So, you think assuming that the laws of physics change over time helps your argument?
Hell, we don't even know for sure that black holes can exist - a slight modification to Relativity, to homogenize how it treats gravitational energy fields with all other fields, renders black holes impossible at any mass, while remaining completely consistent with observations.
I'm a big fan of Wacom technology; however, even among Wacom-based styluses there's no guarantee of interoperability. I've had three different Wacom tablets (desktop digitizer, old transformable laptop, and modern tablet), and none of the styluses work with the other devices. It's very disappointing, though I wouldn't be surprised if it's due to lowering power requirements for successively more power-sensitive devices.
Haven't paid much attention in a long time, but I always thought Wacom was the undisputed leader in the stylus market. No batteries required in the stylus, plenty of special-purpose buttons, incredible fast and high-resolution position tracking, excellent pressure sensitivity, and their pro-level products offer orientation tracking as well for high-fidelity virtual paint brushes and the like (2 axis? 3? I'm not certain.) Of course, I don't know what the power consumption was, it might not have been as suitable for low-power mobile devices.
> Micro USB is ubiquitous, required by law in the EU Pretty sure the EU just endorsed it as the recommended charging standard, rather than actually requiring it by law. Otherwise iPhones couldn't be sold in the EU.
That said, having an official EU-wide phone plug recommendation did absolute wonders for the global phone-charger market within months, so gotta give credit where it's due.
Quite - both duplicates would have equally valid claims to being "you", and would likely remain recognizably pretty-much-identical for some time after the duplication.
The original question though is, when you are facing imminent death, is it really going to make any difference, to *you*, that there's a duplicate of you out there somewhere that will go on living?
And yes, the illusion of continuity itself is indeed the flip side to the illusion of continuity of self.
It's you-who-was, it's decidedly not you-who-just-died.
Lets say you manage to make an absolutely atom-perfect indistinguishable clone of yourself. Only thing is, you're both still clearly distinguishable to each other: one is the subjective you, and the other is some other, eerily similar person sitting across the room. Shove a knife though one of their hands, and only that one will scream.
Of course, another way to look at it is that it highlights the fact that the entire concept of a coherent "you" extending through time is a perceptual illusion to begin with.
Neither of which help Joe Average, who has barely knows what a "file format" is (that's like, video or spreadsheet or whatever, right?), and whose eyes glaze over as soon as you say the word "settings". Many/most people's concept of a "word processor" begins and ends with the glorified typewriter that is Word, the idea that there's different, incompatible, formats for storing the same sort of data makes no sense to them.
That's part of the reason mp3s remain dominant for music despite several superior alternatives having been available for almost two decades. Mp3=music file, what the hell is ogg,flac, etc?
> I can prove my identity in any way you like Okay then. What did I tell you just after the clone was made?
Even assuming a "teleporter accident" that creates two perfect duplicates, rather than an original and a clone, they cease being the same individual in that moment. Any sort of perceived continuity, stream of consciousness, aka "you", has now been duplicated
Even killing the original immediately doesn't really solve anything - divergence is minimal, but bifurcation has already happened. "your" stream of consciousness is ending, and the existence of another near-duplicate is irrelevant to that fact.
Yeah, it would be nice if during installation there was a was a great big dialog asking "By default, which format should new files be saved in: [Microsoft Office Compatible] or [Open Document Standard]"
Be aware that, unless you intentionally disabled it, Microsoft Office preloads when Windows starts, and never exits. So those fast "load times" are basically just the time it takes to open a new window - Office has actually been running in the background the entire time. Very nice if you use Office a lot, but it means your boot time is slowed accordingly, and those resources are being consumed constantly, limiting the resources available to other applications.
As I recall Open Office actually has a similar preloader available, but it's more obvious (leaves an icon in the tray) and I'm not sure if it's enabled by default - use office suites rarely enough that I always disable such things as being excessively expensive.
>Anyone who actually needs Office gets it through work. You're correct as to MS Office specifically - but not office software in general. Word processors, spreadsheet, and even presentation software are broadly useful on occasion. I write a few documents a year that call for a word processor - it's absolutely not worth buying Office for that. I use spreadsheets far more often, but not for anything that makes me money. Students have even more use for such things, and very many of them can't afford several hundred dollars for an office suite.
And before you mention free/ultracheap student editions, etc: be sure to thank Open Office for those - before it became a credible alternative you were lucky if you could track down the guy that could get you a 40% student discount coupon. Microsoft knows full well it can't afford to have to large a portion of the population get acclimated to alternatives.
