Delta1212

No. The process of capturing that energy increases the entropy of the system. Life is not magic, it is just complex. There will always be less and less useable energy in the universe. There is nothing we can do to change that fact.

The freezing of German and Japanese assets happened within a month of each other. Without having looked more deeply into the circumstances, that seems more like a case of the political will being present at that time to respond to the on-going military actions moreso than as a direct response to what the nations whose assets were frozen did immediately prior.

None of which makes the heat death of the universe reversible, though.

This is not correct. Intelligent beings cannot produce perpetual motion machines. Once energy has been used to do work, it is no longer available to do further work. The heat death of the universe is the point at which the universe finds itself in equilibrium, and if that is the case there is no longer any energy available to do work.

It.you are correct. It just keeps adding smaller and smaller fractions of a percent for the same amount of energy input. Yes, the black hole would just eat it. You cannot blow up a black hole just by throwing something extremely fast at it. THR more energy it has, the more it can feed the black hole. No, you can't turn something into a black hole just by making it go fast enough.

That would be a bit like trying to use a battery to recharge itself. The energy has to come from somewhere.

Zulu has separate tenses for both immediate and far future events, so it's definitely not Zulu. I haven't heard of a language that lacks the ability to communicate time aside from a couple of famous mistakes/misunderstandings as already mentioned.

That was me. Thanks for posting it because it saved me the trouble of going back to find that post.

There is a long-standing myth that the Hopi language has no concept of time originating with Whorf (of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis fame) that still gets taught in some entry level classes in high school and occasionally even college despite not actually being true. I assume this is what is being referenced.

So everyone else is wrong about what words mean and only you have the insight to understand their real definitions. Ok.

Nazi Germany's alliance with Japan was a defensive one, so technically they were not obligated to declare war on the US as Japan was the aggressor. While FDR certainly wanted to go to war with Germany, he would have had to get a declaration of war through Congress, which would not have been a sure thing with attention being focused on Japan. Hitler's pre-emptive declaration made things much simpler in that respect.

As always, that is easier said than done.

I don't understand your first two sentences.

An evaluation of what?

What is a psychology test?

No, he's right that there is at least some evidence of long term or permanent learning disability in cases where children have been isolated during their earliest years. That said, I haven't done a lot of research into the validity of that beyond what I learned in a high school psychology course, a lot of the information from which I have since discovered to be spurious.

Is that the same thing as no longer being sapient?

Is a lone human not intelligent when separated from the group?

Is civilization-level technological progress a requirement for advanced intelligence, though? We're humans not sapient before we started wiring things for electricty?

Though that is a bit like making "left fossils" as a requirement for classifying something as a dinosaur. Yes, if it didn't we won't know about its existence and will therefore be unable to classify it as a dinosaur, but there are likely plenty of things that we would certainly classify as dinosaurs that we will never know about because there isn't sufficient or extent evidence of them for us to find. The ability to communicate certainly makes it easier to accept the sapience of another being, but utilizing language is not necessarily a pre-requisite for having sapience. You'd expect to find that in a social intelligence, which is what we are, but while social structures are likely part of the driving factor of humanity's evolution of intelligence, it is not the only thing driving it and it may be possible for a less social creature to develop advanced intelligence by taking a different evolutionary route, in which case it may not co-evolve with anything we would recognize as language.

