In the UK this particular example is largely safe because we don't have a President and the country isn't particularly politically divided any more because only ~25% of the population don't hate the Tories, but imagine the effect of something like that in the US. What, I can't read this out, it's trying to get the President to commit suicide by jumping from a railway bridge, and we all know magic words have power (though we don't call them that), and he's our great white savior (emphasis on white), and suicide is a Sin.
]]>I can't stand any cultivars of B. oleracea.
Yep, this is genetics: the bitterness and smell (in those of European ancestry, anyway) come from the same source: an unbroken TAS2R38 gene, so you can taste (and smell) phenylthiocarbamide.
I am quite glad I cannot :)
]]>The above does not appear to be widely known: I know only because my twin brother is in such a mass grave. We don't know where it is. They wouldn't even tell my parents what was going to happen to him at the time: apparently he was considered medical waste and thus just entered the hospital's waste stream, though seemingly with enough separation that he did at least end up in something like a grave rather than a random landfill (not that he was in a position to care). This was not Ireland but Hertfordshire.
(Frankly this is not something I care much about personally -- he was genetically identical to me, we shared almost all stimuli until the point of his death, and thus the only difference from me he could have had relates purely to random thermal noise, randomness of embryological development, and things like uterine positioning. I don't consider that to be enough to override the identity of indiscernibles: the thing to mourn is the future that might have been, not a body which is genetically identical to one still walking around above ground, and burying someone in a mass grave or using them for compost doesn't change that.
But I can see how a lot of people might disagree: something with its own brain that in time could become a person is definitely qualitatively different from most medical waste and that classification was frankly silly. It's IMHO even worse where the baby was not one half of a surviving monoamniotic twin pair, so couldn't be regarded as any sort of "duplicate".)
]]>Is this a love story?
Here's another one. Some species of ant farm aphids, right? And obviously this is beneficial for the ants because they get free food and beneficial for the aphids because the ants defend them (to the death, often). That's a love story, right?
... only it's not. In at least some species, this is manipulation (in an evolutionary sense, of course, the aphids don't mean to do anything, they're insects). Many ant species (including aphid farmers) have a common, colony-wide crop: ants can share food with other ants by going head-to-head with them and stroking the other ant's head with their antennae in a particular way; the other ant then provides a nice lump of macerated whatever from her crop (if they have any going spare).
Aphids exploit this. The rear end of many farmed aphid species looks (to an ant) like the head of another ant; hungry ants will go up to them and ask them for food in exactly the same way, and the aphid responds to an antenna stroke just like an ant would. Instant food! And obviously ants defend food sources and colony members and the aphids now count as both.
If this is a love story, it's a very strange one: the ants didn't need to change anything, and the aphids evolved to provide something they weren't before and otherwise didn't need to change anything either. So we have a love story where one participant gives the other stuff and the other participant doesn't really realise that the first one is even there, even while it feeds from it, defends it to the death against all attackers, carries it around to new feeding sites, and even feeds its young. And both sides benefit (though it is pretty clear to me that the aphids are manipulating the ants, not vice versa).
One wonders what sort of bizarre relationships one could have with colony organisms out there... relationships in which the organism as a whole doesn't realise any particular individual exists and is very apologetic when eventually informed that its components were chemically enslaving humans by the million and the birthrate has plunged, but oh I'm sorry there's simply nothing anyone can do about it, it's not intentional and it's not like a colony can consciously control its individual components. Hm, sounds like something Tiptree might have written :)
]]>Assuming we're talking extrasolar alien and not some local from Europa or Mars or something, which if they're that much like us we must be... how do you maintain a long-distance relationship with years between letters? Epistolary novel with hibernation, here we come, I guess. A somewhat out-of-fashion form, mind you. (Or the Saturn's Children approach: if we assume that Freya et al, as children of humans, are basically human, it would be easy for them to maintain long-distance relationships with significant others at astronomical distances. They probably do it routinely already. All they have to do is switch species, something they quite possibly won't even notice.)
]]>But, returning to our six-legged muttons, there is no reason to believe that aliens will have enough of a mental match to establish reliable communication on complex topics, let alone become a love match.
