Wait, since Chloe's theory was a TVTropes reference (see pedanterrific's comment) could the vrooping thing be too?

Oh my Bayes, it's completely obvious:

Clearly visible from where Harry had perched himself on his chair's arm was a truncated-conical object, like a cone with its top snipped off, slowly spinning around a pulsating central light which it shaded but did not obscure.

It's a lampshade. But what was Eliezer lampshading?

ETA: Obvious in retrospect, I should say. Which doesn't actually mean obvious at all.

An unrelated generic New York Times article. Paper beats blog!

I think you need to start by cashing out "understand" better. Certainly no physical system can simulate itself with full resolution. But there are all sorts of things we can't simulate like this. Understanding (as I would say its more commonly used) usually involves finding out which parts of the system are "important" to whatever function you're concerned with. For example, we don't have to simulate every particle in a gas because we have gas laws. And I think most people would say that gas laws show more understanding of thermodynamics than whatever you would get out of a complete simulation anyway.

Now the question is whether the brain actually does have any "laws" like this. IIRC, this is a relatively open question (though I do not follow neuroscience very closely) and in principle it could go either way.

I guess I don't really understand what the purpose of the argument is. Unless we can prove things about this stack of brains, what does it gets us? And how far "down" the evolutionary ladder does this argument work? Are cats omega-self-aware? Computing clusters?

Took most of it. I pressed enter accidentally after the charity questions. I would like to fill out the remainder. Is there a way I can do that without messing up the data?

Well, I disagree that complimenting a stranger's netbook is creepy, but...

This disagreement on what is creepy demonstrates precisely how hard it is to predict in advance if some behavior will be perceived as creepy or not.

Multiplication by a constant is an affine transformation. This clearly is a very big problem.

Editors can edit top level posts but have no access to comments. I could ban them, but they have useful content that doesn't deserve to be hidden entirely.

If you can't tell whose side someone is on, they are not on yours. -Warren E. Buffett

Doesn't this imply that an infinity of different subjective consciousnesses are being simulated right now, if only we knew how to assign inputs and outputs correctly?

One example: The Thing That I Protect.

...except for one last thing; so after tomorrow, I plan to go back to posting about plain old rationality on Monday.

If that makes you want to know what the "last thing" is, you have to click Next no less than ten times on Articles tagged ai to find out. Another is "More on this tomorrow" in Resist the Happy Death Spiral.