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[quote] I don't think anyone denies unconscious, automatic brain activity preceded conscious action.[/quote] And I don't understand the science behind these kinds of claims. The only way to know if someone is concious of something is for them to report that they were concious of it. But since their reporting takes time, isn't it quite possible
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[quote]Hashem, you describe consciousness as an [epiphenomenon][/quote] That seems reasonable. But then surely dogs have a kind of conciousness. And bacteria. And electrons. Can a brain have two sets of ephiphenomena, i.e. two conciousnesses? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Split_personality
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[quote]you have no idea what you mean when you say, "a person has free will".[/quote] I've seen "free will" used in this thread as simply a synonym for "autonomous". So someone who is drugged or zapped by cosmic rays might not be acting out of their own free will. I guess this use of the term is unobjectionable. But
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[quote]I mean full comprehension as measured by the ability to find the most compact scientific theory (to "compress the brain program" to its smallest size).[/quote] No one comprehends the motion of individual molecules in a 1 mililiter container of gas. And, really, no one cares. Rather, people speak of a few variables like temperature,
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[quote]I cannot write a program which is smarter than I am.[/quote] Can two people write a program which is smarter than you are? Do you think the Blue Brain project will simulate a human brain in the end? What will stop researchers from simulating something with 10x the neurons and 100x the synapses? Human brains aren't compression algorithms.
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[quote]It is possible to prove that the human brain will never fully comprehend the human brain, nor will it ever supersede itself with its own creations[/quote] These proclamations sound like sophistry, and I think they are reckless. As "I, Pencil" explains, no one knows how to create a pencil, yet pencils are created. It just takes an organization
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[quote]it could be that the amount of energy required to move a particular mass to a particular velocity simply increases in the appropriate proportion with gamma[/quote] It does. And the enormous energy is imparted on the moved object. A proton so accelerated can have as much energy as a basbeball: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultra-high-energy_cosmic_ray
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[quote]the speed of light is the universal speed limit, you find that it rests on much shakier ground than the consensus of physicists would lead you to believe[/quote] Actually relativity has no problem with tachyons, which would have imaginary rest mass and would be forbidden from transitioning to below the speed of light. But SR does say a particle
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[quote]The transform in this case is mapping Lorentz space to Euclidean 2-space.[/quote] This is only SR. In this toy problem, there's no curvature of space (the Riemann tensor vanishes for all observers). [quote]What a black hole would look like to a human" is not a valid thought-experiment because a human would be torn apart by gravity long
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[quote]We can define a measure in such a way that Euclidean space is preserved within the measure space.[/quote] Perhaps for one or two distances. You can say "apply a correction factor of X when measuring the circumference at a distance of Y" to make C=2pi R magically work. But there is no consistent way to do this for all distances between