TheVat

A rather strange turn this thread has taken. I am hoping that toilet seats cannot ever be conscious. Anyway it seems like an argument against emergentism is being made... and its unintended consequence is that humans cannot possess agency, intentionality, or consciousness. 1. Consciousness cannot be accounted for by physical particles obeying mindless equations in accordance with natural laws. (such particle interactions are just machinery, like toilet seats or carburetors or thermostats) 2. Human beings seem to be made up of physical particles. 3. To the best of our knowledge, those particles obey mindless equations, without exception, and without a causal role for higher-order operations. (no downward causation) 4. Therefore, consciousness does not exist. We are all zombies.

There is no logical requirement that a universe without a god must also have no afterlife. One could disbelieve in a god but still believe in some information structure of spacetime, or connectedness throughout a biosphere, which gives continuity to personal consciousness. Or one could believe that personal consciousness is an illusion and all consciousness is connected but not through a deity. There are literally thousands of metaphysical belief systems which require no deity.

I cannot be conscious. In act of human agency, my parents got together and started a bioware program which oversaw the metabolizing of air, hydrocarbons and trace minerals to feed the growth of a self-assembling neural network. The neural net has a sophisticated system of heuristic and self-programming algorithms running in a massively parallel cortical stack architecture with both digital and analog aspects of neural signaling. This assembly is guided by a blind and nonsentient evolutionary process of several billion years duration, and there is clearly no principle which would introduce consciousness or agency into the development process. Further evidence of my lack of consciousness is my constant repetition of primitive survival programs, reproductive programs (even when completely useless towards procreation), and notable lack of novel strategies for obtaining dinner or maintaining wakefulness when input stimuli drop below a critical threshold. I do not possess intrinsic impetus. All my behaviors are programmed by a blind process. My consciousness would be impossible, as my design precludes it!

One thing I liked about Arrival was that the aliens, "heptapods," were not remotely humanoid, or even terrestrial looking.

Not real. I saw a news article on this... https://apnews.com/article/extraterrestrials-ufo-mexico-congress-af7d54fabf3278ef83c39d899c457c76 In 2017, Maussan made similar claims in Peru, and a report by the country’s prosecutor’s office found that the bodies were actually “recently manufactured dolls, which have been covered with a mixture of paper and synthetic glue to simulate the presence of skin.”

Yes, my scenario is unlikely. My point was that unexpected shifts can happen when constitutional guard rails are dismantled. In the West, we see many reports of Modi inflaming anti Muslim sentiment. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/feb/08/narendra-modi-anti-muslim-strongman-global-leader-india-bbc

There is a lot of pop psychology where one is asked to consider one's life, and one's self, as a narrative. This can be useful sometimes, but I think there is also value in not doing this. Some situations require us to observe carefully, not reference past experience or any narrative, adapting and improvising. (easier said than done, I know) Some moments lie outside of narrative. Will try to revisit this later, as this post is a bit vague. (will adapt to this vagueness by... fixing breakfast!)

The difference is less in the religion, more in what is that nation's form of government. Anywhere you have a theocracy, you might have loudspeaker or other methods of making the State religion as dominant and all-encompassing as possible. Nowadays, the most visible theocracies are Islamic so we are more aware of the compulsion there. There are almost no Christian theocracies left, so we aren't as aware what that would be like. Mohdi would like India to be more Hindu, so it could happen that he or someone like him in the Right Wing party could push India towards theocracy and try to suppress Islam and other faiths.

There is also assisted migration (using artificial reef foundations like dropping terra cotta tiles on the bottom) toward a little deeper water where there is more protection from heat. My impression is that this shorter migration might allow some coral species more generational time to adapt to warming and then slowly work their way back towards the original reefs. Some countries don't span enough degrees latitude to develop N/S migration, so the deeper water approach might help.

Agree. Just trying to retrieve valid points from Macks post and lean toward assuming that hyperbole is part of his style. If he really thinks Likud group is worse than Hitler, then I will revise my no-DV policy. I do think Israel government could chart a better course in engaging with neighbors and not condemning everyone as a terrorist. Yes. The gap in democracy lies in the occupied territories where Palestinians have no right to vote, yet their lives are controlled by Israeli government. The US has this problem (though less fraught) with Puerto Rico.

My post, though joking, was a hint. So was Genadys reply. Watch the video very closely.

I have no idea why you were neg voted on this. Before someone neg reps me for asking this, let's consider Mack's assertions. Israel is indeed run by a far right coalition. The Likud Party is a RW populist and Zionist party. This is public record. And billions of dollars in US support do indeed provide some check on the party's more radical proposals. And they do indeed want to compromise the supreme courts independence from the executive and power to render decisions through a plan thinly veiled as "reform." And they have, by almost any standards, promoted a fascist shift in government and continued herding Palestinian Arabs off of their lands, shoving them into narrow and crowded strips of land and depriving them of freedoms, fundamental rights and economic access. TWIMC: Maybe knock off the neg reps and just debate the facts?

