I, and most good drivers, can often anticipate a movement several seconds before it actually happens. Put that in your equation.
Why wouldn't a computer system be able to "anticipate a movement several seconds before it actually happens", specially when it's continuously and actively looking for such movements for the specific purpose of anticipating them and avoiding collisions?
Sure, the human brain has lots of pattern recognition functions that go about working even when you aren't consciously using them, but pretending they're beyond and/or faster than what technology can do doesn't make sense. The prime example are air bags. The system detects an impact and deploys the bags way before your brain (or your body, for that matter) starts noticing that a crash occurred. One instant everything is fine, the next instance the bags are around you, your car is topside down.
As for a fully operational computer driver system, with it most of the time the accident won't have occurred to begin with.
There is no tech yet that can anticipate a child about to kick a ball out onto a road, or to see that a pedestrian is about to walk out in front of you without looking first.
Do you really think you 300ms senses are better at detecting 'random_object_in_car_path()' and doing a 'controlled_break( distance( random_object_in_car_path() ) / car_speed() );' than a laser detection system operating at sub-millisecond speeds?
IMHO instead of ignoring it's better to just assume they are conscious. This way if they actually are you don't risk doing something that'd be cruel, and if they aren't, well, no gain but also no loss.:-)
We don't disregard it but I think before we do it, we need to come up with a test to determine whether or not it is actually a mind in the sense that it has conscious experiences like we do.
The problem is that the epiphenomenal concept admits of no such test. It states that you can have two entirely identical material configurations with absolutely no differences, neither in their materiality nor in their behaviour, in fact two absolutely identical clones acting and behaving in exactly the same way, and one could have the epiphenomenal attribute of consciousness while the other didn't. Were I to ask to "Pino Grigio Conscious" and "Pino Grigio Non-Conscious" anything and both would provide the same answers. Were I to look at their brains under a tunneling microscope and I'd see both working in exactly the same way. And yet, the epiphenomenalist states, one of them could be doing everything unconsciously, mere movements of matters, while the other would be conscious.
This must be so, argues the epiphenomenalist, because if you could find any difference, then this finding, being material, would mean that conscience is phenomenal, not epiphenomenal, and thus physical. Since the whole effort of epiphenomenalist is to affirm conscience as something beyond physics, there's nothing physical, including air moving though a lump of matter shaped as vocal chords (hence the futility of asking questions) that could be used to detect that which, by definition, is entirely beyond physics. For if it could be detected then that'd show that consciousness is indeed physical, as it could be causally found in and through phenomenal matter.
I don't believe it's enough to simply simulate it with some system. I'm definitely not a functionalist in that sense.
The problem with this is ethical. If we disregards that a sufficiently simulated mind is a mind, we can do to it whatever we want and it won't be considered the monstrous act it actually (IMHO) is because we'll rationalize as "yeah, it is screaming in utter agony and being driven mad, but that's just an appearance, there's no one there really suffering, at all".
The p-zombie concept leads to that, and in a very nasty way. With it you can have someone that is down to their individual particles entirely human, indistinguishable from any other, all the while negating that it has any consciousness even when she implores you to believe she does, because she lacks (the p-zombie theorist can affirm) conscience.
I prefer the phenomenal approach without dwelling into epiphenomenal reasoning, as it's simply much more humane to do so: if it looks like a duck...
There are neural correlates of your phenomenological experience, but you can't say that the colour is the neural correlate.
Certainly, as I cannot say that there is an external world at all if I take a strict Kantian perspective. But there are advantages in being a strict reductivist in addition to a strict determinist: assuming these things to be so you open the doors to studying them as if they were so without placing restrictions upon your research. If dooooooown the line we find something, anything, that can't be reduced, then well, we admit it and move on. Otherwise, why do so? Additionally, if reality reveals itself as reductionist all the way down so that subjective experience is pure physics, that opens another door, that of cognitive engineering, leading us to an extremely rich future in which we become machines and/or virtual personalities, physically immortal, with fully upgradeable minds able to run on a myriad of hardwares rather than being restricted by whatever non-reducible substratum we were born with, gaining new carefully projected subjective phenomena to go along an ever expanding sphere of raw data with which to interact with, unrestricted and unrestrictable.
