That's not what "nil to zero" means. "Nil to zero" means a range from nothing (not necessarily even a value) to value is nothing.

We might not, but Google does. Six ways from Sunday.

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.

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.

I have been experienced the way a glass of water is drunk.

Humor is the appreciation of learning quicker than was expected from what had been learned before. Seems a very valuable feature in an info collecting and integrating being.

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?

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.

"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.

The characters in our MMOs don't know they're being played by us.

We are just walk-on extras in somebody else's nightmare.

Beginning? I haven't been "neo" for decades.

The simulation is a system described within a system. Our universe is the simulation. Our universe is described by the terms in Principia. Goedel said that a no system description can be complete, that its completeness requires a larger system containing it to describe it.

I eagerly await our duck overlords. Or more to the point: fuck a duck!

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.

Ah - my mistake. That was some AC with the unsupported attack on physics. I guess that collapses my reply to you into more of a contradiction than an argument, though not a valid one :).

But they're relevant to your anecdote. The AC evidently has some science literacy, implying the Columbus discoveries myth is false, in light of earlier Viking arrivals. But indeed there were earlier arrivals, and some evidence not yet well (scientifically) explained of even earlier ones. Literacy is relative.

As for relativism, I don't know that the physics PhD candidate was saying that the inability of some people to accept an experiment proving air's mass was equivalent to other people's ability to accept such an experiment, or (I'd extend) to the candidate's ability to arrange the experiment. It sounds to me more like they're saying that to those scientific illiterates, especially if they've been educated with some anti-intellectualism, the experiment would prove nothing. That doesn't mean that the experiment proves nothing. It simply means that some people are so stupid that they not only don't know they're stupid, they think they're smart. It's like how Newt Gingrich is a stupid person's idea of what a smart person sounds like.

It's true that there are some accredited higher schools, like "bible colleges", where people are taught that fallacies are equivalent to actual truths. I don't think that's generally true in colleges. I do think that generally colleges do teach that there are other ways of knowing that aren't the canonical European/American methods, but not that they're all equally reliable. Also that people are equally valuable regardless of their culture, and that different cultures that might even contradict are (at least more or less) equally valuable - which is different from the eurosupremacy taught for centuries, including by luminaries such as Voltaire. And I do think that the vast growth in quantity of education has diluted quite a lot of its quality (though the highest quality I think today is far higher).

Ultimately all intellectual exercises can be measured by how well they create an accurate mental model of their subject. That is an objective measure. But I do agree that objective measures have been devalued by a lot of people in favor of a more convenient (to both the lazy and to the powerful) relativism. I just don't think it's convinced physics PhDs that the Earth is also flat just because some fools think it is.