51
votes
Accepted
How do you solve the copied consciousness conundrum without killing anyone?
You use centralized version control
The problem is akin to copying computer programs around - you must dissociate the physical substrate from the program. It is complicated by the fact that the ...
- 996
46
votes
Accepted
How can I prevent an oracle who can see into the past from knowing everything that has happened?
If the collective mind contains memories of people, well... It contains what people remember, not the factual truth. This poses multiple problems:
Conflicting memories, which may either be mutually ...
- 142k
42
votes
What species should be used for storage of human minds?
«primarily for hospital patients with painful conditions»
Assuming they are going to recover.
Turtles. Very sturdy, easy and cheap to keep, long-lived. You can also reduce their metabolism and keep ...
- 55.9k
37
votes
Accepted
How plausible would a self-aware, conscious viral life-form be?
There is no agreement among scientists if virus are life forms at all, because they are basically just a proteic capsule containing nucleic acid. In order to reproduce they need to hijack some other ...
- 301k
32
votes
Accepted
How much can you compress information?
Can data be compressed infinitely? No. Thank goodness. Part of the problem is the effort required to compress data represents the effort required to get at it. Thus, the more highly compressed it is ...
- 132k
30
votes
How do you solve the copied consciousness conundrum without killing anyone?
You don't
In the way you describe, any way of making original cease to function is killing it, so you simply can't do. There are few ways to go around it.
StarTrek way — because original is ...
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30
votes
How plausible would a self-aware, conscious viral life-form be?
A virus itself doesn't have any independent processing power - it's just an inert list of instructions. It requires a living cell to carry them out.
But one possibility would be for a virus to recruit ...
- 301
30
votes
How much can you compress information?
On average? Not at all. It's a simple application of the pigeonhole principle: $x$ bits can convey $2^x$ different messages. $x-1$ bits can only convey half as many messages. You cannot fit all the ...
- 42.7k
28
votes
What reason could change people's mentality to treat each other as members of one kind?
You have a very ... kumbaya vision of what the world should be like. Unfortunately for you, however, human psychology just doesn't work that way.
From the dawn of the human race groups of homo ...
- 34.7k
27
votes
Accepted
What would a modern civilization look like if they aren't allowed to write?
Songs.
Do you wonder why you, a not particularly musical person, can hum the tune of thousands of different songs you have heard on the radio or in church? Why an average person can remember the ...
- 306k
26
votes
Accepted
Can teleportation using the reassembly of atoms preserve consciousness and therefore identity?
Momentary soapbox
I apologize, but the current fad of trying to make every aspect of fiction factual is a bit absurd. The trivial answer to your question is, "insofar as we understand science ...
- 132k
25
votes
What species should be used for storage of human minds?
As much as there might be a trade in recreationally adopting the form of a golden eagle or a porpoise. A very safe and efishent storage vessle would be the goldfish:
Wikipedia 2019 CCSAL- Licence
...
- 27.5k
24
votes
What reason could change people's mentality to treat each other as members of one kind?
Common enemy is the best. Human societies are a pack. There is always some fundamentally beneficiary reason for humans to form groups and it needs to benefit everyone. You see that all the time, mafia ...
- 1,826
21
votes
Accepted
Making humans 'see' in slow motion
How fast we see the world is probably mostly tied to our ability to process sensory information. A fly have a quite small brain with very little processing and interpretation compared to a human and ...
- 1,186
20
votes
How can I prevent an oracle who can see into the past from knowing everything that has happened?
Read the histories of the oracles and you'll see they have certain quirks. Consider Cassandra, her curse was that her predictions were always accurate but that nobody would ever believe her. Other ...
- 118k
19
votes
How much can you compress information?
Data compression works by removing redundancies, so it depends on what is considered to be "redundant" in the sum of human knowledge.
Lossless compression handles redundancies in a way that ...
- 6,945
18
votes
How can I prevent an oracle who can see into the past from knowing everything that has happened?
It's very simple for two reasons.
Reason 1: It is a collective memory of DEAD people. You can't remember the juicy details about your hot neighbour or the bank account numbers of a rich celebrity if ...
- 45.7k
18
votes
Clone consciousness using fake childhoods. Is it plausible?
Summary: The problem with replicating a mature brain by replaying its past experiences is that if there are ever any differences between the brain state of the clone and the brain state of the ...
- 181
17
votes
How do you solve the copied consciousness conundrum without killing anyone?
Who can tell?
Once you've made the copy it opens its eyes and truly believes it's the original. Everyone around them believes and accepts them to be the original, how can you say it's a copy and not ...
- 118k
15
votes
How do you solve the copied consciousness conundrum without killing anyone?
As Separatix alluded to, this is an age old question which has not had an answer which satisfies everyone for thousands of years. You won't solve it in a few minutes.
The name I have most often seen ...
- 133k
15
votes
How can I prevent an oracle who can see into the past from knowing everything that has happened?
First, all of human history is...BIG. So what you'd want is specialists in particular areas of history.
Here's some fixes:
Time. You've got history, but immediate history is more difficult and ...
- 32.1k
15
votes
Accepted
Would giving human-like sentience to a bird make the bird too energy expensive to fly?
We don't know what is necessary for human level intelligence, so let's take the human brain as a starting point, and look at three characteristics:
weight: our brains weigh about 1.5 kg. As noted by @...
- 3,698
15
votes
Accepted
How would an android's ability to think freely be affected if it cannot question its primary goal?
These androids would fabricate explanations for their main priority. They're doing it because "they want to". Sometime in their future, you might start to see androids who claim to "not ...
- 12.6k
13
votes
How plausible would a self-aware, conscious viral life-form be?
Too far-fetched ...
While sentience or consciousness is notoriously badly defined, it probably requires complexity. Humans, whales, or even cats have more complexity than worms or flies, and they ...
- 120k
13
votes
Can teleportation using the reassembly of atoms preserve consciousness and therefore identity?
As far as I'm concerned, teleportation is just another decorative wrapping for the ship of Theseus: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus
And thus, every day you die a bit, get replaced a bit, ...
- 5,702
12
votes
How do you solve the copied consciousness conundrum without killing anyone?
Gradually Replacing the Brain
Similar to Werrf's suggestion I'd go the gradual transfer rout, but I don't know what a "transfer of conscious processes" implies and I'm not sure that a "half conscious"...
12
votes
What would a modern civilization look like if they aren't allowed to write?
So my first question is how can either the master species or their domesticated animals be highly skilled at engineering and construction without writing? What would the impact of no writing be on the ...
- 54.2k
12
votes
How can I prevent an oracle who can see into the past from knowing everything that has happened?
/I need to limit this system to the big moves and shakes of history./
Signal strength increases with number of participants.
Imagine flying along at 10,000 feet. You cannot see a man lighting his ...
- 306k
11
votes
Can the future theoretically be predicted through analyzing the exact patterns of the universe?
Yes, if the uncertainty principle was not a thing
The uncertainty principle creates an absolute theoretical limit to the precision of certain measurements. We would need to exceed this limit in order ...
- 2,023
11
votes
How could a government be implemented in a virtual reality?
Lazy answer: don't do anything. If everyone can create bots, let them, and then no-one will have the upper hand.
Less lazy answer:
Processing power and storage space ain't free. In fact, depending ...
- 78.5k
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