I got no problem with that suggestion. I'm not sure that is what will happen in practice but I got no problem with it. Navies have been using converted civilian ships for years.
You appear to have mixed up anti-Catholic with anti-child rape. You know if I was a member of an organisation which routinely raped children then orchestrated a cover up going to the highest levels, I would leave. I'd certainly stop handing over my money to them. Assuming you are Catholic, and I apologise if you are not, but if you are, are you really saying if Catholicism wasn't a religion you wouldn't have left by now? Say it was a business running a chain of Orphanages?
Nice summary, thought it was worth mentioning there are also people who think that either all moral statements are meaningless or even false, non-cognitivists and nihilists and so on. What the Pope is doing when he talks about relativism is being supremely disingenuous anyway. He is talking about the world in terms of how it 'ought' to be rather than in terms of what one is prepared to do to make it that way. A moral nihilist who will use violence to prevent rape is functionally equivalent to a moral absolutist who will. It is the equivalent of elevating the debate about the existence or otherwise of subatomic particles so it becomes a matter of practical philosophy. Either way, the electrons in your TV flow the right way when you turn it one.
What you are describing are not morals. Morals are shoulds or oughts (you ought not kill, you should be kind), not is statements (you are genetically predisposed to be kind, killing others reduces your own chances of procreation). Explanations of moral codes is not ethics it is science. If you really want an source for morals rather than an explanation you probably want to look at something like Secular Humanism or Randian Objectivism (or even something like Ethical non-Cognitivism) As for moral relativism. Yeah kinda hard to take the Church seriously when their idea of absolute, objective morals seems to be priests should be allowed to do anything they like but the media and the internet are evil (one spokesperson for the church compared the reaction to the scandal to the Jew baiting terrors perpetrated under the Nazis).
Never mind the offensive capability, this system has to be one of the stupidest ideas I've ever heard. You never, ever, ever camouflage your military systems to look like civilian infrastructure. If you do, you leave your opponent with no choice but to blow up your privately owned merchant marine, your trucks and every cargo container it can see. Part of the reason Germany started using unrestricted submarine warfare was the my countries use of Q-ships. Part of the reason civilian casualties in Gaza are so high is 'police stations' and 'schools' that are anything but. Is the idea here to sell this product to countries looking to get their civilians killed for propaganda purposes?
I love the way that we have now become so accustomed to bad copyright law that when one is written that is only a little bit absurdly unfair we heap praise on those authoring it. Copyright in India is still 60 years! And no work released with DRM on it should have copyright protection in the first place. The DRM violates the spirit of the social contract! It's the equivalent of publishing a patent written using whatever cypher was used to encode the Voynich manuscript. This law is not good, it's just not as asinine as the ones we have to put up with in the West. Indian lawmakers deserve some credit for that as I'm sure international pressure on them was severe along with pressure from their own domestic media asshats, but don't lets pretend that this piece of crap legislation is 'good' just because it's a slightly less smelly turd that the one we have.
"If I recall it was a WASP that killed 100's in Oklahoma City 15 years ago. I guess all white Americans of Irish descent are barbarous monsters?"
I wasn't suggesting that the people of the Middle East, North Africa and parts of Asia were barbarous monsters, far from it. I certainly wasn't generalising based on the actions of some extremists. I was suggesting exactly what I said, that a "culture" that as a matter of routine accepts the subjugation of women, the repression of homosexuals and has notions of crimes for witchcraft is absurd, dangerous and evil. I was attacking the implicit and crazy cultural relativism of your statement which implies that our vastly superior and more tolerant secular culture which incorporates respect for basic rights and the objective methods of science is in any way comparable to the prevailing "culture" of the Middle East and North Africa.
Your question basically assumes I'm either racist or generalising a religion based on it's extremists. A better comparison than the one you offer is the witch hunts of the early modern period. In that instance I'd be happy to say that Europe needed to pull it's collective heads out of its collective asses and stop burning women at the stake. We aren't talking about the horrific actions of a handful here, discrimination against women and gays is a matter of routine in the poor parts of North Africa and the Middle East and it is widely supported. I was careful to exclude the nice small town Muslims you get in suburbia in the West because by and large second and third generation immigrants have a culture that is primarily Western.
You also seem to be under the impression I'm not aware of the fantastic cultural achievements of the Islamic Empire and its role as the repository of Greek and Roman knowledge during the Christian Dark Ages. Not only am I aware of it, I apply the same standards there as I do here. If it had been possible to expunge from the European mindset the "cultural" norms that existed during that period, the intolerance and cruelty, I would gladly see it done. The Islamic world was a much better place to live at it's cultural zenith than any other part of the world. That doesn't change the fact that right now it is a backwater.
Your own language reveals you share my view and in no way support the notions of cultural relativism your language suggests. You yourself point out the ways in which the Islamic Culture during the Christian Dark Ages was superior to that in Europe.
As for the notion that geocentricism was an absolutely factual science, this is absurd. Bacon and Galileo were contemporary! Not sure how you plan on proclaiming this factual science when the modern scientific method hadn't even be codified yet.
A "culture" in which someone can be put to death because their sexual orientation is one other than that deemed acceptable by the prevailing religious mindset, the wider population and the existing government is a "culture" that needs to be exterminated. I'd very much prefer that "culture" be removed through peaceful means and that something like the secularised Christian or scientific naturalistic culture of Europe replace it. Pretending that this set of memes isn't, at least by and large, anything other than a cancer in the global zeitgeist is absurd.
