Wild Ideas
hanson.gmu.edu
hanson.gmu.edu
See this entertaining thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5009244
His scenario is a little too bright though... more like minorities getting exterminated by the conservative & powerful.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gram_panchayat , http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panchayati_raj
The only real problem with this kind of a set up is, systems by and large become culture centric. And this leads to medieval mindsets. Stuff like banning couples from having falling in love or having a love marriage, or laws against polygamy, support for child marriage, unfair treatment to widows, honor killings ... stuff like that.
There are also some extreme cases: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khap
Where does this leave us? Despite all their flaws(basically their own definitions of morality and thereby their own laws based on that) these sort of systems are the easiest and cheapest way of resolving a dispute with a very high rate of acceptable justice. Which continues be the case in many places in India today.
Only recently have we been able to overcome it.
Were the seeds of religion sown in primitive peoples observations of and attempts to reckon with all the scary shit they would witness in the natural world? Absolutely. But any "definitive" statements on pre-historical belief systems are probably anthropological hearsay, possibly weighted by our current knowledge of and feelings towards religion. What was going on back then could have been just slightly more complex than a dog hiding under the bed when there's thunder.
And keep in mind, we're talking about a 200,000 year run up to recorded history. However, I'm sure there was a more complex oral tradition of storytelling and mythmaking that was starting to develop before the Sumerians took off.
Weherein we have some evidence that such was not the case with moving towards public law.
Crazy anarchist.
Because there have been no extremely intelligent, logical, level-headed and productive people who are also anarchists.
Start with this guy and get back to me: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murray_Rothbard
If you said "crazy statist" I could maybe agree, since statism is kind of crazy in my opinion, but I think attacking any ideas by disqualifying with adjectives like crazy is extremely narrow-minded and leads to poor results, even if you're talking about statists.
Just because you've never heard of something, don't be so immature to dismiss it without thinking it through... you expose yourself as ignorant of the hard work of many intelligent people that have come before you.
Would anybody who fits this description like to elaborate on why that happened? Found a convincing argument? General disillusionment with humanity?
But I no longer think it's a perfect system. People don't behave like perfect rational market actors, there are edge cases like natural monopolies where normal market mechanisms don't lead to the best outcome, and then there is just enforcing altruism (like looking out for animal rights or children's rights, who couldn't buy legal services under this system, or redistributing income so you don't end up with people starving to death or in poverty.)
Of course the current system we have is so far from a perfect system it makes these problems seem trivial. But at least it seems ok and generally stable, whereas what would happen in an anarcho-capitalist world is a complete unknown.
There still might be a near-perfect system. Robin Hanson's ideas on prediction markets for making policy decisions might be a huge improvement, at least in some areas, and a semi-private legal system for some things might work. And I think libertarian policies in general are better.
And we call that system a government.
Seriously. Every time an anarchist seriously gets down to brass tacks about how their world would work, there's some agency by 'the people' which does things which have to be done, and it's indistinguishable from a government. It's just a Good Government, a Responsible Government, and, really, an Ideal Government.
Either anarchy has never happened or it's the only thing that happens. I don't know which is more damaging to the case of doctrinaire capital-A Anarchists.
> a semi-private legal system for some things might work
This is called contract law.
> Anything a government could do, could in theory be done by a voluntary system if enough people agreed it was a good idea or it was a benefit to them to do so.
And we call that system a government.
The problem here is the foolish tendency of English speaking people to use "government" for everything, when we should distinguish the government from the State.
Anarchists are obviously not opposed to having systems of government, but they are opposed to the state (and governments as their executive bodies), and in general to the concentration of power, authoritarianism and repression that emerge from it.
Just four years ago, the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences was awarded to Elinor Ostrom for her work demonstrating how institutional arrangements were developed in various societies facing the problem of resource exhaustion due to overconsumption, without the intervention of the State.
But these are just a few concrete examples of an uncountable number of norms and institutions there are everywhere, and much more there would be if the State intervention didn't crowd them out by imposing its own solutions and banned all others.
