TheVat

Only knew him from the low-budgie film, Once. That's sad. One thing people in poverty remind me is that you can be well off and then choose poverty, but the reverse is often not possible. People in the US my age can remember how counterculture movements in the sixties which aimed towards lifestyles of voluntary poverty were populated largely by kids from educated middle-class homes. A lot of them turned out to just be slumming.

And then the politicians try to sell locals on the notion that the data center will create jobs for them. That was peddled briefly here, until people started researching a bit and learned that data centers (once the flurry of construction and temp work is over) average 30-50 FT employees. IOW, far fewer than other businesses of similar size. One proposal I saw in New Mexico was especially outrageous, as the company had vowed to install its own power source, which turned out to be NG fueled generators. Middle of a sun-drenched desert but, no, solar/batteries is too expensive.

Partly, it's that so many tech companies are choosing desert locations for their data centers, where any water use will take from water used by people. There are no rivers or seas, just underground aquifers which are already under siege from municipalities and agriculture. Here's a good article on the reasons for this flocking to the desert, which seems counterintuitive at first. MIT Technology ReviewThe data center boom in the desertThe AI race is transforming northwestern Nevada into one of the world's largest data-center markets—and sparking fears of water strains in the nation’s driest state.

Draw? No, Liam, epiphenomenalisms I lane, mon! Eh, pipe mail onward. And Evita, genetic firey walnuts, epiphenomenal anemone? H. pipe stun lawyer if cite negative DNA.

Don't tempt me! LoL.

Also +1 for this. Serious satirical bullseyes there. Brings back memories of my Photobucket debacle, where they provided me a free storage space for pics, then violated the agreement in this gradual way such that I eventually lost all access to the photos. Unless I wanted to pay some ridiculous fee. Then when I dragged my feet on that, they just deleted the photos and my account. And...now I can't get the plus one button to work. Perfect! How fitting.

Cool example. And so as our knowledge of oxidation grows, we find that the macro-level "monster," becomes an instance of overdetermination and thus a redundant thing which is scientifically absurd. Perhaps consciousness, as seen in the "downward causation" theorizing could suffer the same fate as the ancient's fire demon? The macro-property just becomes a redundant cause alongside the micro-properties in the firing neurons and so on....so the macro-effect is then considered overdetermined. The macro-property, fire monster or thinking of the color orange is stripped of its causal power, collapsing into...uh oh...epiphenomenalism.

This is more a listen than a watch thing, so will post here. It seems pertinent to the current active thread on emergence.

Yep, at the end of the day we're all methodological naturalists. Yep, science remains reductionist because it works. Though I guess there have been rumblings from condensed matter physicists that high temp superconductivity might provide something like strong emergence. Not my field, so I have no idea how compelling their case is. ETA: apparently, in condensed matter physics, it's something called strong correlation which is seen as a type of strong emergence. https://cmsa.fas.harvard.edu/event/strongly-correlated-quantum-materials-and-high-temperature-superconductors-series/

Having done social work for several years, back there in antiquity, I've found myself wanting to hang back and take in the many trenchant observations made here rather than unleash a torrent of job experiences. I've really appreciate comments from @Markus Hanke and others on how human well-being and nurturance is not just about money and material stuff. It was interesting to me how much stuff and square footage people could amass and yet not be too happy. (Hedonic treadmill is a pertinent concept here) And how others could have little more than a bedroll and a library card and maybe a closet sized space and live robustly and soar across the universe. My perspective, perhaps call it "Buddhist with a small b," is that the latter see past momentary stimulation and the parade and pageantry of shiny things. What's funny is how outwardly I might seem middle class and comfortably equipped with material stuff and yet how little it matters to me and how easily I would toss almost all of it onto the lawn with a FREE sign. It's like living on a strange planet where people seem to require all this junk to communicate and prop up a fragile persona which they've confused with their real selves. And Capitalism relies upon this falseness of priorities. It's not immoral, it's just amoral, i.e. it has no real perspective on what's important in life. Like cancer cells, corporate entities seek to grow and grow, while draining life from the body of humanity. And nothing drains life from an individual quite like a sense of obligation to his material goods and property. As @Intoscience points out, poverty is really suffering and hardship - the cleverest trick of late stage capitalism is to expand the perception of hardship until it's leached of all its original and authentic meaning and simply becomes "the lack of whatever we want to sell you."

Haha, yes. David Bohm is maybe the poster child for strong emergence, attempting to take all the mysteries and roll them together. His implicate order does make for some entertaining reading, as he flips strong emergence on its ear and suggests what looks like emergence is actually the unfolding of an underlying, primary reality. Scratch away!

It seems more a philosophical conjecture than anything else. In strong emergence higher-level properties of a system arise from lower-level parts, but cannot be deduced, predicted, or reduced to those parts even in principle. That's the standard criterion for "strong." It posits that there are irreducible traits and potential downward causation (our old friend from all those consciousness threads). There's also the novelty aspect: a strongly emergent property introduces a genuinely new quality or dimension of reality that does not exist in the individual components (again, hello Hard Problem of Consciousness and that whole rabbit hole). Is there a macro-level whole which exerts a causal effect back down on its micro-level constituent parts? I guess for some the whole strong emergence conjecture gets traction when some phenomenon seems to resolutely defy a complete bottom-up explanation and then requires new fundamental laws or concepts operating at a more holistic domain. Anyone?

