DavidPlumpton

It seems possible that soon there may be a cure for colourblindness. The Mary's Room thought experiment attempts to pin down something about the nature of qualia in a contrived but similar situation, but my feeling is that the actual result of such an experiment would not be obvious. Would...

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/rational-and-irrational-thought-the-thinking-that-iq-tests-miss/

Overview In "The Generalized Anti-Zombie Principle" Eliezer mentioned that one aspect of consciousness is that it can affect the world, e.g. by making us say out loud "I feel conscious", or deciding to read (or write) this article. However my current working hypothesis is that consciousness is a feature of...

In Zombies! Zombies? Eliezer mentions that one aspect of consciousness is that it can causally affect the real world, e.g. cause you to say "I feel conscious right now", or result in me typing out these words. Even if a generally accepted mechanism of consciousness has not been found yet...

Here's a great article by Paul Allen about why the singularity won't happen anytime soon. Basically a lot of the things we do are just not amenable to awesome looking exponential graphs.

Back in the 1990s I came across a site describing a plan for returning to the moon via privately funded enterprise. They presented a Reference Mission, a timeline (raise some money now, design the hardware, build the hardware, hire a launch vehicle, get to the moon, sell the movie rights)...

To me the following points seem hard to argue against: 1. Oil is harder and harder to find every year (we already took the easy stuff, nobody finds super-giant fields anymore) 2. The peak production year was 2005 with 73.7 million barrels produced 3. The amount of oil produced each...