Obviously I’m biased, but I have to agree with the physicist. Neurologists/biologists in their hubris (yes, I’ve seen it displayed many times) totally dismiss the role of QM. This despite the fact they routinely use the results of QM in biochemistry. I can understand that to a degree as the education, especially in biochemistry, reduces QM to a set of “rules” with very little deep understanding of QM. Physical chemists are much better at QM.
To me, the real question lies at the apparent role consciousness seems to play in terminating the Von Neumann chain of measurement. Or, as the fellow in the clip puts it in terms of “asking a question”. As John Wheeler once said, “It is in some strange sense a participatory universe”. And the same sort of process has to occur whether it’s ions crossing cell membranes in a wet brain, or electrons tunneling across potential wells in a silicon chip; QM is at play. I certainly don’t have an answer to what consciousness is, but I do reject the materialist view of it being simply a physical process of neurons, or if you will, electrons in silicon.
Now that physicsguy has posted, here’s another COVID item for him about his former state: from the Hartford Courant: “Nursing homes will have to accept COVID-positive admissions from hospitals, according to a new requirement from the Connecticut Department of Public Health.”
Consciousness can never stop baffling me, either. I am a religious person, but I find it fun to detach and think about humans objectively; I love studying human evolutionary biology and anthropology; I am fascinated by prehistoric humans. And I always run up against a barrier when thinking about consciousness, a barrier I never heard anyone articulate really well until I recently read “Crossroads” by Jonathan Franzen (great book), where a character launches into a monologue about it: the “why am I me?” barrier. Why out of billions of creatures am I “awake” in this body? And I try to see this as a limitation to my own thinking; I have a bias that there is this “I” there, but I can never overcome it. I think it’s deeply ingrained in our minds that there’s an “I” there.
Kuhn should talk to Eben Alexander, a neurosurgeon who had a materialistic view of the brain until he had an extraordinarily detailed near-death experience. I read his book when it came out. He believed that the experience couldn’t have been generated internally because the parts of his brain that would have generated it weren’t functioning at the time. That does align with what I believe about consciousness, but it still leaves tantalizing questions: how does it all work? How could the brain later remember something it didn’t experience? Maybe we can never understand in this lifetime.
The point about how the brain didn’t achieve consciousness by reaching a critical mass of neurons, so thinking that we just have to make computers complex enough and then they will become conscious is a fallacy, is really interesting. I hadn’t heard that before.
What’s also interesting to think about is how people experience consciousness differently. We all seem to agree that everyone is conscious, even at vastly different levels of intelligence, and even with various ways of thinking. Some people think in words, some in pictures, and some have no inner monologue. Whether other animals are conscious is also a fascinating question. I recently read “Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?” and it makes a convincing case that animal thoughts are much more complex than we’re accustomed to thinking. Curiously, the author admitted that thinking to him did not feel like an inner monologue, so he did not have the bias that animals must have language in order to have thought.
Anyway, cool video and, from exploring the website, it seems like a very interesting series. Thanks.
PA+CAT, yeah, just saw that earlier. Even though the left just keeps doing these sort of things, it continues to amaze me. I mean, how much more can they continue? Sigh…………….
Thank God, I’m in Florida now. The 12+ inches of snow received yesterday in CT was reason enough to leave, but the general insanity of the state makes the move even more imperative.
Politico’s day is off to a very rough start.
If he spoke just a little slower I would have been unconscious.
Weird real world COVID experiment to start off the new year:
As happened with many of you, COVID-19 seemed present at a holiday get together my family attended along with three other families. Ages range from 3 to 63. All are healthy for their age. Many quite fit.
– Of those who had prior cases (natural immunity) (~5 people), none got sick, regardless of vaccination status.
– Everyone under the age of 30 got it, regardless of vaccination status (some were vaccinated, some not).
– The worst case, by far, was the only one who had been boosted; two doses of either Moderna or Pfizer last spring and a booster a month ago. This woman is 21, in good health, runs and exercises regularly, eats a healthy diet. Never seemed to get into her lungs, but days of fever, chills, vomiting…
– The little kids exposed all got it and were sicker than all the twenty-somethings (except for the triple vacc’ed woman mentioned above). The little kids bounced back in about 3 days, but had fevers, etc.
– A few of vacc’ed attendees over 30 have not tested positive, despite being present at the gathering and spending the subsequent week living with family members who did test positive. None of this group have gotten a booster yet.
shadow,
I read Eben Alexander’s book. Very interesting case!
Dr. Mary Neal’s drowning and what happened afterward is also well worth looking into. Like Dr. Alexander, not a person seeking the experience she encountered in any way (actually finding it so out of line with her beliefs that she ignored it for years), but her account also has witnesses and incredible, later evidence, years later, that is very difficult to explain.
Now that physicsguy has posted, here’s another COVID item for him about his former state: from the Hartford Courant: “Nursing homes will have to accept COVID-positive admissions from hospitals, according to a new requirement from the Connecticut Department of Public Health.”
This is very, very disturbing. When they did this two years ago they might possibly have had the excuse that they didn’t know what would happen. But now they absolutely do, and so do we. And they know we know, and they’re doing it anyway. They really do want to kill us, and they’re not afraid if we know.
shadow,
Andrew Klavan gives an account for that “I” that you write about better than any I have heard. It really connects with me. Klavan was raised Jewish and converted to Christianity around the age of 50. Taught himself Greek so he could read the Bible without translation.
I think the reason his explanation resonates with me is because he has spent his life writing and studying language and words. The Old and New Testament put specific (and prior to my hearing Klavan, I thought “odd”) emphasis on the concept of “words” and language. Andrew Klavan is first, and foremost a storyteller. He is expert at using words to reveal greater truths.
For bronze aged people creating myths out of thin air to explain natural phenomena they don’t yet have the science to explain, the Old and New Testaments have some non-obvious and inconvenient descriptions of God, humanity and consciousness. Klavan breaks it all down in a very clever way. I hesitate to relate his explanation because I lack his talent.
On the subject of my lack of verbal talent to describe complex subjects:
I had a very real episode where I experienced life beyond our physical, Earthly existence. I hesitate to put it into words because it is literally indescribable. Any attempt I make locks it into the terms I use to describe it, which then limits it and paints a false image of what truly happened. What I truly witnessed.
I am myself a strong, natural skeptic and I can assure all that I have examined it very objectively. I didn’t seek it. I wasn’t looking for it. It literally just hit me and what I saw is real. It is the most real thing I have ever experienced. Since it happened there are times when this world, the “real” world, appears to me like a scrim used in a play. I understand what so many writers mean when they write of a “veil” between us and reality.
Watching the kerfuffle over Politco’s screw up involving Sotomayor this morning is damn funny.
Seeing leftists like Ruth Marcus shift on a dime from attacking Gorsuch for not wearing a mask to defending Sotomayor for not wearing a mask is hilarious.
Then to top it all off the Sotomayor story was false.
Of course Pelosi and Schumer still had no problem dining out in DC which has one of the highest COVID rates in the country so there is that.
Even the lower animals, such as bugs, SEEM to be conscience. So I somewhat agree with the one guys observation that simply making computers larger is not what is lacking in achieving AI consciousness.
