Retra

Brains-in-vats have only ever been science fiction. Regardless, there's nothing about anything I've said that is known to violate any laws of physics, so your objection to 'magical' extrapolations is irrelevant. I say "The Matrix", but obviously you can substitute any number less fanciful mechanisms into the process -- psychotropic drugs & electromagnetic stimulation are not fiction.

Being a brain in a vat doesn't imply much though. I mean, you can't assume someone has lobbed your head of and crudely crammed it into a jar of formaldehyde. For all anyone knows, you're in The Matrix instead. So unless we constrain the problem, there's no more reason to assume it is torture than there is to assume it is euphoria.

As such, there are no implication to being a brain in a vat other than the fact that you don't experience the outside world. It says nothing about what you do experience. And it certainly does not imply permanent damage in the same way that death does.

Property is no less a social construct than law is. That decision draws a spectrum between individual property and public property that is modulated by use; if you allow public use of your property, it will be regulated by the public, proportional to the degree at which you open the property to public use.

Without doing this, the government only has the authority to guarantee your rights on government property, which would effectively be no different from granting complete sovereignty to private entities.

Monospaced fonts are good for editing. Variable width characters are good for quick reading because they allow you to scan past spelling errors in prose. Monospaced fonts have distinctive 'textures' that make them amenable to detecting symbol identity. Variable width fonts intentionally eliminate that texture and are often optimized for ink density to 'grey out' blocks of text. Arrow keys don't work predictably in variable width text.

You're still assuming it's not like sleep, and that you wouldn't be floating in a vat of chemicals/equipment that had an impact on your mental state. And you still shouldn't assume that death is preferable to solitary confinement or sensory deprivation.

Classical physics and quantum mechanics are already unified by shared mathematical frameworks. So not only is it possible, it's already been done, which is why people expect it to work for gravity as well.

You can consider that a positive, but it is also an inevitability. Nobody is talking about immortality here. But you also wouldn't be saying the end of all life would be positive (which you could, for exactly the same reasons) and that still wouldn't mean you shouldn't delay it for as long as possible.

>almost everything we enjoy about life may be because of our mortality

You don't know that you're mortal until you die. It makes no difference here, because even if this were true, you are already assuming you are mortal regardless of the facts, and you will continue to do so. Being immortal doesn't imply you've also reached some state of deep enlightenment about it.

Besides, you can invert this just as well: everything we enjoy about life may be dependent upon the belief that we're not going to die soon.

You can assume being a brain in a vat would be torture, but I see no reason to assume it wouldn't be euphoria. Either way, life is better than death. Living in any state gives technology more to work with than turning to dust would.

Psychological trauma is still better than death. Besides you could ask the same question in reverse:

Isn't there a real possibility that being subjected to circumstances that allow us to perceive reality, psychological trauma could result?

Or maybe every computer on Earth is right now a mind in a perpetual state of torture. I don't see how a brain in a vat shouldn't be any less objectionable, especially if we're relying on blind conjecture.

How can 0.0001 be greater than 0? Death is very uninteresting and useless, and most importantly, offers almost no possibility of being reversed.

Well, it sounds more interesting and useful than death, which is the default alternative.

Math is abstract, which means it 'rules' many different things by its very nature. You can describe the geometry of space-time with vectors just as well as you can describe quantum state transitions. It's hard to make sense of what your objection could be here; the world works the way it does, and it is not good or bad whether we can describe it using unified mathematical frameworks or not.

A gallon of fuel contains a fixed amount of usable energy. Motion from point A to point B uses a minimal amount of energy. MPG equivalent is a perfectly reasonable way to measure the efficiency of electric vehicles, and optimal if you plan to compare them to ICE vehicles. MPG is only a proxy for distance per unit energy anyway.

You can run an AC inside the building, you just need to exhaust the heat out, which can be done through a window. Do an image search for "portable air conditioner window vent" and you'll see some examples.

I'd be worried about selection bias there. Plenty of TV doesn't show people at work, instead showing circles of friends or family. The fact that there exists some popular shows premised on work relationships is not itself evidence of much.

You can down-vote for whatever reason you like. You are trusted to justify it only to yourself.

The right of way doesn't protect you from injury.