If reality turns out to be neither reducible nor deterministic then, well, I'll lament for everything humanity could have become but never will, remaining forever trapped into an uncrackable black box of irreducible, unknowable, noumenal monads...
That sounds to me like a recipe for strict determinism.
Many-World is in fact strictly deterministic. It's considered one of it's advantages as QM becomes just like everything else in Physics.
Notice that strict determinism doesn't affect subjective free will. Instead of being a property of the world free will becomes a property of your internal representation of the world, pretty much like colors don't exist in the world, only in your brain, what evidently doesn't make them any less real for you and for anything you do based on them "being there".
There are a lot of businesses facing major losses because their rivals can say, "We are NSA free" and get a contract over their US counterparts.
Literally true. Here in Brazil at leas one major business ISP is constantly advertising something like this: "In these times of espionage come to ${ISP_NAME} and be protected from international spies! Here your e-mail can be this and that and blah-blah-blah!" (The features listed have nothing to do with actually protecting the data, but clueless business people won't notice.)
I have no idea what the numbers are, but at the very least Google's Brazilian branch must be feeling the heat.
I'm scared that for you living longer means more time to work.
I remember reading a mathematician who took to calculate how things would work were death by disease and age abolished. His conclusions were more or less like this: people would live on average 500 to 1000 years then die from violence or accident (evidently some would die at 10 or earlier like today, some would live to many millennia); a pair would be allowed to have a child per century or so to account for people dying so as to keep the population stable (allow for space exploration, new world and the like and that's relaxed); and retirement would have to be abolished, probably replaced by a 10 year sabbatical every 40 years of work or so (paid for by the savings you accumulated over that timespan), allowing for people to take a world cruise, study, change careers etc. so as to avoid boredom.
Capitalism is based on the concept that all market participants, including consumers have perfect information on all aspects of all trades.
That's a very old 19th century notion abandoned by modern theorists for the simple fact that it's an impossibility, and basing real stuff on impossible notions has a tendency of not working. The fact that no market participant, not even producers, has or can have perfect information or even enough information is central to contemporaneous free-market theory as the problem Economy must deal with. Friedrich Hayek, for instance, demonstrated that the problem affects all economic models, and is worst in central planning due to way information flows and gets destructively compressed up the chain until reaching the central planners (it it reaches them at all, as much of it is just lost in the way), and the least worse in free markets since individual actors can react almost instantly to changes in the amount, quality and time-variability of information.
The key then isn't to expect perfect information, but to make people aware that they have imperfect information and thus that they must continuously seek information, not trusting any information received unless confirmed by other sources, to use the raw fact that information is imperfect as the shield with which to protect themselves from manipulation. One concrete solution of this type would be people subscribing to well reputed consumer review / safety / etc. publications that economically depended on them, the consumers, not on advertising and actively using those to filter out misleading information spread by producers.
As for the government regulating such information, it's perhaps advantageous to people who like to believe they aren't spending on becoming well informed, but in the end they still are, as producers just pass on the cost of reduced "idiot sales" into the price of whatever they sell, and on top of that they're also paying the taxes required to sustain the bureaucracy required to enforce the rules. The government doing it is just a more expensive way to achieve the same result, as is the case whenever the government does anything the market itself could be doing instead.
I have a few torrents I keep on permanent upload status. None of them is even close of a 10000 ratio. The one with uploaded the most has a ratio of 4 or so, hence, 4 "friends" in total.
By the way, I'd say they are all way more friendly than you.;-)
The greater the level of encryption on more of the communications across the internet, magnifies any attempt at decryption and forces it attempt smaller and smaller captures of data.
Perhaps, but consider this: almost everyone, me included, still uses Windows. Using some of the maybe several backdoors in it to steal private keys just a few bytes at a time, stenographically hidden into something apparently innocuous, and captured at some of dozens of places those packages might travel through, all of which over a period of weeks or months so that it doesn't get flagged by IDS packages, makes using cryptography potentially pointless.
Convince the major countries to switch to Linux. A customized distribution per country that went through a detailed code review for each and every package. Compiled by a compiler that went through a code review of its assembly code. Running on hardware whose silicon is made locally and whose firmware also went through code review. And to institute extremely severe laws mandating their employees to also use it at home and to never, ever, connect anything work-related to a Windows machine. And on top of that add encryption, at every level where it can be done, including within databases, and then you can start becoming confident the NSA will have some difficulty getting at your data. (Without paying for local spies within government offices at least.)
