TheVat

I can't get behind the Dark Forest conjecture. Too many assumptions. Assumes that advanced starfaring races are greedy consumerists. Assumes that scarce resources are worth the enormous energy expenditures of traversing vast interstellar distances and decades-long or centuries-long haulage. Assumes our solar system has something that's rare elsewhere, which doesn't seem to fit with current research on exoplanets. Assumes aliens are racist dickheads* who have no moral restraint about running roughshod on us. No, I think WE are our own Dark Forest. * being aliens, I guess that could potentially be literal

Heh. I was able to steer the general public away from the grimoires. (the trial lawyers sometimes use them for jury selection)

Plus one to @mistermack for telling a good story. Cannot help but think the several pints of beer are relevant. I like the notion of dedicated pranksters waiting on lonely roads with cables and black shiny blobs they drag in front of approaching cars. Not sfartfetched at all! Weirdest experiences for me have been people I encountered, like when working in a county courthouse in my youth. I did LEXIS searches, helped the public find law books (those wanting to do their own research), and there was the occasional crackpot (this was the West Coast). One of them said I was clearly an ancient soul who had been part of the ruling class in Teotihuacan, the ancient Mesoamerican city. She said it was easy to spot people like me, and that we had special powers, and we worked behind the scenes. I said something like "wayyyy behind the scenes." Then the phone rang, and I was rescued, and also saved from the temptation of seeing if my special powers meant she had to go get me a sandwich if I asked.

I hope the group interested enough to watch are those uninformed and undecided. I'm sticking with checking paper summaries, since I followed this story, already aware of the serious crimes against democracy that were committed. To me, the big question will be if the bright lights succeed in showing enough people what a pack of lying scoundrels TFG and his minions are. Enough to keep TFG or one of puppets from pulling a Grover Cleveland.

I don't doubt that. Just addressing the subset of those who obtain such weapons because that's the only way they can perform heinous acts. Other categories of gun bearers, say Ukrainians fending off the Russian assault, may be quite brave and of amazing mental toughness. Nope. It's pretty much the Far Right. I'm American and mos def did not have any part in allowing this madness. In fact I've marched in a demonstration against lax gun laws and received insults and taunts from conservative bullies riding up and down past the marchers all along the route. While exercising my first amendment freedom, they displayed zero respect for it, and made considerable effort to intimidate us with barely veiled threats. (And THESE are the people whining about cancel culture??) At another demonstration (different theme) some of these same fine upstanding citizens shot at people with paintball guns.

I don't go in for beliefs on the whole question, just healthy skepticism. If this case is a group delusion, that doesn't invalidate the ET hypothesis. It just means this case is not relevant evidence for it. I found Brian Dunning's analysis, and scrutiny of the data, to be useful in uncovering some procedural problems. https://skeptoid.com/episodes/4760 I recommend reading all of it, to get at some of the key difficulties. John Mack's interviews, for example, seemed to be influenced by his strongly expressed beliefs in the veracity of abduction reports and other contact stories. Also punctured is the myth of the students as simple rural folk who were unfamiliar with modern media representation of UFOs and aliens. An actual look at the student demographics provided quite a contrasting picture. Again, it's a worthwhile read, if only in terms of understanding how interview data can be skewed when a researcher is looking for a certain narrative. I will be glad to see the documentary if I can find it somewhere accessible. I only ask readers here to bear in mind that bad data, no matter how tempting, has to be discarded.

No. There is a case made that the lightshow stimulated ideas of aliens landing in the minds of imaginative children, which led to games of make-believe and an imagined encounter a day or two later. Read an objective report on the procedural errors in how "witnesses" were later interviewed (and how some of the pupils, oddly, reported seeing nothing). Maybe this link has some primary sources at the bottom of the entry: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ariel_School_UFO_incident My impression is that it's all a little too neat - a silvery craft, telepathic and wise aliens, an environmental message. Fits pop culture a little too well.

