Anything dealing with perception is going to be somewhat circular and vague. Qualia are the elements of perception and by their nature it seems they are incommunicable by any means.

Awareness in my mind deals with the lowest level of abstract thinking. Can you recognize this thing and both compare and contrast it with other things, learning about its relation to other things on a basic level?

You could hardcode a computer to recognize its own process. But it’s not comparing itself to other processes, experiencing similarities and dissimilarities. Furthermore unless it has some way to change at least the other processes that are not itself, it can’t really learn its own features/abilities.

A cat can tell its paws are its own, likely in part because it can move them. if you gave a cat shoes, do you think the cat would think the shoes are part of itself? No, And yet the cat can learn that in certain ways it can act as though the shoes are part of itself. The same way we can recognize that tools are not us but are within our control.

We notice that there is a self that is unlike our environment in that it does not control the environment directly, and then there are the actions of the self that can influence or be influenced directly by the environment. And that there are things which we do not control at all directly.

That is the delineation I’m talking about. It’s more the delineation of control than just “this is me and that isn’t” because the term “self” is arbitrary.

We as social beings correlate self with identity, with the way we think we act compared to others, but to be conscious of one’s own existence only requires that you can sense your own actions and learn to delineate between this thing that appears within your control and those things that are not. Your definition of self depends on where you’ve learned to think the lines are.

If you created a computer program capable of learning patterns in the behavior of its own process(es) and learning how those behaviors are similar/dissimilar or connected to those of other processes, then yes, I’d say your program is capable of consciousness. But just adding the ability to detect its process id is simply like adding another built in sense; it doesn’t create conscious self awareness.

Furthermore, on the note of aliens, I think a better question to ask is “what do you think ‘self’ is?” Because that will determine your answer. If you think a system must be consciously aware of all the processes that make it up, I doubt you’ll ever find a life form like that. The reason those systems are subconscious is because that’s the most efficient way to be. Furthermore, those processes are mostly useful only to the self internally, and not so much the rest of reality.

To be aware of self is to be aware of how the self relates to that which is not part of it. Knowing more about your own processes could help with this if you experienced those same processes outside of the self (like noticing how other members of your society behave similarly to you) but fundamentally, you’re not necessarily creating a more accurate idea of self awareness just be having more senses of your automatic bodily processes.

It is equally important, if not more so, to experience more that is not the self rather than to experience more of what would be described as self, because it’s what’s outside that you use to measure and understand what’s inside.

Yes most definitely, I’d imagine most animals are conscious.

In fact my definition of sapience means several animals like crows and parrots and rats are capable of sapience.

Personally, I’m more a fan of the binary/discrete idea. I tend to go with the following definitions:

• Animate: capable of responding to stimuli
• Sentient: capable of recognizing experiences and debating the next best action to take
• Conscious: aware of the delineation between self and not self
• Sapient: capable of using abstract thinking and logic to solve problems without relying solely on memory or hardcoded actions (being able to apply knowledge abstractly to different but related problems)

If you could prove that plants have the ability to choose to scream rather than it being a reflexive response, then they would be sentient. Like a tree “screaming” only when other trees are around to hear.

If I cut myself my body will move away reflexively, it with scab over the wound. My immune system might “remember” some of the bacteria or viruses that get in and respond accordingly. But I don’t experience it as an action under my control. I’m not aware of all the work my body does in the background. I’m not sentient because my body can live on its own and respond to stimuli, I’m sentient because I am aware that stimuli exist and can choose how to react to some of them.

If you could prove that the tree as a whole or that part of a centralized control system in the tree could recognize the difference between itself and another plant or some mycorrhiza, and choose to respond to those encounters, then it would be conscious. But it seems more likely that the sharing of nutrients with others, the networking of the forest is not controlled by the tree but by the natural reflexive responses built into its genome.

Also, If something is conscious, then it will exhibit individuality. You should be able to identify changes in behavior due to the self referential systems required for the recognition of self. Plants and fungi grown in different circumstances should respond differently to the same circumstances.

