mysterious radio signal
Fast Radios Bursts (FRBs) show large dispersion measures (DMs), suggesting an extragalactic location. We analyze the DMs of the 11 known FRBs in detail and identify steps as integer multiples of half the lowest DM found, 187.5cm−3 pc, so that DMs occur in groups centered at 375, 562, 750, 937, 1125cm−3 pc, with errors observed 5%. We estimate the likelhood of a coincidence as 5:10,000. We speculate that this could originate from a Galaxy population of FRBs, with Milky Way DM contribution as model deviations, and an underlying generator process that produces FRBs with DMs in discrete steps. However, we find that FRBs tend to arrive at close to the full integer second, like man-made perytons. If this holds, FRBs would also be man-made. This can be verified, or refuted, with new FRBs to be detected. http://arxiv.org/abs/1503.05245 -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: The MGA revisited
On 4/2/2015 4:33 AM, Stathis Papaioannou wrote: On 2 April 2015 at 08:30, meekerdbmeeke...@verizon.net wrote: On 4/1/2015 12:30 PM, Stathis Papaioannou wrote: I don't think it's impossible to prove comp true. If comp were not true then it would be possible to make partial zombies. I think that's the inference we're arguing. It's certainly not obvious to me. It's not obvious that comp can be proved or it's not obvious that if comp were false it would be possible to make partial zombies? If partial zombies are possible then there would be no difference between you having qualia or lacking qualia, There would be no 3p observable difference in other people. Just showing that a partial zombie is possible doesn't show that you are one. A partial zombie would not only show no 3p difference, it would also show no 1p difference. There is no conceptual problem with that in a zombie, but there is in a partial zombie, which by definition has normal feelings and cognition except for its zombified aspect. A person who is otherwise normal immediately knows if he loses a significant aspect of his consciousness, such as his vision or his ability to understand language. Sometimes if neurological damage is severe enough it can damage cognitive ability and the subject develops the delusional belief, anosognosia, that he is normal despite all evidence to the contrary, but that does not invalidate the argument. which is equivalent to saying consciousness does not exist; I think it is equivalent to the idea that some (humans) have souls and some (animals) don't. I don't believe that, but it's logically possible. I think you are not making the distinction between a zombie and a partial zombie. A zombie is not obviously absurd, a partial zombie is. Suppose the were a race of people who experienced the qualia of liver function. That doesn't seem absurd to me. So neither does it seem absurd that I'm a partial zombie relative them. Brent -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: The MGA revisited
On 3 April 2015 at 17:30, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: Suppose the were a race of people who experienced the qualia of liver function. That doesn't seem absurd to me. So neither does it seem absurd that I'm a partial zombie relative them. What is absurd is that you have qualia, lose them, but there is no subjective or objective evidence that they have gone. What sense could be given to the word qualia in that case? -- Stathis Papaioannou -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: SETI breakthrough: Project Durin Succeeds!
So, have they been reading 2001 ?! As Arthur C Clarke pointed out back in 1968, the Moon is a far more sensible place for an advanced race visiting the solar system to leave a message for humanity. For one thing, getting there indicates that we're possibly worth talking to (as Eddie Izzard said, God really should have shown up to congratulate us). And for another thing, it's rather more geologically stable. Why bother burying something on Earth where it can easily get subducted or otherwise destroyed, when you have the perfect spot for a time capsule a mere 400,000km away? Of course, they may have left it on Ganymede, for the creatures living on Europa... -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: SETI breakthrough: Project Durin Succeeds!
PS maybe I should have read the whole thing. I just noticed some 14s and 41s in the post, is this a very belated April fool? -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: Michael Graziano's theory of consciousness
On 02 Apr 2015, at 19:12, John Clark wrote:
On Thu, Apr 2, 2015 Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote:
A thought experiment is not needed to realize there is a
difference between I and you.
It ias moe about the difference between the 3-you
In other words he.
and the 1-you.
In other words I.
Like, the 3-you are in both M and W, but the 1-you are in only M
or W.
It would be wise if Bruno Marchal were less preoccupied with putting
numerals before you and gave a little more thought about what that
personal pronoun is supposed to mean. Does you mean John Clark the
Moscow Man or does you just mean John Clark? It makes a
difference, a very very big difference, and that's why John Clark
says that the English language will need a major overhaul when
matter duplicating machines become common (and that will be about an
hour after they become technologically possible).
And other than show that The Moscow Man aka the man who sees
Moscow will turn out to be the man who sees Moscow aka The Moscow
Man I can't figure out what you think you've proven.
A non quantum first person indeterminacy. The step 4 asks if such
indeterminacy is the same if we add different delays of
reconstitution in the reconstitution in M and W.
And that's exactly why I haven't read step 4. Before I worry about
if such indeterminacy changes under various conditions I need to
know what the hell sort of indeterminacy you're talking about, and
despite reading your stuff for years you still haven't been able to
make that clear.
Imagine the iterated duplication, the average history in the diaries
obtained contained histories like
W (I was unable to predit that), W again! Would it be always W? M. Oh
I did not predict that, let us sump up, my hisytory is HWWM
[•••]
Let us sum up: HWWMWWWMMWMMMWWWMWMWWMWMWMMM Hm, I don't find
anyway I could have use to predict that.
I don't see the difficulty. By comp, you know that you will not die,
by comp, you know that you will not feel yourself in both place, and
by the protocol, you know that both will get the coffee, but cannot
predict which one, despite there will be one among the option {W, M}
(assuming comp, the protocol and the defaut hypothesis.
I don't see what is not clear with that. Nobody grasp where you see a
difficulty. The indeterminacy is the one described in the memories or
diaries of the average persons at the end of the experience.
