"Eray Ozkural exa" <er...@bilkent.edu.tr> wrote in message
news:fa69ae35.0404270508.164edb46@posting.google.com...

What do you mean?  You already experienced the "use"!!!

Noise?  There's noise here?  And I thought the s/n here was
well over 2000 dB.  Or is there supposed to be a sign in front
of that?

LOL!!!  I ain't no netcop.  Last time I checked, there aren't any
laws against being a kook (which is a good thing for all of us
at some time or another).  And as far as netiquette goes, I
would say that Glen is the worst offender with his most annoying
"quoting" style.  Can't anyone condition that rat to quote like
a civilized human being?  Don't they have Usenet Boxes or
something for that?  As far as the massive cross-posting goes,
it seems that nobody from the other groups minds, so I don't
care about that.

Not if your goal is to get people to stand in a circle and sing
"Kumbaya", no.  But if you want to get people to stand in a circle
and laugh at each other, that's a pretty good way to do it.  Odds
are, the people who aren't laughing are kooks.  Anyway, this
group is way too informal and non-technical to worry about
such things as "productivity".  It's obvious that nobody here
does real AI work, which is why they're here, instead of working
on it.  What's funny are the people who take it so seriously.

Frank is cuckoo for immortality puffs.  Neil seems to think the
book was tongue-in-cheek, but physicists I have talked to seem
to think he's gone well off the deep end.  Chalmer's zombies
aren't kookery at all.  They're a clever philosphical device of the
sort you expect to see from philosophers all the time.  I happen
to think that his zombies *are* logically impossible, but that's
a different argument.

Well, that's the problem.  Having non-mainstream ideas doesn't
make you a kook, despite what others might say about the
"innovators".  Believing that your new idea is right in the face of
all evidence to the contrary is what makes you a kook.  And
that's why Galileo and Copernicus and Newton and Einstein
weren't kooks, even if the majority disagreed with them at the
time.  They had the numbers to back them up.  People here
don't even *have* numbers.  So the ones who insist they are
right are obviously kooks.

Chalmers isn't a kook because you can't disprove zombies.
They aren't meant to be disprovable.  That's the whole point
of them.  Unfortunately for Chalmers, buying into zombies
requires you to buy into a lot of other things that he never
brings up, but that's another argument.  Penrose isn't a kook
because even though he is earnest and serious in his belief
that consciousness transcends machinery, he admits that
he doesn't know where exactly this quantum black box is
and how it works (despite the hype about microtubules).
But the idea that quantum-level effects unique to a particular
cognitive substrate might not be reproduced on another
substrate is not mere kookery.  At the worst, it's very very
sophisticated kookery.  But mostly, it's just desperation.

Tipler, on the other hand, goes to extravagant lengths to
project the future of the universe, the behavior of life and
intelligence, and a bunch of other stuff that astrologers and
palmists would blush to predict.  It doesn't bother Tipler that
the cosmological constant might be too small, or that a
collapsing universe full of black holes might not even
result in a "Big Crunch".  It's this disregard for plausible
alternatives that makes Tipler a kook, in my book.  If it were
a mere 30 page pamphlet, then I could buy that it's not to
be taken seriously.  But it's more like a 300-page tome on
immortality.  I have to take that seriously, no matter what the
author says.  Oh, and his discussion about beautiful women
is just too funny to read with a straight face.  You really should
check out the book.  It's called "The Physics of Immortality."

But then, what do I know?  Some people think Ed Fredkin
is a kook, but I not only buy into his computational view of
the universe (which I don't think should be called
"computationalism", like some people have done); I also
think it happens to be a rather simple and elegant way to
look at it.  So maybe I deserve a 10 too.

Dave

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