Try participating in an endurance sport on zero carbs and tell us how you do. Nevermind, that was rhetorical; I know how you'll do: at best you'll plod along at a slow pace, unable to do better, because using bodyfat exclusively to supply your muscles with the fuel they need is a slow process. Furthermore your brain runs on glucose. So-called 'keto' diets are not sustainable nor are they healthy.
By the way I am an endurance athlete (race bikes). If I didn't understand proper nutrition I wouldn't be successful at it at all, nor would I have the low bodyfat percentage I have -- and I'm 53 years old in less than 2 weeks.
The key to this subject is pretty much the same as it is for so many things: moderation is the key. You do not have to eschew sugar (or as you say 'anything that turns to sugar, which is all carbohydrate sources) entirely 'to be healthy', you just have to be sensible about it.
It is common wisdom amongst sports people. Including South African sports scientist Tim Noakes, who runs and advises sports teams. He wrote the Lore of Running, and when he had his realisation, he had to tear out the chapter on carb loading. In a recent podcast he talks about recent research,
"I have just come from a conference where my team presented on low carb diets, and we had a world class triathlete there who'd converted, and we in fact did an experiment on him, and we did show that if he ate a little more carbohydrates, his power over 20 kilometres went up, but on 100 kilometres it went down, so that was the interesting thing, that by increasing his carbs, he went down -- but what was really interesting is that he has got the highest rates of fat oxidation we've ever measured, at 90 percent of his VO2 max he was burning 1.85 grammes of fat per minute... so this guy does an IronMan and he burns fat all the way... "
I gather the general idea is that the body will burn sugar first, if it is available, and if it is always available, it never gets round to adapting to burning fat, so a runner will hit the wall, even though they have a lot of energy stored in their fat, as they can't access it. By practicing low carb for months, you adapt, and then you can access those stores continuously. If you start looking round the endurance world, you'll start finding athletes who are switching.
As for normal people like me, paleo/keto going on for ten years. And I never felt healthier (caveat being you don't know what is really going on in the body objectively, but subjectively over ten years... that's something). My recent experiment with zero carb isn't about the remaining sugar, it is about meat nutrient density versus plant matter and the various defences which plants have, and interestingly, as some other people have reported, it has changed my mood to be unusually calm, and I did go through the first couple of week wondering where my sugar would come from, but glucose readings are fine, the brain needs a bit of sugar, and the liver manufactures that from protein. However, I expect I am quite fat adapted, being LCHF for years, and practicing occasional 24 hour water-only fasts.
So you are in the position of understanding the conventional wisdom, but like Noakes, there is a shock in discovering things can work entirely differently. He developed diabetes, even though he was running a hundred kilometres a week. Moderation sounds good as a principle, but you need to see it in context that the normal level of blood sugar is small, just one teaspoon, something like that, so "moderation" for sugar means a tiny amount of sugar daily.
True, and I agree it would be a mistake to try turn it into simple minded notions like, paleo man did not drink tea so we do not drink tea. Rather, it is simply a hint about, well, if a food is relatively new, we might not be adapted to eat it, or maybe as it happens it’s fine anyway. We can already see today that different populations seem more or less susceptible to various problems. So, generally, there is the broad view that for 2 million years we developed on meat, and ten thousand years ago we started agriculture, and today different populations seem adapted in various ways. But today’s Westen diet is yet another big change, and there’s a hint in this coinciding with epidemics of obesity and diabetes.
I am not sure where you get this idea that meat is expensive. I don’t mean eating expensive steaks all the time. Bacon, eggs, liver, heart, cream, butter - - these are not expensive items. Part of what capitalism does is try to create demand for products which are not necessarily good but nevertheless which it can mass produce and get a monopoly on, and for decades we have been taught to eat “healthy” grains, so I am not sure that this means grains are inherently cheap or meat is inherently expensive, as if the industry had just not gone down the “big grain” path, who knows what quality meat products we would have now. If the whole health industry keeps telling your customers not to eat your products, do you suppose you will be able to lower your prices for mass market?
Basically, don't eat sugar, or stuff that turns to sugar [...]
Are you aware that ultimately everything we eat gets turned into glucose with digestion, yes?
