joigus

In Latin: So both referring to 'I'. I don't know why it is always cited as just 'cogito, ergo sum'. Missing the 'I', resp 'ego' in it. Just a note about language. In English pronoun+tense give you all the information you need, but you need the pronoun to remove ambiguity. In Latin you kind of have the pronoun incorporated in the verb: Cogito (I think), cogitas (you think), cogitat (he/she thinks), cogitant (they think), cogitamus (we think), cogitant (they think). It's very much like Italian and Spanish. You can use the pronoun, but it sounds emphatic. In the nominative case the pronouns usually don't appear. It's therefore not natural to say "ego cogito, ergo ego sum." I might be missing finer points. It's been a while since I last talked to an ancient Roman.

The question seems far from being settled. I've just found this interesting article: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/why-did-humans-evolve-lose-fur-180970980/ Some of the hypotheses seem a bit far-fetched to me. Let go of you fur because you are better able to notice other people blushing? It seems a tad extreme. A protein seems to be involved that apparently acts as an inhibitor to selectively suppress hair growth in certain areas. In most mammals --according to the article-- the difference manifests itself in the plantar skin in some exceptional mammals --polar bears and some rabbits. Maybe for humans there are intensifiers at the level of regulatory sequences or the like? But there must be a strong evolutionary pressure behind it. Another interesting piece of information providing likely timeline: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3002236/ The main argument is about when clothing probably appeared based on evolutionary divergence of head/clothing lice.

I do remember other people being under neg-rep attack, and reporting accordingly. I know I've been protected when I was under fire for no other reason than disagreeing with someone. I like communities that are self-correcting to some extent. A judicious combination of refereeing and community awareness.

What's very interesting is that hair loss is universal in all human families, irrespective of environment. It could have been a spandrel that got carried along because humans started using animal pelts, so there was no adaptive pressure on having more and thicker hair. If you go to the tundra you still got mammoth! If it further affords you the possibility of turning them into a sensory device for ticks, that would be very welcome. Some further thoughts... I'm acting like a sounding board to people that know much more about this. But I love the discussion.

You must get a few of them (neg-reps). It's a rite of passage. It's bound to happen if you clash with some nut here or there. I'd be concerned if I didn't get any. Have you gotten yours?

I disagree. A cat is a cat, and a jellyfish is a jellyfish. Why do I know that? By virtue of examples of catness and jellyfishness being available to me. That way, I can look at a tree and say "that is no cat, nor is it a jellyfish." "It possesses no catness, nor does it possess any jellyfishness." I've never seen, felt, or even been able to surmise, a non-self. You know, "in the world of selfness, this is no self." As a matter of fact, I've never seen a self either. A self cannot be re-instanciated, or multiply instanciated, it cannot be gradually deprived of its qualities by removing aspects of it, even mentally --like a jellyfish can. It cannot be compared to another "self" in any meaningful way that I can think of. It cannot be presented to my conscience as a distinct, clear-cut --or any other way cut-- thing. I cannot even start to fathom whether you have a self, the same way that I feel I do, anymore than I can fathom whether there is some other space and time outside of this space and time. I can only use the --learnt, inferred, constructed-- notions of time and space to say things like: "Before I was born, there was no catness, no jellyfishness, no quality or example of anything." That's all I can say, but even that is unredeemably contaminated by my experience. How can I be sure that time makes sense outside of my experience? In that sense, I'm with @Sensei in that, if a machine engaged me in a conversation about its self, it might be able to convince me that it has one. How would I know it doesn't? The self is a construct. Very powerful, very intimately-attached to survival for us humans, and therefore very convincing*, but a construct. * How could it be otherwise for animals for whom an essential tool for their survival is guessing each other's minds?