If you repeat the experience a big number of time, the probability
that you will see W is given by the usual integral of the gaussian
e^(x^2) with the normalization constant. In that protocol. French
statisticians called that épreuve de Bernouilli. You get the same
with the quantum coin, and in that case the probabilistic feature is
isomorphic, despite a different origin (quantum superposition and self-
duplication).
And the step 4 question is: should we take another distribution, of
those first person experience, if we add a delay of reconstitution in
Moscow?
Bruno
John K Clark
and the Theaetetus' definition of knowledge
I don't think that those working on cutting edge scientific
problems in 2015 will be helped much by reading a book written in
369 BC by an author who thought the Earth was the center of the
universe and the 7 planets ( Mercury Venus Mars Jupiter Saturn, the
Sun and the Moon) were fixed to 7 crystal spheres and the rest of
the universe, the stars, was pasted on the inside of a 8th sphere.
?
!
Clearly you have not read the Theaetetus,
Nor do I intend to.
as it does not mention astronomy.
But Plato, the author of Theaetetus mention astronomy Timaeus and it
the Republic and he advocates a cosmological theory that has been
obsolete for 2000 years, even Ptolemy with his epicycles was better.
Do you really think that scientists working on string theory would
be helped by reading such crap?
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Re: Michael Graziano's theory of consciousness
On Fri, Apr 3, 2015 Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: Imagine the iterated duplication, the average history in the diaries obtained contained histories like W (I was unable to predit that), W again! Bruno Marchal keeps making the exact same error over and over and over again. Whatever is in the diary that the Washington Man is carrying is totally irrelevant because it was not written by the Washington Man he's just carrying it, the diary was written by the Helsinki Man. And Bruno Marchal just can't kick that personal pronoun addiction. For the 123rd time WHO THE HELL IS I? I don't see what is not clear with that. The I in the above sentence causes no unambiguity because matter copying machines do not yet exist and because there was no prediction about what Mr. I will experience in the future; otherwise it would be so ambiguous there would be no way to determine even in theory if the prediction turned out to be correct or not; in other words the sentence would be meaningless. Nobody grasp where you see a difficulty. Perhaps because like Bruno Marchal they can't stop themselves from effortlessly spewing out personal pronouns without thinking. That's fine for everyday conversation, poetry and even most technical writing, but personal pronouns don't work worth a damn in thought experiments that try to uncover the fundamental nature of personal identity. And the step 4 question is Is step 4 infested with personal pronouns just like everything else Bruno Marchal writes about personal identity? John K Clark John K Clark -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: The MGA revisited
On 03 Apr 2015, at 00:44, Russell Standish wrote: On Thu, Apr 02, 2015 at 05:10:37PM +1000, Bruce Kellett wrote: Why are the limitations due to the size and/or age of our present universe relevant if the computation is carried out in Platonia -- on a non-physical UTM? If the computations are carried out on a real physical UTM then consciousness supervenes on the physical universe after all! The whole point of the MGA is to try and close off a gap in the argument if you assume that ontological reality I guess you mean here: physical ontological reality (assuming it exists). is less than Platonia. You mean, does not contain a concrete universal dovetailing. Platonia might still be bigger than the universal dovetailing. The universal dovetailing is sigma_1 complete, but not sigma_2 complete, ... Usually, I think of platonia as to be the entire arithmetical truth, which is pi_i and sigma_i complete for all i. Ontologicall, we can limit ourselves to sigma_1 complete set. It is the epistemology, physics, and theology, which get much bigger, but they emerge phenomenologically from the sigmz_-truth seen from inside. In such a non-robust universe setting, physical limits are quite relevant. Like Sen Carroll illustrated. Too much Boltzman brain, or a too much big part of the Universal Dovetailing, and prediction needs to take them into account. OK. If we have a robust ontology (ie the full Platonia), You really mean: robust physical ontology. then the MGA is not needed, the first 7 steps of the UDA suffice for Bruno's point. If robust enough to make all Boltzmann brain, which is equivalent with the universal dovetailing, except that it is unclear if they have the right redundancies. No problem with comp, because the redundancies is imposed by the math. Moreover, I would argue that the MGA doesn't even work, as recordings can be fully counterfactually correct. By adding the inert Klara? But then the physical role of the inert Klara to produce consciousness to the movie is not Turing emulable, and you stop assuming computationalism. I can understand the role of Klara and counterfactual correctness for the computation and behavior being correct hen change occur, but how could they change the consciousness by being non present when not needed? Bruno -- Prof Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile) Principal, High Performance Coders Visiting Professor of Mathematics hpco...@hpcoders.com.au University of New South Wales http://www.hpcoders.com.au Latest project: The Amoeba's Secret (http://www.hpcoders.com.au/AmoebasSecret.html) -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: Life in the Islamic State for women
On Fri, Apr 3, 2015 at 4:04 AM, Telmo Menezes te...@telmomenezes.com wrote: If the world is indeed being destroyed by pollution [...] It's not, things are becoming less polluted, at least in capitalist countries. The amount of sulfur dioxide in the air of London reached its peak around 1850, by 1950 it was one tenth that, today it is one tenth that again. The number of particles in the air reached its peak in 1960, today it is one tenth what it was. Carbon monoxide has been reduced 80% since 1990 and there was a similar reduction in lead compounds; the reduction of nitric oxide has been less dramatic but even here has been cut in half since 1975. Yes the amount of carbon dioxide has increased but that's not necessarily a bad thing. Experiments have shown that the amount of plant biomass increases with approximately the square root of the carbon dioxide abundance in the air, so the 30% increase in CO2 over the last 60 years resulted in a 15% increase in food production and a 15% increase in planet Earth's total biomass. Also, an increase in CO2 makes plants more drought resistant. John K Clark -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: The MGA revisited