Importantly most things that are done by government would be done completely differently and by private organizations. The point is, that if the way government does something is truly superior, then people would still do it that way. They just couldn't force people to participate or pay for it. But you could still have a non-profit with elected officials and all that, if it's really better and can compete on a free market.
Again, I'm no longer certain this is the best system as there really are things where a free market doesn't lead to the best outcome and participation has to be forced (like public goods.) But there are ways of funding public goods without a government that might work, and most of what government currently does doesn't fit in that category anyways.
> The point is, that if the way government does something is truly superior, then people would still do it that way.
Then why hasn't this ever happened in the past? Why is Somalia suffering through what it's going through when self-organizing communes are so much better?
> They just couldn't force people to participate or pay for it.
Then nobody's going to pay for it, and the people who opt out of the laws entirely are going to be robbing everyone else.
Why is Somalia suffering through what it's going through when self-organizing communes are so much better?
Somalia is not some country who had an anarchist society; it's a country which had a state and a government, and where a civil war broke out, eliminating all possibility of a stable society regardless of its political system.
Judging anarchism by the state of Somalia makes even less sense than judging non-anarchist societies by the actions of the Third Reich.
In order for that to work you would need nearly 99% of the population or more to agree to that punishment and to actively participate. Which is a lot more than required in a democracy or pretty much any system.
>Then why hasn't this ever happened in the past? Why is Somalia suffering through what it's going through when self-organizing communes are so much better?
Somalia is a collapsed society, not really a good example of anything. The same could be said for democracy until 200 years ago. It took a long time even after the first democracy was established for the idea to spread, and the creation of the US itself took a war and a few centuries of cultural evolution before that to get to that point.
The point is that you can't just say "well if it's a perfect system why has no one done it before?" Libertarianism is counter-intuitive for most people, how do you expect them to form perfect anarcho-capitalist societies overnight?
>Then nobody's going to pay for it, and the people who opt out of the laws entirely are going to be robbing everyone else.
People would defend their own property or pay into some private legal system that promised to do so.
But it has happened in the past. Never underestimate the power of groupthink to do horrible things to minorities.
> Somalia is a collapsed society, not really a good example of anything.
No better place, then. Nothing for the anarchist utopia to compete with.
> Libertarianism is counter-intuitive for most people
No, it isn't. Not from what I've seen both online and off.
> People would defend their own property or pay into some private legal system that promised to do so.
We've tried this and it didn't work.
Which are these "things which have to be done" that only a government could take care of?
Crime prevention? Does our government police prevent crime, or just punish criminals? I can argue that without any state-established law criminals would be punished, in some way or another.
Medical services? I think that some people really enjoy being doctors and nurses, and they would associate even without state-mandated organization.
One thing is for sure, we're not ready yet for anything like that, since many necessary services and resources are "scarse", and scarsity makes people fight for their survival with brutal results. But we're (slowly) solving scarsity through science and technology.
Both.
> I can argue that without any state-established law criminals would be punished, in some way or another.
Without any state-established law there would be no criminals, just the much broader category of people that other people don't like. Quite arguably, the whole purpose of state-established law is to limit the scope and severity of punishment compared to what happens in the absence of central authority, and to provide clear rules. This aids in deterrence, since, to the extent that antisocial behavior is rational and deterrable, there needs not merely be an expectation of punishment if you do 'wrong', but a clear idea of what 'wrong' is in the context, and a clear expectation that punishment will not be imposed if you do not do 'wrong'.
Certainly, one can argue that modern states are less than ideal in each aspect of this, but that's very different than arguing that they are worse than the absence of a state would be.
> Medical services? I think that some people really enjoy being doctors and nurses, and they would associate even without state-mandated organization.
The problem here isn't that there would be no medical practitioners apart from a mandate to provide them (after all, most states that provide medical services don't compel people to become doctors and nurses), but that medical services lack features that make it the kind of service modeled well by econ 101 rational choice assumptions, with (among other things) a very high and uncorrectable cost of bad (or even merely incompetent) suppliers.
