Not amazed, just depressed.

I get the impression you don’t think this was a good thing to have done, hence the interrogation?

Not very satisfying answers I’m afraid, they were probably 8-10 and I have no idea how we got onto the topic since this was 15+ years ago.

They were actually pretty grateful, feeling it had set them up for a lot of positive realizations down the line. We play D&D now and they’re working on their masters, so I guess they weren’t too badly scarred…

I had a former summer camp kid come up and credit me with having given them their “first existential crisis” (for explaining that when you die, “you just cease”) which I am proud of.

(I am absolutely going to steal the Principle of Objective Things in Space, that’s wonderful.)

There’s a drive philosophers have, to question why things are the way they are, through a very specific lens. Why is it wrong to push a fat man onto the trolley tracks, if his death would save six others? Why is there a difference between the perception of the shadows and the perception of the man with the shadow puppets? Does free will exist, and why does that matter?

These are all the pursuit of meaning, and while they are noble and important questions to ask, they are not questions driven by the pursuit of understanding. Philosophy depends on assumptions about the world that are taken to be incontrovertible, and bases it’s conclusions from there. The capacity for choice is a classic example, as is the assumption of a causal universe, and though they’re quite reasonable things to assume in most cases, it can get mind-bleedingly aggravating when philosophers apply the same approach to pure fields like mathematics, which require rigorous establishment of assumptions before any valid value of truth can be derived.

Which is not to attack philosophers. I want to be clear about that, I bring this up just to emphasize that there are differences in thought between the two disciplines (that occasionally those differences in thought make me want to brain them with a chair is unrelated to the topic at hand). The philosophical study and speculation as to and on the nature of consciousness is perhaps the single oldest field of inquiry humanity has. And while the debate has raged for literal ages, we haven’t really gotten anywhere with it.

And then, recently, scientists (especially computer scientists, but many other fields as well) have shown up and gone “hey look, we can see what the brain looks like, we know how the discrete parts work, we can even simulate it! Look, we’ve got the behavior right here, and… well, maybe… when we get right down to it, it’s just not all that deep?” And philosophers have embraced this, enfolded it into their considerations, accepted it as valid work… and then kept right on asking the exact same questions.

The truth is, as I’ve been able to study it, that ‘consciousness’ is a meaningless term. We haven’t been able to define it for ten thousand years of sitting around stroking our beards, because it’s posited on assumptions that turn out to be, fundamentally, meaningless. It’s assumed there is another layer of abstraction, or that there’s a point or meaning to consciousness, or anything within the Theory of Mind. And I think it’s just too hard to accept that, maybe, it all… doesn’t matter. That we haven’t found any answers not because the question is somehow unanswerable, but because the question was asked in a context that invalidates the entire premise. It’s the philosophical equivalence of ‘null’.

Sufficiently complex networks can compute and self reference, and it turns out when you do that enough, it’ll start referencing The Self (or whatever you’d like to call it). There’s no deeper meaning, or hidden truth. There’s just that, on a machine, a simulation can be run that can think about itself.

Everything else is just… ontological window dressing. Syntactic sugar for the teenage soul.

Can’t, but I suspect not for the reason you’re hoping. The consensus, at least among computational neurologists (the field that, among other things, studies how brains work mathematically), is that “consciousness” as a concrete thing isn’t really… real. It’s just a term humans created to loosely describe a phenomenon that arises from any sufficiently complex well-ordered network. If you want to know what it really looks like, you can run your own OpenWorm robot! The human ‘mind’ looks just like that, only around a dozen orders of magnitude more complex.

The problem is that you’re asking mostly meaningless questions. Even the loose definitions of consciousness aren’t definable to the ‘atomic level’ - a mind is a mathematical construct. It’s like asking where the files on your computer live; I can point to the sectors of the harddrive where a program is encoded, or even hand you a really really massive stack of punched tape, but neither of those actually are the computer program. What we call the program is the interaction of a grammar consisting of logical rules and constants running within the linguistic and computational context of an automata. It’s the same as with a mind - it’s the abstract state of an unfathomably complex machine.

Alas, philosophers answer questions about the interrelation of minds, but not what a mind actually, chemically, is. They can extemporize at great length on the tendencies of a mind, the definition of consciousness, the value of thought, the many many vagaries of morality. They cannot, unfortunately, sit down and draw a picture of a mind. Many good and important questions can be answered by philosophers, but not every problem can or should be assessed with the tools they have.

You may be conscious, and you may have many long and deeply opinionated thoughts about what it means to be conscious, and how you can know that you are in fact conscious, but you cannot tell me what consciousness looks like. And to be perfectly honest, I don’t really care.

I don’t know if you’ve ever done this, but you should sometime present an engineer with the trolley problem. I’ve done this many times, and the invariable result is that they will ask endless questions to establish the parameters and present endless solutions within those parameters so that nobody has to die at all. It is, in short, a problem. Not an ontological tool for unlocking hidden understanding, which falls under the purview of your ‘philosophy’, but a practical problem. Like how you’re going to prevent some big mean mother-hubbard from tying you to the hypothetically metaphorical trolley tracks. And the solution? Is a gun. And if that don’t work, use more gun. Like this heavy caliber tripod-mounted little old number designed by me. Built, by me.

And you best hope, not pointed at you.

We can see what it’s sending to facebook though, and it’s not constant. There’s a bunch that it does send and receive, but this isn’t hypothetical speculation, like, we can just see that it’s not using your microphone for that, or sending anything like audio data. You can check this yourself, wireshark is free and packet specifications are available.

