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I suppose I was overly vague about what I meant by “exact copy.” I mean all of the knowledge, memories, and an exact map of the state of our neurons at the time of upload being uploaded to a computer, and then the functions being simulated from there. Many people believe that even if we could simulate it so perfectly that it matched a human brain’s functions exactly, it still wouldn’t be conscious because it’s still not a real human brain. That’s the point I was arguing against. My argument was that if we could mimic human brain functions closely enough, there’s no reason to believe the brain is so special that a simulation could not achieve consciousness too.
And you’re right, it may not be conscious in the same way. We have no reason to believe either way that it would or wouldn’t be, because the only thing we can actually verify is conscious is ourself. Not humans in general, just you, individually. Therefore, how conscious something is is more of a philosophical debate than a scientific one because we simply cannot test if it’s true. We couldn’t even test if it was conscious at all, and my point wasn’t that it would be, my point is that we have no reason to believe it’s possible or impossible.

I see, so your definition of “physical” is “made of particles?” In that case, sorta yeah. Particles behave as waves when unobserved, so you could argue that they no longer qualify as particles, and therefore, by your definition, are not physical. But that kinda misses the point, right? Like, all that means is that the observation may have created the particle, not that the observation created reality, because reality is not all particles. Energy, for instance, is not all particles, but it can be. Quantum fields are not particles, but they can give rise to them. Both those things are clearly real, but they aren’t made of particles.
On the second point, that’s kinda trespassing out of science territory and into “if a tree falls in the forest” territory. We can’t prove that a truly unobserved macroscopic object wouldn’t display quantum properties if we just didn’t check if it was, but that’s kinda a useless thing to think about. It’s kinda similar to what our theories are though, in that the best theory we have is that the bigger the object is, the more likely the interaction we call “observation” just happens spontaneously without the need for interaction. Too big, and it’s so unlikely in any moment for it not to happen that the chances of the wave function not being collapsed in any given moment is so close to zero there’s no meaningful distinction between the actual odds and zero.

There shouldn’t be a distinction between quantum and non-quantum objects. That’s the mystery. Why can’t large objects exhibit quantum properties? Nobody knows, all we know is they don’t. We’ve attempted to figure it out by creating larger and larger objects that still exhibit quantum properties, but we know, at some point, it just stops exhibiting these properties and we don’t know why, but it doesn’t require an observer to collapse the wave function.
Also, can you define physical for me? It seems we have a misunderstanding here, because I’m defining physical as having a tangible effect on reality. If it wasn’t real, it could not interact with reality. It seems you’re using a different definition.

A building does not actually enter a superposition when unobserved, nor does Schrodinger’s cat. The point of that metaphor was to demonstrate, through humor, the difference between quantum objects and non-quantum objects, by pointing out how ridiculous it would be to think a cat could enter a superposition like a particle. In fact, one of the great mysteries of physics right now is why only quantum objects have that property, and in order to figure that out we have to figure out what interaction “observation” actually is.
Additionally, we can observe the effects of waves quite clearly. We can observe how they interact with things, how they interfere with each other, etc. It is only attempting to view the particle itself that causes it to collapse and become a particle and not a wave. We can view, for instance, the interference pattern of photons of light, behaving like a wave. This proves that the wave is in fact real, because we can see the effects of it. It’s only if we try to observe the paths of the individual photons that the pattern changes. We didn’t make the photons real, we could already see they were real by their effects on reality. We just collapsed the function, forcing them to take a single path.

I think you’re a little confused about what observed means and what it does.
When unobserved, elementary particles behave like a wave, but they do not stop existing. A wave is still a physical thing. Additionally, observation does not require consciousness. For instance, a building, such as a house, when nobody is looking at it, does not begin to behave like a wave. It’s still a physical building. Therefore, observation is a bit of a misnomer. It really means a complex interaction we don’t understand causes particles to behave like a particle and not a wave. It just happens that human observation is one of the possible ways this interaction can take place.
An unobserved black hole will still feed, an unobserved house is still a house.
To be clear, I’m not insulting you or your idea like the other dude, but I wanted to clear that up.

On the contrary, it’s not a flaw in my argument, it is my argument. I’m saying we can’t be sure a machine could not be conscious because we don’t know that our brain is what makes us conscious. Nor do we know where the threshold is where consciousness arises. It’s perfectly possible all we need is to upload an exact copy of our brain into a machine, and it’d be conscious by default.

