We all know what we want: We want Comcast to be unable to charge Google extra for the service of letting customers access Youtube. But it's really hard to phrase this well enough and clearly enough that it lets network admins do the kinds of QoS and traffic shaping things they need to do in order to provide good service, or for that matter, block unwanted traffic entirely.
That's because the whole point of Net Neutrality is that there is no unwanted traffic unless the end user blocks it. It's not up to a carrier to block, shape, or in any other way interfere with traffic; his only concern is getting each packet to its destination as fast as possible.
After all, why the heck should your video conferencing take precedence over my torrents? If the carrier oversubscribed too much, it's their problem, not mine.
I am not at all convinced that getting the government involved will improve my life.
However, I am utterly convinced that no matter how corrupt a government may be, it is still a shining pillar of ethical perfection compared to the types that write on Wall Street Journal. Even Hitler, Stalin and Mao had some goals other than filling their own pockets, but corporate types have repeatedly killed people just to save a few dimes.
There's no such thing as actual addition though. I'm not sure what simulating addition even means, to be honest. But since "I" deal with representations of numbers, not theoretical numbers (and as you say we lack the hardware to even do that), and a simulation is also a representation of something else, and a representation of a representation is still a representation, in that particular case there's no difference between the process and the simulation of the process.
That was kinda the point:). It doesn't make sense to differentiate between simulated and actual mental processes, yet Chinese Room tries to do just that. So do all arguments against Strong AI (by which Searle meant a computer that actually thinks, rather than just appears to think).
But there's a difference between simulating an avalanche in a supercomputer down to the most fundamental units of matter and an actual avalanche occurring in front of you right?
Of course: one can bury me, the other can't. However, it could be argued that the simulated avalance is an actual avalance that's simply happening in a virtual world. It can further be asked whether this world is virtual.
The basis is that we don't know how brains or human consciousness work, we're not even sure of how the universe works on super fine levels. We do know how buildings and rooms within buildings are built, we know how paper and pencils work, and how a person could follow the steps of an algorithm. Those are large and stable processes. There's absolutely nothing unexplainable in the physical nature of the Chinese Room.
There is absolutely nothing unexplainable in the physical nature of your brains (with the reservations you mentioned of imperfect physics). The particles that make it up are exactly similar to the particles that make up the rest of the universe, which is a good thing since it's constantly replacing them.
Even more importantly, neither you nor Searle have given any reason for why the Room would not be really conscious. Searle simply keeps on talking about "causative powers of human brains" yet doesn't give any kind of reason of why such powers would be necessary for consciousness, or exist even if they were.
Right but like I said, that's a widely held notion, and it's one we can comfortably hold onto because we can't explain the brain. We can explain the Chinese Room, so the "but maybe there's something we don't see yet" does not apply.
This is, of course, a ridiculous notion. A list of instructions - or, in other words, program - required to build a program that makes sensible conversation in Chinese would be truly epic. To say that you understand how the Room works because you know it's some guy following a list of instructions is a bit like saying that you understand how brains work because you know the Master Equation of physics.
Also, this sounds suspiciously like the good old God of Gaps: "okay, maybe soul is hiding in here - no, neurologists just figured that part controls your attention, so maybe it's here - no, that part is responsible for fear, so how about..."
The leap into computers is a bit problematic. Computers are harder to understand than rooms. By the time we have a computer that really is capable of simulating human thought, it may be beyond our understanding because maybe it uses organic components, or some currently unknown properties of matter.
Current computers already use quantum physics for operation. I sincerely doubt most people know how a transistor works.
But if we had every computer on the planet, including all the supercomputers, all running a human simulation, at the current level of technology, we could understand the hardware and so most people would be comfo
So over the past two millennia we have cut the working day by 1/3rd and doubled the average lifespan at birth (if you ignore infant mortality, our lifespan hasn't increased that impressively).
Yes it has, from 40-60 to 70+.
Meanwhile we have turned the majority of Western humans from independent men into chair-warming consumers singing in lockstep for trinkets.
Someone doesn't know history, I see. Try Googling "Feudalism", "Divine right of Kings", "Serfdom" and "Slavery".
We've made up for the opportunity to live a life of leisure surrounded by virtually infinite resources by blasting our population beyond 6 billion.
Um, what?
Technocracy is for the lazy man who wishes to be controlled and for the fascist who wishes to control others.
Technocracy is for those who want humanity to fulfil its potential, or simply to help themselves or their fellow men.
The technocrat only has to think about one thing.
"What possibilities does this open?"
But philosophy regards technology as one of many tools, not as a master. The philosopher-ruler
Ruler? Didn't being one make you a fascist, just a few sentences ago? Or is that just when you don't get to be one?