Yeah because I know lots of people who as a matter of routine will fly planes into building if you suggest that the fundamental building blocks of nature are anything other than one dimensional extended objects.
The fanatically religious parts of the undeveloped part of the world need to pull their collective heads out of their collective asses before one of their number do something really stupid and our religious fanatics start using the fruit of 'fairy tales' like atomic theory and chemistry on them and there is nothing we can do to stop them.
Having the audacity to call science and technology a 'fairy tale' while labelling the barbarism that embraces female genital mutilation and the death penalty for sorcery 'culture' is probably one of the most offensive things I've ever heard, yet I have no intention of doing you physical harm.
You can't blame religion for idiots any more than you can blame politics for idiots.
Religion can totally be blamed for idiots. If during the course of treatment for cancer the chemo boxes your kidneys is the kidney failure not to blame for worsening your condition? Does it make a difference if you could have also gotten worse by developing a heart condition?
Sure religion is a reflection and consequence of an underlying condition innate in human kind. That does not mean it can be absolved of blame. Furthermore removing religion does help the problem! It's one less thing that can be exploited and by making society resistant to religion we make them resistant to exploitation in general.
Using the example above, just because the kidney failure isn't the underlying condition doesn't mean a transplant wont help the patient.
Explain. Why is it absurd to think that there are limits to human capability? There are all kinds of things that humans have never done and likely will never do.
I'm looking to wrap up this discussion since I think we have both said our pieces but I wanted to address what you said here as you asked me to explain.
I don't question that there are limits to what humans can do. My point was that since there exists a mind (the human mind) capable of doing all the things we have discussed and we understand the process that resulted in that end point (evolution) if nothing else humans could use the same process to create a mind capable of doing what you describe. I granted you that this may be difficult (like go to another planet, add the right microbes and wait 500 million years difficult) but there is very little preventing us from doing this right now. The end result we are looking for has been done, it has been done by nature. It is therefore possible and within the material reach of humans at least in principle. I've little doubt you would admit that this somewhat extreme thought experiment could easily be sped up by human manipulations, although we may debate by how much. I will grant you there would be some debate as to whether this constitutes 'artificial' intelligence but I see no distinction between organic and inorganic computers other than the chemicals their components are assembled from.
Of course it depends on what you mean by achievable and reasonable. Given theoretical limits on computing power and existing rates of development we will have machines with comparable computing capability to the human mind in the next few decades. As far as I am concerned the challenges are then software related because the only empirical means we have for differentiating a mind capable of love from one that is not is how the mind behaves. Your objections to the notion that we could test such a mind just for a response congruent with experiencing love are entirely correct and we would require the corroborating tests your describe. Notice however that all of your tests are of the same essential nature ('does the brain behave as we would expect', essentially they are all functional tests of the brains behaviour). The philosophers are welcome to their debates as whether this functional notion of love is 'real' in some meaningful sense but unless I can measure it with a multimeter or a question which is responded to by a speaker it wont do me a lot of good. Given this position in my opinion there is no compelling argument to suggest that computers cannot behave in a manner we would recognise as love.
My perspective on strong AI is that without a radical redefinition or reimagining of what computers are and how we use them and the contents of their programming, we will never be able to produce a mechanical simulation of a human brain with sufficient fidelity to produce a mind.
I consider this a position that requires evidence. You have not provided any. Of course I will grant you that we will need to 'write' the 'software' for a model of the human brain, a task which may be incredibly difficult. However since nature has done it in that humans are evolved creatures the notion that humans cant is absurd. It is merely a question of difficulty and I've already granted you that it may be far harder than we imagine.
The brain can be modeled through computation, but that doesn't mean it reduces to a finite set of steps producing a determined result.
It does if your definition of the 'output' of the algorithm is how the brain manipulates those outputs connected to it. By demanding that an AI respond in a manner we would recognise as love you have defined an output function which is computable and finite by definition. If a response we would recognise as love is defined as one output state then the process is definitely algorithmic as the brain is by definition effective. You can claim defining the algorithm this way is meaningless since it applies equally well to saying the cloud formation process is an algorithm for the making of rain (assuming clouds always result in precipitation of some kind) but as far as I'm concerned that is an algorithm.
I am rather shocked that "all the minds we know of require these things" does not constitute evidence of some kind to you.
It's not evidence because we haven't even begun to eliminate vast swathes of the search space. If you saw 3 sheep it is not reasonable to conclude all sheep are white just because all the sheep you had seen were white unless I tell you that the number of sheep in the entire universe is 3, maybe 4 or 5. If the number of sheep in the world is 7 billion many of which are in inaccessible locations this evidence is sufficiently flimsy that no conclusion can be reasonably obtained.
You have the burden of proof mixed up here. I am asserting nothing more than that which is supported by the currently available evidence. That is that the human brain is nothing more than a collection of connected neurons (and some structures for delivering chemicals to said neurons). This is all we have seen of the brain. There is no evidence for anything more to the brain and as far as I'm aware no where else to look for more material that would form the brain.
If you are claiming there is more to the brain that just the components we can see then you are the one who must provide evidence to support this assertion. Incidentally by evidence I don't mean hand waving arguments like 'qualia' I mean real, solid, empirical evidence.
That said, you won't be able to do this unless you also simulate sensory connections to the world, basic physical needs, the ability to move around and experience the world, centralized location in space, and a lifetime of lived experience (the latter would probably be accomplished by providing the simbrain with a lifetime in which to experience things through its sense simulations).
