You're confusing two meanings of the word "good" here. There is the use of the word "good" as in "I have a good car" meaning you are satisfied with it's performance, capabilities, etc. You would not term the opposite of a good car an "evil" car (unless it's named Christine maybe). You might call it a "bad" car, or a "lemon" or maybe a POS even. However, the terms "good" and "evil" I'm referring to are regarding morality with "good" being positive morality and "evil" being negative.
As far as the whole Adam and Eve story, I don't even know how to respond, other than to say I respect your beliefs.
For myself, I have to believe that even it I were a snake-handling, rolling in the aisle, speaking in tongues fire and brimstone evangelical, I'd have a hard time taking that story literally. I can understand it as a parable or allegory, but the whole "Eve made out of Adam's rib, talking snake, apple eating" story is a bit hard for my feeble mind to accept literally.
If you are able to suppress your cognitive abilities enough to believe that literally, then I salute your faith.
In your example, both the atheist and the religious person are 'taking comfort' in a belief about death. Both of them fear it. The belief of your atheist is more totalitarian though - it admits no compromise with other possibilities. In that sense I don't see how that's different from the Christian who is certain they will go to heaven rather than to hell.
I agree with this 100%. But I was generalizing with the two extremes. A true atheist is just as sure there is no god as the Christian (or any theist) is sure there is. In this respect one is just as dogmatic as the other (in fact atheism can be considered a religion itself). Of course many people (I would hope most people who invest at least a little time into thinking about it) fall into a varying range between agnostic atheist (doesn't think there is a god, but does allow for the possibility) and agnostic theist (thinks there is a god, but allows that there "may not" be one).
I congratulate you on you faith and to a certain degree, envy you're assuredness of what will happen after death. Myself, well I just don't know what will happen, I don't think any one person has anymore insight into this than another. I was raised Christian and for the most part, agree with most of the important lessons of the faith (the lessons on morality) while I don't necessarily buy into the dogma. To me, how much fear and doubt one has when facing death has more to do with how content they are with the way they've lived their lives. Some part of human nature (most likely due to the evolutionary advantages it conveyed - IMHO), call it conscience or superego, tends to make us feel good about ourselves when we do good, and bad about ourselves when we do wrong, regardless of whether we subscribe to a religion or not. Another factor in how much one fears death (probably much more significant than education or faith), is how long they've lived and how hard their life has been. It seems to me as I've become more advanced in age myself that the thought of passing on seems much more comforting and less scary than it used to.
Sorry, but this is exactly the sort of double-talk that has always made me question religion. Reminds me of lawyer-speak, only more vague and deceptive. Whenever pressed on a hard question, this is the type of response I always get.
If God created everything, he created EVERYTHING. You can't have it both ways. If good and evil exist, how could he have created one without creating the other? Good and evil are opposites. Opposites exist only in relation to each other. If one thing is more "good" than something else, by definition it is less evil. If something is more "evil" than another thing, it is less "good". It's Yin and Yang.
You are free to redefine the English language to suit your argument, but that's all you'd be doing - redefining the language.
Where are these statistics? How are you defining religious? Please stop correlating education and atheism.
I do know the type you're talking about: the third year university student who thinks s/he knows it all and can replace religion with science. Religion is not science and science is not religion. There's no link between the two and people need to stop trying to "reconcile" them.
There simply isn't any way to disprove god and because of that, the existence of god is not something science will ever explore.
You want statitics? How about this study from MIT
^ Shermer, Michael (1999). How We Believe: Science, Skepticism, and the Search for God. New York: William H Freeman. pp.pp76–79. ISBN0-7167-3561-X.
Please don't shoot the
messenger. Now understand that because there is a corelation between education level and faith doesn't mean one is somehow more correct if they have a higher education. It simply indicated that higher education, especially in science or philosophy, values independent thought over faith. After all, how far would science progress if everyone just took what they were told on faith? As Einstien (a man of faith himself), once said, "question everything". I'm sorry if it offends your sensibilities, be intellectual curiosity tends to foster skepticism rather than blind faith.
it's because (statistically) the more educated, the less religious. While one would think that the religious person, hoping for life after death, would fear it less, I think the opposite is true. The atheist can take comfort in believing that everything just stops when you die, that is you just cease to exist - no pain, no awareness, no anything. A religious person who believes in the after life has to worry about whether they're going to heaven or hell, will it hurt when I'm dead and (for some) maybe even a little fear about the cracks in their faith (i.e. could I be wrong?)..
