I was trying to explain the relayed subjective experience there. The relayed subjective experience is a discontinuity occurring that's similar to waking up. The self is the thing that relays the experience to other people. You're probably right that consciousness in some expansive sense didn't go away, but that's not what I was referring to. I was referring to what it was like to be the part of my friend that relayed the story to me.
We're going to be embarrassed of centralized solar in the future. Like big liver spots visible from space. Any expansion of energy supply is good - but assuming this doesn't detract from more effective efforts is naive. Even after making nuclear nearly cost-prohibitive with misguided regulation, nuclear is still a superior choice in the long run.
I think there are levels of inebriation disable your ability to contextualize sensory experience within a self. I think it basically amounts to becoming a p-zombie with some caveats.
I don't think there's a way define suffering without invoking contextualized pain and an entity that suffers (a self). A self is a complex phenomenon that has a bunch of additional requirements not least of which is the capacity for bridging multiple moments of sensory input that happen in the now.
One can remember that one suffered because one can experience pain in the now and bridge that into a context where the self exists. Selfing is the trick of consciousness, it's not necessarily the natural state of all creatures with sensory equipment or memory - it's an additional trick that only a handful of creatures have.
Great question. I would guess he woke up and that this was subsequent to him forming memories again. Memory seems to be a requirement for the kind of self-referential conscious experience that appears to be basically unique to humans. An anesthetic that acts entirely on memory formation and paralyzes the body is in many ways the ideal anesthetic. It's not super unlikely this is how many anesthetics work to at least some degree. If you were administered such a perfect anesthetic it's likely that subjectively you'd experience a distrinct discontinuity in time. Even if you received surgery during that discontinuity, you wouldn't ever suffer from it - not even on some deep non-conscious level. There is no suffering in the now, suffering requires a self which requires memory.
"Idea that one mammal has unrelated thinking/sensing from other mammals does not makes sense."
Sure it does, you can see it all around you. It's so incredibly apparent that its actually possible to miss it. It's like a fish denying the existence of water.
I'm talking about being extremely drunk. I have a friend that "woke up" walking in a park after a night of drinking. If he was already walking exactly who woke up? My friend the human-animal was walking already. My friend the human-consciousness woke up. It was his consciousness coming back online as the ethanol was metabolized in the parts of his brain that afforded his consciousness.
Humans that are blackout drunk are emotional but non-conscious. They can carry on full conversations without a sense of being. Basically every animal exists in this state continuously. It's why human behavior is vastly different from animal behavior. Self-referential consciousness is as much of a curse as it is a blessing. It's spoken about in this way by basically every human religion for a reason. This article is misses the mark entirely. This kind of sloppy thinking about consciousness exists in part because it's incentivized by fiat economics that require replacing economization-resistant traditional human food staples (like meat) - with less expensive alternatives to hide economic mismanagement.
Ever met a person who was blackout drunk? Easy example. They are very often not conscious but still emotional. You could easily imagine animals that exist in this state continuously without requiring chemical assistance. It makes sense on a neurological level as well. The more robust and evolutionarily older parts of the brain like the brain stem take much more ethanol to inhibit. The PFC is inhibited almost immediately - which can be credibly argued is part of why many humans drink alcohol.
Deregulate nuclear especially small scale reactors utilizing known technologies that make them incapable of melting down. Why engage in the insane mental gymnastics to set up some Rube-Goldberg machine of centralized wind and solar with battery backup. The costs are incredibly distorted for wind, solar and nuclear - with the latter being artificially expensive due to regulation and misinformed sentiment and the former being artificially inexpensive due to costs being hidden in the lifecycle, supply chain, and problems only seen at very large scale.
I don't deny stress prevents organisms from reaching their genetically-defined potential. I'm resisting a dishonest worldview that's sneaking inside the title but isn't present in the paper itself. All the statement about height was intended to be was a counterbalance that demonstrates the dishonesty of the editorialized title.
I agree that bitcoin is definitely in trouble if there's a powerful totalitarian world government that can unilaterally hack anything, stop any internet service via backdoors and packet manipulation, potentially break double SHA-256 encryption and send invincible commandos into any location without any kind of repercussions.
When governments get involved in free markets - isn't the thing that makes this situation worse that the market becomes even less free? I can't understand your reasoning here yet.
It seems like the worst thing about free markets are changes that make them unfree or coercive beyond the baseline coercion inherit in being alive. Free markets are just the state of nature and improving on nature is difficult right?
I'm in total support of you not having children "to starve the bourgeoisie". I want to do all that I can to help you remain true to this strategy as long as you feel this way!
Where does the money come from that funds these proxy wars? Taxes? Taxes barely cover half of what is spent year to year. Doesn't the rest comes from inflating the currency? Where else could it possibly come from? As long as we are running a massive deficit I can't understand how the money supply can actually decrease unless money is actively being taken out of circulation and deleted (regardless of what the federal reserve charts seem to say). This seems like an impossible task in a basic sense. People obviously notice when money is taken away or destroyed. Please make it make sense - I honestly don't understand.
Inflating the money supply by billions of dollars to fund several expensive conflicts around the world seems like it would have a larger effect on inflation right? We are in the process of regularly shooting down 300$ drones with weapons systems that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars (sometimes millions) per shot. Should we really have deep concern about wages that companies freely decide to pay their employees? Isn't this completely insane regardless of what any kind of "the research" happens to say?
The state wants to fully control the sources of media it currently only partially controls. How much more obvious can it get. It has nothing to do with the safety of anyone. It's all so tiring.
I am not discounting ideas or culture at all. I chose my terms wisely and never once mentioned genes. Culture is heritable and is very difficult to completely isolate from many other heritable or semi-heritable factors. Is cultural inheritance as straightforward a process as genetic inheritance? Absolutely not - but culture is certainly heritable. Take populations with barely functional societies and introduce Marxist cults of personality and you don't get North Korea. North Korea is a rarity in this sense. How long did it take many other pseudo-Marxist states to fall apart? Many of these states destroyed themselves so quickly they were essentially lost to history. Again, nothing to do with genetic determinism or cultural determinism - we're just noticing reality here. Humans deserve dignity and nothing I am saying is aimed towards undermining that.
It's a good thing fear of racism and anti-racist signalling is strong. Sometimes it comes across is as naive and whinging though. Is the wish for South Koreans to reproduce the people in their high-functioning society racist? Do we really think the hereditary composition of said society has nothing to do with how highly-functional it is? I think we can see the reality of these things in a sober way, and still maintain our human dignity - even if we aren't South Korean.
Paul Ehrlich seems like an evil person in that unintentionally or not he refuses to learn from his mistakes. They are also the kind of mistakes that incur massive opportunity costs which people are much less sensitive to than direct losses.