(for philosophy is a basis for living, not an alternative) must not let prejudice cause him to dismiss the possibility that he can do better and for more.
Do better by what metric? Or is requiring actual measurable results too concrete for your philosophy?
Meanwhile, we technocrats continue curing diseases, feeding the hungry, conquering the space, improving communications, and otherwise improving the lot of humanity. Don't worry, we're used to ungrateful philosophers condemning us and the progress we bring while enjoying its fruits.
It seems to me that you're assuming a particular goal of the Chinese Room. To me, it's about the difference between simulation and what we commonly call understanding. Now when you talk about semantics, that makes me think of meaning, not understanding. A Chinese Room can be meaningful to the people interacting with it but the Chinese Room itself may not achieve understanding.
What's the difference between, say, simulating addition and actual addition? Hint: whatever it is, you're doing the former whenever you need to add, since it's not a built-in capacity of human brain but needs to be learned.
To me the only question begged by the Chinese Room argument is that we have consciousness ourselves. That consciousness and understanding exist. But that's okay because that's a widely held notion.
That's not okay. The reason we hold that notion is because other people behave like us. So does the Chinese room, that's the whole point of this thought experiment. On what basis does behaving like you had a mind lead to the conclusion of having a mind when talking of humans but not when talking of the Chinese Room?
This is exactly the kind of sloppiness I was referring to.
But that is correct isn't it? Do you think a room could have a consciousness based on what goes on inside it? Do you think that the execution of *every* algorithm leads to consciousness of some kind?
Actually, yes: I think anything that reacts to external stimuli has a consciousness of some kind, down to individual electrons, since they couldn't react to an electric field if they weren't aware of it. In this view, consciousness is a gradual thing which becomes more complex the "higher" entities you are talking about, not something that suddenly flares up to existence somewhere between atoms and humans.
I thought Searle is arguing that there is actually some physical thing in the brain that is different from the ordinary material in the Chinese Room. The reason we have a mind and the room does not is that we are more than simple Turing machines.
Searle is arguing that just because you behave intelligently doesn't mean that you are intelligent. That's all fine and good, but it also applies to humans. After all, since Searle didn't bother specifying what this "physical thing" is, it's impossible for me to say whether you have it or not. For that matter, it's impossible to say whether the Chinese Room has it. And of course Searle has not given any reason whatsoever for his assumption, and why it should be favoured over the non-magical model of the brain.
Furthermore, since - according to Searle - this magic-like property is not necessary for intelligent behaviour, why would a human have it? It's easy to see how evolution would favour a smarter organism; but it's very difficult to see why it would favour a non-detectable magical property over an non-magical system.
Also, please understand that a Turing machine is originally also a thought experiment, not a physical object. If a Turing machine is capable of replicating your behaviour completely - as it is in the Chinese Room argument - then you are a type of Turing machine, completely independent on what's the actual basis of your mind.
That's right, and the conclusion is that a computer using the technology we have today will never get to the point where it deserves something like human rights.
And that "conclusion" requires assuming itself to reach, in other words, begging the question. And assuming it also disqualifies actual human beings from having human rights.
I wouldn't know, since the earlier blog entry has been retroactively changed to advertize Connectify, censoring the original content. Whether doing this on an article about the aptly named Kindle for Remote Book Burning is purposeful irony or not I cannot say.
You fail at reading comprehension, GP said the world would be better if we were motivated by philosophy rather than technocracy, not that we shouldn't have any technology at all.
The GP said: "Mathematics is the foundation for philosophy, not technocracy. What a better world we'd be in if we were motivated by the former rather than pursuing the latter." Emphasis mine. Perhaps it's you who should learn to read?
But don't worry about it. The thing about technocracy is that it brings prosperity, which brings freedom, which you can use to pursue philosophy all day long if that's your desire.
Exactly the criticism I, and loads of philosophers before us, offered (yup, you are doing philosophy when you criticise philosophy, weird, hu?! Which raises new questions about whether such a system works the same way as our internal one (which, this time incidentally, was the stupid assumption that had me leavning English Lit.).
And yet the Chinese Room still pops up. That's my problem with "raw" philosophy: it doesn't seem to go anywhere or really advance. It's only saving grace - a rather large grace, admittedly - is that it occasionally spawns sub-fields which turn into real science.
Chinese Room starts with begging the question: it assumes that syntax is insufficient for semantics, then goes on to try to prove that very thing. It then proceeds to throw in an argument from incredulity ("how could a room possibly have a mind, when there's nothing there that does?"). Finally, as an icing to the cake, the exact same argument can be said of human brains, which, after all, are a kilogram or so of watery goo. And yet the whole thing still keeps on popping up, like a particularly nasty-smelling turd in a cesspool.
