Have you done the cost:benefit analysis? Curious what makes you so confident that "crashing the economy" (you're aware of all the excess death and despair this would cause?) is the best move here.
I mean it's pretty obvious that our current situation is already causing death and despair (droughts, wildfires, hurricanes) and this will only increase on our current trajectory.
I am not sure crashing the economy is a viable solution.
I say this because what I learned so far is that is people will start being cold and hungry then they will focus on immediate needs and that will make sure that no money will be spent on solving climate change. This is a natural instinct: you cannot think about the future if your current situation is suffering.
right, now imagine the hysteria that would come from doing that actively and intentionally to everyone on an accelerated schedule. thwarting cancer by downing a bottle of cyanide
the analogy doesn't hold for me. my mom just finished chemo the other week, and it definitely wasn't close in effect to what she'd've dealt with otherwise. she went on living her life as usual, minus some household chores
I feel like maybe some Western leaders have done a bit of this, and their conclusion has been "Let's let the poorer few billion of the world die rather than fuck up our own electorates' lives.". Obviously with a bit of twist and turns like "My hands are tied, I don't want to crash my economy by being super radical (so I'll adjust things a little here and there like asking car manufacturers to promise to be neutral by 2035), but external effects like death and destruction in poorer countries? Well... that's their own shit to deal with."
The federal government doesn't "hoard" land around areas where people would want to purchase a first home. The vast majority of crown land is not around any major urban centers.
Canadian tech workers make way above median income levels.
San Francisco tech salaries are not representative for the entire US tech industry. And on top of that, San Francisco salaries drive up housing prices, so i'm not sure if working in SF results in a higher discretionary income.
I just checked and in EU big cities like Munich, tech salaries are also around 1.0x-1.2x GPD per capita, making EU just as bad as Toronto. Man, the US is really in a league of its own for tech wages.
Well, if they live in a small town in some rural area they either inherit a house, or build their own, with substantial financial help from from their parents.
If they live in a city they are screwed, unless they are lucky enough to get a really well-paying job.
Even with the prices of commodities falling, stock prices can still rise, and as long as this is higher than the deflationary rate, investing still beats hoarding.
Although it's the riskiest time for deer, I love centering my road trips around dusk, so that you get some daylight, some golden hour softness, a beautiful sunset, and some darkness. It feels like a complete experience that way, a miniature but whole life cycle.
Sensations are not just information. A number is information. There's something that it's like to experience a sensation. There's nothing that it's like to be a number.
Of course, there’s nothing it’s like to be data. Un-recalled memories are data, they only become experiences again when we recall them into our active minds.
I don’t think consciousness is data, I think it’s a highly sophisticated process on data. It’s an activity, it’s something we do. Anil Seth described this process very well in the interview. It’s the third and last quote from him in my top level comment. Also I described my full account of consciousness in a reply to tekni5.
More seriously, I know how much philosophers love their “what is it like to be …” phrasing but there are a host of embedded assumptions which are seldom even acknowledged, let alone examined or defended.
The law of large numbers let's you abstract in such a way that the group can appear simpler than the individual unit. Of course, to fully simulate it across every single possible scenario, one would need to model all the individual units in order to accurately model the group, and so technically the group is more complex to fully model.
I'm not aware of any data that says either that the brain relies on quantum effects, that quantum effects are needed to solve the binding problem, or even for sure that the binding problem is a problem that needs solving.
I also know of no such data, and only arguments that are not commonly accepted. Anyhow, what prevents a TM simulating a system 'at the quantum level'? A TM has infinite storage by definition, so the state space is not a limiter.
Lots of reasons. You need energy to store the information. You wouldn't be gaining anything, only losing efficiency. The quantum level is the "lowest" level of existence, there's nothing "lower" to use to simulate it. Furthermore, "random" is a critical concept in QM, and one can never achieve true random with a TM. What's the digital algorithm to generate a truly random number?
