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HP:MOR and the Radio Fallacy
Random83213y-10

You're not likely to find a remotely reasonable hypothesis, even in the Methodsverse where magic abounds, by which the internal parts of a thinking computation can be damaged by damaging the brain, and yet removing the whole brain leaves the soul capable of internal thinking.

Has your hypothesis that thought remains possible after the whole brain has been removed, in fact, been tested?

EDIT: I read your post as meaning that the "fact" that thought remains possible after a brain has been removed [to be cryo-frozen, for instance] was evidence against a soul.

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Delayed Gratification vs. a Time-Dependent Utility Function
Random83213y00

I don't even know any Haskell - I just have a vague idea that a monad is a function that accepts a "state" as part of its input, and returns the same kind of "state" as part of its output. But even so, the punchline was too good to resist making.

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Delayed Gratification vs. a Time-Dependent Utility Function
Random83213y10

How do you write a function for the output of a state machine?

Monads.

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Two kinds of cryonics?
Random83213y20

while they await the outcome of clinical trials and new approaches

http://xkcd.com/989/ seems relevant despite the slightly different subject matter. Clinical trials can't happen if all the potential subjects are frozen.

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A Kick in the Rationals: What hurts you in your LessWrong Parts?
Random83213y20

Well, don't forget that it will hit the ground with a force proportional to its weight. You probably wouldn't want him to have dropped it on your head - it would be a rather more unpleasant experience than having a controller thrown at your head.

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Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 16, chapter 85
Random83213y40

General Relativity, actually. You could also look for "gravity as a fictitious force".

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A Kick in the Rationals: What hurts you in your LessWrong Parts?
Random83213y20

Large CRTs are made of very thick curved glass. I once did hit one hard enough to chip it, which left a hole several millimeters deep and did not appear to affect the structural integrity of the tube. But I don't know about "that durable" - if you dropped one from a sufficient height it would surely break - but it's more a question of how much force you (or I) can throw a controller with.

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A Kick in the Rationals: What hurts you in your LessWrong Parts?
Random83213y00

when one inevitably fractures from the force of the blows

Define inevitably. I don't think I could throw a controller hard enough to damage a CRT or a rear projector. These suggest designs for protective covers (for the former, put the TV behind thick curved glass; for the latter put it behind a durable plastic sheet held in a rigid frame.

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[SEQ RERUN] Collapse Postulates
Random83213y00

The only phenomenon in all of physics that violates Liouville's Theorem (has a many-to-one mapping from initial conditions to outcomes).

I don't know what Liouville's Theorem is, but this sounds like an objection to not being able to run time backwards.

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Muehlhauser-Wang Dialogue
Random83213y20

I will note that the AI box experiment's conditions expressly forbid a secure environment [i.e. one with inspection tools that cannot be manipulated by the AI]:

the results seen by the Gatekeeper shall again be provided by the AI party, which is assumed to be sufficiently advanced to rewrite its own source code, manipulate the appearance of its own thoughts if it wishes, and so on.

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