TheVat

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.

A soft boiled egg must be cracked along its middle! Die, heretic! (which is my way of saying you're quite the optimist.) I think nations would immediately and feverishly set about forming special alliances with the ETs in hopes of gaining favored status and leverage to edge their rivals out of ET trade agreements. I really hope they are not like the Vogons and planning to demolish us to built a hyperspace expressway. Or bad poets. I could envision a truly benevolent race studiously avoiding contact, on the premise that any contact with a vastly more advanced species would hinder our creativity and social development. And possibly lead to societal breakdowns as Terran cultural norms were upended.

Obviously smoked one jay too many. Raven lunatic...

LoL. Thanks. The vagueness of such buttons makes me not want to use them overly much. But I've been getting upvotes (apparently winning a day, yesterday -- I've never won a day in my life! Do I add it to my lifespan? This is exciting...) so now I feel somehow guilty and stingy if I don't cast them, too. I'll just let the thumb operate autonomously, see what happens...

Also worth considering, if most power were nuclear by 2000, how many Fukushimas, Chernobyls, 3 Mile Islands would there have been along the way, and how might that have affected the amount of habitable land, arable land, etc. Ten percent of the world's electrical power comes from nuclear. So, if it had been 90% instead, that would be a s--t-ton of reactors. And spent fuel we'd be struggling to safely dispose of and keep sequestered for many thousands of years.

It's good to get the passion directed at public officials. Of course that means getting their attention during that five minute window in each day when they're not preparing their reelection campaign or sucking up to the donor base. Sure, we can all do grassroots stuff and lower our personal carbon footprint and reject plastic packaging and try to send out green signals to friends, but it really takes massive public policy change to nudge whole nations in any direction. Environmental laws aren't for we angry passionate ones, they're for the large cohorts that are apathetic and don't think much beyond fashions and status and personal wealth. Money sent to an environmental group with lobbying and litigating powers may do as much as putting it into composting toilets (erm, investing in one, that is!) and PV panels. It's great if one can do both, of course. As Phi's analogy suggests, it's great to make the propeller turn.

My impression is that it's nearly impossible for any modern human not to engage in some level of hypocrisy where animals are concerned. Though primarily vegetarian, I go off the wagon and eat sardines twice a week. Two reasons - one, my arthritis flares when I don't eat the little fish; two, sardines seem to exist at a developmental level where I feel sentience (and awareness of their demise) is minimal, ergo less suffering. Yes, people have asked "why don't you just use fish oil capsules?" Then I remind them that fish oil capsules come from squishing fish and so are not really an ethically superior option. Ethically, there are many places that even a vegan diet will mean cropping land that was originally a rich habitat for animals, and so your vegan meal was won by clearing land which resulted in animal deaths and even species extinctions within a certain area. I think we'd need to cull the human herd back to a few hundred million (as the Deep Ecology movement would have us do) in order to avoid this kind of indirect harm to all creatures great and small.

If you have a frame of steel, then you need that frame to be girded with something fire-resistant, due to the possibility of steel members deforming or even buckling under great heat. For mid-rise or high-rise buildings, I would think you'd want to avoid flammable materials, except as interior design accents. However, given the LEED pluses of bamboo and its low carbon footprint, it's certainly worth looking into possible ways to use it wherever feasible.

Noob question: I've seen these used at other forums, where they use either Like or Upvote, and they mean approval/agreement to that posting. Here, both seem to be options, so I'm just getting clear on what the distinction is. Does upvote mean more that we approve the posting's opinion, while "like" is more that we like the style or approach even if we disagree?

One afterthought. If the area of sport has a large number of outliers among its cis players, e.g. plenty of tall people to stock a basketball team, plenty of high aerobic capacity people for running, etc., then you can have leagues where teams can be reasonably well matched against each other. There would really be little difference between a cis girl who happens to be tall and aerobically stellar (just the type who would seek out a basketball team), and a trans teammate of similar attributes. IOW, where there are plenty of players, it's quite likely trans players wouldn't really stand out or crush competition. (IIRC, Scientific American did a feature on this topic, which reached that conclusion) It would be rather in the "small pool," situation, where there's a small population to draw players from and the probabilities of finding outliers are smaller, that a single outlier (either cis or trans) would loom larger. Which sounds like the storyline of dozens of small town sports movies. The plucky local team goes up against the Bumfark Bruisers, who have Big Harrie, and all the Bruiser teammates have to do is pass to Big Harrie who stuffs the ball in 95% of the time. The plucky locals must drawn upon their heart and character and cleverness to undermine Big Harry and beat the Bruisers. (DISCLAIMER: this example is offered in a purely jocular vein, and has no redeeming discursive features)

I wanted to track this down, because I had gotten it second hand and in a form lacking details. In fact, I will demote my example, pending more verification, to "rumor from a small prairie town. " Digging further, it looks like the governor (a conservative Republican) was alarmed by a case in Connecticut: between 2017 and 2019, transgender sprinters Terry Miller and Andraya Yearwood combined to win 15 championship races, which prompted a lawsuit. It looks to me (and my apologies for not sifting through all this earlier) like the administration here did not actually find a well-documented case IN the state and so, in its zeal to pander to RW evangelicals and the RW generally, battened on to the Connecticut case and began pestering the legislature. It's all pretty thin, given the major anomaly is two sprinters in one state who did win an unprecedented number of races. So it's me who should be making apologies, to you and Zapatos. If my bruising giant on the girl's field turns out to be urban legend (wait, that's rural legend!), then I will ask directions to the nearest wet market that stocks crow meat.

Thanks, Zapatos. I offered my example honestly, as it represented an actual controversy in my state over a trans player on a high school team. I agree completely that fear mongering is counterproductive, and offered the scenario as an example of how ordinary people develop concerns over the issue. If hormone treatments could safely reduce human joints, bones, and body mass, then there would be little need for people to have such worries about high-contact sports, eh?

If you could change "something which lacks parity, " to "something which could potentially lack parity in particular sports domains, " then I think you would be honoring science more and the idea that one may TEST a hypothesis without embracing it. I deny your wording for the simple reason that I think the hypothesis of disparity has to be tested before I would assert it in that way.

Again, see my reply above, I am trying to explain the psychology of sports fans, and where these questions of parity come from. Made-up scenarios are pretty much how most people mull over proposed changes in their society. There are so few trans females in sports, that people naturally tend to try gedankexperment to hypothesize over the what-ifs. They can be wrong (just as they usually are about the spectre of CRT), but their concerns don't vanish until science can cast light on the athletic parity issues.