Delta1212

He wasn't under oath when he tweeted that, so the only semi-plausible legal consequence he could really face for just making it up is probably Obama suing him for libel or defamation, and that's unlikely to happen in any case.

 

So, in other words, no. Nothing is going to come of this.

I'm clueless ?

Does not marriage STILL provide the majority of procreation by our species ?

So if a government wants to encourage that, it would naturally favor marriage between people who can procreate.

 

Got a clue yet ?

Does this mean couples known to be infertile should not be provided the benefits of a marriage? Should couples who choose not to have children be prosecuted for tax fraud?

Folks, lets try to stay on topic. Let's discuss whether pro-gay marriage folks feel it's ok to have a situation where the civil partners are afforded all the same legal rights as married people, or is it important to give them the term "marriage," as well.

 

 

 

That IS a secular difference. Its biology, not religion.

My argument doesn't apply to mixed race or anything else. Marriage has traditionally been defined as a union btw a man and a woman, race doesn't enter into it, nor any of the other things you mention.

 

 

 

Who says its second-rate, you do.

Who cares what the thing is called? (I'm arguing withn the premise of "what if they had all the same legal rights")

If no one cared what the thing was called, there'd be no reason to argue that it shouldn't all be called by the same name. After all, who cares what it's called?

 

 

OK the Slinky thing is cool. My question on that would be, does the fact that its coiled and not stretched taut and essentially out to its limits have any impact on that? Obviously if you did the same thing with a cable and a 100 lb weight, the weight at the bottom will appear to move at the same time as the cable is released, and not wait for the top end of the cable to reach it before moving downward . Do the coils cause the delay entirely, or merely accentuate the delays for human eyes to notice?

 

Lets replace the space station in my scenario with a powered spaceship pulling against a tether, so that we are not dealing just with inertia. What keeps the spaceship from instantly moving even a quarter inch to trigger the laser when the tether is released at Earth level? We are not talking about a transference of energy up the cable, as we would be if we were moving the cable to create a wave action along the cable. We are simply removing an action at one end . Its hard to conceive that the ship at the other end pushing to move away would remain motionless even though there is no longer any restraint upon its movement, especially that we are now talking about it remaining motionless for around a minute with a powerful engine trying to move it with (now) no actual restraint, instead of 3 seconds.

 

Or to go back to the gravity beam, so that we are not dealing with pressure waves . If this beam is simply ended at Earth level, what keeps this ship motionless for 3 seconds with the actual restraining force removed?

Re: the gravity beam

 

Imagine you have a faucet running in your sink. When you turn it off, the water doesn't just vanish. Whatever was already in the column of water between the faucet and the basin of the sink continues to fall, so there is a delay between when the water is shut off and when water stops hitting the basin as that "shut off information" propagates downward. The same is true for light rays or, if you could create a directional source of gravity in the form of a beam, gravity.

 

Changes in gravity propagate out from their source at the speed of light. This is quite well modeled by General Relativity and we just last year got additional confirmation that gravity does indeed behave as it is modeled in this way by the first detection of predicted gravity waves.

 

It does intuitively very much seem like there should be some way to arrange things so that the effect of some action happens instantly over great distances. I had many of the same or similar thoughts when I was first learning about these concepts and trying to come up with ways around them myself. The reason for that intuition we have is that for a lot of similar actions we encounter in our daily lives, it seems like the effect instantaneously follows from the cause. But it seems that way because the effect propagates out from the cause very, very quickly and we are dealing with extremely short distances, so for all practical purposes of a typical person these effects might as well be propagating instantaneously.

 

When you are multiplying the very tiny difference between "might as well be instantaneous" and "actually instantaneous" over the unimaginably vast distances found in space, however, it starts being very noticeable indeed.

You don't even need to wait for the future or operate at the speed of light to see how this would work:

 

 

 

If you hang a slinky by one end and release, the bottom of the slinky won't begin to fall until the release of tension has been transmitted from the top to the bottom in the form of a pressure wave.

That's the worst limerick I've ever tried to read.

There once was a man from Nantucket

And cotton: he'd daily to pluck it

While knitting his sweater

He said, "Nature is better!"

Yet refused to squat over a bucket

 

I understood. Although a possibility, what I'm suggesting is that I believe it's very unlikely now without that understanding. Without a proper understanding, how would developers know their machines are doing anything more than mimicking consciousness?

How do we know other people are doing anything more than mimicking consciousness?

 

Perhaps, but what I've seen thus far is mimicry without that true spark that says to me, "I am awake and aware!"

Of course not. If you had, we'd already have such an AI. I said that I think we're likely to see that kind of AI before we have a true understanding of how consciousness works, not that it had already been created.

