Xyph

I assume it's to minimize resistance caused by heating, something that isn't important for insulators.

That ceased to be a problem a long time ago. I'm quite certain that there is no such law. Energy (or it's equivalent in matter) is conserved, but matter itself is not. Energy can produce matter, and vice versa. That's silly. Unless you have a shell of some form of 100% reflective exotic matter - or matter at the edges of the universe has some utterly bizarre gravitational properties that bends all outgoing light through acute angles back into the material universe - radiation will gradually leak outwards and the universe will eventually become a cold, energetic wasteland. In any case, what further experiments do you suggest to verify your (somewhat unlikely, it seems) hypothesis?

I'd say it makes more sense for it never to end. If it ends, it lacks something, and infinities that lack something are not true infinities. Also, mathematically, start from a negative infinity - what happens when you add something to it? You can go on adding for as long as you like, but you'll never reach zero.

While I think it's rather obvious that consciousness can be computerised by now, I do understand your fears about transference to a computerised substrate from a biological one for those that aren't brought into being within such a substrate (ie, AIs). It's quite a scary thought that having finished having your consciousness copied, you could awake once more in a state of immobile confusion in your decrepit, biological body, just in time to slip into death - although I am confident that your transferred self would awake with a sense of relief and wonder that it didn't end up experiencing such a thing. A destructive copy would be most desirable, I suppose - with near-instantaneous copy and activation combined with erasure of the original. Of course, there may still be some worry that you won't be the same consciousness, but in this case I think it's more analogous to not being the same consciousness from one moment to the next - was the consciousness that you felt a few hours ago the same consciousness you feel now? Are people who are revived from apparent cessation of brain activity the same consciousness? I would say yes, for all intents and purposes, but am also, admittedly (and irrationally, I admit) a little unnerved by the idea of such a change of substrate. Continuity is probably the key, though - the most satisfactory transference, I expect, would be a gradual destructive copy with communication between the two substrates maintained as the copy occurs. The process would be divided into individual neuron-clusters (or, even better, individual neurons - but possibly, a bit cruder, observably divided parts of the brain) and as each cluster was transferred to the computerised substrate and activated, the biological one would be deactivated and the computerised one would be purposefully handicapped to limit it to biological speed. Through some technological means, communication would be maintained so the computer parts acted as a part of the brain. I'm not sure how this would be done - perhaps some form of nanotech, or other insertions into the brain. Anyway, the process would continue until the entire contents of the brain were transferred. This would probably be the least disconcerting method because there would be no sense of discontinuity, or sudden transitions of thought-style, and once you were safely computerised the bio-emulating handicaps could be removed, allowing a gradual immersion into the new environment. I think such a desire is probably quite irrational. But nonetheless, if I had a choice, the decentralised nature of consciousness would lead me to prefer a transference of substrate such as the one I've detailed above.

You can start at any number you want and define a sequence that tends to infinity, even if you can't actually count to it. I don't think this would work in reverse, however. But infinities are logically inconceivable anyway. You're asking for the logical outcome of an illogical scenario.

I expect the reason we think we have free will is because the feeling of free will is an inevitable result of a system complex enough to simulate it - the illusion persists within as well as without.

Free will is an illusion. The processes underlying consciousness are entirely deterministic. That fact, however, isn't really relevant to day-to-day human existence.

Bump. I know an "intact brain" is somewhat badly defined, but I can't really think of any other way to describe it... "Undamaged" is what I'm trying to convey, in any case - at least, not damaged beyond the point of possible recovery. As for temperature, I hadn't actually considered that - now that you mention it, though, for the purposes of the original question, the brain should be assumed to be in an environment at around room temperature (although presumably the body will be warmer at first). But also, an addendum to the original question: how well does cooling the brain down preserve its structure and contents? Is current cryogenic technology sufficiently capable of maintaining the brain's structure over long periods?

Muscles in the brain would be utterly useless at controlling thoughts. Can you imagine how complex an entirely mechanical brain would be? The interactions going on inside the brain are composed of firings of neurons in various combinations. Brain cells don't "act" on impulses they receive from other cells, the impulses they receive from other cells merely serve to alert the brain as a whole as to what is happening to the body it's encased within. We can control our thoughts by triggering the firing of certain neurons in certain combinations, all of which will relate to some aspect of our accumulated knowledge and consciousness.

Then why can matter be produced from kinetic or electromagnetic energy?

Stationary relative to the measuring apparatus.

