You are already in some trouble at step one - how do you figure out if something has any of those feelings? Just asking or observing the behavior does not seem good enough, one can easily write a program that prints »Yes, I am tired, I need some sleep.« and with more effort one could build a robot that behaves as if it was tired.
On the other hand I have a lot of sympathy for something I heard the first time from Daniel Dennett, that something like pain is just the sum of its effects. It occupies your mind and prevents you from thinking clearly, it makes you not move or touch the body part that hurts, it dulls other sense, and so on. If you removed all those effects, what would be left of pain? With that understanding you could probably probe if something is experiencing pain from the outside by looking for those effects.
These needs are often conflicting, so satisfying these needs me delaying others. Your definition makes all animals conscious (which tbf I may not disagree with, but i think you do). This is before getting into what an instinct is.
Here is a counter example to your test. If we view an entire nation as one entity, especially considering the perspective of other nations in terms of diplomatic relationships, the nation would satisfy all requirements in your test. However, I don’t think most people believe that a nation has continuous consciousness which outlives all of its citizens for hundreds or even thousands of years. This argument can be applied to any large organization or a group of people.
The following lines say "any of", not "all of". Lack of one particular feeling does not imply lack of consciousness. Lack of all of them probably would.
if a human could not feel hunger, thirst, pain, sexual desire, fear, tiredness, or literally anything else, they'd be considered braindead. we already don't consider them conscious.
Let's say you artificially meet or restrict the biological basis of the needs.
E.g. put the subject on a drip so that none of the hunger senses are triggered. Automatically manage the body's water balance with sensors and a feeding tube. Restrict them so that they can't hurt themselves to feel pain. Modulate their sexual hormones to inhibit sexual desire. Etc., etc.
They still have the capacity to, in this case the experiment is being set up so that a being that COULD pass the test on their own CAN NOT when hooked up to a bunch of equipment.
I mean I can easily train a model to say it feels those things, which is experimentally indistinguishable. I focus on the first part your or comment because the second part is clearly satisfied by an LLM inside a suitable harness.
Also there are people who for whatever reason don't feel at least one of those things, we do not doubt their consciousness.
If you train a model to say it feels those things, then you are forcing an unconventional definition of the word "feel".
If you satisfy the second part thanks to a suitable harness, then you agree it is not an emergent property of the AI itself, but rather an add-on tacked in.
When using zstd (or anything else) make sure you don't have something in your .sss/config that would make ssh use a compression as you'll waste a bit of CPU to send a little more data as a less efficient compression method is applied on top. Though TBH I think that unless I'm on a very slow link, if I'm sending something big enough to need compression it is probably in a pre-compressed or otherwise uncompressable format anyway (video, photos, …) so zstd does little, the one exception I can think of being if I'm throwing an unencrypted VM image from place to place.
> wanting to composite application together from smaller bits in a unified workspace that I the User control
This bit reminds me of TRON/BTRON, a Japanese OS where a core principle was that users interacted with documents made of fragments which were documents themselves.
"The file and the application were implementation details […] the user-visible primitive on a desktop computer shouldn't be a file or the application, but the typed document part."
This sounds amazing. I guess I'm a bit biased in that evaluation, though, as it sounds a lot like an object graph database I'm creating.
What an absolute shame it got shut down over trade restrictions. Even if, in the West, we'd still have Microsoft and Apple and Linux, at least there would have been severe competitive pressure to move beyond the Unix model.
Charging rate of 11 kW, with efficiency of about 90%, means that the charger sucks around 12.2 kW of power from the grid, of which 1.2 kW is continually lost*, and only 11 kW is effectively being stored in the battery at any point in time.
I don't understand the mention about battery capacity (80 kWh, which would translate to around 7½ hours of charging at 11 kW, if a battery could charge at a uniform rate) or where the "9 kW lost" figure comes from.
*Which is probably useful to melt snow above the device, when installed outdoors on cold climates.
The Cayenne seems to need about 315Wh / mile. I assume a substantial number of them are sold in California, where rates are often above $0.50/kw. I think $1.50 would get you about 9 miles.
I drive a more efficient PHEV and spend much more than $1.50/day.
Average cost of electricity is around 18¢/kWh. $2 of electricity at 18¢/kWh is about 11kWh. 11000 / 315 = 34.9. The average US driver does about 40 miles of driving a day. Its a pretty close gut-estimate figure to a median US driver paying an average price per kWh with this particular car.
> I drive a more efficient PHEV and spend much more than $1.50/day.
Cool story bro. I drive a more efficient EV and spend less than $1.50/day. Isn't it fun to share anecdotes?
It uses the term “greenhouse gas” to refer to CO2 and uses the term “air pollution” to refer to what people traditionally think of as air pollution. For example, in one place of says: “Consequences of CO2 enrichment and climate change for natural terrestrial ecosystems could be modified by other environmental factors, both natural and man induced (e.g., by air pollution).” So that’s treating “CO2 enrichment” (emissions) as distinct from “air pollution.”
Did we call it “pollution” back then or something else? That is, did we lump CO2 conceptually into the same category as soot from coal plants and things like that?
Society uses labels to group things together so that we can treat similar things similarly for various purposes. For example, when we talk about “education” we usually mean teaching kids in schools or colleges. Of course, there’s lots of other things you can call “education.” But if the Department of Education comes in and says it’s going to regulate technical presentations at software conferences because that’s also “education,” then you’d say: “that’s not what people mean by the word education in this context.” That is, we have a consensus about what “education” encompasses and what it doesn’t for purposes of government regulation, and seminars at conferences falls outside that understanding.
Yes, labels matter; so let's take a step back and ask why you're fighting this argument? Why does it matter which of the harmful emissions from a smokestack count as "pollution"?
> Why does it matter which of the harmful emissions from a smokestack count as "pollution"?
Because society uses labels to delineate the boundaries between different legal regimes and sources of authority, and adhering to those boundaries is important. The FCC (Federal Communications Commission) can't point to the traffic on a fiber cable within a data center and say it falls within their jurisdiction because that's also "communications."
It's especially important in this context, because the half-century-old laws and regulations designed to control soot emissions from factory smokestacks is ill-suited to managing CO2 emissions. The fundamental premise of the Clean Air Act is that pollution can be controlled at the source with control technologies (RACT, BACT, etc.).
This focus on control technologies puts well-defined guardrails on the EPA. The EPA can't go around making big decisions about how factories work or what people produce. They can simply tell you to put the best reasonably available scrubbers on your factory. That approach completely breaks down when it comes to CO2, because there is no such thing as a "CO2 scrubber." Treating CO2 as a pollutant puts the EPA into a role of supervising the energy sector that the agency simply was never designed to do.
I think you miss rayiner's point. He's not disputing whether CO2 is a greenhouse gas. He's saying that doesn't make it a "pollutant" as the term was understood at the time, say, the EPA was created. There was no congressional legislation that said that it was something the EPA was empowered to regulate. Then the EPA decided to regulate it anyway (and, yes, won the court case about whether it could). But it was still shoehorned in, as it was not considered a pollutant in the way that NO2 or particulates or chlorine were.
Locomotive itself? Probably not. If you turned its abstract bounding box into real box - thin, negligible mass, enough strength not to break up - and evacuated the air inside, then yes, the box with locomotive in it should float.
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