I agree with Strange; contemporary robots are not capable of consciousness but future robots could be. I think the problem contemporary programmers have in developing truly conscious robots is their inadequate understanding of how the human brain produces consciousness. Human consciousness involves a confluence of separate brain areas engage in distinct processes that together constitute cognition and cognitive output. I believe that when programmers learn how to duplicate the intricacies of human brain function accurately, they will succeed. As a start, programmers will need a precise understanding of what mind truly is. Consciousness is a product of our brain function's matrix and that matrix is what we refer to as mind. What constitutes a mind in living organisms is both simple and complex but not beyond our ability to program with the proper understanding.

To be honest, I think we'll have the first AI capable of indistinguishably replicating consciousness before we really understand how consciousness works on the kind of deep level that you are talking about.

 

Presupposing, of course, that both achievements are physically possible.

Yeah, that's not a razor's edge. That's a simple fact.

 

Well yeah, as opposed to what?

 

Dreaming may be important to any number of animals, and may even be an inherent survival trait; but how does a robot dream and how is it "an inherited survival trait" for robots?

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-11-17/google-deepmind-gives-computer-dreams-to-improve-learning

 

Not an inherited trait, but building in a dream-state analog apparently increases the speed at which neural network AIs learn by a significant amount.

 

Since the binding problem of consciousness has not yet been elucidated, I think we're far from seeing mindful machines. Machine intelligence is a software program, and cannot pass the Turing test until we know how/why humans are self-aware.

That is not strictly true. You don't actually need to understand why something works in order to build it if you can replicate the conditions and get a little lucky.

 

I would be shocked if we didn't build machines that could pass the Turing Test well before we have a real answer to what consciousness is. The former is in sight of where we are now. I don't think the latter is really.

AI is intrinsically limited by the intelligence of its programmers, so I guess its not possible for machines to "modelize" the unknown using

algorithms based on mathematics and physicalism. However, AI can certainly extrapolate models (I prefer the term "theories") of the universe but

could probably not produces hard scientific evidences about its validity.

It's not strictly true that AI is limited by the intelligence of its creators. The best modern AI is designed to take inputs and be shown the desired outputs and then figure out how to get from the one to the other on its own. The people designing it don't necessarily, and in fact don't usually, understand how to get there themselves. That's actually the advantage of using artificial neural networks.

 

Re: the topic at hand,

 

Apparently, Google's new translation AI spontaneously developed a "mental model" of semantics. Rather than simply encoding that cat <> gato, it recognizes that cat and gato have a shared meaning that is also shared by Katze. So as soon as it learns that chat <> Katze, it also knows that chat <> cat and chat <> gato.

 

It was not programmed to do this, but rather it was a happy accident as a consequence of training the same AI to translate between a variety of different languages. Having a deeper semantic pseudo-language allowed it to more quickly learn to translate between languages it had already "learned" without having between taught to translate between those two languages specifically.

A "mental illness" is not based on scientific evidences, but on the testimonial of the patient to the psychiatrist. Try to find a psychiatrist who will do brain scans to figure out the cause of the mental disorder.

You are confusing evidence with specific kinds of evidence.

 

Symptoms proffered by the patient or that are readily apparent to the observer without the aid of equipment is still evidence.

Who would sign them? They're not laws until the President agrees...

(though, if he vetoed, they'd have the option to override)

The point is that they could if they really wanted to, but yes, that is not going to happen without an overwhelmingly opposed Congress dedicated to restricting executive power, which is pretty much the opposite of what we now have.

So he has no real need for the rest of his Republican kin to support it, or am I wrong? I must admit I'm not looking very closely. Can they bring him to task?

There is, theoretically, a limited degree of scope to what a president can do with executive orders that relates to his personal domain of authority.

 

The Courts can strike down executive orders that wander outside of this scope of authority, and if Confress really doesn't like a particular order, they can, for the most part, pass a law or laws that override it.

 

Generally speaking, you can think of most executive orders as being like memos that provide operational guidelines for the executive branch of the government. The number of them matters much less than the content, since such changes to operational policy can be either incredibly mundane or have much wider repercussions for the country at large depending on what exactly they are.

Not at all. You are not responding to what I wrote. You're responding to a cut down version. If you look at MY post, it's made perfectly clear that I'm saying that we have no clocks that are not affected by the time dilation of SR.

 

In the case of a sound clock, you have access to an external clock not affected by the motion through the medium.

In the case of measuring the speed of light, there is no clock unaffected by time dilation.

 

So here's a question for you :

IF there was such a thing as a clock, that was not affected by time dilation, would all observers using it measure the same figure for the speed of light?

