...virtualization's problems can include cost accounting (measurement, allocation, license compliance); human issues (politics, skills, training); vendor support (lack of license flexibility); management complexity; security (new threats and penetrations, lack of controls); and image and license proliferation.
Examine that quote from the article closely. See anything there that indicates virtualization "doesn't work"? No, nor do I. What they are talking about here has nothing to do with how well virtualization works, what they're complaining about is that a particular tool requires competence to use well in various work environments. Well, no one ever said that virtualization would gift brains to some middle level manager, or teach anyone how to use an office suite, or imbue morals and ethics into those who would steal; virtualization lets you run an operating system in a sandbox, sometimes under another operating system entirely. And it does that perfectly well, or in other words, it works very well indeed. I call FUD.
An action resulting from false information is usually in good faith and with no knowledge of any error.
What this attitude does is excuses the action-taker from responsibility. If you are going to take action, you should be sure that you are doing the right thing. That means you are responsible for your actions. In business, this is called "due diligence", in other words, if a decision is to be made (an action taken) then the company has the responsibility to learn all about the consequences, justify the cause, etc. People are no better. If someone tells you A, then it is your responsibility to verify A before you act on it; it is certainly no one else's responsibility to bear the brunt of the effects of your actions. Every step the law, or society takes that exonerates people from the consequences of actions they chose to take is a step in the wrong direction. IMHO.
The operator could not have referenced any other material since it isn't required to be correct as there are no consequences for false information.
This is nonsense. The operator should not lift a finger until they are sure they know what they are doing. Because they are responsible for their actions. The action is the problem. Not the words.
A contract is just "speech" which two parties use to plan their actions
You can say anything you want in a contract; there is no restriction on free speech in such a document. That's all I argue for. Your argument that a signed, witnessed agreement isn't binding under law for free speech reasons is not of interest to me, though I will say I don't agree.
For society to function we agreed to give up some of our rights to protect each other. One of the rights we decided to give up is the right to deceive each other because we agreed that society functions better if we can trust each other and punish those who abuse that.
I made no such agreement; I signed no such agreement; I have been party to no such agreement. Just so we're 100% clear. This "we" you speak of does not include me. Nor does it include anyone else I know; I can't say I've ever met anyone who has mentioned being party to such an agreement, nor does my observation of society support the idea that such an agreement exists. People lie all the time. All the time. Claiming otherwise is disingenuous.
If someone lies to you in a way that causes damage to you (e.g. "the brakes work fine" when really the brakes fail once you go over 60mph) he is liable for that, thus creating a strong incentive to be truthful.
You are responsible for the magnified actions of yours taken by machines you operate. You should verify your machine works properly before you operate it. If you don't, you have no business operating it. It is just that simple. Personal responsibility. Certainly you should test your steering, brakes, tire inflation, know your lubrication status, and bearing wear before you drive. Why should you be excused from this? I can't think of a single reason. Blaming other people is the game of those who duck responsibility. Know what you're doing; know why you're doing it; know what the consequences are; understand the risks. Not the risks you'd prefer to take, but the actual risks.
What is written down, yes. Unfortunately the language is hardly unambiguous and judges are needed to interpret what it applies to and what not. In Common Law that interpretation then becomes law so if a judge says "porn isn't speech" that means porn isn't speech.
Let me give you an example: the 1st amendment, in full, emphasis mine:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or th
Everything that you accept as true in science, but have not personally verified, involves a certain "leap of faith" on your part.
No - really, it doesn't. All it requires is that I have a reasonable amount of confidence in the process. The reason why this is so is because I can, if I so choose, verify the results myself, or arrange to have them verified. This is because science deals with the natural world and all science involves consensual experience. This applies directly to your example, and yes, it does show why you are well advised to place your confidence in the scientific process. It was the scientific process that unmasked the fraud.
Confidence is not faith. Faith requires that you accept things where no proof is forthcoming, no matter if you would like to go find it, or not. If I tell you there is a Santa Claus, I can't prove it; you must take it on faith. If I tell you there is a planet such as mars at such-and-such an orbit, you can go out at night and look for yourself. After you find it, look at it in a telescope, monitor its orbit, and send a spacecraft there, you will have high confidence that in fact, there was a planet there. Confidence is a measured response to assertions you can verify, coming to you through the natural world. Faith is a leap taken based upon stories you have been told or which were created out of your own imagination, which have no "handle" in reality by which they may be consensually shared, verified, tested, and re-tested.
Science, I like to say, is a "confidence-building scheme" in the non-pejorative sense. That is its purpose. To collect information and models that create an ever-growing, interlocked net of concepts that by virtue of the filter (the scientific method) are strong candidates once they reach the level of theory, and which buttress each idea that they interlock with throughout the rest of science.
Science can certainly be manipulated for the purpose of defrauding people. As can faith. But science, by its very nature, cannot hide such fraud - the very first time an attempt is made to reproduce false results, the other shoe drops. Faith, in sharp contrast, can hide fraud forever. The value of faith as a tool for managing information and models of how the world works is consequently very, very low.
In the end, you do have to trust somebody
No. You don't. You can test things for yourself; the scientific process is not one way, as it is with faith.
Thanks for the English pointer. I'll be after that.
1. Do you define anything as speech that comes out of a mouth (or pen or key board or...)? A problem is that we assume that speech is used to communicate information and communicating false information can cause severe damage, both economic and physical, to other people.
Yes. Speech, writings, radio, telephone, telegraph, videos - all human-to-human communications. At the time this amendment was penned, they had print/written and they had speech, and that was it. The 1st addressed print and speech; the generalization to all human communications is, to me, obvious and natural. With regard to your statement that "communicating false information can cause severe damage" I disagree. In all communications that are human to human, the only way damage can occur is if the receiving human takes action. If we are to have laws, they must be against actions taken, not communications made. I believe there is absolutely no reasonable, ethical case for stifling speech of any kind, under any circumstances. Actions are something else again. If I say you are a twit, nothing has happened but vibrating air. If you choose to act, you must be responsible for that act. If you act in such a way as to cause harm, then you should be liable for that harm. Speech never, ever causes harm, given only that it is not presented at such a level that the communication itself damages your sensory apparatus.
Acts like fraud usually involve promising things you don't fulfill.
Contracts require action; they fall under actions taken or not taken. Verbal contracts should not, in my opinion, be enforceable. For many reasons.
Does freedom of speech mean that there cannot be consequences for anything you say
That's exactly what it should mean.
No consequences means no accountability which in turn means that speech cannot be trusted.
Precisely - the fact is, speech cannot be trusted. The examples demonstrating this are literally endless.
Since speech is often interpreted as referring to any communication the lack of accountability would mean we could no longer communicate with any form of insurance that people are saying the truth.
The fact is, we can't do that now, and we never could do it. Whether we will be able to even come close to doing it in the future will depend on technologies that can reliably detect whether an individual believes what they are saying to be the truth; even so, that isn't the same as them actually telling the truth in many cases. Some people honestly believe in elves and faeries; if you asked them if that flash of light was a faery, they'd tell you the truth as they understand it: "Sure it was." Such technologies do not exist at this time, though there are hints in that direction.
5. The issue with subjective values in assessing values is that you can't really put a price on them and it leaves too much leeway to whoever is in charge of assessing them with no way to review the decision.
