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Comment Re:They got my email (Score 1) 268

CAPTCHA's do not now or will ever work. Its trivially easy to circumvent them by paying a sweatshop of kids in a 3rd world country to solve them or by forwarding them to a "view porn by completing CAPTCHA" service. CAPTCHA's cannot ever work, so they only serve to keep away the small time bots or to annoy legitimate users.

Comment Re:Software Projects vs. Traditional Projects (Score 1) 140

If I could, I'd vote you up. People have this illusion that software is unique or different. Bullshit. Software is buggy because its become accepted. Once bad quality is something that people will not to tolerate, it will get better. I agree completely with your post and have thought this for quite a while now. Congrats for a good post!

Comment Re:No... not buying this at all (Score 1) 295

I would say it means that the software (the thought processes) has BSOD'd and the user (the soul) is temporarily locked out. After a quick reboot, the soul is back in control and you wake up, or whatever. The biggest mistake God ever made was to allow Microsoft to make our Operating System.. I'm sure most of our personality and mental disorders are really just driver bugs...

Comment Re:No... not buying this at all (Score 1) 295

I agree with most of what you said, but do have a few comments:

I know that I'm me and I agree that this sense of self is a product of my function and experience. But since I'm (and I assume everyone else is too) aware (that is, my my function and experience contain references to itself and the environment around me), then this poses a small problem: if I duplicate my function on different hardware (another body), will this merge into my current function? Logically, no, there would now exist two instances of the one function and unless both are subject to the exact same external forces, the experiences would quickly diverge - meaning there are now two different people with two separate awarenesses. Since my original awareness exists separately from the new one, then that is not me.
For this reason, I do not believe that the immortality depicted in some science fiction (cloned body with memories implanted, which I believe could potentially be possible in the distant future) would ever actually work - because that clone is not me, that clone has its own sense of "self", I'll still die when my original body dies, theres just someone else alive with the same memories and mannerisms as me, but its not me, its a copy.

Continuing on this train of thought, it makes sense, to me, that by limiting the function (perhaps by restricting its inputs or by removing it altogether) that you can end up with Zombie bodies. I'm too tired to think about what implications this may or may not have, however.

Comment Re:No... not buying this at all (Score 1) 295

I don't think it matters. This is "hacking" the biological aspects of the brain/body/implants, nothing to do with the soul, if it exists.

My housemate just came back from the Berlin BCI Workshop and he informs me that BCI has made some huge advancements. I don't think it will be long before this stuff is real. They already have monkeys remote controlling robots with their brains, are already able to extract images from brain readings and are already able to detect stimuli with good accuracy (my housemates own p300 and other reaction detection algorithm is approx. 94% accurate; I've seen it!) so I reckon give it maybe five to ten years and BCI will be fairly common.

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