TheVat

I went back and read the Chomsky interview, at an MIT symposium about ten years ago, where he talks about cognitive science and AI. I think he has a lot to say to this thread. I will try to find a PW free screenshot if possible. https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/11/noam-chomsky-on-where-artificial-intelligence-went-wrong/261637/ Ah! Found a nice clean archive screenshot.... https://archive.is/2023.10.18-114835/https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/11/noam-chomsky-on-where-artificial-intelligence-went-wrong/261637/ This interview uncovers an important ongoing debate in the philosophy of science, as to how best to get at the deeper workings of things. I don't think you will regret reading it.

Hmmm, let me see, uh...North Dakota, South Dakota, aaannd Baja Dakota!

https://www.quantamagazine.org/how-quantum-physicists-flipped-time-and-how-they-didnt-20230127/ Physicists have coaxed particles of light into undergoing opposite transformations simultaneously, like a human turning into a werewolf as the werewolf turns into a human. In carefully engineered circuits, the photons act as if time were flowing in a quantum combination of forward and backward. “For the first time ever, we kind of have a time-traveling machine going in both directions,” said Sonja Franke-Arnold, a quantum physicist at the University of Glasgow in Scotland who was not involved in the research. Regrettably for science fiction fans, the devices have nothing in common with a 1982 DeLorean. Throughout the experiments, which were conducted by two independent teams in China and Austria, laboratory clocks continued to tick steadily forward. Only the photons flitting through the circuitry experienced temporal shenanigans. And even for the photons, researchers debate whether the flipping of time’s arrow is real or simulated....

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kruskal's_tree_theorem Really large number.

It is if people use it that way. Using an upper case G is using it that way. You are wasting our time. And I sense Dimreepr is itching to post the Jehovah scene from Life of Brian.

God, as a monotheistic being, is capitalized for the same reason Allah is. It's being used as a proper name. If I refer to a "god" that could be any from a vast range of supernatural entities, and so it's a common noun. Grark, the god of rotten cashews. The god of small things. Children of a lesser god.

One of the more sad and horrible war stories I've heard, and that's saying something. It's the kind of story that sends me back to my core opinion on human aggression: you cannot trust humans with anything more lethal than a stick.

Buddhism does not posit a soul. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/belief/2010/jan/20/buddhism-animals-souls-religion

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.

Well of course. That's why dualism remains the dominant philosophical position of most of humanity. The phenomenal aspect of existence, qualia, points us to a sense of self. Some kinds of dreaming or traumatic conditions, like ones where we leave our bodies, naturally lead to the notion of a soul or "astral body." I have had a couple such experiences myself, and am aware of both the dualistic mystical explanations and the neurological ones. I lean towards the latter, while remaining agnostic on the former. On litterbugs, I remain firm in the advocacy of public flogging. It's an offense I find less easy to understand than murder. 🙂 Swap God for a janitor, rot in a jar of dog paws! (one of my favorite palindromes)

These movies are evidence that people are imaginative and some imaginative people become screenwriters. Regarding soul, this seems to be a prescientific concept from the ancient world when the nature of living things was not understood. When a person stopped breathing, ancient people saw that final breath as some essence leaving the body because it provided a simple explanation to them of life as some animating force.

True. What I meant is that IIT has been a sort of centerpiece for a lot of recent discussion and debate on how the mind works. Just today I was browsing Vox and noticed yet another article on IIT. https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2023/12/15/24001424/consciousness-complexity-neuroscience-mental-health There are some strong rival theories out there, the one of Changeux and Dehaene comes to mind, often called the Global Neuronal Workspace. It's a model that may be useful in understanding consciousness as an emergent process. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dehaene–Changeux_model

Even church potlucks? I love what the Lutherans do with macaroni dishes. Never mind the need for prompt angioplasty right after eating them. No, really, I agree. However, human social structures being what they are, I suspect that the old Abrahamics will slowly evolve and morph and strain out garbage in a long and painful process. But I remain an optimist that the long arc will bend towards compassion and consciousness raising and away from a giant angry bearded guy who will toss you in a flaming pit run by his former employee if you touch your johnson.

All consciousness chats on a science forum tend to arrive at Tononi. -- Vat's Law 🙂

I think people have a craving for metaphysics, whether philosophically grounded or based in a spiritual framework. Children tend to be indoctrinated in the religious forms, and those that reject that (or grow up in secular oriented households) sometimes gravitate towards options like the paranormal, UFO lore, panpsychism, meditation, the matrix, fringe physics etc. For many, psychological growth and maturation means losing one's parents as wise, protective beings that create a moral order and home, and then trying to fill that void with a supreme being operating on a universal scale which also offers protection, comfort, and a moral order. Some religions appeal to people with prepackaged answers and emotional comforts. Others more austere, like Zen, leave it up to you to work towards some illumination. And yes, some sects offer intolerance and harsh judgments of others - the hell with them.

It wasn't. I appreciate that you have sympathy for the plight of Palestinians.

