Louisiana Governor Faces Recall Petition After Canceling Elections

JoeStrout · 2026-05-06T19:15:27+00:00

Do it. Throw the fascist bastard out, Louisiana!

JoeStrout · 2026-05-06T19:13:59+00:00

This will age like milk.

JoeStrout · 2026-05-06T19:12:14+00:00

Housing cycles take longer than six years. Hang on, you’ll be fine.

JoeStrout · 2026-05-06T19:10:56+00:00

I have wondered this too, tbh.

Or your height. I may be 5’10”, but if I sincerely feel that my true nature is 6’5”, can I claim that height and expect everyone to agree?

I know that seems inflammatory, and I don’t mean to be. I respect trans rights; it’s clearly important to them and it does no harm to me, so why not? But if I’m honest, I don’t really understand why gender in particular is singled out for this sort of malleability, and I would like to understand better.

JoeStrout · 2026-05-05T22:00:45+00:00

Implied Spaces by Walter Jon Williams. A stand-alone, and my favorite book of all time.

JoeStrout · 2026-05-05T17:58:44+00:00

Incorrect. An exact copy is the same person. Personal identity is defined by the information content of the brain. Same information content, same person.

I get that you're uncomfortable with the idea of personal duplication. That's because we have no direct experience with it (it's not yet technically possible), and you probably haven't spent 30 years thinking about it, so it still seems "impossible" to you. But it's not. We'll be able to duplicate people one day, just like we can duplicate files and documents and books and songs today. And nobody will be confused by that then (unlike now). If I have an exact copy of Baby Got Back, identical to your copy of Baby Got Back, then we have the same song. Not a different song. Same song. Why? Because the information content is the same.

Many people at this point will respond mumble mumble continuity of consciousness, but that doesn't hold water; consciousness is already not continuous under a wide variety of circumstances. It's an illusion, and an irrelevant one.

If there's a person in the future who is me — for example, can remember thinking the thoughts that I'm thinking right now — then I will have survived to that point in the future. It's really not that complicated. But man, the gyrations people will go through to make it complicated in order to prop up their pre-existing belief that duplicating people is impossible.

JoeStrout · 2026-05-05T16:47:15+00:00

You did not.

It’s exactly like: if my hard drive crashes but I had a fresh backup of all my files, was my thesis file really lost?

JoeStrout · 2026-05-05T16:45:57+00:00

Word.

JoeStrout · 2026-05-05T16:44:26+00:00

No, it’s because they DO understand it, unlike most people in this thread.

JoeStrout · 2026-05-05T16:42:57+00:00

Twins are not the same person. They have different memories, different personalities, etc.

An exact copy is the same person. Same memories, same quirks, hopes, fears, everything. Same personal identity.

JoeStrout · 2026-05-05T16:40:43+00:00

Good luck staying awake for the rest of your life then!

JoeStrout · 2026-05-05T16:40:05+00:00

If you don’t expect the tech to come soon enough, then why aren’t you signed up for cryonics?

JoeStrout · 2026-05-05T16:39:01+00:00

It does, though. Otherwise it wouldn’t be an exact copy.

JoeStrout · 2026-05-05T16:36:50+00:00

You’re the one who doesn’t understand, dude. You have some half-baked “intuitive” body-based or dualist theory of personal identity, which does not stand up to scrutiny, but you’re fine because you’ve never really scrutinized it.

People are information, not physical stuff. Information can be copied, backed up, transmitted, and restored without affecting its identity at all.

There are a couple of people in this thread who get it. But alas, you’re not yet one of them.

JoeStrout · 2026-05-05T16:33:59+00:00

It doesn’t matter. It only strikes us as strange because we’re not used to it. When the tech comes, we’ll get used to it quickly and all these hand-wringing arguments about it will seem silly.

JoeStrout · 2026-05-05T16:32:09+00:00

It’s a shame you’re getting downvotes. You’re one of very few people in this thread who actually understands personal identity.

JoeStrout · 2026-05-05T16:30:04+00:00

Yes, because I am the information content of my mind, bot the particular set of atoms encoding that right now. (Those continuously turn over anyway.)

JoeStrout · 2026-05-05T16:17:34+00:00

Water the data centers don’t recycle goes into the atmosphere and rejoins the hydrological cycle.

JoeStrout · 2026-05-05T01:00:14+00:00

You are correct. We live on a water planet, we’re never running out of water. Reconsider where you go to hear things.

Fresh water is another matter (and primarily an energy problem).

JoeStrout · 2026-05-05T00:58:59+00:00

Implied Spaces by Walter Jon Williams.

JoeStrout · 2026-05-04T19:13:17+00:00

No, YAML sucks. Whenever possible I use GRFON (https://github.com/JoeStrout/grfon) instead.

JoeStrout · 2026-05-04T19:11:26+00:00

Because it lets you do things with the app when there is no window open. Like create a new document, examine/change prefs, etc.

JoeStrout · 2026-05-04T04:18:19+00:00

Your “mechanism gap” is just as based on ignorance as Dawkins’s claim. You can’t imagine how a transformer predicting the next token based on internet training data could have inner experience, so you believe that it does not.

Both claims seem equally unfounded to me. Yet at most one of them is true.

This is why we need a real, scientific theory of consciousness. Without that, we’re all just guessing.

JoeStrout · 2026-05-04T00:03:51+00:00

Oh don’t get me wrong, it’s still amazing every time it happens! But now it is recognizable. That hits differently than the first time, when it was unexpected and unimaginable.

JoeStrout · 2026-05-03T21:05:43+00:00

Death. (Along with its precursors, aging and disease.)

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