Almanildo

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Birthdate: October 9th, 1988 (35 years old)

Member Since: February 5, 2009
Last Power Points used: March 12, 2009
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Happy anniversary! Today marks year number 2 since you first became a Sifter and the community is better for having you. Thanks for your contributions!

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Your video, Terry Pratchett on religion, has made it into the Top 15 New Videos listing. Congratulations on your achievement. For your contribution you have been awarded 1 Power Point.

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Your video, Substance dualism, has made it into the Top 15 New Videos listing. Congratulations on your achievement. For your contribution you have been awarded 1 Power Point.

gwiz665

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The best is so much again.. pretty awesome, but best? Ah who am I kidding, of course I am!

In reply to this comment by Almanildo:
Thanks, you're the best.

In reply to this comment by gwiz665:
*quality!

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Your video, How the mysterious Norwegian sky spiral might have formed, has made it into the Top 15 New Videos listing. Congratulations on your achievement. For your contribution you have been awarded 1 Power Point.

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Your video, Urban myths about climate change, has made it into the Top 15 New Videos listing. Congratulations on your achievement. For your contribution you have been awarded 1 Power Point.

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Congratulations on reaching new heights on VideoSift. You have earned yourself 25 stars, earning you status of Bronze Star member. You have been awarded 1 Power Point for achieving this level. Thanks for all your contributions.

laura

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my pleasure. I love the lute, that one was my fav.

In reply to this comment by Almanildo:
Wow, two videos sent out of my queue at once! Thanks!

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Your video, Putting faith in its place, has made it into the Top 15 New Videos listing. Congratulations on your achievement. For your contribution you have been awarded 1 Power Point.

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Your video, The Hubble floats away from the Space Shuttle Atlantis, has made it into the Top 15 New Videos listing. Congratulations on your achievement. For your contribution you have been awarded 1 Power Point.

Crake

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In reply to this comment by Crake:
That sure is a creepy avatar you got there... where is it from?

In reply to this comment by Almanildo:
That's the logo of Gentle Giant, my favourite prog-rock band. I've posted some music by them here.

Heh, reminds me a bit of good old Ludwig-van in this.

Crake

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That sure is a creepy avatar you got there... where is it from?

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Congratulations on reaching new heights on VideoSift. You have earned yourself 10 stars, earning you status of Bronze Star member. You have been awarded 1 Power Point for achieving this level. Thanks for all your contributions.

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Congratulations! Your comment has just received enough votes from the community to earn you 1 Power Point. Thank you for your quality contribution to VideoSift.

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Your video, James Randi suspended from Youtube, has made it into the Top 15 New Videos listing. Congratulations on your achievement. For your contribution you have been awarded 1 Power Point.

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Almanildo

said:

I'll try to approach this from another angle.

I know that I am 'aware'. That is, not only do I behave as though I was a concious being with self-awareness, I am indeed aware of what's going on. I don't know, however, whether any of you guys are. You certainly behave like it, but there is no way to know for sure.

However, there is no reason to believe otherwise. From an objective point of view, there is nothing about any other human being that is fundamentally different from me, therefore I have no reason to believe that any other human being is not 'aware', just like me.

Now, here's a thought experiment: Make a brain in a vat. Take a live person, somehow extract his brain from his body without killing the poor guy, and place it in a vat. Attach artificial sensory organs and life-support systems, such that all the information that flowed between the brain and the body now flows between the brain and an artificial machine. In the traditional philosophical experiment, the person shouldn't notice any difference, but that's not really important for my purposes. The important thing is that he can experience the outside world.

Is there any reason to doubt his awareness now? I can't see any.

Now continue to mess with our poor victim. Replace his prefrontal cortex with an equivalent ANN (Artificial Neural Network), made out of electronics. Whether or not that's possible, here's the next step:
Abandon the vat and simulate the entire configuration on a computer.

Now we have an ensemble of electronics instead of an ensemble of neurons. Still, the guy's behaviour is essentially the same. The objective facts can be correlated with the facts about the original person. He still has a prefrontal cortex, it just exists in computer memory instead of in a real configuration of neurons.

I still can't find any reason to doubt whether this person is aware. This seems to demonstrate that it's not the 'stuff' you're made of that's important; it's the abstract configurations between the functional units, no matter how the units themselves are manifested in reality. And that seems to argue against any important ontological difference between people and other things.

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