I think of the brain as being one place where the largely unseen spiritual dimension , or other non spiritual dimensions, interacts with the more readily observable four dimensions of space- time that we perceive.
Some years ago our former pastor was talking about the dominant Christian view of the Trinity. ( Arians , and some other groups, not withstanding.)
His observation was that plants have bodies, animals have bodies and souls ( inner consciousness) and humans, being made in the image of God, have body, soul and spirit. The spirit being our ability to perceive the spiritual world and the eternal aspect of our being.
( It is possible I am flipping around his use of “ soul” and “ spirit” , because for most of my life I used those terms interchangeably, but I realized how he was making a distinction between the two.)
Rufus T. Firefly:
Some believers I know say they have had hyper-real experiences of such things, and that they cannot explain the experiences in words. I think it’s not all that unusual to have such an experience and that it is very deep and convincing. I don’t think the experiences are limited to believers, either, although the people I know who’ve had them happen to be.
So-called near-death experiences also fall into that category.
“There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio…”
The consciousness problem isn’t a new one. I can’t find a reference, but I’ve read on the internet that the famous eighteenth-century chemist, Antoine Lavoisier, conducted a consciousness experiment at his own beheading.
Supposedly, as he was about to be guillotined during the French Revolution, Lavoisier made an agreement, with the French mathematician Comte Joseph-Louis Lagrange, that he would blink his eyes if he retained consciousness after his head was chopped off.
According to this story, Lavoisier’s head kept blinking for almost thirty seconds, but apparently there’s no evidence to support the claim. (Journal of Chemical Education, vol. 81 no. 5, May 2004)
neo,
“There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio…”
Yes, that quote precisely. I’ve heard it claimed that if you poll any sizable group of people assembled for any random reason (a sporting event, a graduation, a rocket launch, a concert…) around 10% will claim to have had a very real, supernatural experience. 1 in 10 is a lot of people. It certainly seems there is something going on.
Mine was certainly religious*, but I’m not sure I’d describe myself as a believer beforehand and (looking back it has struck me how odd this part is) it really didn’t impact my religious belief afterward, at least not instantly or noticeably.
*Although not conventionally. No white tunnels, bright lights, harps or figures clothed in white. What I saw was actually very much in line with physics and astronomy, especially dilation of space and time, but since I’ve studied those more than religion maybe that was the bridge for my consciousness to comprehend it. There is another existence over the one we experience. It is all around us. Always. We all have experienced it and understand it (and everything) completely when exposed to it, but we are trapped here and when here are unable to experience it. Also, IT IS WONDERFUL!
Cornflour,
I too have read that account several times. And, of course, there is Harry Houdini’s promise.
Shadow,
I do not think you have to “ detach” your religious nature and objectivity. I do not know what your religious background is, but allow me to comment on how I deal with “ evolution” and “ creation”.
Among Christians in America, the biggest loudmouths about creation are the “ New Earth” creationist who insist Earth and the Universe is only about 6000 years old, so they find themselves warring against a lot of science. Both real science and the trademark “ science” where theory is presented as absolute unquestionable fact.
My late father was both a physicist and a Baptist deacon and Sunday School teacher – though way more conservative than Jimmy Carter 🙂
In my youth, as I started asking questions, he introduced me to “ Gap theory” as it pertains to the first Chapter of Genesis. This is the understanding that the very first verse of Genesis WAS creation, sometime in the deep , remote past, and that the “ six days of creation” in subsequent verses was part of a great reset after some catastrophe on Earth. This would be why the prophetic writer, Moses, observes light thru the post destruction haze before he observes the sun , moon and stars, as observed by someone standing on the surface of a destroyed world. Note, there are at least THREE different Hebrew words in the first two chapters of Genesis typically translated into English words such as “ create” or “ made”.
Personally, I think one of the reasons that first chapter of Genesis keeps talking about living things being made “ after their kind” is that the great reset involved rebooting , in this new “ Matrix”, the same species which existed before, more or less. When HE got to humans, this time he gave them an immortal soul.
As for as subsequent chapters, from which the six thousand year old creationist get their dates based on one person “ begetting” the next generation, there is evidence that sometimes there may even be generations being skipped.
Plus, keep in mind, the strictly secular side makes a lot of assumptions themselves, even if the larger public thinks otherwise.
Rufus,
I like Andrew Klavan! Have any links to where he talks about that stuff?
I’ve heard it claimed that if you poll any sizable group of people assembled for any random reason (a sporting event, a graduation, a rocket launch, a concert…) around 10% will claim to have had a very real, supernatural experience.
Andrew Greeley in his capacity as an academic sociologist wrote a slim monograph on the subject about 40 years back. He found the share to be about 25%, among them a majority of people who have been widowed.
jon baker and shadow,
Jordan Peterson has given some excellent lectures on Genesis and it ties in with Andrew Klavan’s philosophy. Truth does not necessarily mean real, tangible. Every culture tells/has told stories to convey great truths. Many people I know reference literature and/or movies as having helped them understand great truths.
I’m not at liberty to watch the video, but will make this dogmatic statement: there is zero reason to believe that computers can develop consciousness. The belief that they can is an act of pure materialist faith, justified by no evidence whatsoever. I’m amazed that anyone who knows how computers work down to the gate level can believe it.
Consciously deleting election surveillance videos in the state of Georgia.
(Or maybe subconsciously? Unconsciously?):
This is an interesting story. Like the Politico fiasco from this morning are there no fact checkers in any kind of publishing anymore? This is a book for God’s sake and yet no one caught this.
Does anybody here remember Julian Jaynes theory on the origin of consciousness? His late 1970s book postulated that human consciousness arose from the breakdown of what he called a bicameral mind. In other words, humans were largely schizophrenic until circumstances required a merged conscious mind. His theory was supported by multiple lines of evidence. Jaynes understood the conscious mind as a biological machine producing metaphors to describe physical reality. He would likely say that the conscious mind is a product of the mind itself and devoid of any supernatural aspects.
I see human consciousness as something greater than just the brain. Its full description is only hinted at in the inexplicable events humans have experienced throughout history.
Griffin @ 4:49pm:
A quote from the author in the article:
“Cooney said in her response that the aggressive and nasty feedback she’s received over the factual errors was a symptom of White supremacy and misogyny…”
It’s completely predictable, but still very, very funny!
neo,
Thanks for the link to the post on Delmore Schwartz. Very interesting stuff from you and the commenters. Ymar Sakar’s first comment fits all the elements of my experience. I will look for the Katherine Porter story.
shadow,
Regarding Klavan’s description of truth, the body and soul; I wish I knew of one source where he lays it all out. He is a gifted communicator, but I haven’t found a synopsis. He has discussed it several times on his podcast, but it sort-of builds on itself. I don’t know of a stand alone piece by him on the precise subject.
I’ve read his book, “The Great Good Thing” and it definitely touches on the subject. He’d likely state the entire book is precisely about this subject, but I don’t recall a succinct section of the book on this subject that would be sharable. I did enjoy the book. Coincidentally, he had a similar experience to my epiphany at the birth of his daughter and, since he is a writer, he does a good job of relating it. When I read it I wondered if he hadn’t had the precise, same epiphany I had?
I will search to see if I can find Klavan stating his philosophy succinctly.
