TheVat

Thanks, this stresses the coherence problems of epiphenomenalism which as a metaphysical naturalist I reject. Everything either supervenes on the physical, or reduces to it. The relationship of consciousness to the physical is definitely the first one. And consciousness then becomes, in a physicalist view, a certain sort of relationship between collections of matter. E.g. consciousness is not a thing like my brain, it is the relationship between the body, its brain, ("me") and the external world. Sort of like the novel is not ink on the page but the relationship created by those inked pages between a storyteller and a reader. (don't hold me to all this, I'm still working it out....)

I think of Hannah Arendt's banality of evil when this topic comes up. https://philosophybreak.com/articles/hannah-arendt-on-standing-up-to-the-banality-of-evil/

Please tell me you're pulling our legs.

I don't see a clear line of evidence that geomagnetic storms directly cause CV problems. There is a more direct causal link between GM activity and levels of PM 2.5, and the latter is a definite influence on CV problems due to particulates of that size passing through the alveolar membrane and entering the bloodstream. I find no evidence that the pineal gland has anything to do with this, outside of various pseudoscience theories. If the pineal gland does anything besides respond to day/night cycles with melatonin production, no one has found evidence of it. If it were so easily "messed up" by magnetic fields, then I would think power plant workers, physicians, particle physicists, auto salvage yard workers, and anyone receiving an MRI would be in SERIOUS trouble!

I accidentally clicked on the oldest page of the quantum theory subforum, p. 85. https://www.scienceforums.net/forum/9-quantum-theory/page/85/ Why are there all these threads, with zero posts, and the threads are dated Dec. 31, 1969?? Fascinating. Seems "Guest" was quite prolific 54 years ago.

For that three minute period when Nikki was explaining why America should send troops into Mexico, I was able to view Trump as slightly less insane. Then the moment passed and I went back to hoping Trump wins the nomination and makes Biden's job much easier. Trump is his own best Democratic political attack ad.

None needed - I was being grumpy. And my bad for not proofreading. I don't need to be giving math students topological nightmares.

EU is one of the world's largest markets for digital goods and services, so its regulatory moves are influential on companies around the world. Somewhat analogous is California when it enacts regulation on automobiles - automakers pay attention due to the size of its market and its influence on other states.

Per MSM, a deal was reached on Friday, so it looks like the EU act will become law. How much it furthers the EU's existing laws on digital privacy is still not clear to me. The Post reports... The deal on Friday appeared to ensure that the European Parliament could pass the legislation well before it breaks in May ahead of legislative elections. Once passed, the law would take two years to come fully into effect ...

Not to sound grumpy but I think a benefit of the doubt that my autocorrect turned cuboid to cube would have been welcome. Of course I know it's not a cube. Cheers.

Consider the operation you do on the 5:3:2. Can you see what you might do to that result to obtain the volume given? Remember this is a cube.

A liitle trouble following here. Does this relate to Prigogine and self-organizing systems? So rather than a world where pure classical chemistry prevailed, fully deterministic, and maybe the complex chemistry of life would not have developed, we needed the unpredictable but still deterministic chaotic systems of quantum superpositions of all possible arrangements? Would this increase the chances of ACGT bits colliding and starting RNA strands? The primordial pond tends toward states that are more organized?

I take @joigus point, that we don't need hyperbole to talk about the problems of Gaza. A place with its unique blend of economic corsets, Malthusian crisis, failed governance, rotting infrastructure, doesn't need to be a concentration camp to be a place of blighted opportunities and overcrowding. This wiki entry speaks to the troubles and abuse Palestinians have received when seeking free movement... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palestinian_freedom_of_movement When a woman in labor is denied passage and has a miscarriage at a border checkpoint, such a story becomes a catalyst that amplifies anger and despair. Israel has operated those checkpoints in a brutal manner that creates thousands of such stories over the years, feeding the hatred. The population explosion aspect also points to the flawed logic of any political and/or religious faction that tries outbreeding its perceived enemy. Both ultraconservative Jews and Muslims have factions that tried this, an insane tactic in a desert land with low biological carrying capacity and narrow borders. As @J.C.MacSwell and others note, Hamas doesn't care about Palestinians but rather about keeping its own ranks well-stocked with young and impressionable cannon fodder. I can see no path to peace so long as all these toxic ideological forces continue to feed each other.

Let me see if I'm following this. Noncommuting, this means a measurement can change the state, right ? If we have observations A and B, we have two observables A and B that fail to commute, it is to say there is an eigenvector (direction) of A that it is not an eigenvector of B. So then an interaction with B isn't just some passive uncovering of preexisting information, but is an interaction that can change the state in question.

