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[Kagus]

I was homeschooled as well, from kindergarten onwards... never been part of a public school in my life. Although, my "homeschooling" was rather different from what might be considered the norm, as it was... Completely unstructured.

Still, something worked. As per Colorado's school laws, I needed to take a standardized test to compare to the public school kids and see if I was keeping up. Ended up scoring in the top 1% of test-takers statewide, with an additional comment stating that I had a reading and comprehension level equivalent to an 11th grader. I was 9.

...it all went straight downhill after that, though! Age 10 brought with it puberty, the onset of depression and a complete lack of all motivation and interest in anything, which curbed my academic activities a fair bit.


The old homeschooling group meetings I went to back in Washington/Colorado were also just social outings, to make up for not getting the social school experience. That said, plenty of the members there were veeery religulous...

Kids mostly don't care about that kind of thing though. Bugs are much more interesting than God.

[Dunamisdeos]

Yeah there was difficulty for me too when I hit that usual age where fun and social life became more important to me than education . Not sure if the effect was more or less than if I was in public school at the time.

Anyway that whole "only nutjobs do homeschooling" thing is basically just a meme. I scored post-high-school in my standardized test for reading and reading comprehension after I went to "real" school. In 4th grade. I was way up there in other areas too. I'm not a genius, my mother just taught me better than the US public school system (insert obligatory dig at public school).

I think the big benefit is that if your kid likes math, and masters it quickly, you can just teach him more math. He doesn't have to wait for everyone else to catch up to his level in 8th grade or whatever if he figured out long division early, etc.

[Kagus]

My issue was kinda compounded though by the fact that my homeschooling didn't have any structure, as mentioned... At all. See, my parents did think that I was a genius, and that I as a child would intuitively know what was best for my own development.

Again, *something* worked, as I did fairly well with whatever measurements were made of my progress... But yeah. Mainly my education was just getting interested in something and then reading a book about it.

Then my grandfather (whom I was close to) died in 1998, my dog (who spent at least as much time raising me as my parents, and was my one fast friend through 3-4 moves across the country) died in '99, 2000 hit the world and puberty hit me as we moved yet again into what was effectively a retirement community with the youngest neighbor clocking in at 72 years, my dad adultered and I tried to avoid becoming an adult.

And my parents went along with my answer of "nothing" when asking me what I wanted to do. "It's a phase, he'll snap back on his own when he feels it's time". Cue several years of isolation and dark thoughts, when I described my general state of being as "I feel like I'm rotting from the inside out".

But it's okay. I was a smart kid. The smartest kid. I'd work out a solution, as I was the only one who could. They just had to sit on their hands and wait patiently until I figured it out.


Yeah... Didn't quite work out so well.

[Dunamisdeos]

Oof, sorry that all that happened to you. My parents invested in a general curriculum, though I think it was highly modular as to what they could/did teach.

Glad to hear you turned out good though, all things considered.

I think the moral of the story is that you need to be really, really involved directly and extremely committed to homeschooling your kid if you want to do it, otherwise there will be ill effects.

[Kagus]

Glad to hear you turned out good though, all things considered.

Well, I mean, I'm still in the process of dealing with life-altering mental illness resulting in depression, anxiety, emotional dissonance, stress flashbacks and suicidal ideation, not to mention I've never held a job and I can't focus and retain information enough to pursue an actual education... But I haven't killed anybody and I don't fuck kids.

So I've got that going for me!


The only halfway formal education my folks invested in was buying practice material like the big books of math problems and just leaving them around the house for me to find. I used to think those things were pretty fun, so I'd just plop down and go through the problems in them.

So, again, I wound up with a knowledge base and academic understanding that was pretty great for a 9-year-old. It's just that now I'm 28, and my educational level is... Still pretty great for a 9-year-old.

[Dunamisdeos]

Glad to hear you turned out good though, all things considered.

But I haven't killed anybody and I don't fuck kids.

So I've got that going for me!

Those are important traits, though! Chin up! Still sorry you had to go through all that difficulty, though.

[JoshuaFH]

Kagus, I didn't know you were me, if we were the same person all along, you should have told me.

[scriver]

Why bother with physically preserving brains when you can just brain-upload people? Sure, takes more effort, but can be easily copied and backed-up. A downside is that you can't put it back in a body, but you could make a robot body, I guess.

Because you can't upload data from the brain when the data is the brain. To copy the data of the brain you need to create another, identical, brain.

[IcyTea31]

Re: simulating a universe atom-by-atom: what if we compress the data? Only unpack it when someone is looking through a microscope or performing a particle accelerator experiment or something, and just leave it unrendered and simulated by simpler rules when nobody is looking. Hell, couldn't we use this to explain the observer effect?

[Reelya]

The observer effect is taken out of context. It doesn't have to be a human.

e.g. if you do an "unobserved" (by humans) series of experiments in which the observer effect should play a part, then the results are the same as if you "observed" all the steps manually. So, the observer effects works at all levels down to the sub-atomic: atoms are each the observers for other atoms, and so on.

e.g. in the Schrodinger Experiment the reason the results don't hold at the macro-level is that the atoms in the wall of the box are all observers of the experiment as much as any human is. e.g. the atoms of the box need to know whether the cat's alive or dead to properly calculate their own temperature etc. So, every single atom is a pair of eyes as far as the observer-effect goes. Nothing special happens at the "human" level.

[IcyTea31]

Yes, but only humans can scream in existential horror. You can save on processing power by leaving everything that a sapient mind doesn't detect unsimulated until it becomes relevant. And if you want to save it further, just generate random numbers for the lowest level; a few compression artifacts or quantum fluctuations won't break the simulation.

[Bumber]

Well, not in a bit, no, but with some kind of elemental reference you should be able to reference each kind of atom using just a nybble, considering the number of known/calculated-to-be-possible elements. You don't need to define it each time.

...actually, scratch that. If you're going to factor in isotopes, you'll probably need a full byte to reference each atom.

So to map the entirety of a human brain's atoms, the references themselves (ignoring the reference library they're pointing at) would need something in the range of, oh, approximately 140 yottabytes. Perfectly manageable!

Knowing the element of each atom is basically worthless. You need to store an extremely precise location, what atoms it's bonded with, the states of the electrons, etc.

You might just as well have suggested each atom gets an index, for all that reveals about the data requirements.

[KittyTac]

Yes, but only humans can scream in existential horror. You can save on processing power by leaving everything that a sapient mind doesn't detect unsimulated until it becomes relevant. And if you want to save it further, just generate random numbers for the lowest level; a few compression artifacts or quantum fluctuations won't break the simulation.

Sentience is fuzzy, actually, because free will is not actually a thing, just probabilistic thoughts.

[hops]

Brains in jars are just your mind uploaded onto the physical world.

[IcyTea31]

Sentience is fuzzy, actually, because free will is not actually a thing, just probabilistic thoughts.

If so, then it's quantifiable. Pick an arbitrary amount of probabilistic thought to define sentience/sapience for your simulation and you're set.