Yep, cause we aint bleeding heart enough about people already.. now they can be bleeding heart about the neocortical simulation running on a microcontroller in my toaster. Very well put, you answered him perfectly. Whenever I read something like "when AI gains awareness" I get very strong impulses to kill people and/or cause damage to my surroundings, and I am not really a violent person.
a) AI is not going to "gain awareness" very soon, if at all. In fact, we (comp. scientists) don't know what awareness really means, because it turns out our friends in cognitive psychology are pretty stumped as well. It's not about complexity - we can handle that. It's just that it may very well be that human consciousness(which affects all of cognition) is not representable mathematically. Decades of mathematical philosophy, Godel, Hilbert, Turing and others have shown us how futile mathematics (and by extension computation) is due to its LACK of inconsistency, a property that seems to belong to human reasoning alone due to this business of "awareness". Talk to any decent veteran of AI and you will see how sobered up they are compared to the cowboys who make comments like the GP, and who in my opinion should be locked up in jail until they understand the incompleteness theorems fully.
b) "Touching" and "feeling" mean nothing if he was talking about responding to stimuli through some mechanism. Any old chair "responds" to getting kicked. Tree leaves respond to gusts of wind. Circuits respond to changes in their resistance caused by mechanical action and from this the entire field of sensors is born. There's no magic there, only simple physics. The magic is not in the mechanism/feeling, but in the recognition of the feeling, and that takes us back to (a).
I sincerely hope people will stop talking about things they don't understand in the future, for the benefit of our collective blood pressure. Thanks again for the +1 Insightful comment tho, I couldn't have said anything better without resorting to abusive language:)
Only to a mathematician. Uncountably infinite things are more numerous than countably infinite ones. Even though there is nothing uncountable in this case, there is still a hierarchy of infinities that may relate to the $1 vs $20 question.
Smells of Coriolis forces. This isn't done very well on wikipedia : basically, if you are rotating a tuning fork around its central axis and at some instance hit it (exert a primary "driving" force) on the side while it is still rotating, a secondary vibration by the fork's tines/hands is noticed perpendicular to the direction of your hitting the fork. This is used frequently in modern sensors to detect rotational acceleration.
Top view of fork being rotated clockwise:
^ resulting force
^
_ _ |_| |_| --driving force
v
v
How this causes the shapes, and why on the north pole only (no south pole), is the subject of a nice M.Sc in maths, not a slashdot post;)
You're only partially correct. I'm not about to upgrade to Vista unless I absolutely must do so due to hardware/software compatibility - I use windows for convenience, and there is very little that I need to change. Vista will be the new worm/virus target, and XP has matured after years of exploits to a situation where you are reasonably secure with the latest updates. In short, I want peace of mind like many others, and the "hot new interface" is not going to move me very much, no matter how much Microsoft pushes it on us.
It's good that there are people counting. When elections begin, people should not only vote, but try as much as possible to publicize the reasons why party X lost their vote. Lists like these should be made common knowledge. We all know it is (sadly) a matter of least-dislike, and if the newly elected government knows in general what made the other party so unlikable, they will do what they can to avoid the same demise. Multi-term elections are great in this respect - they give the people in power incentive not to piss people off. If we only we knew how to use that.
How can you possibly regulate the value of a SL property when the only value it has is perception? All things in a system ruled by the banknote have values based only on percieved faith in the economic system(theoretical promise to pay gold..etc). The SL economic system is not backed by the faith of enough real people to make it reasonable to trade in for the wise man, hence the GP is actually correct. Both the real and the SL system are "nothing", but the "nothing" of the SL system is far more volatile. If people wanted to only to show-off, then very well.. this maturity of understanding (ironic isn't it) does not need to be safeguarded because they take SL for what it is. It is the people who do not understand, and who will participate in earnest, who will suffer when the servers dissapear one day or the game shuts down. For their sake, everybody should be made aware of the dangers of engaging in this nonsense. Why can't people just stick to make-believe money in make-believe worlds?
