TheVat

This is a vast topic. I agree that memory is a good starting point. Once an organism can form memories, it can start to assemble sensory data into a coherent narrative (which narrative evolves because it confers a selective advantage). Ate an almond before. Was bitter. Barfed. Not eat almond now. And that's actually a pretty sophisticated thought. Many animals avoid bitter almonds (which all almonds were until a few thousand years ago) through a more hardwired and unthinking process.

If we lived on a planet whose atmosphere blocked visible light enough to block stars, it's possible it would also block the primary, and we would evolve more towards acoustic sensing and less towards vision. You can have soupy atmospheres that support life and liquid water, but surface condition is essentially darkness. You can do a lot with sound, as any bat or dolphin would tell you (if it could), though the "sky's the limit" definitely applies here. If you developed technological civilization, and being curious creatures, decided to see what was up there, your departure from the atmosphere and entry into vacuum would be, to your senses, like entering utter blackness. Of course, if you had actually developed tech to that capability, you would have instruments that could detect the EM spectrum and convert it into auditory "images" for you, and your mind would be properly blown. But EVA stuff would probably not interest you so much.

Yes. There's an element of "what aren't they telling us" to all this. If it's microwaves, has anyone's lunch burrito been mysteriously reheated? Seriously, the "hearing a loud sound" symptom made me wonder if the attack could be acoustic, but then you would expect more effect in adjacent offices and something being picked up on audio recording devices in the building -- sound has a way of bouncing around.

(I did a keyword search, thinking this might already have a thread here, but found nothing. If SFN already has a thread on these apparent attacks on US Embassy staff, mod can fold this into it as an update.) https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/national-security/many-200-americans-have-now-reported-possible-symptoms-havana-syndrome-n1274385 There are aspects, regarding motivation, that are baffling. If they are deliberate attacks, what's the goal here -- removing specific persons that foreign intelligence doesn't want around? General harassment? Impeding embassy operations for some political goal? If it's some form of surveillance, why keep using a method that makes itself so obvious, so lacking in stealth? And which would likely prompt embassies to bolster their EMF shielding and move safe rooms?

The fact that all these issues are being discussed openly here suggests that any negative prejudices regarding trans people are likely to be reduced or at least made more conscious, if the unconscious aspect is a concern. A prejudice that one is conscious of is a prejudice who negative effects can be mitigated, in my experience. I think "phobia" is sometimes misused as a suffix. Many prejudices do not result in an incapacitating fear, but do result in a warped perception of others. It's worth looking at the DSM-5 to get a clear understanding of what phobia means, compared to other terms like aversion or bias.

To avoid insanity, it seems to me you would need developmental stages that would correspond to human infancy and childhood. And some kind of stable virtual environment with parental figures of some sort. In short, you would need a deliberate effort from humans at developing a sentient AI, which would be "birthed" with basic desires and an environment where it is motivated to seek the satisfaction and refinement of desires, growing in awareness as it does so. To have an entity that is, as Peterkin put it, "undirected" is to have something incoherent and possibly self-terminating. To have an "I, " it's likely that you also need "others. "

If Feynman had never written a book, his direct method of investigation on the Rogers commission, like dunking a sample of O-ring in ice water, would have still put him in the public spotlight. And his eponymous diagrams, QED, the path integral formulation, quantum computing, nanotechnology...call into question the OP setting him at a "lower level" than the pantheon of physics. Toss in bongo drumming, innate charm, wit, and the search for Tuvan throat singers and you have a personality that people would still have written books about, even if he'd never penned one himself. And, as MigL mentioned, his incomparable lectures.

And this, my liege, is how we know the earth to be banana-shaped.

Swanson, though my comment was that the ET conjecture is dismissable, from any "either/or," if you feel it belongs in the other thread, you may move it there if you wish. Though it would somewhat strip out the context of the post. The software of this website seems to not permit much window for editing or self-deletion, so I am unable to do this myself. To Moontan, I can only point out I was not saying there is no evidence of something, only that it is not evidence of ETs. I have little cause to doubt there are radar anomalies, and that they are quite fascinating. And the word for eliciting interest is "pique" and not "peak. " (yes, I've got a bit of a pedant in my otherwise spotless character...I can usually squelch the little bugger, but he just runs amuck over spelling... )

Yep. The fallacy of binary thinking. Ockham's razor is your friend when assessing any theories that involve advanced technology and centuries or millennia-long voyages culminating in weird planetary voyeurism (we're not going to contact, we'll just watch for decades as we confound the locals with bizarre aerial stunts because, really, we have nothing better to do!). Hitchen's razor is also a friend, when over 70 years of combing over reports yields not one shred of solid evidence for the ET origin hypothesis. I find it telling that, a few months after a movie was released in which an alien craft descends on Washington DC (The Day the Earth Stood Still), the famous DC UFO sightings occurred.

