Let me put the question to you: what metrics do you use to verify whether elite overproduction is happening or not?

I feel like whether a game is considered sweaty or casual is more dependent on the game mode (e.g. ranked vs normal, UMS vs ladder etc).

> The original formulation is awkward to modern ears, but the heart of the problem remains: How does/can consciousness emerge from smaller unconscious parts?

> A single neuron can be modeled with a physics simulation, and is clearly not conscious. But at what size/configuration does a group of neurons become conscious?

This is clearly not the Chinese Room Argument. The Chinese Room Argument was supposed to prove that computers will never be capable of consciousness simply by following rules written down in a book. It was directed at symbolic AI systems that literally were just computers following rules in a book. Modern deep neural networks as well as human brains clearly don't function anything like that.

The idea that computers can't think is clearly based on irrational prejudice against electronic technology. Why can't a computer gain consciousness by simulating a human brain? John Searle himself said that consciousness requires "organic substrate" without any elaboration. Taken in context it's clear that the Chinese Room Argument was fundamentally clearly and obviously just motivated out of an irrational bias and prejudice against electronic/non-organic substrates.

The treatment of the Chinese Room Experiment is shallow and Watts clearly does not possess a more than rudimentary grasp of the philosophy, nor of computer science apparently.

It also felt shoehorned in. As was the vampire subplot, as other commentators have already discussed.

Felt like Watts just wanted to add in the Chinese Room Argument to make the novel seem "deep", when in fact it accomplished the exact opposite. No computer scientist that I know of takes the Chinese Room argument seriously, Scott Aaronson had a Quora answer where he mentioned how when he presented it to his undergrad class none of the students found it convincing, even after he tried to present arguments for it.

I don't like most of John Searle's work in general, but his Chinese Room Argument is obviously one of the worst pieces of philosophy of the 20th century, on par with the worst of the works ridiculed by Sokal et al.

You are asking people to reduce their highly complex internal evaluation process into a very small number of variables that you ask them to enter such as height preference.

The whole point of Gale Shapley (imo) is that it bypasses the need to reduce people's preferences down to single variables such as height. The idea is that you just give people a list and let them rank the list using whatever internal hidden black box process they want, the algorithm just operates on the output ranked list.

Trying to reduce people's internal evaluation process to a small number of variables (such as height) is where you run into problems, of the kind that you mentioned.

Whatever they're running, it's not gale shapley.

Surely this explanation is circular. People look around and see that their peers are having fewer kids. But why are their peers having fewer kids to begin with? There has to be a backstop somewhere otherwise you get infinite regress.

Also sometimes friends come over to my house and need to use my computer to do their stuff. So it is convenient if I can easily swap out the SSD and hand it over to my friends.

Yes, I realize that this requirement limits me to 15-year-old Toughbooks and Getacs.

That's why I looked into the UGREEN NAS and ended up deciding not to get it, same reason as all the other cheap Chinese NAS boxes