GeorgeKangas

> Without a placebo group...

You just needed to read the next paragraph:

"The 2026 multicenter placebo-controlled trial extending this work..."

That part of the book (Contact) really bugged me.

The definition of pi is what determines the digits of pi, FULL STOP. There's no room whatsoever, for any sort of agent to 'leave a message' in those digits. I would think even a full-on theist would be embarrassed to suggest otherwise.

Why is no one looking at the chance-giver, and considering his motive? One would reasonably assume he'd like to minimize the payout -- so he'd offer you the chance to switch only if you had chosen the richer envelope. The description explicitly allows this possibility:

"Having chosen... you are given the chance to switch"

Nowhere does it say, you'll be offered the switch no matter which envelope you choose.

Same idea applies, to the very similar Monty Hall problem.

Recognizing one's subjective experience (SE), entails knowing for certain that it exists.

That true statement is definitely not an argument in favor SE; it would be of no evidentiary value to a zombie, for example.

If and when you, naasking, have SE and recognize it: it's existence will then be impossible to doubt.

Dennett's position makes perfect sense -- if Dennett is a zombie. For a zombie, to whom subjective experience (SE) is not even a thing, the "hard problem" can only mean: why do people talk about SE? So that's what they set about explaining.

However, I don't think Dennett (or any human) is actually a zombie. The difficulty, is getting people to recognize their own SE. Our vocabulary, all about material and mechanisms, can't actually define SE. Instead, we have a few ostensions by which an attentive experiencer might recognize his own SE:

[Descartes] SE is that one thing, which absolutely must exist.

[Nagel] SE is "what it's like, to be...". He adds, that all our science is fully consistent with SE not existing. That's why it makes perfect sense for a zombie to believe it doesn't exist.

[Jackson]: Mary knows what seeing red is like, only when she has seen red.

Very well then: you either don't have SE, or don't recognize your own SE. My guess is the latter.

I don't think SE is exclusive to humans, but only humans talk about it, as far as we know.

If you start with material mechanisms, you'll never get subjective experience (SE) as a conclusion.

Start instead with SE, and then any sort of material universe can be the contents of it.

If one is a "phenomenological zombie", i.e. does not have subjective experience (SE), then Dennett's position is the only one that makes any sense. The only thing to explain, is why others are believing this SE illusion.

Those of us who do have SE, and have recognized it, know something the zombies cannot know: that SE must exist.

"you don't have conscious experience, you only think you do."

That's what illusionism, the position of Keith Frankish, asserts. Dennett mostly seems to support it, as you note, but more equivocally than Frankish.

For those of us who have subjective experience (SE), and are aware of it: SE is the thing, which we know must exist (as noted by Descartes).

Anyone doubting the existence of SE, either is not having SE (i.e. is a "phenomenological zombie"), or (more likely, IMO) has not identified his own SE.

One somewhat incremental approach, is called a hypercycle: several simple self replicators "form an alliance" wherein they promote each other's self replication.

Not specific to RNA.

And I'm not a biologist.

I can see two ways around the low probability problem, for RNA abiogenesis:

1) The crystal gene hypothesis of A. G. Cairns-Smith. As a clay crystal grows and splits, the info in the crystal's defect structure is replicating with impressive fidelity, and those defects also interact with the surroundings. So you get the Darwinian game bootstrapped pretty much for free. Later on, the crystals start using organic polymers; later still, the polymer technology is developed well enough to take over from the clay. So this might make abiogenesis reasonably probable on one planet.

2) An observable universe is just any epsilon size patch, on an inflationary universe. The space-time curvature of our whole observable universe is too small to measure, hence the radius of our inflationary universe is a large multiple of the 13 G-lightyear radius we can observe. So abiogenesis could be highly improbable in any observable universe, answering Fermi's paradox, yet be probable within the much greater volume of an inflationary universe (maybe this is what TFA said? TLDR [Edit: yeah, it says that right in the abstract]). And there could even be a large number of inflationary universes, for all we know.

I read (I forget where) that the Hindenburg's skin is where it started burning. The skin was fabric, painted with flammable shellac, and the shellac contained a lot of aluminum powder.

Thanks for replying, skohan! Since this item has moved far off the front page, I'm guessing that just about nobody else will be seeing whatever else we write here. If you wish, you can email me at gwkangas@ku.edu .

Descartes described the clearest identifying property of SE: it's absolutely certain to exist. Since absolute certainty lies outside the scope of science: science can't define what SE is, it can only describe what SE does.

Science doesn't rule out the philosophical hypothesis known as "illusionism" (advocated by Keith Frankish), that SE is a delusion.

If you, skohan, have SE and have correctly identified it: its nonexistence will be inconceivable to you. Are you there yet?

