My favourite argument against this idea is that it would violate the law of conservation of energy. In any case it looks to me that all these dualist theories of mind are non-falsifiable
It's irrelevant anyways, I would argue that what makes you you is not the emergent/transferred via antenna/magic consciousness - a.k.a. sensation of being a aware of your brain's processes.
Rather, the brain's processes themselves are probably what makes you you. Regardless of whether they generate consciousness, the biochemical sensory-processing, storage-and-modelling, and decision-making algorithms (which we can detect by looking at synapses) are where you lie.
If your brain was somehow modified to take completely different decisions and make different statements ('dumb' magic-less rewiring), with the magic/antenna/emergent/quantum/whatever consciousness part kept intact, I am pretty sure that I would not consider the resulting being 'me'.
Your "me" is going to disappear. How do you convince your "me" that it is necessary to disappear? One possible explanation is that you will get another "me".
Heating up a stove takes considerably more energy than using a microwave.
On my microwave, it takes about 96,000 joules (800W x 2') to heat up a plate with leftovers, while doing it on my oven it takes around 432,000J (1800W * 4').
Why not use a 24 hour clock then? In Europe, 24 hour (digital) clocks going from 00:00 to 23:59 are commonly used.
My French friends even use it even when speaking (I admit is kind of weird to hear "see you at sixteen thirty"), while in other countries such as Italy they use 24 hour clocks as well, but they "translate" it when speaking.
I guess for me personally the perfect solution would be a 12-hour clock that operates on the same principles as the European 24-hour (which I think is the same as the military clock?). So 00:00 to 11:59, twice per day.
But honestly my whole argument is pretty academic, so I'll probably just put up with the clock starting at 12.
In my experience most of the time "attackers"/script-kiddies just scan over a range of IPs for port 22, and if it's not open on your computer, they just move on to the next IP. That's why you get thousands of requests for port 22 and very few on say port 21.
Of course, not that it would stop someone willing to spend more than a few seconds on attacking your server, but still makes the camo analogy a quite nice one in my opinion.
It's good that you mentioned it, but it should be said that the experience is far from perfect (at least in FF). Playback speed resets at every question break, each new video, etc. Audio drops out of sync frequently and seems to have more issues when sped up than in VLC.
I'm more comfortable downloading the lectures, but there are a few upsides to using their HTML5 player:
- When I speed up the video in VLC the pitch of the sound goes up. This doesn't happen for me in Chrome.
- You don't get the "in-video quizzes" when you download the lectures. Some courses put them up for download separately, for others there is no other way to get to them but through the online player. The quizzes don't typically (never?) count towards your final grade, but they can reinforce concepts and correct mistaken understanding early.
On the other hand,
- I have finer speed control in VLC, and
- The video players on my computer are just "nicer" than the web alternative, maybe better than a web alternative can be.
As I understand it, the BSD licence (which BTW only some elements of Mac OS X have, as happens with some elements of Windows) allows to redistribute binaries, modified or not, provided you keep the copyright notice. In that case, how are Apple products "less closed" than, say, Microsoft's?
Note: I barely use Apple or Microsoft, so the question is NOT rhetorical.
Indeed. How does using the stack makes windows any less closed? Since you can't even tell to which degree it was modified, I think the answer is "it doesn't at all". And I think the same reasoning goes for mac OS X.
I think you can "escape" a programming language by sketching in quite the same way you can do it for natural languages, if not more easily. After all, we'll been using Flowcharts and the like since the beginning of computing.
I think it's more correct to say that Portuguese is a modern version of ancient Galician (usually known as Galician-Portuguese), just as modern Galician is.
I know many people enjoy screencasts, but they are just not for me.
I can't copy-paste code from a video.
Searching is orders of magnitude slower than just pressing "Page Up"/"Page Down". This is particularly important when I just want to take a glance and figure out if the text/video is of any interest.
I have to adapt myself to the speed of the video, and maybe most importantly, I have to swallow all the non-relevant parts (such as moving windows, launching commands, typing, etc.).
It takes me so much more effort (and patience) to watch a video instead of reading an equivalent text, that I almost never do so (khan academy being the exception).
My favourite argument against this idea is that it would violate the law of conservation of energy. In any case it looks to me that all these dualist theories of mind are non-falsifiable