xamuel

56 ms·

541.
by xamuel 8y ago
I think about this sort of thing a lot. Imagine you stumbled upon a band that produced music objectively just as good as The Beatles. But they're just a pack of rich trust-fund kids, and nobody has ever heard of them. Is their music re
542.
by xamuel 8y ago
>Does anyone believe we have gained more with this "democratisation" of publishing than we are losing to conspiracy theories, hoaxes, and populism? I do. At least now we have grass-roots conspiracy theories, hoaxes, and populis
543.
by xamuel 8y ago
We cannot improve our ethics and morals on our own. I've certainly found that true in my own life. Even when I read or write philosophy, the truth is, I'm only doing it to feel superior to people: pride and vanity. The only thing
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by xamuel 8y ago
You could easily achieve perfect accuracy on the test set by just hardcoding the entire test set into your "model" and the entire model is "1. See image, 2. Look up image in test set, 3. Read off answer". It would be int
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by xamuel 8y ago
>Though he failed to consider of course that life itself could be a test. Before brushing Pascal's Wager aside, one should remember that Pascal was one of the main founding fathers of probability itself. We're not talking about
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by xamuel 8y ago
>Practical intelligence is clearly multidimensional I wouldn't call that clear at all! Of course no matter how intelligent a person is, there will be environments in which they do poorly. Feynman would do poorly in the environment c
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by xamuel 8y ago
In today's world, a status quo improvement is revolutionary, because the default is for everyone to seek to create nothing but revolutionary products. In other words, you might say OP is disrupting the disruption industry.
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by xamuel 8y ago
>In mathematics you don't understand things. You just get used to them. Yep, one of my favorite math quotes and highly under-rated. One thing I've found is that if you find yourself using the wrong "types", you'r
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by xamuel 8y ago
It's similar to the way in C you can malloc memory for two data structures, and then check which pointer is smaller. Say, one pointer points at the data for Mario, and the other pointer points at the data for Luigi. You look at the raw
550.
by xamuel 8y ago
Do you complain similarly when Euclid states that for any two distinct points, there exists an infinitely long straight line which passes through those two points? We cannot point to that line, we can only point to a small portion of it wit
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by xamuel 8y ago
Thanks, fixed
552.
by xamuel 8y ago
One of the axioms of set theory is the axiom of the empty set, which states that there exists at least one set which has no elements. Another axiom of set theory is the axiom of extensionality, which states that two sets are equal if they h
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by xamuel 8y ago
Article seems very verbose and only really addresses the natural numbers (it mentions negatives and rationals in passing). In case anyone just wants actual answers without reading pages and pages of prose, here is one set of constructions (
554.
by xamuel 8y ago
>Alter’s Bible doesn’t seek that kind of canonical status; it is not out to replace the Hebrew Bible, but to engage in a dialogue with it. The idea of engaging in a dialogue with the Bible is very important. It should not be viewed as bo
555.
by xamuel 8y ago
Good point. To make it closer to leetcrew's point, we could further imagine that while I'm lying in bed in the 9-month coma, you're the one paying my medical bills, and it's almost driving you bankrupt. Or: you need a he
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by xamuel 8y ago
Thanks, when you put it that way, it's not as clear-cut as I thought.
557.
by xamuel 8y ago
One should err on the side of caution and assume consciousness for sake of ethical decision-making, whenever possible. That said, it's incredibly presumptuous to assume everything has consciousness just because you do. We are not all a
558.
by xamuel 8y ago
Trying to come up with the one correct interpretation is as futile as trying to get to heaven by good deeds (impossible). All interpretations fall short just like all humans do. Salvation is not won by ingenious interpreting, but by grace t
559.
by xamuel 8y ago
I feel like people tend to forget that a religion like Christianity is an entirely new way of framing the universe. Re-discovering Christianity in my 30s was like learning how to read and write for the first time in my life. Activist atheis
560.
by xamuel 8y ago
Define long-term. You could just as well say the universe will eventually collapse in on itself and that will cause extinction in the long-term. None of the species during the Permian-Triassic extinction knew about things like nuclear power
561.
by xamuel 8y ago
>There is also plenty of cause for concern about human extinction Do you seriously mean literal extinction, as in, not one single human being left alive? That seems really implausible to me. Of course, it's academic in some sense--i
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by xamuel 8y ago
This is cliche, but your musings remind me of the scene in 2001: Space Oddyssey where Dave Bowman "kills" HAL. The computer tries to dissuade Bowman by saying things like "I'm afraid, Dave." "I can feel it.&quo
563.
by xamuel 8y ago
On the other hand, the double-slit experiment doesn't take any expensive equipment, and if things had gone differently, could easily have gone un-noticed until 2019. My bet is there are other experiments like double-slit which will be
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by xamuel 8y ago
We can only speculate at this point. Maybe consciousness is a gestalt experience whose full description would require a map that is nearly the territory. Or maybe there's something simpler to it that we just don't know about yet.
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by xamuel 8y ago
I specifically, believe every normal human is conscious. I have no idea whether animals are conscious, but I'll err on the side of caution and assume they're conscious for the sake of making ethical decisions. I doubt plants are c
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by xamuel 8y ago
>I run an old collaborative writing (roleplaying) forum populated mostly by teens that's paid for by a banner ad. I know this is going to sound like heresy nowadays, but you could always just run your forum and pay for it out of poc
567.
by xamuel 8y ago
The thought experiment isn't science, I never claimed it was. Science is for studying physical things in the real world. The thought experiment in question is for studying the scientificness of a claim. The scientificness of a claim is
568.
by xamuel 8y ago
>I think you are suggesting ... consciousness is not testable Yes, that's right. (Edit: I mean, we don't know how to test it yet.) Re: your experiment: In principle, I could design a dumb machine that you can plug your EEG mach
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by xamuel 8y ago
Yeah, I'm not saying you or I are the only consciousness in the world... that's almost certainly false (barring ridiculous extreme cases like solipsism etc.) The point is, this isn't science . Compare it to arguments for ext
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by xamuel 8y ago
>I would rather say that it seems likely science in the strict sense cannot either support or refute the existence of consciousness Yes, that's the whole point of my first comment. Glad that we ended up agreeing!

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