> ...the need some people seem to have to reach for an extra-physical domain for the mind to exist in.

It's because subjective experience (SE) cannot even be defined in physical terms. Or any terms, really. Instead of any definition of SE, all that's on offer are ostensions that will direct a reader's attention to his own SE if he's having it. Such as:

Descartes: SE is what you're absolutely certain must exist, even if everything else is an illusion.

Nagel: SE is "what it's like to be _____".

Nagel again (same paper, but not quoted enough): It [SE] is not captured by any of the familiar, recently devised reductive analyses of the mental, for all of them are logically compatible with its absence. [italics mine]

The word "turbocharger" was introduced to shorten the phrase "turbine supercharger", whether driven by the crankshaft or by the exhaust. Later, it came to mean "exhaust driven turbine supercharger" pretty much exclusively.

I don't have any dates for these usages.

Edit: that p-47 powertrain is an absolute beast!

I believe Chicken & Cyclone both:

  ..transpile to C for speed,
  ..have an interpreter (REPL) for convenience,
  ..use *Cheney on the MTA* to support:
  ....continuations
  ....1st generation of GC.

If I'm wrong, thx in advance for corrrection.

The 6809 was 8 bits, in the same way Z80 and 6502 and 6800 were: 8 bit data bus, 16 bit address bus.

It had a few 16 bit instructions: arithmetic on data in registers, or loading/storing a 16 bit register (8 bits at a time). I think the Z80 did as well.

Here's Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola_6809

I had an 8-bit micro, the Tandy (i.e. Radio Shack) Color Computer ("CoCo"), made in the mid 80s.

I got an optional OS for it, called "OS9" but unrelated to Apple's OS9 (which came later).

OS9 had capabilities very similar to (and modeled on)Unix. Clearly, Linux or something a lot like it could also have run on the CoCo.

Suggestion: to make the tree self-similar at the vertex point, use [x, y] = t * [cos, sin] ( k * ln(t) ). The constant k determines the tightness of the spiral winding.

Another way to describe it: the spiral's uphill slope stays constant.

For me, most singing "Sounds Like English But Is Nonsense". So if I had watched this Italian guy's video, without being told it was nonsense... I wouldn't have made out a single word, but I wouldn't have known there actually wasn't a single word to make out.

Some singing is enunciated enough, that I actually do hear all the words. Notably, the Beatles.

The following two sentences, from the second page of the paper, are where he really nails it:

"We may call this the subjective character of experience. It is not captured by any of the familiar, recently devised reductive analyses of the mental, for all of them are logically compatible with its absence."

All of today's science is logically compatible with the absence of subjective experience, because science cannot even define what subjective experience is.

Every "definition" of subjective experience (SE, in what follows), is actually an ostension: the reader's attention is directed to his own SE. For example:

  - Perhaps nothing actually exists -- except SE.  That's the one thing that MUST exist. [Descartes]

  - "There is such a thing, as what it's like to be..." [Nagel, in the posted paper]

  - There's such a thing, as what seeing red is like: a quale.

  - Science can't rule out that a behaviorally perfect duplicate of you, could lack SE (i.e. be a zombie).
    Science can't rule it out, but maybe SE does: why would a zombie vociferously assert the existence of SE?
    Those who claim SE is an illusion, i.e. that you actually are a zombie but don't know it,
    have the burden of explaining why zombies claim to have SE.

All of these "definitions" require an audience that has SE and is able to recognize it. A scientific definition would not.

Oops! I used He's atomic number (2) instead of its atomic mass (usually 4).

I believe deuterium fusion events mostly produce He4, occasionally He3 + neutron. So we'd actually produce between 3 and 4 grams.

It would cost a fuck ton! Here's how I figure it:

Each fusion event makes one He atom and releases about 17 MeV of fusion energy. Since (one mole) X (one eV) = ~100,000 Joules, fusing one mole (2 grams) of He would produce about 1.7 X 10^12 Joules. That's about 472 megawatt-hours of fusion energy produced.

Another commenter says that the energy INput (to the Farnsworth fusor) is about 100,000 times the energy OUTput; so fusing that 2 grams of He would require a 2,000 megawatt power plant to run for 23,600 hours, or 2.7 years.

Readers: please correct any mistakes you find.

May I suggest t * sin( k * ln(t) ), for some constant k? That makes the path self similar about the (0, 0) point. Maybe you'd like that.

>This one always stumps people.

A good way to "unstump" such people, is to ask, "Is there such a thing, as what it's like to be you? When Thomas Nagel used some such phrase in his essay "What Is It Like to Be a Bat?", a lot of light bulbs were switched on.

Any experiencer, once his attention is properly directed, shall be certain that experience exists. Science, on the other hand, would be perfectly consistent with the non-existence of experience and experiencers.