Economics is a subset of history, data from the past, and therefore it is based entirely on correlations. There can be no cause and effect derived from correlations, so 'science' is not possible. Science requires experiments, controlled for 1 variable at a time.
So there's a big difference between "observational science" and "historical science"...
You clearly don't want to accept that these people are just fucked in the head.
I'm pretty sure this is a psychological issue. On both their part, and yours.
You do realize the environment is identical in these scenarios. So ventilation, etc. is irrelevant.
Oh, I get it. You were so busy feeling smugly superior to other people that you lost the ability to comprehend English. Let's try this again - if the study had shown that no combination of wifi or lights made these people sick, but they still felt sick in certain places, then it's possible that it wasn't in their heads, and might have some other cause. Wouldn't that be a good thing to know as well?
Why would it not be a stronger experiment if there were no lights at all?
OK, you run that test and nobody feels ill, on or off. What does that prove? Not much - your signal could be too weak or the wrong frequency, or the room could be interfering, or it need to send data in bursts or cycles, or both the signal and the blinking lights are needed, or... On the other hand, if you can create the feeling of sickness using just lights and with lights and wifi you can be pretty sure that lights are the (indirect) cause - making those 'what ifs' more implausible.
Second, it also gives you a chance to catch non-wifi issues that are making people sick. What if the school's lack of proper ventilation, or an old chemical spill giving off fumes, or the hot plastic of the router creating VOCs really is making people ill? We can catch it now by proving that it's not just not wifi, but also not all in their heads, and start looking for other answers.
The bud guy tries to kidnap the protagonist's fiancee, she kicks a goon into the controls which launches the ship straight up at ~10G. When they wake up they're out of copper and being pulled into a black hole, and her engagement ring was used in their last-ditch effort to avoid it.
At least we're past the first hurdle. And I'll take "syntax is insufficient for semantics" as your thesis.
If this seems unclear, consider that everyone who denies the CRA on some variation of the robot reply necessarily accepts the argument.
Not really. They suggest that most symbol manipulation can't produce understanding, but manipulation of symbols of that have a causal connection with the outside world can. Essentially, they're saying "syntax is insufficient for semantics, but the extra needed component is still compatible with computationalism". But I don't find this argument very compelling, at least on its own.
On the sidelines, where you'll find magical thinkers offering variations of the systems reply, there's a strange sort of denial. To accept the systems reply is also to conceded the argument entirely as it necessarily introduces non-computational aspects.
This is simply false - they're just suggesting that two minds can be produced by the same object, like two programs running on the same computer, so the the man's lack of understanding doesn't mean that there can't be understanding somewhere else. If I'm wrong about it, just name the non-computational aspect in the systems reply.:)
And it's especially amusing that you think that these guys are the magical thinkers. All they're saying is that one part of something can understand things that other parts don't, which anyone who knows what 'subconscious' means or what brain injuries can do to a person should accept. On the other hand, you seem to think because you don't know how X could produce Y on its own that there must be a Z to produce it, even though you can't point to Z or describe how it produced Y - much like dualists or creationists.
It's probably why you'll find so few condemnations that actually address the crux of the argument (syntax is insufficent for semantics).
Except for all the people pointing out the problems with that assumption - masked man/problem of other minds issues, the reliance on intuition, the origin of something mental that isn't needed to produce behavior, and above all the complete lack of suggestions (or even hints) about what would be sufficient for semantics.
And I'm serious about that last part. Give me one solid lead on the source of semantics, understanding, qualia or any of the rest of the vaguely-described subjective stuff that separates mere computation from thinking, or a way to test something outside my own mind for any of those things, and I'll cede the entire argument.
"And make no mistake about it, if you took a poll -- in the first round of BBS Commentary, in the Continuing Commentary, on comp.ai, or in the secondary literature about the Chinese Room Argument that has been accumulating across both decades to the present day (and culminating in the present book) -- the overwhelming majority still think the Chinese Room Argument is dead wrong, even among those who agree that computers can't understand! In fact (I am open to correction on this), it is my impression that, apart from myself, the only ones who profess to accept the validity of the CRA seem to be those who are equally persuaded by what I called "Granny Objections" earlier -- the kinds of soft-headed friends that do even more mischief to one's case than one's foes."
Let me guess, as with your misreading of the other source I gave you, you're somehow going to see that as saying that nobody disputes the CRA, right?
Sense when? "AGI" has been synonymous with "strong AI" since the term's inception.
Really? Even the Wikipedia entry for AGI discusses Searle's definitions of strong and weak AI and clearly spells out that "The weak AI hypothesis is equivalent to the hypothesis that artificial general intelligence is possible." The CRA only addresses strong AI.
