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The issue would be how would you make that bomb focus all it's released energy towards accelerating the probe? The closest example we have in this respect is an underground nuclear bomb test from 1957. The bomb was placed at the bottom of a shaft with a iron cap. When the bomb was detonated, it blew the cap off. Estimates have put the speed of the cap at 5 times the escape velocity from the Earth. Now, given the size of the cap and the density of Iron, you can get an estimate of how much KE it had. If you then take that KE and apply it to something with the mass of a cellphone, you can get its equivalent speed. It works out to ~ 2% of light speed. And this was using a nuclear devise many times more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb. To reach 50% of c, it would have had to had more than 625 times more energy than that (At this velocity you'd need to use the relativistic KE formula to get an accurate value)

+1 Fruit fly consciousness is actually very interesting on account of their behaviour, as you have already observed. I already said that I don't know about US law but the point is that UK law require the fabrication of tyres to incorporate tell-tale markers at the minimum legal tread depth. Hence the tyre self diagnoses when it is too worn. However the tyre in this respect is not even a machine, let alone living or conscious so can take it no further. We have been through all that with the discussion about my accidental wedge. This whole thread appears to be one long litany of rejection. The opening post starts with a hypothesis of rejection "Artificial Consciousness is Impossible" and carries on from there. You seem to have rejected pretty well all matters germaine to the discussion of this hypothesis, at times quite rudely to others. Your current score of matters germaine appears to be You nearly 100% Others nearly 0% Do you think this likely for any human analysis ?

Since you still haven't given a short concise definition in plain English then "actual consciousness" is still a mystery. It's going to be different in every animal anyway. Human consciousness isn't likely to be the same as in a fruit fly larva.

I don't buy into emergentism, especially complexity emergentism which I addressed in my article. This is what I got off of two quick searchs from MS Bing: Frontier has about 9,707,648,000 + 48,598,272,000 = 58,305,920,000 or over 58 billion transistors. (Edit: oops looks like I severely undercounted this figure because just the CPUs in that thing is more than 95 trillion transistors but let's just be pessimistic about computers) Let's discount any connections between transistors, don't even design anything, just plop all of them down on a slab substrate or something. Let's allow connections in the fruit fly brain but not computer chips, because we need "margin." Because I didn't even get an answer out of Bing, I went to Perplexity and got this: Okay. That's about 55 million versus 58 billion with a big margin built in. Why isn't a supercomputer more conscious than a fruit fly? There goes the complexity argument, but what about other varieties of emergentism? I don't buy those either, and others apparently also don't. This is what someone else has to say (he leads an applied AI team at a robotics company https://ykulbashian.medium.com/emergence-isnt-an-explanation-it-s-a-prayer-ef239d3687bf There is another discussion from a prominent systems scientist, but it's behind a signup wall: https://iai.tv/articles/the-absurdity-of-emergence-auid-2552?_auid=2020 I think it's handwaving and they do too when it comes to the idea being abused. If the issue is about system behavior as Cabrera points out, then what separates it from behaviorism?

I will be happy to take the cat outside if there is less wind. Maybe it will not matter.

That may depend on where one wants to land on the question of AI and consciousness. I have found his paper quite thoughtful and it is nudging me to review my notions of the popular analogies between human brains and digital processors as we know them. The Epstein paper he linked also dashed some cold water in my face, especially regarding how little we know about the causal operations of brains. I want to marinate for a few days on that one. That said, I am disappointed when anyone uses terms like "hysterics" against anyone. That's a putdown rooted in misogyny and myths about the psyche, but maybe its roots are being forgotten. Hope we can move past that. Talking of self-diagnosing tires seems a little off the topic, but maybe not. Whatever consciousness refers to, it seems to be something emergent in highly complex and multilayered systems, so that seems like the place to turn the light and try to discern causal efficacy.

