would thoroughly enjoy abusing them, although I'm not sure I would enjoy it actually, knowing that they aren't actually suffering. — bert1
People tend to treat others as if those others don't really exist, as if they are merely shells with no inner life, other than the one stipulated by other people. — baker
That basic awareness should be absent while memory and identification is fully functional simply makes no sense to me. — unenlightened
I neither claimed nor implied that color-signedness "serves no function". — 180 Proof
Sentience" may be epiphenomenal and serve no more of a function than color-sightedness. — 180 Proof
Also, what you say about "love" is a non sequitur with respect to the question posed in the OP. — 180 Proof
You did stipulate what you wished, and it ended up implying dissent is lies and consensus is truth. I would wear a tinfoil hat and cardboard sign if it meant I didn’t have to agree with such absurdities. — NOS4A2
From special relativity, the Lorentz factor is unbounded as v approaches c. — jgill
That doesn’t make it true, either. Your stipulation is just that, a stipulation, like they stipulated phlogiston or a pantheon of gods. — NOS4A2
betrays my intuition and experience — NOS4A2
We love people we do not have a "connection" with e.g. celebrities, authors, leaders, the dead, etc. We also love inanimate or abstract objects e.g. stuffed animals, our country / city, our sports team, vehicles, cultural objects, power, wealth, etc — 180 Proof
"Sentience" may be epiphenomenal and serve no more of a function than color-sightedness. — 180 Proof
Doesn't love require connection? How can you connect with someone you know isn't there?Not care. It's about my "sentience", not theirs. — 180 Proof
Worries about zombies is a vestige of the Christian idea of a soul. — Jackson
That makes no sense. P zombies resemble us in every outward way — Bartricks
It just has to do that thing about another 100,000,000,000,000,000,000 (hundred quadrillion) times, and by that time it can expect one to have appeared! — hypericin
And yet, if for every passing year a god were to count one atom in the (observable) universe (there are between 10^78 and 10^82 of them), by the time it had counted all of them it wouldn't have made the slightest perceptible dent in its waiting time for a single Boltzmann brain to appear. If for every atom, it begins anew the entire yearly enumeration of every atom, still, not the slightest sliver of progress, it's waiting would have not even begun.We can't be, that's the problem. — Michael
So both M (Boltzmann brains) and S(M) (common sense life) are extraordinarily unlikely, but given that S(M) is less likely than M, what greater explanatory power does it have? — Michael
Replace S(M) with common sense life and M with Boltzmann brain. — Michael
That is far more complex than just a brain forming in a void. — Michael
Is math something we discovered, or something we invented? — Count Timothy von Icarus
How does our limited cognitive power offer up a finer grained (indeed, infinitely finer grained) reality than that which seems apparent? — Count Timothy von Icarus
In this related argument, 3D space and time are illusory, a sort of hologram created by 2D information theoretic structures. — Count Timothy von Icarus
3D space-time might actually be an error compressing code that evolution hit upon, an effective means of encoding fitness information, rather than the structure of reality. — Count Timothy von Icarus
Reason being that a simulator would only need to simulate the areas you're currently looking at, not the entire universe. It could be analogous to video games, which render the world around them based on the players' line of sight. — Count Timothy von Icarus
Thier case might be the more parsimonious actually, — Count Timothy von Icarus
We have an issue because mathematics tells us we should be able to have continuous things, but instead we only have discrete things — Count Timothy von Icarus
How do these four words deal with abortion or capital punishment? — Tom Storm
To the degree ordinary experiencing is called-into-question by (memories of) nonordinary experiences, this is what I understand by "insight" — 180 Proof
You can't get any better model of something than an artificial copy of it. — T Clark
While it does take more power to emulate a system, you can fully emulate an older system on a more powerful system. Just look at MAME the Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator — Harry Hindu
What do you mean by "insight"? "enlightenment"? — 180 Proof
It doesn't require an inordinate amount of resources. — noAxioms
I mean, our physics can be simulated at best down to the classical level, not the quantum level. To do that, you need something with more capability, with completely different rules. — noAxioms
How would a physics simulation know when a particular state of simulated material qualifies as a sentient being requiring being fooled? — noAxioms
As for solipsism, it is simpler — Agent Smith
I think this is true if one assumes that the simulation is of the exact quality and complexity of the universe the computer making the simulation belongs to. — punos
In this context, we can realize that plain translations, although they give an impression of being easy and clear, exactly for this reason they are very dangerous: they can give you the illusion, they can make you persuaded that you understood and that the topic and the discussion is simple and clear. — Angelo Cannata
This opens another dramatic problem: are non-professional people condemned to be excluded from understanding anything? I would answer dramatically: “Unfortunately, yes”. — Angelo Cannata
Your very act of posting here demonstrates your conviction of the existence of others — Banno