Unfortunately, defense and the NSA budgets together are dwarfed by social security. The NSA won't bankrupt the country for at least a couple of years, and certainly not until the social security problem has been solved. Do we even really need an NSA?
1 Civil disobedience is a useful tool, and there really isn't any reason to wait. 2 I'd advise against voting for a republican or democrat candidate, even if they do appear to align with your values... they are lizards (hope you get the reference). They will almost always switch as soon as they get elected. Vote for a human.
Perhaps we can cook up some stats on things like how often a politician has flip flopped, and how often they have followed thru on their promises... if there exists a website with this info, I'd love to see it...
Backdoors in encryption software would necessarily involve weakening the core encryption code. This section rarely changes, and is the most important part to get right. It's also not a lot of code. Any changes to this section will get a LOT of scrutiny. Plus, it's actually hard to weaken encryption... you probably go after the key generation and make it generate keys from a smaller space than necessary. To write code like that and sneak it in without it being spotted would be very difficult. The NSA isn't magical. My bigger fear is that the currently popular encryption methods have already been broken for current sized keys at the NSA. It's just not possible to prove an encryption algorithm secure. I just saw a story about the discrete log problem being closer to a solution. The NSA has been ahead of public sector researchers in the past, and it's reasonable to expect that will continue.
You're right. The criteria for proof are arbitrary, and life can go on with the Christian viewpoint, or that of any religion for that matter. At least, if you want to live in the dark ages. Today we have proven standards of argument and standards of proof and methods for making and testing hypotheses. You go ahead and throw those away. I find them useful.
How did the NSAs ability to decrypt most of the encrypted communications of the world prevent Syria's chemical attack on its own people? Or even help after the fact, for that matter? How is helping Syria's people even part of the NSAs charter?
"Considered and answered"? Hardly. Theologians, priests, religious leaders all disagree on these matters. Even within the same denomination. Also, I'm hardly the only one to find the arguments lacking. Even religious people find the claims of other religions bizarre and unlikely, illogical and self contradictory. Whatever happened to judging the quality of an argument? Weighing substance and support, logical precision? If any modern person were to make similar claims in other fields, like business or science, or in a court of law, they'd be ridculed. But these claims get a pass because it's about faith and religion. I'd rather have evidence than faith. I'm getting tired of this - you haven't provided a single argument. Instead you say others have already answered. By any standard of debate you've brought nothing.
You start by challenging the validity of logic and reason. If you do that then there is no point in talking at all. There can be no debate or progress, or even any real communication of any kind. How can you communicate if we disagree on the underlying structure of the dialog itself? Then you suggest that Christianity has largely answered the issues I brought up. Odd if they actually answered the issues rather than attacking the validity of reason. They don't and they haven't. I've had many such discussions, and they're never enlightening. I've watched many debates between atheists and some of the most respected leaders in the Christian and Jewish worlds. None of them have ever suggested that what we think of as reason is invalid. It almost always comes down to faith and interpretation. Faith is raised on a pedestal as if lack of evidence is positive. And interpretation should be applied to scripture. You should ignore its faults and stick to the good stuff. But by those arguments, I can justify anything at all. It isn't an argument at all, it's a distraction. Religions have these faults. They haven't been addressed because they cannot.
But some things we can be certain of. For example, two contradictory things cannot both be true. But they could both be false. Other things should require a lot of evidence. For example invisible pink unicorns. Religious texts don't reach even the semblance of a reasonable level of argument, and religious dogma is clearly all made up by men. I can't say for a fact that God does not exist. But I'm pretty sure all the religions I've studied are all nonsense, and encourage magical thinking, none of which is justified in any way shape or form. I'm strongly suspicious that this applies to all religions.
If different people teach conflicting laws, rules, guidelines and morality about Christianity, then what's the TRUE way? What's right? How much comes from God, and how can you be certain? What is it for a particular teaching to come from "Christianity"? Since Christianity is a group of different religions, and not a single Dogma.