Clearly not because it would mean that relativity was wrong.

It is not because it is purely chemical that it is an illusion. We just aren't "more conscious" than a complex computer.

 

Determinism also doesn't contradict free will. We are a bunch of chemical reactions, so if those chemical reactions make a decision, it is our decision.

I support the sentiment of the first statement in the abstract but we're not there yet technologically so it's still a hypothetical computer and we don't have direct evidence this is true.

 

Philosophically, I agree entirely with the second statement.

Don't most motors revolve?

 

 

Tricky. Wold is probably the ideal word. If it weren't so obscure!

 

I would partly say "rolling [green] countryside"

 

Anyone got any better suggestions?

Yeah, I'm with you on this. I'd describe it as rolling hills or countryside or something along those lines. That is, apparently, the definition of "wold" but as I have never heard that word used before, it doesn't communicate that meaning to me.

 

Dale, maybe.

A dale would be more of a small valley in that sort of terrain, though, wouldn't it?

 

Done it.

 

For human/pantai two of your choices are "see" and "wold".

 

I think the first should be "sea".

 

And the second is a really obscure word. I doubt most English speakers know what it means. (I guessed and got it half right!)

You can see how obscure it was because I re-read your post twice and went back and re-read all of the questions and then re-read your post again before noticing that the word in question wasn't "World."

Thanks Outrider,

 

The jury is definitely out on this very old question, I'm just sharing the things that have shaped my intuition.

 

I think your 2 additional concepts are equally vexing- something from nothing, or why did the universe start, might be truly unanswerable.

 

As for what lies on the other side of the universe, there are several ways of looking at this:

 

Firstly, there can be a boundary condition from any observer's perspective, which is easy to achieve in an expanding universe. No observer can get any closer to the receding edge by real travel, so there is no way to interact with such an edge. Like the event horizon of a black hole from the inside, a causal boundary.

 

The more popular solution which we've been discussing here is boundlessness, where travel in any direction will eventually return the observer to the place they started, like traveling on the surface of the Earth.

 

And my least favorite option which just kicks the can down the road, the boundary of our universe is other multiverses or a parent universe.

 

 

 

That's not really fair Strange. I presented paradoxes as asked, as well as an important example of infinity disappearing from science history. Of course I'm not going to prove here that the universe is finite, I'm just telling you what informs my intuition. It is most definitely possible that the universe is unlimited, I'm just leaning in the other direction.

 

 

 

 

I read about this self-consistency principle a bit- it's interesting, although I'm not sure I understand the mechanism through which it is proposed to operate. I would say that our world is pretty fantastically chaotic, and that the idea of a whole live human being going back in time and not generating any paradox-inducing situation at all is a challenge. The grandfather paradox usually talks about killing your grandfather, but heck, all you'd have to do is add a one second delay to the day he and grandma conceived your parent, and you'd probably still prevent your existence because a different sperm would make it over the finish line. And culture is just as stochastic. The past is so elaborately determined that there would not be a lot of room to move around if something was preventing any paradoxical situation from occurring.

My own thoughts on the matter are as follows: Whatever you will do in the past is part of what already happened. If you travel back in time, you cannot change what happened because whatever happened already included you doing whatever it is you are going to do.

 

This feels paradoxical because we are used to thinking of the past as something known and unchanging and the future as something unknown with endless open possibilities, and time travel mixes up the two by making your future the past. The general conclusion then is that it opens the past up to endless possibilities, because we would rather assume that the past is changeable than that our future is locked into a single possible outcome, but you can just as easily draw the opposite conclusion to resolve this conflict at which point many time travel paradoxes, including the grandfather paradox, disappear.

 

The remaining paradoxes, like the Bootstrap paradox, that are still possible lend themselves to stable time loops and so aren't actually problems for single timeline time travel.

Your point is about to get a lot stronger with the advent of solar energy. In effect solar panels constitute a "personal" power plant. They produce DC current which, unfortunately, needs to be transformed (at significant energy loss) into AC because of the fact that the appliances can only work off AC.

Currently (no pun intended), sure. If a significant number of people become users of DC current, expect a market for DC appliances to start opening up to take more efficient advantage.

The problem with the Auquatic Ape Theory is not the idea that humans have some adaptations that allow us to better deal with and live in and around water than many other apes. To say as much is not especially controversial.

 

The problem is that Aquatic Ape Theory supposes that adaptations to the water are the primary driver of a wide range of features in human evolution for which there are, frankly, better explanations.

 

It is a dispute over the number of adaptations and their relative importance in the formation of humanity as it now exists, rather than about whether humans have any adaptations that help us live in and around water at all.