Carrock

What is your definition of sensation? And which definition of sensation are you referring to as 'too narrow'?

Quick point of order: This is untrue. Galvanic skin response, changes in heartbeat and breathing, digestion activities, and many similar autonomic functions will shift as a result of sensations that themselves often never enter conscious awareness. I suspect this is a definitional issue. There are myriad stimuli which never or rarely enter conscious awareness, many of which never or only sometimes reach the brain. Are you saying these stimuli are experienced as sensations, which implies substantial unnecessary processing, not merely acted upon, by the 'autonomic' nervous system? Evidence that e.g. the spinal cord or the skin experiences sensations? Xposted with KipIngram.

You do as if consciousness for inner states is the same as for objects I observe through the senses, in other words, that the 'awareness of a sensation' is in itself again a sensation. I do not believe that. Try it out. If I look at my computer mouse, I am aware of something black. I am also aware that I am aware of something that is black. But for me it stops there. What you really describe is just a logical construction, that does not occur in the mind. How can you discuss a logical construction which does not occur in the/your mind? Most of what we 'observe' visually is actually a very clever construct in our brains i.e. inner states. If you blink or shut your eyes while looking at your mouse, you no longer observe it through the senses and are only conscious of it in inner states, but I doubt your consciousness significantly changes. Shouldn't "I am also aware that I am aware of something that is black" be "a logical construction, that does not occur in the mind, is also aware that I am aware of something that is black" or "there is an undefined awareness that I am aware of something that is black" I prefer infinite regression. No. You can't experience a sensation without being aware of it. e.g. if someone lightly touches me on the arm to get my attention when I'm busy, I may not notice and may later believe no one touched me. If the person persists, I may become aware/conscious of not only the later touch, but also of earlier touches which were retained for a time in unconscious memory. If I say 'I am aware that you are conscious of pain' I am not reporting that I am in pain. That another person is in pain is not a report of an inner state of mine. But maybe I did not get your point. My error: I missed out some essentials. I've tried updating it but soon realized it wasn't useful. I've only responded to Eise as their are a lot of partial overlaps of concepts in this thread. A very brief summary of my views: consciousness has strong evolutionary advantages for humans and at least some other animals. It's not fully susceptible to scientific or philosophical analysis because they both implicitly regard consciousness as axiomatic.

I don't know of any system ( or person ) which can universally anticipate possible events. Given that incapability, isn't a microprocessor based central heating system which reports internal faults aware and conscious by your definition? Infinite regression is the real problem in trying to analyze consciousness. e.g. if you introspectively analyze your own consciousness, is it possible to include that aspect of your consciousness which is aware of your self analysis? If not, self awareness is not subject to your analysis. If yes, it should be possible to include awareness of self analysis, awareness of awareness of self analysis, awareness of awareness of awareness of self analysis,..... Note the impersonal explanation; implicitly the explanation is for an observer which is assumed to have no consciousness. Otherwise, the observer has the infinite regress problem of explaining how (s)he is aware/conscious of the explanation of consciousness. It is possible in principle to find quite accurate correlations between brain activity etc and consciousness but there is only a qualitative difference between that and sticking a pin in someone and saying 'I am aware that you are conscious of pain.'

I think there's probably something there. However... You seem to be saying that absence of evidence is proof of guilt. Alternatively, if the FBI only looks when it has proof, why does it bother looking?

Don't bother with the laser; connect a heat engine between the inside and outside of the box and you have a perpetual motion machine.

No you can't. You can define a countable infinity of points in this way but between each two points there is a (much larger) uncountable infinity of points which you haven't defined. You can't assume a smooth function when most of the points are undefined. (Near the top top right of Cantor's diagonal argument there is a diagram showing how to generate numbers/points that are not included in your sequence.) You seemed to be talking about cosine waves rather than sine waves and my critical faculties switched off at that point! This is really the claim I can't accept and where I stop. (I've no problem with 'IMO' Even if I was an 'expert' I'd still sometimes get things wrong.)

I was just questioning your definition. It is generally accepted sin x can take any value of y such that -1 <= y <= 1. Your definition excludes e.g. the infinite number of transcendental numbers between -1 and 1. sin x can't be greater than 1. In a proof like this, I stop analysing when I encounter (IMO) an unequivocal error as later reasoning may be based on this error. It's certainly worth looking for a simpler proof of Fermat's last theorem than Andrew Wylie's, but I doubt any such proof will be much simpler.

How about an e, pi, sqrt(e^2 + pi^2) triangle? I.e. all points between -x and +x are points on a sine wave.

