TheVat

The universe is essentially a large kidney bean and consciousness is the gas that arises from a god digesting the bean. Or as TS Eliot wrote, the river's tent is broken.

I guess why anyone would want to track Musk is another question. Is there anti-tracking software that would entirely remove all Elon Musk news from any news outlets I'm browsing? Even better, software that allows me to target Musk with a Rothschild XP-42 Orbital Laser the next time he shares one of his stunted adolescent gibes and/or Dunning Kruger Effect opinions via social media.

The mention of punctuated equilibrium by @joigus reminded me about the recent Nature paper studying the dropoff in "disruptive" groundbreaking research. Here's a pull-quote from the New York Times coverage today... https://archive.ph/hwOGJ (screenshot of full article) Miracle vaccines. Videophones in our pockets. Reusable rockets. Our technological bounty and its related blur of scientific progress seem undeniable and unsurpassed. Yet analysts now report that the overall pace of real breakthroughs has fallen dramatically over the past almost three-quarters of a century. This month in the journal Nature, the report’s researchers told how their study of millions of scientific papers and patents shows that investigators and inventors have made relatively few breakthroughs and innovations compared with the world’s growing mountain of science and technology research. The three analysts found a steady drop from 1945 through 2010 in disruptive finds as a share of the booming venture, suggesting that scientists today are more likely to push ahead incrementally than to make intellectual leaps. “We should be in a golden age of new discoveries and innovations,” said Michael Park, an author of the paper and a doctoral candidate in entrepreneurship and strategic management at the University of Minnesota. The new finding of Mr. Park and his colleagues suggests that investments in science are caught in a spiral of diminishing returns and that quantity in some respects is outpacing quality. While unaddressed in the study, it also raises questions about the extent to which science can open new frontiers and sustain the kind of boldness that unlocked the atom and the universe and what can be done to address the shift away from pioneering discovery. Earlier studies have pointed to slowdowns in scientific progress but typically with less rigor. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-04577-5

Why don't you try that, then? Being mindful what a basic antacid does, perhaps you can hypothesize what the result will be. Grind up some eggshells (or use powdered garden lime) in water, add some baking soda, see what if anything happens. You are the observer 1, right?

You may want to look into the area of quantum computing.

There's just one goal??

To your stomach? Sounds like an antacid blend. The baking soda part (NaHCO3) part will react pretty quickly with the stomach acid (HCl). The calcium carbonate will also neutralize the acid. Not sure but I think the baking soda works a little quicker. Both lower the concentration of H+ radicals.

https://www.bmj.com/content/379/bmj-2022-072833 Abstract Objective To compare the rate of energy expenditure of low efficiency walking with high efficiency walking. Design Laboratory based experimental study. Setting United States. Participants 13 healthy adults (six women, seven men) with no known gait disorder, mean (±standard deviation) age 34.2±16.1 years, height 174.2±12.6 cm, weight 78.2±22.5 kg, and body mass index 25.6±6.0. Intervention Participants performed three, five minute walking trials around an indoor 30 m course. The first trial consisted of walking at a freely chosen walking speed in the participant’s usual style. The next two trials consisted of low efficiency walks in which participants were asked to duplicate the walks of Mr Teabag and Mr Putey (acted by John Cleese and Michael Palin, respectively) in the legendary Monty Python Ministry of Silly Walks (MoSW) skit that first aired in 1970. Distance covered during the five minute walks was used to calculate average speed. Ventilation and gas exchange were collected throughout to determine oxygen uptake (V̇O2; mL O2/kg/min) and energy expenditure (EE; kcal/kg/min; 1 kcal=4.18 kJ), reported as mean±standard deviation. Main outcome measures V̇O2 and EE. Results V̇O2 and EE were about 2.5 times higher (P<0.001) during the Teabag walk compared with participants’ usual walk...

Sulphates form compounds at altitude that are especially good at reflecting solar radiation (you'd have to look it up, but there's some sort of scattering index that indicates the relative degrees of scattering and absorption - I'm a little rusty on this). Also, they make good condensation nuclei. You will recall that diffuse water vapor is a GHG (and CO2 effect magnifier), but condensed droplets (i.e. clouds) increase albedo and reflect radiation. That's why there's an anomalous cooling trend (or rather, flattening of the global warming trend IIRC) during the decades 1940-1970s, due to a massive escalation in burning of high-sulfur varieties of coal. As soon as this was curtailed, as governments started dealing with the acid rain problem, that cooling effect went away.

For someone new to the field, Will Buckingham's "The Philosophy Book: Big Ideas Simply Explained" is a nice intro. For wading a tiny bit deeper, there is Bertrand Russell's classic, "The Problems of Philosophy," which brings a lot of clarity to difficult concepts. If there's a particular branch of philosophy you are interested in, I can also suggest more specific works.

I see your point on topic relevance, but would suggest the relevance lies in asking why have a thread that duplicates all the back and forth on cavemen, invisible images, etc. More of a "meta" relevance. Especially when served up by what is obviously the same person after they encountered critical headwinds in their first thread. I would have been agreeable to a request to edit the sockpuppet portion of the post out, but your acceptance of Zapatos mockery while deleting mine struck me as a little inconsistent. None of this is of burning importance, but I thought you deserved a reply.