I would be comfortable enough starting from that seed for the purposes of a discussion. I would even go as far as to say that there are hints of an anthropological basis for the emergence of a notion of the self --or intensification of it-- from changes in patterns of human behaviour, but that this self is not a necessary part of the animal condition. Hunter-gatherers seem to have been more at peace with their mortality, even though they practiced burials, and seem to have been aware of this ending of existence. And tribal conflicts emerged only when they had to fight for scarce resourses. I'm aware that I'm identifying burial culture and awareness of death with awareness of self, but I think it's a reliable-enough yardstick for it. When you settle, on the other hand, you tend to identify yourself with things, people, tools, etc, around you. You create this concept of home. This is my landscape, the landscape of my forefathers. This is my game, and my staples, and so on. It's by virtue of the recurrence of your experiences, repetition, that you try to make sense of these "correlations in your experience" --for lack of a better term-- onto a self, which is nothing but a placeholder, that holds all of that experience together. Language, of course, has a powerful role to play in all of this, giving names to things, and people, and generally facilitating all of these initially loose notions to stick. It would be very interesting to know if/how people who are constantly on the run, barely trying to survive one more day, with faces and landscapes being forgotten in a matter of weeks, would be able to develop a notion of "I" in a similar way than we do. My feeling is that they wouldn't. They would be far too busy with the "something is happening" aspect of things. I don't know about Brentano and Husserl a great deal, TBH.

I'm thinking that, in particular, the Weyl solution extends this rotational velocity field to infinity --I'm not clear about assymptotic behaviour, but paper seems to suggest radiation-like, so 1/r. So it's probably not realistic to describe a distribution of galaxies. At some point near the intergalactic distance it's bound to stop being accurate. Even so, it's interesting that the picture of an axially-symmetric rotating galaxy already produces deviations from the Newtonian approximations for reasons that, OTOH, are very physical --a Lense-Thirring-like effect. I'm reminded of techniques that are used to deal with condensed-matter systems like, eg, the mean-field approximation. Usually, when I read about numerical relativity, it's always colliding BHs and the like. Extrapolation to clusters of galaxies, and the metric "looking Weyl" near any particular galaxy? I'm trying to dash-off some thoughts, but I still haven't made up my mind, one way or the other.

DNA by itself says nothing much without an environment. Sapolsky himself insists very strongly on this. He deals at some length on how the Dutch-starvation phenomenon has to do with some genes being activated by an environmental situation, then remaining activated some generations down the line, even when said environmental factors are no longer there, due to perinatal conditions --developing embryos detecting mother's environmental stresses because they're "marinated" --Sapolsky's prose-- in their mother's stress hormones. Thereby => environmentally-induced developmental changes that stick. If the topic gains interest, I will dig for literature and references, and correct possible oversimplifications I'm making... When you jumped to Michio Kaku I kinda started finding it harder to follow your line of thinking. I don't see the connection to "reality" there. Or the "I." "Reality" or the "I" are concepts that I --personally-- find suspect. I would engage in any serious attempt to supersede them with weaker-sounding terms, as "objective descriptions" or "correlations based on experience." => Illusion of "reality"; illusion of "I." But --something I try to say as often as humanly possible-- what the hell do I know.

Very interesting. I'm familiar with Immirzi from the "Immirzi parameter" in topological GR. I'm assuming it's the same Immirzi. I'll probably take a second and a third read of this. Thank you. +1

Definitely the most interesting differential change in humans, up there along with changes in frontal cortex and trapezoid, is skin, along with its hair follicles, and how body fat is organised. I know it's been hypothesised that it's an adaptation to persistance hunting, and "managing of sweat" as a cooling mechanism, to make it possible. In my mind, it makes evolutionary sense to put the hairs to good use as a sensory device, if you're gonna lose a lot of them for some other "collateral" reason. What I mean is several innovative features "helping each other out in a common suite of adaptive advantages" rather than one of them being the only driving causal force. Does that make sense to you?

Interesting... Coincidence? Perhaps these poor things have been too long among us. As nothing but a guess, but a relatively learned one, the longer you live, the more wild variation not based on the common adaptive theme is bound to appear. Perhaps animals that live much longer than their expectations in the wild should be considered as natural targets for some surprises in the development of their bodies.