> But we're (slowly) solving scarsity through science and technology.
We may be reducing the resource costs of some goods and services, but that doesn't solve scarcity (it reduces the opportunity cost of some while increasing the opportunity cost of others, since it is unequal progress, and opportunity cost is what else you could have gotten for the resources you put into getting what you chose.)
Suggesting that we are "solving scarcity" demonstrates a lack of understanding of what "scarcity" means.
Sure, criminals would be punished, but in a much more arbitrary manner. Do you really think that would be an improvement?
> Medical services? I think that some people really enjoy being doctors and nurses, and they would associate even without state-mandated organization.
Yes they would, but as people get richer they start to want there to be standards, at which point you need some kind of group to codify and enforce those standards. Over time, these thousands of different groups that are setting rules for their own little domains end up being grouped together, for a range of reasons, and then you have a dreaded 'government'.
Formality offers protection. In all the cases I can think of, weaker government corresponds to an increase in either the arbitrariness or the corruption of justice. This applies both to criminal justice and to the wider sense of an equitable (not equal) distribution of resources.
And you build your world on that, you see world might work well like that.
Then you get your job, car, house, 2 saplings, wife. You have to defend it, system that supports it and everything that holds it together.
Current system is very well alive, self replicating and with strong immunity, it is living intelligent being, completely different from human thinking and not really communicable in direct way.
It all is very interesting.
In my opinion, private law system is pretty much anarchism, since people tend to aggregate with similarly-minded people that share the same values and rules: rules and leadership tend to form spontaneously in human groups (since we actually are tribal animals).
I have the gut feeling that as we eliminate scarcity through technology a real anarchist system is possible. I just miss enough theory to back it up.
Does anyone know any good book/author talking about that?
It's certainly a compelling vision - at least to me - but it's not exactly a political treaty.
Other than that, no progress at all. /s
Almost all of the major improvements happened early on in the century, not so much in recent times. All the low hanging fruit has been picked. There is never again going to be a single technology that improves people's lives as much as mass adoption of electricity did (short of a singularity at least.) More efficient or even self driving cars compared to today's cars, will be nothing compared to what cars were for horses and trains. No single medical technology is going to have as big of an impact as antibiotics did. Cell phones are not nearly as big of an improvement as the first phones were.
Did the world really change and improve as much between 1970 and now as it did between 1930 and 1970? Did it change as much then as between 1890 and 1930?
Because lower prices don't affect anyone's lives?
Also,
> search is still keywords in a textbox
what else would you suggest? The "hard problem" part of search now doesn't seem to be anything to do with indexing information usefully, but rather getting people to be able to clearly communicate (and before even that, clearly decide) what they're looking for.
Let's say you read the book Black List by Brad Thor and you had an awesome memory to remember everything. Your friend won't ask you about this novel by keywords. They will ask you questions like "What is the best way to steal a car?" or "How would you get rid of strangers chasing you?" or "what breed of dogs are very vicious when you signal but very friendly otherwise?". And you would be able to answer those questions, not only by quoting related text but also summarizing and enriching the information. This what the ideal search would look like... pretty much how you can converse with computer on Star Trek. That's why I said current search is just "keywords in a textbox", still a very far thing from making science fiction a reality.
This, on the other hand, is recommendation--finding something you don't know you want, by clustering things together and modelling your desires and personality. Amazon and Netflix are recommendation companies. Recommendation problems ultimately "boil down to" a full Bayesian network modelling your own brain, so they can have the right context to answer you. Recommendation is a subjective problem, best solved, probably, with a neural implant or something which can literally "read your mind" to know what you would like the most even if you don't currently "want" anything in particular.
(Two examples that come immediately to mind: I recall one of Heinlein's characters describing something that seemed a lot like a microSD card. It had a capacity of something like a million words. I got the impression that it was quite expensive. And in Neuromancer, "three megabytes of hot RAM" was contraband.)
(I think actually those examples are both from the eighties, but I don't think that's particularly important in this case.)