The actual issue is that the value of the land may legitimately be more than the government can afford or be willing to pay, and much higher than that which an appraiser might set. The entire premise of appraising land is based on the idea that the owner wishes to sell. When that precondition does not obtain, no appraiser can provide an accurate number for value, because it is the value to the owner that we are talking about. Not the value to a thief or thieves. Eminent domain is intellectually and financially dishonest from first principles. Coercion of non-criminal citizens is not a valid function of government.
Remember that Common Law dictates that the interpretation of a law by a judge is effectively a new law so
What I'm trying to get across is that his belief in religion is based in the same logic as your belief in science.
I know what you're trying to get across; but your base presumption, that the filter of the scientific method is of equal value as the filter of "gee, that's a nice story" in getting things into your brain and pulling them out again or using them to proceed forward inductively, is insufficient to the task of holding up the rest of your argument. The data - human technological progress - show that science works, and works well. It shows the opposite for religion. So regardless of your idea that once in the mind, all things are of equal value because they depend upon memory, the facts reveal that the situation is not at all balanced. I don't need to derive everything myself, as I have done a fair amount of that, scattered across a broad spectrum of science, and statistically speaking, my results were what everyone else's result were. This allows for a high level of confidence, similar to that which I feel when I step onto an apparently well-maintained bridge and do not expect to plunge through it. It is based on consistent experience and an understanding of why that experience has manifested in the way that it has. I didn't say that science was perfect all the time (in fact I carefully said otherwise) but by and large, science is rock solid and a very appropriate place to stand, intellectually speaking.
Faith is not the same as confidence. Faith is blind; it requires no facts whatsoever. Confidence is built upon experience and the ability of the thinker to predict an outcome based upon past experience. I don't use faith as a mental model; it is bereft of value.
With regard to AI and my observation that the ability to set up a situation and stop learning resembles religious behavior, I don't think you have a valid point to make, again because your base assumption is incorrect. The world isn't some flaky place that changes every time we turn around. It is a dependable environment that follows rules and contains real objects. Books say just what they said when you pick them up the second time as they did the first time. Experiments give the same results within the boundaries of accuracy they are intended to process. It isn't all about memory, it isn't all about trust - anyone can test anything at any time, pretty much, and most high schoolers and college folk re-do many classic experiments and get those same answers over and over again. At higher levels, the number of people re-testing shrinks dramatically, but it is still enough to ensure the method is in place and working. Science is the optimum method to observe, analyze, and filter what almost everything we learn about this world because as a method, it presumes this is the case and all of its steps address issues that way. For AI, science, as compared to my observation about religion, is a better model for almost anything because science can increase or restart learning about something based upon new evidence (or any, considering there is none whatsoever for religion.) This is the path to correctness, accuracy, and the ability to mesh well with other information - or perhaps you would simply call it some level of truth. We might want to give AI a "religion" that says things like Asimov's "don't hurt the humans" rules, something they can't adjust under any circumstances, but then again, if the human is trying to hurt them... it's an interesting issue, luckily one we don't have to face quite yet.
When people try to make points like yours, that the mind is an ephemeral residence for information and that our knowledge of the world is vague, temporary and inaccurate, on a par with religion in scope or utility, I just point at the space shuttle, microprocessors, genetic engineering, and a host of other accomplishments that would in no wise be possible if that were true. Now, I'd be willing to stipulate that your mind may be a messy, unreliable place where science theory == religious story, but even if that is the case, you cannot reasonably presume such a sad state applies to everyone else.:-)
The problem is that you are assuming there is some difference between the knowledge you hold about science and the knowledge a religious person knows about religion.
That's not a problem; that's a fact.
Science is a method that produces information and models that can be repeatedly tested in the natural world, not only by the originator of the idea, but by anyone to whom the idea is transferred. Likewise, should a new test be created that causes the model to fail or the data to become a poor or impossible fit with a model, that test can be transferred back and the model adjusted or discarded. Consequently, science suffers contradicting ideas only during the situation where all data sets pass all tests and the models make 100% accurate predictions. Consensuality is the heart of science; one person's ideas are enhanced by the ability of every other person to duplicate, test and use those ideas for prediction. The confirmation of this is, of course, the huge strides science has made in moving forward. Science regularly provides very useful answers to the questions "how" and "why" and "does" with regard to questions characterized by our having the ability to put our hands and instruments and minds to the situation of interest.
What a person "knows" about religion consists of ideas they created or adopted; ideas that have no means of testing consensually and therefore no means of becoming more or less accurate. There are many religions, each claims the literal "truth", and these religions contradict each other in fundamental ways that clearly indicate that at least one of them is very wrong. But, because there is no way to test religion's ideas, no predictions made by religions ideas, no data accumulated from supernatural events (because there aren't any, of course) there is no way for these ideas to grow, refine, or be discarded. Religion can prove nothing; generates no new information; and cannot answer any question about the real world.
These two radically different situations highlight the huge difference between science and religion. This is why your statement is completely wrong-headed.
The same principal that prevents him from converting to another religion (faith) is the same idea that prevents you from suddenly believing that the sun revolves around the earth
No. It isn't. A great deal of evidence in the natural world indicates that the sun revolves around the earth; no evidence indicates otherwise. It is a highly testable proposition, and it has survived all such tests, and consensually speaking, we of the scientific community can agree that we all see the meaning of the results of those tests the same way. So we can have very high confidence in this particular description of the natural world. A very formal process underlies such knowledge; a process that will label the information as wrong if anything happens that makes the data, or the model, suspect. Survival of the process is the strongest indicator we can have that we have as accurate as possible model of what is actually going on given the ability to observe the data we possess at the moment, which is considerable.
As to whether (for example) Kali or Jehovah more closely represents a godhead that is not mythical, there is no evidence whatsoever to guide a choice; no tests can be performed, no results can be examined, no god may be interviewed, tested or otherwise probed to guide such a choice. Neither putative godhead performs acts in the natural world that can be examined or pointed to. So the only thing left is stories created or adopted without recourse to facts, the opinion of the tribe, the pressures of the community; all religious choices such as you suggest come down to these in the end. Sticking to such a choice is done because behavior has been learned and change would challenge not only the original pressures, but the stories one has decided to believe. Changing from one to another is usually done becau
If by "unshakable faith" you mean the ability to do the right thing 100% of the time without ever thinking to do the wrong thing
No, I was thinking more along the lines of after the Turin shroud was dated to a much more recent period than the time when Christ's death is written to have occurred, a good sized chunk of the Christian community went right on believing it was contemporary with that time. I was thinking about children being trained in religion, and being unable to escape those myths as adults, regardless of the complete dearth of evidence. I was thinking of scientists who, when faced with the overwhelming evidence that all brain activity is supported by electrical, chemical, and biological activity, and that brain activity correlates 100% with what we think and react, and when we think and react, still think "they" are "going to heaven" when they die.
There is an even simpler truth that underlies all this; you and I, using nothing but our brains and what we've learned, can multiply 7 times 9 in our heads and get the right answer. Computer methods can do that, and far faster and more reliably than we can - though they certainly don't do it the same way. At least most of us don't convert to binary and use ALUs.:-)
The task, however, is useful because it is well accomplished. Nothing in particular that is very exciting is presented to neuroscience, but that is not to say that accomplishing the task another way was was not useful - it certainly was!
