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Do 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 le
by JBiserkov 6y ago
Do 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...