Humanity has the debate about AI consciousness backwards

Ah. An entirely different response, having nothing to do with whatever that 'mine,' business was.

It's exceptionally simple. Endless countries around the world have given 'baby bonuses' and 'child dividends' to parents. Money has been thrown at the problem. In many cases, when such programs run, it's profitable to have children. And there's no study needed, as it is a simple fact. And yet? The birth rate keeps dropping across the entire world. As in, every single country across the entire world.

You already started with a weird, what seems like perhaps snide response, where you (I guess?) read my comment and misunderstand it. Now, you're just throwing something else.

How about, you engage in thoughtful consideration of what I'm saying.

It's a very serious problem.

We're talking about the extinction of the entire human race.

And it's not a result of money. It's not. And it's very, very important to not just say "Well it seems like it's money for me, so who cares, it's money".

Because this is a bigger threat than global warming, than nuclear war, then a meteor impact. In such cases, humans would survive. But if we just end up unable to have offspring?

Well. Game over.

We cannot risk just presuming.

See here, in this very same thread:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49479324

To come back to what?

Just to be clear, my objection to the "simulated rain won't get you wet" argument is not predicated on any assumptions about brains, minds, or the relationship between the two, and in my presentation of that objection in the chronologically first of my posts yesterday, I did not mention either and did not make any assumptions about their relationship.

In reply to your statement that you don't see a reason why a brain absent a mind could not be simulated, let's consider whether we could have a simulation of an Enigma machine that does not encrypt and decrypt messages.

It is possible in a trivial sense, of course: you could have a sort of cargo-cult simulation where the plug-board can be connected in various ways, the rotors turn when a key is pressed and one of the lights come on, but it lacks the causal relationships to produce output it could decrypt. This, however, is just an incomplete simulation, and the one that matters is this: could you completely digitally simulate the physics of an Enigma machine in a way that is incapable of being used to perform encrypted communication? If not, then there is something very wrong with what seems to be well-established physics.

Now let's suppose that we could do a complete-physics simulation of a person's brain. It will be missing many of the features of a brain (it will not consume material nutrients and produce waste products, for example), but how would you go about testing for whether it has a mind? How would an absence of a mind manifest itself? If you think the answer lies in the simulation not being part of a body, then let's suppose we simulate the person's whole body.

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With regard to your concluding question, "Are you claiming that the specific bit formations here indicate the presence of a mind?", the short answer is no. I feel that with this question you are reverting to an earlier issue that we have already gone over: a digital simulation of anything is not just a pattern of bits, it is a physical process (i.e. a sequence of events.)

> Also note that I'm using the term "materialism" loosely to mean that oneself is a part of a larger world rather than the whole.

No matter how good physics gets, it can't solve the mind-body problem, that exists at a level that the very activity of using repeatable physical experimentation cannot provide a usable answer towards. A person can believe that physics could create a solution, but it would just be yet another belief about metaphysics in a sea of many.

> The movement of things have predictable bounds regardless of whether this apparent movement of matter has metaphysical origins in mind/simulation/god/whatever, it can be predicted as if it's material.

What is the black-body speed of an idea? I'll let you assume the idea is spherical. If your position is that an idea is just neurons firing in the brain, then you need some kind of way to account for changes in said speed. What is so special about that hundredth monkey... on the physical level? All you can use to guess at this answer is... more ideas.

> I know with metaphysical certainty that you are bound by the workings of a materialist world, because I am defining certainty using my own consciousness, and you are a part of my materialist model. But hearing this from me is not enough for you to prove to yourself in a metaphysically strict sense that you are in a true material world, even if we're both in a true material world, because your definition of certainty is based on your own consciousness, and we do not share the same consciousness.

This is perhaps the most hilarious bit of equivocation I've ever seen from a materialist. "I know this with certainty but you won't be convinced of my certainty because our consciousnesses are different." That consciousness is different between people is a part of the mind-body problem, subjectivity cannot be explained with materialism alone.

Fair enough on that, but your original response did seem a bit snide. Still, if you're like me, you poke at things when bored, or just notice things you're mildly interested in when you stumble across them.

If so? Please keep what I said in mind. It's not a pet peeve of mine, it's just rather startling once you assemble all the data. There are places with idealogical reasons to want to maintain birth rates, and it's been tried for decades. For example, since the 70s, Quebec has wanted to ensure the continuation of its culture, and so was quite sensitive to noticing birth rate decline. It's not like this happened all in the last decade.

They've had many programs. A whole, societal approach. And before the collapse in the last 10 to 15 years, Canadian health care was absolutely the best, world class, immensely accessible.

So you had:

* free, excellent, easily accessible health care. the poorest of the poor having the same health care as someone wealthy

* in a province and country among the top standard of living in the world

* with immensely generous parental leave

* with state run programs to ensure private daycare was cheap and accessible

* baby bonuses at the federal level

* crazy level provincial/Quebec bonuses for each child, that stacked.

* at that time, if you're poor, your child would often get grants, not loans, grants to go to university or college, and it was easily accessible

And it never, ever worked. Sometimes rates budged mildly, but it was just never significant.

And if you look at the world, if you look at Europe, countries in which even University is free, where having a child is not a burden due to such programs? Birth rates still fell.

I guess my point is, people have the wrong reason. And while you feel you have loads of personal examples to the contrary, go back 50, 70 years? Even the poorest people living in squalor in cities, had more kids and were happy to have them.

I've seen couples with a smart phone worth $1500, each, and a large flat screen TV, and highly expensive personal computing gear, complain they have no money for kids. Um, no. You have enough money in all that spend, to send your kids to university if you invested just that cash for them today.

It's not about wealth. Otherwise every single family at Google, Meta, would have 10 kids.

It's about something else.

My thoughts are there are two drives. Reproductive and sex. Men embody sex drive, women reproductive drive. Evolutionary scientists will cite the different reproductive methods both men and women have. Men can have 100s or 1000s of offspring, if they are able to bed enough women. Women can only have perhaps 10, if lucky, maybe a few more.

The point is, the strategies are different.

There is a lot of discussion about what separates a female human, from any other primate or mammal. For example, women don't only go into 'heat', as most larger mammals do, in the spring, they're ready all year long to have offspring.

But the mechanisms are still there.

And female reproductive drive is very much controlled by genetic expression, the whole process of pregnancy is hormonal (same thing). It's not much of a leap to consider that something is interfering with the female desire for offspring.

Then on the male side, sperm rates are down all across the chart, all across the world.

People are losing fertility.

Having offspring is the rawest, most direct, strongest drive a species has. Nothing is more important for continuance. It's not really under our control. The urges people have to desire a mate, to have intercourse, those aren't conscious desires, and more than being thirsty is.

So if you consider that from the female perspective, pregnancy is a drive too, what then?

And no, it's not the pill. There are countries where female contraceptives are illegal, where they don't have a choice (recall I mentioned Iran? and every country in the world?).

This matter is more important than dealing with anything else on our plate. Anything.

Also I'm available for booking at weddings, parties, and graduations.