If mathematical details matter, they should be specified (or be clear anyway - e.g. you don't define "real numbers" in a physics paper). Physics can need some domain knowledge, but knowledge alone is completely useless - you need the same general reasoning ability as in mathematics to do anything (both for experimental and theoretical physics).
In fact, many physics problems get solved by reducing them to mathematical problems (that is the physics part) and then solving those mathematical problems (still considered as "solving the physical problem", but purely mathematics)
Add physics to that.
I guess we can answer question 2 under the condition that the majority of humans falls under the definition of conscious, and we don't require 24/7 consciousness from the brain emulation.
I cannot imagine how moving sodium and potassium ions could lead to consciousness if moving electrons cannot.
In addition, I think consciousness is a gradual process. There is no single point in the development of a human where it suddenly gets conscious, and in the same way, there was no conscious child of two non-conscious parents.
"There are a million reasons to learn a foreign language, but it'd be a very costly way to improve rationality."
It is a "free" side-effect if you belong to the 95% of the world population without English as native language.
So much room for improvements in healthcare even without new stuff :).
I think it arises at the point where you did not even consider the alternative. This is a very subjective thing, of course.
If the probability of the actual outcome was really negligible (with a perfect evaluation by the prediction-maker), this should not influence the evaluation of predictions in a significant way. If the probability was significant, it is likely that the prediction-maker considered it. If not, count it as false.
I think (5.) can give a significant difference (together with 1 and 2 - I would not expect so much trouble from 3 and 4). Imagine a series of 4 statements, where the last three basically require the first one. If all 4 are correct, it is easy to check every single statement, giving 4 correct predictions. But if the first one is wrong - and the others have to be wrong as consequence - Kurzweil might count the whole block as one wrong prediction.
For predictions judged by multiple volunteers, it might be interesting to check how much they deviate from each other. This gives some insight how important (1.) to (3.) are. satt looked at that, but I don't know which conclusion we can draw from that.
That might sound weird, but do we have any evidence that our time follows the standard numbers (or a continuous version of them) only? Is it even possible to get such evidence? Maybe our turing machine (looking for contradictions in PA) stops at -2* - "we" cannot see it, as "we" are on the standard numbers only, experiencing only effects of previous standard numbers.
Hmm, the whole statement is ' "is false when preceded by its quotation" is false when preceded by its quotation.', and it is not preceded by its quotation.