JackC

Look. If it means I have to wait for my peanut, you are just going to have to cure that mild case of death you're suffering from.

Equal terms means just that doesn't it? Everyone has a similar risk of being killed in a freak glue accident. Not everyone has the same risk of being killed by little Johnny's PB&J sandwich. Now if you could infect all kids with peanut allergy genes, that would also be "equal".

Thanks for the correction. My mistake.

Right, cos then you could crucify him for using his influence to help illegal aliens get into the country.

I think it was the other way around. The school were asking according to CSpenceFly's post and skydiver30960 was requiring.

Hang on a minute. You're against the idea of a school requesting that kids don't bring nuts to school because it infringes someones freedoms, but you're OK with schools requiring other kids to keep intravenous adrenalin on them? So regulation instead of a voluntary code of conduct is your way to maintain freedoms. That's a bit backwards isn't it?

He's got one now. 20 years ago at the height of his bloaty headedness, they hadn't been invented. Well I agree but there are much bigger things to get bent out of shape about than having to wait for your PB&J sandwich. Personally, I'd rather waste my time opposing something that really is removing civil liberties. Something like a government DNA database or forcing your ISP to give them all your surfing habits and email correspondence. Peanuts just seem like, well, peanuts in comparison.

I have a friend who is allergic to nuts. When he is unlucky enough to find nut traces in something he has eaten, his head bloats up like a beach ball and turns bright purple. It isn't much fun watching him choke and puke himself close to death on the way to ER. The guy has been on a resus table more than once. Now if you put me in a position where I am responsible for the safety and welfare of a bunch of kids with nut allergies in a place where other kids are gonna smear their PB&J sandwiches all over the worktops, I'm gonna do one of several things. Either quit and get another job where I'm less likely to have dead kids on my hands, ban kids with nut allergies from entering the place or ban nuts. Banning nuts seems like the least drastic measure and a completely acceptable one to me. I don't see the big deal.

Don't let the facts get in the way of your rant. The number of overall offences involving firearms fell by 13% in 2006/07 compared to the previous year. Firearms were involved in 566 serious or fatal injuries in 2006/07, compared to 645 the previous year - a drop of 12%. The number of armed robberies involving guns dropped by 3% There were 13% fewer serious and fatal injuries related to gun crimes in 2006/07. The number of reported crimes involving imitation guns dropped by 15% in 2006/07. The number of reported crimes involving air guns dropped by 15% in 2006/07 over 2005/06. Source: UK Home Office

Like what? I think it's far from easy to write a 'mind' algorithm but I understand your point. I think that if there is more to it than just the algorithm, then it would be necessary to define what that missing component is. If you could write an algorithm that had the appearence of being self aware, possessing free will, intelligence and whatever else you decide makes up a phenomenological 'mind', then what could you test in order to differentiate it from a real abstract mind?

That depends on your definition of mind. Take free will as an example component of what a mind could be expected to have. You could define the abstract notion of free will as: free will exists if decisions are made (in response to external input) that are neither externally determined nor random and are not consequences of the laws of physics. Then there is the phenomenon of free will which could be defined as: free will is displayed if the decision making appears to satisfy the abstract definition of free will. I think it would be possible to write an algorithm that would conform to the definition for phenomenological free will. Now if you could do that, then it would be impossible to tell if anything that apparently displays free will, had actual abstract free will or simply looks like it does by displaying phenomenological free will. So if you want to know if 'mind' can be created, you need to define what the word mind means very precisely indeed.

I haven't got a clue but I doubt you mean this. I wasn't trying to suggest that you were being deliberately ambiguous, just that ambiguity is sometimes the result of using words that have different vernacular and scientific meanings.

That sort of description frequently comes up in conversations like this. Unfortunately it seems to be virtually impossible to nail down what things like "energy aspect of the mind" means. Now energy potential has a specific scientific meaning, bit it's pretty ambiguous in the context you are using it and almost certainly not what you mean. The trouble is, you have to define very carefully what 'it' is and how to measure 'it' before you can figure out if you have replicated 'it'.

Motor Neurone Disease that Steven Hawking suffers from, destroys motor neurons which are the cells that control voluntary muscle activity and general movement of the body. If Steven Hawking had damage to other parts of his Cerebral Cortex instead of just his Motor Cortex, you would see a very different effect. That adds plenty of weight to the argument that certain parts of the brain are responsible for certain roles and adds absolutely no weight to the soul theory. I don't know what you mean by quantify the origins of a thought so I can't answer but there was a recent discussion that you might find interesting. The links in there relate to a recent experiment where a subjects brain was monitored with an fMRI machine during a decision making process. The results were quite suprising. But in general it seems that science does study conciousness and the mind quite a bit.

Do you think he'll see the irony?

John apparently can't. But it's hard to take the America bashing complaint with a straight face since he puts so much effort into England bashing.

Are you familiar with the concept of attempting to prove a negative proposition? It's a basic logic issue and essentially comes down to, "it can't be done". For instance, if you ask me to PROVE that little green mean in UFOs have NEVER visited the planet earth, there's actually no way anyone can do that. Science can't "prove" something didn't happen, only something did happen. It does that by looking at evidence. There is currently no evidence the soul exists. It can't be measured or tested for. That's not to say it doesn't exist, but it is not something that science prove at this point, therefore most scientists would simply state that, there is no evidence to support any theory that a soul exists. If you're a different kind of scientist and see the world with an alternative viewpoint, I would propose you design an experiment and see if you can define what a soul is and how to test for its existence. People have tried before. There is a fairly famous experiment where one scientist attempted to measure the "weight" of the soul as it leaves the body. It was pretty bogus but . . . hey . . . at least it was an attempt. Check it out; http://www.snopes.com/religion/soulweight.asp I'd say that brain injury is fairly good evidence against the idea of a soul. Significant brain damage definitely changes a persons personality, or even destroys it completely whereas damage to other parts of the body does not. Even an induced chemical imbalance in the brain can have a significant effect

Actually, if a "gifted" scientific thinker said that, it would make him an idiot.

Oh... My... God... We've not refused to consider your hypothetical. We merely pointed out the great big, enormous, gaping hole in it. And rather than ponder the massive hole in your theory, you conclude that we must be frightened of it. Fookin spiders.

We don't need more intelligent wankers, we need less dumb fuckers.

Interesting point. Nearly all of the complete wankers I've met don't seem to be that smart. So you're saying smart people need to crank one out for the good of the planet?

Maybe but I wouldn't trust a politician not to fuck you over or for a lawyer not to follow the money. Anyway, the last thing this planet needs is more people.

No thanks. http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2007/dec/04/gayrights.immigrationpolicy http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/4397249.stm http://math.berkeley.edu/~galen/popclk.html

Hypothetically speaking, yes God or the boogieman or the FSM could personally reveal themselves to someone. What I'm saying is that even if they did, the results would be indistinguishable from a halucination. Since halucinations are known to exist, are common and easy to induce whereas the number of known entities capable of producing a revealation is still zero, the odds are vastly in favour of the halucination. So even if you did have the mac-daddy of all revealations, the fact that it could have been caused by a halucination means that you still have to treat it with skepticism. Therefore revealation isn't evidence. That's not science, it's common sense.

Any revealation, no mater how convincing, could have been caused by a halucination. Since halucinations are very common and the number of proven gods remains at zero, revealations cannot be considered to be evidence. There is no way around that.