writtles

The Ethereum crowd sale participants?

Appply same principle of buying and holding for 10+ years and get the Motley Fool Stock Advisor newsletter and buy their pics periodically. Excellent stock research.

To save everyone from the oozing condescension of this guy's rant I'll boil down his thesis: Just because someone can spend Satoshi's bitcoin doesn't PROVE that they're Satoshi. Given by the many common sense reasons he listed with the know-it-all fervor of an 8th grade WoW player (someone could have stole it or the original team passed it around among themselves etc). Sure it doesn't prove anything ABSOLUTELY if Craig Write actually moved a bitcoin, but it certainly would help his case.

Too many naysayers in this thread (get burned before guys?).

Motley Fool Investment Guide is where I started. I've subscribe to their Stock Advisor newsletter for nearly a decade and have picked from their recommendations in that newsletter. Basically i've invested money in one of their picks once per month with the expectation to hold that investment for 10+ years. That portfolio has gained an average of 25% PER year and I've never researched a stock.

i had an idea that if I were a US bank I would create a USD token on Ethereum that would be redeemable at my bank (or my network of banks). A eUSD token would created via smart contract and be pegged to the dollar and thereby tradable on the Ethereum network. Individuals and business could then do business in USD (or any fiat of choice for that matter. Obtainable on an Ethereum exchange or through said bank(s)). Other implications: An accounting firm could create a smart contract that calculates and or files my taxes. A business structure (LLC, IPO etc) in can be written into a smart contract. And so on.

I didn't realize the scope of our data went back that far!

Same here. Now it only needs the capability to share items (lists in particular).

Fantastic work. I think the pride one would feel in making this work is well worth the $90 or so required for parts!

True, but there are also other brilliant minds in the field that are creating solutions that you can also learn from. Isolating yourself from that doesn't help much either.

Very true! Also, it's pretty clear that R2 demonstrates conscious personhood so "he's" much more than Big Dog already.

I would imagine robot warfare is / will be much more politically feasable as "our" human cost goes way down.

I've been investing long enough to know that:

1) if a disruptive tech has plenty of personal intrigue and 2) plenty of brilliant people herald it

then buy the crash.

People have to be able to move in and out of cash via BTC instantly. It currently takes days for most people.

I think the introduction of bitcoin into the current paradigm would only serve to deepen and strengthen it. A universal currency with no barrier of entry and a slew of other features and benefits can and should be leveraged.

What about micro loans? http://www.kiva.org/about

Value Memes ala Spiral Dynamics are probably more applicable here.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spiral_Dynamics

I want to see community discussion about the submission.

Also, socioeconomic status is key here. i.e. If no one in your life values education then incentive to learn is greatly diminished no matter how intelligent you are.

Well I provided many arguments in attempt to illustrate my points. They proceeded to get cherry-picked--which effectively removed their context. You deconstructed all of my posts in an attempt to redefine each term used. Maybe I mistook a straw man for you, but you haven't acknowledged any of my greater themes here so either you missed them or their outside of your worldview. I'm sorry if I wasted your time.

The subjective apple has objective correlative brain patterns indeed, but what else?

You're imagining an apple, using stored memories to create an image in your mind. Nothing else.

What if I imagine an object that i've never seen before? No stored image there. Or just watch the ambient closed-eye-visuals that seem to run constantly in the background like a screen saver? Those and many other examples of different ways that people use their brains will require just as many rebuttles which I'm sure you'd provide but that gets us nowhere.

The image of an apple "means" something and cannot be completely reduced to electrons or synapse patterns without losing the concept of "apple".

Sure it can, it is just patterns after all.

Then why do we look at images on the computer monitor? Why not just watch the electrons flow? Why do we imagine in images at all then? Either way the tiresome point-by-point breakdowns into arguing the logical bits outside of their context very much captures symbolically the essence of what we're going on about here I think.

Reductionism. The following statements both true:

A cell is nothing more than a giant chemical reaction and can be eventually explained (with enough scientific understanding) on the molecular level.

The cell as a whole exhibits characteristics and behaviors totally different than any of its molecular counterparts.

You say the latter above quote that the apple image can be boiled down to its electrons and it is still an apple on that level. But then you say in response to my previous quote:

It loses the apple, for now it is just "brain patterns" or electrons.

No it doesn't, materialism doesn't deny subjective mental experiences.

And then:

Neuroscience has pretty well established that consciousness is an illusion Followed by That's merely a subjective mental experience of reality, something completely accepted by materialists and science.

Then go on accuse me of misunderstanding materialism. But in fact your position changes from reductionist materialism to non-reductionist twice in one post. Which is progress in my opinion!

All good points and I don't disagree. Regardless, I was not arguing in favor of some reality without an objective correlation. I'm stating that the subjective has real distinction from the objective--which materialism at the very least doesn't acknowledge--or at least reduces to the low-level mechanics in which they are created, as you have done. But I do appreciate your engagement and i'd like to further it by asking what your take on the following scenario would be?

