The English dictionary was an example. English names are also rather popular among devs. But there aren't over 100M unique words and names in the world, and most of them would, simply put, suck as names for projects.
100000000 is 8 significant places. If you build words by choosing out of 10 viable following letters out of an alphabet, you'll hit that in 8 characters. That's not an especially long word. (I don't actually know if that's a good heuristic, but at least it gives an idea.)
Maybe a lot of them suck as project names, but name collisions also suck. I'd rather have unique names rather than beautiful but hard to find ones. Collisions are fine if they happen across geographical and cultural boundaries, but the software culture, for better or worse, is pretty global.
I'm not sure. Precedented personality rights would be a good place to start [1].
I'd argue for a higher standard of evidence for human-produced voices, Middler v. Ford Motor Co. seems good as any [2]. But a lower burden for synthesised voices, given the difficulty in proving intent and mass producibility of them.
> A claim that the voice originates from a certain person? Then you don't need any licensing in this case
Altman basically claimed as much by tweeting about Her in its context. At that point, he is using her fame to market his products without her permission.
Oh, I wasn't aware of the last bit (brokenwall). Now we're entering gray area, depending on what was said exactly, and how much of a contribution voice actors made their characters.
Having just watched Scavenger's Reign, it differs from both Lem novels in an important way.
Lem uses characters as an excuse to tell something about the portrayed worlds. Scavenger's Reign uses the world as a backdrop to tell the story of the characters.
(Same goes for Solaris, although Tarkovsky's adaptation reverses that.)
> making computer-generated chatter and images indistinguishable from messages sent by humans.
That's a false dichotomy. "computer-generated chatter and images" ARE messages sent by humans. There are no cases of computers having agency known to me yet. The root of the problem is humans who lie and mislead. Now they merely have more avenues to do so. In the same vein, you could blame the electronic engineers for allowing people to lie quickly and over vast distances.
What if you're playing a game and someone pulls the chair from under you?
Do you remain in the game, unresponsive?
Do you prove that you were indeed on the chair all the time?
Or do you get forcefully pulled out from the game to the floor?
What if you play a game at a LAN party while chatting with others in the same room?
What if you put the loudspeaker on in the LAN room to order a pizza? What will you answer to the question of "where are you?"?
I think the answer is closer to "you're in all of those places, to differing extents, depending on who asks". Yes, it feels useless, but attempting to figure out one ultimate answer feels even more useless to me.
>What if you're playing a game and someone pulls the chair from under you?
Right, here is Daniel Dennet's answer, from the story: "For as the last radio signal between Tulsa and Houston died away, had I not changed location from Tulsa to Houston at the speed of light? And had I not accomplished this without any increase in mass? What moved from A to B at such speed was surely myself, or at any rate my soul or mind — the massless center of my being and home of my consciousness."
No, I don't think nonpersons have an "I," because that requires a level of self-reflective awareness that's incompatible with their nature. Being or not being a "thou" is a characteristic of persons, which is why I said it's a category error.
Keep in mind, this is all in the context of why I don't find the article compelling. It's because I disagree with one of the fundamental premises of its proposed hypothetical situation, one so fundamental that the thought experiment is dull without it.
I'm not here to change your mind. I'm just explaining why I don't find the thought experiment interesting. Suspension of disbelief about some core thing you believe to be true about the world is fun for the sake of science fiction stories, but it's dull for the sake of philosophical thought experiments.
I don't intend to convince you or get convinced. To me, the answer depends on the purpose of the question.
I'm curious now instead why you'd grant rights to entities that don't have an "I". Isn't that pointless? Or is it a mistake on my part, i.e. maybe there's no "I" but there's still a "you"?
In the "you" case, do you think the thought experiment could be reframed as an attempt at answering the question "where is the you?"?
I think an "it" can have rights. I'll go back to the horse. It has a basic natural right not to be beaten because it's a creature that can experience pain, not because it's an "I."
The legal system (at least in the U.S.) seems to need to call something a "person" in order for it to have rights (e.g., corporations), but I don't think the legal system is the origin of rights.
"I" and "thou" go together as references to personhood, so I wouldn't distinguish between the two. (And I'm mostly using "thou" here instead of "you" to show I'm referring to the concept rather than you personally. The "I/Thou" philosophical concept also has precedent of using the term.)
The brain is part of you, but not the whole you, so it's different by definition. Same goes for the body. Now that they are split, the distinction is only more pronounced.
The narrator goes on to investigate how and whether the difference is actually supported by subjective feelings.
I find the existence of the "narrator" to be utterly debasing of the thought experiment.
Apply Dennett's deconstructions to the author and ask yourself why are you interested in this thesis of indeterminacy of the self when you've already a priori accepted and endorsed Dennett's existence though your consideration of his story on its own terms. Simply apply the same logic you used to accept the source to acceptance of yourself.
Is the dislocation of Dennett's brain from his body a genuinely marvelous feature of the scenario when the scenario is just in your own mind, already a totally displaced manifestation of Dennett's?
Maybe you are not sure that Dennett exists (apparently he actually doesn't) in which case what's going on in this thread: Is it all thoughts from no one mechanically clicking in the machine of "your" own mind?
How can there be a reasoned discussion of a topic the author himself has totally debased?
More troublingly, this response is no more meaningful, don't bother trying to respond because there's no one to respond to! Yet you're stuck with the chaotic intrusion from no one to no one.
If Dennett somehow transcends his scenario, of which there is universal agreement on this forum that he does because even in death his existence is unquestioned, this whole scene is a fright.
Ultimately, why will you allow his scenario to debase your own commonsense, unless there's a greater wisdom of the self to be learned and mastered?
Maybe there is!
So let's look at Dennett himself: he happily maintained he was Dennett his entire life and is consummately well known as such.
Sure, the story places you from the start with the assumption that there was someone who has been split in the first place.
But why does the topic have to be about any more than that? The question is not "is there a Dennet?", but "what locates a person?". What's there about it that prevents reasoned discussion?
When I try to rely on my common sense, I fall into ruts already described in the story, which Dennet the author clearly shows aren't worth much. Seems my common sense deserves some debasing.
The funny thing is, we already have some experiments that do answer this. There was an experiment where two people wore glasses that projected other's physical view point and IIRC, it led to identity and gender confusion. (Unfortunately, I am not able to find that experiment link now).
It seems like we have solid evidence that your brain maps your body, but the map is in your brain. You is the brain as it exists now seems to be a reasonable starting point and I would expect the philosopher to poke holes starting from that.
