After doing programming and being involved in startups for well over a decade, I decided I don't actually like coding nor startups anymore. I still have a company I run with my partners, and I still treat it like my 'job', but there's no passion there. Instead, I've discovered writing novels, music, and other artsy-fartsy stuff as my new passion of the last few years (it had always been a hobby, but I'm taking it much more seriously... not because it'll ever make money, but because I enjoy doing it!)
So my long-winded point is, I don't think there's anything wrong with this. Only you know what your interests are, but don't be afraid to follow them wherever they lead. If you aren't bored, you aren't boring.
People who aren't bored but who are boring. They come to dinner and yammer on about gossip and celebrities and whatnot. Lousy storytellers.
People who are bored but not boring. They work in technical fields where I'm not educated in their domain. They're retired but had very colorful lives in the past. They're wonderful storytellers and joke tellers and even punsters. They know the latest culture, technology, restaurants, shows etc. They post on HN.
If you read the whole thing, that is in fact the whole point of the article. The comedy show thing was just the trigger/segway but certainly not something to get caught up on. ;)
This brings me to an interesting thought experiment I struggle with:
Most likely most people here would agree that if you make an exact copy of a person's brain, whilst leaving the original intact, it would be a new person, identical but divergent from the original. A new thread of consciousness by such definition.
But then, what if you destroy the original at the moment of copy? It would appear to the same.
But then, what if you replace each neuron one at a time over a period, maintaining the original network? This question is troubling because it brings into obvious doubt the integrity of our notion of consciousness. As it is in fact the case that we shed most of the atomic matter that constitutes us in a given year, we are clearly immaterial. Patterns.
So put plainly: should you copy your brain all at once, killing the original, are you a new person? But if you are: transitioning slowly piece by piece over time, which is what we observe in nature, this maintains the conscious strain? How are these different?
It's obvious to me there is something fundamental here we are missing. I welcome any insights you all might have had in similar thought experiments.
You seem to be assuming the actual existence of a "thread of consciousness" or a "conscious strain", when it could be an illusion.
When you wake up after a dreamless sleep, are you the same person, the same conscious entity, as went to bed the night before? Or is that entity now "dead", and "you" are a new entity that has just inherited its memories (most of which it in turn inherited from its predecessors)? How could you ever tell? In fact, are you the same conscious entity from moment to moment, or at least from thought to thought?
More "making a copy" thought experiments, none terribly original:
- If you're disintegrated and immediately reassembled, are you still you?
- Does using different atoms make a difference?
- Does leaving a gap between disintegration and reassembly make a difference? If so, how long a gap? What if you're resurrected at the Omega Point by sufficiently advanced aliens/post-humans?
- If you're split in two (sagitally, coronally, or however), and each half is immediately reconstructed into a whole human, each identical to you before the split, which is you? Which pair of eyes would you find yourself looking out of? Both? Neither?
- If the two "yous" exchange atoms, such that one ends up with the entire complement of atoms that made up you before the split and the other ends up with none, does that affect the claims of either to be the "real" you?
Excellent points, and actually in line with my line of question as well: I think my assumption of a thread of consciousness was a semantic mis-communication, as bringing that idea into question was indeed where my questions were leading.
There's nothing fundamental we're missing: the reality beneath our intuitive understanding of personal identity and continuity is just a lot messier than our intuitions allow for. Nondiverging copies are, in some sense, the same person, but they're also completely useless: the instant you "wake them up", they diverge and become different people. Destructive "moving" preserves personal identity, but is goddamn creepy because it provides no way for the "moved" person to verify that they remain the same before-and-after. The "continuous stream of consciousness" model is intuitive and lets us detect when something in our heads changes (you can feel yourself going from "sober" to "drunk" while awake in a very different way than if I just injected you with booze while you slept... For Science, of course).
Several philosophers have attended to those very thought experiments. I recently read some of Locke's "Essay Concerning Human Understanding" (Book 2), and he has some interesting thoughts on person-hood and persistence of consciousness in chapter 27.
The only correct work schedule is the one you are able to work out with your employers and customers which works for you and for them. If those conditions are met it's a legitimate schedule, even if it's only 1 hour a day one day a week.
The simple truth is you've put alot of time into thinking about how to look smart, and it shows. Just relax a bit and solve the problems in front of you and your natural intelligence will show, naturally.
Thanks for the reply. From what I understand, the schema I described is similar to what Reddit uses in their Postgres setup. You mentioned that I "won't be getting any of Postgres' advantages", what are some of the most important considerations that play into Postgres strengths? What are the primary advantages you for Postgres your referring to?
I meant just in terms of Postgres expecting a "standard" relational schema; the interface and query planner and the like are designed around that. It's not a bad schemaless data store per se, but it's not really designed for that use case, so I would expect rough edges when using it that way.
The modern selection of schemaless data stores weren't as mature (if they even existed) when Reddit was getting started, so don't assume that they would choose that architecture if they were starting today. I suspect that if you build on postgres in this way you'll have to write significant pieces of functionality by hand that you get for free with mongodb/couchdb/redis/neo4j/etc.
That said I'll emphasise again that I don't know too much about your system; at some point, prototyping and measuring will be the only way to see what works best for you.
So my long-winded point is, I don't think there's anything wrong with this. Only you know what your interests are, but don't be afraid to follow them wherever they lead. If you aren't bored, you aren't boring.