I don't know where you folks got your information, but that's not the story I heard. I'm not even religious, but at least I did pay a little attention when I was a kid.
There was no "God vs Devil" death-match as this thread suggests. My understanding was that God created "everything", both good and evil. It never was a matter of who would win, it was simply that good could not exist without evil.
The whole thing with Lucifer was about trying to get the other angels to follow "him" instead of God, not about kicking God's butt, which even he had the sense to know could not happen.
As I said, I'm certainly no Jesus freak (I tend to think Bill Maher has it about right), but folks, at least get the story straight.
So, being a US citizen here, and presently in the US, if I offer up a personal box, how much trouble am I in legally?
If I do get 'hauled in' what could I possibly be charged with?
As someone who isn't a US politician, I'm not equipped to fully answer your question. They're the ones with the power. They're the ones whose wrongdoings are being revealed. That's a really grim combination. I'm guessing that you're in exactly as much trouble as they decide and you'll be charged with whatever they feel like. Probably treason or some trumped up terrorism charge.
Understand this: patriotism in the US now means supporting the republicans, not the constitution.
The only thing you can do to protect yourself is educate as many fellow citizens as possible and vote for anyone who isn't in favor of the idiocy going on. If there are no non-idiot candidates left, frankly it's time to rebel. But that's just my opinion.
Same here. Hopefully simply commenting about comments about it won't cost me my job (maybe I should have posted as AC, but f*ck'em if they can't take a joke!).
The rationale (as I understand it) behind their position is that if I were to read the documents and then later be asked by someone (anyone) about information contained in the documents, any comment I made could be construed as representing the government's position. Pretty flimsy rational methinks. It definitely feels like a thinly veiled thread to me.
I guess this is the time when the veil's opened and we realize that the web designed by Tim Berners-Lee, is dead.
The Internet has stopped being the land of free-speech as we know it. At any time that corporate or government interests are against free speech, they just hit the political off-switch. If someone decides to install internet routers and domain systems in another country, expect that country to be labelled "terrorist" and invaded by those with power.
Expect peer-to-peer information sources and services to be outlawed. Guess the cyberpunks authors got it right after all.
I find the timing of the massive attempts to shutdown wikileaks at all costs curious (maybe it's just the conspiracy theorist in me). I have no doubt those in power were aware of the pending release of the Afganistan diaries in July. This dump contained information and videos embarrassing (to say the least) to the US, but no real attempt was made to block it's release. The next major dump (gablegate) was no doubt anticipated beforehand as well and we began seeing some moves afoot to try and block it's dissemination, but no "bring the hammer down and stop it at all costs before it gets out" effort. That seems to have changed last week. The government is now warning all military, civilian and contractors to not download and/or read the documents, or they might jeopardize their jobs (or worse). However, the documents are already out there and being reported on. It would seem a little late to try to put the genie back in the bottle, so what's going on here?
Could it be that the next announced major document dump , the so-called "banking information megadump" is the real dump that cannot be allowed to be made public? It's no secret that it's really the banks that control all governments, including the US (or so the conspiracy goes). I'm not sure how much stock to put in this conspiracy theory, but it does make a good deal of common sense that those with the money pull the levers.
You're taking this whole thing from an externalized perspective; but what about internalized? What if I did destroy the original organic copy? Would you wake up with an electronic brain? Or would an electronic brain that thinks it's you wake up elsewhere?
Easy. I would wake up with an electronic brain.
The essential question is, from your perspective, what is the difference between me shooting you in the head versus me copying you and THEN shooting you in the head? Sure, everyone else will see the copy and interact with it like you; yes, the copy will behave exactly like you; but you don't experience anyone else's life, and you won't experience the copy's.