The same applies here. If the idea works as described, then no matter if it represents what our brains do or not, it will be useful. It doesn't have to (a) describe us or (b) feed any particular science more information. It just has to be a metaphor that can be made to work, or perhaps lead to more insight that will be useful in its own domain, which is not neuroscience, but simply computational AI.
I really don't think they deserve any slack, particularly Minsky. There were huge personal issues, they published an outright attack based on Minsky's emotional bias (it certainly wasn't based on the facts, because they weren't in possession of them), they didn't do any testing of the claims they made, and they were wrong. Their results affected research for years in the wrong direction. It was a bone-headed stunt with nothing about it that redeems it. I watched it happen; it seemed vindictive and puerile then, and it doesn't look any better today.
By the way, you didn't say what you like about the US constitution, I'd be interested in knowing what you consider the most important parts of that.
First, thanks for the info on the German constitution. Very interesting. I'll have to see if I can dig up an English-language version.
With regard to the US constitution, the first thing I should say (though I think I've already been pretty clear about this) is that I value what the constitution says - not how our sad, degenerate excuse for a government has "interpreted" it.
The obvious place to start for me is the bill of rights; amendments 1 through ten, and the 14th amendment which is used to apply those ten amendments to the states and, theoretically, keep them from doing anything that violates the ten as well as the federal government.
1; freedom of religion, press, and expression. This amendment is unequivocal; free speech is protected. No ifs, no ands, no buts, no "in a crowded theaters", no "at a funerals", no "at a political rally", no "libel", no nothing. Protected. Period. No exceptions. That is something I admire, and something I support wholeheartedly. The government has ignored the constitutional requirements and is operating illegitimately. That I do not admire.
2; Right to bear arms. This is in two phases; a justification, and a statement. The justification, it seems to me, is partial. The statement, however, is unequivocal, and offers up no exceptions. All US citizens have the right to bear arms. No limits on size, effectiveness, or who may bear. I support this but feel that it needs amending; I think when the arms are larger than you can use to defend property you own, they're too large (and you could bring in a technical quibble as well... you can't "bear" a JSOW, for instance.) But I think we should all be armed with at the very least, rifles and pistols, and I think that the amendment was prescient in the sense that right now, the government ought to have those weapons pointed right at its collective noses until they back down and obey the constituting authority, the constitution itself.
3; not a modern issue
4; search and seizure. Good idea; not strong enough, but a good idea. Needs amending to make stronger. Of course, the government has long ago abandoned it even as written.
5; trial and punishment, compensation for takings: hot spot for me. The compensation section needs a complete rewrite. I could go on about this for hours, but basically, the "market value" of a home or property is not sufficient unless you can show that the owner of the property set that price themselves. You can't value a centuries old family homestead by counting its square feet; you can't value where your children were born and raised by the view, and you can't value where you learned at your father's knee by the opinion of some suit from a land office. Trial and punishment is a decent system, not perfect, but unfortunately, like everything else, the government has abandoned it and now pursues a caricature.
6, 7 and 8; Just like 5. Good ideas, not being used, followed or otherwise respected.
9 and 10; these were such great ideas, I can hardly contain myself. Unfortunately, the feds do everything they can to destroy it. Examples: The commerce clause, designed to control commerce between the states, is being used to crush state autonomy on subjects like drugs. Speed limits are forced into uniformity by the feds by using mafia-like bribery tactics - either comply, or we'll cut funding to your state (thus threatening the entire state economy.) Etc. The feds are thugs, using thuglike approaches.
So what we have here is a document that I greatly admire, but which has been plowed under by criminal activities in the federal, and to a more limited extent, state governments. There are lots of other points I think are well thought out, I really don't have time to go into why things like forbidding ex post facto activities are important - or how deeply the government has violated those ideas. But suffice it to say, I think that for the time, the document is extraordinarily well thought out. If we were actually following it, I think we'd be a lot better off.
Oh, I do have strange "beliefs", if you'd measure them, as most would, by comparing them to the majority outlook. In fact, I try not to have any at all, preferring a confidence-based outlook derived from consensual evidence. So my beliefs... yes, strange or non-existent. You're certainly spot-on about that.:-) The rest, not so much. But you are certainly welcome to your opinion; there's no rule that I know of that says you have to be correct in order to speak out.
If that were the case then elephants and whales would be much more intelligent than we are.
That's an entirely invalid simplification. There are large variations on structure, on sensory input, etc between species. Any one of which could set back - or set sideways, more interestingly - performance. For instance, bats process sounds into direction one heck of a lot better than we do. Cats and raptors, to name but two, process balance and visual information into far more athletic capability than we do. Some humans process information differently (Darwin, Einstein, Fischer, Hawkins, Newton, Mozart, Musashi, Rodin, Sagan, Sartre, Tammet), and they've got, or had, very similar brain structures to yours. This is a very delicate, highly variable area of function, and throwing sweeping generalizations about size, specialized regions and foggy ideas like intelligence" about in a cross-species manner as if they were definitive of performance simply clouds the issues at hand.
The proof will be in the results. Pay attention to those. Not people's opinions.
That's not a "debunking", that's a closed-minded opinion-fest. Reminds me of Papert's and Minsky's huge rants on how neural nets couldn't do this and that, exemplified by the (incorrect) claim they couldn't even be made to do an XOR. They published, just ran off at the mouth like college kids with their first exposure to ideas orthogonal to their thinking, then were proved soundly wrong by the facts.
Some advice for the closed minded: Judge this fellows work by his actual results; not what other people think his results may turn out to be. He's published the code, and those of us who are working in this area are very interested. That still doesn't mean we'll use his work the way he will, or that we'll get the same results. Just be a little patient and just a little less judgmental. Or not; after all, even Minsky and Papert couldn't change the facts. They turned out to be well educated, highly opinionated, deeply respected fuckups. You want to join them? Jump to conclusions. Nature's got a place for you, too.:-)
And yet again, we see the potential of the patent system to retard progress instead of stimulate it; to favor cashing in over invention; to stifle, crush and force back progress, however isolated from the original inventor such progress may have originated. The PTO is a hive of scum and villainy.
In order to understand exactly what the cortex is doing you must integrate all levels of research into your studies.
As a current student in neuroscience, you should know better than to make such a sweeping and inaccurate presumption. There are many paths to working models and working theories, and very few of them include "integrating all levels of research" or anything remotely similar. It is entirely possible to code up (for example) a brand new, highly functional sorting method without either knowing all the other methods, the theory underneath them, or even the theory underneath your own. It is possible to move your arm without knowing a thing about partial differential equations, yet you can't really model it easily without them using traditional approaches. So get down off that high horse. I think the thin air has addled your thinking.
Any comments from people with expertise in this area?
Yes; his reasoning is laid out in the beginning of this document. The thinking seems quite reasonable to me, as far as it goes. AI is my area of research.
Well, I don't know, load up a page 1 of a 2 page Slashdot comment listing, and my browser will go out to lunch, and stay out to lunch for several minutes.
That's actually very interesting. I don't see that behavior. What browser are you using, and what is the base description of your system and OS? I use OmniWeb here, I left that out above, obviously it is a critical factor in this type of thing. Duh.
his claims were quite, uhm, let's say, "ambitious".
