Why compare them with China? Why not the UK? After all, UK courts have ruled that prisoners can be forced to hand over encryption keys, and can be held in custody indefinitely until they comply.
Where was your snarky comment when that was going on, BTW?
The "hard problem" is just a label that people like to use so that they can invoke a god-of-the-gaps argument. What they mean by "hard problem" is "I can't possibly understand how this could happen via biological mechanisms, therefore magic".
It's indistinguishable from the "intelligent design" argument, and just as unconvincing.
And this particular case was a political crime, which means the prohibition on extradition is not only lawful but required by British and American law. Correct?
Political crimes are typically ones committed against your own nation or an occupying power. He could have tried arguing that his crimes were political; it would have been an interesting defence without any precedent of which I'm aware. I doubt it would have worked, but it would have been interesting.
In any event, he didn't make that argument ergo it doesn't apply in this case. Instead he chose the "Americans are mean" defence, which has apparently served him well.
But the GP is talking about actual terrorists, people who were directly involved in killing others, and yes, he's right, they weren't extradited.
I, also, was referring to IRA members who where actual terrorists. The fact that they killed people does not mean that their crime was not political.
No, there's no precedent in UK case law that says it's not murder if you did it for political reasons
Of course not. There is UK case law that says you can't be extradited if you committed murder under certain circumstances for political reasons. The political incidence test as used by the US and UK was defined in In Re Castioni, where the court found:
that the offence which the prisoner had committed was incidental to and formed a part of political disturbances, and therefore was an offence of a political character within the meaning of the statute, and the prisoner could not be surrendered, but was entitled to be discharged from custody
The accused in the case had, in fact, been charged with murder. There was little doubt that he was guilty. Yet the English court found that he could not be extradited as his crime was political in nature.
The US applied the same standard to IRA terrorists, which led to the interesting conclusion in Quinn v Robinson that an IRA member who committed murder in England could be extradited, but if he had committed the same act in Northern Ireland he would not be extraditable.
The US and UK later negotiated some revisions to the extradition laws, which have placed tighter limits on what constitutes political crimes. However, during the timespan we are discussing, refusing to extradite some IRA terrorists was consistent with both US and UK extradition laws.
Plenty of IRA members - murderers & actual terrorists when the word meant something - fled to the US and were never sent back.
Some IRA members weren't extradited because they claimed that their crimes were political in nature, and the US along with other countries (including the UK) has a prohibition on extradicting people for political crimes.
Ironically enough the US rules on how to handle the potential extraditions of political crimes were at least partly based on an analysis of UK case law.
The Saturn 1B has a 100% record of success and no fatalities
That's kinda meaningless. It flew 9 missions total. The Falcon 9 also had a 100% success rate at that point, with the exception of a "partial failure" on Flight #4 which prevented it from deploying a secondary payload (something which the Saturn 1B couldn't do at all). The first failure happened on mission 19.
It's not currently testable, but considering it's damn near impossible to test whether a fellow human is actually aware of anything that's not surprising.
It's entirely testable. I assume you're referring to the old "how do we know if he's aware or just emulating awareness" conundrum, which is another bit of meaningless handwaving. If an entity demonstrates perception of it's environment, the ability to process that information, and the ability to store and recall that information, then it is aware. Whether this is "true awareness" or "emulation of awareness" is a meaningless question. You might classify different entities as having different levels of awareness, much like we can classify them by other abilities, but to deny that it is aware in the first place is absurd.
It's not a symptom of magical thinking, but rather of trying to find the source of something we have no reliable method of detecting in the first place. We're putting the cart miles in front of the horse.
If you assume that you can't detect it, then yes, you certainly are doing that. Which makes me wonder why you're doing it. If you truly believe that awareness cannot even be tested for, it seems absurd to start looking for a source.
And it's not at all a meaningless concept - it's a completely objective and deeply relevant one: either fundamental particles are conscious, or they're not.
It's not the concept that's meaningless; it's the word "conciseness" itself which becomes meaningless if you redefine it in such a way that quantum particles and atoms could actually possess it. Particles cannot perceive. They cannot process. They cannot store, or retrieve. All they can do is interact with each other. In order for you to give them "consciousness" you have to either redefine the word in such a way that it becomes meaningless, or you have to invoke magic. And even if you do invoke magic, so that particles can now magically perceive, process, store, and recall information, you're then left with a near infinite number of entities which have consciousness yet do absolutely nothing with it.
If they are, then that changes they way we should look for the source of our awareness - not for a mechanism that creates it, but for a path that allows it to emerge from lower levels. (presumably in a more sophisticated form)
Which lower levels? You've already invoked magic to give it to the lowest levels. There's nowhere "lower" for it to emerge from.
