I'm honestly of the opinion that teaching children arithmetic (as in, having them perform arithmetic algorithms) is not just a complete waste of time, but actually detrimental as it sours them to the idea of anything labeled "mathematics".
3,367 karma · joined March 4, 2022
That's incorrect, for reasons I've already stated. Humans and simulated humans are not interchangeable.
>If a system takes the same inputs and creates the same output it's the same system on different substrate.
You can't feed a simulated human real food, and you can't feed a real human simulated food. You can talk to a human by vibrating real atoms at them, but you need to make simulated atoms vibrate in order for a simulated human to hear you. Clearly they don't take the same inputs, they take analogous inputs. You're still making the error of confusing the literal thing for its symbol.
>You don't say a human stops being a human if you put them on a ventilator, do you?
Inappropriate analogy. You can put a human into a ventilator and you can also take them out. It's impossible to "place" a real human into a simulation or to "take" them out of a simulation into reality. I'm putting the verbs within quotes to emphasize that I'm using the strict literal meaning of them, which is to translate configurations of atoms into or out of a place.
You can "put" a human in a simulation in a looser sense, which is to copy them and put their analogous representation in the simulation.
>How much of the biological human can be outside the meat body before you stop recognizing them as human?
The moment they stop being made out of atoms and are made out of simulated atoms.
>If the simulation of electronic impulses is exactly the same as what occurs 'in the substance', then merely the medium over which signals occur is different. In my eyes, whatever is experiencing these signals will experience them the same way.
and I don't see how it's in contradiction with anything I said.
>Being capable of that is, arguably, the sole thing that meaningfully separates us from the (real or simulated) fruitfly.
That's a bit of an extreme hyperbole, don't you think?
EDIT: I prefer SOMA's take on it.
If you could simulate a human perfectly, the simulated human would not be a human, it would be a simulated human. It's not a given that it would be subject to the same rules of ethics as real humans.
I don't agree that that's the biggest problem. I think the biggest problem is that patents are abused to stifle competition by refusing licenses or putting untenable fees on them. No one would have cared about Nintendo's D-pad patent if they'd just put a reasonable license fee on it. On the other hand, a patent like MP3 I would argue is quite legitimate, but putting a patent on a coded just makes interoperability more difficult. If MPEG had charged licenses for decoding chips and explicitly allowed software implementations, that would have things so much more smoother.
"They" meaning just Wisconsinites. The only political point I can find with a quick skim of the article is
>“There are well-documented concerns about how this company operates and uses its technology to violate people’s Fourth Amendment rights [against unreasonable searches],”
which is not what I would call a progressive political stance. If anything, it's conservative in the literal sense, of maintaining existing political institutions in their present state. It'd be more progressive (again, in the literal sense) to want to embrace more unrestricted surveillance.