I like the word instantiated but it's not a joe schmoe word. p/quote]

It's a computer programming buzzword. You create a specific instance out of an abstract thing. But I use it more generally, as in saying for example that five apples instantiate the number 5. The number 5 is a mathematical abstraction, and 5 apples is an instantiation of the concept in the physical world.

So mind or non-physical is an abstraction, and neurons instantiate it in the physical world. That's my chain of thinking, for what it's worth.

— Mark Nyquist

The subject of strong AI is possibly an exact analogy in containing non-physicals.
The form would be [computational electronics,(an instantiated non-physical)],
compared with [neurons, (an instantiated non-physical)]. — Mark Nyquist

Yes I completely agree. If somebody succeeds in implementing or instantiating actual self-awareness or consciousness or subjective experience in a circuit board, or any pile of circuit boards, that would show that the physical can instantiate the non-physical.

I don't happen to believe that myself, but plenty of people are working on it from many angles. And after all -- this is the counterargument to my disbelief -- my brain is a pile of atoms, and I have self-awareness. So why couldn't some other pile of atoms have self awareness? Why only people, why only living things? It's a darn good question, one I can't answer.

I will try to write neurons instead of neuron; I meant neuron plural and you read neuron singular. It could be I have my own grammar on some of this and need to clean it up a bit. — Mark Nyquist

Yes I see that now. I apologize that I've been going off into perpectual paragraphs of pedantic pickiness on this point.

So if something seems off keep after me. — Mark Nyquist

You don't want to encourage me to be even more pedantic and picky!! LOL. I'm pedantic and picky enough on my own.

A guess, for humans, performing simple tasks, could involve tens of millions of neurons.
Something about Claude Shannon you may not know is he did not like the father of information (theory) title. — Mark Nyquist

That's interesting!

His work was with signals, transmission rates, error rates and high level math for sure but the result was to implement on physical systems. Looking it up would be better than from my memory. — Mark Nyquist

I see exactly what you mean. He worked on sending "information," streams of bits, through wires. Not on human-to-human communication or "information" as in the contents of our minds. Makes perfect sense.

So my version of information is basically the mind stores and processes information and everything external is just physical matter. Communication works by coding (or encoding) and decoding matter in various forms — Mark Nyquist

Well I thought you were making the point that Shannon distinguished between information as strings of 1's and 0's traveling through a wire; versus information as what the mind stores. They are totally different things. The mind doesn't work on bitstrings. So I'm confused by your now equating bitstrings in wires with the mysterious processes of our minds.

What I specifically mention is reducing the chance of making erroneous decisions in between tense confrontations such as military warfare or even the US and Russian front.

All that you have said is cause for concern on this topic, specifically, don't you think? — Shawn

The world blundered blindfolded into World War I. I've seen people say that global conditions resemble Europe before the Great War. It would only take one small screwup. And plenty of people are stoking the flames. I'm certainly concerned. But in this case the errors of judgment, the bravado, and the stupidity are all sadly human. We can't even blame the machines.

I wouldn't go as far as saying I believe it is the ultimate explanation, only that it is at least equally plausible. I'm not sure if Krauss actively believes it to be the ultimate explanation? It would be interesting to see his reasoning. — Down The Rabbit Hole

I hope you'll check out some of the links I gave and google around for more. A lot of people have written pro and con about Krauss's book. I'm out of my depth, I've said everything I know.

But I do wonder why you think Kraus has any sort of "ultimate" explanation when it leaves unexplained the primeval existence of the RQF and the laws of physics. Why do these things exist, and is their existence necessary or contingent, and have they always existed or did they come into existence? And how did that happen? Maybe God created the RQF and the laws of physics. But then you have to ask the same questions about God. Turtles all the way down. Questions that can never be answered.

I'm just saying that he has a nice account of how the world might have arisen from the RQF, and there's value in that, but I don't see how you can feel that this is in any way "ultimate" when it immediately raises so many obvious questions.

You have written a very good detailed reply. I have to admit that I struggle with the whole question of qualia. I know that it involves the subjective experience of properties, but it must connect to reality beyond us. Of course, light and darkness are based on the retinal reception, but it is connected to so much more. It makes me think that Bergson was probably right in speaking of the brain as filtering down process. — Jack Cummins

Thanks. Filtering down process. Reminds me Like Huxley's The Doors of Perception. "If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is: Infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro' narrow chinks of his cavern."

Regarding qualia, I myself find subjective experience to be evidence that we are not machines, and that physicalism is not sufficient to explain the mind. That makes me some kind of mysterian, someone who believes that there are some mysteries we will never get to the bottom of. I'm a "turtles all the way down" type.

A lot of really smart people hold the opposite viewpoint, though. I could be wrong.

I'm back for another round, there being many statements here in dire need of clarification, rectification, refutation, and outright repudiation.

I don't follow your claim that there are subjects that we have no right to question.
— fishfry

I never once said that. — Xtrix

It's good you said that. So, yes or no, may I take it that it is permissible to discuss the US government's account of the events of 9/11/2001? To this moment I had not realized you felt that way.

I'm talking about 9/11 truthers -- those who believe the towers were an "inside job," brought down by the government -- through use of remote control planes or dynamite installed in the buildings, etc. — Xtrix

Ahhhhhh, this is helpful. In fact when you reacted to my labeling myself as a 9/11 truther as if I'd admitted to frolicking on Epstein island with Prince Andrew, I asked myself if perhaps you and I simply have different definitions of this term.

Following the distinction among the artificial intelligence community between weak and strong AI; let me propose some perhaps clarifying definitions for your provisional agreement.

* A weak 9/11 truther is someone who simply questions the official account and would like to see a serious criminal investigation done. Someone who perhaps knows of Hamilton and Keane's remarks and knows that the families of of the victims have been among the most vociferous advocates of a full investigation. Someone who knows that the entire pile of rubble, the evidence of the greatest crime in American history, was collected by a fleet of dump trucks the next day and hauled off China as scrap with zero forensic analysis performed. Someone perhaps who knows of the PNAC report and finds it curious. Someone who is troubled by a long laundry list of strange doings: the military stand downs, the terrorist exercises scheduled for that exact day, the collapse of the steel-framed buildings, the shorted airline stocks, the involvement of the Saudis, covered up for years and finally exposed due to the efforts of the truthers. I could go on, there are literally hundreds of such anomalies.

Weak truthers don't have answers; only questions. And "move along, nothing to see here you conspiracy nut" does not satisfy us intellectually.

* A strong 9/11 truther is characterized the way you define a 9/11 truther. Holding to a specific alternative theory, often involving elements of the US government, Mossad, mini- or micro-nukes, directed energy weapons, and the Prince of Darkness himself, Richard Bruce Cheney.

Is that a helpful distinction? Frankly I don't know how anyone who takes the time to begin to study this case can be anything but a weak truther. There was simply never any criminal investigation done and there are hundreds of significant questions unanswered.

The "Building 7" crowd. — Xtrix

I understand exactly how you feel. I used to feel exactly the same way. People would be talking about 9/11 and some conspiracy nut would mention "building 7," which I'd never heard of, had no idea what it was, and cared even less. That all changed the day I saw a [url=]video of the collapse of building 7. You can't unsee it. It's a controlled demolition. That doesn't mean that Dick Cheney personally pressed the plunger. It only means that the government can not explain it. The 9/11 commission didn't even mention it, and the NIST report was unable to computer-model anything past the first two seconds of collapse. It remains unexplained.

Like I say, I don't blame you. I used to feel exactly the same way. Till I saw the video and found out that the NIST computer model was unable to explain the collapse.

But please, I'm open to learn. If you have a serious engineering explanation for the collapse of building 7, by all means tell it to me. And to the world, because the government hasn't got one. Maybe you didn't realize that. I didn't, till I looked into it.

If you're talking about something else, fine -- yeah, there are holes in all kinds of commissions. But the evidence isn't restricted to one official governmental commission. — Xtrix

"Holes in all kinds of commissions" covers honest mistakes of a relatively minor nature. That doesn't begin to describe the weakness and obfuscation of the 9/11 commission report.

How did three steel-framed buildings collapse, the first, last, and only such collapses of steel-framed buildings in history?
— fishfry

:roll: Ask a civil engineer. — Xtrix

Like these guys?

Yes, it was the first time in history. It was also the first time in history the US was attacked in such a way on its own soil (besides Pearl Harbor). — Xtrix

You must realize that this is an extremely disingenuous remark, why'd you make it? If gravity made things go up that day, the fact that it was the first such attack on US soil since PH would not obviate the need to explain the phenomenon. Besides, 9/11 was a military attack by a sovereign foreign government. 9/11 was a crime perpetrated by "19 Arabs because they hate our freedoms" if you find such a mindless slogan comforting. Of course our friends at PNAC want you to think of 9/11 as Pearl Harbor. They wrote: "Further, the process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event – like a new Pearl Harbor."

You took the bait. Like they knew you would.

So what? It happened: the planes flew into the buildings, and the buildings collapsed. — Xtrix

You are only revealing your lack of intellectual curiosity. It's true that one thing happened then the other thing happened. You are imputing causation where none has ever been proved. This is a philosophy forum, after all. I'm entitled to note this instance of post hoc ergo propter hoc, "Since event Y followed event X, event Y must have been caused by event X."

If you want to learn about it, there's plenty of credible information out there. The NIST comes to mind.
[/quotre]

That's exactly the problem. The NIST report is a disgrace. It's an exercise in handwaving at best. It raises more questions than it answers. You should do your homework.
— Xtrix

Direct your very free-thinking questions to them. While your at it, direct your skepticism towards electromagnetism -- isn't THAT theory a little funny? — Xtrix

Mindless mockery in place of facts and logic.


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaluza%E2%80%93Klein_theory
Actually you seem rather neck-deep in conspiracy bullshit. You're not even hiding it well.

