TheVat

As I was getting at in my previous post, this was simply defining where the starting blocks were for any future phenomenology. Studying subjective thoughts can lead to understandings of how the Self, if there be such, is constructed, how thoughts about objects are constructed, how intersubjective agreements on objects might he derived, and so on.

This, if I recall my college philosophy courses well enough, was one of the major objections to Descartes' cogito. Descartes posited that some "mischievous imp" could deceive us about any aspect of the physical world (hello, The Matrix) and we could only be certain of our own existence in that given moment as a self that thinks. His later critics pointed out that even the self, the "I," could be illusory and therefore there was only warrant to say that consciousness happens. The only epistemically confident statement would then be "there is thinking, therefore something exists." Pretty hard to argue with that. 😀 Starting from that seed, the discipline of phenomenology proceeds, trying to understand experiences as they present to consciousness and how consciousness is directed at apparent objects. Fellows like Brentano and Husserl got the ball rolling with the idea that consciousness is always about something, a quality that is known in philosophy as intentionality.

Always liked John Wheeler's line: Spacetime tells matter how to move; matter tells spacetime how to curve. Reality is what's out there. Language and math are mental operations to approximate that. Hopefully in a useful and predictive way.

I think the already low rate of smoking is why lawmakers thought they could get away with this. As @Sensei noted, you would have absurd situations. In 2050, the forty year old can't buy cigarettes. But his spouse is 43, so he just has them pick up a carton when they're at the store, since they have a legal right he lacks. Unenforceable. If you are going to ban something, just ban it, period.

You think you are joking...but when I gave up coffee (dealing with an inner ear issue that caffeine worsens) I came pretty close to that. Which reminds me, veering back to topic, how remarkable I find directional hearing. Quite a neat trick of our acoustic wiring, given the small distance between our two ears.

My thought too. Nanny laws just sweeten criminality. And what about nicotine gum, Skoal, vape cartridges, and other unhealthful nicotine habits? This is a silly law for, what, eight percent of the NZ population?

The lion sucker does sound like great fun. But keep a firm grip as you walk past if you're carrying a ticket or paper money in hand. I think the reality check here, speaking as someone who once lived one block from a high school, is that the world will always have teenagers going through the angry rebelling phase. Unless we want to expend enormous resources prosecuting them all, it seems better to invest in refillable containers and meal boxes you bring to a fastfood counter to be filled with your order. No container, no service. Sandwiches and fries (chips) and such would just be wrapped in a paper made from something like corn(maize) husks that starts breaking down rapidly (but not too rapidly)in the presence of moisture or oils.

Where there's a culture of tidyness paired with a nature aesthetic, positive messaging seems better than the rather dystopian idea of litter vigilantes pouncing on every slob. Instead of bounties on the heads of litter bugs, maybe a program that helps youth make a little fun money gathering litter. More foundational would be, as others note, ending single-use packaging and promoting refillable containers. Well put.

I like the boat analogy in that it makes the point that affirmative action programs were never intended to be permanent. They are supposed to be implemented, I'm using college as an example, to help get minorities who start with some academic disadvantages into the college system. Course corrections on the boat. The idea was always that the following generations, raised with the advantages of college-educated higher-earning (sometimes) parents, won't need AA at all. That was the whole point of Senator Daniel P. Moynihan's concept of breaking the cycle of poverty. AA is a ladder out of a hole, not a permanent fixture everywhere you go. If a smart kid has trouble keeping up in school because parents (or a single parent) can't provide homework help, a quiet study space, extra cash for lessons and tutoring, a big shelf of books, trips to museums and arts events, and an array of other amenities that help kids do well in school....well, it's in society's best interest to give him some extra help, because it's in society's interest to have citizens that reach their intellectual potential.

The comparison is mainly about gender difference, so the key fact is that the female heart is smaller in proportion to total blood volume than in men, therefore needs to beat more frequently to circulate that volume of blood. Age is less relevant, given that the heart grows as the whole body and its blood volume grows. (any difference there is more related to youthful metabolism, as it handles growth) Children's hearts don't beat that much faster, since their smaller hearts are pumping a smaller volume of blood. You misread the paragraph, which was simply comparing male and female at all ages.