Now if we are talking about claims made without evidence this is a big one. I see no evidence to suggest that the formation of a sentient mind necessitates these things. I will grant you all the minds we know of require these things but we certainly haven't exhaustively searched the space of possible sentient brains.
Strong AI may be hard. It may be harder than we can imagine. It may even be technically impossible without supercomputers beyond the scope of that which human kind could ever achieve. I will grant you all of those, although I think all these are very pessimistic assessments. However given that there is nothing more to the brain than the physical components that make it up, and these components form a recognised computational structure, there is absolutely no reason at present to presume that an artificial life form could not one day love. As for this being algorithmic, the structure of the brain itself is computational or at least forms a recognised computational structure. By definition is is only capable of algorithmic processes when viewed in this light. That is what computational structures do. It is all they do. Even randomly programmed computers are following an algorithm.
Wow, I think you just managed a new record for wrong density.
Well, I agree that evolution is a theory (I wish people would do a better job of remembering that).
Like the theory of gravity. Evolution describes both a theory and a fact. That dropped objects fall is a fact. That all dropped objects fall in proportion to their mass, the mass of the object they are falling towards and the inverse of the square radial distance between the object is a theory. That new species develop from existing species is a fact. That the fossil record and existing life can be organised into various trees and that these trees all perfectly line up is a fact. That DNA exists is a fact. That DNA mutates is a fact. That bacteria become resistant to drugs is a fact. The modern evolutionary synthesis which predicts these things (and a whole lot more) is a theory.
I don't agree that it is ridiculously strong, particularly if you are talking about evolution as the origin of life.
Evolution does not equal abiogenesis. You might just as well have replaced "origin of life" with "awesomeness of Dire Straits".
In the first place, it violates the second law of thermodynamics. That ought to be sufficient argument against it.
If you are going to use the big boy words it might just be worth learning what they mean. The second law states that in a close system the net entropy will either remain constant or increase. Your first problem in demonstrating your assertion would be finding a closed system described by evolution. Good luck with that.
As we learn more about the complexity of the cell, and of DNA, the amount of information contained therein becomes ever more staggering. Five billion years is simply insufficient for any known mechanism to allow that much information to occur through random chance.
Evolution is not random. Natural selection, as the name suggests, selects certain genetic patterns over others. This is very much not random. Hence the net increase in information in the system. I'm glad you accept that the Earth is at least 5 billion years old however, that's a start.
Beyond all that, there are no known examples of intermediate species. Considering how much evolution must have occurred (if we assume evolution to be correct) there ought to be scads of intermediate forms walking the planet today. Where are they?
Archaeopteryx. There is an intermediate form. You asked for one, you got one. No ifs, not buts and definitely no "but what came between that and birds". In all the categorical trees one can produce this thing goes between dinosaurs and modern birds. It is by definition an intermediate form. You want more, the entire darn fossil record. The whole thing except those species that went extinct (kinda by definition). At this stage the thing is so darn big that pretty much every fossil ever is an intermediate form. Oh wait you want them walking about? Given that the newer species are better adapted than the older intermediate species what you are doing here is asking for something that would falsify evolution as evidence for it. That's a little bit of an odd request. However if you are asking for examples of related species which include a degree of speciation then there are ring species like the salamanders of California which are all able to breed with their neighbours but cannot breed with more distant salamander along a mountain range.
The nice thing about knowing a little biology is the ability to tell when someone has no understanding of it what so ever. You just lumped evolution in with abiogenesis and attempted to suggest there is anything other than a taxonomical difference between micro and macroevolution. This strongly suggests to me you are more familiar with the creation 'literature' than the scientific literature. There is no way to quantify the 'relative' amounts of evidence for each theory since the evidence for both is utterly overwhelming. However if instead w talk about how complete the theories are I think most scientists with experience in both fields would agree that the big bang is a less complete theory than evolution. I say this with some regret as I'm a physicist by training.
It matters because you have a vote and a vote is political power. You in part get to decide how science funding is partitioned, how much funding there is and what we teach future scientists in school.
Because of Turing completeness, there's fundamentally nothing that the human mind can do that a computer cannot.
...love?
This kind of reasoning always worries me. If I build an AI which has emotions and is functionally indistinguishable from a human in terms of emotional response will you still make this claim. Will we one day use this kind of argument to deny sentient beings their fundamental rights?
The human mind is a complicated neural network with some chemically adjustable parameters. Nothing more. While the parent was a little clumsy with their language that is the upshot of their assertion. If you can get a human to do it, you can get a computer to do it and it's obvious this must be the case. A simple thought experiment, consider a supercomputer (it would have to be more powerful than anything that exists today by several orders of magnitude) simulating the workings of a brain. Assuming we choose appropriate initial conditions. Is this simulated brain not a sentient being?
Just wondering what part of the Western world refers to the Falklands war as the Falklands/Malvinas War. You talk like an American but I don't actually know any Americans who don't recognise the utterly one sided nature of that conflict. Refering to it by the name the Argentinians give it is like calling the war in the Pacific the "Greater East Asia War to establish the Co-prosperity Sphere" or something similar.
You are completely right. In the event that the Russians launch a massive nerve gas attack on the US devastating it's cities the first thought that every single American general, air marshal, admiral, statesperson and civil leader is going to have is "darn it, now I wish we hadn't/promised/ not to use our nuclear arsenal". Get real.
