TheVat

Har! Mais oui. Pigeonholing cornholing is not wise.

And we're expected to believe that's because of these cultural gaps? 😁 Seriously, Nietzsche had some of his ideas appropriated and distorted by the Nazis, especially the whole Übermensch thing. Nietzsche was in actuality opposed to Nazi ideas and antisemitism. His concept of the superman was a nuanced metaphor about man's social and cognitive evolution which has nothing to do with the Nazi spin later put on it.

Approach cautiously theories with too many uses of the word "suggests" - just because a metaphor invites you to compare evolution with a cognition process doesn't mean you have to accept. Citation needed. How is critical level defined? And why wouldn't we expect adaptation to happen before things are critical? Cod started migrating northward along the US Eastern seaboard at very small temperature rises.

Can't decipher what you mean by "heterosexual appearing," or "appeared to be lesbian,” here. Naked people look like naked people, AFAICT, they don't come with tattoos designating sexual orientation.

The Dream Hotel, by Laila Lalami (2025), one of the best novels I've read on the dystopian aspects of AI, and how people can be tracked and assigned an identity by an insentient algorithm. It is not wildly dystopian but very much about where we are now, with a little tweak that seems to have the ring of truth as all great fiction does. It is a Black Mirror sort of exploration which dives deep into questions of how we identify ourselves and how people can push back against external coercion and control. The protagonist, flagged as a risk for future criminal action (resonating with Philip Dick tales like The Minority Report), is held in a "retention facility" (not a prison, oh no!) under a Kafkaesque system of monitoring and evaluation which we come to understand as feeding profit to a corporate contractor, trapping both the retainees and their keepers. Lalami has been shortlisted for a Pulitzer and a Booker prize for previous work, and if this book doesn't earn her one then I just don't understand book prizes. It is brilliant, profoundly moving, and for all the patches of darkness, hopeful and upbeat.

Haha! Hadn't realized I was referencing two bands in that sentence, I see it now. Are you aware that famous pig got loose during the album cover photo shoot at Battersea, and they had to shut down Heathrow?

Still a type of evolution, usually called directional selection. Mutation is but one of several mechanisms of evolution.

Rush to my window and see if I can spot some flying pigs. 😁

I have seen the critique from more neutral sources than Greenpeace, so sorry to use them for a quick link. It seems like greenwashing to me mainly because only oil companies are pushing it - usually not a good sign. I was tempted to counter your "hmph" with "hmph, I don't trust anything emanating from oil companies." I will agree that a more economical implementation of CCS might be a bridge, but the potential for future leakage is there and quite scary. As for hypocrisy, yes organizations like GP and Sierra Club do a lot of that. I prefer groups like The Nature Conservancy which seem more practical and about The Art of the Possible.

The movie only clouds the issues, anyway, given its absurd premise that aliens would use our bodies for "batteries," while connecting our vatted bodies to a virtual reality. Plenty of science people have ranted about the gross inefficiencies and preposterous biophysics, so I'll leave it be. The storyline was really just a vehicle for cool martial arts sequences and people intoning pseudoprofundities. I see a lot of the matrix stuff as a way to excuse dirty technology and eco degradation because, hey, we can all get ourselves back to the Garden by moving into a virtual world and ignore that icky old RW. We'll either be in cozy vats* underground or, far more efficient, uploaded and our biological shell discarded. * Mine is really more cramped than cozy, don't believe the brochures.

@JoeyJoystick Reposting, awaiting a reply from the OP. I also wanted OP to acknowledge another potential serious consequence (the CCN uncertainty and effect of particulates on plankton I already mentioned), which is some deposition of deorbited graphene on polar ice and glaciers thus lowering their albedo and hastening melting. No matter where it orbits, air currents can take it to places one might not anticipate.