That is a wonderful thing, though. First of all, claims can be tested. They'll either live up to the description, or they won't. If the don't, another path not to go down in a particular manner has been identified, and that is useful. OTOH, if they are verified, then we may have a key to a form of cognition. Whether it is our kind or not is really not as important as just the fact that it is some kind.
Aside from that, I found some very interesting things in his descriptions of the HTM. For instance, I found the following precise description of enabling religious behavior: First, he describes how HTMs handle specific, non-overlapping domains (and of course this doesn't mean that another HTM can't relate those to each other.) One might handle financial markets, another speech, another cars. Then he says "After initial training, an HTM can continue to learn or not" Emphasis mine. So you can set up an HTM in a learning situation where you limit the input to descriptions consisting of sensory data of any arbitrarily limited set of patterns you like, get it to see the world represented by those patterns as you wish, and then disable learning for that particular HTM. Other HTMs can continue to learn, but that one is "frozen." Sounds like the perfect recipe for a priest or supplicant to me. Does that not sound like the very core definition of "unshakable faith"?
For all the doubt being thrown this fellow's way, you know, eventually someone will come up with something like this and it will be a working model of such a system. It's a tough problem, very abstract and requiring a lot of insight, but as with all problems discovered to date where we can actually get our hands on the system under study, there is no indication that any part of it exists in any way outside the sphere of nature and the natural rules we already know - and we know a lot of basic rules.
Kudos to him for sinking his teeth into the problem, and for coming up with results that can be tested, and for letting them loose into the word for such testing. If he's wrong, he's helping. If he's right - he's going to be mentioned in the same breath with a lot of very important people for a very, very long time to come.
As I already said, I do not assert that the constitution is perfect. What I said was that I thought it was the best out there. You said that you weren't ready to accept that or something along those lines, and I asked what you thought was better. Telling me to look at various other constitutions doesn't answer the question: What do you think is better? And why?
I'll admit my use of the word "hypothesis" might have been bad, but the point stands that believing anything in science that hasn't advanced beyond the stage of theory requires some measure of faith that it will eventually proven.
Your use of the word was exactly correct. If an hypothesis has not advanced to the stage where experiments show that the evidence supports the hypothesis, it remains a hypothesis. If it has gone that far, and the evidence supports it - tests do not disprove the hypothesis and predictions that the hypothesis makes are borne out - then it becomes a theory. At this point, science - and scientists, of course - begin to invest some degree of confidence in the idea. Not faith; in no way do they now presume the theory is "true", they simply begin to look for other ways to test it. Further, as a theory, it is now released to the rest of the scientific community so that they can try to disprove it. The longer this goes on, the more confidence can be invested in the idea. This process continues indefinitely.
the point stands that believing anything in science that hasn't advanced beyond the stage of theory requires some measure of faith that it will eventually proven.
No, it doesn't. First of all, no scientist worthy of the name "believes" anything that is at the level of an hypothesis. Such pursuit doesn't even require hope, though that can be involved. Often, science is a process of closing blind alleys, and countless hours have been spent doing just that, with no particular emotional investment in the area under test. Sometimes evidence, or ideas, point in many directions at once, and there is no choice but to examine all the directions individually. Coming back to hope, certainly if one has what one considers to be a creative idea that seems likely, fresh and new, one will embrace the hope that it represents some natural truth; but faith is not called for. That's what testing is all about. There is no need for faith, because the idea is either a reasonable representation of nature, or it is not, and the testing will tell you what that answer is. No need for faith; the process works every time. Science obviates the need for faith, because the method we call science is specifically designed to get as close to an accurate representation of reality as humanly possible. So my message to you is, stop conflating faith with hope. Hope is a human emotion that can motivate without claiming invalid territory; it does not call belief into service. Faith is a low-level emotion that has absolutely no sense at all about what it calls the mind to believe. As such, it can be both dangerous and highly unreliable. In the specific case of religion, it is both, 100% of the time.
The idea that science "turns on a dime" is ridiculous and unfair to science itself
Not at all. For example, Newton's theory of motion survived tests and was held in high confidence - not "believed, mind you - until measurements of planetary motions showed discrepancies. Einstein came along, new hypothesis, tests survived, new theory, and science lost confidence in Newton's ideas; so they were dropped except as convenient approximations (because they do work on earth, mostly.) That's "science turning on a dime." Compare that to religion's response to the carbon dating of the Turin shroud: "carbon dating must be wrong!" It's been quite some time, and they're still crying foul over a done deal. The evidence shows (a), they believe (b), have faith that (b) is so regardless of the evidence. That's religion trying to fit a camel through the eye of a needle, to ruthlessly borrow a religious metaphor.
see Cold Fusion
Ok, fine, let's talk about cold fusion. It is in the hypothesis stage. No one with half a grain of sense has any degree of confidence in the idea. No one at all "believes" it, or has "faith" in it. Ev
To believe the hypothesis at all is faith. And blind. A hypothesis is a structured idea designed for testing. It is not an established fact. Scientists worthy of the name don't "believe" a hypothesis; they mercilessly try to disprove it, knowing it has not been established and that to have any value, it must be established. They may be quite hopeful that this will be the case; but hope is not belief by any stretch of the imagination.
In science, this faith is often substanciated(sic) or destroyed upon subsequent research.
Absolutely not. No faith involved. Hope, certainly; not faith.
In religion, the same is often true by subsequent experiences, although for many the final word will not be known until death.
No, religion has no parallel in science at all. There is no testable hypothesis; faith is employed instead of measured, correlated evidence-based confidence; and of "final words", religion has to date offered no evidence that anyone will know anything "after" death.
Science, on the other hand, has continuously and repeatedly been able to demonstrate that the continuing of consciousness shows every sign of being entirely dependent upon the physical, chemical and electrical states of the brain, states which 100% cease to persist after cell death overtakes the organ. There is every evidence-based reason to think that the human "you" is an emergent phenomenon that depends upon the complexities of your physical systems; there is no evidence-based reason to think otherwise at this time.
To claim that anyone will "know" anything after death is a claim of blind faith; no evidence, precept not established, concept not verified, belief held anyway. This is in no way similar to science's position here: Science advances the idea - not the faith, but just an idea - that consciousness is limited to the body. There is high confidence; this confidence has yet to be shown to be misplaced; so it makes a reasonable operating presumption. But if shown to be wrong, science will turn on a dime, no problem, and work with the reality, whatever it is. This is not a common characteristic of faith, as I think you well know.
While I also doubt your claim about the US constitution being the best available
Other than the above line, I don't really have any disagreement with anything you wrote there - we have huge numbers of problems, among which are those you mention (though many of them are, in fact, consequences of not following our constitution.)
As for the quoted section, I'm perfectly open minded, I think. What country, in your opinion, has a better constituting authority for its form of government? I don't even require that it be followed (after all, we don't follow ours) but I would be very interested to read such a document, or at least about it.
Look, there are two kinds of assertions of conditions. Only two.
The first asserts condition so-and-so is the case because of [some specific set of] evidence. The second asserts condition so-and-so is the case without any evidence.
