Sayonara

And any animal with a brain and nervous system has this ability?

I was thinking more like environmentally-directed changes to the genetic "template" during gamete production, to increase the offspring's local fitness. That sort of thing.

I don't think there is any form of such a business that can be successfully exploited on a public forum. However, there are always people who get confused.

I was thinking more like a big rocket made out of wheel-barrows and old washing machines. To the sun or bust.

Having a "back-catalogue", as it were, of previous adaptations and so forth would be handy in evolutionary terms, but I doubt there'd be any genetic mechanism that could look up and retrieve the correct entries.

I doubt Bush has ever had cause to use it, unless he was repeating something that someone said about him. It is far more reasonable for you to assume that any given human you can interact with is conscious in the same fashion as yourself, than it is to assume that any given animal is. That is outside the scope of this discussion.

That's a bit extreme. Windows passwords don't actually protect data on your hard drive; they only protect your windows environment - you know, while it's running.

I refer you to post #21, where I first used the word penumbra in this thread. You can ascribe the later hyphenation to the four hours of sleep and blistering headache caused by last night's mathsathon, but I would point out that since pen is a non-native prefix the hyphenation is not incorrect, but redundant. Actually, the definition you used is one of two, and it is the less 'correct' one (insofar as anyone cares how the Catholic church organised its bun fights in days of old.)

I can't remember the reasoning I had at the time, but it probably had something to do with the genes before and after mutation. Skye is better at that stuff than me - I hated genetics at uni.

What do you suppose it is that allows this ability, which we have and rocks don't?

Presumably you'd be offered something else instead, seeing as he has no apples.

You don't have to be a behaviourist to spot anthropomorphisation. If one is not even sure what consciousness is, and one has no empirical data or repeatable tests that in any way indicate that a rabbit or similar is conscious, then what reason is there to ascribe that characteristic to it as a means of supporting an argument?

You can blame that on me posting at two in the morning after doing 14 hours straight of mathematics. The identity is the term 'shadow' (comprising the umbra and pen-umbra), and the characteristics comprise all of its properties (which does include projections due to intersection, yes). The reason I made the distinction was because syntax252 confused the identifying term 'shadow' with the characteristic 'area of lessened light', directly after I pointed out the difference.

The term mould can refer either to fungus, or to the mycelial growths of a fungus.

yeeee! SCIENCE is JUST making STUFF up! ^ That's what you sound like.

If we played it right we could get them to undergo a second exodus.

How?

His question implied that the thing he was talking about and the thing I was talking about were two different but analogous entities, wheres in fact he was describing a characteristic of the thing that I was identifying.

Ornate and sophisticated responses to stimuli are still just responses to stimuli. Having kept a rabbit with a particularly unique "personality", I have to say I never saw any evidence of conscious thought.

You say that about everything.

The help we offer in the homework forum is of the type "tell us why you don't get it, and we'll explain the bit that is giving you a problem", not the "let us do it for you" variety.

Scary, isn't it? There are millions of people like him.

Give me the exact title of the paper you want - I have access to dozens of libraries and databases.

Can you please tell us which bit is giving you trouble, so we can help?