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Mammals also possess the most powerful neuroanatomy nature ever conceived of in the form of the neocortex, and more specifically the neocortical column. Mammals possess the most advanced brain structure for building abstract models of the world of any class of life. I was thinking more along the lines of a molecular simulation, which would be a hell of a lot more effective if there were a lookup table for how proteins fold (otherwise you need an atomic simulation which can account for Gibbs free energy)

As far as I'm aware, it's thwarted about zero legitimate terrorist threats

And humans have an ancestry going back billions of years. Evolving strong AI from scratch isn't exactly a feasible idea. The dead simplest approach would be to use computational biology to grow a human from a fertilized zygote inside a computer.

Here's my list, by subject. This is a list of basic overviews for laymen: Physics Relativity and QM - Fabric of the Cosmos by Brian Greene String theory - The Elegant Universe by Brian Greene Loop quantum gravity - Three Roads to Quantum Gravity by Lee Smolin Status of modern physics - The Trouble with Physics by Lee Smolin Biology Operation of natural selection - The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins Emergent progress in evolution - The Blind Watchmaker and Climbing Mount Improbable by Richard Dawkins History of life on earth - The Ancestor's Tale by Richard Dawkins Yeah, guess you can tell who my favorite authors are

And the plausible mechanism for the earth's mass increasing rapidly over the past hundred million years is what?

Kucinich is a board member of the National Coalition to Repeal the Patriot Act Ron Paul has written articles condeming it as the "Unpatriot Act" Both voted against it

No, but it could. The price of liberty is eternal vigilance, and all that jazz... Are you some parody who's trying to be the antithesis of our founding fathers? It's like you're taking all their quotes and inverting them to make your arguments...

And humanism is a positive movement that's not about being a dick...

A top to bottom MIMD architecture (utilizing the above mentioned shared nothing message passing) atop a multicore CPU with an internal crossbar is effectively limitless, and even overcomes the Von Neumann bottleneck through extensive parallelism and distributed cache coherency. To quote Erlang creator Joe Armstrong: "Your Erlang program should just run N times faster on an N core processor"

Those who would sacrifice essential liberties for safety deserve neither, and all that jazz...

Judge Andrew Napolitano proceeds to issue a rather nasty diatribe on the Patriot Act and its usurpation of our Constitutionally guaranteed liberties. "Is it time to become wolves and fight for our rights?" he asks. The facts, according to him: if the FBI shows up with a self-written search warrant to seize items from your home, the Patriot Act stipulates that you are not legally allowed to tell anyone about it. And... well... the guy is outraged, and so am I! Isn't writing search warrants the Judicial branch's responsibility, not the Executive's, and how the hell can they unconstitutionally silence you after your home has been unconstitutionally searched?! When Fox News starts breaking these kind of stories, I'm really reaching the I'M MAD AS HELL AND I'M NOT GOING TO TAKE IT ANYMORE point...

The line of reasoning is more like: Consciousness is a byproduct of brain activity (a metaphysical view held by materialists and most monists) The brain is a classical physical system and is thus computable by a universal computer (Searle and Penrose take issue here, and Tegmark attempts to refute them) Therefore, consciousness is a byproduct of computation Clearly neither of the premises of this syllogism are "provable," they are only compatible with the prevailing scientific and philosophical understanding. Those espousing dualism or the brain as non-classical system can argue that computationalism is false since either of these propositions refutes the above premises.

I've been a vi/vim user for probably a decade or so now. For programming I've used an editor called TextMate. My motivations for switching to Emacs are better support for Erlang including an integrated Read-Eval-Print Loop

I've been trying to switch to Emacs lately. Depending on who you talk to Emacs is either the ultimate programmer's editor or a bloated piece of crap. Does anyone here use Emacs, and if so, how do you like it? I'm certainly enjoying the integrated REPL and the ability to evaluate the current buffer.

To address the OP, I suggest you have a look at Seth Lloyd's "ultimate laptop": http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/lloyd/lloyd_index.html To address the topic at hand, it's a parallel future. Functional languages are certainly ramping up to take advantage of multiple cores. Erlang, Haskell, JoCaml, and Scala all have excellent parallelism across multiple CPU cores. The main problem plaguing multithreaded programming is the use of shared state concurrency, namely threads. Shared state management is a source of deadlocks and race conditions. Moving to a shared nothing architecture which uses asynchronous message passing dramatically reduces the potential for errors in concurrent programs. With the use of a hybrid heap which does facilitate multiprocess shared data for message-passed items, messaging becomes zero copy while the architecture remains shared nothing from the programmer's perspective. This is truly the best of both worlds: shared state concurrency without the potential for programmer error (at least from the perspective of an end user of the language) Perhaps the most difficult part of reasoning about concurrent architectures is the inherent non-determinism, at least in languages which introduce side effects to facilitate concurrency (e.g. IPC) As I understand it JoCaml facilitates deterministic parallelism through the use of join calculus. Perhaps the real solution is to parallelize declaratively instead of imperatively...

Or for that matter, most types of monism. Dualism is really the only metaphysical formulation of consciousness which precludes computationalism, save for weird arguments like Searle's biological naturalism (monistic formulation which stipulates that consciousness can only arise from biological systems) or Penrose's perspective (loosely knit assortment of anti-computationalist arguments centering around the quantum mind hypothesis, asserting what's essentially dualist metaphysics)

As someone who has been to the Hiroshima Peace Park and witnessed the effects of this bomb firsthand, I find this thread disgusting

This video's rabid content didn't seem that bad compared to the immensely crappy production value. If you're going to make a video that just reads like a web page... try making a web page. It'd at least spare me the crappy XM MOD quality music (no offense to XM MODs)

My point was that despite Saudi Arabia being the bigger problem, we count them as an ally, while the chickenhawks drum up war with Iran Saudi Arabia is a bigger terrorist nation than Iraq ever was

Has this been done before? Probably. A quick search didn't find it, so I'm starting a new thread. Ha! Post your favorite quotes from scientists... go! Here's mine: "Now we know that we shall never know" -- Werner Heisenberg

Recursively self-improving strong artificial intelligence

Harp on the research release all you want. It does include modifications of previous pattern recognition techniques, but the final version most certainly will not. They're using existing algorithms to patch in unimplemented functionality. The goal is to reimplement the neocortical column in software. Among other things, this will facilitate what's absent from the research release: time-sensitive sequence prediction. I'm yet to see a good argument against computationalism... the best I've seen come from the likes of Searle and Penrose, and they're all terrible. I've studied neurophysiology intensively and read Hawkins' book On Intelligence, and was happy to see he came to many of the same conclusions as myself, particularly in regard to the role of neocortical columns in consciousness, as well as thalamocortical loops.

Exactly. das, post a proof in the form of predicate calculus which follows from Godel's theorems which leads to a contradiction Seriously, put up or SHUT THE F*CK UP Admins, can you please ban this bullshit-spouting linkspamming troll?

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/main.jhtml?xml=/earth/2007/11/21/scicosmos121.xml&CMP=ILC-mostviewedbox I don't know what to make of this... anyone with relevant knowledge care to opine?

They're involved through inaction. One would hope that our "allies" in the war on terror actively pursue domestic terrorism. Iran, the country that the neocon chickenhawks are rallying a war against, is doing a better job at that than our "allies" like Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. The best way to fight terrorism is to promote an international sentiment towards control and containment of domestic terrorism and terrorists. And you're oblivious to my point that you're glossing over an important distinction