Not sure, but his dad's got a microwave for a head.

At about page 300 it starts to pay off hard and you fly through the rest. I definitely recommend giving it another go.

For the 20th birthday of the book's publication, there was an article in the Guardian that ended on this beautiful quote that captured the experience of reading the book perfectly for me:

" It’ll be a slog, but around the point where it starts making sense, you will read these words:

'But you never know when the magic will descend on you. You never know when the grooves will open up. And once the magic descends you don’t want to change even the smallest detail. You don’t know what concordance of factors and variables yields that calibrated can’t-miss feeling, and you don’t want to soil the magic by trying to figure it out, but you don’t want to change your grip, your stick, your side of the court, your angle of incidence to the sun.' "

"Once you've read this book, then you can read a good book"

(/s - I have read and enjoyed Infinite Jest. It's very reasonable for someone to not enjoy it though)

I don't know how a materialist could answer anything other than no - you are obliterated. And if, despite sharing every single one of your characteristics, that individual on the other side of the teleporter is not 'you' (since you died), then some aspect of what 'you' are must be the discrete episode of consciousness that you were experiencing up until that point.

Which also leads me to think that there's no real reason to believe that this discrete episode of consciousness would have been continuous since birth. For all we know, we may die little deaths every time we go to sleep, hit our heads or go under anesthesia.

> I don't know how a materialist could answer anything other than no

Well, I'm a materialist and I say yes. Materialism doesn't preclude the existence of information which can be represented by matter. Recreating matter in the same arrangement/configuration as before reproduces the information.

If I copy down an equation, is it now a different equation? Of course not. It consists of different material for sure, but it's the same equation.

I don't doubt that their claims are fantastic rubbish, but you're verifying this by.. feeling the difference with gloves on/off?

I really don't understand what mechanisms could exist in an ideal free market to stop monopolies. What is a monopoly other than a hyper-successful agent on the free market? What kind of a free market is one that would restrict such a monopoly? It's incoherent.

Why obsess over idealism and purity? We (most of us) don’t do that with individual liberty. Sure, we should have guiding principles for deciding how to regulate markets, just like we have for civil liberties. But for everyone except anarcho-capitalists, bikeshedding the purest philosophical interpretation is just navel-gazing.

In Warhammer we call it Fall Back in Good Order.

Because art is the futile attempt by a conscious subjectivity at expressing their subjective experience. It's fraught and impossible and really beautiful. Meanwhile GenAI is not a subjectivity, cannot express anything.

Like laptops, you can sometimes interface directly with them via touch, but it's usually not worth the trouble.

In the sense that my cat communicates by meowing at me when it's dinner time, sure. But so far I don't think apes are signing about remembered events, future plans, or descriptions of non-immediate reality.

In my experience the Y is often the even more profound disagreement between two people, and explicit discussion of Y could be enough to obliterate a relationship completely.