Yawrate:
Yes! Jaynes makes a convincing case in his book. Even if he was wrong, it’s magnificent, brave, genius level of wrongness. Courage and independence of thought not being strong points in the scientific world these latter days. Whether it’s a shiny toy or a useful conceptual tool, either way, the Bicameral Mind Theory is a gem which sparkles.
Mind you, I’m also a fan of the QM deus ex machina hook to get us off the hook. Meat Robots just don’t seem right to me.
I finally watched the video.
Cogito ergo sum.
Zaphod,
“Meat Robots just don’t seem right to me.”
Although not a scientific hypothesis, per se, a hugely important point. Truth ought to correspond with reality. If 9 billion people and the billions who lived before them all “know” they exist and “know” that existence is more than the sum of their parts that ought to count for something.
“not a scientific hypothesis, per se”
A fact least likely to cause me sleepless nights. I fly by the seat of my baseball pants.
The determination of a lot of smart people to prove that they don’t actually exist is a very weird psychological phenomenon. Walker Percy has a possible explanation in Lost in the Cosmos, having to do with the need of the scientist to be a god to his data. To reduce his own and every other psyche to data is, in a contradictory way, to bring it all under his control.
Griffin on January 8, 2022 at 1:05 pm
the Twitter thread you cited (about the rock falls in Brazil) also had this down the thread a little ways:
Scott Adams
@ScottAdamsSays 15h
I declare my right, as a citizen of the United States, to label the 2020 election illegitimate based on a lack of transparency.
An election that can’t be fully audited — by design — must bear the full presumption of fraud.
Will now go look at potentially related link provided on the GA election data removals by Barry Meislin on January 8, 2022 at 4:40 pm
Interesting historical curiosity courtesy of the CIA:
“The determination of a lot of smart people to prove that they don’t actually exist is a very weird psychological phenomenon.”
That’s a great way of putting it!
The determination of a lot of smart people to destroy their own, most successful civilization, is a very weird psychological phenomenon.
The consciousness video had some great interviewees — Charles Tart, Ray Kurzweil, Hubert Dreyfus. I would liked to have heard Roger Penrose, who first brought quantum effects as an explanation for consciousness to my attention. But he’s 90 and in the UK.
I wasn’t so sure of George Lakoff, the cognitive linguist, who brought his credentials to the culture wars with his book on political messaging, “Don’t Think of an Elephant! Know Your Values and Frame the Debate: The Essential Guide for Progressives.” His argument is conservatives win debates by controlling the “frame” with “strict father” metaphors. To counter, Lakoff says progressives need to shift to frames based on the “nurturant parent.”
So it’s hard for me to take Lakoff seriously, but he is part of the “emobodied mind” movement — that our minds don’t stop at the brain but include the whole body — which I do respect.
I sure don’t have an answer to consciousness question. I’m fascinated that the current answers are so divergent. I go with:
_____________________________________
The Universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.
PS The professor character in “Futurama,” Hubert J. Farnsworth, is half-based on Hubert Dreyfus — the critic of artifical intelligence in the video. He went to the mat early against AI as a parallel to human intelligence.
The other half was Philo T. Farnsworth, the great American inventor. I appreciated both sides of the homage.
The weird think about human consciousness is the ability to imagine things one has never seen or experienced.
While animals also are conscious, I don’t think they have the ability to imagine.
This uniquely (?) human trait is what enabled humans to invent things,music, art, literature, mathematics, science, etc. (though one can argue that math and science are not invented but discovered).
Imagination is what allows humans to question/ponder their own existence and ask “what is consciousness.” I don’t think animals can do this.
So why do humans have this trait, and animals not?
Is it the difference in the biochemistry of the human brain vs that of animals?
I assume there is a difference, but I don’t know.
Do human brains react differently to the myriad of subatomic particles (e.g. neutrinos, etc) or EM radiation that constantly bombard planet earth and thus all life forms on earth?
Anyway, a very interesting video that left me more perplexed than before. Sometimes ignorance is bliss.
“John Updike: we may skate upon an intense radiance we do not see because we see nothing else.”
Beautiful quote.
My late father was a cognitive scientist. Among other things, he wrote about optical illusions: the Moon Illusion, the Seeing-More-Than-Is-There (SMTT) phenomenon, and so forth.
Although he was not an overtly religious man, he knew that there are some things we don’t and perhaps cannot know. As he lay dying, we talked around the question of human consciousness and the afterlife. (His mind was thankfully untouched; it was his body that gave out.) I asked him whether we can also see *less* than is there. His answer was immediate and unequivocal: “Absolutely!”
I found that comforting, and still do.
JohnTyler,
We can dismiss it and call it “ instinct”, but somehow birds apparently imagine a nest to the point that they gather the materials and build it. Same with squirrels and their large tree nest. And burrowing animals who build cities underground, from ants to prairie dogs. And then the ants “… gathereth her food in the harvest.” Proverbs 6:8 And paper wasp who build nest. And wasp who build nest from mud. And beavers who build dams. And even some fish build nest of sorts. And spiders who spin their complex webs. And cats who stalk their prey. And primates who use rudimentary tools.
Speaking of “ instinct”. I find it hard to believe their was such specific selective “ evolutionary” pressure on birds to build nest like they do without even thinking about it, and then somehow that got passed on to their young.
Neo, here is Steve Kirsch’s latest on the impact of mRNA injections and Covid infections, hospitalizations and deaths
On genius: one of the best definitions I have come across is “the ability to hit very large and important nails not quite on the head”. Hat tip to economist Philip Hanson, formerly of the University of Birmingham, writing about the Soviet philosopher and novelist-of-ideas Alexander Zinoviev way back in the early 1980s.
Why look–Phil’s article is referenced on (of all places) the Unz Review!:
Because what birds and insects and squirrels and prairie dogs do never changes. They have been doing the same exact thing for many thousands of years.
It’s sort of like they are following a computer program that instructs them when and how to do what they do.
This inability (or is it a choice? or, given their resources, are they following an optimal path) to keep on doing the same thing – without any significant change – generation after generation after generation, may, in a way, be a definition of instinct.
True , primitive human cultures – to this day – live today as they did 10,000 years ago. But these groups are very isolated (e.g. the Korowai) are not representative of modern human culture.
Because they are humans, they must be able to imagine, but for whatever reason, it never compelled them to seek a new methods of living different than their prehistoric life style.
Which leads to another question; why do some cultures progress and others not?
Who knows.
Lee:
There’s so much wrong with the article you linked that it would take an enormous amount of time and study to explain. I’ll be more brief than that.
First of all, how many people on earth can understand it? Can you, for example? It is incredibly long and to understand the math it purports to use is beyond the ability of nearly everyone.
But that’s just the beginning of the difficulties. A lot of studies are difficult to understand and have complex math, but they’ve been published and peer-reviewed, and we at least know the training and credentials of the authors. Part of that review process involves other scientists vetting where the statistics (the numbers that are being crunched) come from, and whether they are accurate. As far as I can tell, this is not done at all for the article you linked. Where did author “Kyle A. Beattie” get these country statistics in the first place and in particular are they accurate? You may recall that in an earlier Lancet study on COVID, the initial statistics were “garbage in” and the study was discredited when the authors were asked to validate them and could not. What about this one?
