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.

Yes. Barely paraphrased.

This article is really an example of the God of the gaps argument, or perhaps the argument from incredulity fallacy, which basically boils down to "science doesn't have an answer for it, so there must be some superlative, transcendent explanation." The possibility that science might later obtain such an answer is discounted.

The authors are victims of Dunning–Kruger: despite their abundance of academic qualifications, they can't even fathom that might be committing a debunked theological trope (and numerous fallacies besides), as they believe they have nothing to learn from those icky, sloppy, backward soft-humanities people from a century and a half ago—yet they are so supreme in their own self-righteousness as shepherds of the True Wisdom of Physics that they feel no hesitation at all to arrogate for their discipline anything that others have failed to conquer.

People can cheerfully look the other way at genocide as long as it's not being done on people that look like them.

Even then they can look the other way if they're not doing so hot economically.

I just came across the old Eddie izzard joke about how Hitler got in trouble because he killed other country's people but Pol pot got to die peacefully because he killed his own people. That's not far off.

But a good old-fashioned sex scandal yeah that'll be a problem for world leaders.

It's why Konami got out of it. You can have a bunch of talented people with a ton of money and even a good chunk of time and the end results and still flop.

That means Microsoft hasn't been willing to pony up cash to make big games or even modest games.

And it's those big tent pole games like God of war and horizon zero Dawn and whatnot that bring people to your platform.

What Microsoft wants is somebody else to take all those risks and for them to get a 30% cut of all their sales and all their hard work.

Valve can get away with that because they go out of their way to promote games and they have tons of useful support tools for developers. There's real value to being a developer on steam. A lot of developers literally use steam is their entire marketing budget which given that most developers will spend more on marketing than developing the game is a huge boon.

Microsoft just doesn't treat partners that well and everyone knows they never will. So the 30% cut isn't worth the risk. And because Microsoft refuses to spend money on their own games, giving us nothing but rehashed games from 2008 or before, they can't draw the critical mass of users that will draw more game developers to their platform to splash out cash.

So they'll get the bank releases but that's it. And that's not enough to keep the beast fed.

Yes, it is tradition for shitty philosophers to say "humans can do X, but computers can't do X," even though a rigorous definition of "doing X" has never been provided and may never be possible.

We don't really have a concrete functional definition of what it means for a human to know/understand something (much less "apprehend" it), but the current thinking from AI researchers is almost certainly that it is within reach of a sufficiently powerful LLM with a robust memory mechanism and the ability to make online batch updates. So hearing this No-True-Scotsman crap that boils down to "universe contains X but computers cannot contain X," where X = "read Douglas Hoffstadter while smoking a pipe and sounding, like, deep, man" is absolutely a fossil from ten or twenty years ago.

I realize we're shitting on a paper with four PhDs and a Nobel prize behind it, but come on, guys. If you're going to wander into religious studies, do your homework first.

Then consciousness is the subjective experience of homeostasis—not a quantum effect. That particular pool is too shallow to yield any other interesting fruit.

Yes, that is the problem with the paper in question—it is a giant emesis of jargon meant to bewilder and subjugate peer reviewers so it can smuggle in its narcissistic, premodern slop about consciousness (and therefore observation) being a fundamental physical property rather than an emergent one (which is unrelated to the physical interactions that we euphemistically and somewhat problematically call observation).

Hey, hey. We're picking on the quantum consciousness crackpots in this thread. Go do your No-True-Scotsman dick-measuring somewhere else.

Really more of a demonstration of the weirdness of entangled photons than anything else; the operant mechanism is still a physical interaction, not some grant-farming pseudo-empiricist checking in on the results.

All of these physical phenomena would still occur as they do even if there were no stinking apes in the entire goddamn universe to gawk at them.

You know I wonder if we get the Epstein files if Trump will finally stop fucking Putin's dick.

It's pretty obvious Putin has the Epstein files and the implicate trump. If it's all out in the open then the compromat is no longer valuable.

