TheVat

That last line, from his Princeton roommate, was pretty funny. Thanks for sharing that. @John Cuthber

IIRC, a character created by a writer is part of their intellectual property and cannot be used by other writers without permission. The exception is when the copyright is expired. Anyone can use a Jane Austen character, or Captain Ahab.

What are your specific criteria for being (still) male? Not sure I've seen these in a post here in this thread. As for posting opinion polls, that is what Americans in some online forums call shouting "scoreboard!" The science of gender is not determined by popular opinion.

You have misread me. The nirvana point was quite opposite to a virtual space of infinite experience. It was a conjecture (hardly an "argument") that a consciousness in such a virtual space might reach a point where no further experience was necessary and so would not suffer from the finite menu of experience available to it. I was pointing to our present limited knowledge of what such a being might consider a bliss, not stating that the conjecture was inevitable. It is a possibility I felt worth considering that a being, in the fullness of time would achieve a kind of contentment and cease to see new states as its source of meaning. This is, it should be noted, a philosophy section, so an eschatological meander is permitted. If not of interest to you, that's quite okay, and I am happy to discuss other aspects of the OP questions. (see also my earlier post, above, about the possible evolution of AI to systems that incorporate both digital and analog processes, which could somewhat shift the limits)

Those of you who persist with this discussion are as hardy as tardigrades. Impressive stamina. The question of free choice probably would thrive more in a philosophy thread, is my guess. Part of the feeling of choice is the awareness of having one. It is probably more likely that, prior to sexual reassignment treatments, most humans tended to see their gender as locked in and would therefore be more likely to find ways to adjust to that, however awkwardly. This spectrum of choice growing is also seen in various medical limitations: when a surgery or medicine came along that could keep someone from being an invalid or confined to a wheelchair, the perception of choice changed and people tended to choose the medical intervention that allowed them the most unrestricted participation in the life around them. As Joseph Campbell et al have pointed out, for most of human history mythology was used as a metaphorical path to go in search of one's true inner nature and be that in the world. It might be that our present culture will evolve new mythologies, allegories, legends, etc. that can help with that journey, side by side with medical procedures. And there may be ancient ones that are revived, also, for that purpose of getting past dyphoria in one's body.

And I have neglected to point out that the brain has elements of both digital and analog operation. So the digital computer and its limitations can become something of a FSM Straw Man in these discussions. https://www.cell.com/current-biology/pdf/S0960-9822(06)01825-2.pdf https://news.yale.edu/2006/04/12/brain-communicates-analog-and-digital-modes-simultaneously ETA: editor chopped off my last comment: Good point, Genady. The change in sequence introduces infinite variety.

Several assumptions here. One, that present digital-only computer architecture is all there will be. Maybe, who knows? Two, that no platform could support continuous cycles of self improvement. After millions of such cycles, who knows? We are speaking of possibilities beyond our present lives as apes with cellphones. There could be eons of growing wisdom leading to some kind of cyber-nirvana that no one could describe to a 21st century human. How can you rule, from this limited perspective, that there aren't information densities that would render a profound and blissful satisfaction in simple contemplation?

I'm not a member of Twitter. Posts are open to read AFAIK in most countries. If it contains "sensitive" material, I think you can just click a permission button to choose to remove the block. It may be different in the UK, though. See my reply to John. Thank you, @Phi for All

Internal combustion operates on the scale of atoms interacting, especially hydrogen, carbon and oxygen atoms. Automobiles are too macro for this. 😏

Not mutually exclusive.

For a long-lived and reliable quantum bit, and processing, don't you need some sort of Bose Einstein condensate to have superposition states in the brain? I never understood Penrose's idea of how this could be achieved in the warm noisy environment of the human brain. Brains seem pretty classical in their functionality, but that's really an open question I guess.

Yes, that was a bit OT reply to PKs comment "To a large extent, film stars have been steadily pricing themselves out of the market." One reason I hope indie film survives is that it will provide a place for the large pool of skill and artistic passion to be found among the B-list actors who cannot pick and choose so much.

Yes, and some actors have gotten the money fever and turn down interesting work (in favor of juvenile comic book movies) that other more serious actors long to be offered. Which is why I hope independent film, with its many handy rowboats, survives. True. I hope the younguns aren't allowed to forget what live actors can bring to a film, much the same as hoping they don't forget what reading a book (with its longer attention span) does for the mind. Like the broom or rake, some technologies are already matured and don't improve with the addition of an engine.

