1) velocity of money matters, some spending creates more economic activity than others due to re-spending.
2) Investment is not the same as having your money sitting idle. Investment makes certain activities possible because of scale, payment made with the expectation of future value, financing capital goods or R&D, etc.
It's effectively the same thing as a separate computer because it's not your problem if the sandbox becomes broken. It's not your responsibility to maintain its integrity.
It doesn't have to be a reference to dualism. We can draw a distinction between specific patterns of brain activity and the body that realizes it. "I" exist only when the characteristic property of neural activity that realizes the self is present. I am the realization of this second-order property. Here the "soul" is this specific pattern of dynamics realized by my body's neurons.
You make it sound like we are flesh robots : sensors and motors, with a central "CPU" that channels between the two. But a robot has no first-person experience, it's just smart electron flows.
That we have first-person experiences shows the soul is definitely not "a process your body runs" : it's where your whole experience "registers".
That we are not flesh robots is also why we have free will. You could coherently argue that free-will is an illusion, but you can't argue that first-person experience is an illusion, as you need something to perceive the illusion.
Yes, with an advanced version on an LLM on top that makes it seem like you is you. As of so far we've found zero external magical devices that cause our body to act like it does other than the cells and electrical signals they produce.
>we have first-person experiences
Do you? You say you do, much like an LLM says it knows things. But all these things you say about you are actually effects many orders separated from the cause. Your idea of first-person is something you're experiencing many filters later. Which is what the article is somewhat about. Messing with the input signals to your brain via physical mechanism changes what you feel about who you are. There is not magic, just electron flows.
>but you can't argue that first-person experience is an illusion, as you need something to perceive the illusion.
A computer can generate and play it's own video game. This can be entirely virtualized like a dream, or it could be more like AR where it's getting inputs from the world around us. "But, but, but, that's totally different in ways I cannot explain nor do I want to because I'm special"
Our improvements in AI will never lead to AI being proven smart. It will just lead to humans being proven dumb.
Dualism?! I believe the quote I referenced wasn't implying any sort of multiplicity...it's subordination of the lesser elements of a single entity and elevation of reverence for the ephemeral. Singularity, baby.
In large organizations motivated reasoning trumps ethics. Behavior starts working along incentive gradients like an ant heap. Spend enough time in an environment like that and you learn to frame every selfish decision as good for the customer.
I think maintaining ethics in large organizations is one of the main challenges of our time, now that mega corps dominate our time and attention.
> Spend enough time in an environment like that and you learn to frame every selfish decision as good for the customer.
This reminds me of "in order to save the environment, we are going to delete all of your recordings older than 2 years, in 2 weeks. You can't download them."
The problem is the limited charging infrastructure. Hybrid owners don't need to plug in for the vehicle to function so they yield available chargers to actual EVs. To get past this you would need ubiquitous charging infra.
PHEV owners only need to charge at home (and if they can’t, don’t need a PHEV) and use electric power for local commuting.
The future of BEVs (and the most practical today) is also charging at home, and available chargers can grow slowly with BEVs used for road trips. Tesla is pretty close to there already. So, chargers don’t need to ubiquitous, just a bit more available on less common road trip routes.
The salient feature is that people consume a higher percentage of their wages than investors do of their wealth. Redistributing some profits to wages means that money gets spent, inducing demand. This also has a higher multiplier effect than profits, because consumer spending can move through the economy multiple times in a measurement period.
Watts is like brain candy, keeps my mind buzzing from all the ideas for weeks. Charles Stross can have the same effect, a sort of future shock.
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