The rubric under which all the actions prohibited on the Sabbath fall is referred to as melakhah. It is an expansive term, first used in the Hebrew Bible to describe the full range of activities which God engaged in to create the world. The only term which really approximates its scope is Jacques Ellul’s la technique, defined as “the totality of methods rationally arrived at and having absolute efficiency (for a given stage of development) in every field of human activity.” The heuristic which the rabbis of the Talmud used to determine melakhah is simple: if the action was performed in the course of the building of the Tabernacle, which after all functioned both as a mikrokosmos in the technical sense and as a microcosm of human society, it was forbidden on the Sabbath.
There's truth to this, but in a time and place. There are times being very specific about what you know and don't know is important, but most of the time we are learning little by little, and we benefit from saying things we aren't entirely comfortable with, if only to figure out whether they are true and/or socially acceptable.
My guess: if non-genetic heritable elements -- epigenetics (such as modifications to DNA) -- are necessary for proper development, then the DNA sequence alone will not be enough to develop thylacines. (There are caveats, notably that some modifications can be inferred). However, the scientists will also be experimenting with gestation and creating embryos from modified cells, so whether epigenetics specifically is a limiting factor will be hard to tell.
Yes, that was basically my point. There has also been some fairly fevered speculation about epigenetics being responsible for some types of instinct - even "cross-generational memories" and the like.
This is a really great point. I want very much their effort to succeed, but I suspect epigenetic is so important for higher organisms that the chances of this working are rather low.
Domestication and breeding/husbandry aren't always done consciously, but even when they are, people produce selective pressures (e.g. selective breeding). Evolution is ambivalent to intelligent, conscious choice or natural selection, as long as the next generation's heritable traits are different.
I've seen similar things. Besides many experiments not being remotely worth the harm they cause (poor design, niche topics without applications, dead end checking-all-the-boxes, etc.), they leave a mark on the people who conduct them. Some leave that sort of research out of distaste or disgust, and some become callous. It struck me that it inculcates an inhumane indifference to suffering. And numb scientists. It ultimately damages both the people and the science. Yet incentives (monetary, career progression) can push people past boundaries, and with time, erase them.
I almost said something similar, the old Nietzsche quote about how if you stare into the abyss, the abyss stares back. I didn't want to be even more dramatic, but I think you are exactly right. There's a cost to such things, and the externalities run deep and wide. All you can do is be very deliberate that the trade is worthwhile.
If I had to guess: "You are a machine." It's reminiscent of Victorian authors describing the heart as pistons or the brain as strings being pulled. Less of a fact and more of a metaphor, a poetic interpretation.
Then, add on the entirely subjective experience each of us has of consciousness: it's not obvious that subjectivity is created or come from machines. Each of us has one good example, and the rest is intuition, induction. At best, "You can build machines like us, because we ourselves are the proof," is a wishful project, rather than a proof.
I think your definition of a machine is limited to simple mechanical devices.
Machines are just physical systems that perform some work. This includes cells, biological systems etc
If we built a human from scratch at atom level detail then it would be reasonable assume it would experience the world as we would. By definition you would have created consciousness.
The issue isn't with machines, but humans as just machines. You rightly point to the assumption: "If we built a human from scratch at atom level detail then it would be reasonable assume it would experience the world as we would." What's the reason the clone has to have experience?
I'm not sure whether this clone would or not, but we don't have a good basis for either. If we built one, we should act like it does experience things, but that's on moral, not scientific grounds.
More horrifying is that our subjective experience is all that there is. Luckily, neither is easy to square with what we experience, and we probably shouldn't try to horrify ourselves anyhow
What's wrong with helping consciousness in the realm of poetry and religion? It's the most humanistic thing we can know, after all.
Consciousness, being internal and subjective, exists at odds with anything else that science considers. Sure, study cognition and neurology, but there's an ontological gap between those and experience.
Who is saying there is anything against either poetry or religion saying whatever they can about consciousness? I'm doubting the value of pidgeonholing.
To claim an ontological gap is to put the cart before the horse. If or when we understand consciousness, we will be able to tell if there is a relevant ontological gap, or whether it is an illusion generated by our ignorance.
Or at least tends to increase. Entropy can always spontaneously decrease, or can simply not increase for a moment. This was actually discussed a week ago! [1] As discussed in those comments, entropy isn't well-formulated outside of equilibrium states, and is subjective: it is a function of an observer's knowledge of the system (particularly microstates).
I'd say time is very real, and an inescapable part of experience (no experience without change). As for time being the most real, we only know it through experience, so I think of it as secondary, along with space, etc.
In my—undergraduate, not-very-specialist—days of being taught something or other about entropy now and then, I felt like we were being told "This state is special, so the entropy is low, and then it probably ends up in one of these other states, and none of them are special, so the entropy has increased”, and it would seem to me that we could appreciate all of the states as equally special if we were big-brained enough. Maybe like the integers being Ramanujan’s personal friends.
That only works if the document is still shared with you. If the spammers are halfway clever, they're removing access immediately after granting it, so the victim can't actually open the document to report it as abusive.
Users who actually click links in the document are clustered towards early openers? Share doc for two minutes, collect clicks, unshare to cut off spam reports.
I received a lot of spam share notifications on Google Drive, and there is no spam in the Shared with Me view in the app. I don't know what their game is, but this is happening. It also doesn't make sense that Google Drive doesn't remove the notification after the file is no longer shared with me.
