Subhuman lemmy posters: “We are spending way too much!!! $0.5m on scientific research!!! Outrageous!”

Me: “Bro we spend billions killing children around the world who tf cares there are other places you should be concerned about budget.”

Subhuman lemmy posters: “Errrm actually stfu stop bringing that up, we want to cut everything but that!”

kys you people are freaks, this place is just as bad as reddit, entirely comprised of genocidal US ultranationalist sociopaths. I need to go to a forum that is not English-speaking.

Interesting you get downvoted for this when I mocked someone for saying the opposite who claimed that $0.5m was some enormous amount of money we shouldn’t be wasting, and I simply pointed out that we waste literally billions around the world on endless wars killing random people for now reason, so it is silly to come after small bean quantum computing if budgeting is your actual concern. People seemed to really hate me for saying that, or maybe it was because they just actually like wasting moneys on bombs to drop on children and so they want to cut everything but that.

that’s only like, as much as a couple dozen of the 45,000+ of bombs we’ve dropped on babies in gaza

So many skibidi vibes here man, it was all vibes rizzing up this place and until I came and unvibed everything. The vibes are so joever vro I was just mogged. 😔

Do you even need quantum mechanics to make that argument, then? You’re basically saying weak emergence is evidence of being in a simulation because you can approximate nature much simpler when “zoomed out.” It seems like even if we did not have quantum mechanics you could still make that argument.

Why would an optimization make things more complicated? The point of optimizations in any simulation is to simplify the complexity of the computation. The entire reason why there is a multi-billionaire industry to research quantum computers is because they are exponentially more difficult to simulate than classical physics, so they are not practical to simulate on a classical computer. Seems weird to me that a simulator would “optimize” things by making them enormously more complex.

i use one of those trackball mice with the ball on top. first time i tried it i never went back, no need to worry about having a proper surface or desk space for a mouse ever again. if you reach the side of your desk using an optical mouse, you have to pick the mouse up and move it all the way to the other side of the desk, while is a proper ball mouse (a good one without too much resistance) when you flick the ball it can continue spinning a bit even as you release it, so you can flick it to the side and then bend your wrist slightly to then flick it again, and the mouse cursor will just continue moving without stopping, which in games you can do this to have endless turning around, when turning is always stuttery on an optical mouse due to hitting the end of the desk. it takes a little bit to get used to, but at least a good one with limited resistance and a large ball, you can easily get just as accurate as an optical mouse as well. the only downside i find is that i do have to take the trackball out and clean it like the ones on the bottom.

I wouldn’t, I’d just live there. Get to know the people and culture, get married, grow to old age and die. Just like almost everyone there, and most people in any country. I’d survive just like I’d survive in any other country: go to work every day to get income needed to eat, repeat the process ad infinitum until my body withers away from old age.

Yeah, the jacket is very different as well if you look at the front chest area. While people do say maybe he just changed his clothes, the problem is if he also changed his backpack, he couldn’t have just put the clothes in the backpack, meaning he would’ve had to have left them somewhere and there would’ve been a trail that probably would’ve been found by now. It doesn’t really add up for them to be the same person.

It’s nice when thing actually go down in price. We need to bring back those days.

That’s not how political parties work, though. Political parties are largely ideological institutions, they exist first and foremost not to win elections but to propagate an ideology, and winning the election is just a sign that they succeeded in their goal of convincing people of their ideology, and so now enough people agree that it can take root in the state. When political parties lose, it’s very rare that they will interpret their loss as “we need to abandon all our values to match the opinion polls.” No, they interpret their loss as meaning they failed in their goal of convincing people of their values, and thus should change their strategy of their out-reach, not changing their whole ideological position.

Democrats going against the rich elites would be an abandonment of their party’s values and everything they stand for. In most countries, if you dislike the ideology of a party, you vote for someone else. The party itself has no obligation to change its entire ideology for you, such a thing very rarely occurs. If that was the case, then every political party would all have the exact same position, just all copy/pastes of whatever the opinion polls say.

I keep seeing all this bizarre rhetoric about how if the Democrats were “smart” they would just abandon their whole party’s platform and adopt some other platform, but this makes zero sense, because you have to consider motivation. Their motivation is not to just win the election, but to convince you of their ideology, and abandoning their ideology does not achieve this. Democrats are not stupid, they just don’t have the same motivations as you. Yes, they want to win, but they ultimately want to win on their platform, not on someone else’s platform.

