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Cake day: September 11th, 2023

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  • In the perspective of realpolitik, he’s fucked anyways. He’s down >10 points with young voters, and currently below Trump in swing states polling (just 1 so far, could be meaningless as a metric, but still relevant). DNC will support Israel because they’re a major political donor. The Ds went too hard to fast early in this conflict and it’s too late to backpedal. He’ll have to try really hard to either try to win back the young votes, or appeal to the moderates and never-Trump Republicans.

    This whole election cycle is bizarre, nobody wants neither Trump nor Biden. Their favorability is abysmal, one’s about to go to jail while the other appears to be half dead. I honestly wish we had decent 3rd party infrastructure and rank choice voting, but I don’t think we’ll be breaking through this 2 party bs this cycle.











  • I’m really not exactly sure what qualifies, but the existence of an emergent system so has to be there. Does fungus communication give rise to a system that can build some kind of memory and refer to it to develop more complex behavior? If not, then it’s lacking the level of complexity to be considered consciousness. (But that’s just where I personally draw the line)

    Eusociality has its own context. It’s possible for a hive to show complex organized behavior, but so would an infinite paperclip machine if it was to consist of a swarm of collector drones. A myriad of units with a set of pre-determined instructions can have complex organizations, which still wouldn’t qualify as consciousness.

    Now, the brain scenario would definitely count since it consists of the necessary “hardware” to start generating its own abstract contextual model of its experiences.






  • Depends on who you ask I think. Emergentism makes more sense to me because if you take consciousness as humans experience it, make it derivative of material structure (neurological activity), and assume the appearance of some kind of uniformity as synthesis of different parts of that neurological system, the only way consciousness may exist in that framing is in organisms that posses a nervous system.

    This does inevitably leads to the problem of where to draw the line on the complexity necessary to qualify as consciousness, and im.not gonna pretend like I have the answer to that, but at least it becomes more of a scientific question rather than purely philosophical I think.


  • Another aspect of this conversation was what was posited by the Sapir Whorf Hypothesis. The experiential differences in perception of color can also be attributed to differences in culture / upbringing which influenced one’s processing of the stimuli itself. I tend to oversimplify it to the firmware analogy. Sometimes you get raw input and the languages provide different libraries for comtextualizing this input.