Bender

21 hours ago, John Cuthber said:

The uranium and plutonium used in nukes are alpha emitters. you could use a cardboard box as shielding if you only wanted to fool a Geiger.
It would do something towards shielding the spontaneous neutrons too. A tank of water would be better.

It doesn't matter for the argument, but I feel I have to point out that this statement is flawed because U and Pu decay to bèta emitters.

18 hours ago, Moontanman said:

I live in one of those port cities, my wife worked for a shipping company, it's a major concern and so far no way to really get a handle on the problem has been worked out... 

I can see how this can worry you, and you have my sympathy.

However, is plausible denial even a concept in NK? I doubt they use it in court. Is a leader who is himself never bothered about plausible denial going to risk everything on another leader to use the concept (especially if that leader is Trump)?

9 hours ago, Gees said:

Agreed. And what is food? Water and other life. Life feeds on life.

Gee

I know the competition is tough, but this may be your poorest argument so far.

I can make my toaster run on eg solar power. If I make it run on organic oil, does it become conscious?

14 hours ago, Gees said:

Just as Biology studies life forms, Science is the Discipline that studies all matter, forces, and causal reality. But Science does not study spirituality. Religion is the Discipline that studies spirituality. These are facts.

So Biology is not science?

Adding "these are facts", is a clear warning for nonsense. I read a piece by Harun Yahya that was full of such statements.

14 hours ago, Gees said:

The plug that was put into the back of a person's head could be called consciousness. Or maybe it was the pill -- the red one or the blue one.

Your definitions of consciousness are getting weirder and weirder. Now our consciousness is an inanimate object that's not even part of our body?

13 hours ago, Gees said:

Why don't you go to the Philosophy forum, type in the title, Monism v Dualism, and write a thread that questions WTF consciousness actually is?

I thought it would have been clear by now that I'm monist/materialist/reductionist however you want to call it.

13 hours ago, Gees said:

Should we notify Neurology, Psychiatry, and Psychology that the unconscious is a myth?

No need to put words in my mouth. I refuse to accept that someone as brilliant as you cannot deduce what I actually meant from the context.

20 minutes ago, Gees said:

All of the above need an electrical source in order to function. What empowers life? Life does not go around with battery packs, so what empowers it? As far as we know, the empowerment is consciousness. Technically, if you could make AI conscious, it would no longer need a power source.

Food

Yes.

Besides, they'd target the US first anyway ;-)

5 minutes ago, John Cuthber said:

The uranium and plutonium used in nukes are alpha emitters. you could use a cardboard box as shielding if you only wanted to fool a Geiger.
It would do something towards shielding the spontaneous neutrons too. A tank of water would be better.

But why bother.
Stick it in a shipping container in N Korea.

Maybe change ships somewhere unsophisticated.

Send it to a large pot city in the USA + blow it.

It doesn't eve need to be labelled  for delivery in the US- it could go off in transit.

There's no way they would find enough of the harbour (never mind the ship) to work out exactly what happened.

 

It never goes near a radiation detector until it's unloaded- and you don't need to unload it to "deliver" it.

There's no sensible way to prove it was the Koreans (even if the terrorist  decide to say it was).

How would you go about proving that it wasn't a "false flag" attack set up by the US itself? (perhaps as a pretext for war with N Korea)

Fair enough, but that was only a minor afterthought and leaves my main objections to the idea untouched.

1 hour ago, Scott of the Antares said:

Maybe it can and maybe it cannot, I do not know! If you are postulating that consciousness can reside within what we class as inanimate objects, then that sounds a bit like the Japanese system of Shinto to me (not that I have anything against that untestable idea).

It has nothing to do with Shinto. I'm referring to sufficiently advanced computers. Since there is no reason to assume consciousness is nothing but an emergent property of biochemical interactions, I also see no reason to assume electronic interactions cannot have the same emergent property.

1 hour ago, Scott of the Antares said:

Yes.

As I already stated in this thread, I think that bacteria, which I consider to be alive, are no more conscious than my toaster. While there are many vague definitions of consciousness, I also think it is silly to say bacteria have it, since it would degrade the concept to meaninglessness.