Presumably the brain is completely saturated with synapses, so the fact that quite a few extend beyond its boundaries and don't connect to anything should be expected.

So how would you like to see gravity measured?

Your friend (in arguing that the laws of our universe cannot be applied to the conditions that brought about the Big Bang) is more correct than yourself (and your argument that it could not possibly have happened by chance). Describing the Big Bang as "perfect" is silly. It was an incredibly violent, chaotic, and messy explosion. Just because the end result appears relatively calm to us, who evolved in these conditions, doesn't mean we can make any sensible judgements on how well the Big Bang was "set up", as far as such things go...

Hm, if the result was an actual curvature of space, I'd expect it to be an actually gravitational effect, rather than the "functional equivalent", as it's described. I got the impression that it would have more in common with centrifugal force than actual gravity. Well, the author of this article claims to have had more recent contact with Ning Li:

But if it's the functional equivalent, then what would be the difference? Surely even if it's not actually a gravitational effect, if it emulates gravity well enough, it could still be used for a variety of applications in which control of gravity would be useful.

Oops. Sorry about that. Yeah, the correct URL should be http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/research/1281736.html.

I posted this a while ago in the pseudoscience forum, but didn't really get the response I hoped for, so I'm posting it here. I know gravity control techniques are generally viewed with skepticism, and quite probably pseudoscience, but I can't find anything refuting this article (or otherwise), and don't know enough myself to judge whether it makes sense or not. So what I'd like to know is whether or not there is anything to what's described in the article. Does General Relativity predict such an effect? Theoretically, going by the information contained in the article, should it work or not? (And why?) Also: I have absolutely no idea how this could possibly have any gravitational effects whatsoever. Can anyone shed any light on what this refers to, and how it would work?

Perhaps I've misinterpreted the article, but is it saying that there are synapses that don't go anywhere on the surface of the brain? If this is the case, it's hardly surprising. I wouldn't expect the surface of the brain to be a perfect boundary, with no stray synapses extending beyond its surface... But in any case: This sentence seems to sum up the supported viewpoint, and in my opinion its quite a silly one - the latter part especially. From what I've heard, the brain does have a fairly clear hierarchy, since we can trace its evolutionary history back through its layers - primate, mammalian and finally reptilian (or something along those lines). I think the claim, in this case, that the brain doesn't have a clear hierarchy comes from wanting to pin down an easily definable, fundamental, "spark" that gives rise to consciousness. Faced with the apparent lack of such a spark, the obvious conclusion should be that there simply isn't one, and consciousness is just the cumulative effect of the interactions going on within the brain. Instead of this, however, the writer seems to have come to the considerably less rational conclusion that there is something immaterial from which consciousness springs. I expect because the actual relevance of these free synapses has been severely overstated. Even if it is true that there are no other explanations, though, "receivers for the soul" is no more a scientific explanation than "God did it".

I expect everything is "pseudorandom" at some level.

I'm curious - on average, how long after someone's brain has become electrically silent does it take for irreversible damage to occur? Or, how long after someone died would it take for revival (with an intact brain) to become fundamentally impossible? In the case that actual revival may become unfeasible before the brain has significantly decayed, assume the ability to revive someone is not in question - how long would it take for chemically stored information in the brain and the cell structure of the brain to deteriorate beyond any hope of retrieval?

No, electromagnetic radiation is not matter, since it has no mass. If you're defining non-matter as "that which is not matter", then yes, it would make sense for a scientist to say that non-matter can interact with matter, since EM radiation definitely does interact with matter.

It would be like a 4 dimensional object with only a part of it in 3 dimensional space, I suppose... Maybe you'd get just the middle "slice" of the object, 1 planck length thick, or somesuch.

Perhaps I'm wrong, but it seems to me that if you disregard friction and neither the hitter nor the hittee has anything to brace themselves on, it wouldn't matter how you hit anything - both the involved would just bounce of each other in opposite directions. Gozer would probably be moving more slowly, though, since he has greater mass.

Yes, relativistic time dilation would be useful on extended space flights, but not in the way or for the reasons that you've stated. The "dreamtime" you're talking about has far more to do with the brain's collective perception of time than the speed of any individual neural impulses. In dreams the situation is even more distorted by the fact that your perception of everything, let alone time, is probably going to be severely skewered compared to reality. I seriously doubt that - if you recorded your dreams by some indeterminate means and then played them back while awake - the passing of time would seem to make any consistent sense whatsoever to your wakeful self, even if you noticed nothing unusual while you were experiencing it.