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This is incredibly shortsighted. First, at least some portion of science has always been dedicated "debating" things. That doesn't mean they're being unhelpful,

This is incredibly shortsighted. First, at least some portion of science has always been dedicated "debating" things. That doesn't mean they're being unhelpful, especially since those are the types of debates which help to steer resources towards practical efforts. How do you decide which telescope to build if you haven't decided, without such telescope, what exactly it's supposed to be looking at? It's also worth noting that theoretical inquiries can be incredibly helpful. You know, like all of Einstein's work. After all, he was a mathematician just playing with numbers and then trusting their results – something most "real scientists" were too skeptical to do because the results didn't look like what they expected. Of course, it didn't help that a lot of Einstein's (and other theoretical scientists) ideas were, at the time, untestable mystical whoop-dee-do, either.

AnimalMuppet 11y ago
Um, no. Einstein's ideas were, at least in part, testable. Parts of them were confirmed rather quickly.
- ethanbond 11y ago
  Parts of some of them were confirmed rather quickly. Other parts of some of them are still unconfirmed, and a subset of those are still well beyond our foreseeable capability of testing. Black holes are one notable prediction that we have virtually no way to confirm. What's your point? I'm not saying Einstein got things wrong, I'm saying that immediately dismissing science which is not immediately testable is risky. Especially as more and more of the low hanging fruit is picked – cutting edge scientific ideas are going to be more and more difficult to test. Compare the Cavendish experiment to the Michelson-Morley experiment to the Large Hadron to... Creating a black hole? Seems to be a steep increase in difficulty. It should be expected.
  - AnimalMuppet 11y ago
    OK. This idea that we're actually discussing... is it testable? Is it even testable in principle?
    - ethanbond 11y ago
      I believe that's the whole point. This is someone trying to distill a seemingly intractable problem into a testable form. I think the answer for now is "no," but that's precisely the question he is attempting to answer: "is consciousness something that can be modeled in such a way that we can answer whether or not it is [x]?" Not: "is consciousness [x]?"
  - scottlocklin 11y ago
    Einstein didn't come up with the idea of black holes. Laplace did; before General Relativity for that matter. Meanwhile, Laplace gets to speculate about such things without being considered a goofball because he invented big chunks of mathematics, optics and physics. In fact, nobody in the physics community spoke of black holes at all until the 1960s when they began converting agricultural colleges into warehouses for people who speculate on untestable things.
scottlocklin 11y ago
It is supremely unhelpful when 1/3 or more of physics department tenure track positions are going to people who are not doing science, which is the present situation. As far as I am concerned, nobody needs a day job doing this sort of thing. It is recreational philosophical speculation, salted with mathematics. It would be far more productive to pay professors of physics to develop renormalization group theory for the game of go or something; at least that is testable, even if it isn't physics any more than the paper under discussion is. You apparently don't understand the difference between "you know, like all of Einstein's work" and nonsense like this. Virtually all of Einstein's work was based on experiment (he won the Nobel for explaining the photoelectric effect), and all of it was/is testable both in principle and in practice. The sort of wanking in this paper simply isn't science in any sense of the word. It isn't even testable in principle. It is no more science than a ghost story or a damp t-shirt with an equation on it.

AnimalMuppet 11y ago

Um, no. Einstein's ideas were, at least in part, testable. Parts of them were confirmed rather quickly.

ethanbond 11y ago
Parts of some of them were confirmed rather quickly. Other parts of some of them are still unconfirmed, and a subset of those are still well beyond our foreseeable capability of testing. Black holes are one notable prediction that we have virtually no way to confirm. What's your point? I'm not saying Einstein got things wrong, I'm saying that immediately dismissing science which is not immediately testable is risky. Especially as more and more of the low hanging fruit is picked – cutting edge scientific ideas are going to be more and more difficult to test. Compare the Cavendish experiment to the Michelson-Morley experiment to the Large Hadron to... Creating a black hole? Seems to be a steep increase in difficulty. It should be expected.
- AnimalMuppet 11y ago
  OK. This idea that we're actually discussing... is it testable? Is it even testable in principle?
  - ethanbond 11y ago
    I believe that's the whole point. This is someone trying to distill a seemingly intractable problem into a testable form. I think the answer for now is "no," but that's precisely the question he is attempting to answer: "is consciousness something that can be modeled in such a way that we can answer whether or not it is [x]?" Not: "is consciousness [x]?"
- scottlocklin 11y ago
  Einstein didn't come up with the idea of black holes. Laplace did; before General Relativity for that matter. Meanwhile, Laplace gets to speculate about such things without being considered a goofball because he invented big chunks of mathematics, optics and physics. In fact, nobody in the physics community spoke of black holes at all until the 1960s when they began converting agricultural colleges into warehouses for people who speculate on untestable things.

scottlocklin 11y ago

It is supremely unhelpful when 1/3 or more of physics department tenure track positions are going to people who are not doing science, which is the present situation. As far as I am concerned, nobody needs a day job doing this sort of thing. It is recreational philosophical speculation, salted with mathematics. It would be far more productive to pay professors of physics to develop renormalization group theory for the game of go or something; at least that is testable, even if it isn't physics any more than the paper under discussion is. You apparently don't understand the difference between "you know, like all of Einstein's work" and nonsense like this. Virtually all of Einstein's work was based on experiment (he won the Nobel for explaining the photoelectric effect), and all of it was/is testable both in principle and in practice. The sort of wanking in this paper simply isn't science in any sense of the word. It isn't even testable in principle. It is no more science than a ghost story or a damp t-shirt with an equation on it.