Setting aside confirmation bias (idk, because it’s boring?): So people you’re in a book club with, an established group which it is very easy to associate you with, were discussing Dell laptops… and you think it’s strange you got looped in? If three people from your book club all looked up dells later, or earlier, or etc. etc., why wouldn’t they figure you might also be interested in dell laptops? An approach that doesn’t require NLP of god only knows how much hypothetical audio taken from pockets, and works much better?

Ah, but how do you know you’re conscious?

The fundamental difference between your two positions seems to be that an identical ship that was created would be a fundamentally different ship. But that’s just something you’ve assumed. Why would that actually be the case? What, when you really get down to it, would be the difference that you could point to and say “ah, this one is a copy”? They would be, truly, definitionally, the same object. The differences between an original and a duplicate that existed together would only appear after they were created - if they appeared before they were created, then (again definitionally) they wouldn’t be identical copies.

If you destroyed the original and then created the duplicate, there wouldn’t be any differences - it would be created as an identical version, and continue being that version, accumulating differences only to itself. Nothing about it would have diverged from that instant of creation. How could it? There’s nothing to diverge from. If you can assume that there could be an original that isn’t destroyed, and then a copy created of it, then why couldn’t you just swap those labels around? Have a duplicate, and create an original from it. If for an instant they’re the same, then… er… there’d be no difference. The labels are just be a human affectation.

Think of it like transferring a file. I’m sure you’ve moved a file onto a different drive or dragged something from your downloads folder to your desktop or somesuch similar action. What actually happens is that the file is frozen to modification, copied from one place to the other, then deleted from the first place. But in all the times you’ve done that, have you ever thought to yourself “huh, you know, this isn’t actually the same file as what I initially clicked on”. And that’s because fundamentally, mathematically, it is the same file. Changes to the file follow it around when it’s moved again, if you change the name it’s still referring to the same piece of data, etc. It’s the same, single file.

As an academic with a great deal of experience in this field, I can quite confidently say that it’s not a debated topic at all. At least, not among academics. We’re (somewhat predictably) called to debate it with representatives of the various religions and spiritual creeds on an almost continuous basis, though.

And it really isn’t academically debated - topics surrounding it, like the nature of the conditions leading to the formation of networks which form a ‘mind’ admittedly are debated, but the fundemental truth that a ‘mind’ is a holographic pattern arising from said network is quite a settled topic, and has been for thirty-some years now.

Ah, but it wouldn’t be a copy of the original. In a hypothetical star-trek transporter accident that results in a duplicate, there would be an instant of creation where the dupe and original would be truly identical - and then the question would be which one of those two is ‘you’? They’d be experiencing identical things, so how could you tell them apart? What would even be the point, they’re identical, there is by definition no difference between them. The differences would only come once the duplicate is exposed to different (for lack of a better term) ‘external stimuli’ than the original, like different angles of seeing the transporter room or the sensation of suddenly and rapidly growing a goatee. Your perception wouldn’t continue with the duplicate because your experience would be different than that of the duplicate’s (for example, you wouldn’t have mysteriously grown a goatee).

If you destroyed the original and then made the duplicate, it would start at that moment of total equivalence, but there would be no deviation. There’d just be one version, that was identical to the original, moving forward through time. ‘You’ would just go on continuing to be you. Consciousness isn’t a ‘thing’ - it’s not magic, its just a weird state that arises in sufficiently complex systems. You and I and everyone else in this thread aren’t special, we’re just extremely densely packed networks that have the ability to refer to themselves as an abstract concept.

It’s a similar thing to the classic “But how do I know that what I see as the color green is what you see as the color green” question. The answer is that the “color green” that we see isn’t real, ‘green’ is just a nerve impulse that hits a network. Each photoreceptor just sends a signal. If we were computers the world would be represented as an array of values, which results in the much clearer “How do I know what I see as G_101.34 is what you see as G_101.34” just isn’t quite as punchy a question.

Extremely old news, but still very cool.

We used to have one of these roaming around my college compaci lab, hooked up to a big red bluetooth button that would recompile the neurological structure when pressed. When we were feeling particularly nasty (or they were waxing particularly poetic), we used to challenge the humanities majors to push the button and ‘kill’ the worm.

I’m not particularly proud of the fact I made quite a few people break down completely with the implications of asking them to do that - or more sadistically, by repeatedly pressing the button and asking them why it mattered. I got punched in the face by a vegan for that one, which was fair enough tbh. Anyways, the reality of the project really isnt something most people are prepared to address.

You’re coming at this from a slightly askew angle. Consciousness is holographic - that is, it’s complex behavior arising in the interaction of a more complex system. There’s nothing “more” to it than what we see. The transporters from startrek, which destroy then reproduce exactly, would change nothing about your experience. You’re just a complex arrangement of atoms, and it doesnt matter where that arrangement occurs so long as it’s unique. There is no “you”, there’s just “stuff” stuck together in a way that lets it think that it can think about itself. A perfect reproduction would result in the same entity, perfectly reproduced.

IDK, this one seems pretty unsurprising. That’s a damned tiny package, I can’t really see another way of fastening it together.

Now if it were me, that would be a reason not to make the damn thing in the first place but what do I know…

Uhm… This seems like preemptive and somewhat unrealistic horn-tooting, since they’re actively testing delivery drones in my neighborhood of seattle, and delivery robots are commonplace on the sidewalks of many cities (london, SF, LA). They’re cute, too!

Demanding more responsible regulation is reasonable and just. Time and time again we’re shown that attempts to prevent the broad adoption of understood technology is as effective as the war on drugs. I just think that a different strategy is going to be needed here.

“Harley Quinn, but as a child” yeeeee…eah. I wish I could extra not go see this, just to get the point across about how mad the fans are. Man, this could have been so cool.

Good.