5 hours ago, Airbrush said:

North Korea has an unknown number of nuclear bombs.  They are desperate for money.  It is likely that North Korea would sell a nuke, that is ready to explode, to a terrorist organization for enough money.  The terrorists deliver the bomb to the middle of New York City in the back of a truck.  When it explodes it vaporizes all evidence of its' origin.  How would we ever know that North Korea provided the bomb?  Of course the terrorists could snitch on Kim, but why would they?

But what is enough money for North Korea, given the risk of total annihilation if word gets out? North Korea has a GDP of $30 billion and $20 billion in foreign debts. To take such a risk, the gain should certainly be significant, and they would have to be very stupid to go bellow $1 billion (above production costs, but it is probably safe to ignore those, as they don't set the price). You still need to get it out unnoticed and untraceable. I don't know how thick of a lead shell you have to put around it to avoid Geiger tellers going off.

(About the question "why would they": would you thrust them, not necessarily their intentions, but also their professionalism?)

I think it is a safe bet that ISIL is the most financially potent terrorist organisation. In 2014, they were estimated to have 2 billion in assets. So perhaps if the most potent terrorist organisation ever burnt 50% of its assets, they might have gotten somewhat close to convincing the most likely seller. On top of that, I highly doubt ISIL was ever organised enough to actually get all those assets in a single location for a single transaction.

Now however, ISIL undoubtedly lost much of its financial advantage together with its territory, which again leaves us with fictional organisations, such as Hydra. International relations with North Korea also seem to have improved greatly since then.

So again: I'm not worried.

1 hour ago, Scott of the Antares said:

Hello iNow, My thoughts (as worthless as they are) are that life/consciousness is a property of intricate systems that are natural processes within and by the universe.

A device is a fabrication made by Man (or other life) that completes a function.

A man-made toaster, regardless of how many functions it has, even if it had AI and self replicating nanites to create copies of itself, is still a device of men and not life/consciousness as generated by the propensity of this universe, in my humble opinion. And equating the two is kind of diverting the topic & not what Gees was referring to (although I can be wrong!).

I would like to apologise as the post I down voted didn’t actually deserve it as it was 100% true; toasters do react to their environment in all the ways you suggest, as every inanimate object does; passively. It is just that you seem to be overseeing that Life/consciousness reacts and also acts; the compliment to passivity which is activity. Yes, we can ascribe the quality of toasting bread as an activity but this is a design of men, and it would not happen without actual life (us) making it so, whereas the universe just creates it naturally. That is the quality that I think Gees is referring to.

I am new here and second apology is coming up; sorry if I have overstepped the mark; I was down voting the direction of the content, not the person. I will check the protocol for using the vote system in future!

Downvotes are for ad hominem attacks, derogatory remarks, poor sportsmanship, particularly bad science and argumentation, arrogance...

It's generally not done to give bad rep simply for disagreeing with someone. Not even if they made a mistake  (except if they are persistent and or arrogant about their mistakes).

About your thoughts: why do you equate consciousness to life? Why can a nonliving object not be conscious? Do you also think all life is conscious?

I have never encounteted that behaviour in pressure regulators. I can see how there could be a (small) surge when the pressure is switched on, but a surge suddenly happening is odd.

Are these electronic regulators?

Are there large fluctuations in the flow? 

5 hours ago, Gees said:

When Biology confirms that an AI toaster is a life form, then I will consider it. I did not come to a Science forum to speculate. I need some kind of evidence or fact.

We are discussing consciousness, not life. Equating consciousness to life is redundant, because we already have a word for that: "life".

5 hours ago, Gees said:

Some of the greatest minds in human history from well before the time of Plato to after the time of Einstein have grappled with the idea of consciousness. But you and Koti find that it is not very interesting or special.

You could say the same about God. In absence of evidence, I see no reason to assume consciousness is in any way special; nor unachievable by nonliving computers.

Besides, the ancient Greek philosophers had all kind of funny ideas, and Einstein rejected  the big bang and quantum uncertainty because of his philosophical ideas. Are you also going to refer to Freud in a discussion about the Higgs boson?