Edit: in a way simulating a crab with a bunch of crabs would be kind of like simulating energy dynamics/QM with energy
A Turing machine, that is, the mathematical formalism, can definitely simulate quantum mechanics.
A classical Turing machine simulating a quantum Turing machine, or other model of quantum computation, would, aiui, incur a super-polynomial slowdown (maybe exponential? My impression is that that it might not be known to exponential. But at worst basically exponential).
The randomness is not an issue. Just don’t add any wave function collapse, or just list the probability of each outcome.
This is just not the case, even with infinite energy and time. There are properties of quantum Turing machines that are not reproducible with classical Turing machines.
That abstract appears to be referring to the superpolynomial slowdown in simulating one, which I already pointed out.
(If there is more than the abstract there, the scrolling isn’t working on my phone.)
There is no function that a QTM can compute that a TM cannot. But a QTM can compute some functions much faster.
Or, as phrased in the abstract “these do not include the computation of any non-recursive function”.
Edit: of course, there are things that can can be done with QM that can’t be with a TM (such as the entangled multi-party prover/verifier setup), but none of them are “compute this function (with no limit on how long it takes)” or “simulate this situation (with no limit on how long it takes)”
Quantum may not be the lowest level: Nobel prize winning physicist Gerard 't Hooft speculates the existence of a more orderly layer underlying the quantum layer.
Otherwise, I see no reason why a thing cannot be used to simulate a thing of the same kind: Computers are used to simulate other computers on a daily basis.
Your left and right visual fields are united in one "space". Classical computation cannot achieve such unity. Digital computation concerns discrete parts changing in discrete steps, which is not like a field at all.
Sure they can, self driving cars do it with a half dozen or more visual fields combining to a single model of the world around them.
Also, your visual system is fairly discrete, between the receptive fields of individual retinal cells, to the granularity of the optic nerves, to how the bottom end of the visual cortex samples all of that.
Self-driving cars don't experience visual qualia. A model is not the same as an actual experience. There's no binding-problem to solve with self-driving cars because there's no attempts to make them conscious. It's a completely different thing.
There's no reason to believe qualia arise in a given discrete computation. Why would they? In what steps in the algorithm do qualia arise and why, what characteristics do they have, what causal roles do they play, etc.
It's completely self-evident we experience qualia. It's what our experiences are made of. There wouldn't be anything to experience or discuss if we didn't. The brain is not a deliberate, man-made object like a computer is, hence why it can possess these properties with us being unaware of how (they were selected for via evolution), but the computer cannot.
The input system is discrete but the end-result, our conscious experience of our world-simulations (made up of visual qualia) are not discrete. They are unified.
An example of how this could be implemented (not saying this is the case, just one of several possibilities):
But that whole argument comes from the a priori idea that you can't build a singular model of the world from discrete inputs. There's no evidence or even logical chain for that conclusion.
And even the quantum world is discrete. That's why it's called a 'quantum'. There are fixed size quantities moving through the field.
No, it's not. The argument rests on the fact that it can't be solely discrete across the entire system. The discrete information needs to "come-together" in a non-discrete way, e.g. something like quantum coherence. This is the binding-problem in a nutshell.
All quanta arise from the wave-equations and can be modeled with continuous mathematics.
> The argument rests on the fact that it can't be solely discrete across the entire system. The discrete information needs to "come-together" in a non-discrete way, e.g. something like quantum coherence.
That's just conjecture though. There's no real evidence that a system of discrete components can't work together to create a single unified system. Stating that they can't with no evidence is an a priori conclusion.
Unless you have a compelling reason for why brains are a unique type of matter whose functions are partly derived from quantum phenomena (more so than other things, that is) then I see no reason why this is true. Or, if it is true despite any lack of uniqueness by brains, then nothing can be simulated because all simulation would be restricted by the quantum barrier.
Chestnut wood has many desirable properties such as rot resistance which lowers the need for toxic wood preservatives. It makes great roofing shingles.
