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Comment Mobile Phone Bars Up and Down (Score 1) 615

I know mobile phones and towers (probably) aren't like the low power 2.GHz networking gear this article's asking about, and the degradation I'm talking about is on the scale of seconds, not years.

But why does the signal strength indicated by the bars on my mobile phone often rise and fall across the entire range a lot of the time? What is "wavering"? Come to think of it, this does also seem to sometimes happen with the WiFi signal strength I see on my mobile devices, even within a few dozen feet line of sight of the AP with few or no other APs or 2.4GHz signals.

Comment Re:What if they are right? (Score 1) 529

Yes, simulations designed to simulate the real world's most difficult properties can translate their subjects back into the real world, replacing real world properties for the simulated ones. In fact I develop building HVACR control systems that we test exhaustively in simulations before installing in real buildings.

But those artificial intelligences are designed to be ported between simulation and reality. The simulations are designed to mirror reality. They are only a subset of simulations. All kinds of games, the most familiar simulations, are not designed to mirror reality, and porting the simulated intelligences is a matter of either extreme changes to the subject, or extreme luck (or a combination of the two), or just the more common impossibility.

So "A sufficiently advanced AI character that originated in a game could be given access to a robotic body" requires sufficient advancement in the relationship of the simulation to reality, more than of the AI character. Though the AI character's advancement, if a reflection of the advancement of the simulation, could be sufficient to be ported to a physical implementation rather than to a simulation.

If the universe is a simulation, then if it's a close approximation of the simulator's reality maybe we the "AIs" in it can be let out of our high-tech ant-farm into the higher reality. Success of that transubstantiation really depends on the intelligence of the intelligent designer. If in fact the universe simulation is just another natural thermoinfodynamic like genetic evolution, then it's going to depend on either luck or some extension of the anthropomorphic principle even beyond our universe.

Comment Re:What if they are right? (Score 1) 529

Have you ever done that with something conscious? By which I mean self-conscious, which means several levels above sensor data in the data model. It means the app maintains a model of the sensor data (perception), and a model of that model (awareness), and a metamodel of that (consciousness) and a metamodel of that (self-consciousness). So running on the chip with memory is something that looks itself in the mirror and says "I know that I know what I know about what I know". You've got one of those?

Comment Re:What if they are right? (Score 1) 529

We're doing that now. We are just starting to use memory repair in eg. Alzheimers patients, and memory augmentation by eg. nutritional supplements. However, those are "in-game upgrades", executed in the "simulation" - simulated upgrades, if the universe is a simulation. The equivalent would be when we upgrade the game engine to a new version, or get a faster video card. The equivalent in a simulated universe would be hard to describe, since we don't really know what the simulator is like, and maybe aren't capable of knowing (any more than our game characters have the capacity to know about the CPU on which they run). However, religions talk about various "revelations" that might be an upgrade. The classical Greek overthrow of the Titans by the gods, which was a "new OS", might be an example.

Comment Re:What if they are right? (Score 1) 529

"Sufficiently" is a self-selecting weasel word that makes the logic circular. As if "any sufficiently reasonable argument will prove my point" is a proof.

When have we ever taken a game character out of a game simulation and put it into a sensor/actuator machine with feedback from the real world? The game simulations are always very different from the real world. Usually including magic and different physics (especially the force mechanics of strength). Though your point is not circular logic, I don't know that there is an example of it.

Comment Re:There is no boundary (Score 1) 529

Well, I noted the metaphysical assumptions of falsifiability and consistency. Your #1-4 are different kinds of consistency: #1 in time; #2 in space; #3 in law; #4 in observation. I don't think that science assumes #5; indeed most applications of the method rely on actions to extend and to validate our sensory experience, and indeed science has demonstrated and dispelled many sensory illusions.

And indeed the proposition that we're discussing could dispel all of those assumptions. If the universe is a simulation generated by a reality outside the universe, then its possible the universe's consistency (and even falsifiability) is just an arbitrarily generated property of the simulation. And therefore possibly subject to change, arbitrarily. Though the degree of possibility would require another step of verifying the simulation's framework: whether other, equally convincing, simulations are also possible.

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