TheVat

Sorry, no antibiotic cheeses, in fact you don't want antibiotics in cheese as they could prevent the fermentive bacteria from doing their job. Same with yogurts - the probiotic cultures need to thrive, being bacteria that help you digest that food. Some herbs and spices are somewhat antibiotic, like ginger or turmeric or garlic, and they don't bother the good gut bacteria. Apple cider vinegar is also a good one (and also reduces phytates in foods, which then improves zinc absorption and thus can boost immune response). Oregano is antifungal. IOW, eat lots of curry and Italian! 😀

Legumes, soy, and spirulina all have plenty of lysine. Land is not a limiting factor at all. Any assertion that it is needs some cited reference.

I've observed that when people on any side of a debate start telling someone what they don't understand it tends to escalate to ad hom. "Not understanding" becomes an implied "you're kinda slow." If someone really evinces lack of understanding of your point, you can either restate it and hope you made it clearer, or you can move on. The latter is my next move WRT this thread. Cheers.

Indeed! The problem with panpsychism is not that it's necessarily wrong, it's more that it's a Mysterian position - how would we be able to isolate a consciousness particle and how would that really explain anything? It seems to draw us back to Leibniz and his monads, or something like them. Epistemically, the only way to confirm consciousness is to be conscious and thereby you know one entity in the universe is conscious. All else is a leap of faith - well, it looks like me, and uses language like me, so I guess it's probably conscious, too. At the end of the day, I think behavior is our best metric of consciousness.

Good list, as one might expect from the late great Mr Sagan. Number four reminds me of the fallacy called "availability heuristic." Which is the tendency, when we form an hypothesis or an opinion or an interpretation of reality, to call upon what we have most recently heard or acquired in the way of information (rather than explore a broader range and timespan of data). We humans have trouble taking the entire information space into account when we try to model reality.

AFAICT, KBJ is the BPFTJ on the SCOTUS. But, as someone once said, IAOTTFLS. And TANSTAAFL. (Sorry, I heard Zapatos say trash can and all my inhibitions melted away)

Gosh, Godwin's Law proves itself once again. (It's gulags, btw) Sorry, I don't think it's the Left or progressives that have been talking concentration camps and putting people in cages. You may want to review the recent activity of the Trumpists and Far Right in the US before you start making comparisons between Democrats and Nazi Germany. We can keep rejecting their lies, their deeply flawed information sources, their bigotry, their misogyny and racism, their loathing for easy access to the polls for all Americans, and their idiotic disrespect for knowledge, facts, and discourse grounded in facts, because it is our duty as citizens of a democratic nation to call out fellow citizens when they are harming that nation. Your question is akin to asking how long we have to look after our children, set rules of behavior, and keep teaching them social skills: until they grow up.

Yes. I would only add (and plus one for making me laugh) that it's also confusing that a reptile pedophile would be going after human children. From what I've heard, pedophiles tend to prefer children of their own species. Sexually molesting juveniles of other species would be categorized as bestiality - also a political liability, at least in northern states*, but Catherine the Great made it work just fine. Sorry I can no longer generate much further insight on the thread topic. Like several members, I see these kinds of selections, and prior announcements to a voter base, as pretty much standard political practice. I mean, the people who didn't like Biden saying his intentions out loud already didn't vote for him and already aren't switching parties or ideologies. So what are they going to do, yell at us? Stomp their feet? * no hate mail please, I'm just kidding

This is common in the Amazon region, where a slender fish called a candiru can swim up your urethra and make its way to the visual centers of your brain, stimulating visions of this type. You will die within a week or two, so best get yourself to a doctor immediately. Not trying to scare you, but regular checkups are important. Also, avoid Tic-Tacs, which can cause hallucinations, leukemia, sarcoidosis, liver failure, night blindness and tooth decay. Finally, DO NOT GO TO ONLINE FORUMS FOR MEDICAL ADVICE OR COUNSELING. Cheers!