I think the Ariel (ha!) sighting came up in the other recent UAP thread - I may have mentioned there that it seemed to be largely debunked, given some procedural problems with the interviews (and possible coaching from a psychologist who favored the ET hypothesis) and that it followed shortly after the impressive aerial lightshow across that part of Africa put on by a Russian satellite breaking up on reentry.

Well said. Most non-ballistic weapons (except maybe the crossbow) require getting up close and personal. It is much harder to walk up to a person and stab them, than stand at some distance and basically squeeze a lever on a killing machine. For all the "patriotic" macho talk we hear from gun enthusiasts, their weapons are the tool of choice of cowards and the emotionally fragile.

This always struck me as a quaint bug in the ST premise. If one could really teleport so easily, you would think it would be scalable to greater distances (and get around lightspeed limit via "subspace"). Sticking with starships, in the scripting, was really just so that the plots could project 20th century gunboat diplomacy into the 24th century.

Court cases pivot on careful fact finding, regarding specific charges. The case was about defamation, by definition a public act of harm against reputation. A trial on abuse would be focused on private acts of harm directed to the person. Its rules of evidence would be different, and simply saying you hit someone would not be satisfying any rules of evidence - you would need CONTEXT. If someone hit someone defensively, while fending off physical attack, for example, that would not be abuse. Or there could be other circumstances which mitigated the harm - we have court trials to work out these matters, because some random people on a web forum do not have the tools for doing so.

A couple decades participating in online forums has taught me this, which I now formalize as Vat's Law: The probability of permanent forum departure is inversely proportional to the total wordcount announcing/discussing said departure. Because I would like @koti to stick around, and have valued his contributions in other threads, from time to time, I find much reassurance in the wordcount so far devoted to his departure. (I was just kidding about the fancy fonts and fridge magnets)

If aliens have developed a civilization where communicating with us is feasible, then they are technophilic like us, and we are going to have enough similarities (use of math and complex language, articulated appendages, aptitude for applying scientific methods, economic systems that allow massive technological projects like starships and/or radio astronomy) that there would be common ground. It's true we might serve, for them, as a glimpse into what might be their ancient times, and so we might chiefly interact with their anthropologists or equivalents. An analogy might be human scientists of the past couple centuries who visited stone age tribes dwelling in remote jungles and learned much about our hunter-gatherer roots from them.

A woman is arrested for attacking her husband with his guitars. Judge: First offender? Woman: No, I started with the Gibson. Then a Fender.

You're leaving? Are you quite sure? You've only declared your departure 47 times, so how can we be sure this isn't just some stray impulse that will pass? I think we need some large official-looking fonts, perhaps a notice from an attorney, maybe a taped press conference? I know: mail out refrigerator magnets.

What puzzles me is that, as a Post subscriber, I don't recall Heard saying one mean thing about Depp (or singling out anyone, actually) in her Op-Ed piece. It struck me, at the time, as more an indictment of showbiz culture and exploitation. I am continuing to increase my baseline level of skepticism about our nation's present jury system. I would like to say all my thoughts on the Depp/Heard case are unbiased and I have strived not to take sides or draw any conclusions on what a jackass Depp is. (JK) I would guess that incidents of spousal abuse of men are understudied, not least because they are vastly underreported. This skewing would seem pretty obvious, and yet maybe difficult to quantify. My guess is that, if you conducted a survey of men that contained the question "Would you contact law enforcement if your wife hit you?" the ink that had been used to print the YES box would be largely wasted. Though a good social scientist would hopefully derive multiple questions with greater specificity, like how would they respond if hit with a fist, or a rolling pin, or an unabridged dictionary, etc. I guess if sledgehammer or andiron was one of the options, there would be police involvement whether or not the victim was able to make the phone call.

Or, technically, "them yonder hills." Is this thread suitable for merger with The Meaning Behind thread that INow posted? (I guess I should run a search on that thread to learn the truth behind INow and StringJunky. And whether Phi for All is offering everyone wavefunctions or golden ratios. I already have the former. ) Andrew Mellon established a vast business empire and was Secretary of the Treasury during the boom years of the 1920s. I would think he had some capacity for logic.