The former position is not faith; it is testable and it is subject to revision or negation by consensual manipulation of the very issues it stands upon in the natural world. This is open-eyed in the most basic sense - people are looking at what obtains in the natural world and seeking to figure out how those things fit. There is something to see and to sense and to test, where sight is a metaphor for direct perception of evidence in the natural world using any consensual method - for example, you can touch a crystal face and assert it is smooth; I can likewise do the same - consensual and testable. Well educated people who use these presumptions to go about their daily business understand that although those ideas may represent the best possible current understanding today, they may be revised or superseded tomorrow as the evidence demands - a microscope becomes available, and we determine that the crystal face is in fact not smooth at all - it was a mistaken presumption based upon not enough information.
The latter position, the one without evidence, is faith; no matter how long, or deeply, one has considered the condition one is asserting obtains, no evidence exists to support that assertion, and so holding to that position is, in fact, a matter of faith. Holding to any position without evidence of any kind to base the assertion means there is no way to see why said assertion would be true; it is blind because there is nothing to see, nothing to fit, nothing to probe or test. You make, or adopt, a mental construct - and that's all you have, no matter how you fondle or manipulate it. If you presume it represents an accurate model of the conditions you assert it affects, you are (a) exercising faith and (b) acting blindly, that is, without any real-world based evidence whatsoever. Mental models in and of themselves carry no weight. Perhaps you assert that an invisible being will carry you to a happy place when you die; this is not consensually verifiable and there is no evidence for it at all; to cling to that assumption, then, requires faith. Intentional or inherent blindness.
All faith is, in fact, blind. Else it is not faith.
As you mention science, it is also very important to distinguish the difference in attitude between that of a scientist who sets up a hypothesis (a working presumption, hopefully suitable for testing and further consideration but certainly not presumed to be true a priori), and that of a theologian or astrologer who creates or adopts a position and then proceeds to take it as true.
Slashdot Mirror
Examine that quote from the article closely. See anything there that indicates virtualization "doesn't work"? No, nor do I. What they are talking about here has nothing to do with how well virtualization works, what they're complaining about is that a particular tool requires competence to use well in various work environments. Well, no one ever said that virtualization would gift brains to some middle level manager, or teach anyone how to use an office suite, or imbue morals and ethics into those who would steal; virtualization lets you run an operating system in a sandbox, sometimes under another operating system entirely. And it does that perfectly well, or in other words, it works very well indeed. I call FUD.
What this attitude does is excuses the action-taker from responsibility. If you are going to take action, you should be sure that you are doing the right thing. That means you are responsible for your actions. In business, this is called "due diligence", in other words, if a decision is to be made (an action taken) then the company has the responsibility to learn all about the consequences, justify the cause, etc. People are no better. If someone tells you A, then it is your responsibility to verify A before you act on it; it is certainly no one else's responsibility to bear the brunt of the effects of your actions. Every step the law, or society takes that exonerates people from the consequences of actions they chose to take is a step in the wrong direction. IMHO.
This is nonsense. The operator should not lift a finger until they are sure they know what they are doing. Because they are responsible for their actions. The action is the problem. Not the words.
You can say anything you want in a contract; there is no restriction on free speech in such a document. That's all I argue for. Your argument that a signed, witnessed agreement isn't binding under law for free speech reasons is not of interest to me, though I will say I don't agree.
I made no such agreement; I signed no such agreement; I have been party to no such agreement. Just so we're 100% clear. This "we" you speak of does not include me. Nor does it include anyone else I know; I can't say I've ever met anyone who has mentioned being party to such an agreement, nor does my observation of society support the idea that such an agreement exists. People lie all the time. All the time. Claiming otherwise is disingenuous.
You are responsible for the magnified actions of yours taken by machines you operate. You should verify your machine works properly before you operate it. If you don't, you have no business operating it. It is just that simple. Personal responsibility. Certainly you should test your steering, brakes, tire inflation, know your lubrication status, and bearing wear before you drive. Why should you be excused from this? I can't think of a single reason. Blaming other people is the game of those who duck responsibility. Know what you're doing; know why you're doing it; know what the consequences are; understand the risks. Not the risks you'd prefer to take, but the actual risks.
Let me give you an example: the 1st amendment, in full, emphasis mine:
No - really, it doesn't. All it requires is that I have a reasonable amount of confidence in the process. The reason why this is so is because I can, if I so choose, verify the results myself, or arrange to have them verified. This is because science deals with the natural world and all science involves consensual experience. This applies directly to your example, and yes, it does show why you are well advised to place your confidence in the scientific process. It was the scientific process that unmasked the fraud.
Confidence is not faith. Faith requires that you accept things where no proof is forthcoming, no matter if you would like to go find it, or not. If I tell you there is a Santa Claus, I can't prove it; you must take it on faith. If I tell you there is a planet such as mars at such-and-such an orbit, you can go out at night and look for yourself. After you find it, look at it in a telescope, monitor its orbit, and send a spacecraft there, you will have high confidence that in fact, there was a planet there. Confidence is a measured response to assertions you can verify, coming to you through the natural world. Faith is a leap taken based upon stories you have been told or which were created out of your own imagination, which have no "handle" in reality by which they may be consensually shared, verified, tested, and re-tested.
Science, I like to say, is a "confidence-building scheme" in the non-pejorative sense. That is its purpose. To collect information and models that create an ever-growing, interlocked net of concepts that by virtue of the filter (the scientific method) are strong candidates once they reach the level of theory, and which buttress each idea that they interlock with throughout the rest of science.
Science can certainly be manipulated for the purpose of defrauding people. As can faith. But science, by its very nature, cannot hide such fraud - the very first time an attempt is made to reproduce false results, the other shoe drops. Faith, in sharp contrast, can hide fraud forever. The value of faith as a tool for managing information and models of how the world works is consequently very, very low.
No. You don't. You can test things for yourself; the scientific process is not one way, as it is with faith.
Thanks for the English pointer. I'll be after that.
Yes. Speech, writings, radio, telephone, telegraph, videos - all human-to-human communications. At the time this amendment was penned, they had print/written and they had speech, and that was it. The 1st addressed print and speech; the generalization to all human communications is, to me, obvious and natural. With regard to your statement that "communicating false information can cause severe damage" I disagree. In all communications that are human to human, the only way damage can occur is if the receiving human takes action. If we are to have laws, they must be against actions taken, not communications made. I believe there is absolutely no reasonable, ethical case for stifling speech of any kind, under any circumstances. Actions are something else again. If I say you are a twit, nothing has happened but vibrating air. If you choose to act, you must be responsible for that act. If you act in such a way as to cause harm, then you should be liable for that harm. Speech never, ever causes harm, given only that it is not presented at such a level that the communication itself damages your sensory apparatus.
Contracts require action; they fall under actions taken or not taken. Verbal contracts should not, in my opinion, be enforceable. For many reasons.
That's exactly what it should mean.
Precisely - the fact is, speech cannot be trusted. The examples demonstrating this are literally endless.
The fact is, we can't do that now, and we never could do it. Whether we will be able to even come close to doing it in the future will depend on technologies that can reliably detect whether an individual believes what they are saying to be the truth; even so, that isn't the same as them actually telling the truth in many cases. Some people honestly believe in elves and faeries; if you asked them if that flash of light was a faery, they'd tell you the truth as they understand it: "Sure it was." Such technologies do not exist at this time, though there are hints in that direction.
