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One more location that is added to the list of where mind could be in the brain. The RAS is located in the brainstem and I guess that this affects all of the brain. We also lose consciousness when we are in a coma or when we are asleep. Different brain regions being dampepended or activated causing a temporary loss of consciousness. Where is the center of mind or consciousness in the brain remains uncertain. My position at this stage, based on evidence, is that brains are not always needed to produce consciousness, but living matter is required. My position could move backward or forward depending on evidence.

Various errors, most notably your failure to take account of water vapor flux and its amplifier effect on CO2 as a GHG, as well as albedo change, CH4 effects, methane hydrates, and other feedback mechanisms, and research going back to Tyndall and Arrhenius, all suggest your knowledge of atmospheric physics is minimal. For this reason I suspect several posters here are simply passing by your posts. This is not a "religion" thing, but your straw man is duly noted. Net warming also occurs when there is overcast. Better check your work.

Check the y-axis: it is radiant heat flux to space. Why would anyone not expect this to be a flat line close to the corresponding value of insolation and independent of CO2 concentration? There are reasons: eg temporary accumulation of heat in the system while it's temperature increased to a new equilibrium level, for instance? If so then the shape of the flux to space curve is dependent on some assumed temperature gradient that quantified that accumulation rate, otherwise the flux to space would be ill-defined. It is an issue of context framing. The graph, accurate or otherwise, provides an answer to a question that wasn't asked. We are not interested in the value of the nett flux to space - that is already known with some accuracy. Rather we are interested in the rate of temperature rise for the anticipated changes in CO2 concentration: a figure the presentation implicitly assumes, and in doing so, denies its sensitivity to the variable in question. Deliberately dishonest. So no surprise there.

My view of consciousness regards the most basic form of awareness as suggested by an organism's observed behavioral reactions. Truly, we cannot determine whether an organism has even the smallest measure of consciousness without observable behavioral responses to its environment. From my perspective, consciousness doesn't necessarily confer intelligence. Intelligence is a subjective measure based on observable behaviors suggesting a thought process and having a thought process is exclusive to having a mind. A mind, from my view, is that mental matrix arising from brain function that give rise to behaviors we perceive as thought and intelligent. Nevertheless, I agree that consciousness in its most basic form is not exclusive to having a brain; however, for human equivalent consciousness, some form of brain or neural function is essential. Thought, in my view, arises from a matrix of biological processes within the brain involving a recipracol metabolic system of checks and balances (homeostasis). I would prefer not to speak too much about this system as it's basic implications are most unsettling. However, if we agree that basic consciousness is the progenitor of the mind and the mind the progenitor of thought, then none of these are observable without responses to stimuli. Indeed, there are responses to stimuli that appear mindless, which we confer as instinct; however, mindful responses confer a thought process, which is a quality that appears contrary to instinctive and reactive behaviors. If the behaviors we observe in other living things are contrary to those we confer as instinctive, then it's most likely that their behaviors doesn't confer thinking. But most living things are complex and function through a combination of instinct and thought. A bird, for example, may be instinctively driven to build a nest while its seemingly thoughtful behaviors in choosing the materials to build that nest suggest otherwise--indeed, there is more than mindless reactiveness occurring. In the early days of my study of the dreaming brain, the RAS was a focal in understanding of the sleep process and its association with atonia amid that process. IMO, there's so little regards given in science to the brainstem and particularly its crown, the thalamus. There is more than considerable research suggesting that thalamic function is sufficient to viably sustain life in the absence of major cortical structures.

By no means do I have any particular expertise in this area. However some years ago I went through a spell of being subject to occasional bouts of sudden neurally mediated syncope: temporary blackouts, a bit like someone hitting the reset button without warning. The way it was explained to me at the time was that I was experiencing (or rather, not experiencing) a temporary glitch in my ascending reticular activating system (ARAS), also known as the extrathalamic control modulatory system or simply the reticular activating system (RAS). Any partial loss of ARAS functionality tends to produce a corresponding reduction in degree of consciousness ranging from attentional dysregulation to sleep pattern issues through to deep coma. Brainstem features upstream of this structure were broadly sufficient to maintain life without consciousness. Therefore ARAS provided the gateway to all aspects of consciousness in areas of the brain downstream of it. I do hope I got this right, as it provides some sound constraints on the physical location of consciousness, and the degree of consciousness that may be experienced by other species. Lab experiments in this area seem to involve cats quite frequently.