I couldn’t even ascertain who this author – “Kyle A. Beattie” – is, but in the comments section at Substack, people said he’s a Canadian political scientist. I don’t know whether that’s true, but if it’s true then it certainly doesn’t inspire confidence that he knows what he’s doing in the sense of statistics of this complexity.
The trajectory of COVID in each country is very different even WITHOUT vaccines. Some countries were very lightly hit and some very heavily hit – prior to vaccines. Many countries also have had cycles (prior to vaccines) of high infection and low infection alternating back and forth. That represents a tremendous drawback to any study such as the one the author purports to have done. Unless all of that is controlled for in each country – as well as other factors such as age, changes in virus mitigation such as masking and distancing, methods of reporting, definitions of cases and deaths, definitions of what vaccinated means (how many?) and what brand of vaccines were used – it is impossible to say the data means anything.
This part in particular caught my attention (from the actual study itself, not the Substack article):
Ultimately, this study chose to utilize the data of four countries in Africa (Burkina Faso, Chad, DRC, South Sudan) that were chosen specifically for their low average severity indices since vaccine administration began (i.e. low levels of mandatory mask wearing, social distancing, crowd limitations, travel restrictions, etc.) and for their low vaccination rates. These countries in the author’s estimation best represent a “natural” progression of the virus with limited vaccine intervention on par with most other nations, making them the least likely to display problems of endogeneity while still acting as valid control groups….
Countries with few COVID-19 deaths in the year 2020 appear to have fared the worst of all countries after vaccine administration (e.g Thailand, Vietnam, Mongolia, Taiwan, Seychelles, Cambodia, etc.). The causal impact results from vaccine administration seen in these countries of hundreds or thousands of percentage increases in total deaths and cases per million are also the causal impact results we can be most statistically confident in due to the direct increase of COVID-19 associated deaths and cases after vaccine administration, where prior to vaccine administration there were few or none.
This makes no sense. Those countries that weren’t hard hit earlier often experience an increase later – it has to do with virus patterns, weather patterns, all sorts of things that we poorly understand. “Later” could certainly be after vaccines are introduced, but that would not mean any increase was caused by vaccines. And some countries (whether vaccinated or not) simply don’t seem to have much COVID ever, whether because of weather patterns, previous exposure of the population to related viruses, genetic resistance in that population, use of certain medicines in the general population, age of population, density of population, all sorts of things we poorly understand. These countries with lower disease rates will of course have lower vaccination rates for obvious reasons. But such countries (Burkina Faso, Chad, DRC, South Sudan, as used in the study) are typical only of themselves and do NOT represent the natural course of COVID as it would be in a country such as Italy or the UK if such a country didn’t have vaccines. That’s absurd.
From a Substack comment:
I’m not sure how/why this study might be refuted, but if it is, i’ll suspect that this is important:
“this allows us to look at the past 12-16 months (each country is slightly different) before vaccine administration began, this is called the pre-intervention period, and utilize that data to project where y1 (total deaths per million) and y2 (total cases per million) would have been had the intervention of X (vaccine administration) not occurred, what the authors call a “counterfactual””
Not clear to most of us that one can extrapolate from pre-intervention to later times.
(because the growth/spread of virus is radically non-linear, an subject to so many things)
Given the fact that cases/death do increase after vax; it’s going to be really hard to demonstrate that the increase is *caused* by the vax, and not other factors in that country/region.
Sure, you can do the stats, and select the p<.05, etc, etc; but this is not a model that is strongly bound by causal and/or predictable time-series effects.
Another comment:
There is no doubt that COVID-19 cases have been on the rise over the past year despite the vaccine rollout but this study is prematurely assuming causality between the two. Just because cases rise after the vaccine rollout, it doesn’t mean the vaccines caused the increase. Other factors, such as more transmissible variants and the relaxing of mask mandates and other measures can play a role in this. Further, the study doesn’t break out the increased cases and deaths by vaccination status – how do you know that the majority of the increase in COVID deaths post-vaccine rollout are not among the unvaccinated? In fact, many studies that break the data down by vaccination status, like the one below, show the unvaccinated account for an unproportionally large number of the COVID deaths.
It is apparent that Mr. Beattie [the author] fundamentally misunderstands statistical hypothesis testing, as evidenced by his characterization of his null and alternate hypotheses: (H0 and HA):
“Hypothesis 1
H0: X has no statistically significant (P > 0.05) causal effect on Yx.
HA: X has a statistically significant (P<0.05) causal effect on Yx.”
To start with, effects do not have or lack significance. Experiments to measure an effect either yield significance or not. Lack of significance merely shows that the experiment lacks sufficient power to measure the effect, if it exists. Second, an experiment showing a significant difference does not show causality. Third, it is statistically unsound to conduct multiple inquiries or to evaluate multiple hypotheses and to discard the ones that fail to show significance.
From the Circling the Bath House Drain Department:
They’re going to get it good and proper for LGB happening on their watch. Signing a Reinsurance Treaty with the Weirdos and Degenerates might pour some oil on the Waters.
Spectator Normie may need to make some adjustments and accommodations. But who the hell is he, anyway?
“The NYT review does not dare mention the single most famous fact about this expedition: that Michael Rockefeller, the son of sitting New York governor (and future U.S. VP) Nelson Rockefeller and great-grandson of John D. Rockefeller, almost certainly got eaten by headhunters. Of course, why would anybody be interested in learning that young Mr. Rockefeller was devoured by cannibals rather than of his connection, such as it was, to Attica?”
Glorious! More like this please!
Went back over Roger Penrose’s quantum approach to consciousness in my copy of Penrose’s “The Road to Reality,” the most daunting book in my personal library. I don’t feel like typing out his text, which I don’t understand well at all. So here’s an abstract which covers the basics (which I don’t understand well either):
____________________________________
The microtubule-based model of consciousness, proposed simultaneously in the mid-1990s by the British physicist Roger Penrose and the American anesthesiologist Stuart Hameroff, is probably the best known, least understood, and most controversial among the various hypotheses that aim to account for such puzzling faculty in terms of quantum physics. In this theory microtubules —i.e., long fibrous structures that form an intracellular framework supporting the shape of every neuron— are able to integrate information in a non-computable way through transient conformational changes of the tubulin protein molecules that constitute them. Switching between two alternative states tubulin dimers allegedly may, apart from providing a huge capability for standard binary computation, reach a third quantum superposition state with its own specific wave function. As the number of tubulin dimers in the quantum superposition state gradually increases, coherence in this state is believed to build up and spread intracellularly and transcellularly through the population of microtubules across relatively wide regions of the brain. It is postulated that this process goes on up to a point when a spontaneous abrupt reduction of quantum coherence takes place, a collapse that amounts to an instant of awareness calculated to occur every 20–30 ms. The subjective impression of a continuous stream of consciousness would thus be the result of a succession of such self-reduction events.
The take-away, as I take it, is that Penrose and Hameroff are proposing a specific biological manner in which quantum effects could work in the brain, which means that the brain’s functioning is not computable — not predictably a function a of previous inputs — though what such effects might be are not explained..
Here’s an article with some detail on how Penrose’s idea might work.
