You are correct, the person was on life support. But they grew and went through puberty like any other normal functioning human. (I believe the person was born brain dead, and the wealthy parents couldn’t let go so they kept the person on life support at home).
Cells are living things by definition. So it is alive, though the body functions more like a tree than a mammal at that point. But a decentralized nervous system grew around the different vital organs.
The real flip side of your question is: do you think you’d still be you as a “brain in a vat” without any body?
Ultimately this whole discussion boils down to challenging the definition of “you” or “I”. Biologically every “singular” person is the result of many living things working together, so the concept of “I” is an illusion. Physically, there is no “I”, but only “us”.
This makes the discussion easier. If the hand is removed, then of course “we” are different because “we” lost a piece of “us”. This would also be true if “our” brain was removed.
Nevertheless, there have been cases of brain dead people’s body adapting to the lack of central nervous system, so the body is more independently alive than we tend to give it credit.
It’s not about the content, but rather the skills gained when becoming an expert on the content. For example, physics degrees are often sought after in the financial realm because of they’re expert ability to model things with mathematics.
Philosophers are generally expert thinkers, writers, and debaters. Not a lot of jobs are hiring philosophers for their content knowledge, but instead, they’re hired for their skills.
Please learn the definition of “Circumstantial Evidence”.
The reality is they defined it as “circumstantial evidence” which is a valid way to describe their premises.
Gotta think a little further, CmdrShepard49. If the DOJ brings California to court, then whatever decision the court makes will also set a precedent for what happened in Texas. You best believe that if the courts strike down California’s attempt at redistricting, then Texas will be next.
This is such a silly technical argument that I’ve seen twice now in this thread. Watts is just Joules/second. It’s entirely valid to wonder “what rate am I ‘consuming’ energy when I do X” rather than ask “how much energy did I ‘consume’ when I do X”
Making this correction is similar to telling someone that asking how fast they moved is wrong, and they should only ask how far they moved.
Technically, you’re both correct. Plutocracy is a type of Oligarchy.
The irony of a Republican lawmaker trying to make this point is unbelievable…
Given the random nature of the universe, point 1 is the only one I am pretty confident is true. The universe is a basically a massive probability function.
4790k was among the fastest per-core performance for many, many generations, even long after CPUs with 4x as many cores that could do 2x as much work total, 4790k could still beat them on single-core performance.
Tbh, this is testament for Intel’s CPU stagnation more than anything else. Hence, why they are getting cooked financially today.
Even today it’s still a great CPU and I’m still running one of my gaming machines with it.
Idk if I would call it a great CPU today when you can achieve roughly double the performance with a budget tier ryzen 5 7600. Not to mention that a 7600 will get to use ddr5 rather than ddr3 memory.
Hehe, yeah, it’s a bit harsh to call it science fiction, especially this day in age when a lot of new physics lives in theoretical physics.
Cosmological models are very difficult to test given their nature. In many cases they are tested in massive physics simulations. The general test is to simulate the cosmological theory and see if it produces a universe that has the same observable qualities as our current universe once the simulation reaches our present epoch.
Nevertheless, Hawkins had his own reserves regarding his theory due to it not being experimentally falsifiable; but one must understand that rejecting the multiverse theory = rejecting the big bang theory since they are currently coupled.
I’m pretty sure the multiverse theory is baked into the big bang theory and cosmological theories, so I wouldn’t necessarily call it mostly science fiction.
Cosmological hypotheses suggest universes with different initial conditions are possible (different space-time geometries, different elementary particle masses, etc.). The big bang theory suggests multiple universes (not just ours) with different initial conditions were formed due to eternal inflation. As the multiverse continues to undergo this eternal inflation, there forms pockets where the inflation has ended and is “hospitable”. Our observable universe would be an example of such pockets, but since inflation is eternal, there should be many of these pockets.
Not exactly germ theory, but the early concepts of contamination which ultimately led to germ theory.
The Native Americans at the time did not postulate the concept of bacteria and viruses, but they understood that sickness was not supernatural and that it was important to sterilize in order to prevent further sickness.
Native American medicine was in many ways more advanced when compared to European medicine at the time. They also introduced things like sun screen, painkillers, and dental hygiene to Europeans.
Some Major Issues:
The industrial revolution started almost a century and a half after 1600 (in 1760) which was well after European colonization.
You are assuming that Europe would have developed the same way if they remained isolated. For example, the fundamental ideas which ultimately led to the modern concept of disease (bacteria and virus causing infection) was introduced to Europeans via the Native Americans. Beforehand, Europeans thought sickness was caused by religious superstition. This is why sterilization between surgeries wasn’t really a thing in Europe beforehand. European medicine involved reusing bloody knives to perform surgerys on different people because they didn’t understand the concept of cross contamination.
The knowledge today is not purely the result of European thinkers. Your prediction grossly discounts the contributions to science and technology from other cultures in world.
BeliefPropagator posted a link above which possibly verifies the screenshot: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Jul/11/grok-musk/
I get that we need to be wary of AI slop, I really do; but If speaking academic English with decent grammar becomes associated with talking “like a bot”, then we are cooked.
This is a good point to bring up, but this correlation is still being debated: the causal connection between the IQ test and the correlation is unclear, and there is debate on whether the correlation is being constructed through bad data or analysis techniques. Because of this, no one can confidently claim whether IQ tests predicts good job performance, employment, etc.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4557354/
[Skip to the conclusion at the end to get the tldr, since this is a long scientific publication]
You truly believe the semantics of the English language disproves the point? English and the way it defines “I” is greatly affected by things seperate from biological definitions (one being the spiritual concept of the “soul”)
Also, there did exist languages in other cultures that did not have the same concept of “I” as the English language. Your counter-argument is very weak.