Carl-Richard

Imagine if you said we need timber because that is what we have reasonable concluded burns, and instead we start gathering leaves. Sentience is as far as we can reasonably conclude part of the entire tree of life, down to single-celled organisms. A chatbot is like a dust in the wind hitting that tree. If you are simply unable to see the complete disconnect in substrate between a collection of silicone chips and a biological cell, I can't really help you.

Yes, but it's a category error to equate one infinitesimal part of that process to the entire process. One hydrogen ion passing through a proton pump in a cell is a part of the evolution of life but it is not equal to the whole. Expecting to create something which seems to be deeply tied to the whole (sentience) by having a monkey assemble a concoction of rocks and sticks (and in 1/68.66 millionth of the time), seems like a category error. A monkey moving its arms and feet and doing simple approximated two digit divisions in its head over the course of 67 years, it's as close to zero you can get compared to the computational density of the evolution of all life on the planet.

Storm et al. (2010) or Cardeña's 2018 paper. What you're calling "scientific consensus" is people who don't read the studies and who explain why they don't read them using metaphysical propositions like "we don't need to read them because we know the laws of physics doesn't make it possible" (Sean Carroll) or complete sophism like "my Bayesian priors means the probability is essentially zero and therefore it would be a waste of time for me to read them" (Steven Pinker). These are the pop science "thought leaders" and it encapsulates the overall view of psi phenomena for both pop sci laymen and materialist scientists. The running assumption (that you're displaying) and of these people is that everything that is scientifically defensible has been embraced and throughly investigated by the mainstream. Which is of course as far from the truth as you can get, any knowledge of the history of science supports this (just read Kuhn); e.g. 20 years ago, mindfulness was fringe. Today it's staple in psychological practice. And of course, it's entirely antithetical to their own approach to science and the scientific process; they are looking for new stuff, they do think there are new things to discover. It's only the stuff they think is interesting.

It's like the choice is between trying to reverse-engineer qualities found in biology like autopoesis, self-concern, selective attention, relevance realization (which is reasonably the only way you get a self-driving organism that can truly interact with the world like a living organism), or you use biology and go from there. The former seems again like just a slow and inevitably unworkable process again because we're monkeys with tiny processors compared to the cosmos (and current AI are our sheep) and we're using starting materials that are way too dissimilar from what ourselves are made of and what we're aiming at (we're aiming at ourselves just better, just more powerful, smarter), while for the latter we align ourselves more closely with the "right" starting materials and we can let mother nature be the artist while we're more like managers. Michael Levin changed the electrical charge of some cells in a flatworm, cut it in half and instead of the piece with the head regenerating a new tail like normal, it regenerated a new head, giving it two heads. If we can map out the space for manipulating cells using electricity or other stimuli (combined with genome-editing, bionics, etc.), we might end up creating something like a mega-Einstein, not a robot, not a human, maybe a bit of both. (Don't quote me on the ethics of that). "But he/it will be the size of a human so their brain will be small". Will he, will it?

Let me tell you guys about something called biology: Life on Earth is a product of a 4.6 billion year long process called evolution by natural selection. 4.6 billion years, that's 4.6b/(2026-1959=67) = 68.66 million times the time since the first integrated circuit was invented in 1959. The products of evolution are also selected by the entire ecosystem holistically, a huuuge, interconnected and complex information processing system, and in the entire history of life on the planet, that equals essentially the entire Earth's surface, the atmosphere, the Sun, lunar cycles, interstellar radiation, cosmic background radiation, etc. Essentially the entire universe is doing the selection holistically as one coordinated unimaginably information-dense unit. Meanwhile current human computer technology (and current AI technology) is literally monkeys banging rocks together (silicone chips are made out of silicone, a type of rock). The selection process is only probably a couple thousand minds on the entire planet (and again for only the last 67 years), and their minds can only focus on one thing at a time, horrible CPU (7±2 chunks of information for any given moment), thinking is usually awfully reductionistic, linear, confined, contrived, limited to language. "But AI is now used to improve itself iteratively". Yes, AI, that is LLMs, are now doing the job of banging (in terms of software) rocks together, using monkey knowledge and cities worth of power, real estate, materials for hardware, water, etc. Yet we only get a chatbot that can write overly verbose text that might solve a theoretical problem or two from time to time when granting it again immense power, materials, water (through ungodly amounts of special-access token usage) and even then it only brute forces the problem like some rat in a maze. LLMs are by estimation by any reasonable stretch of the imagination a dead-end when it comes to sentience, and perhaps even intelligence given certain projections about the limitations of upscaling of hardware. If we want something that even has a chance of developing / possessing sentience, we have to in my opinion abandon silicone chips as a hardware/substrate and instead focus on hacking biology like Michael Levin is doing and the rest of synthetic biology. The level of complexity of biology is in an entirely different domain than monkeys banging rocks together. Choosing an arbitrary level of computation like "neural synapses" ("neural networks are just like the brain") or "electricity" for establishing similarity is itself a testament to our severely limited monkey brains for dealing with such complexity.