Your post may be very insightful and everything, but you cannot argue with centuries of human's equating cowardice to the word "chicken". The day I get nightmares thinking about giant chickens will be the day I finally admit that psychotherapy may in fact have uses. They're not scary dammit. I refuse to follow your reasoning.
Lean down close and look a rooster right in the eye, you can see the miniature power there. No, you can see the "utter stupidity and cluelessness inherent in being a chicken" there. And I wouldn't put my eyes very close to a rooster's beak, by the way. Insurance companies don't like it. [humor ends here]
Finally I would like to say that of course dinosaurs partly survived. The possibility of the entire range of land animals evolving again from ground zero is not very high at all. That would require fish to develop lungs and "legs" again, plus the entire sequence of successful genetic mutations that lead to the basic characteristics shared between dinos and today's phyla. I haven't done the math, but I wager not enough time for all this to happen all over again, particularly as the probabilities dramatically decrease when "stacked" after each other.
Federal agency can prey on one poor objector, two, maybe 5. But if say 10000 people with illegal warrants of info from FBI/CIA/NSA get together on 1 day in a court of law or somewhere else where they can make a public statement and demand protection from government abuse/retribution, then something will be done. The US is not an orwellian nightmare just yet - scandals are scandals, and our govmint still fears them.
The question of course is how to arrange for such a meeting with fearful participants making the arrangements, and the possibility of FBI interfering. Can someone think of a techie solution? It's mathematically impossible methinks, even if our ISPs were not on the bad side.
The third "instinct" is not an instinct but simply your human reasoning, which cognitively provokes other complex instincts like your ego. Your ego doesn't want you to seen as bad, and your instinct against hurting others is telling you "BAD BAD OUCH DISGUSTING". At the same time you want the money, so the result is a complicated outcome of which set of emotions wins over and drives your action. In some people the desire for money is strong enough to rob the bank - these are the simple criminals.
Nihilists and others who understand this whole process can become far more dangerous "complex criminals", because they will see the morality for what it is and consciously deny morality altogether for their own pleasure. The scary thing is that from an athiest point of view they are extremely logical, and that is why society will protect itself with bank security even though society may understand the reasoning above.
The model I have described is called determinism, and it was made problematic in the last 100 years or so due to the astounding discovery of probablistic quantum mechanics. The philosophical interpretation of QM is not clear, and the people who discovered QM and QED (Heisenberg, Bohr..etc) died without settling on an answer, and the most disturbed by it all was Einstein.
You can tell everything about what a person believe and thinks simply by asking him who he intends to vote for That is definitely not correct, at least in American politics. You have a set "A" of weighted ideals/views and party "B" has another. You do A INTERSECT B for every major party and the biggest resultant set gets your vote. Notice the word "major", because people - smart people - realise that the world is not an ideal enough place to vote for someone who will clearly not win, or to simply not vote at all. You cannot pretend to understand all the people who voted Republican, monsieur I-know-how-your-mind-works AC. [Feels joke coming].
On the other hand you are partly correct in that the political right-left thingie is rather consistent, globally even. There seems to be a politically evolved benefit to "clumping" ideals/agendas based on certain outlooks.
But it won't be the end of morality. If anything, I see a maturing humanity that will come to terms with a need to be moral "just because" it helps us deal with life and is good for us all. Very well...but you must still concede that morality is an emotional illusion, even though it is an illusion that society may concsiously wish to follow because of the strength of its instinctive drive. However, to those with enough philosophical sophistication (e.g nihilist hedonists) it may be possible to overcome some basic "moral" feelings in the interest of personal pleasure.
Religion - and I hate to admit this - is the only construct which meaningfully defines morality in mathematically logical terms(given that religion is 'correct'), by defining activity done with the intention of satisfying the demands of the religion as "good". You are wrong if you think they shy away from biological explanations. They can't. But the idea of recognizing an action as "good" or "bad" has to necessarily incorporate the intention of the actor to comply with the definition, otherwise it becomes worthless in their books, and that is indeed logical (given again that religion is somehow true/correct).
