exchemist

It seems to me there is huge amount of baloney associated with the concept of consciousness. The picture you have chosen does not, to put it politely, suggest you are adopting a scientific attitude of mind about it. The statement that "ultimately there is is nothing but consciousness" seems ridiculous, on the face of it. How do you reach such a conclusion?

Sure, and I read it, or at least the abstract and the discussion. But that didn’t seem to explain the significance of the research and nor did the university press release. All rather baffling. (My comment about Phys Org was just meant to be a general observation that as (I now realise) it isn’t a magazine with articles written by science journalists, one is on one’s own if the press release is unclear so recourse to the actual paper - as supplied by you in this instance - is the only route.)

Wiki says it’s just a news aggregator. I’ve found in the past articles they have published in which some PR person has written a press release without understanding the science. I think with Phys Org it’s pretty important to look at the actual paper, not just the press release.

LLMs tell you what you want to hear and make stuff up if they can’t find the answer. Also they seem to have a tendency to write in verbose and pompous language that tries to sound impressive. That is the opposite of what you need. I really don’t think there is any effective substitute for reading and then discussing or asking questions about what you have read. But others here may have a different view.

Well yes, oddly I did mean real issues. And yes I do think the world’s population as a whole will always lack the relevant knowledge on every subject worth deciding, simply because of the specialist or local knowledge required to make an informed decision. This is quite apart from a large proportion of the population not having the necessary mental acuity or interest in the topic. There are good reasons why democratic governments have a regional mandate rather than a global one and why they are governed by elected representatives, whose primary job is to understand issues and represent the interests of those who elected them. I simply can’t see how referenda involving the entire population of the globe can ever be an appropriate way of governing.

Many of these questions can be answered by reading. Videos are in general a lousy resource in my opinion. You need to be able to go at your own pace and go back and re-read bits you did not grasp first time round. There is a huge amount available on the internet. Wikipedia is generally reliable, though can get too rigorous for beginners at times - you have to be selective and sometimes just read the opening few paras, before it goes off the deep end with walls of maths. Another good one I find is the hyperphysics site run by Georgia State University. http://www.hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/index.html Also the Libretext series is good: https://phys.libretexts.org. One approach might be to pick a topic, say mass or waves, read what these sources have to say and then come a place like this with specific queries on aspects you are having trouble with. That’s just because it is more efficient than asking people on forums like this to explain concepts from scratch. (You are welcome to try that too of course but we are not all professional educators.)

This about Einstein’s formula is something of a popular misconception. It does not say energy and matter are interchangeable. What it says is energy and mass, (not matter, please note) go hand in hand. m stands for mass, not matter. Mass is a property, as energy is. Neither mass nor energy is “stuff”. Both are just properties of certain physical systems. A system that gains energy also gains mass. For example, a charged battery has slightly more mass than a discharged one, though the difference is so small you would struggle to measure it in practice. Anything with rest mass does indeed possess energy by virtue of its mass. But some entities, such as photons (of visible light, gamma rays etc) also possess energy in spite of having no rest mass. There is in fact a longer version of Einstein’s famous formula, though much less well known, that provides for this.

Well yes that’s the puzzle. But see my previous post for a possible (tentative) explanation. It looks to me like another of these cases in which Phys Org simply reproduces a press release from the research organisation, which has been written by someone who doesn’t understand the point of the research. Phys Org doesn’t do any journalism, it just collates press releases, apparently.

Having reread it, I think the point may be to do with the protracted existence of hydrothermal systems in the rocks shattered by the impact, in this case apparently for >1m yrs. They seem to be suggesting that systems like this, generated by meteorite impact rather than vulcanism, may have created conditions for the emergence of life on Earth. I suppose this could be interesting to connect with previous findings that biochemical building blocks, such as the nitrogenous heterocyclic bases used by RNA, have been found in meteorites. One would need to account for how these rare chemicals came to be present in exactly the same - also rare - environments on the early Earth that were suitable for biochemistry to develop. But this is just me attempting to join the dots. The paper itself does not really explain why these findings are significant, and nor does the Phys Org article (which exhibits zero journalism, being just a reprint of the university’s press release.)