In that case though you would be liver blind and easily distinguished from people who could talk about what it's like for their liver to produce the sensations it does. I'm colorblind - but that doesn't make me a partial zombie with regard to seeing hues of red. It's easy to tell the difference between me and someone with full color vision. On Fri, Apr 3, 2015 at 2:30 AM, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: On 4/2/2015 4:33 AM, Stathis Papaioannou wrote: On 2 April 2015 at 08:30, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net meeke...@verizon.net wrote: On 4/1/2015 12:30 PM, Stathis Papaioannou wrote: I don't think it's impossible to prove comp true. If comp were not true then it would be possible to make partial zombies. I think that's the inference we're arguing. It's certainly not obvious to me. It's not obvious that comp can be proved or it's not obvious that if comp were false it would be possible to make partial zombies? If partial zombies are possible then there would be no difference between you having qualia or lacking qualia, There would be no 3p observable difference in other people. Just showing that a partial zombie is possible doesn't show that you are one. A partial zombie would not only show no 3p difference, it would also show no 1p difference. There is no conceptual problem with that in a zombie, but there is in a partial zombie, which by definition has normal feelings and cognition except for its zombified aspect. A person who is otherwise normal immediately knows if he loses a significant aspect of his consciousness, such as his vision or his ability to understand language. Sometimes if neurological damage is severe enough it can damage cognitive ability and the subject develops the delusional belief, anosognosia, that he is normal despite all evidence to the contrary, but that does not invalidate the argument. which is equivalent to saying consciousness does not exist; I think it is equivalent to the idea that some (humans) have souls and some (animals) don't. I don't believe that, but it's logically possible. I think you are not making the distinction between a zombie and a partial zombie. A zombie is not obviously absurd, a partial zombie is. Suppose the were a race of people who experienced the qualia of liver function. That doesn't seem absurd to me. So neither does it seem absurd that I'm a partial zombie relative them. Brent -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: The MGA revisited
On 03 Apr 2015, at 01:18, Stathis Papaioannou wrote: On 3 April 2015 at 01:06, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: However, what you call my fuctionalism is a superset of comp, and it may still be possible to replace part of the brain with a device incorporating a hypercomputer, or even a magical device animated by God, and preserve consciousness. ... making your functionalism trivial, if you excuse the straightness. It is not trivial because it makes this (if I may say so) rather profound claim: that it is impossible even for God to make a device that reproduces the observable function of the brain without also reproducing any associated consciousness. Roger Penrose proposes that the brain utilises non-computable physics and that therefore it is not possible to reproduce either the observable function of the brain or its consciousness using a digital computer. Yes, he defends non-comp (even non-quantum-comp, unlike Hamerov). This is logically consistent, OK, but this shows you agree that we can't prove comp. Only the generalisation your-functionalism. even if there is no actual evidence for it. John Searle, on the other hand, believes that it is possible to reproduce the observable function of the brain but that this would not necessarily reproduce consciousness. Yes, it is another way to disbelieve in comp: believing in zombie. Given that consciousness actually exists, which entails that there is a difference between being conscious and not being conscious, this is not logically consistent because it would lead to partial zombies. Almost OK. What about someone who say that as long as 1/4 of its biological brain is organic he is fully conscious, but once more that 3/4 of the brain is digital, then it becomes a total zombie. In that case: no partial zombie. (just try to find a logical loophole ..., don't mind to much, I do agree with Chalmers' fading qualia point). It is my contention that the only requirement is that this device replicates the I/O behaviour of the part of the brain that it replaces, and any associated consciousness will follow necessarily. OK. I think you get close to prove the half of comp yes doctor, as everybody agrees that we cannot prove Church thesis. (which does not mean we cannot give very powerful evidences for it). Then the proof of yes doctor use the fact that partial zombiness makes no sense, but I think that anosognosia can be used, notably if we believe in things like a consciousness volume (on which the anosognosia would bear on). I don't see how that could make sense. It is sufficient to consider not special cases where the change is small or memory and cognition are deficient, but a general case where the change in consciousness is extreme and the person's cognition is intact. If you claim that it is possible to radically change the consciousness volume without someone noticing then I think that is tantamount to claiming that consciousness does not exist. I agree. The point is logical. Like in MGA, once we argue on reality, we can only present evidences, no proofs. The LHC has not prove the existence of the Higgs boson, nor does Mars Rover and its image prove the existence of Mars, or Apollo 9 the existence of the moon. They just give strong evidence. It would be on that strong sense of proof that my critics would bear on. A bit like Russell's critics on the MGA. I think the argument I present does not depend on any fact about the world (although going from the general case of what I call functionalism to what Putnam called machine-state functionalism and you call comp does depend on the physical CT being true). It depends on a very basic operational definition of consciouness: that you know it if you are conscious and you realise if there is a large enough change in your consciousness. If you don't accept this operational definition then I can find no meaning in the word consciousness. You make your point. For some reason, I have still a little doubt, but I might need to just think a bit more. Some of my neurons make strike because they want me sleeping a bit more. My point is that we cannot prove comp, but I agree that even God cannot refute your-functionalism. A perfect zombie does not make sense, but a non-comp person can of course decide that some or other person are zombie or have no soul, but then it is the usual insult of fear of the other. We might also get evidence against comp, like never succeeding in making an artificial brain. That could mean not that comp is false, but that the level might be low. In that case the personal with artificial brains would notice the difference, and some output would be different. Bruno -- Stathis Papaioannou -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to
Re: The MGA revisited
