TheVat

The information exclusion weakness is one of many to be found in IIT. Cerullo does a good job showing the lack of empirical support for the theory. I occasionally follow Scott Aaronson, a foremost theoretical computer scientist, who has a really good blog, and he does a robust critique of IIT. https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=1799

Published in Nature today. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06692-3 Simpler language version from NASA news site: https://exoplanets.nasa.gov/news/1771/discovery-alert-watch-the-synchronized-dance-of-a-6-planet-system/ The discovery: Six planets orbit their central star in a rhythmic beat, a rare case of an “in sync” gravitational lockstep that could offer deep insight into planet formation and evolution. Key facts: A star smaller and cooler than our Sun hosts a truly strange family of planets: six “sub-Neptunes” – possibly smaller versions of our own Neptune – moving in a cyclic rhythm. This orbital waltz repeats itself so precisely it can be readily set to music.

What?

Stopped feeding them - seriously? You make them sound like stray cats. If you didn't intend a racist slur on these people, then perhaps you should learn some of their history. These people owned and ran farms and grew olives and dates and other cash crops. They sustained themselves for generations and then were driven off their lands and shoved into a tiny space without consent or due process of law. They didn't go there because Israel "made it nice." The Naqba ravaged their lives and means of economic autonomy and created a misery and anger that comes from that genuine condition and is amped up by each new round of brutality and heavy civilian casualties that Israel's many attacks have brought, and the ongoing degradation of being shoved into horrible conditions of overcrowding and restricted rights and various embargos. It's rather like someone knocking you down, putting their boot on your face and whenever you punch at their leg they cry, Look! Look how awful a person he is! He is a vicious leg puncher! No wonder I have to keep this boot here! Oy!

Analysis is breaking down something into its elements and then making a detailed examination of those elements. Analysis as such seems too abstract and complex a process to be achieved by a single neuron. (and because analysis breaks down a whole into parts, it doesn't seem like the optimal path to a holistic sense of an aware self) I wonder if the process that is more relevant to consciousness (see Godel Escher Bach, by Hofstadter) is recursion, another one that seems to require a network of neurons. Our awareness of self seems to have a recursive quality. We are aware of our perceptions. We are aware that we are aware. We are aware that we are aware that we are aware. And so on. The mind is thus involving a process of self-reflexivity or recursion.

If you put a word in quotation marks, you are changing its meaning. So I then don't know what you mean by "analyze." Also, it would help if you define "system" in this context. Cells have more than one system that regulates their various activities.

Analysis is a high-order cognitive process that, so far as we know from this planet, only one or two species with large brain/body ratios can manage. So, no, an individual neuron cannot analyze anything. It can no more analyze than it can compose a symphony. You might want to find a basic introduction to neurosciences. Your Brain, Explained by Marc Dingman is an example. Another neuroscientist, V S Ramachandran, has several accessible books out on the topic that have been quite popular.

Why must this be binary? Why support either government, Hamas or a Far Right Likud government, both so invested in killing civilians and perpetuating a looping cycle of revenge now at least 75 years old? You are not obligated to support either government. Hamas, in reality, all their insane vicious bluster aside, is focused on regaining what Palestinians want, their land back. The fact that their approach is terroristic and counterproductive is not some stamp of virtue on Israel nor does it absolve Israel of its decades long role in creating oppression and dispossession.

If both our inner motivations and life influences are determined, then there would seem to be no relative degrees of freedom. In compatibilism, some actions may feel more free than others, but all are woven in the web of causality. Even if I use a coin flip to make a decision I feel I can't.

Yup. Linen is more absorbent than cotton and also allows more rapid evaporation of that moisture. Linen makes a somewhat rougher weave, as it is looser woven, but the loss of smooth finish is more than compensated by its cooling qualities IMO.

Where do they go when you're depressed?

Helpful stuff @Sensei - thank you. As you did, I checked the SSL certificate for SFN, at the Godaddy SSL tools page. The Firefox tweak is wonderful - there is an old site I visit sometimes, with expired certificates, and now I can use FFox, instead of switching to DDG. (the owner of that site hates to pay for anything like renewing the SSL cert.)

Looks like the OP is more for a speculative philosophy thread. Some sort of half-baked Berkleyian idealism, where the moon ceases to exist on a night when no one happens to be looking up. Mar might want to look up quantum decoherence, if they are thinking QT somehow will provide a foundation for such a theory.

