TheVat

A woman is arrested for attacking her husband with his guitars. Judge: First offender? Woman: No, I started with the Gibson. Then a Fender.

You're leaving? Are you quite sure? You've only declared your departure 47 times, so how can we be sure this isn't just some stray impulse that will pass? I think we need some large official-looking fonts, perhaps a notice from an attorney, maybe a taped press conference? I know: mail out refrigerator magnets.

What puzzles me is that, as a Post subscriber, I don't recall Heard saying one mean thing about Depp (or singling out anyone, actually) in her Op-Ed piece. It struck me, at the time, as more an indictment of showbiz culture and exploitation. I am continuing to increase my baseline level of skepticism about our nation's present jury system. I would like to say all my thoughts on the Depp/Heard case are unbiased and I have strived not to take sides or draw any conclusions on what a jackass Depp is. (JK) I would guess that incidents of spousal abuse of men are understudied, not least because they are vastly underreported. This skewing would seem pretty obvious, and yet maybe difficult to quantify. My guess is that, if you conducted a survey of men that contained the question "Would you contact law enforcement if your wife hit you?" the ink that had been used to print the YES box would be largely wasted. Though a good social scientist would hopefully derive multiple questions with greater specificity, like how would they respond if hit with a fist, or a rolling pin, or an unabridged dictionary, etc. I guess if sledgehammer or andiron was one of the options, there would be police involvement whether or not the victim was able to make the phone call.

Or, technically, "them yonder hills." Is this thread suitable for merger with The Meaning Behind thread that INow posted? (I guess I should run a search on that thread to learn the truth behind INow and StringJunky. And whether Phi for All is offering everyone wavefunctions or golden ratios. I already have the former. ) Andrew Mellon established a vast business empire and was Secretary of the Treasury during the boom years of the 1920s. I would think he had some capacity for logic.

Thanks. It would be, if the simulation was of better quality. Re your moniker, I initially thought it might be a blues musician name, like the famous Blind Lemon Jefferson. Glad to know you're not a lemon, or lazy. Though the former would probably invite the latter. I am looking forward to learning how @StringJunky acquired his username. I've heard addictions to string, twine, any sort of cordage, can be debilitating.

I am a brain in a vat. Pretty straightforward. Or, from an epistemological standpoint, I have no way to determine that I am not a brain in a vat, being fed sensory data through wires which simulate having a body. And a very bossy cat.

Are we certain that Tourette's doesn't manifest in writing YOU GRAVY LICKING PIG BASTARD!? Jesting aside, most Tourette's involves tics like throat clearing or excess blinking, and not speech, so writing wouldn't impact it in any way. The form of Tourette's highlighted by popular media, called coprolalia, is actually quite rare.

Good question. Lack of sufficient evidence is the legal criterion maybe. I don't think disproof is required. (I didn't follow this case, but that is what I recall of other libel cases) Odd, though, that the evidence was sufficient in the UK for Depp to lose his libel case there. I didn't think evidence rules were that different over there.

It seems fortunate that Depp does not, in reality, have scissors for hands.

More on the emergentist argument against the Chinese Room. There is no iron-clad analogy between a computer program and a mind that is required here. Therefore, the semantic argument becomes obsolete: Even though a program as a syntactical construct doesn’t create semantics (and therefore couldn’t be equal to a mind), it doesn’t follow that a program can’t create semantic contents in the course of its execution. Moreover, this emergentist argument is not that the computer hardware is the carrier of the mental processes. The hardware is not enabled to think this way. Rather, the computer creates the mental processes as an emergent phenomenon, similarly to how the brain creates mental processes as an emergent phenomenon. So, if one considers the question in the title of Searle’s original essay “Can Computers Think?”, the answer would be “No, but they might create thinking.” In order to make this more plausible, imagine a program that exactly simulates the trajectories and interactions of elementary particles in a brain of a Chinese speaker. This way, the program does not only create the same outputs for the same inputs as the Chinese’s brain, but proceeds completely analogously. There is no immediate way to exclude the possibility that the simulated brain can’t create a mind in exactly the same way as a real brain can. The only assumption here is that the physical processes in a brain are deterministic. Searle's argument is ultimately veering into metaphysics because it is one with causal implications, namely that only a biological brain can cause a conscious mind. This seems to confer a special causal power upon brains, which the OP and others have yet to demonstrate. When other molecular machines engage in complex internal signaling between elements, Searle would insist that that it's only syntax and nothing like a mind can emerge. And yet, very strange, there are executive parts of my brain which help me to understand English but are in themselves not at all conscious - they route signals, handle symbols, but do not attach meaning to them. Indeed, my understanding of English seems to emerge from these unconscious processes and does not happen in a specific cluster of cells. Those executive areas, like the person in the Chinese Room, do not understand English at all, but we don't say that I (the totality of my neurological processes) don't understand English. Hmm.

