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Eliezer destroys the dreams of millions of people
That seems naive. Why do you think ths argument would convince someone who meditates and has his spiritual experiences?
I said that with a humor. But as there are a lot of people who believe in dragons, who are on the supernatural end of the scale, there are rational people who are on the opposite end of the scale AND there are a lot of people in the middle. They are partially rational and partially they can believe that e.g. by practicing meditation or some other practices they may achieve SUPERNATURAL abilities. So Eliezer's post may convince some of them to abandone their "dreams" of supernatural. Sayint this I don't mean that meditation or other practices are irrational and bad, things are not black and white :)
In response to
Psychic Powers
The conclusion is rather strong one, Eliezer destroys the dreams of millions of people who are reading books about meditation, mind-control and other stuff. But this conclusion is stated at the end of the sequence which was preparing us all the way through - so it is good and gives a good chance to reflect over it.
In response to
Zombies: The Movie
Personally I enjoyed the movie :) Just because I am consciousness ))
In response to
GAZP vs. GLUT
One more thing. Suppose there is a GLUT and I can talk to it. So I can ask a question: "GLUT, is there a question which you cannot answer?" What do you guys think the GLUT will tell me?
In response to
GAZP vs. GLUT
Probably I am not right, but it looks to me that consciousness can go on without any "inputs" and "outputs". If I sit in the dark room alone and think about some sort of problem then I neither taking any inputs at that moment and nor generating any output uless I decide to think aloud :) So if you believe I am not a zombie then I am consciousness regardless if there are any inputs/outputs.
Nope, because the notion of "zombie" here is a weird one cooked up by philosophers with the property that whether someone is a zombie has no effect at all on how they behave. So there would be exactly the same amount of chaos as before the switch or lorry had its effect.
In response to
The Generalized Anti-Zombie Principle
And if the tiny gravitational pull of the littlw 1 gram switch can turn off the consciousness then imagine what would happen in the crowded city when a large lorry loaded with 20 tons of lead moved accross that city :) People will go zombiiiiiies and that would be a total chaos.
Now I know who is Scott Aaronson, so your comment was useful.
Honestly I don't know who Scott Aaronson is, so hard to say for me. And regarding that science cannot explain consciousness - it probably cannot explain it exhaustively YET. But this was the same with a lot of other things in the past, which were not explainable at some moment in time but were explained completely clear after some work has been done. So be patient, science will explain consciousness some day as well (at least I want to believe in this).
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Thanks for this explanation. I've tried to read it some time ago but have not really coped with it. Now after reading again it was interesting for me to check if this is explained on some other internet sources and how exactly. So I checked one of the first top search results and here is what I saw: http://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/91695/double-slit-expirement-fundamentals-half-silvered-mirror-version
There some guy asked for an explanation of this experiment and answers are all about optical refraction and phase shifting, which honestly speaking would not clarify the matters for me. Now this is all ok about theory and numbers. But I tried to google some videos which will show this in action and found that actually it is not really easy (or not possible at all) to set up all these pieces and see it in action. For example, in this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M6y_igUpyCg guys tries to set it up and does not succeed. Is that about he is usint a laser which in fact transmitts a bit different photons every time? Could you recommend some video where this experiment can be seen in action?