It's because of the sybil problem. If accounts are globally unique, then a bad actor can register as many accounts as they want, and can do things like e.g. reserve other people's usernames and charge real money to have them unreserved.
1 karma · joined December 12, 2024
I have no idea how 2D time would work, though.
Think about how you would actually write a program to achieve this. The iron bar is just a bunch of atoms with random bit states that flip at random intervals - we'll model it as a contiguous 1D array of bits. You have a 1 second consciousness mapping, which is most likely rather large in size. Our interpretation process maps the random bits in the bar to a time instant of the conscious process by interpreting some bits in the bar as themselves, and the other bits in the bar as the reverse of themselves. In other words, our interpretation of which atom-bits are telling the truth and which are lying is itself a 1D array of bits that satisfies the following property:
BAR bitxor INTERPRETATION = CONSCIOUS_INSTANT
As time progresses, BAR and CONSCIOUS_INSTANT continuously change, therefore necessitating INTERPRETATION to change as well to keep the above formula consistent. In fact, by the rules of XOR, we can compute exactly what INTERPRETATION is at any given moment:
INTERPRETATION = CONSCIOUS_INSTANT bitxor BAR
But wait! This means that to dynamically know INTERPRETATION, you _must_ know all of the information associated with both CONSCIOUS_INSTANT and BAR. But if you know all the information associated with CONSCIOUS_INSTANT, haven't you already simulated a conscious process...? So there is in fact a consciousness here, but not in the {BAR} system: it is in the {BAR,INTERPRETATION,CONSCIOUS_INSTANT} system.
(Note: If you squint at this for long enough, it starts sounding a lot like a motivation for Death of the Author.)
> So, class, how might a strong AI proponent respond to this argument? Duh: you might not understand Chinese, but the rule book does! Or if you like, understanding Chinese is an emergent property of the system consisting of you and the rule book, in the same sense that understanding English is an emergent property of the neurons in your brain. Like many other thought experiments, the Chinese Room gets its mileage from a deceptive choice of imagery -- and more to the point, from ignoring computational complexity. We're invited to imagine someone pushing around slips of paper with zero understanding or insight -- much like the doofus freshmen who write (a+b)^2=a^2+b^2 on their math tests. But how many slips of paper are we talking about? How big would the rule book have to be, and how quickly would you have to consult it, to carry out an intelligent Chinese conversation in anything resembling real time? If each page of the rule book corresponded to one neuron of (say) Debbie's brain, then probably we'd be talking about a "rule book" at least the size of the Earth, its pages searchable by a swarm of robots traveling at close to the speed of light. When you put it that way, maybe it's not so hard to imagine that this enormous Chinese-speaking entity -- this dian nao -- that we've brought into being might have something we'd be prepared to call understanding or insight.
TL;DR: It will not happen. You would need to throw on the order of a thousand Earth-masses to even get close to neutralizing Jupiter's orbit.
All processes in this world are unsustainable, but only some matter.
I always thought the fact that Vim had automatic buffer copying and forced me to use "0p instead of p was really annoying. Looks like there is an actual reason for it after all :)
The problem with mosquito-borne diseases is that they're non-consensual. People have a right to live without mosquito-borne disease.
But who is "they"? If you copied them 10 times, it's not like they act as a collective; there are 10 unique instances having unique experiences. What's wrong with 10 different people each owning a house?