If a person internalised all the trappings of the Chinese Room, does he understand Chinese (as the Chinese do?)
No, he has a secondary entity residing in his mind, and that entity understands Chinese.
Where this gets really creepy is when you consider what happens when you, say, write a novel: the characters are all in your mind, and have inputs and outputs independent of you, just like the Chinese Room, so in some sense they are "real". You are, from a certain point of view, creating and deleting sub-entities to perform a task. The ability to do this - and thus reprogram your mind on the fly, at least somewhat independently on the underlaying physical substrate - could very well be the difference between humans, who have cultural evolution, and animals, who depend on their inbuilt ones.
Also, it rises interesting ideas about how a system with more processing power and more flexible - in the sense of being able to reorganize its own operation through conscious decisions - than human brains might operate: as a bunch of sub-entities (subprocesses?) with shared long-term memory, created and deleted as needed. The main challenge seems to be how to expose the inner workings of these entities to each other, to keep this "hive mind" from splintering.
The thought experiment is useful for studying our concepts of syntax and semantics, and what constitutes understanding and consciousnes.
The though experiment was, to put it bluntly, made up to reinforce Searle's feeling of being special. It's simply the good old "humans have souls which are magical" -thing in a new disguise, the "magic" in this case being replaced with "causative powers of human brains", the nature of which is left unspecified.
Mathematics is the foundation for philosophy, not technocracy. What a better world we'd be in if we were motivated by the former rather than pursuing the latter.
Well, we would likely all be malnourished, due to lack of fertilizers, at least those of us who hadn't died at childbirth or soon after. There wouldn't be an Internet to talk on, but that would be okay, since we wouldn't have time to use one due to the lack of engines and the resulting need to do backbreaking labour 16 hours a day. In short, our lives would be miserable, but due to lack of medicine, they would at least be short.
Missing these kinds of little details is why I have very little respect of philosophers. As far as I can tell, most of them chose their field because it doesn't punish sloppy work. And then there's idiocy like the Chinese Room, which assumes that a system cannot have properties its components don't have, yet hasn't been laughed out like it should had been.
Philosophy means you accept the human condition. Technorcacy means you try to do something about it. Hope for a better world in the future lies on the latter, not the former.
If the government can declare something "illegal" and pressure private companies to not do business with a particular entity... does it really matter if they can "make no law" abridging freedom of speech? Isn't the first amendment completely worthless?
It has always been, as well as the whole Constitution. "The Congress shall make no law..."; well, who's going to stop them? The Supreme Court doesn't have the power, and the States are constantly trying to pass laws pissing on freedom even worse than the Federal Government is.
All governments are unlimited because any entity capable of stopping them from doing anything would be even more powerful, and thus by definition be a stronger government. And anarchy is even worse, since then the local gang leader / robber baron makes the decisions without paying even lip service to anything except his personal short-term interests.
The only way to maintain some level of freedom is to keep one step ahead of governments, companies and other power centers. The Internet was one such step, however the powers-that-be have caught up and are busily erecting Great Firewalls, three-strike laws and tiered service to stop the free exchange of information, so we need another step. A mesh-network of some kind? Insect robots acting as couriers and passing messages? Whatever it is, we'll need to develop it now, before we're cut off from one another again.
Quantum theory is very wrong. Relativity theory is very wrong (we've found experiments that violate both theories,
Such as?
and in any case, there are many real-world things they don't touch (quantum theory can't explain anything "big" and relativity can't explain anything "small").
From what I've understood, General Relativity doesn't combine with Quantum Theory because it uses a locally flat spacetime as a simplifying assumption, and Quantum Theory results in an increasingly turbulent spacetime the smaller space you look at. If so, it could very well be that they combine just fine but the result has nigh-infinite mathematical complexity.
However, I suspect the model giving correct answers is pretty simple: you just have to accept that, because of the quantum fluctuation of the gravity field, the spacetime interval between two events doesn't have a certain length but rather a probabilistic length distribution, and consequently causality could also flow either way (or not at all) with a certain probability distribution. Maybe I should take up matemathics again and try to turn this into actual equations:).
Anyway, what we can say for certain is that both the pointlike particle model and String Theory must be wrong, because both describe (most) particles as objects with finite mass that you can approach arbitrarily close to - in other words, black holes. And a black hole the size of an elementary particle would instantly evaporate due to Hawking Radiation.
so you mean everything is bonds checked, no wonder the universe is so slow.
Slow? It's emulating all your computer hardware with native speed on sub-atomic level of emulation! Go on, make a computer that's faster than the Universe, I dare ya. And then you can start working on 10 billion years of uptime...
