https://oceanexplorer.noaa.gov/technology/technical/technical.html:

While the recommended maximum depth for conventional scuba diving is 130 feet, technical divers may work in the range of 170 feet to 350 feet, sometimes even deeper.

https://www.saltwatersportsman.com/story/gear/how-to-choose-the-best-fish-finder-frequency/:

“Low frequency is practical to depths of 2,500 feet,” Cushman says. “Its booming signal makes this a good choice for fishing wrecks in excess of 350 feet, West Coast rockfishing, deep-dropping and daytime swordfishing.” The wider beam angle of a low-frequency model such as the B175L 1,000-watt chirp-ready transducer (about $1,100)—which ranges from 32 degrees at its lowest frequency of 40 kHz to 21 degrees at its highest of 60 kHz—lets you search a wide swath for fish, which proves especially helpful when offshore game like marlin, wahoo and tuna are holding deep.

Clearly you don't know what you are talking about.

This would hardly be the technological challenge you make it out to be. The depths at which the pipeline was damaged are within technical scuba diving range. The pipeline is likely easy to spot on a modern 'fish finder'. GPS controlled autopilot makes holding a position relatively simple...

For example, a AAA battery has a potential voltage of 1.5V, but until it's plugged into a complete circuit, that potential is not realized. — Gnomon

Bzzzzt!

Aristotle is probably not the best source, regarding the nature of batteries. Also the subject was potential energy. Voltage is not energy.

https://www.electronics-tutorials.ws/dccircuits/electrical-energy.html

How so? — NOS4A2

I'd use "characteristic" rather than "feature", but we are evolutionarily inclined to be somewhat xenophobic. You might call it an aspect of monkey mindedness that humanity has to deal with.

:100:

There is a philosophical tradition (which I am not totally unsympathetic to) which "answers" questions by consigning them to meaninglessness. It's convenient enough, for all these seeming imponderable questions to be mere misuse of language. We can move on with our life. But what does it mean for these questions, seemingly so full of meaning, to be in fact meaningless? — hypericin

Perhaps it means that your brain is intuitively projecting meaning onto the question, despite where your more consciously reasoned thinking points?

Can this even be, if meaning is in my head? — hypericin

To me it seems to me like a good example, of meaning being in our heads.

I read about half way through "The Grace of Kings" but lost interest, largely due to the poor characterization. The book might have a lot of merit, as the sort of retelling it sets out to be, but the characterization was too discordant for me.

Similarly, Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment lost me, due to the psychological implausibility of the characters.

If one takes away the possible forms of their experience and we do not accept claims indistinguishable from the imagination (no matter how plausible), then there is nothing intelligible left: there is nothing to be said about the world in-itself.
— Bob Ross

Again, correct. We can only know of the world in-itself through logical limitations and consequences. Namely, some "thing" must be there. But beyond that, everything is a model we create that attempts to represent what is there... — Philosophim

Why only, "through logical limitations and consequences"? Could you elaborate?

I'd be more inclined to say, that we can only know the world through our nature, and the nature of other people, including the imaginitive thinking of our intellectual ancestors who managed to point the way towards having a more accurate view of nature, and... and... and...

Is that contradictory?

OK. What kind of philosophical world model, based on what kind of scientific evidence, are you willing to accept as Real? Is that less confusing --- or more? — Gnomon

Well, I find it to be a matter of skill in considering things, to be able to look at things from different perspectives, so I'm apt to apply the sort of modeling that seems most usefully accurate for what I am considering, whether that be particles, or fields, or whatever. It doesn't make much sense to call a model "Real" though. It makes more sense to me to consider the degree to which a model is accurate, and not confuse the model for that which is being modeled

Your cat looks pretty ferocious.

I think the problem with the answers that brains give though is they are finely contextualized by different personal histories, individual differences in brain structure, noise etc. What people learn and the information they store is probably different for everyone, but in places like academia we want to remove all ambiguity. The side effect of neat clean concepts is they lose all the fuzzy non-linearity which makes them exceptionally good at being used in real life. — Apustimelogist

:100:

So, if people like this emerge and write about it, would we even be aware they exist, would we even consider their work? Or are we stuck with slow changes? And by slow changes, I mean derivations from the main method that don't challenge it to the core. — Skalidris

Everyone is working with whatever set of intuitions that they have, but people are diverse. Wouldn't we expect some to catch on more quickly than others, due to some people having intuitions more compatible with recognizing the merit of the new idea?

To answer the OP...

Psychotherapy?

When the best psychotherapists are AIs, we might be doomed.

So, what kind of evidence are you willing to accept as Real : physical/material Objects, or mathematical/immaterial Fields? — Gnomon

You seem to be confusing evidence with ways of modeling things. Your question doesn't make much sense to me.

