Delta1212

He wasn't under oath when he tweeted that, so the only semi-plausible legal consequence he could really face for just making it up is probably Obama suing him for libel or defamation, and that's unlikely to happen in any case. So, in other words, no. Nothing is going to come of this.

Does this mean couples known to be infertile should not be provided the benefits of a marriage? Should couples who choose not to have children be prosecuted for tax fraud?

If no one cared what the thing was called, there'd be no reason to argue that it shouldn't all be called by the same name. After all, who cares what it's called?

Re: the gravity beam Imagine you have a faucet running in your sink. When you turn it off, the water doesn't just vanish. Whatever was already in the column of water between the faucet and the basin of the sink continues to fall, so there is a delay between when the water is shut off and when water stops hitting the basin as that "shut off information" propagates downward. The same is true for light rays or, if you could create a directional source of gravity in the form of a beam, gravity. Changes in gravity propagate out from their source at the speed of light. This is quite well modeled by General Relativity and we just last year got additional confirmation that gravity does indeed behave as it is modeled in this way by the first detection of predicted gravity waves. It does intuitively very much seem like there should be some way to arrange things so that the effect of some action happens instantly over great distances. I had many of the same or similar thoughts when I was first learning about these concepts and trying to come up with ways around them myself. The reason for that intuition we have is that for a lot of similar actions we encounter in our daily lives, it seems like the effect instantaneously follows from the cause. But it seems that way because the effect propagates out from the cause very, very quickly and we are dealing with extremely short distances, so for all practical purposes of a typical person these effects might as well be propagating instantaneously. When you are multiplying the very tiny difference between "might as well be instantaneous" and "actually instantaneous" over the unimaginably vast distances found in space, however, it starts being very noticeable indeed.

You don't even need to wait for the future or operate at the speed of light to see how this would work: If you hang a slinky by one end and release, the bottom of the slinky won't begin to fall until the release of tension has been transmitted from the top to the bottom in the form of a pressure wave.

There once was a man from Nantucket And cotton: he'd daily to pluck it While knitting his sweater He said, "Nature is better!" Yet refused to squat over a bucket

How do we know other people are doing anything more than mimicking consciousness?

Of course not. If you had, we'd already have such an AI. I said that I think we're likely to see that kind of AI before we have a true understanding of how consciousness works, not that it had already been created.

To be honest, I think we'll have the first AI capable of indistinguishably replicating consciousness before we really understand how consciousness works on the kind of deep level that you are talking about. Presupposing, of course, that both achievements are physically possible.

Yeah, that's not a razor's edge. That's a simple fact.

Well yeah, as opposed to what?

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-11-17/google-deepmind-gives-computer-dreams-to-improve-learning Not an inherited trait, but building in a dream-state analog apparently increases the speed at which neural network AIs learn by a significant amount.

That is not strictly true. You don't actually need to understand why something works in order to build it if you can replicate the conditions and get a little lucky. I would be shocked if we didn't build machines that could pass the Turing Test well before we have a real answer to what consciousness is. The former is in sight of where we are now. I don't think the latter is really.

It's not strictly true that AI is limited by the intelligence of its creators. The best modern AI is designed to take inputs and be shown the desired outputs and then figure out how to get from the one to the other on its own. The people designing it don't necessarily, and in fact don't usually, understand how to get there themselves. That's actually the advantage of using artificial neural networks. Re: the topic at hand, Apparently, Google's new translation AI spontaneously developed a "mental model" of semantics. Rather than simply encoding that cat <> gato, it recognizes that cat and gato have a shared meaning that is also shared by Katze. So as soon as it learns that chat <> Katze, it also knows that chat <> cat and chat <> gato. It was not programmed to do this, but rather it was a happy accident as a consequence of training the same AI to translate between a variety of different languages. Having a deeper semantic pseudo-language allowed it to more quickly learn to translate between languages it had already "learned" without having between taught to translate between those two languages specifically.

You are confusing evidence with specific kinds of evidence. Symptoms proffered by the patient or that are readily apparent to the observer without the aid of equipment is still evidence.

The point is that they could if they really wanted to, but yes, that is not going to happen without an overwhelmingly opposed Congress dedicated to restricting executive power, which is pretty much the opposite of what we now have.

There is, theoretically, a limited degree of scope to what a president can do with executive orders that relates to his personal domain of authority. The Courts can strike down executive orders that wander outside of this scope of authority, and if Confress really doesn't like a particular order, they can, for the most part, pass a law or laws that override it. Generally speaking, you can think of most executive orders as being like memos that provide operational guidelines for the executive branch of the government. The number of them matters much less than the content, since such changes to operational policy can be either incredibly mundane or have much wider repercussions for the country at large depending on what exactly they are.

Clearly not because it would mean that relativity was wrong.

I support the sentiment of the first statement in the abstract but we're not there yet technologically so it's still a hypothetical computer and we don't have direct evidence this is true. Philosophically, I agree entirely with the second statement.

Don't most motors revolve?

Yeah, I'm with you on this. I'd describe it as rolling hills or countryside or something along those lines. That is, apparently, the definition of "wold" but as I have never heard that word used before, it doesn't communicate that meaning to me. A dale would be more of a small valley in that sort of terrain, though, wouldn't it?

You can see how obscure it was because I re-read your post twice and went back and re-read all of the questions and then re-read your post again before noticing that the word in question wasn't "World."

My own thoughts on the matter are as follows: Whatever you will do in the past is part of what already happened. If you travel back in time, you cannot change what happened because whatever happened already included you doing whatever it is you are going to do. This feels paradoxical because we are used to thinking of the past as something known and unchanging and the future as something unknown with endless open possibilities, and time travel mixes up the two by making your future the past. The general conclusion then is that it opens the past up to endless possibilities, because we would rather assume that the past is changeable than that our future is locked into a single possible outcome, but you can just as easily draw the opposite conclusion to resolve this conflict at which point many time travel paradoxes, including the grandfather paradox, disappear. The remaining paradoxes, like the Bootstrap paradox, that are still possible lend themselves to stable time loops and so aren't actually problems for single timeline time travel.

Currently (no pun intended), sure. If a significant number of people become users of DC current, expect a market for DC appliances to start opening up to take more efficient advantage.

The problem with the Auquatic Ape Theory is not the idea that humans have some adaptations that allow us to better deal with and live in and around water than many other apes. To say as much is not especially controversial. The problem is that Aquatic Ape Theory supposes that adaptations to the water are the primary driver of a wide range of features in human evolution for which there are, frankly, better explanations. It is a dispute over the number of adaptations and their relative importance in the formation of humanity as it now exists, rather than about whether humans have any adaptations that help us live in and around water at all.