My death is when I permanently stop experiencing life.
Not sure what that means for an ‘Upload’ scenario… I guess he’s just a swamp man of me and he’s alive but I’m not anymore… but I’m not signing up for the digital afterlife anyway.
Yes, that is an interesting question as well. I am wondering what the people with near death experiences could still experience from their bodies, because that would make a big difference as well.
What the article actually says is more like “we might be able to revive you if not too many if your cells have died, even if your heart and brain seem to have stopped.”
I wonder how this would play with the whole “Ship of Theseus” philosophical theory of identity, where even though we’re constantly changing out our parts (cells), our sense of continuous self persists. If you suddenly have a hard break in continuity of matter or thought (like with a Star Trek-esque matter transporter or brain death), do you experience life whenever you’re revived or is your consciousness ended and another starts?
As long as your brain mass has not deteriorated you should still have access to at least your long term memory. But in theory it could range from a terrible hangover to amnesia and brain damage, and in that case recovery may take longer and you may end up being a completely different person, as it can already happen with some accidents.
This comic is terrible and the sort of thing that gets refuted in Philosophy 1000. It’s not even a good version of the same bad argument that I’ve heard dozens of times. The fact that it compares copying and destroying a person to falling asleep is absolutely absurd. Your brain doesn’t stop functioning when you sleep, and your molecules don’t instantly replace themselves each night.
The point of the Ship of Theseus thought experiment is that if you replace the parts of a ship one by one over time, never replacing more than what you keep at any one time, you can easily understand how it continues to be the same ship even if at the end of its existence it contains none of the original parts. Each part has shared experience with the others. There is continuity of the whole even if any individual part has been lost and replaced. If you replace the entire thing all at once, it is absolutely a new ship because not a single piece shared any experience with a part of the original, or a part that can be traced back to a shared existence with the original.
That continuity of experience is what matters, and in sentient creatures that extends to continuity of thought (conscious or unconscious). A person has a sense of self that doesn’t end just because you lost consciousness. If you create a copy of a person and destroy the original, that sentience doesn’t jump into the new body. Yes, it thinks and acts exactly as the original person did, but the original person is still dead. This only wouldn’t matter to someone who lacks sentience. But then again I have always been a bit solipsistic.
I wasn’t making any arguments for or against. For the record, I don’t agree with the comic. I simply found it relevant based on it touching similar topics to what you wrote, and thought I would share. But, that’s my bad for posting a link with zero explanation.
The comic is fine. You’re assuming that all humans act rationally. This is clearly the story of a man who had an irrational fear that didn’t bother everyone else, and then learned to deal with it, in a way.
Essentially the protagonist isn’t you, but it certainly falls in the range of expected behavior for someone out there.
There’s no way to prove it to others, just like there’s no way to prove your own sentience. But it’s pretty easy to tell from experience. I am consciously experiencing this moment right now. When I fall asleep, the conscious being that I am right now is not going to just never wake up.
But if you can’t prove your own sentience to yourself, maybe that’s worth digging into.
When I fall asleep, the conscious being that I am right now is not going to just never wake up.
But how do you know this? That’s the root of the question.
How would you distinguish “I woke up as the same consciousness” from “I woke up as a new consciousness with an identical memory”, from the first person perspective?
One answer could be that having the exact same memories means you are the exact same consciousness. But this means that your moment-to-moment feeling of “self” is not actually intrinsic to your consciousness, since the memories alone are sufficient.
Hey, it’s me from the next day. Can confirm, my previous consciousness terminated the moment I fell asleep and I’m a totally different person now.
But seriously, I started wondering why so many people have trouble proving this to themselves and so many others don’t. Maybe it’s something similar to how about half of people don’t have an inner monologue. I personally do and I’m curious to know if the people who aren’t sure they’re the same person every time they wake up are the same people who don’t have an inner monologue.
You seem to be missing the point of the philosophical question.
Just because you feel like you are the same conscious doesn’t mean you are, which is what needs proving. We need to demonstrate that we have some way to know we are a different entity without just saying “I know I am”. Is it enough to have the same set of memories? Surely not, as the Star Trek thought experiment implies.
For the record I do have an inner monologue. I just also think that the notion of consciousness and what it means to “be” the conscious process isn’t as simple and clear-cut as you think it is.
