So how do you measure qualia? What is it made of? How is it actually defined? How do you detect if qualia is present in something other than your own head?
I stand by my statement that qualia is simply an artifact of our cognitive architecture. You are welcome to disagree but the arguments you are presenting fail to convince me in the slightest.
So our subjective experience must “exist” because we experience it? This seems rather circular. My personal take, consciousness is an artifact of how our brains work. It’s not a thing that exists in any physical sense, it is simply part of the model our brain structures the stimulation it receives throughout the course of our lives.
Your opening statement is incorrect. Observation in the quantum mechanics sense does not have anything to do with consciousness. Observation is really just a form of interaction.
I think the real issue is with the fact that consciousness is not particularly well defined. Something can be more or less conscious than something else but what precisely does that mean? Has there ever been a means of measuring or detecting consciousness in anything?
Interesting but I struggle to see how this hypothesis could ever be proven or disproven. If it can’t actually be tested then I don’t see how it presents more scientific value any other religious or superstitious belief.
Either point break or bad boys 2.
More than one, actually.
My personal take is that intelligence is much like muscular strength. Genetics probably play a role but the more important factor is how you use and train your cognitive strength. A cognitively sedentary person will almost always be less intelligent than a cognitively active person, I doubt genetics play a large role unless we’re talking about people who put similar levels of effort into their development and upkeep.
A healthy office culture and team members to collaborate with. I go to the office because interacting with my coworkers in person is enjoyable and I learn new things faster through those interactions. It helps that we also have free coffee and snacks and the commute is less than 10 minutes but I primarily go in because of the people I work with.
Atropine? My cat had keratitis right after we adopted her and we gave her that with a cocktail of antibiotics and steroids. The atropine caused her eye to dilate so she looked like a Bond villain while her eye was healing.
Huh, I hadn’t considered that some of the stories would have pharmacological explanations like that. Some of the stories would make more sense if the person were blasted on opium or something like that.
Congrats on getting out, I hope it wasn’t too awful to extract yourself. Also, lol @ the ephedra thing, I haven’t heard that before so it made me chuckle and gave me a new perspective on how some of those unbelievable stories can be explained.
It’s certainly possible but in my Catholic upbringing, virtually every martyr has some badass story that implied they were above pain and suffering of their execution (due to their absolute faith, of course). Some stories might be true but my money is on most being heavily embellished. This one in particular seems implausible because I would imagine that being grilled would send your body into shock pretty quickly. Plus the heat would likely damage your lungs when you breathed so I doubt someone could talk for very much of the process.
I’m certainly not saying it’s impossible but I think it’s more likely false (or embellished beyond recognition) than true.
sick burn
Solid pun.
Yeah, this looks like artwork of saint Lawrence, who was basically grilled to death. I remember being told that partway through the execution, he reported told the executioners, “You should probably flip me over, I think I’m done on this side.” I strongly doubt this actually happened since the mythology around martyrs is typically heavily embellished to make them look like badasses.
Well said. Keep being awesome!
Science is built upon repeatable experiments that can be used to test hypotheses. It is not built on axioms and logical extrapolation- those are used to form new hypotheses but they are insufficient by themselves. We don’t decide something exists, we hypothesize that it exists and make predictions based on that hypothesis. If experimental results line up with our predictions then we call that a theory. If new data contradicts the theory or hypothesis then we revise and try again.