>> ^spawnflagger:
I wonder what his take on antimatter/dark-matter is? Is it something which is being created in the LHC?

Dark matter isn't being created in any human experiment yet.

When matter/antimatter is created, what happens is merely that energy goes from one form (kinetic energy in particles) to another (rest mass of matter). The same would go for dark matter if it was ever going to be created in an experiment.

Here's how my girlfriend feels when she listens to: The Smiths

Are you a male or female? Some girls are bigger than others

Describe yourself: These things take time

How do you feel? Heaven knows I'm miserable now

Describe where you currently live: Cemetery gates

If you could go anywhere, where would you go?: Take me back to dear old Blighty

Your favorite form of transportation: Punctured bicycle

Your best friend is: Hairdresser on fire

You and your best friends are: Half a person

What's the weather like? Golden lights

Favorite time of day: How soon is now?

If your life was a TV show, what would it be called?: Please, please, please, let med get what I want

What is life to you: Stretch out and wait

Your current relationship: Hand in glove

Your fear: Panic in the streets of London

What is the best advice you have to give? Shoplifters of the world, unite.

Thought for the Day: You just haven't earned it yet, baby

How I would like to die: Oscilliate Wildly

My soul's present condition: Still ill

My motto: Meat is murder

*dead

I kinda remebered that the The Reign of Chaos intro was awesome.

They should have put a Starcraft cinematic in the mix too, since it shows kind of a midpoint in animation quality between Warcraft 2 and 3.

I upvoted Westy's comment because it made me laugh, but I actually liked this. There's such a wealth of novel rhythms and so much skill behind it that I was continually excited to hear what he would do next.

But I too wouldn't be able to stand much more of it. In the end it is too sporadic and too little of a musical unity.

Interrupted is the word.

Now why on earth did they count to thirty?

*dead

More than just a bit tacky.

I feel duly chastised on the coffee point.

*dead

That's the problem, isn't it?

It probably won't work, but Lessig has adopted a strategy that at least seems to give it some small chance.

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.

I remember reading about this, and I am quite amazed. How does it take two hundred years to get rid of something unconstitutional from a constitution?

It's like the Norwegian blasphemy paragraph. We have a paragraph in our penal code that makes blasphemy an offense (yeah, Scandinavia can have bad laws too). Though it hasn't been used in ages, getting rid of it has turned out to be harder than we thought.

>> ^Lodurr:
I don't see the point to that definition of substance dualism. How much farther removed from "physical" can you get than existing in a separate, invisible dimension? All the statements substance dualism makes about consciousness can still be true in a scenario where consciousness is part of an extra-physical dimension.
I watched Dennett's talk, the salient point comes at the conclusion which is "free will exists in the sense that matters," which is to say "real" free will doesn't exist, and that the universe is still ultimately deterministic in his view.

I guess I misunderstood your point. I thought that your statement that "we can't presently percieve" something meant that we might be able to percieve it in the future. But then I don't see your point about how today's non-physical is tomorrow's physical. If we can percieve it, it's physical. If we in principle can't percieve it, I argue that it's irrelevant, because it can't affect our bodies.


You're basically right about Dennett. Consider, though, that so-called "real" free will would be indistinguishible from Dennett's kind of free will, since you can never reproduce an event exactly.