Thanks, that's helpful. What occurs to me about the graph is that they have chosen a scale and a range that makes the effect look as small as possible. We are in reality concerned with the range from 280ppm (the level at the end of the c.19th) to ~400ppm +/- 50 for scenarios in the recent past, today and the near future. So be useful, the graph should be scaled to show the effects within that range. On that basis it would be clearer that, even assuming the chart is correct, which I can't verify, the effect of an increase from 400-450ppm would be about 50% of the increase from 350-400ppm. So less rapid, sure, but still very substantial, and nowhere close to reaching some sort of asymptote of course.

And so gratefull for it

https://royalsociety.org/topics-policy/projects/climate-change-evidence-causes/question-8/ “CO2 has its strongest heat-trapping band centred at a wavelength of 15 micrometres (millionths of a metre), with wings that spread out a few micrometres on either side. There are also many weaker absorption bands. As CO2 concentrations increase, the absorption at the centre of the strong band is already so intense that it plays little role in causing additional warming. However, more energy is absorbed in the weaker bands and in the wings of the strong band, causing the surface and lower atmosphere to warm further.“

Intellect is no guide to societal stability. Intellectuals are not necessarily inherently good and accommodating to all viewpoints; they are as vulnerable to deceiving and self-deceit as anyone else.

I see it more as an issue of identity. I may identify as a baseball player, or as an artist, or as a father. As I approach the world, I am just being myself as who I am. The world then tries to impose other labels on me. Those labels aren’t always ideal. Gender is more of a spectrum than a binary set of two, and sometimes trying to force ourselves into just one of those two buckets feels like smashing a square peg through a round hole. Likely in part due to how little gender matters when interacting online and how many hours of our existence are now spent online, more and more people are simply being authentic, less concerned about ostracization, and saying “I no longer feel like smashing myself every day to fit your arbitrary outdated shape.” So, maybe being born with a penis isn’t what makes the male, or being born with a vagina isn’t what makes the female. Maybe hormones are weird and not black and white. Maybe we can just start being ourselves as humans and stop giving a shit if someone else fits into MY rigid categories. Apologies if this isn’t the type of answer you’d hoped for. Definitions change all the time. What’s weird is how people seem to get so spun around the axle on this particular one.

My intention was defining it as something you consider yourself aside from your physical body, assuming there is such a thing. If there isn't I think it's almost certain, at least in my mind (lol because that's where I assume my soul would be), that we do not have free will. Most people believe they have free will and some essence of self but can't prove it, and I think that is how I would define my soul So I guess that's roughly how I choose to define it, but I can't even be certain I have a choice, though it feels like I have both a soul and free will right now, being alive and all. So assuming it exists...the question becomes what happens to it when you die? Since it really doesn't lend itself to a scientific investigation, it can't be proven as correct thinking...so religion, unencumbered by provable lines of thought, gets to reign over this type of question. That's the best I think I can do at the moment...weak-ass as it seems.

Israel just had an oopsie and killed 3 of their own hostages. Hard to get the rest of the world to give you a mulligan on something like that. Expect heavy negotiations in Qatar over the weekend and amplification of international pressure until operational tactics change.

If you don't mind an application with a GUI, there is an application written by Microsoft engineers FileMon: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/filemon Later replaced by ProcessMon: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/procmon Such an application installed on your computer can tell you if someone has used your computer without your permission or if someone has hacked into your computer, even if anti-virus applications find nothing. I don't think it's interesting to monitor file activity to spy on someone (unlike keyboard presses and mouse movements). It is an anti-spyware application, not a spyware application....

Please pardon this late response: I agree with iNow, you appear to be conflating mind with consciousness as a singular concept; therefore, before I proceed further, let me provide some clarity on how I perceive these distinct qualities. You've title this discussion thread with "Mind" and have cited research in neuroscience as a basis for your perspective. If our discussion regards the mind with a basis in neuroscience then this discussion does indeed involve brain function. Specifically, mind and consciousness does not exist without brain function. More specifically, consciousness is the progenitor of that quality or attribute we perceive as the mind. For clarity sake, we should define the relative and basic nature of consciousness in brain function. Consciousness isn't a quality unique to humans. From my view, consciousness is merely the awareness suggested by an organism's responses to stimuli. To respond to stimuli, an organism must have an sensory system for the detection of stimuli. In addition to a sensory detection system, an organism must also have a system that provides recipracol responses to detected stimuli. In the brain, we have afferent neural pathways for the delivery of sensory into our central nervous system and efferent pathways for the recipracol responses that issue from our central nervous system. The effect of this diametrical system is that the action of one of these systems does not engage without the action of the other--essentially, there is no efferent response from the brain without afferent stimulation. Consciousness is the efferently expressed behavior that suggests awareness and awareness is the basic progenitor of those processing in the brain that lead to the quality we perceive as having a mind. To add emphasis, the entirety of this process requires energy and without that energy the system fails. With brain function--and yes, this is about the brain--failure is not a option. Homeostasis is the process that drives brain function.

