People too young to remember the 1990's might not know that Patrick Stewart's Picard was a sex symbol.
I was surprised by how many of my friends considered the character 'hot'; on paper, one would expect young people to write him off as a balding goody-two-shoes.
To have a character whose main traits included compassion and reason was a good influence on my generation of men.
> To have a character whose main traits included compassion and reason was a good influence on my generation of men.
I agree and although the prestige TV era has produced some wonderful TV it’s also been overflowing with antiheroes. I hope todays younger generation gets to see another character like Picard.
I have started to wonder if anti-heros are generally bad at a social level. If you train people to believe that bad people are not that bad and good people are not that good, and you should never believe the name on the tin, then people start carrying over those lessons to the real world, and encouraging antipathy since anyone who esposes good ideals is lying, and anyone who esposes bad ideals is playing 4d chess, or is not that bad - so what's the difference?
I feel like the rise of "virtue signaling" as a critique is a symptom of all of this: if I see someone visibly doing something good then it isn't actually good, rather they're just showcasing how much better they are than other people. Somehow a positive trait becomes a negative one.
My wife and I met through OKCupid, and one of the things that most caught my eye on her profile was that she had a crush on Picard as a teenager. I knew then that she was a woman of impeccable taste.
In normal circumstances, one cannot return a phone with a broken screen; it's generally accidental damage rather than the design being unfit for purpose.
In this case, it's obviously a manufacturing or design flaw, but were I in these customers' shoes, I would be a little nervous on my way back to the AppleStore, too.
It does not matter how they give Alzheimer's to a lab mouse providing they give Alzheimer's to a lab mouse – not a different disorder that happens to have the symptoms of Alzheimer's.
If a device made of human brain cells were designed to function like a traditional, deterministic CPU, that would raise similar questions as LLMs raise today.
It would do no such thing. LLMs are neither living nor sentient nor intelligent. The fallacy of computationalism is a failure to read a coarse metaphor as merely analogical. Any correspondence is superficial and limited, and even then, merely correspondence, not identity.
So, the use of human brain cells is different territory. Bioethically speaking, it is illicit to press human body parts (which includes cells) into service for technological ends. They can only licitly enter into service of the integral human whole (such a life-saving transplants). Using them in technology also commoditizes the human body. (The reverse is not the case: it can be licit to use cybernetic devices to restore native function within a human body.)
No, not at all. For one thing, they said "made of brain cells", not brains--those are two very different things. (Yes, brains are made of brain cells, but that's a fallacy of affirmation of the consequent.)
Computers made of transistors were designed to function like computers made of vacuum tubes without negating the benefits of transistors.
I get the sense that there is a school of thought I’d call “biological exceptionalism”, a belief that somehow constructs made up of many functionally simple units, is fundamentally different and special compared to a similar construct composed of silicon units. I can’t see how someone could hold this belief and be a materialist (I’m not implying you are btw). Biological exceptionalism surely implies the existence of a “soul” or “spirit” (which raises a whole bunch more questions).
I don't think it'd have to imply a soul - one of these "functionally simple units" is much less well-understood than the other, and you can insert whatever belief you want to fill the gaps.
I think it goes the opposite way, starting with a soul and arriving at biological exceptionalism: You start by saying "I have a soul / spirit". Then you extrapolate "things like me probably have a soul / spirit". But since there is no theory of souls, the extrapolation is not based on principles but rather on vibes and guesswork, ending up somewhere like "there must be something weird going on with neurons that somehow create a soul, connect with an existing one or something like that.. maybe.."
Which is an interesting argument because: do neurons somehow create a soul (as you mentioned), or are do neurons somehow attract souls, or do souls choose what to inhabit. In the first case it posits that a “soul” is purely a function of biology. In the others that there’s some sort of inextricable link between the two (which in the absence of any theory of soul or how these are linked to biology, seems rather far fetched, unless of course souls could choose to inhabit anything with sufficient degrees of freedom: a brain, a mega computer, a planet, a galaxy)
Maybe a materialist biological exceptionalism position could be that biological substrates are capable of sending kinds of signals that silicon substrates are not, in the sense that brain matter especially might give rise to far greater complex processing in ways that we don't know about or appreciate yet, and which we may discover can't be efficiently recreated in silicon?
I don't know if I buy that argument or even if it makes sense. But yeah this all smacks inextricably of soul talk.
I agree that as per current understanding, the functional biological base units have more degrees of freedom and a greater functional diversity as a result, but that’s merely a quantitative difference not a fundamental distinction. One could imagine equally more complex silicon base units beyond what we have now. Whether they need to follow the same pattern/modes as the biological units remains to be seen (but it’s pretty hard to argue against evolution as an efficiency maximiser).
The reasoning behind the 1970 amendment is usually traced to the Nuremberg Laws. Nazi Germany defined a Jew for the purposes of persecution as anyone with a Jewish grandparent. The amendment drew Israel’s circle of protection at the same radius: if having one Jewish grandparent was enough to be persecuted, it should be enough to be given refuge.
I wasn't making an argument for or against the legitimacy of Israel; I was arguing that self defense explains Israel's immigration laws better than a sense of racial superiority.
It's one thing to accuse Israelis of paranoia, hypocrisy, or even genocide, and it's another to deny that the primary motivation to have Israel be a jewish ethno-state was to have a refuge from persecution.
It isn't clear if the accusation is that I knowingly am telling lies, or that I am gullible and repeating lies. Either way, we could go back and forth all weekend and probably still not agree on much. Cheers.
They are certainly not engaging in genocide. The population of Palestinians has increased by 5% over the past 3 years. Even the population of Gazans has not decreased.
That conflates the state with a business headquartered in it. It begs the question of what the sanctions would be for: is the argument that this firm is an arm of Israel, that Israel turns a blind eye to abusive businesses, or something else?
Yes, obviously the state and this company are the same thing. Why would a private company spy on the ICC and the UN? I’m sure there are plenty of 8200 people involved.
In case my point was unclear: Discover-Tech served ads to many clients. As far as I could tell, it's the paper's authors who singled the ICC and UN out.
That might be why the authors, in that disclaimer:
• used "in and of itself" without a footnote
• downplayed "confirm targeting" by sticking "or infection with spyware" into the same sentence.
Exporting the Islamic Revolution of Iran is a strategy in Iran's foreign policy that believes in exporting the teachings of the Iranian Revolution of 1979 to achieve similar results in Islamic and even non-Islamic countries.
I was surprised by how many of my friends considered the character 'hot'; on paper, one would expect young people to write him off as a balding goody-two-shoes.
To have a character whose main traits included compassion and reason was a good influence on my generation of men.
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