Without a concrete, divine, unquestionable, untouchable law, 'morality' reduces to little more than instinctive drive. Utilitarianism may attempt to make sense of it, humanism may champion it, but it is really in essence nothing more than a set of randomly evolved functions that *happen* to insure survival. And survival is not capable of being ascribed correctness or fallacy: survival is simply a phenomenon. So why should I not help myself to an odd million dollars in federally insured money by, say, robbing a bank? Because some molecules happened to collide 10,000 years ago in the developing brain of an animal leading to (DNA encoding of)endorphins being released when members of the same species were hurt? Because that is what it is. Add in the bit of cognitive magic in the human brain and you get explanations for everything. The truth is I can't do it because the logical drive is not as powerful as the instinctive one, even though I understand both fully. But there may be others who are wired a little differently - are they 'wrong'? Are they wrong if they shoot you in the street, or steal your credit card info, or conquer your nation's resources by wiping out it's population with an instantanteous WMD that causes no "pain"? Our emotions scream yes, but we know why they scream, and the knowledge can motivate some to silence those nuisance feelings.
So before you fear the 'nihilist Islamists' (the terms are contradictory by the way), start fearing the rationalist age of crime that may come before. The real masses subscribing to monotheism will never be a major problem in the future, even though everybody will suffer from their fanatical offshoots in this global society of today. This is because as others have noted, religion coincides with collective uitility in many cases. Individuals however, are another story.
Was there no other way to determine that a single photon was released? They used a beam splitter, and the method makes sense, but is there no other way using the "discreteness" of energy levels?
Or... you could do all those things then finally break down emotionally in an amount of pain that would render this option not so much better anymore. The difficuly here is that it's hard to put exact limits on the time-scale. The diseases are not very simple, and the chances of survival not perfectly determined. You can be told you will last a year or 2, but what if the number was 10? 15? Would you want to make those decisions?
GP post was correct. In some matters, ignorance is bliss.
Summary: differences in cortical structure shows males are at an advantage in math and spatial awareness, women in linguistic/empathic matters. These are not concrete rules in any way of course, but the biological differences do exist.
For your enlightenment, the 'water' in question is a series of multidimensional branes, according to one cosmological theory.
The reason why mathematical arguments are so difficult to accept is that you need to somehow go from the conceptual to the physically real, assuming that physical reality itself is well understood (and it is not). 1+1=2, but that doesn't cause energy to come into existence. This is a realm of metaphysics and borderline philosophy, because energy and the spacetime "reality" are very different from mathematics, even if they abide by mathematics. Describing how one could emerge the other is not something that will happen with the current understanding/theories.
This is not about probability. There is no time scale before this event, hence it is meaningless to talk about its likelihood. The universe can exist, from an atheist standpoint, if and only if it's existence is a mathematical necessity. Ferris was joking. I hope.
I'm agnostic, but this is largely not correct. You are basing the argument on the (Christian)premise that God's existence is somehow comparable to the physical existence of the uni/multiverse and therefore requiring whatever physical explanations needed for the latter to be made for the former. Certain monotheist theologies, notably Islam, describe God as thus: "Nothing can be likened to Him[there is nothing that bears resemblance to Him..etc]". For them, the bearded guy in the white robe is an immense, abonimable heresy.
Anyway, for those who have studied contemporary gravitational theory (i.e GT of relativity) and some decent quantum physics, it is quite easy to understand Hawkins when he talks about no time (specifically no spacetime) existing outside the singularity that was the beginning of this universe. The problem with all fundamental theory however is that either there was no physical existence before that "stage" or there was an infinitely extending series of bangs and crunches, and the second option immediately becomes an unsatisfactory deferment of the question we are about to ask: why did anything "change"(remember, no time concept yet) to cause existence (which in reality is a bizarre fabric of and around energy/matter) to "become"? Mathematical answers relating to branes and other such nonsense from string theory is not going to help very much, and I am not speaking out of confidence in my own abilities here - this is one of the almost philosophical questions (along with maybe a couple of others in quantum) that puzzled the giants(Einstein, Bohr, De Broglie, Born..etc) until they died. Max Born's 1954 Nobel prize lecture is good reading here.