The article suggests that backwards in time quantum effects might explain the ability of a tennis player to make conscious decisions about returning the ball, even though the brain is too slow to do so.
_________________________________
Gray (2004) observes that in tennis “The speed of the ball after a serve is so great, and the distance over which it has to travel so short, that the player who receives the serve must strike it back before he has had time consciously to see the ball leave the server’s racket. Conscious awareness comes too late to affect his stroke.” McCrone (1999): “[for] tennis players … facing a fast serve … even if awareness were actually instant, it would still not be fast enough ….” Nonetheless tennis players claim to see the ball consciously before they attempt to return it.
Obviously I’m biased, but I have to agree with the physicist. Neurologists/biologists in their hubris (yes, I’ve seen it displayed many times) totally dismiss the role of QM. This despite the fact they routinely use the results of QM in biochemistry. I can understand that to a degree as the education, especially in biochemistry, reduces QM to a set of “rules” with very little deep understanding of QM. Physical chemists are much better at QM.
To me, the real question lies at the apparent role consciousness seems to play in terminating the Von Neumann chain of measurement. Or, as the fellow in the clip puts it in terms of “asking a question”. As John Wheeler once said, “It is in some strange sense a participatory universe”. And the same sort of process has to occur whether it’s ions crossing cell membranes in a wet brain, or electrons tunneling across potential wells in a silicon chip; QM is at play. I certainly don’t have an answer to what consciousness is, but I do reject the materialist view of it being simply a physical process of neurons, or if you will, electrons in silicon.
Now that physicsguy has posted, here’s another COVID item for him about his former state: from the Hartford Courant: “Nursing homes will have to accept COVID-positive admissions from hospitals, according to a new requirement from the Connecticut Department of Public Health.”
https://notthebee.com/article/stop-me-if-youve-heard-this-before-connecticut-is-asking-nursing-homes-to-take-in-positive-covid-patients
Consciousness can never stop baffling me, either. I am a religious person, but I find it fun to detach and think about humans objectively; I love studying human evolutionary biology and anthropology; I am fascinated by prehistoric humans. And I always run up against a barrier when thinking about consciousness, a barrier I never heard anyone articulate really well until I recently read “Crossroads” by Jonathan Franzen (great book), where a character launches into a monologue about it: the “why am I me?” barrier. Why out of billions of creatures am I “awake” in this body? And I try to see this as a limitation to my own thinking; I have a bias that there is this “I” there, but I can never overcome it. I think it’s deeply ingrained in our minds that there’s an “I” there.
Kuhn should talk to Eben Alexander, a neurosurgeon who had a materialistic view of the brain until he had an extraordinarily detailed near-death experience. I read his book when it came out. He believed that the experience couldn’t have been generated internally because the parts of his brain that would have generated it weren’t functioning at the time. That does align with what I believe about consciousness, but it still leaves tantalizing questions: how does it all work? How could the brain later remember something it didn’t experience? Maybe we can never understand in this lifetime.
The point about how the brain didn’t achieve consciousness by reaching a critical mass of neurons, so thinking that we just have to make computers complex enough and then they will become conscious is a fallacy, is really interesting. I hadn’t heard that before.
What’s also interesting to think about is how people experience consciousness differently. We all seem to agree that everyone is conscious, even at vastly different levels of intelligence, and even with various ways of thinking. Some people think in words, some in pictures, and some have no inner monologue. Whether other animals are conscious is also a fascinating question. I recently read “Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?” and it makes a convincing case that animal thoughts are much more complex than we’re accustomed to thinking. Curiously, the author admitted that thinking to him did not feel like an inner monologue, so he did not have the bias that animals must have language in order to have thought.
Anyway, cool video and, from exploring the website, it seems like a very interesting series. Thanks.
PA+CAT, yeah, just saw that earlier. Even though the left just keeps doing these sort of things, it continues to amaze me. I mean, how much more can they continue? Sigh…………….
Thank God, I’m in Florida now. The 12+ inches of snow received yesterday in CT was reason enough to leave, but the general insanity of the state makes the move even more imperative.
Politico’s day is off to a very rough start.
If he spoke just a little slower I would have been unconscious.
Weird real world COVID experiment to start off the new year:
As happened with many of you, COVID-19 seemed present at a holiday get together my family attended along with three other families. Ages range from 3 to 63. All are healthy for their age. Many quite fit.
– Of those who had prior cases (natural immunity) (~5 people), none got sick, regardless of vaccination status.
– Everyone under the age of 30 got it, regardless of vaccination status (some were vaccinated, some not).
– The worst case, by far, was the only one who had been boosted; two doses of either Moderna or Pfizer last spring and a booster a month ago. This woman is 21, in good health, runs and exercises regularly, eats a healthy diet. Never seemed to get into her lungs, but days of fever, chills, vomiting…
– The little kids exposed all got it and were sicker than all the twenty-somethings (except for the triple vacc’ed woman mentioned above). The little kids bounced back in about 3 days, but had fevers, etc.
– A few of vacc’ed attendees over 30 have not tested positive, despite being present at the gathering and spending the subsequent week living with family members who did test positive. None of this group have gotten a booster yet.
shadow,
I read Eben Alexander’s book. Very interesting case!
Dr. Mary Neal’s drowning and what happened afterward is also well worth looking into. Like Dr. Alexander, not a person seeking the experience she encountered in any way (actually finding it so out of line with her beliefs that she ignored it for years), but her account also has witnesses and incredible, later evidence, years later, that is very difficult to explain.
This is very, very disturbing. When they did this two years ago they might possibly have had the excuse that they didn’t know what would happen. But now they absolutely do, and so do we. And they know we know, and they’re doing it anyway. They really do want to kill us, and they’re not afraid if we know.
shadow,
Andrew Klavan gives an account for that “I” that you write about better than any I have heard. It really connects with me. Klavan was raised Jewish and converted to Christianity around the age of 50. Taught himself Greek so he could read the Bible without translation.
I think the reason his explanation resonates with me is because he has spent his life writing and studying language and words. The Old and New Testament put specific (and prior to my hearing Klavan, I thought “odd”) emphasis on the concept of “words” and language. Andrew Klavan is first, and foremost a storyteller. He is expert at using words to reveal greater truths.
For bronze aged people creating myths out of thin air to explain natural phenomena they don’t yet have the science to explain, the Old and New Testaments have some non-obvious and inconvenient descriptions of God, humanity and consciousness. Klavan breaks it all down in a very clever way. I hesitate to relate his explanation because I lack his talent.
On the subject of my lack of verbal talent to describe complex subjects:
I had a very real episode where I experienced life beyond our physical, Earthly existence. I hesitate to put it into words because it is literally indescribable. Any attempt I make locks it into the terms I use to describe it, which then limits it and paints a false image of what truly happened. What I truly witnessed.
I am myself a strong, natural skeptic and I can assure all that I have examined it very objectively. I didn’t seek it. I wasn’t looking for it. It literally just hit me and what I saw is real. It is the most real thing I have ever experienced. Since it happened there are times when this world, the “real” world, appears to me like a scrim used in a play. I understand what so many writers mean when they write of a “veil” between us and reality.
Watching the kerfuffle over Politco’s screw up involving Sotomayor this morning is damn funny.