Gaza is under a multidecade land, air, and sea blockade. Not conducive to beautiful resorts or letting oil companies or other developers in. Gaza airport was demolished by Israel. Border restrictions mean very limited access to Palestinians main urban center, East Jerusalem, or its agricultural resources in West Bank (what's left of them). This is not really "newfound freedom." All this in spite of the terms of the Oslo Accord being that Israel must treat Palestine as one political entity. On what planet would such gross violations of international law result in a prosperous economy for a small enclave effectively torn away from its other pieces and primary urban center of banking, education, foreign consulates and other services? Even if Gaza were run by people better than the Hamas cretins, they would have no shot at the rosy alternate universe you paint.

Not typical of my music tastes, but it's interesting to learn that a mystery regarding a background song on The X-Files has finally been solved after 25 years. I remember the episode, but hadn't the slightest idea that a background song in a bar scene was specifically composed for the episode. Or that it had an ET theme (the second video, at the end of the article, has the full track minus bar noise). https://www.npr.org/2023/12/13/1219137444/x-files-missing-song-mystery-music-lost-media

I think we agree on this. Having friends and a spouse who gain something from their Abrahamic practices, I will offer my observation that not everyone is shackled. Individual people aren't binary where either they attend church and wear cognitive shackles or they are enlightened freethinkers soaring grandly over the intellectual landscape. The problem with stereotyping believers is that not everyone who attends a service has signed on to every page of dogmatic boilerplate. Stereotypes can also be strawmen. I fear a hypocritical douche like Mike Johnson, but I didn't fear a Daniel Berrigan or a Thomas Merton.

Nope. You are seemingly denying the words and actions of Bibi and his Far Right coalition. Bibi has said on multiple occasions that there is no two state solution with Palestinian sovereignty, or any return of stolen land. That's not someone seeking peace or justice for all parties. His position is a radical Zionist position backed up with harassment and killing of West Bank people, fomenting vigilante murder done by illegal settlers, massive and indiscriminate bombing that has in the current war killed over 18,000 civilians, half of them children, use of white phosphorus, starvation of civilians, murder of POWs and surrendered soldiers, etc. These are the actions of an unlawful and immoral regime. There is nothing liberal about them, and my sympathies to the Israelis who have broken free of their national news bubble and realize what their government is doing. So yes, I will compare the illiberal actions of both Israel and Hamas. Look up "Israel War Crimes" on Wikipedia - it's a real eye-opener.

A student of field ornithology Did a GPT search on ontology; When the AI inferred That Kant was a bird He blamed, not the code, but zoology.

I'm astonished that there can really be so much debate as to whether Gaza is a place of inhumane confinement or not. Numerous posts have documented this reality. Few people could leave, except for maybe half a percent who had work permits (also a feature of some prisons). Food and water constantly rationed. Normal trade and economic opportunities blocked. Every few years, jets pass over and destroy part of the infrastructure and housing. Who gives a FF what it's called, it is still inhumane and strips people of basic sovereignty over their own lives. Weird that members here who could easily grasp the miseries of places like East Berlin or the Ghetto of Warsaw, find it difficult to empathize with the 99% of Palestinians who are not Hamas militants and are simply trying to survive. Both Israel and Hamas are at fault, each feeding the endless cycle of vengeful hatred and reprisal, each dominated by an illiberal and miltant faction in a part of the world where liberalism is most sorely needed.

Apparently this company gets involved if we don't ask.... https://www.curicaltech.com/ I think this discussion could benefit from a dichotomy between religion as a hierarchical dogmatic system of population control and as a personal spiritual practice. I see considerable difference from a Zen practice seeking inner peace and enlightenment, and a power broker banging a Bible or a Quran. I know scientists with first rate brains whose spiritual practice may embrace something like the former while rejecting the latter. Religion may not be hardwired (though a tendency to believe in unseen things may lurk in our wiring, as Sagan noted, in Dragons of Eden), but a desire to understand oneself as part of something larger, as connected to all life, may be somewhat baked in, both genetically and memetically. I think it's possible humanity can embrace reason and science without discarding spiritual acts like meditation, contemplation, and some seeking after metaphysical questions. Any utopia that discards all such activity would seem to risk a totalitarian cliff edge.

There's some variation in the menstrual cycle - 21 to 35 days. The moon's synodic period, however, is 29.5 days. So the correlation is kind of weak. And mammalian estrus cycles show wide variation among species, a range which is not at all centered around the lunar month. So those cycles look to be controlled by biological factors not astronomical ones.

And the individual level we can see people interacting many different ways with a religious framework. My wife is Catholic, and derives great spiritual value and comfort from that without taking on some of the more dogmatic and intolerant baggage that some of that faith might do. Her experience is such that I am unable to dismiss the value of a spiritual practice for some people, even if it differs from my own (more buddhistic, with a small B) or I see some members of a group acting badly and without compassion. For her, it's a path of compassion, patience with others, tolerance, and support of personal freedoms (including, yes, medical freedoms for women) in life. The ugliness and manipulations of organized heirarchical religions that alienate @Phi for All and many others here is something I understand, while at the same time recognizing that some people are adept as "taking the best and leaving the rest" in their religious practice. So I find myself falling short of the Hitchens position - religion poisons a lot of life, in a lot of places, but it doesn't poison everything. For some people, their religious practice is a way to codify and issue self-reminders to love, care, show compassion, withold harsh judgments and work for peace. For every religious nut who wants to send women back to the middle ages or squash LGBT folks or violently smite their enemies, there is a religious person who hasn't forgotten what great teachers like Jesus and Gautama taught. And are better people for it.