I'm pretty sure that people who make children make them because they want them, rather than because they're thinking of England.
seems like a simple nobrainer, but i've run into a lot these strange "crotchfruit" thinkers like yourself, and i want to understand why the blindingly obvious escapes you
Pointing out the obvious fact that you can't have everything but have to make choices has nothing to do with calling children "crotchfruit".
simple logical consequences: if you don't have children, your value system will simply die off
And if you do have children, they are going to require some of your attention and energy, which means that you have less to devote to your career, which will thus be less spectacular than it otherwise would be. One would think that to be a nobrainer.
you do understand that right?
You seem to have a problem with understanding the concept of limited resources.
please, go right ahead and considering child rearing an unimportant aspect of life. its odd to choose your own extinction, but there you are, posting away
He isn't choosing any such thing. Learn to read. For that matter, learn to write.
because your entire point of view boils down to nothing but choosing the extinction of your own values, whether you realize this or not, you do understand however why i will consider your opinion just odd and strange and impossible to take seriously?
No, his entire point is that you can't give your all to a career and to getting children simultaneously. You have to make a trade-off between them. You can't have everything, you have to choose. Given equal abilities, if you put your all to a career, you are going to push ahead of someone who's devoting some of their energy to raising a child; demanding that they be held back so you can keep up with them is unfair to them.
Your complain is analogous to complaining that you can't afford a 100" television but must make do with a 90" one because you spent some of your money for a nice car. It's just absurd. And, since you raised that point, it's also worth noticing that it is you who isn't taken seriously by anyone with the least amount of ability to think logically.
A particular math theory may or may not be flawed, but do we really prefer "subjective beliefs" (a.k.a. "hunches") around here?
Garbage in, garbage out. Math is nothing more than a method of taking a model and facts and deriving the implications. Feeding nonsensical details - such as the number of e-mails sent - to a model that likely has very little to do with reality will result in a completely meaningless result. You'd be much better off using your common sense when dealing with people.
Just what does performance even mean for a programmer? Lines of code? Number of bugs? How often you advice others? Hours of overtime per month? Seconds of work per pot of coffee ?-)
Math cannot give you an answer if you don't even know what you're asking. Using it in this way is just voodoo.
So loudmouths that brag (non-verbally... ok) every time they managed to piss without getting too much on their pants get promoted while people who quietly do their work get the shaft. Anything else new?
Yes. Now that the level and efficiency of the bragging is measured by a computer, it will most likely be trivial for any halfway competent programmer to analyze the emails sent by those who got promoted, find patterns, and replicate them. In other words, you can automate giving an impression of being busy; a small script can send emails back and worth between you and your friends while you do actual work. So I guess this technology actually will increase productivity after all;).
I guess accidental success still counts as success.
Besides, people tend to think too much about their careers, IMO. A good job isn't everything. I would rather spend more time with my family than work hard to rise to the top. (in the end, what do you really have with that option? Is your life really going to be better?)
If you don't have a good job, you won't be spending any time with your family, because you'll be spending all your waking hours working two bad jobs to feed them. On the other hand, once you've risen to top you have guaranteed income and likely enough savings that you can quit and retire whenever you want, or do whatever you please, so yes, you'll life will be much better.
In a society where competition is considered a virtue you don't really have the option of only making a reasonable effort. Either you give your all to an attempt to claw your way to the top, or you resign to spend the rest of your life at the bottom of the barrel; and the latter means that you can't afford to have a family. It's sick, but that's the way it is.
Not to mention that I regularly use satellite imagery to augment maps when I am going somewhere unfamiliar and want to get a better idea of what it will look like when I get there.
And that's exactly the problem. Only a pedophile would seek out a school, only a terrorist would seek out a church, and only a politician would seek out a government building.
Besides, everyone knows that terrorists use Google Maps to aim their orbital laser cannons.
Until then, she's not thinking scientifically, starting from evidence and forming theories, she's thinking religiously, starting from belief, and discarding evidence.
Sure she is. It's simply that she's accepting the Bible/Koran/whatever as evidence, so her model of reality must contain explanations for any perceived conflict between that and other evidence. She's not discarding evidence, she's simply making mental contortions trying to fit it all into a consistent whole. Of course such contortions appear pretty retarded to anyone who doesn't accept her holy book as evidence, but they aren't in princple different from those of someone trying to wrap his mind around Quantum Mechanics or the Theory of Relativity and integrate them to his worldview, just misguided.