Yes but the thing that determines whether a piece of imagination conveys knowledge about the world, as opposed to being a mere fantasy, or just nonsense, is whether it can be tied to observation of nature. Any fool can imagine all manner of things. That's not hard. But imagination that is consistent with what we observe about how nature behaves is far more constraining - and thus far harder. That is the only form of imagination that is any use in science.

I've skimmed this and can't work out why it is important. It seems to be about the colonisation of a meteorite impact crater created ~80m years ago, i.e. some time in the Cretaceous, by the terrestrial micro-organisms that were around at the time. Why is that of interest?

Recent testing of the tripwire in Europe may well be intended to draw the attention and resources of the EU and NATO towards the Baltic and thus away from the emerging plans for defence of Ukraine. The cyber attack on EU airport systems today is likely part of the same operation.

No it isn't. The basis of knowledge, at least where the natural world is concerned, is reproducible observation of nature.

OK, so what observation(s) are you proposing could be made to test the validity of your hypothesis?

Intuition helps, certainly. However the big piece you seem to miss is the need to test intuition by observation, to see if one’s intuition successfully withstands contact with reality. Without that, you are just making shit up - and that is not science. You may not need to make observations yourself, but you do need your intuitive idea to make predictions of what we should be able to observe, so that the idea can be tested.

It seems you don't have anything to discuss on the forum at the moment, then. See you around, perhaps.

Where have you addressed the thermodynamic objection to the existence of these hypothetical things.

This seems to be due to the media being almost entirely owned by business corporations, who at the end of the day have no guiding star other than making money.

It would in my view be pointless. There is no issue I can think of where the people of the world would be well enough informed to make a good decision. The essence of representative democracy is to choose governments and legislators that people trust to make those decisions for them, having first informed themselves on the issues in question. “Do you want to live in a peaceful world or not?” Is a fairly empty question, unless accompanied by a lot of context.

I’m not sure what you mean by “debate” here. Do you mean attack? Or challenge? That would make sense from the context, but it’s not how I understand the term. Surely one debates a proposition of some kind. What would the proposition be here?

I was interested to learn of the protective, UV-absorbing properties of dissolved iron in the oceans before the Great Oxygenation Event. Fe II salts being more soluble than Fe III (less liable to precipitate as hydroxides) would have provided some protection in the photosynthetic zone. It also seems modern cyanobacteria contain scytonemin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scytonemin which acts as a UV-absorbing pigment. The evolution of this fairly early on would have helped. There were a couple of threads on this some months ago, I think, if you are interested. One on lichens, if I remember right.

Yes this is a science forum and what you have written here is meaningless nonsense, not science or anything remotely like it. I suggest you may be better off finding somewhere else for your effusions. You won’t last long here at this rate.

It doesn’t quack. These are heterocyclic compounds containing nitrogen, thought to be formed inorganically in deep space on cold bodies containing carbon and ammonia. They are not evidence of life elsewhere.

Oh I agree it seems most improbable that our planet is the only one in the cosmos with life. However there have been no signs of life in meteorites, so far as I am aware. There been signs of certain building blocks of our biochemistry (precursors of nucleotide bases) which could explain how they came to be available on earth, but that’s about it, at least according to what I have read.

I grew up eating meat and still do, but the vegetarian dishes I like are not fake meat, they are dishes in their own right, from a proper culinary tradition. Things like cheese soufflé, mushroom or cauliflower risotto, dhal of various kinds, grilled Mediterranean vegetables, caponata, lentil and vegetable soup, pasta with broccoli or fried courgettes, and so on. I suspect eating a meat substitute just makes one pine for the real thing, rather than being a satisfying alternative. But if my son’s girlfriend sticks around, I’ll be doing more of this, so I’ll see how I get on. One slight issue is that cheese becomes more important, and many of the AOP cheeses in Europe have to be made with animal rennet rather the synthetic version. It’s a bit silly, as chemically it is the same, but the traditionalists won’t allow it. One can get a synthetic rennet “parmesan” (thank God) but can’t call it that. There is one stilton (Colston Basset) that uses it and some quite good modern artisanal English cheeses like Wigmore, but the gold standard French and Italian ones all still need animal rennet to qualify as the real thing. I’m on a learning curve with all this, thanks to this rather strict but otherwise sweet Scottish lass my son has teamed up with.