If you taught a conscious fungus to play chess and then put it in a typical environment, you would expect to see it respond very differently than another member of its species who was not cursed with the knowledge of chess.

If a plant is conscious, you should be able to teach it to collaborate in ways that it normally would not, and again after placing it in a natural environment you should see it attempt those collaborations while it’s untrained peers would not.

Damn now I want to do some biology experiments…

This isn’t my field but like it shouldn’t be horrible to drink a little sip of this right? It’s just salts and amino acids and sugar, so I’d expect worst case scenario you majorly throw off your electrolyte balance and possibly give your kidneys and liver a lot of amino acids to get rid of. But that’d probably require drinking a significant amount yes?

Anyone with more bio knowledge want to correct or confirm this hypothesis?

TIL some of my asexuality comes from ADHD lol

This is prejudice against academics with dyslexia :(

The Dalai Lama currently in exile assumed his political power at age 15 AFTER the PRC invaded. So unless the PRC didn’t end feudalism in 1950 like they say they did (and also assuming the slavery actually happened the way the PRC said it did despite others claiming it is mostly just PRC propaganda used to try and legitimize their invasion) I don’t think you can really call him a slave owner.

Regardless, the only one trying to twist things seems to be you because once again, you are trying to draw attention away from the main argument which is that the PRCs actions were imperialist.

Even if the slave owner claim was correct, that wouldn’t negate the other events and imperialist actions I listed. However, because you can’t refute those claims you instead chose to default to ad hominem, trying to attack me or my reliability rather than the evidence I listed.

You know I haven’t personally seen ICE in my city; I guess that means there is no genocide or imperialism happening here either. Guess America isn’t imperialist after all lol

No, OP is probably referring to the invasion as a whole, as well as the genocide and cultural/social repression carried out by the Chinese government on Tibet during its ongoing occupation of the country.

You can free slaves without needing to annex the region. Claiming an independent country for your own government to control permanently (regardless of supposed initial intent) is called imperialism.

The kidnapping of a child for the purposes of destroying/controlling the religion of a culture you conquered definitely is imperialism.

As is the shelling of civilian populations to quell protests, shelling major sacred monasteries / cultural heritage sites, imprisonment and torture of women during women’s uprising, installing your own government controlled head of a religion because the original one said bad things against your imperialist government etc.

Those are probably what OP is referring to when they mean the PRC acted imperialist when it used ”military interventions, and cultural influence to maintain their dominance over other nations” like Tibet.

^ that quoted section is from the ProleWiki page for Imperialism btw, so even by the communist/socialist definition of imperialism, the occupation of Tibet by the PRC was/is imperialist

Fake: anon gets frequent tinder dates? Doubt.

Gay: while on said dates he’s thinking about another man.

Also it’s like the worst man to think of for both for the object of attraction and for the confidence trick.

Talking like Cave Johnson would be a much better option all around. Then you’re not drooling over or mimicking a pedophile AND you can make vaguely ominous jokes about science, so it’s clearly the better choice

Zoidberg A: “I think she means you.”

Fake: no cockney slang

Gay: porn bruv sounds like a name for a gay Brit incest porn channel

I think I get what you’re saying, but if you’ve ever looked into particle life simulators, they are much less susceptible to the “going static” you talk about. The more properties that exist, even purely randomized, the more likely you’ll get extended chaotic behavior. (Also the current scientific outlook is that our universe is technically destined to “go flat” just like those scenarios you mentioned)

The real issue with your reasoning from a scientific standpoint is that we don’t know how many universes there are. Maybe there are an uncountably infinite number of universes holding every possible combination of physical rules. Then in these universes there would be infinite universes that evolve life like ours without needing a creator. You can’t say/prove/estimate the chances of a universe having life producing rules because you have no idea how many universes might exist at all.

Furthermore, the probability that we just happen to exist in one of the possible universes that is capable of harboring life like this is actually 100%. This is a fact because, if a universe couldn’t harbor life like ours, we wouldn’t exist in it.

