Goodbye timezones then. It'll be noon where you are, and 12:05 in the next city over. That'll be fun.

My post wasn't intended to be more about consistency than spying in general. If you're ok with our government spying on any foreigners for any reason, then you must be ok with foreign governments spying on us for any reason, at least if you want to be able to claim your argument is based on some fundamental concept of right and wrong and not just "I want the world to revolve around me."

We should be spying on nations, organizations, and people who are a direct physical threat to the safety of our country, and I would expect and be fine with other countries doing the same. We should have a military that will protect our country from those physical threats as well, as should every other country. Just because I disagree with many of the people our agencies spy on doesn't mean I want our spies gone altogether, I just want them to be focused only on the people who are out to cause us harm.

More to my original point, if I am not planning harm against Russia or France, I would say it is immoral for them to spy on me. On the other hand, if I were planning an attack against those countries, I may not like them spying on me, but it would be hard to argue that it is immoral for them to do so.

How does spying on friendly nations ensure our security? That is the job of the National Security Agency, isn't it? To ensure our security? Seems to me that pissing off our allies would do more to threaten our security than spying on them would do to help it.

So your ok with Russia, China, and France spying on you? If that's not ok, then it's either not ok for us to do it, or your argument that them spying and us spying are similar on a moral level is invalid.

They believe it's legal? What does that have to do with anything when writing a law? How about deciding if it's right? How about, "Does this push us closer to a police state?"

Instead of asking "How can we instill public confidence?", how about they ask, "How can we prevent our intelligence agencies from enabling tyranny?" or "What are the consequences of allowing this data collection if a future presidential administration decides to significantly oppress the public?"

Another good question they should ask is "What happened to needing to get a warrant issued based 'upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched'?"

Didn't I reply to laie_techie? That's how the thread appears to me, and what I intended. I was trying to argue with his claim that "Drugs which cause hallucinations put others at risk."

I've heard stories and seen news reports of people causing problems while tripping, but out of the hundred or so times I've tripped with people I've never witnessed it.

I just hate it when people suggest that psychedelics are bad or should be illegal. I think pretty much everyone could stand to gain something from tripping at least once. Once weed gains widespread acceptance, I'd like to see a push for legitimizing psychedelics.

Have you ever tried a hallucinogen? I don't think you understand what their actual effects. Granted hallucinogen is a very broad term, but the common psychedelics like LSD and psilocin certainly don't tend to put people in a mindset where they are likely to be a threat to others. And certainly not to the extent of alcohol, which is known to cause aggression and impulsivity, a pretty risky combination.

When's the last time you've heard of someone being violent or harming others due to alcohol vs hallucinogens? I've seen plenty of people causing problems because they're drunk. I've never seen anyone causing problems because they are tripping.

Think about what it means to be conscious. Consciousness is the integration of all of your sensory input and your memories into a singular subjective experience.

Right now you are sitting in a chair in front of a computer reading English text. To have your conscious experience at this moment you are integrating your knowledge of where you are at this moment, that you are sitting in a chair in front of a computer, your knowledge of what Slashdot is and that the text you are reading is a comment by another user, the concept of what a user is - that it's another person somewhere else in the world, the parts of your brain that recognize text and processes English into thoughts, your memories/knowledge of the concept of consciousness, your awareness that you yourself are conscious, and many other things all at once. All of those things are integrated into your singular conscious experience.

Compare this to something non-conscious, like a reflex. When the doctor hits your knee cap and your leg moves, you aren't integrating the feeling of the object hitting your leg with any memories or objectives. You don't "want" to move your leg, it just happens, unconsciously.

Also think of the way unconscious thoughts "bubble up" into consciousness. Scientists have shown that using brain scans they can predict what decision a person will make before the person even consciously knows. This is because the scientists are taking readings from the part of the brain that is responsible for making that decision before the results of that process get sent back to the part of the brain that kicked off that processes and to the rest of the brain that's responsible for acting upon that decision.

When you really get down to it and analyze it, everything that you would consider a conscious experience necessarily involves the coordination of many distinct parts of your mind. It's no coincidence that the parts of the brain that have been shown to be heavily involved with the subjective experience of consciousness are the the parts that are highly connected to many other parts of the brain.

As far as the strange possibilities for any complex system having consciousness, I fail to see how that should preclude a definition of consciousness involving systems and complexity. Just because the idea of any sufficiently complex system being conscious is bizarre from the conventional understanding of consciousness doesn't mean it's wrong. I think it's entirely plausible that any system with sufficient feedback loops and integration between components could be considered conscious. That's not to say that such a system would be necessarily sentient or deserve rights.

I think what this comes down to is agreeing upon a definition of consciousness and coming up with testable qualities that could be used to confirm consciousness. I think that "A system capable of integrating disparate sensory and past experience into a continuous singular whole" is a good start for a definition of consciousness that doesn't require any kind of non-material entities such as a soul and doesn't necessarily involve subjectivity; simply come up with some tests that could only be completed if the system is capable of such integration. Such a definition would certainly apply to humans and most other animals of higher cognitive abilities.

Some other interesting food for thought: Think about the way companies interact with the outside world and the way they build off past experiences. I wouldn't consider it to be too crazy of a notion that large organizations of people display some level of consciousness.