That's the whole point. The copy would be "me". It wouldn't be anyone else's life, it would be mine. If you shot me in the head, but didn't make a copy first, I would cease to exist. I wouldn't know it, because I would no longer have a functioning brain to think with. My "mind" (aka "I") would no longer exist because it was merely the result of the processing going on in my now defunct brain.
That brings us back to the question of what consciousness is.
Conciousness is actually fairly well understood nowadays and doesn't really require any metephysical explanation.
Consciousness is simply a "state of attention" that is produced by the processes going on in the brain and is primarily a function of the hippocampus (a walnut sized kidney shaped organ deep in the center brain). Consciousness is merely the collection of thoughts that your brain is primarily focused on at any given moment, with the most pressing thoughts receiving the most attention. Think of it this way. Imagine you are absorbed in reading a book while walking down a flight of stairs, (assuming you are somewhat coordinated). The mechanics of walking down the steps will be managed somewhat automatically by lower priority thought processes and your attention will be focused on what you are reading - no problem. Now imagine that you miss a step. You immediately switch your attention from what you are reading to trying to catch yourself. What you were reading gets pushed down in priority and the hippocampus diverts all attention to the motor cortex so that you can try to keep from busting you ass (it also dumps copious amounts of adrenaline into your cortex so you can react quickly). This amounts to a radical reorganization of your thoughts. After you recover, it will take some time for the adrenaline to dissipate so that you can go back to focusing on your book.
If you try and recall what happened, it will seem almost as if the near fall happened to someone else. You will feel somewhat disconnected from it. This is because the "stream" of consciousness was broken and a new stream started. What this tells us is that (in the mind vs brain sense) there is no "you" or "me" in a static context, just like it's not possible to separate space and time. Who you are is constantly changing, with every modification of the synapses in your brain. Just as your mind underwent a major change when you almost fell, switching off from my organic brain into an electronic would result in the same sort of context switch, but I would still feel like "I" was "me".
It all depends on your definition of "real ai". AI is a broad term that applies to anything from a simple game of "Eliza" to giant cerebral cortext simulations. I see real progress in the 35 years I've studied the field, though apparently not a fast enough pace for our society of instant gratification. Human-level intelligence (maybe not such a high bar when you think about it) is fast approaching. http://www.forbes.com/2009/11/18/ibm-brain-science-technology-breakthroughs-supercomputer.html
In my view, it's advancing almost faster than society can handle it. Can you imagine what would happen in our society if someone built a truly intelligent machine that exceeded human capacity? It could scour the internet for information, acquiring knowledge what would take generations of humans to learn in a matter of hours, if not minutes. Would we need doctors and lawyers, or any sort of educated person anymore if we could just let our cyber-guru agent tell us what we should do? It's a pretty scary proposition if you think about it, especially when you see some of the decisions the uninformed masses have been making lately...
Now suppose I move your brain's data into another organic brain, electronic brain, or anything else of the source. Would you continue to "live"? Would YOU continue to live?
To make the point more clear, what if I made an identical copy and booted both at the same time. Do you suddenly develop a psychic link with your other self, experiencing both existences at once, living in two different places?... ridiculous.
No, not ridiculous, quite simple really. YOU would awaken once the switch was flipped to start the processing of your newly copied electronic brain. This new you would have the same memories/experiences you had when the snapshot of your organic brain was taken. Now, assuming your original organic brain was not instantly destroyed when the snapshot was taken and is still functioning, YOU would go on as if nothing happened. Your electronic brain "clone" would do the same, only from the very instant it became concious, it would begin deviating from the original because it would begin absorbing a separate set of experiences. If you were to, a while later, sit down an converse with your "clone", you would undoubtedly feel a tight kinship when it because of the share memories, but it would be a relationship more akin to a close twin. Basically, we are our memories, no soul or special spritual sauce required. While the idea of (at least momentarily) there being two "YOU"s with exactly the same memory might seem odd, if you think about it there's really nothing special about it. It's no different than my having two copies of the same file (in computer terms). It is exactly the same configuration of bits, even though it exists within two separate media locations. Once I alter even one bit however, it becomes a separate entity.