When the birthrate soars to where the average age is 18, that's usually a strong indicator that women are extremely oppressed in a society - basically chattel for breeding. And when you're at that point demographically then bad governance is perpetuated. Throw in confinement to a small space and it's a recipe for Calhoun's behavioral sink. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behavioral_sink Again, while acknowledging the horror that is Hamas, I do not absolve Israel of its role in the past century of oppression and displacement. And creating that sink. Apparently when one calls on Israel for moral accountability, everything one has said will be falsely framed by someone as sympathy for Hamas or anti-Semitism.

If Patrick McGoohan, as Number Six, had really been a "free man" wouldn't he have selected a piece of cutlery from his kitchen and taken it along on his beach runs in order to puncture that giant angry balloon? Clearly something was keeping him from choosing escape strategies that he wanted to try. My theory is that all his actions were dictated by an invisible being called a screenwriter.

A bachelor, then. 😀 One reason I resist adopting a firm stance on free will (and why I've minimized participating in this chat) is that no position really seems to resolve any issues in life or in the mysteries of cognitive science. Some like to strike bold philosophical postures, but at the end of the day, if they haven't gone insane, they still behave as beings who make decisions and are held responsible for them.

I posted on this a week ago in the neighboring free will thread, with an article comparing Sapolsky book to another book, which was compatibilist. (I'm not rejoining the discussion, just adding a bit of background reading) The floating quote function has removed the quoted portion within that quote, sorry.

Humility would serve you well. If someone can't understand you, putting the onus entirely on them is unreasonable when you possess the intelligence to meet them halfway with your own clarification and employment of the common parlance. As it is, you come across as cute but a bit solipsistic.

I remain highly skeptical that LLMs can skirt the symbol grounding problem. They are handling semantically empty signifiers and this won't change unless their deepest architecture could somehow become self-renovating and reactive to the world in a manner that....well then they would not really still be LLMs in any meaningful sense. I am not saying an artificial semantics is flat out impossible, but it seems to me something that arises when an entity must survive and adapt to the world (though not necessarily in our particular human ways of doing so) and exist in an evolutionary relationship to other entities. But I'll read Bajohr's paper, beyond the intro, and see what is meant by "dumb meaning." It sounds pretty fuzzy. Thanks for keeping the thread going btw.

Jinx!

1971. From an easily searched online source, which took me about 30 seconds to find: Hall thrusters have been flying in space since December 1971, when the Soviet Union launched an SPT-50 on a Meteor satellite. Over 240 thrusters have flown in space since that time, with a 100% success rate. Hall thrusters are now routinely flown on commercial LEO and GEO communications satellites, where they are used for orbital insertion and stationkeeping... 🙄

For those following, I thought it might be useful to define the acronym RCP 8.5 which is being used here. RCP 8.5 is one several scenarios (Representative Concentration Pathways) that yields a particular concentration of carbon in the atmosphere. RCP 8.5 is the concentration of carbon that delivers global warming at an average of 8.5 watts per square meter across the planet. (at the surface, at noon on a summer day in the temperate zone, we get about 1000 w/m2 total insolation - I got this figure from Woods Hole) The RCP 8.5 pathway delivers a temperature increase of about 4.3˚C by 2100, relative to pre-industrial temperatures. RCP 8.5 is often contrasted with RCP 2.6, which would deliver a total warming of about 1.8˚C by 2100. @Ken Fabian has neatly summarized all the political and market forces that are smoothing the path for renewables and decreasing the chances of the dystopian RCP 8.5 scenario. I would only add that the driver of an alternative like wind is its fundamental simplicity and ease of construction once production of components is scaled up. There's something almost surreal about looking back at the history of power generation and seeing how humanity breezed (npi) right past a 19th century technology that ran on free fuel.

Quite serious vulnerability. If LLM bots are trained on personal information, breaches of their training data could reveal bank logins, home addresses, embarrassing images, etc. There could be lawsuits ahead if training data is not properly anonymized.

Hopeful there won't be too many pissing contests in the humidity thread. Comfort does seem very subjective, based on my experience living on a high arid steppe. Ms Vat and I have gotten so acclimated that when we travel east to someplace like Omaha it feels like driving into a Lousiana swamp. The thread has prompted me to think more about getting a humidifier, for the sake of skin and mucous membranes in the winter. Piano hygrometer was at 20 this morning. Came up to 22 after we boiled water for oats and made coffee, so kitchen activity doesn't make a big difference.