bascule

There's several companies working on solutions for short range (i.e. three feet) wireless electrical transfer using simple induction. Here's one: http://powercastco.com/

Many individuals, including scientists like Roger Penrose, have tried to make the case that the brain exhibits distinctly quantum mechanical, non-classical behavior, and because of this any attempts to simulate the brain using neural networks that treat the brain as a purely classical system will fail (an example of which is the BlueBrain project) Contrary to this opinion is this Max Tegmark paper, which argues just the opposite, specifically in relation to mechanisms hypothesized by Penrose: http://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/9907009 So, again, for those of you who study this sort of thing, is that paper credible, or is it much like Penrose trying to use quantum physics as a basis for metaphysical statements about consciousness?

I'll start another thread on it... Well, like most laymen I have a propensity to put too much faith in individual high-charisma scientists, mainly because I can't understand what they're actually talking about. Good thing science isn't charisma-based

Thus far my track record is 100% on your polls for picking the wrong answer every time

Wow, thanks for clearing things up. That's really sad to think about Tegmark: I routinely cite him in regard to his paper on the brain, in which he declares it should be interpreted as a classical, and not a quantum system. From what you've said it sounds like his credibility is less than stellar. In terms of things I "like" (for purely arbitrary reasons) I prefer a closed spatial curvature. I didn't realize that Tegmark was suggesting an infinite repeating flat universe, in fact I just assumed that he meant if you proceed so far in closed space you will eventually get back to where you started... hence my confusion as to how that could be a "copy" of some object when really it's the same object. Anywho... My preferred interpretation of waveform collapse was, for quite some time, Bohmian mechanics. I don't think they're realistic but for whatever arbitrary reasons I long for a non-local hidden variable theory. The only "parallel universe" theory I personally entertain is Smolin's idea of fecund universes.

Let me start by saying that I'm a liberaltarian and thus stand for a limited subset of conservative values. I'm also enamored with Ron Paul and the staunch disconnect he provides with modern (i.e. neo)conservatism. Whatever happened to ideas like: - fiscal responsibility - limited government - personal responsibility - individual liberty - states' rights - isolationism Neoconservatism, at least under Bush, has advocated a policy of: - rampant, fiscally unsound spending - massive expansion of governmental power - governmental responsibility for individual safety - stripping of liberties to promote the safety of the population as a whole - increased federal control and responsibility - neoimperialism and interventionism Whatever happened to the Barry Goldwater conservatives? Why is Ron Paul, a man who stands for traditional conservative values, being shunned by both the mainstream press and mainstream conservatives? Why is he gaining greater traction among "liberals"?

I prefer one liners

Our office subscribes to Scientific American and I happened to notice an article by Max Tegmark on our bathroom floor: http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?articleID=000F1EDD-B48A-1E90-8EA5809EC5880000 He insists there are cosmological arguments which necessitate the existence of various types of parallel universes. One type he describes sounds less like a "parallel universe" and more like the necessary properties of a closed universe, however he describes what he calls a "Type II" universe which sounds more like the Everett many-worlds interpretation. Can someone who actually studies this stuff opine?

Well yes, that's entirely my point. You're describing an ideology I agree with, but is not necessarily espoused by all "liberals". If anything is proving "Republicans/Bush wrong" it's the floundering dollar and an overall move internationally to different currencies to back various commodities, such as oil...

I agree with Ron Paul's sentiment that isolationism, particularly in regard to the middle east, would've left us in better shape than we are presently. Unfortunately, there's that pesky oil thing...

Warren Buffet disagrees

Watch me subdue myself to an overly broad categorization and defend "liberalism": Liberal concern over the cost of living applies mainly to the deleterious effect on the lower class, which is compensated for by a system of progressive taxation designed to minimize tax on the lower class. Liberal concern over tax cuts, especially in recent history, mainly deals with Bush's tax cuts primarily benefiting the upper class while shifting the brunt of the tax curve onto the middle and lower classes. Everyone gets tax cuts... the rich just get more. Meanwhile the national debt caused by our heinously unbalanced budget is destroying the value of the dollar and making imports more expensive for everyone. Who does that hurt the most? Here's a hint: Not the rich who are cashing in on cheap exports.

Prove it

They cannot abstractly plan for the long-term future, no What's your point?

Argue with that! I dare you.

They can perceive and use memories of their perceptions to make predictions. Their specific abilities in these three regards (perception, memory, prediction) vary from individual to individual and species to species In that they learn certain things they desire appear only sporadically, yes

Most of us aren't going to read it. This comes down to the fundamental problem that it's quite large and we can sense right away that it includes far too many fallacious arguments to warrant stepping through and debunking. Your best bet would be to break it down into self-contained sections that make specific arguments and post those individually if you really want responses to it all. Spread them out over a longer period of time so that each of the points can get addressed individually. Right away I can see you're confusing evolution with abiogenesis, and making the assumption that unless abiogenesis can be demonstrated to be true then evolution is discredited. This is false, because evolution is supported by a wealth of empirical evidence in an of itself. Evolution stands on its own regardless of the demonstrability of feasible abiogenesis. Evidence of evolution includes the fossil record, massive surveys of the genotypes and phenotypes of innumerable species, the existence of ring species, evidence of genetic drift, observed speciation among several kingdoms of life, including animals, plants, fungi, protists, and monerans, detection of gene banding similarities among various species showing a specific progression as well as absorbtion and retention of parasitic DNA, and a whole host of other areas that would be too exhaustive to keep your attention.