We could build one of these and in principle make it big enough to kill all life on earth. Why we would want to is beyond me but we could. I'm not saying that for certain a large enough Cobalt bomb would definitely kill all life on earth, but it is conceivable.
I am having to make inferences about what you point is because I cannot determine what it is from your posts. I'd really rather not do this but since you aren't making any sense what so ever I'm left with guess work as my only option.
As mentioned elsewhere in the thread, I meant scientific evidence. I did not mean anecdotal evidence or hearsay. One explanation (however unlikely) for the phenomena mentioned is that heaven in fact exists and that we have not or cannot collect and categorise the evidence to show this (yet).
I would argue that the concept of heaven is unscientific and an entity in the sense of Occam's razor, meaning we could never show that it exists. This however is a different problem to the one posed.
You seem to be under the impression that this research assumes there is no heaven, again missing the point. I believed that this was because you were unable to differentiate between experience of X and X but since you insist this is not the case I am at a loss to explain your confusion.
According to a poster above one of the researchers who conducted this study believes in heaven and views ketamine as means of spiritual communion. Hence this individuals motivations are not as you describe, hence at least one of the researchers holds no preconceived notions about these experiences. You don't have to assume the individual is delusional to do this kind of research and in fact the way I posed the research question made it very clear that no such assumption was being made (at least in my formulation of this experiment). That is just good science, don't make assumptions you don't have to. I might hold assumptions about the delusion state of these subjects but a good scientist should be able to ignore their own biases.
At this stage all we can say based on this research is that dosing people with ketamine can induce a state similar to a near death experience (assuming we trust their reports of their experiences). There are many interpretations of this and I've argued for my interpretation of this result in this thread.
I would further argue that the explanation that near death experiences are caused by the existence of heaven is scientifically useless because no experiment could differentiate this explanation from chemical reactions in the brain anyway. That is not however the argument we are having. In fact I'm unclear what exactly your point is since you keep insisting that this study was conducted under the assumption that near death experiences are a delusion when I see no evidence to suggest this is the case.
Again I ask what metric are you using to declare human kind pathetic? You belittle the vast achievements of our species with technicalities. Do you think it matters to the child who was cured with penicillin that they will only get to live to be the same age as a very old Roman citizen? Do you know of anything that can create planets? I've never met anything with such a capability so why demand it of human kind? Do you have any evidence for something capable of creating new life? I've never encountered such a being. You refer to our quest to understand the nature of the universe as "scratching around looking for the Higgs boson", is there any creature you know of that even has a concept of the Higgs boson? The gods of the ancient world certainly didn't, heck some of them cant even get the value of Pi right.
The gods of the ancient world achieved nothing but death and destruction. As a meme the notion of the divine has inspired man to little more than unleashing cruelty and violence upon the world. The crusades, the dark ages, the fall of the Islamic empires, the protestant-catholic wars, the conflicts on the Indian subcontinent and in the middle east. These are the achievements of the gods. I've seen no evidence to suggest that these gods ever flung a star into space or created a new form of life. All they seem capable of is destruction.
I don't believe we need to worship or idolise something, but if we are going to worship and idolise something it should be that which is noble in the human animal, not that which has inspired our worst excesses. You accuse me of desperation and egotism because I redefine a god to the actual effect of the concept. The real achievements of human kind are vastly superior to those of any god if we confine ourselves to those things both beings have demonstrably achieved. You call this redefining "god" and an act of desperation, I call it giving credit where it is due.
Ah yes but I'm comparing humans to deities for dramatic effect. Those deities (Zeus, Thor, YHWH) do not exist, and so have achieved nothing. Whatever is being compared I think we can agree that the bottom rung of any scale is not doing anything, at least in terms of impressiveness.
These deities are also highly anthropomorphised making comparisons to people possible if admittedly still a little awkward.
I can reach inside my brain and modify it. Just the other day I learnt about modes of locomotion in bipeds. Heck my brain isn't even the size of an entire universe. I see where you are coming from, and 'impressiveness' is subjective anyway so your opinion of what is or is not impressive is no more or less valid than my own. However if I am forced to make such a comparison I would have to say I remain wholly unimpressed by the achievements of the universe compared with those of human kind.
You do realise that the parent was modded down because their views were unclearly expressed and demonstrably wrong right?
They were modded down because almost everyone reading it could come up with better arguments for the case they are making than they do, regardless of if they agree with them or not.
Heck watch I will do it for them. The following is not my viewpoint. I do not agree with it, I think it is bullhonky.
----- Science results in the advancement of material capability. It enables us to build bigger bombs and better light bulbs. One of the main assumptions of the modern secular outlook is that this will result in greater quality of life. This is actually not the case. Improvements with material capability often inversely correlate with these factors.
Religion is an effort to advance the spiritual capability of a society. We need to move beyond trying to make people happier by building them a better X-box and instead work towards a better spiritual existence.
Religion is tradition and tradition is accumulated knowledge. The more rabid elements of our secular society are building a world-view around the notion that material advancement is all that matters and disregarding the wealth of knowledge that lies locked away in religious understanding. Worse than this many of the wish to expunge this collective wisdom from the zeitgeist entirely.
This is clearly a foolhardy endeavour. -----
I think the above few paragraphs are entirely crap by the way. I don't agree with anything I say in them. But it still a better argument that the one the OP presented for the strengths of religion and the weaknesses of a naturalistic secular outlook.