On 03 Apr 2015, at 05:55, Bruce Kellett wrote: Bruno Marchal wrote: On 02 Apr 2015, at 15:04, Bruce Kellett wrote: Bruno Marchal wrote: On 02 Apr 2015, at 04:08, Bruce Kellett wrote: Emulation is a dynamical process in time. I wonder where you get a time variable for your UTM. By a variable on the computational steps. It has nothing to do with a physical time a priori. What variable? A simple numbering of steps? But that will not work, or at least, you have hidden an assumption of an external time in your notation. The external time is given by the universal machine running the computation. It can be the basic level (elementary arithmetic, or the universal dovetailer), or it can be some other universal layer, running on some other universal layer, running on some other running on the basic level. At the basic level, we have the block mindscape, like the UD* (the infinite cone of all computations). This does not do the work you require of it. See below. At the end of step 27, move to step 28. That contains an implicit notion of time -- 'ending' and 'moving' are temporal concepts. I do not see that you can remove all traces of the idea of an external temporal parameter. Otherwise the machine could just halt arbitrarily at some point and never know that it had halted. I think you ned to flesh your ideas here out a great deal more. Well, this is a forum, and I explain things already explained with all details in much longer text (which sometime does not help, because busy people tend to skip even more the long texts nowadays). Let me try to help a bit though. Fix some universal programming language, like Fortran, say. Enumerate all programs computing function with 1 argument, p_0, p_1, p_2, Let us denote by [p_i(j)^k] the kième step of the execution of the ième program on argument j, by the universal dovetailer (which dovetails then on all such [p_i(j)^k] . Then we can define, indeed already in Robinson arithmetic, a computation by a sequence of such steps, when i and j are fixed. So a computation is given by the sequence [p_456(666)^0] [p_456(666)^1] [p_456(666)^2] [p_456(666)^3] [p_456(666)^4] etc. This sequence is a subsequence of the general universal dovetailing, which dovetails on all [p_i(j)^k]. It is a computation, only in virtue of the universal dovetailing, and the universal dovetailing can be defined in arithmetic. I can translate the proposition the UD access to [p_345(898786)^89] entirely in term of arithmetic, using only the notion of addition, multiplication, successor (of natural numbers) and 0, and predicate logic. The only external time used is the ordering of the natural number, which is easily translated in arithmetic: x y means Ez(x + z) = y). OK? I got this much from reading your paper and other things you have said. But this, at best, provides and ordering (indexing if you like) Ordering is good, for the step (here k) of the computations. Indexing is usually used for the enumeration of the p_i. on the computational steps. It does not provide a time parameter. I agree. In fact, it is entirely static, and you get no more than some ordering imposed on sequences that can be found in any normal number. you get the proof that the relations between numbers emulate some computation, and the emulation comes from the trueness of this, (be it realized in a universe, or in the arithmletical reality). The emulation does not of the syntactical description of the computations, which we need only to refer to those relation., but which alone in the counting algorithm does not emulate any computations (in the precise technical sense of emulate). The real numbets are even more full of such description, yet that can't emulate a universal Turing machine. Diophantine polynomials on the reals are not Turing universal, yet in the integers, and the natural numbers they are. Let me be more specific in my criticism. In step 7 of your argument you introduce the dovetailer. But you then say Suppose now, for the sake of argument, that our concrete and 'physical' universe is a sufficiently robust expanding universe so that a 'concrete' UD can run forever... Why do you need infinite time in an expanding universe to run the dovetailer if it is not a physical machine? ? The 'concrete' UD is a physical UD. By the way, I did it in 1991. I implement the UD in Lisp, and let it run during two weeks. In step 7, I add the following assumption: 1) there is a primitive physical universe 2) it run the UD. Then you can understand that such a universe needs to be extending for ever, and be robust, because the universal dovetaling involves bigger and bigger programs using greater and greater inputs. The game of life of Conway is Turing universal. The UD can be programmed by a two dimensional pattern in the game of life. Then its dynamics gives a third dimensional
Re: Life in the Islamic State for women
On Thu, Apr 2, 2015 at 10:19 PM, LizR lizj...@gmail.com wrote: The defining characteristic of stupid is that stupid doesn't work, so regardless of what you may personally think of capitalism's ethics (and there is no disputing matters of taste) the fact remains that if capitalism was stupider than communism then it wouldn't have won the 40 year long face to face confrontation with it. It didn't. Communism hasn't been tried except at the tribal/village level (you're getting confused because some people called themselves communist). My point is that capitalism is in the process of destroying the world, Are you sure all that bad stuff wasn't caused by people who just called themselves capitalists? And given the fact that people have never been richer, healthier, better educated or more peaceful than the are right now it's a pity nobody started the process of destroying the world thousands of years ago. And why are communist countries like China and former communist countries like the USSR the most polluted part of the planet? John K Clark -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: The MGA revisited
On 4 Apr 2015, at 7:32 am, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: On 4/2/2015 4:18 PM, Stathis Papaioannou wrote: I think the argument I present does not depend on any fact about the world (although going from the general case of what I call functionalism to what Putnam called machine-state functionalism and you call comp does depend on the physical CT being true). It depends on a very basic operational definition of consciouness: that you know it if you are conscious and you realise if there is a large enough change in your consciousness. If you don't accept this operational definition then I can find no meaning in the word consciousness. I don't understand how that applies to someone who, for example, is red-green colorblind. Aren't they partial-zombies by your definition? They may come to realize that they don't distinguish the full spectrum, just as we realize we don't see infrared. Supppose the colorblind person used to see colors but lost the ability (as my mother did after cataract surgery)? She realized it by noticing that things that used to be colorful weren't anymore. But like the person born colorblind, she didn't directly experience a qualia of being colorblind. She noticed a difference and there was also an objective change in her ability to discriminate between a colours. A partial zombie would not notice a difference and there would be no test that could find a difference. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: The MGA revisited
