Not likely! While I don't really want to go through the exact details of it (I've had hilariously long and protracted conversations about this before), liquid water and the chemistry of the common non-metals (hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, and carbon) at temperatures where water is liquid have some fairly special properties that make them really well-suited to giving rise to life. Ammonia instead of water seems possible, but a few sci-fi staples like silicon-based lifeforms are extremely unlikely—and given the fickleness of what we know about abiogenesis, it's likely that any emergent life that starts off using anything unfamiliar will optimize toward something more similar to what we have. Strange things might be possible, but it's pretty likely alien life will be... compostable (if not edible) by us Earthlings.

Groundhog Day isn't a parable for that at all—Bill Murray keeps his knowledge of the universe through each iteration of the day, and is shaped by his experiences. In fact, it agrees with the alternative, as he is able to predict the behaviours of absolutely everyone every single time, as they have no knowledge of subsequent events. They have no innate randomness; they are completely deterministic.

Are you sure? Consider a poem. The best formalist poetry (not counting free-form poetry) fits an incredible number of very difficult constraints and yet creates an intricate image without apparent effort. If that poem is then labelled with its metre by someone who understands that metre, and then you try to reproduce the same beauty and find you cannot, then that frustration commands a much higher respect for the author than merely witnessing the poem's beauty from afar (perhaps, for our metaphor's sake, in a language you don't even understand, thus making it nothing more than beautiful gibberish) and having no further insight into how it works.

I, for one, definitely prefer marvelling at the beauty of how something works and how intricate its assembly is, not just the image it creates from afar. That image is merely an illusion; more a part of your imagination and expectations than of the thing itself.

I don't think Chrome uses my Ubuntu keystore. It never asks for a password when opening Chrome, and it never requested access to the keystore. I'm using 12.04.

An understandable trepidation. Alas, I can't exactly mod you up. Good luck!

Godel set out an ontological proof for the existence of God which, like the earlier Saint Anselm proof that he built his on, boils down to "God exists because he is good, and good things must exist." In the Anselm proof, the 'good' quality is "greatness;" in Godel's, it's (moral) "positiveness." Such ontological proofs categorically rely on premises that are incompatible with empirical realism, and are ultimately circular. (Which is fairly ironic, as Descartes himself proposed one.)

I don't think it's fair to characterise his opinion of set logic as being a "failure," either; his theorems established limitations on what it could describe, and as a result helped precipitate the end of positivism, but to have the conviction to pursue such ideas he must have seen set theory as incomplete and accepted it that way to begin with. It's not that he thought it was a failure, it's that other people felt it was a failure after he showed them the truth about what it could and could not do. Gottlob Frege, Bertrand Russell, and many other prominent logicians had already been doing this for thirty years when Godel's big works were contributed.

He definitely was a little crazy, though—he starved to death, weighing less than half his healthy weight, obsessively paranoid that someone was trying to poison him.

As far as the physical laws of the universe go—keep in mind that the impact on science of Godel's work has been the acceptance that we may not know everything about the universe because we cannot detect it. If, once technology has reached its absolute maximum, we still cannot detect a phenomenon, then in all likelihood it will be something that does not affect us—otherwise we'd be able to detect its effect!

As far as we know, the human mind doesn't depend on any of that stuff, though. There's enough mystery about how the brain works, and we're making enough headway in figuring it out, that at present we're not even sure the quantum randomness implied by this weird story is required.

Remember, the universe is plenty capable of being beautiful even when it isn't inexplicable.

I think you're misunderstanding my use of the word "mechanism" here. I'm not saying there are fixed gears and circuits that explain how we work (there quite obviously aren't!), only that there are patterns, pathways, and systems behind the brain and hence the mind. There is a way in which the mind works, it's not some magic supernatural black box instilled by some indecisive buffoon on a cloud.

I'm a little weirded out by the "near-uniform" part, though. Do you truly believe that, placed in a situation with no new knowledge, you would consistently make significantly different choices? Most decisions are the results of our experiences and our immediate concerns; at best, the maximum variability in the outcome occurs when we fail to think things through. But as with catching your balance when you slip, it has been greatly beneficial to evolution to try to avoid screwing up (Hence why Larry Niven's contribution to the Crosstime series is bullshit.)

Granted, there is a tiny spot in our model of how the central nervous system works to allow for quantum randomness to interfere with otherwise completely deterministic decision-making (the transposon activity we discovered a couple years ago), but I personally would argue most arbitrary decisions come from reflecting on forgotten knowledge or memories, a little like "casting the runes" over uninitialized RAM to get a random number. (An example: what is the most random-sounding two-digit number you can think of, and why?)

I think you may be drawing unintended semantic distinctions—I would not say that a "process" of evolution would be any different than a "mechanism." It happens, it happens in a way, that way is predictable. (Excepting of course for the stochastic realities of quantum randomness.) I did not mean to suggest there is some agent picking the exact direction of evolution, only that, if an organism's functioning is not based around some mechanism whose behaviour is primarily predictable, then evolution has nothing to optimize, and would be impossible.

Absolutely; I'm saying that although the non-physical component of our humanity must obey the laws of the universe (i.e. that there's no soul), that's no excuse for assuming we're dumb, instinctual creatures; the "linoleic acid pheromone romance" hypothesis utterly conflicts with the rest of what we know about how the mind and brain works. It is not wise to shave with Occam's razor without illumination!

But there are mechanisms for learning; mechanisms we know must exist and, to some extent, even understand. The subtleties in them form the foundation of who we are when we are conceived, and interplay with our experiences as life continues. They are the tie-breakers that prevent us from being completely at the mercy of our situations, and what ties us to our parents even if we have not met them.

What these people do is claim there is nothing more, and it is obvious they have no knowledge of cognitive science (or possibly other people). That is self-evidently wrong. But there's nothing inhuman about being a machine if that machine can learn, grow, and discover the universe. Would you deny personhood to an artificial intelligence with the same potential?

These are distinctions that, as a Canadian from the east, I was not aware of. So noted!

Welp. Mark that one as torpedoed. The really aggressive "doesn't require cookies!" tracking/ad services rely on stuff like Panopticlick's tricks, I'm pretty sure.

I wouldn't go so far as to say we're not machines at all, just that we're not simple machines; ultimately, everything must have a comprehensible mechanism, or evolution cannot function. Possibly that's what you meant, but I just want to underscore that my concern is that there's a profound amount of functional reduction going on because of a shortsighted, overly-analytical mindset: the authors are looking at a single brick with a bit of mortar on it and assuming the brick belongs to a barbecue pit, when we know there's a skyscraper sitting right in front of them. This is not only bad psychology but bad behaviourism—even B. F. Skinner's radical reductions of human activities came with the caveat that he was too humble to speculate on the underlying reasons for the causal links he observed.