Slashdot Mirror
I got no problem with that suggestion. I'm not sure that is what will happen in practice but I got no problem with it. Navies have been using converted civilian ships for years.
You appear to have mixed up anti-Catholic with anti-child rape. You know if I was a member of an organisation which routinely raped children then orchestrated a cover up going to the highest levels, I would leave. I'd certainly stop handing over my money to them. Assuming you are Catholic, and I apologise if you are not, but if you are, are you really saying if Catholicism wasn't a religion you wouldn't have left by now? Say it was a business running a chain of Orphanages?
Nice summary, thought it was worth mentioning there are also people who think that either all moral statements are meaningless or even false, non-cognitivists and nihilists and so on.
What the Pope is doing when he talks about relativism is being supremely disingenuous anyway. He is talking about the world in terms of how it 'ought' to be rather than in terms of what one is prepared to do to make it that way. A moral nihilist who will use violence to prevent rape is functionally equivalent to a moral absolutist who will. It is the equivalent of elevating the debate about the existence or otherwise of subatomic particles so it becomes a matter of practical philosophy. Either way, the electrons in your TV flow the right way when you turn it one.
What you are describing are not morals. Morals are shoulds or oughts (you ought not kill, you should be kind), not is statements (you are genetically predisposed to be kind, killing others reduces your own chances of procreation). Explanations of moral codes is not ethics it is science. If you really want an source for morals rather than an explanation you probably want to look at something like Secular Humanism or Randian Objectivism (or even something like Ethical non-Cognitivism)
As for moral relativism. Yeah kinda hard to take the Church seriously when their idea of absolute, objective morals seems to be priests should be allowed to do anything they like but the media and the internet are evil (one spokesperson for the church compared the reaction to the scandal to the Jew baiting terrors perpetrated under the Nazis).
Never mind the offensive capability, this system has to be one of the stupidest ideas I've ever heard. You never, ever, ever camouflage your military systems to look like civilian infrastructure. If you do, you leave your opponent with no choice but to blow up your privately owned merchant marine, your trucks and every cargo container it can see. Part of the reason Germany started using unrestricted submarine warfare was the my countries use of Q-ships. Part of the reason civilian casualties in Gaza are so high is 'police stations' and 'schools' that are anything but.
Is the idea here to sell this product to countries looking to get their civilians killed for propaganda purposes?
I love the way that we have now become so accustomed to bad copyright law that when one is written that is only a little bit absurdly unfair we heap praise on those authoring it. Copyright in India is still 60 years! And no work released with DRM on it should have copyright protection in the first place. The DRM violates the spirit of the social contract! It's the equivalent of publishing a patent written using whatever cypher was used to encode the Voynich manuscript.
This law is not good, it's just not as asinine as the ones we have to put up with in the West. Indian lawmakers deserve some credit for that as I'm sure international pressure on them was severe along with pressure from their own domestic media asshats, but don't lets pretend that this piece of crap legislation is 'good' just because it's a slightly less smelly turd that the one we have.
"If I recall it was a WASP that killed 100's in Oklahoma City 15 years ago. I guess all white Americans of Irish descent are barbarous monsters?"
I wasn't suggesting that the people of the Middle East, North Africa and parts of Asia were barbarous monsters, far from it. I certainly wasn't generalising based on the actions of some extremists. I was suggesting exactly what I said, that a "culture" that as a matter of routine accepts the subjugation of women, the repression of homosexuals and has notions of crimes for witchcraft is absurd, dangerous and evil. I was attacking the implicit and crazy cultural relativism of your statement which implies that our vastly superior and more tolerant secular culture which incorporates respect for basic rights and the objective methods of science is in any way comparable to the prevailing "culture" of the Middle East and North Africa.
Your question basically assumes I'm either racist or generalising a religion based on it's extremists. A better comparison than the one you offer is the witch hunts of the early modern period. In that instance I'd be happy to say that Europe needed to pull it's collective heads out of its collective asses and stop burning women at the stake. We aren't talking about the horrific actions of a handful here, discrimination against women and gays is a matter of routine in the poor parts of North Africa and the Middle East and it is widely supported. I was careful to exclude the nice small town Muslims you get in suburbia in the West because by and large second and third generation immigrants have a culture that is primarily Western.
You also seem to be under the impression I'm not aware of the fantastic cultural achievements of the Islamic Empire and its role as the repository of Greek and Roman knowledge during the Christian Dark Ages. Not only am I aware of it, I apply the same standards there as I do here. If it had been possible to expunge from the European mindset the "cultural" norms that existed during that period, the intolerance and cruelty, I would gladly see it done. The Islamic world was a much better place to live at it's cultural zenith than any other part of the world. That doesn't change the fact that right now it is a backwater.
Your own language reveals you share my view and in no way support the notions of cultural relativism your language suggests. You yourself point out the ways in which the Islamic Culture during the Christian Dark Ages was superior to that in Europe.
As for the notion that geocentricism was an absolutely factual science, this is absurd. Bacon and Galileo were contemporary! Not sure how you plan on proclaiming this factual science when the modern scientific method hadn't even be codified yet.
A "culture" in which someone can be put to death because their sexual orientation is one other than that deemed acceptable by the prevailing religious mindset, the wider population and the existing government is a "culture" that needs to be exterminated. I'd very much prefer that "culture" be removed through peaceful means and that something like the secularised Christian or scientific naturalistic culture of Europe replace it. Pretending that this set of memes isn't, at least by and large, anything other than a cancer in the global zeitgeist is absurd.