Like I originally said, if it were possible to prove to someone else you’d be able to put it into words. It’s just like being aware of your own sentience without being able to demonstrate it to others. What I am experiencing now is not just a memory waiting to happen. I can tell the difference between memory and experience and I can chain experiences without resorting to memory. Maybe not everyone can do that. The inner monologue thing was just an idea but probably not related.
But I can’t put to words what that chaining of active experience is like in a way that’s ever going to convince you I’m a thinking being with an awareness of self that dates to before 0800 this morning. The real question for me isn’t “how do I know I’m the same person?” but “why is it difficult for some people to know the same thing about themselves?”
ETA: Do you also have the same questions about whether you are a sentient being or do you accept “I know I am” as the answer because the only proof is through personal experience?
I don’t accept “I know I am” as any form of proof toward any introspective qualities, whether that is sentience or consciousness or even free will. I also don’t accept “I just know it” as proof of any deity or higher power, or that there is an objective morality embedded in the universe, etc.
I’ll stop responding here, because I think we are just not going to make any progress with each other. Your posit that you can just tell the difference and know it, is fundamentally incompatible with my stance that there must be some method or technique to distinguish what the difference is. I simply do not know that I am the same person today that I was yesterday - I feel that I have good reason to believe that I am, but I also accept that this might simply be an illusion because of the circumstance of having woken up with memories that lead me to that conclusion. I have no way to know that the consciousness that “ended” with sleep last night is really the same one that woke up this morning, outside of the apparent continuity of memory. I find it an interesting and thought-provoking question, but you may also simply decide that you know the answer by feeling.
Then this goes back to my point of “if you can’t prove your own sentience to yourself, maybe that’s worth digging into.” The very baseline of philosophy is “I think therefore I am.” It’s the one thing Descartes thought one can know with certainty. If you question even that about yourself, it might imply an abnormal psychology or that you’re overthinking things to a point of pedantry that even a 17th century philosopher would say is “a bit much.”
Yes, rebuttals by a bunch of philosophers who, like you, can’t even accept their own existence or get hung up on the definition of “I” and “think”. “I” doesn’t need to be one’s physical body as one perceives it. “I” could be a brain in a jar or a computer generating an entire simulated universe or a bored deity. But something that you are, or at least I am, is producing thought about itself and its input stimuli.
Anyone who can’t even accept the fact that, by thinking, they must exist in some capacity in order to be capable of thinking, is being obstinate for obstinance’s sake. That isn’t a philosophical question. It’s refusing the answer provided by your own experience in order to be the most pedantic person in the room. So, basically 20th-21st century philosophy.
Or maybe you really aren’t sentient and I’m wasting my time with an NPC.
Your entire argument is as clever as a toddler repeatedly asking “why?” to everything, not because they’re genuinely curious, but because they realized it gets a rise out of the adults in the room.
So, yes, if you really can’t grasp that by thinking you must exist in some form, then I can only conclude that you A) really don’t exist, B) are suffering from some psychotic malady, or C) are just a troll arguing in bad faith to annoy the grown-ups.
I hope having a transporter device is more like folding space than particle-scanning and reconstruction. The scanning and reconstruction would still be great for replacing or repairing lost or deteriorating structures. Regardless, I have a number of questions that come up as we learn more about how our brain might work.
If our brain is changed in (near) death how would we determine what was lost?
Could we even reconstruct consciousness (this could be also gradual, but what is the speed of consciousness)?
It seems more like we would have to gradually move our conscious processing from per-existing wetware to whatever replaces it (even more wetware). It should behave like our brain as much as possible, but I don’t think we could avoid being different from what we were.
Our own brain changes over time, do we think the way we did when we were 5? How different will we think far later in life (assuming our brain is at least healthy)? I think we would have to accept changes in our fundamental being (which is already very challenging). The difference is that not only could we live for longer physically, but within the pure consciousness an entire lifetime could be lived in less than a second. We experience this temporarily in dreams, or while experiencing a life threatening event such as an automobile accident or the final moments of death itself. What if that was extended over physical months, years, decades? How would we deal with such a inheritance, who would teach us how to cope and find meaning?
Would we want to live life at the speed of the physical world after such an experience?
And this is why I carry an organ donor card prohibiting taking my organs.
Death is a poorly-understood process and I don’t want doctors under extreme time pressure to decide when to end it.