So you're bound to your brain. You cannot live forever unless your particular, specific, physical brain stays in tact. If I copy your brain to another cloned brain, yank yours out, and replace it with the clone, everyone else will interact with you as if you were you, no difference; but YOU would vanish into the blackness, you'd stop living, you'd die.
No, I don't so, anymore than receiving a heart transplant changes the way you feel about your loved ones. You'd continue on just as before, only you'd be "running" on a new brain. The same would be true if brain transplants were viable and your brain could be removed and placed in someone else's body. While your physical body would be different, the mind within your brain would still be you.
Your brain is simply the hardware that you are implemented with. If an exact copy of your brain structure, along with all neuruonal connections and states can be replicated and placed into another brain or electronic device it would, by all accounts be you. The difficulty in imagining this is the idea that somehow there is something special (spiritual) going on, and that "you" are somehow unique and separate from you physical implementation. When in reality it is just as you mentioned, just a configuration of chemical and electrical states and processes.
Keep in mind that neurons (and their related connections) have been dying and getting replaced your entire life. You are no longer the same set of cells you were when you were young, but you still feel like the same person (at least to a certain extent).
I'm 100% sure that at some point in the future (unless the human race dies off first), that the ability to do just what we're discussion will be possible. All these ideas I hve no problem accepting.
What I find fascinating is the implications of this new capability (far beyond the egotistical notion of immortality).
Assuming that one's "mind" can be converted and stored in electronic form, organic bodies would no longer be necessary since an electronic existence would be far less fragile. It would also mean that it could be simply transmitted as well. This would allow travel to distant regions of space (at the spe
By the middle of next year, our researchers will be working with thousands of candidate animats at once, all with slight variations in their brain architectures. Playing intelligent designers, we'll cull the best ones from the bunch and keep tweaking them until they unquestionably master tasks like the water maze and other, progressively harder experiments. We'll watch each of these simulated animats interacting with its environment and evolving like a natural organism. We expect to eventually find the "cocktail" of brain areas and connections that achieves autonomous intelligent behavior. We will then incorporate those elements into a memristor-based neural-processing chip. Once that chip is manufactured, we will build it into robotic platforms that venture into the real world.
Then, once they become self-aware, we can turn Arnold Schwarzenegger loose on them.
My apologies as well. I was absolutely miffed at the way I was attacked. Also, your right. I wouldn't consider a 250k household "Joe Moneybags", anymore that I would consider a 249K family "average joe". I'm talking in generalities here. However, one point you seem to have missed is that the 250k threshold is "taxable income". Assuming you are in this bracket, you probably have a hefty mortgage deduction, and probably some tax shelters. The reality is a family with 250k taxable income (if they are smart) probably have a gross income of 350-400k.
Also, the increased tax rate is only applied to the taxable income exceeding the 250k threshold. When you do the math, I really don't see an additional 4% tax on taxable income over 250k as that unbearable a burden - call me a moron if you will, I just don't think it will kill anyone. (BTW, you shouldn't assume that just because I think it's the right thing to do, that I'm not part of the >250k club myself). Warren Buffet has come out and said it's the right thing to do and he'll probably pay more tax as an individual than just about anyone else. Finally, I agree the CBO is rarely correct, and even if it is correct in this case, what they estimated probably won't look anything like what is actually implemented (for better or worse). However, I stand by my position. Providing preventative care with the hope of reducing E/R care is the correct strategy, whether it's winds up costing more or less. It's just the right thing to do. You are correct, no one is turned away at the hospital for emergency care. However, if they do have to go there and they don't have insurance, their next stop is probably going to be at the lawyers office to file for bankruptcy because NO ONE can afford E/R care without insurance.
Slashdot Mirror
Masturbating to a video of Steve Jobs on your iPhone doesn't count.
You're confusing two meanings of the word "good" here. There is the use of the word "good" as in "I have a good car" meaning you are satisfied with it's performance, capabilities, etc. You would not term the opposite of a good car an "evil" car (unless it's named Christine maybe). You might call it a "bad" car, or a "lemon" or maybe a POS even.
However, the terms "good" and "evil" I'm referring to are regarding morality with "good" being positive morality and "evil" being negative.
As far as the whole Adam and Eve story, I don't even know how to respond, other than to say I respect your beliefs.
