Just let the EFF compute the entropy in your browser fingerprint for ya.

What a dumb remark. The prediction, that the Triple Crown is an unlikely event, is correct. That this outcome happened to occur in our timeline is neither here nor there.

Using BarTab Heavy and the other BarTab addons to load and unload tabs in the background makes a huge difference to performance. So does using uBlock Origin instead of ABP. (And NoScript of course).

A terror suspect not linked to terrorism?

I think they mean terrorist NGOs like ISIS that aren't "foreign powers?" Or maybe it's for general FISA Court-approved warrants with no link to terror?

I think so too, but I also think that at this point there is overwhelming evidence that we are our physical bodies - our whole organism - and zero evidence for any rival proposition.

That's really just a guess, best. It appears highly likely that the "core person that you are" is your form. To put it another way, the statement "if I woke up a different person, I would still be the same person" is merely contradictory.

Again - this is hard to read as anything other than assertion, in this case motivated by feelings of apparent superiority over other people. (I don't mean to insult you at all, but to me the way that statement is written sounds like bluster).

Exactly! I tried to make the same point in this comment, which has apparently sparked a lively discussion.

Critically, the structure is spatiotemporally contiguous throughout these changes - which is totally unlike the transfer hypotheticals.

Again, this is just asserting the conclusion that the physical structure of the brain is unimportant, and then reasoning backwards from that conclusion.

I think what you're saying is akin to claiming that something without wheels, differentials or a steering column is still a "car" which "drives." It may be a highly efficient vehicle, but it's not going to "feel the same."

That's the point here - the mind isn't a homunculus inhabiting your head, which can simply get a new job managing a different theater. All evidence to date supports the materialist proposition that to radically alter the physical structure of the mind/brain would be to radically alter its subjective character as well.

I didn't say they would help, I said "we would find out" because the nuclear powers would undoubtedly try it.

Still, some asteroids are relatively loose agglomerations of rocks, so maybe in that case it would make a difference.

It's a non sequitor - we're talking about hypotheticals which feature entirely different physical structures, or similar physical structures composed of physically distinct sets of atoms, not single spatiotemporally connected sets of atoms. We are talking about instance identity (the "same" mind), not categorization.

You are begging the question, by simply assuming that human mental processes are exactly representable in entirely different physical structures.

Right - you're just guessing.

Isn't this just as true of any programmatically automated solution? Control software bugs/misfeatures have already caused various unintended consequences without any learning/AI components. E.g. that big Northeastern blackout a while back.

And isn't this just a general argument for not hooking up any shiny new control software (again, regardless of learning/AI capacity) to the nukes until after it's been thoroughly tested?

Very true, but it's common to see sensational explanations of the ANN, so it's a limitation I like to point out.

There is also the issue of fixed-size inputs (not just for ANN but for essentially all current statistical learning methods). There are some workarounds (like tiling with convolutional networks), but in general it's a pretty severe limitation that will require big advances in data reduction algorithms to overcome. Active Appearance Models have an ingenious solution, the "shape free patch," which could maybe be a template for other approaches. We'll also need to develop robust methods for handling real semantics, which is a prerequisite for most tasks we consider truly "intelligent."

Fair enough, but we aren't dealing with the belief that AI can in principle have such motivations, but the belief that any intelligence will have such motivations.

That wasn't supposed to be an argument, in and of itself. I think this "vessel" viewpoint is a kind of closet dualism often exhibited by self-proclaimed materialists when pop psychological notions aren't closely examined.

But this seems to rest on an assertion that it would be the same mind. Set aside whether or not it's possible in principle to "transfer" the intelligence to a new type of "vessel" and just consider the old teleportation problem: is the new copy "you?"

Again, that this is possible in principle is just an assertion. It is also possible that one's mental processes can by definition not be preserved in a silicon-based machine, so long as direct simulation is excluded. (I do think that if you simulate every atom in a brain using a physically correct simulation, the simulated brain would feel like a physical one "on the inside," all though this still leaves us with the "is it you" problem.)