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  • Hey all, just changed over the backend after 15 years I figured time to give it a bit of an update, its probably gonna be a bit weird for most of you and i am sure there is a few bugs to work out but it should kinda work the same as before... hopefully :)

Early Reviews - Terminator Salvation at 14% on Rotton Tomatoes

karapetkov said:
No, it's not. :)
And, BTW, what does *physics* mean?
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It means our brains think, feel and dream by means of a biological computer (our brain). What substance: silicon or amino acids is beside the point. There are already billions of living computers walking the earth. They just use a different manufacturing process than humanity has harnessed and controlled.

Coco said:
Humans are alive.

"A virtual 1:1 molecular simulation of an existing human brain" is not.

Just a little tiny difference. :cool:
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We don't even have a definition of life. It's thinking like that, that will bring on one of the greatest genocides ever committed on this planet. It was once thought that blacks, jews, neighboring tribes and women were also subhuman. Some even suggesting that they had no souls nor were human.

It's that kind of attitude that continues to lead to the abuse of other primates because they haven't been supposedly sanctioned by God as worthy of rights despite exhibiting incredibly sophisticated and comparable intellect to small children.

A definition of life is largely impossible. Any definition we attempt to pin down is full of contradictions. It's an arbitrary definition. It doesn't actually really have a cut off point either. You can say that a human is obviously more independent and autonomous than a rock. That as an identified entity it would be more 'lifelike' than a rock.

Similarly humanity is not a binary experience. Some humans are 'more human' than others. Someone in a vegetative state with no brain activity is awarded human rights. A Dog is not. The Dog is "More human" than a vegetative human. Someone with developmental disorders and the intelligence of a 1 year old will never be as intellectually or emotionally sophisticated or advanced as a chimpanzee and yet we award the human rights but not the chimpanzee. It's a rational position to take. It's too dangerous to create a loophole in the legal system where humans can be deemed 'inhuman' but I think it's also a challenge to evaluate all life on a consistent set of rules and not based on their DNA, Chemical composition or other arbitrary and largely irrelevant details.

The reason I say everything is physics is because there has never been any proof or even suggestion of evidence that any thinking or deciding happens outside of our brains. On the contrary all of the evidence we collect on the human brain points strongly to all thinking being present inside of the chemical hardware running in our skull.

Coco said:
Yes, but would it's ignorance make it alive? :)

Brain input from the body is needed from both chemical and nervous pathways for the production of self-consciousness.
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And yet people have cochlear implants. Blind people have had sight restored by neural implants. Both of these senses have been replaced by silicon implants. Quadrapalegics feel nothing below their neck. Creating a simulated skin and eyes and ears as part of the "brain on a chip" experiment wouldn't be challenging at all if we had the technology to simulate every atom in the brain.


We're all squishy robots.
 
Gavin Greenwalt said:
We don't even have a definition of life. It's thinking like that, that will bring on one of the greatest genocides ever committed on this planet.
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hahaha

And who said a rock is not alive?!
 
Nobody.

A silicon based lifeform might look exactly like a rock. It might be 'eat' plutonium and have no need to move.

Its reproductive life cycle might be centuries or millenia. And that's just a rock. I would say someone has already written 'living' software. We just haven't been willing to recognize it. Not saying it was sentient. But I would say that we've already created a new form of life.

That's why we have to be so open and flexible in definitions of life. Even a rock can be misleading.
 
Gavin, normally I would ask to see some sources cited, but I'm kinda still trying to comprehend it all and what this means for the future.

Squishy robots indeed.
 
Read: "Bicentennial Man". Or, just go see the movie with Robin Williams. Not badly done........

Asimov=way ahead of his time again........ Really miss that guy!.......sigh.........
 
Gavin Greenwalt said:
It means our brains think, feel and dream by means of a biological computer (our brain). What substance: silicon or amino acids is beside the point. There are already billions of living computers walking the earth. They just use a different manufacturing process than humanity has harnessed and controlled.