For myself, I have to believe that even it I were a snake-handling, rolling in the aisle, speaking in tongues fire and brimstone evangelical, I'd have a hard time taking that story literally. I can understand it as a parable or allegory, but the whole "Eve made out of Adam's rib, talking snake, apple eating" story is a bit hard for my feeble mind to accept literally.
If you are able to suppress your cognitive abilities enough to believe that literally, then I salute your faith.
You "girly-man" iPhone toting guys... be a real man and get an Andriod phone ;P
This sounds an episode of CSI...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hkDD03yeLnU
In your example, both the atheist and the religious person are 'taking comfort' in a belief about death. Both of them fear it. The belief of your atheist is more totalitarian though - it admits no compromise with other possibilities. In that sense I don't see how that's different from the Christian who is certain they will go to heaven rather than to hell.
I agree with this 100%. But I was generalizing with the two extremes. A true atheist is just as sure there is no god as the Christian (or any theist) is sure there is. In this respect one is just as dogmatic as the other (in fact atheism can be considered a religion itself). Of course many people (I would hope most people who invest at least a little time into thinking about it) fall into a varying range between agnostic atheist (doesn't think there is a god, but does allow for the possibility) and agnostic theist (thinks there is a god, but allows that there "may not" be one).
I congratulate you on you faith and to a certain degree, envy you're assuredness of what will happen after death. Myself, well I just don't know what will happen, I don't think any one person has anymore insight into this than another.
I was raised Christian and for the most part, agree with most of the important lessons of the faith (the lessons on morality) while I don't necessarily buy into the dogma.
To me, how much fear and doubt one has when facing death has more to do with how content they are with the way they've lived their lives. Some part of human nature (most likely due to the evolutionary advantages it conveyed - IMHO), call it conscience or superego, tends to make us feel good about ourselves when we do good, and bad about ourselves when we do wrong, regardless of whether we subscribe to a religion or not.
Another factor in how much one fears death (probably much more significant than education or faith), is how long they've lived and how hard their life has been. It seems to me as I've become more advanced in age myself that the thought of passing on seems much more comforting and less scary than it used to.
Sorry, but this is exactly the sort of double-talk that has always made me question religion. Reminds me of lawyer-speak, only more vague and deceptive.
Whenever pressed on a hard question, this is the type of response I always get.
If God created everything, he created EVERYTHING. You can't have it both ways. If good and evil exist, how could he have created one without creating the other? Good and evil are opposites. Opposites exist only in relation to each other. If one thing is more "good" than something else, by definition it is less evil. If something is more "evil" than another thing, it is less "good". It's Yin and Yang.
You are free to redefine the English language to suit your argument, but that's all you'd be doing - redefining the language.
no DMCA notice yet .
There. Fixed that for ya....
infringement or not?
Big corporate vs small time developer.
Right vs wrong has nothing to do with it.
It boils down to high-powered legal team vs "can't afford a lawyer". Case closed. On to the next story...
Where are these statistics? How are you defining religious? Please stop correlating education and atheism.
I do know the type you're talking about: the third year university student who thinks s/he knows it all and can replace religion with science. Religion is not science and science is not religion. There's no link between the two and people need to stop trying to "reconcile" them.
There simply isn't any way to disprove god and because of that, the existence of god is not something science will ever explore.
You want statitics? How about this study from MIT
^ Shermer, Michael (1999). How We Believe: Science, Skepticism, and the Search for God. New York: William H Freeman. pp.pp76–79. ISBN0-7167-3561-X.
Please don't shoot the messenger.
Now understand that because there is a corelation between education level and faith doesn't mean one is somehow more correct if they have a higher education. It simply indicated that higher education, especially in science or philosophy, values independent thought over faith. After all, how far would science progress if everyone just took what they were told on faith? As Einstien (a man of faith himself), once said, "question everything".
I'm sorry if it offends your sensibilities, be intellectual curiosity tends to foster skepticism rather than blind faith.
it's because (statistically) the more educated, the less religious. While one would think that the religious person, hoping for life after death, would fear it less, I think the opposite is true. The atheist can take comfort in believing that everything just stops when you die, that is you just cease to exist - no pain, no awareness, no anything. A religious person who believes in the after life has to worry about whether they're going to heaven or hell, will it hurt when I'm dead and (for some) maybe even a little fear about the cracks in their faith (i.e. could I be wrong?)..