To put it simply, it is not true that the mathematical concepts NEED to manifsest themselves in a physical reality. There is no reason for this inflation of "concept" into "existence". Mathematics does not cause anything at all, although we try to use it today to describe, and therefore prove - given established axioms - everything we know. This may mean that we cannot know how everything became, but it is in fact far easier to ascribe this "becoming", and indeed all properties of the universe, to a fundementally different Creator than to nothingness itself.
1) Well, you're definitely new in town, aren't you. Classical "you must be new here" bait.
2) You need to ease up a little. Everybody knows they have six-pack holsters as standard accessories in Alabama, your trying to deny it is no good. Next thing you'll be saying they have a computer forsenics lab over there, or something.
Slashdot Mirror
a) AI is not going to "gain awareness" very soon, if at all. In fact, we (comp. scientists) don't know what awareness really means, because it turns out our friends in cognitive psychology are pretty stumped as well. It's not about complexity - we can handle that. It's just that it may very well be that human consciousness(which affects all of cognition) is not representable mathematically. Decades of mathematical philosophy, Godel, Hilbert, Turing and others have shown us how futile mathematics (and by extension computation) is due to its LACK of inconsistency, a property that seems to belong to human reasoning alone due to this business of "awareness". Talk to any decent veteran of AI and you will see how sobered up they are compared to the cowboys who make comments like the GP, and who in my opinion should be locked up in jail until they understand the incompleteness theorems fully.
b) "Touching" and "feeling" mean nothing if he was talking about responding to stimuli through some mechanism. Any old chair "responds" to getting kicked. Tree leaves respond to gusts of wind. Circuits respond to changes in their resistance caused by mechanical action and from this the entire field of sensors is born. There's no magic there, only simple physics. The magic is not in the mechanism/feeling, but in the recognition of the feeling, and that takes us back to (a).
I sincerely hope people will stop talking about things they don't understand in the future, for the benefit of our collective blood pressure. Thanks again for the +1 Insightful comment tho, I couldn't have said anything better without resorting to abusive language
Only to a mathematician. Uncountably infinite things are more numerous than countably infinite ones. Even though there is nothing uncountable in this case, there is still a hierarchy of infinities that may relate to the $1 vs $20 question.
Top view of fork being rotated clockwise:
^ resulting force
^
|_| |_| <--driving force
v
v
Smells of Coriolis forces. This isn't done very well on wikipedia : basically, if you are rotating a tuning fork around its central axis and at some instance hit it (exert a primary "driving" force) on the side while it is still rotating, a secondary vibration by the fork's tines/hands is noticed perpendicular to the direction of your hitting the fork. This is used frequently in modern sensors to detect rotational acceleration.
;)
Top view of fork being rotated clockwise:
^ resulting force
^
_ _
|_| |_| --driving force
v
v
How this causes the shapes, and why on the north pole only (no south pole), is the subject of a nice M.Sc in maths, not a slashdot post
You're only partially correct. I'm not about to upgrade to Vista unless I absolutely must do so due to hardware/software compatibility - I use windows for convenience, and there is very little that I need to change. Vista will be the new worm/virus target, and XP has matured after years of exploits to a situation where you are reasonably secure with the latest updates. In short, I want peace of mind like many others, and the "hot new interface" is not going to move me very much, no matter how much Microsoft pushes it on us.
It's good that there are people counting. When elections begin, people should not only vote, but try as much as possible to publicize the reasons why party X lost their vote. Lists like these should be made common knowledge. We all know it is (sadly) a matter of least-dislike, and if the newly elected government knows in general what made the other party so unlikable, they will do what they can to avoid the same demise. Multi-term elections are great in this respect - they give the people in power incentive not to piss people off. If we only we knew how to use that.
[humor ends here]
Finally I would like to say that of course dinosaurs partly survived. The possibility of the entire range of land animals evolving again from ground zero is not very high at all. That would require fish to develop lungs and "legs" again, plus the entire sequence of successful genetic mutations that lead to the basic characteristics shared between dinos and today's phyla. I haven't done the math, but I wager not enough time for all this to happen all over again, particularly as the probabilities dramatically decrease when "stacked" after each other.