Or do like Russia and go paper-only for anything important.
I highly doubt an NSA-defeating system would cost $50 million to build from scratch.
The problem is that Brazil is one of the most corrupt countries in the world. Corruption is so entrenched in our culture that millions of people think it a perfectly acceptable way of living. And differently from the USA, Brazilians in general just aren't patriotic (you find actual patriotism among the military, but that's it). It'd be trivial for the NSA to find people at SERPRO, ABIN (our NSA) and/or any of the several TI departments in the government to help them with keys, code samples, hardware purchasing decisions or all three. $50 million would be plenty...
If Brazil had a brain amongst them, they would simply focus on having their postal companies offer up security keys per citizen and then use that communications.
Actually, the Brazilian postal company (singular: it's a government monopoly) sells security keys. Several government websites only offer full functionality if you purchase one and use it to access them. Asking for the government to give those away equals asking them to give up tax revenue. It won't happen.
SERPRO is a company. State owned, but a company nonetheless. It's valued at about $1 billion with an yearly revenue (not profit) of about $745 million, and that involves stuff such as the developing the software Brazilians use to file their taxes. For comparison's sake NSA's budget is about $10.8 billion. So, let's suppose SERPRO has a very generous $50 million available to spare to this kind of stuff. That's 200x less than NSA's budget. In short, whatever SERPRO manages to do the NSA will be able to break in a matter of weeks, if not days.
According to the Libertardians this could never happen, since the holy Free Market would prevent any such thing. This pretty much puts the lie to their entire religion.
Why? Can't you go to the author's website and purchase directly from it? Even if credit card holders were to refuse accepting payments for this kind of content, they can very well start accepting bitcoins, sidestepping this silliness. This kind of attitude by major ebooksellers shows exactly what libertarianism preaches, and it opens opportunities for 3rd party market disruptors.
PS.: Oh, and among jihadist Muslims there's also the overuse of this concept of the, so to speak, "Peaceland" (technically "house of Islam", in contradistinction to the "house(s) of War", i.e., everyone else), which is what they believe to be protecting and/or fighting for.
(Tongue-in-cheek, but too many of my fellow Americans think that way.)
It became evident back in 2002 when the US started using the word Homeland. The similarities with the USSR usage of Motherland or the Nazi usage of Fatherland aren't simple coincidence. There are patterns in this kind of thing.
Scrivener looks decent, but seems bent towards using it to produce a magazine or write a novel, not just take down a list of groceries, or any project just requiring text with styling. Also its featurers really look cluster-f**ky, It has a built in notepad? and you are supposed to import the PDF and webpage you are using as a reference, so it can show it in its own window with its own worse renderer?
Scrivener is targeted at writing researched stuff. It helps you organize the research and then write around it, but most of the advanced features come disabled by default and the user usually only enables then when he notices he has a need, asks in the forum whether it'll be implemented and someone answers that it's already in there, just go in this or that menu and enable it. Also, it uses the concept of writing tons of small files rather than putting everything into a single large document so that you can reorganize the text on the fly and view it in several ways (collections, filters, separate bits of text, merged bits of text etc.), something Word and its clones cannot do. When you've completed your manuscript and organized it into its final form you tell it to generate a final version for sending to 3rd parties, and it can do that in tons of way, from the typical DOC and PDF to ePub, Mobi and even some more esoteric formats such as MultiMarkdown and LaTex.
I use it to write my serious stuff. It's well worth learning. Once you get used to the way it works you simply cannot go back to using Word and similar softwares for anything more than formatting the final version.
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I, and most good drivers, can often anticipate a movement several seconds before it actually happens. Put that in your equation.
Why wouldn't a computer system be able to "anticipate a movement several seconds before it actually happens", specially when it's continuously and actively looking for such movements for the specific purpose of anticipating them and avoiding collisions?