Well, so far, no one has been able to offer a satisfactory reply.... There's a reason it's still seriously discussed 35 years on. Had that pillar been knocked down, we'd all know the standard reply.
Well, as I said before there are at least five kinds of standard responses, and none of them have been solidly knocked down either. That's why this is still (like many questions in philosophy) an open question. Even Stevan Harnad, who thinks the CRA is just obviously correct, knows that he's in the minority.
Oh, almost forgot I was playing with a troll: If you can't even get the vocabulary right... OK, that was weak. I'll try harder next time.
I don't even know where to start with you posts, but I'll try a quick pass:
AGI does not imply consciousness, intentionality, qualia, or any of the other difficult issues in philosophy of mind - it's only about the ability to preform tasks.
Searle's argument only covers issues like those, in fact it's a basic assumption of the argument that computation can produce every possible kind of response needed to emulate a human being, including making creative works and original discoveries. You could even reformulate his conclusion as "Computation could produce an AGI, but not a conscious AGI." without being far off.
And even worse, you seem to think that it was some kind of knock-down, indisputable argument. Sure, it was a landmark paper that stimulated a lot of discussion, but there are about a half-dozen different kinds of replies. Heck, even Wikipedia has a good rundown of the issues, and nowhere (there or in the literature) is Searle's conclusion treated as definitive.
This is almost the philosophical equivalent of saying that abiogenesis is impossible, so evolution is false.
Oh, and since you like snark: Kid, I hope that before you go out into the real world you learn that being able to poorly paraphrase a single work does not make you an expert in a field. If you don't, you'll end up hurt - badly.
So you're defending "X is caused by Y" by pointing out that you think X might do something in the future, and what I'm presuming was the Carey Schueler stunt where she was a 43rd round draft pick by her father. All you've given me is your imagination and a one-off joke.
I'll call, and raise you Manon Rhéaume and Eri Yoshida.
While it's entirely possible that those men are innocent, having the original conviction thrown out and the state declining to prosecute them again after so many years doesn't prove they are innocent.
While it does happen, it's pretty rare for someone to get a Declaration of Actual Innocence - in fact the entire appeals process revolves around procedural and legal errors, not factual ones. Just getting a new trial for someone convicted before DNA testing was available, but who can now prove that their blood or semen doesn't match the evidence, is an uphill battle.
So what would you accept as good enough evidence? The Innocence Project claims to have found 140 actual perpetrators of the crimes that their clients were originally accused of.
Events can appear at same time or not regardless of whether they occurred at the same time or not however there is never an observable ordering disagreement.
This is true only for things that are separated by time-like (and, being the edge case, light-like) intervals. For events that are separated by space-like intervals they might be simultaneous in my frame of reference but not in yours - i.e. simultaneity is relative.
It went with me thru my shortcut slower than light.
You mean didn't exceed the local speed of light, which is fine. But that doesn't change the fact that in some other reference frame you arrived 50 years before you left. And if there was a return wormhole at rest in that frame of reference you could come back to earth 50 years before you left.
And that's why scifi and popular science are so keen on warp drives and wormholes - they obey the well-demonstrated limits on high-speed travel while (purely in theory) allowing FTL and time travel.
If you were to travel through 100 light years of space in 4 minutes... nobody sees a time reversal in any frame of reference.
You're at two events events (leaving one place and appearing at another) separated by what in relativity is called a space-like interval - and by definition there are observers that 'see' them happen at the same time, others that 'see' one happen first, and others that 'see' the other happen first. This isn't a problem because (as far as we can tell) those events can't affect each other.
My best guess as to what you're trying to say is that because you don't end up in your own past light-cone (i.e. the events don't have an inverted time-like separation) there are no paradoxes, no violations of causality, etc. Which is true if this kind of trav... er... 'changing position' is one-off, or fairly strictly limited in certain ways.
The consequences of that never propagated superluminally.
So you went 100 light years in less than 100 years. That's basically the definition of superluminal. It doesn't matter how it's done.
Superluminal propagation of the light cone is needed to invert cause and effect...
I'm not even sure what you're trying to say. "Magic" or not, you'd be travelling outside of your future light cone, and that's exactly the problem - to you and people on Earth it would appear instantaneous, but for some observers you would be traveling backward in time.
On other words, "instant" travel is nonsense because spatially separated things can't happen "at the same time" for all observers. Relativity of simultaneity and all that.
If I were to magically snap my fingers and magically materialize between "earth" and "earth2" 100 light years away without having propagated thru space... at no point will any observer in any frame be able to detect an inversion of cause and effect.