And you seem remarkably uncurious about the world.

But I've never said things can't be legitimately discussed. — Xtrix

Ok. You never said there are things that can't be legitimately discussed. I believe you.

Some things can, some things can't. — Xtrix

And now you just did You can't even keep your own story straight from one sentence to the next.

I don't consider 9/11 "questions" to be legitimate ones — Xtrix

Why not? The case is full of unresolved anomalies and unexplained facts. The 9/11 commission report was a joke, the NIST report worse. Are we supposed to just accept it anyway on the say-so of you and George Bush? "Let us never tolerate outrageous conspiracy theories concerning the attacks of September the 11th " You do Dubya proud.

-- they're not after "truth," they -- like Creationists and Holocaust deniers before them -- start with an idea that's been planted into their heads and they try to poke holes, distort and exaggerate every word and every detail, use false arguments and sophisticated sophistry to confirm their gut feelings. — Xtrix

Wow. You marginalize and dismiss the questios of the 9/11 widows like this? I am very serious here. You should educate yourself. Nobody has been more vociferous in their demand for 9/11 truth than the relatives of the dead. You have no idea what you are talking about.

All with either no alternatives, or stories that are so ludicrous as to be embarrassing. Flat earthers do the same thing -- are their questions "legitimate"? Maybe to you -- not to me. 9/11 truthers are in the same group, in my judgment. Again, your circle of legitimacy needs to be shrunk -- by a lot. — Xtrix

Again, low-intellect snark rather than facts, evidence, and logic. You equate mere questioning of the many unexplained aspects of 9/11 with flat earthers?

People asking questions makes you feel this way. The widows of the dead asking questions makes you react like this. They should shut up and collect their government payoffs, is that it?

No -- that's just an excuse you tell yourself. The real reason -- and obvious to anyone with any historical or psychological sense -- is that Reagan didn't die. Had he died, it would have been another JFK moment, and people like you would be defending bogus theories about Hinckley being a CIA operative or something. — Xtrix

I don't see that at all. I suppose that if a guy with lifelong connections to the Mafia had strolled unchallenged into a tightly secured police station and shot Hinkley dead in front of seventy cops, that might have gotten tongues wagging. (I refer of course to the shooting of Lee Harvey Oswald by Jack Ruby, if there's anyone to whom that wasn't clear). But absent that, I don't recall anything out of the ordinary or questionable about that case.

There's plenty of problems with that assassination attempt I could conjure up right now. — Xtrix

But you need to "conjure them up." Because there aren't actually any questions about this particular case. You don't seem to be able to distinguish between conjuring and actual unanswered questions.

How did this guy get so close to the President? Did you know there were warning signs that were ignored by the FBI? Full documentation is still classified. Reagan's stint in the hospital was odd -- no reporters, no pictures. Many people think that he really died but a look-alike was put in his place from then on -- plenty of video evidence that suggests this. Etc. — Xtrix

LOL. Good stuff! There was nothing remarkable about the case at the time. You seem to think people make up conspiracies, rather than simply notice anomalies in the official explanation and look for answers.

I'm not saying any of it is true -- but how can you not question? Don't you want to find out the truth? If you want to sit and idly believe the standard narrative, that's on you. Why are you so conforming? — Xtrix

You honestly don't seem to be able to distinguish between people making things up, and people noting actual, substantive anomalies. I don't understand your lack of discernment. Some events happened pretty much the way the authorities say, and others didn't. It takes judgment, an open mind, and a desire to research and learn, to tell the difference. It's not easy. But when you equate the questions the 9/11 widows asked the 9/11 commission with flat earthers, you do yourself a disservice. I don't actually think you're that stupid. I don't know why you're trying to convince me that you are.

Note: I really hated writing that. We're mostly civil. But to equate the 9/11 widows to flat earthers is stupid. I tried to rewrite this sentence or find a better word but I couldn't. Please forgive.

Psychological theories aren't evidence.
— fishfry

Again, not a surprise you miss the point. What psychology does do is show why people like you even care about evidence in the first place. — Xtrix

That was exactly my point, which YOU missed. I've heard this for years. "People can't accept that a nobody like LHO could change the course of history by killing JFK, so they look for a conspiracy. And THEREFORE there is no conspiracy." I can't imagine worse logic.

And after all -- didn't a lone nobody like Gavrilo Princip spark World War I by assassinating the Archduke Ferdinand and his lovely wife Sophie, virtually by accident? Nobody ever says they don't believe a 19 year old Serbian nobody could have changed the course of history.

People question the official stories of the JFK assassination and 9/11 precisely because the official explanation are so full of holes. Not because they are psychologically disposed to see things that aren't there. And this explains your Hinkley example. There really weren't any mysteries about that case. That I know of. And if there were, as you enumerated, they didn't resonate with enough people.

You're clearly of this cloth. — Xtrix

Ad hominems are all you've got. No facts, no evidence, no logic. Mindless jokes. The 9/11 widows are flat earthers. You're embarrassing yourself.

And no amount of explanation by me or anyone else can convince you of where you're going wrong. — Xtrix

Why don't you provide some so we can both find out?

But you are. You go way too far towards one extreme, then want to justify it with the standard arguments about "free thought," while of course invoking Galileo and the Church, how "everyone believed" the earth was flat at one point (straight out of Men in Black, if I recall), sapere aude, etc. etc. etc. Been there, done that. — Xtrix

I honestly don't see it. I've advanced no alternative theories. I've pointed out established facts and asked questions.

Indeed. I do the same with Creationists and Flat Earthers as well. Normally I don't even bother with the claims about "facts" or "evidence" at all -- so you're an exception in that case! — Xtrix

Flat earthers like the 9/11 widows and Hamilton and Keane. Can't you see how weak your own argument is?

But still ultimately another deluded individual. And again, me saying so won't sway you. I already know that. I'm writing mainly for others -- you're a good demonstration of thinking gone awry. — Xtrix

I have not advanced a single alternative theory that I say I believe. You're reading things I didn't write. I'f I'm deluded, tell me exactly what I'm deluded about.

Guess I caught a real one here. Funny I anticipated the building 7 thing above -- without having read further. Shocker. — Xtrix

That's because the collapse of building 7 has turned more people into 9/11 skeptics than any other single fact. Well, maybe the missing airplane debris at Shanksville or the total lack of photographic evidence of an airplane hitting the Pentagon. But Building 7 is the one event that startles people when they investigate it. I can't help that.

Another typical response. Actually in the 9/11 case I have, a little. But I regret spending even a second on it -- the most it deserved was 0 seconds, like the claims of flat earthers. Of course I could be wrong about them too! But that's a risk I'm happy to take. I trust my bullshit-detector. — Xtrix

You have as little curiosity about 9/11 as you do about flat earth theory. I just find this a stunning admission.

Calm down... — Xtrix

I'm pretty calm. But of course you haven't facts or evidence or logic, so "calm down," and "Flat earther!" are all you've got. I'll have some ad hominy with those grits.

Why do they need to stay home, socially distance, and wear masks if every single one of them is vaxed?
— fishfry

Why? WHY? — Xtrix

Well? Why?

Yes. You have poor judgment and I don't. That's the difference. — Xtrix

I would say the same about you. I'd use the word discernment. You can't distinguish the questions the 9/11 widows put to the commission, from flat earthers.

I actually did laugh at this one. You rebel you! Just a natural born rebel! — Xtrix

Actually a questioner of authority is more like it. Not actually much of a rebel, sad to say.

Or naturally born deluded. But go with whichever is more psychologically pleasing. — Xtrix

What am I deluded about? I've asked questions, and linked to the questions asked by others. I've asserted no alternative theories at all, not a single one, beyond the perfectly true fact that the 9/11 commission did a piss-poor job and did not conduct a criminal investigation. And that no criminal investigation into 9/11 has ever been done. This is a factual matter of public record. The 9/11 was not a criminal investigation. So what do you think I'm deluded about?

Yes, and I suspect you'd go right to the end of that experiment -- if the experimenter was a 9/11 truther, of course. — Xtrix

That didn't even make any sense.

Alright enough of this. You can have the last word. And thanks for the chat, it was fun.

You use the caterpillar as a model for us? And these references to Darwin pin you to the very mundane scientism you deny. Caterpillars do not give us an analysis of the structures of thought and experience. Do you really think you can infer from an insect's world to ours? — Constance

You could substitute a house cat if you prefer. Cats most definitely have sophisticated mental states. They have dreams, for one thing. That I assume must indicate a fairly high order of mentation.

I knew my reference to Darwin was a mistake. And I immediately qualified it by saying I have some interest in and perhaps sympathy for the position of the Darwin skeptics. I name-checked a couple. No use, the rhetorical damage was done.

I wrote an entire post explaining my position that since Newton combined great science with deep belief in God, that I found no contradiction in doing science and then saying, "It's amazing that God created all these interesting natural laws, as well as the world." I'm perfectly ok with that.

I would ask you to go back and re-read what I actually wrote, and don't be triggered by the word Darwin. Be honest with me. Would a hard-core scientism type name-drop Michael Behe and Stephen Meyer? The fact that I know who they are should tell you that I have a more open mind and broader interests than you think I do.

And why bother? We only rely on analogies when we have no actual conditions to examine, and in our case you have the actual conditions our existence to observe. Evolution will tell you nothing of the qualitative events that may or may not confirm foundations of religion. — Constance

That one D-word I used caused to to not hear anything else I said. Newton was the greatest scientist of all time and he was big on God too. I'm ok with that. It's a bit of my own position as well if I think about it, which I don't too much. But you misconstrue my words greatly if my mention of Darwin caused you to miss everything else I wrote. I knew it was going to get me in trouble the moment I wrote it but it was part of the point I was making. So let me roll it back. We used to think we were at the center of the solar system and we turned out not to be. So perhaps we think we're the ultimate in intelligence and we're not. That was my point, not to spark a debate on evolution. But even so, I'm far more sympathetic to your position than you give me credit for.

