The PSA statement (that there is a step that reaches the goal) directly violates the premise that any given step gets only halfway to the goal. Either...
The lack of a defined number for the last task does not prevent completion (by the all-tasks definition), so I regard your statement as a non-sequitur...
Countably infinite means that any step can be assigned a number. It does not in any way mean that there is a meaningful count of steps. fits this defi...
The physical process of descending stairs is not a supertask. I couldn't think of a way to make it a supertask, even by making each step smaller. A su...
This is equivalent to asserting that 'infinity' is the largest integer. Does nobody else see that making such an assertion is going to lead to contrad...
There are no empirical differences, agree. Presentism is the movie reel being played (a sort of literal analogy of the moving spotlight version of pre...
That sounds like a Boltzmann Brain, a mere state from which all is fiction and nothing can be known. Under this sort of presentism, there is nothing b...
This seems to be an assertion, not a logical consequence of the premise. In fact it leads to a contradiction of the premise, hence demonstrating that ...
Ah, thank you for that. I sort of remembered the story but not the name/author. It seems far more paradoxical than Zeno's thing since motion is preven...
The mathematics is clear. The sum of the infinite series 1/2 + 1/4 + 1/8 ... is 1, not more, not less. Nobody has claimed 'under a minute'. Well, the ...
This is nicely illustrated by Zeno's 'dichotomy paradox'. Per wiki: "Suppose Atalanta wishes to walk to the end of a path. Before she can get there, s...
Exactly. Step n takes 60/2**n seconds. That's very much a nonzero duration for any n. After a minute, yes. Do you contend otherwise, that the sum of 6...
I get shades of Zeno's paradox going on here, except Zeno get's there. He reaches the bottom of something with no bottom. It taking a minute is fine, ...
Then you seem to define 'conscious' as having one of those 'self' thingys as defined by the quoted book. I don't consider myself to be conscious then,...
That seems to be a straight assertion of dualism, but a non-dualist can also have a sense of self, so I must disagree with the book's definition. You ...
OK, I accept that,and retract the bit about the dictionary. In general,no,but I gave an alternate definition that is very much about causality. It sol...
First of all, all definitions are essentially circular, as evidence by somebody not being able to immediately glean a language simply by by being hand...
I've seen several articles about interesting ways to do logic and computation. Scientific American had one that designed a Turing machine consisting o...
I didn't vote on the poll since 'none of the above' wasn't a choice. Contrary to the popular belief, determinism has nothing to do with this. It has t...
The weather is closer. Fluid dynamics of a system in stable state (say water moving through a pipe, dam spillway) needs a description of that state, a...
So I wanted to address the Simulation Hypothesis from Bostrom directly. I quote only the abstract and a few parts of the intro. Posthuman is defined h...
In that sense, the two are similar. Also, quite often, in both VR and a true sim, solipsism is true, but you know it because there are clues. We here ...
On the Turing test discussion: Indeed. I dragged in Relativist since the topic of Turing test came up, and he suggests that the test is insufficient t...
Nothing like dreaming. VR has many of the same issues as the first two. The actual simulation hypothesis does not suggest an artificial sensory stream...
Remember, we're not worrying about what those running the simulation are calling the simulated things. We're supposing that we are the subjects here, ...
Indeed it isn't, but the assumption is implicit. It's too obvious to bother calling out explicitly, or at least it was obvious until ~50 years ago. Yo...
There's a contradiction here. People is animal. A machine is not animal. But a machine can be people? That means a machine is animal and not animal. I...
I agree that the logic presented is completely valid, but the premises are outrageous, and the conclusion is only as sound as those premises. I don't ...
I do think there are ways, but most of the posters are using fallacious methods to justify their assertions. I can think of ways, albeit technological...
Unclear on the question. The difference between reality (which doesn't supervene on something higher) and the sim (which does) is just that. Reality i...
The simulation needs to provide an initial state that provides that history. History is, after all, just state. Hence my suggestion of starting the si...
Well, the Sim hypothesis (all versions) as how we might know we are or are not in a sim or VR. You're speaking of a VR in this case. Your memories def...
I echo NotAristotle's sentiments. If the guy knows he is in a simulation, he also knows that the virtue he is practicing is wasted, benefiting nothing...
This would be a violation of the premise, that only the inputs and outputs are artificial, and the experiencing entity itself is left to itself. If yo...
Well, to quote the BiV IEP page, very close to the top: https://iep.utm.edu/brain-in-a-vat-argument/#:~:text=The%20Brain%20in%20a%20Vat%20thought%2Dex...
Picture 'reality' R0 as the trunk of a tree. It has 9 boughs (S1-S9) coming out of it, the simulations being run on R. Each of those has 10 branches, ...
That's pretty much Bostrom's argument, a sort of anthropic reasoned hypothesis that demonstrates a complete ignorance of how simulations work. That wa...
It simulates no mental processes at all. It answers on its own, not by simulating something that it is not. It is an imitation, not a simulation of an...
Last I checked (which has been a while), they can do bugs, and even that is probably not a simulation of the whole bug, let alone an environment for i...
Not sure what is being asked. I mean, what aspects of physical processes would, if absent, not in some way degrade the subjective experience? I think ...
The bit about imitation people (human-made constructs) is very relevant to the 'thinking computer' topic, and relevant only if not all people/creature...
OK, so I spent some time on that article, and apparently the Wigner's friend experiment is something completely different than what I've seen describe...
I also wondered what a chat bot would say about such a thing since there's so much BS in the training material. Bottom line is that science uses metho...
Not sure what you mean by iteration, or 'permitted'. It's a loop, an instance of reverse causality. It's one loop in our example, and it just is, per ...
Not to let the main track die, let me poke at the dualism implications. If there is a dualistic mind/body relationship, the identity convention is usu...
I am going to disagree, but draw a similar conclusion for different reasons. First of all, a CTC doesn't come in iterations, so if there's a loop, it'...
That was sort of the main simple example in the SEP article. Fred sneaks into a museum, steals the time machine, goes back a bunch of years, and donat...
I'm not saying it is, but that simply isn't the point of the topic. In a stretch, it could be, especially with exotic matter. Thing is, exotic matter,...
Thank you all for your initial responses. Well I didn't say 'travel to where they keep time'. Time travel seems to be the presence of a person with me...
I don't consider it a 'part', no. I don't see perdurantist language in the field, so I don't use it. A part of a 4D object would be a smaller 4D objec...
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