That’s how political parties work. They have a platform, and the platform is paramount. If a green party adopted all pro-coal and pro-oil lobby positions just to win an election, that would not be a “smart” decision for them, because, even if it leads to their victory, it still is an abandonment of their ideology. Democrats are unabashedly a pro-rich elite party, it should not be smart for them to become anti-elite, because it is not aligned with their motivations.

Yes, it’s ultimately a cautionary tale as to why social democracy is unsustainable, as it is just the implementation of social policies while maintaining capitalist hegemony. There is no such thing as a benevolent oligarch. Capitalists have utilitarian reasons to implement pro-worker social policies, and it’s usually to reduce unrest or increase productivity. The moment those reasons no longer become relevant, they will begin to dismantle it. Much of western Europe in general right now is suffering from nonstop austerity for a long time now.

Bell’s theorem demonstrates that you cannot have a deterministic theory that would also be Lorentz invariant, that is to say, compatible with special relativity and the speed of light limit. The speed of light limit is very well tested over and over again, and no one to this day has ever been able to construct even a single mathematical model that could even approximately reconstruct the predictions of quantum field theory in a way that is deterministic. That suggests that any deterministic theory would actually make quantifiably different predictions than quantum field theory, and yet we don’t have any evidence that its predictions are violated, and quantum field theory is verified to 12 decimal places of precision.

I don’t really understand your point about the dice. If you have two “quantum” dice that are exactly the same, they are not guaranteed to land on the same thing, and that is precisely what it means to be nondeterministic, that even if all the initial conditions are the same, the outcome can be different. Yes, we cannot make the whole universe the same throughout the experiment, but to make sense of this, you cannot speak in vague philosophy but need to actually specify in mathematical terms what parts of the universe you think are determining the outcome, which, again, any attempt to specify such a thing would require contradicting the predictions of quantum field theory.

My issue with your argument is that, whether or not you intended this or not, what you are undeniably arguing is that all our current physical theories are currently wrong and making the wrong predictions, and they need to be adjusted to make the right predictions, and you are basing this off of what is ultimately a philosophical criticism, i.e. that it is not deterministic and you think it should be, without even having a viable model of what this determinism would look like. It just seems far too speculative to me.

Yes, you can always make the argument that “our old theories have been proven wrong before, like Newton’s gravity was replaced with Einstein’s gravity, so we shouldn’t put much stock into our current theories,” but I just find this unconvincing, as you can make this argument in literally any era, and thus it completely negates the possibility of using science to understand the properties of nature. Every scientific theory would have to always be interpreted as just something tentative that can’t tell us anything about nature, because it’s bound to be replaced later, and instead we’re just left arguing vague philosophy not based on anything empirical.

I will readily admit that if I base my understanding of reality on our best physical sciences of the era, those can be overturned and I could be shown to be wrong. However, I still find it to be the most reasonable position as opposed to trying to “intuit” our way to an understanding of nature. The person who strongly defended the Newtonian picture of nature prior to Einstein was later shown to be wrong, yes, but he was still far more correct than the majority of those who insisted upon trying to derive an understanding of nature entirely from intuition/philosophy. I am with Heisenberg who argued that until we actually have any experimental evidence that violates the predictions of quantum field theory and can only be corrected with the introduction of hidden variables, then positing their existence is pointless metaphysical speculation, not derived from anything empirical.

How do we even know that’s the killer? The person who shot was wearing a mask. For all we know it wasn’t even a man, some women are flat chested it’s possible. They should probably just call off the investigation since there’s no clues for anything.

Ah yes, crying about “privilege” while you’re here demanding that people shouldn’t speak out against a literal modern day holocaust at the only time when they have the political power to make some sort of difference. Yeah, it’s totally those people who are “privileged” and not your white pasty ass who doesn’t have to worry about their extended family being slaughtered.