Isn't there a big empty space down the left side of most pages? What is the difference between it being blank or there being an advertisement there.
Why, the difference is simple: advertizers don't like controversy, so if you run Wikipedia with their money, they'll "sanitize" it. At the very least all negative information about any of their products must go. Very likely everything sex-related gets removed too. We might also get annoying mature content warnings a la Tvtropes.
Taking corporate money is the path of corruption, as our politicians have shown time and again.
They seem to have forgotten the real reason for noblesse oblige, which is basically that we will kill you if you push us too far.
More to the point, they've read the works of Ayn Rand and her ilk too many times. In the beginning, they simply used them as an excuse for their evil and greed; but they've been telling lies for so long they've truly started believing they keep the sky up, so the whole idea that the "looters"/sheep/rabble could rise up and defeat their oppressors is unthinkable. It is, after all, a comforting lie: that nothing has consequences.
It's going to be a really nasty surprise when all the hatred sheething beneath the surface will finally boil over.
Hey, don't worry yourself over this. They may be banning books that involve any sort of incest within them, but I notice that they still make over a dozen different versions of Hitler's 'Mein Kampf' available as well as copies of the Turner Diaries.
Considering that even most Nazis found Mein Kampf to be not exactly a joy to read, I think Amazon's assumption that it won't be turning anyone on is a reasonable one. After all, as we all know, sex is a special kind of evil - the Supreme Court has ruled that First Amendment doesn't cover "obscene" material - while calling for genocide is fine and dandy.
Didn't Amazon say that they would no longer remove books remotely?
Was anyone stupid enough to believe them?
As long as Kindle has the ability to remotely remove content, you should understand you don't own anything in it. Buy a book, or download a text file with a real computer, but don't trust Kindle or its ilk.
Humans are genetically programmed to be selfish - capitalism is the system most closely aligned with human nature.
Small socialistic hippie communes are the system most closely aligned with human nature, because they most closely resemble the tribes where humans evolved. Capitalism, which simultanously rewards selfish behaviour and expects people to limit their predations to comply with a set of rules, doesn't work at all, as we have seen time and again in recent years.
Not that any of this matters, since "human nature" only covers some basic instincts, has allowed a wide variety of extremely different value systems to be developed by various societies during history, and thus excuses neither a psychopathic CEO or an ambitionless hippie.
So no, your favorite political/economic/religious/philosophical/whatever system isn't in fact programmed in human genetics, and is not the only one that could possibly work, nor is it self-evident to the point where anyone disagreeing is evil or stupid or both. Sorry.
I understand that a movie can only be so long before your audience falls asleep, but hand waving saruman away with a one-liner and instead tacking on 10 minutes of happy ending, fade out, happy ending, fade out was a slap in the face to anyone who read the actual books
No, it wasn't. They cut out the Saruman takes Shrine -subplot, and instad have Grima kill Saruman at Orthanc. They also cut Tom Bombadil, the fight with the undead in a Barrow-down, and the parts of backstory where Sauron had a fair form and helped elves forge the Rings of Power, was beaten by Numenor, and deceived and sank Numenor. They even cut the Shadow of Sauron departing from Mordor, instead having his (literal!) eye explode.
It had been better to make LotR a mini-series rather than a movie trilogy, but they didn't, and as a result things had to be cut.
Is it just me or does it seem odd to you that they have 200,000 confidential informants in a county with a population of 150,000? What the frack is going on in Mesa County?
What if annual security training was mandatory for all the IT staff connected with law enforcement IT equipment -- just like weapons training is mandatory for all law enforcement officers.
What would that help? If you put data to an Internet-connected machine, there's a risk of it leaking. It doesn't require security training to understand that, simple common sense is sufficient. And no amount of training will help people who refuse to use their common sense because they can use "teh computers are scary" as an excuse to shut down their brains when using them.
We, the libertarians, are always ready to accept whatever motivation an individual person chooses, but socialists always reduce everything to the economic level.
You the libertarians are always ready to defend everyone's right to do what the rich and powerful tell them or starve. Us the socialists wish to derail this Feudalism 2.0 project by distributing enough wealth to everyone that they can at the very least survive without becoming your serfs. This wealth must be generated somehow, so we either tax the aristocracy or have the state own at least some means of production.
I hope that the whole issue becomes moot with the advance of nanotechnology and personal manufacturing. I wonder what excuses the rich and powerful will use to try to squash them and keep people in dependency? And I wonder what side the libertarians will take in such a situation?
In any case, almost all social questions reduce to the economic level, because once political dictatorship and religious tyranny have been undone, economic bondage is the next - and hopefully last - thing creating abusive power hierarchies. Libertarians never seem to acknowledge that such a thing as economic tyranny exists, which I'm finding increasingly difficult to accept as a position held in good faith. One cannot possibly be that ignorant about both history and current situation in Western countries.