Also on the note of random chance creating the complexity we see in life, have you heard the theory that life didn’t start on earth and actually might’ve started only a few million years after the big bang?

There was a period of time after the first stars had created the lighter elements (the ones life uses like carbon nitrogen oxygen) where the universe was much closer together, and with enough pressures/temperatures that the conditions for water to exist and remain in liquid form were prevalent.

We know from the old studies of trying to prove life could spontaneously emerge that if you add energy (like UV light from stars) to water and nitrogen and carbon, you do get organic compounds: amino acids, alcohol, ketones, etc. So the basic building blocks of life probably existed in relative abundance in parts of the universe at this time.

Now the universe would have been in this state for millions of years. A relatively dense, warm, wet universe for millions of years and have still larger than our galaxy. I’d imagine the chances of RNA forming viroid rings somewhere in a cloud that size are relatively high. And after that, well RNA + basic amino acids + energy + time is pretty much all you need to get evolution going.

That’s my favorite life starting theory, especially since it kind of fits better with our model of genome growth rate over time.

Anyway, the problem of not knowing how many universes there are/have-been/could-be is the real reason no one can actually say or “calculate the probability” of how likely a universe with life is. But I thought you might find it fascinating to learn that life could’ve started in much better conditions and a lot longer ago than you may have thought when you originally did your math.

Sidenote: if intelligent life must be created by some intelligent thing, where did that intelligent creator come from in your theory? Is there an infinite chain of creators creating universes? If not, if intelligent life can be created without needing a creator, then your main assertion must be false. If it does loop or go on forever, then the full set (universe) of these chained universes actually does either exist forever or loops indefinitely meaning it in total was not created by a creator, again contradicting your assumption that life must be created by a planned process.

I know the oc prompt was an unscientific belief that can’t be shaken, but I’m curious, what math makes you think the universe or just life was planned?

I was raised religious but when I first started programming and wrote my own evolutionary algorithm, I realized that life existing makes as much sense as entropy does. If a process can replicate itself efficiently will you have more or less of it later in time? If two replicators require the same resources, which is more likely to survive? It’s randomness that makes this process efficient.

So I thought that perhaps a god set the events in motion to create life by evolution, but then I learned about Conoways Game of Life and other cellular automata, and I wrote my own particle life simulations and I realized that life-like things can arise from almost any system of random rules. The only caveat seems to be that some form of “energy” must be conserved if you want to avoid the situations where the system dies completely or reach an unchanging equilibrium.

And now, as I’m learning about neural nets (specifically the more biologically plausible ones) and the structure of human brains, it all seems so natural that things would arise the way they have.

Given enough time and how vast the universe is, I’d be more surprised to find that sentient life hadn’t evolved naturally on at least a few of the sextillions of planets and other celestial bodies in the universe.

So I’m curious what math you’re basing your opinion on

Any change is a difference in between two states. Creation implies something changed.

However, if by transformation you mean that some property is conserved between all states, only when that’s true is creation a transformation.

If energy was not conserved, and some suddenly popped into existence that would be a change and creation but not necessarily a transformation (depending on your definition of transformation).

I recently realized that the concept of “before” is an assumption we try to place on the universe without any basis that it exists outside the universe.

Like we are used to deterministic phenomena. Effect follows cause, something followed from something else. But that’s only true from our perspective inside universe.

The universe might not change at all from an outside perspective. What if every moment exists simultaneously? Only from within a moment does the concept of before and after make sense, but outside the universe there’s no concept of before. Everything just is.

Maybe it’s a ring, maybe it’s a multidimensional volume containing all the possible moments that could ever happen, maybe it’s bounded “temporally” in certain directions, maybe all the moments chain together in a crazy space filling curve such that all possible moments/worlds would eventually be reached if you started in one and kept following the curve to the next. But nothing has to actually be changing. The paths don’t need to change, they didn’t need to be created or destroyed.

Point is that the “before” of the universe might not exist at all even if the timelines within it start and stop at defined points. We feel the need for things to have a reason because that’s what we’re used to experiencing, but we’re only used to that due to the rules within our part of existence.