On 4/2/2015 4:18 PM, Stathis Papaioannou wrote: I think the argument I present does not depend on any fact about the world (although going from the general case of what I call functionalism to what Putnam called machine-state functionalism and you call comp does depend on the physical CT being true). It depends on a very basic operational definition of consciouness: that you know it if you are conscious and you realise if there is a large enough change in your consciousness. If you don't accept this operational definition then I can find no meaning in the word consciousness. I don't understand how that applies to someone who, for example, is red-green colorblind. Aren't they partial-zombies by your definition? They may come to realize that they don't distinguish the full spectrum, just as we realize we don't see infrared. Supppose the colorblind person used to see colors but lost the ability (as my mother did after cataract surgery)? She realized it by noticing that things that used to be colorful weren't anymore. But like the person born colorblind, she didn't directly experience a qualia of being colorblind. Brent -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: The MGA revisited
On 4 Apr 2015, at 3:14 am, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: On 03 Apr 2015, at 01:18, Stathis Papaioannou wrote: On 3 April 2015 at 01:06, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: However, what you call my fuctionalism is a superset of comp, and it may still be possible to replace part of the brain with a device incorporating a hypercomputer, or even a magical device animated by God, and preserve consciousness. ... making your functionalism trivial, if you excuse the straightness. It is not trivial because it makes this (if I may say so) rather profound claim: that it is impossible even for God to make a device that reproduces the observable function of the brain without also reproducing any associated consciousness. Roger Penrose proposes that the brain utilises non-computable physics and that therefore it is not possible to reproduce either the observable function of the brain or its consciousness using a digital computer. Yes, he defends non-comp (even non-quantum-comp, unlike Hamerov). This is logically consistent, OK, but this shows you agree that we can't prove comp. Only the generalisation your-functionalism. Yes, comp is false if CT is false. But in that case you would be unable to make a zombie either. even if there is no actual evidence for it. John Searle, on the other hand, believes that it is possible to reproduce the observable function of the brain but that this would not necessarily reproduce consciousness. Yes, it is another way to disbelieve in comp: believing in zombie. Given that consciousness actually exists, which entails that there is a difference between being conscious and not being conscious, this is not logically consistent because it would lead to partial zombies. Almost OK. What about someone who say that as long as 1/4 of its biological brain is organic he is fully conscious, but once more that 3/4 of the brain is digital, then it becomes a total zombie. In that case: no partial zombie. (just try to find a logical loophole ..., don't mind to much, I do agree with Chalmers' fading qualia point). There must then be some crucial indivisible component responsible for the flip (for if it were not indivisible you could still make a partial zombie). It is not inconceivable as a partial zombie is, but it is wildly implausible and probably not consistent with the assumption that consciousness is a naturalistic process in the brain. It is my contention that the only requirement is that this device replicates the I/O behaviour of the part of the brain that it replaces, and any associated consciousness will follow necessarily. OK. I think you get close to prove the half of comp yes doctor, as everybody agrees that we cannot prove Church thesis. (which does not mean we cannot give very powerful evidences for it). Then the proof of yes doctor use the fact that partial zombiness makes no sense, but I think that anosognosia can be used, notably if we believe in things like a consciousness volume (on which the anosognosia would bear on). I don't see how that could make sense. It is sufficient to consider not special cases where the change is small or memory and cognition are deficient, but a general case where the change in consciousness is extreme and the person's cognition is intact. If you claim that it is possible to radically change the consciousness volume without someone noticing then I think that is tantamount to claiming that consciousness does not exist. I agree. The point is logical. Like in MGA, once we argue on reality, we can only present evidences, no proofs. The LHC has not prove the existence of the Higgs boson, nor does Mars Rover and its image prove the existence of Mars, or Apollo 9 the existence of the moon. They just give strong evidence. It would be on that strong sense of proof that my critics would bear on. A bit like Russell's critics on the MGA. I think the argument I present does not depend on any fact about the world (although going from the general case of what I call functionalism to what Putnam called machine-state functionalism and you call comp does depend on the physical CT being true). It depends on a very basic operational definition of consciouness: that you know it if you are conscious and you realise if there is a large enough change in your consciousness. If you don't accept this operational definition then I can find no meaning in the word consciousness. You make your point. For some reason, I have still a little doubt, but I might need to just think a bit more. Some of my neurons make strike because they want me sleeping a bit more. My point is that we cannot prove comp, but I agree that even God cannot refute your-functionalism. A perfect zombie does not make sense, but a non-comp person can of course decide that some or other person are zombie or have no soul, but then it is the usual
Re: The MGA revisited
meekerdb wrote: On 4/2/2015 8:55 PM, Bruce Kellett wrote: The only reason that the dovetailer might have to worry about time limitations is if it is actually a physical computer. Physical computers have to contend with such things as physical laws, the finite speed of light, the properties of materials, the generation of heat (entropy) and the need to remove that heat to a safe distance before everything melts down. If your computer is not a physical device, then it has none of these limitations, and there is no such concept available as the 'speed' of the computation, the 'time for each step', or anything of this sort. From our external concrete perspective, the whole thing is instantaneous, or it enters statis at some point and gets nowhere. For a non-physical computer these things are equivalent. So without a physical computer you have no dynamics. A mere ordering of states is still a static thing, and the dovetailer does nothing useful that could not more easily be done by referring to a normal number. Why would it not have the same dynamics as in any Platonia version of physics, e.g. a block universe simulated in a digital computer? The states don't even have to be computed in their inherent time order. Bruno doesn't argue for this -- as far as I can see he moves from a physical computer straight into Platonia, without any attempt at a justification for the move. Unfortunately for his case, if you start with a physical computer, you have to start with a set of physical laws and that will run this machine composed of physical matter in an orderly manner. It cannot bootstrap itself -- run the machine and this itself generates the laws that enable the machine to run? Argue the self-referential bootstrap, don't just ignore the problem. But a more significant point, it seems to me, is that time in the block universe works