Just curious, when Amy Barrett was appointed, was there a long thread here with much wringing of hands over the "optics" of TFG "pre-announcing" ( @swansont neatly deflated this term) that he would select SCOTUS candidates that were conservative Christians who would throw out Roe v Wade? And he pre-announced this to an electorate that by a considerable majority supports Roe and a woman's reproductive rights and the idea of SCOTUS as an impartial body. Maybe instead of worrying about optics, we should worry about a voting system and districting system that seems to promote minority rule even when we get displays of optics from a former POTUS that sear the retina.

Ned Block has rejected any Turing test - what's sometimes dubbed the Blockhead argument. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blockhead_(thought_experiment) Then there are thinkers like Colin McGinn, who is one of the New Mysterians, who simply reject that the human mind is equipped to ever measure, or open any epistemological access, to consciousness in any entity. Their position is that we can never know if an AI, or a mouse, is truly conscious. I'm a bit more hopeful. Like the "Phi" guy, Tononi (referenced by @Prometheus), I see possible paths with neuroimaging, TCMS, and neural net modelings with computers. I think we are in the infancy stage of studying the connectome. (the term for the comprehensive map of neural connections in the brain)

I should clarify. I am not a biochauvinist, nor do I have any problems with an inorganic substrate. What I was driving at (with lack of finesse, like a Tesla struck by an EMP perhaps) was that to do some things that humans do and might someday want for an AI to do, like listen sympathetically, an AI would need to implement consciousness. Simply manifesting the behavior of "sympathetic listener," like one of David Chalmers' philosophic zombies (aka "p-zed") would not be enough. An intelligent person, seeking comfort, would rightly point out, "it's a simulation, it doesn't really feel anything about my situation, so I need a real person!" (or a more advanced AI). Unlike John Searle (early Searle, anyway), I believe it's possible in principle that a DNN (perhaps interwoven with an analog system, CNNs, etc) could wake up and be conscious, have qualia, and thus achieve certain sorts of thought that really don't happen without self-awareness and "raw feels.". So my earlier comments were concerned with what a computer can do, insofar as some behaviors only bloom where there is someone there. It certainly doesn't have to replicate being human (with all its attendant flaws and blind spots), but there is some process in our neural networks, deep in the wetware, that must also happen in silicon substrate in order for an AI to do the activity I've suggested.

At last! A surefire way to frighten off storks!

I like the point John Searle, the philosopher of mind (of "Chinese Room" fame), has made: if we develop an AGI that replicates all the functions of a human brain, we have simply demonstrated the point that a traditional computer cannot really achieve consciousness or general intelligence. To make an authentic brain, we have to replicate much of what is in a natural brain, i.e. make something that is really much more than a computer. Our trans-computer DNN system would likely need both digital and analog elements, which is what the human brain has. It would likely need, per developmental psychologists, a period of growth that would be much like a childhood. It would probably need to be embodied in some way so that it can interact with the world and develop responses and feelings regarding the world and its inhabitants, and form models of how a physical world follows certain rules and patterns. It would need some basic drives of curiosity, self-preservation, social needs, etc. Older paper, but addresses the issue of digital/analog: https://news.yale.edu/2006/04/12/brain-communicates-analog-and-digital-modes-simultaneously

Y'all are still talking past each other, because the term discrimination is assumed to be pejorative by those arguing against criteria of ethnicity/gender for a particular appointment. All appointment processes are discriminatory (look at Trump's cabinet, if you have a moment) - the issue in this case is whether or not that discrimination is warranted by what the judicial panel needs to best perform its duties. The pro argument seems to be that having that panel look as diverse as possible increases public trust in the justice system. And broadens the life experience base of the Court. And contributes opinions that reflect a special awareness of the impact of the justice system on the ethnicity which, per capita, has the highest level of contact with the justice system. The con argument seems to be that....well, I'm having difficulty discerning anything beyond "It's discrimination! Discrimination bad!"

The brain is not a computational machine, if we are speaking of a Turing machine. A TM cannot decide whether or not to perform a computation. A brain can. However, if we broaden the meaning of computational machine to include AI neural nets, which can learn and grow and change the rules and even self-program more in the manner of a biological brain, then maybe the brain could be equated to one. While I don't subscribe to Penrose's quantum microtubule theory, I think he does argue convincingly that some cognitive functions of a brain are non algorithmic. There are approximations and holistic insights from a brain that do not seem reducible to algorithms. While the human brain can perform algorithms, it is an adaptive entity that resides in a biosphere which is not algorithmic. Novel adaptations and inventions do not proceed algorithmically. If you want to dig deeper, look at the formal concept of affordances in object-oriented programming. And why some cognitive scientists do not believe formal affordances can succeed in object representation. Worth a google - out of time here. Back later.