Quite. Haddock and fruitflies are quite like us: they are attracted to the opposite sex in a way we can kind of project human feelings onto, even if only at the right time of year (one area where humans are freaky weird). But even if a superintelligent haddock or fruitfly could modify itself to fall in love with a human, why would it want to?
And that's downright normal. Even some species closer to us don't have much like sexual attraction. It's not as if a shark knows what love is (except insofar as those that give live birth are protective of their offspring), so a superintelligent shark would definitely not want to engineer variants of itself that could fall in love with us, any more than we'd like the idea of redesigning ourselves to produce large litters that cannibalize each other in the womb. (And they'd be mystified about our wasteful inability to have children without males present.)
And these are all animals. Does an oak tree know what love is, when it never sees its million spouses? How could it? It doesn't even have a body plan, much less anything like a mind: there's no there there to fall in love with anything, even if the tree carries out computations of a sort in order to survive. Flowering plants don't love insects, they've just evolved to fool them, but if they did love anything it would probably be insects more than their own actual breeding partners.
And nearly all terrestrial life is much less like us than plants are.
]]>Starts out fairly normal as Star Trek fanfic goes, ends up seriously skin-crawlingly awe-inspiring and ethically dubious. (Well, for me, anyway.)
]]>However... the claim that thought isn't different does indeed run afoul of the fact that basically nothing else has recursive grammar allied to vocalized symbolic representations like we do (songbirds have recursive grammar, but not symbolic representation: nothing else comes close except perhaps whales). And obviously this is inherited, and obviously the ability to learn it is a genetically encoded trait (witness the fact that it is universal among neurologically normal humans). But that doesn't mean FOXP2 is a thing that has any more effect on the process of thought than any of the other 1/3rd of the entire coding genome that gets expressed in the brain.
It is interesting that small mutations in it have the ability to knock out grammar so tightly, but this is at most telling us something interesting about the lack of compensatory pathways in whatever grammar-related aspect of neural development the pathway it is part of involves. Not having very many compensatory pathways in a new trait like building a brain that can do grammar is not terribly surprising: nor is the fact that most of its other expression sites keep on ticking after it's mutated, because they are mostly ancient traits with lots of alternative ways to get a working organ system out.
]]>I know Google are physical presence lunatics, but surely they of all people could have managed a talk over the internet?! Talk about self-defeating.
(But then I suppose they think everyone lives within a short distance of Silicon Valley. No, sorry, we don't.)
]]>Is there proof that thought requires words?
As anecdata, I had a fever many years ago in which I stopped thinking in words for almost a day. I didn't stop thinking: I was just entirely relying on things like mental maps to cogitate (that's my most overdeveloped mental skill anyway, it translates easily to all sorts of graph data structures). In so far as one cogitates at all with a nasty fever, that is.
It was fairly relaxing, or it would have been if I didn't fairly soon pick up on the fact that I wasn't using words to think in at all any more, and then that I couldn't even when I tried and couldn't even really remember memories involving words -- I could remember book plots, but not book quotes etc. Once I realised that it was fairly terrifying (would they come back? am I wordless forever?). But it didn't stop me thinking, and as that chain of thought suggests it definitely didn't stop me reasoning either. Except of course it wasn't really like that because it was wordless and it's a bit hard to demonstrate that in a textual comment form :)
Symbolic manipulation: not the be-all and end-all after all.
]]>This is needlessly confusing. I think we need to fix this by making these collisions less likely. Since we don't know who might become well-known, and different subgroups of humanity have different well-known people, this reduces to a strict limit: all names should be globally, spatiotemporally unique! Yes they might be a bit hard to remember and harder to abbreviate but that's a price we'll just have to pay.
Yrs, the bpfh now known as 2f7d19f6-fa87-4a4d-863c-42f25d4e2070
]]>Of course... Truss and Kwarteng just screwed those people. Bedrock Tory voters. Oops. They even screwed the retired well-off who are the immovable bedrock by nearly wrecking the pension system. It's now getting hard to find traditional Tory voters (and MPs) who aren't furious with them.
Conference will be interesting...
]]>