Heck, you don't even need to assume it originates from fundamental particles for that to be a useful perspective - anyone who has watched an amoeba hunt will get the impression that it has some spark of awareness in it's single-celled body, and it's no great leap to assume our individual cells may possess such awareness as well. So how is it that the awareness of your neurons combines to form the gestalt awareness of "you"?
Whatever level of "awareness" you want to assign to a neuron is probably not much different than the level of awareness you could assign to a silicon logic gate. You may as well be asking "how does the awareness of logic gates combine to form the gestalt awareness of an AI". Well, I could explain to you how it works, but I suspect you already know the answer, so what is it you're really looking for? Some magical "something more" which somehow makes the higher level consciousness more than the sum of it's parts?
It should be clear that starting from that assumption suggests an entire realm of research avenues that are overlooked by the assumption that awareness is something somehow produced by mechanistic "bio-transistors"
I don't see how. Other than the fact that, if you insist on invoking magic, it pretty much puts an end to any serious inquiry. If we leave out magic and just start assigning limited awareness at the level of multicellular organisms, then you're back to the same "realm of research avenues" as the rest of us; figuring out how exactly many simple parts can organize to form a more capable whole.
I don't imagine an atom or electron has a particularly sophisticated awareness, but if it has even the smallest fleck of "I am!" to build upon, then it fundamantally changes the nature of the questions we should be asking.
He references Donald Hoffman who, amongst other rather goofy ideas, suggests something along those lines; the idea that "consciousness" is infinitely subdivisible, right down to the subatomic particles.
The thing is, once you start defining concussions or "awareness" in those terms, it loses all useful meaning and becomes indistinguishable from just saying "there's magic stuff everywhere". It's not science, it's barely philosophy, and it's certainly not useful. That doesn't mean that it's wrong, per say, but it's not even wrong. It's unfalsifiable, and so meaningless that it provides nothing of value to consider or discuss. It's essentially religion dressed up as philosophy, which is why Donald Huffman sounds a lot like a more eloquent Deepak Chopra.
About as long as a troll is proud of his ignorance.
You'll have to put that into non-troll language for me. Are we talking minutes? Or years? Where exactly is your data for candle-induced mitochondrial damage?
Quoting Tesla is the hallmark of cranks. When you can't say anything intelligent or meaningful, you can always rely on nebulous quotes from a long dead idol.
Let me remind you that skeptics base their opinions on evidence, not on what some TV magician tells them is true.
You wouldn't know skepticism if it bit your ass. NDEs are some of the most blatant billshit out there, completely unsupported by anything other than anecdotes and post-facto rationalisation.
Just checked it out as well as I could. Seems quite good and on the right track.
My default feed on it is mostly filled with right wing pundits and conspiracy whackjobs. It's basically a far-right Facebook, without the privacy issues.
It totally is. Others in the industry (e.g. Google/Waymo) have done it. They use a combination of starting first in safer conditions (closed environments; safer, slower roads; multiple, attentive safety drivers on short shifts) and massive use of simulation.
You're in violent agreement with me, and total disagreement with the guy I responded to.
You'll note that they didn't test or launch the rockets from downtown Tempe.
You'll note that the rockets weren't intended to drive around downtown Tempe. And self driving cars aren't intended to fly to the moon.
Sooooo, the point is the sensitivity to the wavelength because we're not talking about cooking children in a microwave oven, we're talking about the threshold for damage to mitochondrial DNA. Biiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiig difference.
Cool story. So how long does it take for lightbulbs and cabdles to damage your mitochondrial DNA?
Random speculation can be fun, but before you start trying to figure out what's going on there it's usually best to figure out if there's a "there" there.
Slashdot Mirror
So the US is becoming China-lite now?
Why compare them with China? Why not the UK? After all, UK courts have ruled that prisoners can be forced to hand over encryption keys, and can be held in custody indefinitely until they comply.
Where was your snarky comment when that was going on, BTW?
A good elementary reading here, and an understanding that "soft AI" is NOT consciousness, is basic for us to advance any meaningful conversation here.
That's fine; if an AI doesn't meet your definition of consciousness, then it's certain that elementary particles do not either. I'm fine with that.
The "hard problem" is just a label that people like to use so that they can invoke a god-of-the-gaps argument. What they mean by "hard problem" is "I can't possibly understand how this could happen via biological mechanisms, therefore magic".
It's indistinguishable from the "intelligent design" argument, and just as unconvincing.
