It's because of the sybil problem. If accounts are globally unique, then a bad actor can register as many accounts as they want, and can do things like e.g. reserve other people's usernames and charge real money to have them unreserved.
The conscious part of that system is the interpretation, not the bar itself. You have skipped directly over the observer, who is actually performing the conscious computation.
Think about how you would actually write a program to achieve this. The iron bar is just a bunch of atoms with random bit states that flip at random intervals - we'll model it as a contiguous 1D array of bits. You have a 1 second consciousness mapping, which is most likely rather large in size. Our interpretation process maps the random bits in the bar to a time instant of the conscious process by interpreting some bits in the bar as themselves, and the other bits in the bar as the reverse of themselves. In other words, our interpretation of which atom-bits are telling the truth and which are lying is itself a 1D array of bits that satisfies the following property:
BAR bitxor INTERPRETATION = CONSCIOUS_INSTANT
As time progresses, BAR and CONSCIOUS_INSTANT continuously change, therefore necessitating INTERPRETATION to change as well to keep the above formula consistent. In fact, by the rules of XOR, we can compute exactly what INTERPRETATION is at any given moment:
INTERPRETATION = CONSCIOUS_INSTANT bitxor BAR
But wait! This means that to dynamically know INTERPRETATION, you _must_ know all of the information associated with both CONSCIOUS_INSTANT and BAR. But if you know all the information associated with CONSCIOUS_INSTANT, haven't you already simulated a conscious process...? So there is in fact a consciousness here, but not in the {BAR} system: it is in the {BAR,INTERPRETATION,CONSCIOUS_INSTANT} system.
(Note: If you squint at this for long enough, it starts sounding a lot like a motivation for Death of the Author.)
I like Scott Aaronson's response[1] to the argument:
> So, class, how might a strong AI proponent respond to this argument? Duh: you might not understand Chinese, but the rule book does! Or if you like, understanding Chinese is an emergent property of the system consisting of you and the rule book, in the same sense that understanding English is an emergent property of the neurons in your brain. Like many other thought experiments, the Chinese Room gets its mileage from a deceptive choice of imagery -- and more to the point, from ignoring computational complexity. We're invited to imagine someone pushing around slips of paper with zero understanding or insight -- much like the doofus freshmen who write (a+b)^2=a^2+b^2 on their math tests. But how many slips of paper are we talking about? How big would the rule book have to be, and how quickly would you have to consult it, to carry out an intelligent Chinese conversation in anything resembling real time? If each page of the rule book corresponded to one neuron of (say) Debbie's brain, then probably we'd be talking about a "rule book" at least the size of the Earth, its pages searchable by a swarm of robots traveling at close to the speed of light. When you put it that way, maybe it's not so hard to imagine that this enormous Chinese-speaking entity -- this dian nao -- that we've brought into being might have something we'd be prepared to call understanding or insight.
27/30. You can tell the AI ones because they don't look like they were made with the same constraints as a human; they merge, distort, twist together lines, shapes, and colors, rather than have images split into the compartmentalized pieces that humans like to do. I find the best place to check for AI art is to look at the overlaps; this is how I figured out the kindergartener one, for example: there were no obvious "AI-like" patterns except for the one section where the drawn lady's legs intersected with the ground line, and you could see that DALL-E 2 didn't know what to do, putting one leg over the line and one underneath, which can't be done unless one leg was drawn, then the ground, then the other, which is not what a human does.
I always thought the fact that Vim had automatic buffer copying and forced me to use "0p instead of p was really annoying. Looks like there is an actual reason for it after all :)
Well, if we're being pedantic here, raw RGB video as would be displayed on a RGB monitor does indeed take 3 bytes per pixel. Technically, YUV is either an optimization or a backwards compatibility measure, and hence the adjective "raw" does not apply to it.
Yeah, but the problem is that some doctors are not capable of doing things of this sort safely, and thus doctor regulations happen. There are definitely unnecessary regulations out there, but I imagine that most of them are simply yet another symptom of "any large enough system eventually gets ruined by abuse".
> then they are taking real resources from actual humans.
But who is "they"? If you copied them 10 times, it's not like they act as a collective; there are 10 unique instances having unique experiences. What's wrong with 10 different people each owning a house?
So then I suppose the Earth flag will be for the people who are willing to share the Earth, and the non-Earth flags can be for those who do not wish to share.
Whether this specific problem is intentional or not, these kinds of problems show the issue with using a single centralized service for distribution of third-party dependencies. But it's just so much more darned convenient than hosting your own Git server! It would be super cool if there was a decentralized alternative to GitHub, that used Git under the hood. Perhaps one would upload their repositories to a node, which would then be synchronized with all other nodes, and all you would need to do to use it is to specify any_node.com/author/project. This would keep GitHub's discoverability, while allowing all the benefits of decentralization.