We don't even have a definition of life. It's thinking like that, that will bring on one of the greatest genocides ever committed on this planet. It was once thought that blacks, jews, neighboring tribes and women were also subhuman. Some even suggesting that they had no souls nor were human.

It's that kind of attitude that continues to lead to the abuse of other primates because they haven't been supposedly sanctioned by God as worthy of rights despite exhibiting incredibly sophisticated and comparable intellect to small children.

A definition of life is largely impossible. Any definition we attempt to pin down is full of contradictions. It's an arbitrary definition. It doesn't actually really have a cut off point either. You can say that a human is obviously more independent and autonomous than a rock. That as an identified entity it would be more 'lifelike' than a rock.

Similarly humanity is not a binary experience. Some humans are 'more human' than others. Someone in a vegetative state with no brain activity is awarded human rights. A Dog is not. The Dog is "More human" than a vegetative human. Someone with developmental disorders and the intelligence of a 1 year old will never be as intellectually or emotionally sophisticated or advanced as a chimpanzee and yet we award the human rights but not the chimpanzee. It's a rational position to take. It's too dangerous to create a loophole in the legal system where humans can be deemed 'inhuman' but I think it's also a challenge to evaluate all life on a consistent set of rules and not based on their DNA, Chemical composition or other arbitrary and largely irrelevant details.

The reason I say everything is physics is because there has never been any proof or even suggestion of evidence that any thinking or deciding happens outside of our brains. On the contrary all of the evidence we collect on the human brain points strongly to all thinking being present inside of the chemical hardware running in our skull.



And yet people have cochlear implants. Blind people have had sight restored by neural implants. Both of these senses have been replaced by silicon implants. Quadrapalegics feel nothing below their neck. Creating a simulated skin and eyes and ears as part of the "brain on a chip" experiment wouldn't be challenging at all if we had the technology to simulate every atom in the brain.


We're all squishy robots.
Click to expand...

Wow! Gavin! Deep stuff. Well laid out. Thanks! Like it.
 
Gavin Greenwalt said:
It means our brains think, feel and dream by means of a biological computer (our brain). What substance: silicon or amino acids is beside the point. There are already billions of living computers walking the earth. They just use a different manufacturing process than humanity has harnessed and controlled.
Click to expand...

I failed to find any proof here, just statements. :sifone:
 
It's not that you failed, somebody else did.
 
This has turned into a religious debate masquerading as a technical one. :yikes:
 
Does life equal consciousness? That's an unanswered question I think.

Famous thought experiment. Lets say every person was given the responsibility of looking after one brain cell (some might joke there are some already doing that with their own). Ok, this cell is housed in an environment that keeps it alive. Your responsibility is to feed in and feed out signals that you receive from the internet from all the other cell holders. You get signal in, feed it to the brain cell and then feed out the responding signals to other cells. So basically you have a brain that has been broken down and is essentially still operating normally. Distance between cells, even direct contact, no longer dictates the definition of alive and conscious. Now here comes the fun bit. If instead of a cell you only had on paper a set of functions dictating exactly how the cell might react to signals. Signals are received in paper form in the post by letter and you write and send out letters according to those set of functions specific to your paper 'cell'. Is this mass of communication alive? It can function and operate in the same way as any human brain.

It's just a thought experiment folks so don't post in saying how it wouldn't work as the point is to change your view of consciousness as not being so easily tied down to location or other dubious parameters.
 
Throw into the mix quantum mechanics and things become stranger still since there might be something called non locality
 
I enjoyed it but it was not as good as I had hoped. The sound effects of the giant robots sounded just like the ones from the recent "War of the Worlds". Still very effective.

There's a nasty rumor going around that Jim Jannard is somehow linked to the real SKYNET. I don't think those little red eyes have anything in common with Red. So we should all just relax and ignore the unsavory gossip.
 
