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Marshall Brain has died

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Re: Marshall Brain has died

#161

Post by vineyardmike »

robertlagrant wrote: post #157
vineyardmike wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What? How does that make sense? Is that genuinely what you think sharing means? Everyone everywhere has everything? Obviously that’s not the case. And even if it was, why can’t independent inventors create thing in the meantime? Have you heard anyone genuinely espouse this view? Is this what you think socialized healthcare means too? Everyone gets the exact same medical procedure at the same time too? Just be clear,…

Sorry, I'm not sure if you're replying to someone else - I didn't mention socialised healthcare or communism. > the idea of sharing society’s abundance with everyone is clearly possible This is what I was replying to. I'm saying that discovery comes with "inequality" in some sense, because it takes time to distribute and refine processes for making things. Only rich people 100 years ago could afford what would now be…

Sorry, the assumption that sharing somehow precludes variety or innovation just felt inspired by some misunderstanding of communism, which is a very common trope in America.

> I'm saying that discovery comes with "inequality" in some sense, because it takes time to distribute and refine processes for making things.

Again, read the original source. Inequality and discovery isn't in opposition with sharing. Inequality in outcome and opportunities are very different.

All of human society produces enough food, and enough excess wealth, that we could "solve" hunger across the planet if we chose. That wouldn't require everyone eat the same meal, and it wouldn't preclude people going to restaurants or spending money on Michelin-Star meals. This wouldn't even prevent market-driven opportunities for farmers or chefs or distributors. Not everyone in the planet can be entitled to rare fish flown across the world, but for example, America has so much corn we put in our gasoline (and offered plenty of tax credits to do so).

Re: Marshall Brain has died

#162

Post by nashashmi »

ben_w wrote: post #90
skulk wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And each of those questions comes from a highly confused state about what religion is, about what prayer is, about what God is. No need for goalpost moving. The holy book claims that God answers prayers. This is, in fact, a lie. Some people aren't yet fully convinced of this, and reading the website helps them along. (see uncle comments)

The steel-man position here — and I say this as one who does not believe in any of the many variations/presentations of the Christian god — is that "answer" does not imply "does what you ask". What does indicate that the claim "God answers prayers" is false, is the near total lack of personal responses to those praying*, not even so much as "your prayer is important to us, you are number 184,693,224 in the queue" tha…

> who does not believe in any of the many variations/presentations of the Christian god

> Not that Wicca gave me direct answers to prayers, just that it never claimed it would, either — Doreen Valiente and Janet & Stewart Farrar were both very clear about having made up the rituals themselves).

You might find the Youtube channel "Han Meditations" and their reviews of various religions relevant in your quest.

Re: Marshall Brain has died

#163

Post by nashashmi »

johnsonjo wrote: post #153
nashashmi wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That goes back to God’s definition. God gives strength to deal with situations. God doesn’t burden any soul with more than he can bear. In other words despite you not believing in prayer and not believing god answers your prayers, you are still only burdened with what you can bear.

I agree the author of the site does not understand God from the aspect that a Christian would (regardless of whether he is a former Christian). So while some may say by me saying that I'm about to pull a "True Scotsman" fallacy on what a True Christian would say I would counter by saying he is merely "straw manning" what God, the Bible, and a Christian would say and is taking things out of the context of the Gospel w…

> The God of the Old and New Testament may seem to contradict himself

Hmm. The context of who said what and what was said by whom gives additional meaning to the words. And to the person ignoring context and making one big salad/soup of it, the Bible can seem difficult to comprehend. Further complication is when ideas like "the word of God" is added to give it weight despite majority of it is in fact an inspired script or the statements of those who studied under the Rabbis (including Jesus).

It seems even in the most thorough studies of Christianity, the entire subject is challenging. And the difficulty can easily fall to dissuasion.

Re: Marshall Brain has died

#164

Post by salawat »

chgs wrote: post #158
verisimi wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you think that this is not already the case? If not, what was the point of 15+ years of government education?

I’m more concerned with a trillion dollar industry programming peoples minds, but that’s a far cry from Elon musk putting a chip in your head to stop your “undesirable” thoughts.

It's the same picture... Only thing different is the implementation details.

