I think it's more of a statement on the nature of intelligence. Many of the behaviors we view to be intelligence are really just emergent properties of iterative algorithms implemented by simple machines. We shouldn't assume intelligence holds some privileged status.

There was a fun paper a while back on how this could be explained by the use of memristors in a dynamically stable circuit. >> ^Sagemind:

So, does that prove intelligence or just the will to survive?!

She's saying we wear the party all over our bodies and faces
What allows me to speak in wild abstractions
The senseless killings gifts God gives us have no one to love them

It's the kind of thought that kills you twice on the way down
You might forget them but you're not nice they don't forget about you
How they claw me in my false or foster reflection
Is that my reflection in the Damascus play?
How they claw me in my foster or false reflection

You should call me sometime. I won't answer but, at least I'll know you care.
(How will you know it was me?)
You think I got caller ID?

I guess I should be happy for you, for your success and all that
But your fame ain't got nothing for us
I supported you kid, back when no one else did (oh yeah, oh yeah)
You know I waved your flag, back when no one else did
I just want things to be the way they used to be,
When you only set a place for me

The great chorus of my skull is choking on their dulcer tones
Ten lashes on the ass of anyone who even tries and
Heaven's patience glaring down at us filling your room with black b_tterflies

You don't have to try to steal no nothing from my heart
Because for you anything you want is always free
Send your freaky fantasies to my phone
Black Converse on and an ice cream cone
Now that I'm not a virgin to you you'll never walk alone
Far beyond the several years of shame
I live to make you call my name
(Call my name)

Guess I should be happy for you, for your success and all that
But your fame ain't got nothing for us
I was your booster babe, back when no one else cared (oh yeah, oh yeah)
You know I celebrated you (I'm hard for you girl),
Back when no one else even thought to
I just want things to be the way they used to be
When you only saved a seat for me
Come back! Come back!

I feel so at peace
Why is the sky karma
I think I'm the one I got from

@hpqp

I agree with you (I think). If I'm reading your post correctly you're saying that people shouldn't be able to say something reprehensible and then hide behind the "it's just a joke" shield to avoid criticism about what they said. CK Louis was right I think--most comedians have a hard time dealing with criticism. It's easier to attack the people who don't think the joke is funny by insisting they don't have a sense of humor than it is to admit your joke bombed.

I have no idea if things went down the way the blogger says they did, but when I heard what Tosh allegedly said, my first thought was that he crossed the line. I think rape is a valid topic to joke about but he was no longer joking about rape as an abstract concept, he was basically intimidating a member of the audience in order to shut her up so he could get on with his show. No, I don't think he was serious (if he really said it) but he certainly deserved to be criticized for the alleged intimidation.

The problem (as is amply demonstrated in this thread) is that the public debate got distracted by irrelevant 1st amendment rights hysteria, discussions of which topics were "appropriate" for comedy, what is or isn't offensive, etc. when really, like you said, the issue is whether or not Tosh used the implied threat of rape to silence a critic.

LOL... you're a good troll. Here's a game for you: please precisely define the distinction between sensory processes and cognitive processes, and how exactly DS sufferers lack the latter. Or were you just some armchair bullshitter?

Fair warning, if you really want to have this debate, I'm probably out of your league.

>> ^gorillaman:

>> ^dag:
I believe sentience is a gray scale that extends well into the animal kingdom.
You can judge the character of a person by how they treat those that are weaker and less capable.

I think there's an argument to be made for one or more 'sentience thresholds' where the sum of an advanced intellect's understanding of the world, sense of itself, and capacity for abstract thought places it in a very different sphere of mentality to even slightly less able minds.
It's obvious that there's a distinction between non-thinking objects and any thinking creature at all, which would be the first threshold; I claim that humanity, or perhaps only the best of humanity, has cracked another.
It's a fact that compared to humans, animal brains are disproportionately devoted to sensory processing, etc. rather than cognition; which places us orders of magnitude ahead of them in our particular province, even with brains of apparently similar complexity. So there's a real gap there, rather than a smooth progression.
We have animal brains with a little extra cognitive grey matter stapled on top. That little bit seems to make all the difference. It's exciting to think where we'll be when we're able to create a lot more cognition, either biologically or electronically.
Now all of this may not have direct implications for damaged human brains, but it informs our understanding of intelligence generally.
I feel that the error being made by say, vegetarians who claim that 'an animal has just as much right to exist as a person', and similarly sincere but misguided retard-guardians is that they fail to account for these extremely important distinctions.

