TheVat

Is this referring to the double entendre on machinist? I liked that. Unsure what a soupçon of Poe face is, however. My head can also be flown over, it seems. Back to topic... if there are sentience cases in future courtrooms, I imagine the free will debate will enter into that. E.g. could a bad robot have chosen to do differently than drop the family dachshund down the trash chute? If it's not sentient, then it would seem clear that its misinterpreting the request be sure to throw out the hot dogs is a fault of the company that programmed it. The heads of coders will roll!

Yep, this shite is generational. BTW, who keeps dropping in DVs and then splitting? Just cancelled Swanson's DV because it did not seem to me the post was abrasive or misleading, and it ended with a good question (which I'm unable to answer).

Not what I was saying, but rather that anyone who won, or ran in the general election, will have some donors who favor strong support of Israel. While that segment matters more to some candidates than others, all are aware of the effect on their next election and downstream elections if they try to move their party away from our treaties and alliance with Israel. It's a political third rail, as they say.

As Stringy mentions, this will be an area of intense legal scrutiny and debate. I think the question of sentience, though some may dismiss it, will be important to many people simply on the basis of our natural human curiosity and desire to know who we're talking to - especially if we're uncertain there is a "who" there at all. To give an example, if a very old Mr Vat had an android home assistant, "Hal," show up and begin to live in his home, he would very much like to know if Hal was sentient. And his views on Hal's legal rights would definitely pivot on that question. And it seems Mr Vat would be afflicted with a condition that caused speaking of himself in the third person.

There are some painful truths here (Mack's post included a couple that apparently stung, DV cancelled because blunt opinions are allowed here). Biden was always going to support Israel - every US president has entered office with the understanding that the US is a longterm ally of Israel and that the alliance has long been important to our weapons industries, to the American Jewish community of 8 million people, and to many of the large donors that almost every POTUS has depended on to win. Yes, these influences can lead to our morally smelly policies regarding a Far Right Israeli militant government that seems to think dispossession, bullying, lockdowns, carpet bombing civilian areas, and severe economic repression are all legitimate instruments of foreign policy. Hamas is the twisted child that grows from that kind of violent soil. If the Presidents were not bought from day one, there could be one who pushed a different approach, e.g. defunding Israel until it starts to learn actual diplomacy and other nonviolent tools. As it is, North Gaza is essentially destroyed, over a million are homeless and facing a grim future in refugee camps, and....this is ridding the world of Hamas how? This is just insuring a robust version of Hamas 2.0 that will regroup in sympathetic nations, raise money from donors whose hatred of Israel has only been ratcheted up, and prepare for the next stage of war.

If I were to guess (there seem some translation difficulties), I think you are saying that in some measurements, light has particle-like properties. When light strikes a retinal cell, there is a photon of a certain energy that interacts with a retinal pigment - this is the measurement part of human perception. This form of measurement physics would interpret as a particle interacting with a molecule of pigment. Color is a perception artifact that arises from neurological processes farther along the causal line. It is, as you said, "created" by our mind as part of its ongoing process of making models of what's happening in the external world. It assigns certain subjective properties, e.g. "blueness," to a measurement of 450-495 nm light striking the retina. The part relevant to quantum theory would be that light strikes a receptor, like the retinal cell, with only certain specific energies, as if it were not continuous waves but also discrete packets bearing a specific energy. The receptor pigment molecule energy does not change continuously, as would happen with a pure wave-like interaction, but rather rises in discrete jumps. Hence, "particle" becomes the term of convenience. However if we looked at the light beam passing through the cornea and lens, then it would be more useful to see it as an optical phenomenon i.e. waves.

I always wonder if Uranus jokes will ever get old. And then I laugh at the next one that appears. So, short answer: No.

His title was also primate...

I live north of the line in the US where AS heat pumps will fail during cold snaps. We have days where the HIGH just reaches 5 F., not frequent, but often enough that an AS heat pump system requires backup resistance coils. For these latitudes and farther north, it would be good if possible to pursue more innovation in not just GSHPs, but also ways to make resistance heat more efficient (e.g. zone heating). And there's that third rail in any discussion....smaller houses.

(snicker) Methane hydrates, on sea floor in near coastal areas, are also looming as a threat to the climate. As oceanic waters warm, this can destabilize some deposits of methane hydrates, and could be another source of positive feedback that speeds up global warming.

Well so much for science forums, then.

I don't know if there's a significant fraction of SF readers who are looking for a Biblical message dropped into the narrative. Maybe. Am more certain that removing vulgarity will cut your readership in half. Is there a Christian-compatible way to give me a hardon (or female/NB equivalent) somewhere in the first chapter? If so, that might be as useful to sales as a plausible DNA structure. Afterthought - Philip K Dick wrote several novels with some Christian theological themes. They did, however, contain some vulgarity, but what else could one expect of a druggy hipster living in that American Sodom, the San Francisco Bay area?