I'm sort of a movie buff (indie films, foreign, surrealism, sci-fi, mysteries, political thrillers, spy thrilers, comedies, period dramas, well, a pretty broad range) and IMO it is real human actors, inhabiting a character, taking risks, experimenting, getting caught up in a moment, that are at the heart of a story well told and what distinguish great film from the vast cesspool of CGI shlock that is out there now. To put those hardworking professionals on the street while you use soulless digital simulacra in their place would be a crime against humanity and a death blow to the art of cinema. This is a case where the Luddites should not just smash the looms, but also burn the mills and toss the owners into the inferno. Yeah, strong opinion here. 😀

The usual objection is the human brain cannot host the quantum phenomena required since it is considered too "warm, wet and noisy" to avoid decoherence. But Orch OR, as Penrose and Hameroff's theory is called, is intriguing. (most forums like SFN have an old thread somewhere on classical brain v quantum brain) Yes, that is one of the better counters to the idea that no real transition of consciousness is possible. I have heard the example of the coma patient who has been completely unconscious and her brain has changed enough since last being awake that we could not say the same person is awakening. Yet we do assume a continuity. And the same goes for the "little death" of sleep. (I know little death means something else in French)

Raised body temperature activates the immune system and helps it work more efficiently. It also creates a less receptive environment for bacteria and viruses that are very acclimated to a specific narrow temperature range and will replicate more slowly if it gets too warm. The trick is to get these good effects without driving the temperature so high that it harms or kills you. Which is why fever management, figuring out when to hold off on fever suppressing drugs and when not to, is an important part of modern medicine. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7195085/ The Fever Paradox.

So, to make sure I'm following, this is like I read a novel where some scene took place at Cawker City, Kansas, home to the world's largest ball of string, and then I later opened YouTube and its homepage prominently places a video on this very roadside attraction in Kansas. Is it possible that, as you read the book, you stopped and did a quick Google search on the place/agency and then forgot you had done so? Or mentioned the story element to a friend via social media? (either that or, as others suggest, the place/agency is trending in popular culture these days and this led the author to use it. It could have been on previous YouTube homepages you opened and you didn't notice it until you read the novel) If your example had more specifics, this could be helpful in gauging the degree of coincidence.

https://apnews.com/article/humans-epcoch-anthropocene-climate-change-power-4699002bbc3b60ade715ee94a7b7567d This puts the power of humans in a somewhat similar class with the meteorite that crashed into Earth 66 million years ago, killing off dinosaurs and starting the Cenozoic Era, or what is conversationally known as the age of mammals. But not quite. While that meteorite started a whole new era, the working group is proposing that humans only started a new epoch, which is a much smaller geologic time period. The group aims to determine a specific start date of the Anthropocene by measuring plutonium levels at the bottom of Crawford Lake. The idea of the Anthropocene was proposed at a science conference more than 20 years ago by the late Nobel Prize-winning chemist Paul Crutzen. Teams of scientists have debated the issue since then and finally set up the working group to study whether it was needed and, if so, when the epoch would start and where it would be commemorated. Crawford Lake, which is 79 feet (29 meters) deep and 258,333 square feet (24,000 square meters) in area, was chosen over 11 other sites because the annual effects of human activity on the earth’s soil, atmosphere and biology are so clearly preserved in its layers of sediment. That includes everything from nuclear fallout to species-threatening pollution to steadily rising temperatures.... Seems tricky, as to where to draw the line. I've heard anthropologists try to put it back there when aboriginals burned huge tracts of forest in order to create more open savannahs better suited for hunting. But I can see the point here is that none of those earlier alterations of landscape were really global in scale.

Moreover, how is that immortality? How do we know that after your brain is precisely copied by some as-yet unknown (and implausible) method for a "quantum snapshot," then you will die, and a distinct consciousness will awaken that has all your memories? It will tell everyone that "you" survived and are just fine, but that subjective report does not eliminate the possiblity that the original biological you lost consciousness and is gone forever.

Makes sense. British are helping preserve the historical roots of those words. Most of those ones we Yanks drop the U from were probably French imports, like colour, honour, valour, humour, etc.

Haha. Like the superfluous "u"? It's odd behavior. Or behaviour. My guess is that English will change towards more phonetic spellings. Mass marketing tends already towards that in the US, e.g. doughnut to donut. Perhaps not a good trend in a language that has so many homophones. At least now I can distinguish write, right, rite and wright. Yes, there's a line in George Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion - "Her English is too good, which clearly indicates that she is foreign."

Why assume all personalities fit that scenario? Some love repetition, some don't, and a lot of research suggests human personality is fairly malleable as life circumstances change. Perhaps a Matrix dwelling mind would become more like the gamesters of Triskelion in that famous ST episode, whiling away the eons playing games of chance. 300 quatloos on the human! Even if repetition is inevitable, this planet has hosted around a hundred billion human lives, and no two exactly alike. The same might be the case for other planets with sentient species. A robust universe simulation could offer trillions of years of unique experiences of sentient lifetimes before one would "start over." By then, one might have forgotten a lot of them. Or there could be other experiences to move onto beyond our present imaginings.

The irregularities of English must be a challenge to those who learn ESL. One ought to know it's tough to cough when you eat dough on a shaky bough in a slough. VtT is possibly also a culprit, in cases where the misspelled word has a homophone. (like the there/their example) I wood never use it bee cuz of that. There once was a girl in the choir, Whose voice rose up higher and higher, Till it reached such a height, It went clear out of sight, And they found it next day in the spire.

Will put half a hotdog in a small storage dish rather than just finish eating it. Sorted! Now the thread can move on.