This talk about levels above or below is just general speculation. — Constance

Of course. Your belief that there's no level above (except for God) is speculation. My belief that there MIGHT be (not definitely, just might be) is speculation.

Ask rather: what IS there in framework of experience that gives rise to religious ideas that is not part of the incidental features of our making? — Constance

Now THAT is a good question, and one that I would put to an atheist. Even if there is no God, we must still account for the universality of religious experience and belief, and its influence on history. It seems to be hardwired into our minds. Or (ahem) maybe we evolved that way. Perhaps belief in a supernatural higher being confers evolutionary advantage.

I agree with you on this point. That it's a good question. Whether or not there's a God, the belief in God is a powerful aspect of the history of the world.

For the record I'm agnostic, not an atheist at all. I truly don't know. The universe is full of miracles that can't be explained. I don't think it could have been all luck. But I don't agree with intelligent design. That's too easy a cop-out. "God did it" is often a clue that we need to look deeper using reason.

As far as the time perception model goes I could restate it in sentence form.
The past is an idea held by present neurons.
The present is an idea held by present neurons.
The future is an idea held by present neurons. — Mark Nyquist

Perfectly agreed, perfectly obvious, perfectly well known to everyone. Don't you think? Also FWIW numerous studies show that memory is very unreliable. Something happens and you form a memory. Then you think about the memory and embellish it a little. After a while, your memory of an event can be quite different from the original event.

We don't store memories the way a video stores a scene. We store approximate memories which are also linked to emotional states. I think of that bad meal or long-lost friend and have an emotional experience that often induces a physical sensation in my body. So memories are extremely subtle and by no means a "record of what happened."

But why do you keep saying neurons? There's much more involved than neurons. I don't understand why you keep saying neurons. There are a lot of mechanisms in the brain and body besides neurons that are involved in experience.

My use of the semi colon was to add clarification. And in common terms a normal average Joe would understand it and there wouldn't be an issue. — Mark Nyquist

I apologize that I misunderstood. But as it happens I'm much pickier and anal-retentive than the average Joe so a lot of things jump out at me that most other people ignore. I heard once someone describe this as "sharpeners" and "levelers." Sharpeners, like me, take a small discrepancy and make a mountain out of it; levelers just smooth it out. Levelers have a much easier time in society, needless to say.

So I'm getting you don't like models that use anything non-physical. — Mark Nyquist

You couldn't be further from the truth. I am saying that your some of your terminology seems imprecise or a little off from the ideas you're trying to convey. I'm having to work hard to understand you. It could just be me of course.

That's just fine. I like any model and often going deeper has surprises.
So would your Venn diagram of reality be a big circle with all the matter in the universe and small circles as brains being a special class of matter?[/quote]

Brains are certainly matter. What minds are, nobody knows. If I had to make a diagram I'd have a circle for all the matter in the universe, and an other circle for mind, and a dotted line between them with a big question mark over it. That's my ontology right there! Thanks for helping me to clarify it.

And do you have a model or definition of information in any form you wish? — Mark Nyquist

Well information, that's a different concept than consciousness. Information was defined by a guy named Kolmogorov and studied by Shannon et. al. Here are a couple of links.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_theory

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kolmogorov_complexity

The idea is that a bitstring, a string (finite or infinite) of 1's and 0's, is either information or random depending on whether there's a short rule to describe it. For example

11111111 is 8 1's, so this is information rather than randomness. It can be "compressed" as they say.

11001010 is more random, there's not an obvious rule that generates the bits.

So when you say information, I am afraid I immediately think about the technical meaning of the term. If you turn on the radio and hear music, that's information. If you hear static, that's noise, or non-information.

This goes back to something you said earlier about the physical versus the non-physical. A bitstring is abstract, it's just a pattern without physical existence. But if you program that bitstring into a computer, you are performing a computation that takes time and energy and space and generates heat. It's a physical implementation of the abstract bistring. Which is why I like the word implementation. If you have a physical process that makes an abstract thing real, that's implementation. The analogy's not entirely good, but in my semantics I would say that brain implements mind. And then the question is, could there be anything else (a computer perhaps) that could also implement mind.

It may not be common knowledge nowadays; but, some of the most modern and sophisticated computers are built via neural-networks collected from human writing, speech, and even behavior. — Shawn

Just a quibble with this statement as it's not relevant to the rest of your subject. But at this point I believe it's fairly common knowledge. I'm pretty sure the average person on the street, or at least the average scientifically literate person, has heard the terms machine learning, AI, neural networks, and the like.

A second point I'd make here is that neural nets run on conventional computing hardware and are essentially Turing machines. That is, neural nets are a clever way of organizing a program; but they are NOT a new or revolutionary mode of computation. There is in fact only one known mode of computation, the TM. That fact has not changed since Turing's 1936 paper. Also note that the same remarks pertain to quantum computing, since in fact quantum algorithms can be simulated on conventional hardware. They just run more slowly. That's an issue of computational complexity and not computability, and important distinction. We could run Shor's algorithm with pencil and paper, given enough time, pencils and paper.

More specifically, human thought has been researched even with advanced brain interface devices such as brain activity monitoring devices. — Shawn

That's pretty cutting edge and I'm definitely keeping an eye on the developments. It's more likely such technology will be used to assist disabled people to see, walk, etc. rather than enable us to think of a Google search and have Google pump the answer into our heads, along with some highly targeted ads.

Brave new world indeed!

Where else can you go towards than reaching out for information about how consciousness works rather than human beings? Was there any other way? — Shawn

If machines ever achieve true general AI, meaning actual sentience implemented in a non-human substrate, I predict it will NOT be by means of the current approaches to machine learning. ML is just datamining on steroids. It tells you everything there is to know about what's happened, and nothing at all about what's happening.

However, one has to contemplate about how to remove bias from these computers since they are such a facet of human thought and behavior? — Shawn

The algorithms are written by humans. All the works of humanity are flawed. You know (off topic entirely) I wanted to say all the works of man, but that's sexist, so I have to say all the works of humanity. It doesn't scan as well, not at all. These are the times that try people's souls, not that people have souls in our secular age.

Anyhoo. All algorithms are biased by the biases of the designers and programmers who implemented them. ML is even worse, because ML depends entirely on its training dataset. There's a famous example where they trained an AI to distinguish between huskies and wolves, two animals that are hard to tell apart. The AI did spectacularly well but failed on some samples. They dug into the code and found that most of their pictures of wolves (or huskies, I forget which) were taken in snowy environments. The program had learned to identify snowy landscapes, not huskies and wolves!

https://unbabel.com/blog/artificial-intelligence-fails/

You will never eliminate this kind of bias from ML systems precisely because that's how they're designed to work. You train them on a dataset. Who choses the dataset? What biases did those people have? What accidental biases are in the data that nobody thought of? How can you ever tell you're correlating the right thing?

These problems will never go away. But of course every technology has downsides. 3000 Americans a day die in car crashes. Every single day, 24/7/365, another 9/11's worth of death. Yet nobody blinks an eye or gives it a moment's thought when they hop in their car for a run to the grocery store.

In the future a certain number of people will have their lives ruined by machine error and we'll just go, "That's just terrible, something must be done." And deep down, not even consciously, we'll say to ourselves, Better him than me.

I'm glad I'm old.

I'm not trying to catch you out; I'm genuinely interested in your view. — Down The Rabbit Hole

I don't feel that you're trying to catch me out. I just feel like I answered the question the best I can already and can't say much more. I gave three links at the end to excellent articles criticizing Krauss on the grounds I've given, but of course saying it much better than I can.

Maybe, nothing came before that "nothing". — Down The Rabbit Hole

Krauss's physics is correct and (from what I hear, I haven't read his book) he gives a fine popularized account of how the universe began from the RQF and the laws of physics.

What I object to is his equivocating the word "nothing" so that he can say the RQF is nothing, when it's perfectly obvious that it's not; along with his actual in-print admission that he only called his book, A Universe from Nothin in order to sell more books; and his claims that this disproves God (or whatever he claims along these lines). Of course it does nothing of the sort.

What would be a less absurd ultimate explanation than the "nothing" Krauss speaks of? — Down The Rabbit Hole

Your question contains an implicit assumption I strongly disagree with. You say, what would be a less absurd ultimate explanation that Krauss's. But I say Krauss has no ultimate explanation at all. At best he's gone one turtle down.

Krauss does not have an ultimate explanation. Do you agree with that? If the question is why are there elephants, we say animals. Why animals, life. Why life, organic molecules. Why organic molecules, atoms. Why atoms? Protons, neutrons, and electrons. Why protons and neutrons? Because quarks. (The electrons don't have internal parts as far as we know). Then we ask why quarks, and Krauss tells us: quantum fields. And if we ask why quantum fields, Krauss says, "That's the ultimate explanation. Why are you so stupid?" He has an arrogant jerk kind of attitude as it happens.

Now why do you think the RQF is an ultimate explanation? After all in 1900 they thought atoms were the ultimate explanation. This was right before relativity and the quantum revolution.

I am not saying Krauss/RQF is not THE ultimate explanation. I'm saying it's not even AN ultimate explanation; because it immediately provokes one to ask, "Well that's pretty cool, the universe arose out a spontaneous symmetry breaking or whatever of the primeval RQF. So tell me, where did the primeval RQF come from, not to mention the laws of physics? Why should there be laws of physics at all?" Aren't these questions that immediately -- immediately! -- suggest themselves? We've gone from elephants to molecules to atoms to quarks to quantum fields, and Krauss says that we need not inquire any further? That's obviously wrong, right?