"Yet to prove itself" seems to me like understatement. More like "ridiculous scam," that would be insanely expensive to implement on any scale that matters - money that could be hastening the vitally important transition to renewables. The only reason oil companies were interested in this was because CO2 injection into oil wells could help to extract more oil (you are probably familiar with this, but I'll post a link for those who might not be) while greenwashing at the same time. Greenpeace InternationalThe Great Carbon Capture Scam — Rex Weyler - Greenpeace I...Oil companies hid knowledge of global heating for decades, but the captains of petroleum also schemed to turn the ecological crisis into a profit centre. 😆

New Republic writer Greg Sargent (another refugee from WaPo) talks with veteran national security expert Bradley Moss about the 47 admin Iran scam. https://newrepublic.com/article/197284/transcript-maga-dope-pete-hegseth-tantrum-exposes-trump-iran-scam President Donald Trump and his top advisers have worked themselves up into a pathological fury about the leaked intelligence assessment that casts doubt on the success of Trump’s bombing of Iran, a story that has consumed Washington. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth ranted wildly about it during a press conference with Trump at the NATO summit, and White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt went full North Korea in praise of Trump with one of her most absurdly obsequious performances yet. Both of them went full throttle in attacking intelligence officials for leaking the assessment. All of which raises a question: Will this administration ever officially tell the truth about the Iran mission, given that everything always must serve the cult of Trump above all else? Today we’re trying to unravel all this with someone who lives deep in the bowels of the deep state and can explain it really well: veteran national security lawyer Bradley Moss....

What is wrong with you? Use one of them?? And what are these "attempts" you speak of? Were these in the labs of Dr. Mengele or Frankenstein? Sorry, I just kind of lost my shit there for a minute. I suggest you go and acquaint yourself with the basics of bioethics and, well, basic human decency, before posting this kind of garbage.

Sounds expensive, and there's enough gas at LEO to cause atmospheric drag on anything moving at orbital velocity. My guess is your graphene cloud would deorbit quickly and require continual costly recharging with enormous expenditures on rocket fuel and graphene production. Money better spent on long-term solutions like improved distribution and storage of wind/solar/tidal/geothermal etc. Also, think about what happens when graphene particles deorbit and enter the troposphere where they serve as CCN, cloud condensation nuclei. Whatever cooling effect that might bring, it will also potentially destabilize the atmosphere in ways difficult to predict. Lastly, the Earth's surface is 3/4 ocean - what effects on, say, phytoplankton does thousands of tons of graphene particles have? You don't know? Nobody else does either!

Looks like the war games will include Hide and Seek with the centrifuges and partially enriched uranium. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jun/24/jd-vance-trump-iran-nuclear-program But Vance insisted it was not a concern that Iran could have moved it and claimed the bombing represented “mission success” because he said Iran no longer had the capacity to turn the stockpile into weapons-grade uranium. “And that was really the goal here,” he said. The former UN nuclear weapons inspector David Albright told CNN on Monday there are centrifuges that are “unaccounted for” that must still be dealt with to consider the US mission successful. “I think that part of the mission has been accomplished,” he said. “Stocks of enriched uranium are one of them. I wish those stocks were buried, but our understanding is that some of them were taken away by Iran, and we don’t know where they are.” Albright added that the question of the remaining, unaccounted-for centrifuges meant that “this problem isn’t over yet, but it is a manageable problem. Partly because turning that enriched uranium into weapons-grade uranium is not going to be a fast process”.

Given the aspects of brain function which are analog and not digital (though they do handshake with digital operations), I don't think our present computer architectures could get us to a robust simulation with conscious agents and all that. As Joigus says, that could all change in a few years. And, btw, that video does seem to have some relevance to the thread, and being an Asimov fan from age eleven or so (and met the man several times in the Newton neighborhood in which we both lived, as well as stepping on his foot once in the coffee hour room of the Unitarian Church causing him to laugh) on a par with those panel members, I will watch it avidly. I note that one panelist is arguably the world's cutest physicist, Zoreh Davoudi. I also note that the AMoNH website does also provide transcripts, which might be a better way to home in on the meat of the discussion.

Dismissing criticism of some of your premises with an hominem (they're not deep thinkers, they have cognitive dissonance, they just don't understand, etc) is a shoddy and weak argument. But keep the insults coming. It just assures me that you can't really support your theory with any empirical evidence. E.g. solid evidence for quantum computation in cellular microtubules that gets us around the decoherence problem as it applies to quantum mechanisms in the brain.