But hey, you keep on telling yourself that you're defending freedom while helping modern nobility put an ever tighter leash on us all.
No their not. At least in theory - the military is never deployed against your own citizens, there are massive differences in what they are - and what they aim to achieve. Soldiers want to WIN a war. Policemen have only one goal -to restore the state of peace.
Of course military is deployed against your citizens if needed, such as in the case of open rebellion. The police handles small disturbances and asks military for aid if needed.
Ants have those qualities and wage wars - do you truly believe that humans are INCAPABLE of evolving beyond their hive-mind mentality ? I'm the first to admit most of us haven't - we just dress it up in words like "patriotism" - but I do believe we are capable of it.
Such an evolution is unlikely since it would make a person and society less fit. After all, your interests are more likely to align with your neighbours than with foreigners, and doing favours for said neighbours makes it more likely they will return them.
That is wrong on every possible level. Policemen shout stop BEFORE they shoot. Surrender is the option they WANT you to take. They only use violence as a LAST resort and you have rights even before they meet you.
Apart from oddball psychopaths, the army also wants the other guys to surrender. Why wouldn't they? As for shouting stop, you do realize that an army is called up when shouting stop has already been tried and failed - also known as diplomacy?
A policeman never goes up on a hill and starts shooting everybody wearing gang colors from afar.
Ever heard of police snipers?
Policemen don't bomb neighbourhoods with high crime rates... the entire approach is almost directly opposite.
No, they ask army for heavy-weapon support if needed.
Better - I would pull a Monty Python and arrest their entire high command and every soldier for behaviour likely to cause a disturbance of the peace.
How? You still haven't answered that question.
Soldiers get life in prison, all officers and higher get an automatic death penalty.
This rises a question of just why do you want peace so much, since you obviously aren't shy to deal death on a scale beyond most wars.
Nobody will even TRY to start a war then - unless they truly believe their armies can hold off every cop on the planet and are well aware that they are getting a guaranteed death penalty with no option of lenience if caught...
Any army can fight off every cop on the planet, simply by the virtue of having better weaponry.
Not even the worst madman will be able to get enough people willing to take that risk to get an army you can't subdue by the simple method of arresting the whole damn lot of them.
Plenty of madmen seem to have no trouble recruiting people to carry out suicide missions. You also seem to be completely ignoring guerrilla forces, French Resistance and other underground armies.
You only look at history - you never consider how ELSE things may be done - only how they have been done before when the very IDEA of world peace requires us to consider something radically different.
And you only look at your own fantasies which seem more nightmarish with each post.
Now imagine a version of the UN that actually governs all people, and everyone on the PLANET gets a vote. Not one strong nation playing global policeman while all the rest of us hope to god they pick a smart president this time - which is what we have now (and it's failing miserably).
No, instead I'll get to hope the Chinese don't shut down Slashdot this year, the Muslims don't force me to adopt Sharia, and the Africa
Suppose you buy 1000 shares of Example Co on Monday and on Tuesday the CEO of Example Co is charged with fraud and the public details of the case strike you as pretty damning; should you be forced to wait to sell just because you were a more recent purchaser than someone else?
Yes, because such a lawsuit is one of the risks you accepted when you bought the stock.
A bigger problem is the possibility of an acute need for money during your can't-sell -period.
Should you be denied the right to buy more if its your guess the CEO going to jail won't hurt the company much?
Given that the issue here is how long you hold shares, why would you be prevented from buying anytime?
Slashdot Mirror
That's because the whole point of Net Neutrality is that there is no unwanted traffic unless the end user blocks it. It's not up to a carrier to block, shape, or in any other way interfere with traffic; his only concern is getting each packet to its destination as fast as possible.
After all, why the heck should your video conferencing take precedence over my torrents? If the carrier oversubscribed too much, it's their problem, not mine.
However, I am utterly convinced that no matter how corrupt a government may be, it is still a shining pillar of ethical perfection compared to the types that write on Wall Street Journal. Even Hitler, Stalin and Mao had some goals other than filling their own pockets, but corporate types have repeatedly killed people just to save a few dimes.
That was kinda the point :). It doesn't make sense to differentiate between simulated and actual mental processes, yet Chinese Room tries to do just that. So do all arguments against Strong AI (by which Searle meant a computer that actually thinks, rather than just appears to think).
Of course: one can bury me, the other can't. However, it could be argued that the simulated avalance is an actual avalance that's simply happening in a virtual world. It can further be asked whether this world is virtual.