The simplest explanation is that man created all the religions and gods. It's and explanation that neatly fits all the available facts. It could easily be disproved by a single artifact, writing, miracle etc. demonstrably non human in origin, but hasn't. Quite the opposite, in fact. More and more of religious dogma is proved false, illogical and self contradictory. As time goes on the areas relion is applied to reduces. In order to maintain a belief, thinking people have to contort their minds, achieving astonishing feats of doublethink. It's bizarre. And humans are so good at it!
Completely wrong. The propaganda machine is much more subtle these days, and much more effective. When you think about all science has learned about selling to individuals, this is hardly surprising. Plus, people/want/ to believe some lies.
I may actually agree with what Snowden did, but he did, in fact, break a law.
On the other hand, you're entirely correct about Assange. There isn't even a crime being claimed, yet. They want to extradite him in order to talk to him...
Your test doesn't even work. There isn't any reason to expect that similar patterns in external readings imply a conscious mind. And I imagine that, having done this experiment and found (my suspicion) that the patterns are distinctly different, that you'd point out that the result doesn't imply a lack of consciousness. But I still hold that the most basic rule holds: its only input was the original dna. Therefore, unless you want to argue that all cells are conscious, the resulting brain cannot have gained anything not in the original cell and cannot be conscious. I think the biggest difficulty here is that we don't even have a working definition of consciousness. And I suspect we might differ over any proposed definition.
They were simply examples of things that are either learned or come in large part from the way the brain attaches to the body. My point is still the same: no connections no coherence.
There is a LOT more linking body functions with emotion than you have presented. The body functions are a precursor to emotion. You can cause emotions by simply manipulating the body. Making smiling or frowning faces, for example, can cause the appropriate emotion (even when the subject is unaware they are smiling/frowning). Studies have shown many other kinds of bodily functions causing emotions.
Your point about logic is nonsense. (I, of course, meant "... can't have any logic" in the above post) You're presenting the ability to learn as if it were evidence of logic, but that's not the case. Everyone is great at learning, yet very few are any good at logic. The human brain network is great at self organizing and finding correlations, and using them to make predictions. It is NOT, a priori, good at logic. Logic is learned... and in most people not very well.
There isn't any such thing as optimal learning, as learning is a series of trade offs. You could make a criteria, and optimize against that, but your criteria will be arbitrary.
You say the brain would be "presumably... dreaming". What would you suppose it would dream of?
There isn't any way it could have a conscious stream of subvocalization, as we do, since that would require having learned a language. It can't be said to be thinking, by any reasonable definition of thinking. It has no history. It likely has no sense of time passing. It get's no feedback from other systems, respiratory, for example.
Take a neuron in an adult brain. You can usually quite clearly identify, broadly, what that neuron does. Stimulate it and you can cause the person to experience feelings and memories. Take a neuron in this "disconnected" brain. What is/its/ purpose? What can it have self-organized into? You can't even come up with a reasonable proposition. There is nothing. Its neighbors will be similarly in the dark.
Brain plasticity/requires/ input from other areas, in order to change its function. Much study has been put into finding good ways to train brain areas that have been affected by adjacent brain damage, etc. It all revolves around finding ways to stimulate the area in question - with repetitive external stimuli. With no stimuli the brain area atrophies. The longer it goes the less likely it will be able to be trained for anything.
I wouldn't suggest that it just shuts off. The brain is simply a network. It's complex, sure, but in this case it hasn't been trained. Nerves are noisy, so you'd expect some firing. Firing often occurs periodically, and neurons are good at learning correlations. So it seems likely that areas of the brain would begin to fire in phase with each other.
I'd say there isn't any reason to expect or assume that it's conscious by any reasonable definition of the word.
The fact is that considering the known chemical makeup of much of mars, we can be very close to certain that rock have come from mars to Earth.