Ditto people in the developing world - you can get a halfway-decent new PC for less than the cost of a copy of MS Office, far less if used. You want people scrimping and saving to afford a PC to be forced to become criminals to get access to basic functionality? To say nothing of those people who, for one reason or another, don't use Windows as their operating system should they be denied the ability to use word processors or spreadsheets just because Microsoft managed to drive every other Office-suite developer out of business through a slew of unsavory behaviors, including outright sabotage in some cases?
> I remember all the whining how file format was the only reason various open source clones sucked. What's the excuse for anything less than 100% compatibility now?
Still file formats - Microsoft *still* hasn't fully documented their format - the documented format they've released to get OOXML approved as an "open format" is 1) incomplete - there are sections where it literally states that certain binary blobs are defined by the data exported from Office. 2) Extremely verbose, and some have argued intentionally confusing 3) Not used by any software on the planet. Files saved by Microsoft Office are very often NOT compliant with the published standard, nor can Office consistently read files that *are* correctly formatted in compliance with the specification.
As for any UI suckery - that's admittedly one place that massive software companies have an edge - it costs a lot of effort and/or money to do proper usability studies, and user interface design is perhaps outside the core strengths of most developers. Still, the software gets the job done, and isn't too painful to use once you know your way around. In some ways it's even superior to MS Office.
Also - what's wrong with tribalism? They were feeding themselves just fine - just because they diodn't choose to live in overpopulated, disease-ridden open sewers like Europeans did doesn't make their lives any less fulfilling.
Where did I bitch about war or militias? I bitched about colonialism - a far more exploitative practice. If we're talking tribal Africa specifically, they also *didn't* have wars like Europe did - rather they had semi-ritualized raiding parities where people rarely died or were seriously injured.
So does FTL and many other causality-breaking constructs that most theoretical physicists agree probably won't actually work due to as-yet undiscovered forces.
Relativity is just a theoretical construct - a successive approximation designed to describe a fundamentally unknowable reality. It does a better job than Newtonian gravity, but it still calls for 95% of the material in the universe to be stuff we've seen no direct evidence of, despite decades of looking.
What are you talking about? They were doing fine before the British invaded. They weren't an industrialized society, but they were taking care of themselves just fine.
No, you offered zero explanation for an esoteric theoretical construct. This is the first time you mentioned "time machine" - and really, that's as far as I have to read to say this is all theoretical bullshit. Sure, maybe time machines are actually possible - but if so, where's all the evidence of it? Heck, if you've got time machines why just keep popping back to relive the previous few billion years - why not send back enough mass to stabilize the universe?
It's not trying to explain anything - it's trying to *describe* it, which is what a great deal of science is about (Newtons law of gravity - describes forces, explains nothing)
Watch any sufficiently large population for a sufficiently long time, and you can easily enough plot their odds of death versus age - normally you get a "bathtub curve", this time they haven't.
Probabilistic models give concrete predictions for a sufficiently large population. You're absolutely right that they're not explanatory, but they are descriptive. Explanation comes later, once you've recognized the trend and began looking for root causes.
Actually though, you could say the same thing for a great many models. Gravity: Fg = G*m1*m2/(r^2) describes gravitational acceleration pretty accurately - but offers no explanation for what causes it. Most scientific Laws are like that - they're a mathematical *description*, you have to turn to the (usually) accompanying theory for explanation.
That's true of just about any organism - mice, deer, wolves, humans, you name it. Humans are just the only ones that have managed to more-or-less provide such an environment for ourselves. For a while. We're starting to push up against the limits of this big spherical box we're in though, and things are getting interesting.
True, and if you offer some great value to the world worth keeping around, that's a good thing for them. But it does *you* no good at all - you're still dead. The clone may still be walking around, but it won't be you any more - the two of you will have started diverging from the moment the clone was made.
That is an excellent analogy. And molerats, unlike humans or hard drives or pretty much any other complex system we know of, don't appear to have a far side to their bathtub - their mortality risk just flattens out. Which makes them *incredibly* interesting - as they appear to have somehow beaten entropy's usual toll.
That would be the point of studying the mole rats, would it not? There's ways to regrow telomeres, we've done it as I recall, but the results still left much to be desired.
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No, now they're suffering ongoing famines. Used to be they lived well under the carrying limits of their environment.
So, you think assuming that the laws of physics change over time helps your argument?
