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New Scientist has put together a handy dandy reference guide to the most common claims being leveraged by the naysayers around here. I can't tell you how many arguments I've seen in these forums based on the same, repeated misinformation. Perhaps we can stop trying to rearticulate every single rebuttal to every bit of misinformation being circulated, and just link these clear and concise replies in the future: http://environment.newscientist.com/channel/earth/dn11462 I used to enjoy the global warming threads, but now they're just gotten boring and repetitive

Not to slippery slope you, but what's next... maybe the Sun doesn't heat up the earth... maybe when earth warms up, it causes solar luminosity to increase? Can we really be sure which one causes the other??? Can I demonstrate the physical science basis of this hypothesis? No. Can you demonstrate the physical science basis for your idea? Perhaps you could calculate the earth's precession as a function of the polar ice accumulation.

There's several brace styles. I prefer what's known as 1TBS (one true brace style) which looks a little something like void function() [or class] { if(1tbs) { puts("All other braces are inline"); } } What Dak showed looks a lot like GNU style. Personally all this crap about braces makes me long for languages without them, heh

I don't know about you two, but I've disliked the quality of television programming in general, to the point that I stopped watching. I don't own a TV and the only TV I've watched in the past 6 months was an hour long program on the Discovery channel at a friend's house. I find Google Reader to be a much better source of news than any TV program. If you're engaging in a completely voluntary activity, why come here to complain about it? If you dislike the news media so bad, why do you continue to eat their dogfood? Masochism? What reason is that? How is it anything other than a collective, unconscious effect of continued meta-reporting?

CNN recently reported on this very subject: http://www.cnn.com/2007/WORLD/meast/05/02/iraq.scenarios/index.html Clearly those advocating withdrawal don't want these things to happen. They see the long term consequences of remaining indefinitely as being less desirable. Perhaps "damned if you do, damned if you don't" is the best way to summarize the situation Or this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunk_cost I believe those who advocate continued presence in Iraq are falling victim to the "sunk cost" fallacy, which essentially says we should continue investing in our presence there because we have already invested so much already. Leaving now would be a waste and would plunge the country into chaos. We should continue investing in our presence there in order to see a stable democracy realized, one which is capable of quelling insurgency on its own. Those advocating withdrawal no longer see this as a realistic goal. It's no different than business: If you can lure investors with a promised outcome, and fail to achieve that outcome, should they continue investing in you until that outcome is realized, or simply cut off funding and take the loss? Clearly withdrawal represents a dramatic loss not only economically but in terms of human lives. Nevertheless, we must question if this loss is inevitable or if the afforementioned goal is achievable. I think the general outlook among those advocating withdrawal is that the situation is NOT progressive. Things have not improved. They have gotten worse over time. We're now refereeing a civil war. We're engulfed in a military occupation. Is this really a worthwhile use of American lives and money? In 20/20 hindsight, is our continued investment worthwhile?

I can list what you should learn in a reasonable computer science course. Unfortunately that's not what mine taught me. Many have veered far away from actual computer science and turned into Java shops churning out "coders" who have little fundamental knowledge of programming and instead can take a "brute force" approach to producing code which meets specific problem domains. I would hope you'd receive: A basic introduction to algorithms. This would include basic data structures knowledge, sorting algorithms, and algorithms for manipulating complex data structures. It would also include coverage of computational solutions to basic mathematical problems, both those from linear algebra and matrix algebra. Knowledge of discrete mathematics, including the theory behind formal languages. Knowledge of grammars, languages, programs, (and how these three concepts interrelate) and the Chomsky Hierarchy. You should be familiar with the differences between first, second, and third generation languages, and how they fit into the Chomsky hierarchy. Knowledge of regular languages and their applications in pattern matching (e.g. regular expressions and scanners) Knowledge of how to scan/parse a 3GL into an abstract syntax tree and output it as a different language (e.g. a 2GL) Knowledge of how to scan/parse a 2GL and output machine language. (i.e. a compilers class)

Source? Reversal of the current trend? Source? Are we? Source? Source? I'm sorry, I'm just not one for prolonged anecdotes... Do you have a peer reviewed scientific paper arguing each of these specific claims? Or are you perhaps drawing facts from one paper then using them to come to your own conclusions?