The actual issue is that the value of the land may legitimately be more than the government can afford or be willing to pay, and much higher than that which an appraiser might set. The entire premise of appraising land is based on the idea that the owner wishes to sell. When that precondition does not obtain, no appraiser can provide an accurate number for value, because it is the value to the owner that we are talking about. Not the value to a thief or thieves. Eminent domain is intellectually and financially dishonest from first principles. Coercion of non-criminal citizens is not a valid function of government.
I know what you're trying to get across; but your base presumption, that the filter of the scientific method is of equal value as the filter of "gee, that's a nice story" in getting things into your brain and pulling them out again or using them to proceed forward inductively, is insufficient to the task of holding up the rest of your argument. The data - human technological progress - show that science works, and works well. It shows the opposite for religion. So regardless of your idea that once in the mind, all things are of equal value because they depend upon memory, the facts reveal that the situation is not at all balanced. I don't need to derive everything myself, as I have done a fair amount of that, scattered across a broad spectrum of science, and statistically speaking, my results were what everyone else's result were. This allows for a high level of confidence, similar to that which I feel when I step onto an apparently well-maintained bridge and do not expect to plunge through it. It is based on consistent experience and an understanding of why that experience has manifested in the way that it has. I didn't say that science was perfect all the time (in fact I carefully said otherwise) but by and large, science is rock solid and a very appropriate place to stand, intellectually speaking.
Faith is not the same as confidence. Faith is blind; it requires no facts whatsoever. Confidence is built upon experience and the ability of the thinker to predict an outcome based upon past experience. I don't use faith as a mental model; it is bereft of value.
With regard to AI and my observation that the ability to set up a situation and stop learning resembles religious behavior, I don't think you have a valid point to make, again because your base assumption is incorrect. The world isn't some flaky place that changes every time we turn around. It is a dependable environment that follows rules and contains real objects. Books say just what they said when you pick them up the second time as they did the first time. Experiments give the same results within the boundaries of accuracy they are intended to process. It isn't all about memory, it isn't all about trust - anyone can test anything at any time, pretty much, and most high schoolers and college folk re-do many classic experiments and get those same answers over and over again. At higher levels, the number of people re-testing shrinks dramatically, but it is still enough to ensure the method is in place and working. Science is the optimum method to observe, analyze, and filter what almost everything we learn about this world because as a method, it presumes this is the case and all of its steps address issues that way. For AI, science, as compared to my observation about religion, is a better model for almost anything because science can increase or restart learning about something based upon new evidence (or any, considering there is none whatsoever for religion.) This is the path to correctness, accuracy, and the ability to mesh well with other information - or perhaps you would simply call it some level of truth. We might want to give AI a "religion" that says things like Asimov's "don't hurt the humans" rules, something they can't adjust under any circumstances, but then again, if the human is trying to hurt them... it's an interesting issue, luckily one we don't have to face quite yet.
When people try to make points like yours, that the mind is an ephemeral residence for information and that our knowledge of the world is vague, temporary and inaccurate, on a par with religion in scope or utility, I just point at the space shuttle, microprocessors, genetic engineering, and a host of other accomplishments that would in no wise be possible if that were true. Now, I'd be willing to stipulate that your mind may be a messy, unreliable place where science theory == religious story, but even if that is the case, you cannot reasonably presume such a sad state applies to everyone else. :-)
That's not a problem; that's a fact.
Science is a method that produces information and models that can be repeatedly tested in the natural world, not only by the originator of the idea, but by anyone to whom the idea is transferred. Likewise, should a new test be created that causes the model to fail or the data to become a poor or impossible fit with a model, that test can be transferred back and the model adjusted or discarded. Consequently, science suffers contradicting ideas only during the situation where all data sets pass all tests and the models make 100% accurate predictions. Consensuality is the heart of science; one person's ideas are enhanced by the ability of every other person to duplicate, test and use those ideas for prediction. The confirmation of this is, of course, the huge strides science has made in moving forward. Science regularly provides very useful answers to the questions "how" and "why" and "does" with regard to questions characterized by our having the ability to put our hands and instruments and minds to the situation of interest.
What a person "knows" about religion consists of ideas they created or adopted; ideas that have no means of testing consensually and therefore no means of becoming more or less accurate. There are many religions, each claims the literal "truth", and these religions contradict each other in fundamental ways that clearly indicate that at least one of them is very wrong. But, because there is no way to test religion's ideas, no predictions made by religions ideas, no data accumulated from supernatural events (because there aren't any, of course) there is no way for these ideas to grow, refine, or be discarded. Religion can prove nothing; generates no new information; and cannot answer any question about the real world.
These two radically different situations highlight the huge difference between science and religion. This is why your statement is completely wrong-headed.
No. It isn't. A great deal of evidence in the natural world indicates that the sun revolves around the earth; no evidence indicates otherwise. It is a highly testable proposition, and it has survived all such tests, and consensually speaking, we of the scientific community can agree that we all see the meaning of the results of those tests the same way. So we can have very high confidence in this particular description of the natural world. A very formal process underlies such knowledge; a process that will label the information as wrong if anything happens that makes the data, or the model, suspect. Survival of the process is the strongest indicator we can have that we have as accurate as possible model of what is actually going on given the ability to observe the data we possess at the moment, which is considerable.
As to whether (for example) Kali or Jehovah more closely represents a godhead that is not mythical, there is no evidence whatsoever to guide a choice; no tests can be performed, no results can be examined, no god may be interviewed, tested or otherwise probed to guide such a choice. Neither putative godhead performs acts in the natural world that can be examined or pointed to. So the only thing left is stories created or adopted without recourse to facts, the opinion of the tribe, the pressures of the community; all religious choices such as you suggest come down to these in the end. Sticking to such a choice is done because behavior has been learned and change would challenge not only the original pressures, but the stories one has decided to believe. Changing from one to another is usually done becau
No, I was thinking more along the lines of after the Turin shroud was dated to a much more recent period than the time when Christ's death is written to have occurred, a good sized chunk of the Christian community went right on believing it was contemporary with that time. I was thinking about children being trained in religion, and being unable to escape those myths as adults, regardless of the complete dearth of evidence. I was thinking of scientists who, when faced with the overwhelming evidence that all brain activity is supported by electrical, chemical, and biological activity, and that brain activity correlates 100% with what we think and react, and when we think and react, still think "they" are "going to heaven" when they die.
There is an even simpler truth that underlies all this; you and I, using nothing but our brains and what we've learned, can multiply 7 times 9 in our heads and get the right answer. Computer methods can do that, and far faster and more reliably than we can - though they certainly don't do it the same way. At least most of us don't convert to binary and use ALUs. :-)
The task, however, is useful because it is well accomplished. Nothing in particular that is very exciting is presented to neuroscience, but that is not to say that accomplishing the task another way was was not useful - it certainly was!
The same applies here. If the idea works as described, then no matter if it represents what our brains do or not, it will be useful. It doesn't have to (a) describe us or (b) feed any particular science more information. It just has to be a metaphor that can be made to work, or perhaps lead to more insight that will be useful in its own domain, which is not neuroscience, but simply computational AI.
I really don't think they deserve any slack, particularly Minsky. There were huge personal issues, they published an outright attack based on Minsky's emotional bias (it certainly wasn't based on the facts, because they weren't in possession of them), they didn't do any testing of the claims they made, and they were wrong. Their results affected research for years in the wrong direction. It was a bone-headed stunt with nothing about it that redeems it. I watched it happen; it seemed vindictive and puerile then, and it doesn't look any better today.
