Kirk Cameron schools Stephen Hawking in science

The BBQ Pit
161

Consciousness has been explained though. That’s the problem. We’re essentially a really complex computer program run by electrical impulses. Every time there’s something that “science can never explain” it’s explained later. I’m seeing a pattern here…

…Except, no? You’re factually wrong and no amount of sophistry will take that out of you.

Wait a second. You WANT this person to suffer eternal torture?

You sadistic bitch! Man, I reprimanded him for saying we’d all be better off if you were dead, but fuck, that’s really something else. You’re insane! Look, I’ll tell you what. Spend 3 days straight getting waterboarded, then make this claim again. Torture is no laughing matter, and you want to subject him to an eternity of it? You sadistic, evil bitch! Do you have any idea how cruel that makes you sound? Most people crack after a few hours, but you want him to suffer eternally… Do you even understand what you’re saying?

…:smack:

The stupid. It burns.

Look, just because we don’t understand something, doesn’t mean we won’t. Like, say, how our species diversified. We used to not know how that happened, so we made up a fairy tale about it and everyone believed it. Then someone found the answer. Your argument, the “god of the gaps” argument, is so ridiculously flawed, it’s not even funny. There’s only one argument I know that’s more fallacious, and it has to do with Hitler’s religious beliefs.

Oh yeah. I did this for you, by the way.

Yes, it hurt to do.

162

I like that post so much that I think I’ll steal it…

What?

163

But computers are not conscious. That’s an importance difference between a human and a computer. I thought my statement that we are not simply meat computers implied that. I guess not.

Or do you think computers are conscious?

164

Our brains are orders of magnitude more complex that the most powerful computers on Earth.

165

How do you measure that?

166

For a good exploration of this topic, I recommend the first few chapters of this book:

Of course, the rest of the book is really good, too.

167

By the number of neural connections?

[

](Strong AI - Wikipedia[/url)

168

OK, I just wish-listed the book. It sounds interesting.

So, to read between the lines, your answer is that a computer could be conscious if it were orders of magnitude more powerful? Is that the difference between a human having consciousness and a computer not? Or do you think computers are conscious, or humans not? Or what?

Lobohan, your wiki-link has garbage in it - here’s the page. AI still recognizes that the computer is imitating intelligence, without having self-awareness, though. Or do you think a neural-net computer could be described as conscious?

169

Sorry about the link, I didn’t double check it.

I don’t think we’d know if it were conscious or not. But that said, I don’t actually know that you’re conscious. In any case, since our brains are subject to damage and chemical interference it highly suggests that our consciousness is mechanical in nature.

To put it more clearly, if you had a soul, getting shot in the head and surviving shouldn’t damage your actual thinking.

170

I’m not sure if the question is really aimed at me - I haven’t been participating in this thread, but I’ll give my basic thoughts anyway.

A lot of what the author talks about is our brain’s ability to place value on decision outcomes - that is to determine, before the calculation is made, how valuable the answer will be and put an appropriate amount of resources towards the question. So, we change the acceptable margin of error of our questions reflexively through heurisitcs.

Our ‘programming’ is a result of our evolution and our chemical and electrical systems are built ina way that give us desires such as procreating and surviving. We have biological feedback mechanisms that make us ‘desire’ those things (pain, pelasure). Computers don’t have these. They don’t have desires and they don’t have much in the way of assigning importance to different tasks. I see these as inter-related - if you don’t know what your goals are, you’re not very good at prioritizing.

Our goals are clear - live, reproduce. The author makes a good argument that the efficiency of our brains as computers is related to our ability to assign values and priorities to computational tasks - of course, there’s a ton of other stuff going on that’s way beyond my ability to throughly grasp, let alone restate intelligently.

Could computers become conscious at some point? I guess anything’s possible, but I’m not betting on it happening anytime soon.

171

Where the fuck did that come from? You’ve been saving that up for what? 9 years?
Seriously, if you let some anonymous guy on the Internet put a bug in your ass for a decade, you need to get a life and reassess your priorities.

Let it fucking go. You’re creeping me out.

172

To be fair, you’ve been posting like an idiot, and he just wanted to show a newcomer (me) just how deep that rabbit hole goes.

173

Maybe you should run barefoot into the woods and go waterboard yourself? [/scylla_creepout_intensifier]

174

“The word God is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of honorable but still primitive legends which are nevertheless pretty childish.” Albert Einstein

175

Instead of stealing from each other, perhaps you and Polecat could trade market.

176

Sorry you feel that way. I won’t force you to waste your time on an idiot by responding to your earlier post.

177

To also be fair, while I’ve never found myself agreeing with Scylla on politics, he’s generally a pretty stand-up guy, and he tells a hell of a story. Look for “The Terror of Blimps” for a prime, prime example.

[I also don’t agree with him on religion, since I’m either agnostic or atheist, depending on the wind’s direction. The rest stands.]

178

HERETIC! Stone him!

(The notion that the Flying Spaghetti Monster is female is only held by a handful of renegades known as the She’ites.)

179

I don’t understand the She’ite heresy personally. I mean his meatballs are right there in plain sight.

180

Good question. I think it generally is and, as far as i can tell that seems to be the standard nodus operandi of scientific inquiry.

For example, in statistics fudge factors like beta and discount rate are used to name things that aren’t definable so we can get closer to defining them. Their existence allows us to define other things more precisely, and let’s us perform useful operations. As long as you are doing it this way, it’s cool.

So, if we are saying “God created the universe because we can’t explain it any other way and that’s that and don’t question it,” than that’s not what I’m talking about and no, that’s not good.

If we saying the Big Bang event’s cause is godlike in that it is vastly powerful, ancient, all encompassing, debatably knowable, and created the universe and so therefore we might as well call it God, than I would say that is good and every bit as useful as beta, discount rate, dark matter, the bodily humous, the wether, and the g-spot.

Place holders, fudge factors, bad theories, are good and useful because they help you define what you don’t know, and they help you start to know it by identifying and cataloguing it’s characteristics.

Saying you don’t know and shrugging your shoulders is comparatively useless.

Where you get in trouble is when your place holder or fudge factor is no longer subject to modification or revision but simply accepted as fact.

Invisible pink unicorns are useful. When you posit them they start showing you what the answers will look like.