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What is it like to be a smartphone?
- blendergeek 6y agoWayback Machine Link: https://web.archive.org/web/20200928213413/http://www.roughtype.com/?p=8528 https://web.archive.org/web/20200928213413/http://www.rought...
- JBiserkov 6y agoDo smartphones "die" when they run out of battery or is that merely "sleep" for them? RAM needs power, but ROM is preserved so ... amnesia? Comma? I'm never letting my phone battery drain again.
- sassycassie 6y agohahaha this is a unique way of thinking lmao
- Stratoscope 6y agoDo Android phones dream of electric sleep?
- monocasa 6y agoI'd say they die. There's not really a better analog in biology. Even in the case of sexual reproduction, the new life carries tons of epigenetic state across the creation boundary, and is more akin to fork(2) than exec(2). A ceasing of operations and erasure of all current state seems more like death to me.
- gruez 6y ago>A ceasing of operations and erasure of all current state seems more like death to me. but some state is preserved in non-volatile memory.
- monocasa 6y agoAnd when you die, your DNA can still be sequenced.
- gruez 6y agoDNA is generally non-mutable, so that's more akin to the (read-only) /system partition on androids. There's still the /data partition which is mutable and gets saved even after you power down.
- monocasa 6y agoIn that conceptual framework it seems life doesn't have non volatile storage at all, so it seems a bit of a non sequitur to use it in an analogy with computing systems. The closest I can come up with using that framework is plasmids. But if you squirreled away the plasmids of a plasma before ceasing all of it's operations, then injected those plasmids into a new copy of the bacterium, you'd still say that the original bacterium died.
- sergeykish 6y agoAmnesia of everything but carefully written. Rebirth.
- samatman 6y agoWhat you're illustrating here is that "awake", "asleep", "death", and "life", are pretty terrible metaphors for states our computers exist in. Saying my laptop is "asleep" when it's suspended is verbally cromulent, no one would be confused by what I meant. But the metaphor breaks down badly on any attempt to extend it. Even if I brick it, I have the option to purchase fresh equipment and restore from the most recent backup. If my timing is good, there may be no difference from my perspective. This isn't possible with living things, and it might not even be possible, the fond dreams of mind-upload enthusiasts notwithstanding.
- core-questions 6y agoPerhaps we should say 'reborn' instead of rebooted, 'reincarnated' instead of 'reinstalled'.
- sergeykish 6y agoIt is a clone. The original one is dead. Works for teleportation too.
- inopinatus 6y agoand time travel. O'Brien must suffer.
- Inityx 6y agohttps://youtu.be/k0_LQtPQUu8 https://youtu.be/k0_LQtPQUu8
- gugagore 6y agoBecause we built the phone, we know what is the "state" of the phone and any information in volatile storage can be persisted in non-volatile storage. I can't think of any biological analogy for that. If/when there is a mechanism to save and restore the state of a human mind, we will have to add more nuance to how we talk about dying.
- taneq 6y agoDying is irreversible cessation of function. Turning off a machine that can be restarted is more like suspended animation.
- FabHK 6y agoTed Chiang's SF story collection "Exhalation" has a wonderful story on digital life forms ("digients"): The Lifecycle of Software Objects. It raises many questions, among them the ethics of putting such beings to sleep, or restoring them from a previous checkpoint. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lifecycle_of_Software_Objects https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lifecycle_of_Software_Obje... Full text of the novella: https://web.archive.org/web/20130306030242/http://subterraneanpress.com/magazine/fall_2010/fiction_the_lifecycle_of_software_objects_by_ted_chiang https://web.archive.org/web/20130306030242/http://subterrane...
- Animats 6y ago"Our pets are amusing" - Dust SF. Two intelligent Alexa-like devices maneuver their "owners" into hooking up.
- TeMPOraL 6y agoThis reminds me of the question: did we domesticate wheat, or did wheat domesticate us? Did we domesticate cats, or did cats domesticate us? Thus is the nature of the feedback loop.
- freedomben 6y agoI studied dogs quite a bit (informal academia (course audits, etc)), and I firmly believe they domesticated us instead of the other way around.