One more point, I quote from Wiki

The main theme of the book is how "we have discovered that all signs suggest a universe that could and plausibly did arise from a deeper nothing—involving the absence of space itself and—which may one day return to nothing via processes that may not only be comprehensible but also processes that do not require any external control or direction. [fishfry -- emphasis mine]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Universe_from_Nothing

Here Krauss is stepping out of his lane from physics to theology. After all, maybe God made the quantum field. This is a very old debate. Newton was able to describe gravity but he could not explain it. He only knew how it behaved, but he was not able to determine an underlying cause. He himself was mystified by his action-at-a-distance. And you know what he said? He said it's due to God. And he's the greatest scientist of them all.

So Krauss is a pretentious blowhard; and self-consciously so, because he knows that merely talking about RQF won't sell as many books as saying he proved the universe came from nothing without any need for God. That sells books!

I hope my response answers your question. I'm not saying there's a better theory of the origin of the world. I'm saying Krauss hasn't got one at all. What he does have is a nice layperson-level explanation of a speculative scientific theory as to how the world could have arisen from the RQF. Claims that we need not look further and that there is no God is why I criticize him.

Here are two excellent articles critical of his book that I hope you'll read. I was going to pull-quote some paragraphs but this is already long enough. If you are interested in criticism of Krauss, or why I'm critical of Krauss, these articles have influences my thinking.

https://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/25/books/review/a-universe-from-nothing-by-lawrence-m-krauss.html

https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/is-lawrence-krauss-a-physicist-or-just-a-bad-philosopher/

The title of the second one is, "Is Lawrence Krauss a Physicist, or Just a Bad Philosopher?" I couldn't put it any better. I do hope you'll read these articles if you want to see some high-toned Krauss criticism, far better than I can do.

Here's Massimo Pigliucci on the subject, he's another critic.

http://rationallyspeaking.blogspot.com/2012/04/lawrence-krauss-another-physicist-with.html

I don’t know what’s the matter with physicists these days. It used to be that they were an intellectually sophisticated bunch, with the likes of Einstein and Bohr doing not only brilliant scientific research, but also interested, respectful of, and conversant in other branches of knowledge, particularly philosophy. These days it is much more likely to encounter physicists like Steven Weinberg or Stephen Hawking, who merrily go about dismissing philosophy for the wrong reasons, and quite obviously out of a combination of profound ignorance and hubris (the two often go together, as I’m sure Plato would happily point out). The latest such bore is Lawrence Krauss, of Arizona State University.

I hope you'll read that one too!

Which would you choose, and why? — Lif3r

I think that if you look at the state of the world, what most people would do is the opposite of what they say they would do. Show me the money!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mBS0OWGUidc

People at birth are inherently good. — Proximate1

Haha. I read the title as inherently "good at birth." Like Octomom, who gave birth to octuplets.

I think this is the old philosophical question of whether we're all born innocent and corrupted by the world; or if some people pop out fully evil. Like The Bad Seed.

Are light and darkness purely physical? — Jack Cummins

Light intensity can be measured by a simple instrument, for example a digital sensor in a camera. But the subjective experience of light or darkness is a quale, "a quality or property as perceived or experienced by a person." We have no idea if qualia are purely physical or not; and if physical, by what means; and if not physical, what on earth can that even mean?

We certainly have detailed understanding of the physical mechanism. A bunch of photons hits our eye and gets focussed on the retina. Or in my case the photons my eyeglasses and get properly focused on the retina, since my eyeball is the wrong shape to correctly focus light by itself.

My retina sends an electrochemical signal to the visual cortex in my brain, and then (this is the part we don't understand) I have a subjective experience of seeing. I not only have an experience of seeing, I then have an emotional and/or cognitive response to what I see. If I see a nice meal in front of me I feel happy and hungry and desirous of eating. If I see an equation on a blackboard I try to understand it, or (avoiding that) ask if it will be on the test.

We understand everything there is to know (mostly I guess) about the physical aspect of how the photon signal gets to the cortex; but we understand nothing of the experience of perception and the association of that experience with other emotional and cognitive states. It's a real mystery.

But life would be pretty boring we had all the same physical responses to the outside world but no subjective experiences or awareness. Then we'd be a philosophical zombie. But boredom is a subjective experience too, p-zombies don't experience that. They don't experience anything at all. Being a p-zombie is not even boring!

if they could replace it incrementally and guarantee I was conscious the whole time, I don't consider that death, — RogueAI

Speaking as someone who has had the experience of general anesthesia during a surgical procedure, I would say that there are times in life when consciousness is greatly overrated. What if the replacement procedure is painful? Don't you want them to use medical technology to make you comfortable? Would you feel this way if they needed to repair your spleen?

What do you make of the fact that every cell in your body (except your brain cells) regenerates periodically, a few days for some cells and months or years for other? Of course this medical factoid supports your point, since your brain cells don't regenerate when they're gone. But the rest of you does. You are literally not the body you were yesterday and you're getting a partially new one tomorrow.

No, you're transparently attempting to make a point which you believe supports your call to question things. — Xtrix

But we all have a right to question everything. I don't follow your claim that there are subjects that we have no right to question.

I'll try to keep my responses brief, since we can surely agree to disagree on a number of things. (Addendum: The brief thing didn't work out).

Nevertheless: what exactly would the "full truth" be? — Xtrix

* A full, fair, and comprehensive criminal investigation. The kind that the 9/11 commission didn't do, by its own co-chairs' admission.

* Full responses to the questions of the families of the victims. The families sent a long list of questions to the commission, very few of which have ever been answered.

* And so forth. Surely it's perfectly clear, beyond dispute, that the commission didn't do a thorough investigation. So why shouldn't one be done?

It's a ridiculous phrase. Am I certain that the WTC was hit by airplanes that were hijacked by Islamist extremists plotted by Al Qaeda? Yes, I am. But that's not what's important here. — Xtrix

No, it's not. Who paid for it? Who planned it? Who knew ahead of time? Why was there an air defence stand down? How did three steel-framed buildings collapse, the first, last, and only such collapses of steel-framed buildings in history? How does it happen that the PNAC document laid out the framework for a succession of Middle East wars that are now coming to pass? And that the PNAC signatories all ended up in the Bush admin? It's like you suspect a guy of robbing a bank, and you don't have any hard evidence, but you DO find in his home a project plan for robbing that bank. That's a clue, even if it's not conclusive.

Look I am not interested in debating 9/11 here. You brought up 9/11 as a subject that cant even legitimately be discussed. I just don't get this at all.

What's important, as I mentioned before, is the reason why people like you want to enter into "debate" about it in the first place and not, say, about the assassination attempt on Reagan. — Xtrix

In the case of Reagan there was no investigating board whose obvious purpose was to cover up and bury the truth rather than reveal it.

There's a reason we learn from psychology: with big events (just look around during this pandemic), especially very emotional ones, people want to look for special explanations of why it happened. — Xtrix

I hear this about JFK all the time. "Conspiracy theorists don't want to believe that a lone nut nobody like Oswald could have killed a great man like JFK." This may well be true. But it doesn't put Oswald on the sixth floor of the Texas Schoolbook Depository at 12:30pm Dallas time on November 22, 1963, with a rifle in his hands. You may well have proof of this. But your psychological theory isn't it, and therefore isn't relevant to determining what actually happened.

People got emotional after a group of Roman Senators killed Caesar on March 15, 44BC. But their emotionalism does not somehow magically prove that Caesar was stabbed by a lone knifeman.

Psychological theories aren't evidence.

They also want to appear like they have "special knowledge." So suddenly they become cheap skeptics -- even when otherwise they couldn't think themselves out of a paper bag -- and get drawn into the sophistry of conspiracy theorists and other quacks, who of course are just "questioning" and "thinking for themselves" (what could be wrong with that?). — Xtrix

Again, what of it? it's a great pop psychology theory of zero evidentiary value in a criminal conspiracy. And say what you will, 9/11 was a conspiracy. Unless you think it was all done by a lone planeman.

You're clearly of this cloth. And no amount of explanation by me or anyone else can convince you of where you're going wrong. But you are. You go way too far towards one extreme, then want to justify it with the standard arguments about "free thought," while of course invoking Galileo and the Church, how "everyone believed" the earth was flat at one point (straight out of Men in Black, if I recall), sapere aude, etc. etc. etc. Been there, done that. — Xtrix

Ok. But notice how you have zero interest in the facts of the case, or of the clear implications of the statements by Keane and Hamilton that their investigation was barely deserving of the name. You want to talk about me, you want to talk about the psychological proclivities of people "like me," and on an on. Tell me how you think the buildings collapsed at freefall speed in defiance of the laws of physics. That we can talk about (in some other thread, please). The rest of this is irrelevant nonsense.

So yes, to answer your question: I'm fairly certain, given the evidence -- and common sense (uh oh -- that controversial term! Have a field day with that one!). But this doesn't have anything to do with physics, which was the OP. With the sciences, I'm even more certain. (It's like gambling, where I win time and time again because I know how to bet on winners -- i.e., the scientists.) — Xtrix

Actually science has a hell of a lot to do with 9/11 The government's description of the collapse of the buildings violates the laws of physics. Especially the infamous building 7, which collapsed perfectly symmetrically at freefall speed into its own footprint from "office fires" without ever being hit by a plane.

I see you've never actually taken the trouble to study the case.

But how can you say I have no right to question these things? I have every right. Look at what's been done in the name of 9/11, from the Middle East wars abroad to the suppression of civil liberties at home. All going back to the government's account of 9/11. I would say that every American has a civic and patriotic duty to study and question this case.

Again, if you want to waste your time chasing every claim that literally anyone can conjure up, have at it. — Xtrix

But I don't. 9/11 is not a research interest of mine, nor do I know much about it beyond the basics. I'm simply questioning your belief that I am somehow beyond the pale as a human being for even daring to question the government's account or to even remind you that the commissions OWN CO-CHAIRs questioned their own account.

