TheVat

By fraudulent or shoddy science. It is important to understand that if I go to the trouble of gathering data in good faith then I am not going to ignore it. If others do the same experiment and it looks like they get really different data, then there will be intense peer review and scrutiny of our datasets and methods. A common fraud is someone getting data that doesn't support their favored hypothesis and so they massage the data to fit. Because very few scientists are the sole researchers in an area of inquiry, this kind of fraud has a way of being discovered. Someone reported that transcranial magnetic stimulus of the parietal lobe caused people to see God. Turned out to be bad interpretation of data and experimenter asking subjects leading questions and limiting the sample to religious people. Then others repeated the TCMS experiment with a better cross-section of population, more open and neutral questions as to what was felt, more longitudinal data (repeating experiment with a subject multiple times over a couple years) and so on. From those experiments it seemed the parietal lobe simply generated a sense of presence and then people filled in with details that, in their cultural context, made sense to them. Shoddy science and fraud, ignoring evidence, tends to reveal itself.

And yet there you are, crossing bridges, stepping aboard jetliners, flipping on lightswitches and computers and stoves, taking pharmaceuticals, reading weather forecasts before you select your day's wardrobe, etc as if they were going to work properly, based as they are on empirical science. You must not be that worried about bias. And when there is bias, like the over-dependence on computational models of mind, prominent scientists (like my cited one, Robert Epstein) make beaucoup de bruit about it and there are massive critical discussions all over the Web and in professional journals and pretty soon MIT Technology Review and Nature and Scientific American are devoting feature stories to how computers are a weak and sometimes misleading metaphor for how brains work. Indeed, it's hard to imagine any other human mode of knowledge that is so brutally mean towards bias. The glee that scientists bring to finding bias, in peer review, is breathtaking.

Yep. Both are a metaphysical stance. The scientific stance is simply that consistent patterns appear in the phenomenal world as we observe it, and that it is governed by formulae which are uniformly applicable throughout spacetime. It is an ontology that is known as empiricism. It is premised on the notion that that which is real can be observed or known by inference from what is observed.

Not sure, but Luc might be letting panpsychism in the back door. If its conjecture, that all matter has some residual consciousness, were somehow supported (so far, zilch in the evidence department) then it would retrofit the hard sciences. It's a bit like the Star Trek Discovery rubber science idea that outer space is permeated by a mycelium - mind-blowing but lacking in empirical basis. Science has the method tools it has - where observation and objective measure can't go, is meta to science.

It's been a good question. I think there have been assumptions made by many in cognitive sciences on how the brain works, that are a sort of bias. Once again, cognitive scientist Robert Epstein's famous article which takes down the notion that the brain is like a computer.... https://aeon.co/essays/your-brain-does-not-process-information-and-it-is-not-a-computer

The requirement of time-reversal symmetry plays havoc with causality. In FWAT, emitters and absorbers are interchangeable. I think later interpretations like Cramers TIQM have tried to resolve this. Or maybe one just throws out all the advanced wave solutions and restores the traditional arrow of time? You don't have to use ALL the math. 😏

Time flies like the wind, fruit flies like a banana.

I do not believe that is the case for any of those four thinkers (two of whom have retired from horsemanship, may they rest in peace). They do assert, in various ways, that some areas of knowledge will not yield useful explanations of their objects of study purely via subjective experience. But none would argue that the study of big toe pain would not include gathering subjective reports of people experiencing big toe pain. To say the subjective has its limits in unraveling mysteries is not saying that the subjective doesn't exist.

What I'm finding when I google holotropic mind is a guy named Grof who has some sort of New Age mysticism and connects the holotropic to the Hindu conception of Atman-Brahman. While this may be of interest to spiritual seekers, I am not clear how this would change the scientific view of the neurological correlates of consciousness. There doesn't seem to be a scientifc theory there that is supported by evidence of a nonphysical field of consciousness outside of brains. The default position that consciousness is a brain process is not from bias, but from the mountains of evidence (Himalayan sized mountains) of the supervenience of mental properties (like the sensation of pain) on physical properties (like the firing of certain groups of receptors and connected neurons). A feeling supervenes on neural activity, and neural activity entails feeling. Kill the neurons, it all goes away, no feeling, no consciousness, nothing. A dualist view, contrary to this paradigm, has only odd anomalies and ambiguous anecdotes. As others point out, this doesn't offer much to a scientific inquiry. As Swanson asked,

"Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned."

Just to be clear, re PB. Aspergillosis is a pulmonary infection or allergic response to the airborne fungal spores. Aflatoxins are secondary carcinogenic fungal metabolites from various Aspergillus species. It is the latter that is the concern with peanuts, maize, etc from certain agricultural regions where there are issues with storage and inspection, e.g. Zimbabwe. Because PB is a poor growth medium (as others have mentioned here) for Aspergillus, the production of significant amounts of its aflatoxin metabolites is very unlikely. It's a bit like radioactive isotopes. They exist in small amounts in almost everything, but usually producing levels of ionizing radiation that are harmless. Aflatoxin is similar.

Hence my posting that the probability is low, not zero. I seem to keep referring back to points I thought I already made, and dealing with partial quotes that have been misunderstood. For the last effing time: aflatoxin, though widely distributed, is not sufficiently concentrated in northern European houses (the OP context to which I was replying) that it would likely get into peanut butter. Hence my comment: Ciao.