None of this makes the assertion that dinosaurs and humans coexisted any less unlikely, of course. It simply means that if one accepts it as a fact for any reason, then claiming that the rate of radioactive decay varies is, in fact, scientific: it's an attempt of fitting all known facts into a model of the world. She's starting from evidence (some harebrained interpretation of the Bible, in her case) and forming theories, thus demonstrating the time-honoured principle of "garbage in, garbage out".
However, worthless as such theories might be for the field they were supposed to cover, they nevertheless give a fascinating insight into the workings of human mind, and how pre-existing knowledge guides the integration of new knowledge into the whole, and especially how the process can go horribly wrong when said pre-existing knowledge is bad. That's certainly something AI researchers should examine very closely.
I would, as number (0) understanding what is and what isn't science.
Obvious example: "intelligent design"
Asking people whether Intelligent Design is science is unlikely to get you meaningful data about their general scientific abilities. There's too much hulabaloo surrounding it currently; people might answer "yes" simply out of perceived identity or the desire to belong to a group; and they might answer "no" for the exact same reason. Worse, the question-makers are also human and as such vulnerable to let their own emotions lead them in how to pose the question - "Do you believe in Intelligent Design?" vs. "Do you believe that Intelligent Design is a scientific theory?", for example.
In order to test for general scientific knowledge it would make much more sense to ask something no one is likely to passionate about, such as "Do rockets need to keep their engines running in space to keep on going?" (no) or "Why is it warmer at the equator than at poles?" (because sunlight arrives at an angle near poles and thus gets spread over larger area).
The most merciful quality of human mind is its inability to correlate its contents, quoth Lovecraft. Cognitive dissonance should always be accounted for when doing this kind of study, and the topic likely to cause large amount of it avoided. And Intelligent Design happens to be just such an issue.
Well, that's not even a close analogy. The merchant is asking you to give them money. They're not threatening you in any way. They simply say "Okay, you gave us some money, now give us some more". By contrast a mugger threatens you with harm. I don't see where the situations are in any way analogous to each other.
A mugger uses a superior attribute of his - his brawn - to take something of yours. A dishonest "merchant" uses a superior attribute of his - his salesmanship - to take something of yours. Both are examples of an amoral scum taking advantage of the weak, making the situations analogous and, in fact, nearly identical.
Basically, drug culture is an -illusion- of wealth, because while a few do get rich, its ultimately just terrible work for the vast majority of people that participate in it. It tends to thrive in impoverished areas, because, for those people, there's just no work at all.
But if you walk in buy a computer for $400 and then walk out with a $200 service plan, you can't blame Office Depot for trying. You can primarily blame yourself for being an uninformed consumer.
And when you get mugged, you can't blame the mugger for mugging. You can primarily blame yourself for not learning karate.
While victims should certainly learn to take care of themselves, their failure to do so doesn't excuse anyone who takes advantage of their weakness. Scum is scum and a moron is a moron, and one party being one doesn't mean that the other couldn't be the other. And someone who takes advantage of some moron's gullibility to fool him out of $200 is a scum.
But do you know WHY they pay their employees so little ? Because people are willing to take the jobs at those wages.
Given a surplus of labour which has existed since the start of the Industrial Age, people are willing to work for any wage, since each and every penny pushes starvation a little further down the road. That's why minimum wage laws exist in the first place.
Do you know why the employer wants to pay as little for labour as possible ? Because labour is an operational cost, just like leasing office space, buying equipment and paying for advertising etc. EVERYONE, whether you're a business owner or not, always wants to sell high and buy low. That's not greed. It's common sense.
So basically, paying as small wages as possible is a common-sense way of minimizing wage costs; in other words, it's motivated by greed.
Raise the wages, raise the prices. We all make more money but not really because everything costs more.
Actually, no, we wouldn't all make more money. The people making minimum wage would make more money. Your buying power would drop a little, theirs would rise a lot, leading to a more egalitarian society.
Because they don't create cards on the fly through electronic terminals. They are sold from the shelve of Apple stores, grocery stores, corner stores.... They are pre-printed and usable without activation. There is no way to follow a card.
Maybe they could, gee, I dunno, generate a random number or string, store it into the iTunes database, and then print a card to match?
We've talked about this before, but there is a difference between capitalism, and corporatism. The two are often confused.