Comment hidden because you are ignoring dag. (show it anyway)

Do you claim that there is a quantitative value of sentience? Are 100 chickens worth the life of a single human? Your rational argument breaks down into absurdity when followed to its ends. Better to err on the side of compassion and kindness towards living creatures where possible.
>> ^gorillaman:

>> ^dag:
I believe sentience is a gray scale that extends well into the animal kingdom.
You can judge the character of a person by how they treat those that are weaker and less capable.

I think there's an argument to be made for one or more 'sentience thresholds' where the sum of an advanced intellect's understanding of the world, sense of itself, and capacity for abstract thought places it in a very different sphere of mentality to even slightly less able minds.
It's obvious that there's a distinction between non-thinking objects and any thinking creature at all, which would be the first threshold; I claim that humanity, or perhaps only the best of humanity, has cracked another.
It's a fact that compared to humans, animal brains are disproportionately devoted to sensory processing, etc. rather than cognition; which places us orders of magnitude ahead of them in our particular province, even with brains of apparently similar complexity. So there's a real gap there, rather than a smooth progression.
We have animal brains with a little extra cognitive grey matter stapled on top. That little bit seems to make all the difference. It's exciting to think where we'll be when we're able to create a lot more cognition, either biologically or electronically.
Now all of this may not have direct implications for damaged human brains, but it informs our understanding of intelligence generally.
I feel that the error being made by say, vegetarians who claim that 'an animal has just as much right to exist as a person', and similarly sincere but misguided retard-guardians is that they fail to account for these extremely important distinctions.

>> ^dag:

I believe sentience is a gray scale that extends well into the animal kingdom.
You can judge the character of a person by how they treat those that are weaker and less capable.


I think there's an argument to be made for one or more 'sentience thresholds' where the sum of an advanced intellect's understanding of the world, sense of itself, and capacity for abstract thought places it in a very different sphere of mentality to even slightly less able minds.

It's obvious that there's a distinction between non-thinking objects and any thinking creature at all, which would be the first threshold; I claim that humanity, or perhaps only the best of humanity, has cracked another.

It's a fact that compared to humans, animal brains are disproportionately devoted to sensory processing, etc. rather than cognition; which places us orders of magnitude ahead of them in our particular province, even with brains of apparently similar complexity. So there's a real gap there, rather than a smooth progression.

We have animal brains with a little extra cognitive grey matter stapled on top. That little bit seems to make all the difference. It's exciting to think where we'll be when we're able to create a lot more cognition, either biologically or electronically.

Now all of this may not have direct implications for damaged human brains, but it informs our understanding of intelligence generally.

I feel that the error being made by say, vegetarians who claim that 'an animal has just as much right to exist as a person', and similarly sincere but misguided retard-guardians is that they fail to account for these extremely important distinctions.

>> ^ChaosEngine:

>> ^bcglorf:
So the moral is, it is absolutely time to panic.
Not just maybe, but absolutely time to panic.
Fortunately, he IS overstating the situation. Right from the very start he declares how stable the last 10k years have been, and that the last 100 have already broken all records seen over those 10k years. Go use google scholar and read Michael Mann's recent work on reconstructing the last 2k years. Mann is one of the leading scientists arguing that it is time to panic and things are getting bad very fast. His research is publicly available on google scholar for everyone to go and read.
If you can be bothered to go and read that before shouting me down as a denier, you will find the following in his research. That there is at least some evidence that on at least two occasions over the last 2k years, climate HAS been as warm or warmer than current.
I'm not saying it's all roses and that there is nothing to see here. I AM saying that if you go read the actual research you'll find a much more nuanced and less panic stricken assortment of facts than what is presented in this video.

