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mcompengr

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    UNM, BSCpE

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Meson

Meson (3/13)

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  1. A fossilized whale was just found, and it has the word יונה (Jonah in Hebrew) on a hatband in its stomach.
  2. Okay, here's a thesis: That tiny thought-processor is the mind, and everything else is the "Extended Mind", including the Library of Congress.
  3. The next time I'm in an FQXi contest, I'm sure it will be the first time. They seem all hepped up about consciousness being fundamental. Some go too close to "new physics" for me, like meta-physics made palatable. At best, doing that seems to me to be like using renormalization for good purposes, but it can't be good long term.
  4. And now, three years later quantum computing is on steroids. We MUST throw money at it because "they" might try to build one. My father worked on nuclear aircraft. Somebody had to do it. A.I. is making money and it's fun, and scientists will follow their bliss anyway.
  5. It was hoped that a neuroscientist was writing here, more social media than forum. Intellectual masturbation should not be admonished.
  6. I felt deep and profound shame for about two weeks after. It gets better, if y'all would be so kind, but more blood too. This is the end. Fully conscious throughout. (Fundamentals of consciousness? Brain physiology and neuroscience, OK?) Next was sunlight and zero fear, but still the same bizarro world. (sigh) Except, now there seemed a small (beautiful and logical) area of reality on the left and forward. Mentally stepping through, all was normal again except for a small (ugly and mad) area of bizarro world on the right and behind. There to gather data, I went back in and out three times. Each time it was the same, with both worlds seen clearly, right next to each other, from the alternating perspectives. On the third time: thoughts of getting stuck, exited and never looked back. (The fast then ended with a pint of half & half milk.) Two days later, good to go.
  7. [It may be that sleep deprivation is kind of indistinguishable from schizophrenia in the lab. So there is that, too.] But, the machinery referred to is just that tiny speck of a thought processor. My brain was hosed but not me. Something physical was done to it and consciousness is physical, right? The next time you're blue for no good reason, remember it's not you, it's just bad data being presented to your processor. You are the thinker, not the thought.
  8. What is the nature of consciousness? The machinery was fine, but absolutely nothing made any sense or had any meaning. Unbidden, words would be swimming before my mind's eye. I had no clue even as to what they were, but some came and went with concomitant sensations. The phrase "united states" seemed somehow important and special. (No sentence ever appeared.) Seeing the word "love" would cause the fear to abate. (These actually facilitated my return.)
  9. An opportunity presented itself. Being so thin, I figured I had a leg up on the likes of Bobby Sands (R.I.P). Something physical was expected. When something other happened it seemed like a much bigger opportunity. (The "stupid bloody" bits.) I even concocted a (useless, duh!) escape plan, but I would have gone in anyway. Early on, I was brilliantly solving world historic problems, and it went downhill from there. (I thought black fast meant: water only) Maybe not pointless. Consciousness and mental illness are kind of interesting. Except for back in the world, folks still knew me as I always was. And also, how do you know you're awake? It was like that.
  10. Something happened in my brain. 6'0", 126 lbs., a "black" fast for 8 days. Also, near total sleep deprivation maintained with tiny, infrequent doses of cannabis. Motivation: blah, blah, blah, and thus performed a "forbidden experiment" upon myself. The result was like a mental breakdown, rather than any sort of physical one. Not a breakdown as such, but gradual loss of reality with complete insanity near the end. Direct knowledge, subjective data was obtained about a most hideous and frightening state of mind. (must needs in first-person, narrative follows) Somehow, throughout the whole ordeal I remained the exact same "me" that I am right now and have always been. My consciousness was intact and unchanged even after words lost all of their meaning. Although terrified, I was still curious and observant. There was no "out of body" sensation whatsoever. With useless sensory input and meaningless memory, self awareness was pretty much all that was left. And yet, it was 100% of the cognitive me that I am, with nothing missing or distorted. No doubt, had I interacted with another human at that time I could have been rightly described as being totally out of my mind. But within that small, empty, full consciousness, my mental state was OK. It wasn't that my little mental engine (me) was broken, it was bad data. I was a thought processor with nothing to process except: "What is all this stuff (available info)?" and "What am I?"
  11. The thesis here is that there is and has been only one economic system throughout all of human history, namely: free trade and enterprise. Differences between the various implementations has involved such things as regulation and control of free trade (and the funding of government). Capitalism would be an advanced free trade technology, a collection of free trade strategies, and not a form of government. Communism fails because it would replace free trade with....nothing.
  12. Thanks, I never meant that bent space is anything more than a model. Math, of course, is the best model. "The [GR] mathematical result Einstein found underlies the figures [images of warping] and is embodied in what are called the Einstein field equations. As the name indicates, Einstein viewed the warping of spacetime as the manifestation -- the geometrical embodiment -- of a gravitational field." (Brian Green, The Fabric of the Cosmos, p.70) The warped space model comes from that math. Gravity as a force model comes from Newton.
  13. For that annihilation, quarks too would only do so with their paired opposite. Mesons are made of a quark and an anti-quark, but not opposites. Common "constituent stuff" might be seen because anti-particles come out of collisions where none went in. (I don't know, only this from 1980: osti.gov/scitech/biblio/5165829-antiproton-neutron-annihilation-rest-anti-pi-final-states)
  14. Any good model will do as long as cell size/radius is never zero.
  15. This is what 56 regular tetrahedra look like, 3D. (The small gaps between are not visible. Empty slot at center.)
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