Recently I have gone zero carb [...]
If you really mean no fruit and no vegetables: how healthy do you think it can be in the long run?
RT.
I'm aware protein is used to make glucose. If fat is also converted... well, that's new. But in any case, point is, body can make its own glucose, so you don't need to eat any, assuming there has been enough time for the body to convert and get used to burning fat for energy. Of course if you want to do a 200m sprint then maybe you want carbs to help. But generally, if blood sugar levels are normal with zero carbs eaten, then what do you think is happening to all the carbs you would eat?
The fruit and vegetables thing is an interesting one. I've been about ten years LCHF, always eating veg, and now trying zero carb, because as it turns out, there is an argument that plants are not necessarily as good for you as we have been told to believe. If it is of interest, there's books by Vilhjalmur Stefansson, who did a sort of controlled experiment under medical supervision, after his travels which indicated to him that meat was sufficient.
I basically ate a lot of sugar for 20 years, so I think I am one of those people who, perhaps like you, can shunt all that sugar out of the bloodstream, in vast quantities.
But low blood sugar does not tell you how much insulin you had to produce to achieve that. And there's some thinking that high insulin is in itself damaging.
And eventually, when the ability to produce that insulin craps out, then the blood sugar goes up and the the doc will worry about pre-diabetes.
But that is so far down the road already, towards bad health, that it is a sort of double edged sword I guess -- low blood sugar looks great, but meanwhile, insulin resistance is creeping up on the body.
Maybe, but have you, for a counter example, seen Allan Savory's talks? That most of the world's land is unsuitable for agriculture, but it is suitable for grazing, and that's our place on the food chain, to eat the flesh of animals, who can graze and use their digestive systems to convert all that energy in ways we cannot do, with our small digestive systems. So in that model, it is actually grain that's the expensive food, it is just that industrialised petrochemical heavy farming made it look cheap, and ignores the externalities (god I hate that word) of bad health, and diabetes epidemics, which may bankrupt health systems. The human model is more like, some Massai guys wandering around with nothing more than goats. And assuming you are not in arid lands, those goats will eat anything.
There's quite a few people out there, from various scientists to doctors to members of the public, doing some form or low carb, paleo, primal, and even zero carb, and finding that they thrive on it (yes very controversial as it means public health advice for last 30 years has been wrong, but that's progress).
Basically, don't eat sugar, or stuff that turns to sugar, and body does not then have to deal with damage from sugar.
Recently I have gone zero carb [1] and I just cannot get my head around how my body simply had no need for any sugar or carbs at all. Naturally people have to experiment for themselves to see if this is also true for them. Get a blood glucose meter, and wake up feeling fine on say, 4.0 mmol/l or 72 mg/dl
[1] More or less, there is the odd gram of a carb in cream cheese and so on.
Why wouldn't the replica just be sentient? why wouldn't the program running that is feeding in the data from the other example not also just be sentient? Surely they would be reacting in the same exact way to the same stimulus. Otherwise every one else could just be a robot or an illusion or trick, and if they can be why cant you be? Maybe your sentience is just another sentience playing a joke on you.
Well, to me this is the point... could just as well be... could also just as well NOT be... the sentience is irrelevant either way, to a fully functioning robot, if the robot is sufficiently complex... at least, that's the implication of believing that the brain and the brain alone generates sentience... do you see what I mean?
If the brain is a machine and is doing everything... why would it need sentience? What possible evolutionary advantage is there, in an animal which experiences pain and existential suffering? People don't kill themselves because they have problems, they kill themselves because they experience the problems, and cannot bear experiencing the problems. It would be better to "sleepwalk" through life, simply not experiencing any of it. The animal which is unfortunate enough to experience its pain (as opposed to merely processing a stimulus and calculating a response to avoid it) is at an evolutionary disadvantage.
Evolution should have selected against sentience. So this is another little thought on why and how sentience is very very weird, when trying to fit it into usual material processes.
"a consistent world with physical laws is no guarantee that this world of matter is the true reality"
This is how I test if this is real or a dream. Are the rules consistent, not just here but across wake-sleep boundaries. I do this in "dreams" and find that it is indeed inconsistent and then find that I'm able to break additional rules such as I'm able to fly simply by jumping up into the air and exerting my will to fly. This leads to a conclusion that I am in a "dream" in those instances. In other instances I can't fly which does not prove that I'm in a "dream" or not. The test merely failed.
