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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • Yeah there’s two ‘main’ kinds of people who want a platform where users are able to post hate speech and reach “everyone” with it.

    • People who want to be hateful and want access to the targets of their hate. They want to upset people, they want to ‘own the libs’ or be able to toss slurs at minorities, and those things are unrewarding for them if they don’t get to see how upset they’ve made their targets.

    • People who want to recruit people to being hateful. They want to convince normal people to share their prejudices and their biases, they want “debates” or would like to share “statistics” and are seeking a soapbox that can reach people who might find their views convincing.

    This is a huge part of why defederation works, why platforms like Voat or Gab rarely thrive for very long. Being hateful in an echo chamber towards people who are outside the room is rarely fun for those folks, and very often results in in-fighting and fragmenting of the movement. Moderates and ‘normies’ are driven off because now they’re a target rather than a participant or spectator.



  • I criticized you for jumping to conclusions and fabricating narrative to support them. And apparently you got so offended by the criticism that … you went and did it all over again, targeting me, committing even harder to the bit.

    You just wrote a bunch of wild fanfiction about me and then tried to have an argument with that imaginary version of me. Might as well just yell at ghosts in the shower if you’re that desperate to feel like you’ve snatched some petty victory from the jaws of self-inflicted defeat that is this thread.

    You’re the problem with your own experience.

    This response is hugely excessive for the “provocation” and yet I’m sure you’ll storm off imagining that I’m the big meanie here and you were some completely reasonable and utterly justified saint of good behaviour - for absolutely going off on someone who gently mocked your very serious demands for everyone to be nicer to you and meaner to the people you dislike. And you’ve done that to everyone who wasn’t fawningly positive towards you in this thread - that you started by being hateful and childish towards a site you just left and the userbase of the site you just joined.

    Even with the tiny sample size I can see why you have so many encounters with “toxic” people. You antagonize and attack people, then pretend they were the toxic ones if they defend themselves.

    It’s not hard to miss that you’ve just happened to call me all of the things that other people have told you about yourself in this thread. Hell, this whole little speech would have been far more appropriate as something someone said to you, if they were trying to hurt your feelings; so given how off the mark it was when directed at me, it’s easy to wonder if maybe you’re projecting a little here.


  • The idea that Reddit is staging some nefarious conspiracy to “poison” fediverse spaces … is losing the whole plot.

    OP’s straight up writing fanfiction trying to cast a site they just left as villains in some swashbuckling coming-of-age story. It’s a nine-hour-old account, and they’re already embracing the Us vs Them mentality and trying to sell it with prose.

    I don’t know how OP managed to pick fights within a couple hours of signing up for their account, but I’d suggest that if they left Reddit for “toxicity” only to immediately find it here too … maybe they’re carrying it around with them?



  • 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.


  • 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.