First, thanks for the info on the German constitution. Very interesting. I'll have to see if I can dig up an English-language version.
With regard to the US constitution, the first thing I should say (though I think I've already been pretty clear about this) is that I value what the constitution says - not how our sad, degenerate excuse for a government has "interpreted" it.
The obvious place to start for me is the bill of rights; amendments 1 through ten, and the 14th amendment which is used to apply those ten amendments to the states and, theoretically, keep them from doing anything that violates the ten as well as the federal government.
1; freedom of religion, press, and expression. This amendment is unequivocal; free speech is protected. No ifs, no ands, no buts, no "in a crowded theaters", no "at a funerals", no "at a political rally", no "libel", no nothing. Protected. Period. No exceptions. That is something I admire, and something I support wholeheartedly. The government has ignored the constitutional requirements and is operating illegitimately. That I do not admire.
2; Right to bear arms. This is in two phases; a justification, and a statement. The justification, it seems to me, is partial. The statement, however, is unequivocal, and offers up no exceptions. All US citizens have the right to bear arms. No limits on size, effectiveness, or who may bear. I support this but feel that it needs amending; I think when the arms are larger than you can use to defend property you own, they're too large (and you could bring in a technical quibble as well... you can't "bear" a JSOW, for instance.) But I think we should all be armed with at the very least, rifles and pistols, and I think that the amendment was prescient in the sense that right now, the government ought to have those weapons pointed right at its collective noses until they back down and obey the constituting authority, the constitution itself.
3; not a modern issue
4; search and seizure. Good idea; not strong enough, but a good idea. Needs amending to make stronger. Of course, the government has long ago abandoned it even as written.
5; trial and punishment, compensation for takings: hot spot for me. The compensation section needs a complete rewrite. I could go on about this for hours, but basically, the "market value" of a home or property is not sufficient unless you can show that the owner of the property set that price themselves. You can't value a centuries old family homestead by counting its square feet; you can't value where your children were born and raised by the view, and you can't value where you learned at your father's knee by the opinion of some suit from a land office. Trial and punishment is a decent system, not perfect, but unfortunately, like everything else, the government has abandoned it and now pursues a caricature.
6, 7 and 8; Just like 5. Good ideas, not being used, followed or otherwise respected.
9 and 10; these were such great ideas, I can hardly contain myself. Unfortunately, the feds do everything they can to destroy it. Examples: The commerce clause, designed to control commerce between the states, is being used to crush state autonomy on subjects like drugs. Speed limits are forced into uniformity by the feds by using mafia-like bribery tactics - either comply, or we'll cut funding to your state (thus threatening the entire state economy.) Etc. The feds are thugs, using thuglike approaches.
So what we have here is a document that I greatly admire, but which has been plowed under by criminal activities in the federal, and to a more limited extent, state governments. There are lots of other points I think are well thought out, I really don't have time to go into why things like forbidding ex post facto activities are important - or how deeply the government has violated those ideas. But suffice it to say, I think that for the time, the document is extraordinarily well thought out. If we were actually following it, I think we'd be a lot better off.
Oh, I do have strange "beliefs", if you'd measure them, as most would, by comparing them to the majority outlook. In fact, I try not to have any at all, preferring a confidence-based outlook derived from consensual evidence. So my beliefs... yes, strange or non-existent. You're certainly spot-on about that. :-) The rest, not so much. But you are certainly welcome to your opinion; there's no rule that I know of that says you have to be correct in order to speak out.
That's an entirely invalid simplification. There are large variations on structure, on sensory input, etc between species. Any one of which could set back - or set sideways, more interestingly - performance. For instance, bats process sounds into direction one heck of a lot better than we do. Cats and raptors, to name but two, process balance and visual information into far more athletic capability than we do. Some humans process information differently (Darwin, Einstein, Fischer, Hawkins, Newton, Mozart, Musashi, Rodin, Sagan, Sartre, Tammet), and they've got, or had, very similar brain structures to yours. This is a very delicate, highly variable area of function, and throwing sweeping generalizations about size, specialized regions and foggy ideas like intelligence" about in a cross-species manner as if they were definitive of performance simply clouds the issues at hand.
The proof will be in the results. Pay attention to those. Not people's opinions.
That's not a "debunking", that's a closed-minded opinion-fest. Reminds me of Papert's and Minsky's huge rants on how neural nets couldn't do this and that, exemplified by the (incorrect) claim they couldn't even be made to do an XOR. They published, just ran off at the mouth like college kids with their first exposure to ideas orthogonal to their thinking, then were proved soundly wrong by the facts.
Some advice for the closed minded: Judge this fellows work by his actual results; not what other people think his results may turn out to be. He's published the code, and those of us who are working in this area are very interested. That still doesn't mean we'll use his work the way he will, or that we'll get the same results. Just be a little patient and just a little less judgmental. Or not; after all, even Minsky and Papert couldn't change the facts. They turned out to be well educated, highly opinionated, deeply respected fuckups. You want to join them? Jump to conclusions. Nature's got a place for you, too. :-)
And yet again, we see the potential of the patent system to retard progress instead of stimulate it; to favor cashing in over invention; to stifle, crush and force back progress, however isolated from the original inventor such progress may have originated. The PTO is a hive of scum and villainy.
Abolish it. It is out of hand.
I think that's a very good, and very accurate summary. And I am an expert, or at least as much so as anyone in the field is, these days. :)
As a current student in neuroscience, you should know better than to make such a sweeping and inaccurate presumption. There are many paths to working models and working theories, and very few of them include "integrating all levels of research" or anything remotely similar. It is entirely possible to code up (for example) a brand new, highly functional sorting method without either knowing all the other methods, the theory underneath them, or even the theory underneath your own. It is possible to move your arm without knowing a thing about partial differential equations, yet you can't really model it easily without them using traditional approaches. So get down off that high horse. I think the thin air has addled your thinking.
Google "Ornithopter
Yes; his reasoning is laid out in the beginning of this document. The thinking seems quite reasonable to me, as far as it goes. AI is my area of research.
That's actually very interesting. I don't see that behavior. What browser are you using, and what is the base description of your system and OS? I use OmniWeb here, I left that out above, obviously it is a critical factor in this type of thing. Duh.
That is a wonderful thing, though. First of all, claims can be tested. They'll either live up to the description, or they won't. If the don't, another path not to go down in a particular manner has been identified, and that is useful. OTOH, if they are verified, then we may have a key to a form of cognition. Whether it is our kind or not is really not as important as just the fact that it is some kind.
Aside from that, I found some very interesting things in his descriptions of the HTM. For instance, I found the following precise description of enabling religious behavior: First, he describes how HTMs handle specific, non-overlapping domains (and of course this doesn't mean that another HTM can't relate those to each other.) One might handle financial markets, another speech, another cars. Then he says "After initial training, an HTM can continue to learn or not" Emphasis mine. So you can set up an HTM in a learning situation where you limit the input to descriptions consisting of sensory data of any arbitrarily limited set of patterns you like, get it to see the world represented by those patterns as you wish, and then disable learning for that particular HTM. Other HTMs can continue to learn, but that one is "frozen." Sounds like the perfect recipe for a priest or supplicant to me. Does that not sound like the very core definition of "unshakable faith"?