Did a beautiful princess kiss you? You were probably hoping it would turn you into a handsome prince. I had a similar experience, as my photo shows. (the princess has stuck with me anyway) Regarding @geordief post, I wonder if he was getting at the social shift if strong determinism was widely held to be true. Perhaps promises and contracts would be replaced by forecasts? That's not actually the point of the Dunning and Kruger research. The Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which people with limited competence in a particular domain overestimate their abilities. Some researchers also include the opposite effect for high performers: their tendency to underestimate their skills. In popular culture, the Dunning–Kruger effect is often misunderstood as a claim about general overconfidence of people with low intelligence instead of specific overconfidence of people unskilled at a particular task.

I am far from qualified to say. Somewhere around here there may be an old thread or two on the reality of photons. I like Cramer's interpretation, too. Partly because Wheeler is its godfather, and I much admire him. Not a terribly scientific reason I'd have to admit. Sorry for the derailment.

Hey, when they implement your controlled breeding program and extermination of the less sentient, what do you think your prospects will be? Would you be "on the spectrum" by any chance? What happens when your "best class" dictates that you climb in the boxcar?

David Bohm, among others. And more recently, this fellow... https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg14319392-200-science-do-photons-really-exist/

Time is short this a.m. so I'll just say that my intention cannot be reduced to "C-fiber translating data packets through superior medial cortical stacks 9 and 43," or some such. The lower-order causal explanation will fail.

My impression, too. Will read beyond the abstracts and conclusions today if time permits. I have some appreciation that he approaches consciousness as something that extends beyond neurons and must involve a body interacting with a world. Yup. My thermostat behaves. Same old same old. For a behaviorist, there is no knowable difference between two states of mind unless there is a demonstrable difference in the behavior associated with each state. Easy to see why such theoretic approaches are superseded.

I would never dismiss the many small tweaks that can add up, and I take your point on promoting small benefits. Not only for their pragmatic value but also as they foster more public awareness. I was zooming out a little from the myriad problems, in my post, to convey some caution about the public not falling into the complacent trap of thinking their individual choices aren't as critical to what will be an "all hands on deck" human project.

Was going to point this out. More greenwashing, at this point. Really good news for the environment would be masses of people in developed countries bicycling and walking and buying less fungible junk and living in smaller homes and eating more plants, choices that powerful corporations strenuously want people not to make and fight tooth-and-nail against with enormous campaigns of mass marketing.

The definition of downward causation, in philosophy of mind, is not one that requires a cause to be from elsewhere. It is compatible with emergent states of mind in a physicalist view. I.e. downward causation is a causal relationship from higher levels of a system to lower-level parts of that system. From our perspective as conscious creatures, we can perceive this as mental events acting to cause physical events. (we see higher order activity as mental) It doesn't require an ontologically dualist view that the mental events are other than an emergent process of a physical neural network. So I agree that on that high-order level where I form intentions, free will can be meaningfully defined as acting according my intentions. To be a compatibilist, if I am understanding that position, is to say there is an irreducible value to such high-order processes like intention forming, which gives meaning to free will. The sum of neural signals was greater than its parts.

I tried to ignore the logic contortions needed for the problem to make sense and treat it as the ethics problem apparently intended. The logic is wobbly, as everyone noticed - why not just leave well before the predicted event? @Ghideon noted that the ethics problem is two-tiered, with one tier being the behavior of the higher being. Might simplify the problem to just call it a mischievous demon, or an alien running a virtual world where it can simulate ethical conundra. And further sharpen the dilemma by having the home be an apartment in some sort of home detention scenario where early departure or retreat by an exit is impossible. Then the answer seems obvious: don't shoot unless they break in.

Number five, you don't shoot someone through a door who is not presently attacking you, because you are a sane person and have no wish to risk taking an innocent life. If the person then escalates to breaking down the door or trying to breach a window, then you can more confidently assume they mean harm, and retreat through a back door, fire escape, or other means. Retreat seems the more ethical option, unless there is also harm threatened to another housemate who cannot retreat, or other circumstance where you become cornered. Retreat prevents both your being murdered, and you becoming a murderer - however justified it might feel, it is a life-altering and terrible thing to take a life. So it should be the last resort.

Kantianism is not a trait. It is the entire philosophy of Kant in epistemology, ethics, metaphysics and philosophy of mind. Kaufman can call his set of traits whatever he wants, but Kantianism is a long-used term that means something else entirely. You have wandered into the field of philosophy with minimal knowledge of it. That doesn't work for me, sorry.

https://www.reuters.com/technology/microsoft-emerges-big-winner-openai-turmoil-with-altman-board-2023-11-20/ Analysts also said more employees could jump ship to Microsoft as the turmoil could impact what was expected to be a share sale at an $86 billion valuation by the startup, potentially affecting staff payouts at OpenAI. The enormous Microsoft amoeba engulfs yet another startup. If most of its brains follow Altman to Microsoft then the tech giant has effectively eaten OpenAI.