The concept of “change” or “creation” or “time” might not exist at all outside our experience.

Iirc some of the stoics believed in a similar idea. They thought the world was deterministic and it simply happened over and over the exact same way every time.

On the note of energy not being created or destroyed. The energy in your brain doesn’t wait till the universe ends to leave. It continues moving as heat or chemical reactions when we die just like it did before. The order of the system it’s in breaks down, but all that energy keeps existing forever.

Since you emit energy as infrared light just by being warm, and infrared is capable of leaving the atmosphere. It is possible, that just by stepping outside, some of your energy has already left the planet and made it to other astronomical bodies in our solar system.

If we assume there is life on any of the moons or planets or asteroids nearby, who knows, maybe some of the energy that used to be part of you has already become part of a new, alien, life form.

You just brought back memories of my siblings and I walking around outside barefoot to the point these things penetrated our shoes more easily than our feet.

In rural southern Utah these things are literally everywhere. If you go out with cheap foam flip-flops, the entire bottom of the shoe will embedded with dozens of these seconds after you start walking around lol

Kind of oddly satisfying to pull them out of the soles of shoes tbf

Originally, IQ was a score obtained by dividing a person’s estimated mental age, obtained by administering an intelligence test, by the person’s chronological age. The resulting fraction (quotient) was multiplied by 100 to obtain the IQ score.

“Originally” because that’s not the case for modern IQ tests because now we fit the data to a normal distribution, giving us a much more reliable and repeatable experiment.

Furthermore, even if that was quotient formula was still used, the average score of others your age is still a population parameter (something you cannot measure the true value of) that you can only sample and estimate for the possibly indefinite population. Your confidence in your estimate of the average depends on the number of samples; the actual parameter does not because it is (supposedly) an inherent quality of the class of things you’re sampling.

Please just go through a statistics crash course I don’t know how to explain this better.

The sigma 8 was for our confidence interval of the point estimate, not a score that would give you sigma 8 results.

Furthermore as your picture points out, that test was defective because it gave a standard deviation higher than it said. The modern ones normalize the distribution to avoid that problem.

There is no theoretical limit to IQ. If you gave an arbitrarily long enough test it would be possible (though incredibly unlikely) that you could get IQ values in the thousands.

I think you are getting confused by what the meaning of the score is supposed to be. It has nothing to do with the number of people in existence.

The test is assuming that humans have an IQ that follows a normal distribution. They then sample humans and normalize the scores of each sample population. This is not a “you are smarter than x people” test. It assumes that IQ is an inherent property of humanity and gives you a probability of people (any amount of them) having a lower score than you.

Sure, at a certain point that basically means you’re likely to be smarter than everyone alive currently. And yeah if we get multiple scores like that it means it is likely (though not guaranteed) that our metrics are not effective.

As a counter example of why multiple crazy high scores don’t necessarily mean the scales are broken here’s a thought experiment:

Imagine you did this test over a million years or just that you actually sampled an absurd number of people like 4quadrillion. There are going to be people who ranked the highest on that set. So the chance of a person being in the top 4 is about 1 in a quadrillion.

Now if we make the assumption that IQ is unaffected by time, it is entirely possible that two of those people might be alive at the same time or even all 4 of them.

These people would have IQ scores placing them wayyy above the population of their current time period, but that wouldn’t change the fact those scores are still in fact accurate.

The scores have nothing to do with the current living population of humanity; those scores are supposed to be relative to general human intelligence regardless of time or place. Ergo, if we assume intelligence is not limited and that humanity survives indefinitely (and that IQ tests actually mean something) then there is a nonzero chance of getting any arbitrary score in the natural numbers. 400, 8000, 10^23, who cares.

As long as you can write tests long enough and you keep testing humans long enough you’ll eventually find someone who scores at those levels without your test being defective. That’s how probability works.

If you still don’t get what I’m saying or what a normal distribution is, I suggest you go to YouTube or peertube to look it up. Chances are they’ll be able to explain it better than me lol