Caledonian--You forget that in the first encounter with the Borg, they were saved by a shameless deus ex, in which an established character (Q) was made to do openly what writers normally do by contrivance. Don't know whether it's good writing, but it's not as bad as some of the "three thousand, seven hundred and twenty to one!" successes that appear in fiction.
I'll have to give it a try, though I kind of expect to be disappointed. It's ridiculously hard to work through the impact a new technology would really have on society--just remember your own example of transmitting pictures of lesbian sex by pretending they are made of numbers. But maybe I'll be surprised.
Eliezer: Thanks for the link, man.
Silas & Patrick: Don't think this applies only to liberal denominations. If you accept Dennett's idea that even fundamentalism is less about ordinary belief than belief in belief, there's the potential for common knowledge to disrupt religion's function as belief in belief. But it's more obvious in liberal religion.
Steven: Thanks for correcting my terminology. I was doing my best to follow Pinker's usage, but was unsure of this point.
Eliezer--
In principle, it seems like AI should be possible. Yet what reason do we have to think we will work it out on any time frame worth discussing? It's worth reflecting on what the holy grail of AI seems to be: creating something that combines the best of human and machine intelligence. This goal only makes sense unless you think they are two very different things. And the differences run deeper than that. We have:
Different driving forces in development: gene survival vs. specific goals of thinking humans Different design styles: a blind watchmaker no...
But if you followed the physics and anti-Zombie sequences, it should now seem a lot more plausible, that whatever preserves the pattern of synapses, preserves as much of "you" as is preserved from one night's sleep to morning's waking.
Part of the problem here, though, is we don't even have proof-of-concept. We know the freezing process damages the brain, or else we'd already be able to revive people, no problem. Being complicated, the brain tends to get complicated in damaged ways. In spite of our best efforts to provide effective treatments f...
I find this post interesting, because I wonder whether you really have periods where you can't work and therefore must do other things, or whether the other things get in the way of working. My default assumption is that website browsing keeps me from getting work done, because finding a cool website is instant gratification while serious work involves delayed gratification. Similarly, I'm doing national novel writing month right now, and I found my most productive fifteen minutes were when a friend said, out of nowhere, "want to see who can do the mo... (read more)