Say I'm being monitored by a machine that can detect my brain patterns in real time. I am asked to imagine an arbitrary object, say an apple. I close my eyes and think of the apple and all of its sensual properties etc. My neurons fire and the machine picks up all of the brain patterns that correlate with my idea of "apple". And yet nowhere will the machine detect anything remotely resembling an apple. Only I "see" the apple in my "minds eye". The subjective apple has objective correlative brain patterns indeed, but what else?

Now to follow that, you could counter with the fact that a computer's graphics processor will have all kinds of electrons flowing in certain patterns to produce an image of an apple on screen. And I don't deny that the brain is indeed a high-order computer. But the difference here is that the actual computer (of today's technology) requires an end user whereas the brain (we can only assume) has one built in more or less. There is an experiencer that has yet to be explained by any science I know of yet. Maybe you do, and I'm not going to claim that it resides independent of the brain, but I will claim that it is this very end user that creates it's own interior subjective reality.

See we all "fabricate" a worldview within our minds. We take inputs from objective reality and process them according to the picture of reality that we construct there over time. We all contain a subjective reality maintained by our hardware that is dependent upon but quite different than the hardware itself. The image of an apple "means" something and cannot be completely reduced to electrons or synapse patterns without losing the concept of "apple". It fits into this scheme that we create. This is how we "learn about our world." Some people use different means than others. Some people value The Secret. Some people value science. And so on. Materialism reduces it all to something less. To that which only can be detectable in the objective world. It loses the apple, for now it is just "brain patterns" or electrons. No, it is only in part those things, but also a part of a subjective reality that may or may not be shared by others.

Semantics. Definitions or not you can't get around the issue by specifying a new term "Subjective reality" You have made no distinction between the two anyways and here's why: * ...subjective experience is not a thing (i.e. physical) that can exist or not, it's simply your limited interpretation of reality."*

So how's that different than my "subjective reality" -- that isn't really a thing either.

And to hammer the confusion further you say:

* Your subjective experience, in the real world, is just patterns of electrical signals in your brain, that's what actually exist*

So my subjective experience IS an objective phenomenon and nothing more? If its something more than what we can measure "in the real world" then what is the part that is "more"? It doesn't exist right?

I can only logically conclude that pure Subjective Experience doesn't exist! As scientific materialism has always claimed.

This one always stumps people. Your subjective experience is unique to yourself. Your Self (your personal subjective experience -- which is denied by the scientific materialists) exists as such. And we can logically conclude that through the following mental exercise:

In the future is a cloning device. You step in and your body and brain are cloned down to the last electron. All of your memories, scars and epigenetics are cloned here as well. Now this is key here: In all Objective sense, your clone is you. There are no distinction between you and your clone and nobody can tell who is who. You both know yourself to be you and no one would be the wiser if you went and lived in a foreign country under a different name and your clone stays back and lives your life for you. Well nobody except YOU would know. You see, to you that clone is another person that you can talk to and shake hands with. Even though a brain scan will reveal the same thought patterns between you two, you will never literally see through the clone's eyes. If the clone dies, you go on just fine, but if you die... It's over even though your perfect clone goes on. So therein lies the one distinct difference between you and your clone and that is YOUR subjective experience makes you YOU.

So the problem is is that this subjective experience has no real evidence of its existence, so it doesn't exist right? Just like fairies don't exist, right? And THAT is the absolutistic mindset of the scientific materialist.

Scientific materialism is merely an objectivity bias within the subject-object problem (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subject%E2%80%93object_problem)

Because, you see, if we can only objectively measure things scientifically with instruments then there can be no subjectivity because we can't see it on any instrument! Therefore anybody who continues to insist that it does exist falls into the category of "woo woo," "magical thinking", or "superstitious". And those anti-scientific stances can only lead down the slippery slope into any of those pitfalls--or worse yet--fundamentalism (because there is just as much evidence for a mythical god as there is subjectivity... or unicorns for that matter... or spaghetti monsters...etc)! So its easy to lump all that is non-objective into the same category as unicorns since we cannot measure any of it.

/caricature

This is a fallacy of absolutistic thinking and it is rampant.

A book can alter your mind more than any drugs. So what's your point?

You might be surprised...

But there has to be some characteristic that certain species required many evolutionary "steps" to get to. For example, there were no humans OR poplars one billion years ago nor the possibility yet since their / our ancestors hadn't yet made the scene.

> Evolution is not about gaining complexity but about fitting to (current state of) the environment

I'm glad you cleared that up. Here I was thinking evolution and its "goal" is still a mystery to science.

Not to mention the "other side of the world" factor. If a bomb went off on your doorstep and killed your cat, for instance, that would be a much bigger deal to you than the Boston Marathon incident. Let alone terrorist strikes in Iraq...

>Some friends followed my example onto other social media sites. Not many. Perhaps they weren't really friends.

Wow, OP really feels his friends chose Google over the friendship?

I work from home, and much of this rings true. I would like to see a similar article from an employer's perspective, too.