TheVat

An interesting distinction. Perhaps it is more precise to say that Eise's free will is freedom to act in accord with one's desires and wants. @Eise can order the mushroom tofu casserole because it is a choice on the menu and he wants to eat vegan today. I understand his definition but it seems to kick the question of cause farther down the road: what caused those desires and wants?

What? What does any of that have to do with restaurants and food? Or anything I said?

I think these equations of Hamas and ordinary Palestinians are typical of political rhetoric where the purpose is to draw attention away from Geneva Convention violations, as in this case the indiscriminate killing of civilians, starvation tactics, and destruction of non military targets like homes. The same rhetoric was used in WW2 to justify Dresden and Hiroshima. Nazis bad, we can kill Germans with impunity. Japanese bad, we can nuke a whole city or two. It's interesting how most people can look back at those events and condemn them, or condemn the US brutal slaughter of indigenous tribal peoples, but somehow Israel gets a special pass and anyone who questions their conduct of war or occupation is pelted with ad hominems like being an antisemite. It doesn't take a moral philosopher to understand two wrongs don't make a right. If someone had stolen my house and plowed the olive groves that five generations of my family had farmed, and did that to thousands of others around me, and drove me into a fetid slum I could not leave and which is subjected to mass murder attacks every decade or so, I might be easy prey to a political party that promised to get tough with my attackers and get my land back, and would probably not really grasp I was voting for a gang full of vicious sociopaths with a very stupid approach to negotiation . So tired of nuance-free discussions around the web where people seem to think Hamas just popped in out of nowhere and announced with a gleeful cackle, "Let's be evil and kill some innocent Jews!" Hamas and PIJ were created by the series of forcings and swindles that started with a letter written by Arthur Balfour. Was Balfour naive or foolishly optimistic or just having a feel-good moment with Britain's Jewish community? Maybe someone more knowledgeable of that history could say.

I find this nearly unintelligible. What is your goal? If you want health and fitness, don't obsess over food. Set a few boundaries and walk on. Minimize sugar and ultraprocessed foods whose ingredients list looks like a list of chemicals you don't have in your kitchen. Embrace fiber. Avoid foods that contain the word "isolate." (eating an isolate is like taking vitamin A pills instead of having a carrot or sweet potato)

https://anatomypubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ar.21290 The expanded M. caudofemoralis of Tyrannosaurus may have evolved as compensation for the animal's immense size. Because the M. caudofemoralis is the primary hind limb retractor, large M. caudofemoralis masses and the resulting contractile force and torque estimates presented here indicate a sizable investment in locomotive muscle among theropods with a range of body sizes and give new evidence in favor of greater athleticism, in terms of overall cursoriality, balance, and turning agility. (cursoriality = ability to run)

The big muscular tail was designed so it could run easily and swiftly. On land. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/11/101115131127.htm

If their legs are so strong, as you said, then why is a dry land lifestyle implausible?

I was not saying our actions are not part of a causal web, just trying to make clear why the common usage of "free will" is one that ascribes a particular kind of agency to humans for which there is no evidence. The compatibilist definition is, as you know, quite distinctly different. Compatibilists achieve their reconciliation of determinism and free will by means of changing what is meant by free will. I just find it simpler to skip that and say there is no scientific evidence of free will in the classic meaning. It doesn't mean I may not personally entertain some metaphysical idea that minds somehow transcend that, but I would not bring that to the science table.

You don't need a costume to post in Biology. For physics, an Einstein wig is preferred, but you can also just carry around bongo drums like Richard Feynman. Is there any evidence for an amphibious T Rex?

Research didn't find evidence of fomite transmission of COVID. The antiseptic industry made out like bandits, though. I suspect research will discover COVID did create a generation of germophobes, who will suffer lifelong immune impairment as a result.

It seems to me that defining free will in a deterministic universe is a semantic trick. I have never much liked compatibilism for that reason. If the choice I freely made was determined by events set in motion by the Big Bang then it is not really free, and no amount of folk psychology (it felt free!) (no one stopped me!) will change that. And randomness doesn't really rescue free will, either. If my decisions happen at the whim of random antecedent events then I am not really exercising free will in making a choice. My feeling of free choice is an illusion. I just don't think a physicalist view can ever allow us to be truly volitional agents - our selves cannot be an instigating cause that moves downward through functional levels. We are not causal agents. But it's necessary to our mental and social health to proceed with life as if we are. Quite the conundrum.

