Prometheus

An alternative interpretation of the Christian creation myth is that the snake was liberating us from an overbearing patriarch; encouraging Humanity on a wonderful yet painful journey to the stars. An interesting number of parallels to the Promethean myth except there the bringer of knowledge is considered a hero to Humanity by the ancient Greeks, while Christians regard the bringer of knowledge the very Devil. Says everything you need about the churches attitude to knowledge.

Some people are born with a congenital insensitivity to pain. They have a very low life expectancy.

What keywords are you using? Have you tried 'pharmacodynamics'. The BNF might have useful info, but it doesn't give its specific sources. Could also try the Cochrane database of systematic reviews.

Will this be something like when the value of pi was under legislative scrutiny?

Let us know of the results. Could do some simple statistics on the results - maybe save them for a future maths school project?

Your daughter is smart: if possible have each person take the taste test first with odourless oil, then later with the scented oil. That means each person is his/her own control and reduces variations in your outcome of interest (taste) due to humans just being different (and makes the stats analysis nicer). This is quite a typical feature of dietetic studies - but you then have to think about how eating the candy the first time might influence tasting the candy the second time around. For such reasons some studies might have a wash-out period, allowing any lingering effects of an initial exposure to wear off. In your case it might be a few minutes and a glass of water (i'm just guessing - your daughter could look up things like how long taste lingers, if taste influences future tastes, if water resets taste etc). Not an easy answer to this one. Generally quantitative information, which you can measure or categorise somehow, is much more useful than qualitative. Your daughter could look into the pros and cons of each. Maybe google 'quantifying taste for research' or similar. All you actually want to know is whether the taste changes, not what the taste actually is. So you could just ask the question on a scale of 1-10 how similar are the two tastes? But asking this very question could trigger them to seek differences when normally they wouldn't. Even the wording asking for 'how similar' instead of 'how different' could influence people's responses. Just try to make decisions based on what will reduce the amount of bias in the study, justify them if you have good reasons and if there's not a clear answer to a choice just say why its not clear. Like i say, no easy answers. Hope my rambling helps. Nurses do a lot of this kind of research and it sounds like your daughter is asking better questions than many of them. Good luck: sounds like a fun school.

So? What has that got to do with whether AI can experience? Humans and computers are both made of stuff. Why is biological stuff special regarding the emergence of consciousness?

We've been asking that question a long time: Omar Khayyám and Edward Fitzgerald put it quite nicely.

I think the key word you're missing is sometimes. Some people need stabilisers to learn how to ride a bike, some don't. Either way once you've learned you throw away the stabilisers.

That's your prerogative, i just wonder why you can't take the neutral position of 'don't know'. Not to say you can't speculate, but to take a definitive position based on a flimsy of thought seems counter-productive.

Why do you assume AI will not be able to experience, even if it is different to how we experience?

So ethics used to be about something other than entertainment but now that's all it is? You'll have to explain that one. To my mind it is the most important thing humans do. As far as we know there is only one place in the entire universe where morality exists: in the space between humans. As such it is our unique contribution to existence. There are such things as justice, mercy and compassion in the universe, but only to the degree that we make it so.

Sure, scientists believe certain things and religious people certain things. With a little sophistry you can call both of these types of faith. Your mistake is to think that all beliefs are equal: they are not. Belief in scientific terms comes from evidence, whereas beliefs in religious terms are usually despite evidence. Consider: if i hold up my pen and release it i believe it will fall the the ground. I also believe that the potatoes in my kitchen come to life at night and consider me their king. Last night they held a festival in my name, which is why there was less juice in the fridge than i remember there being. Are these beliefs equal? According to your arguments thus far, they are.

This equivocation of religious beliefs and scientific evidence is quite insidious. You not only do a disservice to science, but also to religion and humanity in general.

Worse, it could exacerbate the situation. The Jihadists want a Holy War, this is one step further towards accommodating them.

I have never had it explained to me why the existence of a creator god gets around the 'problem' of creation. The argument normally starts that if something exists it must have been created, hence it must have a creator. But then i ask if god exists what created it? Nothing - god is eternal - is the usual answer. But if these people are happy that god needs no act of creation, then why not just suppose this of the universe in the first place? By adding the god hypothesis nothing has been resolved but things have been made more complicated. Compare the imagination required to dream up quantum theory or general relativity to your banal image of god, a king of kings, sovereign to all men. Even in the domain of awe and wonder science has exceeded religion. And a creator being could've planted all those fossils and 'evidence' just to keep us amused, or test us, or for 'mysterious' reasons we'll never understand. And that's just the problem with a creator god: if it can do absolutely anything then it is absolutely meaningless. The stronger your image of god the less convincing it is.

Granted immigration and terrorism are a cause of much fear in Western countries, but the protest is correctly directed at the president because his reaction to this fear is eroding liberty. It is this loss of liberty which warrants protest. While the Islamic Jihadist/Salafist movements are shaping the discourse of Western politics then terror is winning. This is the price we pay for living in a liberal society and it is a price i am willing to pay, but i recognise others in the same society prefer safety to liberty. In Europe, where it is said there is an Islamist crisis, you are more likely to die choking on your food than die from a terrorist incident. I can live with that level of risk and am thankful to the various security agencies for keeping the risk that low, but no more liberties need be removed to further reduce it. The more broad issue of how much immigration a country can economically and culturally handle is is another question, and one which i imagine could have a reasonable estimate if it were not so laden with various political biases. But dictating migration policy based on data and model based projections in probably too much to ask for at the moment: our politics relies on charm not data.

No... you have used the word 'faithfulness' incorrectly. If you meant unchanged, say unchanged. It is disingenuous to use your own meaning of a word and accuse others of not understanding.

I found it a useful motivator to overcome my natural reticence when others would try to chat up the women who would become my wife.

It sounds like a problem of finding a suitable model. The sum of five dice, for instance, can be well modelled by a theoretical distibution. We need only that some assumptions hold approximately true: mostly the assumption that all 5 dice are fair. From this theoretical distribution, and without rolling a single die, we can calculate the variance: the variance is a property of the theoretical distribution. No rolls are necessary for this to exist just as no perfect circles need physically exist for pi to exist: variance is a mathematical property. We are hoping to model the dice rolling with this theoretical outcome, and the degree to which we are successful depends on how well our assumptions hold. We may attempt to extend this model to, for instance, outcomes in poker games (about which i know very little so forgive any technical errors). But here we need to make very many more assumptions, and some of those will be about the nature of the humans involved. It would be very difficult to find a theoretical distribution to model these outcomes as well as we could for the dice rolls. Another method to model these poker outcomes which captures the 'human' factor is to collect data from real games and construct an empirical distribution - i.e data. We could then use this empirical distribution to predict future outcomes on the assumption that the future will be similar enough to the past for the model to hold.

This is a bit like asking what organ is the most - you might think the brain or heart but see how far you get without an anus.

Maybe it's the population and sample variance you are conflating? A definition based on the maximum amount it can change sounds like an odd definition, it would mean, for instance, any Brownian motion would have infinite variance. edit: Is often easier to work with the variance rather than standard deviation, but given the latter is the principle root of the former yes it's used all the time in probability theory. Maybe one way to think about it is that the theoretical variance is the amount you expect a random variable will vary before you roll the dice (or whatever is your outcome), assuming that theoretical distribution well models your dice roll outcomes.

This isn't a problem if you consider the gene to be the basic 'unit' of evolution rather than the individual. Incidentally, i recently heard Richard Dawkins say he regrets not calling the 'Selfish Gene' something like the "Altruistic Individual'.