#thought experiment

Let’s say you body swapped with me tomorrow. You wake up unable to sit or support your head independently. You cannot walk or stand and have weak arms with limited hand function. You rely on a powered wheelchair that you have to be heavily strapped into. You cannot take care of yourself or do many of the hobbies you previously had. You can just about use a touchscreen phone but it’s exhausting and painful to do so.

It’s probably easy to say “In that situation, I’d give anything to [do X] again. I wanted to test that, so my question is how much cash would you be willing to pay to be able to do the following activities again?

1. Go off road. My NHS wheelchair is designed to be used on the pavement only. It can kind of handle some dry grass or compacted earth/ stone but it’s not great. How much would you be willing to pay to:

Go for walks where there aren’t pavements or specially made paths

Cross the road where there isn’t a dropped curb (Bear in mind there is never a dropped curb where you want them)

Roll on the sand when you visit the beach

Cross cobbled areas

Is your answer the £15,000-20,000+ that an off road powerchair that meets your new needs would cost? Would you be willing to pay that every 5 years (the average lifespan of a powerchair)? Because for me, as much as I’d love more than anything to do those things I simply can’t afford the equipment to be able to do so. And even if I did manage to save that kind of money, I don’t think I could justify not spending it on things that would last me longer.

2. Maybe going outside isn’t your thing – what about art and technology? How much would you pay for the piece of equipment I recently bought that allows me to:

Paint and create traditional art

Make digital art

Play games on an iPad

Type without using my voice (which is also impacted by disability so this is tiring and takes ages, as well as not being private – remember you now have a carer in your home 24/7)

Scroll social media without pain

Learn to write again

Craft activities like diamond painting

Access the internet on a touchscreen.

Is the answer $850 USD not including international shipping or import costs? Because that’s what I just spent on a Guided Hands device I’ve been looking at online for ages trying to weigh up how much it was worth to me.

We ask your questions anonymously so you don’t have to! Submissions are open on the 1st and 15th of the month.

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Vote before you read below the line.

I think it’d be cool if the avatar the second scan is given is different than the first scan, as the person scanned has had more life experience, personality shifts, ways they identify, etc.

To me, it feels like a sort of reverse ship of Theseus. If you keep adding materials to a ship, turning it into a galleon where the original ship makes up 1% of it, is it the same ship?

Haven't seen anyone point this out yet so I just wanted to share. The Chinese Room is a thought experiment regarding AI consciousness. Imagine a person (or a program) stuck in a room with no outside information. They are only fed Chinese characters, and they don't speak Chinese. Eventually the person (or program) inside would be able to, through sheer pattern recognition, spit out a combination of Chinese characters that appear to make sense, but we the outside observer have no way of knowing if they actually understood the meaning of the words they spit out or whether they are recognizing patterns. This means that we won't truly ever know if AI has a conscience.

Caine states he (the program) doesn't understand Chinese.

Caine explicitly says that (despite not knowing what's on the other side) he thinks it's a fluent Chinese speaker giving him advice. However, later on in the episode we see the npc inside with a Chinese dictionary run out - showing he didn't know Chinese.

This is the premise of the actual Chinese room argument, which is a thought experiment on how if a Chinese speaker sent messages into a room and received answers in Chinese, they'd assume it was a fluent Chinese person inside. But rather, inside is actually an English speaker who doesn't know any Chinese using a dictionary to translate charecters they're recieving into English, then back into Chinese.

Now, there is the point that can be made about how everything is not as it seems and how the circus may appear as something but it's very different in reality, but I think we've already seen enough evidence of that.