It's always a fun semantic category error, when one puts abstractions in a concrete box. Kitty's box also contains the hope of a nation, several latent tendencies, the creeps that a Stephen King novel gave me, the purpose of a paper clip, and the unobserved litter of Schrodinger's cat. And, like Hilbert's Hotel, there is always more room available.

Wouldn't it depend on what's causing the platelet destruction. If it were an autoimmune condition like lupus, you could get vessels inflamed and clogged as the immune system turns on itself. You'd have damage to vessel walls and platelet clumping -- ergo possible thrombosis. Heparin could do this, too, when antibodies are formed against it. Kind of ironic, yes, because you have a blood thinner that's resulting in clumps that lead to blockages.

That was the question implied in my first post. Perhaps not world ending, but enough releases of radioactive material to cut into arable land and water supplies in a serious way. Murphy's Law is not something to be dismissed here.

https://news.gallup.com/poll/352397/democratic-republican-confidence-science-diverges.aspx I wonder if that 45% ticks upwards when their child needs medicine.

Not sure I follow. If there had been nine times as many nuclear plants, then there would have been FEWER "very peculiar incidents"? In many cases when you multiply "particular circumstances" by nearly an order of magnitude, you have more opportunities for anomalous events. Also, I'm wondering if every nation would have the regulatory framework and responsibility of France. Maybe, but I remain skeptical on that one. And the question of more nuclear waste remains. The US still has not found a place for much of its nuclear waste, and locations like Yucca Mtn. have been tied up in litigation for decades. A lot of it is sitting in aboveground tanks or pools of water - what could possibly go wrong there? :-)

IIT (see the Koch interview posted earlier) does sort of "grade" consciousness..... AFAICT, phi has no upper boundary so IIT wouldn't be putting puny humans at any pinnacle.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jul/15/kremlin-papers-appear-to-show-putins-plot-to-put-trump-in-white-house Somehow this utterly failed to surprise me.

Christoph Koch is one of the cognitive scientists who supports Integrated Information Theory. I was going to post this at sciencechatforum.com, but it went belly up, so I'll post it here.... https://medium.com/@mitpress/christof-koch-on-the-feeling-of-life-itself-and-how-technology-allows-us-to-observe-consciousness-e52b39091ad3 I note that his (and Tononi's) "intrinsic causal powers of the brain" sounds a bit like sneaking dualism in the back door. Like Searle, he attaches great importance to substrate.

For all practical purposes, it's probably enough to give the Web entity a broader upgraded version of a Turing test -- by broader, I mean not just the Turing ability to emulate a human responding but emulate any kind of sentient being. IOW, determine the common features of all varieties of mind. Genuine AGI, unless it's generated by a neural net modeled on a human's, in a robot body that relates to a physical world and parental figures as we do, may have an architecture that yields a perspective quite different from ours. For all we know, the emergence of consciousness might be a mind more like that of a sociopathic dolphin or a displaced hive of bees. It doesn't have to get my jokes or like jazz to be self aware. Of course the answers we get could all be the completely unconscious responses of John Searle's "Chinese Room, " but that's where the testing has to get more nuanced. Looking for quirky answers that change over time, in unpredictable ways, e. g.

Thank you all, helpful answers. And there is probably also a good free speech protection argument to be made for nondeletion as a policy, especially where the "hair trigger" is concerned. (I'm guessing spam of the "free porn" or "lowest price for hydroxychloroquine" variety would be the exception.) I would probably delete my own post here, since it is a digression. To reduce further such, I'll try to ferret out your posting guidelines today.

Thinkers who conjure a "hard problem" of consciousness, everyone from Thomas Nagel to Dave Chalmers, tend to slide into some form of property dualism. Usually of the form that something in neuronal processes is not ontologically reducible, and somehow achieves "downward causation. " The subjective "felt" aspects of experience, or "qualia," become a sort of special thing outside of scientific naturalism and physical causality - and there lies Gilbert Ryle's category error. Sean Carroll has a great blog on the pitfalls of downward causation and using the wrong sort of language to talk about physical processes. https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2016/09/08/consciousness-and-downward-causation/ For those that don't speak English, "watermelon" is almost impossible to understand or explain. Unless, of course, you have a watermelon on hand.

Quick question -- do mods here not delete threads like this? Kind of time wasting for a passerby (like me) to click on it because it looks like some interesting chat on epistemology or Nick Bostrom's simulation hypothesis.... and then turns out to be about some childish game.

Robert Sawyer's "Wake" is the most plausible fiction I've encountered on this question. And it's fairly gentle on AI neophytes, introducing concepts like cellular automata and Shannon entropy without too much pain. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wake_(Sawyer_novel)

Thank you for a Swift and convenient End to my inquisition.