My guess, they’ll spread a conspiracy theory about him still being alive. They’ll claim this is a coverup so that he can appear dead and go into hiding.
Okay, some explanation, this is not exclusively wind powered but wind assisted. Sail is meant to aid in reducing fuel consumption. Design of the sail, which is what most people are finding odd, is as such to require very little management, since it’s using Mesner effect it only requires adjusting speed and direction of rotation. At the same time design is such as to not hinder loading and unloading process. Also claimed 30% is grossly exaggerated.
Why hasn’t this caught on yet you might ask? Well ship owners don’t give a shit. Simple. The cost of fuel is calculated in transport cost and since no one else is doing it, why would anyone do it. Cargo ships have multiple fuel tanks and they will burn pretty clean fuel while they are in controlled areas (EU/USA). The moment they leave those areas they burn the dirtiest and also the cheapest fuel possible. Why wouldn’t they when their engine’s piston is so big human can lie in it. I mean just look at the crankshaft
So all in all, this could have been done ages ago. The sail is called Flettner rotor and has been invented in 1920s. Image on site shows a bit different design, but probably based on same physics just slightly more optimized. The reason why it wasn’t done ages ago… well, simply fuel was too cheap and paid for by another.
This article is a classic example of North Atlantic propaganda writing.
Cambodia remains one of the world’s most heavily mined countries, 48 years after the end of its brutal civil war.
Passive voice. It’s not that Cambodia was mined by someone, it just remains mined. Who mined it? Well, it apparently owns a brutal civil war, so presumably it mined itself?
It was a civil war rooted in the French colonialism in the area giving way to US dominance (like in Vietnam) in the USA’s campaign to encircle China with nuclear military bases. Yes, Cambodians did mine their own country and they used Chinese mines to do it. And they did it because they didn’t have many other choices when facing the US military and the puppet regimes of European colonialism.
Even worse than the historical context around the mining, there’s literally no context for anything. Are landmines a thing of the past? Absolutely not. The US is still using landmines despite 90% of the world signing a treaty to stop using them because of how they kill so many innocent people for decades. In fact, Cambodia is one of the classic examples of why the treaty was signed. But the US still uses them. How is that not relevant to a story about landmines in Cambodia? Because it’s a BBC article.
But the layers of propaganda keep going. Not only is Cambodia one of the world’s most heavily mined countries, it’s one of the world’s most heavily bombed countries. And these bombs, especially the unexploded cluster bombs, remain throughout the country as well, killing innocents decades later. And why is Cambodia one of the most heavily bombed countries in the world? The USA. So we’ve got a story about a high school finding land mines in it, a statement that Cambodia is passively one of the most mined countries in the world, but zero accountability, except to say “civil war” so it allows ignorant readers to imagine it was all Cambodians.
And as if that context isn’t enough to add, Cambodia is but ONE of the 30 countries the US has bombed, and it ranks among the top bombed countries in the history of the world along with North Korea, Vietnam, and Laos. So, a story about Cambodia have unexploded ordinance in a school makes no mention of the context of unexploded ordinance in general, the basic history of who is responsible for the conflict (France, US) and how Cambodia is not exceptional for the region nor for the time period. None of that context matters, I guess.
But since we’re here, let’s add some more context. The bombings of Korea, Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia all came AFTER the USA nuked 2 civilian cities in Japan while in the middle of negotiations. Literally in the middle of negotiations, Japan is sending a message to the negotiators, the USA receives the message asking for dialog on particular points, and in response the USA nukes civilians in the world’s only ever nuclear attack. This is the context that precedes the US making 4 other countries the most bombed countries in the world. But, unlike in Japan, the US didn’t use nukes in these theaters. Instead, they left literally going on 50 years of unexploded ordinance in these countries that continues to kill people. And in Vietnam they brought in genocidal chemical warfare by developing and deploying Agent Orange. Agent Orange is a defoliant, and the US deployed it to literally destroy all of the leaves in massive chunks of rain forest because they claimed it would help them fight the Vietnamese better if the Vietnamese couldn’t hide in the trees. Well, turns out Agent Orange is so toxic that it still causes massive numbers of terrible disfiguring birth defects, stillbirths, and virulent cancers - not as bad but with echoes of the radiation poisoning in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. These are literal multi-generation mass murder campaigns.
I wish that was the end of the context, but instead what we see is the USA continue this centuries-long genocidal mass murder program in Yugoslavia where it directed NATO to drop Depleted Uranium bombs in a densely developed European country. That region also has multiple generations of terrible birth defect, still birth, and cancers many many times the incident rate for countries in the region that were not bombed with nuclear waste. The US then proceeded to kill a million Iraqis, in a conflict where it used white phosphorous which burned thousands of innocent people to death much like the use of napalm in Vietnam, and where it used depleted uranium rounds, much more prolifically. The birth defects, stillbirths, and cancers in Iraq are sky high, again a multi-generational mass murder campaign.