The two are often confused because capitalism leads inevitably to corporatism - or plutocracy, to be more general. When you have a competition, someone will inevitably win; and the more capital you have, the easier it is to get more, so any differences in success levels are magnified exponentially until the plutocrats - be them corporations or individual entrepreneurs - have achieved near absolute dominance.
What we have in America right now leans far more towards the Corporatism end of the spectrum, than true (pure) capitalism.
Of course. That's because once the winners emerge, they can use their capital to get the odds stacked on their favour; they can use both outright bribes and their control over a significant portion of local - and later national - economy (blackmail) to force their will on politics.
Pure capitalism leads to aristocracy and is thus an unstable model.
Sure the average movie downloading teen doesn't have the knowledge to do this but I am sure there is already some app you can download which provides a nice friendly GUI interface.
Last I used it, Windows provided a nice friendly GUI interface for setting a network adapter's MAC value to a desired value.
Let the law pass, then use the law to deny service to the very same lawmakers who voted it in. Shouldn't take long to piss them off.
Lawmakers aren't subject to the laws. That's why they pass stupid laws in the first place: they know that any complaint made against them will be investigated and, unless done by a large enough company, ignored.
Why hurt the common man unless we have to when it's the legislators that are being stupid.
The common man is the only one you can hurt. Legislators are quite safe in their ivory fortress.
I also recommend using the law to hit big corporations in a variety of ways.
If politicians are untouchable, then corporations are Demon Gods capable of smiting you with lawsuit and then dragging you through all kinds of legal Hells. Don't even think of going up against them.
You know that old joke? "Cthulhu for president - why vote for the lesser evil?" The sad thing is that, as far as powers that be go, Cthulhu is the lesser evil.
If there is an algorithm that can describe a solution, then it's "solvable" (theoretically possible), but if it takes an infinite amount of time or an infinite amount of processing power, then it's not "practically possible".
If it takes an infinite amount of time or processing power (same thing, really) to solve a given problem instance by a given algorithm, then that problem instance is not solvable by said algorithm even in theory, since the algorithm will never return the solution (by definition of infinite).
When we say that a problem is "solvable" (theoretically possible), we mean that there is an algorithm that will return a solution after a finite number of operations for any finite problem instance. If we don't put this constraint on the word "solvable", then for example the Halting Problem becomes trivially solvable: simply run the algorithm to be tested in a "simulation" and return "it halted" if it halts.
Now who's arguing from a point of incredulity? We have no evidence that the laws of physics can be reduced to symbol processing.
Um, yes we do, namely our extremely successful attempts to do just that. Read any physics book for details. For good measure, I'm representing here one rather famous such formulation of a physical law: E=mc^2.
And if you want to misrepresent my argument and then apply ridicule in response, I can't be arsed discussing the subject with you.
Giving a reply stating that you can't be bothered to reply is rather ironic.
You claimed that there is no evidence that the human brain operates by the laws of physics ("We have no evidence that it is merely executed rules either, nor that chemistry and physics follow the same."). This must mean that it instead operates by magic, there being nothing else left it could operate with. You also implied that said magic transcends the laws of logic and thus can't be modelled by a computer, since your claim was an answer to: "We have no evidence that human thought somehow transcends the model of executed rules anyway; at some level it is all chemistry and physics.".
How the Hell could I possibly not consider that ridiculous?
You similarly misrepresent Searle's views, but discussing the differences would be a painful experience I imagine.
"You're wrong, but I can't be bothered to show any errors." Right. This is why I have an increasingly cynical view of philosophers nowadays, at least when they leave the realm of ethics and try to mess with science.
For anyone reading this: Searle's argument was that the Chinese Room can't be a mind (or have a mind), because the only thing there that could possibly be a mind would be the algorithm itself, and only an algorithm can't - according to Searle - be a mind unless it's running in a right sort of hardware (human brains). This is, of course, circular logic, and thus fails to prove anything; consequently, the Chinese Room boils down to an argument from incredulity.
Of course this doesn't prove that the Chinese Room has a mind either; for all we know Searle could be right and only human brains are capable of producing them. However, Searle fails to produce any reason why this would be so and merely asserts it.
The point of Turing's test is that for all practical purposes it simply doesn't matter if something has a real mind or is merely simulating one; we treat each other as if everyone besides ourselves really had a mind, so simply extend this convention to any AI's that might emerge.
Pedantry is justified when the matter one is being pedantic about is at the very heart of the dispute.
Perhaps I meant "get something for free that somebody produced and is charging for".