Seeing leftists like Ruth Marcus shift on a dime from attacking Gorsuch for not wearing a mask to defending Sotomayor for not wearing a mask is hilarious.
Then to top it all off the Sotomayor story was false.
Of course Pelosi and Schumer still had no problem dining out in DC which has one of the highest COVID rates in the country so there is that.
Jeez, that looks awful.
https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/1479873330220085256
Even the lower animals, such as bugs, SEEM to be conscience. So I somewhat agree with the one guys observation that simply making computers larger is not what is lacking in achieving AI consciousness.
I think of the brain as being one place where the largely unseen spiritual dimension , or other non spiritual dimensions, interacts with the more readily observable four dimensions of space- time that we perceive.
Some years ago our former pastor was talking about the dominant Christian view of the Trinity. ( Arians , and some other groups, not withstanding.)
His observation was that plants have bodies, animals have bodies and souls ( inner consciousness) and humans, being made in the image of God, have body, soul and spirit. The spirit being our ability to perceive the spiritual world and the eternal aspect of our being.
( It is possible I am flipping around his use of “ soul” and “ spirit” , because for most of my life I used those terms interchangeably, but I realized how he was making a distinction between the two.)
Rufus T. Firefly:
Some believers I know say they have had hyper-real experiences of such things, and that they cannot explain the experiences in words. I think it’s not all that unusual to have such an experience and that it is very deep and convincing. I don’t think the experiences are limited to believers, either, although the people I know who’ve had them happen to be.
So-called near-death experiences also fall into that category.
“There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio…”
The consciousness problem isn’t a new one. I can’t find a reference, but I’ve read on the internet that the famous eighteenth-century chemist, Antoine Lavoisier, conducted a consciousness experiment at his own beheading.
Supposedly, as he was about to be guillotined during the French Revolution, Lavoisier made an agreement, with the French mathematician Comte Joseph-Louis Lagrange, that he would blink his eyes if he retained consciousness after his head was chopped off.
According to this story, Lavoisier’s head kept blinking for almost thirty seconds, but apparently there’s no evidence to support the claim. (Journal of Chemical Education, vol. 81 no. 5, May 2004)
neo,
“There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio…”
Yes, that quote precisely. I’ve heard it claimed that if you poll any sizable group of people assembled for any random reason (a sporting event, a graduation, a rocket launch, a concert…) around 10% will claim to have had a very real, supernatural experience. 1 in 10 is a lot of people. It certainly seems there is something going on.
Mine was certainly religious*, but I’m not sure I’d describe myself as a believer beforehand and (looking back it has struck me how odd this part is) it really didn’t impact my religious belief afterward, at least not instantly or noticeably.
*Although not conventionally. No white tunnels, bright lights, harps or figures clothed in white. What I saw was actually very much in line with physics and astronomy, especially dilation of space and time, but since I’ve studied those more than religion maybe that was the bridge for my consciousness to comprehend it. There is another existence over the one we experience. It is all around us. Always. We all have experienced it and understand it (and everything) completely when exposed to it, but we are trapped here and when here are unable to experience it. Also, IT IS WONDERFUL!
Cornflour,
I too have read that account several times. And, of course, there is Harry Houdini’s promise.
Shadow,
I do not think you have to “ detach” your religious nature and objectivity. I do not know what your religious background is, but allow me to comment on how I deal with “ evolution” and “ creation”.
Among Christians in America, the biggest loudmouths about creation are the “ New Earth” creationist who insist Earth and the Universe is only about 6000 years old, so they find themselves warring against a lot of science. Both real science and the trademark “ science” where theory is presented as absolute unquestionable fact.
My late father was both a physicist and a Baptist deacon and Sunday School teacher – though way more conservative than Jimmy Carter 🙂
In my youth, as I started asking questions, he introduced me to “ Gap theory” as it pertains to the first Chapter of Genesis. This is the understanding that the very first verse of Genesis WAS creation, sometime in the deep , remote past, and that the “ six days of creation” in subsequent verses was part of a great reset after some catastrophe on Earth. This would be why the prophetic writer, Moses, observes light thru the post destruction haze before he observes the sun , moon and stars, as observed by someone standing on the surface of a destroyed world. Note, there are at least THREE different Hebrew words in the first two chapters of Genesis typically translated into English words such as “ create” or “ made”.
Personally, I think one of the reasons that first chapter of Genesis keeps talking about living things being made “ after their kind” is that the great reset involved rebooting , in this new “ Matrix”, the same species which existed before, more or less. When HE got to humans, this time he gave them an immortal soul.
As for as subsequent chapters, from which the six thousand year old creationist get their dates based on one person “ begetting” the next generation, there is evidence that sometimes there may even be generations being skipped.
Plus, keep in mind, the strictly secular side makes a lot of assumptions themselves, even if the larger public thinks otherwise.
Rufus,
I like Andrew Klavan! Have any links to where he talks about that stuff?
Rufus T. Firefly:
Please see the Updike quote at the beginning of this post. Also, you might like to read a long short story by Katherine Anne Porter entitled “Pale Horse, Pale Rider.”
I’ve heard it claimed that if you poll any sizable group of people assembled for any random reason (a sporting event, a graduation, a rocket launch, a concert…) around 10% will claim to have had a very real, supernatural experience.
Andrew Greeley in his capacity as an academic sociologist wrote a slim monograph on the subject about 40 years back. He found the share to be about 25%, among them a majority of people who have been widowed.
jon baker and shadow,
Jordan Peterson has given some excellent lectures on Genesis and it ties in with Andrew Klavan’s philosophy. Truth does not necessarily mean real, tangible. Every culture tells/has told stories to convey great truths. Many people I know reference literature and/or movies as having helped them understand great truths.
I’m not at liberty to watch the video, but will make this dogmatic statement: there is zero reason to believe that computers can develop consciousness. The belief that they can is an act of pure materialist faith, justified by no evidence whatsoever. I’m amazed that anyone who knows how computers work down to the gate level can believe it.
Consciously deleting election surveillance videos in the state of Georgia.
(Or maybe subconsciously? Unconsciously?):
“As Georgia ballot harvesting probe starts, some election evidence has vanished already”—
https://justthenews.com/politics-policy/elections/georgia-ballot-harvesting-probe-starts-some-critical-election-evidence
This is an interesting story. Like the Politico fiasco from this morning are there no fact checkers in any kind of publishing anymore? This is a book for God’s sake and yet no one caught this.
https://legalinsurrection.com/2022/01/egyptologists-assertion-that-kyle-rittenhouse-killed-two-black-men-unravels-like-an-old-mummy/
Does anybody here remember Julian Jaynes theory on the origin of consciousness? His late 1970s book postulated that human consciousness arose from the breakdown of what he called a bicameral mind. In other words, humans were largely schizophrenic until circumstances required a merged conscious mind. His theory was supported by multiple lines of evidence. Jaynes understood the conscious mind as a biological machine producing metaphors to describe physical reality. He would likely say that the conscious mind is a product of the mind itself and devoid of any supernatural aspects.
I see human consciousness as something greater than just the brain. Its full description is only hinted at in the inexplicable events humans have experienced throughout history.