I'm definitely planning to reduce my political sausage intake. Too much political sodium nitrite. I think Robert Plant should send Congress some mayflies from his hedgerow. They'll last longer. Or maybe that head of lettuce that was competing with Liz Truss is available?

I have never had a clear understanding of how random micro events can even do that. How do we know they don't just cancel each other out and devolve into white noise? The lines and webs of causality could skate above that. As many of the people replying to Heisenberg (who famously wrote of the failure of causality) for the past century have noted, the fact that something cannot be determined or is uncertain by an observer does not mean that the underlying physical phenomena is not causal. In an act of Introspection, we tend to see influences as multiple forking paths, and we create the impression of our Self having agency in selecting from those paths. I cannot tell if that's an accurate impression or not. It does seem that causality is not linear and I have much doubt there can only be one way the Big Bang plays out in me now typing the word "heteroconsanguineousflurb."

Not to be crude, but doesn't Blike give his RW name on the ICANN registry? So deep privacy would seem not a huge issue with him. Would it be overstepping for an admin to simply call his office and leave a message with the receptionist? I'm not exactly Sherlock Holmes and I figured out his office location in about five minutes. He has described his profession in old posts here and the last name is unusual. Dots easily connected. (being not a mod or admin, I just used the privacyadvocate.org contact form, which relays an email message - the problem there, I suspect, is that people will neglect old email boxes when they set out on a busy professional career)

Swansont is a collective of professional naval gazers.

I think you accidentally produced a wormhole that moved the site forward in time one week.

Not well braced. I had a question about hydraulics and household plumbing on last Monday, so I removed my SFN ring and dallied with two other cute science forums. Some exciting moments of cross-fertilization. As a gentleman, I cannot share further. I also discovered that Blike uses privacyadvocate.org as intermediary, so I filled out their handy little form yesterday, which then relays him the message. No idea if that made a difference or if someone else reached him first.

I advise reading Dim posts in moderation. Life is short. Agree. There is a lot of imprecision when people talk about emergent properties or processes. Wetness, for example, is just a perceptual shorthand for talking about more complex properties like strong polar bonding between molecules. Things look different at different levels of scaling.

The one you select was determined 13.7 GYA. Thank goodness for Dewitt's Many Worlds Interpretation of quantum theory! Kind of exciting to imagine there's a universe where you chose to have "I" be the fourth word of your first sentence. I have goosebumps.

There's been some scare-mongering here in the States over glyphosate in corn, given that researchers testing non-organic corn could not find detectable levels of glyphosate. As a lawn treatment in "Roundup" I avoid it because it's so indiscriminate in what it kills. I like a fairly natural and diverse range of plants in our groundcover. We opt to yank and tug, in lieu of chemicals. Keeps you limber. What specifically do you want to discuss?

Read. The. Answers. Already. Posted. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/scientists-have-solved-mystery-how-wombats-poop-cubes-180976898/ Science!

This is now added to my list of favorites. Another was a story about wombats having rectangular poo and using it, like bricks, to make protective walls around their burrows. Amusing to watch someone have the sleep apnea/drugs factors explained over and over and it having seemingly no effect on their single-minded fixation.

This is an area where I did some research for a company I used to work for. One thing that stood out is how many supplements offer little or nothing to a person eating a balanced diet. Zinc is one to avoid unless there is some pathology causing deficiency. Also, bioavailable forms of zinc, like picolinate or citrate, tend to block absorption of other minerals, especially copper. Have some oats and nuts, maybe some pumpkin seeds, and you will be fine. Where dis you get those figures? My source (Chan School of Public Health at Harvard) has it around 8-11 mg for adults. Anything over 40 mg is potentially toxic.

Thanks, I had not been aware of the rough seas problem. And that would make a fast ferry difficult. My experience is limited to calmer Pacific waters, and also one that ran from Cape Cod to Nantucket. Sorry to hear notaries are such a pain there. As in UK, notaries here are a very simple thing, just witnessing and stamping documents. And they are everywhere. I used to shop at a supermarket that had a notary. Libraries, banks, post offices, municipal offices, etc all have notaries.

I was surprised so short a distance (60-70 km, from the map I looked at) would need a flight. Is there not a ferry boat of some kind? Flying seems like an expensive method for inter-island travel.