RogueAI

Can a machine have ANY mental states? Or is that something only brains are capable of?

No, I'm asking you how would you prove a machine has thoughts at all using the scientific method. How could you determine whether any machine does or ...

How would you go about proving that with the scientific method?

Do machines have thoughts?

If you hold that consciousness is ultimately explainable within the scientific framework, then you are assuming that the hard problem is tractable by ...

But you have faith science will eventually solve the hard problem?

It makes no sense. The obvious strategic move is to decapitate Ukraine and install a puppet.

So they planned on invading, taking a chunk of the country, and then how were they going to prevent a resistance movement forming from the remaining c...

Yeah, that's how things shook out, but the Russians would have to be absolute morons to have planned things this way. They did not plan on suffering a...

So the plan was to take only part of Ukraine? What were the Russians planning on doing when the non-annexed part of Ukraine violently objected to all ...

I would say conscious states definitely have causal powers: torturers and interrogators and The Spanish Inquisition, have known that since the dawn of...

You are correct that the universe rarely let's you have something from nothing (except, possibly, itself), and consciousness emerging from nonconsciou...

What about fusion? If you take a bunch of hydrogen atoms and squeeze them, you don't get fusion. You don't get anything like fusion. Ah, but if you ta...

So then, how does consciousness emerge from non-conscious stuff?

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But let's say your neural activity was slowed down, either through temperature or chemical or some interference. Does that mean the song playing in yo...

I'm pretending we have a God's-eye view outside of space-time.

What does "normal" mean? That it flows at its normal 1 second per second rate?

Defense spending, as a share of GDP and of the federal budget, is historically very low right now.

The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner By Randall Jarrell From my mother’s sleep I fell into the State, And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze....

This may be hard for you, but pretend one of your kids is trans and you're at some function with a bunch of people and some person on stage with a mic...

There's some wiggle room a Dem politician has. A lot of old school dems like myself were turned off with Biden's open border policy. Hey, I appreciate...

I think you are giving a pass to behavior that would make you apoplectic if the other side were doing it.

Any Democrat politician has to toe the line on certain policies to win the primaries. No matter how telegenic a person is, they're not going to be the...

If Trump doesn't give the stolen election "fight like hell" speech on the morning of Jan 6th, do you think the rioting still happens?

This is always strange to me, and before we go further, I want to ask if you think the 2020 election was stolen and if you think Trump tried to steal ...

It's not just a questionable effect on the economy. The British grooming scandal wasn't economical. There are real concerns with male immigrants from ...

You didn't mention the conspiracy theory lunacy that has taken over much of the Right. Don't you think that's a big problem?

Did you vote for Trump in 2024?

There's more to it than that. Sending immigrants to CECOT was never policy before Trump. The Trump Administration behaved in despicable fashion with A...

Yeah, apparently we're going to be running Venezuela. We're so good at that sort of thing.

Maybe people will be glad Maduro is gone and will welcome a change? It's not like the Middle East, where you have historic enmities like Shia vs Sunni...

I think they want to install that Nobel Prize winner, Maria Machado.

As an idealist, I agree.

:roll:

Isn't science supposed to be explanatory? If science cannot answer the "what is it like?" question, isn't that a huge failure?

My point is that there should be some healthy skepticism about how good neuroscience is at detecting emotions. It can detect physical correlates of em...

Isn't it possible that a small unnoticeable change to a region of the brain could result in her condition? Or it could be a psychological condition th...

Let's go back to my earlier question about Mary: Suppose Mary falls and hits her head and says she can't feel any emotions anymore. Her body still dis...

OK, how does the brain produce consciousness? Your answer is to give it time, science will find a way. Pretend it's a thousand years in the future and...

I would say neuroscience studies the physical processes and correlates associated with emotional states. If you were unable to orgasm, neuroscience is...

The scientist needs to actually verify the emotion is really there, before investigating the cause. With humans, this is easy. We all just assume we f...

Quibble: they are physically possible, under certain conditions: you're in a simulation, you're a Boltzmann Brain, the laws of nature, for whatever re...

Would you say that absent a necessary being, the universe is a result of either an infinite series of causes or a series terminating in an uncaused ca...

Is Kastrup a traditional idealist in that he only believes minds and ideas exist? For an idealist, something is alive if it has a mind, otherwise it's...

Are you talking about physical time and space (space-time)? Also, isn't "there is at least one thinking mind in existence" axiomatically true?

I think I'm going to do what Athena has been doing.

There's no context that excuses what he said. He is using scripture to support his point that trans people are a "middle finger" to God and Thomas is ...

If all minds in the universe suddenly vanished, would Holmes still exist?

Yes! I was going to bring up possible worlds. And Sherlock Holmes. Doesn't he exist in some fashion? What about undiscovered digits of Pi? Do those ex...