I've got one for you now: the WTC was brought down by space lasers. All the video footage of the planes was CGI. Behind it was a secret deal involving the Business Roundtable, George Soros, and Dick Cheney. — Xtrix

You say this to marginalize someone wanting to know what's behind Keane and Hamilton's remarks? That's a very puzzling turn of mind you have.

Have fun with that one. Could be true, after all. Where do you draw the line, exactly? Because wherever you do draw the line, it needs to be re-calibrated. But as Bob Dylan once said, "I can't teach you how to weed it out." — Xtrix

Your remarks are so irrelevant as to border on unhinged. Keane and Hamilton. They are the ONLY SOURCES I'VE QUOTED. They co-chaired the commission. But your mind can't deal with that, so you flail about wildly.

:lol: Exactly. Something Donald Trump could say, too. — Xtrix

Again. That's all you've got. Not a single acknowledgement from you that the only sources on 9/11 I've quoted are Keane and Hamilton, Hamilton and Keane. The co-chairs of the commission. They literally told us not to believe a word of their fraudulent report. You can't handle that and don't even seem to be able to mentally process it. So you throw out psychological theories and slurs and jokes instead.

* I'm fully vaccinated, as well. — Xtrix

I'm happy for you. By the way, why did most of Congress stay home, and the ones that did show up social-distanced and wore masks at Biden's speech the other night? I'm not the only one who noticed that. Someone called it the greatest anti-vax add ever. Can you explain this to me. Why do they need to stay home, socially distance, and wear masks if every single one of them is vaxed?

I was the first one at my job to sign up. No hesitation whatsoever, despite all the BS surrounding it and some of the concerns of my co-workers. — Xtrix

I'm happy for you. You and I have different personality types.

Did I have to refute every one of their claims beforehand? No. Did I have to go through every internet theory and debunk them all? No. I had a friend who is a very bright anti-vaxxer try to convince me not to do it -- and she had a mountain of information about it, too. Information that I would have had to spend months unraveling. I took it anyway, and I've been absolutely fine -- no surprise whatsoever. — Xtrix

I'm happy for you. What point are you making? I would say that if we draw a continuum between "natural born rebel" and "natural born conformer," I'm closer to the former and you to the latter. It's ok. Some like chocolate and some like vanilla. it's a great big world out there. I'm a pluralist. I accept that there are people different from me.

Why? Why was I so certain it would turn out that way, given all this "controversy"? It's a matter of common sense, critical thinking, probability, BS detector, etc. — Xtrix

And personality, one's degree of conformity. Psychologists have studied this for years. You may have heard of the famous Milgram experiment, in which normal people were induced to subject others to fatal doses of electrical shock when told to by authorities. It's a frightening experiment.

Now I would say in the case of the vax, you are being perfectly prudent. I do wonder why you're going on about it. When told to jump, you say "How high?" and I say, "Why should I?" We both know this about ourselves and each other. You're belaboring the obvious.

But mainly it's just going with what the consensus of experts say. I do this same thing with all kinds of issues in life and, as I said before, I come out looking super smaht, when in reality it's just extending what we do all the time -- going to a doctor, a mechanic, a lawyer, etc. It's trusting in expertise, and not getting sucked up into the vortex of bullshit that always surrounds "big" issues (and which gets amplified with social media these days). It's picking your battles and weighing probabilities. — Xtrix

You're just trying to say that your personality type is "right" and mine is "wrong." I know that one loses the debate when they bring up the H-word, but you'd have made a fine Nazi. Conformity and not wanting to be out of step is exactly how one lunatic brought an entire great nation to insanity and ruin.

Not that I have anything against the free speech rights of Nazis!! LOL. Only the Nazis themselves.

Well I blew it when I said i'd keep it brief.

You and I are different. The fact that you have an anti-vax friend tells me that in real life you must at least be a little tolerant of those with different opinions and personalities.

Also FWIW I have always been interested in cranks and crazies. I spend a lot of time online correcting and clarifying bad math; but I myself am a lifelong student of math crankery. I am interested in math cranks. That doesn't mean I agree with them. I find alternate takes on things to be interesting. I just don't see why you think that makes me a bad person.

And finally I must note for the third time, with respect to all the irrelevant nonsense you spouted in this post, that regarding 9/11 I never put forth any alternative theory or quoted ANYONE other than Keane and Hamilton, the co-chairs of the 9/11 commission, who told the world that their investigation did not get to the bottom of the incident. You won't even respond to the point.

Peace, brother. And remember to stay home, wear your mask and social distance even when you go out, and cower in fear at all times even though you're vaxed, because your Leaders told you to. Heil Fauci.

Sorry I just can't help needling people like you.

Yes, words sometimes fail. I'm trying to think of analogies that fit the relation. I could say my hand holds or grasps a physical object but how do I say my neurons 'fill in the blank' a non-physical?[/url]

I've suggested "implements." Or perhaps even instantiates. Five apples instantiate an instance of the abstract number 5. And as I said, emergentists would say that consciousness is an emergent property of the brain. I don't know what the reverse-direction verb is. The brain emergentizes consciousness.

— Mark Nyquist

Would the word 'pair' or 'paired with' be more neutral? — Mark Nyquist

It wouldn't make much sense. Laurel is paired with Hardy, vanilla ice cream is paired with fresh hot apple pie, and Ricky is paired with Lucy (am I showing my age, or what?). But pairing does not suggest the instantiation or implementation relationship.

The important thing is to start thinking about the relation. Neurons have the capability to manipulate non-physicals — Mark Nyquist

Again you are imputing to the part what can only be done by an assemblage of parts. You say a neuron implements consciousness but you are wrong. It takes the entire brain/body system to implement consciousness. As an example, you would say a water molecule quenches your thirst. Thirstiness is a non-physical because it's a subjective sensation, even if it's caused by biochemical processes. So it's a good analogy. But a water molecule can't quench your thirst. It takes about $8 \times 10^{24}$ water molecules to quench your thirst. That's how many water molecules are in a glass of water.

You keep repeating that a neuron implements consciousness but that is simply false. You have your neurons but you also have all the other brain goo, plus your body and your senses and your living experience in the world. All that together somehow implements consciousness, and I can't figure out why you don't see this.

and non-physicals cannot exist without being 'fill in the blank' by neurons. — Mark Nyquist

Implemented. But FWIW. this is a supposition. The proponents of strong AI (of which I am not one) claim that non-physicals can be instantiated in suitably complex arrangements of electrical circuits. I don't believe that, but I had to start paying attention when Deep Blue beat Garry Kasparov. Now weak AI systems can drive cars. It's impressive. You can't dismiss the claims of strong AI out of hand.

I would think of a hydrogen atom as fundamental and the DNA molecule as emergent. Anything following the DNA molecule would also be emergent such as brains and the ability to process information (using the neuron contained non-physical definition). — Mark Nyquist

Ok. Where's this going?

I did get looking at neuron tables for various species and that's interesting if you want to correlate number of total neurons to capabilities. Interesting, a honey bee has 960,000 neurons and can do things like find food and get back to it's hive without direct visual input. — Mark Nyquist

At least you're now admitting that it's large assemblages of neurons and not individual neurons. But yes, evidently brain size is correlated with intelligence. Not for nothing is "pea brain" a way to insult someone's intelligence.

So without using the word contained, let's just show it this way,
[neurons,(a non-physical)] as an irreducible unit — Mark Nyquist

Here you seem to be contradicting yourself. I'm willing to believe (for sake of argument) that large assemblages of neurons in the proper configuration (ie in a functioning brain, not sitting in jar of pickling solution on a shelf in a lab) may implement consciousness.

But you just wrote that "neurons, (a non-physical) ..." But I thought we were agreed that neurons are physical.

And you said a neuron is irreducible, but a single neuron has axons and dendrites and various other parts, and is made of proteins and other organic molecules and bio-goo. A neuron is hardly irreducible.

and do something useful with it - model time perception:
[neurons,(the past)]; physically exists in the present
[neurons,(the present)]; physically exists in the present
[neurons,(the future)]; physically exists in the present — Mark Nyquist

This is a little woo-woo for me. Are you saying that in the present we have memories of the past? Yes, we have portions of the brain that store memories, in ways we don't fully understand.

And the future physically exists in the present? You'd better justify that claim or retract it.

This model shows how time perception is always in the physical present but lets us perceive a past, present and future. — Mark Nyquist

Of course, this is well known. I sit here today and think about the past and imagine the future. All part of my brain process, little neurochemicals swimming around in my brain goo.

What of it? If you don't mind my saying, you're going a long way to state the obvious. We're physical bodies in a physical universe, and we don't understand why we have consciousness, dreams, hopes, fears, thoughts, qualia, and so forth. Everybody knows this.

Why not Krauss' one? What would be a better ultimate explanation than that? — Down The Rabbit Hole

Krauss claims to explain how the world came from "nothing." But the only way to make this work -- and Krauss has admitted this in print -- is to change the definition of nothing to me "the relativistic quantum field plus the laws of physics." And that's not nothing. But I already said exactly this a few posts ago when you or someone else asked the exact same question.

Krauss can't tell us where the relativistic quantum field (RQF) and the laws of physics came from. So he's done great service in laying out the process by which the RQF and the laws of physics brought about the world. But he's utterly failed in his greater claim that he's explained everything. And as I've already point out, he has admitted changing the definition of nothing and naming his book A Universe from Nothing in order to sell more books.