The lack of oxygen on early Earth is similarly well understood. If there were a lot of oxygen in some localized area, it would rapidly dissipate throughout the whole ocean. (There was only one)
The evidence is mounting that Earth didn't have a good environment for generating the necessary precursors if life.
Now they've found evidence that mars was, at some point, a really good environment for those kife precursors.
It's not concrete, but it's plenty for a story to tickle the neurons.
Is it conjecture if it's a logical conclusion? We understand the brain very well on a micro scale. What we can't do is extrapolate a lot of the macro scale things that the brain does. But we can make certain inferences. This is one of those. There isn't any way it can have emotion - since emotion it directly tied to the functioning of the body. It can have any logic, since it's self evident from people's mistakes that logic is learned - and this brain cannot have any correctness clues. Similarly it can't have understanding of objects, physical or metaphysical. It can't know pain, and will never receive goodness or badness cues. We know from brain plasticity that a part of the brain that receives no input from its usual source (due to blindness, for example) will get switch to processing something it *does* have input from.
It's clearly not merely the network itself, since having no inputs it can only be a jumble of incoherence. Consciousness probably emerges from the right kind of network and the right kind of learning.
Gp never said hfcs is the same as glucose. Sucrose is half fructose half glucose. Hfcs is about half fructose half glucose. It takes mere seconds for sucrose to be split into fructose and glucose once eaten. So they are really very similar. Replacing sucrose with hfcs makes almost no difference. (They are different while in the mouth).
There are two significant changes in our diet that caused most of the trouble: 1 a vast increase in daily sugar intake 2 a large decrease in fiber intake.
Blaming hfcs over agave, honey, pure sucrose or fructose is pointless.
Slashdot Mirror
Unfortunately, defense and the NSA budgets together are dwarfed by social security.
The NSA won't bankrupt the country for at least a couple of years, and certainly not until the social security problem has been solved.
Do we even really need an NSA?
On the whole, I agree with this.
But... (there had to be a but)
1 Civil disobedience is a useful tool, and there really isn't any reason to wait.
2 I'd advise against voting for a republican or democrat candidate, even if they do appear to align with your values... they are lizards (hope you get the reference). They will almost always switch as soon as they get elected. Vote for a human.
Perhaps we can cook up some stats on things like how often a politician has flip flopped, and how often they have followed thru on their promises... if there exists a website with this info, I'd love to see it...
Just send each other truly random bits. Hopefully I don't need to explain...?
You are utterly wrong.
Backdoors in encryption software would necessarily involve weakening the core encryption code. This section rarely changes, and is the most important part to get right. It's also not a lot of code. Any changes to this section will get a LOT of scrutiny.
Plus, it's actually hard to weaken encryption... you probably go after the key generation and make it generate keys from a smaller space than necessary.
To write code like that and sneak it in without it being spotted would be very difficult. The NSA isn't magical.
My bigger fear is that the currently popular encryption methods have already been broken for current sized keys at the NSA. It's just not possible to prove an encryption algorithm secure.
I just saw a story about the discrete log problem being closer to a solution. The NSA has been ahead of public sector researchers in the past, and it's reasonable to expect that will continue.
You're right. The criteria for proof are arbitrary, and life can go on with the Christian viewpoint, or that of any religion for that matter.
At least, if you want to live in the dark ages.
Today we have proven standards of argument and standards of proof and methods for making and testing hypotheses.
You go ahead and throw those away. I find them useful.
How did the NSAs ability to decrypt most of the encrypted communications of the world prevent Syria's chemical attack on its own people?
Or even help after the fact, for that matter?
How is helping Syria's people even part of the NSAs charter?
"Considered and answered"? Hardly.
Theologians, priests, religious leaders all disagree on these matters. Even within the same denomination.
Also, I'm hardly the only one to find the arguments lacking. Even religious people find the claims of other religions bizarre and unlikely, illogical and self contradictory.