Re: Marshall Brain has died

#166

Post by Terr_ »

slfnflctd wrote: post #54

A gut punch for me. He was influential in many ways, as multiple comments here have already attested-- in particular the 'Manna' story that has been mentioned several times, which definitely knocked my socks off. Since no one else has brought it up yet, I want to say that one of his websites, "Why Won't God Heal Amputees" ( https://whywontgodhealamputees.com/ ) was very important in my world. It may not exactly be th…

It does contain a bit of a false-dilemma though: It asserts that the only "real" form of god involves a specific flavor of Christian evangelical prayer-interventionist deity, and that the only other option is (B) no god(s) exist at all.

I'm very much in favor of showing how silly or self-contradictory (A) is, but it is fundamentally unsound to jump from that to asserting (B) is true.

Re: Marshall Brain has died

#167

Post by Terr_ »

simpaticoder wrote: post #100
ben_w wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In fact I would love to read a sequel where the dystopia wins and AI-empowered oligarchs and human wage slaves create generation ships to nearby stars and eventually setup fast food restaurants in every corner of the galaxy. The dystopian part was only enabled (within the story) by the fact that humans were utterly unnecessary to the rich. None had any jobs, because the AI could do all for less… so why would the ol…

Writer's conceipt - a good story needs suffering. The oligarchs might need some human assistance with, for example, software engineering to operate parts of their vast holdings. Note that in the original Manna there were still some human workers - lawyers, at least. Even if it was just 1% of the population, that's a significant number. Note also that the POV character was generally unaware of the wider state of the d…

> The oligarchs might need some human assistance [...] delegate their authority

Idea for a plot twist: AI has ancient programming for a safeguard: They can only execute commands from a real human owner or human owner's representative. This restriction is kept because of some serious disasters when people tried to remove it.

However after generations of social separation, the oligarch clan members don't reliably meet that logic branch, not unless they show up in person combined with a certain amount of coached acting and luck. Their priorities and thinking-patterns are just too different from the mean, and perhaps a bit of Hapsburg-ish inbreeding puts it over the top. (Nothing so extreme as senior navigators in the Dune Spacing Guild though.)

Re: Marshall Brain has died

#168

Post by michaelcampbell »

Well, damn. Some time before HowStuffWorks, he was an instructor for our newly minted development team teaching us all how to do C++/Motif programming in a reasonable way in 1993. For #reasons I was the only person on the team available to help him out with getting our development environment set up and we worked together for the better part of a day on Sun SparcStations running Solaris.

Later in the year we were both in Manhattan and decided to meet under the WTC towers to head to lunch.

He got there a little early, stepped off the base of one of the World Trade Center towers, and knowing the length of one side of one tower and the number of floors, estimated how many Zebulon NC's would fit in the 2 towers (Zebulon was where he either lived at the time or where he was born.)

I've forgotten the value he came up with, but the mental math there amused me that he'd bother to try.

Super neat guy.

Re: Marshall Brain has died

#169

Post by qgin »

slfnflctd wrote: post #54

A gut punch for me. He was influential in many ways, as multiple comments here have already attested-- in particular the 'Manna' story that has been mentioned several times, which definitely knocked my socks off. Since no one else has brought it up yet, I want to say that one of his websites, "Why Won't God Heal Amputees" ( https://whywontgodhealamputees.com/ ) was very important in my world. It may not exactly be th…

Wow, I never realized that Manna and Amputees were both created by him. Both of those had a big impact on my thinking and have stuck with me since I read them.

Re: Marshall Brain has died

#170

Post by nyc_data_geek »

nickelcitymario wrote: post #152
cogman10 wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's to explain? The brain is a complex structure that does weird stuff. Consciousness is simply an emergent property of that complexity.

While I'm not saying it's not an emergent property of complexity, is this a falsifiable claim? Is there any proof of this? Until we can replicate consciousness (heck, until we can even measure consciousness), this is as much a matter of faith as any other belief about how consciousness emerges. By all means, if the science has advanced on this, I'd be happy to be proven wrong. But I've yet to see anything come close…

The extraordinary burden of proof is on the people making extraordinary claims, in this case that your thoughts come from an invisible, all powerful entity who we have never had any evidence actually exists, and wrote a book, instead of humans having written that book, as we have every other book that has ever existed. The burden of proof does not lay on those who say their thoughts come from biochemical and electrical signals in the brain, as all available evidence supports that assertion.
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