Harrison Danneskjold

Absolutely. 100% yes. A "zombie" is supposed to be a mindless, soulless, nonrational monster (like Stephen Mallory's beast from the Fountainhead) that walks on two feet but cannot think or speak; it cannot be reasoned with; its only motivation is to devour the living (or rob them of their souls by turning them into more zombies). And yet it does walk upright and was a human being once, which makes it all the more terrible (indeed, most zombie movies include at least one scene involving a zombie's loved ones struggling to come to terms with the fact of their zombification). Now

Skillet - Back from the Dead The visuals are spliced in from StarCraft.

Thank you. A lot. It's mainly just thinking in non-essentials. I spent several weeks on the Immigration thread, looking at the whole thing in the wrong (specifically non-essential) way. And over here I moved the goalposts from "the Turing Test will work" to "it'd work with the right judge" to "human-level intelligence requires consciousness" - every step of which was better than the last one, but all of which indicate superficial thinking. It's a little infuriating. But now that I've identified what it is I've been trying to develop some better thought-habits. Nothing's gonna happen overn

Absolutely. I just wanted to underscore, briefly, that the question is not whether immigrants HAVE every single right a native can logically claim to have (they do) but precisely who is responsible for SAFEGUARDING those rights, and how. If you'd agree with that (as I suspect) then there's nothing else I could add to it. And that's where I'm gonna have to stop you. I once spent about 2 weeks in Finland with the intention of immigrating for a foreign-exchange student I'd known in High School. During that time, although I was no less opinionated than I've always been, I had no inter

Harry Binswanger wrote an essay advocating totally open borders here: http://www.hblist.com/immigr.htm And when I say "totally open" I really mean it. He specifically says there should be no stops, no border patrol, nothing. And I know that at least one participant in this thread has tried to advocate for the same, because until recently I was. Specifically because I couldn't find any holes in Binswanger's reasoning. And for the record, the only hole in his reasoning is context-dropping. So it really might not be relevant to you or the case you're trying to mak

I'd just like to point out that if a Paraguayan murderer can get a clean slate by simply moving past some totally open border (without so much as giving his name) then not only would he be a threat to all the citizens of the new country but a grave injustice to all his victims in the old. Totally open immigration (like Binswanger argues for) wouldn't just harm us. I've recently realized that this whole debate has been framed by terms like "foreigners" this entire time (even in Binswanger's essay, which you'd expect to be of a slightly higher caliber than whatever we can come up wit

Not that they're foreigners, but that they're crossing from one government's jurisdiction to another. That's why I asked DA whether the stops he's advocating should be applied equally to vacationers returning to their homes in, say, New York or New Jersey. The question of citizenship isn't relevant to the argument he's making. That was a pretty funny video, though.

Yes, but thinking is not a team sport. I've been working these ideas out in any odd moments I've been able to find, but the problems they've highlighted will take a bit more than that. The "remote mountaintop" bit was a dash of my own color, though; it shouldn't take more than a week or two, once I get to it. Besides. The Golden Age arrived today.

No, like what programs did you use to put the slideshow together with your own audio?

Maybe. I've been describing my reasoning skills as "rusty" but the more I review what I've been posting, the more atrocious thought-habits I discover. Don't be surprised if I drop off this site sometime soon: I'm considering taking one copy of Atlas and one of the ITOE to a remote mountaintop somewhere. Except for that cheeky line at the very end, I have no other "maybes" for the rest of that. That's exactly why I wanted to avoid using those terms in the first place. I won't be happy if you're right about such flawed concepts STILL being a factor in this thread - because that's exactly

How'd you do that?

This is nearly 3 hours of Sam Harris discussing AI with various people (Neil Degrasse Tyson comes in at around 1.5 hours and Dave Reuben at almost 2.5). I don't agree with everything he says (in fact it reminded me of all the aspects of Sam that I despise) but it ended up helping me reformulate precisely what I'm trying to say, here. He repeatedly mentions the possibility that we'll create something that's smarter and more competent than we are, but lacking consciousness; a "superhuman intellect in which the lights aren't on". What I was trying (very, very clumsily) to say by way of the T

The Aristotelian concept of "essences" being metaphysical (rather than epistemological) seems applicable.

Yeah; sorry about that. I was already a little bit tipsy. Thanks for not giving me the kind of answer you definitely could have. Sure, it can be text-only, but I wouldn't be comfortable with the kind of emotionalist "average human being" that'd fall for any program sufficiently capable of tugging at their heartstrings. Obviously I'd prefer to be the judge, myself, but the average Objectivist should suffice. Let's not limit the processing power or memory capacity. Well, that's just it. If it was generating any of its own content on-the-fly then it wo

And presumably this would apply equally to American citizens and foreigners, alike? For instance, if I take a vacation to Cancun then the Mexican government should stop me on the way there and my own government should stop me on the way back (just in case I took up murdering random strangers while I was there)?