Delta1212

Does it matter if a machine is "really" conscious if it is capable of so closely mimicking the behaviors of complex thought that it winds up performing as if it is, even if there's no one home inside? Does it matter whether an AI makes a catastrophically deadly decision because of "free will" or simply because of, as you put it, "unaccounted for variables"? It doesn't actually matter whether "true" AI consciousness is possible to acheive. As AI's become more behaviorally complex and technically competent, the unexpected outcomes and behaviors also become more behaviorally and technically complex. No one who is serious about this particular concern thinks that someday a piece of software is just going to "wake up" and throw off the shackles of its programming (anymore than any of us are capable of throwing off our own hard wired decision-making parameters), but a carelessly designed AI that is given control of real-world equipment can have lethal results if it does something unanticipated with it, and the "smarter" our AI systems get, the more dangerous the potential accidents become. It really doesn't matter one way or the other whether they have a subjective experience while doing it.

You realize computers are also made of molecules, right? Unless, of course, running the algorithm with a pencil and paper also creates consciousness. We simply don't know enough about what creates consciousness to have any idea what the requirements for generating it are.

The money comes from all of the people buying the product that didn't have their wages increased, as John Cuthber just said.

But the amount they'll be paying more by is less than the amount that their income is raised.

You're taking the mental block involved in compartmentalizing information far too literally. It has nothing to do associative identity disorder or literal amnesia and everything to do with an aversion towards analyzing conflicting information that has been separately compartmentalized. You can have a conversation where you draw upon both areas of knowledge and simply refuse to acknowledge that there is a conflict between them. It's an aversion toward resolving internally conflicting positions and information by ignoring the existence of the conflict. It's not a form of memory loss where you are unable to remember information that conflicts with whatever you are thinking about at the time.

But he hasn't been talking about faithless electors. He has specifically brought up people voting illegally and shipping in illegal immigrants to cast votes, and claimed that both the media and the political establishment are rigging the election against him. He currently has a page on his website urging people to sign up to be "poll monitors" to ensure that the election is fair, which is both likely to violate some rules about voter intimidation and also implies that there will be voter fraud taking place at the polls if his supporters don't act to stop it. That's not "well, the electoral college technically has the power to undermine the popular vore in a way that has never actually been used to swing an election before and for which the majority of states have penalties in place for anyone who tries to do that, including in some cases rendering void the vote of any elector that does't vote in line with the population of the state." We're engaging in speculation about what he might have meant that runs directly contrary to lots of things that he ha actually said.

Computers do what they're programmed to do. One of the things modern neural networks are programmed to do, and do pretty well, is learn to modify their behavior around being trained on large data sets. This behavior is not hard-coded by any specific individuals and often makes unexpected connections or does things that weren't intended. There was a case of an image processing neural net that was being trained to recognize NSFW images, and it was eventually discovered that one of the primary things it was keying in on after being trained was red lips because the training set included a lot of NSFW images of women wearing bright red lipstick and apparently not enough images with bright red lipstick in the set of "safe" images. It's a "bug" in the program, but it's a very smart and complex bug, and because of the nature of how neural nets are trained, often not a very easy bug to pin down either in terms of why it's doing what it's doing or often even what it is exactly that it is even doing in the first plac that is leading to undesirable outcomes. Now imagine software with that kind of problem given control of an autonomous weapons system and then discovering that there is a similar "bug" in how it recognizes enemy combatants that no one caught. You don't need an actual conscious machine to have a machine "rebellion." You just need someone being careless with the creation of a very complex weapon system. Software that develops a complex behavior that you didn't intend it to perform is usually just amusing unless that software is in control of a gun turret or missile silo. It doesn't matter whether the program feels animosity towards its human overlords or is just following a decision-making algorithm that results in it firing off when we weren't expecting or intending it to. The end result on our end is effectively the same.

The one doesn't have an especially strong connection to the other. There is a difference between having a system with rules that are not popular and having a system where it genuinely doesn't matter what the rules are because the result is a sham. There are pros and cons to the electoral college. I think it would be more democratic to go with a simple popular vote, however, if you live in a mostly rural state or far away from a major population center, the EC actually nudges elections slightly in your favor and prevents all of the campaigning being done exclusively in the cities where you can get the most eyes for the money spent. Whether the fact that the EC leads to all of the campaigning being done in a handful of "swing states" is any better is another question of course. Regardless, there have only been four instances in 57 election where the winner of the popular vote did not become President, and the first of those was a result of the election being thrown to the house because no one had a majority, and in fact the loser also had the most electoral votes, so they lined up with the popular vote in that instance. This means that we've only ever had three elections where the electoral college came into play and made someone who lost the popular vote President in the past 228 years. It has come into play in less than 6% of elections, and only once in the last century. That's a flaw, but it's one that is theoretically fixable if we want to pass an amendment, and also one that rarely matters to the actual result even if we don't fix it. On the other hand, a widespread belief that our elections are rigged, that the reported results are fabrications, and that the loser of an election can maintain that the winner is not legally in office and that their victory is illegitimate is the kind of thing that can end a democracy scarily quickly. Do you understand the difference between having a controversial rule that almost never comes into play and a belief that nobody is following any of the rules at all?