by taking some subsystem and using it as a clock. But the clock function is instantiated by showing correlations between the regular dynamics of the clock and the dynamics of the rest of the universe. In other words, the universe has to run according to regular dynamical laws that apply equally to the clock subsystem and to the rest. Without these regular correlations you have no clock, and no time. Barbour's solution is rather different, and more ingenious, because he doesn't actually recreate physical time or dynamics. He simply connects otherwise unrelated slices by his 'time capsules'. One can argue for ever whether this actually works, but it is an ingenious possibility. The problem I see is that Bruno has not made any attempt to argue for any sensible notion of time when he moves into Platonia. He can refer to relations among numbers in arithmetic as 'computations', but that is just a play with words -- there is still no dynamics involved. And Bruno really does need dynamics in order to make a computational model of consciousness different from a static recording. The MGA is an argument from incredulity -- it is not a valid argument. This is why I have said several times in previous posts that you rely on an underlying notion of physical time, and an underlying physical computer, in order to make your computation dynamic and not static. What you say above does not let you escape from this conclusion, it merely reinforces it. The problem of time is your undoing. I think the UD necessarily takes unlimited time. Given any particular state the UD will visit that state infinitely many times and compute infinitely many different successive states. It doesn't halt, so all the different successor states are never completed. These states may be indexed by some internal time, per Barbour. I agree that the UD, implemented physically, will take an infinite time and will compute an infinite variety of variations on any particular state -- though why we should happen to find ourselves in a state with other people and a physical world remains unexplained. The Boltzmann brain problem is probably worse for Bruno than the white rabbit problem. Nevertheless, without actually providing a solution to the problem of time in his model -- which involves justifying the step from a physical computer running the UD, to Platonia which is static -- Bruno has not, it seems to me, demonstrated that consciousness is a computation in unphysical Platonia. Bruce -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: Life in the Islamic State for women
TELMO: I did not expect from you to point to the 2 centuries old obsolete and theoretical exercise of Marx-Engels (irrespective of Lenin's intermitted LATER speculations) as blueprint for a (still?) viable(?) political system. It never got further than a tyranny of 'leftish-sounding' slogans by pretenders. As the original authors dreamed it up, it never (and nowhere) did get off from the ground. I know, I lived in a so called Peoples' Democracy (Called 'commi' system - ha ha) which was neither peoples' nor democracy. Nor Marxist, nor Leninist. It was a Stalinist tyranny. And Maoist, Pol-Pot, plus a KimIrSen-istic one. Capitalism - in my view an advanced form of slavery, following feudalism - started to destroy the entire human experiment on this Globe - way before the warming entered the picture. It never 'faced' a competition of any 'socialistic' challenger. It succumbbed to the authoritarian religious tyrannies (brutal and violent, or just retracting and philosophical). On Fri, Apr 3, 2015 at 4:04 AM, Telmo Menezes te...@telmomenezes.com wrote: On Fri, Apr 3, 2015 at 4:19 AM, LizR lizj...@gmail.com wrote: On 2 April 2015 at 15:18, John Clark johnkcl...@gmail.com wrote: On Wed, Apr 1, 2015 LizR lizj...@gmail.com wrote: In practice Communism was evil but in theory it was just stupid Almost as stupid as capitalism, The defining characteristic of stupid is that stupid doesn't work, so regardless of what you may personally think of capitalism's ethics (and there is no disputing matters of taste) the fact remains that if capitalism was stupider than communism then it wouldn't have won the 40 year long face to face confrontation with it. It didn't. Communism hasn't been tried except at the tribal/village level (you're getting confused because some people called themselves communist). The same claim can be made about anything. Reality never seems to conform to the idealized version of any political theory. Communism has a blueprint, The Communist Manifesto by Marx and Engels. Several societies of varying sizes and cultural backgrounds attempted to implement these ideas. In all cases so far, the results have been horrendous. I have no doubt that this is not the outcome that Marx desired, but there is now strong empirical evidence that this is the outcome you get when applying the idea to societies of human beings. My point is that capitalism is in the process of destroying the world, so it hasn't won anything and may well lose the entire human experiment thanks to the greed of a few short sighted individuals. If the world is indeed being destroyed by pollution, then this is being done by a complex network of cooperation between communist, capitalist and autocratic nations, of which a communist nation is the biggest polluter. Yes, maybe Chinese communism is not what Marx had in mind, but western capitalism is not what the intellectuals who defend capitalism have in mind either. The no true Scotsman brigade will not help us here. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: Michael Graziano's theory of consciousness
On Saturday, April 4, 2015, John Clark johnkcl...@gmail.com wrote: On Fri, Apr 3, 2015 Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be javascript:_e(%7B%7D,'cvml','marc...@ulb.ac.be'); wrote: Imagine the iterated duplication, the average history in the diaries obtained contained histories like W (I was unable to predit that), W again! Bruno Marchal keeps making the exact same error over and over and over again. Whatever is in the diary that the Washington Man is carrying is totally irrelevant because it was not written by the Washington Man he's just carrying it, the diary was written by the Helsinki Man. And Bruno Marchal just can't kick that personal pronoun addiction. For the 123rd time WHO THE HELL IS I? I is a single entity travelling through time in the forward direction. If you have duplication you realise this is an illusion. However, brains are strongly wired up to persist in this illusion, and the result is that if you are teleported to two places it will seem to you that you are teleported to just one with probability 1/2. The original and the copy know it's not objectively true, but they can't help the feeling. I don't see what is not clear with that. The I in the above sentence causes no unambiguity because matter copying machines do not yet exist and because there was no prediction about what Mr. I will experience in the future; otherwise it would be so ambiguous there would be no way to determine even in theory if the prediction turned out to be correct or not; in other words the sentence would be meaningless. Nobody grasp where you see a difficulty. Perhaps because like Bruno Marchal they can't stop themselves from effortlessly spewing out personal pronouns without thinking. That's fine for everyday conversation, poetry and even most technical writing, but personal pronouns don't work worth a damn in thought experiments that try to uncover the fundamental nature of personal identity. And the step 4 question is Is step 4 infested with personal pronouns just like everything else Bruno Marchal writes about personal identity? John K Clark John K Clark -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com javascript:_e(%7B%7D,'cvml','everything-list%2bunsubscr...@googlegroups.com'); . To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com javascript:_e(%7B%7D,'cvml','everything-list@googlegroups.com');. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. -- Stathis Papaioannou -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: The MGA revisited
