bascule

The question of whether a copied consciousness (namely a destructively copied consciousness) bears any kind of emergent connection to the original is an unanswerable one, without a precise, scientific definition of the emergence process. We can imagine your entire neural structure, down to the very last connection, being non-destructively scanned soma by soma, axon by axon, dendrite by dendrite, with nanomachines. The resulting data could then be turned into a mathematical model of your consciousness and executed inside of a computer. In this case, we imagine "you" the human coexisting side by side with "you" in the computer, somewhat like Max Headroom. In this case, it seems like the copy and the original are two different entities. However, we can also imagine quantum teleportation where your original quantum state is destroyed but passes partly by entanglement and partly by some other process of (luminal/subluminal) information transferrence to another destination, where the state information gleaned through the destructive transferrence process is recombined with the resulting entangled state at the destination, resulting in... you again. (if quantum teleportation is remotely applicable to something like a human) In this case, since the state information is transferred rather than copied, wouldn't it seem like you would still be "you"?

I think we should be taking a serious look at the underlying economic problems which have lead to slash-n-burn agriculture...

Japan never realized that the '80s ended 16 years ago

This was so hilarious I just had to share it. I love prudish douchebags who think SR/GR somehow condone moral relativism. http://www.renewamerica.us/columns/hutchison/050128

Yeah, use nukes to destroy nukes... what a great idea </SARCASM>

Wow, that's awesome! Thanks for the pointer

I don't trust anyone with nukes, including America. Well, relative to the others you list, these aren't too bad... Pakistan scares me greatly, not because of Musharraf, but because of the possibility of Musharraf's regime being toppled and someone else (like Al Qaeda?) taking control of the country and with it their nuclear arsenal. I always worry about nuclear escalation between Pakistan and India... North Korea is presently my biggest worry (as far as nuclear powers go at present). They're working on both uranium and plutonium bomb cores. Unsubstantiated rumor has it that they're also working on developing hydrogen bombs. They supposedly have a variant of their TD-2 ICBM that can hit the west coast of the US. And they're selling this technology to Iran. Scary, scary stuff. Religious fanatics and nuclear weapons just do not mix. China just confuses me. I can't tell if they want to kick our ass with a ground invasion or just in the international marketplace. Well, the big difference with Iran is that they're threatening to wipe Israel off the map. They're developing nuclear weapons and ICBMs with a 6000km range. The other difference is, as yet, they don't seem to have developed any nukes. We still have a chance to stop them. We don't need a ground invasion as much as just some cruise missile attacks.

I like my socks ankle height

Neocortical columns

patcalhoun smells like revprez Meme meme singularity meme. P.S. Meme

Why LSD is illegal in two words: Richard Nixon http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,70015-0.html

It's okay, I'm a skeptic too. This page is a little more substantiated: http://www.braintypes.com/16_types.htm

The administration's foreign policy in Pakistan has always left me scratching my head.

As a concerned citizen of Earth I certainly don't want Iran obtaining nuclear weapons.

I'm not sure how much work has actually been done as far as finding what genes are responsible for what personality types, but modern psychology has been shifted almost completely away from Freud's pseudoscientific insistence upon nurture over nature and accepted that our personalities come primarily from genetics and not upbringing.

Hair provides so much needed protection from the elements. It only became redundant after humans started wearing clothing. Considering you're contradicting Richard Dawkins here, I'm going to go ahead and assume you're wrong. Mokele? Care to chime in on that?

Oh, I forgot the all-time greatest sitcom ever made... All in the Family And one of the wittiest shows to make fun fun of the sitcom, even if their audience was oblivious... Married with Children

So are you saying that global warming is mostly an alarmist meme? Then yes, you are correct... Somehow the greenhouse effect is being blamed for all sorts of regional warming effects. http://realclimate.org/ http://climatesci.atmos.colostate.edu/ When it really comes down to it, forcings which alter global climate are very hard to change. Kyoto has demonstrated this quite well; its projected benefits over the course of 50 years are a savings of 0.07C for the global mean surface temperature. That's lower than the precision with which we can actually measure the global mean surface temperature. Regional warming effects are much easier to tackle. For one, they don't require global treaties. They operate on a much smaller scale, so the potential to make a real impact is substantially greater.

Well, some propose an infinite regression as an alternative. I don't buy it. I believe we live in a cyclical (or oscillating) universe as well. I think it dies when intelligence, which is about to expand rapidly from earth and begin filling the universe, wills it to, upon realizing that the alternative is entropy death in which no further existence as a complex entity is possible.

Kurzweil defines it as any technological constructions smaller than 50nm in size. I believe that definition was purloined from K. Eric Drexler's Engines of Creation.

Just stumbled in on this clusterf*ck of a thread, and wanted to add what Dawkins had to say on the issue of race: People of one race are genetically no more or less similar to people of another race than they are to individuals of their same race. The actual genes that manifest the phenotypical features we associate with various races are an extremely small subset of the human gene pool. There is enormous diversity among humans as a whole, and no race is so isolated that both "smart genes" and "dumb genes" don't pervade the group as a whole.

Trailer Park Boys The Young Ones Chappelle's Show South Park Family Guy

This one kinda freaks me out: http://kvoa.com/Global/story.asp?S=4344749&nav=HMO6HMaY I dunno about you, but there's something that seems... rather wrong about that to me, heh.

So is this broken nuclear seal stuff freaking anyone else the f*ck out?