- glouwbug 6y agoPlease tell us more
- MayeulC 6y agoI think the relationship is more of a symbiotic one, like wheat. On the other hand, we get to pick the meaning of "domestication", and I believe the definition leans heavily on the traits a domesticated dog exhibits, so there is not much to discuss here.
- glouwbug 6y agoEh, the guy studied dogs. I'm sure he has something to say
- oldschoolrobot 6y agodumb
- madprops 6y agoThing's will probably snowball exponentially once we figure out how to clone consciousness and create fractal networks.
- wombatmobile 6y ago"We are, however, able to see that, excepting the simplest of life forms, an animal has a consciousness" What does the word "consciousness" mean in that sentence, and why are the simplest of life forms excluded? What test do we apply that all organisms pass, except for the simplest life forms, which fail?
- thaumasiotes 6y agoGut feelings, obviously.
- jprupp 6y agoWhat is it like to be the Internet? That structure resembles our brain: a reactive, resilient, shifting network of connections among billions of individual human brains using smartphones and other technological devices, storing, aggregating and routing information in complex and arbitrary ways. If consciousness is to be found in our technology, I wouldn't look at the individual smartphone, but at the network of all smartphones.
- k__ 6y agoCould society be a body, the internet its nerves and the economy its blood?
- lemonberry 6y agoFun read. Only tangentially related... the podcast "Everything is Alive" is really enjoyable. The host interviews a variety of everyday objects: a can of soda, a magic eight ball, a towel, a song, etc. The first episode, "Louis, Can of Cola", is my favorite.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- aidenn0 6y agoFor the opposite take, I remember a short story with aliens that were intelligent, but not self aware. They instinctively attacked the humans because they interpreted entertainment broadcasts as a malicious attack.
- taneq 6y agoBlindsight by Peter Watts.
- ineedasername 6y agoYep, great book. All of his work in fact is great. Checkout Echophraxia if you liked Blind sight.
- kwhitefoot 6y agoThey are all great but often seriously uncomfortable reading.
- taneq 6y agoI've got them both in hardcover as Firefall. :) I must confess I couldn't make it through the third Rifters book with all the torture. :S But yeah, overall his stuff is great. If it's uncomfortable, that's because it's all too plausible.
- mlajszczak 6y agoThe question "does X have subjective experiences" could be addressed by a theory of consciousness. Such theory should be able to tell what physical systems, and to what extent, are conscious. Interestingly, attempts of such theory already exist: Integrated information theory is a good example.
- ta1234567890 6y agoAlso Panpsychism: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/panpsychism/ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/panpsychism/ The problem with these definitions is that they require wide-spread agreement to be considered valid explanations.
- jibal 6y agoIIT is really just a definition. And like all such definitions, it includes some things that are intuitively not conscious and excludes some things that are intuitively conscious, which is why such "theories" don't go anywhere.
- thisisauserid 6y agoI enjoy being a battery: https://www.theonion.com/i-enjoy-being-a-battery-1819583258 https://www.theonion.com/i-enjoy-being-a-battery-1819583258
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- ineedasername 6y agoI think there's a few questions that need answering first. At least one of them is whether or not a non-stochastic system can be conscious. To summarize the cutting edge state of understanding of consciousness,: "We don't know". I'm not saying this isn't a fun little question to think about, but from the perspective of advancing knowledge, it's premature, and assumes an answer to a whole lot of questions.
- optimalsolver 6y agoAm I correct in thinking that you presume humans to be stochastic systems?
- tjpnz 6y agoYou'll spend every waking hour of your life being poked, thrown around, yelled at, dropped and sometimes drowned. If that doesn't kill you you'll spend the rest of eternity in a drawer. So hell maybe?
- Angeo34 6y ago>The Day I got Reincarnated as a Smartphone The Anime
- Ste_Evans 6y agoThere are a lot of potholes in the roads. The guy who wrote this should get a shovel and go and fill in some potholes and so finally make a contribution to humanity.
- jibal 6y ago"We know it feels like something to be that animal" Daniel Dennett and others have shown that this is not generally true. Nagel's arguments have been repeatedly refuted, so they are not a good foundation for an argument.