When you speak of an "infusion of conscious will" you are engaging in metaphysics. Not sure how to make that clearer. I didn't say DNA engages in directed design, I said that a blind evolutionary process can in effect design a molecular machine, and the burden is on you to prove that is somehow different from any other design, so far as conscious cognition is concerned. You're entering a special pleading for biological neural nets, that only they can modify their own software and hardware. Yet current AI research has been moving in that direction for decades. It's as if you're saying no future innovation is possible, an assertion that the history of science has proved to be laughable, over and over. You can't keep moving the goalposts, saying, sorry, consciousness is whatever I do, and not what you do. And it seems to me the Emergentist argument makes the semantic argument (the Chinese Room) obsolete. Will try to get back to that later.

Zarathustra, if the soundtrack can be trusted.

Alko: The problem I find with your core thesis is that one can use the same argument to deny consciousness to any matter, even matter that grows from DNA coded instructions and which we call a person. To clarify, let's take your opening comment, "This article is an attempt to explain why the cherished fiction of conscious machines is an impossibility. The very act of hardware and software design is a transmission of impetus as an extension of the designers and not an infusion of conscious will. " Now I can substitute DNA coded life into that paragraph, like this: This article is an attempt to explain why the cherished fiction of conscious beings is an impossibility. The very act of reproduction, resulting in DNA-directed design is a transmission of impetus as an extension of the parents desire, and not an infusion of conscious will. Do you see the problem here? Your formulation seems to be unwittingly sneaking in a sort of Cartesian dualism, where something immaterial must be "infused" in some mystical process. But really, what does it matter (no pun intended) whether hardware that has the self-modifying features of a neural network (a connectome, in current parlance) is initiated in nucleotide chains or in some inorganic substrate. Your thesis begs the question.

Looking at Rowling's travails, I do see that hyperreactivity is one of the flaws of some progressives (and overreacting, as we've learned, is amplified by social media). Her comments seem pretty anodyne compared to the trans bashing that goes on this side of the pond. It seems unfortunate when societies can't have a calm conversation about something that almost no one had heard of twenty years ago. (in vast swathes of my country anyway). Maybe less preaching, less smug superiority, less demonization, and we wouldn't have had to have a culture war where the Jim Jordans and Louis Gohmerts declare that Democrats want to castrate our children. Or maybe it was inevitable, given some of the theological roots in this country. There are many RWE Christians and other groups here who will always believe that we are "as God made us," and simply won't hear of any exceptions. (Though one wonders how they square that with heart surgery where a pig valve replaces the God-given one)

The Ohio law will fail for reasons mentioned above and also because it will be weaponized by anyone who has a grudge against someone (or anxiety that player might be better than them, or is some form of a sore loser). This could cause some girls to quit a team because they don't want to face the degrading physical exam or further accusations. It seems almost like a catalyst for poor sportsmanship, the very thing that school sports programs are supposed to remedy. Not surprising this comes from Ohio, the state that gave us Trumpian hatchet man Jim Jordan in Congress. Of course, Jordan might not want to weigh in on this, given his unsavory history with the sexually abusive wrestling team physician Richard Strauss. Not that he actually has sufficient brain to keep his trap shut in such situations.

Glad you posted this. Deadwood, which I live thirty miles from, had the "coat check" policy the article mentions. Municipalities didn't worry about parsing the Constitution, they just did what was necessary to keep the peace. And it worked most of the time. Deadwood, these days, is a boring tourist trap. There is little I would say is interesting, except the neutrino lab a few miles south in Lead (down in the former Homestake gold mine).

