TheVat

The cheap ones - they're called bottle jacks - are usually 2 - 4 tons. Mine is 2, iirc. Haven't used in years.

Gullibility. Poor critical thinking skills. Persistent mood of pessimism and fear. They are the clay that extremists mold.

I think our language tends to cause a creeping in of dualism when we speak of minds and brains, as if those are separate things that interact with each other. The implication is a false Cartesian split. Rather than use umbrella terms like mind, it seems more useful to look at specific cognitive processes in a neutral monism stance, trying to see how that process, e.g. intending to purchase beer, plays out through neurological operations, physical movements (checking in the cellar and fridge, writing beer on a list, placing money or card in a pocket, etc.), spatial shift, vocalizations to other bodies, etc. The parity principle (Chalmers et al) is a useful one here. Thanks to @AIkonoklazt for bringing that. This moves our understanding away from the mind as a thing that influences other things, and perhaps towards a truer understanding of mind as an array of dynamic processes that extend through the world. One pitfall of having created a memory narrative we call The Self is that we tend to defend it by making it separate from the world. This invites the fallacies of dualism, or at least aspect dualism.

I was taught that all elements with atomic number above 92 are radioactive, making me think visitors may want to pack their lead undies. But if there is a way an element with 163 AN is stable, I would be interested to hear how that happens.

We were sent out to walk on fresh road tar so that it would adhere to our feet and form a sock that would last for several weeks. (I feel we are entering The Four Yorkshiremen sketch)

I enjoy some philosophy of science, but agree the free will stuff has a way of going in tedious loops. As you trenchantly point out, we have to go with our gut. Determinist! 😀 I feel we do want a better word. But I'm not really sure what you are suggesting there. I like @Peterkin citing of how aboriginal society deals with these problems. It underscores, among other things, how modern urban society depersonalizes the relation between miscreant and their victim.

How do you think this impacts the Second Amendment right to arm bears?

Hi, Dim. In terms of justice systems, it seems we rely on the idea that people have some free will. When someone commits a crime, and is determined to be of sound mind, then it is held that they could have chosen to do otherwise. In a determinist view, however, they were fated to transgress (however society was equally fated to devise a criminal justice system and punish them). Indeed, from a deterministic perspective, all beliefs in free will and moral responsibility were predetermined, and any future retooling of that social consensus will also be predetermined. One could argue as a determinist that society should embrace immediately the view that there are no real choices and set about eliminating all choices as illusory nonsense. Which would sort of end life as we know it. Prisons would be gone, but so would the most minimal assurance of public safety, and democracy, and probably a vast array of other social structures that presume human moral choice. That's not gonna happen, so we remain with a belief in real moral choice, and the institutions that follow from that. But if you are asking about gray areas, about degrees of belief in free will, then there is certainly wiggle room. E.g. we now identify mental illnesses that deprive people of the capacity to make moral choices, and can move in the direction of therapy rather than incarceration.

Me, too, as per my reply over at the dot org website today. Paternal grandmother had some Sámi roots. (paternal grandpa could also, but not known to him)

Thread seems more like a vehicle for the OPs narcissism than about genetics.

I think I mentioned downward causation yesterday (to massive yawns, apparently). Epi forbids it, in ways that do seem to create logic problems. How would we ever discuss such things as qualia, if they had no causal role? Epi is like emergence without downward causation .

https://academic.oup.com/cid/article/26/2/384/508233 In vitro mutagenic activity and carcinogenic potential of metronidazole in certain animals raised concerns about its possible carcinogenicity in humans. We studied the late incidence of cancer after metronidazole use among persons enrolled in the Group Health Cooperative of Puget Sound, Seattle, a health maintenance organization. Randomly selected nonusers were matched on a one-to-one basis for age, gender, and year of enrollment to persons who used metronidazole on an outpatient basis during the period January 1975 to December 1983; 5,222 metronidazole user/nonuser pairs, for whom the median follow-up was 12.6 years, were analyzed. Forty-nine percent, 39.2%, 9.8%, and 2% of users had 1, 2–4, 5–9, and ⩾10 prescriptions or refills of metronidazole filled, respectively. The late (after the first 7 years of follow-up) incidence of cancer was nearly identical among users and nonusers (652 and 662 per 100,000 person-years, respectively; relative risk, 0.98; 95% confidence interval, 0.80–1.20). Age-gender stratified analysis did not reveal any association between metronidazole use and cancer. These data support no association between short-term exposure to metronidazole and cancer in humans. Although the results are reassuring, they may not extend to subjects who have used metronidazole for prolonged periods; further epidemiological studies should focus on these individuals.