Many who have watched someone die will likely know this
It’s not like the light leaves their eyes and that’s it
My cousin’s breathing stopped, but his heart kept stopping and starting again. He was clearly gone, but certain parts didn’t stop working for several minutes
Yeah nothing about this seems like it shouldn’t be obvious, it takes some time for everything to fail, just like being ‘alive’ and having a single organ fail, you can be in various states of ‘alive’.
As someone else in here mentioned, a trip to titanic in a private submarine controlled by a rechargeable Xbox controller and a narcissist captain would be a good bet
I’m closer to a carnivore than a vegan, but if something is good, it’s good. I’m not going to hate on something delicious because I feel threatened by someone else’s life choices.
Don’t worry, farmers; if I start eating vegan cheese I promise I’ll make up for it in beef consumption.
I haven’t heard anything about it, only that it’s been detected in milk and pasteurization kills it. Cooking should kill it if it’s in meat anyway. At least to medium, preferably to full doneness.
“Consuming raw or undercooked meats, poultry, seafood, shellfish or eggs may increase your risk of foodborne illness" has been the standard disclaimer since 2016, but nobody’s thrown a fit, even though there’s a big difference between a rare steak and rare burger (the interior of the ground beef has been exposed, the interior of the steak has not).
Remnants of bird flu have been found in bovine milk and recently sampled in 20% of milk in grocery stores. So far, it’s been determined to just be “genetic material” - not live or infectious. Milk is pasteurized in the US so it’s reasonably safe to keep drinking. I don’t believe this would impact beef consumption, certainly not cooked beef.
Beth Mole at Ars Technica has been covering it arstechnica.com/author/beth/
The CDC is reporting at least one dairy worker has been infected www.cdc.gov/media/…/p0401-avian-flu.html
A lot of vegan “alternatives” are actually really good when you know what you’re doing with them. I will take tofu or mushrooms over meat any day tbh. Problem is some people don’t know that and will just prepare tofu like it’s meat, and then wonder why their tofu tastes like shit.
That’s a really dumb argument. Sorry but literally every food is really good when you know what you are doing with it.
It is not even a question of quality… some of the tastiest food is terrible quality used with great effect.
That doesn’t even take into account personal preference, which is majorly just familiarity.
The awards world is filled with awards that would never be given if there wasnt a story to go with it. This vegan cheese is an example of this as well.
Problem is some people don’t know that and will just prepare tofu like it’s meat, and then wonder why their tofu tastes like shit.
You arent even wrong about this, but you could say the exact same thing about damned near anything that has more than a single opinion on.
Like literally exchange in what i quoted tofu to a burger patty and instead of “like its meat” change it to some aspect of the experience. Whether its what temperature to cook it or how thin or thick it is.
Same exact argument based on different peoples familiarity. Many people dont have just dont care that much and also some people are really bad at cooking.
To sum up my point, you are making a statement that is so broad it is useless
I tried tofu multiple times in different meals as a alternative for meat, but sadly all were disappointing. Do you have recipes that you can recommend? I am eager to find one.
A lot of times I think the problem is trying to substitute the protein in a dish with tofu or something vegan. It’s always going to be compared to the meat version. Should just try to find recipes that were tofu based to begin with, like mapo tofu.
Tofu doesn’t really bring taste, just texture so that’s kinda to be expected. That’s why I typically get firm or extra firm. I like those textures over softer ones.
I’m not sure what you mean by pressed as all tofu is pressed. That’s how tofu is made. I’ve never tried dipping it in cornstarch so IDK how that would turn out. I don’t typically do anything other than cut it up and cook it.
As for how to stir fry; I suggest looking that up. You mostly just use whatever veg and protein you want and add some stir fry sauce at the end. I haven’t really found one I prefer. I don’t do stir fry all that often. I really should since it’s super simple.
Extra firm+fried in oil has never NOT been a hit for me! Generally sesame or strangely peanut butter has killed it among my non-veg friends, trying to make a dish for both non-veg and vegan friends.
“Pressed” tofu usually refers to firm or extra firm tofu that is then put under much higher pressure to expel not only more water but also most of the air, and has a completely different texture.
They’re not mutually exclusive. For those too lazy to follow the link - traditional mapo tofu (like many Chinese tofu recipes) isn’t vegetarian . Tofu as a total replacement for meat is a Western idea - in most Eastern cultures that use it, tofu is just another ingredient and often used along with meat and animal based broths. The same is true of soy milk.
Notwithstanding the fact that the comment was obviously made in jest, why would it matter whether a consumer had anything to do with the preparation of the food? I don’t think anyone is genuinely ignorant of where meat comes from.