Sure, the human brain has lots of pattern recognition functions that go about working even when you aren't consciously using them, but pretending they're beyond and/or faster than what technology can do doesn't make sense. The prime example are air bags. The system detects an impact and deploys the bags way before your brain (or your body, for that matter) starts noticing that a crash occurred. One instant everything is fine, the next instance the bags are around you, your car is topside down.
As for a fully operational computer driver system, with it most of the time the accident won't have occurred to begin with.
There is no tech yet that can anticipate a child about to kick a ball out onto a road, or to see that a pedestrian is about to walk out in front of you without looking first.
Do you really think you 300ms senses are better at detecting 'random_object_in_car_path()' and doing a 'controlled_break( distance( random_object_in_car_path() ) / car_speed() );' than a laser detection system operating at sub-millisecond speeds?
you may as well just ignore the whole concept.
IMHO instead of ignoring it's better to just assume they are conscious. This way if they actually are you don't risk doing something that'd be cruel, and if they aren't, well, no gain but also no loss. :-)
I know you need 1.21GW peak power,
It's actually 1.21 jigawatts. The conversion factor from jigawatts into gigawatts is unknown.
but what's the total energy requirement?
Extrapolating from the documentary, where time travel takes about 0.5s, I'd say at least 0.6 jigabrowns, give or take. ;)
We don't disregard it but I think before we do it, we need to come up with a test to determine whether or not it is actually a mind in the sense that it has conscious experiences like we do.
The problem is that the epiphenomenal concept admits of no such test. It states that you can have two entirely identical material configurations with absolutely no differences, neither in their materiality nor in their behaviour, in fact two absolutely identical clones acting and behaving in exactly the same way, and one could have the epiphenomenal attribute of consciousness while the other didn't. Were I to ask to "Pino Grigio Conscious" and "Pino Grigio Non-Conscious" anything and both would provide the same answers. Were I to look at their brains under a tunneling microscope and I'd see both working in exactly the same way. And yet, the epiphenomenalist states, one of them could be doing everything unconsciously, mere movements of matters, while the other would be conscious.
This must be so, argues the epiphenomenalist, because if you could find any difference, then this finding, being material, would mean that conscience is phenomenal, not epiphenomenal, and thus physical. Since the whole effort of epiphenomenalist is to affirm conscience as something beyond physics, there's nothing physical, including air moving though a lump of matter shaped as vocal chords (hence the futility of asking questions) that could be used to detect that which, by definition, is entirely beyond physics. For if it could be detected then that'd show that consciousness is indeed physical, as it could be causally found in and through phenomenal matter.
I don't believe it's enough to simply simulate it with some system. I'm definitely not a functionalist in that sense.
The problem with this is ethical. If we disregards that a sufficiently simulated mind is a mind, we can do to it whatever we want and it won't be considered the monstrous act it actually (IMHO) is because we'll rationalize as "yeah, it is screaming in utter agony and being driven mad, but that's just an appearance, there's no one there really suffering, at all".
The p-zombie concept leads to that, and in a very nasty way. With it you can have someone that is down to their individual particles entirely human, indistinguishable from any other, all the while negating that it has any consciousness even when she implores you to believe she does, because she lacks (the p-zombie theorist can affirm) conscience.
I prefer the phenomenal approach without dwelling into epiphenomenal reasoning, as it's simply much more humane to do so: if it looks like a duck...
There are neural correlates of your phenomenological experience, but you can't say that the colour is the neural correlate.
Certainly, as I cannot say that there is an external world at all if I take a strict Kantian perspective. But there are advantages in being a strict reductivist in addition to a strict determinist: assuming these things to be so you open the doors to studying them as if they were so without placing restrictions upon your research. If dooooooown the line we find something, anything, that can't be reduced, then well, we admit it and move on. Otherwise, why do so? Additionally, if reality reveals itself as reductionist all the way down so that subjective experience is pure physics, that opens another door, that of cognitive engineering, leading us to an extremely rich future in which we become machines and/or virtual personalities, physically immortal, with fully upgradeable minds able to run on a myriad of hardwares rather than being restricted by whatever non-reducible substratum we were born with, gaining new carefully projected subjective phenomena to go along an ever expanding sphere of raw data with which to interact with, unrestricted and unrestrictable.
If reality turns out to be neither reducible nor deterministic then, well, I'll lament for everything humanity could have become but never will, remaining forever trapped into an uncrackable black box of irreducible, unknowable, noumenal monads...
