gloriousduke

I was about to add a similar comment. Definitely interested to read his evaluation and whether there is more hype than substance here, though I'm guessing it may take some time.

If that's the case, the QC computer endeavors are still worthwhile since while failing to scale them we may develop another piece of a more complete model of reality.

> maybe that he goes to tv news channels preferentially over arxiv publishing

https://arxiv.org/abs/2110.15213

This works pretty well: https://blogs.nasa.gov/webb/.

> Fix death please, that's a good way to prevent the fear.

Even if you were able to postpone your non-existence to some late stage of the Universe, it's all but assured you will have to end eventually in light of postulated Cosmological denouements. In other words, you will not exist forever due to physics.

That being said it would be nice to know it's possible to get at least a few hundred years of healthy and happy living in. Yet, would the fear of the end grow even greater then?

A world of only perfect beings does sound pretty boring. I'm not sure if anything worthwhile would actually happen in such a place. That being said, mental (rational) tools that help one recognize the origin of anxiety and reduce its deleterious effects are quite welcome. I think this article could help programmers/founders do just that.

The article describes how influenza viruses (not coronaviruses) use sialic acid to bind to the upper respiratory tract.

Edit: a letter.

> nominally has a meaning of merely being aware of, and responding to, the environment, but this is not the self-aware consciousness that is currently unexplained

By this do you mean we've explained how "what is it like to be a bat?" works? (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Is_It_Like_to_Be_a_Bat%3F)

If so, can you point me toward that explanation?

> then you get a picture of an extraordinarily complicated system, and the nuts and bolts of exactly what that system is running on fall away into irrelevance

I think this is a common failing of thought experiments. Gedankenexperiments help us ask better questions and design better real experiments, but if you're trying to use them to make fundamental conclusions about reality in an a priori way, you're likely going to fail.

This may sound absurd, but you actually need some (mostly settled) philosophy to determine what “facts and empirical truths” are.

> But these two things are not directly comparable

Correct. You simplified my comment nicely here (though I'm trying to find papers about smaller scales):

> While species diversity as a whole in the Hawaiian islands is likely increasing, due to introduced species, the diversity at smaller spatial scales is likely decreasing as endemics become rarer.

How do conservationists make value judgements in cases like this?

It's interesting that the image used for the article, from the windward side of Oahu, shows only invasive species (or maybe that's the point). Ironically, the biodiversity of plants on the Hawaiian Islands has increased tremendously since the arrival of man. The graphic shows 79 species of plant lost. Anyone that's been to Hawaii knows there are far more than 79 introduced plant species.

I'm not saying this is a good thing by any means, but it's interesting to see that novel forests of invasive species are still maligned even if they contain a greater number of species/area than what was displaced. If anyone is interested in this comment, I can unearth at least one paper that examines these values.

In the end, I suppose we value the total number of different species in existence, and as that number decreases, there is a Great Loss. Yet I do like to mull over why conservationists favor native species that are struggling to survive over the introduced that are flourishing, often at great economic cost to control said invasives.

Note: this comment only considers plant species, which probably makes it very uninformed and bad. Take it with a grain of salt.

When I was looking at a Game of Thrones subreddit after the episode last night, I realized I was getting more emotionally from the memes (which aren’t exactly the sort of memes Dawkins was thinking of) than long-winded analysis of what was good/bad about the episode. Those reddit memes are a way to encapsulate quite a bit of thought and feeling with only a few words and an image or two. Aside: those memes have been building up on each other for years, so quite a few images, words and online interactions are involved in their existence from a historical perspective. Not to say there is anything profound about this memeified manner of communication, or that it is all that much different from other types of human language and the appreciation of art or a photograph, but I still found it interesting (futuristic?) that I was thinking that way.

The article seems well-researched and informative. It made me think about the balance between economic growth's positive and negative outcomes. If it takes a modicum of editorial trickery to get more eyes on such a piece, I think we're fine.

I've encountered an idea similar to this:

> The transcension hypothesis proposes that a universal process of evolutionary development guides all sufficiently advanced civilizations into what may be called "inner space," a computationally optimal domain of increasingly dense, productive, miniaturized, and efficient scales of space, time, energy, and matter, and eventually, to a black-hole-like destination.

https://accelerating.org/articles/transcensionhypothesis.htm...

I suppose that falls under "Part of being a good person is to recognize these deterministic effects and plan your life accordingly."

