>>Old ICE cars are basically the same as new ones.
I'm not sure that's totally true. The rate of change might be lower, but new ICE vehicles have higher efficiency (directly correlating to longer EV range) and are safer, more comfortable, and quieter.
I am definitely on the pro-EV side, nearly an evangelist I suppose, but ICE vehicles do improve.
How are ICEs quieter than EVs? Are you talking about the artificial noise EVs put out at low speeds so they don't sneak up on people?
ICEs have longer range, some of them are really fuel efficient, especially hybrids. But they drive relatively more poorly unless you opt for a sports car that is cramped and expensive. It isn't the worse thing in the world to drive an ICE, but it is noticeably less fun than driving an EV.
> How are ICEs quieter than EVs? Are you talking about the artificial noise EVs put out at low speeds so they don't sneak up on people?
I think your second sentence answers your first. Car noise = tire noise + motor noise. EVs have very low motor noise compared to IC.
EVs also tend to have better cabin dampening on average, but that likely has to do with price-band consumer expectations, and not inherent to the method of propulsion.
You know you can disable that. It might be against the law though, and it isn't the EVs that demand noise, it is the society that demands them not to be silent killers. Even Hybrids have to make this noise when they are running on their electric drive trains.
But let's say ICEs were made as quiet, they would be demanded to make noise as well. Also, no one has done anything about tire noise yet, so at high speeds, EVs and ICEs are about the same.
That wasn't the point being made. The point was that newer ICE cars are quieter than older models, and thus ICE vehicles have improved (at least to some degree) over the same period as EVs.
Stop paying companies to put spyware in your house. Don't connect your smart TV to the network, don't buy cloud cameras, and above all don't run a phone with an OS that they phone company gives you.
Materialistic interpretations of the world around us are quite literally the only useful ones. If we didn't do that we'd be sleeping in caves and hitting each other with heavy rocks.
While I hold a similar view as Sean Carroll that it is basically hand-waving to say we'll never understand consciousness, I can't discount Donald Hoffman's Interface theory of perception and that evolutionary fitness requires we only perceive four dimensions (but there could be more as hypothesised in string theory).
Wrong. Materialistic only got us to a level. Now we're looking past materialism in neural reuse, coordination dynamics and ecological psychology and neurobiology. The causes are out there in contradictory correlations.
A word is a material? You can show me the brain state that corresponds repeatedly and with continuous accuracy a single word? I don't think so.
You can train a computer to correspond to an individual's idiosyncratic brain state for their word voxels, but no one has yet to reduce the material to a single repeatable voxel state.
“We refute (based on empirical evidence) claims that humans use linguistic representations to think.”
Ev Fedorenko Language Lab MIT 2024
The problem with the materialist POV is it doesn't solve the most basic question of brain states. No not everything is a material.
There clearly are processes, like oscillations, that require material to some extent, but are not material themselves. And that's the problem with the materialist camp. If the oscillations, dynamically integrated, are the source of intel/consciousness, then material may not even be a requirement of life. We may just be material sinks.
> There clearly are processes, like oscillations, that require material to some extent, but are not material themselves. And that's the problem with the materialist camp. If the oscillations, dynamically integrated, are the source of intel/consciousness, then material may not even be a requirement of life. We may just be material sinks.
I understand.
There is a however a flaw in that thinking.
There is no oscillation that exists outside of some material/medium to oscillate. I agree it is important to distinguish the water from the wave. There is no light wave without the photon.
Thus - I strongly suspect - there is no consciousness without the brain (or similar medium).
It's not a mind body problem, unfortunately, it's problem of hard indeterminism. We lack free will but the universe is not necessarily deterministic. Chaos has some level of intervention, like quantum darwinism, or gravity probability that is expressed somewhere between physical and process. This may be the interzone both share that is where the gateway exists, how DNA emerges, how neurons are evolved. The material may be inseparable both at origin and inexorably from the process, making the material simply the partner to the process. So materialism may simply be an illusion by itself.
As all our explanations are immaterial, they are post hoc observations, to claim any direction to the role of material is to sportscast the existence of material. There is no consciousness without the process, the material may be secondary as its explanation is a process as well.
We haven't found the format that finds the material in its place yet, whether its eliminative materialism, or another state-process pairing that cuts materialism down to a partner role. The jury is still out, but materialism isn't the answer.