I’m also a meat eater but Impossible burgers hold a special place in my heart. If I’m craving a whopper I’ll always go for the Impossible whopper instead - it’s just so much more satisfying.
Similarly, the meat quality at my local Chinese spots is questionable so I always get tofu instead.
I’m down to only eating meat half of days, and only for dinner, vs eating meat with every meal every day. My wallet and waistline have thanked me.
Really, the disqualification is probably better publicity than winning the award itself. If someone told me some vegan cheese won a “Good Food” award, I would assume it was related to eco- and social-consciousness. Learning that it was so delicious that the dairy industry schemed to take away the award tells me they’re afraid of the competition.
Indeed, and while they might have been initially furious at the snub, this is going to wind up being VERY good for business. Now they have an incredible story to tell, complete with mystery and intrigue that consumers love. Their marketing department must be salivating right now.
Yeah, well, you can’t. It’s only available to restaurants, and isn’t ready for retail. That’s one of the stupid reasons they can’t have their stupid award. Stupid sexy cheesish.
When Seiko beat the Swiss at their own mechanical watch accuracy competitions, they decided to cancel the long running prestigious competition entirely instead of make a better watch.
That’s partly because “Scotch” is a protected label. You can only call a Whisky Scotch if it was distilled with a certain technique, from certain grains, by certain companies, and matured in certain casks for a certain amount of time. All of it is regulated.
Japanese whisky doesn’t have these limitations. They can just do whatever makes it taste good.
Scotch whisky must be made in Scotland. Similar story with bourbon, bourbon must be made in the United States. In many places you can follow the same recipes and processes as those products, but you may not label them with those terms.
Yes, and being distilled and aged in Scotland are both rules in that rule book. Again, same for bourbon, not all American whiskies are eligible to be labeled as bourbon.
I’m an American, and we just don’t really buy into the whole “you must be from this region to be called this item”. All sparkling wine is champagne, all peaty whiskey is scotch, and all rice liqur is sake.
You can make whiskey, though. According to the EU, if you have a product distilled from grain mash and stored, at full undiluted strength, in wood casks for at least three years, you can call it whiskey. You can produce a Single Malt Whiskey, or a Rye Whiskey, anywhere you want and in fact some German Korn would qualify as whiskey as it’s aged long enough.
Side note: Whisky wasn’t always aged. Originally it pretty much resembled Korn (though German noses have some rather strict standards when it comes to fusel alcohols that Whisky and Vodka producers don’t tend to have), then the UK prohibition came along and distillers had no choice but to let the stuff age in its casks while they fought the legislation, then they were allowed to sell the aged stuff, aged much longer than was previously common, and the rest is history.
To be fair, a crystal clock is just going to be more accurate than a movement based watch. Even the biggest watch fanboys admit that a $30 Seiko Casio outperforms the majority of mechanicals on raw accuracy.
So… The existing market leader chose to flip the table instead of admitting that their position was weaker and lower value.
Yep, that sure sounds like the pursuit of capital instead of… innovation, quality, or any of the other attributes capitalism attempts to associate itself with.
The Neuchâtel Observatory is a publicly funded institution that certifies movements with high accuracy as chronometers. Not a private body, or a marketing tool used by a watchmaker. The same ‘competition’ is done by other observatories, all giving their own rating of a timepiece’s accuracy against a reference chronometer kept at the observatory.
A quick search could have brought you that information_ Quartz movements beat the pants off mechanical movements, and they’re far cheaper to make, allowing the non-rich to have a decent watch with good battery life and serious accuracy. Cheap and normal mechanical watches regularly drift and lose a few seconds time over days and weeks - quartz drifts between 1-110 seconds over a year.
So funnily enough, the very first movement they submitted to the contest in 1963 was a quartz, and it placed tenth overall. They went with mechanical movements for subsequent competitions, and didn’t actually start placing high again until 1966 when they placed ninth overall. In ‘67 they did even better, placing fourth, but then the contest was canceled for good the next year.
You’re right, but it’s understandable why the dairy industry shat themselves. They fucked up by allowing things to be named “oat milk” or “whatever milk”, so they damn sure aren’t going to let their “cheese” territory get encroached on.
The problem with restricting the use of the term “milk” is that people have been using the term “milk” to describe non-dairy liquids for longer than there have been trademarks. The word hasn’t ever been used exclusively to describe dairy.
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