But you are making the argument that the HPOC is real and that you've solved it. People are warranted in asking if you can "solve" a non-existent problem. Just as if I were to tell you, "I have solved the long enduring mystery of how Santa Claus fits down 6 inch flue pipes." You might point out this isn't a real problem because (SPOILER ALERT) Santa Claus doesn't exist and ergo there is no mystery to be resolved. If you construct an interpretation on certain assumptions, then those assumptions may be questioned legitimately. What if consciousness works perfectly well on classical mechanics, in the warm, wet, and noisy tissue of the brain? Max Tegmark, for example, has calculated that the decoherence timescale of microtubule entanglement in the brain would be extremely brief, on the order of femtoseconds, which is far too short for meaningful neural processing to occur.

What predictions does your theory make which could be put to the empirical test? I'll wait.

It might be useful to acquaint oneself with the idea of a category error, as it applies to the invented "hard problem" of consciousness. The fact that we study some things with cognitive science and others with phenomenology shouldn't really be that strange. Houses look different from the outside than they do from the inside. That doesn't mean there's a Hard Problem of Architecture. Subjective experience, or qualia, are how brains appear from the "inside." That's just a different category of experience from looking at a PET scan or an EEG or other analytical tool used in neuroscience. Saying that the Hard Problem is universally agreed upon in philosophy is simply wrong and reveals that you have not sufficiently delved into the field. The HPOC is quite controversial and debate on this has raged for many decades. You could at least follow up on the Pigliucci essay which @exchemist linked for you, and look at the ideas of some of the main players in this ongoing area of debate. The author "gestures" - science doesn't just gesture. It makes observations, forms an hypothesis, then tests it. Simply pointing at some speculative and unevidenced connection is conjecture, not a real theory. That the author claims internal coherence has zero probative value - fairy tales may have internal coherence. You don't ground anything in octonion algebra, you ground it in a correspondence to cosmological observations. If some octonionic construction maps well onto those observations, then you might have something.

Look out, Austin! https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/tesla-tiptoes-into-long-promised-robotaxi-service-2025-06-22/ If I were in Austin today, I would (a) look carefully before crossing the street or traveling by bike, and (b) petition City Hall for a test mobilizing a large team of pedestrians (in heavy body armor) pushing empty baby carriages and suddenly and randomly crossing streets.

I remember long ago reading a paper on false correlations and pseudoscience that used Canadian hockey as an example. Some kook had come up with a "proof" of astrology which was that Canadian hockey teams were dominated by Scorpios and Sagittarius. The debunker pointed out that Canadian kids started hockey in some early grade and that coaches picked mostly the kids born right after the school system's age cutoff, at an age (say, seven) when the oldest kids in the grade had a distinct advantage in strength, speed and motor development. Compensate for that effect and the whole skew vanished and distributions became Gaussian around seasonal birth rates.

What are Ritter's sources on that? His rant just makes that assertion - do you have other intelligence to back that up? He's a nonfiction author, so I would think he's used to providing footnotes. And where else would the Iranians have that could provide such a deep subterranean location or be somehow invisible to all remote sensing? I'm not disagreeing with Ritter about 47's penchant for theater and shallow displays of "winning.". I just need to see his beef.

Interesting how 47 always pivots wildly after campaign promises are made. He ran in 2024 on a platform of isolationism and US non-intervention. Wonder how the MAGAs who voted for that are handling this. There is certainly no guarantee that Iran will now just make peace. Both they and their client states could start setting up some kind of reprisal. It could be narrow, like attacking a US base in the region, or it could be broader - block Hormuz strait, get various proxies on a terrorist path, etc. That's what I'm wondering about. Does that program, which cost billions to start, just reboot or are their finances depleted to where they will just try other methods that give more bang for the buck? My guess is that the super bomb the US used is actually capable of drilling down in there and took out the facility. (And two others). Will they do that all over again under another mountain or decide it's not worth all those billions for what could end up with the same outcome?