You forgot you joined here three months ago and had a chat on this topic? Ok. Why would a supreme and omniscient creator being concern itself with dress codes? This would seem a low priority for the highest consciousness in the universe, one which transcends time and space. The Bible could recount personal revelations of some holy men, but surely you can see it's possible that some of the content is just fables and allegories used to maintain social order in nomadic desert tribes. And it IS a desert, so the pragmatic value of clothing (compared to tropical/subtropical forest-dwelling peoples) is undeniable.

One of the lowest of the estimates out there. CJCS (Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff) has it at 40,000 civilian casualties. My guess is that this is due to differing definitions of what are war caused deaths/injuries, some including more indirect causes. Everyone counts someone killed or seriously injured by munitions landing near them or being shot, but not everyone may count the heart attack of someone who was running away or digging out or cases of people dying of pre-existing health conditions due to interruptions in medical care and/or medicine supplies. There would also be deaths of despair for which war conditions were the precipitating factor. If this seems pretty grim, add in what happens in terms of deaths from freezing (and fleeing) if Putin's current campaign against power utilities is not countered by further western alliance donations of anti-missile systems (like the Patriot missiles now planned).

Indifference strikes me as much more probable than overt aggression. To use an analogy, I don't know anyone who is personally hostile to a low tech tribe living deep in a remote forest, but our desire for cheap lumber (or razing forest to grow crops) might result in their loss of viable habitat. Without intending genocide, we could wipe them out with indifference and lack of creating a special preserve. The probability of advanced civs that dismantle rocky planets for resources seems low, but I agree that it's not zero. Ten thousand years ago or earlier, Earth would have not shown any obvious signs of intelligent life to a casual observer or a planet-cracking robot, so any possible ethical reservations might have been moot. Seems like it's very much a human 21st century mindset to consider another ET race as exploitative in this way. Another factor not much discussed is the loneliness factor. If advanced civs are rare, would they want to go around wiping out possible future companions who would make the vast bleakness less lonely? Yes, that depends on their character and emotional makeup.

Going from a seven pound helpless blob to an intelligent being that can walk on two legs and plumb the ocean depths, outer space, and a dizzying range of hostile environments. Our capacity to get used to anything. Self-repairing tissues. Epigenetic mechanisms. The thermogenesis of brown fat cells in January. Why overbites are sexy. The versatility of the larynx. Dependence of the mind's operations (per @iNow) on subtle interactions with environment and physiology. Hand/eye coordination that allows virtuoso musicians and surgeons and other fine-motor miracles. The generation of consciousness from unconscious matter. So, yes, evolution.

Here is a screenshot of the Washington Post editorial today on the NIF news. (I hope this is okay, in terms of the rule about posting just links to commercial websites - this is really just a screenshot archive, quite safe to click on): https://archive.ph/vS6fX

My diet is mainly Italian cuisine, but I am thin. In my case, I think it's possibly metabolism regulation genes from mom's side. Also my version of Mediterranean diet is very heavy on vegetables - I almost never dump just red sauce on pasta. There's always zucchini, beans, chickpeas, carrots, green peas, spinach, sweet potatoes, etc. The only poundage multiplier I really have to watch is polenta. I can relate to @Genady cheese problems - I have to moderate the parmesan and mozzarella these days. Cheesemaking does not remove the lactose. Ricotta is the worst for that. Love cabbage, but it's a paint peeler in any confined space. And Brussel sprouts are lethal.

This was the original concept when I first read about it back in the early Paleolithic. A miniature sun in a magnetic bottle. It also has the advantage in terms of "where do we put everything?" The inertial confinement with its stadium-filling array of LAZERS faces the thorny engineering problems of where you then fit all the thermal conversion stuff needed for an actual power plant.