I don't know where you folks got your information, but that's not the story I heard. I'm not even religious, but at least I did pay a little attention when I was a kid.
There was no "God vs Devil" death-match as this thread suggests. My understanding was that God created "everything", both good and evil. It never was a matter of who would win, it was simply that good could not exist without evil.
The whole thing with Lucifer was about trying to get the other angels to follow "him" instead of God, not about kicking God's butt, which even he had the sense to know could not happen.
As I said, I'm certainly no Jesus freak (I tend to think Bill Maher has it about right), but folks, at least get the story straight.
Is Windows written by a bunch of C# programming neophytes living in Steve Balmer's basement or huddled together in Delhi, India dormitories?
C++ programming cultists often write in C.
So, being a US citizen here, and presently in the US, if I offer up a personal box, how much trouble am I in legally?
If I do get 'hauled in' what could I possibly be charged with?
As someone who isn't a US politician, I'm not equipped to fully answer your question. They're the ones with the power. They're the ones whose wrongdoings are being revealed. That's a really grim combination. I'm guessing that you're in exactly as much trouble as they decide and you'll be charged with whatever they feel like. Probably treason or some trumped up terrorism charge.
Understand this: patriotism in the US now means supporting the republicans , not the constitution.
The only thing you can do to protect yourself is educate as many fellow citizens as possible and vote for anyone who isn't in favor of the idiocy going on. If there are no non-idiot candidates left, frankly it's time to rebel. But that's just my opinion.
There, fixed that for ya...
Same here. Hopefully simply commenting about comments about it won't cost me my job (maybe I should have posted as AC, but f*ck'em if they can't take a joke!).
The rationale (as I understand it) behind their position is that if I were to read the documents and then later be asked by someone (anyone) about information contained in the documents, any comment I made could be construed as representing the government's position. Pretty flimsy rational methinks. It definitely feels like a thinly veiled thread to me.
I guess this is the time when the veil's opened and we realize that the web designed by Tim Berners-Lee, is dead.
The Internet has stopped being the land of free-speech as we know it. At any time that corporate or government interests are against free speech, they just hit the political off-switch. If someone decides to install internet routers and domain systems in another country, expect that country to be labelled "terrorist" and invaded by those with power.
Expect peer-to-peer information sources and services to be outlawed. Guess the cyberpunks authors got it right after all.
There's still freenet! http://freenetproject.org/
I find the timing of the massive attempts to shutdown wikileaks at all costs curious (maybe it's just the conspiracy theorist in me). I have no doubt those in power were aware of the pending release of the Afganistan diaries in July. This dump contained information and videos embarrassing (to say the least) to the US, but no real attempt was made to block it's release. The next major dump (gablegate) was no doubt anticipated beforehand as well and we began seeing some moves afoot to try and block it's dissemination, but no "bring the hammer down and stop it at all costs before it gets out" effort. That seems to have changed last week. The government is now warning all military, civilian and contractors to not download and/or read the documents, or they might jeopardize their jobs (or worse). However, the documents are already out there and being reported on. It would seem a little late to try to put the genie back in the bottle, so what's going on here?
Could it be that the next announced major document dump , the so-called "banking information megadump" is the real dump that cannot be allowed to be made public? It's no secret that it's really the banks that control all governments, including the US (or so the conspiracy goes). I'm not sure how much stock to put in this conspiracy theory, but it does make a good deal of common sense that those with the money pull the levers.
I does make one wonder - I'm just sayin'
You're taking this whole thing from an externalized perspective; but what about internalized? What if I did destroy the original organic copy? Would you wake up with an electronic brain? Or would an electronic brain that thinks it's you wake up elsewhere?
Easy. I would wake up with an electronic brain.
The essential question is, from your perspective, what is the difference between me shooting you in the head versus me copying you and THEN shooting you in the head? Sure, everyone else will see the copy and interact with it like you; yes, the copy will behave exactly like you; but you don't experience anyone else's life, and you won't experience the copy's.
