Uh, yes, in fact. If a company does something or causes an accident that results in the death of its employees, they often go through arbitration and private settlement to settle with the families of those employees.
If you are referring to crime and murder, it's the police that carry out those "dispute resolutions," as the criminals would obviously not go to court for their crimes voluntarily. And in a world without government, private security, bounty hunters, and mercenaries can do the job of forcing criminals into court just as well.


WTF? Private arbitration is NAP.

Actually, it's all just statistical probability in a world of chaos. If we pick up a ball and drop it, there is a close to 100% chance that it will fall towards the gravitational center of the nearest body with the most mass. We know this not so much through interpreting observational evidence, as through figuring out the actual mechanics of the process. Likewise with evolution, the reason that theory allows us to predict what happens to species with such great accuracy is not so much because we have observed it in the past, and believe it will happen again just because it has happened before, but because through observation we have figured out the actual mechanics of the system, the parts that make it work, and why. We understand that if this shifts to that, and this becomes that, the end result will most likely be so-and-so. It's the difference between stating that a lever works in a specific way because you have seen it work in a specific way, and knowing that it works in a specific way because you know and understand the laws of physics that the lever, and everything else in this universe, has to follow. Due to this, I can't see how we can formulate an actual conclusion for the mechanism of evolution of consciousness. At least not beyond the "brain evolving as a computational machine."



As in reply to #1, experience does not mean knowing. Plenty of people experienced solar eclipses, and claimed to know what causes them, but it wasn't until we actually discovered and studied the mechanism of our solar system that we actually knew. And those who don't know how our solar system works, still won't be able to figure out solar eclipses just by experiencing them.


I think atheists simply reject the idea of a "mental" reality; at least in a sense of there being anything spiritual, or beyond our physical world.



Not sure what you are trying to say here, because it sounds like you are claiming that before language (actual language, involving words and such), nothing could exist. Yet we know things existed for millions of years, reality and all, before humans came along and invented language. There was a ton of other communications methods before then, and some of them unconscious even (meteor hit moon, mood change orbit, signal received). Maybe you can restate this a bit differently?


Chance and probability are not unknown, nor supernatural. It just means that either of two or more options can happen, and we can't predict which, but we do know what has happened after it has. E.g. you can drop metal filings all around a magnet, expecting then to fall into perfect spheres around the edges of magnetic lines, but many of the filings will fall a bit off, or in a weirdly turned way. We can't predict that, but we can easily explain that it was due to air resistance, some of them bumping into each other, and outside magnetic interference. Totally random chance probability, but nothing supernatural or unknown.



Do you believe the universe can exist without us being there to observe it? If yes, then I'm not sure how you can hold the view that reality is the output of our internally processed information. (If a tree falls in the woods, and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?)


That's actually the thing that has been confusing people for millenia, making them think that they are somehow apart from their bodied, just existing in their heads and using their ears and eyes to look out into the world. I don't know about other atheists, but as one myself, I claim that, yes, I am different from a tree, in a sense that the tree is an organism with it's own system, but I am not very different from my body, in a sense that my body and my consciousness are all part of the same organism, linked directly together through the nervous system. The tree and my body both exist in the same system, planet earth, but that doesn't make the computational part of my organism that gives me consciousness a part of the tree.

If we have been through all that, and you have already concluded that private arbitration is a failure (despite being the dominant form of dispute resolution, both in private and international business matters), then why are you asking the question again?

Dear god I would NEVER suggest such a thing! 

First, people have to pay for electricity, so they can't ask their power company to hold off on sending them a bill until bitcoin prices rises a bit. The way it works is, if it's profitable to mine, more people buy ASICs and start to mine. If it's unprofitable, those miners are far better off shutting down their ASICs and using the money they would've paid for electricity to buy bitcoins directly; why spend $100 to mine $90 worth of bitcoins in hopes their price will rise, when you can just buy $100 worth of bitcoin? In that sense, the price rises and falls on it's own, and the difficulty just follows it up and down.

Second, the reason I say miners don't affect price is because the amount of mined coins that are being sold every day is not a big percentage of the total amount of coins being traded. The percent has gone up recently, due to the decrease in trading, but something like 3% to 5% of coins being added to the market won't move prices too much. It will put a constant downward pressure on it (which will be constant and will not change due to difficulty changes, since number of coins mined doesn't change), but it's offset by the upward pressure of new adoption, and so the actual mining, or difficulty, doesn't really matter much.

And yet, we can measure the electricity, the magnetic field in the surrounding air around the metal, and can almost track individual electrons. Better yet, we understand it well enough to be able to calculate extremely precisely how that electron would move, and where exactly those magnetic fields will be generated and with what strengths, using detailed physics calculations derived from decades of testing and observation. I get the sense that you want to believe that consciousness is something unknowable, something greater than us, something that us mere mortals will never understand, while I believe that everything can be understood, measured, and eventually predicted with formulas and concepts after enough study.

Question: Once computer AI is able to compete with human intelligence, both on an intellectual and on an emotional level (i.e. it can solve complex problems, make complex decisions, AND feel good or bad about them), will you still think that consciousness is something more than a whole lot of computer code running on silicon (or carbon once we get that working)? Or would your definition of consciousness change from "this unknowable etheral thing of everything observing everything, where the whole universe is conscious" to something simpler and more mundane?

LOL, who's this Heffernan dude? I've never heard of him, he's not on any list, and he's a nobody. Plus, you think we, er, I mean they live in 6 bedroom houses? Hah, don't make me laugh, Those houses have 6 bathrooms, and way way way more bedrooms. This was just some poor upper-middle class schmuck. When 32 bedroom houses start burning, then I'll be worried.