That sounds to me like a recipe for strict determinism.
Many-World is in fact strictly deterministic. It's considered one of it's advantages as QM becomes just like everything else in Physics.
Notice that strict determinism doesn't affect subjective free will. Instead of being a property of the world free will becomes a property of your internal representation of the world, pretty much like colors don't exist in the world, only in your brain, what evidently doesn't make them any less real for you and for anything you do based on them "being there".
There are a lot of businesses facing major losses because their rivals can say, "We are NSA free" and get a contract over their US counterparts.
Literally true. Here in Brazil at leas one major business ISP is constantly advertising something like this: "In these times of espionage come to ${ISP_NAME} and be protected from international spies! Here your e-mail can be this and that and blah-blah-blah!" (The features listed have nothing to do with actually protecting the data, but clueless business people won't notice.)
I have no idea what the numbers are, but at the very least Google's Brazilian branch must be feeling the heat.
I'm scared that for you living longer means more time to work.
I remember reading a mathematician who took to calculate how things would work were death by disease and age abolished. His conclusions were more or less like this: people would live on average 500 to 1000 years then die from violence or accident (evidently some would die at 10 or earlier like today, some would live to many millennia); a pair would be allowed to have a child per century or so to account for people dying so as to keep the population stable (allow for space exploration, new world and the like and that's relaxed); and retirement would have to be abolished, probably replaced by a 10 year sabbatical every 40 years of work or so (paid for by the savings you accumulated over that timespan), allowing for people to take a world cruise, study, change careers etc. so as to avoid boredom.
Capitalism is based on the concept that all market participants, including consumers have perfect information on all aspects of all trades.
That's a very old 19th century notion abandoned by modern theorists for the simple fact that it's an impossibility, and basing real stuff on impossible notions has a tendency of not working. The fact that no market participant, not even producers, has or can have perfect information or even enough information is central to contemporaneous free-market theory as the problem Economy must deal with. Friedrich Hayek, for instance, demonstrated that the problem affects all economic models, and is worst in central planning due to way information flows and gets destructively compressed up the chain until reaching the central planners (it it reaches them at all, as much of it is just lost in the way), and the least worse in free markets since individual actors can react almost instantly to changes in the amount, quality and time-variability of information.
The key then isn't to expect perfect information, but to make people aware that they have imperfect information and thus that they must continuously seek information, not trusting any information received unless confirmed by other sources, to use the raw fact that information is imperfect as the shield with which to protect themselves from manipulation. One concrete solution of this type would be people subscribing to well reputed consumer review / safety / etc. publications that economically depended on them, the consumers, not on advertising and actively using those to filter out misleading information spread by producers.
As for the government regulating such information, it's perhaps advantageous to people who like to believe they aren't spending on becoming well informed, but in the end they still are, as producers just pass on the cost of reduced "idiot sales" into the price of whatever they sell, and on top of that they're also paying the taxes required to sustain the bureaucracy required to enforce the rules. The government doing it is just a more expensive way to achieve the same result, as is the case whenever the government does anything the market itself could be doing instead.
Not you and 10,000 of your "friends".
I have a few torrents I keep on permanent upload status. None of them is even close of a 10000 ratio. The one with uploaded the most has a ratio of 4 or so, hence, 4 "friends" in total.
By the way, I'd say they are all way more friendly than you. ;-)
many universities have a site license available for you to use it
And if not, anyone can download and use its open source clone, GNU Octave.
I was using Mathematica in grad school (experimental physics).
That wasn't the right tool for the task. Mathematica is for symbolic math, not number crunching.
The greater the level of encryption on more of the communications across the internet, magnifies any attempt at decryption and forces it attempt smaller and smaller captures of data.
Perhaps, but consider this: almost everyone, me included, still uses Windows. Using some of the maybe several backdoors in it to steal private keys just a few bytes at a time, stenographically hidden into something apparently innocuous, and captured at some of dozens of places those packages might travel through, all of which over a period of weeks or months so that it doesn't get flagged by IDS packages, makes using cryptography potentially pointless.