5 hours ago, Gees said:

"God" ideas come from the unconscious aspect of mind. This is a really simple straight forward idea.

The God idea: yes (although I'm not convinced of the unconscious part).

A toaster also comes from the human mind. That doesn't mean a toaster is consciousness. (I'm really starting to like toasters, the towel of philosophical discussions)

6 hours ago, Gees said:

Since you do not really study consciousness, maybe I can present this in a way you can understand. Think of the chemicals, hormones, as magnets and think of consciousness, emotion, as the force that is between the magnet and a piece of iron.

I can do analogies too. Think of the temperature sensor and timer as magnets and the electrical current in the wiring as the force.

Or another analogy : think of consciousness as the operating system organising low-level processes and emotions as user profile settings 

1 hour ago, Velocity_Boy said:

Who said anything about Hydra? Don't be naive. A state or terrorist faction sponsored actor will one day pull off the event we're speaking of. Mark it. The fact it hadn't occurred yet is both lucky and fortunate for us. And as I told Junky...a nuke device is not required. Also don't put words in my mouth or straw man me, bro. I never hypothesised anything vthat is the sole province of a fictional super villain clan. Grow up.

I did. Real terrorist organisations are usually poorly organised and uncoordinated, and have never even remotely shown the capability of stealing nuclear weapons.

Getting some people trained as pilot isn't particularly difficult, and even capturing a civilian plane with no guards at all on board is quite a bit easier than invading a military facility.

And of course a nuke is required : That's the topic of this thread.

Also: please drop the attitude and agressive language.

1 hour ago, Velocity_Boy said:

Infrastructure? What are you talking about?

Enriching uranium to 80+% is not easy. I can't access your link.

36 minutes ago, John Cuthber said:

Which bits of this would be beyond the ability of a well funded terrorist or criminal gang?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun-type_fission_weapon

 

I can see how it's hard to get hold of the uranium (that's why enriched uranium is usually carefully guarded), but the rest seems simple.

For a bomb, you need about 50 kg of Uranium 235 with a purity above 80%.

Nuclear power plants need uranium with about 3-5% u235, which is completely useless for a bomb.

So to get the uranium required, you need to make it yourself or Rob a military facility.

15 minutes ago, Janus said:

Mercury is presently  ~22-23 degrees from the Sun.  Using the girl as reference, I 'd say that the angular distance between the Sun and object is much larger in this photo.   The Moon would be about twice this angular distance at ~45 degrees from the Sun.

Could be. I don't have much experience estimating angles in the sky. 

31 minutes ago, Velocity_Boy said:

Why?

Because Hydra only exists in movies and comic books.

3 minutes ago, StringJunky said:

which is going to cost you over $50m

Excluding the billions you need for the required infrastructure. 

Sky Map is a nice app to identify stars or planets.

Mercury would be more or less at that position, but not that bright.

Did you also see it at the moment you took the pictures? If it was the moon, that should have been quite obvious with the naked eye.

Perhaps it was a satellite (was it moving), or a weather balloon?

On 10/5/2018 at 10:54 PM, Airbrush said:

A terrorist attack.  It seems like suicide for any nuclear power (especially N.Korea)  to launch ICBMs at any country.  The whole world will know WHO started the fight.  Then all arsenals of the world will be turned against the attacker 100 times as much.

The most likely event in my opinion would be a terrorist organization gets one or more nuclear bombs.  They issue a threat against any nation then back up the threat by destroying a large city.  Then they issue a second threat saying "How did you like that?  Now here is where you send the money,"(... or whatever their demand...) "...or we destroy another city."  It will be hard to track down the offender.

Sounds more like a criminal organisation than a terrorist organisation.

Also, since Hydra doesn't actually exist, I wouldn't worry too much. It's not like atomic bombs can be bought on ali-express, or that terrorist are well known for their exquisite organisational skills.

You are welcome. Good luck.

Care to share what the experiment is?

Is the power supply 24V or lower?

If not: don't use it until you know what you are doing.

