I haven't read Fossil Future, but it sounds like he's ignoring the option of combining solar and wind with batteries (and other types of electrical storage, like pumped water). The technology is available today and can be more easily deployed than fossil fuels at this point.
Parts of this are easily falsifiable through the fact that organ transplant recipients sometimes get donor’s memories and preferences
The citation is to an unreputable journal. Some of their sources might have basis (though a lot of them also seem unreputable), but I wouldn't take this at face value.
There can also be meaning that the author simply didn't intend. In biblical interpretation, for instance, there have been many different (and conflicting!) interpretations given to texts that were written with a completely different intent. One reader reads the story of Adam and Eve as a text that supports feminism, another reader sees the opposite, and the original writer didn't intend to give either meaning. But both readers still get those meanings from the text.
Interestingly, it apparently used to be Zebra, but is now Zulu. I'm not sure why they switched over, but it seems to be the predominant choice since the early 1950s.
I understand that definition, which is why I’m confused for why you brought up the behavior of bacteria as evidence for why bacteria has experience. I don’t think any non-animals have experience, and I think many animals (like sponges) also don’t. As I see it, bacteria are more akin to natural chemical reactions than they are to humans.
I brought up the simulation of a bacteria because an atom-for-atom simulation of a bacteria is completely identical to a bacteria - the thing that has experience is represented in the atoms of the bacteria, so a perfect simulation of a bacteria must also internally experience things.
If bacteria have experience, then I see no reason to say that a computer program doesn’t have experience. If you want to say that a bacteria has experience based on guesses from its actions, then why not say that a computer program has experience based on its words?
From a different angle, suppose that we have a computer program that can perfectly simulate a bacteria. Does that bacteria have experience? I don’t see any reason why not, since it will demonstrate all the same ability to act on intention. And if so, then why couldn’t a different computer program also be conscious? (If you want to say that a computer can’t possibly perfectly simulate a bacteria, then great, we have a testable crux, albeit one that can’t be tested right now.)
If you look far enough back in time, humans are are descended from animals akin to sponges that seem to me like they couldn’t possibly have experience. They don’t even have neurons. If you go back even further we’re the descendants of single celled organisms that absolutely don’t have experience. But at some point along the line, animals developed the ability to have experience. If you believe in a higher being, then maybe it introduced it, or maybe some other metaphysical cause, but otherwise it seems like qualia has to arise spontaneously from the evolution of something that doesn’t have experience - with possibly some “half conscious” steps along the way.
From that point of view, I don’t see any problem with supposing that a future AI could have experience, even if current ones don’t. I think it’s reasonable to even suppose that current ones do, though their lack of persistent memory means that it’s very alien to our own, probably more like one of those “half conscious” steps.
Nit: "if he does that then Caplan won't get paid back, even if Caplin wins the bet" misspells "Caplan" in the second instance.
Cable companies are forcing you to pay for channels you don’t want. Cable companies are using unbundling to mislead customers and charge extra for basic channels everyone should have.
I think this would be more acceptable if either everything was bundled or nothing was. But generally speaking companies bundle channels that few people want, to give the appearance of a really good deal, and unbundle the really popular channels (like sports channels) to profit. So you sign up for a TV package that has "hundreds of channels", but you get lots of channels that you don't care about and none of the channels you really want. You're screwed both ways.
Any position that could be considered safe enough to back a market is only going to appreciate in proportion to inflation, which would just make the market zero-sum after adjusting for inflation. Something like ETH or gold wouldn't be a good solution because it's going to be massively distorted on questions that are correlated with the performance of that asset, plus there's always the possibility that they just go down, which would be the opposite of what you want.