Here’s my solution to Newcomb’s Paradox: the predictor can be perfectly infallible if it records your physical state and then runs a simulation to predict which box you’ll pick. E.g. it could run a fancy MRI on you as you are walking through the hallway towards the room, quickly run a faster-than-real-time physical simulation, and deposit the correct opaque box into the room before you open the door. The box, the hallway, the room, the door are all part of the simulation.
Here’s the thing: a computer simulation of a person is just as conscious as a physical person, for all intents of “consciousness”. So as you are inside the room making your decision, you have no way of knowing if you are the physical you or the simulated you. The predictor is a liar in a way. The predictor is telling the simulated you that you’ll get a billion dollars, but stating the rules is just part of the simulation! The simulated you will actually be killed/shut down when you open the box. Only the physical you has a real chance to get a billion dollars. The predictor is counting on you to not call it out on its lie or split hairs and just take the money.
So if you think you might be in a simulation, the question is: are you generous enough towards your identical physical copy from 1 second ago to cooperate and one-box? Or are you going to spitefully deprive them of a billion dollars by two-boxing just because you are about to be killed anyway? Remember, you don’t even know which one you are. And if you are the spiteful kind, consider that we are already making much smaller time-cooperative trade-offs all the time, such as the you-now taking a breath just so that the you-five-seconds-from-now doesn’t suffocate to death.
What if the predictor doesn’t use a MRI or whatever? I posit that whatever prediction method it uses, if the method is sufficiently advanced to be infallible then somewhere in the process it MUST be creating conscious observer instances.
JoJo's Bizarre Adventures proposes a couple of interesting . One villain has a power called "The Lovers" he manifests a tiny ,almost microscopic, insect creature which is physically very very weak (or at least the weakest we have seen at that point), but has the ability of going crazy whenever the stand user feels any kind of pain, so he sends the stand inside an opponents ear to their brain and pain centre – whenever he feels any pain The Lovers inflicts that same pain but much worse on his opponent. It's also heavily implied that any pain caused by The Lovers that is above a certain level would be lethal.
Super weak power that is actually really strong if used intelligently.
One power I’ve always entertained is the ability to slow the passage of time linearly to the level of danger you’re in.
You can’t move much faster than the average human, and just because you can see something coming it doesn’t mean you can avoid it (though with time, your eyes will eventually train your muscles to reflex appropriately).
The ultimate killer ending of such a superhero would be an unwinnable situation (e.g. Comet coming to obliterate Earth) and all our hero will see is time slow down and down and down until the point where the catastrophe is about to occur, but (for them) never does.
I think it's more complicated than free will existing or not.
If you knew every single possible value about the universe at its start and had a perfectly accurate model of physics, you could theoretically predict/simulate everything that would ever happen. For practical reasons, though, that's impossible, even ignoring weird quantum effects, for the simple reason that that is a lot of data points, more than any of us could reasonably keep track of- it's like how, in sufficiently controlled conditions, a fair dice can roll the exact same number 100% of the time, but there are enough variables that are hard enough to control for in a normal situation that it's basically random.
Similarly, if you knew everything about every human on Earth, you could theoretically predict exactly what any of them would do at any given moment. Of course, that's just not practical- the body and brain are a machine that is constantly taking in input and adapting to it, so in order to perfectly predict someone's thoughts and actions, you'd need to know every single detail of every single thing that has ever happened to them, no matter how small. Then, you'd need to account for the fact that they're interacting with hundreds of other people, who are also constantly changing and adapting. It's just not possible to predict or control a person for any reasonable length of time like that, because one tiny interaction could throw off the entire model.
Just look at current work with AI- our modern machine learning algorithms are much more well-understood and are trained in much more contained environments than any human mind, and yet we still need to manually reign them in and sift through the data to prevent them from going off the rails.
So, technically, I suppose free will doesn't exist. For practical purposes, though, what we have is indistinguishable from free will, so there's not much point getting riled up about it.
Thats a big one i think. Iirc people would use an extension (or maybe a 3rd party app?) to block those users that commonly repost things and for a period of time i saw people saying their feed changed a lot on Reddit just from that. Tho Idk if thatd change much lately bc a lot of reposts I saw before coming here were from new account that were bots tryna build karma :/
You’re in Safe search: strict mode. It probably thinks it’s a term for porn and therefore blocks it completely. Set it to moderate or off and you’ll get results.
The negativity is definitely less. Sure, out of say fifty comments to a post there's maybe two disgruntled souls. Overall it's conducive to discussion.
Over on reddit I kept to just hobby subreddits for the most part to make comments. Only way to not come across the trolls.
Yes, the clean UI is wonderful. It's good to have something simple. It's also fun to watch something grow.
The hobby subreddits and the smaller subs were the only ones I was sad to see go when moving to Lemmy, I was surprised by how much I didn't miss anything else at all .
Of course it feels new, because it is new to many people. :-)
I felt like people were seeing my Reddit posts and comments, and I feel like people are here, as well. As with any commenting website or service, as the numbers of commenters grow large you need to be relatively quick to reply if you want many people to see what you write. On Reddit, obviously that means it depended what subreddit you were commenting on. And surely it will be the same or already is the same here.
The UI all depends on what client you're using. In my mind it doesn't feel like the early Internet, but that probably depends on our relative ages.
First thing that comes to mind is RocketJump's video Milk Man: World's Worst Superhero. Essentially, his power is drinking and regurgitating milk. While this sounds lame, he actually manages to disarm and incapacitate the robber, fly, and give the distressed citizen a nice, refreshing beverage. Sounds pretty useful to me.
In the British TV show Misfits there was a villain who had the power of limited telekinetic control of milk (and cheese), he literally managed to successfully kill all but one of the main heroes (including the guy whose power was the ability to resurrect himself!). He was only stopped because of time travel by the one hero who was also lactose intolerant.
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