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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • I really enjoyed some darker content in terms of establishing that humans aren’t always the good, wise, enlightened people of the galaxy, consistently The Good Guys in nearly every encounter.

    But shifting to that “oh there’s a dark side to all the optimism” as the consistent ongoing tone for the show rings wrong as much as the always good guys tone did with older trek.





  • I feel like there is space for talking about games besides actually playing them, similar to sports.

    To refine further, I think there exists demand for a “middle ground” of games discourse that is talking about games as a whole, or as entries into their genre, in detail and with consideration - but without being a hyper-focused discussion of one specific game by it’s die-hards. We have both poles - there is lots of relatively superficial discussion of games, or game reviews, that aren’t giving a particularly detailed discussion of each game … and there’s lots of posts in a specific games’ space with ultra-specific and supremely detailed discourse from a highly-invested players’ perspective.

    But there’s not been a successful venue or single leading voice that’s really filling that niche. TB did for ages, and I don’t think anyone has come close to filling those shoes since.

    I personally want the kind of insights that come from putting a week into a game and playing a lot of other similar games, but not necessarily being a hardcore fan or hater of the game or the genre. Like, I’ll get a week into a game and start noticing that the core gameplay is good, but the economy seems off, or that gunplay is just a little jank when playing near obstacles - deeper than “better/worse than GAME1, while slower not as twitchy as COMPETITOR”.

    In similar sense, talking about games as a media and as offering within a media landscape - in that sense you talk about asking “what is fun”; looking at game systems and mechanics from a lens of media critique and systems design. How does this work, how do competitors solve this problem, what other problems does it introduce - how does the sum picture mesh and how cohesive is the end product.


  • If you are in fact a doppelganger you have no way of knowing and neither does the Anomander who died. And that is why I wouldn’t risk teleportation.

    Which, conversely, is also why I don’t care about teleportation. If I have no idea before and I have no idea after and for all intents and purposes I am still me in the new location … all the parts that I can engage with, all the parts I care about - they’re all coming up fine. I might as well have fallen asleep on a plane, or blacked out after a few too many at the pub. When consciousness returns, I am in a new location.

    In that explanation you quoted, I fall firmly into the former camp. I don’t think we have special-ness that transcends the meat, but that the consciousness is wholly rooted in it - and so I think that moving the meat from one place to another achieves the result of moving the consciousness from one place to another.

    My main difference is that I don’t believe a “soul” transported or transplanted - or exists to be lost. The consciousness that is my sense of ‘self’ is the sum of my meat and my memories, and those are preserved.



  • To me it has nothing to do with souls, it’s about continuity of experience. […] If I don’t get to continue to experience life because I’m dead and some clone with my exact thoughts etc is now me, it’s only the rest of the world who experiences that as me continuing to live. But I don’t get to.

    I think that distinction is artificial.

    My continuity of experience is interrupted every night, among others - and I don’t worry that my experience as being me is somehow invalid now, or fear sleeping lest a doppelganger take my body overnight and wake up ‘as me’ the next morning. The idea that this would be different is resting on the notion that there is something other than mere meat and electricity that would be lost when the teleport interrupts consciousness, and I think that assumption is something that needs direct challenge.

    I think you would experience life continuing from the moment consciousness resumes in the new location, the exact same as how you experience life ‘continuing’ when you wake up each day. All the ways that you experience your own consciousness would simply have relocated. Without assuming a soul, there is no subjective distinction between pre/post teleporter any more than there’s a distinction between pre/post nap.


  • This presumes that there is something special in this model that doesn’t resume when your mind resumes running in it’s new location. Or, in other terms, “a soul”.

    That is ridiculous.

    So you do see my point.

    People aren’t computers, so getting all worked up about how software models instances still isn’t a valid modelling for human consciousness.

    When you kill a process and you re-run a program, even if you saved the full state of the memory elsewhere, you don’t say that it’s the same process. Is another process with identical content. There’s no need of a metaphysical entity. It’s another instance.

    But this is so hair-splittingly pedantic it’s almost doubled back to be incorrect. If you ask 99.999% of the world, they’ll be like “yeah I closed outlook and then I opened outlook” - to them, it’s still the same program. They’re launching the same software again. No one is like “oh well once you quit Skyrim it’s all over because even if you reopen it later, it’s a new instance and the old one is dead” … no. That’s ridiculous. It’s the same program, the same save file, resumed from save at a later date.