So, if I start charging for the oxygen my houseplants produce, you are a thief if you don't pay me?
Notice I used the analogy of taking, and didn't specifically state it was taking anything.
You said: "If you take something without the intent to pay for it, you are a thief." As taking is not analogous to copying, your analogy is false.
I download stuff. I don't hide behind nutjob defenses. It's wrong, but at least I admit it.
See, this is where I disagree with you. You assert that downloading is wrong, but don't give any reason why this would be, apart from a false analogy. Nice ad hominem, thought.
Turn it on its' head - If they didn't care about them being visible in satellite images, why are they so concerned about wanting them to be blurred?
That is an excellent question: why is the UK demanding that Google blurs its satellite images, yet does nothing to block the view for actual spy satellites? As I see it, the the possible answers are either security theater, bureuecratic inefficiency in getting the roof built, or some "security conscious" manager making the demands on his own. Of course it could also be any combination of these.
The "rules" in the box are part of the system, and I would claim that if it passes the test, the person+rules do demonstrate understanding.
Well that was Turing's argument, and what the Chinese room is arguing against (or at least questioning).
No, Turing's argument was that the question "can X really think or is it merely perfectly simulating thinking" is impossible to answer for any value of X other than yourself. For this reason, we have a polite convention of treating things which appear to think as really thinking, so simply extend this courtesy to any seemingly sentient computer we might ever produce and be done with it.
If anything the Chinese room and all other arguments from incredility ("How could it think? It's just a room!") reinforce Turing's point about the pointlesness of such arguments.
We have no evidence that human thought somehow transcends the model of executed rules anyway; at some level it is all chemistry and physics.
We have no evidence that it is merely executed rules either, nor that chemistry and physics follow the same.
We have no evidence... that the laws of physics exist? Lul wut?
Gotta hand it to you, you certainly take your scepticism seriously;).
Searle's response to this was to replace the man in the box with the population of India, thereby allowing for much more processing power in a reasonable time.
This doesn't help the main problem in Searle's philosophy, namely his assumption that "brains cause minds" as opposed to their functionality. In other words, Searle assumes that an algorithm being executed on arbitrary hardware isn't conscious, but that only a (biological) brain can be. He never once proves or shows any evidence for this assumption, yet without it one has no reason to assume that the Chinese room isn't conscious or doesn't "really" understand Chinese.
Chinese Room isn't a thought experiment, it's an argument in the lines of: "If algorithm executing on arbitrary platforms can be minds, then an algorith being executed by someone by hand might be a mind, and that's incredible!"
Don't sweat it... these are the same people who believe that a computer can "think" about chess, instead of just searching through N number of plies in T time, then offering the best solution it has found in those constraints, without ever having to "understand" chess on any level.
That's how I play chess, and all other games and make decisions too for that matter. Of course I use a directed search with heuristics, and can build new heuristics as I go from what seems to work, but none of that is inherently beyond an algorithm. I'd even go so far as to say that considering the consequences of your options and then making the one which seems best is the very definition of thinking.
If you disagree, please explain just what you mean by "understanding"?
This whole question was answered decades ago (1970s) with the "foreigner in a sealed room" turing thought experiment. It showed that the person in the sealed room doesn't have to understand english, or even know the answer to questions, provided they are given some simple rules to link words together in a response depending on what words are in the original statement.
It was Chinese room, and it failed to show anything except that a system can have more capacity than any of its components alone, which we already knew since our brains are capable of understanding English (or Chinese, as the case may be) while the individual neurons (or molecules, atoms, particles etc) they are composed of are not.
The Chinese Room experiment attempts to refute strong AI with an appeal to intuition: that a room with a person (or a robot, or a computer) blindly following a series of instructions (a program) can't have a mind. The problem is that this intuition is merely assumed to be correct, rather than proven.
An even bigger problem is that Searle, who made the argument, is in some ways similar to the room: he is composed of fundamental particles which blindly follow a series of instructions (the laws of physics). While we could of course assume that Searle is just a non-conscious AI simulation, I know for certain that I'm conscious, and have every reason to assume that I'm composed of the same type of particles following the same list of instructions, yet the same intuition which would lead one to proclaim the room unconscious would lead one to proclaim me unconscious too, making it extremely suspect.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm pretty sure that people who make children make them because they want them, rather than because they're thinking of England.
Pointing out the obvious fact that you can't have everything but have to make choices has nothing to do with calling children "crotchfruit".