I wonder if blablahblah has me on ignore...

You mean like, "I don't have guns, and this constraint won't affect me directly, but I'll vote to put gun constraints on everyone?"

Depends on the infraction. The authority wouldn't be elected, it would be purchased by the participants.

Not nearly as limited as you seem to believe.


Sure. In many different ways even, from complexity, to weight, to energy usage, to which parts are linked to which other parts.


The machine that computes is weighs about 1300 to 1400 grams. Asking how much the actual processing weighs is like asking how much does a bitcoin blockchain weighs. It's software/information, being processed by a biological machine.


Less than 80 Watts when dormant, and approximately 100 watts when doing normal everyday activities.


Theoretically, yes. We just don't have the technology yet, due to its complexity. To get a sense of what a brain is, imagine a huge cluster of tiny computers (neurons) all networked together in some specific way, where every packet sent from a source ends up passing through a bunch of other specific computers to its destination. The network cables get moved around as the network develops. So, let's say you want to think of a bear. Instead of just pulling up a data file on bears, a packet gets sent through the system, which passes through computers that store information on topics like: furry, brown, 4 legs, round ears, snout, teeth, claws, forest, dangerous, etc. As the packet travels through the system, it travels through specific network nodes and actives all the things that are related to "bear" that are deemed most important to the concept, allowing us to come to a general concept of a bear. That's how all information and all thought is stored and processed by our brains. In order for us to safely store that consciousness in a freezer, we would have to figure out how to freeze the wet network without the expanding water molecules (water expands when frozen) tearing the network up. We may figure out how to store brains safely without having to freeze them, or freeze them by some other method. As for transplanting, if we are able to scan the network structure and rebuild it from scratch, building a cluster with the same connections, then we can duplicate /transplant consciousness elsewhere. Likewise, if we are able to successfully disconnect and reconnect all the tiny nerve endings between the brain and the spinal column, then we can transplant brains. It's not a question of how, it's a question of do we have the technology.


LOL! Yeah, there is exactly the same amount of evidence as for the operating system running on your computer and the browser you're using to read this.

The same amount of bitcoin gets mined every day, regardless of how much hardware is mining, or whether it is new or old, so changes in mining technology should not affect the price at all. Note that the price went up in Spring due to Cyprus worries, but then was not affected when ASICs started coming out at the end of spring, and has remained relatively constant at $100 despite a huge number of  new miners coming online, pushing the difficulty from 4mil to 100+mil

In short, mining difficulty and costs DO NOT affect bitcoin prices. At least not in any significant way.

Here, read this https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Scalability

In short, you don't need the full copy of a blockchain to use bitcoin. Plenty of light clients just ping random nodes and request only the address balances that are relevant to them. Also, the blockchain can be pruned to only the addresses that have balances in them. If that was done today, the 12gig blockchain file would shrink to only something like 200 megs.

Satoshi envisioned that eventually only few copies of the entire blockchain will be stored for archive purposes, and large miners and pool operators (and wealthy hobbyists/supporters) will be the only ones keeping copies of the blockchain, with the general users just relying on the light clients that only request address balances, and sign/transmit transfers to the network.

Which is ridiculous, but true.

For if it isn't the accuser, then it would be:

- Some authority - but they're against authority.
- A jury of peers or some voting system - but they're against democracy.
[/quote]

Now you guys are conflating NAP with anarchy 

There are no objections to authority, if the people chose to give someone authority over them. For instance in arbitration. There are no objections to a jury of peers, since that's how society works, period. You can't escape others judging you for doing something wrong, and refusing to do business with you or shun you from their lives, whether you are for democracy or not. So yes, it could be some authority that both the accuser and the accused agree to use to settle their dispute, and yes, it can be a jury of peers, or just society in general. Neither require a government in order to exist. It's like you think everything in the world was invested and created by a government or something 

Wait, are you saying that colonizing other people's property, kicking them out of their homes, and killing them when they try to take their home back, is NAP? Really? Are you really suggesting that people who believe in NAP supported that?



I said "people directly involved, the general society, and any judges that may get involved in figuring out the details." Basically same as now. What would you consider satisfactory? Do you now consider our current system satisfactory?

4th dimension is just time. We are all perfectly capable of experiencing it. Someone who actually exists on that level will just be able to see everything that has ever happened and everything that will ever happen at the same time. But they won't see the 5th dimension, which is all the other time lines running parallel and intersecting with ours.

Why do you guys say we don't understand what consciousness is? Our understanding of how the brain works is pretty advanced...

I will be arriving at 8:30 on Thursday, and will likely not have had any sleep during the flight over. Though I'm probably still ok to party that evening. When I stay up late, I get all light-headed and slightly hallucinatory, probably what it's like to be very drunk

Hi guys. Sorry for being away for a while. The Amsterdam conference is coming up next week, so I've been a bit busy with that in the evenings.

Anyway, Regarding PanPeru, I wanted to know what they actually do, and the first thing their main page and their Mission says is
"We seek to improve the quality of life of children By focusing on education by creating in them an awareness of Christian values ​​and principles, with projection to the family and the community."

Looks like most of their work is in educating children from impoverished areas, so I guess it's ok, but it's a bit concerning how much focus they're putting on religion...

Don't feed the bears with honey. They'll tear you up as soon as you're done feeding them. I'm endorsing Joerg.

All you need for that is a lot of people with a lot of guns keeping other guns out of the area you want to keep gun free. Problem solved (except for all those guns at the border)