Do you thing emergent properties are somehow not materialist? Do you know what the word means? Do you think it means only things that make a noise when you knock on them exist? You seem to be very confused about the conversation we're having.
If you're bringing up emergence when I've already raised ideas of ecological relations, then it's you who must be very confused about the conversation we're having.
>A creative genius envisioning a new world and a person trapped in a state of torment isn't the hardware, but the learned software of regulation, awareness, and perspective.
No, it's hardware. There is no amount of 'wisdom' bootstraps pulling that will make you not schizophrenic.
I mean, the brain is hardware as in we can take things like neurons and force them to do things like computation in a standalone fashion (biological computer). An FPGA would be the closest non-biological thing we've created. It's hardware that can be programmed like software.
Maybe we need a new acronym. Self Programmable Neuron Array. SPNA.
Ah, psychologists contriving arguments on why the brain isn't some particular thing or another. Or, that "phycologist learns about fuzzy edge/component compression"
I expect it would be pretty significant probably when compared to the actual fiat inflows/outflows to and from the cryptocurrency market.
Trying to liquidate $15bn to USD reasonably quickly would very likely cause a massive drop the price, which would correspondingly drop the market cap by potentially many times that $15bn.
Haha that last part is pretty wild. rather than worrying about systemic problems in the entire internet let's just make mandates crippling devices that China, where all these devices are made, will defffinitely 100% listen to. Sure, seems reasonable. Systems that rely on the goodwill of the entire world to function are generally pretty robust, after all.
I'm sorry that you find thinking about second order dynamics annoying, but that's what you have to do if you actually want effective laws. Just making laws doesn't magically fix problems. In many cases it just makes much more exciting problems.
This take is simply wrong in a way that I would normally just sigh and move on, but it's such a privileged HN typical pov that I feel like I need to address it. If a plumber did plumbing specifically because someone needed it and he would be paid, would you call them a narcissist? If a gardener built a garden how their customer wanted would you call them a narcissist? Most of the world doesn't get to float around in a sea of VC money doing whatever feels good. They find a need, address it, and get to live another day. Productively addressing what other people need and making money from it isn't narcissism, it's productivity.
You are comparing a skilled trade that commands ~100k annual compensation to positions that have recently commanded 100 million dollars in compensation upon signing, no immediate productivity required, as this talent denial is considered strategic.
You consider the person who expects eventual ethical behavior from people that have 'won' capitalism (never have to labour again) to be privileged.
Is caring for a helpless infant objectively good if it is infected with an extremely virulent plague that will undoubtedly kill any human who comes in contact with it, or a human who comes into contact with them, or them, many layers deep? What if that infant has 2 days to live no matter what, but millions of people will die if it's cared for?
It's not so absurd. The only afterlife that exists (in a materialist sense) is what other people think of you. The only part of 'you' still around us quite literally just a memory in someone's head. That's not nothing.
Whether we should care about that or not is a philosophical conversation, I suppose. I would take the side of if we care about what people think about us when we are alive, surely we should care what they think of us when we are dead. Otherwise, we only value their opinion of us as a function of what they will do for/to us, which seems not great.
Weird. Cesium 137 is only produced in spend nuclear fuel as far as I know. Was someone trying to get rid of nuke waste contaminated scrap metal? Soviet maybe?
Cs-137 is commonly extracted from fuel used as a source for radiation therapy, although less so these days, due in part to incidents with misplaced sources.
The poster child for Cs-137 incidents is the Goiânia accident where four people died when a Cs-137 capsule was stolen from an abandoned hospital and sold to a scrapyard. Four people died of radiation poisoning, including a six year old.
My guess is this probably has a similar root cause, someone didn't dispose of a medical Cs-137 source properly and it ended up in the scrap metal stream.
IIRC all sources are tracked at manufacture and it migh also be possible to try to match the isotope ration to the original source material ? Not to mention the whole "spraying deadly radiation all over the place" that can be detected with modern sensitive detectors, possibly tracing back all places where the original source was miss-handled.
If the metal is still radioactive they can probably narrow it down to a couple of train cars of scrap that were likely sources, but short of adding sensors to prevent a repeat, and auditing their partners…
I'm not sure that's totally true. The rate of change might be lower, but new ICE vehicles have higher efficiency (directly correlating to longer EV range) and are safer, more comfortable, and quieter.
I am definitely on the pro-EV side, nearly an evangelist I suppose, but ICE vehicles do improve.
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