The point is missed. The very conditions of your accepting the actual terms of your limitations, all this talk about caterpillars and inherent boundaries of knowing, is itself imposed by the standards of normalcy you internalized when you were a child. Were it otherwise, and the lines drawn were not so rigorously established, perhaps in a world open to greater possibilities, you would be able to see terms like god, spirituality, redemption, divinity and the like actually have an existential underpinning that is simply structurally ignored in a science oriented world like ours. Remember, empirical science, I gather from your thinking, rules not just what you believe, but what you will not believe.
This doesn't make popular ideas of theism believable, but it does change the conversation, from, say, Jesus' ascension to heaven to talk about metaethics and human interiority. — Constance

I would like to call your attention to the religious views of Isaac Newton. Newton was a devout believer. To start with,

Isaac Newton (4 January 1643 – 31 March 1727)[1] was considered an insightful and erudite theologian by his contemporaries.[2][3][4] He wrote many works that would now be classified as occult studies and religious tracts dealing with the literal interpretation of the Bible.

In fact during his life he wrote far more words on theology and religion than he did on math and science.

Nevertheless, he was a profound scientist, perhaps the greatest of all time. How did he reconcile this? Long story short, he discovered the laws of nature, and then said how wonderful it was that God had created them.

His law of gravity was criticized because it described gravity without explaining it. He said that two bodies are attracted to each other by a force proportional to the product of their masses, and inversely proportional to the square of their distance from one another. But he could not say WHY that happened.

He said basically that God did it. He was fine with that. He believed in God, he wrote about God, he talked about God. And he did brilliant science, in order to uncover and elucidate the works of God.

Likewise I say to you that there is no conflict between religion and science. I am not one of these "new atheists" or believer in "scientism" as you seem to think I am. On the contrary, I find it a perfectly logical position to look at the laws of nature as discovered by science, and say, "It's pretty cool that God made all that."

It's ok with me if people don't believer God made the laws of nature, that they just happened by chance or whatever.

But I find no contradiction between doing good science and the belief that God made the laws of science. And as evidence, I point to the greatest scientist of them all, my man Ike, Isaac Newton.

Now I also take your point that you believe that we are the highest level of intelligence below God. "The crown of creation." That unlike the caterpillar, we have no level above us. This I am not so sure about. The intellectual history of humanity is to realize that we are not central. We are not at the center of the universe. We're not at the center of the solar system. The laws that govern the heavens are the same laws that operate on earth. Darwin showed that we are not separate from the animals. Although let's not get sidetracked into Darwinism, and I'm happy to stipulate that I'm a fan of the modern anti-Darwinists like Michael Behe, Stephen Meyer, et. al. I don't necessarily agree with them, but I do respect their opinions and I keep an open mind.

I don't think it's beyond possibility that there is an intelligence beyond ours, in the same way ours is beyond the intelligence of a caterpillar.

Participating at TPF has necessitated that I become an expert at grade school principles, because many people here do not seem to understand these very basic principles, like what "=" signifies. And so, I have to explain over and over again, the same principle, in as many different ways as possible, in an attempt to dispel the misunderstandings which these people hold. It seems to be much easier to teach young children these principles than it is to teach adults who have already developed bad habits of misunderstanding, by accepting contrary principles. So the teacher of adults, must become an expert, rather than just an average teacher, requiring not only to instill good habits of understanding, but first needing to dispel bad habits of misunderstanding. — Metaphysician Undercover

LOL. Thanks for the chuckle.

Noam Chomsky's comments — Wayfarer

I'm a big fan of Chomsky and Newton and I'm really enjoying the linked article and video. Thanks for posting.

See how easy it is? Grade school stuff. — Metaphysician Undercover

You'd be the expert on that.

The pairing of neurons and content seems intuitive enough to me — Mark Nyquist

Consider these two statements:

* A neuron contains axons and dendrites.

* A neuron contains mental states.

Now the word contains is being used in two very different ways here. Perhaps this needs clarification. Earlier I suggested that neurons implement mental states. People who believe in emergence (I don't) would say that mental states emerge from neurons, or rather networks of neurons.

That's another issue. Even if mental states do emerge from the brain by way of its neural network; that's not the same as saying a mental state emerges from an individual neuron. For example a fist emerges from five fingers (this is a favorite example of the emergentists). But a single finger doesn't contain fistness or have the potential to become a fist. It takes all five.

A computer may perform a calculation, but just the memory or just the cpu or just the keyboard or just the printer can't perform a calculation. You need the whole team.

I can imagine the brain's network of neurons implementing consciousness; or consciousness emerging from the network of neurons. But I can't imagine consciousness emerging from a single neuron.

And "contains" is not the right word. Tables come from carpenters, but tables aren't contained in carpenters.

Just my thoughts. The product of my neurons, but not the product of any one individual neuron.

I also think it is likely a temporary phase. — T Clark

Chairman Mao's cultural revolution, which is very much like our wokester movement, lasted ten years. Fortunately Joe Biden is no Mao Zedong, and neither is Kamala.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_Revolution

but redefine information as a neuron contained non physical. — Mark Nyquist

I have only read your OP. I asked you how you define a "non physical" and what means "neuron contained non physical?"

Do you mean a neuron contains a non physical? What does that mean? Neurons contain organic goo, proteins and such. I don't know what it means for a neuron to contain a non physical. And I don't know what a non physical is. That's why I'm asking.

I'm not blowbacking at all. I'm trying to understand what is meant by the phrase non-physical (I hope you don't mind my adding the hyphen, it adds clarity IMO) and a neuron-contained non-physical.

I had a thread on randomness and I think you making a joke lol, because you did participate with some great observation. — Gregory

No joke, just didn't remember.

I don't know how they can rule out all non-local variables because with "many worlds" couldn't another world influence the entangled pair? And if the communicate faster than light, to save relativity they posit wormholes and these might be connected to other worlds and so there is then even more territory we have to rule out — Gregory

I am afraid that's all way over my head physics-wise.

They pick random samples sometimes in physics — Gregory

I think there was a recent thread on randomness, I don't remember if I participated. There's no evidence that anything in the world is random. Or the contrary. We don't know. Quantum mechanics tells us that our measurements are random. There's an x% probability that I'll find it here and a y% probability I'll find it somewhere else. QM tells us nothing about where it really is. In QM that question is unknowable. The Copenhagen interpretation tells us it's in both places till we look. Many-worlds says it's in both places in different worlds. That's as good as it gets in physics these days.

Randomness is a very tricky business.

When does the Freedom of Info Act take effect? 25 years? — frank

I don't know the status of the 9/11 files. Thousands of government documents on the JFK assassination are still sealed after 57 years. Funny they'd still have so many secrets when it was just a lone nut.

Thinking for yourself and healthy skepticism is important. But notice the italics. Letting your imagination run wild and questioning everything always, under the guise of simply being a "contrarian" (a very self-serving view), is completely hopeless. But you're welcome to it. — Xtrix

You didn't answer my question. Do you think we know the full truth of 9/11, despite the commission's own co-chairs telling us that we don't? Or do you just not care? I'm curious to understand. Myself I'd like to know the truth. And for that you said I'm not worth talking to. I'd like to understand that too. That's like a physicist saying they want to know the truth about nature, and you go, "Oh, a nature truther! I don't want to talk to YOU anymore!"

As Plato said: “No one is more hated than he who speaks the truth.”

And you hate people who even ASK about the truth. How bad is that?

Because pissed off Saudis can't decide to fly planes into buildings all by themselves? — frank

Because the government did a piss-poor, shoddy simulation of an investigation. Please see my post above containing the words of Hamilton and Keane, the co-chairs of the 9/11 commission, telling us it didn't get at the truth.

Do you hear what I'm saying? I didn't post an alternate theory and I didn't post something from Alex Jones. I posted the words of the co-chairs of the commission. They could have chosen to say, "We want the American people to know that we got to the bottom of this." They did the opposite. They told the world that the Bush administration blocked them from getting to the bottom of it.

Which part of what they said causes you to not want to be interested in finding out what the late, great Paul Harvey would have called, "the rest of the story?"

I understand, though. A lot of people really don't want to know what happened that day. "19 Arabs because they hate our freedoms." Well we have a lot fewer freedoms since then, maybe the Arabs like us by now. If not we'll invade and torture some more of them.

So you're a 9/11 truther. Got it. I'll skip the rest of your post. Be well. — Xtrix

As are Thomas Keane and Lee Hamilton, co-chairs of the 9/11 commission.

The two co-chairs of the Commission, Thomas Kean and Lee Hamilton, believe that the government established the Commission in a way that ensured that it would fail. In their book Without Precedent: The Inside Story of the 9/11 Commission describing their experience serving, Hamilton listed a number of reasons for reaching this conclusion, including: the late establishment of the Commission and the very short deadline imposed on its work; the insufficient funds (3 million dollars), initially allocated for conducting such an extensive investigation (later the Commission requested additional funds but received only a fraction of the funds requested and the chairs still felt hamstrung); the many politicians who opposed the establishment of the Commission; the continuing resistance and opposition to the work of the Commission by many politicians, particularly those who did not wish to be blamed for any of what happened; the deception of the Commission by various key government agencies, including the Department of Defense, NORAD and the FAA; and, the denial of access by various agencies to documents and witnesses. "So there were all kinds of reasons we thought we were set up to fail.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_the_9/11_Commission

Do you really believe a full investigation was done and that the full truth is known?

Or is it that you realize that there wasn't a real investigation and the truth is not known, but you're ok with that because, well, it's the consensus? Of whom, exactly? It's actually NOT the consensus!! Only 46% of the world believes Al-Qaeda did it (2008 numbers). By your own logic you should agree with them!

Peace, friend. Or are you one of those always eager to send someone else's kids off to war?



Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinion_polls_about_9/11_conspiracy_theories

I can't see a way of rescuing this image. — Banno

I think the OP is trying to get at the non-physicalness of information. I'm not sure if the particularities of the diagram matter all that much.