Only if it took 100 years for you to make the trip. Otherwise you will be moving backward in time for some possible observers.
People usually only freak out about behavior in movies that they think other people will emulate, especially things that seem realistic. My parents like to watch lots of British murder mysteries, but they'll be put off by 'bad' language, nudity, or people being rude in the same show.
The people who boycott for the reasons you gave believe that our entire culture is heavily racist and sexist, and movies are part of the problem. But most people aren't corrupt cops.
And before that, the meteorologists refered to "the southern oscillation"
It's still called that.
there was El Nino and La Nina - depending on whereabouts in the Pacific the warm surface water was located.
Those are names for the warm and cold phases of that oscillation. The only thing that might have changed is that people are more willing to use the Spanish words to describe the phenomenon.
A few decades ago, before global warming became popular
The Southern Oscillation and Anthropogenic Climate Change refer to different phenomena that are explained by different processes. The only thing they have in common is that they both have something to do with the weather.
You can't agree to anything just by being born; you aren't even sentient at that point.
Try using that argument to opt out of the "income tax" portion of the social contract.
Well, it didn't work out well for some of my ancestors when they tried to opt out of the "you're a slave" part of the one-sided "contract" they were born into.
On the other hand, some people realize that answering moral questions with appeals to who can inflict the most harm is stupid.
...I strongly disapprove the hysterical, one-sided tone of the intactivist movement, which I think has potential to harm the body image of circumcised children who grow up with it.
Interesting. Are pro-choice activists 'hysterical' for pushing their particular "my body, my choice" argument? And do they deserve criticism for making women in Ireland who couldn't get abortions feel bad?
Slashdot Mirror
Economics is a subset of history, data from the past, and therefore it is based entirely on correlations. There can be no cause and effect derived from correlations, so 'science' is not possible. Science requires experiments, controlled for 1 variable at a time.
So there's a big difference between "observational science" and "historical science"...
Ken Ham, is that you?
You clearly don't want to accept that these people are just fucked in the head.
I'm pretty sure this is a psychological issue. On both their part, and yours.
You do realize the environment is identical in these scenarios. So ventilation, etc. is irrelevant.
Oh, I get it. You were so busy feeling smugly superior to other people that you lost the ability to comprehend English. Let's try this again - if the study had shown that no combination of wifi or lights made these people sick, but they still felt sick in certain places, then it's possible that it wasn't in their heads, and might have some other cause. Wouldn't that be a good thing to know as well?
Yes, I agree. But if you want to convince other people, who may have different beliefs and biases, you want the strongest evidence possible.
Why would it not be a stronger experiment if there were no lights at all?
OK, you run that test and nobody feels ill, on or off. What does that prove? Not much - your signal could be too weak or the wrong frequency, or the room could be interfering, or it need to send data in bursts or cycles, or both the signal and the blinking lights are needed, or... On the other hand, if you can create the feeling of sickness using just lights and with lights and wifi you can be pretty sure that lights are the (indirect) cause - making those 'what ifs' more implausible.
Second, it also gives you a chance to catch non-wifi issues that are making people sick. What if the school's lack of proper ventilation, or an old chemical spill giving off fumes, or the hot plastic of the router creating VOCs really is making people ill? We can catch it now by proving that it's not just not wifi, but also not all in their heads, and start looking for other answers.
"The Skylark of Space" by E. E. "Doc" Smith?
The bud guy tries to kidnap the protagonist's fiancee, she kicks a goon into the controls which launches the ship straight up at ~10G. When they wake up they're out of copper and being pulled into a black hole, and her engagement ring was used in their last-ditch effort to avoid it.
Yes. We're legally allowed to discriminate against dead people, at least for now.
So, does Apple's free trial period have a "if you're not satisfied, return all the music you got for free without paying the artists" clause?
Well, it's a music streaming service, so...
At least we're past the first hurdle. And I'll take "syntax is insufficient for semantics" as your thesis.
If this seems unclear, consider that everyone who denies the CRA on some variation of the robot reply necessarily accepts the argument.
Not really. They suggest that most symbol manipulation can't produce understanding, but manipulation of symbols of that have a causal connection with the outside world can. Essentially, they're saying "syntax is insufficient for semantics, but the extra needed component is still compatible with computationalism". But I don't find this argument very compelling, at least on its own.
On the sidelines, where you'll find magical thinkers offering variations of the systems reply, there's a strange sort of denial. To accept the systems reply is also to conceded the argument entirely as it necessarily introduces non-computational aspects.
