I watch the personalities and, sad to say, make the weakest one my bitch. Once I do that then I'm on my way to acceptance. It's how they play, it's how I have to play.
No, this is not how "they" play, this is how you play and I find that highly disgusting.
As for respect, please. management doesn't give a shit about anybody, what makes you so special?
Good IT workers can leave and find other place with better management that actually cares about people. Even at these times, Competent IT workers are very hard to find...
From what I have heard and seen, auditors do a very lousy job. I very much hate the fact that they get a lot money while they are generally not responsible for the quality of their work.
On the other hand, it is clear that auditors can not find all possible problems, therefore it doesn't make sense to make them responsible for all incidents. This just would not work.
If you're serious about this, then release it under a Free software license.
I do not necessarily need the source code, but a technical description of the algorithms would be nice. I read most of TFA and it is quite shallow.
Visual sensation is what's going on in the brain. We don't know enough to speculate about it reasonably. End of story.
The information that it happens in the brain is not that much useful to understand it. It is a very interesting (and very old) problem we should try to solve. If we do not know enough we should try to learn more.
And if you want to make unreasonable speculations go ahead but leave me alone - I prefer science.
First, we should try to define the problem. I believe that qualia (although somebody would call this phenomenon differently) is key to defining consciousness. Once we have a correct definition we can start what you call "science". For me trying to define a problem is part of science. Don't get too distracted by the fact that many philosophers speak crap.
This is not end of story. We are at the very beginning.
If your brain were somehow rewired so that you see red as blue, then your brain would adapt to the change over time and you would start identifying red colors correctly again
You brain would adapt in the sense that you would start to associate (your subjective) blue with things like fruits, warmth, aggression (and other things not-rewired people do associate red color). Yes, you would adapt and start responding to colors correctly.
But would you see the red as red or blue? And what does it mean to "see red as red" anyway? It is not that easy as you might think, see qualia. These are "feelings" in their "raw form". Where do they arise from? People like D. Dennet argue they are just "illusions". But what does "illusion" means then (renaming the problem doesn't solve it). I can feel them [qualias], therefore I want to know what they are, be they called feelings, qualia or illusions.
Wow, long post. But you have not got the parent post right. Of course, brain is a quantum system. The same way as you car travels according to Einsteins special relativity. But I assume that your car moves at speeds where using Newtonian mechanics makes more sense.
The same holds for your brain, there is no evidence so far that its function can not be accurately described solely in the terms of electric potentials (no quantum mechanics involved).
In fact TFA is about modeling the brain as a relatively simple (although very large) electric circuit. Of course consciousness is still a mystery, but this doesn't prove that brain is a quantum system, there is probably something much deeper (information?) in play.
All right, we probably basically agree with each other
I found only two reasons to believe that other people are conscious (by which I mean they are not philosophical zombies or equivalently that they have qualias ["feelings"]):
The first argument would not convince me for machines (although it convinces me that at least mammals are conscious).
The second argument is quite problematic because of this damn "independently". Of course philosophers have coined the term independently of me, but I do not use it independently of them. Still, I believe I would have these feelings even if I didn't learned this concept.
So yes, I totally agree that a best way to assess whether someone or something is conscious is simply to ask the "right questions" (preferably the test subject was never exposed to notions like feelings, qualia and consciousness before). I just didn't called this "Turing test" (which is on one side too strict and on the other side can be cheated surprisingly easily), but it is just a terminology.
OK, the "weakness" section is irrelevant. But it is still a valid point that Turing test doesn't test for consciousness.
The problem is that consciousness is subjective "by definition" (of course we do not have a proper definition), which makes objective testing difficult at least.
The only test I can think of is this one: I an AI can independently (by introspection) come to a notion equivalent to "consciousness" (or better yet "qualia") it probably has these (subjective) traits.
"Red" is what your parents told you it is. A name arbitrarily assigned to a specific visual sensation, which is defined by the physical makeup of your eye.
Yes, but the fundemantal qeustion is: What is this "visual sensation"? In other words: What is qualia?
Otherwise, I do agree with you, you parent post is mostly gibberish.
I am really tired of this. Some blogger/journalist shares with us his ingenious thoughts what is Linux doing wrong and how it can get better. The crowd disagrees, discussion under the blog/article turns to flameware and nothing is accomplished.
The blogger/journalist is angry that the crowd didn't agreed and developers didn't "fixed" the "obvious" failures he has pointed out. So he writes another blog/article how "these Linux guys" do not like critics.
Dear blogger/journalist, everyone "has great ideas" and everyone "knows how to fix the world". But at the end of the day it is the doers who change the world while nobody cares about blogs.
So next time please, either spend money for some commercial distro and write your suggestions/criticism to them or keep using your free of charge Ubuntu (at least it seems according to TFA that this is what you were using) and help the community to improve the product, there are plenty of tasks even for non-programmers. But do not keep saying "they" should improve that, "they" should listen to my criticism...
"What man has done, man can aspire to do." -- Jerry Pournelle, about space flight