We don’t even know what consciousness is, let alone if it’s technically “real” (as in physical in any way.) It’s perfectly possible an uploaded brain would be just as conscious as a real brain because there was no physical thing making us conscious, and rather it was just a result of our ability to think at all.
Similarly, I’ve heard people argue a machine couldn’t feel emotions because it doesn’t have the physical parts of the brain that allow that, so it could only ever simulate them. That argument has the same hole in that we don’t actually know that we need those to feel emotions, or if the final result is all that matters. If we replaced the whole “this happens, release this hormone to cause these changes in behavior and physical function” with a simple statement that said “this happened, change behavior and function,” maybe there isn’t really enough of a difference to call one simulated and the other real. Just different ways of achieving the same result.

My point is, we treat all these things, consciousness, emotions, etc, like they’re special things that can’t be replicated, but we have no evidence to suggest this. It’s basically the scientific equivalent of mysticism, like the insistence that free will must exist even though all evidence points to the contrary.

Can somebody give me a better explanation of how NH keeps ending up red on these maps? As a trans person who’s lived in both NH and VT for very large parts of my life, I’ve found that they’re really, really similar when it comes to trans rights. Hell, NH is one of the few states to cover laser hair removal and electrolysis for facial hair under medicaid for trans people. Vermont doesn’t even cover that and has repeatedly shot down any attempts to add it.
Also even though both states cover breast augmentation for trans people, Vermont refuses to cover it for me because I have a deformity and require a slightly different procedure which they go out of their way to explicitly exclude, whereas in NH that procedure is explicitly also covered.

I’m assuming there’s something deeper and more sinister going on in NH if it’s red even despite that. I wouldn’t doubt it tbh. I can’t move back there because they intentionally illegally shut off people’s disability benefits hoping they just won’t bother to appeal the decision, so I’m not blind to how awful the state can be.

Because body shaming circle-chan is funny.
Edit: I knew this joke wouldn’t land before I even hit enter, but now I must own it.

Kerbal landing technique? Like smashing into the surface max speed because you somehow managed to decouple your only engine due to poor preplanning? At least that’s how I play it.

An update: For some reason the issue was solved on Windows simply by running the “powercfg/a” command in the command prompt to check available sleep states. I no longer think the issue is with my motherboard, as it also slept fine on Windows before I’d started Linux. It’s possible the windows issue was just a fluke. It now sleeps properly.
Ubuntu still will not sleep properly however. I could have sworn I previously found other people with the same issue, but I cannot find them anymore.

Either way, the issue appears to be with Linux unlike previously thought. Possibly an incompatibility with my motherboard.

Yeah, I’m suspecting now that some of my hardware just has incompatible sleep states with each other. Since hibernation and such work, it’s possible my motherboard tries to go into it’s sleep state, and gets interrupted by another piece of hardware that doesn’t support that sleep state and the whole thing just panics and dies.

I’ll look into that tomorrow. I think if that’s the case the only possible solution is to just disable sleep entirely and rely on hibernation if I really need to suspend the system.

I’ve been updating the bios every time a new version comes out hoping it fixes the issue, but unfortunately no luck so far. I also can’t find any options related to sleep states in my bios besides some energy saving settings that I’ve already tested and don’t fix the issue.

As far as checking the sleep states of the GPU and potentially the NVME, I don’t know how to do that. I could see though that it’s possible the GPU and motherboard are trying to sleep in different ways.

Oddly though, the one example I’ve found of the same issue occurring to other people was that it happened on certain AMD thinkpads on older versions of the Linux kernel. My issue seems a bit different though since it applies to windows too.

Unfortunately, disabling wake on lane didn’t help the issue. It still won’t sleep properly. I think however that that solved a completely different issue I was having of my PC randomly turning on on occasion.

I’d thought I could hear a difference in hires audio, but after reading up on it I’m starting to think it may have been some issue with the tech I was using, whether it be my headphones or something else, that made compressed audio sound veeeery slightly staticky when high notes or loud parts of the track played.
Personally though, even if it wasn’t, the price for the equipment wasn’t worth it for a difference that was only perceptible if I was listening for it. Not to mention it’s near impossible to find hires tracks from most bands. Most claiming to be hires are just converted low res tracks and thus have no actual difference in sound quality, the only difference being the file is way larger for no good reason.