Yeah because I know lots of people who as a matter of routine will fly planes into building if you suggest that the fundamental building blocks of nature are anything other than one dimensional extended objects.
The fanatically religious parts of the undeveloped part of the world need to pull their collective heads out of their collective asses before one of their number do something really stupid and our religious fanatics start using the fruit of 'fairy tales' like atomic theory and chemistry on them and there is nothing we can do to stop them.
Having the audacity to call science and technology a 'fairy tale' while labelling the barbarism that embraces female genital mutilation and the death penalty for sorcery 'culture' is probably one of the most offensive things I've ever heard, yet I have no intention of doing you physical harm.
You can't blame religion for idiots any more than you can blame politics for idiots.
Religion can totally be blamed for idiots. If during the course of treatment for cancer the chemo boxes your kidneys is the kidney failure not to blame for worsening your condition? Does it make a difference if you could have also gotten worse by developing a heart condition?
Sure religion is a reflection and consequence of an underlying condition innate in human kind. That does not mean it can be absolved of blame. Furthermore removing religion does help the problem! It's one less thing that can be exploited and by making society resistant to religion we make them resistant to exploitation in general.
Using the example above, just because the kidney failure isn't the underlying condition doesn't mean a transplant wont help the patient.
Explain. Why is it absurd to think that there are limits to human capability? There are all kinds of things that humans have never done and likely will never do.
I'm looking to wrap up this discussion since I think we have both said our pieces but I wanted to address what you said here as you asked me to explain.
I don't question that there are limits to what humans can do. My point was that since there exists a mind (the human mind) capable of doing all the things we have discussed and we understand the process that resulted in that end point (evolution) if nothing else humans could use the same process to create a mind capable of doing what you describe. I granted you that this may be difficult (like go to another planet, add the right microbes and wait 500 million years difficult) but there is very little preventing us from doing this right now. The end result we are looking for has been done, it has been done by nature. It is therefore possible and within the material reach of humans at least in principle. I've little doubt you would admit that this somewhat extreme thought experiment could easily be sped up by human manipulations, although we may debate by how much. I will grant you there would be some debate as to whether this constitutes 'artificial' intelligence but I see no distinction between organic and inorganic computers other than the chemicals their components are assembled from.
Of course it depends on what you mean by achievable and reasonable. Given theoretical limits on computing power and existing rates of development we will have machines with comparable computing capability to the human mind in the next few decades. As far as I am concerned the challenges are then software related because the only empirical means we have for differentiating a mind capable of love from one that is not is how the mind behaves. Your objections to the notion that we could test such a mind just for a response congruent with experiencing love are entirely correct and we would require the corroborating tests your describe. Notice however that all of your tests are of the same essential nature ('does the brain behave as we would expect', essentially they are all functional tests of the brains behaviour). The philosophers are welcome to their debates as whether this functional notion of love is 'real' in some meaningful sense but unless I can measure it with a multimeter or a question which is responded to by a speaker it wont do me a lot of good. Given this position in my opinion there is no compelling argument to suggest that computers cannot behave in a manner we would recognise as love.
My perspective on strong AI is that without a radical redefinition or reimagining of what computers are and how we use them and the contents of their programming, we will never be able to produce a mechanical simulation of a human brain with sufficient fidelity to produce a mind.
I consider this a position that requires evidence. You have not provided any. Of course I will grant you that we will need to 'write' the 'software' for a model of the human brain, a task which may be incredibly difficult. However since nature has done it in that humans are evolved creatures the notion that humans cant is absurd. It is merely a question of difficulty and I've already granted you that it may be far harder than we imagine.
The brain can be modeled through computation, but that doesn't mean it reduces to a finite set of steps producing a determined result.
It does if your definition of the 'output' of the algorithm is how the brain manipulates those outputs connected to it. By demanding that an AI respond in a manner we would recognise as love you have defined an output function which is computable and finite by definition. If a response we would recognise as love is defined as one output state then the process is definitely algorithmic as the brain is by definition effective. You can claim defining the algorithm this way is meaningless since it applies equally well to saying the cloud formation process is an algorithm for the making of rain (assuming clouds always result in precipitation of some kind) but as far as I'm concerned that is an algorithm.
I am rather shocked that "all the minds we know of require these things" does not constitute evidence of some kind to you.
It's not evidence because we haven't even begun to eliminate vast swathes of the search space. If you saw 3 sheep it is not reasonable to conclude all sheep are white just because all the sheep you had seen were white unless I tell you that the number of sheep in the entire universe is 3, maybe 4 or 5. If the number of sheep in the world is 7 billion many of which are in inaccessible locations this evidence is sufficiently flimsy that no conclusion can be reasonably obtained.
You have the burden of proof mixed up here. I am asserting nothing more than that which is supported by the currently available evidence. That is that the human brain is nothing more than a collection of connected neurons (and some structures for delivering chemicals to said neurons). This is all we have seen of the brain. There is no evidence for anything more to the brain and as far as I'm aware no where else to look for more material that would form the brain.
If you are claiming there is more to the brain that just the components we can see then you are the one who must provide evidence to support this assertion. Incidentally by evidence I don't mean hand waving arguments like 'qualia' I mean real, solid, empirical evidence.
That said, you won't be able to do this unless you also simulate sensory connections to the world, basic physical needs, the ability to move around and experience the world, centralized location in space, and a lifetime of lived experience (the latter would probably be accomplished by providing the simbrain with a lifetime in which to experience things through its sense simulations).