Apologists can pretend that the US didn’t understand what it was doing to the Vietnamese or the Japanese, that the weapons were new and hadn’t been tested, and the long term effects just weren’t understood. I don’t think that’s true. But even if it were, Henry Kissinger was the architect of what happened in Vietnam and Cambodia, and he’s still alive today. They sent him to talk with China recently. You don’t get to say the US didn’t understand the effects of white phosphorous, depleted uranium, landmines, and cluster munitions in the conflicts it created in Yugoslavia, Iraq, other parts of Africa, etc. You don’t get to say the US is a net force for good when it does these things consciously, knowingly, systematically, and against a global cry for peace and for deescalation.
This is the context in which an article is written detailing some landmines found in a Cambodian high school. Cambodia remains the most mined country in the world after a devastating 48-year civil war.
Ms Gonzalez, 36, whose career has mainly focused on environmental issues, is due to take part in Sunday’s presidential debate in the capital.
Mr Villavicencio, 59, a former journalist and member of the country’s national assembly, was shot three times in the head as he left a public event in the capital on Wednesday.
His death has shocked a nation that has largely escaped the decades of drug-gang violence, cartel wars and corruption that has blighted many of its neighbours.
Mr Villavicencio’s campaign focused on corruption and gangs, and was one of only a few candidates to allege links between organised crime and government officials in Ecuador.
Interior Minister Juan Zapata said on Thursday that six suspects had been arrested, adding that were Colombians who were members of organised criminal groups,
Patricia Villavicencio, his sister, said “this crime can’t go unpunished… We are hurting, with a broken soul, there is no justice, there is no protection”.
The art unit of Italy’s police force found the items had been looted and sold to US museums and private collectors in the 1990s.
The oldest item dates back to the Villanovan age (1000 - 750BC), while other artefacts were from the Etruscan civilisation (800 - 200BC), Magna Graecia (750 - 400BC) and Imperial Rome (27BC - 476AD).
Most artefacts had been stolen in the 1990s, then sold through a series of dealers with one selection apparently being offered to the Menil Collection, a museum in Houston, Texas.
The ministry said the owner of the collection “spontaneously” returned the items after police found that they had come from illegal excavations of archaeological sites.
Separately, the ministry said that 145 of the returned artefacts had come from a bankruptcy procedure against an English antiques dealer, Robin Symes, who amassed thousands of pieces as part of a network of illegal traders.
Italy has long sought to track down antiques and artefacts that have been stolen and sold to private collectors and museums.
NSFL> Several nurses are also being sued for concealing the incident. > Mr Lynch alleged in graphic detail the measures staff had taken to cover up the the horrific incident, including wrapping the baby’s body in a blanket and propping his head up to make it look like it was still attached.
Holy shit, that’s indefensible, and they all worked together. It reminds me of the Milgram shock experiments.
Why would you assume it's an emergent property and thus should be dismissed as not being a force of nature? I'm making fewer assumptions than you are by wanting to list it alongside the other forces until we can determine if it is emergent or not, and the implications of such emergence. It's kind of a big deal that we can sit here and ponder the forces of nature with some degree of control over our little sack of atoms.
It's safe to say that this list is going to change over time and represents a current snapshot of humanity's limited understanding. Under the current snapshot of human understanding, leaving it off of the list seems to me to indicate an ironic bias on the behalf of researchers who must use the very force in question to do anything. By necessity, it is the overarching phenomenon surrounding all other forces since the only place we can definitively know these forces even exist is within our own mind. To say anything more is to make assumptions.
While I agree that a certain level of assumptions are necessary if we're going to get anywhere, I'm also acutely aware that they're still assumptions and that assumptions are not scientific. If we're going to be scientific about this, we need to make as few assumptions as possible.
It is feasible for consciousness to be something like a force (more accurately, perhaps, a field) and as such it would be by definition a “physical” force. The use of the modifier “physical” on force doesn’t make much sense here: all forces are physical, as are all things that actually exist. It could be useful to consider the objects of consciousness as emergent, and the force of consciousness as fundamental; I don’t know enough about this line of thought to say much on that.
Consciousness is not a force, as far as we know.
That’s literally what the comment you’re replying to says. Emphasis on “as far as we know”. There’s no obvious way to dismiss it outright as not being a force, it’s just that as far as we know currently, it isn’t a force.
I don’t personally have a well thought out stance on the matter.
We know that when the brain chemistry is disrupted, our consciousness is disrupted
You can test this yourself. Drink some alcohol and your consciousness will be disrupted. Similarly I am on Gabapentin for nerve pain, which works by inhibiting the electrical signals my nerves use to fire, and in turn makes me groggy.