Will it keep this rate as Kurzweil postulates? I have no idea. Until now, though, he's correct.
Comparing tech today with sci-fi of the past is wrong. Predictions fail both ways: there's lots of tech we do have that is missing in sci-fi.
* Research has been initiated on reverse engineering the brain through both destructive and non-invasive scans.
* Autonomous nanoengineered machines have been demonstrated and include their own computational controls.
* People can talk to their computer to give commands.
He has crafted his long term predictions such a way that 8 out of 10 are pretty trivial and 2 most likely to go wrong. No wonder he often claims 80% success rate. For example, for 2020 he is predicting trivial stuff like this which has been in works already since he started predicting:
* Computers are embedded everywhere in the environment (inside of furniture, jewelry, walls, clothing, etc.).
* People experience 3-D virtual reality through glasses and contact lenses that beam images directly to their retinas (retinal display). Coupled with an auditory source (headphones), users can remotely communicate with other people and access the Internet.
* People are able to wirelessly access the Internet at all times from almost anywhere
* Nanotechnology is more capable and is in use for specialized applications, yet it has not yet made it into the mainstream. "Nanoengineered machines" begin to be used in manufacturing.
However his non-trivial predictions are almost guerenteed to be false:
* By 2020, there will be a new World government.
* The basic needs of the underclass are met.
* Most human workers spend the majority of their time acquiring new skills and knowledge.
* Phone calls entail three-dimensional holographic images of both people.
The point is predicting long term future is not just hard, it's impossible. But there is an expectation from long term future that sets our sense of progress and achievements.
More important than that, in this context, Kurzweil shows that scientific evolution has not stagnated or decelerated, in the last few decades, as the parent comment was proposing. Much to the contrary, the current pace is faster than in the past.
It's difficult to intercept line of sight communications and it's unlikely we'd fall on the line of sight of two hot spots of intelligent communication in all the vastness of space.
Even if they broadcast, I doubt it would be so completely uniform in all directions through long periods of time so as to appear as background.
Let's say we are actually able to do that by 2100. Somebody is scanning in patterns and current state of my neural activity. He copies that into a simulation - more than once. Which of the simulations will be me? All of them?
Also, it reminds me a bit of Swampman problem : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swampman
If we keep writing down common sense datums until 2100, we can make computers as smart as people.
Would it make them smart or just filled with hard coded knowledge? I would expect that in this case the goal would be to create a system that is able to acquire common sense knowledge on its own from a given environment and reason from it. What we might consider as common sense in our daily lives might not be fully applicable in different situations.
Putting aside the philosophical problems for a moment, the notion that the only relation between a brain and a mind is the pattern of neuronal connections is pretty naive.
The formation and maintenance of memory is controlled at multiple levels: single atoms (ionic gradients determining the polarization of neurons), small chemicals and hormones (e.g. neurotransmitters in the synapses and signalling peptides), DNA (epigenetic control, mainly methylation), proteins (constant synthesis and degradation in the process of memory consolidation and long-term potentiation) and finally cells (pattern of connections between neurons).
I highlight these different levels because they are formed by compounds that are very different from a biological and chemical point of view. You can't just snap-freeze them all in their place. And freezing is the easy part -- how do you thaw a brain and preserve the state of all these components (all of which have different thermodynamic properties)?
Assuming you don't want to thaw it but, as the article suggests, 'scan it' you would have to be able to determine the conformation and activation state of each involved protein and compound, along with all their density gradients in intracellular spaces... Not by 2100, sorry.
Biology is hard because it's all relations, thresholds, gradients and fuzzy logic. To escape this probabilistic haze into a clean world of ones and zeroes -- I read HN.
IMHO the teleported person ceases to exist at some point and a _new_ , identical person is being "created" by the transporter device. It's more of a gut feeling, hard to explain in words why I feel this way.
Imagine you fall in coma and sleep long enough that all your body cells have been changed. Do you wake up a different person? I don't think so.