That's the whole point. The copy would be "me". It wouldn't be anyone else's life, it would be mine. If you shot me in the head, but didn't make a copy first, I would cease to exist. I wouldn't know it, because I would no longer have a functioning brain to think with. My "mind" (aka "I") would no longer exist because it was merely the result of the processing going on in my now defunct brain.
That brings us back to the question of what consciousness is.
Conciousness is actually fairly well understood nowadays and doesn't really require any metephysical explanation.
Consciousness is simply a "state of attention" that is produced by the processes going on in the brain and is primarily a function of the hippocampus (a walnut sized kidney shaped organ deep in the center brain). Consciousness is merely the collection of thoughts that your brain is primarily focused on at any given moment, with the most pressing thoughts receiving the most attention.
Think of it this way. Imagine you are absorbed in reading a book while walking down a flight of stairs, (assuming you are somewhat coordinated). The mechanics of walking down the steps will be managed somewhat automatically by lower priority thought processes and your attention will be focused on what you are reading - no problem. Now imagine that you miss a step. You immediately switch your attention from what you are reading to trying to catch yourself. What you were reading gets pushed down in priority and the hippocampus diverts all attention to the motor cortex so that you can try to keep from busting you ass (it also dumps copious amounts of adrenaline into your cortex so you can react quickly). This amounts to a radical reorganization of your thoughts. After you recover, it will take some time for the adrenaline to dissipate so that you can go back to focusing on your book.
If you try and recall what happened, it will seem almost as if the near fall happened to someone else. You will feel somewhat disconnected from it. This is because the "stream" of consciousness was broken and a new stream started. What this tells us is that (in the mind vs brain sense) there is no "you" or "me" in a static context, just like it's not possible to separate space and time. Who you are is constantly changing, with every modification of the synapses in your brain. Just as your mind underwent a major change when you almost fell, switching off from my organic brain into an electronic would result in the same sort of context switch, but I would still feel like "I" was "me".
It all depends on your definition of "real ai". AI is a broad term that applies to anything from a simple game of "Eliza" to giant cerebral cortext simulations.
I see real progress in the 35 years I've studied the field, though apparently not a fast enough pace for our society of instant gratification. Human-level intelligence (maybe not such a high bar when you think about it) is fast approaching.
http://www.forbes.com/2009/11/18/ibm-brain-science-technology-breakthroughs-supercomputer.html
In my view, it's advancing almost faster than society can handle it. Can you imagine what would happen in our society if someone built a truly intelligent machine that exceeded human capacity? It could scour the internet for information, acquiring knowledge what would take generations of humans to learn in a matter of hours, if not minutes. Would we need doctors and lawyers, or any sort of educated person anymore if we could just let our cyber-guru agent tell us what we should do? It's a pretty scary proposition if you think about it, especially when you see some of the decisions the uninformed masses have been making lately...
THEY CAN'T EVEN MIMICK A GNAT'S BRAIN.
Methinks you are a little, shall we say, "out of the loop"?
http://www.forbes.com/2009/11/18/ibm-brain-science-technology-breakthroughs-supercomputer.html
We've long passed a gnat's brain and will probably reach primate brain equivalence within a couple of years.
Now suppose I move your brain's data into another organic brain, electronic brain, or anything else of the source. Would you continue to "live"? Would YOU continue to live?
To make the point more clear, what if I made an identical copy and booted both at the same time. Do you suddenly develop a psychic link with your other self, experiencing both existences at once, living in two different places? ... ridiculous.
No, not ridiculous, quite simple really. YOU would awaken once the switch was flipped to start the processing of your newly copied electronic brain. This new you would have the same memories/experiences you had when the snapshot of your organic brain was taken. Now, assuming your original organic brain was not instantly destroyed when the snapshot was taken and is still functioning, YOU would go on as if nothing happened. Your electronic brain "clone" would do the same, only from the very instant it became concious, it would begin deviating from the original because it would begin absorbing a separate set of experiences. If you were to, a while later, sit down an converse with your "clone", you would undoubtedly feel a tight kinship when it because of the share memories, but it would be a relationship more akin to a close twin. Basically, we are our memories, no soul or special spritual sauce required. While the idea of (at least momentarily) there being two "YOU"s with exactly the same memory might seem odd, if you think about it there's really nothing special about it. It's no different than my having two copies of the same file (in computer terms). It is exactly the same configuration of bits, even though it exists within two separate media locations. Once I alter even one bit however, it becomes a separate entity.