Griffin @ 4:49pm:
A quote from the author in the article:
It’s completely predictable, but still very, very funny!
neo,
Thanks for the link to the post on Delmore Schwartz. Very interesting stuff from you and the commenters. Ymar Sakar’s first comment fits all the elements of my experience. I will look for the Katherine Porter story.
shadow,
Regarding Klavan’s description of truth, the body and soul; I wish I knew of one source where he lays it all out. He is a gifted communicator, but I haven’t found a synopsis. He has discussed it several times on his podcast, but it sort-of builds on itself. I don’t know of a stand alone piece by him on the precise subject.
I’ve read his book, “The Great Good Thing” and it definitely touches on the subject. He’d likely state the entire book is precisely about this subject, but I don’t recall a succinct section of the book on this subject that would be sharable. I did enjoy the book. Coincidentally, he had a similar experience to my epiphany at the birth of his daughter and, since he is a writer, he does a good job of relating it. When I read it I wondered if he hadn’t had the precise, same epiphany I had?
I will search to see if I can find Klavan stating his philosophy succinctly.
Yawrate:
Yes! Jaynes makes a convincing case in his book. Even if he was wrong, it’s magnificent, brave, genius level of wrongness. Courage and independence of thought not being strong points in the scientific world these latter days. Whether it’s a shiny toy or a useful conceptual tool, either way, the Bicameral Mind Theory is a gem which sparkles.
Mind you, I’m also a fan of the QM deus ex machina hook to get us off the hook. Meat Robots just don’t seem right to me.
I finally watched the video.
Cogito ergo sum.
Zaphod,
“Meat Robots just don’t seem right to me.”
Although not a scientific hypothesis, per se, a hugely important point. Truth ought to correspond with reality. If 9 billion people and the billions who lived before them all “know” they exist and “know” that existence is more than the sum of their parts that ought to count for something.
“not a scientific hypothesis, per se”
A fact least likely to cause me sleepless nights. I fly by the seat of my baseball pants.
The determination of a lot of smart people to prove that they don’t actually exist is a very weird psychological phenomenon. Walker Percy has a possible explanation in Lost in the Cosmos, having to do with the need of the scientist to be a god to his data. To reduce his own and every other psyche to data is, in a contradictory way, to bring it all under his control.
Griffin on January 8, 2022 at 1:05 pm
the Twitter thread you cited (about the rock falls in Brazil) also had this down the thread a little ways:
Scott Adams
@ScottAdamsSays 15h
I declare my right, as a citizen of the United States, to label the 2020 election illegitimate based on a lack of transparency.
An election that can’t be fully audited — by design — must bear the full presumption of fraud.
Will now go look at potentially related link provided on the GA election data removals by Barry Meislin on January 8, 2022 at 4:40 pm
Interesting historical curiosity courtesy of the CIA:
https://asiafoundation.org/2015/04/08/george-dupont-the-only-thai-in-the-u-s-civil-war/
Chang and Eng Bunker, the ‘original’ Siamese twins will have to be cancelled, I guess, because they owned a plantation and slaves. I kid you not.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chang_and_Eng_Bunker#Mount_Airy
Mac,
“The determination of a lot of smart people to prove that they don’t actually exist is a very weird psychological phenomenon.”
That’s a great way of putting it!
The determination of a lot of smart people to destroy their own, most successful civilization, is a very weird psychological phenomenon.
The consciousness video had some great interviewees — Charles Tart, Ray Kurzweil, Hubert Dreyfus. I would liked to have heard Roger Penrose, who first brought quantum effects as an explanation for consciousness to my attention. But he’s 90 and in the UK.
I wasn’t so sure of George Lakoff, the cognitive linguist, who brought his credentials to the culture wars with his book on political messaging, “Don’t Think of an Elephant! Know Your Values and Frame the Debate: The Essential Guide for Progressives.” His argument is conservatives win debates by controlling the “frame” with “strict father” metaphors. To counter, Lakoff says progressives need to shift to frames based on the “nurturant parent.”
So it’s hard for me to take Lakoff seriously, but he is part of the “emobodied mind” movement — that our minds don’t stop at the brain but include the whole body — which I do respect.
I sure don’t have an answer to consciousness question. I’m fascinated that the current answers are so divergent. I go with:
_____________________________________
The Universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.
–J.B.S. Haldane
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PS The professor character in “Futurama,” Hubert J. Farnsworth, is half-based on Hubert Dreyfus — the critic of artifical intelligence in the video. He went to the mat early against AI as a parallel to human intelligence.
The other half was Philo T. Farnsworth, the great American inventor. I appreciated both sides of the homage.
The weird think about human consciousness is the ability to imagine things one has never seen or experienced.
While animals also are conscious, I don’t think they have the ability to imagine.
This uniquely (?) human trait is what enabled humans to invent things,music, art, literature, mathematics, science, etc. (though one can argue that math and science are not invented but discovered).
Imagination is what allows humans to question/ponder their own existence and ask “what is consciousness.” I don’t think animals can do this.
So why do humans have this trait, and animals not?
Is it the difference in the biochemistry of the human brain vs that of animals?
I assume there is a difference, but I don’t know.
Do human brains react differently to the myriad of subatomic particles (e.g. neutrinos, etc) or EM radiation that constantly bombard planet earth and thus all life forms on earth?
Anyway, a very interesting video that left me more perplexed than before. Sometimes ignorance is bliss.
“John Updike: we may skate upon an intense radiance we do not see because we see nothing else.”
Beautiful quote.
My late father was a cognitive scientist. Among other things, he wrote about optical illusions: the Moon Illusion, the Seeing-More-Than-Is-There (SMTT) phenomenon, and so forth.
Although he was not an overtly religious man, he knew that there are some things we don’t and perhaps cannot know. As he lay dying, we talked around the question of human consciousness and the afterlife. (His mind was thankfully untouched; it was his body that gave out.) I asked him whether we can also see *less* than is there. His answer was immediate and unequivocal: “Absolutely!”
I found that comforting, and still do.
JohnTyler,
We can dismiss it and call it “ instinct”, but somehow birds apparently imagine a nest to the point that they gather the materials and build it. Same with squirrels and their large tree nest. And burrowing animals who build cities underground, from ants to prairie dogs. And then the ants “… gathereth her food in the harvest.” Proverbs 6:8 And paper wasp who build nest. And wasp who build nest from mud. And beavers who build dams. And even some fish build nest of sorts. And spiders who spin their complex webs. And cats who stalk their prey. And primates who use rudimentary tools.
Speaking of “ instinct”. I find it hard to believe their was such specific selective “ evolutionary” pressure on birds to build nest like they do without even thinking about it, and then somehow that got passed on to their young.
Neo, here is Steve Kirsch’s latest on the impact of mRNA injections and Covid infections, hospitalizations and deaths
https://stevekirsch.substack.com/p/new-big-data-study-of-145-countries
On genius: one of the best definitions I have come across is “the ability to hit very large and important nails not quite on the head”. Hat tip to economist Philip Hanson, formerly of the University of Birmingham, writing about the Soviet philosopher and novelist-of-ideas Alexander Zinoviev way back in the early 1980s.
Why look–Phil’s article is referenced on (of all places) the Unz Review!:
https://www.unz.com/print/Survey-1982q1-00029/
Still under copyright, alas.
