this post was submitted on 01 Dec 2025
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Showerthoughts
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A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The most popular seem to be lighthearted clever little truths, hidden in daily life.
Here are some examples to inspire your own showerthoughts:
- Both “200” and “160” are 2 minutes in microwave math
- When you’re a kid, you don’t realize you’re also watching your mom and dad grow up.
- More dreams have been destroyed by alarm clocks than anything else
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- The entire showerthought must be in the title
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- If your topic is in a grey area, please phrase it to emphasize the fascinating aspects, not the dramatic aspects. You can do this by avoiding overly politicized terms such as "capitalism" and "communism". If you must make comparisons, you can say something is different without saying something is better/worse.
- A good place for politics is c/politicaldiscussion
- Posts must be original/unique
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If you made it this far, showerthoughts is accepting new mods. This community is generally tame so its not a lot of work, but having a few more mods would help reports get addressed a little sooner.
Whats it like to be a mod? Reports just show up as messages in your Lemmy inbox, and if a different mod has already addressed the report, the message goes away and you never worry about it.
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I suspect Turing Complete machines (all computers) are not capable of producing consciousness
If that were the case, then theoretically a game of Magic the Gathering could experience consciousness (or similar physical systems that can emulate a Turing Machine)
Most modern languages are theoretically Turing complete but they all have finite memory. That also keeps human brains from being Turing complete. I've read a little about theories beyond Turing completeness, like quantum computers, but I'm not aware of anyone claiming that human brains are capable of that.
A game of Magic could theoretically do any task a Turing machine could do but it would be really slow. Even if it could "think" it would likely take years to decide to do something as simple as farting.
I don't think the distinction between "arbitrarily large" memory and "infinitely large" memory here matters
Also, Turing Completeness is measuring the "class" of problems a computer can solve (eg, the Halting Problem)
I conjecture that whatever the brain is doing to achieve consciousness is a fundamentally different operation, one that a Turing Complete machine cannot perform, mathematically
Also also, quantum computers (at least as i understand them, which is, not very well) are still Turing Complete. They just use analog properties of quantum wave functions as computational components