And if you do have children, they are going to require some of your attention and energy, which means that you have less to devote to your career, which will thus be less spectacular than it otherwise would be. One would think that to be a nobrainer.
You seem to have a problem with understanding the concept of limited resources.
He isn't choosing any such thing. Learn to read. For that matter, learn to write.
No, his entire point is that you can't give your all to a career and to getting children simultaneously. You have to make a trade-off between them. You can't have everything, you have to choose. Given equal abilities, if you put your all to a career, you are going to push ahead of someone who's devoting some of their energy to raising a child; demanding that they be held back so you can keep up with them is unfair to them.
Your complain is analogous to complaining that you can't afford a 100" television but must make do with a 90" one because you spent some of your money for a nice car. It's just absurd. And, since you raised that point, it's also worth noticing that it is you who isn't taken seriously by anyone with the least amount of ability to think logically.
Garbage in, garbage out. Math is nothing more than a method of taking a model and facts and deriving the implications. Feeding nonsensical details - such as the number of e-mails sent - to a model that likely has very little to do with reality will result in a completely meaningless result. You'd be much better off using your common sense when dealing with people.
Just what does performance even mean for a programmer? Lines of code? Number of bugs? How often you advice others? Hours of overtime per month? Seconds of work per pot of coffee ?-)
Math cannot give you an answer if you don't even know what you're asking. Using it in this way is just voodoo.
Yes. Now that the level and efficiency of the bragging is measured by a computer, it will most likely be trivial for any halfway competent programmer to analyze the emails sent by those who got promoted, find patterns, and replicate them. In other words, you can automate giving an impression of being busy; a small script can send emails back and worth between you and your friends while you do actual work. So I guess this technology actually will increase productivity after all ;).
I guess accidental success still counts as success.
If you don't have a good job, you won't be spending any time with your family, because you'll be spending all your waking hours working two bad jobs to feed them. On the other hand, once you've risen to top you have guaranteed income and likely enough savings that you can quit and retire whenever you want, or do whatever you please, so yes, you'll life will be much better.
In a society where competition is considered a virtue you don't really have the option of only making a reasonable effort. Either you give your all to an attempt to claw your way to the top, or you resign to spend the rest of your life at the bottom of the barrel; and the latter means that you can't afford to have a family. It's sick, but that's the way it is.
And that's exactly the problem. Only a pedophile would seek out a school, only a terrorist would seek out a church, and only a politician would seek out a government building.
Besides, everyone knows that terrorists use Google Maps to aim their orbital laser cannons.
Sure she is. It's simply that she's accepting the Bible/Koran/whatever as evidence, so her model of reality must contain explanations for any perceived conflict between that and other evidence. She's not discarding evidence, she's simply making mental contortions trying to fit it all into a consistent whole. Of course such contortions appear pretty retarded to anyone who doesn't accept her holy book as evidence, but they aren't in princple different from those of someone trying to wrap his mind around Quantum Mechanics or the Theory of Relativity and integrate them to his worldview, just misguided.
None of this makes the assertion that dinosaurs and humans coexisted any less unlikely, of course. It simply means that if one accepts it as a fact for any reason, then claiming that the rate of radioactive decay varies is, in fact, scientific: it's an attempt of fitting all known facts into a model of the world. She's starting from evidence (some harebrained interpretation of the Bible, in her case) and forming theories, thus demonstrating the time-honoured principle of "garbage in, garbage out".
However, worthless as such theories might be for the field they were supposed to cover, they nevertheless give a fascinating insight into the workings of human mind, and how pre-existing knowledge guides the integration of new knowledge into the whole, and especially how the process can go horribly wrong when said pre-existing knowledge is bad. That's certainly something AI researchers should examine very closely.
Asking people whether Intelligent Design is science is unlikely to get you meaningful data about their general scientific abilities. There's too much hulabaloo surrounding it currently; people might answer "yes" simply out of perceived identity or the desire to belong to a group; and they might answer "no" for the exact same reason. Worse, the question-makers are also human and as such vulnerable to let their own emotions lead them in how to pose the question - "Do you believe in Intelligent Design?" vs. "Do you believe that Intelligent Design is a scientific theory?", for example.
In order to test for general scientific knowledge it would make much more sense to ask something no one is likely to passionate about, such as "Do rockets need to keep their engines running in space to keep on going?" (no) or "Why is it warmer at the equator than at poles?" (because sunlight arrives at an angle near poles and thus gets spread over larger area).