What you perceive as yourself is the experience of being aware of everything you have learned in the world. An identical brain, whether created by teleport or running in simulation, is you just as much.
So yes, both simulations will be sure they are you (and in a sense, both will be you—if we allow the simulations, we must abandon the idea of there being only one “you” at the moment). The funny thing, these simulations will immediately diverge by obtaining different experiences, and thus can be thought of “forks” of you.
I believe you do. In fact I believe you are a different person moment-to-moment. The concept of 'you' is simply a mental convenience. This is exactly why Buddhists deny the 'self.' It's not that you don't exist- it's just that there is no single thing that remains unchanging, and the idea of a 'you' that exists through time is illusory.
Not the most productive thing to think about as you fall asleep :-)
"[..] mortality either stayed the same or decreased during, and in some cases, after the strike. [No study] found that mortality increased during the weeks of the strikes compared to other time periods."
The authors speculate about the reasons: "The paradoxical finding that physician strikes are associated with reduced mortality may be explained by several factors. Most importantly, elective surgeries are curtailed during strikes. Further, hospitals often re-assign scarce staff and emergency care was available during all of the strikes."
[1] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18849101
EDIT: clarity
Interesting. Have there been strikes which made emergency care unavailable?
Due to higher taxation, low-income individuals would have even less access to medicine than today. Keeping people away from drugs with prohibitive taxation means starving entire demographics of this component of health care.
So sure, people who have the funds to take excessive amounts of medicine may be "just as healthy." Others would be considerably worse off.
If the purpose of taxing medicine is to subsidise the provision of medicine to people who couldn't afford it at cost price, then that would give such people greater access.
While not "obvious", I still feel like others have probably thought of this idea. It could make a cool science fiction story.
If we consider that only simulating the atoms contained within the Earth is enough to have a perfect understanding of it's state across time, by logical conclusion simulating a house would be enough to rewind the history of it's structure.
"So we expand the computer to simulate everything. Hell, if we were to correctly determine the state of the universe at the big bang and simulate every atom since then we could answer everything about the past, have a perfect image of the present (intelligence dream!), predict the future... We could simply write an algorithm to know where or if intelligent life exists outside of Earth..."
Then, after some consideration I realized that the smallest possible computer capable of simulating every particle in real time... was probably reality itself.
For example, if you took a video of a coin being tossed into a coin pond, and then CGIed the coin out of the video, you could probably hire a criminal forensics-style physicist who could go through the video frame by frame, and then tell you the type of coin, velocity, point of impact, etc. just based on the splash and ripples.
I mean the whole idea is kind of ridiculous but in theory, it might work.
http://rein.pk/gravitational-lensing-to-observe-ancient-eart...
[1]: Einstein, Hawking, and many others have speculated that time travel should be possible, but were ultimately skeptical of it because of the "Where are all of the time travelers?" argument. Fear of the creation of time paradoxes could be the reason why there's no evidence of time travel.
Which is to say, if you remove all your goal conditions, all your reference points that could be moved away from center to provoke response -- if you are reduced to http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Orgasmium, in other words -- are you really aware any more?
It's me; and I'd be happy to give up the biological machine I'm running on and trade it for an equivalent or better technological machine or VR environment where the limits of biology no longer applied. Removing my biology doesn't remove all of my goal conditions; it removes the ones nature imposed upon me. I could add back any I like and choose to drop those I don't.
We're intelligent beings who have transcended being driven by instinct alone; we can choose our own goals independent of nature.
Update: some links
The little brain on the heart: http://www.ccjm.org/content/74/Suppl_1/S48.full.pdf
Does changing the heart mean changing personality? A retrospective inquiry on 47 heart transplant patients: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/1299456
How come people who get a heart transplant don't become different people?
Also, see "massive object".
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/moslive/article-1269288/STEP...
I've never really heard that argument from any heavyweight physicists, but who knows, you could be right.
In fifty years ecology will seem as ridicule as we see the middle age crusades now.
The only allowed porn will be animal documentaries.
