keyholez:

Well, jeepers. My initial judgment, based on Lux’s summary alone, was that the project seemed dangerous and maybe a little evil; on closer inspection, the project seems dangerous and maybe a little evil!

• […]After all, what’s the worst that could happen if you create an arbitrary human mind without having any clue what you’re actually doing?”
• It’s really not cool to fabricate a soul, keep it trapped in a box, torture it, drive it crazy, try to make it un-crazy, reboot it, etc. […]

On the first point, this is a risk even when one brings life into the world the old fashioned way. On the second (and no one should underestimate how seriously Keyholez takes the charge of uncoolness), I think I’ve made it clear how I feel about souls. As explained by Keyholez₂₀₀₉:

This has to do with being a materialist — i.e. not a religion-crazed imbecile. Where do you, o wise and honorable Reverend Greif, think love happens? The soul, you little muppet? […]

These people call themselves intellectuals, but they have yet to adjust their worldview to align with the basic scientific discoveries of the last several centuries, so they end up accidentally spouting nonsense, invoking some ghostly person-essence that does all the loving and the smooching, totally independent from nasty, Scrooge-like “brain chemistry,” which no one should trust their daughter with. [Emphasis added]

Here’s the hypothetical I’d like to run through: We fabricate this soul in this box and run the torturous program once. So, we do a little bit of evil. Then we do it again and again and again. More evil? Now, what if we put the soul in the box and just run a simulation that is totally awesome (or design a brain that enjoys what another considers torture, but we’ll leave that alone for the moment). Negative evil (“goodness”?) points? What if we run more happy simulations than we do sad ones and still come out with more insight into the operation of the brain? Net positive on the good/evil thing and science points! Everybody wins!

The point is that ethics gets pretty murky if you can just start generating more utils by running more supercomputers no matter what you do with that capability. Hey, what if we can simulate trillions of happy existences for the same resources it would take to provide for a million “real” people over the course of their lives? If the soul in the box is equally ethically salient (as Keyholez₂₀₁₀ is suggesting) we’d be remiss for wasting our money on inefficient version 1.0 embodied souls.

But I don’t think any of this is relevant for the same reason I’ve always dismissed speculation about singularity-style technological advancement scenarios that focus overly narrowly on AI/whole-brain simulation: We’ll get halfway there first, and that will be wacky enough.

I wish I’d been using tags so I could call up all the examples of brain-computer interfaces I’ve posted about and try to demonstrate that there’s progress being made in the field (as opposed to directionless, largely non-sequential localized advances). Instead I’ll just finally getting around to posting about the new X PRIZE: $10 million for some sort of big progress on brain-computer interface systems (they’ve neither fully defined the criteria for success nor finished raising the money, but it’s the thought that counts).

The last X PRIZE went to Virgin Galactic for progress in commercial space flight, and that’s not exactly commonplace. I realize that just because a lot of nerds are trying to buy incremental progress on this front isn’t going to usher in a new era all that soon.

But that line of work and the sort of things the Bluebrain folks are working one will converge before either reaches any sort revolutionary potential on its own. We’ll have ambiguous hybrid cases before we have to ask about whether what’s in the box is a soul created ex-nihilio or not.

In general I thought that religiously restrictive dietary practices tended to largely overlap or be nested inside on another. More specifically, without getting into drawing pictures, Jewish and Muslim dietary restrictions are similar-ish in a lot of ways and so overlap a bunch. It’s possible to follow both, although you’d get some weirdness in doubling-up on incantations during slaughterings. Each also allows or proscribes things the other does not, so it would also be possible to follow one but not the other. In the midst of the overlap is vegetarianism (as in Hinduism) and within that the Xtreme Jain version of vegetarianism (no root vegetables, kills too many bacteria, etc.).

With that general tendency towards concordance in mind, I was surprised to learn that Sikhism (and the consensus among meat eating Hindus) explicitly prohibits eating ritually slaughtered animals, the only kind allowed in Judaism and Islam! They have jhatka meat (as opposed to kosher or halal) which is

Meat from an animal which has been killed by a single strike of a sword or axe to sever the head, as opposed to Jewish slaughter or Islamic slaughter in which the animal is killed by ritually slicing the throat. It has been described as the antithesis of ritual slaughter. [Wikipedia]

Basically the reason is that the Abrahamic fetishization of the killing process is creepy, which is a reasonable position.

But also, Sikh temples only serve vegetarian food precisely because everyone is allowed to eat it (as per said general concordance) and it would be mean to do otherwise (also very reasonable).

In conclusion, for the World’s 5th largest religion I sure don’t know much about Sikhism!

almostepistles:

so the pilot wrote a manifesto, but it has been taken down at the request of the FBI.

Looks like the FBI can’t stop Wonkette!

It’s sort of worth a look!

They are charging money for this…

You’ve committed your life to Jesus. You know you’re saved. But when the Rapture comes what’s to become of your loving pets who are left behind? Eternal Earth-Bound Pets takes that burden off your mind.

We are a group of dedicated animal lovers, and atheists. Each Eternal Earth-Bound Pet representative is a confirmed atheist, and as such will still be here on Earth after you’ve received your reward. Our network of animal activists are committed to step in when you step up to Jesus.

Eternal Earth-Bound Pets (via io9)

I asked Leoncrawl to ask Tumblr about this and then it happened?

katiebakes:

OH GOOD MORNING!

So many ways to read that “oh good morning!” I prefer either addressing the dog in the picture or an exclamation meaning that this article makes it a good morning.

If when a lot of snow was predicted it turned out to be not that bad does that mean when only a little snow is predicted that it will be terrible?

skyscraper: seashelllz: ourseattle: kennypjdmek

katiebakes:

I can’t really use it because it’s blocked at work, and I’m still pretty hazy on the details of like, what it even is, but based on the little I’ve seen I am bullish on the Buzz.

(via Wonkette)

So, because of Google is into the whole social graph techno-hippie stuff Buzz works with open standards for moving information around. That means you can send your Tumblr into your Buzz feed as long as you make sure your public Tumblr page announces itself as belonging to the same person as your Google profile does. It’s actually not that hard, just add this line into the custom HTML for your theme (you can activate custom HTML without doing anything bad to your existing theme, this won’t change the appearance):

<link rel="me" type="text/html" href="http://www.google.com/profiles/your.username"/>

It can go right after/under this one (near the very top):

<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="RSS" href="{RSS}"/>

And you have to replace “your.username” with whatever comes at the end of your Google profile URL (usually just the first part of your Gmail address).

Once Google indexes a page of your Tumblr next (only a few minutes to a few hours, depending) you’ll magically have the option to add your Tumblr as one of your sites at the bottom of your Google profile editing page. Then when you go into Buzz you can select it as one of your sites to import from.

Neat!

My somewhat meandering take on Google’s latest…thing.

NOTE: Totally outdated as it was written before I has access to it. Also, I figured how to pipe in Tumblr!

It’s not against the concept of peer review, so much as the implementation. Implies some interesting roles for distributed technology to help make knowledge happen more transparently (and thus, hopefully, more efficiently).

(via leoncrawl)

A: Sort of. One of the things that sweat is for is to cool your body off (as it evaporates). So, when you sweat as a result of physical exertion a) your body heat causes the sweat to be warmer, but more importantly, b) you experience the cooling effect as a component of returning to your typical resting body temperature. That same cooling effect is experienced as “cold” when your body doesn’t need to cool down, as in the case of sweating as primarily a “psychological” reaction.