There is a slight cancer risk from any diagnostic using X-rays. Also from moving patients to specialized treatments by air travel (stratosphere increases exposure to radiation). It's not that difficult to weigh relative risk and use such technologies. So it is with antibiotics et al. If I have tetanus or gangrene (anaerobic bacteria), I definitely will risk the metro. Especially given exposure would not likely be more than a week. Common sense is applicable here. Rather than name-calling.

Another problem with decreased potency is that, if it's an antibiotic, say amoxicillin, you might actually help any offending bacteria develop an immunity to that compound by offering a weakened sample. You really want the full potency. For a toothache, you also want a dentist - the problem might not be bacterial at all. NSAIDs are probably okay for a few years after expiration, and I've used old acetaminophen (paracetamol to you Limeys) to good effect up to seven years iirc. There are no hazardous decay products, they're just weaker.

When I hear "emergence" I am reminded of the ancient maps that would show unknown areas of the world with the caption, Here there be monsters. It is a nonexplanation of a casual structure we simply do not understand. The big question for those who wish to confer causal powers on mind is of emergence and downward causation. Emergence and downward causation are best understood in light of one another. Downward causation would occur when a whole, which includes various parts, influences the behavior of those parts. A whole, or a property of a whole, is emergent when it is capable of exercising downward causation, so again the question of how we would discover and demonstrate downward causation. This seems really challenging with conscious creatures who are interacting with their environment. You have lower order signals from outside interacting with higher order mental states. Sometimes there is thought without behavior. Sometimes, as we have seen, there is behavior without thought, or only thoughts post hoc. Sometimes mind seems to exercise prior restraint (to borrow lamguage from my nation's first amendment) and block behavior, e.g. I'm just going to ignore that. We don't understand emergence because we don't understand what is the possibility of downward causation.

Though my wording was ambiguous, that's what I was getting at. The poll figure only shows support for a generic Dem platform. And as I said, any real potus will drag the chains of inflation, border surges, personal warts, etc.

If I were to guess at the reluctance, I would say they are not favoring a non-deterministic choice process (which could be randomness, rather than actual free agency) but rather one in which the self, the "I" has some kind of agency that is not tethered to physical causality. It's aspect dualism, if you peek under the hood. For some, it's a way to distance oneself from the clockwork universe. Side note: Leibniz thinking on counterfactuals somewhat anticipated MWI. Leibniz argued that there could be an infinite number of alternate worlds, so long as they were not in conflict with laws of logic. So there could exist worlds where counterfactuals were the reality, where Alice, regretting that she didn't call Bob, did in some world call Bob, with positive consequences. Each world would still be deterministic from a physicalist perspective, but all counterfactuals would be permitted in a larger view of all possible Alices, with all possible evolutions of the state vector.

Some northern German company bought that brand recently. They say now it will be made from Hamburgers.

When they bother to. This is why reputable polling firms try to identify likely voters (i.e. not just registered to vote) and weight results on that basis.

If the robot draws electrical power from a line, and the plant has a load center with circuit breakers, could one flip the relevant breaker and then isolate the faulty sensor system in some way so it can be taken to a workbench and analyzed? Maybe I've seen too many movies where they just shut off the robot and then remove the faulty element.

It's interesting that Unnamed Democrat polls much more strongly against Trump than Biden, ahead by 8 points. Any sitting president whose administration coincides with high inflation and a surge at the border will face such headwinds in polling. A lot of voters don't sit around having informed thoughts like regional socioeconomic forces and failing regimes are chiefly responsible for surges of illegal border crossing ....or..... inflation arises from global forces over which presidents have little control. They let themselves be pawns of media influencers who want them to react emotionally and with partisan outrage. Trump has completely sold his base on the idea that those 90+ felony counts are all false charges concocted as part of a political witch hunt. The power of media bubbles to block obvious facts that contradict this is staggering.

Heisenberg is driving down the highway when he is pulled over by the state patrol. "Excuse me, sir, did you know you were going at 87 mph?" Heisenberg: "Oh great. Now I'm lost!"

Middle East political threads always seem to devolve into spitting and growling. Which oddly mirrors the ME itself. I think it's a fool's errand trying to find some kind of original sin in the region that will somehow decisively determine who gets to be the good guys and bad guys. We can regress through Ben Gurion, Balfour, the Mamluk sultans, the Mongols, the Crusades, and on and on and never find it.

Perhaps time for a wee review of terms. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epiphenomenalism

In Chuck Palahniuk's "Choke," the main character is told that he was cloned from Jesus' foreskin. Seems prepuce-terous. Skin DNA doesn't hold up that well.