Can you post a link to the page your talking about? I used google scholar, but Mann has published quite a few papers and I really don't have time to read them all.
That said, even if I read the paper, I'm not confident I'd understand it fully. From my limited research into climatology, it's a reasonably complex science. My problem is that I don't really have time to study all the theory around this.
And frankly, I shouldn't have to. I'm not a climatologist. No-one alive today can possibly hope to understand all science in every field. That's why we specialise. With a small amount of ego, I'm willing to say that most climatologists are worse programmers than I am, but that's ok too, 'cos that's not their field.
What I'm trying to say in my trademark, rambling, incoherent way is that I generally accept a scientific consensus (assuming it's been properly peer reviewed and so on). Fallacy of majority? Possibly. I'm willing to accept the possibility that there's a gifted climatologist out there who is desperately trying to get the rest of them to understand the crucial theory/evidence/algorithm they've missed, and it's all going to be ok. Hell, I hope there is, but it seems unlikely to me.
To apply Occams razor: which makes more sense?


You can see Mann's latest work here. Just don't stop with reading the abstract where he declares the reinforcement of his previous studies and findings. Go further down and look at the reconstruction of the last 2k years the article was built on. The green EIV line is the 'newer' statistical method recommended to him by statisticians that claimed his previous method was biased towards 0(minimized highs and lows). You can clearly see the EIV reconstruction shows multiple peaks in the past. More importantly though, look at the last 100 years on the graph. The bold red line is the instrumental record. It blots out most of the last 100 years, but if you look closely, you can see that none of the reconstructed lines spike away into scary land like the instrumental record. In fact, none of the reconstructed lines climb above where the EIV line has peaked multiple times in the past. To me that screams the need to look harder still at the probability that our methods for reconstruction aren't sensitive enough to pick up a short spike like what we know from the instrumental record is currently taking place. That doesn't prove spikes like the last 100 years are common, but it DOES call into serious question the claim that it's never happened before in the last 2k years. That final claim is the vital and key point between everyone panic and lets study this further to understand it fully.

>> ^maestro156:

>> ^heathen:
Wouldn't it make more sense to say that some infinite sets are more dense than others, rather than bigger?
Whether or not the numbers of an infinite set could theoretically be listed both sets are still infinite in size.
If you take the set of natural numbers (1, 2, 3, ...) and the set of integers (.. -2, -1, 0, 1, 2, ...), you will see that the infinite set of natural numbers is encompassed within the infinite set of integers. Thus the infinite set of integers is "bigger" by any measure.
If you prefer to look at the set of integers within the set of real numbers, you could reasonably use the term "denser" since there is an infinite and uncountable set between any given pair of integers, but bigger is still a reasonable term.


Not exactly, as you can pair up every integer with any natural number in a one to one relationship. Bigger usually always means "more of". There is no meaningful way to say that any set of numbers that can have a 1 to 1 relationship with any other set of numbers is larger. The fact that one set can eat up another set and still be of the same "magnitude" infinity is pretty amazing, but not really indicative of "size" in the typical sense. For instance, take the set of numbers infinite half's from 0-2, and the set of numbers from 0-1 inclusive of ends. So, you have

(0:2)0...1/4...1/2...3/4...1,...5/4...3/2...7/4...2

(0:1)0...1/8...1/4...3/8...1/2...5/8...3/4...7/8...1



Notice 2 things; one, every time you go and make a new set of halfs for the 0-2 set, it eats up all the similar numbers in the 0-1 set, however, set 2 will also create a new set that doesn't match up...ad infinitum. We didn't have to start at these particular halfs, this is just the list order I chose, there are infinite other sets with the same numbers but different orders. Also note, that the every number from the top set is a 1/2 multiple of the set on the bottom. Every number from set 1 can get a number in set 2 by way of multiplication by .5, the revere is true of the other set. In fact, if you don't include the end point for the set of numbers from 0-2, then 0-1 has more numbers in it than 0-2 because a one to one relationship can't be established for 1 (because in set 2, if you multiply 1 by 2 to get a number by our multiplication factor you get 2...which is not included!)...so the set of numbers from [0-1] is greater than the set of numbers from [0-2).