And that exaggerated image is what critics get stuck on, same as critics of psychic phenomena more generally. "If manifestation is real, manifest a Lamborghini at this instant". "If psychic phenomena is real, predict the next million dollar lottery number". The antidote is of course "the statistical worldview" (being aware of statistics, subtlety, partiality). Even if a baseballer doesn't hit a home run 100% of the time, that doesn't mean that home runs are not real. The 108 studies on the Ganzfeld effect showing a 32% hit rate vs 25% expected by chance, with astronomical significance (p < .00001), granted the studies are not confounded, that's suggestive of a real phenomena.

Give me your best explanation. Best explanation gets a cookie (laced with meth).

A large sum of money purportedly offered by a non-scientist who doesn't accept actual scientific evidence. 1. The phenomena could be real but harder to control than one would like. 2. How do you know what the CIA does?

Maybe we shouldn't. Electricity does not metabolize or maintain its boundary of inside and outside or self-replicate. Electricity does not build itself through protein synthesis, DNA and RNA transcription, nutrition (although it can arise as a product of such things). A pocket lighter and a fighter jet runs on petroleum products. A brain functions through electrochemical gradients driven by ATP-driven ion pumps driven by metabolism of fuel, neurotransmitters being released and re-uptaken by synaptic vesicles created inside synaptic terminals and docking at proteins, leading to intracellular cascades and changes in DNA/RNA transcription and protein synthesis.

Now do it naked 😊

*emoji of jelly-like jiggly noodly bodily movements*

Ship-through-bottleneck me sideways into a Klein bottle and call me a Quadraceptaurus-degenerate hyperbundle manifold.

This is probably one of the most passionate vocal performances that exists and I think everybody could appreciate it: @Natasha Tori Maru In many ways a male version of Aurora? 🤔

Insane impressionist. His Warren character feels like a real human being. 3:47 His Bill Maher is also off the charts. And last but not least, RFK:

I believe that is what they're discussing in this clip.

If you care about scientific evidence: If you care about personal stories: Tom Campbell recounting shared out-of-body experiences with his colleague at Monroe Institute back in the 70s: 8:13

Another thread another day of religious people bashing religious people. Stage Blue literalist fundamentalist traditionalists is the word you're probably looking for.

Can we not litter the thread with poo? >.<

This sentence combined with the profile pic is just comedic gold.

You still encode the affect of faces in the amygdala 74 ms after the signal, i.e. in the limbic system. That's the starting phase of the cascade. But the neurological model is only a simplification to explain the behavior. The behavioral cascade is signal -> habitual response -> conscious interpretation. Even if some of the habitual response (involving context information) can be said to belong to the cortex, you don't actually evaluate the information consciously (certainly not "logically" as you're talking about) before it's evaluated habitually. 6-7 month olds start to show increased reactions to negative faces, then 8-12 month olds start to use context information to judge the meaning of the faces. Are you saying for you as a 8-12 month old, thinking (logically) happened before habitual emotional responses? Did you think logically as a 1 year old? Obviously no. You were encoding and interpreting habitually, building up that repetoire which you then express still to this day. It's just over time as you mature, you become more adept at top-down responses to the signals. And even that becomes habitual; the suppression that happens more often in men happens habitually, really quickly. Higher-order logical thinking happens way down the line.

Some people think most people are just stupid, uninteresting, morally bankrupt, etc. But it just happens that the former are maybe pretty introverted and don't like interacting with people. And therefore they don't interact with people and they don't learn how people really are. Or they are too consumed by their own judgement that they can't open themselves up to see what is really in front of them.

Killer >:) You give me that word after priming words like "anger". Mmmm.

Is meditation a religious practice?

You mean "comes first" as in temporally? EEG Event-Related Potential (ERP) research disproves this. Just the way the brain is structured disproves this. The cortex receives signals later than the limbic system in reaction to stimuli. The cascade is sensory stimulus -> limbic -> cortex. Men are more likely to suppress emotional responses right after they happen (in the course of milliseconds); it just happens so fast and it's usually habitual (and ignoring or desensitizing that millisecond experience itself can also be habitual) so they might simply be completely unaware of it. And of course, the repression doesn't really remove the emotion as much as it pushes it to the side. The signal still reached the cortex, it was just diverted and not given the right to flow in a particular way. And it leaves a lasting physiological arousal which now is more likely to be interpreted as anger (especially if the emotion occurred in a situation where you feel compelled to externalize some of the cause; "something happened and now I feel this arousal, I didn't like very much what happened and this thing out here was the cause and it must be dealt with, and now I'm angry". It's a very caveman type of circuitry).

If I practice religious practices and say I believe in God, am I religious?