So they humiliated themselves as a marketing tactic, to later promote fugly knockoffs.

We really are a month away from the Heavy Friendship Box with a pink thumbs-up on the side.

He’s more popular than you, because of the work he’s doing.

Off-brand PS5 shells should have been fine, unless they were dumb enough to copy Sony’s logos and whatnot. It’s just swoopy inert shapes and it’s only designed to work with official hardware.

Two hard problems.

‘We’re so awful that–’

Jail.

He is playing a tech-bro billionaire.

You have Alec’s attention.

Five years ago, talking about Not Hotdog, I said “Opening a VHS-era home movie and walking around your childhood home in VR is now a matter of missing software.”

This is that software.

They recently announced ‘by the way we’re deleting Animator forever’ and seemed genuinely surprised by the overwhelming backlash. That alone is reason to say, nope, you don’t own the software anymore. You just threatened an entire global industry, out of nowhere, for no gain. A civilized society would levy fines just for the fakeout.

You mean spending money as fast as possible to give everything away isn’t bAsIc eCoNoMiCs?

It’s one of many pedantic services I provide.

I would’ve also tried to answer the question, but others seem to have done better first.

“How do I” is a question, “How to” is an explanation.

Sorry, pet peeve.

the math of the simulation includes the math which defines the different substrate

2+2 on an emulated calculator gets a different answer than 2+2 on a real one, because there’s different math. Math being physics in this case but not when it undercuts your whole point. Conscious experience must only be possible in this substrate, despite zero evidence to the contrary… and faking the entire substrate with physics math doesn’t count because numbers work differently in rocks than in meat.

k.

If telling you to shut up is redundant then good riddance.

… yeah?

If the prompt and the safety mechanisms are in-band, no shit you can trick the almost-intelligent chatbot by being smarter at it.

You can tell the difference between a simulation and the thing it’s simulating.

The premise is - you fucking can’t. It acts ex-act-ly like the real thing, and for all the same reasons. Given that unreasonably high standard, you still insist, nuh uh. Would never be conscious. We’re beyond ‘but what if.’ You’re explicitly arguing that machine consciousness would not count. That any difference from exactly how humans work cannot be a mind. Fuck off. That’s just novel bigotry. Dog-torturing prejudice.

If you can have a long-ass argument with someone and go away figuring they’re a person like you - that’s consciousness. That’s the only way you can judge the inner life of any person you have ever met. And you want to pretend that someone meeting that standard, while you observe their brain at a subatomic level, is disqualified? Come back and fuck off again.

You cannot laud the perfect exactitude of… squishy biology and quantum foam… and still say nuh-uh when a whole-ass person arises from those exact processes. If you mean anything when you say it’s all just physics, then whatever physics are required for consciousness, can be faked. The resulting person really does think, as surely as an emulated calculator does real math. It’s not simulating math. It’s doing math. The device is simulated, but the answers are real. Get it?

Simulating physics from first principles is not “mimicking human behavior.” Don’t dismissively phrase it like a chatbot. If you insist the exact molecular exchanges in human neurons are a mandatory component, you could observe every subatomic event, not just the fact they talk to you like any other meatbag on the street.

I never insisted that it’s “only simulating consciousness.”

You just did! Again! You think an entire simulated human being, that acts exactly like a living person for the same underlying reasons, must be different - somehow. Your consciousness only arises from the laws of physics and the shape of matter, but if we simulated both of those exactly, and got indistinguishable results, then nuh-uh.

This is dualism. This is Descartes torturing dogs and insisting they only act like they feel pain, unlike us real humans, because we’re different and special. It’s straight-up Chinese Room horseshit, where no demonstrable evidence of conscious thought is enough, unless it fits your preconceived notions of what minds look like.

‘If it happens, it counts’ is not a tautology when you insist happening and counting are different things. To the guy in the simulation, any experience is real. His consciousness entails all the processes you insist must be accounted for. It works the exact same way as it does in real life with real meat.

If you would insist ‘well that’s only simulating consciousness’ - that counts.

Do you know what if means?

You want to make this a matter of philosophy, and then you suck at philosophy. Hey buddy, do you have facts about other real people’s experiences, or do you just have beliefs? Could you even demonstrate your own conscious experience to me?

And all of this is such tired Philosophy 101 crap, just so you can cling to ‘aha but what if,’ even though I have a concrete answer for what-if. Are we ruling out magic? Great, then physics can be simulated and a computer can host a mind that way. Its experiences would be identical to any free-range meatbag. If it wrote a book, you could read it. That would be real art. So in what fucking manner is its consciousness not real experience?

If you are simulating it, it is a different thing.

No.

If a simulated person experiences consciousness, that experience is real. That’s qualia, numbnuts. That is a mind.

I’m not gonna pick apart the word salad of ‘calculating the difference between substrates’ if you can’t even keep your philosophy straight.

Like planes don’t experience flight unless they flap.

This is stupid. I acknowledge that’s not an airtight logical counterargument, but just, come the fuck on. You are asserting that neurons made of silicon, with identical observable function, wouldn’t count somehow. Charitably: wouldn’t work, somehow. That at least distinguishes it from standard Chinese Room horseshit. But if we can fake every neuron to do the same thing, or simulate the entire physical environment to do the same thing, of fucking course it’s going to do the same thing. If the laws of the universe somehow mean only meat can experience being a true Scotsman, we can fake those laws.

You’ve picked a philosophical nit that is somehow at odds with Turing completeness. Unless you think physics are incomputable - it cannot matter what substrate they run on. It’s literally math.