Convince the major countries to switch to Linux. A customized distribution per country that went through a detailed code review for each and every package. Compiled by a compiler that went through a code review of its assembly code. Running on hardware whose silicon is made locally and whose firmware also went through code review. And to institute extremely severe laws mandating their employees to also use it at home and to never, ever, connect anything work-related to a Windows machine. And on top of that add encryption, at every level where it can be done, including within databases, and then you can start becoming confident the NSA will have some difficulty getting at your data. (Without paying for local spies within government offices at least.)
Or do like Russia and go paper-only for anything important.
I highly doubt an NSA-defeating system would cost $50 million to build from scratch.
The problem is that Brazil is one of the most corrupt countries in the world. Corruption is so entrenched in our culture that millions of people think it a perfectly acceptable way of living. And differently from the USA, Brazilians in general just aren't patriotic (you find actual patriotism among the military, but that's it). It'd be trivial for the NSA to find people at SERPRO, ABIN (our NSA) and/or any of the several TI departments in the government to help them with keys, code samples, hardware purchasing decisions or all three. $50 million would be plenty...
As anyone who's ever seen a "Score:5, Troll" can attest. :-)
If Brazil had a brain amongst them, they would simply focus on having their postal companies offer up security keys per citizen and then use that communications.
Actually, the Brazilian postal company (singular: it's a government monopoly) sells security keys. Several government websites only offer full functionality if you purchase one and use it to access them. Asking for the government to give those away equals asking them to give up tax revenue. It won't happen.
the NSA, who's budget is probably 10X SERPROs.
SERPRO is a company. State owned, but a company nonetheless. It's valued at about $1 billion with an yearly revenue (not profit) of about $745 million, and that involves stuff such as the developing the software Brazilians use to file their taxes. For comparison's sake NSA's budget is about $10.8 billion. So, let's suppose SERPRO has a very generous $50 million available to spare to this kind of stuff. That's 200x less than NSA's budget. In short, whatever SERPRO manages to do the NSA will be able to break in a matter of weeks, if not days.
Edit: holders -> companies
According to the Libertardians this could never happen, since the holy Free Market would prevent any such thing. This pretty much puts the lie to their entire religion.
Why? Can't you go to the author's website and purchase directly from it? Even if credit card holders were to refuse accepting payments for this kind of content, they can very well start accepting bitcoins, sidestepping this silliness. This kind of attitude by major ebooksellers shows exactly what libertarianism preaches, and it opens opportunities for 3rd party market disruptors.
So we need to find aliens who are willing to maintain it?
Nope. We make the aliens to maintain it, either via genetic engineering or Artificial Intelligence.
PS.: Oh, and among jihadist Muslims there's also the overuse of this concept of the, so to speak, "Peaceland" (technically "house of Islam", in contradistinction to the "house(s) of War", i.e., everyone else), which is what they believe to be protecting and/or fighting for.
(Tongue-in-cheek, but too many of my fellow Americans think that way.)
It became evident back in 2002 when the US started using the word Homeland. The similarities with the USSR usage of Motherland or the Nazi usage of Fatherland aren't simple coincidence. There are patterns in this kind of thing.
Scrivener looks decent, but seems bent towards using it to produce a magazine or write a novel, not just take down a list of groceries, or any project just requiring text with styling. Also its featurers really look cluster-f**ky, It has a built in notepad? and you are supposed to import the PDF and webpage you are using as a reference, so it can show it in its own window with its own worse renderer?
Scrivener is targeted at writing researched stuff. It helps you organize the research and then write around it, but most of the advanced features come disabled by default and the user usually only enables then when he notices he has a need, asks in the forum whether it'll be implemented and someone answers that it's already in there, just go in this or that menu and enable it. Also, it uses the concept of writing tons of small files rather than putting everything into a single large document so that you can reorganize the text on the fly and view it in several ways (collections, filters, separate bits of text, merged bits of text etc.), something Word and its clones cannot do. When you've completed your manuscript and organized it into its final form you tell it to generate a final version for sending to 3rd parties, and it can do that in tons of way, from the typical DOC and PDF to ePub, Mobi and even some more esoteric formats such as MultiMarkdown and LaTex.
I use it to write my serious stuff. It's well worth learning. Once you get used to the way it works you simply cannot go back to using Word and similar softwares for anything more than formatting the final version.