Economy will be replaced by something that actually works, the same way alchemy has been replaced with chemistry.
High buildings will be considered as dangerous paper castles and cities will be flat.
Having to sit on a desk at work will be considered as belonging to the lowest end of the social scale.
We will run on highways with special shoes and cars will make us laugh at their utter discomfort.
2. If medicine were taxed so much that people only bought half as much, they would be just as healthy. False. The "extra" spending in medicine drives innovations so we have better drugs & procedures etc. than we would otherwise.
3. If we keep writing down common sense datums until 2100, we can make computers as smart as people. False.
4. If your head is cryogenically frozen today, you will be alive in 2100. Maybe.
5. By 2100, the vast majority of "people" will be immortal computers running brain simulations. True.
6. There's a five percent chance I live in a "future" computer simulation as I write this. False - to run simulate sentient beings with so much suffering would be cruel.
7. By 2100, world economic growth rates will have increased by over a factor of a hundred. Maybe - progress & growth keep happening faster and faster.
8. The growth of humanity and its descendants will stop forever within a thousand years or so. False - see _The Beginning of Infinity_ by David Deutsch.
9. Our descendants will colonize millions of star systems within ten thousand years or so. True, if we don't fuck up - again, see _The Beginning of Infinity_.
10. The nearest intelligent aliens are many millions of light-years away. True.
11. Billions of years ago, intelligent aliens had a colony near here, but left in a big hurry. False. It's a bad explanation.
12. If we allowed complete freedom of contract, law could be privatized, to our common benefit. Maybe - I don't know about "complete freedom of contract" (can you sell yourself into slavery?) but privatizing law might be a good idea, eventually.
13. If we switched to "futarchy" as a form of government, we would be richer and just as happy. Maybe - if we're going to deviate from tradition, better to do it in the direction of more freedom and less government control - which is known to make people richer.
14. If even a few of us honestly sought truth, we would not disagree with each other. True. For any issue, there is an objective truth of the matter, and if people care enough to find out the truth, they should eventually find a theory/explanation of the issue that no has an issue with, at least for a while. People will keep finding new problems with the latest theory, and they'll have to sort that out, but eventually truth-seeking should lead to plateaus of agreement.
Last time I checked HN was still interested in rational and scientific discourse. Most of your "True/False/Maybe" assertions are nothing of the sort.
I say "most" because for #2, #3, #4, #11, #12, #13 there is room for scientific falsifiability so we could set up experiments to support or invalidate your hypotheses. From there rational discussion is possible.
For the rest... about #1, #6: there's no way you can know this for sure. As another commenter says these theories are untestable. So it's just your beliefs speaking.
About #8 and #9: the Beginning of Infinity you cite is also fiction with little to no scientific support. I can't see how you can support an assertion with this reference.
I can specifically address #5, #7, #8, #9 as I have studied this stuff: all I can say is that your statements amount to a big optimistic wish for the future. There is in our current world and recent history no evidence whatsoever that we can escape the cyclical rise and fall of civilizations. All exponential laws supporting your wishes (Moore's law, economic growth etc) are not really "laws" but simply models of recent history built in hindsight. The real question to be asked is: what are the enabling factors that make this model accurate until now, and will these enabling factors continue to exist for 80 more years?
Of course it boils down to 1) USA supremacy in world politics, a mere historical incident due to WWII and 2) fossil fuels.
For all we know at this time, infighting and China will probably make #1 disappear within <20 years, and finite supply will take care of #2 within <50 years. Then what? Your belief there will be a magic way can save the energy and politic stability is just that -- belief.
(This is where HN turns into Reddit or 4chan. A series of sci-fi statements cited from a blog, with the commenters assertions next to them with no justification whatsoever. Not cool.)
Yes.
the Beginning of Infinity you cite is also fiction with little to no scientific support
WTF? BoI is not fiction.
The many-worlds interpretation is nonsense. It's not even science. It makes no testable predictions that differ from any of the other interpretations. I've never understood the weird fascination with "many-worlds". Quantum mechanics provides a very clear set of postulates that allow the prediction of various phenomena through mathematical equations -- that's as far as I read into it.
