I've added most of your sources to the TakeOnIt wiki debate:
"Is cryonics worthwhile?"
http://www.takeonit.com/question/318.aspx
The cryonics debate now has four sub debates:
Am I missing any major sub-debate?
I forget who brought this up--maybe zero_call? jhrandom?--but I think a good question is "How quickly does brain information decay (e.g. due to autolysis) after the heart stops and before preservative measures are taken?" If the answer is "very quickly" then cryonics in non-terminal-illness cases becomes much less effective.
Here's another one. When reading wikipedia on Chaitin's constant, I came across an article by Chaitin from 1956 (EDIT: oops, it's 2006) about the consequences of the constant (and its uncomputability) on the philosophy of math, that seems to me to just be completely wrongheaded, but for reasons I can't put my finger on. It really strikes the same chords in me that a lot of inflated talk about Godel's Second Incompleteness theorem strikes. (And indeed, as is obligatory, he mentions that too.) I searched on the title but didn't find any refutations. I wonder if anyone here has any comments on it.
I may be stretching the openness of the thread a little here, but I have an interesting mechanical engineering hobbyist project, and I have no mechanical aptitude. I figure some people around here might, and this might be interesting to them.
The Avacore CoreControl is a neat little device, based on very simple mechanical principles, that lets you exercise for longer and harder than you otherwise could, by cooling down your blood directly. It pulls a slight vacuum on your hand, and directly applies ice to the palm. The vacuum counteracts the vasocontriction effect of cold and makes the ice effective.
I'm mainly interested in building one because I play a lot of DDR, but anyone who gets annoyed with how quickly they get hot during exercise could use one.
I called the company, and they sell the device for $3000 dollars (and they were very rude to me when I suggested making hobbyist plans available), but given the simplicity of the principles, it should be easy to build one using stuff from a hardware store for under $200. I have a post about it on my blog here.
Neutral vote. I like the PEZ juxtaposition but 'arational' would fit better. A simply false assertion doesn't fit well with the irony.
As it was mocking bgrah's assertion, and bgrah used "unrational", and in my estimation his meaning was closer to "irrational" than "arational", I used the former. Perhaps using "unrational" would have been better, though.
If it's not utterly voluntary when committed, I don't class it as suicide.
I'm still unclear why you classify it as death at all. You end up surviving it.
I think you're thinking of a each copy as an individual. I'm thinking of the copies collectively as a tool used by an individual.
The difference between what you proposed and the sleeping pill scenario is that in the latter, there's never a situation where an individual is deprived of rights.
Ok, say you enter into a binding agreement forcing yourself to take a sleeping pill tomorrow. You have someone there to enforce it if necessary. The next day, you change your mind, and the person forces you to take the pill anyway. Have you been deprived of rights? (If it helps, substitute eating dessert, or gambling, or doing heroin for taking the pill.)
Ok, say you enter into a binding agreement forcing yourself to take a sleeping pill tomorrow.
I don't think any such agreement could be legally binding under current law, which is relevant since we're talking about rights.
How so? I wasn't spouting the usual greedy/fake reductionist cliches; I was talking about the paintings that look like a 3-year-old made a mess, yet get classified as art, and noting that an art class probably wouldn't convince me this is appropriate.
What specific criticism of that claim do you have?
You may be a good person to ask this question:
I was wondering if there was a function f(x, y, z) so that x and z represent the left and right sides of common mathematic operators and y represents the level of operation. So f(1, 2, 4) would be 1 + 4 and f(2, 2, 4) would be 2 * 4. Better versions of f(x, y, z) would have fewer end cases hardcoded into it.
The reason behind this is to handle operator levels greater than addition, multiplication, and exponents. The casual analysis from my grade school and undergrad level math shows the pattern that multiplication is repeated addition and exponents are repeated multiplication.
My quick attempts at coming up with such a function are spiraling into greater and greater complexities. I figured someone else has to have thought about this. Do you know of a place I can start reading up on ideas similar to this? Is what I am doing even plausible?
Quick thoughts based on me playing around:
Hyper operators. You can represent even bigger numbers with Conway chained arrow notation. Eliezer's 3^^^^3 is a form of hyper operator notation, where ^ is exponentiation, ^^ is tetration, ^^^ is pentation, etc.
If you've ever looked into really big numbers, you'll find info about Ackermann's function, which is trivially convertable to hyper notation. There's also Busy Beaver numbers, which grow faster than any computable function.
Sure it does -- Faithful reproductions give the shadowed portion the appropriate colors for matching how your brain would perceive a real-life shadowed portion of a scene.
Umm, that's not what I meant by "faithful reproductions", and I have a hard time understanding how you could have misunderstood me. Say you took a photograph using the exact visual input over some 70 square degrees of your visual field, and then compared the photograph to that same view, trying to control for all the relevant variables*. You seem to be saying that the photograph would show the shadows as darker, but I don't see how that's possible. I am familiar with the phenomenon, but I'm not sure where I go wrong in my thought experiment.
* photo correctly lit, held so that it subtends 70 square degrees of your visual field, with your head in the same place as the camera was, etc.
Well said (including your later comment about color constancy). Along the same lines, this is why cameras often show objects in shadows as blacked out -- because that's the actual image it's getting, and the image your own retinas get! It's just that your brain has cleverly subtracted out the impact of the shadow before presenting it to you, so you can still see significant contrast and colors in the shadowed objects.
Along the same lines, this is why cameras often show objects in shadows as blacked out -- because that's the actual image it's getting, and the image your own retinas get! It's just that your brain has cleverly subtracted out the impact of the shadow before presenting it to you
That doesn't explain why faithful reproductions of images with shadows don't prompt the same reinterpretation by your brain.
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I forget who brought this up--maybe zero_call? jhrandom?--but I think a good question is "How quickly does brain information decay (e.g. due to autolysis) after the heart stops and before preservative measures are taken?" If the answer is "very quickly" then cryonics in non-terminal-illness cases becomes much less effective.
I came across a few cites supporting the "quite a bit" answer in the "Cold War" article at Alcor (linked elsewhere on this thread).
There's more at the link.