swid

I agree with most of what you are saying; it absolutely applies to physical questions. Whether or not quantum computing can be practical depends on our ability to fight off decoherence in more and more qubits.

But I'm more of a software guy, so it feels fair to ask if Turing completeness enough to simulate reality, and therefore human-like intelligence?

If so, what shortcuts can we take to avoid simulating "everything"?

For the record, I am consistent because I absolutely think it is not possible we live in a simulation, because the immense resources it would take to simulate the large, detailed, world we live in. I don’t think even the most advanced civilizations could build a computer that we live in.

But this is different from if we can simulate some amount reality at all, which I think is possible, and I use that to demonstrate why I think computers can contain human like intelligence in theory. Of course you will see instructions and be unable to tell why it feels alive if you just look at op codes.

Then I do ask, without answering, how much can you omit and still get sentience. You can likely simulate bio chemistry alone and get consciousness. And you may be able to simulate even less than that. Though each reduction would make it easier for a simulated scientist to discover they are simulated.

This question is like asking if a soul exists. I don’t think it does. I think, the state of brain gives way to us feeling alive. There is nothing special in there that happens outside of the physical reality. So by this view, simulating a person does indeed produce consciousness.

Another (unsubstantiated) way of looking at it is that the universe is a kind of computer already, which we seek to emulate. We are already running on a computer if the universe can be considered one.

We are using different definitions of simple. Any equation can be written down and calculated by a Turing machine. By simple I mean computable.

Simple is ambiguous as I said, people can and do claim anything is simple. So it can’t be categorically wrong. If it’s possible to simulate five atoms, why not more? I’m not placing time or memory bounds on the process.

I linked to a simulation of an artificial cell [1] in a different comment, I’ll toss the link here too. As I said there, this is not the way the universe works, but I think this approach to simulation may support real thought (ignoring time and memory requirements). It supports cell division.

[1] https://www.quantamagazine.org/most-complete-simulation-of-a...

Simple is an ambiguous term. A simple cell is still very complex by other measures.

No matter how simple or complex, is it possible to implement the rules of simulated universe on a computer? Can biology be simulated (however slowly) on a computer?

Reasonable time frame is not a requirement of the argument I was trying to make. I’m saying that there is nothing inherently missing from a silicon based computer or Turing complete language to support human level intelligence.

I'm not suggesting we can do this today (no universal theory), and I'm not suggesting it is practical in the sense that we can simulate that much amount of matter in a certain amount of time. But I think it's theoretically possible.

There is also the question about how much simulation would be necessary to get approximately real life results that includes consciousness -There was a very detailed simulation of a cell[1], I think that used a library of known chemical interactions. This is not the way the universe works, but such an approach might still simulate life, including people, with enough running time.

[1] https://www.quantamagazine.org/most-complete-simulation-of-a...

1) I used nuclear reactions just as a fill in to say it should be possible to simulate matter with close enough approximation to facilitate thought. This was posited in "A New Kind of Math" which suggests there is a thing as "computation equivalence", which is a theory I mostly subscribe to. If we wanted to simulate a human naively, we would probably only care about biochemical reactions at earth like temps, not nuclear or quantum physics.

2) I’m not sure matrix math is sufficient, but let’s ignore that because I feel some kind of math is sufficient, and any computer program will have the same question apply. I also feel the universe might be the most efficient computer in time and space, which means we aren’t living in a simulation, because the computer would be bigger and run time slower than the reality it simulates.

- I don’t think it matters where the network is in reality. Virtual is fine. In a mostly perfect simulation of reality (let say enough to accurately model biochemical processes), there will be some state of the program, and for something living in the simulation, they will feel alive if they are complex enough.

They will experience time differently than we do, but they will arrive at their own conclusions as part of the simulation.

I meant something else. If you can perfectly simulate a rock, as it exists in reality, you can also simulate a brain. The universe doesn’t care that the brain produces thoughts.

Thoughts are an emergent property of the network, there is no rule in the universe to treat the brain different. So if we think we can simulate matter, with sufficiently close behavior to reality, than that is already sufficient to produce AGI, and none of the code will look like it provides thinking… it will just look like math/physics.

I agree with that - maybe the only practical way to get a human brain map of sufficient detail to fully simulate is to grow it virtually, and maybe this would take too long compared to a human life.

I think it’s just a useful starting point to make the argument it is possible given infinite time and perfect data. Then, we can ask how much can be optimized and how to get the structure needed digitized.

It may not be needed for consciousness, but even if it is, we can simulate quantum mechanics on traditional hardware, just slowly compared to real life. This is why I brought up possible optimizations to the real world.

If it takes us 100 years to simulate 1 second of consciousness with quantum effects, the consciousness will just experience time differently than we do.

Personally, I think we don’t need to take quantum effects into account to achieve consciousness.

