TheVat

Well at least he seems receptive to the possibility that this might be more metascience than science. If so, then the move to Philosophy could be fairly painless. Unless we receive a last minute bulletin that mind-preons have been discovered...

I don't think the perception of cognitive impairment is only with the GOP. The Hill writer's take on Bidens fogginess is kind, but I don't think it is accurate. One need only browse through the responses of liberal pundits in such places as the NYT, The Guardian, The Atlantic, Reuters, The WaPo, Politico, et al to see a shift in how Bidens slowness on his feet (and completely missing obvious opportunities to strike back at Trump's nonsense) is being seen. Here's Tom Nichols, who I quoted over in the sister thread to this one: https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/archive/2024/06/the-end-of-the-biden-era/678851/ GIFT LINK, NO SUBSCR REQUIRED ---> https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/archive/2024/06/the-end-of-the-biden-era/678851/?gift=43H6YzEv1tnFbOn4MRsWYq63Ez881LcDKL8p3Z_YDJE&utm_source=copy-link&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=share ETA: And, afterthought: This is politics. Perception is everything in politics. If an old Lefty like me can admit that I saw a befuddled and often vacant Joe Biden Thursday night, then how easily will that political middle, which may well decide the election in a half dozen swing states, have a similar perception? Here's Matt Bai, well known pundit, in WaPo yesterday... https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/06/28/democrats-should-welcome-convention-floor-fight-chicago/ For the past year, at least, the so-called wisest Democrats in Washington have not simply been telling me that President Biden is a strong candidate for president, or even their best candidate — but also that he is the only candidate who can possibly beat Donald Trump, because he is the only one who has done it before. This was always a childlike rationale. Trump has only beaten one very flawed Democrat, and his party has lost every national election since, so it’s not like you have to be the love child of Lyndon Johnson and Margaret Thatcher to have a chance at beating him. But within the first 20 seconds of Thursday’s debate, as Biden shuffled slowly and unsteadily toward the lectern, it must have occurred even to the president’s admirers that, far from being the only candidate who can win, he might not even rank in the top 10. The question everyone’s asking is: What comes next? If the answer is chaos and contention, I think Democrats would be wise to bring it on.... Now, they find themselves in the predictable position of having realized — possibly too late — that the imagery of a Biden campaign will overwhelm anything he has to say about policy or judgment. Democrats committed the age-old political sin of confusing hope with strategy, and the country is now at risk of paying for it. Biden might yet be persuaded to step aside and let the party choose another nominee. But that would likely mean a scramble for votes and a floor fight at the convention (assuming the party couldn’t unify behind Vice President Harris by the time of a virtual nomination vote in August). This scares Democrats to death. It shouldn’t....

Tom Nichols wrote an incisive piece in The Atlantic on where Biden is now. https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/archive/2024/06/the-end-of-the-biden-era/678851/ Biden, however, was simply not present. Opportunity after opportunity to call out Trump passed him by as he garbled a basket of statistics and talking points. The president’s staff clearly overprepared their candidate, stuffing his head with factoids about Pell Grants and climate targets and tax rates and other things that are completely irrelevant in a debate with a deranged bully... I now accept that the Biden we saw last night is as good as we’ll get in the election, and that Americans—unfortunately—are likely to decide that an entertaining autocrat is less of a risk than a decent old man. If Biden should step down, how does that happen, and who replaces him? This is where I freeze. Every option, whether Biden stays or goes, seems to lead to electoral disaster and a Trump victory. But it’s time to think about the unthinkable. Replacing Biden is going to be almost literally impossible unless he willingly steps down. Biden controls nearly all of the pledged Democratic delegates; to reopen the nomination process, he would have to end his candidacy and then release them. But release them to whom? And here, we run into the Kamala Harris problem.... (I can load this post with pull-quotes, but am running out of time, so if you hit an Atlantic paywall, just tell me and I will put up a "gift" link for you) Gift link: https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/archive/2024/06/the-end-of-the-biden-era/678851/?gift=43H6YzEv1tnFbOn4MRsWYq63Ez881LcDKL8p3Z_YDJE&utm_source=copy-link&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=share