On 4/2/2015 8:55 PM, Bruce Kellett wrote: The only reason that the dovetailer might have to worry about time limitations is if it is actually a physical computer. Physical computers have to contend with such things as physical laws, the finite speed of light, the properties of materials, the generation of heat (entropy) and the need to remove that heat to a safe distance before everything melts down. If your computer is not a physical device, then it has none of these limitations, and there is no such concept available as the 'speed' of the computation, the 'time for each step', or anything of this sort. From our external concrete perspective, the whole thing is instantaneous, or it enters statis at some point and gets nowhere. For a non-physical computer these things are equivalent. So without a physical computer you have no dynamics. A mere ordering of states is still a static thing, and the dovetailer does nothing useful that could not more easily be done by referring to a normal number. Why would it not have the same dynamics as in any Platonia version of physics, e.g. a block universe simulated in a digital computer? The states don't even have to be computed in their inherent time order. This is why I have said several times in previous posts that you rely on an underlying notion of physical time, and an underlying physical computer, in order to make your computation dynamic and not static. What you say above does not let you escape from this conclusion, it merely reinforces it. The problem of time is your undoing. I think the UD necessarily takes unlimited time. Given any particular state the UD will visit that state infinitely many times and compute infinitely many different successive states. It doesn't halt, so all the different successor states are never completed. These states may be indexed by some internal time, per Barbour. Brent -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
April crossword
In case anyone's interested, my next crossword, which appears in the local magazine Channel -- and also on this blog, for those remote areas not yet reached by Channel ... ;) https://channelcrossword.wordpress.com/ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: The MGA revisited
On Fri, Apr 03, 2015 at 06:33:52PM +0200, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 03 Apr 2015, at 00:44, Russell Standish wrote: The whole point of the MGA is to try and close off a gap in the argument if you assume that ontological reality I guess you mean here: physical ontological reality (assuming it exists). If we have a robust ontology (ie the full Platonia), You really mean: robust physical ontology. No, because the label physical should refer to what is phenomenal, otherwise it doesn't have any meaning. The Church Thesis (true by assumption) shows that what is phenomenal cannot be ontological (or noumenal, to borrow Kant's term), when the ontology is robust. That is pretty much the whole point of UDA1-7. Moreover, I would argue that the MGA doesn't even work, as recordings can be fully counterfactually correct. By adding the inert Klara? But then the physical role of the inert Klara to produce consciousness to the movie is not Turing emulable, and you stop assuming computationalism. But in a robust ontology, the Klaras are no longer inert. They cannot be. I can understand the role of Klara and counterfactual correctness for the computation and behavior being correct hen change occur, but how could they change the consciousness by being non present when not needed? If they are not needed, then some non-counterfactually correct recordings can be conscious. I don't have a strong opinion on this, as the relevant recordings will be really very complex, but do suspect, along with Brent, that full embodiment in an environment is needed, along with counterfactual correctness. As I point out in my paper, that, physical supervenience, and the MGA entails a robust ontology (ie something like the Multiverse to exist). Cheers -- Prof Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile) Principal, High Performance Coders Visiting Professor of Mathematics hpco...@hpcoders.com.au University of New South Wales http://www.hpcoders.com.au Latest project: The Amoeba's Secret (http://www.hpcoders.com.au/AmoebasSecret.html) -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: Are all terrorrists Muslim? Not even close!
On 4/3/2015 6:00 PM, LizR wrote: On 3 April 2015 at 04:13, Telmo Menezes te...@telmomenezes.com mailto:te...@telmomenezes.com wrote: Switzerland is a special case. Their army is structured in a weird way. All men up to a certain age are technically in the army and are actually obliged to have a weapon and keep it in their home. We are talking about assault rifles (there are about half a million of them in Swiss household) as well as regular pistols. So this might mess up the statistics, because they might not be counted as weapons owned by a civilian household, even though they are available as such. On the other hand, this also means that all of these gun owners receive military training on how to handle the weapons. Oh, so Brent was just trolling. I guess that's nothing new. Why does it make a difference that the guns are not owned by the citizens. The citizen possess the gun and can use it at any time. It is a fully automatic weapon (which is very restricted in the US). That the owners receive training in how to use the weapons might reduce accidents, but it can't be the difference in intentional homicides. So I think Switzerland is an excellent counter example to the proposition that it is the widespread availability of guns in the US that is responsible for the high gun death rate. The Swiss have more widespread availability of guns that are more capable of killing a lot of people killing than those available in the US. The obvious conclusion is that there is some other very important factor. If you look at the rates of homicide in different nations http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_firearm-related_death_rate The first thing you notice is that virtually the top spots are filled by western hemisphere nations. The exceptions are Swaziland which is #5 and Canada which down with Switzerland. They, at 0.5 (per year, per 100,000) are roughly twice that of New Zealand at 0.26 which is twice Australia's at 0.11. I think the availability of guns in the US is probably a major factor in the gun suicide rate in the US; even though the US is 19th in intentional homicide rate, it's only 4th in suicide rate and 12th in accidental rate. Brent -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: Are all terrorrists Muslim? Not even close!