Well, the strip driver (what the AC/DC transformer is called here) should be a fairly simple magnetic one with a rectifier output, with 120v AC input and 12v DC output (or 24, sometimes), with watts and volts properly matched to the strip. There would be no dimmer on the supply side or DC output. There are solid state LED drivers that use the PWM method, but IIRC those are avoided in residential installations. Those cause EMF interference, foul up WiFi, radio, etc. I need to fact check meself later. It's weird, that regular blinking sounds like a PMW shenanigan, but it would be on all the bulbs wouldn't it? Unless they're wired funny.

Whew. I think semantics did overwhelm the chat for a minute. Getting BTT, it seems to me that a mind is foremost an adaptive structure which resonates with the universe in which it evolves. Sophisticated cognition (above and beyond the 4 Fs of biology) will include creativity that is inspired by the regular patterns that are perceived. @Genady made a telling point about how computers are not really like brains. We humans observed regularities in numbers, logical operations and how electrons flow - from this came something novel and quite unlike a brain.

It's likely to be the dimmer switch. Went through this a couple years ago. Not all dimmers are rated for LED lights and not all LED bulbs are dimmable. If your wall switch still uses the old incandescent dimmer, the LED bulbs may not respond well. Similar response. LED bulbs should outlive you unless your light is stationed on a paint shaker. If they're starting to fail you have an incompatible dimmer/LED situation. The average bulb is rated for 50,000 hours. LED bulbs have not been residentially installed long enough to be failing now.

The Almond Hammer Collection https://hammer.ucla.edu/collections/armand-hammer-collection I hope this is the correct link. I can't find my reading glasses.

@MSC and @Genady I think you two fellows are taking slightly different meanings on "design from nature." My ornithopter was to make the point that we see evolved structures in nature but then will innovate something different that is actually easier to craft and works better. I think MSC is saying that nature dictates certain structures because they just make sense for a purpose. A camera has to project an image onto an emulsion or CCD through a lens, the way an eye projects an image onto the retina through a lens, because the natural laws of optics suggest this is the way to do it. Genady is stressing that we seek certain goals in engineering something, but that we take our cue from natural laws and then go our own direction on innovating something. So we get jets instead of ornithopters, extension ladders instead of knotted vines, IC engines instead of mitochonddria, wheels instead of artificial feet, and so on. x-post with Genady

😁

There shall, in that time, be rumors of things going astray, erm, and there shall be a great confusion as to where things really are, and nobody will really know where lieth those little things wi-- with the sort of raffia work base that has an attachment. At this time, a friend shall lose his friend's hammer and the young shall not know where lieth the things possessed by their fathers that their fathers put there only just the night before, about eight o'clock. Yea, it is written in the book of Cyril that, in that time, shall the third one...

Hume shot the TA down neatly with his "Philo" essays. Later thinkers, on to Dawkins and The Blind Watchmaker, elaborated those well. As does your temporal argument, @MSC. The natural order of the universe, like the fine structure constant, leads naturally to stable atoms, self-replicating chemistry, and organisms that gain selective advantage by gathering photons ---> eyeball. The universe has the quality of not being chaotic but allowing randomness.

Women don't seem to mind male baldness as much as men imagine they do. I have it on good authority that it's sexy. Wigs tend to look fake and kind of silly. (I would strongly advise against buying one online - they really need to be tried on and a proper fit) Show that billiard ball with pride! But maybe apply some sunblock to it if you spend time outside. (- all the above comments are JMO, and would be less applicable to someone like a cancer patient who has suddenly lost hair due to chemo. )

I should clarify: if you live in a developed country. Very low probability. In third world countries, especially in the hot and humid conditions of those in the tropics, aflatoxin is a serious public health problem, both in agricultural storage of nuts and grains, and in its infiltration of residences. I was addressing the OP, who IIRC resides in the UK. Where aflatoxin in peanut butter (above permissible levels) would be extremely rare. Imported nuts and maize are inspected carefully, especially if they are from the Global South. (one reason I'm familiar with this topic is that a family member got pretty ill eating peanut butter some years ago, and we did some research)

It would seem, from all the cognitive science data collected over centuries, that cognitive biases are better explained by natural causes, neurological ones, than as the work of a deity or as some supernatural phenomenon. Metaphysical naturalism just requires fewer assumptions that are just tossed in ad hoc. It lowers bias by assuming less. But that doesn't mean science could not expand the scope of its understanding of the universe to phenomena that presently appear supernatural but are in fact just another sort of physical phenomena which we approached formerly with a religio-spiritual bias. Humans have made that epistemic leap from time to time throughout history - e.g. fairy lights that turned out to be bioluminescence when observed with less bias and therefore more freedom to test various hypotheses.

There is data that provides evidence of nonmaterial entities? Physicalism (the term used in philosophy of science) is not an "ingredient," but rather the default assumption in the absence of any indication of supernatural realms or objects. And the only assumption is one of parsimony - in the absence of data that points towards dualism, it makes sense to adopt a provisional stance of monism. There is no coherent view, so far, of how nonphysical entities could interact with physical ones, that doesn't logically break down into contradiction.

Yeah, I wondered if a family member worked in a healthcare facility, had put a sample in a pocket and then forgotten it was there. Couches tend to acquire items that fall out of pockets. The fact that you know it's a 1.5 ml microcentrifuge tube would suggest you have some acquaintance with that line of work.