Large numbers.
Federal agency can prey on one poor objector, two, maybe 5. But if say 10000 people with illegal warrants of info from FBI/CIA/NSA get together on 1 day in a court of law or somewhere else where they can make a public statement and demand protection from government abuse/retribution, then something will be done. The US is not an orwellian nightmare just yet - scandals are scandals, and our govmint still fears them.
The question of course is how to arrange for such a meeting with fearful participants making the arrangements, and the possibility of FBI interfering. Can someone think of a techie solution? It's mathematically impossible methinks, even if our ISPs were not on the bad side.
That was a great piece. But posted by an Anonymous Coward? Surely there's some irony in there somewhere ;)
The third "instinct" is not an instinct but simply your human reasoning, which cognitively provokes other complex instincts like your ego. Your ego doesn't want you to seen as bad, and your instinct against hurting others is telling you "BAD BAD OUCH DISGUSTING". At the same time you want the money, so the result is a complicated outcome of which set of emotions wins over and drives your action. In some people the desire for money is strong enough to rob the bank - these are the simple criminals.
Nihilists and others who understand this whole process can become far more dangerous "complex criminals", because they will see the morality for what it is and consciously deny morality altogether for their own pleasure. The scary thing is that from an athiest point of view they are extremely logical, and that is why society will protect itself with bank security even though society may understand the reasoning above.
The model I have described is called determinism, and it was made problematic in the last 100 years or so due to the astounding discovery of probablistic quantum mechanics. The philosophical interpretation of QM is not clear, and the people who discovered QM and QED (Heisenberg, Bohr..etc) died without settling on an answer, and the most disturbed by it all was Einstein.
These guys eat toads - I wouldn't land my green butt in France if I were an alien.
You do A INTERSECT B for every major party and the biggest resultant set gets your vote. Notice the word "major", because people - smart people - realise that the world is not an ideal enough place to vote for someone who will clearly not win, or to simply not vote at all. You cannot pretend to understand all the people who voted Republican, monsieur I-know-how-your-mind-works AC. [Feels joke coming].
On the other hand you are partly correct in that the political right-left thingie is rather consistent, globally even. There seems to be a politically evolved benefit to "clumping" ideals/agendas based on certain outlooks.
welcome our abstinent 100-million year old micro-organic losers *cough* overlords.
Religion - and I hate to admit this - is the only construct which meaningfully defines morality in mathematically logical terms(given that religion is 'correct'), by defining activity done with the intention of satisfying the demands of the religion as "good". You are wrong if you think they shy away from biological explanations. They can't. But the idea of recognizing an action as "good" or "bad" has to necessarily incorporate the intention of the actor to comply with the definition, otherwise it becomes worthless in their books, and that is indeed logical (given again that religion is somehow true/correct).
Without a concrete, divine, unquestionable, untouchable law, 'morality' reduces to little more than instinctive drive. Utilitarianism may attempt to make sense of it, humanism may champion it, but it is really in essence nothing more than a set of randomly evolved functions that *happen* to insure survival. And survival is not capable of being ascribed correctness or fallacy: survival is simply a phenomenon. So why should I not help myself to an odd million dollars in federally insured money by, say, robbing a bank? Because some molecules happened to collide 10,000 years ago in the developing brain of an animal leading to (DNA encoding of)endorphins being released when members of the same species were hurt? Because that is what it is. Add in the bit of cognitive magic in the human brain and you get explanations for everything. The truth is I can't do it because the logical drive is not as powerful as the instinctive one, even though I understand both fully. But there may be others who are wired a little differently - are they 'wrong'? Are they wrong if they shoot you in the street, or steal your credit card info, or conquer your nation's resources by wiping out it's population with an instantanteous WMD that causes no "pain"? Our emotions scream yes, but we know why they scream, and the knowledge can motivate some to silence those nuisance feelings.
