the columns end at the bottom of the visible screen, so that you don't have to scroll around to move from column to column, and (2) there is more than one column.
Paul's a really smart guy. I enjoy his writing, and I always read it. But it feels like reading text on an 80-column screen written by someone on an Atari 800. When you resize the screen, the text doesn't get wider. There's a huge whitespace gap to the right of the text.
This probably seems somewhat irrelevant, but I'm saying it here because I'm hoping that Paul or someone who knows him will notice and fix it - it's a shame to have this writing presented in such a difficult-to-read fashion.
Good article, by the way. I don't entirely agree with what's being said here, but I think it's an excellent tangent to a core idea the circumference of which one might better grasp, having read it.
Maybe I have a drive to communicate?
The reason why it is worth reasoning about these things (if it is) is not for the joy of abstract discussion. It is because life is dissatisfactory. I do not tend to react to the things that happen to me in the way that is most likely to produce happiness for me - my natural tendency seems to be react in the opposite way. So if I want to be happy, I have to go against my natural tendency. The thing that allows me to do that is reason - reason that allows me to decide what I think the correct thing is to do, and reason that lets me decide, knowing what the correct thing to do is, to actually do it, based on reasoned knowledge of a future reward. I know that it is not my nature to act this way because unless I deliberately choose to act this way, I tend not to.
You ask if a penecillin shot is pain or pleasure. The pain of having to have a needle in your arm is pain. The experience of having the penecillin cure what ails you is, if not pleasure, then at least a temporary cessation of pain. The pleasure of eating a twinkie is pleasure. The feeling of being too full is pain.
It can be useful to divide things up this way, the same way you seperate terms when doing algebra, because it allows you to consider the terms seperately. Does the twinkie cause pleasure? Does it cause pain? Or do the pleasure and pain come from seperate causes? If they do, then I can eliminate the cause of pain, and keep the cause of pleasure, and this will tend to make life less dissatisfactory, and more satisfactory.
Why debate about this? Mostly because you seemed not to have understood my point, and so I was making second and third attempts to communicate it. I don't mind if you disagree with me, but I feel I have to a large degree failed to communicate, and I think this is an interesting topic, and you seem like someone who, if you understood the point I was making, might be able to help me to see what is true about the point I am making, and what is not true about it. But we didn't really follow the rules of formal debate, either of us, and as a result we got way too deep way too fast, and I don't think much was accomplished other than a (hopefully amusing) conversation.
Taking refuge in etymology isn't a good way to debate - you are just redefining words so that the way I am using them seems nonsensical, when we really know that the words I am using do not refer to the concepts to which you have assigned them.
There are three kinds of objects that you can perceive. There are the objects that are obvious. For example, if I see a fire burning, I don't have to reason about it - I just know that there is a fire burning.
Then there are hidden objects. These are objects that we do not see directly. We perceive these objects through reasoning. For example, if you are looking at me, and I have a pencil in my hand, and then I put my hand behind my back, and you don't hear a sound, you can perceive that I am holding a pencil, because you haven't heard it drop. Even though you are not seeing it directly, you are still able to perceive it, using logic.
Then there are deeply hidden objects. These are objects that you can't see, and you can't discover through reasoning. In order to perceive an object like this, you need to take it on faith. For example, if I were congenitally blind, and I had a good friend who had sight, and I handed an object to my friend and said "what color is this object," my friend would tell me the color, and I would know the color of the object, even though I had never seen it and had no logical basis for thinking it was a particular color. I still wouldn't know what the color looked like, having never perceived it directly, but I would have had a valid perception about the object based on my friend's assistance.
So the point is that logic isn't a quality that things have. Something isn't logical or illogical, really. If you express a logical statement, it can be valid or invalid, but generally when you perceive hidden objects, you are doing so based on logic. The nice thing about this is that if we want to be careful not to have incorrect perceptions, we can frequently examine our reasoning to see whether each step is valid or invalid, and if we find steps that are invalid, then we can reject the conclusion we have drawn, or we can try to find some better basis to support that conclusion.