This is simply false - they're just suggesting that two minds can be produced by the same object, like two programs running on the same computer, so the the man's lack of understanding doesn't mean that there can't be understanding somewhere else. If I'm wrong about it, just name the non-computational aspect in the systems reply. :)
And it's especially amusing that you think that these guys are the magical thinkers. All they're saying is that one part of something can understand things that other parts don't, which anyone who knows what 'subconscious' means or what brain injuries can do to a person should accept. On the other hand, you seem to think because you don't know how X could produce Y on its own that there must be a Z to produce it, even though you can't point to Z or describe how it produced Y - much like dualists or creationists.
It's probably why you'll find so few condemnations that actually address the crux of the argument (syntax is insufficent for semantics).
Except for all the people pointing out the problems with that assumption - masked man/problem of other minds issues, the reliance on intuition, the origin of something mental that isn't needed to produce behavior, and above all the complete lack of suggestions (or even hints) about what would be sufficient for semantics.
And I'm serious about that last part. Give me one solid lead on the source of semantics, understanding, qualia or any of the rest of the vaguely-described subjective stuff that separates mere computation from thinking, or a way to test something outside my own mind for any of those things, and I'll cede the entire argument.
At this point, you're just in denial.
And I don't even have a word for what you're doing. You were wrong, deal with it.
Citation needed.
"MINDS, MACHINES AND SEARLE 2: WHAT'S RIGHT AND WRONG ABOUT THE CHINESE ROOM ARGUMENT" by Stevan Harnad:
"And make no mistake about it, if you took a poll -- in the first round of BBS Commentary, in the Continuing Commentary, on comp.ai, or in the secondary literature about the Chinese Room Argument that has been accumulating across both decades to the present day (and culminating in the present book) -- the overwhelming majority still think the Chinese Room Argument is dead wrong, even among those who agree that computers can't understand! In fact (I am open to correction on this), it is my impression that, apart from myself, the only ones who profess to accept the validity of the CRA seem to be those who are equally persuaded by what I called "Granny Objections" earlier -- the kinds of soft-headed friends that do even more mischief to one's case than one's foes."
Let me guess, as with your misreading of the other source I gave you, you're somehow going to see that as saying that nobody disputes the CRA, right?
Sense when? "AGI" has been synonymous with "strong AI" since the term's inception.
Really? Even the Wikipedia entry for AGI discusses Searle's definitions of strong and weak AI and clearly spells out that "The weak AI hypothesis is equivalent to the hypothesis that artificial general intelligence is possible." The CRA only addresses strong AI.
Well, so far, no one has been able to offer a satisfactory reply. ... There's a reason it's still seriously discussed 35 years on. Had that pillar been knocked down, we'd all know the standard reply.
Well, as I said before there are at least five kinds of standard responses, and none of them have been solidly knocked down either. That's why this is still (like many questions in philosophy) an open question. Even Stevan Harnad, who thinks the CRA is just obviously correct, knows that he's in the minority.
Oh, almost forgot I was playing with a troll: If you can't even get the vocabulary right ... OK, that was weak. I'll try harder next time.
I don't even know where to start with you posts, but I'll try a quick pass:
AGI does not imply consciousness, intentionality, qualia, or any of the other difficult issues in philosophy of mind - it's only about the ability to preform tasks.
Searle's argument only covers issues like those, in fact it's a basic assumption of the argument that computation can produce every possible kind of response needed to emulate a human being, including making creative works and original discoveries. You could even reformulate his conclusion as "Computation could produce an AGI, but not a conscious AGI." without being far off.
And even worse, you seem to think that it was some kind of knock-down, indisputable argument. Sure, it was a landmark paper that stimulated a lot of discussion, but there are about a half-dozen different kinds of replies. Heck, even Wikipedia has a good rundown of the issues, and nowhere (there or in the literature) is Searle's conclusion treated as definitive.
This is almost the philosophical equivalent of saying that abiogenesis is impossible, so evolution is false.
Oh, and since you like snark: Kid, I hope that before you go out into the real world you learn that being able to poorly paraphrase a single work does not make you an expert in a field. If you don't, you'll end up hurt - badly.
So you're defending "X is caused by Y" by pointing out that you think X might do something in the future, and what I'm presuming was the Carey Schueler stunt where she was a 43rd round draft pick by her father. All you've given me is your imagination and a one-off joke.
I'll call, and raise you Manon Rhéaume and Eri Yoshida.
Actually, those barriers are often set up by men.
The NHL (and as far as I know, most other professional sports leagues) don't prohibit women from playing.
While it's entirely possible that those men are innocent, having the original conviction thrown out and the state declining to prosecute them again after so many years doesn't prove they are innocent.
