Viewing profile — 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…

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 …

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 evidentia…

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 peo…

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 …

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 content…

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 wh…

"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, bu…

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 RN…

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 th…

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 pow…

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…

> ...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 te…

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 turb…

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 generati…

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/s…

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 …

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…

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 wo…

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…

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 produ…

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, fus…

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 …