I think this was the film Jim Lovell disliked because the commander died. Later, as commander of Apollo 13 he may have wondered if life was going to imitate art...

Another gesture, for U.K. residents who don't want to embarrass the Queen but do want to embarrass the prime minister: https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/171928. 1,658,056 signatures so far.

A clarification might help. Was Comey demonstrating his integrity when he announced a few days before the election that evidence he hadn't looked at would incriminate Hillary? Was he demonstrating his corruption when he didn't charge her after trying and failing to find that evidence? Does he not get any credit for being scrupulously careful not to publicly investigate anything which might harm Trump? Comey doesn't bother with subtleties like separation of police and judiciary. If, as you imply, every F.B.I. agent thinks Comey is corrupt, how trustworthy are those agents who are just following orders?

From Donald Trump's plan to build huge wall at Irish golf course scrapped amid concern for rare snail

[irony warning] Not at all. From JOSEPH MCCARTHY - AMERICAN PATRIOT Comey's breaking protocols and politicising the FBI to help prevent wrong thinking people electing un-American Clinton is right thinking McCarthyism. Trump is pro Putin out of expedience, but give him a safe chance with an actual communist like Fidel Castro (deceased) and his vitriol demonstrates he's pro-American. [/irony warning]

The FBI would be better employed investigating whether their own, very public, evidence free fishing expedition for dodgy emails just before the election was enough to get Trump elected. Perhaps FBI head should be an overtly political appointment.

Your post seems to be pure classical physics, except for the mention of superconductivity. From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cathode_ray The idea that matter is not infinitely divisible is surely a classical concept, originated in 5th century B.C.E. by Leucippus and his pupil Democritus, or earlier.

I've been reading (or at least skimming) this thread and there's almost no mention of a former official republican in a supposedly neutral position who breached protocols and perhaps the law in a carefully timed way to cause Clinton maximum damage. FBI Director James Comey originally, after very public investigation(1) decided that (in his prejudicial opinion) the Justice Department would not prosecute Clinton over email security. He did not say she was innocent and without the case being referred to them the Justice Department could not say whether or not Comey was right. The, ten days before the election (2) he announces that he is reopening the investigation although no new evidence against Clinton has been found. This time the justice department gets involved, presumably to demonstrate that evidence not known to exist indeed does not exist. To some people this is serious as the justice department is involved, not just Comey whose only proper task is to gather evidence and make private recommendations. Two days before the election it's announced that no new evidence against Clinton has been found. Perhaps he'll have better luck later.... It's possible to claim of course that Comey thought protocols didn't apply to him and that he didn't think announcing a new meritless investigation eleven days before an election would have any effect on the result. (1) a breach of protocol. (2) an even worse breach of protocol From http://www.npr.org/2016/11/14/502018139/trump-advisors-mulling-whether-to-keep-fbi-director-james-comey?utm_medium=RSS&utm_campaign=news

and from the winner.

From http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/...bi-investigation-security-clearance/86709410/ Comey is simply stating that political expedience ultimately decides how he deals with possible crimes or security risks. As a Republican, it was expedient for him to raise the prospect of possible charges against Hilary a week ago and declare her cleared yesterday even though there is exactly as much evidence now (ie none) as there was a week ago. Similarly he is likely to ignore evidence concerning Russia helping the possible future Republican POTUS by hacking American computers. (Is he really saying that an FBI investigation is sufficient to cost any POTUS but Hilary her job?)

Where is the split? Perhaps Heisenberg's cut? I don't think there's any way to have detectable macroscopic non-quantum effects without requiring a suitable observer subject to unknown physics. Cats might not be regarded as suitable observers.

If you read my quoted post, you will note that my (implicit) conjecture was that the FBI did not illegally read emails. I may well be wrong.

Senior F.B.I: "Now remember, you must lie under oath if necessary." Juniors: "Of course. Our word is our bond."

Getting 100% in homework and 30% in exams might make someone suspicious.

Either way.. Trump: (I can't even attempt his style.)

I was not aware that there were multiple versions of the Copenhagen Interpretation. From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copenhagen_interpretation#Current_status_of_the_term The maths makes me wonder if it might be possible to design an experiment to test when the superposition ends. Maybe a variation on the Bell's Theorem experiment, where entangled particles in a superposition are measured, then a second measurement is made before the first result is seen by the experimenter (This assumes that a new superposition is not created automatically after the first measurement). If the second measurement showed that there was still a superposition, this would support the intelligent observer version of CI. If not, maybe science writers will eventually stop asking "Can the universe exist without a human observer" (not that we can observe the universe - all we can observe are photons and cosmic rays). Also, without a good theory to test, any experiment will only rule out a few possibilities.