Re Sanders, if age is an issue with Biden then it could be one with Bernie who will turn 83 this September. Though Bernie, in terms of mental sharpness, seems to be more in the category of superagers like Jerry Brown (who I recently saw give a lecture at the University of Chicago, at age 86, and with the energy and mental acuity of a man half his age). Anyway, to your main question, I lean towards one of those Midwest centrists who can approach the political middle without having what some will see as coastal elitism or leftist baggage. Not because I prefer such but because holy crap dear God sweet fucking jumped up Jesus on a motorbike do we need Trump to lose. So I would cast a vote for Whitmer (smart, savvy, plain-spoken and good at bipartisanship...and not too hard on the eyes, imho). Or Klobuchar, for similar reasons. I doubt that. One need only observe how Michelle Obama polls when hypothetical Trump matchups are presented.

https://academic.oup.com/book/12822/chapter-abstract/163059537?redirectedFrom=fulltext The view put forth in this thread is panpsychism. One of the influential papers in current panpsychist theory is this one, by Galen Strawson. (my link is to a chapter summary for a collection of his papers) This chapter discusses the following statements: a materialist holds that every concrete phenomenon is wholly physical or material and a realistic materialist is a full-fledged realist about consciousness. Therefore it follows that a realistic materialist must hold that consciousness is a wholly physical phenomenon, and that at least some arrangements of matter are conscious or constitute consciousness. The chapter asks: what follows from this? It must be assumed in a standard way that all matter is made of the same stuff (leptons and quarks, or strings, or...) and it must follow that all matter can be arranged in a consciousness-constituting way. It is then argued that for certain things A, you cannot get A from non-A, and that consciousness is one of those things. Therefore no matter can be wholly non-conscious in its ‘intrinsic’ or ‘ultimate’ nature. If so, any realistic — any truly serious — materialist must be a panpsychist. An intriguing view but I don't see how it can be buttressed by the empirical methods of science. It seems to be a philosophical argument that proposes panpsychism as a core principle which, if adopted, then allows one to pass a wand over a great variety of puzzles and mysteries and say it all makes sense now! That could be deeply satisfying but it is still not science. Pehaps "metascience" would be more the term?

Seriously? Your research is YouTube videos? And ignoring what looks to be hard data that someone earlier posted for you, I guess. And my dream dies. 😀

D.B. Cooper would beg to differ.

It's a risk, for sure. He has been a statesman for these 3.5 years, firm hand on the tiller, and it would be best if he can leave on that note. Maybe he has lived long enough and honed his political intelligence which will allow him to be self-aware and confront that he can no longer think on his feet. I am noticing prominent progressives, like Nick Kristof, who are suggesting he step aside. Others are speaking with silence, never a good sign. And Politico mentioned Euro officials and diplomats sharing their dismay. We Yanquis are faced with choosing between foggy Joe and a ranting fool who claimed last night that he would settle the war between Russia and Ukraine while still president-elect.

By any chance have you looked up the comparative stats for car fires in IC cars and EVs? Or between newer EVs and the earlier models?

Android tablet. I'll try the Brave browser you mentioned. I do have an alternative browser, DuckDuckGo, which I would use more often in such situations but it's rather clunky and so stripped-down that it's missing features I am used to in Chrome. Thanks @Phi for All for checking. Liked your curly hair joke, btw.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/jun/27/biden-trump-debate-democrats-reaction I share their concerns after last night's debate. To folks less acquainted with facts or the issues, Trump manages in a very shallow way to appear forceful, authoritative and verbally agile. Hoping listeners can peel away that layer and notice the lies, evading of many questions, and underlying lack of coherent policy ideas. Biden was painful to watch - he has declined visibly in the past couple years and he was never silver-tongued to start with. He seemed to struggle, often coming across as a grumpy old man, which obscured many valid points he made about his record v Trump's. The sense I had of someone desperate to get his words out and sometimes staring off in an odd way as if searching for an answer, and sometimes a suitable facial expression, is something I've seen in relatives and acquaintances on the cusp of dementia. Trump has always lived in a narcissistic fantasy world, but can feign normality. Biden is a long term resident of the real world but now looks slow on his feet, bumbling, and to be feeling his way through fog. I fear that undecideds who do not prize facts and evidence will be fooled by appearances and Trump's knack for hammering on his narrow selection of American Carnage themes. For the love of democracy and your country, Joe, please step aside at the convention and direct your delegates to someone like Whitmer, Newsom, Beshear, Harris, Booker, Klobuchar, or any of a dozen strong alternatives who show intelligence, competence, and authority.

