low_entropy
Regulars-
Posts
4 -
Joined
-
Last visited
Everything posted by low_entropy
-
Here's a cheesy one I thought up while reading Atlas Shrugged: Double Jeapordy round: "I'll take fictional characters for 600, Alex." "This hero of an Ayn Rand novel started a capitalist's haven" [contestant buzzes in] "Who is John Galt?"
-
Can man mechanically recreate consciousness?
low_entropy replied to LadyAttis's topic in Questions about Objectivism
If Ambrose of Milan is indeed trying to reason us into that corner, he will be disappointed. Man is the rational animal; it is incorrect to take the differentia "rational" out of the context of the genus "animal". So even if machines were even better at reasoning than humans, that would not therefore give them the rights of man. Besides, what computers/machines do is not reasoning in the living, active sense. A computer chip, or any machine, no matter how advanced, has one function: to react to its internal state (memory or configuration) in a relatively simple, predetermined way. No matter how "beyond our comprehension" this technology is, no matter how arbitrarily complex, it is still just a glorified Turing machine: at its core, it's still as simple and predictable as clockwork. A human, on the other hand, chooses to reason - he must focus his mind and maintain that focus as long as he wishes to use his reason; man's is a volitional consciousness. -
Hey BigDaddy: Principles - those things which you decided were just a part of Objectivism you could leave out - are the reason i'm not going to be taking pleasure in violence on your person (even though you are the right bastard) for calling my lady a Puritan.
-
Your thoughts on my views on "Satanism"?
low_entropy replied to NIJamesHughes's topic in Metaphysics and Epistemology
First off, you haven't excluded metaphysical principles: you've implied one. Your 'method' implies it. Secondly, if there *were* no metaphysical principles, how would you determine the validity of any method? The correctness or incorrectness of a method implies a principle at work. Lastly, the principles of reality are inescapable; they *do* exist. So why hypothesize in their absence?