Because it does not, has not, and won't be relevant to all of humanity or the Universe.

Yeah. I've added Gödel's Theorem.

I'm totally Ok with that.

Consider the following:

- The Singularity
- Immortality
- Life in the Universe
- The Hard Problem
- The Easy Problem
- Quantum entanglement
- The Two Slit Experiment
- Bell's Theorem
- Gödel's Theorem
- Relativity
- Dark Energy
- The human diaspora (prehistoric)
- The human diaspora (in the future)
- The overkill hypothesis
- Climate change
- The human socio-economic-political complex
- Steady state economics

I may edit and add to this list. Discuss. Links to books, papers and websites should be forthcoming.

Here are some names:

- Aubrey de Grey
- Vernor Vinge
- David Chalmers
- Daniel Dennett
- Roger Penrose
- Stephen Hawking
- Paul Ehrlich
- Herman Daly
- Werner Heisenberg
- John S. Bell
- Kurt Gödel
- Albert Einstein
- Niels Bohr

It's kind of ironic though. Patents encourage R & D. Would Bayer have invested in the R & D if they knew their patents were going to be ignored? Is the generic company going to pay Bayer royalties? Does the price the generic company is going to sell the product at account for the R & D costs?

Do you want to see well made movies where a great deal of effort goes into making them? Then make sure the producers are compensated for their efforts by not allowing copying.

I'm a little surprised at the irony here from both sides. Rassah wants to ignore movie copyrights, but likely thinks Bayer should charge what they want. Hawker thinks copyrights should be supported, but says screw the patents.

At least I'm consistent. Don't steal and distribute copyrighted material. Give the company that did the R & D their fair share.

Humanity, unconstrained and unchecked: http://www.economist.com/node/21549096?fsrc=scn/fb/wl/ar/overtherainbow

Of course. That's not what is at issue. I have no interest in disputing the mathematics. What I dispute is the desire and belief that the application of 2+2=4 to economics is better than the application of (2 + 2) * 1.012 - 0.2 = 3.848.

Nobody disputes the supply and demand curves. What you're missing is there are an infinite number of ways to shift the demand curve left or right and an infinite number of ways to shift the supply curve up and down.

Free markets, unmodified, in all their raw form, are not as wonderful as you think. They usually exploit, to the detriment of our future, because the market participants are individuals maximizing their own present reality.

Free markets should be constrained and regulated. Are they being constrained or regulated right now? Yes. Are they being constrained and regulated in the best possible way? Probably not. Are zero constraints and regulations the most desirable? Absolutely not.

In the case of your pill, a solution is to allow the government to tax things which cause people to need the pill, thus reducing demand for the pill (shifting the demand curve left), and then use that tax revenue to subsidize production of the pill, while moving the supply curve until it gets enough pills into the hands of those who need it.

With regard to the environment, taxes should be applied to things we want less of, and then the revenue should be used to subsidize that which we need more of which does not harm the environment.

Things we want less of (which are unsustainable and should be taxed):

- Natural resource depletion
- Wilderness destruction
- Pollution
- Inefficient products

Things we want more of (and should be subsidized):

- Super efficient products

Again, completely irrelevant. Just because someone supposedly knows a lot about a subject does not mean that they don't. It might very well be the case that a particular Green Peace environmentalist does know a great deal about the subject matter at hand - or not.


His understanding would be exactly as he has portrayed it, possibly more so, but certainly not less. Same goes for your often ignorant understanding of free markets. It really doesn't matter what your background is. What matters are your ideas. Anytime you wish to be educated on that subject, let me know.


Sometimes overstating something is the only means by which to draw attention to the diametrically opposite and obtuse views of the audience.


Usually, that's a signal that you should start listening, at the very least. See my above statement.

Oh, and I'm dead serious about engaging in a discussion about free markets with you. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I seem to recall that your belief in them is so fervent, it borders on religion.

I call bullshit on your underhanded line of questioning which leads nowhere.

Irrelevant in every measure. Argue the points, not what you presume are the credentials or lack of credentials of the person you are arguing with. There rarely is no better expert than one who is passionate about a subject.

If you wish, I will personally engage you (with extreme confidence) in any of the following topics, even though I have no formal education in any of them:

- Computer graphics
- Philosophy of mind
- Climate change
- Filmmaking
- Environmentalism

Ummm, so I watched the video. He's doing good work - on the Easy Problem. No mention of the Hard Problem though. Get a solid understanding of the distinctions between those two problems, and then we can move on.

I watched part of the video.

The brain has about 100 billion neurons, each connecting to about 5,000 other neurons, giving about 500 trillion connections. It is these connections which are varying in strength which define our memory and how our brain will behave. In a simple computer model, you need to store both the strength of the connection, and the distance (to model synaptic timing). That's two values, preferably floats, which would require 4,000 terabytes. That would be a really simple model.

And just what the heck is it about a neuron and it's firing that makes consciousness whereas something else doesn't?

I'll say it again: the brain's structure and organization capitalize on and efficiently build our level of consciousness from the most basic and primitive components which essentially already possess a sort of proto-consciousness at a very fundamental level.

I absolutely do not think that it is logical to believe that a set of neurons and their wiring should produce qualia otherwise.

