bascule

Yeah... stroke, seizures? Doesn't sound like she's very healthy. If she were a 12-year-old girl with a 9-month-old body but the intellect of a 12-year-old girl, that'd be far more interesting. This just seems like a bizarre case of neoteny.

I guess it's cut-n-paste argument time again:

So they're human-shaped? I'm afraid the carbon cycle isn't that simple: http://cypenv.org/Files/sequest.htm http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn2958

Nasty

ActiveRecord is the best ORM I've ever used

It isn't a "change" in measurement technique. It's the introduction of a new measurement technique, and the first one which has any degree (pun unintentional) of accuracy or precision in terms of assessing the temperature. Are you trying to suggest that the GCM inputs are being skewed by bad data? If not, the GCMs agree with empirical measurements, and you have no argument whatsoever. If you are, you'll find information about the input data used by the 12 different GCMs in this graph in the papers for their corresponding studies: If you're going to argue against the validity of the GCM input data, look up a paper, find what inputs they're using, and argue against that. Otherwise, your arguments are completely unfounded.

What the hell are you talking about?

The point is there's nothing remotely bordering upon a conscious perceiver in a plant. For one thing, I'd say a prerequisite of a conscious perceiver is: a nervous system.

http://www.cnn.com/2006/POLITICS/07/11/budget.deficit.ap/index.html?section=cnn_topstories Bush is now saying tax cuts are responsible for a reduced deficit: This harkens back to the Reagan-era "Laffer curve" argument, that decreasing tax rates boosts the economy and in doing so generates greater tax revenue. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laffer_curve Is this sort of fiscal policy sound? Here's one argument that it's not: http://finance.yahoo.com/columnist/article/economist/4065?p=1

Very, very old...

Yeah, here's where IMM doesn't want to get into how the philosophy of mind comes into moral philosophy. Personally I consider a neocortex (found in all mammals) to be what distinguishes suffering from mere fixed action patterns that respond to innate releasing mechanisms. I'd extend this to species with structures similar to the neocortex, such as what is found in birds. This is because I think the neocortical column represents the fundamental unit of consciousness. Well, do you admit that chimpanzees/bonobos at least possess a human-like capacity for suffering?

A thread?

Because feeling beings suffer I think the word you're looking for is "empathizing"

So yeah, this will come off a lot like 5 billion other posts I've made along the same lines... To begin, I'm a transhumanist. I don't believe it will be long before purely biological humans are rendered obsolete by technology, specifically advancements in nanotechnology, artificial intelligence, and brain/computer interfaces. Many are anticipating the obsolescence of purely biological humans, and event known as The Singularity. I believe that human collective intelligence brings about structures similar to our own brains. I believe humans already represent a single, collective intelligence-powered organism (with transport systems, and metabolism, and a digital nervous system) which has spent all of history internally reconfiguring itself to improve its own operation. Human society represents a self-improving collective intelligence system, and according to the research of one prominent transhumanist/Singularity evangelist, Ray Kurzweil, the rate at which we self-improve is exponential. Transhumanists forsee humans eventually recognizing their fundamental nature as mere computational/informational systems, presently executed by the wetware of our brains, but see no reason why the program and data that comprise us could not be offloaded onto a different platform. Most transhumanists forsee an eventual move to a distributed network of self-replicating nanorobots which will provide a ubiquitous platform for networked computing. Many wish to undergo a process of mind transferrence where their consciousness would be transferred out of their bodies and into this ubiquitous computer network. It's kind of hard for people to imagine how this would work, but here's one scenario: the nanorobots that comprise this computer network crawl into your brain. One by one, they gobble up each of the 100 billion neurons in your head. If you're comfortable with the idea, they can do it fast, and if not, they can do it slow. They could gobble up, say, 1 billion neurons a day. They analyze the connection structure of your brain, how the neigboring glia were affecting your neurons, etc. and replace the physical connections of your neurons with wireless, digital links. Eventually, your entire brain is made only out of these little robots, who are already wirelessly connected to the ubiquitous computing network. Suddenly your brain is a completely distributed entity, and where the links between your neurous used to be physical, not they run in software. Once you've transferred your mind, you can no longer die. You can be distributed among countless nanomachines. And what's more, this will be a giant network teeming with collective intelligence and sensory abilities. If anything threatens it, it will be able to detect it long in advance, and transfer any programs off any nanorobots that are about to be destroyed long before it happens (after all, it can move information between these nanorobots at the speed of light) Furthermore, this eliminates all the obstacles of space travel. No longer do we have to send a giant biological entity somewhere to explore it, an entity where 99.99999(insert however many sigmas you want here)9% of the universe represents instant death. Nanorobots will be robust and durable, and better, tiny! It will not take much energy to accelerate one to nearly the speed of light. Modern day linear accelerators are approaching the ability to do this already. We can shoot one of these nanorobots, which can store a quantum computer incomprehensibly more powerful than any existence today, along with quantum storage of an incomprehensible amount of information (i.e. all of human knowledge along with as many intelligent agents as we please). These robots, as universal constructors, could be sent to multiple destinations throughout the known universe. As soon as any one of them successfully lands on any form of matter, they can begin making copies of themselves, transforming that matter into more and more nanorobots, and spreading throughout the galaxy. The speed of light may be an insurmountable barrier, in which case it will take millions of years, or it may not, in which case it will take far shorter. This nanotechnological collective intelligence system will slowly gobble up the universe, transforming all undirected processes into directed processes. In this respect, I see this sort of system asymptotically approaching the propreties we'd attribute to a god: omnipotence, omniscience, and omnipresence. It seems like people turn to religion out of an innate desire for the sorts of things transhumanism is offering: transcending your body and living forever in a utopia where there is no suffering and no death. This has been the universal human dream since the dawn of history. I think the Singularity will fulfill everyone's religious desires in a way no religion to date has been able to do, since all of them are ultimately rooted in falsehoods. Even the more "untouchable" religions like Buddhism which claim to be mere philosophies won't be able to survive. Buddhism teaches that we should suppress these desires, because they are the cause of suffering. I believe the exact opposite: these desires will bring about the end of suffering. The transhumanists think we're about to technologically realize this utopia with the advent of artificial intelligence. AI will represent the birth of the greatest genius mankind has ever known, one which can see the connections which permeate all of human knowledge now yet remain invisible to us because of our limited ability to comprehend large systems of information. Such an intelligence system will have the capacity to lead all of us in the way no other human can. AI will represent the birth of Plato's Philosopher King, a king smarter than any human on Earth who rules by reason and not politiking. I believe this is the idea Christopher Langan was ultimately getting at with the Cognitive-Theoretic Model of the Universe