So what does this have to do with good and bad? The only basis we have for thinking a thing is good or bad is, does it help us to avoid pain or experience pleasure. It is nonsensical to ask the question "is pain really bad?" It is a fact that, for most of us, we do not want to experience pain. It is equally nonsensical to ask, "is pleasure really good?" All we have are our direct perceptions of obvious objects, and our indirect perception of hidden objects, through chains of reasoning.
So we do have a drive to avoid killing ourselves, although I think we also have a drive to self-sacrifice for the good of the group - we are social animals. These drives are not rational - they are drives. The evidence suggests that they come to us through evolution. Wolves are like us in this way - they are pack animals, who will sacrifice for the good of the pack, and who tend otherwise to want to stay alive as long as possible.
The difference is that we aren't slaves to our drives, because we have a capacity that wolves have to a lesser degree - the capacity for abstract reasoning. It doesn't make sense to try to get a wolf to stop killing - wolves don't have the capacity to overcome their drives using their reasoning, at least to that extent.
So it is not because killing is okay for the wolf and not okay for us that when we kill, it is murder, and when a wolf kills, it is killing. I am sure you are no more willing to be killed by a wolf than by a human. The difference is that we can teach a human not to kill, and we cannot teach a wolf not to kill. We are able to create a meme "it is not okay to kill" and follow that meme.
When I look at another person and see them not as a source of food, or a source of pleasure, but rather as a creature like myself, this is not a direct perception.
Everything so far indicates all brain functions are localized in the physical brain.
You are implicitly asserting that brain function and consciousness are not merely related, but one and the same. This is an assertion that is not supported by known facts, other than the old "I can't think of any other way for it to be." This is fine as long as nobody else can either, but it is no good when you are using it as a reason in a logical argument.
Your MRI experiment, for example, shows that a stimulus produces a result that is more spread out than the original stimulus, and of course it looks simultaneous - the results come from a single cause. This is interesting, and clearly shows a connection between the senses and the cognitive faculties of the brain, but all you've done so far is illustrate Plato's cave - you haven't yet shown what's looking at the image in the cave.
The difference between me and a wolf is in degrees. A wolf is less intelligent than I am (although wolves are quite intelligent in comparison to many other animals), and so has less choice. I can choose to eat a rabbit, or not. The wolf has no choice - it has to eat the rabbit. The reason why we can call an act of killing murder is precisely because we have this choice, and the choice is based on our intelligence.
Why should I find my own happiness worth some effort? This is a somewhat silly question. Everybody wants to be happy. Everybody wants to escape pain. We don't always believe we have any right to escape our pain, or to be happy, and we often torture ourselves as a result, but I have never met someone who would, in the abstract, prefer being unhappy to being happy.
Is that logical? Logic is based on valid perceptions. If you can observe something directly, you don't really need to reason about it with logic, except to question whether your observation is accurate. So if I can observe directly that I prefer being happy to being unhappy (and indeed, I do observe that this is my preference) it is meaningless to construct a logical argument about it. However, it is quite useful to use logic to combat my tendency to make myself unhappy despite my desire to be happy.
A logical basis for wanting others to be happy? In real-world terms, if everybody in the world is happy, then I don't have to worry about them killing me. When we are unhappy, we look for ways to become happy. Quite frequently, the ways that we identify involve harming others. So out of pure self-interest, I might want to ensure the happiness of others.
Going beyond that, I have found, again from my own personal experience, that having everything I need isn't enough to make me happy. Having a nice place to stay, enough food, a kind and loving wife - none of this is enough to make me happy. Why? Because as my lacks become less, my ability to see lacks in others - to turn my mental eye outward - becomes greater.
I've experienced great unhappiness in my life. I grew up a nerd, a social outcast. I know what it feels like. I know what it feels like to think nobody cares about me. It's awful. So when I see that in someone else, it's impossible for me to say to myself "it's okay that they are feeling pain directly, because I am not feeling their pain directly."
I think you are arguing that it is human nature to react in this way. But in fact it is not. I am sure you are aware of people in the world around you who have everything they need - food, shelter, a loving family - and yet who are not able to turn their mental eye outward and see the pain of others. Who may even destroy everything that makes them happy because they are unable to have compassion for the ones who love them.
