GeorgeKangas

6 ms·

1.
by GeorgeKangas 4mo ago
> Without a placebo group... You just needed to read the next paragraph: "The 2026 multicenter placebo-controlled trial extending this work..."
2.
by GeorgeKangas 4y ago
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
3.
by GeorgeKangas 4y ago
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
4.
by GeorgeKangas 5y ago
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,
5.
by GeorgeKangas 5y ago
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
6.
by GeorgeKangas 5y ago
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.
7.
by GeorgeKangas 5y ago
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.
8.
by GeorgeKangas 5y ago
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. T
9.
by GeorgeKangas 5y ago
"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
10.
by GeorgeKangas 5y ago
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.
11.
by GeorgeKangas 5y ago
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 impre
12.
by GeorgeKangas 5y ago
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.
13.
by GeorgeKangas 5y ago
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 describe
14.
by GeorgeKangas 5y ago
> ...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 defini
15.
by GeorgeKangas 6y ago
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
16.
by GeorgeKangas 6y ago
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 advan
17.
by GeorgeKangas 7y ago
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 t
18.
by GeorgeKangas 7y ago
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 s
19.
by GeorgeKangas 8y ago
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 const
20.
by GeorgeKangas 9y ago
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 th
21.
by GeorgeKangas 9y ago
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 t
22.
by GeorgeKangas 10y ago
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.
23.
by GeorgeKangas 10y ago
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
24.
by GeorgeKangas 13y ago
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.
25.
by GeorgeKangas 13y ago
>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