So before you fear the 'nihilist Islamists' (the terms are contradictory by the way), start fearing the rationalist age of crime that may come before. The real masses subscribing to monotheism will never be a major problem in the future, even though everybody will suffer from their fanatical offshoots in this global society of today. This is because as others have noted, religion coincides with collective uitility in many cases. Individuals however, are another story.
I deciphered it as bot-hell and wanted to ask what sort of sadistic, fiery-pit network they set up over there to torture the bots.
I'm personally glad they didn't say anything about football fields.
I love it when ACs fight. Log-in you a**holes!
To the resident quantum physicists at /. :
Was there no other way to determine that a single photon was released? They used a beam splitter, and the method makes sense, but is there no other way using the "discreteness" of energy levels?
Or... you could do all those things then finally break down emotionally in an amount of pain that would render this option not so much better anymore.
The difficuly here is that it's hard to put exact limits on the time-scale. The diseases are not very simple, and the chances of survival not perfectly determined. You can be told you will last a year or 2, but what if the number was 10? 15? Would you want to make those decisions?
GP post was correct. In some matters, ignorance is bliss.
That is very interesting, probably explained by this:/ cerebro-homens.html
http://www.cerebromente.org.br/n11/mente/eisntein
Summary: differences in cortical structure shows males are at an advantage in math and spatial awareness, women in linguistic/empathic matters. These are not concrete rules in any way of course, but the biological differences do exist.
For your enlightenment, the 'water' in question is a series of multidimensional branes, according to one cosmological theory.
The reason why mathematical arguments are so difficult to accept is that you need to somehow go from the conceptual to the physically real, assuming that physical reality itself is well understood (and it is not). 1+1=2, but that doesn't cause energy to come into existence. This is a realm of metaphysics and borderline philosophy, because energy and the spacetime "reality" are very different from mathematics, even if they abide by mathematics. Describing how one could emerge the other is not something that will happen with the current understanding/theories.
This is not about probability. There is no time scale before this event, hence it is meaningless to talk about its likelihood. The universe can exist, from an atheist standpoint, if and only if it's existence is a mathematical necessity. Ferris was joking. I hope.
I'm agnostic, but this is largely not correct. You are basing the argument on the (Christian)premise that God's existence is somehow comparable to the physical existence of the uni/multiverse and therefore requiring whatever physical explanations needed for the latter to be made for the former. Certain monotheist theologies, notably Islam, describe God as thus: "Nothing can be likened to Him[there is nothing that bears resemblance to Him..etc]". For them, the bearded guy in the white robe is an immense, abonimable heresy.
Anyway, for those who have studied contemporary gravitational theory (i.e GT of relativity) and some decent quantum physics, it is quite easy to understand Hawkins when he talks about no time (specifically no spacetime) existing outside the singularity that was the beginning of this universe. The problem with all fundamental theory however is that either there was no physical existence before that "stage" or there was an infinitely extending series of bangs and crunches, and the second option immediately becomes an unsatisfactory deferment of the question we are about to ask: why did anything "change"(remember, no time concept yet) to cause existence (which in reality is a bizarre fabric of and around energy/matter) to "become"?
Mathematical answers relating to branes and other such nonsense from string theory is not going to help very much, and I am not speaking out of confidence in my own abilities here - this is one of the almost philosophical questions (along with maybe a couple of others in quantum) that puzzled the giants(Einstein, Bohr, De Broglie, Born..etc) until they died. Max Born's 1954 Nobel prize lecture is good reading here.
To put it simply, it is not true that the mathematical concepts NEED to manifsest themselves in a physical reality. There is no reason for this inflation of "concept" into "existence". Mathematics does not cause anything at all, although we try to use it today to describe, and therefore prove - given established axioms - everything we know. This may mean that we cannot know how everything became, but it is in fact far easier to ascribe this "becoming", and indeed all properties of the universe, to a fundementally different Creator than to nothingness itself.
you are not the only prejudiced person here.
1) Well, you're definitely new in town, aren't you. Classical "you must be new here" bait.
2) You need to ease up a little. Everybody knows they have six-pack holsters as standard accessories in Alabama, your trying to deny it is no good. Next thing you'll be saying they have a computer forsenics lab over there, or something.