4,270 karma · joined May 30, 2020
Does that mean GPS is used by the baseband chip even when I disable location services in the OS?
>We are an editorially-independent part of [Asimov](https://www.asimov.com/).
It seems to be a vanity publication for some kind of genetic engineering company.
Some people think identity and the continuity of consciousness are based on information or computation, and not on specific physical matter or soul-like constructs, so for them a transfer of all relevant information would constitute a transfer of consciousness and identity. From this perspective (leaving aside questions of practicality) "you yourself looking from the biological body at somebody else in the computer" is exactly as valid as "you yourself looking from inside the computer at somebody else in the biological body" (and in fact the whole idea that you have to choose one or the other as "the real you" becomes moot on this view).
Of course it's a difficult metaphysical conundrum but to say that your view of things is "a simple fact" when the basic scientific materialist worldview of today points at least as much in the opposite direction is a bit overconfident.
If you broaden the comparison (only a little bit) it looks suspiciously like employees being forced to train their own replacement (be that other employees, or factory automation), a regular occurrence.
Ok yeah I guess you could be right..
I acknowledge this is partly just my personal bias, in some cases really not fair, and unenforceable anyway, but someone relying on llms just makes me feel like they have... bad taste in information curation, or something, and I'd rather just not interact with them at all.
Anyway to reiterate my point upthread, there could be people who think a chicken-level entity suffering is permissible, and a human-level entity suffering is not, and it is a perfectly consistent moral position for them to say we should not do research into creating new kinds of human-level entities with the potential for suffering. The permissible suffering being in the present and the impermissible suffering being in the future does not really change that.
PS in this thread we were not only talking about computer programs, but artificial brains made from biological human neurons too.
This is a fair point in general, but the whole point in this context is not that human design is more efficient at duplicating an entire organism, but that it can be more efficient at narrowly defined tasks. Evolution has never had the goal 'evolve human consciousness as quickly and efficiently as possible', it just had the goal (and even calling it that is stretching things of course, but let's say an emergent goal) of reproducing organisms.
How do you know?