Hell, we don't even know for sure that black holes can exist - a slight modification to Relativity, to homogenize how it treats gravitational energy fields with all other fields, renders black holes impossible at any mass, while remaining completely consistent with observations.
Wow, I wonder how I missed that.
I'm a big fan of Wacom technology; however, even among Wacom-based styluses there's no guarantee of interoperability. I've had three different Wacom tablets (desktop digitizer, old transformable laptop, and modern tablet), and none of the styluses work with the other devices. It's very disappointing, though I wouldn't be surprised if it's due to lowering power requirements for successively more power-sensitive devices.
Haven't paid much attention in a long time, but I always thought Wacom was the undisputed leader in the stylus market. No batteries required in the stylus, plenty of special-purpose buttons, incredible fast and high-resolution position tracking, excellent pressure sensitivity, and their pro-level products offer orientation tracking as well for high-fidelity virtual paint brushes and the like (2 axis? 3? I'm not certain.) Of course, I don't know what the power consumption was, it might not have been as suitable for low-power mobile devices.
> Micro USB is ubiquitous, required by law in the EU
Pretty sure the EU just endorsed it as the recommended charging standard, rather than actually requiring it by law. Otherwise iPhones couldn't be sold in the EU.
That said, having an official EU-wide phone plug recommendation did absolute wonders for the global phone-charger market within months, so gotta give credit where it's due.
Quite - both duplicates would have equally valid claims to being "you", and would likely remain recognizably pretty-much-identical for some time after the duplication.
The original question though is, when you are facing imminent death, is it really going to make any difference, to *you*, that there's a duplicate of you out there somewhere that will go on living?
And yes, the illusion of continuity itself is indeed the flip side to the illusion of continuity of self.
It's you-who-was, it's decidedly not you-who-just-died.
Lets say you manage to make an absolutely atom-perfect indistinguishable clone of yourself. Only thing is, you're both still clearly distinguishable to each other: one is the subjective you, and the other is some other, eerily similar person sitting across the room. Shove a knife though one of their hands, and only that one will scream.
Of course, another way to look at it is that it highlights the fact that the entire concept of a coherent "you" extending through time is a perceptual illusion to begin with.
Neither of which help Joe Average, who has barely knows what a "file format" is (that's like, video or spreadsheet or whatever, right?), and whose eyes glaze over as soon as you say the word "settings". Many/most people's concept of a "word processor" begins and ends with the glorified typewriter that is Word, the idea that there's different, incompatible, formats for storing the same sort of data makes no sense to them.
That's part of the reason mp3s remain dominant for music despite several superior alternatives having been available for almost two decades. Mp3=music file, what the hell is ogg,flac, etc?
> I can prove my identity in any way you like
Okay then. What did I tell you just after the clone was made?
Even assuming a "teleporter accident" that creates two perfect duplicates, rather than an original and a clone, they cease being the same individual in that moment. Any sort of perceived continuity, stream of consciousness, aka "you", has now been duplicated
Even killing the original immediately doesn't really solve anything - divergence is minimal, but bifurcation has already happened. "your" stream of consciousness is ending, and the existence of another near-duplicate is irrelevant to that fact.
Yeah, it would be nice if during installation there was a was a great big dialog asking "By default, which format should new files be saved in: [Microsoft Office Compatible] or [Open Document Standard]"
> opens in about half a second on my computer
Be aware that, unless you intentionally disabled it, Microsoft Office preloads when Windows starts, and never exits. So those fast "load times" are basically just the time it takes to open a new window - Office has actually been running in the background the entire time. Very nice if you use Office a lot, but it means your boot time is slowed accordingly, and those resources are being consumed constantly, limiting the resources available to other applications.
As I recall Open Office actually has a similar preloader available, but it's more obvious (leaves an icon in the tray) and I'm not sure if it's enabled by default - use office suites rarely enough that I always disable such things as being excessively expensive.
>Anyone who actually needs Office gets it through work.
You're correct as to MS Office specifically - but not office software in general. Word processors, spreadsheet, and even presentation software are broadly useful on occasion. I write a few documents a year that call for a word processor - it's absolutely not worth buying Office for that. I use spreadsheets far more often, but not for anything that makes me money. Students have even more use for such things, and very many of them can't afford several hundred dollars for an office suite.
And before you mention free/ultracheap student editions, etc: be sure to thank Open Office for those - before it became a credible alternative you were lucky if you could track down the guy that could get you a 40% student discount coupon. Microsoft knows full well it can't afford to have to large a portion of the population get acclimated to alternatives.