I've seen that research, and it seems to overlap with studies showing that police also tend to shoot more at the mentally ill (unarmed). Another interaction where unreasoning fears and bias can take over. Older black males with mental illness are the highest risk group, in police interactions. The "black targets" thing is less clear in its significance, since many firing ranges present human targets as blank silhouettes, which are black but not because of any racial representation. (And a chuckle at @StringJunky for "beyond the pale") And today I'm an organism!

https://www.politico.eu/article/backpain-cancer-and-covid-vladimir-putin-top-health-scares-throughout-the-years/ Looks at Putin's history through health rumors and conjectures. (Sorry, not a video person) In this article intelligence experts dispute the rumors of ill health as wishful thinking. https://www.businessinsider.com/no-credible-evidence-putin-is-ill-despite-appearance-anger-in-public-experts-2022-5 In this article, doctors explain why they cannot diagnose people who they haven't examined.... https://www.dw.com/en/putin-and-parkinsons-what-experts-say-about-his-health/a-61597476

One need look no further than recent photos of Depp to understand why his career might be on its downslope. He reminds of guys I've seen at riverboat casinos who aspire to be lounge lizards but their shallow charm is undermined by an overall sleaziness. His future as a character actor is secure, leading man not so much. I'm sure it felt good for him to lay the blame on a Washington Post column that didn't mention him. Gosh, I am not being very nice. This is why I avoid celebrity gossip stories. NM.

Like everyone who is not Amber Heard or Johnny Depp, I have no idea what really went down in their brief marriage. Which means there has already been way too much public discourse.

https://archive.ph/8IJzp Atlantic article (this is a PW free version) that explores the change in our awareness of our nuclear arsenals and whatever strategies they are supposedly guided by. I like that the writer asks if the US would do better to put all that nuke maintenance money into conventional defense, and what sort of changes that would involve (aside from the obvious requirement that other nuclear powers join us in disarmament). Here is a pull quote (which by no means sums up the article contents or would substitute for reading it): There was a time when citizens of the United States cared about nuclear weapons. The reality of nuclear war was constantly present in their lives; nuclear conflict took on apocalyptic meaning and entered the American consciousness not only through the news and politics, but through popular culture as well. Movie audiences in 1964 laughed while watching Peter Sellers play a president and his sinister adviser in Dr. Strangelove, bumbling their way to nuclear war; a few months later, they were horrified as Henry Fonda’s fictional president ordered the sacrificial immolation of New York City in Fail-Safe. Nuclear war and its terminology—overkill, first strike, fallout—were soon constant themes in every form of entertainment. We not only knew about nuclear war; we expected one. But during the Cold War there was also thoughtful engagement with the nuclear threat. Academics, politicians, and activists argued on television and in op-ed pages about whether we were safer with more or fewer nuclear weapons. The media presented analyses of complicated issues relating to nuclear weapons. CBS, for example, broadcast an unprecedented five-part documentary series on national defense in 1981. When ABC, in 1983, aired the movie The Day After—about the consequences of a global nuclear war for a small town in Kansas—it did so as much to perform a public service as to achieve a ratings bonanza. Even President Ronald Reagan watched the movie. (In his diary, he noted that The Day After was “very effective” and had left him “greatly depressed.”)

I would like to have dynamite be legal for me to buy, so I can use it legitimately to blow up a big tree stump. All the good people who want to use dynamite are being punished because of a few bad apples. So now only people with mining or demolition licenses can buy it. Aiiee! Legitimate use doesn't trump public safety. We understand this with explosives, many deadly poisons, fireworks, and other things where the misuse is clearly understood and there is not some hot button issue of patriotism and freedom. We accept limits on how we can clean aquariums or remove stumps, because it protects people. We can have rational conversations about regulating those dangerous things. But raise the same issues with guns and you would think it was about proposed legal castration, the way some people react.

I've got $8.05 for the highest gas price, at 901 N. Alameda in LA. The average in CA today, per AAA, is around $6. But CA has very high gasoline taxes, and they've had prices like this since early March, as the global market started responding to the war. Serg's photo has a mid March timestamp, in fact.

Aww.. My least favorite thread just reproduced. They're so cute and harmless looking when they're young. Pretty soon we'll have a mating pair and the transgender threads will overrun Australia. Maybe, with luck, they eat cane toads or rodents. Seriously, I think the thread title is a self-answering question. Let trans/NB kids play on whichever team is the best fit with their size, strength, and level of aggressive. And there are always some kids who won't fit anywhere in a given sport. I was never going to be a football (American def.) player, and I got over that easily. Children's psyches are not Fabergé egg shells, unless adults tell them they are all the time.

An alternative view is that he is calling out the myth that guns serve as effective means of self-defense, when in fact guns are mostly used for acts of aggression against oneself (suicide), family (domestic violence), or strangers. Stats bear out the latter view, ergo banning them protects people's right to live. Also "scoring political points" is spin, not argument. Politicians do what their constituents elected them to do, represent their interests. Unless they are bad, in which case they do what their donor base paid them to do and tell the electorate to GFYs.