fluoridation

I'm pretty sure that's incorrect. The whole point of the center of mass is that it's at the intersection of all the bisecting lines. If you slice a shape in two and you don't get two parts of equal area then you didn't pass through the center of mass.

Well, I'm listening.

Am I being stupid? Isn't this mind-numbingly obvious? Collapse the shape into a function describing the area of the left side if you were to cut the shape at that X coordinate in that orientation. On one end the function has value zero and on the other its value is the area of the shape. Is there any reason why this function might not be continuous?

Asking rhetorical questions as a form of argumentation is the Socratic method.

You're trying to use the Socratic method to show that the havingness of the book is a spectrum, and I'm taking the position of a hardliner who considers that "having the book" means having the original string of symbols from beginning to end, and anything besides that is not having the book. I'm trying to show you that your line of argumentation is uncompelling to such a person.

You don't have the book, you have someone else's interpretation of the book's contents, re-expressed into a language you can read. Both steps can involve a loss or distortion of information, either because the translator doesn't fully grasp the original language or context, or because in the re-expression they chose to leave out details that were relevant to you. The more distant the original language to yours, the more translation involves interpretation, too. A translation is really not too different from a commentary; it's just a different text.

>If you have a translation, do you have the book?

No, you have a translation.

>Even if, like the Odyssey, there are hundreds of wildly varying translations?

Precisely why translations are not considered equivalent to the original text.

>What about an abridged copy? What about the Sparknotes version?

An abridged copy is not a copy of the unabridged version.

>If you have a copy of Pride And Prejudice And Zombies, do you have a copy of Pride And Prejudice?

No.

I'm honestly surprised these were the questions you chose to ask, when you could have asked what if you have 90% of the pages, or what if most of the pages are missing pieces because the book was shot with a shotgun, or what if the book was scanned and OCRed and all the "rn"s were replaced with "m"s and all the lower case Ls with ones. Hell, is a scan of the book close enough to having the book, or is it far enough that one can no longer be said to have the book anymore?

In math they shouldn't be computing at all, they should just be performing symbolic manipulations.

I'm saying young children shouldn't be led to believe that that's what math is. People should probably learn how to do basic operations, but it should have much, much less emphasis than it does now, and it would be much more useful to teach intuitions regarding how to stop when you've made an error, how to estimate, which operations useful when, etc. As an example of what I mean, my mom is an accountant and I've caught her on at least one occasion multiplying a monthly interest rate by 12. That's an OK method to estimate, but it's pointless when you're doing it on a calculator anyway.

>Then afterwards just give them a calculator.

If problems were properly designed the students shouldn't even need calculators. In math the specific numerical value of a result is far less important than how it relates to the inputs. Raw calculation doesn't develop the intuition of when one operation is more appropriate than another.

I'm honestly of the opinion that teaching children arithmetic (as in, having them perform arithmetic algorithms) is not just a complete waste of time, but actually detrimental as it sours them to the idea of anything labeled "mathematics".

It sounds like it's still meant in earnest, then. That it's a self-deprecating joke doesn't detract from the sentiment.

That's a different sense of "just like". Not "in the same manner", but "to the same extent".

Wouldn't a font that shuffled the codepoint-to-glyph assignments be more effective?

Someone has to accept that they're looking at the flattest pair of cheeks ever to interpret that as an ass.

It'd be a real copy of the simulated human, yes.

Eh. It would be better, yes. I still think it would suck.

>What you've created is a human.

That's incorrect, for reasons I've already stated. Humans and simulated humans are not interchangeable.

>If a system takes the same inputs and creates the same output it's the same system on different substrate.

You can't feed a simulated human real food, and you can't feed a real human simulated food. You can talk to a human by vibrating real atoms at them, but you need to make simulated atoms vibrate in order for a simulated human to hear you. Clearly they don't take the same inputs, they take analogous inputs. You're still making the error of confusing the literal thing for its symbol.

>You don't say a human stops being a human if you put them on a ventilator, do you?

Inappropriate analogy. You can put a human into a ventilator and you can also take them out. It's impossible to "place" a real human into a simulation or to "take" them out of a simulation into reality. I'm putting the verbs within quotes to emphasize that I'm using the strict literal meaning of them, which is to translate configurations of atoms into or out of a place.

You can "put" a human in a simulation in a looser sense, which is to copy them and put their analogous representation in the simulation.

>How much of the biological human can be outside the meat body before you stop recognizing them as human?

The moment they stop being made out of atoms and are made out of simulated atoms.

Bacteria are alive too, and I'm going to guess you don't claim we have a moral responsibility to them. And as I said, humans can feel empathy for things that are not alive. The capacity to feel empathy rests entirely on the empathizer, and has nothing to do with any intrinsic properties of the empathizee. Is a psychopathic murderer morally in the right because he doesn't feel any empathy for his victims?

Sorry, I can't respond because I don't know which statement in particular you're disagreeing with. What I can say is that, unless you're using words in a surprising way, I agree with

>If the simulation of electronic impulses is exactly the same as what occurs 'in the substance', then merely the medium over which signals occur is different. In my eyes, whatever is experiencing these signals will experience them the same way.

and I don't see how it's in contradiction with anything I said.

You're answering a different question, which is "why do humans empathize with non-humans?" Humans can empathize with inanimate objects and with fictional people. The question of the origin of empathy really has nothing to do with what I asked.

I think the question is valid. Why should a human have a moral responsibility towards non-humans, while a cat doesn't have a moral responsibility towards non-cats, just because the human is capable of making moral judgements? Is there any analogous situation where capacity engenders responsibility? Are gorillas more responsible for how they use their strength, since they're stronger than humans?

>Being capable of that is, arguably, the sole thing that meaningfully separates us from the (real or simulated) fruitfly.

That's a bit of an extreme hyperbole, don't you think?

I just said it's not a given. It's not immediately obvious.

EDIT: I prefer SOMA's take on it.

It's not the thing, because the thing is made of substance, not electronic impulses. No matter how hard you compute, you will never compute the simulation into a real, tangible object. The simulation and the real object are extremely, obviously distinguishable, even though they're structurally analogous.

If you could simulate a human perfectly, the simulated human would not be a human, it would be a simulated human. It's not a given that it would be subject to the same rules of ethics as real humans.

If life is physics and physics is an algorithm, it doesn't follow that an algorithm reproducing the physics of life contains life, even if we grant that it actually reproduces it completely and perfectly. That's just confusing the symbol for the thing.

I've seen that too. I was so mad when I finally figured it out.

What does "suffering" mean? Define your boolean function, apply it to the state of the program, and you'll know if the program is currently suffering.

>the biggest problem has been granting patents for inventions that at least in retrospect seem non-novel or obvious.

I don't agree that that's the biggest problem. I think the biggest problem is that patents are abused to stifle competition by refusing licenses or putting untenable fees on them. No one would have cared about Nintendo's D-pad patent if they'd just put a reasonable license fee on it. On the other hand, a patent like MP3 I would argue is quite legitimate, but putting a patent on a coded just makes interoperability more difficult. If MPEG had charged licenses for decoding chips and explicitly allowed software implementations, that would have things so much more smoother.

Having people create new technology to avoid arbitrary legal hurdles instead of adopting existing and perfectly functional technology doesn't seem particularly efficient.

Is that a promotion, though?