For all the doubt being thrown this fellow's way, you know, eventually someone will come up with something like this and it will be a working model of such a system. It's a tough problem, very abstract and requiring a lot of insight, but as with all problems discovered to date where we can actually get our hands on the system under study, there is no indication that any part of it exists in any way outside the sphere of nature and the natural rules we already know - and we know a lot of basic rules.
Kudos to him for sinking his teeth into the problem, and for coming up with results that can be tested, and for letting them loose into the word for such testing. If he's wrong, he's helping. If he's right - he's going to be mentioned in the same breath with a lot of very important people for a very, very long time to come.
As I already said, I do not assert that the constitution is perfect. What I said was that I thought it was the best out there. You said that you weren't ready to accept that or something along those lines, and I asked what you thought was better. Telling me to look at various other constitutions doesn't answer the question: What do you think is better? And why?
Your use of the word was exactly correct. If an hypothesis has not advanced to the stage where experiments show that the evidence supports the hypothesis, it remains a hypothesis. If it has gone that far, and the evidence supports it - tests do not disprove the hypothesis and predictions that the hypothesis makes are borne out - then it becomes a theory. At this point, science - and scientists, of course - begin to invest some degree of confidence in the idea. Not faith; in no way do they now presume the theory is "true", they simply begin to look for other ways to test it. Further, as a theory, it is now released to the rest of the scientific community so that they can try to disprove it. The longer this goes on, the more confidence can be invested in the idea. This process continues indefinitely.
No, it doesn't. First of all, no scientist worthy of the name "believes" anything that is at the level of an hypothesis. Such pursuit doesn't even require hope, though that can be involved. Often, science is a process of closing blind alleys, and countless hours have been spent doing just that, with no particular emotional investment in the area under test. Sometimes evidence, or ideas, point in many directions at once, and there is no choice but to examine all the directions individually. Coming back to hope, certainly if one has what one considers to be a creative idea that seems likely, fresh and new, one will embrace the hope that it represents some natural truth; but faith is not called for. That's what testing is all about. There is no need for faith, because the idea is either a reasonable representation of nature, or it is not, and the testing will tell you what that answer is. No need for faith; the process works every time. Science obviates the need for faith, because the method we call science is specifically designed to get as close to an accurate representation of reality as humanly possible. So my message to you is, stop conflating faith with hope. Hope is a human emotion that can motivate without claiming invalid territory; it does not call belief into service. Faith is a low-level emotion that has absolutely no sense at all about what it calls the mind to believe. As such, it can be both dangerous and highly unreliable. In the specific case of religion, it is both, 100% of the time.
Not at all. For example, Newton's theory of motion survived tests and was held in high confidence - not "believed, mind you - until measurements of planetary motions showed discrepancies. Einstein came along, new hypothesis, tests survived, new theory, and science lost confidence in Newton's ideas; so they were dropped except as convenient approximations (because they do work on earth, mostly.) That's "science turning on a dime." Compare that to religion's response to the carbon dating of the Turin shroud: "carbon dating must be wrong!" It's been quite some time, and they're still crying foul over a done deal. The evidence shows (a), they believe (b), have faith that (b) is so regardless of the evidence. That's religion trying to fit a camel through the eye of a needle, to ruthlessly borrow a religious metaphor.
Ok, fine, let's talk about cold fusion. It is in the hypothesis stage. No one with half a grain of sense has any degree of confidence in the idea. No one at all "believes" it, or has "faith" in it. Ev
To believe the hypothesis at all is faith. And blind. A hypothesis is a structured idea designed for testing. It is not an established fact. Scientists worthy of the name don't "believe" a hypothesis; they mercilessly try to disprove it, knowing it has not been established and that to have any value, it must be established. They may be quite hopeful that this will be the case; but hope is not belief by any stretch of the imagination.
Absolutely not. No faith involved. Hope, certainly; not faith.
No, religion has no parallel in science at all. There is no testable hypothesis; faith is employed instead of measured, correlated evidence-based confidence; and of "final words", religion has to date offered no evidence that anyone will know anything "after" death.
Science, on the other hand, has continuously and repeatedly been able to demonstrate that the continuing of consciousness shows every sign of being entirely dependent upon the physical, chemical and electrical states of the brain, states which 100% cease to persist after cell death overtakes the organ. There is every evidence-based reason to think that the human "you" is an emergent phenomenon that depends upon the complexities of your physical systems; there is no evidence-based reason to think otherwise at this time.
To claim that anyone will "know" anything after death is a claim of blind faith; no evidence, precept not established, concept not verified, belief held anyway. This is in no way similar to science's position here: Science advances the idea - not the faith, but just an idea - that consciousness is limited to the body. There is high confidence; this confidence has yet to be shown to be misplaced; so it makes a reasonable operating presumption. But if shown to be wrong, science will turn on a dime, no problem, and work with the reality, whatever it is. This is not a common characteristic of faith, as I think you well know.
Other than the above line, I don't really have any disagreement with anything you wrote there - we have huge numbers of problems, among which are those you mention (though many of them are, in fact, consequences of not following our constitution.)
As for the quoted section, I'm perfectly open minded, I think. What country, in your opinion, has a better constituting authority for its form of government? I don't even require that it be followed (after all, we don't follow ours) but I would be very interested to read such a document, or at least about it.
Look, there are two kinds of assertions of conditions. Only two.
The first asserts condition so-and-so is the case because of [some specific set of] evidence. The second asserts condition so-and-so is the case without any evidence.
The former position is not faith; it is testable and it is subject to revision or negation by consensual manipulation of the very issues it stands upon in the natural world. This is open-eyed in the most basic sense - people are looking at what obtains in the natural world and seeking to figure out how those things fit. There is something to see and to sense and to test, where sight is a metaphor for direct perception of evidence in the natural world using any consensual method - for example, you can touch a crystal face and assert it is smooth; I can likewise do the same - consensual and testable. Well educated people who use these presumptions to go about their daily business understand that although those ideas may represent the best possible current understanding today, they may be revised or superseded tomorrow as the evidence demands - a microscope becomes available, and we determine that the crystal face is in fact not smooth at all - it was a mistaken presumption based upon not enough information.
The latter position, the one without evidence, is faith; no matter how long, or deeply, one has considered the condition one is asserting obtains, no evidence exists to support that assertion, and so holding to that position is, in fact, a matter of faith. Holding to any position without evidence of any kind to base the assertion means there is no way to see why said assertion would be true; it is blind because there is nothing to see, nothing to fit, nothing to probe or test. You make, or adopt, a mental construct - and that's all you have, no matter how you fondle or manipulate it. If you presume it represents an accurate model of the conditions you assert it affects, you are (a) exercising faith and (b) acting blindly, that is, without any real-world based evidence whatsoever. Mental models in and of themselves carry no weight. Perhaps you assert that an invisible being will carry you to a happy place when you die; this is not consensually verifiable and there is no evidence for it at all; to cling to that assumption, then, requires faith. Intentional or inherent blindness.
All faith is, in fact, blind. Else it is not faith.
As you mention science, it is also very important to distinguish the difference in attitude between that of a scientist who sets up a hypothesis (a working presumption, hopefully suitable for testing and further consideration but certainly not presumed to be true a priori), and that of a theologian or astrologer who creates or adopts a position and then proceeds to take it as true.