No, that's an analogy for 'hearing music'. Another example: what you're reading right now may be described in terms of 'pixels on a screen' but what i...
Right. I moved your comment from that other thread to here because we're touching on the debate about qualia, which is generally associated with the h...
Hope you don't mind if I but in but I think you have the wrong idea about metaphysics. It's not really 'primitive science' although it is of course tr...
Sure, I get that. The key point about empiricism generally is 'only trust what you can see, touch and measure.' So in practise it usually amounts to a...
That doesn't tally with my understanding of it. I know for instance that Switzerland has high gun ownership and low homicide rates, but then, they als...
:100: Like I said, I'm sure much of the imagery in sci-fi and super-hero movies is grounded in the longing for immortality. In traditional culture, th...
The Jan 6th trial is the big one. If Trump is convicted for election interference you’d think it’ll have to drive the 14th Amendment stake through his...
He rode a wave that’s for sure but it’s well and truly broken. (And if Bannon’s appeal against his contempt of congress conviction fails, he’s going a...
My bet is he’s not on a winning trajectory even in the absence of convictions. The story my quote was drawn from was castigating the media for not spe...
The capacity for experience is not itself an experience. The capacity for experience is an attribute of sentient beings. In addition to that basic cap...
I’ve noticed a classic sociological text on the Routledge book stands, A General History of Magic, by Marcel Mauss, apparently a very good book. I was...
Um, no. I interpret qualia to refer to experiential qualities, which are exclusively the attributes of subjects. Although that said I also regard ‘qua...
Non-physicist Kastrup’s first job was at CERN. He’s quite conversant with physics. But plainly you’ve missed the whole point of the article so I won’t...
As has been noted already in this thread by myself and several others, the concept of entropy, and indeed of information, in Shannon’s theory, is real...
That’s more characteristic of positivism, really. There is a school of thought called ‘constructive empiricism’. Constructive empiricism is a philosop...
I consider the idea that our culture’s quest for interstellar travel is really the sublimated longing for immortality. Having substituted material pro...
Actually something that might or might not have been mentioned in this thread already, is that there’s a school of thought amongst historians that the...
Taken out of context it looses much of ifs cogency but there’s a limit to how much of the original text can be copied here. It was in a chapter on the...
Yes, after my foray on the tech forum with my homespun tech wisdom based on my study of the internet circa 2004, I realise my understanding of large-s...
Very interesting observation! There’s a passage in Manjit Kumar’s book I mentioned above which touches on a similar concept. i.e. ‘a constructed ideal...
They’re an odd combination of books. I don’t think Wittgenstein had anything to say about physics, and would probably have demurred if asked. Philosop...
No, metaphysics ain’t magic, nor is it simply ignorant conjecture. I don’t have expertise in the subject, but I know enough to understand that it is a...
well, yeah, not talking ‘civilizational collapse’ but ‘multi-day outage of electronic transaction systems.’ Oh, and I got schooled on a tech forum abo...
I do consider getting ten grand out of the bank and storing it somewhere safe at home in case there was a severe disruption to either electronic banki...
Hey there was a major telecoms outage in Australia yesterday. One of the big three mobile/data/broadband providers, Optus (owned by SingTel) went down...
My view is that DJT is leading the entire MAGA cult off an electoral cliff, lemming-like, and that his lead in the polls will basically amount to givi...
Seems a good outcome for Democrats. Particularly Andy Beshear in Kentucky who had a solid win in a nominally Red state. Hopefully a harbinger for next...
damn close. No stars, matter or living beings, and certainly nobody to converse about it with. Your relativism is showing again. Have you no faith in ...
Not according to the book cited, Just Six Numbers, Martin Rees, the UK's astronomer royal (and 2011 Templeton Prize winner, as it happens.) Were any o...
But that’s where the cosmological constants and fine-tuned universe arguments come into play - Martin Rees' 'six numbers'. They themselves might not a...
If indeed you hold to a stereotyped view of religion and of what the word means. Of course, you won’t have any trouble identifying many examples which...
Did you notice the origin of the link between information and entropy that I provided above? In Shannon’s information theory, the term “entropy” is us...
Disappointing but not entirely surprising, regrettably. Although note the caveat “Since the majority of the organizations are multiple focus organizat...
I wonder if Americans GOP voters know that their likely presidential candidate has said, on the record, and out loud, that he will suspend the constit...
All that said, I looked at the video summary (crappy because of the low-quality computer-generated voice and editing glitches) and I can really see ho...
Yes I’ve encountered Steps to an Ecology of Mind before but didn’t read much of it. Have a look at @"Gnomon"’s OP, he does a good job of capturing som...
Right. And a major part of the point of this paper is that these increases in order and information density are subject of a natural law not implied b...
Again, this is against the background of information transmission and error correction. Aha, now I’m getting it: That would be minimum total informati...
You know the famous anecdote of how the relationship between entropy and information theory was drawn, right? John Von Neumann was a professional coll...
Nothing is meaningful to a computer, though. You could program the computer to register any combination of pixels as a representation, but that would ...
Can't see it. If I zero out a hard drive, then it's physically the same as a hard drive with a thousand gigabytes of information. But there is no orde...
If the same image is repeated twice, then I suppose the same information is presented twice. But the correct comparision is between any image and rand...
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