Now if we are talking about claims made without evidence this is a big one. I see no evidence to suggest that the formation of a sentient mind necessitates these things. I will grant you all the minds we know of require these things but we certainly haven't exhaustively searched the space of possible sentient brains.
Strong AI may be hard. It may be harder than we can imagine. It may even be technically impossible without supercomputers beyond the scope of that which human kind could ever achieve. I will grant you all of those, although I think all these are very pessimistic assessments. However given that there is nothing more to the brain than the physical components that make it up, and these components form a recognised computational structure, there is absolutely no reason at present to presume that an artificial life form could not one day love. As for this being algorithmic, the structure of the brain itself is computational or at least forms a recognised computational structure. By definition is is only capable of algorithmic processes when viewed in this light. That is what computational structures do. It is all they do. Even randomly programmed computers are following an algorithm.
Wow, I think you just managed a new record for wrong density.
Well, I agree that evolution is a theory (I wish people would do a better job of remembering that).
Like the theory of gravity. Evolution describes both a theory and a fact. That dropped objects fall is a fact. That all dropped objects fall in proportion to their mass, the mass of the object they are falling towards and the inverse of the square radial distance between the object is a theory. That new species develop from existing species is a fact. That the fossil record and existing life can be organised into various trees and that these trees all perfectly line up is a fact. That DNA exists is a fact. That DNA mutates is a fact. That bacteria become resistant to drugs is a fact. The modern evolutionary synthesis which predicts these things (and a whole lot more) is a theory.
I don't agree that it is ridiculously strong, particularly if you are talking about evolution as the origin of life.
Evolution does not equal abiogenesis. You might just as well have replaced "origin of life" with "awesomeness of Dire Straits".
In the first place, it violates the second law of thermodynamics. That ought to be sufficient argument against it.
If you are going to use the big boy words it might just be worth learning what they mean. The second law states that in a close system the net entropy will either remain constant or increase. Your first problem in demonstrating your assertion would be finding a closed system described by evolution. Good luck with that.
As we learn more about the complexity of the cell, and of DNA, the amount of information contained therein becomes ever more staggering. Five billion years is simply insufficient for any known mechanism to allow that much information to occur through random chance.
Evolution is not random. Natural selection, as the name suggests, selects certain genetic patterns over others. This is very much not random. Hence the net increase in information in the system. I'm glad you accept that the Earth is at least 5 billion years old however, that's a start.
Beyond all that, there are no known examples of intermediate species. Considering how much evolution must have occurred (if we assume evolution to be correct) there ought to be scads of intermediate forms walking the planet today. Where are they?
Archaeopteryx. There is an intermediate form. You asked for one, you got one. No ifs, not buts and definitely no "but what came between that and birds". In all the categorical trees one can produce this thing goes between dinosaurs and modern birds. It is by definition an intermediate form. You want more, the entire darn fossil record. The whole thing except those species that went extinct (kinda by definition). At this stage the thing is so darn big that pretty much every fossil ever is an intermediate form. Oh wait you want them walking about? Given that the newer species are better adapted than the older intermediate species what you are doing here is asking for something that would falsify evolution as evidence for it. That's a little bit of an odd request. However if you are asking for examples of related species which include a degree of speciation then there are ring species like the salamanders of California which are all able to breed with their neighbours but cannot breed with more distant salamander along a mountain range.
The nice thing about knowing a little biology is the ability to tell when someone has no understanding of it what so ever. You just lumped evolution in with abiogenesis and attempted to suggest there is anything other than a taxonomical difference between micro and macroevolution. This strongly suggests to me you are more familiar with the creation 'literature' than the scientific literature. There is no way to quantify the 'relative' amounts of evidence for each theory since the evidence for both is utterly overwhelming. However if instead w talk about how complete the theories are I think most scientists with experience in both fields would agree that the big bang is a less complete theory than evolution. I say this with some regret as I'm a physicist by training.
It matters because you have a vote and a vote is political power. You in part get to decide how science funding is partitioned, how much funding there is and what we teach future scientists in school.
Because of Turing completeness, there's fundamentally nothing that the human mind can do that a computer cannot.
...love?
This kind of reasoning always worries me. If I build an AI which has emotions and is functionally indistinguishable from a human in terms of emotional response will you still make this claim. Will we one day use this kind of argument to deny sentient beings their fundamental rights?
The human mind is a complicated neural network with some chemically adjustable parameters. Nothing more. While the parent was a little clumsy with their language that is the upshot of their assertion. If you can get a human to do it, you can get a computer to do it and it's obvious this must be the case. A simple thought experiment, consider a supercomputer (it would have to be more powerful than anything that exists today by several orders of magnitude) simulating the workings of a brain. Assuming we choose appropriate initial conditions. Is this simulated brain not a sentient being?
Just wondering what part of the Western world refers to the Falklands war as the Falklands/Malvinas War. You talk like an American but I don't actually know any Americans who don't recognise the utterly one sided nature of that conflict. Refering to it by the name the Argentinians give it is like calling the war in the Pacific the "Greater East Asia War to establish the Co-prosperity Sphere" or something similar.
You are completely right. In the event that the Russians launch a massive nerve gas attack on the US devastating it's cities the first thought that every single American general, air marshal, admiral, statesperson and civil leader is going to have is "darn it, now I wish we hadn't /promised/ not to use our nuclear arsenal". Get real.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobalt_bomb
We could build one of these and in principle make it big enough to kill all life on earth. Why we would want to is beyond me but we could. I'm not saying that for certain a large enough Cobalt bomb would definitely kill all life on earth, but it is conceivable.