“Separation of powers” is an incredibly nonsensical concept. If we live in a democracy then the democratically elected legislature should have total power. The idea that unelected judicial branch can dictate policy is indeed anti-democratic, the judicial branch should be wholly subervient to the legislature. The same is true of the executive branch, the executive branch also should be wholly subservient to the legislature. Giving a single guy control over the whole freaking military and making the branch roughly independent is also entirely nonsensical. It has happened historically in the past in several countries that the executive just tells the military to attack the legislature and the country collapses into a dictatorship. This literally almost happened in South Korea literally today, although the president backed down at last moment. Any country with separation of powers is already borderline a totalitarian dictatorship, since it just takes a single crazy executive to decide to pack the courts and disband the legislature solely for their own personal gain and the whole thing falls apart.

Expand the court then? Well, too late now since Dems are losing every branch of government.

No, the point is that bacteria can produce toxins in between a company packaging a product and a person receiving it and then boiling it themselves. Companies have to kill the bacteria prior to shipping it. It’s similar to canned foods for example, they put it in the can then heat up the can to kill the bacteria, then ship it, so it shouldn’t have any harmful bacteria in there to begin with.

Good. That’s when Democrats should be criticized the most, because that is the only time you have the power to exercise any leverage over them. Why would you refuse to criticize them when you actually have a tiny bit of leverage and wait until you have no power at all and your criticism is completely irrelevant and will be ignored? That is just someone who wants to complain but doesn’t actually want anything to change.

We don’t know what it is. We don’t know how it works. That is why

If you cannot tell me what you are even talking about then you cannot say “we don’t know how it works,” because you have not defined what “it” even is. It would be like saying we don’t know how florgleblorp works. All humans possess florgleblorp and we won’t be able to create AGI until we figure out florgleblorp, then I ask wtf is florgleblorp and you tell me “I can’t tell you because we’re still trying to figure out what it is.”

You’re completely correct. But you’ve gone on a very long rant to largely agree with the person you’re arguing against.

If you agree with me why do you disagree with me?

Consciousness is poorly defined and a “buzzword” largely because we don’t have a fucking clue where it comes from, how it operates, and how it grows.

You cannot say we do not know where it comes from if “it” does not refer to anything because you have not defined it! There is no “it” here, “it” is a placeholder for something you have not actually defined and has no meaning. You cannot say we don’t know how “it” operates or how “it” grows when “it” doesn’t refer to anything.

When or if we ever define that properly

No, that is your first step, you have to define it properly to make any claims about it, or else all your claims are meaningless. You are arguing about the nature of florgleblorp but then cannot tell me what florgleblorp is, so it is meaningless.

This is why “consciousness” is interchangeable with vague words like “soul.” They cannot be concretely defined in a way where we can actually look at what they are, so they’re largely irrelevant. When we talk about more concrete things like intelligence, problem-solving capabilities, self-reflection, etc, we can at least come to some loose agreement of what that looks like and can begin to have a conversation of what tests might actually look like and how we might quantify it, and it is these concrete things which have thus been the basis of study and research and we’ve been gradually increasing our understanding of intelligent systems as shown with the explosion of AI, albeit it still has miles to go.

However, when we talk about “consciousness,” it is just meaningless and plays no role in any of the progress actually being made, because nobody can actually give even the loosest iota of a hint of what it might possibly look like. It’s not defined, so it’s not meaningful. You have to at least specify what you are even talking about for us to even begin to study it. We don’t have to know the entire inner workings of a frog to be able to begin a study on frogs, but we damn well need to be able to identify something as a frog prior to studying it, or else we would have no idea that the thing we are studying is actually a frog.

You cannot study anything without being able to identify it, which requires defining it at least concretely enough that we can agree if it is there or not, and that the thing we are studying is actually the thing we aim to study. We should I believe your florgleblorp, sorry, I mean “consciousness” you speak of, even exists if you cannot even tell me how to identify it? It would be like if someone insisted there is a florgleblorp hiding in my room. Well, I cannot distinguish between a room with or without a florgleblorp, so by Occam’s razor I opt to disbelieve in its existence. Similarly, if you cannot tell me how to distinguish between something that possesses this “consciousness” and something that does not, how to actually identify it in reality, then by Occam’s razor I opt to disbelieve in its existence.

It is entirely backwards and spiritualist thinking that is popularized by all the mystics to insist that we need to study something they cannot even specify what it is first in order to figure out what it is later. That is the complete reversal of how anything works and is routinely used by charlatans to justify pseudoscientific “research.” You have to specify what it is being talked about first.