Given that they are scrabbling around like drug addicts looking for anything they’ve split, including checking the cracks in the floorboards…

For some models, it’s obvious they’ve long scrapped the erotic fan fic sites!

Trying to scan a monkey’s brain, while it’s awake and interacting is not a trivial task. MRI scanners are uncomfortable for humans, and we know what is going on with the big scary machine.

An anti-memetic counter agent.

That is pretty much my view on things. I don’t like it, but it’s what the evidence suggests. However, my internal thoughts still assume I have free will. It’s a useful lie.

Discworld’s Death put it quite well, in Hogfather.

All right," said Susan. “I’m not stupid. You’re saying humans need… fantasies to make life bearable.”

REALLY? AS IF IT WAS SOME KIND OF PINK PILL? NO. HUMANS NEED FANTASY TO BE HUMAN. TO BE THE PLACE WHERE THE FALLING ANGEL MEETS THE RISING APE.

“Tooth fairies? Hogfathers? Little—”

YES. AS PRACTICE. YOU HAVE TO START OUT LEARNING TO BELIEVE THE LITTLE LIES.

“So we can believe the big ones?”

YES. JUSTICE. MERCY. DUTY. THAT SORT OF THING.

“They’re not the same at all!”

YOU THINK SO? THEN TAKE THE UNIVERSE AND GRIND IT DOWN TO THE FINEST POWDER AND SIEVE IT THROUGH THE FINEST SIEVE AND THEN SHOW ME ONE ATOM OF JUSTICE, ONE MOLECULE OF MERCY. AND YET—Death waved a hand. AND YET YOU ACT AS IF THERE IS SOME IDEAL ORDER IN THE WORLD, AS IF THERE IS SOME…SOME RIGHTNESS IN THE UNIVERSE BY WHICH IT MAY BE JUDGED.

“Yes, but people have got to believe that, or what’s the point—”

MY POINT EXACTLY.

We are not there yet. Some of the theories put the energy requirements within reach of the LHC. They were at the extremes of possibilities however, and none have been detected so far.

It’s a case of running out of terms. I was using it here as apparent, but not a “real” thing.

It’s a bit like a lot of visual illusions, we can often all see them consistently, but they don’t exist in the image itself.

In this case, consciousness is likely related to keeping our own mind functioning coherently. Providing a common virtual ground for the various parts of our brain to interact. There is no seat of consciousness, it’s akin to the operating system on a computer. Not required, but makes a lot of tasks massively easier.

I’m not expecting anything any time soon either. Though I can see someone like musk pumping far too much money into it at some point.

My point was however that the difference is just one of scale. We don’t need to predict the firings, just run it and compare it to nature. From what I’ve read, it behaves like a fly, including walking and grooming itself. This means there is no magic mystical difference between a real fly’s brain and a virtualized one.

Projecting further, there is no difference, other than scale, between our brain and the fly. Implying there is nothing mystical about consciousness.

If a human brain can be conscious, then a virtualized human brain can be conscious. If a virtualized brain can be conscious, then so can the computer it runs on.

The question then becomes do we WANT consciousness in an AI, what would it look like, and how can we detect/measure it?

https://xkcd.com/882/ This, but done retrospectively

There’s fundamentally not much difference between our brain and a fly’s, at the cellular level. We have fully simulated a fly’s brain already. When given a virtual body, it promptly started acting like a fly.

I don’t think LLMs are conscious or sentient. However, consciousness is likely just an internal illusion. There’s no obvious reason we can’t scale up from a fly to a human brain, other than difficulty. At that point you have a fully virtual brain that believes itself to be conscious, and can demonstrate sentience.

Steam have an impressive reputation of not trying to just bend their customers over and screw them over raw. Them remembering not only lube, but to wine and dine us first also helps.

You still get screwed (for your money) but it’s a far more pleasant experience.

The problem is they end up built into specialised boards with ridiculous requirements, but no good for most tasks.

A few people might get one working, but I can’t afford the power bill to keep one running full tilt 24/7

Think about it like trying to use mining vehicles as a car.

The worst thing is, the format needed for data centres isn’t compatible with home use. A lot of the ram and SSDs will just be scrapped.

It happens in the UK too. Kids play in the street, and get out of the way, if someone needs to drive through or park. Conversely, car drivers keep the speed down and give the kids time to get out of the way.

Everyone wins, and no, it’s definitely a road not a path.

It’s worth noting that combining the relativistic correction factor into mass is actually quite problematic. It’s a vector (directional), while mass is scalar(directionless). You suddenly need to ask what direction your mass is. Furthermore, a hypothetical person on the ship will still measure their inertial mass as normal.

As it stands, it would take an infinite amount of energy to reach the speed to light, but you can get arbitrarily close to it, with a finite amount (huge, but finite).

They also happen to be a (retired) nurse themselves. It’s uncommon, but not that uncommon. Most nurses would have seen it before. Its only for 5-10 seconds after waking up. Coming from a relatively skinny woman is quite a bit more unexpected. She also has unusually good aim.

I know someone who has had quite a few general anesthetics. They’ve taken to warning the nurses involved that they are a puncher. Several have not taken it seriously and ended up with some impressive bruises (including black eyes).

I saw a talk from someone working in the field a few years back. The “fusion is only 10 years away” had a small proviso “if fully funded”. The actual funding was barely enough to keep the lights on.

That has now changed. It’s gotten close enough that private investment has decided it’s worth investing in. I believe the only really big problem left is the wall material. The neutron flux transmutes the elements making it up. This makes it difficult to maintain a hard vacuum, since the wall can start leaking and/or outgassing, forcing a shutdown to replace them. On a minor plus side, if you dope the walls with mercury, it transmutes to gold, in commercially viable amounts!

Fusion has several advantages over fission. The biggest is the impossibility of a meltdown. The very difficulty in balancing the reactor means that it shuts down fast and mostly clean. This would let them be placed far closer to population centers. They could provide a base load supply, in the way nuclear could/should have.

The bacteria don’t need to be identical.

Think of it like rolling a dice. Any given roll can only have a single number. However patterns can be detected by combining multiple rolls. E.g. a biased dice.

As for larger things. It’s possible, but the speed required goes up with mass, and not linearly. In theory a person could go through. They would be moving a significant fraction of the speed of light however. Catching them alive on the other side would be… difficult.

Only 1 bacteria ever arrives. It’s the probability wave that interferes with itself.

With the Young’s double slit experiment, if you fire a single photon, you get a single photon arriving. It looks just like how a cannon ball flies. It’s only when you let hundreds go (either collectively or individually) that the interference pattern appears.

The end pattern is the probability that the photon (or bacteria) arrives at any given point on the receiver screen.

Anything moving has an associated wavelength. If that wavelength is long enough, you can do the young’s double slip experiment on it.

It was a few years ago, so the details are hazy. A scientific team accelerated a particularly small and sturdy bacteria fast enough that their speed produced a viable wavelength. They then sent the stream through 2 slits. They then captured the bacteria in aerogel (I think) to slow them back down.

Most didn’t survive, but some both survived, and ended up somewhere they couldn’t without interfering with themselves. They successfully reproduced afterwards. The debris also followed the classic ripple pattern of the experiment.

Basically, there is nothing special about “life” when it comes to quantum mechanical effects, other than it’s on the big side.