There is absolutely nothing unexplainable in the physical nature of your brains (with the reservations you mentioned of imperfect physics). The particles that make it up are exactly similar to the particles that make up the rest of the universe, which is a good thing since it's constantly replacing them.
Even more importantly, neither you nor Searle have given any reason for why the Room would not be really conscious. Searle simply keeps on talking about "causative powers of human brains" yet doesn't give any kind of reason of why such powers would be necessary for consciousness, or exist even if they were.
This is, of course, a ridiculous notion. A list of instructions - or, in other words, program - required to build a program that makes sensible conversation in Chinese would be truly epic. To say that you understand how the Room works because you know it's some guy following a list of instructions is a bit like saying that you understand how brains work because you know the Master Equation of physics.
Also, this sounds suspiciously like the good old God of Gaps: "okay, maybe soul is hiding in here - no, neurologists just figured that part controls your attention, so maybe it's here - no, that part is responsible for fear, so how about..."
Current computers already use quantum physics for operation. I sincerely doubt most people know how a transistor works.
Yes it has, from 40-60 to 70+.
Someone doesn't know history, I see. Try Googling "Feudalism", "Divine right of Kings", "Serfdom" and "Slavery".
Um, what?
Technocracy is for those who want humanity to fulfil its potential, or simply to help themselves or their fellow men.
"What possibilities does this open?"
Ruler? Didn't being one make you a fascist, just a few sentences ago? Or is that just when you don't get to be one?
Do better by what metric? Or is requiring actual measurable results too concrete for your philosophy?
Meanwhile, we technocrats continue curing diseases, feeding the hungry, conquering the space, improving communications, and otherwise improving the lot of humanity. Don't worry, we're used to ungrateful philosophers condemning us and the progress we bring while enjoying its fruits.
What's the difference between, say, simulating addition and actual addition? Hint: whatever it is, you're doing the former whenever you need to add, since it's not a built-in capacity of human brain but needs to be learned.
That's not okay. The reason we hold that notion is because other people behave like us. So does the Chinese room, that's the whole point of this thought experiment. On what basis does behaving like you had a mind lead to the conclusion of having a mind when talking of humans but not when talking of the Chinese Room?
This is exactly the kind of sloppiness I was referring to.
Actually, yes: I think anything that reacts to external stimuli has a consciousness of some kind, down to individual electrons, since they couldn't react to an electric field if they weren't aware of it. In this view, consciousness is a gradual thing which becomes more complex the "higher" entities you are talking about, not something that suddenly flares up to existence somewhere between atoms and humans.
Searle is arguing that just because you behave intelligently doesn't mean that you are intelligent. That's all fine and good, but it also applies to humans. After all, since Searle didn't bother specifying what this "physical thing" is, it's impossible for me to say whether you have it or not. For that matter, it's impossible to say whether the Chinese Room has it. And of course Searle has not given any reason whatsoever for his assumption, and why it should be favoured over the non-magical model of the brain.
Furthermore, since - according to Searle - this magic-like property is not necessary for intelligent behaviour, why would a human have it? It's easy to see how evolution would favour a smarter organism; but it's very difficult to see why it would favour a non-detectable magical property over an non-magical system.
Also, please understand that a Turing machine is originally also a thought experiment, not a physical object. If a Turing machine is capable of replicating your behaviour completely - as it is in the Chinese Room argument - then you are a type of Turing machine, completely independent on what's the actual basis of your mind.
And that "conclusion" requires assuming itself to reach, in other words, begging the question. And assuming it also disqualifies actual human beings from having human rights.
I wouldn't know, since the earlier blog entry has been retroactively changed to advertize Connectify, censoring the original content. Whether doing this on an article about the aptly named Kindle for Remote Book Burning is purposeful irony or not I cannot say.
Just put the mouse electronics on the bottom of a keyboard and enjoy your new 102-button two-handed mouse.
The GP said: "Mathematics is the foundation for philosophy, not technocracy. What a better world we'd be in if we were motivated by the former rather than pursuing the latter." Emphasis mine. Perhaps it's you who should learn to read?
But don't worry about it. The thing about technocracy is that it brings prosperity, which brings freedom, which you can use to pursue philosophy all day long if that's your desire.
And yet the Chinese Room still pops up. That's my problem with "raw" philosophy: it doesn't seem to go anywhere or really advance. It's only saving grace - a rather large grace, admittedly - is that it occasionally spawns sub-fields which turn into real science.
Chinese Room starts with begging the question: it assumes that syntax is insufficient for semantics, then goes on to try to prove that very thing. It then proceeds to throw in an argument from incredulity ("how could a room possibly have a mind, when there's nothing there that does?"). Finally, as an icing to the cake, the exact same argument can be said of human brains, which, after all, are a kilogram or so of watery goo. And yet the whole thing still keeps on popping up, like a particularly nasty-smelling turd in a cesspool.