I do believe that neurons and their wiring can produce behavior and zombie like memory, but there would be no qualia without there being some intrinsic qualia like property built into the Universe already at a deep down level.

The brain amplifies the sensing of qualia and organizes it into millions of different experiences, but it does not create qualia out of nothing.

Hawker, you must understand that bitcoinbitcoin113's research strategy is to scan and search for phrases in documents, so he can parse some special meaning from some particular phrase. I've noted this over and over in the discussion related to climate change. A solid and deep understanding of any topic is often counter to his goals.

Bitcoinbitcoin113 almost has it right, but not quite. His advice is just a little simple.

Obviously consciousness spans a spectrum from being highly aware to being sort of aware. If you've ever been put under, you know what I'm talking about. You just slowly drift out of consciousness.

What bitcoinbitcoin113 fails to address or acknowledge is that even variable things have quanta - i.e. most all things with variable amounts of power are still composed of units at some basic level. Bitcoinbitcoin113 might argue that it's a neuron, but that's because he's a neuroscientist and he clings to this logically false ideal that because of that, neurons must be the answer to saying why we're conscious. If you give it some hard thought though, you'll see how silly that is.

Fundamentally, consciousness is likely composed of simpler units. I subscribe to the idea that consciousness is composed of tiny proto-conscious units which are fundamentally part of the Universe.

The first rule about discussing consciousness: Acknowledge that Chalmers is required reading, understand Chalmers' viewpoints, and go from there. Chalmers' work is really important.

Meaning? Please elaborate.

Also, consider the merits of actually educating yourself on the environment and what environmentalism is from those who actually conduct research in the field. Some keywords: ecosystems, trophic cascades, edge effects, biodiversity.

You might find the Centauri-dreams blog interesting. Not necessarily today's blog entry, but as a whole. It discusses the Fermi Paradox, the Drake equation, search for extrasolar planets, search for life in the oceans of Jupiter's moons, interstellar probes, Dyson spheres, life, etc. Read it, search it, and so on.

http://www.centauri-dreams.org/

Now, regarding life in the Universe, consider the possibilities:

1. Many different kinds of life are bound to happen, given a primordial soup.
2. Just DNA life is bound to happen, given a primordial soup.

Or consider possibility three:

3. Given 500 billion galaxies, each having 100 billion stars, where it seems reasonable that a very large fraction of those stars (born out by the Kepler telescope's results) have rocky Earth sized planets in the habitable zone with liquid water, and most of those planets having a primordial soup at some point, and all those chemical reactions, that even so, the chance of the right sequence of molecular chain reactions happening to give rise to the precursor of life still turns out to be a million to one in this Universe.

Let me rephrase option 3 a little so you understand exactly what I'm saying: the molecular chain reaction to create life in this Universe happened just once, and it was a million to one against it for the entire life of the Universe. Conclusion: if you buy into option 3, life only exists on Earth, and it was a fluke.

Now, is option 3 unreasonable? No! Theories in cosmology predict that there are millions of Universes, so in at least one of them, life could've arisen once, and naturally we will be the ones witnessing it, because obviously we wouldn't be in one of those Universes where life didn't arise.

Do I believe in option 3? I consider it a possibility. I also consider option 1 and 2 possibilities.

Here's a very sobering thought, though. If we're all descendants from the same species of microscopic DNA based life, then it seems that it only happened once. Why aren't there other descendants from other primordial microscopic forms of life on Earth?

Now, let's move on to the second part: intelligent life and the possibilities.

1. Life is common in the Universe, but technology wielding life is a fluke.
2. Life is common in the Universe, and technology wielding life is common, but they never survive long enough to migrate throughout their home galaxy.
3. Life is common in the Universe, and technology wielding life is common, and they have spread through their home galaxy in a diaspora.

Consider 3. Where are they? It can be shown that even if near light speed is never obtainable, it should only take about a million years for a space faring civilization to spread throughout the galaxy. Where are they?

Let's consider the methods:

1. Superluminal speed is possible, and they can go anywhere, anytime.
2. Only a fraction of light speed is possible, and it would take several million years to traverse the galaxy. In this case, it would be about 50 years between the stars. Assuming colonies are setup along the way, they should still be here, unless their civilization fizzled. Remember, the key point is, other space faring civilizations would not necessarily have arisen coincident in time with ours. Presumably, many have arisen billions of years ago.
3. Even a moderate fraction of light speed is not possible. Consider our technology. Our fastest spacecraft would require something like 70,000 years to reach the nearest star, and it's only 4.5 light years away, as opposed to stars in our own galaxy that are nearly a hundred thousand light years away. Still, consider generation ships migrating outwards, or utilizing the resources in the Oort Cloud to hop our away across the void between the stars the way the Pacific Islands were colonized.

Do you wish to read an interesting book on the subject? Consider these two:

Entering Space: Creating a Spacefaring Civilization by Robert Zubrin
Interstellar Migrations and the Human Experience

I don't know where to take this.


Paramecium have memory. Plastic has memory. Tall buildings have stories. Novelists have stories.

However, I will admit I am not an expert on paramecium. Are you? Feel free to find scholarly papers on the study of learning among paramecium. I might engage in similar activity.

Don't confuse illustration, education and explanation with whatever you would like to believe it is.