"you are always certain of consciousness"
I'm not so sure about that one... If I exist as a simulation of consciousness then am I really conscious or just emulating consciousness? At what point does the difference lie on the spectrum? I have not found a good test for this so it is still a quandary.
You can test yourself... are you right now experiencing? See, the data fed to your senses, that could be a simulation. But if you are experiencing anything at all, even if all inputs are simulated, the moment that becomes a conscious experience, well that proves to you that you are conscious.
As for testing whether other people and robots are sentient... that's verging on impossible.
Put it this way, if we built a replica robot of you, your body and mind and knowledge and behaviours, and it functionally acted in the world exactly as you do, would it need to be sentient? After all, if our minds are 100% just our brains, and thus just a machine, then we can have such machines, being perfectly human, with absolutely no need for any sentience. They would just function. And there would be no-one experiencing anything.
Yet you are having an experience, I assume. You are sentient. I assume.
This is quite a specific meaning of the word. The eye converts light energy to electrical impulses (something like that) and eventually that energy data becomes the inner movie, the experience of "blue" or "red". There is nothing "red" about light energy. That's purely a human sentient experience. It is that point where energy becomes qualia.
You don't understand the concept of emergent phenomena. It's not a cop out, it's the observation that complex systems exhibit behaviour that can be difficult to predict from knowledge of their constituent parts. How much complexity depends on the system. The psuedoparticles that are emergent phenomena in condensed matter physics require varying numbers of interacting atoms. When you study emergent phenomena enough you can certainly learn how they emerge from simpler constituents. We know how Cooper pairs form from paired electrons, and we know how they lead to the phenomenon we observe as superconductivity.
Well, the little box on my shelf, the "radio", produces music. I open the box and look at all the parts, and I cannot see how the parts can compose music. But I know about "emergent phenomena" and that such behaviour, the music, will be difficult to predict from knowledge of the parts, anyway. So I continue to assure myself that the radio box does, in some emergent way, compose music. This is what I mean that it actually says nothing, as it merely begs the question.
The materialist assumption is that sentience must be created by the brain, because we know that there is a link between people's conscious experience and physical workings of the brain. But again, the simplest analogy with a radio, a faulty circuit causing lots of static in the music, is not evidence that the music is composed by the radio.
The problem is, we really do not know what sentience is. So it is a very woo woo subject. And people assume it must be the brain, an emergent property of the brain, just like music composition is an emergent property of the radio box on the shelf.
I skipped to the part whete you can check for yourself. That’s the easiest point to make. So no appeal to authority nor rhetoric is needed.
You know you are present, and thus sentient, you are right now experiencing existance. That’s consciousness.
Now, if you don’t like Decartes, let’s use the bomb in the cult classic Dark Star. The bomb’s AI begins to wonder whether it can trust its sensory inputs. How does it know that its sensory inputs are correct? And the intelligent bomb rightly concludes it cannot know. The bomb concludes that its own sentience is the only thing which it knows is absolutely true. Its senses, matter, remained suspect.
But the problem for the bomb is that it then misinterpreted its situation and believed itself to be God. See this is why you cannot deny your own sentence, as when you stop and consider it, your sentience is the only truly absolute thing you can know without doubt (which is why the bomb misinterpreted that absolute as a kind of godhead, forgetting that the world has many sentient beings, not just itself).
So if, and i say if, you had to answer, which do you know to be more real, more undoubtably verified, the world of matter you see, or your own sentience, you can answer that yourself by just noticing that you are sentient, and the fact you can notice anything at all is proof you are existing as a sentience, see? but the world of form and matter is... is what... the matrix? How would you know?
So consciousness always wins the “reality” prize, if you had to choose. And I’m saying that for various reasons, we say it is both sentience and energy, both consciousness and matter.