Good point about disengenuous reporting-- The Warmists are guilty of that. They commonly show the co2 gragh and the temp graph superimposed- both, miraculously, with a 50% slope implying a 1:1 relationship....But in truth, the co2 graph should be sloped about 60% (260ppm ==> 420ppm or 160/260) over the last century, while the temp graph should be sloped only 0.7% (286 ==>288*K) ...Then we could argue about what a 2deg rise in temps means...Can you step outside and accurately estimate the temp to any greater accuracy than +/- 5 degC? The common wisdom has been that co2 is a well mixed gas with little variation from one geographic location to the next, but now that we have a co2 sensing satellite, that may not be as true as we'd like to think. https://wattsupwiththat.com/2023/12/01/carbon-dioxide-movie-night-the-global-picture/ Note how much co2 is being dumped into the atm by Asia, and, with Mauna Loa, the "official measurement site" directly downwind, maybe we need to re-examine how much the [co2] has really gone up. This whole "GW" controversey is marred by so much bad science, unethical practices and outright lies for political and financial advantage that we have to treat it like we treat "data" about Big Foot-- while we can;t scientifically say he doesn;t exist, there's so much outright fraud involved in the reporting that we have to hold all info suspect.

Because the major source of warming for the planet is the sun, there is net warming locally for only about 6 hr a day, with net cooling for 18hrs. At this point, the total energy budget is stable. It just takes a little longer, theoretically, to cool back down each day at any given location. but we still do cool...We are dealing also with the problem of the physical meaning of averages.... The satellite record shows that virtually all of the warming seen over the 45 yrs of the record has taken place in the polar regions-- completely predictable because heat flows from high concentration to low. There has been only a ittle warming, mostly at night, in the temperature zones and almost none in the tropics. https://www.nsstc.uah.edu/climate/ The geologic climate record shows that the planet must have a negative feedback system dominating temps. Despite [co2] of 8000ppm ages ago, temps never have seemed to exceeded 25*C....The co2 influence should be a positive feedback loop, but it likely is "over-powered" by the several other cyclical factors influencing climate. Reviewing the concept of coupled oscillators may give insight into the problem at hand. Say swinging to the left causes warming and to the right, cooling. Now expand it to at least a dozen masses of widely varying size with a wide range of pendulum lengths-- the state of "the climate" being the total state of the system at any particular moment in time...The "perfect storm" is the codition when all are at their max or min at the same time. Thanks for the negative credits...Anybody care to show some intellectual integrity and say why you think I'm wrong or are you simply insulted that your religion has been questioned?

It looks like that's a back-handed way of saying that the co2/temp relationship is exponential, exhibiting a doubling period phenomenon. https://hifast.wordpress.com/2019/02/15/how-does-temperature-depend-on-co2/ To be considered on the logical level, increasing [co2] won't result in more warming over all, just a trapping of heat in a thinner layer, closer to the surface. ...That means higher atm will be cooling. We see that now in the UAH satellite data-- troposphere warming, stratosphere cooling. ...and consider the phenomenon of extinction of absorbtion-- Increasing humidity may make the lighthouse look dimmer and dimmer until it's fogged out completely. At that point, adding thicker fog won't change anything in regards seeing the lighthouse. Skeptics don't "deny" that there's climate change or that the GH Effect exists. They point out that the actual effect of increasing [co2] at the current level of 420ppm has minimal effect on climate, and even less as it goes higher....It's like ignoring the relativistic component of the gravity equation when calculating the trajectory of the bowling ball dropped form the Leaning Tower. Perfectly justified from the practical stand point. Now, we could discuss the source of the increasing [co2] if you like-- also more likely to be due to warming oceans and minimally caused by humans mobilizing geologically sequestered carbon. Keep in mind that the increasing co2 seen in the ice core data lags 800 yrs behind the warming. In a cause & effect situation, the cause has to pre-cede the effect. Addendum in respnse to iNow-- Those minor absorbtion bands for co2 coincide with the major bands of h20, so they add little to the GH trappjing effect of co2...co2 is a much "stronger" GHG on a molar basis than h20, but h2o is so much more prevalent that it far outweighs co2 in its warming effect... ...and then it gets really complicated because h20 means clouds and clouds shade the surface, and also mean precipitation which further adds cooling effects. Cf- diurnal temp changes in desert vs rain forest-- they both have the same amount of co2. It's a mistake to look for a simple explanation in a complex matters.