And this particular case was a political crime, which means the prohibition on extradition is not only lawful but required by British and American law. Correct?
Political crimes are typically ones committed against your own nation or an occupying power. He could have tried arguing that his crimes were political; it would have been an interesting defence without any precedent of which I'm aware. I doubt it would have worked, but it would have been interesting.
In any event, he didn't make that argument ergo it doesn't apply in this case. Instead he chose the "Americans are mean" defence, which has apparently served him well.
But the GP is talking about actual terrorists, people who were directly involved in killing others, and yes, he's right, they weren't extradited.
I, also, was referring to IRA members who where actual terrorists. The fact that they killed people does not mean that their crime was not political.
No, there's no precedent in UK case law that says it's not murder if you did it for political reasons
Of course not. There is UK case law that says you can't be extradited if you committed murder under certain circumstances for political reasons. The political incidence test as used by the US and UK was defined in In Re Castioni, where the court found:
that the offence which the prisoner had committed was incidental to and formed a part of political disturbances, and therefore was an offence of a political character within the meaning of the statute, and the prisoner could not be surrendered, but was entitled to be discharged from custody
The accused in the case had, in fact, been charged with murder. There was little doubt that he was guilty. Yet the English court found that he could not be extradited as his crime was political in nature.
The US applied the same standard to IRA terrorists, which led to the interesting conclusion in Quinn v Robinson that an IRA member who committed murder in England could be extradited, but if he had committed the same act in Northern Ireland he would not be extraditable.
The US and UK later negotiated some revisions to the extradition laws, which have placed tighter limits on what constitutes political crimes. However, during the timespan we are discussing, refusing to extradite some IRA terrorists was consistent with both US and UK extradition laws.
Plenty of IRA members - murderers & actual terrorists when the word meant something - fled to the US and were never sent back.
Some IRA members weren't extradited because they claimed that their crimes were political in nature, and the US along with other countries (including the UK) has a prohibition on extradicting people for political crimes.
Ironically enough the US rules on how to handle the potential extraditions of political crimes were at least partly based on an analysis of UK case law.
Ohlook, a delusional bastard who thinks he's an expert because he hallucinates.
The Saturn 1B has a 100% record of success and no fatalities
That's kinda meaningless. It flew 9 missions total. The Falcon 9 also had a 100% success rate at that point, with the exception of a "partial failure" on Flight #4 which prevented it from deploying a secondary payload (something which the Saturn 1B couldn't do at all). The first failure happened on mission 19.
And every single launch ONE of his rockets has failed to land on its ass-end too, or taken out the landing platform on the way down.
SpaceX has attempted 29 landings, and succeeded 26 times. In what world does that equal a failure to land on every launch? Do you even math, bro?
I'll never get why you people love crazy-expensive monopolies run by defense giants so much.
It's not so much that they love monopolies; its just that they love to hate Musk.
It's not currently testable, but considering it's damn near impossible to test whether a fellow human is actually aware of anything that's not surprising.
It's entirely testable. I assume you're referring to the old "how do we know if he's aware or just emulating awareness" conundrum, which is another bit of meaningless handwaving. If an entity demonstrates perception of it's environment, the ability to process that information, and the ability to store and recall that information, then it is aware. Whether this is "true awareness" or "emulation of awareness" is a meaningless question. You might classify different entities as having different levels of awareness, much like we can classify them by other abilities, but to deny that it is aware in the first place is absurd.
It's not a symptom of magical thinking, but rather of trying to find the source of something we have no reliable method of detecting in the first place. We're putting the cart miles in front of the horse.
If you assume that you can't detect it, then yes, you certainly are doing that. Which makes me wonder why you're doing it. If you truly believe that awareness cannot even be tested for, it seems absurd to start looking for a source.
And it's not at all a meaningless concept - it's a completely objective and deeply relevant one: either fundamental particles are conscious, or they're not.
It's not the concept that's meaningless; it's the word "conciseness" itself which becomes meaningless if you redefine it in such a way that quantum particles and atoms could actually possess it. Particles cannot perceive. They cannot process. They cannot store, or retrieve. All they can do is interact with each other. In order for you to give them "consciousness" you have to either redefine the word in such a way that it becomes meaningless, or you have to invoke magic. And even if you do invoke magic, so that particles can now magically perceive, process, store, and recall information, you're then left with a near infinite number of entities which have consciousness yet do absolutely nothing with it.
If they are, then that changes they way we should look for the source of our awareness - not for a mechanism that creates it, but for a path that allows it to emerge from lower levels. (presumably in a more sophisticated form)
Which lower levels? You've already invoked magic to give it to the lowest levels. There's nowhere "lower" for it to emerge from.