On 3 April 2015 at 04:13, Telmo Menezes te...@telmomenezes.com wrote: Switzerland is a special case. Their army is structured in a weird way. All men up to a certain age are technically in the army and are actually obliged to have a weapon and keep it in their home. We are talking about assault rifles (there are about half a million of them in Swiss household) as well as regular pistols. So this might mess up the statistics, because they might not be counted as weapons owned by a civilian household, even though they are available as such. On the other hand, this also means that all of these gun owners receive military training on how to handle the weapons. Oh, so Brent was just trolling. I guess that's nothing new. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: The MGA revisited
On 4/3/2015 2:38 PM, Stathis Papaioannou wrote: On 4 Apr 2015, at 7:32 am, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net mailto:meeke...@verizon.net wrote: On 4/2/2015 4:18 PM, Stathis Papaioannou wrote: I think the argument I present does not depend on any fact about the world (although going from the general case of what I call functionalism to what Putnam called machine-state functionalism and you call comp does depend on the physical CT being true). It depends on a very basic operational definition of consciouness: that you know it if you are conscious and you realise if there is a large enough change in your consciousness. If you don't accept this operational definition then I can find no meaning in the word consciousness. I don't understand how that applies to someone who, for example, is red-green colorblind. Aren't they partial-zombies by your definition? They may come to realize that they don't distinguish the full spectrum, just as we realize we don't see infrared. Supppose the colorblind person used to see colors but lost the ability (as my mother did after cataract surgery)? She realized it by noticing that things that used to be colorful weren't anymore. But like the person born colorblind, she didn't directly experience a qualia of being colorblind. She noticed a difference and there was also an objective change in her ability to discriminate between a colours. A partial zombie would not notice a difference and there would be no test that could find a difference. But what does it mean to say she noticed a difference? Was the noticing a perception of a difference, or was it just remembering that grass and roses aren't named by the same color. The latter could be noticed by someone who had never had color vision (and was in fact well known to my father who was red-green colorblind all his life). If the noticing was just a fact learned in the way anyone might learn a 3p fact, then I think that would still leave my mother a partial zombie by your definition. Brent -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: Are all terrorrists Muslim? Not even close!
On 3 April 2015 at 04:13, Telmo Menezes te...@telmomenezes.com wrote: Sorry, I assumed you were arguing my point that there is no way to stop people from obtaining them. There are societies where people have a less desire to own guns, but I don't think there is any simple answer as to why. Yes. But to turn the question on its head, most people in most countries don't have a desire to own guns unless they have a good reason to need one. It only seems to be the US in which there is this actual desire, hence my phrase gun fetish (which I'm sure isn't original). Are guns banned in, say, New Zealand? No. Yet there are less per head, and less injuries and deaths caused by them, probably because Kiwis own guns only for the reasons one might expect - hunting, for example - rather than whatever reason it is Americans do (it looks from the outside like a sort of national fetish, a theory that the glamourisation of violence in many American TV shows and movies would seem to support). This is another tough question. My guess is that puritanical values and a repressive stance on sexuality have something to do with it, and we also see high levels of violence in other societies that are (even more, of course) sexually repressive. But my guess is as good as yours. Fair enough. So, anyway, any comments that address the actual situation? Yes, serious social science. Really trying to figure out why so many kids in America want to start a rampage at their schools. Being willing to accept the real answers to this question instead of avoiding the parts of the answer that might be less palatable. Yes. Obviously there is some feedback going on here. Not restricting gun sales much enables those people who want to do these things to do so, rather than just fantasising. There are undoubtedly such people in all societies - my point is that enabling them to easily buy Uzis is probably a bad idea if you want to avoid these rampages. Home 3D-printed guns are at the prototype level at the moment. Both the designs and 3D printing technology will keep improving and becoming cheaper. People are already experimenting with 3D printing ammunition. The technology to make atomic bombs in your basement exists. So, should that be made illegal? What do you think? Like all other things, one day technology will have advanced so much that making them illegal is irrelevant. Hopefully by then we figure out how to be nice to each other -- or we finally discover the solution to the Fermi Paradox. My point was more that to the best of my knowledge no one appears to have done this, even though it would be a way to make a suicide bomb that *really* did a lot of damage. And certainly a load of material has gone missing over the years... I suspect the answer to the Fermi paradox has a few parts...maybe some factors would include... - an advanced civilisation is more likely to accidentally destroy its planet's ecosphere - or to have a global war, or create a disease, or do other things that wipes it out or at least reduces it to medieval times again - even if the above doesn't happen, interstellar contact is very, very difficult. The distances and times involved are mind-boggling, and the evidence so far is that a nice stable solar system like ours is fairly rare. I don't think any of the 100s we're found so far are similar in terms of goldilocks orbits and other helpful factors like galactic disc avoidance, a massive shield planet, a large shield and otherwise helpful Moon, etc etc etc. I'm sure they're out there, but the chances of us detecting them is minute... ...unless it's possible for a civilisation to go up the Kardashev scale and start manipulating star clusters, galaxies etc. But not much sign of that going on so far. The trouble with trying to solve problems by restricting access to technology (in this case firearms) is that, as technology progresses, the laws have to become increasingly repressive to keep up. Preventing people from owning guns will soon devolve into a multi-prong approach where you have to restrict access to information on the Internet (if that is even possible), regulate the sale and ownership of 3D printers, worry about the availability of the common components that go into gunpowder, etc. For any difficulty you pose, there will be eventually a technological solution, and the only possible response from the regulatory mindset is to forbid more things, until we need permission to do almost anything. Now that we've got the straw men out of the way, I find my question still stands. So, why *does *the USA have so many firearms per head compared to anywhere else in the world, even a few was zones? And why does it have the highest rate of firearm related deaths and injuries per head in the first world, and close to the highest in the world (outside war zones) ? Ok, but this is a slightly difference perspective to assuming that the other countries are
RE: Fast moves for nuclear development in Siberia
Has anybody been following this. Looks like the lead cooled fast breeder design is being carried ahead in Russia. An experimental lead-cooled nuclear reactor will be built at the Siberian Chemical Combine (SCC). If successful, the small BREST-300 unit could be the first of a new wave of Russian fast reactors. http://www.world-nuclear-news.org/NN_Fast_moves_for_nuclear_development_in_S iberia_0410121.html -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