Infinity will drive you nuts! I have heard that the human minds has evolved to think to the number 7 without abstraction. Beyond 7, you venture into a realm for which your mind has no naturally evolved tools.

While this is an interesting discussion, I don't see the purpose of creating hard splits into three groups based on how you feel the abstraction of numbers should be thought of. There is most definitely room to hold aspects of the views of all three "groups" expressed here.

I'm sorry but I'm gonna love this and not give a shit about my reading of classical literature or going to abstract plays.

>> ^Trancecoach:

I'm not denying the existence of misogyny, but I do wonder why, if men are paid more then women, anyone would hire a man? Why not hire a woman in a man's place, pay them 80 cents on the dollar, and make a killing?

The use of the word if suggests that men being paid more than women might not really be happening. You then ask a question whose obvious answer would be "misogyny," as if this was some sort of refutation of the fact that pay discrimination exists.
>> ^Trancecoach:
I don't understand what you mean by accusing someone of misandry as a form of misogyny. You'll have to explain that to me.

Rachel says "it is factually true that women get paid less than men for doing equal work." You respond (in part) "the myth of male power only serves to further propagate both the misogyny and the misandry that are both rampant throughout the society"

Let's make this more abstract:

Rachel asserts that A is true, and cites data from studies to back it up.

You assert that perpetuating the falsehood A is harmful to society.

I am asserting that A really is true, and disputing it is harmful to society.
>> ^Trancecoach:
Personally, I found Warren Farrell's book, Why Men Earn More to be fairly illuminating with regards to these issues.

Does he have data that refutes A? Or does he just have some explanation for why A is happening that makes A seem morally acceptable, and that reversing A through legislation would be harmful to society?

Rachel (and I) always thought the anti-pay equality folks believed some form of the latter. Now they (and you) are implying they have the former. Implying that it is now an established fact that A is not true about the world we live in, and people who repeat A are spreading myths and lies either out of ignorance or misandry.

I'm saying that denying the truth of A is both a lie and dismissal of the legitimate concerns of women that amounts to a misogynist act.

And just to be explicit, Proposition A = Women get paid less than men for doing equal work.

I don't have time to waste on your ignorance any more, but just a few quick rebuttals should be sufficient to discredit your credibility.

First off, I'm not sure what you're trying to prove by this abstract:
http://www.annualreviews.org/doi/abs/10.1146/annurev.es.24.110193.001101

Quote: "Morphologists achieved much during that time, and none of their well supported phylogenies is overthrown by molecular data. So far, molecular sequences have contributed most significantly in areas where morphological data are inconclusive, deficient, nonexistent or poorly analyzed."

If anything it supports my point, but there are better sources out there. Which is why I chose to limit my literature sources to those that were at least after the year 2000. Why, you ask? Because the first bacterial genome was sequenced in 1995, about two years after that article. We've learned a lot since then, though, according to that abstract, even then they understood that molecular systematics were capable of elucidating many areas of the fossil record we didn't understand. Just read to the end of it.

I knew you would jump on the whole part where I conceded that it is not absolute agreement. Look, I took 30 seconds to write a sarcastic response on an internet forum. So what that I didn't bother to delve into the nuances of consensus trees and whatnot. Argue with the damn articles, not me.

You also just ignore it when I say that the fact that junk DNA has a function has nothing to do with it's evolutionary relevance and continue to claim otherwise without giving a reason. It is the relative mutation rates, not the functionality - maybe you didn't catch that the first time around.

Yada yada yada, I've got better things to do. Anyone who reads this little exchange can see your evident dishonesty and unwarranted extrapolation and that's all that matters. Because if someone is willing to plug their ears and yell loudly whenever something contradicts absolutely held beliefs like you are clearly willing to do, then there will be no convincing. This exchange is for those who are on the fence, and you're little display of anti-intellectualism speaks for itself even without all the scientific proof.