Not sure why Zapatos wisecrack stays, but mine was just deleted (though it's partially preserved in exchemist's reply). I am not the one posting under two forum names or trolling on their unsupported assertions and apparent psychic knowledge of stone age peoples cognition. If mods are going to start disappearing people's posts, I think that's going to chill discussion here.

And if we could trigger them, there's the problem that eruption is often pretty unpleasant for those who live nearby. (also, lots of dust can backfire if it deposits heavily on glaciers or snowfields, lowering the albedo for an extended period) I'm surprised they don't erupt more, given that we have stopped sacrificing virgins to appease the volcano gods.

Maybe if you asked them to remove their shoes first?

The need to tighten up a definition of this is one matter that led to Integrated Information Theory, developed by Tononi. And also Christof Koch, who has become the Carl Saganish popularizer of consciousness studies in the past decade... https://www.wired.com/2013/11/christof-koch-panpsychism-consciousness/ There's a theory, called Integrated Information Theory, developed by Giulio Tononi at the University of Wisconsin, that assigns to any one brain, or any complex system, a number — denoted by the Greek symbol of Φ — that tells you how integrated a system is, how much more the system is than the union of its parts. Φ gives you an information-theoretical measure of consciousness. Any system with integrated information different from zero has consciousness. Any integration feels like somethingto that system. When it's dissolved, it does not feel that anymore. It's not that any physical system has consciousness. A black hole, a heap of sand, a bunch of isolated neurons in a dish, they're not integrated. They have no consciousness. But complex systems do. And how much consciousness they have depends on how many connections they have and how they’re wired up. And I see Koch and Tononi get cited in both the papers that iNow posted. Koch, C., Massimini, M., Boly, M., and Tononi, G. (2016). Neural correlates of consciousness: progress and problems. Nat. Rev. Neurosci. 17, 307–321. doi: 10.1038/nrn.2016.22 Papers in professional journals, in this field of cognitive science, do tend to come across as word salad to the neophyte, which is why fellas like Koch (or David Chalmers, or Stanislas Dehaene) are so helpful when you just want to get your feet wet.

They are mutualistic symbionts, aren't they? Zooxanthellae are the photosynthetic algae which team up with the polyps, paying rent with sugar and aminos. Then parrotfish come along, eat the coral, and poop white sand. I love that I can type that sentence and be completely factual. Do larger scale reef aquariums introduce parrotfish and generate their own sand?

Wow, I had no idea aquariums were such a battleground. My question concerns chlorine. When I was a teen, I had a 55 with Oscars, a tropical cichlid. I was told to let tapwater stand for a couple days so chlorine could evaporate out of solution before adding to aquarium. Never was sure how important that was. Is that necessary with reef tanks? Anyway, interesting thread, at least where one can step around the blood puddles.

Pretty much all research into the neurological basis of consciousness finds it to be emergent rather than fundamental. One molecule of water isn't wet. A billion are, at sea level between 0 and 100 C. As for theories, those are generated by minds. It doesn't mean what the theory is about is also generated by minds.

The first page and OP seemed less about Friedmann equations (which later chat left us nonphysicists barely treading water) and more about interrogating our intuitions about time as anything more than a part of a geometric description of how matter/energy behaves in space. There is matter/energy. To observing biological entities, it changes - position, energy state, decay, etc. This is due to changes in the biological entities, as well. These changes can be described (and predicted) with geometric descriptions that include a measurable elapsed time, t. The OP prompts the question: is there an ontology of time? Or is time simply how we sentient beings process the universe as we move across a landscape of "events"? Could there be an entity that could see the universe and all events at once, like some sort of cosmic jewel? (A question that invites incoherence, for sure)

I'm impressed whenever another Uranus joke can be squeezed out. It's also interesting that Uranus is a gas giant. I'm sorry, I don't get the joke.

Probably not. 😀 Indeed, i crash into circularity as soon as I hit concepts like rate and change.

It's hard to see time as more than comparative rates of change. So many oscillations between energy levels in a cesium atom compared to a defined fraction of the solar day (sun moving from the noon meridian to noon meridian at a specific point in Earth's orbit) compared to number of beta decays in one gram of carbon 14 compared to change in position of bowling ball falling from 127 meters above sea level over downtown Scranton PA compared to change in seconds of arc of sun position from the vernal equinox compared to average follicular hair production in nanometers of elongation in the standard poodle. Time, abstracted from change, can only be defined in a way that logicians call circular. I need to review McTaggart on the unreal aspects of time. IIRC Rovelli references McTaggart's A series and B series concept in his theory of time. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10701-019-00312-9

And space is what stops everything from happening to you.

If I were to guess, I would say he is making a distinction between identities that have some objective marker, like XY chromosomes and frankfurters, and identities that rely upon a subjective self-assessment. If a cis male has a subjective inner narrative that develops through childhood of being male (which he often does, in his quest for identity), he also has objective markers that provide confirmation of the narrative. If that male has a different one, e.g. "I have always felt like a female," then there is both interior friction, and social friction, between that felt condition and what the world sees. I assume that IntoSci is extending an olive branch, in that respect, by asserting that he would not push back against that felt identity and add to someone's difficulties. However, if that is the case, it does beg the question: why not trust them?

What the heck is an "invisible mental image" ? Images, however they are presented in the mind's eye, are in some sense visible to the person experiencing them. If someone says elephant, I see an image of an elephant in my mind.