Science does ignore things outside of the universe, but amazingly enough, everything that matters is, by definition, inside it.
In other words, suppose there is a soul. If we can still make a brain simulator that acts conscious, then it doesn't really matter, because it had no observable effect. If, because humans have souls and computers don't, we can't make a conscious brain simulator, then the soul has an observable effect, and can be reasoned about with science. Now, in the first case, you might say that the brain simulator acts conscious but isn't. It would be a lot like saying people with a different skin color act conscious but aren't, though - not morally defensible.
Religions are not dualist because their ability to reason without evidence has allowed them to see some great truth that science has missed. They're dualist because they were conceived before we came to the great realization that the behavior of living things emerges from the physical laws.
Why would you be unable to aenesthetize an artificial brain? It's just a chemical that has some (currently not well understood) effect on the physical processes in your brain. If the artificial brain works by simulating those processes, it should be relatively straightforward to simulate those effects, and you should get the same temporary loss of consciousness.
I would say that consciouness is inherently tied to the algorithms that produce it. Those algorithms happen to be executed by a massively parallel self-modifying chaotic biological organ, but, being algorithms, they could in principle be carried out by other hardware. (The strong Church-Turing thesis.) Granted, our crude attempts to design similar algorithms from first principles (Bayesian networks, predicate logic, expert systems, etc.) are so different from what happens in the brain that it's fair to say they are not the same thing. But that's not what these guys are doing - they're not reverse-engineering the software, they're emulating it at a low level.
I suspect the only real barriers are technical - how do you get sufficient information about the structure of the brain, and how it changes over time? How do you learn which aspects of that are important and which can be abstracted? And how do you get it running sufficiently quickly?
Randomly banging on the keyboard clearly produces less than ideal entropy. Case in point, your password contains "asedf", which I'm willing to bet was the result of you drumming the fingers of your left hand. Now, whether it matters for such a long password is another matter, but if you're paranoid enough to use a password like that, you may as well go the extra mile.
But that gets really annoying, and you have to spend a whole episode explaining how you're not, and you might need to get shot with primitive weapons to prove your mortality.
Yeah and why do they have to pass a checklist of requirements to release their code freely?
Because it's not exactly their code - NDISWrapper uses kernel interfaces*, so it's derivative of Linus et al's code. That means the kernel developers get to tell them how they can release it, and they've said "GPLv2, no linking exception".
*Not just the syscall interface which the kernel license says doesn't constitute a derivative work. It even uses those interfaces that the kernel specifically marks as constituting a derivative work.
Even the pieces fired forward aren't really in a higher orbit. The high point of the orbit is higher, yes, but the low point is still at least as low as the point of impact. So the new orbit, no matter how high the high point was boosted, takes the debris close enough to the atmosphere to slow it down significantly.
Um, yeah, I'm sure nobody involved in the project has thought of that. They must have thought it would come falling down immediately, much like Buzz Lightyear in Toy Story. Why are you wasting time on Slashdot? You owe it to America to become a presidential adviser immediately, lest we be doomed to repeat the harsh lessons of Disney movies forever.
Well spirals are orbits, but ones which are perturbed by air resistance. If you ignore air resistance (and relativistic effects), then yes, all orbits would be perfect ellipses (or hyperbolas). In this case, the orbits of any debris will pass through the point of the explosion again, discounting air resistance. In reality, they will pass even lower, due to air (and in many cases, ground) resistance. They only way they could attain a stable (that is, higher than significant air resistance) orbit is if half an orbit after the explosion, they get kicked forward again.
Aside from funding, which they've done generously - how can you attribute the success or failure of such a mission to the current administration? "Sorry, guys - everything was going fine until T-2.34s to impact, when the president lost interest."
I doubt the distance is much of a factor in difficulty. It may even be harder to shoot down such a low satellite - you have to do more of your course correction while still in the relatively unpredictable atmosphere. Plus, this attempt won't litter orbit with debris as the Chinese one did.
It's conceivable they would turn off GPS, but it's not like that would make the GPS constellation harder to kill. It's necessarily no secret where they are. Also, it would take something much bigger than a GPS receiver to have bi-directional communications with the satellite.
Actually, I heard a pretty argument that no debris produced by this could stay up for more than a few orbits. Basically, no matter what impulse you give to something at a certain point in its orbit, the new orbit and the old orbit will have that point in common. And that point is low enough in the atmosphere that any orbit crossing it will decay quickly.