While we don’t know exactly how consciousness works, we have a VERY good understanding of chemistry, which is to say, the strong and weak nuclear forces and electromagnetism (fundamental forces). Literally millions of repeatable experiments that have validated these forces exist and we understand the way they behave.
Drugs like Gabapentin and Alcohol interact with our brain using these forces.
If the interaction of these forces being disrupted disrupts our consciousness, it’s reasonable to conclude that our consciousness is built on top of, or is an emergent property of, these forces’ interactions.
If our consciousness is made up of these forces, then it cannot be a fundamental force as, by definition, fundamental forces must be the basic building blocks of physics and not derived from other forces.
There are no real assumptions here. It’s all a line of logical reasoning based on observations you can do yourself.
I find emergence to be the least reasonable of the 3 main hypotheses I consider, but I still accept that it's possible since I can't disprove it. However, it is illogical to conclude your hypothesis must be true at this stage.
Your comparison proves nothing. It is no different than insisting a radio must be creating the signal it's picking up, because if you poured alcohol or liquid gabapentin all over it, it will no longer be able to play music. I'm sure you realize that if your radio breaks, that doesn't mean the radio signal has disappeared. It is possible our brains are simply interfacing with consciousness rather than inexplicably fabricating it from more than the sum of its parts.
Based on everything science has taught me, it seems far more likely to me that consciousness is not magically created by my brain, but rather one of two things are happening:
My brain is able to interface with a conscious field
Consciousness is a force inherent within the universe, and our brains are able to make use of the force
I actually think the radio signal is an apt comparison. Let’s say someone was trying to argue that the signal itself was a fundamental force.
Well then you could make the argument that if you pour a drink into it, the water shorts the electronics and the signal stops playing as the electromagnetic force stops working on the pieces of the radio. This would lead you to believe, through the same logic in my post, that the signal itself is not a fundamental force, but is somehow created through the electromagnetic force interacting with the components, which… It is! The observer might not understand how the signal worked, but they could rule it out as being its own discreet thing.
In the same way, we might not know exactly how our brain produces consciousness, but because the components we can see must be involved, it isn’t a discreet phenomenon. Fundamental forces can’t have parts or components, they must be completely discreet.
we might not know exactly how our brain produces consciousness, but because the components we can see must be involved, it isn’t a discreet phenomenon
This statement begins with the assumption that the brain produces consciousness, then says that because the thing that produces consciousness has components, that it can't be fundamental. This is a really really good example of circular logic.
Something becoming more than the sum of its parts to such a degree would indeed be magic. Are you claiming we're AI computer programs and that real life is analogous to ChatGPT? Are information and consciousness synonymous? I would say that one of us indeed doesn't understand the complexity of the situation.
Are you claiming we’re AI computer programs and that real life is analogous to ChatGPT?
No, those are T2 systems and we’re (at least) T3 systems, roughly speaking we don’t have pre-programmed methods of learning and can generate behaviour from that, but we have pre-programmed methods of learning how to learn to generate behaviour. Notice the additional “learn”. T4 if you count evolution itself as a further level, learning that which is pre-programmed in us.
Practopoiesis is currently the best model we have, incorporating all the neurological and psychological data we have in a cybernetic understanding of things respecting (as cybernetics generally does) issues of computability and complexity theory. Trying to replicate the information processing capacity of the human brain with our current AI tech, all T2 systems, indeed would require computers (or brains) the size of multiple planets. It’d also make us prone to forget how to play piano when learning to cook pasta as compartmentalisation of learning requires said capacity to learn how to learn, to encode things in distinct ways and not just smear everything into an overgeneralised whole, overwriting unrelated information.
Are information and consciousness synonymous?
Now that would be rather strange and terminally fuzzy. You could say that consciousness is a by-product of information processing. Best I can put it (and this is meditation experience, not fancy science) is that the field of consciousness is a point of different information processing systems coalescing, integrating their individual results. A committee meeting room of sorts. We like to identify with that and think it’s oh so important but, eh, is it really? I mean the identification, not the coalescing and integrating. If the experience was not present but its function was still fulfilled, what would change in practice? Are you sure that none of those sub-systems contributing to your consciousness aren’t themselves conscious, you generally just don’t notice it because there’s no need to? If your motor cortex cracks a knuckle and you’re not around to notice it, did it really crack a knuckle?
Consciousness is relevant, and your point should not be dismissed. But it is difficult to measure, so science is not able to comment on it yet, rightfully so.
Force of nature or not, some abstract philosophical conceps will have to wait to be tested experimentally or better described empirically in order to be applied the same way.
Interesting. I never expected a fifth. If anything, I’ve seen a push for reducing the number down to three (gravity, strong and electro-weak) or possibly just two.
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