TheVat

I guess there are political aspects to it but I saw this going more in an engineering (in the broad meaning) direction, on how to adapt to regional temperature changes. For example, would it help to build homes below street level, like berm houses, for more efficient cooling. I know some places, where the water table is high, or the soil is very hard, that would not likely be practical.

First, fire your translation software. Second, you're talking about these? https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/materials-science/metamaterials#:~:text=Metamaterials are artificial electromagnetic media,endowed with entirely unexpected properties. Not sure what you mean by optical wormhole.

Alcohol prohibition probably had some mitigating effect partly due to the fact that people who were law-abiding and not desperate for a drink simply figured it was easier to follow the law and find other social lubricants. Some drugs, the cohort that uses it is much smaller, less moved by moral arguments and more driven to obtaining it, so legal banning has less effect.

Funny! Hope she did not teach science.

Would south, yuzhnyy, usually be abbreviated with Ю? So they are trying to turn the Amerikanski world upside down?

Cool thread, Mac. The only design scenario that doesn't get shot down by where did the designer come from is one where the universe is a virtual space. And if that were the case, why expend so much coding and processor space on a physics that is needlessly complex? Why millions of macroscopic species, and up to a trillion microbial species? I suppose a virtual design argument could be we need to make a universe that's really interesting and challenging for scientists. A team of alien toy universe builders rubbing their tendrils together and laughing gleefully as one suggests, "let's make the speed of boson propagation so slow that it takes like f__ing forever to get anywhere!" Haven't watched @Genady video yet, so will reply to that later.

Baffling that this kind of drivel isn't in the Trash thread. Why engage with this nonsense?

Yep, and that's the case with many of the theories of consciousness. They just don't offer a basis to empirically test their core assumptions. They are saying we might know what it's like to be a wombat, if we probe neural operations deeply, and I think there are meta science reasons that may never happen. Phenomenal experience (the philosophy term for subjective experience) may be something beyond a purely objective accounting. IIT has not even established that what goes on in the brain is information. (fun fact: wombat poo is rectangular in shape)

It's a similar question to the coastal construction one. Some places draw too many resources to render them viable. And if people are forced by, political/economic boundaries to live in a hot place then architecture should adapt (like your high roofed Lagos pool hall) and not just rely on brute force AC. Also, clothing styles should be in tune with local climate. Traditional European business attire makes little sense in more tropical climes.

Use a Carribean method. Make a voodoo doll of the relative.. Then subject it to harsh peer review.

It also occurred over hundreds of other hometowns, including mine. The moon's shadow tracked over Oregon, Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, Nebraska, Kansas, Missouri, Illinois, Kentucky, Tennessee, North Carolina, Georgia, and South Carolina. Sorry, buddy, you're not that special.

The name Albert Einstein can have its letters rearranged to spell nineties table R. Do you realize what this foretold? Neither do I.

There seems to be another possibility. He figured out the puzzle himself, then checked his own answer on the internet, and when he found a verifying page he liked the way it was worded so he copy/pasted that. So he could be honest about solving it but still plagiarized - do you and he communicate in a language that is not his first language?

I did. Back up the thread, eleven posts up. Agreed with Pigliucci on category error, and disagreed with Dennett, Churchland, et al that it's an illusion. There was a whole chat and everything. After two pages touching on subjective experience you stroll in and.... I think my response to that was the soul of restraint, considering. And now I'm done here.

Thanks to everyone who read the thread, and links, before commenting. It really makes for a richer give-and-take between participants. And thanks for reading the part of the thread regarding Pigliucci et al and category errors and qualia.

Next week's topic: What it's like to be Margot Robbie. 400 years in the future, the quantum cognitive brain emulator, or QCBE, will allow anyone to temporarily become anyone who has been paid to provide their complete connectome down to quantum states of every brain atom, thus having their experiences and reactions to them. People who love chocolate, but can't eat chocolate for health reasons, will be able to hook up the QCBE and temporarily become Bob, who ioves chocolate, has extremely sensitive tastebuds and can gorge on it without ill effects while his entire brain lights up with pleasure and bliss....

Failure to wash a toad? I will be contacting the relevant animal welfare agency in your country. Thanks to @Ken Fabian for pointing out the alkalinity of wet wood ashes. I had not realized the pH could go up to 12. I wish I could edit or delete my misinformation in the earlier post. I was somehow thinking of the ashes as dry and the toad also, not fully registering it went into wet foliage on a wet night.

That's a helpful short essay. He has a strong point that we will be misusing the term explanation when we try to have it encompass experience. As he says, I can in theory offer a complete explanation of how I see the color red, but that cannot include the phenomenal experience I have in so doing. Subjective experience or qualia as the cognitive philosophers call it, are simply a different category from objective functional explanations. His concluding comment is spot on (which to my brain, looks like an arrow hitting a bullseye)... Consciousness as we have been discussing it is a biological process, explained by neurobiological and other cognitive mechanisms, and whose raison d’etre can in principle be accounted for on evolutionary grounds. To be sure, it is still largely mysterious, but (contra Dennett and Churchland) it is no mere illusion (it’s too metabolically expensive, and it clearly does a lot of important cognitive work), and (contra Chalmers, Nagel, etc.) it does not represent a problem of principle for scientific naturalism.

Don't know. Dogs chew a lot of things, sometimes just for something to do, or maybe it's also dental care. My neighbors dog chews chunks of wood, sometimes will eat poop or clods of dirt. Hard to say. If you put out a mineral lick (like ranchers use) and they start licking that, and stop nibbling ash, that might indicate something. Sometimes with horses it's just about salt. Out here in the winter you will sometimes see the bison in the State Park licking road salt. They will gather in groups in the middle of the road and ignore drivers trying to get through.

The ash is harmless. Donkeys and horses eat it when they crave minerals, like potassium. I gather being covered with ash does decrease the odds of a toad being kissed by a beautiful princess.

The whole "what's it like" discussion in philosophy of mind addresses what's called the Knowledge Argument, against physicalism. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_argument This summarizes the argument and the famous thought experiment called Mary's Room, developed by Frank Jackson. Dennett, predictably , argues that there's no need for qualia.

I think a snapshot is static, but its meaning is dynamic. So your later analogy might be somewhat valid. We don't really get the dynamics of a mental state from just seeing the connectome map. In your particle analogy, we don't know the momentum of the particles. In the connectome map, we don't have the kind of dynamic picture that would allow us to say When Alice's C4905 transmedial fiber fires, plus (etc), then she is seeing a soft red glow. We don't know rising or falling activation potentials or numerous other dynamic conditions back through time to when baby Alice was figuring out the soft red glow and configuring those transmedial fibers and synaptic sensitivities and so on. Maybe it's like penetrating a lot of noise and we just can't. But who knows? Maybe someday.

I think the stakeholders on complexity emergentism are going with the assumption that type of complexity matters. I would agree a rigid structure of transistors pushed together like Legos is highly unlikely to be the sort of complexity one might find in an animal connectome. We are very distant from understanding the connectome or its idiosyncrasies, as Epstein points out, so I could agree that invoking its complexity is, at this time in history, hand waving.

I think it relates to the idea that two people can have the same thought but each brain will show a different set of pathways for that same thought. Each brain develops connections and signal paths in an idiosyncratic way. (that's the price of plasticity) So the converse of that is that you could have two identical connectomes which would be having entirely different thoughts and memories. A connectome map does not consistently correspond to a particular pattern of thought. Human neural architecture is not built of off-the-shelf standardized components. So you would need my entire developmental and experiential history to know what my current connectome snapshot means. And maybe not even then?