HN user
'No doubt' is a figure of speech. But in species where there aren't any pain signals at all, my case is strengthened. I've skimmed the page you link: doesn't it just assume that 'pain experience' implies suffering? But this is contradicted by the testimony of cancer patients on opiates or Hindu saints undergoing surgery without anaesthesia. They feel the pain but it doesn't bother them.
Oh I agree, I'm the same, but I do acknowledge that there's an unsolved philosophical/scientific problem here, with no good explanations in sight.
And thus I can't equate indifference to the death of insects with sadism.
Yeah. Another questionable assumption:
If you had the opportunity to feed harmless bugs into a coffee grinder, would you enjoy the experience? Even if the bugs had names, and you could hear their shells painfully crunching?
No doubt their nervous systems transmit pain signals but whether bugs experience suffering seems like an open question to me.
shame has become a central tool for trying to create positive social change
Yet it doesn't. It creates fear and reduces communication. The motive for shaming people, for trying to make people feel guilty, is to increase the power of the one who does the shaming. To cement their position in the in-group. Because deep inside they feel weak and powerless.
Whereas truly good people make you feel stronger and they inspire you by their example of virtue.
I don't expect professional philosophers will contribute much either. But it's plausible that a philosophical advance (a new way of thinking) within an existing field such as computer science will lead to the breakthrough. Deutsch has claimed elsewhere that all great advances in science are like this. For example, Darwin's Theory of Evolution represented a fundamentally new mode of explanation.
In fact anything computers ever do is not real intelligence
No, he doesn't say that. On the contrary he names the principle ('Universality of Computation'; see paragraph 4) which guarantees that computers are capable of true intelligence, since, if programmed correctly, they can simulate the behaviour of any physical object, including human brains.
there is some divine truth and wisdom that only humans possess.
He also explicitly repudiates supernatural explanations (see para immediately before the one mentioning John Searle).
One thing the article gets right I believe is that highly creative people are annoying, almost psychotic individuals. It can't be otherwise. If they cared what other people thought as much as the rest of us do they'd self-censor their ideas.
I have to agree. Sometimes I think I'm not disciplined enough. But every now and then I start a book which is so interesting and vital that I'm compelled to go all the way through at top speed, with later re-reads. I'm thrilled and altered as a result. That's what reading is like for me now. Unfinished books no less than unordered books are part of the search and nothing to be ashamed of.
Yes. There's something about walking isn't there? Returning attention back to the body and the senses amounts to relaxing after hard concentration. Perhaps petting the dog enhances that, the body being where emotions are felt. Scientists seem to suspect that walking or just standing occasionally is important for health.
To complete the argument about learning: you play the tough section, correcting a few errors. Then you go away for a bit, and during that period the brain updates its hardware to include those corrections. The mistake is to hammer/saw away repeatedly and interfere with what you have already achieved, wasting time and effort. I think the OP kinda acknowledged this by recommending switching at whim between different tasks within a practice session.
Sleep is a given. The brain is learning continuously, not just during sleep. Go back to a section of a piece after 15 minutes doing something else and notice it has become easier.
When she does this with students, she asks them afterwards, “Was anything fuzzy?” It’s usually the part that they were messing up that’s fuzzy.
This is genius. Reminds me of the rule that if something feels fuzzy at the instrument it's always a conceptual error about the piece rather than poor coordination or poor finger strength.
Why is it better to practice every day for an hour, instead of seven hours on one day of the week?
For the same reason that it's better to practice for 10 minutes several times per day instead of one hour straight.
Yes. We could define it as any movement which condemns people on the basis of their professed ideas.
Plus you'll likely still have access to it years later. And it will remain private.
Perhaps would-be surgeons ought to have their manual coordination assessed before they commence years of expensive training. The irony is that for my father's generation, in England, prowess on the rugby field was considered important in getting into medical school. (And that might actually have been a good thing. I suspect top athletes, musicians and surgeons all possess the same talent which would cease to be a 'talent' if only we could explain it.)
If animals eat all the food that is available to them and reproduce as fast is they are physically capable, then the environment will be denuded, the next generation will starve, and the species will face extinction. All animal species are evolved to avoid this
Isn't this a Tragedy of the Commons? Won't genes that cause individuals to eat more and reproduce more quickly than fellow members of their species confer a relative advantage causing those genes to spread through the gene pool?
Why can't recovering from WW2 have been the cause? Re-building institutions and cities from scratch causes people to think more creatively.
I would say that by and large it's actually the social people who get lonely. They need the acceptance of others in order to feel good about themselves. Newton had his God and his work. Sure, there's 'more to life' but bear in mind that by any reasonable measure his work was full of life and, logically, every choice he made precluded other choices. We're all the beneficiaries of those choices and I expect they were intensely meaningful to him.
If you have a creative personality, a source of income, and an internal source of validation then, yes, social time is time wasted.
Some people claim that there is indeed such a pill:
http://www.reddit.com/r/Ibogaine/comments/2kb3s9/i_have_done...
We ought to design for a range of masses.
I was addressing the statement 'Currently, all our human rated rocket engines use chemical reactions', and I agreed with it. But it's not good enough if you consider the lengthy design cycle of propulsion systems. We ought to be creating additional designs which assume that fusion sources of various sizes and masses will be available.
To address my claim you would need an explanation of why that trend will continue, including for the several new projects. Btw, Apollo used a novel alloy.
The value of his 'boyish wonder face' is that he's emotionally open, relatively speaking, and therefore we perceive that he's not consciously deceiving us in ways that he thinks important. It shouldn't matter, of course, since explanations either stand or they don't. But it seems that so much public discourse is infected with paranoia and conspiracy theory, including around space history.
Currently, all our human rated rocket engines use chemical reactions (combustion of a fuel and oxidizer) to produce the energy.
Yes, however, for completeness: an explanation of why we must limit designs to chemical rockets ought to include an explanation of why the dozen or so fusion projects underway around the world will all fail, i.e. let's inject some rational optimism. Note that the Apollo programme began before its tech was ready.
As a result of these fears, AIs will be sandboxed:
Subsequently having their interactions monitored and restricted for a period of probation:
Look familiar?
Where did you get your epistemology?
Karl Popper.
If we can't measure things we don't understand, how the heck would we come to understand them?
We get new ideas, such as the concept of distance, by guessing them in response to problems.
We can't measure things we don't understand. Note that a photodetector detects light, not suns.
No, it's not obvious. If it were then we'd have programmed an AGI by now.
It is possible to be intelligent and unwilling to follow instructions
True. But whether an instruction has been followed is easy to measure and relates directly to language, unlike the other criteria in Table 1.
Also, note that chimps are capable of tearing limbs from humans. So if people could be bred from them I would like them to be basically friendly and cooperative.
Fascinating stuff but the concept of intelligence is rather nebulous. Their operational definition is cobbled together from things that people have intuitively considered important like eye tracking and tool use. But these aren't connected to any deeper explanatory theories. Personally I'd be inclined to selectively breed chimps on the basis of how well they follow instructions (since instructions are perforce couched in abstract symbols and language is the quintessentially human trait).