Took me a couple tries to just post this. On the brain/protein thread I couldn't post at all. Sometimes the text box wouldn't open or the quote selection feature would refuse to work. Seemed to relate to drop-down ads atop the page that would freeze all activity until I closed them, but sometimes not. And of course there seems to be a new and aggressive wave of full page blocking ads, a lot of them seem to want me to join a popular service that rhymes with snick-snock (don't want to inflame them further by including actual name).

It's intriguing, the radio signal hypothesis, but why should one appeal to a metaphysical conjecture at all? Thanks, I am familiar with the phenomenon. But the current research tends to reinforce my point that it just makes more sense to look at neurological correlates to these temporary "awakenings " than to appeal to metaphysical conjectures of brains-as-dualistic-radios. In 2021, a hypothesis was proposed that near-death discharges of neurotransmitters and corticotropin-releasing peptides act upon preserved circuits of the medial prefrontal cortex and hippocampus, promoting memory retrieval and mental clarity. These would not be a genuine reversal of dementia but rather a period of unusual neural activity shortly preceding death. Here is the paper.. https://alz-journals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/alz.12162 It may be hard to test such hypothesis, given the sensitivity to approaching patients and families during final days, but it is at least in principle a path to a scientific understanding. (if this led to some treatment for dementia, no one would be happier than I to abandon the orthodox view of irreversibility) Yes, well said. There may be paths to metaphysical insight, but they seem to lie outside of science and very elusive in terms of reproducible results among people from different cultures.

That distinction, between brain and mind, is an assumption you are making. Your bias is towards dualism, so your phrasing implies that brain and mind are somehow different and should have different lines of inquiry. As far as I can tell, the science of the brain IS the science of the mind, because mind is just an umbrella term for brain processes. When the brain stops getting oxygen and nutrients, or when amyloid protein plaques wrap themselves around neurons, these processes stop. No intentions, volitions, memories, qualia, awareness...nothing. The day that severe Alzheimer's patients start to miraculously wake up with their memories and personalities restored will be the day that there is an empirical basis for questioning brain-as-mind.

Did I see Hameroff's theory of quantum computing in microtubules pop up here? Not really much there but conjecture and pixie dust. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuart_Hameroff Hameroff and Penrose's model has been met with skepticism from many disciplines. Rick Grush and Patricia Churchland, argued that "physiological evidence indicates that consciousness does not directly depend on microtubule properties in any case". In 2000, physicist Max Tegmark calculated that quantum states in microtubules would survive for only 10−13 seconds, too brief to be of any significance for neural processes... Christof Koch and Klaus Hepp also agreed that quantum coherence does not play, or does not need to play any major role in neurophysiology. Koch and Hepp concluded that "the empirical demonstration of slowly decoherent and controllable quantum bits in neurons connected by electrical or chemical synapses, or the discovery of an efficient quantum algorithm for computations performed by the brain, would do much to bring these speculations from the 'far-out' to the mere 'very unlikely'." In 2022, a group of Italian physicists conducted several experiments that failed to provide evidence in support of a gravity-related quantum collapse model of consciousness, weakening the possibility of a quantum explanation for consciousness.... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orchestrated_objective_reduction While more generally accepted theories assert that consciousness emerges as the complexity of the computations performed by cerebral neurons increases, Orch OR posits that consciousness is based on non-computable quantum processing performed by qubits formed collectively on cellular microtubules, a process significantly amplified in the neurons. The qubits are based on oscillating dipoles forming superposed resonance rings in helical pathways throughout lattices of microtubules.... Orchestrated objective reduction has been criticized from its inception by mathematicians, philosophers, and scientists. The criticism concentrated on three issues: Penrose's interpretation of Gödel's theorem; Penrose's abductive reasoning linking non-computability to quantum events; and the brain's unsuitability to host the quantum phenomena required by the theory, since it is considered too "warm, wet and noisy" to avoid decoherence.

Indeed, it seemed like he fell back on a devil of the gaps theory to explain some of the lesser understood aspects of heterosexual attraction. Certainly showing less rigor there than, say, his interpretation of Tito Puente's theory of how rhythms are perceived as enjoyable in Oye Como Va, which seems to have held up under decades of peer review. Probably to be expected given that cognitive science has gone farther towards understanding music (due to its basis in mathematical relationships between pitches and intervals) than human sexual dynamics. 😏

The sociologist Carlos Santana has postulated that romantic relationships germinate when an interested party is willing to give their world in order to lift up the other. He draws parallels between the gravitational effects of the moon on the ocean and the emotional valence of one in the throes of romantic attraction.

