ConfucianNardin

They're also squatting the putty.org domain to advertise their software, which is pretty bad-mannered.

Examine.com does NOT sell vitamins/supplements.

They collect and analyze available research, and the result of that process is their product (in the form of guides etc).

If you're looking for performance, don't go with Vivaldi, at least if you use many tabs.

With many tabs (>= 100 or so), it becomes really sluggish. For example, opening a link in a new tab can take approximately five seconds. Chrome, which it is based on, does not have this issue. Chrome is however unusable (with many tabs) for other reasons (lack of lazy loaded tabs essentially causing a DoS for many minutes when starting it, at least on Windows).

I do not find it bizarre to pose that it could be possible to use another set of primitives (than biochemical ones) to create something analogous to the higher level structure in a human brain that produces thoughts.

No, the issue is with the very premise, then.

It is not clear that consciousness necessarily only emerges from a neurochemical process.

What was basically said was "We do not know for certain that it is this neurochemical process that accounts for consciousness. Isn't it reasonable to suppose that we might encounter things that actually are conscious, but whose consciousness is not accounted for by the same property (neruochemical) of the underlying process."

I'm not sure that stated premise is very useful, since it borders on the tautological.

The dog (or even a human doing some task) is akin to an intricate state machine whose next state depends on the current state and its environment. Just like the spinning top. For each of those we modify the lower level mechanisms to effect a different high level behavior. Changing the thing in the former case (Cocaine/neurosurgery) or its environment (steal the bone). Changing the thing in the latter case (cutting out part of the spinning-top) or its environment (carving the surface it spins on).

The difference in the two cases being the number of intermediate steps (or abstraction layers if you will) between the high level behavior and the low level mechanisms from which it emerges, and the complexity of the emergent behvaior.

Illusion: the low level mechanisms (biochemical or otherwise) that, using the current state and the environment, transition to the next state, and in the process "present" an experience that we interpret as ourselves thinking, making decisions, taking skillful actions and so on.

If we observe the target phenomenon "skillful action" we discover that all known occurrences are biological. This doesn't really preclude the possibility of other mechanisms producing it.

To modify the behavior of a machine, you cannot use cocaine. That's because the machine has no receptors for the comprising molecules - not because it has no thoughts. You could instead modify the logic gates it possesses instead by applying a certain pattern of electromagnetic radiation which would cause interference, just like the cocaine interferes with the normal workings of the brain.

> Even current ("real") intelligence can do that.

No it can't. A biological creature's output is not deterministic from its input and can be sensitive to conditions not anticipated at-programming-time. That isn't understanding.

A spinning top may spin on many surfaces not anticipated by the designer and acquire all sorts of interesting behaviors by doing so.

[...]

Many of these tests you're outlining aren't relevant to the question "does this biological creature have what we are interested in". Ie., "is this piece of lead actually gold". Not "is it shiny with a brass coating" -- but can it participate in all the causal interactions gold can. I'm not concerned with how good the tool is, or how close we are to fooling people, i'm concerned with whether the biological creature can think.

Does the biological creature posses any concept? Any idea? Any understanding?

No, only metaphorically. It seems as-if it does to people who use it to aid in their understanding. It is only a trick, no more than the sun being ascribed agency by ancient human being.

Intelligences which we're targeting do not possess concepts. They are not meaningfully connected to their environment. They don't understand it. The dog's finding its bone is just the same as the spinning top find its grove. The spinning is only much more intricate, and the nature of and interaction with the surface much less easily understandable.

The dog experiences illusions of thoughts, concepts, ideas, imagination (and many other things besides) that are about its environment. Those have been caused by the nature of its environment. The spinning top topples towards its final point as-if it understood, just like the dog.

Biological creatures are rivers of biochemical and electrical currents that topple toward and outcome that it sensitive to their current state, like a top spinning about a board. They have no active, navigating, motivated concernful goal-directed action.

My view is that they never will, since on all the best evidence, skillful concernful action does not exist. It is merely illusions that emerge from chemical and electrical interactions.

It is not obviously clear whether your argument is any more valid than the above (or the other way around).

To expand, if a robot in every imaginable way behaves exactly like another human would, how can you know know that one possesses "intelligence" (or rather, consciousness), while the other doesn't?

Why would it be possible to construct the high level structures from which intelligence emerges on top of one set of primitives (electrical/chemical in biological context), and not the other (electrical-based logic on silicon).

The argument you pose have many signs of being an appeal to the ghost in the machine.

For anyone interested in exploring ideas around (self)consciousness and the mind, The Mind's I by Douglas Hofstadter and Daniel C. Dennett is a good read.

The problem is that Firefox was the last well supported browser that allowed for power user features.

With this change, Firefox targets the lowest common denominator just like every other major browser (tracing the footsteps of Chrome). In the progress, it too, is becoming just like Chrome.

This whole saga begun back when Opera dropped support for their 12.x browser, and became just another Blink-based browser. At that point, the only way to get a usable browser (with vertical tabs, MRU tab switching, gestures) was Firefox with a number of addons (Tree Style Tab, Tab Mix Plus, Firegestures).

One may argue that users like this should just use a fringe browser with such features built-in, but that's not viable because they're either unstable or lack timely security updates.

You may also argue that you can get all those features, even in Firefox 57, but that's only true with caveats:

Tree Style Tab still exists, but if you use either the history or bookmark sidebars, you better get ready to switch back and forth all the time (since only one sidebar can be active at a time).

The about:config setting browser.ctrlTab.previews (now also exposed in preferences as "Ctrl+Tab cycles through tabs in recently used order") is mostly useless, since it is limited to the 6 most recent tabs (probably even fewer on lower resolution screens).

There are several mouse gesture addons for Firefox 57, but none of them currently work on Linux/Mac. Even on Windows (and the others when they're fixed), gestures will work neither on internal pages nor on addons.mozilla.org.

That looks like opt-out (it's named "telemetry.enableTelemetry" and has "'default': true").

The Tinyx tool mentioned in the paper doesn't seem to be published anywhere.

It doesn't help that the name was already in use (by a minimal X11 server).

According to Wikipedia, Plan 9 has been using fossil as the default file system since 2003.