    Your focus on “Process” instead of “Program” is making the soul argument. The “process” you’re arguing for is a soul. Something intangible and irrelevant to the end user, that does get terminated on shutdown, that cannot be restored from save. Consciousness is the software, not the process itself. Memories are the save file. There is nothing in OP’s model of teleporting that suggests “process” itself is the sacred portion - when the hardware & software of “Dave” gets paused and resumed flawlessly.

    You’re deeply, sorely mistaken. Even in a deep, unconscious state, the mind keeps working, even if the degree of consciousness is different. That we’re not 100% certain of what the brain does in those moments doesn’t mean that it stops working.

    Not at all. Consciousness is interrupted. Unless we’re assuming that the “process” itself is sacred - what happens to consciousness is all that matters in either case. If your ability to perceive yourself as a conscious being stops - it doesn’t matter to your experience of your own consciousness if the ‘process’ stopped or went to sleep during the gap.


  • That’s absolutely the issue.

    Your body is copied as a file.

    Your mind is a process running in a body created from that file.

    When the process stops, you are effectively dead. Another copy of your body runs another process with an identical content. He has your body, but he’s not you.

    This presumes that there is something special in this model that doesn’t resume when your mind resumes running in it’s new location. Or, in other terms, “a soul”. The idea that an identical consciousness in an identical body is “not you” is based wholly on the assumption that “you” is something other than the consciousness.

    And your mind, or my mind, are both “processes” that stop regularly already - are you claiming that old you dies each night and a completely new but otherwise identical person lives each morning?


  • or in a real teleport where you are disassembled, you’re gone the moment

    I love how this was said completely unironically.

    We’re talking about something that only exists in sci-fi stories and you’re trying to argue about souls as if one outcome of teleports is clearly more real than another.

    you’re gone the moment you teleport and the “you” that remains is another different person with exactly your thoughts, feelings, motivations, memories, etc

    Ship of Thesius, though. If it’s exactly my thoughts, exactly my feelings, exactly my motivations, my memories, my body … That’s me. There’s no other parts that got left out.

    But consciousness was interrupted briefly when the transport happened? That happens to me every night - except in the morning I wake up in the same place instead of a different one. For all worthwhile intents and purposes, everything tangible and real that makes a person a person is relocated and the person remains. Getting lost in whether or not “you” “survive” is wasting angst on the existence of a soul.


  • Putting the blame on Microsoft or IWF is meaningfully missing the point.

    People were responsible for moderating what showed up on their forums or servers for years prior to these tools’ existence, people have been doing the same since those tools existed. Neither the tool nor it’s absence are responsible for child porn getting posted to Fediverse instances. If those shards won’t take action against CSAM materials now - what good will the tool do? We can’t run it here and have the tool go delete content from someone elses’ box.

    While those tools would make some enforcement significantly easier, the fact that enforcement isn’t meaningfully occurring on all instances isn’t something we can point at Microsoft and claim is their fault somehow.


  • You’re repeating what OP said.

    Thing is, the idea that an “old you” has “died” is a modern soul conceit. If “me” is just the combination of meat, electricity, and memories - then for all intents and purposes I was simply taken apart in one place and reassembled in another. Continuity of all three is maintained when I am reassembled on Mars with my body and memories intact. There is no “old” and “new” me - because what you or OP think defines “me” isn’t something that dies when the meat stops working briefly.


  • I think there were a lot of players up and down the ranks waiting to see which way the wind blew before casting for any given side.

    With so many concerns that the coup had backing from either Putin or other power blocs, a whole lot of side players would have wanted to back a winning pony and were waiting on early outcomes. Equally, with Putin not providing decisive action, I’m sure that invited meaningful concerns that this was some sort of double-dealing or the beginning of a Putin-backed purge.




  • Yeah. Rather a decent number of communities have actually moved to Discord, or are trying to, including a decent sampling of larger communities like MFA.

    There’s been some kind of wonky takes in Fediverse about some of those moves that seem to reject the validity of migrations that aren’t coming to our spaces. Mods will post “going to Discord, fuck this place” and they’re like “it’s temporary, Discord isn’t a forum”.



  • My favorite absolute boss take from him was reassuring an author that only had two people show up to a signing -

    Chelsea Banning, Author : Only 2 people came to my author signing yesterday, so I was pretty bummed about it. Especially as 37 people responded “going” to the event. Kind of upset, honestly, and a little embarrassed.

    Neil Gaiman : Terry Pratchett and I did a signing in Manhattan for Good Omens that nobody came to at all. So you are two up on us.

    Link here, which was in reply to this tweet - but because twitter has apparently busted context in links from offsite, it’s easier to just copy the tweets wholesale here.