If anything it argues to the idea that causality regresses infinitely, an alternative to the cosmological argument for a first cause

I would say the neocortical column provides the underpinnings of consciousness. If you buy that, then at least all mammals are in some way "conscious". I also believe that NCC-like structures aren't limited to mammals, but exists in other animals like birds. Humans have a larger neocortical hierarchy and more thalamocortical loops than other species. Humans have the largest (in terms of number of neurons) neocortex of any animal. Dennett tries to describe what makes humans special in terms of something he calls a "Joyceian machine". This represents the ability of several parts of the brain to interact using a common natural language. Given the hierarchical nature of the neocortex, this doesn't necessarily involve multiple parts of the neocortex directly comprehending natural language. Instead, the parts that distill neocortical activity into natural language can communicate with the parts that process natural language through a thalamocortical feedback loop. The process looks something like this: (collect thoughts into natural language) -> (generate natural language) -> (impart natural language messages to the thalamus) -> (process natural language from thalamus) -> (distribute results of language processing back to the neocortex) Thus natural language takes on the role of providing a unified abstraction mechanism by which the brain can conjure up ideas of limitless abstraction and represent them to itself. If the natural language used by the process is shared among other humans because it's been learned from other humans, then abstract ideas can be rerepresented from human to human just as they can be generated and interpreted internally. This requires a number of different things happening at the same time, namely ballooning neocortex sizes and the development of specific types of thalamocortical loops. That doesn't mean that animals with a smaller neocortex or fewer thalamocortical loops aren't conscious.

Those are actually Kant's terms

Severian, you're raking up some rather nasty smelling philosophical muck, the likes of which some of the foremost philosophers in recent history, including Hume, Kant, and Wittgenstein, have no answers to. Consciousness is ontologically distinct from the real world, and therefore the noumena which exist within our first-person ontology should all be regarded as "belief". These are all structures constructed out of sense data. If you're an epiphenomenalist and an empiricist, then you should regard noumena/sense data objects as being ontologically distinct from the real world. One set of noumena that hopefully exist in your head dictate that there exists a mapping between sense data objects and real world objects, that is you assume there is a reality and that the noumena you directly experience correlate to phenomena in the real world. Provided you believe this mapping exists, i.e. you are not a brain in a vat being deceived by some sinister experimenter, then you can start making a different set of claims about phenomena and their verifiability through mutually supporting structures of real-world data. Belief in noumena and belief in phenomena are ontologically distinct. Noumena belong to your first-person ontology and phenomena belong to the realist ontology. In that respect there are two classes of faith which are ontologically distinct. Faith in noumena is completely unverifiable; we are subject to what we perceive which is ontologically distinct from what anyone else can perceive, which is thus unverifiable. Phenomena can be verified by other people, provided you aren't a brain-in-a-vat. In that respect phenomena which belong to the realist ontology is verifiable, whereas noumena are not. Should we regard noumena which map to verifiable phenomena in higher regard than noumena which don't? Well, that's for you to decide. Hume claims it's our only choice, Kant claims it's unknowable, and I don't even want to talk about Wittgenstein as chances are whatever I say is not what he would've intended. I believe Glider's suggesting we should. You seem to be suggesting there is no ontological distinction between faith in noumena and faith in vicarious phenomena-as-noumena which have been methodologically verified. If so, you two are talking about two different types of faith which shouldn't be directly compared. Glider seems to have faith that he's not a brain in a vat and that phenomena are methodologically verifiable in the Cartesian sense. You seem to have faith in neither of these, and put all noumena on an even playing field. Is that the case?

Sounds like you're asking about a first cause Existence can't have a first cause because the cause would have to exist The negation of existence is meaningless without existence Therefore, we're left with a simple explanation: existence is, because nothing else makes sense

Why can't the latitude / longitude information be applied retroactively? Why are you using a video camera to take a series of still photos? By using timestamps, you can correlate the timestamps on the GPS data with the timestamps on your photos, and thus apply the latitude / longitude info retroactively. This can also be published in the form of a GeoRSS PhotoStream

For still images you can use this web site, which correlates the timestamps on a GPS device that logs to GPX format with the timestamp a camera places in the EXIF data on your photos. The site can then plot your movements on a Google Map and insert pinpoints with the photos that show where they're taken: http://walkingboss.com

In part 2 of the series Dawkins points out that it's okay if people believe crazy things, but then addresses NHS paying for homeopathic "cures" and how that isn't okay because it's taxpayer dollars funding pseudoscience which can't do any better than a placebo in clinical trials