It is sleepy.

Might do better switching to to the Penrose process, which is much more efficient conversion than proton-proton chain. First, you get a properly sized black hole... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penrose_process

This may be a shortcut?

I have passed your unique mythology of numbers on to Mr Von Daniken. Though most believe it was Cardano who first proposed complex numbers, there is evidence that ancient alien astronauts may have shown them to Ezekiel.

As I recall in the novel Callisto and Ganymede develop mild terrestrial climates which makes human colonization easier. Europa has sentient aquatic life, so the monolith makers ban humans from going there. I have never factchecked the science for all this, but Clarke was pretty good about that, so it may be possible to terraform some Jovian moons if Jupiter becomes a star-like primary.

2010, Arthur Clarke. Self-replicating machines ignite Jupiter. All these worlds are yours, except Europa. Side note: I wrote Clarke a letter when I was eleven. A school assignment was to read a book then write the author with a question you had about the book (the one on the Great Barrier Reef). To my amazement, Clarke sent me a handwritten note from Sri Lanka. I have a heard a vulgar version of Waltzing Matilda that your comment reminded me of. Perhaps it will appear in a more appropriate thread. Someday.

Yep. Or other technologies. Kurzweil sees a universe post-stellar, filled with computronium, using matter in the most efficient way to indefinitely prolong the lifespan of the universe. Charles Stross wrote about matrioshka brains built around stars, which would eventually replace the dying star with some artificial energy source.

In democracy the reforms would need to encourage more wisdom in those we elect as our representatives, as well as civic education of the voter. (it's easy to say the latter would lead to the former, but you can have wise voters faced with a candidate field of sociopaths, showbiz hucksters, and the clueless wealthy (not mutually exclusive sets)) Equality factors in as equality before the law - in voting that means access and fair districting, as others point out. Any voting system with a single type access point will favor some over others. Probably a wide menu is best - online, mail-in, brick/mortar polling stations, mall kiosks, etc.

Another green one is going past us this week, and will be visible in the N hemisphere for the next few days before it's too close to the sun. From AP News: https://apnews.com/article/comet-northern-hemisphere-nishimura-200f8cc81140387177b3436c4c3a7663 (....)Italian astronomer Gianluca Masi, founder of the Virtual Telescope Project, said in an email that the next week represents “the last, feasible chances” to see the comet from the Northern Hemisphere before it’s lost in the sun’s glare. “The comet looks amazing right now, with a long, highly structured tail, a joy to image with a telescope,” he said. If it survives its brush with the sun, the comet should be visible in the Southern Hemisphere by the end of September, Masi said, sitting low on the horizon in the evening twilight. Stargazers have been tracking the rare green comet ever since its discovery by an amateur Japanese astronomer in mid-August. The Nishimura comet now bears his name. It’s unusual for an amateur to discover a comet these days, given all the professional sky surveys by powerful ground telescopes, Chodas said, adding, “this is his third find, so good for him.” The comet last visited about 430 years ago, Chodas said. That’s about a decade or two before Galileo invented the telescope.

I think the food threat is more from climatic changes and stress to the arable land we do have. Most foods, no matter how they are genetically enhanced, require regular water and soil nutrients. What we are losing are the crisis buffers and backups that assure a consistent food supply for all 8-10 billion mouths. I recall that was one of Paul Ehrlich's points. Not that mass Malthusian catastrophe is inevitable, but that we inch closer to that line where everything is a gamble, where escaping famine relies more and more on being lucky and having everything go right and every country that's a big agri producer also will retain the wealth and governmental benevolence to ship massive quantities globally whenever there's a drought or other agricultural failure. I don't think we need to totally give up dairy and meat, but most people in wealthy nations eat way more than nutrition requires. Not sure if you've heard...for those with latex allergies (quite common among medical workers) there are alternatives to rubber.

LoL running around kettle. If you have a temperature probe which is plunging through the kettle at relativistic speed, wouldn't it be impacted by molecules with an average velocity that is higher? Moving through the star, your proton-man would get higher temperature measurements, as atoms whacked into the probe at near-c. (i am being whimsical, because I know that a proton taking measures is purely a gedankenexperiment) (and we still get your correct answer which is faster cooling because there are two readings - we can just as easily get this from Lorentz contraction, where in one nanosecond by Proton's clock, it has traveled farther through the star, and more time with more cooling has passed for the star and observers in its rest frame)