Besides, guessing is a lot more fun...

You mean: E.D.G.E? The link was to "Trey the Explainer"... The links worked for me, BTW. Thanks. They seem very interesting.

You don't want to be bitten by a gorilla: The thing that intrigues me the most about the human body is our loss of hair* in comparison to most other mammals. I have a vested interest on advances in this particular field of research, but still... *Mighty selective --and peculiarly so-- as to certain body areas, especially for aging human males, I must say.

I have to say, I like this method way better...

I don't like it either. Prohibition tends to make room for more criminal activity. If anything, youngsters are more attracted to what's forbidden to them than discouraged by the prohibition. But what do I know... I'm looking forward to your head-butting. Interesting points always surface.

We tend to get exceedingly dramatic over these topics, and start thinking of the Middle Ages and the like. I'm not totally enamoured of the way a society like Japan handles similar issues, but it's a good example of how you can tackle them with a more creative approach --or perhaps based on a different tradition and cultural background. They tend to use what I would call inner-circle shame instead of physical punishment. Shoplifters, eg, if I got my information right, are treated to a public display of shame in their usual circles: Their boss, coworkers and family are duly informed about their lapse. Being showcased as a litterer might be deterrant enough. That could be another way to put those drones to good use. Just a thought. But Studiot may be right that you need more than just "leave nothing but your footsteps" witty information panel.

History of the Earth: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC_aOteuWIY8ITg7DQQspG1g History of the universe: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCtRFmSyL4fSLQkn-wMqlmdA Excellent channels as far as I can tell, and I've been watching them for quite a while. High quality by my standards. Excellent narrative and prose in English, beautiful and precise imagery with text info that you can look up and doesn't disappear in half a second. Loads of information that you can follow up. On top of it all, excellent choices of accompanying music, so you can use then to sit in front of a screen, unwind your troubled self, and let your imagination go back to the first eons of our world, our solar system, our universe, and the origins of life. I highly recommend them.

Very much in the vein of thoughts expressed. How could it not? It is essential to explain magnets, for example. Ferromagnetism is a quantum phenomenon. So you either QM your physics, or you get it wrong.

No.

Hey, I've got one: There once was a man with a doubt All the mistakes pointed out He asked left and right He wasn't too tight But his questions were nothing about I hope it helps.

Found this definition by one such Jason Preston at Quora that I like, and think is relevant to this discussion: https://www.quora.com/What-are-some-examples-of-sophistry

Yes, it is. A neutral chlorine atom has zero charge. So does a neutral sodium atom. But they stick together because sodium "donates" its extra electron (the 3s1 electron), which is very loose, for quantum-mechanical reasons, while the incomplete 3p5 level of sodium is much more stable with an extra electron. Ionic bonds are electrostatic in nature, but not because the original atoms are charged. It's a matter of quantum stability vs electrostatic attration, so to speak. The chemical bond does not happen because of electrostatic unbalance, but because atoms create these stable "rooms" for the electrons to be in. Atoms with similar electronegativity create a common orbital, in which to share electrons. That's the essence of the covalent bond. While transition metals create gigantic orbitals to cut loose their extra electrons. Those are the conduction bands. A salt crystal is neutral overall though, same as metals, and covalent substances. Electric unbalance for macroscopic samples of matter is a tiny, tiny percent. Electron and proton are not kept apart because of the exclusion principle. The exclusion principle is valid for identical particles. Electron and proton are very far from identical. They're kept apart because of the HUP. One thing is attraction proton-electron in the hydrogen atom (electrostatic), and another thing is atom-atom attraction. I was addressing @JustJoe's request, (My emphasis.) Those are different phenomena.

You definitely need quantum mechanics to understand how atoms stick together. They are not electrostatic forces, as a chlorine atom attracts a sodium atom for reasons other than electrostatic force. They stick together because of a quantum equilibrium. With old ideas about force you can cover only so much ground. I'm sorry.