Can all of you climate science skeptics answer one question for me? Why don't you apply all the same criticisms you apply to global warming to evolutionary biology? There's still considerable uncertainty about our evolutionary lineage. We don't know how early mammals evolved into primates, for example. Are primates the descendants of rodents? Or do we share a lineage with bats, tree shrews, and flying lemurs? We don't know. There's considerable uncertainty. Our evolutionary history cannot be experimentally verified. Therefore, it doesn't follow your asinine ideas of what the "scientific method" is (by the way, there is no one single "scientific method", and not all sciences are experimental) The earlier back you go, the more uncertainty you'll run into. The best biologists can assemble is an unrooted tree of how early life evolved, and even then connections within the tree only represent a best guess. How can biologists possibly claim that man descended from single cell organisms and that there is a common ancestor to all life on earth, given how much uncertainty there is? I think you're complete hypocrites for questioning climate science the way you do, yet not applying the same criticisms to biology. I think you should be evolutionary skeptics too, and not accept evolution until biologists have eliminated all the uncertainties. As for me, I accept the scientific conclusions of both biology and climate science, and despite the uncertainty in both fields, I accept that man descended from single celled organisms and that all life on earth has a common ancestor, and I also accept that anthropogenic forcings are primarily responsible for recent global warming trends.

It isn't that "humans have some effect"' date=' it's papers that support the concensus viewpoint of the IPCC, that:

Yet sadly, wild bonobos are being driven into extinction.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5503685

Dr. Dalek's poll is from 1997... produced by a special interest think tank (Citizens for a Sound Economy) and not peer-reviewed. Here's the paper Gore is referencing... it's from a well-respected, peer-reviewed scientific journal, Science, and published in 2004: http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/summary/306/5702/1686?maxtoshow=&HITS=10&hits=10&RESULTFORMAT=&author1=oreskes&searchid=1103210845409_5389&stored_search=&FIRSTINDEX=0&fdate=10/1/1995&tdate=12/31/2004 Here's RealClimate's take on skepticism of the scientific concensus: http://www.realclimate.org/index.php?p=86 Here's his take on IPCC:

The great error of Einstein was writing off quantum to the degree he did. I think this just goes to show that Einstein was a conceptualist thinker who, after developing his concept (SR/GR) was really out of good ideas. That's how conceptualists tend to work (e.g. Raphael, Picasso, Jean Baptiste Seurat, Orson Welles, Andy Warhol)

I guess evolutionary biology and astronomy aren't sciences. However, climate scientists do perform experiments... inside of climate models. What you're really trying to argue is that climate science is impossible.

Hmmm... http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.07/posts.html?pg=6

That's too bad, because Odwalla Superfood is the single most nourishing beverage I've ever tasted, and an entire serving of fruit in a single bottle! Mmmm I also had a tasty tempeh reuben for lunch today. Yummy!