It’s the null hypothesis. It is a thing we absolutely know is happening in a dying brain regardless of whether there is ALSO something spiritual going on.

Subjective hallucinations in people teetering on the edge of brain damage from oxygen starvation and other chemical imbalances is not meaningful evidence of anything. File it along with drugs and sensory deprivation nonsense.

> folks with NDEs

Oh lord.

> believes that AIs/robots need to be programmed to 'feel' and to 'fear death' as a way to truly capture the essence of living and is the breakthrough that is needed for true AGI

I always hated that shit in Bicentennial Man. People keep going on about how uplifting the story and later the movie were, but it always just seemed creepy AF to me.

What could possibly go wrong?

Sounds like he's working on the future presented in "Mindplayers" (1987) by Pat Cadigan.

You say that with such insulted seriousness.

And yet there are many respected physicists treating the many-worlds interpretation entirely seriously. Here's a fairly recent paper arguing that it's actually required for conservation of energy in QM.

https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2021/01/28/energy-conservation-and-non-conservation-in-quantum-mechanics/

> What you and I think of as a “measurement” is just when a quantum system in a superposition becomes entangled with some macroscopic object (the “measuring apparatus”), which in turn becomes entangled with its environment (“decoherence”).

Edit: Oh, you blocked me? Well, bye bye.

My answer is to unask the question. Mu.

Look, consider the cat in the box thought-experiment. Everyone gets all hung up on the cat being in two states, and doesn't stop to think "what if the cat is also an observer". When the vial breaks the cat collapses the system. Or "what if the mechanism that breaks the vial of poison is also an observer". And that's just the lowest level of confusion. I'm saying, what if the experimenter isn't an observer?

They open the box and are now in a superposition, their wave function has two peaks in the states "looking at a live cat" and "looking at a dead cat".

The device, the cat, the experimenter, they're all just collections of particles. You can't meaningfully point to any of these collections and claim that the privileged role of the observer stops there.

And you can't go the other way, and say it's observed when it interacts with another particle, because quantum mechanical devices have been used to keep entangled states functioning as qbits while in a sea of particles, or even transmitted them over fiber optic cables made of zillions of particles.

Now you're the one that's claiming some interpretations make it easier. Instead of being an actual thing that happens, observation is now a performance hack.

How does the system know "observation" has occurred?

You said that something is harder to compute if it’s not observed. That’s only true if the collapse of the wave function is a real thing, and is one of the reasons for postulating the collapse in the first place.

I didn't suggest any of them did.

This only applies if you treat the collapse of the wave function as a thing that actually happens.

This article is written by someone who hasn't thought very deeply about the mechanics of simulation, particularly the analogy it draws between the speed of light and processing power which it later completely invalidates when discussing quantum entanglement by stating position (and thus velocity) to be irrelevant.

The test itself is fallacious. Annihilation, in particular, would not destroy the information in a particle-pair. That information would be retained in the states of the resulting photons, just as it's retained in the event horizon of a black hole.

"Weakly General AI"? LOL

We're still on dumb pattern generators and they're already setting up to fake the close.

Roko's Basilisk.

I would say that the biggest accomplishment from the space program is weather satellites, they've saved who knows how many lives over the decades just because we know when a hurricane is coming before it appears on the horizon.

Tell me you've never seen a Bugs Bunny cartoon without telling me you've never seen a Bugs Bunny cartoon.

They are finally getting legs in Facebook Horizons I hear.

66 years ago the LGP-30 was released. It had 4k of magnetic drum memory. No random access memory. It cost $47,000 and was one of the first personal computers (it beat the better known PDP-1 of spacewar fame to market by three years).

Edit: Also: http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/story-of-mel.html

Your level of detail algorithms would produce observable artifacts unless you have some super AI managing it aware of the meaning of things like electronics and sensors so it can simulate the few cubic centimeters of rock that's the processors in a space probe but won't bother simulating the millions of cubic meters of rock in the asteroid it's flying past. Also, it needs to know that this chunk of rock is part of a gravity wave detector so you need to sync it up with the simulated supernova that happened 30 years ago 30 light years away... but this is just a chunk of the Earth and you can treat it as a uniform mass of undifferentiated basalt.

I don't think it's possible to hide the error artifacts from even our level of technology.

Nope. 50 years ago is early 70s and late 60s, there was no chickenpox vaccine, just smallpox as a general varicella vaccine.

50 years ago we were still getting the smallpox vaccine and measles was more of a thing. The measles vaccine was introduced in Australia in 1968.

Who the hell remembers if they got chickenpox 50 years ago? I would call that prophylaxis rather than therapeutics still.

@justsaysinmice

Non-sterilizing vs sterilizing vaccines.