Is there a good way to fix it? I mean, if you were building bridges, certainly another engineer could show you data about material properties and successful builds, and you could reasonably extrapolate to your new (unique) design fairly well, but that's because you're building with the same physical materials and operating under the same laws. With software, it is a bit harder to find that common ground, because the 'laws' change if you are on a different architecture or handling different kinds of 'traffic', etc. For a bridge, you can just make a bigger beam because you would never try to build close to the scale which would make the material properties irrelevant, but with a computer, you can do this, and you might start to invalidate prior evidence. A large amount of software development dogma is built around scaling up, but that's also a huge problem in every engineering & scientific discipline.

Though, to counter my own counter-point, it would be nice to have better analytical tools; more informative & accurate ways to understand & visualize how resources are actually being used when a program runs.

That would be true if you can find a frame of reference in which the photon's velocity is 0 (its rest frame -- a pre-requisite for associating that frame of reference with the photon in the first place). But special relativity does not allow photon velocity to be zero in any frame of reference, so there is no frame of reference associated with a photon.

My comment indicates that the world is complicated and that we don't need to paint people's behaviors are unreasonable just because they happen to be unlawful.

The irony is in your own self-confidence, and the idea that strongly-held beliefs are beyond criticism, but that the author's are somehow not.

Why are you willing to use a dictionary to look up a word, but not willing to use a car manual to look up a symbol? Do you throw out your car manuals and replace them with dictionaries or something?

The US is the third most populous country in the world, and it's GDP is comparable to the entire EU, and almost twice China. And it only spends ~2% of that on defense. Do you understand the relative scales here? Military spending per capita per area is quite comparable to other nation's spending. With the amount of shipping and money that flows through the US, it would be absurd to leave it inadequately defended.

>it's considered above-sacred to allow this military machine to do literally anything it wishes to do

It doesn't do anything it wishes to do, it does what politicians wish it to do, and what it does is "protect US interests", which is exactly the same thing every other military force on the planet does for its host nation.

>is now a good time to mention the Bikini atoll?

No, you're probably 60 years too late to bring that up.

Oh, Irony.

Those people in graves? They were put there by material impacts. Serious material impacts. That Serious People do pay a lot of attention to. Because the consequences are real, unambiguous, and repeatedly demonstrable.

>Do you also respect the freedom of a creator to choose a license and a distribution method of their liking for their works? It seems like you don't.

It seems like you want to peddle a narrative. Otherwise you wouldn't be jumping to conclusions about things you have no knowledge of.

>Well, your comments seem to indicate that you find many things wrong with the copyright law.

My comments are not referring to the merit of copyright law. In fact, I explicitly said that I'm not arguing there was anything wrong with it per se in order to highlight that. So if that's what you're looking for, stop. You are missing my point. Don't accuse me of trying to make a point that I am explicitly telling you I'm not trying to make. That is beyond uncharitable.

>But the fact is that one of those people is on firm legal ground, and the other one isn't.

Copyright law was invented in the seventeenth century. The vast majority of human history has taken place in a world where humans were rewarded for copying and sharing any information they could find. I have the lyrics to a copyrighted song stuck in my head at this very moment! I don't want it, but it is there.

My objection is the use of the word 'entitlement,' which is nothing more than a propagandist term here.

The religious dimension is not universal. The materialistic point of view is. That's why there a many contradictory (and self-contradictory) religions, and only one material world.

That's why physicists talk about interaction rather than perception.

'Simulation' has already been invented, and it pretty much exclusively refers to things that are not fundamental to how the universe works. So it would seem like the opposite of the closest word we have for describing how the universe fundamentally works.

The vast majority of human behavior is hypocrisy if you discard all context and justification for what people do.

They gym doesn't have any policy. If you have a membership, you're free to use the facility or not. Real life doesn't have any policy either, if you have the capability, you're free to copy & distribute what you have access to or not. It is a third party that is trying to interfere with these native abilities. The ability to create something is not intrinsically tied to the ability to control it.

Which isn't to say there's anything wrong with copyright laws, per se. What I'm saying is that it is not 'entitlement' on the part of the copier, but entitlement on the part of the copyright holder to expect to hold dominion over other people's capabilities. That is the negotiated result of social processes.