Bay 12 Games Forum

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I feel safe knowing that somebody has a "happening" bunker.

It runs alright, but you'll want DFhack installed so that you can use the clean map commands to prevent FPS death.

I suppose that most days I don't think of myself as a chemical reaction. There aren't many times in my life where I could benefit from thinking of myself that way.

I suppose that it is machismo, but I believe that it would be beneficial to go ahead and try uploading. So long as the process doesn't kill us, even if the copy ended up going wrong somehow because of some software issue, it's just that there's nothing mathematically stopping us from replicating our consciousness in machines.

And so long as we backup the information the upload needs prior to running it, we can keep on trying to fix it until it stops going insane. So long as the copy doesn't have continuity between iterations, it's not so bad.

Actually, having typed that out now, I suppose it would be unethical. I guess that we're just going to have to do uploads the same way that we develop medicine today, by first running studies on animals that are not terribly dissimilar in their chemistry to us. Move from rats to dogs to monkeys to people.

Just wondering, would anyone like to know a recipe for Vegetarian Burgers with ground Beef?

I made some once. It was an experience I would recommend for anyone who can tolerate meat.

Wow. I don't even care about these sources because they aren't necessary to reduce the mind to a physical system as is requisite for simulation to take place.

Charles Stross in many of his novels about post-singularity things talks about reconstructing people not from their brains, but from the information they left behind. Finding a brain layout that could produce given these known inputs X produce these Tweets Y.

Continuity isn't all it's cracked up to be. We have so little continuity between when we go to sleep and when we wake up. Conciousness is not a continuous process. It is interrupted without issue. The memories are ultimately what I treasure though. There's a bit of machinery in the brain besides the memory that makes a person who they are, but those seem to be conserved from the little neuroscience that I've read recently. Like structures produce like outputs.

That means your mind is strongly connected to that meat in your head. Dualism is a stupid way to avoid dealing with the fact that we are subject to the environment around us, and the people who were able to make choices that lead to the existence of the environment that produced a criminal are more to blame than the people who come out of it.

They simply followed the structure in their heads, they took a path, and the path they chose is the one that looked the most attractive at all points given their brains. The situations they come from are the things that force most people into doing unethical things to one another. They could have avoided it, but then their life would have been different.

Ignoring the fact that we are agents determined by physical structure, adapting to the local environment, internalizing it and modelling it and using it to make the decisions that becomes our lives is hard. Lots of people believe in free will. Lots of people believe that we can avoid fucking up. But in the end, if the environment makes fucking up the best choice that we can see, the environment forced our hand.

The difference between us and the environment is that we can be punished for these transgressions, even if they are forced by the situation we are in. We can suffer for our choices. Choices are not mistakes unless the choice you intended to make, at every point, was not achieved. Choices are what they are. A single signal that gains dominance over the others in the brain. That moves us from simulating inside our brain, to moving our bodies and affecting future thought.

TL;DR, we're chemical reactions wearing clothing.

No worries.

I see a lot of people defend religion by using arguments fairly similar, so I'm fairly certain that it's not a good method to argue.

Also I'm not seeing your posts where you do that. I'm talking about the ones with screen-shots of google definitions for words.

Though attacking an argument based upon grammar or the words used, so long as the meaning/intention is clear is a way to justify dismissing the argument without presenting evidence to the contrary.

It's a shitty thing I used to do in High School to derail a conversation.

If we did that they'd be tragically murdered by the Empire's goons and you know it.

So, you know, same cycle, just a bit longer.

And I hadn't noticed the avatar.  Very much related to tragic, terrible cycles.

--snip--
we're allowed to use that definition to help us define any further definitions of the word. It's not preferred, of course, but it is a thing that is still logically legal.

But the word "Contradiction" is in every dictionary. That means we can logically derive anything!