I love the corruption of the saying to give us the name. Reminds me of “Goodbye” being a corruption of “God be with ye”.

It’s not a passive process and the arising of socialism isn’t guaranteed.

First, I’ll say you’re right. There’s more than two sides. Its a mistake to only highlight the leaders and the fighters. The average inhabitants are primary in my world view.

I shared the long passage because I thought his slide from condemning netanyahu and the right wing of likud to criticizing slogans was important. So I posted a long passage to show the both sides he was criticizing. The second size isn’t Hamas, it’s social media with a “just asking questions” about Hamas.

Its funny to me that he gets that Likud* is a monster that needs to be banished. And I agree, Hamas emerged as a monster. But he fails to ever say who has almost all the cards. And who has all the power and where that is coming from.

Likud knows they can and will get away with ethnic cleansing. They know they are doing monsterous things. And that Israelis will thank them later. There will be no Palestinians left to blame or thank or codemn Hamas. If Hamas ever returns all the kidnapped, I don’t think Likud will stop. Do you?

Do you think what Hamas did on Oct 7th is anything near the scale of what Israel has done since? Israel denies targeting civilians or reporters and yet they seem to just die somehow. Isn’t this a horror that exceeds the terrorism of Hamas. We don’t have a word for it, but it’s worse. And the horror of Israeli control of Palestine, an act whose monstrosity can be hidden because of the power imbalance and the rest of the world pretending like nothing is happening … Again we have no words. We have no power. We pretend to when we scream “Free Palestine”. But we know all we have is sorrow.

* I use Likud to represent their whole coalition. If Likud fails to win the next election, but another right wing government emerges and continues the policy, my analysis still stands.

They both sides it.

I think Netanyahu and his crew of extremists are totally out of control and need to be stopped, and that the international community should put all the pressure it can on them to cease. Their excuse of self-defence has long since worn thin and has been replaced by a transparent desire to take control of Gaza and the West Bank permanently.

I believe this ultra-nationalist administration has hidden itself behind a terrified & grieving people and used them to deflect any criticism, using that fear and grief to further their ultra-nationalist agenda with terrible consequences, as we see now with the horrific blockade of aid to Gaza.

While our lives tick along as normal these endless thousands of innocent human souls are still being expelled from the earth… for what?

At the same time the unquestioning Free Palestine refrain that surrounds us all does not answer the simple question of why the hostages have still not all been returned? For what possible reason?

Why did Hamas choose the truly horrific acts of October 7th? The answer seems obvious, and I believe Hamas chooses too to hide behind the suffering of its people, in an equally cynical fashion for their own purposes.

I also think there is a further and extremely important point to make.

Social media witch-hunts (nothing new) on either side pressurizing artists and whoever they feel like that week to make statements etc do very little except heighten tension, fear and over-simplification of what are complex problems that merit proper face to face debate by people who genuinely wish the killing to stop and an understanding to be found.

This kind of deliberate polarization does not serve our fellow human beings and perpetuates a constant ‘us and them’ mentality. It destroys hope and maintains a sense of isolation, the very things that extremists use to maintain their position. We facilitate their hiding in plain sight if we assume that the extremists and the people they claim to represent are one and the same, indivisible.

If our world is ever able to move on from these dark times and find peace it will only be when we rediscover what we share in common, and the extremists are sent back to sit in the darkness from whence they came.

I sympathize completely with the desire to ‘do something’ when we are witnessing such horrific suffering on our devices every day. It completely makes sense. But I now think it is a dangerous illusion to believe reposting, or one or two line messages are meaningful, especially if it is to condemn your fellow human beings. There are unintended consequences.

It is shouting from the darkness. It is not looking people in the eye when you speak. It is making dangerous assumptions. It is not debate and it is not critical thinking.

Importantly, it is open to online manipulation of all kinds, both mechanistic and political.

I won’t even believe this on September 5th.

facts are always backed by numbers*

9/10 bolded statements are true.