The type of "reshaping" you're referring to would go beyond willpower in a single moment. Probably something like cognitive behavioral therapy?

"When your amygdala is active, you can’t have empathy for others"

This is an excellent example of those aspects of our existence that are deterministic. No matter your willpower, you may be bound by biology to act a certain way. Part of being a good person is to recognize these deterministic effects and plan your life accordingly.

For example, if you get "hangry" often, keep a food item on hand at all times so that you can address your hunger before you say something mean to your partner et al.

Oumuamua probably isn't artificial, but observations of objects like it and Tabby's star, fast radio bursts and contact binary systems* will likely increase as our instruments and data parsing improve. So, if aliens are the cause of any these or some repeated, anomalous future observations, it's only a matter of time before we all but confirm we are not alone.

*https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/vvbx4x/starivores...

It sounds like he did try to change course by moving and applying for other jobs and positions. The tragedy, well one of them at least, is that the system doesn’t value poets (or librarians). This guy had to die for his work to make it out into the greater world.

I need to get caught up on new developments regarding Wheeler's "Participatory Universe" to find out if anyone else is thinking along these lines, but if observation does result in existence becoming--wave function(s) collapsing into the truly concrete--then essentially the history of the Universe occurred instantly when the first observation of it was made? I don't know where that conscious observer would have been located. Earth? A planet like it? Perhaps on every world (simultaneously of course) where the retrocausal positioning of conscious entities made sense?

Why do we set out to do something? In many cases it's because we've been told achievement is important since a very young age. But since all accomplishments will presumably be lost at the time of the heat death of the Universe, maybe it's more important to focus only on tasks if your inner voice requires such dedication for your own happiness/sanity.

If you never get to enjoy life because you're constantly working at achieving what is required mostly by external influences, you may be wasting your existence.

"This above all: to thine own self be true."

How does the rosiness of this assessment jive with the UN’s report that 40 million Americans live in poverty? Perhaps they are an ancillary component of such a Republic?

Gardening for me. These are good examples of one of the main benefits of working from home. At many workplaces you need to simply be present at your desk hammering away at the keyboard to signal productivity, but it's easier for remote workers to get up and do their coding while engaged in something like walking or working outside. It's amazing how clearly the solutions for programming problems can come in those scenarios.

This idea's been passed around the psychedelic community, even so far as to suggest a drug like LSD or DMT changes your brain chemistry enough that you receive a different form of consciousness, endowing one with everything from the ability to commune with "machine elves" to providing a priori insight into the unitary nature of existence. Unfortunately these ideas get weaved within New Age-type thinking and I tend to lend them no credence. [1]

Similarly, if consciousness is a fundamental component of the Universe/reality, it may not supervene (a technical term in philosophy) on the physical structures of the brain. [2]

[1] http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1340425/

[2] See the arguments of the philosopher David Chalmers.

It means the deist explanation doesn't stand up to Occam's razor as well as the multiverse explanation. "Parsimony" in this context comes from the latin, lex parsimoniae, "law of parsimony."

Adding a deity to the explanation requires adding an "entity" completely nonexistent in the current models that are the basis for the multiverse, i.e. those within quantum theory and cosmology.

A deist creator explanation is equally untestable, but is probably less parsimonious than a multiverse explanation.

Similar to the idea that the downsides of globalism intermixed with potent capitalism, say ecological damage, will be outweighed by the sorts of technologically imbued powers that will take our civilization far beyond Earth.

It's interesting that Trump became the leader of free world by embodying the opposite of many of these precepts (he'd probably call someone adhering to them a loser or weakling). Epictetus would not be surprised, nor care.

Still working through the article, but it reminded me of the presumable fact that everything that happened before the first conscious entity existed in the Universe was essentially instantaneous. Same goes for time's forward direction. Without consciousness, i.e. with a perfect form of stasis, one could time travel to just before the heat death of the Universe in an instant.

John Archibald Wheeler took this idea even further with the PAP, the Participatory Anthropic Principle.

Sometimes I feel like work is the meaning life. From a certain (simplified/badly poetic) view, living existence exists just to, and because it can, battle against the 2nd Law of Thermondynamics, and that sort of just trickles all the way up to our complex social existence. If you're only increasing entropy by hanging out and resting on your laurels (again, simplified), rather than making/creating, you're sort of waste from the aforementioned perspective.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy_and_life