1,155 karma · joined February 16, 2013
That sounds lovely.
Fake news (the actual kind), name-calling, absurd conspiracy-theorizing, memes that remove all nuance from complex issues, botnets that amplify anti-science/anti-intellectual nonsense ... aren't political dialogue, they're the breakdown of it.
(I'm an enthusiastic org-mode user, by the way.)
It's just a matter of how you weigh such considerations: https://www.utilitarianism.net/types-of-utilitarianism
Two weeks later, an angry user (the only one with a 100-digit password) complains that they can't log in anymore. The guy is the company's best-paying customer; the boss is furious. The whole team goes on a wild goose chase for two days and nights just to find out what happened, as clearly there's nothing wrong with their code.
A few years later, a former colleague shares the episode on HN. As you read the comments, it dawns on you that the idiot antagonist of the story is you. In this moment, you are enlightened.
If qualia arise only in particular configurations of physical substrate, then it might be possible for flatworms to have qualia but not search engines. This doesn't mean the flatworm has a concept of self, a concept of time, or even low-level cognition. "Nobody home", so to speak. But the basic qualia of light/dark/hot/cold might still be present.
"Last links post I included tech company Triplebyte in the shame list for refusing to let employees switch to work-from-home, then firing them. A representative of Triplebyte contacted me and asked me to explain their perspective, which is that they took the pandemic seriously and went all-remote around the same time as everyone else. The reluctance to let employees switch to work-from-home applied only to a few employees in early March, before the scale of the crisis was widely appreciated, and they say that they would have tried to make accommodations if they had understood the seriousness of the requests. They had been planning the downsizing for a while, it was really unlucky that it ended up in the middle of a pandemic, and they tried to make it as painless as possible by offering good severance pay, etc. I’m relaying their statement because I’m realizing it was probably unfair of me to single them out in particular – my hearing a lot about this was downstream of my having a lot of friends who work(ed) for Triplebyte, and my having a lot of friends who work(ed) for Triplebyte was downstream of them being a great company doing important work which all my friends wanted to work for. I continue to generally respect them and their vision (see here for more), and you don’t need to give them any more grief over it than they’re already getting."
This isn't mentioned in the linked BBC article, but both http://www.varasanos.com/PizzaRecipe.htm and http://www.perfekte-pizza.de/ swear by it, and I think it has made a noticeable difference to my dough.
Wolfram claims that they don't need to be; on the contrary. Take another look at the last section of the article.
Therefore, it may be true that using biological neurons, arranged in a certain configuration, would give rise to qualia like pain in a way that shifting electrons between CPU registers never could. We just don't know.
For more reading, here's a relevant whitepaper by the Qualia Research Institute: https://opentheory.net/PrincipiaQualia.pdf
To a computer scientist, superdeterminism seems like the most elegant solution to most of the current problems in physics. But it has always been firmly out of the mainstream, perhaps because it runs directly counter to our human experience. Gerard t'Hoofts framing of the universe as a cellular automaton (https://arxiv.org/abs/1405.1548) is relatively intuitive, but still only a rough sketch. Hopefully, Hossenfelder and Palmer now publicly arguing for superdeterminism will recruit some more bright minds to fleshing out these models into workable theories.
Where is the "you" in that equation?
More importantly though, it gives Google accurate insight into web traffic (many users block Google Analytics, but almost everyone loads web fonts), and it allows them to crawl websites more easily – before web fonts, many websites used pre-rendered PNGs to show web-unsafe fonts, which made crawling impossible.
Google has poured a lot of money into this, the fonts are free and open source, and the users aren't the product. Overall, I think it's a rare win-win story in this age of dystopian adtech.
You are correctly pointing out the conflict between computationalism ("consciousness is what certain computations feels like from the inside") and physicalism ("consciousness is what certain computations feel like from the inside, when they take place on physical substrates, perhaps requiring the involvement of quantum decoherence").
One of the best primers on the current state of academic hypotheses on these topics is the whitepaper "Principia Qualia" by the good folks at the Qualia Research Institute [0].
The mathematically ideal solution may be something close to Partial Common Ownership[0]: you self-assess what your property is worth, and you get taxed based on that number. However, that number is public, and if someone wants to buy your property at that price, you must sell to them. This system encourages optimal allocation of resources and penalizes hoarding.
[0] See Glen Weyl's fantastic book "Radical Markets". Full chapter here: https://assets.press.princeton.edu/chapters/s11222.pdf
Here is someone who believes that a private company's open attempts to rank websites by quality amounts to "seditious behaviour" deserving of criminal prosecution, and the only people willing to pay attention were Project Veritas. Google has plenty of ethics issues, but this guy's claims are absurd.