That's why it isn't science ;)
Maybe when QM was being developed "collapse" was a debated concept; I'm not too familiar with its history. Currently though, modern QM predicts that ensembles of identically prepared systems select an eigenstate of the linear operator corresponding to whatever observable it is you're measuring. Each of these eigenstates has a probability that can be calculated for it, and the mean value of these measurements is given by <Ψ|A|Ψ>, where A is the operator. I see no implications of collapse with this -- just probabilities of what values you will obtain in experiment.
Not exactly, your statement is correct for single states, however it breaks down for entangled states. When one wavefunction describes two or more particle a measurement on one particle can be thought of collapsing the two particle wavefunction, which then forces the other particle into a well defined state.
Edit, I am not arguing in favour many worlds theory, only that the 'collapse' of the wavefunction is a well developed and useful idea in quantum physics.
Quantum entanglement doesn't seem to be particularly unusual any more so than the fact that electron-electron correlation must be taken into effect when computing energy levels with some kind of QMC. All particles within a quantum system are correlated, so entanglement just kind of falls naturally out of that; I'm not assuming any kind of locality. I suppose what you're saying is that collapse is defined as the process of "fixing" these correlations?
> I've never understood the weird fascination with "many-worlds".
Thinking about the "what if" constitutes a deeply human tendency (or weakness, if you will). The notion that all our missed chances, fantasies, dreams, ideas, etc. may be actual as opposed to potential -- that's way too attractive a thought to ignore.
This theory does not claim to be Science as it uses a different model to find answers.
Science is about explaining the world/universe, not merely making predictions.
This came up at Galileo's trial. The Church was happy to accept his theories as mere predictions of astronomical observations. What they wouldn't accept was that the earth actually DID move around the sun. But Galileo was adamant on explaining what as actually out there. "According to popular legend, after recanting his theory that the Earth moved around the Sun, Galileo allegedly muttered the rebellious phrase And yet it moves." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/And_yet_it_moves)
So you mean the chance is much higher?
I see you've never searched youtube for "The Sims".
I was joking of course, the joke being that ability to recognize itself in the mirror is a common test of self-awareness used by biologists. And Sims can (sort of) do that.
But! You mention "simple tricks", and it reminded me of Dan Dennett lecture on "Magic and Consciousness": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3jBUtKYRxnA
His point is exactly that maybe the consciousness is just a collection of "simple tricks", which, to us, give the illusion they are not so simple.
This, along with most arguments based on morality just doesn't hold water, it assumes both that the Simulators (those running the simulation) hold the same moral values as us and that our suffering is deemed unnecessary.
The first also assumes that every member of a Simulator level race is perfectly moral on top of assuming they share the 'suffering = cruel' moral bullet point because at some point all member of a society would likely have the ability to create and run UniverseSimulator.exe.
Today we do tons of cruel things for science or to learn who's to say that the Simulator runners wouldn't make a similar valuation or draw a distinction between their real existence and our simulated existence?
This is called Logical positivism [1], well-known in the world of philosophy, and there are many criticisms. I'm not sure the matter is as self-evident as you present it to be.
Worth noting that this approach has already been tried:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyc
"Commonsense reasoning" has been around for a long time as an AI topic - like many AI topics it appears straightforward but is actually full of complexity.
* ConceptNet (http://conceptnet5.media.mit.edu/), I think the first major attempt at a "messier" crowdsourced commonsense-facts database. Not a carefully designed hierarchical ontology like Cyc, but rather a large set of lightly curated statements about natural-language nouns and verbs. Has the pros and cons you might expect: better coverage, and easier to use, but less precision and a lot of ambiguity due to polysemy.
* CMU's "Read the Web" (http://rtw.ml.cmu.edu/rtw/) and U. Washington's "Open IE" (http://openie.cs.washington.edu/), both projects that combine a shallow-parsing fact-extractor with web-scale crawling. They are truly gigantic, but the accuracy is not very high.
