4 Nov – 10 Nov

What did you do this past week?

We fixed that one error (we made the row and column labels use only the most significant digit), then did all the stuff. You know the stuff. That stuff.

What’s in your way?

Nothing for this class. Or any class really. Had a lull in my schedule yesterday. Went to a café. Ate a mozzarella and veggie sandwich. It was good.

What will you do next week?

Melted mozzarella, fresh pesto, mushrooms, caramelized onions, all on fluffy, buttery sourdough bread. With a side of chips and salsa.

What was your experience of move semantics and allocators in the context of the vector implementation?

Isn’t it a bit confusing to have the r-value cast called “move”? I know that it’s most common use case is to move values, but that’s not really what it’s doing. And what if you have a method called move, but then also want to cast a variable to an r-value? That’s gonna lead to a collision. Why didn’t they just do something like reinterpret_cast<&&>, or call it to_r_val, or something like that? Just some small complaints.

Other than that, moves and allocators don’t ellicit any emotional responsed from my. They are just tools you might want to use sometimes.

What’s your pick-of-the-week or tip-of-the-week?

Here’s a tip: when people ask you for your information, like when websites ask for your email, or when hotels ask for your address, you can usually give them fake info. Give them the address of the white house, or some road in the middle of Idaho or something. When I was making the UML diagram for the project, Gliffy asked for my email. So naturally I typed in fake@email.com. Funny enough, the address was already in use. Guess I wasn’t the first person to think of that. I should try to register that email. I wonder what kind of spam it receives.

Well, I haven’t reached the word limit, so as promised in a previous post, here’s that philosophical thought experiment.

Ok, so, imagine that a scientist invites you to his lab. In this lab, there is a supercomputer that runs a simulated copy of everything in the lab (except for simulation itself. No recurrsion allowed here). When you enter the lab, your brain is scanned and copy-pasted into the simulation.

So there are two you’s: the real you in the real lab, and the virtual, fake you in the lab simulation (I’ll call this version of you “robot-you”). Since you are identical copies in identical settings (and since the universe is, for the most part, deterministic), you and the copy perform the same actions and perceive identical experiences, even though you act independently. It’s like how two coins that are flipped in exactly the same manner and under the same conditions will land on the same side. So whatever you think, robot-you also thinks, and, as you see on the lab monitor, whatever you see, robot-you also sees.

Ok, so where is this going? Well, if you and robot-you are experiencing the same thoughts and sensations, how do you know that you are not the robot? If you were to, say, press the END SIMULATION button, would nothing happen, or would you, upon pressing the button, experience instant anihilation as the “real” you presses the “real” button?

What is the moral to this story? Consciousness is a pattern, not an object (or, to put it a programmery way, consciousness is a type, not an instance). Just as head-heads-tails here is the same as heads-heads-tails there, and how an ordering of playing cards here is identical the the ordering of playing cards half-was across the world, any two consciousnesses that experience the exact same thoughts are actually one consciousness. So you could be a human experiencing life on Earth, or a copy of a human on an identical version of the real Earth, or just a brain in a vat experiencing a simulated reality. It doesn’t matter. All of those consciousnesses are one and the same. There must be difference in the pattern (like turning off the simulation) before the two consciousnesses can be considered separate.

But wait, if patterns aren’t localized to any place in space, and consciousness is a pattern, then why does consciousness feel so localized? Why can’t I experience the consciousness of others? Why can I only see through these eyes and only feel what is in this brain? Well, either external reality isn’t real and you are just imagining all this, or you do actually experience everything, as explained in the end of a previous post.

Hope this was interesting for you.