From a local perspective I've seen no bias reporting black on white violence. At a national level: who are you trying to blame? The collective buzz that surrounds a story? There's approximately 16,000 murders per year in the United States, or an average of 44 per day. How many of these involve grizzly slayings or interracial violence? What exactly justifies the circumstances that should generate buzz? If you were to ask me, the case I'm concerned with is that of Hans Reiser, but that's because I like tech and he contributed a filesystem to the Linux kernel. But how many people actually care about that? Clearly not enough to garner national media attention. Nobody controls buzz. Buzz just happens. It's a collective, emergent effect. Generally it involves mass stupidity, and by the time a story has gained considerable buzz I'm already sick of it. I wish I never had to hear about JonBenet Ramsey ever again. Why did the story you linked not gain national media attention? I don't know. Among the 16,000 murders that happen in the US every year, how many gain national media exposure, and what are the criteria? I don't really think there are any. I also think it's quite easy to take something like the Dupe Rape Scandal/Saga/whatever and juxtapose it with something like this to make a cheap political point and try to argue some sort of racial bias. I could just as easily argue that the mainstream media have a bias against programmers-turned-killers. After all, I've never seen a report on those.

That's certainly a misleading statement: - Positivists can be materialists. They don't have to be monists - Materialism is also consistent with the Copenhagen Interpretation Wrong. Consciousness remains outside physics, but that has nothing to do with the Copenhagen interpretation. It has to do with the inability of science to directly observe consciousness. But that's pretty much relegated to entirely different branches of science than physics (e.g. neurophysiology, cognitive science), although some (monists) would like to argue that science will never observe consciousness. There's this enormous misconception that consciousness and waveform collapse are somehow intertwined, and that idea is being used (by the likes of the site you linked) to argue for quantum mind The real answer is what Severian said: we collapse the wavefunction because we are made up of lots and lots of particles.

So it's a Web 2.0 tolweb?

Actually, Penrose is wrong I'm amazed quantum mind/monism-type thinking has been able to make such major inroads into the scientific and mathematical world. Penrose alleges that consciousness is hypercomputational with quantum oracles doing all the "real" thinking. He is thus alleging that neurons exhibit some sort of quantum mechanical behavior. But his ultimate goal is to send his own personal brand of monism, which he bases upon Godel's Incompleteness Theorem. As the paper I linked above (click wrong) demonstrates, Penrose is misapplying Godel's Incompleteness Theorem. Furthermore, his attempts at postulating quantum mechanical behavior in neurons (namely in the behavior of microtubules) have been discreded by both quantum physicists and neurobiologists. I won't go any farther into the virtues of materialsm vs. monism, only that Penrose's arguments have been thoroughly debunked by the scientific community. Monism is a philosophical premise and if you want to see it defended well, read Kant. Penrose's attempts to put monism on a scientific foundation have all been failures. That said, I still think he is a brilliant physicist and that the Road to Reality is an excellent book.

I mean, don't get me wrong, I get where you're coming from. I mean, I'm guessing you're pulling this straight from On Intelligence, as Jeff Hawkins covered this exact subject (the shortness of the object identification sequence) It would be comparable to a chain of 100 Actors classifying an object (each sending one message to the other in sequence). In a proper Actor implementation of the NCC, my belief is it would take less (imagine an Actor-per-NCC approach) You don't see the ENORMOUS non-sequitur in this line of thinking? Your argument is "A can't do B at present, therefore it never will" This is pretty much the same line of reasoning that people used to argue that heavier-than-air machines could not fly. We had empirical proof that heavier-than-air objects could fly under their own power: birds can fly. Nature figured it out. Despite this, we had people like Lord Kelvin opining in 1895: "Heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible." Yes, for some reason, it was entirely conceivable that nature could do it, but man could not. How dare you compare a bird to a man-made contraption! Nature is some how special, and technology distinct, with separate limits. Surely they don't obey the same physics! This is the same argument being leveraged against brains, especially by individuals like Searle and Penrose. While I'm sure Kelvin would admit the same physics apply to birds and flying machines, just as Searle and Penrose would admit the same physics apply to brains and thinking machines, they all see the technologification of a natural concept as impossible. If you don't think consciousness is computable on a universal computer, what do you think it is? Would you classify it as hypercomputational, or non-computable? You are essentially saying it has been proven that the former is not the case, so will you try taking a stab at what you actually think consciousness is?

Hooray, reposting your own blog, AGAIN Know what's more trustworthy than the blog of a statistician performing statistical analysis on climate data with no scientific background in climate science? Hundreds of climate scientists working together with climate scientists. Your numbers are different from theirs. Why is that?

That's funny, "the media" told me that Iraq would not erupt into a civil war, and how people advancing that proposition were daft and out of touch with reality. In this case, "the media" was a bunch of administration talking heads along with Fox News. I guess "the media" isn't really apt in this case. Perhaps you should examine if "the media" is apt in your case, or if it represents a composition fallacy.