The stamp graphic is doubly clever in that it also has the colors of the composition roughly in the same motif as the country's flag.

Cacao beans are the seed of a cacao fruit. Which makes them a nut. Since it is part of a tree and contains the template for another tree, and a tree is a plant, one could say loosely that it's a vegetable. Nutritional guilt problem solved! There is the further question of whether or not chocolate rabbits count as meat.

Chocolate contains water. It will sweat if moved quickly to a warm environment.

Well, Russia has a lot of tactical nukes, the lower yield bombs that some in Russia seem to think are less morally reprehensible and could be used on a battlefield or to take out a hardened military target. Putin and others have made some thinly veiled threats that such nukes might be used if they perceive a threat to Russia, say anything poised to cross its borders or flyovers by hostile aircraft or, for all I can tell, switching the dinner fork and the salad fork at Vlad's table setting. As @MSC suggests, not much reason to be fazed by the latest bit of nuclear bluster directed at Finland, given that tactical nukes move around easily and there are already a couple thousand that can be lobbed most anyplace in Europe. It's not clear to me what was on the Moskva from media reports.

From a CNN report: https://www.cnn.com/2022/04/13/world/interstellar-meteor-discovery-scn/index.html "Dr. Joel Mozer, the Chief Scientist of Space Operations Command, the United States Space Force service component of U.S. Space Command, reviewed analysis of additional data available to the Department of Defense related to this finding. Dr. Mozer confirmed that the velocity estimate reported to NASA is sufficiently accurate to indicate an interstellar trajectory," wrote Shaw in the letter. Siraj had moved onto other research and almost forgotten about his discovery, so the document came as a shock. "I thought that we would never learn the true nature of this meteor, that it was just blocked somewhere in the government after our many tries, and so actually seeing that letter from the Department of Defense with my eyes was a really incredible moment," Siraj said. A second chance Since receiving the confirmation, Siraj said his team is working to resubmit their findings for publication in a scientific journal. Siraj would also like to put a team together to try and retrieve part of the meteor that landed in the Pacific Ocean but admitted it would be an unlikely possibility due to the sheer size of the project...

Yeah, I have trouble picturing the French parliament signing off on a NATO exit. Even with a LePutin admin. The sanctions - someone said they are "piecemeal," - I would say slow and uphill is more descriptive. You have to herd cats, basically, to really turn off the Russian oil/gas spigot. But if we can get there, with good cooperation between all the allies, then it will be game over for Russia. The crumble may be too slow for some, but it will happen.

There does seem a lot of argument generated by the vagueness of the word religion. As someone who leans toward the nontheistic spiritual life, I would say religion is just a formalized system to attain spiritual calm and contentment through some form of existential awareness. That awareness can be directed towards a postulated deity (and one's relation to it) or it can be directed towards enhancing consciousness and understanding of one's own mental structure and how it interacts with reality. Some forms of religion are directed towards developing particular virtues, whereas others are directed towards a general enlightenment (from which, it is presumed, a virtuous life follows). Marxism seems more to be a political philosophy with a great deal to say about social class and economics and how wealth is distributed, how labor is valued, and how capital is concentrated. I would have to ask if Marx would have ever wanted to see "ism" following his last name. He did not seem to be much for religion, at least the forms of religion he saw around him in 19th century Europe.

Krishnamurthi, the Indian philosopher (sometimes considered a "scientific guru") developed the idea that there could be a scientific sort of spirituality, based on introspective observation and mental experiments. He was somewhat exceptional, among spiritual teachers, in his scrutiny of what constituted belief. Here's an article about him. Some of his ideas remind me of Unitarians a bit. http://www.journal.kfionline.org/issue-1/krishnamurti-and-the-scientific-mind#:~:text=Krishnamurti's approach to religious questions,and recommend experimentation and investigation.