Re information, a bitstring is abstract, non-physical information. The same bitstring stored in a digital computer is a physical implementation of information. Perhaps OP is trying to make a distinction along those lines. But of course brains don't store information digitally (I guess some these days believe they do) so perhaps we should forget about brains for the moment and medicate on the distinction between abstract and physically implemented information.

@Mark Nyquist am I understanding you correctly?

Cosmology vs. Ontology vs. Metaphysics — TheArchitectOfTheGods

Cosmology is a branch of physics. Ontology and metaphysics are branches of philosophy.

Notice that the non-physicals are within of the physical? The Venn Diagram is broken. — Banno

Well the OP is saying that non-physical is "within" the physical, and that's going to be hard to justify. But I think OP really means that somehow the non-physical is implemented by the physical, and that's something a lot of people believe. The mind implemented by the brain kind of thing. My understanding is that the dualists are in full retreat these days.

representing neuron contained non physicals. — Mark Nyquist

What are neuron contained non physicals? Is this some sort of dualist position? Neurons are electrically excitable cells made up of well whatever they're made of. Organic molecules, pink goo or whatever. They don't "contain" anything non-physical as far as we know. They appear to have a role in implementing thought, which seems non-physical if anything is, but even that's a totally open question. We don't know if thoughts arise from the activity of neurons, or if they could arise from the activity of other electronic neural networks in computers for example. Nobody knows any of this.

Stepping back from the particulars of non-physicals in neurons, your Venn diagram idea isn't wrong, but I'm not sure what its use is beyond serving as a visual aid as to what contains what. In math one can draw a big circle containing the real numbers, with a smaller circle inside it labeled the rational numbers, and a circle inside that labeled the integers. It's great for high school students to help them learn their number concepts, but it doesn't offer any insight.

You can draw a big circle labeled the US, an inside circle label states, a circle inside that labeled cities, and that would help high school students learn their civics. Not that they teach civics anymore. Maybe we can do one for oppressed social classes. "Intersectionality." There's a term from set theory misappropriated to bad purpose.

It's just that something's being the consensus view is insufficient to show that that something is wrong. SO recognising that something is the consensus view is not all that useful. — Banno

I advocate a skeptical stance toward all government-induced hysterias and promotion of narratives that make no sense yet allow no dissent. You're saying there's no hard and fast rule. I agree. But there are indicators. The relentless 24/7 MSM barrage, the deplatforming and marginalizing of dissent are clues. If you don't see this I guess I can't say it any better. Do you remember the mood in this country in the runup to the Iraq war? Iraq didn't have a thing to do with 9/11 and that was perfectly well known at the time; but by the time the MSM and the government were done, a majority of the country believed Saddam had been responsible. I don't mean to cherry-pick this one example, but it's a doozy. Yet people keep falling for the propaganda. They'll have no trouble lying us into the next war.

If you don't tell why, then I can't reply. — Banno

Sorry I don't know what this was in reference to. I wrote several posts late last night and I'm just checking my mentions. What did I say?

The consensus view almost always turns out to be wrong.
— fishfry

So often, that would seem to be the consensus.

It doesn't seem to help much. — Banno

I think it's very helpful. If one remembers how often the US government has lied the country into war, one might tend to be skeptical of the next beat of the war drums. If one side of an epidemiology debate is promoted constantly by the MSM and the government, and the other side is de-platformed, banned, suppressed, and actively shut down (as has been the case), one might at least cast a skeptical eye on the government story. And by other side I don't mean the jerks who go into stores and pick mask fights with clerks. I mean reputable senior scientists who dissent from the official party line and aren't allowed to be heard.

There are always indicators. When everyone falls into lockstep on a narrative, that's when to be skeptical. When there's a Rush to Judgment, that's when to be skeptical. Skepticism isn't the same as reflexively denying everything that people accept. It's just a question of stepping back and trying to sort things out for yourself. It's more a mental habit than a hard and fast rule.

I agree with you that in a given moment you can't always tell when something's going to turn out to be right or wrong. But there are always clues. In the run-up to the Iraq war, a million people marched against the war nationwide. They just didn't get any tv coverage as the administration said that they hoped "the smoking gun doesn't turn out to be a mushroom cloud." They used Condoleezza Rice, a woman with high public approval, to scare the hell out of the country. I saw them do it. It smelled like a lie to me at the time.

Likewise the whipping up of hostility to Russia by the Dems. Starting after the 2016 election and continuing to the present moment. Russia's not our enemy. Their GDP is $1.4T, ours is $21T. California's GDP at $3.2T is larger than Russia's. We're being propagandized again.

What makes you think Krauss' explanation is wrong? — Down The Rabbit Hole

I did not say his explanation is wrong. I said his BELIEF that he knows the ultimate origin of the universe is wrong. His account of the universe arising out of the quantum field and the laws of physics is correct (to the extent of the state of our current knowledge). His belief that this is an ultimate explanation is wrong. Where did the quantum field and the laws of physics come from?

His book is called A Universe from Nothing. Now that's bullpucky. Nothing? Nothing is nothing. Nothing is not the quantum field and the laws of nature already sitting there waiting for a random fluctuation to cause the big bang.

In an interview he admitted that the title is deliberately provocative in order to sell books. Fair enough if he's pushing a fad diet or celebrity gossip. Not so much when he's acting as a science educator to the public.

Krauss is an arrogant jerk. And a smart physicist. Those two are not mutually exclusive. On the contrary, they're far too often highly correlated.

But where did that imposition of a limitation come from? I would suggest that you and everyone else is endowed with a suppressed intuitive ability to engage the world at a much deeper level, and it is the philosophy of our age, the positivism, the privileging of science and technology, the disillusionment with public religions, and so on, that create the line you think is uncrossable. — Constance

Did you read my caterpillar story? Caterpillar on a leaf on a branch on a tree in a forest knows what to eat and what wants to eat it. It knows night from day, when to sleep, when to forage. It knows in its DNA that it will someday transform into a butterfly. It has an ontology. But it can't know about the tree, the forest, the earth, the solar system, the quarks and gluons, and so forth. By analogy that's the situation we're in. We may well not be at the top of the intelligence scale. Gotta go finish eating my leaf now.

Spooky action at a distance was proved in Einstein's day I thought. It all pretty confusing. Faster than light action can be explained, or explained away, by geometry and super-dimensions. But determinism would be hard to disprove given that people could subscribe to compatibilism if needed — Gregory

My only point was that when people say Bell's theorem disproves hidden variables, what I've heard is that it only disproves LOCAL hidden variables. Leaving the question of non-local hidden variables open. And this is only something I've read, I have no understanding of any of this.

Compatibilism isn't a physical theory, I don't see how it would make any difference to the debate unless there are some mathematical models and experiments to back up the models.

If they can rule out any hidden variables, then Bell's theorem proves there is randomness in the universe. This makes sense with regard to entropy anyway — Gregory

I am not an expert, and for whatever reason, Bell's theorem makes my eyes glaze over every time I try to make a run at it. At some level it's just something I care about.

However, I have heard one thing relevant to your comment, and it's important. Bell's theorem rules out local hidden variables, but not hidden variables in general. What's the difference? I have no idea. But Bell's theorem does NOT rule out determinism or prove that the world is random, no matter how many "Internet experts" think it does. Say, weren't we just talking about that?

In my opinion, there's a danger in the very idea of "debate" -- as if we're qualified to judge whether there's even "two sides" to the story. I don't think, most of the time, we're even competent enough to make that judgement. — Xtrix

But one doesn't have the time to get a Ph.D. in physics and a Ph.D in climate science and a Ph.D in epidemiology in order to have an opinion on these things. And even if I had a spare eight or so years to get a physics PhD, it would take another ten or whatever years to get to the level of what these professionals are talking about. So one must learn to absorb what one can and make the best informed decision possible. Because at the very top of any profession there are the biggest differences of opinion. Surely you can't be saying that I can't have an opinion from just a little bit of study. Modern life is too complex. We must all "know about" things, which takes ten minutes in lieu of "knowing" them, which takes ten years.

Again I refer to creationism — Xtrix

I don't believe in creationism ... but what gives me the right to say that? Do I have to get a PhD in divinity studies too? And become a priest as well?

And on a serious note, though I don't believe in creationism, I am a bit of a student (ie watched a bunch of Youtube videos) of criticism of Darwinian evolution. There are some valid points being made. There's a lot we don't know. Science is never settled.

, 9/11 truthers, — Xtrix

It always strikes me as a bad sign of our postmodern world that when we want to marginalize and dismiss someone's ideas, we accuse them of being interested in the truth. How quaint! Don't they know that narrative is all that matters?

The 9/11 commission report was a very shoddy piece of work. The commission's own co-chairs Hamilton and Keane said publicly that the commission was set up to fail and that the Bush administration blocked them at every turn. There are still many unanswered questions about the event.

One doesn't need to believe that Dick Cheney personally gave the order to want to find out what really happened. Don't you? The government's account is seriously incomplete and riddled with problems.

holocaust denial, — Xtrix

In some countries holocaust denial is a crime punishable by prison. I believe in free speech. I believe in the right of holocaust deniers to say their piece. I supported the ACLU's position in the 1977 Skokie case and I still support that position today. If Nazis don't have free speech then nobody has free speech. This I believe.

anti-vaxxers, — Xtrix

This isn't the time or place, but "anti-vaxxer" is a loaded term. Which vax and what circumstances? And if the covid vax works, why did everyone in Congress stay home or wear masks the other night at Biden's speech? They're all vaxed. In your worldview is there such a thing as individual critical thinking? The government says jump and you say, "How high?" That's how the Germans got themselves into trouble once. Dissent is crucial in a free society.

climate change denial, — Xtrix

I don't mean to trigger you with my political opinions, this is not a political thread. But I tend to be open minded about things. The climate is changing constantly. Who could possibly deny that? When people say "climate change denial" they really mean that the developed world should put a boot on the neck of the developing world. It's a very complicated and nuanced set of issues that are not addressed by smears and slogans.

etc. — Xtrix

I've always been open to alternative ideas and by nature I'm a contrarian. If you didn't want to hear my opinions you shouldn't have asked :-)

To even say "I've read both sides of this debate, and I align myself with x" is itself ridiculous. — Xtrix

But it's the PhD problem again. It takes a lifetime to become competent at anything, let alone everything. But you need to form judgments to function in the world. What do you suggest? Truly I AGREE WITH YOU that it would be better if before I form a judgment on climate I become a professional climatologist; and before I form a judgment on physics I should become a physicist. But your position is not practical. I hope you can see that.