I subscribed to the Journal of Consciousness Studies for three years and was disgusted by the poor quality of the work. It's not an area of study but a club for people who need to get published. — FrancisRay

There is a matter of perspective here. You should have seen the state of things 36 years ago, when I started looking into the subject. The progress in understanding since then has been substanantial. Considering the complexity of the subject under study, the technological difficulties in gathering detailed information, and the (IMO) warranted ethical restrictions faced by researchers, I'd say we social primates are doing pretty good.

The notion of knowledge being contaminated or distorted by human subjects seems absurd given that we are speaking about human knowledge. — Janus

:100:

But isn't it exactly the same as we all (?) do when we memorize the standard multiplication tables and recall what 12x11 is. — Ludwig V

Yes, it just seemed relevant to me to point out that there are a variety of mathematically legitimate ways that can yield correct mathematical results and therefore it seems weird to me to focus so, on whether some particular rule was used in some specific case. So I brought it up in hopes of getting a better idea of what Kripke was trying to get at.

(Incidentally, how do you deal with 2 to the power of 35? — Ludwig V

With a calculator. :wink:

Many famous scientists in history were not atheists or anti religious as your quotes... — Corvus

About those 'quotes'...

Wikiquote says the one attributed to Heisenberg is misattributed.

The second 'quote' has no attribution and Google doesn't seem to recognize it.

Finally, Einstein also said:

The word god is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of honourable, but still primitive legends which are nevertheless pretty childish. No interpretation no matter how subtle can (for me) change this. ... For me the Jewish religion like all others is an incarnation of the most childish superstitions. And the Jewish people to whom I gladly belong and with whose mentality I have a deep affinity have no different quality for me than all other people. As far as my experience goes, they are no better than other human groups, although they are protected from the worst cancers by a lack of power. Otherwise I cannot see anything 'chosen' about them.
Gutkind Letter (3 January 1954), "Childish superstition: Einstein's letter makes view of religion relatively clear". The Guardian. 13 May 2008. Wikiquote

I am an old earth guy but I don’t believe in Speciation. — Isaiasb

Then in your case, isn't the answer to your title question, "Somewhat, yes."?

Can it be by accident that all birds, beasts, and men have their right side and left side alike shaped (except in their bowels), and just two eyes and no more on either side of the face, and just two ears on either side of the head, and a nose with two holes and no more between the eyes, and one mouth under the nose, and either two fore legs or two wings or two arms on the shoulders and two legs on the hips, one on either side and no more? Whence arises this uniformity in all their outward shapes but from the counsel and contrivance of an author?

From the evolution of tetrapods.

Are you a young earth or old earth creationist?

Thanks for taking the time. I'm reading PI right now, but haven't gotten that far.

Insightful stuff.

other rules like quus. there are probably a multitude of them which are consistent with all of the addition you have ever done so far in your life and you can't rule them out. — Apustimelogist

Does Kripke question the extent to which consciously following a rule even applies?

For example, having worked with digital logic a fair bit, I have all the powers of 2 up to 2^13 memorized and if I see 2048 + 2048 I simply recognize that the sum is 4096 without following any step by step decimal addition rules.

What is supposed to be the significance of arriving at sums via different cognitive processes?

Our language allows "the" to modify "event," thus indicating the latter is a noun i.e., a thing. Does this syntax present a fallacy? — ucarr

I wouldn't call it a fallacy so much as being an aspect of the way our brains model the world in simplistic manageable chunks. I suppose it creates the potential for false analogy fallacies, but off the top of my head I can't think of relevant examples.

Gore Tex patterns.



Rather wooish of that article to treat the superficial similarity between inflated/stretched matter and biologically grown brains as more than the superficial similarity that it is.

Given the speed of light, the cosmos would make for an awfully slow working brain.

So it remains that "God is truth" and such aphorisms do not convey factual information. Theology, taken literally, is nonsense. — Banno

Worse than nonsense, I think, if it results in not being able to make a distinction between God and truth.

You imply events are not things. Why aren't they? — ucarr

Pragmatically speaking, distinguishing things and events as different ontological categories is extremely valuable, and this is so strongly intuitively obvious to me I'm not sure where to begin.

Perhaps it is events all the way down, and our seeing 'things' is just a matter of the way our brains represent events, due to it being (arguably) evolutionarily adaptive for our brains to be as they are.

Seeing events as things is just something our brains do, the science of which can be understood to a substantial degree. So seeing things is an aspect of how we are able to be rather long lasting events.

Picking one example, I say we don't customarily measure the volume (as distinguished from intensity) of our emotional states. Nonetheless we regard them as indisputably real. For this reason, the robust discreteness of scientific truth does not cover the entire spectrum of essential human experience. — ucarr

Perhaps periods of time in an emotional state are more reasonably understood as events than as things? I'd say that from such a perspective our inability to discuss the volume of an emotional state becomes a non-issue. Furthermore, apropos to discussing events, the duration of time spent in an emotional state is a meaningful measure.