If yes: is it a variable or constant power supply? Hopefully it is variable, and in that case you should always start at 0 and gradually increase voltage or current when you turn it on and gradually decrease it to zero when turning it off. Abruptly cutting the current on a coil can cause extremely large voltages, sparks and stuff breaking.

Lastly: don't put the magnet near creditcards or other magnetic cards or near electronic devices.

4 hours ago, Moontanman said:

We react to things according to chemical reactions. At it's most basic all life is just chemicals, emergent properties like consciousness cannot be separated from the basic chemical reactions of life... 

I completely agree, which is why I think equating chemical reactions to consciousness  (and thus to God, as Gees suggested; and to get back on topic), is pretty silly.

I also agree with Koti's earlier remark that there is nothing particularly special or interesting about consciousness.

8 hours ago, Moontanman said:

 I cannot agree, a bacterium at the very least can react to its environment, can a toaster react its environment without lots of tweeking? I know my toaster does not do this... 

Don't overestimate the reaction of bacteria. The interaction is usually limited to absorbing chemicals which accidentally hit their membrane or doing nothing until eg a higher temperature activates some chemical reactions.

On top of the reactions described by iNow, there are also some "functional" reactions: a led goes on when it is pluggen in; the heating starts when the environment presses the on button; the better toasters will even detect in which slots there is bread or (indirectly) adjust to ambient temperature and humidity.

4 hours ago, Moontanman said:

Until you can make a toaster do that along with reproduce (I know moving the goal posts) but reproduction with variation is a big part of the idea that toaster is as alive as a bacteria... 

Yeah, I never said toasters are alive. I never even mentioned they are conscious, only that they are as conscious as bacteria.

18 hours ago, Moontanman said:

 

Bacteria seek out nutrient gradients, will move away from bad conditions ect. 

https://sites.cns.utexas.edu/harsheylab/bacterial-motility

Correction: some bacteria can move. Are those bacteria which cannot move less alive/conscious/aware/whatever than those who can?

Besides, I could build you a toaster that moves towards bread with similar intelligence as bacteria. Seriously, I'm an engineer, if you give me 50.000$ I will make you one for real. I can probably do it cheaper, but then I need you to give me an advance payment for a more detailed quotation.

17 hours ago, Gees said:

I would expect nothing else from a Science person. The medical definition of 'consciousness' is different from the philosophical definition.

There is a "the" philosophical definition? I would say there are dozens of, sometimes contradicting, definitions with varying degrees of vagueness.

I doubt there is even a clear universally agreed on medical definition.

17 hours ago, Gees said:

"Just how complex does AI have to get before it can equal the consciousness of a blade of grass?"

About as complex as a toaster (and I'm not even talking about a fancy toaster with a clock and wifi, which would be a lot more "conscious" than a blade of grass).

17 hours ago, Gees said:

All life has a specific characteristic that causes it to work at it's own continuance -- we call this consciousness. It is unique in that it does not only ignore entropy, it seems to reverse it.

Perhaps you call that conscious  (didn't you previously define consciousness as awareness, to later define it as the ability to replicate cells?).

But hey,  now fire is conscious, crystals are conscious, stars are conscious, ecosystems are conscious...

Life definitely does not ignore entropy but increases overall entropy.

15 hours ago, CharonY said:

Note that you argued the opposite, that death occurs because of cessation of cell division. If cell division stops, the organism will die, however I cannot think of many scenarios where that could theoretically occur. There is basically cell division happening not only until the point of death, but also for a little bit after that (after which bacteria take over and basically have  large snack).

Wouldn't single cell organisms also be considered alive while not currently in the process of division?

14 hours ago, Moontanman said:

Bender, show me a toaster that seeks out a source of bread and you might have a point.

Why is that that relevant? Many bacteria do not seek out anything.

19 hours ago, Dylan T. said:

I don't understand what you said

In general

Let's start with the function of the lens in our eye. You can only focus (see sharp) on one distance at a time. If you focus on an object close to you, you see everything at a distance blurry (you will also see objects blurry which are even closer ). When focussing at the distance, you relax the lens of your eye, changing its shape. You will see objects at a that distance sharp and closer objects blurry.