So what's the difference? Is it human nature? No. It's reason. It's a meme, if you will. If you have the meme that looking out for number one, getting ahead in the world, and so on, are necessary for happiness, then because you want to be happy, you will pursue these doggedly. If you have the meme that by helping others to become happy, you will be happier, then you will try to help others to become happy.
I don't hate myself. I rejoice in the fact that I have the capacity to reason, and that I have been given good reasons in my life to act for the benefit of others. Because it is my impression, based on personal experience, that this meme is an accurate reflection of reality. But it is definitely not built in - it is not "human nature."
When you say that neuroscience is going to find the basis for consciousness, you are stating a prejudice. Once the research has been done, perhaps the facts will support this prejudice, but until there is some experimental evidence to support it, it's just a prejudice.
You've got a lot of work in front of you. For example, how does consciousness get around locality? It must do so, in order to produce the consciousness that you and I experience. Otherwise, every experience we have would have to be experienced in one place in the brain, and as a computer geek with some understanding of how computer vision and computer reasoning happen, that just doesn't sound plausible. Does this happen through some kind of quantum entanglement? What's the physical process that makes this possible?
Being able to clearly observe what consciousness is isn't something you should just dismiss as uninteresting - how can you know the origins of a thing if you don't know what the thing is?
Cleaning up any nuclear plant site is a disaster. If you can, you're better off just encasing the damned thing in concrete and walking away. Of course, the liquid waste will probably come through the concrete a few hundred years later, so this isn't as comforting as it could be, but anything you do to try to break the plant up and ship it somewhere is just going to release the radioactivity sooner, when it's hotter. In the case of stuff with a long half-life, it may not make any difference, but in the case of stuff with a short half-life, of course it does.
Animals do all of these things. No, they don't shoot people, but they do kill their rivals. They do cheat. It's part of evolution. Male cats are cute, and they also engage in infanticide. There are birds that lay their eggs in other birds' nests and let the other bird raise them. Stealing the eggs another creature has laid and eating them is par for the course. Nature may be beautiful, but it is not virtuous.
Sympathy, empathy, pity and love, when they aren't just evolutionary drives, are based on reason, not endocrine glands. You're sympathetic to someone else because you see them as like you, and you see their situation as like your situation, or like a situation you could be in, and you see their happiness as something worth some effort on your part, again because you see that they are like you. This is all logic and reasoning - it's not glands.
The difference between "cold logic" and compassion is not that one is logical and the other is not. It's that one is based on false premises, and the other is not.
Meditators have been studying consciousness for millennia - asserting that what they know about it is mysticism may be comforting for you, in that it supports your hopes for a transhuman future, but that doesn't make your theories about it correct.
As a scientist, you really have two choices: you can repeat the experiments the meditators have done and see if you get the same results, or you can come up with a competing theory that is falsifiable, and design an experiment that will test your theory. If you do neither of these things, then any assertions you make about consciousness are superstition, not scientific.
If you really want to decant your consciousness, you'd better start going down one of these paths, because you're not getting any younger. There's this religion that the singularity is coming, and that all this stuff will just magically appear, but it's nonsense - technology is hard, and we have yet to produce any machines that think usefully, and it's _not_ because we don't have decent computer hardware - Drexler's molecular computers are not going to solve this problem. If it is possible to produce such software, someone is going to have to do it - it won't design itself.
Um, overpasses aren't _that_ expensive to construct. Putting special machinery in every car to do traffic planning, including control of the accelerator, steering and brakes, and making sure these controls don't accidentally kill someone, would probably be substantially more expensive.
In addition, this is going down the same stupid planning rathole that's made cities into kill zones for over the past century, and made cars a must-have item for most people in the U.S. instead of a nice-to-have luxury. We already know how to make transportation problems less bad.
We don't need scary killer future traffic control - we need less stupid urban planning, and fatter, cheaper network pipes to the home to make telepresence more satisfying.
What exactly are you "overcoming" when you overcome "primate programming"? The tendency to react according to your primate instincts. To shoot your girlfriend and her lover when you discover them in bed together. To steal what belongs to someone else because you want it. To respond without thinking, in a way that you later regret. To cheat in school, when the whole point of school is to learn, and cheating simply impoverishes you. To act like an animal would act, instead of acting in a way that is consistent with how you think you should act.