No, he has a secondary entity residing in his mind, and that entity understands Chinese.
Where this gets really creepy is when you consider what happens when you, say, write a novel: the characters are all in your mind, and have inputs and outputs independent of you, just like the Chinese Room, so in some sense they are "real". You are, from a certain point of view, creating and deleting sub-entities to perform a task. The ability to do this - and thus reprogram your mind on the fly, at least somewhat independently on the underlaying physical substrate - could very well be the difference between humans, who have cultural evolution, and animals, who depend on their inbuilt ones.
Also, it rises interesting ideas about how a system with more processing power and more flexible - in the sense of being able to reorganize its own operation through conscious decisions - than human brains might operate: as a bunch of sub-entities (subprocesses?) with shared long-term memory, created and deleted as needed. The main challenge seems to be how to expose the inner workings of these entities to each other, to keep this "hive mind" from splintering.
The though experiment was, to put it bluntly, made up to reinforce Searle's feeling of being special. It's simply the good old "humans have souls which are magical" -thing in a new disguise, the "magic" in this case being replaced with "causative powers of human brains", the nature of which is left unspecified.
Well, we would likely all be malnourished, due to lack of fertilizers, at least those of us who hadn't died at childbirth or soon after. There wouldn't be an Internet to talk on, but that would be okay, since we wouldn't have time to use one due to the lack of engines and the resulting need to do backbreaking labour 16 hours a day. In short, our lives would be miserable, but due to lack of medicine, they would at least be short.
Missing these kinds of little details is why I have very little respect of philosophers. As far as I can tell, most of them chose their field because it doesn't punish sloppy work. And then there's idiocy like the Chinese Room, which assumes that a system cannot have properties its components don't have, yet hasn't been laughed out like it should had been.
Philosophy means you accept the human condition. Technorcacy means you try to do something about it. Hope for a better world in the future lies on the latter, not the former.
It has always been, as well as the whole Constitution. "The Congress shall make no law..."; well, who's going to stop them? The Supreme Court doesn't have the power, and the States are constantly trying to pass laws pissing on freedom even worse than the Federal Government is.
All governments are unlimited because any entity capable of stopping them from doing anything would be even more powerful, and thus by definition be a stronger government. And anarchy is even worse, since then the local gang leader / robber baron makes the decisions without paying even lip service to anything except his personal short-term interests.
The only way to maintain some level of freedom is to keep one step ahead of governments, companies and other power centers. The Internet was one such step, however the powers-that-be have caught up and are busily erecting Great Firewalls, three-strike laws and tiered service to stop the free exchange of information, so we need another step. A mesh-network of some kind? Insect robots acting as couriers and passing messages? Whatever it is, we'll need to develop it now, before we're cut off from one another again.
Such as?
From what I've understood, General Relativity doesn't combine with Quantum Theory because it uses a locally flat spacetime as a simplifying assumption, and Quantum Theory results in an increasingly turbulent spacetime the smaller space you look at. If so, it could very well be that they combine just fine but the result has nigh-infinite mathematical complexity.
However, I suspect the model giving correct answers is pretty simple: you just have to accept that, because of the quantum fluctuation of the gravity field, the spacetime interval between two events doesn't have a certain length but rather a probabilistic length distribution, and consequently causality could also flow either way (or not at all) with a certain probability distribution. Maybe I should take up matemathics again and try to turn this into actual equations :).
Anyway, what we can say for certain is that both the pointlike particle model and String Theory must be wrong, because both describe (most) particles as objects with finite mass that you can approach arbitrarily close to - in other words, black holes. And a black hole the size of an elementary particle would instantly evaporate due to Hawking Radiation.
Slow? It's emulating all your computer hardware with native speed on sub-atomic level of emulation! Go on, make a computer that's faster than the Universe, I dare ya. And then you can start working on 10 billion years of uptime...
Well, given that they are basically advertizing, shouldn't AdBlock block them ?-)
Why, the difference is simple: advertizers don't like controversy, so if you run Wikipedia with their money, they'll "sanitize" it. At the very least all negative information about any of their products must go. Very likely everything sex-related gets removed too. We might also get annoying mature content warnings a la Tvtropes.
Taking corporate money is the path of corruption, as our politicians have shown time and again.
More to the point, they've read the works of Ayn Rand and her ilk too many times. In the beginning, they simply used them as an excuse for their evil and greed; but they've been telling lies for so long they've truly started believing they keep the sky up, so the whole idea that the "looters"/sheep/rabble could rise up and defeat their oppressors is unthinkable. It is, after all, a comforting lie: that nothing has consequences.