I mean it's not as if the public is going to turn on Trump completely. They grumble a little when the economy goes to shit because Trump can't run a country or anything else for that matter. But they love him so much on a deep personal level, the same level a woman with a black eye has for her husband, that I can't imagine any amount of pedophilia is going to turn them against Trump.

I mean the dude has 28 credible rape accusations eight of which involve children. And he's president twice and might even get a third term unless somebody does something about voter suppression. Which nobody is...

.. it's like 5% of the internet dude. So website lots and lots of people used suddenly became Nazi heaven. No shit those of us who don't like Nazis would like some serious alternatives.

If you don't use the site or you only ever use it to look at the occasional post from a very specific person you might not notice the Nazis but if you read any of the comments they're basically everywhere along with pussy pics and bio bots cuz all the mods got fired and replaced with an AI written by teenagers.

One of the pillars of the internet basically got destroyed. People would like to see it get rebuilt. Personally I'd like to see the journalists the Twitter kicked off able to draw enough of an audience again that they can make a living some journalism besides the corporate slop.

Up until muskrat bought Twitter there was a ton of good journalism going on there. You probably did notice it because other outlets would pick up on it and report on it often without going on your way into properly credit the original source.

People do not understand what they've lost even after they've lost it sometimes

And because billionaires and other members of the elite (and no you're fucking college professor is not a member of the elite) are always authoritarian the authoritarians are extremely powerful and well funded.

They are going to keep trying and more importantly they're going to push your buttons to make you look the other way until they eventually pull it off.

This is why you need to think critically and Google competently. Because they never give up. In America fascism started gaining steam after Barry Goldwater lost his election paid that was 60 years ago. The current regime here is the culmination of 60 years of non-stop work. The people who started it aren't even alive anymore.

It's like, plant a tree whose wood you will use to bludgeoned innocent people to death.

Some actual Linux migrations in order to break the dependency on microsoft. Trump has made America to erratic to trust. So it's not going to be about getting discounts from Microsoft anymore. It's become a matter of national security.

I don't think that will terribly much help us Americans. And long-term I don't think it will help Europe because it's only a matter of time before America invades in order to loot the countries there. That's what all failing empires do.

One of those things. If you're going to sit back and let the Russians destroy America you could do that but you probably should have made sure we didn't still have this absolutely fucking enormous military first... Also you probably should have made sure we want absolutely fucking crazy because as an American I can tell you right now we absolutely are. We don't care if you have nukes. Jebus will protect us. Along with Trump's golden dome.

Everything in my post is pretty easily verifiable with Google and I get that you can't be bothered with that anymore than I can be bothered digging up to Google links for you. Neither one of use is worth it

The problem really is that you and I are living in two different worlds. I live in the real world where ice really is pulling random people, including citizens, off the streets and disappearing them for days at a time. You live in a world where that doesn't happen because the reality is just too much for you to cope with. Which I get. When things get bad enough human beings retreat in the fantasy. I do it with anime though instead of the actual whole last news but it's not entirely your fault since our news media has been completely bought by billionaires who would very much like you to not notice that there are armed thugs who will randomly drag you into a van.

So far if you're a citizen you just disappear for 3 to 5 days before they release you.

I would like to think that all of us know enough about history to understand that isn't going to last and either Trump is going to get removed from office and the authoritarian fascism ends or Trump stays in office and those disappearances become permanent because that's how fascism works and always has.

But again you've got your facts and I've got mine. Good luck with yours. Maybe you can Will a different reality into being. Or maybe you're just white enough and well to do enough that you'll get away with it long enough to die of old age or lack of medical Care...

Oh and I'm just screaming into the void at this point. Guys like you are so destructive and dense you've destroyed everything and I don't think the human race can be saved. Your dedication to willful ignorance has doomed us all and it's only a matter of time before theocratic lunatics get hand at the nuclear launch codes and wipe us all off the map. That one isn't anything more than conjecture but honestly given the history of humanity and it's inability to think critically and Google competently I think it's a pretty reasonable conjecture.

Good luck dying of old age before the apocalypse though. Because that seems to be the American dream now