Okay, so you can imagine constructing a repository for consciousness that would not have human instincts, like the fear reaction. Now, can you imagine more people being willing to decant their consciousnesses into such a vessel than are willing to undertake Zen discipline?
Sure, maybe it's possible, but you can do Zen now. There's no evidence to suggest that it's even possible to transfer your consciousness into a mechanical construct. So which are you going to do, the thing you can do now, or the thing your great grandkids may be able to do if your speculation turns out to be something other than crazed imaginings.
BTW, consciousness is a very precise term. What is imprecise is the evidence connecting consciousness to a physical process. Lacking evidence, suggesting that a technological mechanism for transferring consciousness is a practical solution to a present real-world problem is absurd.
Transhumanists wear makeup?
Seriously, overcoming primate programming in the sense of not being controlled by it is perfectly possible. It's just difficult, and required concentrated daily practice, for more than an hour a day, in addition to ongoing mindfulness practice throughout the day. Very few people ever even attempt it, and fewer stick with it. So in the aggregate sense you could argue that it's impossible, but it would be more accurate to say that it's not easy.
I see no reason to think that replacing the monkey brain/endocrine system with some other system would not simply replace one set of problems with another, even if such a consciousness transfer were possible. And since currently there's no evidence to suggest that such a transfer is possible, I think we should probably put some effort into dealing with the situation as it is, rather than as we might like it to be.
...because they mention antivirus software and do not claim that it will be of any value other than possibly satisfying corporate IS requirements.
No offense, but that's not even the real issue. The real issue is, once I have purchased a DVD, do I have the right to play it on the device of my choice, or not? They are saying "we'll let you play it on this one type of device, if you use our DRM". So basically, they are saying "no." It's that simple.
Somewhere.com is a domain that was registered by a friend of mine long long ago back before spam and web sites and all that crap ruined the beauty that was the Old Internet. (I'm being ironic here, by the way). I think he registered it because he thought it was kind of funny, but unfortunately he pointed it at his mail server.
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It turns out that as the internet became more and more popular, more and more people started using someone@somewhere.com as the address they'd put into email when they didn't want the originator of the email to be known. For example, forwarded mail where you don't want the person who forwarded it to get mad at you for publishing their email address.
So he started getting a lot of crank email to somewhere.com - people complaining that he shouldn't send them mail about Jesus' third coming in a UFO, and stuff like that. For a while he tried sending mail to these people to clue them in, but of course they were un-cluable.
Eventially, it got to the point where he was mostly getting the kind of stuff you get when you've been joe-jobbed - angry replies to actual spam of the kind to which we've sadly become accustomed. It was then that he started analyzing the responses, and I'm pretty sure this is what inspired his anti-spam work.
Messagefire, the anti-spam service he started, really rocks. It's too bad that they've stopped accepting new customers. Sigh. Because I know him, I got in on the ground floor, and am still using it to filter my spam. It's wildly successful, and I'm very grateful to him for setting it up. I hope at some point they start selling service again.
It seems like one benefit of a system like this would be that staff abuse would be caught on video. I really don't know much about what goes on in nursing homes nowadays, although my grandmother used to run one. But I have heard that there is a lot of abuse by staff on residents in poorly-run nursing homes. Having a disinterested electronic witness to that abuse might help, although of course it doesn't address the underlying cause.
...but I think that you have to look at few things. First of all, are you running a spam filter with auto-delete enabled? Are _any_ of the people in your company? Are you running your own mail server, or is someone else running it? Do you have enough bandwidth? Are you subscribed to any RBLs?
The biggest thing that's changed in the age of spam is that a lot of people now install spam and virus filters that do not have a 0% false positive rate. If your filter scores attachments higher, it may be dropping email that has attachments.
Another possibility is that you have a virus filter on your mail server, and you have a bunch of infected machines talking to it. If some significant percentage of the mail you send has viruses on it, the virus filter may be blocking otherwise legitimate mail because it's infected. To you this would appear as lost mail.
In answer to your question, no, mail is not dead. I have met other people who are having the same sort of problems you are, but I haven't been having problems like that, either at home or at work. Something about your mail setup is genuinely borken, and needs fixing.