How much gas did you huff before writing that comment?

you mean the Gestapo since GDR was integrated into the west German model

What specifically are you doubting here?

https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/staterev/

oops fixed

Also, it might be possible to engineer life forms that can actually survive and even thrive in space.

Sure, it’s not a surprising finding since the environment is a stable selection pressure driving evolution. It’s still nice to have these studies to confirm our intuition on the subject.

That’s still interaction with the environment though, what this research shows is that even without any such interaction the structures form. So, they’re not shaped by the environment, but are a type of firmware that’s encoded within the genes.

There has been a theory that the weights for the neural connections get mostly shaped by the environment, but this research shows that there’s effectively firmware wiring that will emerge without any external stimulus.

I agree with your point on infinite recursion, and that is precisely why intelligent design is not a useful framework. It is a thought terminating cliche that provides the illusion of an answer without the substance of one.

Saying a designer did it, doesn’t explaining anything, and just pushes the explanation back to a theoretically complex designer who in turn needs its own explanation. This halts all scientific inquiry. If we treat junk DNA or physical constants as mysterious designs, we stop looking for their mechanical functions. It is far better to sit with the discomfort of the unknown than to embrace a pseudo answer that shuts down investigation.

Indeed, and another point to consider is that it’s highly unlikely we’d observe a civilization at our level of development. Life on Earth appears around 4.5 billion years ago. Humans start evolving around 2.8 million years ago. Use of language appears around 100,000 years ago. Writing is invented around 5500 years ago.

Inventions of language and writing are the landmark moment here. Before language was invented the only way information could be passed down from ancestors to offspring was via mutations in our DNA. If an individual learned some new idea it would be lost with them when they died. Language allowed humans to communicate ideas to future generations and start accumulating knowledge beyond what a single individual could hold in their head. Writing made this process even more efficient.

So, after millions of years of life on Earth no technological development happened. Then when language was invented humans started creating technology, and in a blink of an eye on cosmological scale we went from living in caves to visiting space in our rocket ships. It’s worth taking a moment to really appreciate just how fast our technology evolved once we were able to start accumulating knowledge using language and writing.

Now let’s take a look at how technology itself has been evolving. Once we discovered radio communication we went through a noisy period where we were leaking a lot of our broadcasts into space, and within a span of a 100 years we started using more efficient communication, and encryption. If somebody intercepted our broadcasts today they would look like noise because they’re designed to look like noise. Our society today is utterly and completely unrecognizable to somebody from even a 100 years ago. If we don’t go extinct, I imagine that in another thousand years future humans will be completely alien to us as well.

So the period during which intelligent life would be recognizable to us during its course of evolution is infinitesimally small. The time between creating language and becoming an advanced technological society is measured in thousands of years, while evolution of life is measured in millions of years. The chance of two different intelligences finding each other at exact same stage of development where they might be able to communicate is incredibly unlikely.

I would also imagine that the biological phase for intelligent life is rather short. We’re likely to develop human style AIs within a century, and they will be the ones to go out and explore the universe. Meat did not evolve to live in space, we’re adapted to gravity wells. An artificial life form could be engineered to thrive in space without ever needing to visit planets. This is the kind of life that’s most likely to be prolific in space. Furthermore, post biological intelligences would likely be running at much faster speeds than our mental processes operate on. What we consider real-time would be might we consider to be geological scales. Such beings might consider what we view as real time akin to the way we look at continental drift. We’re aware that it’s happening, but it’s of little interest to use on day to day basis. It’s quite possible that advanced civilizations become solipsistic and care little for the outside universe.

For all we know the Universe may be teeming with intelligent life and we just don’t recognize it as such. We might be like an ant hill next to a highway looking to see if there are other ant hills around.

What the article talks about is that a study pointed out a long-term climate process involving algae. As the planet warms, it can lead to larger and more frequent algal blooms in the oceans due to warmer waters and increased nutrients. When these algae die, they sink and sequester carbon in deep-sea sediments, effectively removing it from the atmosphere for a very long time. Their research suggests that the process would take thousands of years to result in significant global cooling. It’s an extremely slow, natural feedback loop. The researchers emphasize that it operates on a timeline that is completely irrelevant to our current, human-caused climate crisis.

But hey, why read the actual article when you can just throw a tantrum like a child.

Didn’t actually red the article did you?

what you mean?

What’s more, Antonson and his colleagues found that the woodpeckers exhaled forcefully with each strike, akin to how professional tennis players grunt when they hit a ball. The birds likely do so because the breathing technique stabilizes the core, Antonson tells Popular Science’s Laura Baisas, increasing the power of each strike for both the birds and the human athletes.

It’s so lovely to see how the mask has finally fallen off and we get to see the EU as the totalitarian regime that it really is.

Oh that’s pretty awesome, I’d be interested to see this approach applied for coding agents as well. You could make a language that focuses on specifying a formal contract the agent has to fill, and then you could have LLM and evaluator converge on a solution.

Incidentally, I can highly recommend Consciousness Explained by Dennett, it’s a really good dive into origin of internal experience, what purpose consciousness serves, and how it might work https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consciousness_Explained

That’s similar to how my mind works as well.

The way I like to look at it is that we build models of the world in our heads. Our subjectivity is basically our own distinct understanding of the world that we develop through our unique experience. It’s not the objective reality itself, but it’s how we represent it and make sense of it.

Yeah that’s a really good way to describe it. Basically, it’s like a visual field, but not from the eyes, and my brain just kind of suppresses it. But practising focusing on it could help with making myself more attuned to paying direct attention to it. I really should try spend a bit of time on that.

It’s really fascinating to hear how other people’s mental processes work, it’s not something we tend to talk about. And it’s kind of easy to assume that other people’s minds work roughly like your own, but clearly there are some pretty big differences.