I think it might help to dial the discussion down a level and build up from there, because animals are always going to be a philosophically fuzzy subject when discussing internal experience. So let's look at a camera instead. Digital cameras include a light-sensitive sensor. It can detect color. Putting aside more modern ones that have facial recognition and whatnot for a moment and just going with an older basic model, there is no real processing of the content of the image. It is very basic input-output, action-reaction stuff. Does such a camera have an internal experience of what it "sees"? I think that the straightforward answer is likely "no." If it did, it would mean that pretty much every chemical, physical or quantum interaction would generate an internal experience in something. Based on the demonstrated importance our nervous system and brain play in our own internal experience of the world, I feel safe in saying that this is not the case, or at the very least that if some internal sensation exists in all things in the universe, it is of a completely different kind and with a different basic mechanism than our own. So then an internal experience is not merely the result of perception of a stimulus, but is the result of the brain processing that perception and constructing a mental model of the world based on the information that stimulus provides (in conjunction with all of the other stimuli being received). This is why, for instance, color perception varies significantly based on context and you can get things like the black-blue/white-gold dress. The qualia are not faithful representations of what is detected by the eye, but generated by the brain as part of its modeling process. Different people may receive the same input and have very different internal experiences based on how the brain winds up collating all of the information and building its model. Because of this, I consider it probable that most organisms with a complex central nervous system have some kind of internal experience of their senses with the odds of this more or less increasing with the complexity of their interactions with the world. I think it is likely, for instance, that anything capable of displaying problem-solving skills when faced with a novel problem, especially when any degree of tool use is involved, most likely has the ability to do some level of predictive modeling in order to recognize what the likely results of different actions it can take will be. And I find it unlikely that anything would obtain the ability to model future states of a system without having a brain that maintains some degree of modeling of the active state of their environment based on sensory input. If the internal model is the thing that provides us with qualia, then it seems reasonable that such creatures also have an internal experience. And I think at least the basic modeling of the environment spreads much father out in the animal kingdom than just the obvious tool-users and problem-solvers. Those are just the ones I'm most confident likely have an internal experience of their senses. In general, I think it's likely that anything with seriously complex sensory input probably has an internal model of it. So single photo receptor that detects day/night cycles? That may just alter certain functions within the organism in response to amount of light received without any direct perception by the organism itself. The compound eye of an insect where the input from each sensor needs to be put together in order to facilitate object recognition for the detection of food, threats and family? I'm pretty sure that that requires a degree of internal modeling and thus, probably, qualia. This is also the major reason why I'm curious as to whether some of our most advanced AIs have started having some degree of limited experience because they are essentially performing a degree of internal modeling on sensory input including that very same object recognition I was talking about. Ultimately, though, we don't really fundamentally know where subjective experience comes from, and so everything and nothing having it is technically within the realm of possibility. In my more existentialist moments, I'm even open to the possibility that I don't have a subjective experience of anything either and that this is a delusion generated in my brain telling me that I have subjective experience. I could even quibble a bit with cogito ergo sum, although not very strenuously. Anyway, there are no hard answers available as far as the internal experiences of others, including other species and even other objects, but I do think what indirect evidence we have points more or less in the direction outlined above.

Philosophy of language is a fairly deep subject. If language is simply a set of symbols in some form that are used to represent some meaning in order to communicate, the humans are far from the only species that utilizes language. There is some trouble with using this as a definition, however. Are street signs, for example, a distinct language? They are a consistent set of symbols that each encode specific meaning. Are emojis their own language? If that's too abstract, you could, with the above description, qualify any encoding system or cipher as its own separate language. Morse code becomes a language. Pig-Latin becomes a language. The Latin alphabet turns written English into an entirely separate language from spoken English, because they use different completely symbols to encode meaning. For human languages, a major component is not just symbolic representation of concepts, but also the syntax. That is, a major part of the meaning of a language is encoded not just in the symbols themselves but in the way those symbols are arranged, which generally conveys information about the relationships between the concepts reprinted by those symbols. This is why memorizing a foreign language dictionary does not mean that you actually speak the language in question and why word-for-word translations are usually broken, even to the point of complete incomprehensibility. As far as we have been able to determine this far, this critical aspect of human language is also something that is unique to human communication. Even most of the more exemplary examples of animals being taught human language have struggled with or entirely lacked any concept of grammar and syntax. Symbolic communication in some form is not especially uncommon, but it's more on par with the kind of communication you would see by playing a game of, say, charades or pictionary, which I don't think qualifies as language use unless we are extending "language" to mean "any kind of communication whatsoever." That said, I'd be interested to see more research done on cetacean communication and birdsong. What I know of the research done on the information entropy of whale songs doesn't make that seem particularly promising as the "bandwidth" appears extremely low in terms of the amount of information it is possible to convey through it, but I don't of any similar studies targeting whale or dolphin clicks.

He gives the equation for adding velocities in the post you quoted. In short, speed doesn't add linearly, it just looks like it does at very low speeds.

I think the really point here is that any wave traveling through a medium will have a velocity equal to the velocity of sound in that medium plus whatever velocity the medium itself has. For people traveling at different speeds relative to the medium, the speed of the sound wave will change relative to the observer. The speed of light does not change in this manner with respect to the speed of the observer.

I'm not sure if I would frame it in terms of a hostage, but that is pretty much what would happen and everyone knows it.