“populism” happens because living conditions decline and the powers that be are unwilling or unable to address it. Why would that happen in a space-faring civilization with replicators?

Here’s the super luminescence research paper https://arxiv.org/abs/2302.01469

although, this PBS youtube video is the summary I actually understand

Yes, it’s an assumption to say consciousness is non-computable. But it’s also an assumption to say it is computable. Not really a phenomenon we understand.

I agree that fleshy brains are probably not the only things capable of producing consciousness. I think it’s actually fairly likely that a machine could be made that reproduces it, I’m just… really skeptical that it’s gonna look anything like a Turing machine. It would certainly be convenient if it did.

As to brains being made of discrete units… there’s some evidence to suggest it might not be. When you put a person (or any living thing) under general anesthetics, the thing the anesthetics target is microtubules within cells. And microtubules themselves have quantum mechanical properties. They’ve been shown to er, “do”, super-luminescence in lab experiments (I don’t understand quantum).

Admittedly, that’s a lot of correlation and almost no direct example of causation. But it does suggest there’s… something… there that needs more examination and research.

People living in a society that de-prioritizes and under-funds public education:

Is this the result of Undesirables breeding?

A brain is several billion living nerve cells all doing their thing, acting and reacting to one another, concurrently. A computer is only ever doing one task at a time, but at a fast enough pace as to give the illusion of multi-tasking.

Emulating a whole brain (everything, not just simplified neural networks, but the actual nerve cells themselves) is currently far beyond what computers are capable of. More then that, not every natural phenomenon can be described algorithmically! It’s entirely possible that consciousness is non-computable.

No, a computer is just boolean logic. I’m not being reductive, that’s literally all you need.

When people say that thinking is just complicated enough computation, that’s an assumption. A particularly convenient assumption, given all the computers we have lying about.

well they can do the sums, but that may be a far cry from thinknig

general anesthetics are so neat

like, you can just switch me off with a drug, and after a while I come back? weird, bizzar, and yet also practical. and (as far as I understand) it’s universal. Works on every living thing. They’ve anesthetized plants

Actually, there was a lot of push-back. People weren’t too happy that suddenly great big hunks of metal were hurling through public spaces at lethal speeds – but the car manufactures had money, so the press and the politicians sided with them.

check out Fighting Traffic: The Dawn of the Motor Age in the American City by Peter D. Norton

there’s like 10 non-permanent seats on the council, flipping one of the forever-seats to temporary isn’t gonna create a vaccuuummeee

A vacuum forms when you, say, disolve the whol dam thing

you can fix the online problems with a USB-to-ethernet adapter on the dock

steamVR works on it

of course, the only good VR game is Alyx and once you finish that it’s only tech demos and chat rooms - nothing else really worth the bother of strapping a monitor to your face.

I don’t think you could ever get the Security Council to dissolve itself. The only reason the UN was able to get off the ground is the veto, the great powers wouldn’t have joined otherwise.

But our permanent seat. That veto. That’s ostensibly under our control. And it shouldn.t. We suck. We use it so much crap like. Gone. I want it gone. Give it up.

limited individual property ownership to say, 5 properties

fine, but taxes kick in on the second and get exponentially larger with each one

if i were president i would do a billion executive orders and try to resign from the UN security council because we clearly don’t deserve that veto power

Sorry, I don’t quite understand what you mean. What does the bible have to do with it?

This type of “By you’re own logic” framing doesn’t actually get results. All it does is reinforce a militarist viewpoint as the natural default for Democrats, as well as Republicans.

Legally, terrorism is defined as a non-state person or group wielding violence. So our government can carry out any number of atrocity, rack up the corpses by the hundreds, thousands, or even millions; and still it would not be terrorism.

We get this definition of terrorism from the British legal system. Ironically, George Washington (and anyone else who fought in the revolutionary war) were terrorists. You can find British newspapers from the era describing them as such.

Well yeah, if we let the bombs just collect dust, the manufacture’s shares might drop in price. Can’t have that, can we.

lemmy gets awful mad if you were to make the same point about Russians