TheVat

I've thought about this a bit FTtT, and tried to question every assumption we might make about what trajectory a technodevelopment takes. (Also, from a more SF angle, how technodevelopment might happen on a metal-poor planet) I don't know if there are many paths for alt-tech cultures to leapfrog fossil fuel use, though I guess it's impossible to rule out some kind of "artisan science" path which relies somewhat less on brute-force industrial revolution - say, still managing to smelt smaller amounts of metal, tinker with chemicals and make batteries, etc. Without mass production, I would think things like generators (from wooden windmills or water wheels) and devices that could run on them, would be more novelties, perhaps part of special exhibitions. The expense of smithy-produced copper, e.g., would mean that specialty electrical devices would tend to cluster around windmills or dams, as it would be too expensive to develop grids. There might be science colonies, widely separated places where people might flock in from the countryside to observe the wizardry, paying a fee to support it. If the Silurians had something like that, they might attain something which left no trace, as large-scale alterations of the planet would be beyond them, and certainly they'd be unable to develop nuclear technology or industrial-scale chemistry which can leave more longterm footprint. We'd be unlikely to find a copper-wound armature, i.e. EM coil, or anything like that. High tech industrial society, however, would seem to inevitably leave traces not hard to find, as @npts2020 suggested. Having just watched a cat bury her product in the litter box, I do wonder how well tectonic action could disperse, grind up, and effectively hide the tech traces. Dispersal would be especially relevant to the ease of random discovery. Would there be preserving bubbles formed around some tech objects by, say, volcanic events like an ash fall or sudden lava inundation? E.g. could a reactor core, encased in ashfall, in the middle of a stable plate, remain fairly together in one lump?

I'm not, and was just mentioning Quine (often paired with Duhem) as a nod to the need to sometimes bundle scientific hypotheses. And the facts that may come from them. That's really a whole other thread. Anyway, we can still falsify things so long as we bundle them with the background assumptions they rode in with. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duhem%E2%80%93Quine_thesis Sorta makes the point about articulating and bundling in all the background assumptions in our statements. And some of them are semantic, yes.

Antfarm.

Fortunately an imperative - in this case telling me to go and mate with a targh - has no definite truth value, since it is not a proposition about some state of affairs in the RW. Now, if we were to tease out implied statements from that, e.g. A targh is a real entity which lives on Qo'nos and resembles a terrestrial wild boar. (which statement, in turn, could imply that Qo'nos is a real planet and the Klingon homeworld and having a culture that prizes insults and so on) Then we can examine a whole web of beliefs (see Quine for elucidation on this, the "web" being a philosophical metaphor describing human knowledge as a vast, interconnected network of statements and convictions rather than a collection of isolated, independently proven facts) that might roughly be assembled as "the Star Trek universe and timeline originating from the OS." Categorizing all these facts as fictitious (and sparing you, gentle reader, from my stomach-churning account of my romantic evening with a targh - they can be quite alluring if you're lonely) then would at least allow us to assert that one premise of Seth's imperative is definitely false: there can be no mating with a fictitious alien animal in any sense that corresponds to the external world. Now, what does a definitely false statement (Targhs exist and inhabit a Klingon home world) imply about truth values? Does it imply the converse, that there are other statements which are definitely true? I.e. absolutely true? Well, for starters, simply make a statement which negates the Targhs are real etc statement... Did you watch "Bodkin"? That series came perilously close at one point to filling a hovercraft with eels. I absolutely recommend this series even if you are not smitten (as I am) by Siobhan Cullen.

Hoverkraftimin içi ilan balıǧı ilə doludur.

Some products also require factoring in hidden costs - like social or ecological detriment from them. Plastic is an example - on the face of it, it has gotten massively cheaper to produce containers, but we're now contemplating massive ecological costs from the enormous waste stream it brings, especially single-use containers. We don't really yet have a handle on the hidden costs.

TIL that Ceuta, Spain is NOT an exclave, because an exclave is a portion of a state or district geographically separated from the main part, by some surrounding alien territory. Since Ceuta can access Spain directly across the sea, which is not alien territory, it doesn't qualify as an exclave. Nor as an enclave, since it is not surrounded by Morocco - though it does share a land border with them. So I was incorrectly calling Ceuta an exclave. (Kaliningrad, however, is one, being separated from Russia by Poland and Lithuania) Since I'd never heard of Ceuta until a couple days ago due to thousands of desperate migrants swarming in from Morocco I didn't make the mistake for very long.

Eva, can I gnaw tit I twang in a cave? Eva, can I drag sad Asgard in a cave? Eva, can I draw "Pudenda had Ned Upward" in a cave?

Indeed. Sorta funny given the breathless claims of AI and smart microgrids that can take renewable energy and set up base power and peak use management. They should be leading on this. As several here noted, there's a regressive partisan political dynamic that seeks to give a black eye to RE.

Conspiracist hogwash. Show us evidence that NASA is doing this. The lack of comment is most likely due to SCIRP being a predatory Chinese scam show.

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.