Flat earthers are out there -- does that mean we should read their books and conclude that there's debate? — Xtrix

Oh I love flat earth theory!. There are some very interesting philosophical aspects. Someone should start a thread on it sometime. Sabine Hossenfelder has a video about it. She made the insightful point that although flat earth theory is nonsense, it nevertheless raises questions for scientists in how to communicate with the public. How DO we communicate scientific ideas to people who will never have the time to become experts? You don't want people to get their opinions from pop science, so how SHOULD they learn what scientists think is true? I think you may have worked yourself into a contradiction.

That being said, for those of us who aren't experts in a given domain, it's our responsibility to weed out who to listen to. This is a very tricky thing, and we're living in the midst of a real dilemma of this very thing. — Xtrix

Yes. I agree with that. Who should we listen to? In the past year we've been told to listen to "science," but professional epidemiologists and infections disease specialists have many differing views on covid. Social media and the mainstream media have ruthlessly suppressed all but the official government view. That's not good in a free society. You want more debate, not less. And yes it's hard to know what's true.

For me, I go with the whatever consensus is reached among experts. — Xtrix

Without becoming an expert yourself? Contradiction! Of course you do agree that we don't have the time to become subject matter experts on every important question. We MUST simply accept consensus; or, if we are contrarians, reject consensus! After all if you look at the history of the world, you would be right more often than you were wrong if you REJECTED every consensus. Geocentrism was "settled science" for 2000 years. And did you know that the data actually fit the geocentric theory better than it fit the Copernican theory? Copernicus had the sun at the center of concentric circular orbits. The numbers did not fit. It was Kepler who figured out that orbits were ellipses with the sun at one focus. THEN they got the data to fit correctly. Scientific knowledge is very hard won; never "settled"; and always subject to revision.

The vast majority of the time, I turn out to look like a genius because of that simplistic, 3-year-old strategy. — Xtrix

Ahem :-) And like I said, over the LONG term, you would look like a greater genius REJECTING the consensus view on almost everything. Feeling sick? Here are some nice leeches to bleed the bad humours out of you. Fire? It's caused by phlogiston, everybody knows that.

The consensus view almost always turns out to be wrong. That does not mean that you go around rejecting everything we know is true about the world. That would be silly. It DOES mean that healthy skepticism and independent thinking are virtues in individuals and societies. When the government tells you that we must invade Iraq because Saddam has WMDs, do you wave your flag and mindlessly support the war? How did that work out? How about Afghanistan? That war had virtually unanimous support in 2001. Now we've been there 20 years, we control LESS territory now than we did the day we invaded, the opium crop is at record levels thanks to the protection of the US Army (we're on the side of the dope dealers, if you don't know that look it up), and if and when we finally leave, the entire world will see that the US has just lost another war. Since 9/11 we've created more terrorists than we've killed, we've violated international law, we've become a torture regime, and in the end the Taliban are going to retake control of Afghanistan and we ended up turning Iraq over to the Iran-favoring Shiites instead of the Sunni Iran-hater Saddam.

But you know, at the time it was the consensus. Which is exactly why you should have tried to think it through for yourself. Why did we invade Iraq when they had zeroto do with 9/11? Because Saddam had WMDs? Turns out the administration lied the country into war. But that's ok. The government lied the country into the Vietnam war too. Gulf of Tonkin? Never happened, but LBJ got his excuse to escalate the war on behalf of the generals and defense contractors.

I'd say that's a good rule of thumb for anyone. — Xtrix

I say it's the most mindless, dangerous, and wrong thing you could possibly do. SOMETIMES the consensus is right and sometimes it's fatally wrong. The Soviet Union collapsed shortly after their own debacle in Afghanistan. Then we went in and executed the same failed strategy against the same people, and we're getting the same results. But man was the Afghanistan war ever a consensus. The whole country loved that war in 2001.

You have to think for yourself.

If one wants to learn more about a topic, listen to them. That's not to say dissent is not valuable -- it is. But within boundaries. — Xtrix

It's fair to say that you and I have different worldviews.

You're entitled to opine about anything you want. But since you asked for my opinion: I don't take either very seriously. Not just from you but from anyone. — Xtrix

I never tell anyone to take me seriously! This is an anonymous internet discussion forum.

But when I give an opinion I try to back it up, and maybe even if someone disagrees with me they may get an insight or two. Maybe the examples of Afghanistan and geocentrism will make you reflect on your feelings about the weight we should give to consensus. Maybe not.

If I know a little something about a topic, and someone has something to say that I find interesting on a philosophy forum, then I take it from there. 95% of what I read here is so uninteresting to me that it's not worth bothering with. I'm sure you feel the same way. — Xtrix

That's true for everyone. There are a lot of new threads every day and a lot of posts in each thread. It's like a buffet. You pick what you like.

When it comes to science, especially mathematics and physics, I have less patience for people's armchair opinions. It's much easier to be a bullshitter in philosophy (and sociology, and literary criticism, etc) than it is in the hard sciences. In my opinion. And so yes, I do perhaps come down more harshly on that class of opinions. — Xtrix

Well that's the funny thing. It comes down to personality. I am a born contrarian, always have been. I don't know why. Whenever society picks up a lot of steam on any issue, I'm always one to think that's a bad sign, that they're probably doing the wrong thing. That's just me.

But we weren't really talking about opinions on physics. I didn't say I don't believe in quarks. I said that the direction of the field may be off on the wrong course, based on some actual physicists who have written books to that effect. That's more philosophy of science than science.

I do. — Xtrix

So glad!

I hope you don't reply to my political opinions, that is not what this thread is for. I may have been having some fun coming down on the side of Nazis. Well actually I oppose Nazis. I support free speech for Nazis because I support free speech for everyone. Free speech used to be a liberal virtue. Lately it's not. I think that's a bad sign.

But 9/11? Don't you want to know the truth? You can't have studied the matter very much if you think the government did an investigation. Again, that does not necessarily mean that Dick Cheney gave the order, or that Mossad did it, or that "Lucky Larry" Silverstein blew up the buildings because they needed a fortune in asbestos remediation. I assert no particular alternate theories. I just want to know the truth. That makes me a 9/11 truther, and proud of it.

I'm what they call a heterodox thinker. You say flat earth? I would be happy to write a few hundred words on why it interests me, and why it offers valuable philosophical insights, even though it's wrong. Kierkegaard did the same. You say climate, I ask you how many third-world peasants must die because the liberal elite raise the cost of energy. Quite a few, as it turns out. None of these issues are remotely as simple as you seem to think.

Here's a piece on how environmentalism hurts the poor. I didn't read much of it and don't necessarily endorse the author or the site on which it appears. I only want to show you a different point of view. Here's a para:

the cost of climate policies is already falling most heavily on today’s poor. Subsidies for renewable energy have raised costs of heating and transport disproportionately for the poor. Subsidies for biofuels have raised food prices by diverting food into fuel, tipping millions into malnutrition and killing about 190,000 people a year. The refusal of many rich countries to fund aid for coal-fired electricity in Africa and Asia rather than renewable projects (and in passing I declare a financial interest in coal mining) leaves more than a billion people without access to electricity and contributes to 3.5 million deaths a year from indoor air pollution caused by cooking over open fires of wood and dung.

https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/matt-ridley-exposes-environmentalists-take-moral-low-ground-defend-rich-poor/

Can you see that "climate denial" is a buzzphrase that shortcuts critical thinking?

I tried to get annoyed at what she was saying, but failed. She is intelligently careful. — Banno

I seem to recall seeing this vid a few weeks ago and it annoyed me. I don't remember the details and no need to re-trigger myself :-)

@tim wood I just watched the Nima Arkani-Hamed video it was awesome. Thank you! Just amazing stuff. Now I know what an amplituhedron is! It's a simple geometric structure whose volume gives you the answer to Feynman diagram calculations that used to take hundreds of pages.

There was another really cool insight early in the lecture. He noted that the Lagrangian formulation of Newtonian physics was a hidden clue to quantum theory, but that only became clear in retrospect.

That having watched a few dozen videos on youtube does not give you licence to re-write General Relativity. — Banno

I think this is related to the Wiki effect. There's knowing things and knowing "about" things. If I want to know about quantum field theory for example I can just skim the relevant WIki page and know enough to yak about it online ... despite that fact that don't know it. These days it's so easy to know about, and imagine that you know. You see it all over. Like last March when everyone suddenly became an armchair epidemiologist. It's human nature.

The OP is about TPF being cluttered up with "Stupid Physics" posts. — EricH

Mea culpa mea culpa mea maxima culpa. I hijacked the thread. Or perhaps I exemplified the thread by making a stupid physics post :-)

I just watched the one n infinity in physics... it might help those who are participating in Can it be that some physicists believe in the actual infinite?... a thread that shows the "bad" is not limited to physics, but extends to mathematics. — Banno

I haven't watched that one yet but /r/badmathematics is one of my favorite Reddit rooms.

Maybe I should watch that vid. I always tend to get annoyed whenever physicists start talking about infinity, because it doesn't seem to relate to the mathematical infinity that I know and I end up thinking they're doing bad physics or bad math. Ok I should watch the vid.