I had checked to see if it was available w/o being logged in. Odd.
Anyway, that seems to be the objective.
As for it’s ability to assimilate, collate, etc. Here is it’s content acquisition strategy as developed for the Jeopardy challenge. I would imagine that’s been refined a bit over the past year and a half.
It seems the need for survival in nature is one of the basic requirements for consciousness.
Even a virus is alive and tries to survive, yet general believe is that a virus is not conscious.
Regardless, researchers such as Philip Bell believe that the cell nucleus itself has a viral origin.
If you like to see Watson at work –> IBM's Watson Supercomputer Destroys Humans in Jeopardy | Engadget - YouTube
Quote “To improve, Watson is now absorbing records”
I think Google can beat Watson in many areas.
The painful question is “How would Watson feel about the way we have been running it down here?” Does emotion play a role in qualifying consciousness? That is, I think, a massive can of worms that could be debated for days with no resolution, but it is worth noting that a human who lacks emotion is considered to have one or more types of affective disorder (autism, sociopathy, etc).
The crucial point, however, is that Watson is still “it”. When a non-impersonal pronoun is broadly considered more appropriate for a device, then we can start to feel like we have made serious progress toward true self-aware AI. Sophisticated number-crunching correlation systems look good with natural language capabilities, but so far, the UI is little more than fancy window dressing for an elaborate abacus. Even Eliza looks fairly good, but it is really no more than algorithms.
Were they being completely honest, I suspect even the folks at IBM might not object too strenuously to that assessment since in the immediate term, it’s the usefulness of the abacus that will be regarded as the most important consideration.
Not necessarily, however I’d have no qualms adding that requirement for whatever your definition for "life"is.
Right, because it hasn’t been shown that consciousness, at least the high levels we’re discussing here, isn’t necessary for life to proliferate. Instinct is something very different than consciousness.
Irrelevant.
Anyhow, perhaps this thread should be splintered off into Great Debates, now that we’ve gone quite afar fron neutrinos from a zombie thread.
More interesting texts can be found here. If anyone decides to read it then please let me know what you think
After reading all this I tend to agree with Niels Bohr,
Quote: ‘It is wrong to think that the task of physics is to find out how Nature is. Physics concerns what we say about Nature.’
The computer you’re using is evidence.
This is nonsense. It’s like saying that you have faith in the fact a rock will drop if released from your hand. Your definition of ‘faith’ is not useful!
‘Wrong’. The word for what you were is ‘wrong’.
And none of this is relevant to any of the arguments you are making.
I have no problem with certain axiom systems being inconsistent. However, others are known to be consistent.
Nobody cares what your ‘fibers’ think. We know math works in physics because we test it every single day.
So? Who says physics has to be intuitive to a bunch of plains apes? After all, Newton didn’t really think that gravity could work at a distance. It isn’t relevant.
And so we see that Your definition of ‘faith’ is not useful.
Whether Bremidon’s definition is useful or not is really besides the point. Regardless, I do believe he has a point. Believing in what he said about faith though actually does make things more confusing.
Bremidon seems to question even commonly accepted reality. For example when I see something and look away, is it there simply because I have seen it? Or, if I see something but don’t touch it, how can I be sure the object is real?
We cannot deny that even in math, we make assumptions and take things for granted. One often believes the conclusions we have come to in science in the past, will still be valid tomorrow. Yet nothing guarantees this. Reality is not a certainty.
My only response to this is that object permanence is typically mastered by two years of age.
True. In math, we make our assumptions explicit in the form of ‘axioms’. That’s one of the things mathematics does for us, in fact: It allows us to reason from a fixed set of starting assumptions, as opposed to trying to reason from the contradictory mass of nonsense we humans are pleased to call ‘common sense’.
What, precisely, do you mean by this? Do you think there’s anything useful to be gained by claiming that the real world might cease to exist tomorrow? (Well, of course there is something useful to be gained, if you consider a false equivalence to be useful.)
To add, reality just is. It’s indifferent to the way we perceive it. Our brains evolved in reality over millions of years, made up of matter from this reality, and its cognition is rather biased to our body’s sensory input, as to interpret this input in a way we can make sense out of it, and adapt/survive in the reality us humans happen to find ourselves in.
To put it another way: We know our brains are biased toward a particular intuition that can be deceiving, yet we do overcome it through the scientific method. Our cognition developed because of the nature of reality, not in spite of it.
Reality built us, and if it were playing tricks on the everyday-level, we wouldn’t have survived as a species to even question it, because all logic and reason would fail us.
However, we do have evidence of a rabbit hole in QM and GR. How deep it goes, and how much falling to the bottom of it to find out might affect us remains to be seen.
Surely when you look at the stars at night, you believe them to be where you see them. :rolleyes: Also, It was not too long ago that we discovered a black hole in the center of each universe and string theory now explains the big bang as a collision of two three-dimensional worlds in a space with an extra spatial dimension. How are those for unexpected changes?
Thus, everything is based on assumptions.
Well, for starters this thread is very amusing.
Mathmatics is. Physics starts with what we’ll call “facts”, like, The sun is bright and hot.
From there you’d make assumptions working from already established theories, hypothesis or “facts” to form a new hypothesis for how the sun works.
Now, test your hypothesis with experiments, acquire data, make predictions. If it checks out with your observations, and works within the framework of every other theory in physics, you have yourself a pretty damn good explaination for reality.
In physics, you start with “facts” not end with them.
My point was that although you may have designed a working model, it is not necessarily the only model, or even a proper model. Additionally, in case you do have a working model, it may fail to work tomorrow. 
While math is likely the best language we have for making accurate observations and predictions in nature, when putting things in a bigger perspective, there can always be factors that cause math to fail working properly.
And that’s what science is all about. Refining the model(s) as new evidence comes to light.
This doesn’t mean anyone ever closes the book, and says, “welp! That’s it then.” We’ll keep looking under every lepton until we can’t look any further.
Philosophy being more concerned with the questions, rhetorical as they may be, and less about any answers is always a good place to start. But don’t start juggling all the rhetoric, and conclude reality isn’t understandable or is meaningless.
Personally, I’m a big fan of 2T-Field Theory (Two-Time), that is 4 macro dimensions of space (our three familiar ones, and the fourth holographic; casting 3 dimensional “shadows” as matter/energy with gravity emerging from behind this 4D veil… or something, blah, blah strings and branes and shit), and two dimensions of time, which might explain all the quantum weirdness we witness, and things like singularities.
Just keep asking questions. 
Paper on Two-Time Field Theory. Warning: PDF.
logging into my facebook account
I can’t really answer such terse negations of my arguments. If you would like to elaborate on any of these points, please feel free, and I will happily counter if I can. Until then, I think everything interesting has been said, and I will simply politely disagree with all your points.
Well, I do have one more thing. My faith in science is personally useful: it gets me through my day and lets me get on with whatever I am doing. It is also useful for me in opening up new avenues of investigations, which in turn have been useful as well. And, my definition of faith has been exceedingly useful to me in reminding me that there are some things that science, math, and logic as we understand them cannot explain.