Thanks. It would be, if the simulation was of better quality. Re your moniker, I initially thought it might be a blues musician name, like the famous Blind Lemon Jefferson. Glad to know you're not a lemon, or lazy. Though the former would probably invite the latter. I am looking forward to learning how @StringJunky acquired his username. I've heard addictions to string, twine, any sort of cordage, can be debilitating.

I am a brain in a vat. Pretty straightforward. Or, from an epistemological standpoint, I have no way to determine that I am not a brain in a vat, being fed sensory data through wires which simulate having a body. And a very bossy cat.

Are we certain that Tourette's doesn't manifest in writing YOU GRAVY LICKING PIG BASTARD!? Jesting aside, most Tourette's involves tics like throat clearing or excess blinking, and not speech, so writing wouldn't impact it in any way. The form of Tourette's highlighted by popular media, called coprolalia, is actually quite rare.

Good question. Lack of sufficient evidence is the legal criterion maybe. I don't think disproof is required. (I didn't follow this case, but that is what I recall of other libel cases) Odd, though, that the evidence was sufficient in the UK for Depp to lose his libel case there. I didn't think evidence rules were that different over there.

It seems fortunate that Depp does not, in reality, have scissors for hands.

More on the emergentist argument against the Chinese Room. There is no iron-clad analogy between a computer program and a mind that is required here. Therefore, the semantic argument becomes obsolete: Even though a program as a syntactical construct doesn’t create semantics (and therefore couldn’t be equal to a mind), it doesn’t follow that a program can’t create semantic contents in the course of its execution. Moreover, this emergentist argument is not that the computer hardware is the carrier of the mental processes. The hardware is not enabled to think this way. Rather, the computer creates the mental processes as an emergent phenomenon, similarly to how the brain creates mental processes as an emergent phenomenon. So, if one considers the question in the title of Searle’s original essay “Can Computers Think?”, the answer would be “No, but they might create thinking.” In order to make this more plausible, imagine a program that exactly simulates the trajectories and interactions of elementary particles in a brain of a Chinese speaker. This way, the program does not only create the same outputs for the same inputs as the Chinese’s brain, but proceeds completely analogously. There is no immediate way to exclude the possibility that the simulated brain can’t create a mind in exactly the same way as a real brain can. The only assumption here is that the physical processes in a brain are deterministic. Searle's argument is ultimately veering into metaphysics because it is one with causal implications, namely that only a biological brain can cause a conscious mind. This seems to confer a special causal power upon brains, which the OP and others have yet to demonstrate. When other molecular machines engage in complex internal signaling between elements, Searle would insist that that it's only syntax and nothing like a mind can emerge. And yet, very strange, there are executive parts of my brain which help me to understand English but are in themselves not at all conscious - they route signals, handle symbols, but do not attach meaning to them. Indeed, my understanding of English seems to emerge from these unconscious processes and does not happen in a specific cluster of cells. Those executive areas, like the person in the Chinese Room, do not understand English at all, but we don't say that I (the totality of my neurological processes) don't understand English. Hmm.

When you speak of an "infusion of conscious will" you are engaging in metaphysics. Not sure how to make that clearer. I didn't say DNA engages in directed design, I said that a blind evolutionary process can in effect design a molecular machine, and the burden is on you to prove that is somehow different from any other design, so far as conscious cognition is concerned. You're entering a special pleading for biological neural nets, that only they can modify their own software and hardware. Yet current AI research has been moving in that direction for decades. It's as if you're saying no future innovation is possible, an assertion that the history of science has proved to be laughable, over and over. You can't keep moving the goalposts, saying, sorry, consciousness is whatever I do, and not what you do. And it seems to me the Emergentist argument makes the semantic argument (the Chinese Room) obsolete. Will try to get back to that later.

Zarathustra, if the soundtrack can be trusted.