Whatever happened to judging the quality of an argument? Weighing substance and support, logical precision? If any modern person were to make similar claims in other fields, like business or science, or in a court of law, they'd be ridculed.
But these claims get a pass because it's about faith and religion.
I'd rather have evidence than faith.
I'm getting tired of this - you haven't provided a single argument. Instead you say others have already answered.
By any standard of debate you've brought nothing.
You start by challenging the validity of logic and reason. If you do that then there is no point in talking at all. There can be no debate or progress, or even any real communication of any kind. How can you communicate if we disagree on the underlying structure of the dialog itself?
Then you suggest that Christianity has largely answered the issues I brought up. Odd if they actually answered the issues rather than attacking the validity of reason. They don't and they haven't.
I've had many such discussions, and they're never enlightening. I've watched many debates between atheists and some of the most respected leaders in the Christian and Jewish worlds.
None of them have ever suggested that what we think of as reason is invalid.
It almost always comes down to faith and interpretation. Faith is raised on a pedestal as if lack of evidence is positive. And interpretation should be applied to scripture. You should ignore its faults and stick to the good stuff.
But by those arguments, I can justify anything at all. It isn't an argument at all, it's a distraction.
Religions have these faults. They haven't been addressed because they cannot.
I did, of course, mean "ostensibly"...
But some things we can be certain of.
For example, two contradictory things cannot both be true. But they could both be false.
Other things should require a lot of evidence. For example invisible pink unicorns.
Religious texts don't reach even the semblance of a reasonable level of argument, and religious dogma is clearly all made up by men.
I can't say for a fact that God does not exist. But I'm pretty sure all the religions I've studied are all nonsense, and encourage magical thinking, none of which is justified in any way shape or form.
I'm strongly suspicious that this applies to all religions.
If different people teach conflicting laws, rules, guidelines and morality about Christianity, then what's the TRUE way?
What's right?
How much comes from God, and how can you be certain?
What is it for a particular teaching to come from "Christianity"? Since Christianity is a group of different religions, and not a single Dogma.
The simplest explanation is that man created all the religions and gods. It's and explanation that neatly fits all the available facts. It could easily be disproved by a single artifact, writing, miracle etc. demonstrably non human in origin, but hasn't.
Quite the opposite, in fact. More and more of religious dogma is proved false, illogical and self contradictory. As time goes on the areas relion is applied to reduces.
In order to maintain a belief, thinking people have to contort their minds, achieving astonishing feats of doublethink.
It's bizarre. And humans are so good at it!
Did you just equate violence against humans to violence against lilacs, because it really sounded that way?
Completely wrong. The propaganda machine is much more subtle these days, and much more effective. When you think about all science has learned about selling to individuals, this is hardly surprising. /want/ to believe some lies.
Plus, people
I may actually agree with what Snowden did, but he did, in fact, break a law.
On the other hand, you're entirely correct about Assange. There isn't even a crime being claimed, yet. They want to extradite him in order to talk to him...
Your test doesn't even work.
There isn't any reason to expect that similar patterns in external readings imply a conscious mind.
And I imagine that, having done this experiment and found (my suspicion) that the patterns are distinctly different, that you'd point out that the result doesn't imply a lack of consciousness.
But I still hold that the most basic rule holds: its only input was the original dna. Therefore, unless you want to argue that all cells are conscious, the resulting brain cannot have gained anything not in the original cell and cannot be conscious.
I think the biggest difficulty here is that we don't even have a working definition of consciousness. And I suspect we might differ over any proposed definition.
They were simply examples of things that are either learned or come in large part from the way the brain attaches to the body.
My point is still the same: no connections no coherence.
There is a LOT more linking body functions with emotion than you have presented. The body functions are a precursor to emotion. You can cause emotions by simply manipulating the body. Making smiling or frowning faces, for example, can cause the appropriate emotion (even when the subject is unaware they are smiling/frowning). Studies have shown many other kinds of bodily functions causing emotions.