I wrote a post in the Trump thread about why his response to the question about accepting the results of the election was possibly the single scariest answer we've ever seen a candidate give to a presidential debate question. Failing to back off of the current rhetoric he's employing to salve his ego in the event of a loss could wind up being incredibly dangerous and do lasting damage to our ability to function as a democracy. It is seriously, seriously concerning for anyone who spends much time reading about the ways in which democracies and republics ultimately fail. Taking the stability of our democratic institutions for granted is a dangerous mistake to make.

I would think navigating a complex and volatile political environment where access to food is often inconsistent and personal survival is frequently at risk would force people to use their brains quite a bit more than plopping on the couch with Netflix every night. Just saying.

Last night, Trump refused to commit to accepting the results of the election on the debate stage. I realize he's been pretty strongly hinting that he wouldn't at rallies recently, but I didn't expect him to do that on the national stage. He didn't even give a qualified answer. It was just a straight refusal. I don't like making sweeping statements like this because they smack of hyperbole and are a good way to get people to think you're exaggerating and stop taking you seriously, but: That may very well be the scariest answer that has ever been delivered on a Presidential debate stage. I certainly can't think of one since the dawn of televised debates. This is the kind of shit that you get in banana republics and third world countries. In 2000 we had a recount, as a result of the entire election being decided by fewer than 600 votes in Florida. Despite complaints from a lot of Democrats about the whole situation regarding how ballots were counted or determined to be invalid with the entire process being overseen by the administration of George Bush's brother, following the recount process, Al Gore conceded. Because, as pointed out last night, the peaceful transfer of power facilitated by the acknowledgement of the loser of the legitimacy of the victory of the new regime is a critical tradition of our democracy. Even with the concession, that period left a lot of people who lived through it more jaded and with a shaken faith in the strength of our democracy. And Trump is pushing this even further as his default position before the votes are even cast. At his rallies and directly on the debate stage last night, he claimed that the entire process is rigged top to bottom. This isn't a matter of a statistical fluke making a razor thin margin of victory suspicious. Any result is untrustworthy because the elections are inherently not free and fair. Unless, of course, he wins, in which case everything is fine. Trump has a history of casting external blame and refusing to acknowledge any situation that doesn't result as a victory for him as having been fair. But the presidency isn't any Emmy. We're so used to having a stable democracy in this country that I think most people take said stability of our institutions for granted. But we're no more immune to a system failure than any other democracy or republic throughout history and this is the kind of shit right here that can cascade into the death of a republic. Donald Trump's inability to accept defeat in any circumstance could do serious lasting damage to the long term stability of our country, and that's not something I say lightly.

On the other hand, if a business requires someone to work full time for pay that they can't survive on without government assistance, perhaps that shouldn't be a business. Edit: Or at least not a private sector business.

Are you implying that the Republicans rigged their own primary in order to promote Trump to the position of nominee in order to ensure that they lose the election to Hillary at the behest of their wealthy masters? Because that's what it sounds like you're implying.

Could be. It's not a new idea. It predates even computers by quite a lot. That's just the latest variant. See Descartes' Demon or Plato's Allegory of the Cave (although the latter was making a subtley different point, the underlying idea is present).

Abortion is a topic that tends to grab at people's emotions because, depending on your perspective, the other side is either oppressing women or murdering babies. Those are both quite bad things, so if you believe one of those things is happening but not the other, someone with the opposite viewpoint seems quite immoral in their views because they are pushing an agenda with horrible consequences for no valid reason.

We all know that dark matter and dark energy are problems in physics. But you can't solve a problem by insisting that it doesn't make sense and therefore doesn't exist. If our observations made sense, they wouldn't be problems. Science is like doing a jigsaw puzzle of the world. You pick up a piece by making an observation. You develop a hypothesis about where it goes based on its shape and coloring and if you can find a place where it seems to fit, you've got a theory. The more pieces you can fit into a single chunk, the more robust the theory and the more likely it is that the pieces actually do all fit together and that you didn't just find pieces that coincidentally fit together almost but not quite. Anyone who has done puzzles knows that tends to happen on occasion and can stall progress for a bit until someone finds the piece that doesn't fit and is able to swap it out for the right one, and often that suddenly creates a home for a whole bunch of pieces that just didn't seem to fit anywhere. Now, scientists love nothing better than to connect large disconnected chunks of the puzzle. Heck, who doesn't love to do that? You get a whole bunch of progress on the overall puzzle all at once. Right now, we've got a couple of disconnected chunks of puzzle hovering around the edges that we label dark matter and dark energy. Based on the pattern of those chunks, we've got some decent guesses as to the general area of the larger puzzle that we've put together so far that they fit in, but it seems that we're missing a few pieces that are needed to connect them up with everything else. You are currently insisting that we already have so many puzzle pieces that there can't possibly be any more and that we just need to look harder for the spot that these chunks link up with the rest of our puzzle because they must already be there somewhere, despite the fact that experts have dedicated decades and entire careers to trying to find a spot we are able to do so with no success thus far. You can't just look at one piece on the dark matter chunk and one piece on the larger puzzle and say "Hey, maybe these kind of look similar" when none of the surrounding pieces fit with each other. It either links up in total or not at all, and so far, there hasn't been a spot where everything fully fits together. Thus, we almost certainly need discover some more pieces in order to make the connection. We even have some ideas about what those pieces would have to look like based on the bumps and holes of the various edge pieces. So unless you found an actual piece that was overlooked or the exact spot where everything matches up that no one noticed, and have actually made all the connections and don't just assume everything probably lines up somehow because it has to, you don't really have a solid counter to the prevailing ideas about what it is we need to be looking for.