Good god that was a terrible movie... and I liked transformers.

It was just so.... bad... and insultingly bad at that. I don't mind bad without ambition but they worked hard to make bad.

And the ending monologue wanted me to shove a T1000 silver spike through Jon Conner's head. I would have cheered for skynet but it was almost dumber than humanity. It's a marvel neither party managed to accidentally kill themselves over the course of the last 9 years.

I could write a master's thesis on what's wrong with that movie. By the half way point I was almost too busy rewriting every scene in my head as it went to even bother caring anymore.

It's been a long time since I've seen a movie where every single shot was a plot hole wraped in terrible dialogue.
 
Gavin, I read a report somewhere which said that in the original script, John Conner was barely seen until the very end. He was the Michael Ironsides character, essentially. Apparently, the producers wanted Bale to play the robot Marcus (not surprising, given Bale's many robotic performances). But Bale insisted on playing John Conner. The writers (particularly Nolan) were then forced to graft Conner's character onto the existing plot, trying to find stuff for him to do.
 
It has been along time since I sat in a movie with my arms crossed wanting to leave. This one did that. Seriously had me twisting in my chair. I went with a buddy who seemed to be enjoying it so I watched the whole thing. Wished I had left (or been killed by a robot) before that last scene............
 
Terminator sucked. I felt violated. I'd call it a disappointment, but it really wasn't -- it was about what I expected. Some of the FX work was pretty cool, but nothing that really made me go "wow!" and nothing revolutionary for the time as we saw with T2. The cringe-inducing dialoge and half-assed story just fell flat. There are so many cool directions that they could have taken this film, but chose not to...

I'll take the kids to see UP, that should be pretty good -- or at least Pixar has yet to let me down. I don't know if I'll waste my time on Transformers -- it's probably going to suck too and I wasn't a big fan of the first one, it was just OK.

I keep preaching it, but I don't think there's a producer or director in Hollywood that would know a good Sci-Fi script if it sat on their face and wiggled. Or maybe there is, but I think Hollywood is afraid that good Sci-Fi won't put enough butts into those theatre seats, it's much better to rape and pillage an existing franchise or take an over-used concept and beat it to a bloody pulp.
 
It was like Anti-SciFi. The whole interesting part for terminator for me has always been the duality between machine and man. Is a terminator alive? Can we grow beyond our programming? It was very philisophical and open. The Sarah Conner Chronicles was a fucking brilliant investigation of the ideas of Terminator. This was a slap in the face.

"The reason humans will prevail is not because of technology but because of the power of the human heart." It made me want to gag. Marcus <spoiler> giving up his heart? Really? He doesn't deserve to live? The only thing that made Marcus "human" was that he had a biological heart? I guess Our 'souls' reside in our cardiac muscles. It was a movie about what makes us human and they pretty much said "If you don't have a brain and a heart you aren't a human." Which was also pretty confusing considering the number of people with artificial hearts.

And that's just thematic stuff.

Oh the plot... me oh my the plot. <spoilers> So the story is that they have this device which will supposedly deactivate a skynet headquarters. And Jon Conner is going to lead an attack and blow up skynet's headquarters. (Well as they point out in the end not the only or really anything more than just another base.) Meanwhile... Skynet has figured out that they just need to kill kyle reese to kill Jon Conner. So they create Marcus to be an 'infiltrator' but instead of being a lethal infiltrator... he mission is to find people and become their friends. And then hope they get captured by skynet. Instead of... you know... just killing them on the spot.

They even succeed. Which was a miracle in accidentally just 'bumping into" the two people on earth they need to find and getting both of them "into the trap" and then again instead of killing them. Lock them in a room for god knows what reasons instead of fulfilling their plan.

Greatest evil plan ever.

I always stay for the credits. Even for like Deathrace 2000 (which was a much much better movie). This was the first movie in years that I just walked out on before it had even finished fading to black.
 
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