In other words, the best you would get is a highly elliptical orbit that still crosses through the point of the explosion, but it will be circularized by the atmosphere. If a piece of debris is shot "upwards", than it will actually be in an orbit that includes an even lower point. That is, if it's moving upwards from the point, then during its next orbit, it will necessarily be below the point.
I'm actually not convinced that gun ownership is the best idea, but I feel the need to call you out on this: grandparent is not suggesting every American should be armed. It is likely that at least some society, even if coincidentally, has experienced an increase in gun ownership and a decrease in murders. And you seem to equate gun ownership with the "right to kill each other." Wow.
You have a good faith belief that there was a risk, you report it to the authorities. They handle the situation by not verifying it and then causing a panic. Who's at fault there?
Why not just allow you to have a Geiger counter, but make it illegal tell anyone if you think it's showing a dangerous amount of radiation? Yes, that's stupid. But, assuming people follow these laws, it would have the same effect as banning them.
So, is it fun living in the Platonic realm of ideal solids, where pool games end in one turn, diodes capture thermal energy, and hard drives never crash?
It doesn't make sense for a company to put its research in the public domain because it may lose profit to other companies that also implement it. That argument doesn't apply to the government, though, as it doesn't directly profit anyway.
I also want to point out that your statement that research is harder than implementation may be true for the biotech or medical industries, but isn't true for the computer industry.
You don't have a right to expect your cell phone will operate anywhere, but you do have a right to expect that it won't be actively interfered with, per the FCC's regulation of that band.
Are you sure that applies to 4-lane highways? It makes sense for a 2-lane road, where you want to get out of the left lane ASAP, but for highways, it just seems like a license to speed.
The source has to be in the preferred form for modification, and it has to include the install scripts, per the GPL. And it's pretty obvious that going out of their way to make it difficult is against the spirit of the license. Keep in mind that as a Linux distro, and not an OS monopoly, goodwill is actually important to them.
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Science does ignore things outside of the universe, but amazingly enough, everything that matters is, by definition, inside it.
In other words, suppose there is a soul. If we can still make a brain simulator that acts conscious, then it doesn't really matter, because it had no observable effect. If, because humans have souls and computers don't, we can't make a conscious brain simulator, then the soul has an observable effect, and can be reasoned about with science. Now, in the first case, you might say that the brain simulator acts conscious but isn't. It would be a lot like saying people with a different skin color act conscious but aren't, though - not morally defensible.
Religions are not dualist because their ability to reason without evidence has allowed them to see some great truth that science has missed. They're dualist because they were conceived before we came to the great realization that the behavior of living things emerges from the physical laws.
Why would you be unable to aenesthetize an artificial brain? It's just a chemical that has some (currently not well understood) effect on the physical processes in your brain. If the artificial brain works by simulating those processes, it should be relatively straightforward to simulate those effects, and you should get the same temporary loss of consciousness.
I would say that consciouness is inherently tied to the algorithms that produce it. Those algorithms happen to be executed by a massively parallel self-modifying chaotic biological organ, but, being algorithms, they could in principle be carried out by other hardware. (The strong Church-Turing thesis.) Granted, our crude attempts to design similar algorithms from first principles (Bayesian networks, predicate logic, expert systems, etc.) are so different from what happens in the brain that it's fair to say they are not the same thing. But that's not what these guys are doing - they're not reverse-engineering the software, they're emulating it at a low level.
I suspect the only real barriers are technical - how do you get sufficient information about the structure of the brain, and how it changes over time? How do you learn which aspects of that are important and which can be abstracted? And how do you get it running sufficiently quickly?
Randomly banging on the keyboard clearly produces less than ideal entropy. Case in point, your password contains "asedf", which I'm willing to bet was the result of you drumming the fingers of your left hand. Now, whether it matters for such a long password is another matter, but if you're paranoid enough to use a password like that, you may as well go the extra mile.
I'm pretty sure that's B_S
But that gets really annoying, and you have to spend a whole episode explaining how you're not, and you might need to get shot with primitive weapons to prove your mortality.
I'm not a vegetarian or anything, but there are more efficient ways of getting protein than growing livestock.
Because it's not exactly their code - NDISWrapper uses kernel interfaces*, so it's derivative of Linus et al's code. That means the kernel developers get to tell them how they can release it, and they've said "GPLv2, no linking exception".