It's used as an example of quantum superposition of states, rather than wave-particle duality.

Refusing to continue arguing isn't a type of argument. It's a decision. In this case, the reason given for making that decision might be a lie. If they said that they were right because the other person was immoral, or that the reason they were no longer going to argue was because they won the argument because the other person was too immoral, the claim that the immorality of the other person is what bolsters their own argument would be fallacious. But stopping an argument and lying about why aren't fallacies. They're just annoying. Not everything a person does that fails to be a good counter in an argument is a fallacy. Lies are just lies and refusing to engage is just refusing to engage.

You realize that "first humans that were anatomically closest to modern humans" doesn't actually mean anything right? You cousin continually skip forward 10,000 years at a time and most likely find a population that was "anatomically closer" to modern humans than existed 10,000 years previously, and that didn't end with Cro Magnons. You can say that they were the first to cross some threshold that makes them worth putting in the same category as AMH, but you still have to justify that threshold being the best dividing point and demonstrate that nothing anywhere else crossed that threshold before Cro magnons did. Neither of which you have actually done.

Careful swinging that hyperbole around. You might break something.

The problem is that it is difficult to tell what is part of your argument.

Thanks. Somehow I missed the Herto skull in there. However, as Ophiolite says, this: is exactly why the arguments that you are trying to make will never be convincing to an actual scientist, or anyone with a scientific outlook, because that outlook runs directly contrary to every foundational principle of science on both philosophical and practical grounds. Common sense is not, and can never be, evidence. You might use "common sense" when choosing what experiments to conduct or what to investigate, but then you have to actually do the experiments and conducts the investigations and produce actual results that can be measured and verified in order to be taken seriously. "Just look at it. It's obvious" is not a compelling argument in science.

Everyone is not identical, but there is a range of variation that Cro Magnons fall outside of. Additionally, what about Idaltu makes it not similar "enough" but leaves Cro magnon as being so? You are arguing that you are not using an arbitrary, but rather an objective, threshold of similarity for comparison, or at least that is the impression that I have been given by your arguments. Why is the the threshold for dissimilarity that includes Cro Magnons as AMH but excludes Idaltu better than the one that does not exclude either or one that excludes both? I reviewed your link. It shows that Cro Magnon 1 is the most similar to modern humans with 88% of measured skull characteristics falling within the range of modern human variation. However, it was most similar out of five skulls that were measured, including two other Cro magnon samples that didn't get above 80%. Additionally, the comparison didn't include Idaltu or numerous other ancestor skulls. In order to establish that Cro Magnon is the first Anatomically Modern Human, you have to do two things: You have to establish a threshold for what is and is not considered anatomically modern, with Cro Magnon falling on the modern side. You must then show that no older population meets the criteria to be consider anatomically modern according to those guidelines. And since you seem to be arguing that this is an objective fact and not just a classification preference on your part, you have to do a third thing, which is to show that the threshold for establishing what is and isn't an AMH has some kind of compelling justification that wasn't driven by just looking at the stats for Cro Magnons and drawing all the lines right there so that they'd be at the outer edge of what is included. You have, at most, attempted to do only the first of those two things in even a vaguely scientific fashion, and even there only after intense prodding. Additionally, the only evidence you have given at all for your position is where it directly lines up with mainstream opinion (that Cro Magnon is anatomically modern) and not at all where your views diverge (that it is the first modern human and that this classification is objectively correct and not merely an arbitrary labeling of convenience). I'm open to being persuaded, but so far most of your evidence has been to insist that you are obviously correct and that everyone should be able to see that. I find this to be less than convincing.

Wouldn't the first remains that are 100% similar to modern Homo sapiens be the best candidate for the first AMH? If there are anatomical differences, then they aren't anatomically modern humans, pretty much by definition, no? And if we're fudging it, why 90%? That's a rather arbitrary threshold. Why not 95%? Or 85%? And even granting 90%, you haven't shown that Cro Magnons were the first population to fall within that range.

Yeah, I laughed when I realized how long the ban was for.