Ditto people in the developing world - you can get a halfway-decent new PC for less than the cost of a copy of MS Office, far less if used. You want people scrimping and saving to afford a PC to be forced to become criminals to get access to basic functionality? To say nothing of those people who, for one reason or another, don't use Windows as their operating system should they be denied the ability to use word processors or spreadsheets just because Microsoft managed to drive every other Office-suite developer out of business through a slew of unsavory behaviors, including outright sabotage in some cases?
> I remember all the whining how file format was the only reason various open source clones sucked. What's the excuse for anything less than 100% compatibility now?
Still file formats - Microsoft *still* hasn't fully documented their format - the documented format they've released to get OOXML approved as an "open format" is
1) incomplete - there are sections where it literally states that certain binary blobs are defined by the data exported from Office.
2) Extremely verbose, and some have argued intentionally confusing
3) Not used by any software on the planet. Files saved by Microsoft Office are very often NOT compliant with the published standard, nor can Office consistently read files that *are* correctly formatted in compliance with the specification.
As for any UI suckery - that's admittedly one place that massive software companies have an edge - it costs a lot of effort and/or money to do proper usability studies, and user interface design is perhaps outside the core strengths of most developers. Still, the software gets the job done, and isn't too painful to use once you know your way around. In some ways it's even superior to MS Office.
Also - what's wrong with tribalism? They were feeding themselves just fine - just because they diodn't choose to live in overpopulated, disease-ridden open sewers like Europeans did doesn't make their lives any less fulfilling.
Where did I bitch about war or militias? I bitched about colonialism - a far more exploitative practice. If we're talking tribal Africa specifically, they also *didn't* have wars like Europe did - rather they had semi-ritualized raiding parities where people rarely died or were seriously injured.
So does FTL and many other causality-breaking constructs that most theoretical physicists agree probably won't actually work due to as-yet undiscovered forces.
Relativity is just a theoretical construct - a successive approximation designed to describe a fundamentally unknowable reality. It does a better job than Newtonian gravity, but it still calls for 95% of the material in the universe to be stuff we've seen no direct evidence of, despite decades of looking.
What are you talking about? They were doing fine before the British invaded. They weren't an industrialized society, but they were taking care of themselves just fine.
Hah! Good one. I'm sure you can recreate the living mind of someone from the degraded DNA remaining in their millenia-dead bones. Necromancy101 right?
No, you offered zero explanation for an esoteric theoretical construct. This is the first time you mentioned "time machine" - and really, that's as far as I have to read to say this is all theoretical bullshit. Sure, maybe time machines are actually possible - but if so, where's all the evidence of it? Heck, if you've got time machines why just keep popping back to relive the previous few billion years - why not send back enough mass to stabilize the universe?
It's not trying to explain anything - it's trying to *describe* it, which is what a great deal of science is about (Newtons law of gravity - describes forces, explains nothing)
Watch any sufficiently large population for a sufficiently long time, and you can easily enough plot their odds of death versus age - normally you get a "bathtub curve", this time they haven't.
Probabilistic models give concrete predictions for a sufficiently large population. You're absolutely right that they're not explanatory, but they are descriptive. Explanation comes later, once you've recognized the trend and began looking for root causes.
Actually though, you could say the same thing for a great many models. Gravity: Fg = G*m1*m2/(r^2) describes gravitational acceleration pretty accurately - but offers no explanation for what causes it. Most scientific Laws are like that - they're a mathematical *description*, you have to turn to the (usually) accompanying theory for explanation.
That's true of just about any organism - mice, deer, wolves, humans, you name it. Humans are just the only ones that have managed to more-or-less provide such an environment for ourselves. For a while. We're starting to push up against the limits of this big spherical box we're in though, and things are getting interesting.
True, and if you offer some great value to the world worth keeping around, that's a good thing for them. But it does *you* no good at all - you're still dead. The clone may still be walking around, but it won't be you any more - the two of you will have started diverging from the moment the clone was made.
That is an excellent analogy. And molerats, unlike humans or hard drives or pretty much any other complex system we know of, don't appear to have a far side to their bathtub - their mortality risk just flattens out. Which makes them *incredibly* interesting - as they appear to have somehow beaten entropy's usual toll.
That would be the point of studying the mole rats, would it not? There's ways to regrow telomeres, we've done it as I recall, but the results still left much to be desired.