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Cake day: June 22nd, 2023

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  • AEsheron@lemmy.worldtoLemmy Shitpost@lemmy.worldSocialism
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    22 days ago

    Sapient, not sentient. Sci-fi has co-opted the word, but sentient basically means able to feel emotions. There are plenty of sentient species right here at home. Sapient is the word sci-fi usually wants, there are no known sapient species aside from humans. Though some may argue that a couple other animals may qualify, it’s a very fuzzy concept that is hard to identify with a being unable to communicate abstract concepts.


  • If it slowed down it would get closer, not further. The truth is, any orbit is only stable given a specific timeframe. The longer that timeframe, the less likely any given orbit is to remain. The moon has just a little bit more speed than the Earth can hold onto, so it is in an extremely slow escape, and always has been.














  • That doesn’t really work either. Human brains are not great at computing unless you are looking for “good enough,” results, and only on some pretty narrow fields, facial/speech recognition, some physics interactions, etc. But worse than that… we’re kind of using them. If they wanted us to compute, the whole function of the Matrix is just taking up run cycles. And you can’t just coopt them during sleep, we need the rest periods ,or we literally die. Only one answer makes sense to me, it’s a nature preserve. They didn’t want to be responsible for destroying their creators, and the only other sapient species known to exist. So they build the Matrix to keep us docile. Then, the energy reclamation actually makes some sense. They’re never going to be net positive, but assuming they are having difficulty keeping their society powered, they would be incentivesed to reclaim every watt of power they could from us to reduce our burden on their grid.



  • I think so long as you maintain consciousness that issue is fairly null in this particular circumstance. There’s lots of tolerance for changes in thought while maintaining the same self, see many brain damage victims. So long as there is minimal change in personality, there are lots of other circumstances that have a stronger case for killing one person and having a new person replace them due to change of consciousness, imo, I don’t think most people would consider a brain damaged person killed and replaced by a new consciousness, or a drug addiction with radically altered brain chemistry, etc.