Simply pointing to an object and uttering simple words sound like a limited elementary ability of language use by young children just starting to learn languages rather than key ability for the general language users. — Corvus

Sounds like something that happens routinely in engineering labs.

Points to waveform on oscilloscope and says, "The op amp doesn't have the balls to do the job."

Because I am speaking on the desire to not allow a higher power to have any basis over them. — Isaiasb

And telling lies about atheists and agnostics is justified because of that?

I didn't believe in Absolute Truth but I was confident in my beliefs. — Isaiasb

So why is it that you weren't able to look at your own experience of being an atheist and recognize the following statement as nonsense?

Agnostics and atheists alike fight for their belief in nonbelief, and their desire to be contemptuous in believing nothing. — Isaiasb

Ironically I have been an atheist longer than I have a Christian. — Isaiasb

Were you a person who believed nothing when you were an atheist?

Then enlighten me on what they think. — Isaiasb

Nah, you'll have to step outside your cultural bubble and learn what atheists and agnostics think for yourself, if you want to see through the propaganda that you have been fed.

For a few reasons, the biggest is that it is a new thing. For all of human history until the last century Atheism was seen as something that is false. Atheism fights a God they don't believe in. In doing so they replaced God with Science, and in doing so they don't have to worry about a higher power with higher morals. — Isaiasb

None of that answers my question. I get the impression you don't actually know any atheists or agnostics well enough to have much understanding of the way they think.

Agnostics and atheists alike fight for their belief in nonbelief, and their desire to be contemptuous in believing nothing. — Isaiasb

Why do you believe that?

There is already an amount of research around replicating microorganism behavior with a combination of logic gates - which is the fundamental computational mechanism in electronics. Example nice read:
https://arstechnica.com/science/2010/12/building-logic-gates-with-bacterial-colonies/ — Generic Snowflake

The article is about replicating logic gates with microorganisms, not vice versa as you suggest.

I think the reason no one has challenged the minor is because we all believe that we possess a knowledge of our acts which is not mediated. This is different from our knowledge of the acts of others.
— Leontiskos

If all knowledge of action is mediated by neural processes, then we may well all be mistaken in thinking that we possess non-mediated knowledge of our own actions. We "feel" our own actions "from the inside" it seems, and we see, or hear the actions of others, but if feeling as well as seeing and hearing is mediated by prior neuronal activity, the immediacy may be merely phenomenological, which then just be to say that knowledge of our actions seems immediate, which is of course true. — Janus

:100:

@Leontiskos

The reason I haven't challenged the minor is because I am lazy. Not because there is not good reason to.

I'll point out, however, that Koch is a neuroscientist, and he also says they can't explain it. — Patterner

Sure. To me it seems quite explainable that we can't totally explain it. Humanity is still developing the conceptual and techological tools that would be required to do so in any comprehensive way. (Making the big assumption that human minds are capable of grasping an explanation that would necessarily have extraordinary complexity.)

Like many matters of scientific understanding, understanding of the mind's relationship to the brain is a matter of looking at many scientific findings relevant to piecing together an enormous jigsaw puzzle. There is a lot to learn, to have a well informed opinion of what the picture looks like. (And facing that picture is something a lot of people have a negative emotional reaction to, at least for a time.)

Greene doesn't give a non-robust scientific explanation. — Patterner

Greene is a physicist, not a neuroscientist. Try Damasio's The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness.

That is all consistent with idealism. — RogueAI

Inasmuch as idealism is unfalsifiable, it is rather uninteresting that you find the evidence I presented doesn't falsify idealism.

Why should we suppose there exists a physical brain made of non-mental stuff? — RogueAI

I don't see "should" as having all that much to do with what we suppose. However, in the case a loved one of yours having a stroke in your presence, I hope it will occur to you that your loved one has a physical brain, and getting your loved one to a doctor who knows about brains is important.

All good examples. They're all about the information processing aspect of cognition, however, and leave open the possibility that this functional level of consciousness is superficial. I was being sloppy suggesting there is no evidence,and should have said no overwhelming evidence. — FrancisRay

:up:

There is no physical experiment that could prove consciousness has a physical basis, and while this does not prove it doesn't it might be argued that it's an unscientific claim. What would be your view on this? — FrancisRay

Strictly speaking, science doesn't prove anything. On the other hand, science has provided us with some of the most reliable beliefs we have. That human consciousness is the result of evolution of brains within a social primate lineage seems an enormously well supported and reliable belief to me. Arguably, of more scientific interest is whether you can present evidence falsifying physicalism.

From a scientific perspective, I'd say physicalism should be seen as a working hypothesis for which there is a lot of supporting evidence and a dearth of reliable falsifying evidence.