So you're bound to your brain. You cannot live forever unless your particular, specific, physical brain stays in tact. If I copy your brain to another cloned brain, yank yours out, and replace it with the clone, everyone else will interact with you as if you were you, no difference; but YOU would vanish into the blackness, you'd stop living, you'd die.
No, I don't so, anymore than receiving a heart transplant changes the way you feel about your loved ones. You'd continue on just as before, only you'd be "running" on a new brain. The same would be true if brain transplants were viable and your brain could be removed and placed in someone else's body. While your physical body would be different, the mind within your brain would still be you.
Your brain is simply the hardware that you are implemented with. If an exact copy of your brain structure, along with all neuruonal connections and states can be replicated and placed into another brain or electronic device it would, by all accounts be you. The difficulty in imagining this is the idea that somehow there is something special (spiritual) going on, and that "you" are somehow unique and separate from you physical implementation. When in reality it is just as you mentioned, just a configuration of chemical and electrical states and processes.
Keep in mind that neurons (and their related connections) have been dying and getting replaced your entire life. You are no longer the same set of cells you were when you were young, but you still feel like the same person (at least to a certain extent).
I'm 100% sure that at some point in the future (unless the human race dies off first), that the ability to do just what we're discussion will be possible. All these ideas I hve no problem accepting.
What I find fascinating is the implications of this new capability (far beyond the egotistical notion of immortality).
Assuming that one's "mind" can be converted and stored in electronic form, organic bodies would no longer be necessary since an electronic existence would be far less fragile. It would also mean that it could be simply transmitted as well. This would allow travel to distant regions of space (at the spe
By the middle of next year, our researchers will be working with thousands of candidate animats at once, all with slight variations in their brain architectures. Playing intelligent designers, we'll cull the best ones from the bunch and keep tweaking them until they unquestionably master tasks like the water maze and other, progressively harder experiments. We'll watch each of these simulated animats interacting with its environment and evolving like a natural organism. We expect to eventually find the "cocktail" of brain areas and connections that achieves autonomous intelligent behavior. We will then incorporate those elements into a memristor-based neural-processing chip. Once that chip is manufactured, we will build it into robotic platforms that venture into the real world.
Then, once they become self-aware, we can turn Arnold Schwarzenegger loose on them.
make the money off of the games they sell, not off of the units they produce... uh wait..
My apologies as well. I was absolutely miffed at the way I was attacked.
Also, your right. I wouldn't consider a 250k household "Joe Moneybags", anymore that I would consider a 249K family "average joe". I'm talking in generalities here.
However, one point you seem to have missed is that the 250k threshold is "taxable income". Assuming you are in this bracket, you probably have a hefty mortgage deduction, and probably some tax shelters. The reality is a family with 250k taxable income (if they are smart) probably have a gross income of 350-400k.
Also, the increased tax rate is only applied to the taxable income exceeding the 250k threshold. When you do the math, I really don't see an additional 4% tax on taxable income over 250k as that unbearable a burden - call me a moron if you will, I just don't think it will kill anyone. (BTW, you shouldn't assume that just because I think it's the right thing to do, that I'm not part of the >250k club myself). Warren Buffet has come out and said it's the right thing to do and he'll probably pay more tax as an individual than just about anyone else.
Finally, I agree the CBO is rarely correct, and even if it is correct in this case, what they estimated probably won't look anything like what is actually implemented (for better or worse). However, I stand by my position. Providing preventative care with the hope of reducing E/R care is the correct strategy, whether it's winds up costing more or less. It's just the right thing to do. You are correct, no one is turned away at the hospital for emergency care. However, if they do have to go there and they don't have insurance, their next stop is probably going to be at the lawyers office to file for bankruptcy because NO ONE can afford E/R care without insurance.