It's going to be a really nasty surprise when all the hatred sheething beneath the surface will finally boil over.
He and the guy hiding in your closet with a machete, obviously.
Considering that even most Nazis found Mein Kampf to be not exactly a joy to read, I think Amazon's assumption that it won't be turning anyone on is a reasonable one. After all, as we all know, sex is a special kind of evil - the Supreme Court has ruled that First Amendment doesn't cover "obscene" material - while calling for genocide is fine and dandy.
Aren't Puritans nice people?
Was anyone stupid enough to believe them?
As long as Kindle has the ability to remotely remove content, you should understand you don't own anything in it. Buy a book, or download a text file with a real computer, but don't trust Kindle or its ilk.
Small socialistic hippie communes are the system most closely aligned with human nature, because they most closely resemble the tribes where humans evolved. Capitalism, which simultanously rewards selfish behaviour and expects people to limit their predations to comply with a set of rules, doesn't work at all, as we have seen time and again in recent years.
Not that any of this matters, since "human nature" only covers some basic instincts, has allowed a wide variety of extremely different value systems to be developed by various societies during history, and thus excuses neither a psychopathic CEO or an ambitionless hippie.
So no, your favorite political/economic/religious/philosophical/whatever system isn't in fact programmed in human genetics, and is not the only one that could possibly work, nor is it self-evident to the point where anyone disagreeing is evil or stupid or both. Sorry.
No, it wasn't. They cut out the Saruman takes Shrine -subplot, and instad have Grima kill Saruman at Orthanc. They also cut Tom Bombadil, the fight with the undead in a Barrow-down, and the parts of backstory where Sauron had a fair form and helped elves forge the Rings of Power, was beaten by Numenor, and deceived and sank Numenor. They even cut the Shadow of Sauron departing from Mordor, instead having his (literal!) eye explode.
It had been better to make LotR a mini-series rather than a movie trilogy, but they didn't, and as a result things had to be cut.
They used Diebold machines for accounting.
What would that help? If you put data to an Internet-connected machine, there's a risk of it leaking. It doesn't require security training to understand that, simple common sense is sufficient. And no amount of training will help people who refuse to use their common sense because they can use "teh computers are scary" as an excuse to shut down their brains when using them.
You the libertarians are always ready to defend everyone's right to do what the rich and powerful tell them or starve. Us the socialists wish to derail this Feudalism 2.0 project by distributing enough wealth to everyone that they can at the very least survive without becoming your serfs. This wealth must be generated somehow, so we either tax the aristocracy or have the state own at least some means of production.
I hope that the whole issue becomes moot with the advance of nanotechnology and personal manufacturing. I wonder what excuses the rich and powerful will use to try to squash them and keep people in dependency? And I wonder what side the libertarians will take in such a situation?
In any case, almost all social questions reduce to the economic level, because once political dictatorship and religious tyranny have been undone, economic bondage is the next - and hopefully last - thing creating abusive power hierarchies. Libertarians never seem to acknowledge that such a thing as economic tyranny exists, which I'm finding increasingly difficult to accept as a position held in good faith. One cannot possibly be that ignorant about both history and current situation in Western countries.
But hey, you keep on telling yourself that you're defending freedom while helping modern nobility put an ever tighter leash on us all.
Of course military is deployed against your citizens if needed, such as in the case of open rebellion. The police handles small disturbances and asks military for aid if needed.
Such an evolution is unlikely since it would make a person and society less fit. After all, your interests are more likely to align with your neighbours than with foreigners, and doing favours for said neighbours makes it more likely they will return them.
Apart from oddball psychopaths, the army also wants the other guys to surrender. Why wouldn't they? As for shouting stop, you do realize that an army is called up when shouting stop has already been tried and failed - also known as diplomacy?
Ever heard of police snipers?
No, they ask army for heavy-weapon support if needed.
How? You still haven't answered that question.
This rises a question of just why do you want peace so much, since you obviously aren't shy to deal death on a scale beyond most wars.
Any army can fight off every cop on the planet, simply by the virtue of having better weaponry.
Plenty of madmen seem to have no trouble recruiting people to carry out suicide missions. You also seem to be completely ignoring guerrilla forces, French Resistance and other underground armies.
And you only look at your own fantasies which seem more nightmarish with each post.
No, instead I'll get to hope the Chinese don't shut down Slashdot this year, the Muslims don't force me to adopt Sharia, and the Africa
Yes, because such a lawsuit is one of the risks you accepted when you bought the stock.
A bigger problem is the possibility of an acute need for money during your can't-sell -period.
Given that the issue here is how long you hold shares, why would you be prevented from buying anytime?