While it does happen, it's pretty rare for someone to get a Declaration of Actual Innocence - in fact the entire appeals process revolves around procedural and legal errors, not factual ones. Just getting a new trial for someone convicted before DNA testing was available, but who can now prove that their blood or semen doesn't match the evidence, is an uphill battle.
So what would you accept as good enough evidence? The Innocence Project claims to have found 140 actual perpetrators of the crimes that their clients were originally accused of.
Events can appear at same time or not regardless of whether they occurred at the same time or not however there is never an observable ordering disagreement.
This is true only for things that are separated by time-like (and, being the edge case, light-like) intervals. For events that are separated by space-like intervals they might be simultaneous in my frame of reference but not in yours - i.e. simultaneity is relative.
It went with me thru my shortcut slower than light.
You mean didn't exceed the local speed of light, which is fine. But that doesn't change the fact that in some other reference frame you arrived 50 years before you left. And if there was a return wormhole at rest in that frame of reference you could come back to earth 50 years before you left.
And that's why scifi and popular science are so keen on warp drives and wormholes - they obey the well-demonstrated limits on high-speed travel while (purely in theory) allowing FTL and time travel.
There is no traveling.
If you were to travel through 100 light years of space in 4 minutes ... nobody sees a time reversal in any frame of reference.
You're at two events events (leaving one place and appearing at another) separated by what in relativity is called a space-like interval - and by definition there are observers that 'see' them happen at the same time, others that 'see' one happen first, and others that 'see' the other happen first. This isn't a problem because (as far as we can tell) those events can't affect each other.
My best guess as to what you're trying to say is that because you don't end up in your own past light-cone (i.e. the events don't have an inverted time-like separation) there are no paradoxes, no violations of causality, etc. Which is true if this kind of trav ... er ... 'changing position' is one-off, or fairly strictly limited in certain ways.
The consequences of that never propagated superluminally.
So you went 100 light years in less than 100 years. That's basically the definition of superluminal. It doesn't matter how it's done.
Superluminal propagation of the light cone is needed to invert cause and effect...
I'm not even sure what you're trying to say. "Magic" or not, you'd be travelling outside of your future light cone, and that's exactly the problem - to you and people on Earth it would appear instantaneous, but for some observers you would be traveling backward in time.
On other words, "instant" travel is nonsense because spatially separated things can't happen "at the same time" for all observers. Relativity of simultaneity and all that.
Again that is all just theory. Nothing has ever actually shown it.
Well, except for all those experiments...
If I were to magically snap my fingers and magically materialize between "earth" and "earth2" 100 light years away without having propagated thru space ... at no point will any observer in any frame be able to detect an inversion of cause and effect.
Only if it took 100 years for you to make the trip. Otherwise you will be moving backward in time for some possible observers.
People usually only freak out about behavior in movies that they think other people will emulate, especially things that seem realistic. My parents like to watch lots of British murder mysteries, but they'll be put off by 'bad' language, nudity, or people being rude in the same show.
The people who boycott for the reasons you gave believe that our entire culture is heavily racist and sexist, and movies are part of the problem. But most people aren't corrupt cops.
When this is done, I'm quite certain that there will be no need for the magical fairy dust matter that is there but isn't there.
So dark 'mentor' is the theory that best fits the available data, but you're certain it's wrong because of ... ???. Brilliant!
And before that, the meteorologists refered to "the southern oscillation"
It's still called that.
there was El Nino and La Nina - depending on whereabouts in the Pacific the warm surface water was located.
Those are names for the warm and cold phases of that oscillation. The only thing that might have changed is that people are more willing to use the Spanish words to describe the phenomenon.
A few decades ago, before global warming became popular
The Southern Oscillation and Anthropogenic Climate Change refer to different phenomena that are explained by different processes. The only thing they have in common is that they both have something to do with the weather.
What was my point? I forgot.
Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced.
You can't agree to anything just by being born; you aren't even sentient at that point.
Try using that argument to opt out of the "income tax" portion of the social contract.
Well, it didn't work out well for some of my ancestors when they tried to opt out of the "you're a slave" part of the one-sided "contract" they were born into.
On the other hand, some people realize that answering moral questions with appeals to who can inflict the most harm is stupid.
...I strongly disapprove the hysterical, one-sided tone of the intactivist movement, which I think has potential to harm the body image of circumcised children who grow up with it.
Interesting. Are pro-choice activists 'hysterical' for pushing their particular "my body, my choice" argument? And do they deserve criticism for making women in Ireland who couldn't get abortions feel bad?