I'd guess people living near the edge naturally develop more compassion, so more likely to offer help to those teetering right on the edge. The wealthy, for the most part, started with some generational wealth, so they have no direct knowledge of the edge. As we used to say in the States about political candidates who came from privilege, "born on third base but thinks he hit a triple." (for any lacking a baseball-to-cricket translator, I can explain this further on request) The writer @sethoflagos mentions I agree with: Americans have long been encouraged to view poverty as a moral failure. And the converse of course, that wealth is a product of high moral character. (Insert guffaw or similar explosion of laughter here)

Emily recently heard from her Tibetan Buddhist friend, Joe the ammonite. Em, dap in ammonite spiral - a rip set in. Om mani padme... In other news... Cite Medicaid I: acid emetic. You bet animals laminate buoy. Do gyro, taro, for Elban emu? I do prefer podium enabler of oratory god.

Love. Compassion. Meaning/Goals. Challenges. Spiritual pursuit/inwardness. Green spaces. Orgasms. And last but not least: something to complain about.

Chuckle. Some thought provoking posts all round. Greed, power seeking, and tribalism seem to be strong currents in the hominin brain. Mankind seems to be a nonstop war between the altruism/sharing/compassion pole and the greed/power/tribal pole. Ideologies, economics, techs, and religions all can serve as amplification mechanisms at either pole, though historically (see "somebody or other" et al) they tend to serve to the bad one more, given that power tends to hoover up as much of the memetic systems as possible and co-opt them into systems of crowd control.

And has a clever sense of humour... An El of a tale.

My translation remains ambiguous as to whether or not Odysseus gave up gluten. Matt Damon did, in order to better fill his character's shoes, or sandals. There is a fragment which has been attributed to Homer, "sailing upon the wine-dark sea to another land where none may partake of wheat or barley, and each man having minimal torso fat thereby..." Though not usually included in translations, as some scholars hold it to be a later forgery, it's possible Mr Damon drew inspiration there.

Probably not, but the way it has become trendy here in the States in the past decade or so makes it feel more neo. In my neck of the woods, no one spoke of mouthfeel until recently. In any case, my post was jocular in tone and not prescriptive.

The fine particulates theory has been a strong contender for quite some time, so maybe not as fresh as the article makes it sound. I was reading about dust-blocking asteroid winters back when Sagan et al had published their famous TTAPS paper (1983) on the mechanism of a potential nuclear winter, with parallels being drawn between the two. The OP paper said something about SO3 predominant. Let me look... If so, then far less radiation blocking by SO3 than SO2. SO2 is a relatively stable gas in the upper atmosphere. It persists long enough to disperse globally and acts as a precursor, reacting with water to form highly reflective sulfuric acid aerosols. But SO3 is highly reactive in the stratosphere, it reacts with water vapor almost immediately to form sulfuric acid, which limits its ability to spread evenly. Also, when exposed to solar radiation, certain byproducts of SO3 can break down, also cutting reflective effect.

Potus: my thanks to your agency officials for basically admitting the administration violated the Constitution! AP NewsWhite House admits it used keywords to kill billions wort...Federal agencies that terminated more than a thousand research grants at the University of California last year admitted that they used keywords related to diversity, gender, vaccine hesitancy and COVIt’s an admission that lawyers for the research professors say is proof that the agencies illegally cancelled nearly $2 billion in grants. And that’s a major development in a lawsuit filed by UC researchers against the Trump administration to permanently get their grants back. The researchers’ legal team is now asking the judge in the case to skip a trial and formally declare that the White House repeatedly violated the constitution, including the First Amendment. A court hearing on whether that’ll happen is scheduled for Oct. 20. The federal agencies made the admission about the keywords in signed stipulations filed in federal court last week in a case called Thakur v. Trump that’s been ongoing since last spring. The stipulations in the court filing show the agencies “did not terminate any grants based on alleged noncompliance with the terms of the grant” and instead used “general criteria, rather than grant-specific assessment of each award’s compliance, or performance,” the lawyers for the plaintiffs wrote. Lawyers for the UC professors now contend that the admission proves three wide-ranging constitutional violations: (...)

Yes. It has been overused. I'm sure there are better ones, like all triangles have three sides. A priori statements often contrasted with synthetic ones, like "All swans are white," which Karl Popper used to example as one which could be falsified empirically by the sighting of just one black swan (which eventually happened somewhere in Australia IIRC). And as Popper et al also pointed out, no amount of white swan sightings would ever have been sufficient to achieve certainty.

He said "crumb structure" - that's real science talk! Lay people call it "texture." While I'm on the topic, here's my least favorite food neologism: mouthfeel

Like, erm, "certainty"? 😉 That might be ol' Manny K's analytic truth - things we know with certainty because they are á priori truths which can be known without empirical support. All bachelors are unmarried. I stepped away from the thread for a while, mainly due to being a right-brain lefty who wearies of word fetishes and semantic wrangling. (is that why I like palindromes and wordplay? they tend to subvert the whole word game) (Like a bottle of JD, right?)

Some of the confusion was maybe with your line... "IMO "truth"is ultimately unattainable and is therefore reduced to a personal outlook, so discussions about whether it changes or not are moot..." ....came from perhaps the way you are using "truth" in a broad coverage of assemblages of true propositions, where some might prefer the word "paradigm" or "settled theory" or SLT. In philosophy, statements and propositions can be true or false, whereas assemblages of them would be rather a body of knowledge or what have you. So in the domain of this forum actual facts and true statements are quite similar things, and not at all about personal outlook. To be sure, personal outlook would be relevant when a statement is made about the relative proximity of (to revert to my example which makes inner 12 year olds giggle) Uranus and Cleveland, Ohio. But if my statement acknowledges my outlook (my geographic and solar system location) then it can still be universally agreed upon beyond my own subjectivity. In this time and place, Cleveland will always be closer. But here your idiosyncratic take will let you down, semantically. If a truth is not factual, then it never was a truth at all. If true has real meaning, then it shouldn't need the scare-quotes.