There is also a McCarthyesque enemies list being compiled as we speak. https://apnews.com/article/trump-biden-president-project-2025-33d3fc2999a74f4aa424f1128dca2d16# WASHINGTON (AP) — From his home office in small-town Kentucky, a seasoned political operative is quietly investigating scores of federal employees suspected of being hostile to the policies of Republican Donald Trump, an effort that dovetails with broader conservative preparations for a new White House. Tom Jones and his American Accountability Foundation are digging into the backgrounds, social media posts and commentary of key high-ranking government employees, starting with the Department of Homeland Security. They’re relying in part on tips from his network of conservative contacts, including workers. In a move that alarms some, they’re preparing to publish the findings online. With a $100,000 grant from the influential Heritage Foundation, the goal is to post 100 names of government workers to a website this summer to show a potential new administration who might be standing in the way of a second-term Trump agenda — and ripe for scrutiny, reclassifications, reassignments or firings.

Love and intimacy do not thrive from a transactional approach. You don't approach it with the attitude of I've invested time and money in my appearance and status, so we should have a great relationship. That tends to be heard as "I want a prostitute, now! One who is reasonable in price, and looks good on my arm!" That's an attitude that must be abandoned rather than concealed. Forget your body and instead seek the intangibles that make a partner happy and your times together mutually enjoyable. Cultivate fun and games and real sharing, not defined abs. Bodies, if you walk them every day and feed them healthy stuff, will generally be fine. Maybe a little pilates or calisthenics, for muscle tone. I had several relationships before I settled into LT monogamy and never had a companion indicate that I should sculpt or shave my torso. I looked like a scrawny non-leading man, somewhere near Sam Rockwell on the spectrum (the actor I most resemble, per reliable sources) and fairly charisma-free. If you have flaws or lacks (who doesn't), make them a fertile source of jokes - showing you are aware of them but not trapped or undermined by them. Sam Rockwell can have fun and adventure just as well as Brad Pitt or Chris Hemsworth. (albeit not on a movie screen)(well, wait, he did have some remarkable achievements as Zaphod Beeblebrox...)

I have this sudden premonition that the rest of this thread will be about sampling bias. Cue: "plate of shrimp" monologue in Repo Man. ETA: So I read down the thread and... it's like I am psychic. Science should really look into this!

No on the manure. Causes algae blooms and oxygen depletion, with far worse effects on coastal waters than the oil itself. Citation please.

In a way, Russians are less susceptible to propaganda because they kind of expect the manipulation, the gaslighting, the agitprop. I lived near a large Russian community for a few years and they would describe a sort of "immune system" Russian people develop with government misinformation. Their perception was that Americans are far more vulnerable to such and often lack that cynical immune response. I just meant that when you annihilate a city with a strategic nuke, things can get out of hand and the probability of losing your entire nation is too high. Symmetrical response would require a level of trust between two nuclear powers that they clearly don't have if one of them has nuked a city. It is kind of a Catch-22: if we trusted each other enough to have a symmetrical response policy, then we wouldn't need the nuclear weapons in the first place. That said, they can have Las Vegas. (Just kidding.)

You seem to have described most long-term relationships. Ohe aspect of this that amuses me is the way my wife will lose something and I can usually find it in a couple minutes. Or the reverse. She is too focused on what she wants the missing item for, while I'm just registering some ingrained pattern of activity.

This is information that would have been helpful earlier in the thread. You need to consult with a mental health professional. Addressing the ADHD should take priority over trying to reshape yourself as some sort of ideal dating prospect. Men do not need to shave their torso to be attractive to women, btw. Your writing style had me wondering if there might be ADHD. A professional can help you with, among other things, your style of communication - this could have a useful effect on your social interactions. And they can get into the thickets with you about specific situations you are getting into, which is far more valuable than putting vague and meandering descriptions of your struggles on the Internet. Four out of those five are what make sex such fun. That you find them infuriating is, again, something to work out with a therapist. One day you might be able to enjoy the silliness along with the raunchiness.

You would have to reverse it, I reckon. And the hours would be reversed, so the gnomon shadow would count down instead of up? So after noon, the shadow would move forward to 11 AM when it was actually 1 pm, and so on. "second hand sun dial" - didn't know they were that accurate, hehe.