@Jon Baker @ 2:44;
IMHO it is instinct.
Why?
Because what birds and insects and squirrels and prairie dogs do never changes. They have been doing the same exact thing for many thousands of years.
It’s sort of like they are following a computer program that instructs them when and how to do what they do.
This inability (or is it a choice? or, given their resources, are they following an optimal path) to keep on doing the same thing – without any significant change – generation after generation after generation, may, in a way, be a definition of instinct.
True , primitive human cultures – to this day – live today as they did 10,000 years ago. But these groups are very isolated (e.g. the Korowai) are not representative of modern human culture.
Because they are humans, they must be able to imagine, but for whatever reason, it never compelled them to seek a new methods of living different than their prehistoric life style.
Which leads to another question; why do some cultures progress and others not?
Who knows.
Lee:
There’s so much wrong with the article you linked that it would take an enormous amount of time and study to explain. I’ll be more brief than that.
First of all, how many people on earth can understand it? Can you, for example? It is incredibly long and to understand the math it purports to use is beyond the ability of nearly everyone.
But that’s just the beginning of the difficulties. A lot of studies are difficult to understand and have complex math, but they’ve been published and peer-reviewed, and we at least know the training and credentials of the authors. Part of that review process involves other scientists vetting where the statistics (the numbers that are being crunched) come from, and whether they are accurate. As far as I can tell, this is not done at all for the article you linked. Where did author “Kyle A. Beattie” get these country statistics in the first place and in particular are they accurate? You may recall that in an earlier Lancet study on COVID, the initial statistics were “garbage in” and the study was discredited when the authors were asked to validate them and could not. What about this one?
I couldn’t even ascertain who this author – “Kyle A. Beattie” – is, but in the comments section at Substack, people said he’s a Canadian political scientist. I don’t know whether that’s true, but if it’s true then it certainly doesn’t inspire confidence that he knows what he’s doing in the sense of statistics of this complexity.
The trajectory of COVID in each country is very different even WITHOUT vaccines. Some countries were very lightly hit and some very heavily hit – prior to vaccines. Many countries also have had cycles (prior to vaccines) of high infection and low infection alternating back and forth. That represents a tremendous drawback to any study such as the one the author purports to have done. Unless all of that is controlled for in each country – as well as other factors such as age, changes in virus mitigation such as masking and distancing, methods of reporting, definitions of cases and deaths, definitions of what vaccinated means (how many?) and what brand of vaccines were used – it is impossible to say the data means anything.
This part in particular caught my attention (from the actual study itself, not the Substack article):
This makes no sense. Those countries that weren’t hard hit earlier often experience an increase later – it has to do with virus patterns, weather patterns, all sorts of things that we poorly understand. “Later” could certainly be after vaccines are introduced, but that would not mean any increase was caused by vaccines. And some countries (whether vaccinated or not) simply don’t seem to have much COVID ever, whether because of weather patterns, previous exposure of the population to related viruses, genetic resistance in that population, use of certain medicines in the general population, age of population, density of population, all sorts of things we poorly understand. These countries with lower disease rates will of course have lower vaccination rates for obvious reasons. But such countries (Burkina Faso, Chad, DRC, South Sudan, as used in the study) are typical only of themselves and do NOT represent the natural course of COVID as it would be in a country such as Italy or the UK if such a country didn’t have vaccines. That’s absurd.
From a Substack comment:
Another comment:
And another comment:
From the Circling the Bath House Drain Department:
https://www.dailywire.com/news/nascar-carolinas-lgbt-chamber-of-commerce-announce-partnership
They’re going to get it good and proper for LGB happening on their watch. Signing a Reinsurance Treaty with the Weirdos and Degenerates might pour some oil on the Waters.
Spectator Normie may need to make some adjustments and accommodations. But who the hell is he, anyway?
Today I Learned That:
https://vdare.com/posts/breakthrough-new-guinea-headhunter-documentary-lessens-chances-of-noticing-by-keeping-screen-black
“The NYT review does not dare mention the single most famous fact about this expedition: that Michael Rockefeller, the son of sitting New York governor (and future U.S. VP) Nelson Rockefeller and great-grandson of John D. Rockefeller, almost certainly got eaten by headhunters. Of course, why would anybody be interested in learning that young Mr. Rockefeller was devoured by cannibals rather than of his connection, such as it was, to Attica?”
Glorious! More like this please!
Went back over Roger Penrose’s quantum approach to consciousness in my copy of Penrose’s “The Road to Reality,” the most daunting book in my personal library. I don’t feel like typing out his text, which I don’t understand well at all. So here’s an abstract which covers the basics (which I don’t understand well either):
____________________________________
The microtubule-based model of consciousness, proposed simultaneously in the mid-1990s by the British physicist Roger Penrose and the American anesthesiologist Stuart Hameroff, is probably the best known, least understood, and most controversial among the various hypotheses that aim to account for such puzzling faculty in terms of quantum physics. In this theory microtubules —i.e., long fibrous structures that form an intracellular framework supporting the shape of every neuron— are able to integrate information in a non-computable way through transient conformational changes of the tubulin protein molecules that constitute them. Switching between two alternative states tubulin dimers allegedly may, apart from providing a huge capability for standard binary computation, reach a third quantum superposition state with its own specific wave function. As the number of tubulin dimers in the quantum superposition state gradually increases, coherence in this state is believed to build up and spread intracellularly and transcellularly through the population of microtubules across relatively wide regions of the brain. It is postulated that this process goes on up to a point when a spontaneous abrupt reduction of quantum coherence takes place, a collapse that amounts to an instant of awareness calculated to occur every 20–30 ms. The subjective impression of a continuous stream of consciousness would thus be the result of a succession of such self-reduction events.
–“Consciousness and Neuronal Microtubules: The Penrose-Hameroff Quantum Model in Retrospect”
https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-94-017-8774-1_16
____________________________________
I hope everyone is clear now. 🙂
The take-away, as I take it, is that Penrose and Hameroff are proposing a specific biological manner in which quantum effects could work in the brain, which means that the brain’s functioning is not computable — not predictably a function a of previous inputs — though what such effects might be are not explained..
Here’s an article with some detail on how Penrose’s idea might work.
The article suggests that backwards in time quantum effects might explain the ability of a tennis player to make conscious decisions about returning the ball, even though the brain is too slow to do so.
_________________________________
Gray (2004) observes that in tennis “The speed of the ball after a serve is so great, and the distance over which it has to travel so short, that the player who receives the serve must strike it back before he has had time consciously to see the ball leave the server’s racket. Conscious awareness comes too late to affect his stroke.” McCrone (1999): “[for] tennis players … facing a fast serve … even if awareness were actually instant, it would still not be fast enough ….” Nonetheless tennis players claim to see the ball consciously before they attempt to return it.
–“How quantum brain biology can rescue conscious free will”
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnint.2012.00093/full
Just read an Amazon product review (for an RME ADI2Pro ADC/DAC/Headamp) over lunch:
“Jeden Cent Wert ..Ende.
Verwende die Beyerdynamic T1 Gen.2 und der Klang ist HOLYSHIT NICHT VON DIESER WELT.”
So it turns out that you don’t need to study German at all to understand German. He likes it. A lot.