* this fact isn’t backed by numbers

You have a 1.5 mo old. You don’t have time. Be a dad. Be a husband. Be a hobbyist.

Take the easy route now. Come back when your kid and family are in a flow state.

They just need will power

Agreed. After looking into it, there’s a clear and established process for drivers and it should be the same for bikers.

It looks like you can self host Navidrome.

Am I missing something? From what I see, this guy does tech repair videos. Did he get hit by an ebike?

Here’s the heart of the argument.

“Since e-bikes do not require a license, drivers of e-bikes can simply ignore their traffic summons with no repercussions whatsoever, making any enforcement futile,” the police spokesperson said. However, the new requirement that cyclists appear in court, or face an arrest warrant if they fail to, creates “a strong incentive to show up in court.”

The article does a good job of explaining why a court summons is any where from an unfair inconvenience to down right dangerous for some, but the initial concern should be addressed.

Maybe it’s because it’s because I just finished reading this section in Range, but I think it’s more than the engineers knew.

When sociologist Diane Vaughan interviewed NASA and Thiokol engineers who had worked on the rocket boosters, she found that NASA’s own famous can-do culture manifested as a belief that everything would be fine because “we followed every procedure”; because “the [flight readiness review] process is aggressive and adversarial”; because “we went by the book.” NASA’s tools were its familiar procedures. The rules had always worked before. But with Challenger they were outside their usual bounds, where “can do” should have been swapped for what Weick calls a “make do” culture. They needed to improvise rather than throw out information that did not fit the established rubric.

Roger Boisjoly’s unquantifiable argument that the cold weather was “away from goodness” was considered an emotional argument in NASA culture. It was based on interpretation of a photograph. It did not conform to the usual quantitative standards, so it was deemed inadmissible evidence and disregarded. The can-do attitude among the rocket-booster group, Vaughan observed, “was grounded in conformity.” After the tragedy, it emerged that other engineers on the teleconference agreed with Boisjoly, but knew they could not muster quantitative arguments, so they remained silent. Their silence was taken as consent. As one engineer who was on the Challenger conference call later said, “If I feel like I don’t have data to back me up, the boss’s opinion is better than mine.”

I think most of us believe decisions should be data driven, but in some edge cases gut instinct is valuable.

It is easy to say in retrospect. A group of managers accustomed to dispositive technical information did not have any; engineers felt like they should not speak up without it. Decades later, an astronaut who flew on the space shuttle, both before and after Challenger, and then became NASA’s chief of safety and mission assurance, recounted what the “In God We Trust, All Others Bring Data” plaque had meant to him: “Between the lines it suggested that, ‘We’re not interested in your opinion on things. If you have data, we’ll listen, but your opinion is not requested here.’”

They didn’t get blown up. The Challenger did.

That’s how it was designed. That’s how everyone uses it.

Sadly it’s been a week. I’ve read this several times as closely as I could and tried to understand where my apprehension lies. I spent some time with the wiki link to counterfactuals and wanted to really dedicate more time doing so, but wasn’t able to dedicate the time to it.

So, again, to restart the conversation, I wonder if, I have two separate confusions. The first, if consciousness is a property that is weakly emergent in brains, what is a brain?

I think I have a hard time buying that consciousness is a property of a brain and not mind. And I get that you are not trying to prove that it does. I’m far more interested in why, in the face of minimal support, we would align ourselves with weak emergence over strong emergence.

I have a lingering second problem. What is a model? In that wiki link, it has a three layer model: association, intervention, and counterfactuals. I would be hard pressed to consider the first two layers as sufficient for bing considered a model. But I think the three layer model doesn’t, as far as I’ve read, address intention, causal connection, or first order simulation. I think I’m hard pressed to see a collection of cells, neuron or otherwise, doing more than creating a response to a condition.

My group recently switched to Matrix and so this would be a tough sell, but it seems interesting. I haven’t been a fan of Matrix and miss the ease of UI in discord, but was happy to leave with it’s direction. How would you sell it with a small group that has small, but mounting usability issues with Matrix?

