There’s one more aspect to that. You are “morally ok” to turn off only your own computer. Messing with other people stuff is “morally bad”. And I don’t think you can “own” self-aware machine more that you can “own” a human being.
kurokikaze
Well, he will be intruder (in my opinion). Like, “unwanted child” kind of indtruder. It consumes your time, money, and you can’t just throw it away.
Thanks for these links (also, fellow DF player here :)).
From inside the simulation, the simulation “reasoning” about phenomenon cannot be distincted from actually causing this phenomenon. From my point of view, gravity inside two-body simulator is real for all bodies inside the simulator.
If you separate “reasoning” from “happening” only because you are able to tell one from another from your point of view, why don’t we say that all working of our world can be “reasoning” instead of real phenomena if there are entities that can separate its “simulated working” from their “real” universe?
I don’t get the question, frankly. Simulation, in my opinion, is not a single formula but the means of knowing the state of system at particular time. In this case, we need an “apparatus”, even if it’s only a piece of paper, crayon and our own brain. It will be a very simple simulator, yes.
I think gravity is “real” for any bodies that it affects. For the person running the simulator it’s “real” too, but in some other sense — it’s not affecting the person physically but it produces some information for him that wouldn’t be there without the simulator (so we cannot say they’re entirely causally disconnected). All this requires further thinking :)
Also, english is not my main language so there can be some misunderstanding on my part :)
Oh, I got what you mean by “Tegmark IV” here from your another answer. Then it’s more complicated and depends on our definition of “existance” (there can be many, I presume).
Okay, I had pondered this question for some time and the preliminary conclusions are strange. Either “existance” is physically meaningless or it should be split to at least three terms with slightly different meanings. Or “existance” is purely subjective things and we can’t meaningfully argue about “existance” of things that are causally disconnected from us.
Maybe the most productive variant is just to ignore the offender/offence?
On a slightly unrelated note, one psychologist I know has demonstrated me that sometimes it’s more useful to agree with offence on the spot, whatever it is, and just continue with conversation. So I think in some situations this too may be a viable option.
Okay, here’s my answers. Please take note that full answers will be too big, so expect some vagueness:
1) B 3) Big topic For me, It can use result of “computation”. 4) Invoking memory or associations? Mostly no. 5) Hard to say yet. I’ll take a guess that it’s mostly functions, with maybe some parts where steps really matter. 6) I think it’s possible. 7) I guess so. 8) They have something in common, but I think it depends on your definition of “conscious”. They are most certainly not self-conscious, though.
In case of C64 emulator, the game is represented, your experience is reproduced. As for second, I think it’s purely subjectional as it depends on what level of output you expect from simulation. For gamer the emulator game can be “reproduction”, for engineer that seek some details on inner workings of Commodore it can be just an approximation of “real thing” and of no use for him.
Sadly, the site seems to be down.
I want to lower my “off-topic” Internet usage when I’m on work.
What do I have now:
No penalties for surfing Reddit if the work is done on time
RescueTime for counting hours I spend on work and hours I spend on various lolcats (right now my efficiency is 0.5, which mean ~ 1 hour of reddit per 1.6 hours of work)
Why I want to do that? To have more time for my own projects and work.
What’s keeping me from doing that:
I’m afraid to burn out doing only the programming-related stuff.
Some sites are just addictive (yes, Reddit, I’m looking at you).
I’m slightly tired from two years long project (I’m going to vacation in less than 1 month).
Hm, I don’t want to distract even more people from their duties, but this may work. I’ll see what I can do.
Still, more ideas are welcome.
1, 2, 3 - You can get into opensource social coding like Github or Bitbucket. This will improve your coding skills and make you some coder friends to help with tough questions (worked for me). Time constraint is harder to deal with.
Ha, I’ve written delaying proxy for this just like in xkcd.
It’s simple. I’ll show on one example.
I was interested in Sphinx search server, so I’ve decided to do its protocol implementation in javascript (for node.js).
I’ve created project on github and got remote URL. Then I’ve created folder on local disk and started coding. Reverse-enginereed PHP Sphinx connector, written some JS code, commited it to local Git repo. Next step: add remote URL to git repo. After this I can push my changes to Github with “git push remote master”, where “master” is the branch name. And voila, project is on the Github.
Then I write some more code and get first working prototype. I announced it in node.js Google group to attract another developers to project. They watch, comment on commits (not often) and send pull requests for code via Github (more often). Then I decide if I need the patch and apply / modify+apply / decline patch. Someone can fork my project if they feel I won’t add some feature they need or I’m too lazy updating the code.
Basically, that’s it.
I’ll tell you the problem with the scientific power that you’re using here: it didn’t require any discipline to attain it. You read what others had done and you took the next step. You didn’t earn the knowledge for yourselves, so you don’t take any responsibility… for it. You stood on the shoulders of geniuses to accomplish something as fast as you could and before you even knew what you had you patented it and packaged it and slapped it on a plastic lunchbox, and now—you’re selling it.
Dr. Ian Malcolm, “Jurassic Park”
Well, even if we have conditions to end game we still don’t know if player’s goal is to end the game (poker) or to avoid ending it for as long as possible (Jenga). We can try to deduce it empirically (if it’s possible to end game on first turn effortlesly, then goal is to keep going), but I’m not sure if it applies to all games.
I just made my first donation yesterday. Talk about timing :)