The argument that deep network algorithms are just matrix operations is not compelling to me as a reason we aren’t getting there…

I believe two things:

-1. the universe itself operates on mostly simple rules which can be simulated to high enough precision on hardware to approach what happens in the real world. If we can simulate nuclear reactions, we can simulate consciousness, and that will result in real consciousness. The simulated entity will believe all the same things as a real one. And there are likely huge shortcuts we can use to optimize so we aren’t simulating a whole brain or person. Maybe matrix math is all you need.

- 2. I don’t know how to build consciousness, but I believe wherever it exists in the universe, some kind of interconnected network like we find in the brain or neutral networks will exist at its foundation.

Given this, I don’t think it’s crazy to say we are making in roads to sentience.

How many colors do you typically identify or would be willing to accept? Somewhere between 10 and 25 would be sufficient… not every word will have a color association, but many will have more than one.

I think you need to be pretty strict to not find a match after 50 words.

I meant it mostly as a joke, but there is a certain amount of irony to it. This goes way beyond prompt engineering - he wrote an algorithm to run on GPT in a way you would not expect a non-programmer to write. I think the idea is cool and the process to write it was revealing.

It's funny to me that this kind of usage of GPT is just programming with a lot of extra steps.

Here's the way you can solve the first problem with generics in go, almost exactly as he described:

https://go.dev/play/p/GrLYBj3N0jr

The trick is to define the fish tank like so:

    type fishTank struct {
      container[fish]
    }

The suggestion in that post about how to fix it is good, and mirrors one I read in the Rachael by the Bay blog - type the number of machines to continue:

https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2020/10/26/num/

The take away by both is there is actually something to do which can wake people up when the stakes are high, and they might not be doing what they expect.

I mean, even in your own post, you spell strong man different from strongman. Here’s a definition of the word strong for you: “possessing skills and qualities that create a likelihood of success.” Obviously this meaning is divorced from the definition of strongman you provide, so why be obtuse about it?

I only have 10kw but most days that is enough to get through the night. Air conditioning will go through it, but I don’t typically need it, especially after the sun sets.

Sounds about right for the power only, but you also probably get a battery with it to deal with power outages… I don’t know how to price the utility of that, but it’s why I bought solar.

If you want an email and okay with anonymous - send an email. If you want verification of economic activity without the right to see that activity - ask for a credit card.

I trying to figure out the problem you want to solve here and how blockchain is better - but it falls apart. For one, most people don’t buy things with crypto and there are also many different coins on top of that. So even if tie an email to a particular crypto address, it’s not likely the average person can prove they have economic activity.

Then the motives are wrong on both sides anyway - I don’t want services I use to have a copy of my spending history, and they want a way to deanonymize me to discourage abuse, or charge me for their services. Neither of which sounds like it is part of what you are suggesting.

I’m not suggesting you can’t add value, but that it grows asymptoticly towards a limit.

Human ingenuity is scarce and even if it wasn’t, I’m allowing for some things to be not scarce in practice, like information and maybe energy someday.

But concrete / metals / something physical will be scarce, and as long as it is, the rest of the economy cannot tend towards infinity. Otherwise, in the far enough future, this scarce thing would be essentially free.

There simply has to be limits to this though, because if there were not, the materials would eventually become (relatively) free.

Think of it this way, if the value of output grows too many magnitudes over the inputs, then essentially the input becomes free, which violates intuition, because those resources are scarce. If the resources are free to me, I will buy them all and raise the price.

Arguing otherwise to me is an indication that you think either the material in question is not actually scarce, or else you realize there is actually a limit to how much value the economy can derive from those resources, but fail to reach the logical conclusion that there is a limit to economic growth.

Reading from config isn’t a problem with the way I am doing it… the name is only the key for the thing to inject, you need some code to fill that key to something else dynamically already.

Saw the uber/fx this morning and decided to give another go at sharing this small project. The thing is, dependency injection doesn't need to be all that complicated. I think, if nothing else, it makes testing easier and helps you be sure you can run all your tests in parallel.

I'm not here to defend DI if you don't like it, but otherwise happy to answer questions about it.

Check out the test file for some kind of example on how to use it.

If the purpose is to avoid KYC laws and turn bitcoin to cash, it isn’t hard to understand why Steam wants to avoid these types of customers.

Also, they aren’t buying low and selling high, they are buying low and selling even lower because they are okay with a lossy conversion.

The people who buy the game then resell the key on other websites for less than you find it on steam. They can buy many licenses when the game is on sale, so even if there is no chargeback, the devs can lose money through these methods. Otherwise it is still a money laundering tactic.

Here’s a blog post where they talk about this eco system.

https://factorio.com/blog/post/fff-303

I think the other poster has a point -

The marginal utility of the second marshmallow is lower. Then there is added cost in the time spent waiting. Even if you have to wait in the room regardless, I think it’s fair to say there is a cost to delaying the gratification.

Why one extra? What if I just give you 5% of a marshmallow? 1%?

A coherent argument can be made that the extra costs are not worth it. I don’t particularly like marshmallows, but maybe I’ll eat one. Maybe two marshmallows in the future would be higher utility or whatnot than one marshmallow now, but that isn’t always the case.

I interpret the warning as the external validation part, not the type of friend.