*Not just the syscall interface which the kernel license says doesn't constitute a derivative work. It even uses those interfaces that the kernel specifically marks as constituting a derivative work.
Mmm, I can't wait to pay more for slower memory.
Even the pieces fired forward aren't really in a higher orbit. The high point of the orbit is higher, yes, but the low point is still at least as low as the point of impact. So the new orbit, no matter how high the high point was boosted, takes the debris close enough to the atmosphere to slow it down significantly.
Um, yeah, I'm sure nobody involved in the project has thought of that. They must have thought it would come falling down immediately, much like Buzz Lightyear in Toy Story. Why are you wasting time on Slashdot? You owe it to America to become a presidential adviser immediately, lest we be doomed to repeat the harsh lessons of Disney movies forever.
Well spirals are orbits, but ones which are perturbed by air resistance. If you ignore air resistance (and relativistic effects), then yes, all orbits would be perfect ellipses (or hyperbolas). In this case, the orbits of any debris will pass through the point of the explosion again, discounting air resistance. In reality, they will pass even lower, due to air (and in many cases, ground) resistance. They only way they could attain a stable (that is, higher than significant air resistance) orbit is if half an orbit after the explosion, they get kicked forward again.
Aside from funding, which they've done generously - how can you attribute the success or failure of such a mission to the current administration? "Sorry, guys - everything was going fine until T-2.34s to impact, when the president lost interest."
I doubt the distance is much of a factor in difficulty. It may even be harder to shoot down such a low satellite - you have to do more of your course correction while still in the relatively unpredictable atmosphere. Plus, this attempt won't litter orbit with debris as the Chinese one did.
It's conceivable they would turn off GPS, but it's not like that would make the GPS constellation harder to kill. It's necessarily no secret where they are. Also, it would take something much bigger than a GPS receiver to have bi-directional communications with the satellite.
Actually, I heard a pretty argument that no debris produced by this could stay up for more than a few orbits. Basically, no matter what impulse you give to something at a certain point in its orbit, the new orbit and the old orbit will have that point in common. And that point is low enough in the atmosphere that any orbit crossing it will decay quickly.
In other words, the best you would get is a highly elliptical orbit that still crosses through the point of the explosion, but it will be circularized by the atmosphere. If a piece of debris is shot "upwards", than it will actually be in an orbit that includes an even lower point. That is, if it's moving upwards from the point, then during its next orbit, it will necessarily be below the point.
I saw a TV program that mentioned guided tank rounds, and they mentioned they were withstanding ~6000 Gs. So challenging, but not impossible.
I'm actually not convinced that gun ownership is the best idea, but I feel the need to call you out on this: grandparent is not suggesting every American should be armed. It is likely that at least some society, even if coincidentally, has experienced an increase in gun ownership and a decrease in murders. And you seem to equate gun ownership with the "right to kill each other." Wow.
You have a good faith belief that there was a risk, you report it to the authorities. They handle the situation by not verifying it and then causing a panic. Who's at fault there?
Why not just allow you to have a Geiger counter, but make it illegal tell anyone if you think it's showing a dangerous amount of radiation? Yes, that's stupid. But, assuming people follow these laws, it would have the same effect as banning them.
So, is it fun living in the Platonic realm of ideal solids, where pool games end in one turn, diodes capture thermal energy, and hard drives never crash?
Why not just build the wall a few feet from the house?
It doesn't make sense for a company to put its research in the public domain because it may lose profit to other companies that also implement it. That argument doesn't apply to the government, though, as it doesn't directly profit anyway.
I also want to point out that your statement that research is harder than implementation may be true for the biotech or medical industries, but isn't true for the computer industry.
You don't have a right to expect your cell phone will operate anywhere, but you do have a right to expect that it won't be actively interfered with, per the FCC's regulation of that band.
Are you sure that applies to 4-lane highways? It makes sense for a 2-lane road, where you want to get out of the left lane ASAP, but for highways, it just seems like a license to speed.
You know, if you weren't such a coward, you could just ask them to leave.
The source has to be in the preferred form for modification, and it has to include the install scripts, per the GPL. And it's pretty obvious that going out of their way to make it difficult is against the spirit of the license. Keep in mind that as a Linux distro, and not an OS monopoly, goodwill is actually important to them.