u/IsaacHasenov

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Yip yip avatar state!

You can't define what is emerging. So. Like, seriously define consciousness and then explain what aspects are hard?

You're just asserting "blue is ineffable therefore something something dualism"

I don't know... By my third read/listen of the series I was able to go at least a month without needing to read it again

Oh fuck yes

There's a particular strain of Dune commentary that goes much farther than the (I feel) the textual evidence supports in criticizing Paul and Leto as "evil" or "corrupt" or "bad" in some way.

I mostly think they're doing it because they like to sneer at facile readings of Paul as a hero in Dune. But they way overcorrect.

Paul wasn't evil. Leto II wasn't evil. They were trapped by prescience, and tried to take the least-bad option available to them. They were tragic figures. Paul tried to hold onto his humanity as long as he could, then wandered out into the desert in grief at all the bad things he had been forced to do.

Leto tried to hold onto his humanity for thousands of years, but was losing it slowly, and cast himself as the greatest villain of all human history in a (successful) attempt to save the human race, only to be almost undone by a cruel trick at the very end---a final chance to experience love.

They're sad, tragic figures in a Classical mode. Not the cartoon villains of OP's limited imagination.

Lol. Sorry for having a PhD in behavioral genetics and doing research in learning and cognition

I bow to your imperious "it's obvious that woo"

If you can't define your terms I don't need to believe your account

Yeah I think that it is not plainly evident. And I think that the strong intuition that consciousness is plainly evident has led to really bad philosophizing and doesn't stand up to minimal scrutiny.

"Like consciousness is just what I feel, man" seems "right". But most people don't pay close attention to what they're feeling. I'm not a big meditator, but even my sporadic efforts make it completely clear that it's really hard to answer the following questions:

* is consciousness unitary? fragmentary?
* what part of our awareness is our "consciousness," is there a kind of inner screen or a homunculus observer?
* what role does attention play in what "rises to conscious awareness"
* how persistent are our qualia? are they transient, do they change?
* what are the qualia composed of? is it a single or multifarious set of impressions?
* how does attention change what we pay attention to?
* where do memories go? how do they come back?
* are we even "conscious" most of the time? how much? are we only fully conscious when we're conscious of being conscious? how deep does this rabbit hole go?
* does consciousness mean different things at different times? like flow state vs focus, vs rumination vs daydreaming? is it the same thing or qualitatively different
* what pieces of experience could you remove from your experience and still count as conscious?

There a dozens more questions like this. And they're central to whatever definition you would want to make for consciousness, but people like yourself simply gloss over it all as "it's obvious"

Well it handwaves the work of moving hard problem to the combination problem by adding an inexplicable and indescribable (ineffable) "other stuff"

Fwiw I'm personally of the opinion the "hard problem" is just silly, because I think that qualia are identical with holding and contrasting and manipulating multiple neural, embodied states at once (what is the qualia of thinking about an apple except the activation of sweet, textual, tactile, color, odorant, neurons, along with neural activation patterns corresponding to teachers, autumn and the garden of Eden.) But that's my own stance.

So like where I live in LA it's pretty obvious, eg, who is African American, who is from Belize, and who is from Somalia/Ethiopian.

I can't really tell West African immigrants (Nigeria or Camaroon eg) from African Americans until I hear the accent

First of all your initial premise is wrong.

There are textbooks and whole branches of mathematics devoted to this topic.

The tl;dr is that pathogenicity evolves when it results in greater growth and transmissibility. There are a ton of mechanisms in the body to identify pathogenic agents (diseases are literally as old as life itself) and if pathogen is too virulent it will kill its own hosts. Think, for instance, of how rare pathogenic cancers are

Long term, mutualism or commensalism is often more stable

It seems very upsetting for you. I'm sorry.

Don't hurt daddy, big brother

"I can't define what I mean by conscious so I've just decided that whatever it means, this rock is a little bit that"

vs

"I can't understand how anything came into being so I propose a Being that I can't describe made everything. And that inexplicable being inexplicably gets mad when men wear women's clothes."

... I guess pansychism makes marginally more sense because it doesn't involve an inordinate fixation on private parts...

Also it's kind of a different thing seeing stuff in the news and in real life

I was getting all sorts of panicked calls and texts a couple years (I live in LA) about the protests and riots and it was super quiet except for a few blocks around downtown. Completely felt different than the news

I have a brother-in-law in Paris and where he is is unaffected.

Not to diminish the importance but for most people in most places this won't make much of an impact

Rote happy endings are as bad as rote grimdark "realism" in my opinion

They can both be lazy excuses for bad writing

And also damn it sometimes I WANT the quirky fish out of water high school prodigy to end up with her enemies to friends former rival because that's what I signed up for and she worked really hard to get there

Not a piece of shit necessarily but that was a pretty gratuitous negging.

Like "boo you did this thing but I'm so much better for doing a thing you're not doing better than you"

Or put another way, the only place an 8 can go in the upper right box is column 7.

Raccoons evolved in North America and it's a long long way to Patagonia, through deserts and jungles and spiky mountains

Beavers released as fur animals in southern Argentina are spreading like crazy, so you could imagine raccoons would do the same (and feral raccoons are spreading through Russia, Germany, France, even Spain no problem)

As a history of science note: "why don't x group of animals live here" (aka biogeography) was one of the biggest early pieces of clues for evolution. Whole diverse clades of plants and animals tend to be found in one place, not necessarily where they would survive the best. You can't explain it as (eg) dispersal from one place after a flood. The pattern is only explicable by local diversification and occasional migration.

As a secondary history of science note, fossil distributions of major groups, and living species, were a huge clue to continental drift.

Mmhmmm

I invariably start to cry from about the moment when he rescues Lois, and all the exhausted burnt-skin heartstopping adventures, pretty much continuously until the point they get back to the weird glowy caves.I love McKinley's characters so much, including Harimad Crewe, Erin, Sunshine. They're such a great mix of tough and prickly spunky and well intentioned.

Yes. It makes me feel a little uncomfortable watching him and Angel on the screen together.

At the time I would say that 100% of the mathematically correct poll aggregators were named Nate Silver

I think maybe we're more open to varying tempos of morphological evolution? Maybe? Because of his writing?

But the biggest change I see is just in textbooks (rightly) de-emphasizing the notion that ALL morphological evolution happens gradually, continuously and insensibly slow. Even if that sort of is the general pattern if you squint.

I think it helps that genetic evolution is front and center now and we can see that genomically you see multiple rates and modes of evolution happening all the time in the same genome: a mix of gradual neutral evolution interspersed with regions showing stabilizing selection and other regions showing rapid selective sweeps. These grand pattern arguments are less interesting now.

There was a similar storm in a teacup series of shouting matches about speciation in the late 2000s and similarly it resolved to "sometimes this, sometimes that" and (maybe less consequentially) a series of later arguments about indirect genetic effects and multi-level selection

All good discussions, nothing super revolutionary

I would say re Gould: he's a great writer. I think he was often pitted against Dawkins who might be a horrible human being, but who is equally a good writer and usually more correct than Gould about natural selection

Yeah some switches are called promoters. Some are called inhibitors. Some are cis regulatory elements, some are trans regulatory elements.

At this point you're going to have to learn to read, Garfield

Screw you, guy. Wtf with spoilers I hope a cat poops on your cereal today