lol! this might actually be the funniest response ive ever seen posted. i really wish i had mod points.

1)get a hot chick to put together jugsaw puzzles on youtube.

2)profit!

it has the worst weather!

we allow humans to decide to kill humans. If we could build an autonomous machine similar to Data, which we are forced to concede has sentience equal to our own, could it be allowed to make that judgement call? If not, wouldn't we then be sowing the seeds for the robot uprising right from the start by belittling it's judgement abilities compared to our own?

well then. you seem to have adequately addressed my gripe :)

my gripe about the first story wasn't the small sample size. It's the source of the sample. The scope of the question seemed framed in terms of US society. Who knows where you are sampling on mechanical turk?

ha ha! this was my first thought after reading the summary. I have no playstation. i'm sure as hell not going to be swayed into buying one just to watch movies and tv.

This is a good point. I wanted to make it. i'll just piggyback on your comment. Mechanical turk seems like a terrible place to try to quantify the views of a society. Unless, of course, you are trying to get statistics on the views of the society of mechanical turk.

I'm pretty sure all dimorphism in the human species is intrinsically sexual. Cultures can choose to draw lines wherever they wish.

zeno's paradox isn't quite the same. there's a difference between defining two points on a road and attempting to define all points between them. one is possible, the other is not. Further, first year calculus books will claim that there is no paradox there, just the wrong math.

The test subjects operated a robot arm with their finger. sometimes it would move in sync with them and poke them in the back. then they felt like they were poking themselves in the back. understandable. sometimes it was delayed. Then they felt like someone else was poking them in the back.

How is that a breakdown of your self cohesion processing? Something you aren't really controlling is just poking you in the back! Sure, you gave the input, but i expect your cohesion times out after a couple milliseconds. we couldn't function if we were trying to attribute every sensation we receive for 5 seconds after doing something as part of our actions.

I'm sure we've all had the experience of being poked in the back by a tree branch. Your brain forms a convincing description that someone is there until you turn around and see it's just a branch. that sounds more like what is being demonstrated here.

i didn't see any mention of a control where people were just randomly poked in the back.

In our experience, there's always a next question. I wouldn't call that a paradox. That's like saying driving down the road is a paradox because once you finish a mile, there's another mile.

If we can say for certainty that our universe was created in this quantum fluctuation we answered a question. It raised another question about what is fluctuating, but that question doesn't invalidate the first. We moved ahead.

Yeah, i didn't mean that we know they have consumed people. Just that there is a high probability that the largest of the big snakes are physically capable of swallowing a person. It likely wouldn't go well for the snake either. There are a number of verified stories of snakes of all sizes suffering after swallowing too large of a meal. That's what i find seriously concerning about this effort.

I also find it hard to believe that you could coax a snake into swallowing a guy in a big suit too. I've been bitten plenty of times by large snakes because i smelled like rat or rabbit. while they certainly would have been capable of then proceeding to swallow my hand, they instead realize it is not what they thought it was and release. They aren't that stupid.

yeah, i think it's easy for us to miss the importance of all the data our brains gather in childhood. Neuroplasticity be damned, i don't think it's the kind of database your brain is able to set up later either. I think best case scenario, a person who spent too much VR time in their formative years would experience the outside world much as we experience VR; not quite right. I think worst case scenario could go off the charts. At the very least, i don't think i would trust such a person behind the wheel of a car.

It's like the hipsters came along and said, "i'm not using the meta materials modern society is pushing on me, i'm only getting craft Goos-Hachen effect made the way my grandpa would make it. with dirt!"