That's what many doctors (also in Europe) argue. An argument against that could be based in Ben Goldacre's Bad Pharma depressing review of the flow of money in relation to how medical trials are used to decide what's better.
This Anarcho-Capitalist ideal has never come to pass in any scenario where it could have happened: That is, there have been multiple scenarios where the established government has broken down entirely, and nobody's ever created this system with government-by-contract or anything like it.
We can argument-from-fiction this to death, and many people have, but if it can only happen if it's set up by some external agency it doesn't look like it's ever going to happen, so why bother?
> If even a few of us honestly sought truth, we would not disagree with each other.
Only if everyone starts from the same premises.
For example, does every example of Homo sapiens sapiens count as a human being? If no, then arguing against some plan because those supposed 'non-humans' would be made unhappy by it is worthless. You might as well argue against a plan because gneiss would be put out by it: In the minds of the people you're arguing against, it would be a total non sequitur.
A lesser, but more important, version of this is "Does every human matter equally as much?" Again, if you're arguing against people who hold as axiomatic that some matter more than others (due to tribalism, "racial realism", etc.), certain arguments aren't going to work.
Maybe we'll have to kill everyone who holds those ideas so we can stop having wars. (Your task: Am I being serious?)
A collapsed society isn't really a good example of anything. There are some good examples of private law systems here http://youtu.be/o0TBE-pcEi0.
>Only if everyone starts from the same premises.
Only if you are talking about subjective things like values or definitions of words or something like that.
If you are debating actual facts like "I expect X to happen tomorrow with 30% probability" or "if I do this experiment I will get this result" or even "this event happened in the past" (like debating whether someone is guilty of a crime for example.)
Given all the same information and arguments, 2 perfectly rational agents should always come to the same conclusion on these things.
We learn more about brains and making smart computers, but we seem to have run out of major architectural innovations -- better ones won't make a huge difference. The big stumbling block seems to be how much "common sense" a system knows, like that things tend to fall down when you bump them. One group has been writing these down for fifteen years with moderate success; a century more effort may be plenty.
This seems like a really inefficient way to go about it.
1. and 5. are mostly to occur first.
Which makes #9 more interesting. A war between man and machines would end very quickly if the AI just designs a super-virus and kills 99% of the population overnight.
Oh, and he is an economist too! How appropriate. Yep, Dr Hanson, keep up the good work.
- Aliens from billions of years into the future with an infinite source of energy and computational power have managed to slice the universe and put us into the solar system as a simulation. Everything coming back beyond the solar system is simulated, matter and energy alike.
- If academics kept compiling the knowledge of the world starting at 2000BC, and everybody were taught the knowledge, we'd have reached our current level of science by 1000BC.
This list of ideas could be an interesting trigger of such discussion.
So, what's the point?
This NASA page estimates a star density of 0.120 stars per cubic parsec (CP), where a parsec is 3.26 light years.
http://imagine.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/ask_astro/answers/980123d....
Thus that page's estimate of the number of stars within a 100 light year radius of Earth is:
= 0.120 stars/CP * 4/3 * π * ((100 LY)/(3.26 parsecs/LY))^3
= around 14,600 stars
= 0.120 stars/CP * 4/3 * π * ((1000 LY)/(3.26 parsecs/LY))^3
= around 14.5 million stars
Of course, there are many other challenges with that prediction, but the speed of light is not an absolute barrier, as you suggest.
http://www.nasa.gov/centers/glenn/technology/warp/warpstat_p...
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/23/science/faster-than-the-sp...
http://techland.time.com/2012/09/19/nasa-actually-working-on...
http://news.msn.com/science-technology/nasa-warp-drive-not-s...
http://io9.com/5963263/how-nasa-will-build-its-very-first-wa...
Acceleration, time dilation and deceleration are.
But barring the g-forces and enough of an engine we could travel to Alpha Centauri in less than 4 years, which may surprise you. Although that would be less than 4 spaceship years, not less than 4 Earth years.