This is a problem on Chrome browser, so I've switched over to Firefox, hoping I can post this. Chrome is generating some kind of error regarding the site's certificate, and refusing to allow me to post in a thread. If the site's certificate has been allowed to lapse, that will be a huge problem. IIRC, only browsers like duckduckgo can plow through certificate problems and let you post anyway. If this doesn't post, I will use a device at home that has DDG on it. Looks like Firefox is okay. Has anyone else had problems with Chrome today? LATER Back on Chrome, going to test this again. OK, now it is working okay. What a weird glitch.

I've heard wurst.

Is this referring to the double entendre on machinist? I liked that. Unsure what a soupçon of Poe face is, however. My head can also be flown over, it seems. Back to topic... if there are sentience cases in future courtrooms, I imagine the free will debate will enter into that. E.g. could a bad robot have chosen to do differently than drop the family dachshund down the trash chute? If it's not sentient, then it would seem clear that its misinterpreting the request be sure to throw out the hot dogs is a fault of the company that programmed it. The heads of coders will roll!

Yep, this shite is generational. BTW, who keeps dropping in DVs and then splitting? Just cancelled Swanson's DV because it did not seem to me the post was abrasive or misleading, and it ended with a good question (which I'm unable to answer).

Not what I was saying, but rather that anyone who won, or ran in the general election, will have some donors who favor strong support of Israel. While that segment matters more to some candidates than others, all are aware of the effect on their next election and downstream elections if they try to move their party away from our treaties and alliance with Israel. It's a political third rail, as they say.

As Stringy mentions, this will be an area of intense legal scrutiny and debate. I think the question of sentience, though some may dismiss it, will be important to many people simply on the basis of our natural human curiosity and desire to know who we're talking to - especially if we're uncertain there is a "who" there at all. To give an example, if a very old Mr Vat had an android home assistant, "Hal," show up and begin to live in his home, he would very much like to know if Hal was sentient. And his views on Hal's legal rights would definitely pivot on that question. And it seems Mr Vat would be afflicted with a condition that caused speaking of himself in the third person.

There are some painful truths here (Mack's post included a couple that apparently stung, DV cancelled because blunt opinions are allowed here). Biden was always going to support Israel - every US president has entered office with the understanding that the US is a longterm ally of Israel and that the alliance has long been important to our weapons industries, to the American Jewish community of 8 million people, and to many of the large donors that almost every POTUS has depended on to win. Yes, these influences can lead to our morally smelly policies regarding a Far Right Israeli militant government that seems to think dispossession, bullying, lockdowns, carpet bombing civilian areas, and severe economic repression are all legitimate instruments of foreign policy. Hamas is the twisted child that grows from that kind of violent soil. If the Presidents were not bought from day one, there could be one who pushed a different approach, e.g. defunding Israel until it starts to learn actual diplomacy and other nonviolent tools. As it is, North Gaza is essentially destroyed, over a million are homeless and facing a grim future in refugee camps, and....this is ridding the world of Hamas how? This is just insuring a robust version of Hamas 2.0 that will regroup in sympathetic nations, raise money from donors whose hatred of Israel has only been ratcheted up, and prepare for the next stage of war.

If I were to guess (there seem some translation difficulties), I think you are saying that in some measurements, light has particle-like properties. When light strikes a retinal cell, there is a photon of a certain energy that interacts with a retinal pigment - this is the measurement part of human perception. This form of measurement physics would interpret as a particle interacting with a molecule of pigment. Color is a perception artifact that arises from neurological processes farther along the causal line. It is, as you said, "created" by our mind as part of its ongoing process of making models of what's happening in the external world. It assigns certain subjective properties, e.g. "blueness," to a measurement of 450-495 nm light striking the retina. The part relevant to quantum theory would be that light strikes a receptor, like the retinal cell, with only certain specific energies, as if it were not continuous waves but also discrete packets bearing a specific energy. The receptor pigment molecule energy does not change continuously, as would happen with a pure wave-like interaction, but rather rises in discrete jumps. Hence, "particle" becomes the term of convenience. However if we looked at the light beam passing through the cornea and lens, then it would be more useful to see it as an optical phenomenon i.e. waves.

I always wonder if Uranus jokes will ever get old. And then I laugh at the next one that appears. So, short answer: No.

His title was also primate...

I live north of the line in the US where AS heat pumps will fail during cold snaps. We have days where the HIGH just reaches 5 F., not frequent, but often enough that an AS heat pump system requires backup resistance coils. For these latitudes and farther north, it would be good if possible to pursue more innovation in not just GSHPs, but also ways to make resistance heat more efficient (e.g. zone heating). And there's that third rail in any discussion....smaller houses.

(snicker) Methane hydrates, on sea floor in near coastal areas, are also looming as a threat to the climate. As oceanic waters warm, this can destabilize some deposits of methane hydrates, and could be another source of positive feedback that speeds up global warming.