mind = blown :)

Yes indeed. Is the most likely option that we are somewhere in the middle?

"It doesn't necessarily have to want to contact us, but we should be able to observe these magical spaceships and colonized Dyson Spheres and all the other mythology the Space Nutters believe in."

But we seem to be making headway towards cloaking before we stride towards FTL (well, we have the neutrino but we refuse to believe in it)

Agreed, but hypothesise that FTL spaceships were possible and we were to discover them in, say, 1000 years. Then we would only be asked to imagine that someone else discovered it sooner than we.

The problem with imagining this comes if we believe FTL to be impossible, so as long as that is a premise then I agree with your argument.

Was not the point suggested by GP that empathy was natural but could be surpressed to different degrees and perhaps in at least some cases due to cultural influence?

Then there is no contradiction in suggesting that such surpression could be differently strong - sometimes so strong that it prevents us from running off to faraway places to help hungry and sometimes even so very strong that we wouldn't even help a baby in the road.

If empathy is natural and initially based on directly available information (direct stimuli) but eventually complemented by also being based on derived information (knowledge) but empathy could also be surpressed for any number of reasons then there is nothing strange with what Dan East stated as far as I can see?

Count on my vote when you run for galactic president.

Assuming politicians are humans, and you assume they are only simulating empathy....did you just simulate empathy for a politician, and does that make you a politician?

Thank you for your answer! I think you have a very valid point and I want to make that clear right away.

I do not intend to troll, but I realize it comes off like that every time I fail to clearly point out exactly the disclaimer you do now - this is in the end only supposed to be a computer science model - and of course I might be failing at that too which is what I would like to ask a real computer scientist such as yourself about!

Any connection between a strict information theoretical model and real physics would be something for a physicist to consider and they may well conclude that the model even if internally consistent bears no interesting resemblance to reality, but that is a later stage (which unfortunately is not clear enough in my current draft).

I am at this point only interested if the model is internally consistent from an information theoretical perspective. The paper indeed jumps ahead of itself and talks as if we could draw conclusions about real physics, which makes it come off as "trollish". But I would ask a reader such as yourself and with patience to spare to try to see past that and help me examine if the model is consistent. Should it be seen as consistent, I think you are probably right to suspect that such a thing might well prompt me to go on and examine the possibility that a computer program _could_ tell us something about reality, but I promise that I will never say that you or any other serious computer scientist gave me the go-ahead to derive such wild conclusions and in the end I would have to agree that it could at least never be _certain_ that we could draw such conclusions.

I hope this is enough to assure you that while I am potentially confused, I am not trying to troll you and I am asking your advice to help me see if I am confused or not. Thank you again for what I found your most useful reply, I am seriously thankful for all help I can get in coming off less as a troll and understand if my proposed computer program (that's all it is really) contains a bug or not!

I have submitted this as a question to "ask Slashdot" but my question is the following: Is the superluminal neutrino considered to be compatible with information theory? And if it is, why exactly would it be incompatible with Einstein? I have uploaded the draft of my analysis on the topic to http://relevancetheory.blogspot.com/2011/11/general-theory-of-relevance.html and http://www.scribd.com/doc/73219743/The-General-Theory-of-Relevance-and-Reliability and would love all help verifying the argument. In essence, it seems that if we create an information theoretically consistent model where we assign a minimal rest mass of 1 to the photon and to empty space and (in consequence) the maximum speed two solid objects could move towards each other were 2 * c then superluminal neutrinos would become compatible with Einstein (although his formula would have to be extended into E = mcc * 2 ). My analysis includes an experiment that could (if my model is right) demonstrate the accelerating redshift effects currently associated with Dark Energy in earthly laboratories, so if nothing else that experiment (described in the section about Dark Energy towards the end) is perhaps the fastest way for you to see if there is a mistake in my argument?

Any help I can get with understanding if the analysis in my draft is faulty or correct would be greatly appreciated!

So that leaves...just linux? :P

I don't know enough about C, so this may just be failed speculation, but...

C allows you to break out into ASM code, fine. But unless what you break out into is in fact an extension of ASM that includes some understanding of the C domain for integration - that is, IF you only break out to standard ASM that has no clue that it is embedded in a C program (this is my unfounded assumption) - then I see no theoretical difference to a langauge that can just call out to a component written in ASM. In other words, if C is considered to be able to "access the hardware directly" only because it can call out to ASM code, then Python could be considered to be able to "access the hardware directly" because it can call out to C which can call out to ASM. Sure, two layers of indirection is more than one, but they are both in the same camp of being more than zero layers of indirection away from the hardware.

Thank you, +1 informative

You just repeated what he said: that the model is supposed to represent the hypothesis.

"and never met a cliche it didn't like."

I love the fact that this expression is by now cliche.