Good point. Once you speculate on self-replicating probes there are so many possible speculative paths from that. And VN machines seem more practical especially in terms of collecting data in some unthinkably vast galactic survey. Yep. And terraforming is really hard work and massive scale investment, even if arsenic, mercury, lead, toxic chemicals, dangerous microbes, allergens, are not a problem. Alien biomes would likely have different protein structures and amino acids, so a colonist couldn't just start with "40 acres and a mule." The reality of most planet based colonies would likely be sequestered spaces beneath sealed domes. We have all really stayed with the FBI topic, haven't we? Hehe.

Makes sense, since Russian would transliterate to keep the "z" sound of the spoken word. And Russian S is C, which is only pronounced like the sibilant S. Добро пожаловать.

Cucumbers. They have fiber, electrolytes and good vitamins with nearly zero kilocalories of food energy.

I share the underwhelmed state here. As the lab director said: "300 megajoules at the wall, two megajoules at the laser.” The old "wall socket" problem. And agree that magnetic confinement might be the better path than inertial, in terms of the engineering hurdles. It's laser, btw, not lazer (forum pedant rears its ugly head briefly). It's originally an acronym. Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation.

Pretty sure if someone kept calling me "retarded," "professor," "liar," or my posts "mangled gibberish," I would terminate my conversation with them. Lorentz may find (cough) transformative benefits in candid self-reflection on his style of discourse. It's often more illuminating than self-justification.

It was probably easier to check IP addresses (and block them, or a small range around them) when the web was younger and fewer had multiple IP addresses or VPNs or the like. It's harder to decisively determine the electronic fingerprint of a sockpuppet, so one is forced as a mod to give BotD. It can be frustrating for a member who in good faith puts together a lengthy explanation at a novice level, as Studiot and others do. One hopes that somewhere out there a reader looks in who does benefit from such explanation. (That would be me, in some physics threads...)

Yes, and plus one to the whole post. I see this problem as part of a culture war, where people move away from conversations that are meant to find out what others are thinking (and how they got there) to agenda-driven conversations where the parties will comb over everything the other person says with a fine-toothed comb in hopes of finding something that could be spun as offensive. It's what partisans often do to politicians ("Hey, Hillary called us all deplorable!") and now it's become the tactic in more mundane encounters between ordinary people. The Antifa example you gave is a good one. Another is Social Justice Warrior. How could fighting for social justice be anything but good and desirable? So the term is twisted to be sarcastic, as if sarcasm is all you need to make a case. The Left sometimes will mock any use of the term "small government," closing off reasoned discussion of the concept. The Right will, in a similar vein, attack "socialism," mocking any top-down economic policy in advance by equating it with Stalinism or Nazis. A recent case regarding the question, "Where are you from?" struck me as one where the criticism of the questioner is often predicated on the assumption that they must be racist. No further examination of context or motivation needed. Guilty. I would heartily agree that the conversation between the Royal Household member (age 83) and a Black woman, recently recounted on BBC, revealed a rather rude and toxic cross-examination that was deservedly condemned. But not EVERYONE who has ever asked this question is being racist and rude. Many people in many places, where newcomers are prevalent, are simply taking a friendly interest in someone arrived from a different place and culture, their words meaning nothing beyond that. It was until recently a common question in many US university towns, because we have so many foreign students that come from all over the world and who enjoy talking about their adventures. Not everyone does, of course, and I have rarely seen the question followed up in a pushy way. Now, it's verboten.

I guess one can describe Earth as one data point, though it does have a multiplicity of civilizations with some variety in their ethical systems. So we can look at them, through history to present day, and see how some systems prosper more than others. While this is a meager data set, with regard to a galaxy, I was suggesting some guesses could be made. One guess, as I posted earlier, is that societies that favor trade over genocide are far more likely to thrive and develop planetary cooperatives that can afford space travel. It's fair to say my guess is a hypothesis maybe only testable by potentially exposing ourselves to possible "Borg" collectives or other threats. Or there may be a natural ceiling for intelligence, as @mistermack discusses. And we may find an empty galaxy, so far as big-brained toolmakers are concerned. Speaking as one of the big-brained toolmakers, I predict this is something we will try to determine even with the risk that the answer will disappoint us. At some point, if we are not finding any signs of intelligence, we might disseminate Von Neumann machines that could massively replicate and survey every star system. (Could some UFO sightings actually be of such devices?)