I should start off and say I’m less interested in the quesiton of free will than the relationship between consciousness and matter. I want to reframe that so you know what I’m focused on.

Modern theories are a lot more integrative. … [I]nstead it is an essential active element in the thought process.

Here, I’m assuming “it” is a conscious perception. But now I’m confused again because I don’t think any theory of mind would deny this.

On the other hand, if “it” is “the brain” then I need to know more about the theory. As I understanding it, the theory says that the brain creates models. Models are mental. I just don’t know how that escapes the black box that connects to the mind. But as you assert and I understand, it is:

stimuli -> CPM ⊆ brain -> consciousness update CPM -?> black box -?> mind -?> brain -> nervous system -> response to stimuli

If it isn’t obvious, the question marks represent where I don’t understand the model.

So if I were to narrow down my concerns, it would be:

1. Is a model a mental process?
2. If mental processes are part of the brain, then how so?

I’m going to stick with the meat of your point. To summarize,

1. Some materialist views create a black box in which consciousness is a passive activity
   brain -> black box -> mind
2. CPMs extract consciousness from the black box
3. Consciousness plays a function role by providing feedback
   brain -> black box -> CPM-> consciousness -> black box -> mind

But to go further, stimuli -> brain -> black box -> CPM-> consciousness update CPM -> black box -> mind -> response to stimuli

The CPM as far as I can tell is the following:
representation of stimuli -> model (of the world with a modeled self) -> consciousness making predictions (of how the world changes if the self acts upon it) -> updating model -> updated prediction -> suspected desired result

I feel like I’ve mis-represented something of your position with the self. I think you’re saying that the self is the prediction maker. And that free will exists in the making of predictions. But presentation of the CPM places the self in the model. Furthermore, I think you’re saying that consciousness is a process of the brain and I think it’s of the mind. Can you remedy my representation of your position?

Quickly reading the review, I went to see if they posited role for the mind. I was disappointed to see that they, not only ignored it (unsurprising), but collapsed functions normally attributed to the mind to the brain. Ascribing predictions, fantasies, and hypotheses to the brain or calling it a statistical organ sidesteps the hard problem and collapses it into a physicalist view. They don’t posit a mind-body relationship, they speak about body and never acknowledge the mind. I find this frustrating.

Sorry for the long delay. I think engaging with the material and what you wrote requires some reflection time and, unfortunately, my time for that is limited these days. And so while I was hoping to offer a more robust response after having read the links you provided, I think engagement was more necessary to keep the conversation fresh even if I’ve only had a glance at the material.

The brain in the dish study seems to be interesting and raised new questions for me. “What is a brain?” comes to mind. For me, I have a novice level understanding of the structures of the brain and the role in neurotransmitters, hormones, neuron structures, etc. But I’ve never really examined what a brain is and how it is something more than or other than it’s component parts and their operations.

Some other questions would be:

• What is the relationship between brain and mind?
• What do we mean by mind? Do all brains create a mind?
• Or, in context of this conversation, do all brains have a CPM?
• Does adaptive environmental behavior by species without a brain indicate a CPM?

So those are some of the initial thoughts I had and would read the paper to see if the authors are even raising that question in their paper.

But more fundamentally, we still have to examine the mind-body problem. Recontextualizing it to a CPM, “what is the relationship between a CPM and either the brain or the mind?” I am unclear if the CPM is a mental or physical phenomena. There seems to be a certainty that the CPM is part of the brain, but the entirety of it’s output is non-physical. I imagine that we assume a narrative where the brain in the dish is creating a CPM because it demonstrates learning, adaptive behavior based upon external stimuli.

Ultimately, I bring it back to a framing question. Why choose weak emergence prematurely? It limits our investigation and imagination.

Well… that’s my set of issues. I’ll try to find time to read those articles in the next few days!

Cheers!