Games Thread

• Short Peace (anthology; mostly good, with the fire story notable for its animation, and the final short film an engaging exploration of near-future warfare using networked soldier squads assisted by drones and robotic suits)
• Death Parade (expansion of Death Billiards, as an episodic series; stories remain a bit heavily focused on suicide and murder, but while the dark background story arc ultimately ends in a whimper, the main story arc ends in a very emotionally satisfying way)

The relevance is physicalism.

If physicalism is the claim that everything, has a physical explanation, then the inability to understand what pain is without being in pain is a contradiction to it. I don' think anyone here believes that physicalism is an unmportamt issue.

What is a "non physical fact"?

The argument treats physical knowledge as a subset of objective. kowledge. Subjective knowledge, which can only be known on a first person basis, automatically counts as non physical. That's an epistemic definition.

The experience of red seems to be physically encoded in the brain like anything else.

If you have the expected intuition from M's R, that Mary would be able to read cognitive information from brain scans, but not expetuental information. In that send, 'red' is not encoded in the same way as everything else, since it can not be decoded in the same way.

sIt does seem clear that some knowledge exists which can't be transmitted from human to human via means of language, at least not in the same way that 2+2=4 can. However, this is just a limitation of the human design

But noit super human design. The original paper (ave you read it?) avoids the issue of limited communication bandwidth by making Mary a super scientist who can examine brain scans of any level of detail.

Proves anything beyond that

What it proves to you depends on what intuitions you have about it . If you think Mary would know what red looks like while in the room, from reading brain scans, then it s going to prove anything to you.

Consider a situation where Mary is so dexterous that she is able to perform fine-grained brain surgery on herself. In that case, she could look at what an example of a brain that has seen red looks like, and manually copy any relevant differences into her own brain. In that case, while she still never would have actually seen red through her eyes, it seems like she would know what it is like to see red as well as anyone else.

But in order to create a realistic experience she would have to create a false memory of having seen red, which is something that an agent (human or AI) that values epistemic rationality would not want to do.

M's R is about what it says its about, the existence of non physical facts. Finding a loophole where Mary can instantiate the brain state without having the perceptual stimulus doesn't address that...indeed it assumes that an instantiation of the red-seeing is necessary, which is tantamount to conceding that something subectve is going on, which is tantamount to conceding the point.

Consider a situation where Mary is so dexterous that she is able to perform fine-grained brain surgery on herself. In that case, she could look at what an example of a brain that has seen red looks like, and manually copy any relevant differences into her own brain. In that case, while she still never would have actually seen red through her eyes, it seems like she would know what it is like to see red as well as anyone else.

I think this demonstrates that the Mary's room though experiment is about the limitations of human senses/means of learning, and that the apparent sense of mystery it has comes mainly from the vagueness of what it means to "know all about" something. (Not saying it was a useless idea - it can be quite valuable to be forced to break down some vague or ambiguous idea that we usually take for granted).

I've been having digestive trouble recently and have started wondering if I've developed a new allergy/intolerance (Known: milk, cashewnuts, chocolate). Does anyone have a recommendation for tests to check for these?

Apparently, "Eight foods account for 90% of all food-allergic reactions: milk, eggs, peanuts, tree nuts (e.g., walnuts, almonds, cashews, pistachios, pecans), wheat, soy, fish, and shellfish." (source: http://www.foodallergy.org/file/facts-stats.pdf). However, nuts are good for you (eg. https://examine.com/faq/how-can-i-best-ensure-cardiovascular-health-and-longevity/). So what do you do?

I imagine allergies are bad for your body, even apart from the digestive issues. So, do you take any supplements for nuts? The only one I am aware of here is Omega-3, which is common to various nuts.

Sidenote: If you are willing to put a "nuts without allergies" supplement together, I might buy it from you. See https://www.reddit.com/r/Supplements/comments/3ptsz8/i_am_a_supplement_caffeineenergy_pill_company/cw9gwht for business advice.

Asian (East Asian): -0.600% 80 3.300%
Asian (Indian subcontinent): +0.300% 60 2.500%

Something I've been curious about for a while is the low proportion of Asian and Indian people in the LWsphere compared to STEM communties in general. Any ideas?

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