The most merciful quality of human mind is its inability to correlate its contents, quoth Lovecraft. Cognitive dissonance should always be accounted for when doing this kind of study, and the topic likely to cause large amount of it avoided. And Intelligent Design happens to be just such an issue.
include <math.h>
#define flat float
#define Earth flat
int main() {
Earth flatEarth=0; return (int)round(flatEarth);
}
Of course I should use roundf here, otherwise the flat-Earthers win...
A mugger uses a superior attribute of his - his brawn - to take something of yours. A dishonest "merchant" uses a superior attribute of his - his salesmanship - to take something of yours. Both are examples of an amoral scum taking advantage of the weak, making the situations analogous and, in fact, nearly identical.
So basically, it's like any other market?
And when you get mugged, you can't blame the mugger for mugging. You can primarily blame yourself for not learning karate.
While victims should certainly learn to take care of themselves, their failure to do so doesn't excuse anyone who takes advantage of their weakness. Scum is scum and a moron is a moron, and one party being one doesn't mean that the other couldn't be the other. And someone who takes advantage of some moron's gullibility to fool him out of $200 is a scum.
Given a surplus of labour which has existed since the start of the Industrial Age, people are willing to work for any wage, since each and every penny pushes starvation a little further down the road. That's why minimum wage laws exist in the first place.
So basically, paying as small wages as possible is a common-sense way of minimizing wage costs; in other words, it's motivated by greed.
Actually, no, we wouldn't all make more money. The people making minimum wage would make more money. Your buying power would drop a little, theirs would rise a lot, leading to a more egalitarian society.
Maybe they could, gee, I dunno, generate a random number or string, store it into the iTunes database, and then print a card to match?
Or we could simply pour more resources into AI research to get a horde of humanoid androids to render said care. Japanese to the rescue !-)
Seriously, thought, we're suffering from massive unemployment, not lack of manpower.
The two are often confused because capitalism leads inevitably to corporatism - or plutocracy, to be more general. When you have a competition, someone will inevitably win; and the more capital you have, the easier it is to get more, so any differences in success levels are magnified exponentially until the plutocrats - be them corporations or individual entrepreneurs - have achieved near absolute dominance.
Of course. That's because once the winners emerge, they can use their capital to get the odds stacked on their favour; they can use both outright bribes and their control over a significant portion of local - and later national - economy (blackmail) to force their will on politics.
Pure capitalism leads to aristocracy and is thus an unstable model.
The parent is wrong but not offtopic. Please fight mod abuse and censorship and mod him back to +2 with, for example, Underrated.
Last I used it, Windows provided a nice friendly GUI interface for setting a network adapter's MAC value to a desired value.
Lawmakers aren't subject to the laws. That's why they pass stupid laws in the first place: they know that any complaint made against them will be investigated and, unless done by a large enough company, ignored.
The common man is the only one you can hurt. Legislators are quite safe in their ivory fortress.
If politicians are untouchable, then corporations are Demon Gods capable of smiting you with lawsuit and then dragging you through all kinds of legal Hells. Don't even think of going up against them.
You know that old joke? "Cthulhu for president - why vote for the lesser evil?" The sad thing is that, as far as powers that be go, Cthulhu is the lesser evil.
If it takes an infinite amount of time or processing power (same thing, really) to solve a given problem instance by a given algorithm, then that problem instance is not solvable by said algorithm even in theory, since the algorithm will never return the solution (by definition of infinite).
When we say that a problem is "solvable" (theoretically possible), we mean that there is an algorithm that will return a solution after a finite number of operations for any finite problem instance. If we don't put this constraint on the word "solvable", then for example the Halting Problem becomes trivially solvable: simply run the algorithm to be tested in a "simulation" and return "it halted" if it halts.
Um, yes we do, namely our extremely successful attempts to do just that. Read any physics book for details. For good measure, I'm representing here one rather famous such formulation of a physical law: E=mc^2.
Giving a reply stating that you can't be bothered to reply is rather ironic.
You claimed that there is no evidence that the human brain operates by the laws of physics ("We have no evidence that it is merely executed rules either, nor that chemistry and physics follow the same."). This must mean that it instead operates by magic, there being nothing else left it could operate with. You also implied that said magic transcends the laws of logic and thus can't be modelled by a computer, since your claim was an answer to: "We have no evidence that human thought somehow transcends the model of executed rules anyway; at some level it is all chemistry and physics.".