This is the typical sort of nonsense answer that we get to these questions. Certain properties conflict and cannot occur simultaneously, and when conflicting properties regarding an entity which is alleged to have them arise, the answer is simply that God is capable of having conflicting properties, and if you can't accept that, then that's simply a limitation of human reasoning. Great. But you're still contradicting yourself. I guess God is a big contradiction. There's something more to the "Can God create a rock so heavy he can't lift it?" question. It involves an interesting form of self-referentiality. I've been reading more Hofstadter, and he broached a similar question: What is "the smallest number that can only be expressed in a minumum of thirty syllables"? For example, the number "777,777" can be represented as "Seven hundred seventy seven thousand, seven hundred seventy seven" or "Six sevens" or "One thousand one times seven hundred seventy seven" etc. "Six sevens", while perhaps ambiguous, is only three syllables, comprared to the unwieldy 20 syllable definition. The problem with "the smallest number that can only be expressed in a minumum of thirty syllables" is that it has an odd self-referentiality problem. Indeed, the statement describes the number in question, but in a mere 23 syllables. Thus such a number cannot exist: it defines itself in such a way that it breaks its own definition. The same goes for the OP

Yes, I agree entirely, and furthermore hate Al Gore for it. http://www.snopes.com/politics/bush/house.asp The best way to lower your carbon footprint is to actually DO IT. Stop driving your car; start riding your bike.

Any universal computer can emulate any other universal computer. If consciousness results from universal computations then any universal computer can be conscious, regardless of how it fundamentally operates. Correlation does not imply causation. I'd say a more human brain-focused approach is needed, and the previous approaches based on ad hoc guestimations of how thought actually worked were previously necessary because emulating the brain in software was too expensive computationally. The computational power of the average human brain still exceeds the fastest supercomputers by multiple orders of magnitude. That's why a brain-focused approach, even one built on high degrees of abstraction, was and still isn't immediately practical and probably won't be for at least a decade. However, none of that says anything about the soundness of the approach. Your attitude is: The approach hasn't worked until now, therefore it will never work! What thought experiments are those? Searle's Chinese Room? I'm no fan of Searle, or neutral monists, and the Chinese room proves nothing but Searle's inability to consider that all universal computers are capable of the epiphenominalism he alleges only biological systems allow for, with little defense of why his theory of biological naturalism is applicable only to biological systems. Searle is incapable of seeing the epiphenominal possibilities of computers. The simple answer to Searle's question of "what part of the Chinese room did the thinking?" is "The gestalt did" Any universal computer can emulate any other universal computer. It doesn't matter how the brain actually works, as long as the computations its performing are universal we can emulate them on any platform we like. Custom hardware is stagnant. The commodity platform, driven by intense market demand, vastly outpaces all custom hardware solutions. Software is universal. While ASICs can generally outperform software running on the commodity platform at a specific point in time, in a year those ASICs are obsolete, and the commodity hardware will have almost doubled in performance. Moving beyond ASICs to FPGAs, even these models have all failed to evolve as their hardware is continually rendered obsolete. (quite ironic considering they're typically referred to as "evolvable hardware") Hugo de Garis and Genobyte's CAM Brain Machine (developed in my hometown of Boulder) is perhaps the foremost example, however Genobyte has since gone out of business, because the approach was immensely expensive and never lead to anything worthwhile. The problem with a hardware model is it requires considerable material investment with an almost nonexistent. Contrast Genobyte with Numenta, who is developing software, which requires comparatively little investment and allows their technology to evolve with the speed of general purpose hardware. There certainly is. The lower level you go, the more computations you waste emulating behaviors the brain is trying to abstract away. While the BlueBrain project is starting with a molecular model, they certainly aren't going to stick with it. Their goal is to use knowledge gained from the molecular model to model the function of the neocortical column at higher and higher levels of abstraction. This means more computations can be spent actually doing the calculations the neocortical column is performing rather than wasting the moving individual molecules around in a molecular simulation. It really involves a scrapping of all previous approaches to the problem of AI, both ones using special-purpose hardware and ones which involved developing software based upon ad hoc observation of how thought functions, rather than intense scrutiny of neurophysiology. Jeff Hawkins has pursued the highest level model he could scientifically defend of the brain's thalamocortical/hippocampal systems, and is developing software which comes nowhere close to modeling individual neurons, but tries to model the neocortex as a whole at the highest level of abstraction.