I am not a neuroscientist, but I have given much thought to what makes me conscious and how other animals can be conscious, albeit on a different level than us, and this is pretty much exactly the conclusion I came to. That consciousness involves the coherent interconnectedness of distinct subsystems. I'm glad to see this topic being discussed, and I'd love to hear other people's opinions of this definition of consciousness and it's implications.

I don't understand this mentality. I would say that him releasing the information he did means that he is willing to go to jail or be killed for what he believes in. If he wasn't willing to have that be an option, then he would have kept the info to himself.

Soldiers are, in theory, willing to die for their country. That certainly doesn't mean they purposely go run into the line of fire, and anyone who would suggest that a soldier need to do so in order to prove they're "willing to die for their country" would be ridiculed.

Being willing to suffer the extreme consequences of your actions in no way precludes attempting to avoid those consequences. Unless your cause has something significant to gain by making yourself a martyr, odds are you're of more use alive and free.

Also, would you rather people not expose crime, corruption, and abuse of power if they aren't willing to go full martyr right after their "one-hit-wonder"? If you had the info Snowden did, you probably wouldn't even be brave enough to release it to the public, much less hand yourself right over to the government whose corruption your just exposed.

The same way you win anyone else's hearts and minds. These are people you're talking about, not machines programmed to destroy anyone who's different. If we take the high road, and they can see that and they see the benefits of peace and tolerance from our example, a lot of them would change. Probably not all of them, but enough that we wouldn't have to fight huge wars.

Besides, most people in the middle east don't have a "devout faith [that] tells them that anyone who doesn't believe the same way should be killed." any more than Christian Americans have a devout faith that tells them that homosexuals, blasphemers, and adulterers should be killed. Sure there are a lot of islamic fanatics in the middle east, but you're buying way to much into the propaganda if you believe most people over there are like that. And as I argued above, even fanatics have have their minds changed.

When you make it into an "us vs them" fight, of course they're going to be on their own side (against us), you're forcing their hand.

You don't see how the environment could possibly have an effect upon the behavior of the people within it? You don't think that being brought up around criminals will make a person more likely to be a criminal than being brought up around law-abiding people? I've never beaten anyone up while drunk, but I still understand that alcohol can have the effect of making people prone to violence. Have you ever played the lottery and lost? Is that definitive proof to you that *no one* must win? Do you understand how statistics work?

Or do you just not understand the difference between explanations and excuses. No one cries foul when we explain why a plane crashed due to faulty parts or lack of maintenance. Things happen for reasons. It's not like there are just "bad" people who do "bad" things simply because that's their nature without any reason or cause for it to be so. Explanations aren't necessarily justifications or excuses; they can be, but they aren't inherently. Explanations are useful for preventing things from reoccurring.

If lead poisoning truely is a cause for increased violence, wouldn't you rather we know that and take action to mitigate that risk rather than just putting our fingers in our ears and shouting "No excuses! Those are just bad people!"

People are highly complex, but we're still products of the same deterministic universe as everything else. Unless you believe that people somehow transcend the causality of physics, your argument is completely nonsensical.

Did you really just argue that food products deserve the same rights against discrimination as humans?

Yes, let's condition our children to be treated like cattle. I'm sure that will do wonders for our free society!

Do you also think we should prohibit alcohol sales? Alcohol's negative effects on society are extremely plain to see. Society would be better off as a whole if people were allowed to use marijuana as an alternative to alcohol.

Besides, what authority does anyone have to tell another what they can and cannot do with their own bodies and minds? If someone wants to get high with friends in the privacy of their own home, what justification do you have to stop them? And yes, this same argument applies to all drugs. Think critically about it. The freedom and right to use drugs is intertwined in the freedom and right to manipulate your own mind and exert control over your mental processes.

And in what way are weed smokers inherently in need of help? Micheal Phelps and Carl Sagan were just pot smoking losers in your eyes? The 20-30% of college students who smoke marijuana on a regular basis are pitiful druggies who will never amount to anything without an intervention? As an openly pot smoking software engineer, I have met a great many people who are intelligent, successful, and reputable and happen to enjoy smoking weed.

It's not for everyone - I've seen people who get panic attacks from it and others who seriously can't think at all on it despite regular use - but many people can use marijuana responsibly and without problems. There is no reason they should be prevented from doing so. And as such, there should be a regulated, legal market for acquiring marijuana. Otherwise you are unjustifiably preventing people from an action they have every right to partake in, funneling billions of dollars to organized crime, fueling the distrust between a large portion of the population and the police, reducing respect for the rule of law, and putting distribution of the substance in the hands of people who don't follow health regulations or check IDs.

And what are your tolerance levels and experience with both substances?

As someone who rarely drinks, I notice significant (not huge, but significant) impairment of my coordination, response time, and thinking ability after just a single beer.

On the other hand, I smoke weed (actually, mostly hash oil - concentrated cannabinoids) on a daily basis and notice no impairment at all from a single hit of weed. After a whole bowl to myself (or a dab of oil) my reaction time can go down a little, and thinking can be slightly slower, but not as much as a single beer will do. It takes a lot of weed to significantly fuck with my coordination. In fact, the main driving related effect I get from weed is that it calms me down; I drive slower, less aggressively, and don't get as stressed by things like traffic and slow/bad drivers.