How the Hell could I possibly not consider that ridiculous?
"You're wrong, but I can't be bothered to show any errors." Right. This is why I have an increasingly cynical view of philosophers nowadays, at least when they leave the realm of ethics and try to mess with science.
For anyone reading this: Searle's argument was that the Chinese Room can't be a mind (or have a mind), because the only thing there that could possibly be a mind would be the algorithm itself, and only an algorithm can't - according to Searle - be a mind unless it's running in a right sort of hardware (human brains). This is, of course, circular logic, and thus fails to prove anything; consequently, the Chinese Room boils down to an argument from incredulity.
Of course this doesn't prove that the Chinese Room has a mind either; for all we know Searle could be right and only human brains are capable of producing them. However, Searle fails to produce any reason why this would be so and merely asserts it.
The point of Turing's test is that for all practical purposes it simply doesn't matter if something has a real mind or is merely simulating one; we treat each other as if everyone besides ourselves really had a mind, so simply extend this convention to any AI's that might emerge.
Pedantry is justified when the matter one is being pedantic about is at the very heart of the dispute.
So, if I start charging for the oxygen my houseplants produce, you are a thief if you don't pay me?
You said: "If you take something without the intent to pay for it, you are a thief." As taking is not analogous to copying, your analogy is false.
See, this is where I disagree with you. You assert that downloading is wrong, but don't give any reason why this would be, apart from a false analogy. Nice ad hominem, thought.
No, it's copyright violation.
BTW, is there a particular reason why you're putting almost every sentence in a different paragraph, even when they belong together?
Why? Why do the "artists" deserve such special protection? Why not declare it's everyone's duty to protect the shoemakers and their works instead?
That is an excellent question: why is the UK demanding that Google blurs its satellite images, yet does nothing to block the view for actual spy satellites? As I see it, the the possible answers are either security theater, bureuecratic inefficiency in getting the roof built, or some "security conscious" manager making the demands on his own. Of course it could also be any combination of these.
No, Turing's argument was that the question "can X really think or is it merely perfectly simulating thinking" is impossible to answer for any value of X other than yourself. For this reason, we have a polite convention of treating things which appear to think as really thinking, so simply extend this courtesy to any seemingly sentient computer we might ever produce and be done with it.
If anything the Chinese room and all other arguments from incredility ("How could it think? It's just a room!") reinforce Turing's point about the pointlesness of such arguments.
We have no evidence... that the laws of physics exist? Lul wut?
Gotta hand it to you, you certainly take your scepticism seriously ;).
This doesn't help the main problem in Searle's philosophy, namely his assumption that "brains cause minds" as opposed to their functionality. In other words, Searle assumes that an algorithm being executed on arbitrary hardware isn't conscious, but that only a (biological) brain can be. He never once proves or shows any evidence for this assumption, yet without it one has no reason to assume that the Chinese room isn't conscious or doesn't "really" understand Chinese.
Chinese Room isn't a thought experiment, it's an argument in the lines of: "If algorithm executing on arbitrary platforms can be minds, then an algorith being executed by someone by hand might be a mind, and that's incredible!"
That's how I play chess, and all other games and make decisions too for that matter. Of course I use a directed search with heuristics, and can build new heuristics as I go from what seems to work, but none of that is inherently beyond an algorithm. I'd even go so far as to say that considering the consequences of your options and then making the one which seems best is the very definition of thinking.
If you disagree, please explain just what you mean by "understanding"?
It was Chinese room, and it failed to show anything except that a system can have more capacity than any of its components alone, which we already knew since our brains are capable of understanding English (or Chinese, as the case may be) while the individual neurons (or molecules, atoms, particles etc) they are composed of are not.
The Chinese Room experiment attempts to refute strong AI with an appeal to intuition: that a room with a person (or a robot, or a computer) blindly following a series of instructions (a program) can't have a mind. The problem is that this intuition is merely assumed to be correct, rather than proven.
An even bigger problem is that Searle, who made the argument, is in some ways similar to the room: he is composed of fundamental particles which blindly follow a series of instructions (the laws of physics). While we could of course assume that Searle is just a non-conscious AI simulation, I know for certain that I'm conscious, and have every reason to assume that I'm composed of the same type of particles following the same list of instructions, yet the same intuition which would lead one to proclaim the room unconscious would lead one to proclaim me unconscious too, making it extremely suspect.