And trust me, I was a Christian. I was deriding salvation by grace as an arbitrary thing, doesn't mean I don't understand what you guys think.

>> ^AnimalsForCrackers:
Y'know, your concept of absolute nothingness doesn't actually exist, insofar as we can show it to exist, right? I mean, how would we? Material existence is what there is.

Yours is an abstraction, a theological/philosophical concept of the human mind, a thought experiment, in no way amenable to actual experiment or observation.

This assumes that there ever was or is such a thing as "absolute nothingness".


Directing you to a general reply to this, here:

http://videosift.com/video/Richard-Dawkins-and-Lawrence-Krauss-Something-from-Nothing?loadcomm=1#comment-1443305

>> ^AnimalsForCrackers:
I also don't see how positing a complex being as the cause of a supposedly simple beginning simplifies matters. At fucking all. You're simply slyly inserting god just beyond reach of humanity's current epistemological horizon. This begs the question, well, where did your god come from? It's a superfluous and unnecessary (not to mention completely evidenced) addition to the regress and reeks of special pleading/wishful thinking. It's crass and obvious and, quite frankly, fucking stupid.


I'll let John Lennox answer your questions:



>> ^AnimalsForCrackers:
I won't even address the arguments from DNA and fine-tuning, as the mental gymnastics required to leap even to the most generic of gods from either just blows my mind.


I didn't say they would necessarily prove any specific God as true, but rather, they are evidence that the Universe was created by a higher intelligence. It is more circumstantial evidence than direct proof, but establishing either would be a death blow to materialistic naturalism.

>> ^shinyblurry:

>> ^eric3579:

Blah, blah, blah... start watching at 11:30.
>> ^Deano:
I was wondering when you'd show up.
As for something from nothing look up quantum electrodynamics.
You obviously haven't watched this splendid video or have even a basic grasp of physics.
I covered these in my response to Gallowflak.

Y'know, your concept of absolute nothingness doesn't actually exist, insofar as we can show it to exist, right? I mean, how would we? Material existence is what there is.


Yours is an abstraction, a theological/philosophical concept of the human mind, a thought experiment, in no way amenable to actual experiment or observation.

I also don't see how positing a complex being as the cause of a supposedly simple beginning simplifies matters. At fucking all. You're simply slyly inserting god just beyond reach of humanity's current epistemological horizon. This begs the question, well, where did your god come from? It's a superfluous and unnecessary (not to mention completely evidenced) addition to the regress and reeks of special pleading/wishful thinking. It's crass and obvious and, quite frankly, fucking stupid.

I won't even address the arguments from DNA and fine-tuning, as the mental gymnastics required to leap even to the most generic of gods from either just blows my mind.

>> ^messenger:

Of course DNA determines everything. The difference is Neil is suggesting there's a 1% intelligence difference between us and chimps because there's a 1% difference in DNA, and that this ratio has a "direction", so all other changes in that "direction" would have equally significant impacts on our intelligence. @Enzoblue is saying that the development of human language is by far the most significant advantage caused by the 1% difference in DNA, and the advantage is much more than a mere 1%; an additional 1% along that "direction" wouldn't necessarily allow us to learn some other skill that would give us as great an advantage.
Personally, I think Neil's idea of the 1% difference being ratio-able (rational?) and describing it as having a "direction" is silly.>> ^vaire2ube:
I don't understand; The ability to have the capability for language comes from our genes. It is the reason, just as he says... what sort of sciences do you study where DNA isnt everything? it is.
>> ^Enzoblue:
To me it's a mistake to blame our advantage over animals on a 1 percent genetic difference and he seems to be stuck on this. The difference between us and animals is language - that ability to abstract, replacing things we see in the world with words that we can then manipulate in our own minds. This gives us consciousness. It's a big leap. It's not like you can then scale that, make a 2 percent difference, and think that it would double that leap.




Having just watched the video it was my impression that he's articulating an assumption, an assertion and is not claiming it as fact. It's closer to a thought experiment than making a definitive statement about the precise gaps between species and the subsequent implications.