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[Egan_BW]

"No no, they're not cool at all."
*Proceeds to describe how cool they are*

:P

[KittyTac]

I mean, they're really powerful. They're just not that interesting from a... whatever the hell my standpoint is, standpoint.

You probably meant "the neural networks we have don't have the potential for sentience".

[Paxiecrunchle]

Oh boy, posting to watch where this flustercluck flies.

[Xyon]

Quite a lot of discussion going on right now, when a simple "yes, playing dwarf fortress is ethical" would have answered the OP.

[strainer]

A cool mathematician gives a little talk here about his position that data can never truly represent reality.

If numbers can represent reality in the respects which are important to result in conciousness, then the "simulation hypotheisis" can be more than pop-science cool aid - and peoples actual conciousness will be measurable in units, similar to 'heat'. Dwarves will have a relatively tiny quantity of it, but none of it will be of any import other than how your individual processes react to it. This idea that the things we understand as computers can be expected to generate sentience, has always been absurd.

[SmileyMan]

And so it went, along that strange assumption.

For a scientific debate, there was an awful lot of bad logic going on (or in the report at least):

"But the argument strikes Tegmark as flawed. For one, he asked, what would prevent an infinite chain of universes each simulating another below it?"

Nothing, but that doesn't preclude a finite chain either. Just because I had a father and a grandfather, it doesn't mean that history is infinite.

[Reelya]

A cool mathematician gives a little talk here about his position that data can never truly represent reality.

I'm not really sold on this. Two objections come to mind:

1) First, the "can all this really be represented by numbers?" argument is basically the "argument from incredulity", and has an in-built emotional appeal. It's also nearly identical to a classic argument about why "souls" exists: "are you really just physical matter or is there something more that mere matter?" is basically the same as saying "numbers cannot represent the ineffable nature of consciousness". "Mere matter" in one case, "mere numbers" in the other case. In both cases there's an emotional value judgement about what "mere" physical matter or "mere" numbers can do.

2) Second, his argument is that two numbers cannot truly represent a vector, since it would be ambiguous. However, if you specify six numbers instead of two, then you can fully represent a 2D vector along with the coordinate system that it's embedded in. So, that example is misleading about "what numbers can't do" because he specified a situation where merely omitting some of the salient numbers caused an ambiguity. So that example fails to be convincing. He then says "numbers cannot represent this, so how can they represent a human being" which is back to the "argument from incredulity" and appeal to emotion, along with being a flawed scenario in itself. In fact, 6 numbers can represent any 2D vector in a coordinate-agnostic format, but there are in fact an infinite number of possible representations of the same vector. That makes numbers more expressive, not less expressive: in other words, the same set of numbers can carry multiple levels of context along with them, which means you have explicit meaning and implicit meaning, an infinite variety of ways to convey the same information with numbers, but each way of saying it carries different meta-knowledge about contextualization, that you can choose to decode or ignore.

[SmileyMan]

Even irrational and transcendent numbers can be represented by their properties. For instance it's impossible to write down π, but that doesn't mean I can't do accurate calculations with it

[MCreeper]

This thread moved from yet another troll topic from professional trolls to arguing about existence of humanity and possibility of creating multiple Matrixes inside each other. It's still for the best. 

[Pvt. Pirate]

honestly i can't think why it should be unethical.
because if it were, then you should start a big campaign forbidding children to phantasize any creatures, because those creatures would cease to exist once they stop thinking of them.

[KittyTac]

Do not revive the thread. Let it rot.

[Pvt. Pirate]

Do not revive the thread. Let it rot.

well, it was too tempting, because i cannot delete it from my list of updated topics...

[KittyTac]

Do not revive the thread. Let it rot.

well, it was too tempting, because i cannot delete it from my list of updated topics...

Let it bury itself until GoblinCookie notices.

[GoblinCookie]

Let it bury itself until GoblinCookie notices.

Here is me noticing this little exercise in thread necromancy..... 

[KittyTac]

You noticed. Don't fully resuscitate it, though.