I skimmed the essay (or at least a similar one) quite a while ago, and I think most of the time I had the term no shit sherlock in my mind. I agree with the general gist, the way the brain works is not the way a computer works. It is also true that the way we describe cognitive activities are superficial narratives (including specifically "information processing theory", as we do not really understand the underlying biology. And that is in my mind the overall issue, we have mostly a black box, we can see what comes in and what comes out and we make a story about what might happen in between. Bits and pieces are known, but we do not really know how they fit together. I think with respect to memory, we do not store memory, we (re)create memory, in part when certain paths are activated in certain combinations. I think a claim that memory does not exist is overreach, but memory as expressed in information processing theory, which was and perhaps still is something that has been heavily promoted, in cognitive psych. It also has resulted in quite a vast arrays of self-improvement theories (usually with little evidence) and which also has been liked a lot by tech folks.

I'm agnostic about God the same way that I'm agnostic about unicorns, hobbits and Zeus. Is that what you had in mind? It does, in fact, natter what we believe.

The gravity "slingshot" uses the planet's gravity to alter the trajectory in such a matter that part of the planet's momentum/orbital velocity is transferred to the craft. The theoretical maximum gain from such a maneuver is twice the orbital velocity of the planet. However, this would require placing the craft ahead of the planet in it's orbit, at just the right spot and at rest with respect to the Sun. In practice, this is not practical ( and you'd likely end up wasting more fuel trying to do so than you'd save with the slingshot). In practice, you will always end up in a scenario where you get a smaller boost. This is further complicated by the fact that if you have a final destination in mind, you are limited as to which types of trajectory/boost you can use. My calculations using fission was assuming 100% efficiency as far as the released energy being converted into propulsion. Using a bomb would waste a good percentage of the energy and be less efficient. Also, it is important not to confuse thrust with engine efficiency. For example, Chemical rockets tend to be high thrust and lower efficiency, while ION engines are low thrust and high efficiency. Higher exhaust velocity equals greater delta v for the fuel used, but lower exhaust velocities give you better thrust for the energy used.

I believe you can get "free" acceleration by using the mass of planets or moons in a "slingshot" effect. I don't know if there's a limit on what you can take from it. Any atmosphere will limit how low you can pass a body, and of course the craft has to be robust enough to withstand the forces involved. But it's substantial enough for long-distance probes to use it on a regular basis. Fusion does allow for a greater percentage of the fuel to be used, but the hardware involved will be extremely heavy for centuries to come, so the weight advantage of a light fuel will be nullified. Controlled fission needs a lot of heavy hardware too. Maybe uncontrolled fission (as in a bomb) could give a craft a hefty kick??

It’s not only an issue of energy, but having a reaction mass to expel*. The longer the period of acceleration, the more mass you need, and this is inefficient because in the beginning, you’re accelerating all that mass. *unless you use photons, which is really inefficient

Nuclear fission converts ~ 0.1% of the mass into energy. If all of that energy was convert into KE for the remaining mass (acting as the reaction mass), then you might get a exhaust velocity of ~.045c. So let's say that you want to reach 10% of c.(43 yrs to Alpha Centauri). Using the rocket equation gives us an answer of needing over 8kg of fissile fuel per kg of payload you want to get to Alpha C. If you want the trip to end with you being at rest with respect to your destination, this jumps to 75 kg of fuel per kg of payload. This is impractical. Fusion is the better option since it converts a larger percentage of the mass into energy, thus giving you a higher exhaust velocity, which decreases the fuel to payload ratio needed to reach any given velocity.

Snopes concludes it’s a fake, so if that’s correct, this is moot https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/titan-sub-transcript/ “Efficiency and brevity were a priority. There was absolutely no chitchat (such as "Enjoy the dive, gentlemen"). Often, the actual exchanges even omitted the verb, newspaper headline-style ("Bottom time up"), to save time and typing.” Scroll to the end to see all of David Pogue’s analysis (correspondent who went on a dive, and so has first-hand knowledge)

Stop your hysterics. How is a car tyre "self diagnosing" (since I can't find your reference) and how does that even fit any definition of intentionality and/or qualia, which my article stated to be the basic requirements for consciousness? and by the way, again, how the heck am I misusing the term "machine?" iNow trying to troll. Cute.