Heck, you don't even need to assume it originates from fundamental particles for that to be a useful perspective - anyone who has watched an amoeba hunt will get the impression that it has some spark of awareness in it's single-celled body, and it's no great leap to assume our individual cells may possess such awareness as well. So how is it that the awareness of your neurons combines to form the gestalt awareness of "you"?
Whatever level of "awareness" you want to assign to a neuron is probably not much different than the level of awareness you could assign to a silicon logic gate. You may as well be asking "how does the awareness of logic gates combine to form the gestalt awareness of an AI". Well, I could explain to you how it works, but I suspect you already know the answer, so what is it you're really looking for? Some magical "something more" which somehow makes the higher level consciousness more than the sum of it's parts?
It should be clear that starting from that assumption suggests an entire realm of research avenues that are overlooked by the assumption that awareness is something somehow produced by mechanistic "bio-transistors"
I don't see how. Other than the fact that, if you insist on invoking magic, it pretty much puts an end to any serious inquiry. If we leave out magic and just start assigning limited awareness at the level of multicellular organisms, then you're back to the same "realm of research avenues" as the rest of us; figuring out how exactly many simple parts can organize to form a more capable whole.
Yep. And in the last 30 years we've made more progress on explaining consciousness than in the last 3,000 combined.
For proper emphasis you have to capitalise The Truth.
I don't imagine an atom or electron has a particularly sophisticated awareness, but if it has even the smallest fleck of "I am!" to build upon, then it fundamantally changes the nature of the questions we should be asking.
He references Donald Hoffman who, amongst other rather goofy ideas, suggests something along those lines; the idea that "consciousness" is infinitely subdivisible, right down to the subatomic particles.
The thing is, once you start defining concussions or "awareness" in those terms, it loses all useful meaning and becomes indistinguishable from just saying "there's magic stuff everywhere". It's not science, it's barely philosophy, and it's certainly not useful. That doesn't mean that it's wrong, per say, but it's not even wrong. It's unfalsifiable, and so meaningless that it provides nothing of value to consider or discuss. It's essentially religion dressed up as philosophy, which is why Donald Huffman sounds a lot like a more eloquent Deepak Chopra.
About as long as a troll is proud of his ignorance.
You'll have to put that into non-troll language for me. Are we talking minutes? Or years? Where exactly is your data for candle-induced mitochondrial damage?
I know shit about consciousness
FTFY. Please don't pretend to speak for anyone but yourself. You may as well be ranting about how nobody knows shit about gravity.
Quoting Tesla is the hallmark of cranks. When you can't say anything intelligent or meaningful, you can always rely on nebulous quotes from a long dead idol.
Let me remind you that skeptics base their opinions on evidence, not on what some TV magician tells them is true.
You wouldn't know skepticism if it bit your ass. NDEs are some of the most blatant billshit out there, completely unsupported by anything other than anecdotes and post-facto rationalisation.
Scientists are discovering that Consciousness Affects Matter. (The fact that the Placebo Effect even _exists_ at all is partial proof of this.)
Dean Radin is a scientist the way Richard Simmonds is a basketball superstar.
The rest of your comment is equally nonsensical. Just one absurd claim after another, supported by bullshit.
In my dreams I am a supermodel starship captain.
Well then. I'll see you tonight ...
Just checked it out as well as I could. Seems quite good and on the right track.
My default feed on it is mostly filled with right wing pundits and conspiracy whackjobs. It's basically a far-right Facebook, without the privacy issues.
I'm over 6 feet tall, have a bodyfat percentage around 10%, have a decent face, a decent personality, and so on
Ah. You're Bruce Jenner!
It totally is. Others in the industry (e.g. Google/Waymo) have done it. They use a combination of starting first in safer conditions (closed environments; safer, slower roads; multiple, attentive safety drivers on short shifts) and massive use of simulation.
You're in violent agreement with me, and total disagreement with the guy I responded to.
You'll note that they didn't test or launch the rockets from downtown Tempe.
You'll note that the rockets weren't intended to drive around downtown Tempe. And self driving cars aren't intended to fly to the moon.
Sooooo, the point is the sensitivity to the wavelength because we're not talking about cooking children in a microwave oven, we're talking about the threshold for damage to mitochondrial DNA. Biiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiig difference.
Cool story. So how long does it take for lightbulbs and cabdles to damage your mitochondrial DNA?
Random speculation can be fun, but before you start trying to figure out what's going on there it's usually best to figure out if there's a "there" there.