So you don't think the computations involved in thought/perception are universal? (in the Church-Turing sense) Also you didn't bother to justify this statement whatsoever That said I don't think thought involves quantum behavior (which would make it hypercomputational) and all that's needed is a programming model that provides for concurrency and asynchronous messaging (the Actor model) You're thinking too low level, and even so, what you're describing is easily implemented using the Actor model on a traditional binary computer. Numenta has created Hierarchical Temporal Memory, an implementation of Jeff Hawkins' Memory-Prediction Framework. Note that they have completely abstracted away the low-level behavior of neurons, and are instead focusing on the high-level behavior of hierarchies of neocortical columns. Also note that neocortical columns can be implemented as Actors.

That's a tough one. It'd be a tossup between neuroscience/cognitive science and physics

That's an odd thing to say, considering I worked with climate scientists to develop mesoscale atmospheric models. You are metaphorically applying concepts to the climate system which simply don't work out in reality. That was the point of the analogy: naive models of the real world do not translate well to reality, no matter how much "common sense" they intuitively make. For thousands of years Aristotle's idea of "every object, its own unique characteristic" ruled the world of physics, until Galileo revealed that universal law governed it all. The naive model was shattered, and science progressed. That's what's happened in climate science. While it may seem possible to apply simple chemistry or fluid dynamics to the climate system at large, it's too large to operate as you'd intuitively expect. The climate is full of nonlinearities and feedback loops which can only be understood through extensive study of its history. The complexity of understanding the climate system exceeds any one human's ability, and thus computational models must be used in order to actually understand its behavior. These models are all based off of existing knowledge of the climate system as well as its physics and chemistry, but are able to model emergent effects that occur from the underlying principles. The emergent effects are both unexpected and counterintuitive. You are suggesting that there are simple rules which can be applied to understand the climate system. This is the same mistake made by SkepticLance and Icemelt, who will not directly argue but insinuate the possibility that climate is driving CO2 increases, rather than vice versa. Simple knowledge of the scale at which man is liberating sequestered carbon and releasing it into the atmosphere should be enough to tip someone off that what is happening is unnatural, and that temperature is following carbon. However, general circulation models have demonstratively shown that carbon increases are the explanation for increasing mean surface temperatures. I would suggest you better familiarize yourself with the behavior of the climate system before you harp so harshly on the IPCC.

If you're talking about display devices, then no doubt. A new form of display technology, called a surface-conduction electron-emitter display (SED), uses quantum mechanical properties and nanotechnology to provide a cathode ray emitter per picture element. A lawsuit filed by Applied Nanotech has prevented the launch of SED displays.

The important point to consider with non-binary computers is the complexity of programming them. Computers based on "trinary" (i.e. tertiary/third-order logic) have been lauded for some time, but are for many reasons impractical, even as languages begin to implement third order logic constructs. With quantum algorithms, the complexity increases to the point that specific knowledge of quantum physics and field theory are necessary to design algorithms. While this may be great for finding "shortcuts" to NP-complete problems (which general intelligence no doubt is) I doubt AI will practically come from anything but a general purpose binary computer, as that's the target platform that all general purpose programming systems are currently abstracted on top of. Perhaps you meant "faster" in lieu of easier.

Well, Hofstadter would probably kill me for trying to use his work to defend the idea that animals without neocortical(-like) structures don't have "a light on in there". He's a vegetarian because he feels ethically obligated not to eat animals with "a light on in there". So do I, but I draw the line at a different place (albeit a place where he drew it until recently) However, I'd suggest you read this Wikipedia article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fixed_action_pattern It's a basic introduction to the origins of animal behavior, specifically innate releasing mechanisms and fixed action patterns. Actually, the author I should really credit for my present mindset regarding animals is Dennett. He's the one who turned me on to these very concepts in the first place. But anyway, I digress. The IRM/FAP solution was utilized by animal biology for quite some time. It forms the primary behavior model of many "earlier animals" (in terms of brain complexification and development), namely fish. It's why I don't feel bad about eating fish; they can't feel. They can't perceive. Their behavior is laregly stimulus/response. The neocortical column was the structure that abstracted information processing to the point that consciousness could emerge. Because of this, I believe any animals who do possess a capacity for abstract information processing (namely mammals and birds) are capible of perception, albeit a radically primitive form compared to what humans are capible of.

What you're suggesting is that an analog computer is better suited to the purpose. That's not necessarily the case.

Primarily Jeff Hawkins' book On Intelligence and Douglas Hofstadter's books Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, and I Am a Strange Loop