Your point about logic is nonsense. (I, of course, meant "... can't have any logic" in the above post) You're presenting the ability to learn as if it were evidence of logic, but that's not the case. Everyone is great at learning, yet very few are any good at logic. The human brain network is great at self organizing and finding correlations, and using them to make predictions. It is NOT, a priori, good at logic. Logic is learned... and in most people not very well.
There isn't any such thing as optimal learning, as learning is a series of trade offs. You could make a criteria, and optimize against that, but your criteria will be arbitrary.
You say the brain would be "presumably ... dreaming". What would you suppose it would dream of?
There isn't any way it could have a conscious stream of subvocalization, as we do, since that would require having learned a language. It can't be said to be thinking, by any reasonable definition of thinking. It has no history. It likely has no sense of time passing. It get's no feedback from other systems, respiratory, for example.
Take a neuron in an adult brain. You can usually quite clearly identify, broadly, what that neuron does. Stimulate it and you can cause the person to experience feelings and memories. /its/ purpose? What can it have self-organized into? You can't even come up with a reasonable proposition. There is nothing. Its neighbors will be similarly in the dark.
Take a neuron in this "disconnected" brain. What is
Brain plasticity /requires/ input from other areas, in order to change its function. Much study has been put into finding good ways to train brain areas that have been affected by adjacent brain damage, etc. It all revolves around finding ways to stimulate the area in question - with repetitive external stimuli. With no stimuli the brain area atrophies. The longer it goes the less likely it will be able to be trained for anything.
I wouldn't suggest that it just shuts off. The brain is simply a network. It's complex, sure, but in this case it hasn't been trained. Nerves are noisy, so you'd expect some firing. Firing often occurs periodically, and neurons are good at learning correlations. So it seems likely that areas of the brain would begin to fire in phase with each other.
I'd say there isn't any reason to expect or assume that it's conscious by any reasonable definition of the word.
You can conjecture with no evidence.
The fact is that considering the known chemical makeup of much of mars, we can be very close to certain that rock have come from mars to Earth.
The lack of oxygen on early Earth is similarly well understood. If there were a lot of oxygen in some localized area, it would rapidly dissipate throughout the whole ocean. (There was only one)
The evidence is mounting that Earth didn't have a good environment for generating the necessary precursors if life.
Now they've found evidence that mars was, at some point, a really good environment for those kife precursors.
It's not concrete, but it's plenty for a story to tickle the neurons.
Is it conjecture if it's a logical conclusion?
We understand the brain very well on a micro scale. What we can't do is extrapolate a lot of the macro scale things that the brain does.
But we can make certain inferences.
This is one of those. There isn't any way it can have emotion - since emotion it directly tied to the functioning of the body.
It can have any logic, since it's self evident from people's mistakes that logic is learned - and this brain cannot have any correctness clues.
Similarly it can't have understanding of objects, physical or metaphysical.
It can't know pain, and will never receive goodness or badness cues.
We know from brain plasticity that a part of the brain that receives no input from its usual source (due to blindness, for example) will get switch to processing something it *does* have input from.
It's not conjecture, it's self evident.
It's clearly not merely the network itself, since having no inputs it can only be a jumble of incoherence.
Consciousness probably emerges from the right kind of network and the right kind of learning.
I think you and gp actually agree...
Gp never said hfcs is the same as glucose.
Sucrose is half fructose half glucose.
Hfcs is about half fructose half glucose.
It takes mere seconds for sucrose to be split into fructose and glucose once eaten.
So they are really very similar.
Replacing sucrose with hfcs makes almost no difference. (They are different while in the mouth).
There are two significant changes in our diet that caused most of the trouble:
1 a vast increase in daily sugar intake
2 a large decrease in fiber intake.
Blaming hfcs over agave, honey, pure sucrose or fructose is pointless.
MMR protects against worse than measles
You could start by refusing medical advice from a pastor...
This deserves a +1 interesting
Why would their electrons be in Canberra?