Yeah, no doubt. But for all the good they do me, right?

I use Bing, and I get Microsoft Rewards points for that. Each month, the points I earn are automatically donated to the Wikimedia Foundation. Just sayin'.

Welllll, a bunch of countries use VAT, where you pay whatever is on the label. In the US, what you pay for a product will depend on where you buy it, despite it having the same price on the tag..

"Use" is relative, unless you mean "figure out how to cancel it."

I don't know. From what I can tell, Tizen seems OK. I just don't know how much "software" you really need in a television.

Hell, I don't like it now!

One reason I can think of is that different states and municipalities impose different rates of sales tax at the register. Multiplying a retail price by 8.75% may not always produce an even, round number.

I'm afraid that you, and history, ignored Rosalind Franklin, whose work was vital and also deserved the prize. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

What is this obsession with pedophilia? I'm really getting rather suspicious of MAGA. I suspect your average Catholic priest or Southern Baptist youth pastor thinks about nude children less than most MAGA individuals.

I happen to dislike Douglas Hofstadter, actually. He isn't nearly smug enough.

The halting problem isn't unsolved at all; there are simple programs that can be fed into the testing framework for which the behavior is impossible to analyze, i.e., undecidable. Perhaps you got "unsolvable" and "undecidable" mixed up.

The original formulation of Pascal's wager is actually quite interesting—it's a game-theoretic probability analysis, described long before game theory was devised and when probability was in its infancy. Pascal's mugging targets the assumptions of the wager rather than its logic: in his writing, the nature of the divine is regarded as immutable, certain, and consistent with church doctrine.

To judge Pascal's intellect we really have to look at the context in which he was writing—the middle of Europe and the height of the witchcraft scare—and observe that he seems to have omitted the possibility of a demon (the sort that witches were alleged to commune with!) posing as a fake god, an idea that was explored extensively in early Christian heresies such as Gnosticism and Marcionism. Moreover the seventeenth century, Huguenots (protestants) were all over France, and so all of his readers would have been intimately familiar with questions of which doctrine was more authentic.

A lot of authors in this period heavily self-censored in order to avoid conflict with the state. Although the Inquisition was no longer active in France, the church had an immense amount of power, and running afoul of it could cost one's livelihood or worse. (Not to mention the sensibilities of patrons.) In some cases we only know an author's real position on occult subjects because of texts that were published posthumously or barely circulated; Isaac Newton, for example, wrote way more on magic and alchemy than on gravitation, calculus, or optics.

It's possible Pascal was not the theological bootlicker we've remembered him as, and, frankly, it's hard to imagine he never considered the flaws of the Wager, considering the messy world he lived in. Unfortunately there's no room for nuance when it comes to the popular narrative of, "child prodigy mathematician drinks too much communion wine and tragically starts spouting nonsense upon reaching adulthood."

Then breathing is animal abuse, and we're all humongous jerks for existing.

Alright. Let me take the gloves off and be serious, since your other new response was a shitpost beyond reckoning.

Trivialism will not help you: the generation of consciousness is undecidable because we do not have a concrete definition of it.

The intended meaning of my comment was that the subjective experience of consciousness, like the Internal Revenue Service, is probably an emergent phenomenon built upon an immensely complex framework. "Missing the forest for the trees" comes to mind—if you're looking at the fundamental interactions that enable the atoms of the trees to exist, you'll never figure out that the trees were planted to spell out a message when viewed from orbit.

This gene, HAR1, is a non-coding RNA that we have known for decades is the smoking gun for human intelligence. It is key to the development of our language skills and absent from chimpanzees. If the authors of the paper were serious about studying the emergence of subjective consciousness, they would throw all their energy into deciphering how this gene influences brain development, then walk backward up the taxonomic tree, repeating the same diff-and-analyze operation until they reached nematodes, which have only a handful of neurons and are so simple that the average person can memorize all of the possible interactions and behaviors of those cells.

There is no room for a God of the Gaps when it comes to nematodes. They can be emulated by a Turing machine with perfect fidelity. They have no subjective experiences beyond those experienced by the billions of macrophages inside of you or a simple paramecium.

Interestingly all of these things thrash around wildly when they receive a fatal injury, ostensibly for the same reason we do—the pain is overwhelming and movement is an efficient way to introduce a competing signal that dilutes the misery. To the layperson seeing this through a microscope for the first time may be a bit horrifying as it seems rather relatable. But it isn't part of consciousness—resisting it is. It's just instinct, the result of a web of signalling molecules and proteins trying to minimize feedback loops caused by negative stimuli.

With all that said—the Simulationist argument is almost always made in bad faith, or as a result of someone acting in bad faith trying to plant seeds in the minds of others. It has long been a thought-terminating cliche wielded by nihilists and eschatologists to justify apathy and other actions that devalue life on this planet. Deciding whether the universe was constructed or not does not matter, because there are no tangible consequences of simply possessing a yes/no answer to that question. Belief will not tell us how to find bugs to exploit, nor will it give us proof we could ever escape from it. To do either, we would need actual direct evidence of artificiality that rules out all alternatives, and even that may not yield any utility.

However, advocates of nihilism do have something to gain from disseminating Simulationism—they get to push narratives about how it is fine to abandon social responsibility. In milder cases of internet-poisoned solipsism, they think it's fine to screw up (because nothing is "real"); more severely, Millerite cultists believe that a completely antisocial value system (donate all your money to the church and wait for the Rapture) is the optimal approach to life. Most dangerous are the oligarchs pushing this narrative: if you do not care about the universe, then you probably don't care about politics and won't stand in their way when they shred public institutions. This is basically what happened in post-Soviet Russia, though they didn't have to work nearly so hard to achieve it.

Because of these manipulative ideologies, anyone who promulgates or advocates a belief in Simulationism needs to be dealt with harshly and cynically to discourage them from openly proselytizing to the public. Unfortunately the battle is, in the main, very much lost for now, but so long as we know how to recognize the enemy we stand a chance of outliving them.

It's all neurons, baby. All neurons.

"Nothing in our math that would generate consciousness?" Wait till you find out there's nothing in any of our cosmological models that would generate the Internal Revenue Service.