I am having to make inferences about what you point is because I cannot determine what it is from your posts. I'd really rather not do this but since you aren't making any sense what so ever I'm left with guess work as my only option.
What, in two sentences, is your point?
As mentioned elsewhere in the thread, I meant scientific evidence. I did not mean anecdotal evidence or hearsay. One explanation (however unlikely) for the phenomena mentioned is that heaven in fact exists and that we have not or cannot collect and categorise the evidence to show this (yet).
I would argue that the concept of heaven is unscientific and an entity in the sense of Occam's razor, meaning we could never show that it exists. This however is a different problem to the one posed.
You seem to be under the impression that this research assumes there is no heaven, again missing the point. I believed that this was because you were unable to differentiate between experience of X and X but since you insist this is not the case I am at a loss to explain your confusion.
According to a poster above one of the researchers who conducted this study believes in heaven and views ketamine as means of spiritual communion. Hence this individuals motivations are not as you describe, hence at least one of the researchers holds no preconceived notions about these experiences. You don't have to assume the individual is delusional to do this kind of research and in fact the way I posed the research question made it very clear that no such assumption was being made (at least in my formulation of this experiment). That is just good science, don't make assumptions you don't have to. I might hold assumptions about the delusion state of these subjects but a good scientist should be able to ignore their own biases.
At this stage all we can say based on this research is that dosing people with ketamine can induce a state similar to a near death experience (assuming we trust their reports of their experiences). There are many interpretations of this and I've argued for my interpretation of this result in this thread.
I would further argue that the explanation that near death experiences are caused by the existence of heaven is scientifically useless because no experiment could differentiate this explanation from chemical reactions in the brain anyway. That is not however the argument we are having. In fact I'm unclear what exactly your point is since you keep insisting that this study was conducted under the assumption that near death experiences are a delusion when I see no evidence to suggest this is the case.
Again I ask what metric are you using to declare human kind pathetic? You belittle the vast achievements of our species with technicalities. Do you think it matters to the child who was cured with penicillin that they will only get to live to be the same age as a very old Roman citizen? Do you know of anything that can create planets? I've never met anything with such a capability so why demand it of human kind? Do you have any evidence for something capable of creating new life? I've never encountered such a being. You refer to our quest to understand the nature of the universe as "scratching around looking for the Higgs boson", is there any creature you know of that even has a concept of the Higgs boson? The gods of the ancient world certainly didn't, heck some of them cant even get the value of Pi right.
The gods of the ancient world achieved nothing but death and destruction. As a meme the notion of the divine has inspired man to little more than unleashing cruelty and violence upon the world. The crusades, the dark ages, the fall of the Islamic empires, the protestant-catholic wars, the conflicts on the Indian subcontinent and in the middle east. These are the achievements of the gods. I've seen no evidence to suggest that these gods ever flung a star into space or created a new form of life. All they seem capable of is destruction.
I don't believe we need to worship or idolise something, but if we are going to worship and idolise something it should be that which is noble in the human animal, not that which has inspired our worst excesses. You accuse me of desperation and egotism because I redefine a god to the actual effect of the concept. The real achievements of human kind are vastly superior to those of any god if we confine ourselves to those things both beings have demonstrably achieved. You call this redefining "god" and an act of desperation, I call it giving credit where it is due.
Ah yes but I'm comparing humans to deities for dramatic effect. Those deities (Zeus, Thor, YHWH) do not exist, and so have achieved nothing. Whatever is being compared I think we can agree that the bottom rung of any scale is not doing anything, at least in terms of impressiveness.
These deities are also highly anthropomorphised making comparisons to people possible if admittedly still a little awkward.
I can reach inside my brain and modify it. Just the other day I learnt about modes of locomotion in bipeds. Heck my brain isn't even the size of an entire universe. I see where you are coming from, and 'impressiveness' is subjective anyway so your opinion of what is or is not impressive is no more or less valid than my own. However if I am forced to make such a comparison I would have to say I remain wholly unimpressed by the achievements of the universe compared with those of human kind.
You do realise that the parent was modded down because their views were unclearly expressed and demonstrably wrong right?
They were modded down because almost everyone reading it could come up with better arguments for the case they are making than they do, regardless of if they agree with them or not.
Heck watch I will do it for them. The following is not my viewpoint. I do not agree with it, I think it is bullhonky.
-----
Science results in the advancement of material capability. It enables us to build bigger bombs and better light bulbs. One of the main assumptions of the modern secular outlook is that this will result in greater quality of life. This is actually not the case. Improvements with material capability often inversely correlate with these factors.
Religion is an effort to advance the spiritual capability of a society. We need to move beyond trying to make people happier by building them a better X-box and instead work towards a better spiritual existence.
Religion is tradition and tradition is accumulated knowledge. The more rabid elements of our secular society are building a world-view around the notion that material advancement is all that matters and disregarding the wealth of knowledge that lies locked away in religious understanding. Worse than this many of the wish to expunge this collective wisdom from the zeitgeist entirely.
This is clearly a foolhardy endeavour.
-----
I think the above few paragraphs are entirely crap by the way. I don't agree with anything I say in them. But it still a better argument that the one the OP presented for the strengths of religion and the weaknesses of a naturalistic secular outlook.