And whilst that kinda leads to the idea that all matter is sentient, I think maybe that’s not quite right, I think that is one interpretation, and it does not seem to explain why individual sentiences exist, why we each experience our own life stream. Saying all matter is sentient seems to ignore this orher really simple observation which anyone can make, that we appear to all be separate and individual sentient beings (kinda like many worlds, perhaps). So there’s no appeal to anyone other than yourself, you are sentient.
Well, your premise runs into the problem that it actually says nothing.
Using words “emergent” and “complexity” actually say nothing.
HOW does it emerge? HOW DOES MATTER BECOME QUALIA?
And why would complexity have anything to do with that? HOW DO YOU KNOW THAT AN ANT IS NOT SENTIENT?
I emphasise those two points, excuse the caps.
I am all for throwing away thousands of years of religious dogma. But materialism has also become a dogma. Most “smart” people get round it by simply ignoring the fundamental reality of consciousness, calling it a ghostly emergent property, as if that explained a single damned thing - pure unadulterated dogma.
First, the materialist view demands that whatever consciousness is, it must merely emerge from matter. For various reasons, this materialist position runs into brick walls and is a dead end. This is Descartes’ point: if you are faced with consciousness and matter, and are wondering which one might be the illusory one, you are going to have to pick matter as the illusory one. All the materialist positions run into this simple fact, that if you just close your eyes and wonder what is truly real, all you can say is that you are existing, you have a sence of existing, and that experience would not be present without your consciousness - - meanwhile, what arises in your awareness, lights and souds, you cannot know if they are real or a dream or the matrix or whatever - - every night we wake from dreams which we had no idea at the time were merely dreams, as they felt real whist you were dreaming (and sometimes you notice and have a lucid dream) so who is to say what you will decide about this life, should you wake up to a higher level after you leave this body? Nobody knows, but the problem remains, a consistent world with physical laws is no guarantee that this world of matter is the true reality, and after all, mathematics is extremely rigorous and consistent and yet all in the mind, so the mind can generate extremely complex and rigorous phenomena yet 100% mind-stuff - - meanwhile, you are always certain of consciousness - - even at night dreaming, you have proof of consciousness - - so consciousness would win, if you had to pick one. So what to do? We cannot pick materialist beliefs. The answer is that consciousness and matter are both real, forever. Trying to explain one in terns of the other always causes problems.
If at all possible, avoid it. But if as a professional you rely on these tools, well that's just another overhead. And fair enough, if these companies have run out of good features and now they just want rent. I suppose they could take it a step further and start demanding a percentage of your profits...
To a lay person like me, this sounds like normal design compromises,
I think a normal person could understand that it makes more sense for the security guard to check their ID before they go into a building, not after they have gone into a building and rifled through the filing cabinets. Intel chose to behave in this fashion while AMD (and literally everyone else) did it the correct way.
By that analogy, some security guards might not be wearing their correct prescription glasses, and when there is a long queue of people, may not actually take a close look at everyone's 10 year old photo of back when the person still had a beard. Or that the security guard might be too busy chatting, and just wave through the innocent looking old lady. This is what I mean, a security guard isn't a definite and reliable 100% check. But we all know that.
To a lay person like me, this sounds like normal design compromises, which are common to any design problem, in everything from kettles to houses.
So in a sense, the reason this became a blame issue, isn't that there are technical compromises, but that these did not come with clear advice about how these technical compromises could not guarantee something which the operating systems were relying upon.
Kettles are dangerous, as they are near the limits of what is safe -- eg. do not plug two kettles into one extension lead, and do not rest your hand on the body when it is boiling. But as users we know this. And maybe they could design a kettle that did not have those problems, but we'd all complain about the slow and enormous clunk of a thing.
But with these CPUs, they did something which everyone should have been made aware of.
And I don't know whether the engineers knew or not -- that's beyond my understanding -- but now, certainly, world + dog needs to know how not to get burned.
That’s what I was wondering too. Seems too easy for it to leak, whilst most everyone who is actually affected is kept in the dark.
My takeaway message, for me, is that, any secret key or whatever, on a machine which ran newly downloaded and possibly untrusted code, now needs recreating on a fresh system. And it would have been nice to have known that months ago, even if no fix was available.
This is like the old days where the doctor doesn’t inform you of terminal illness, because they think they’re better judge of how to manage you.
I recall they used to get round it by saying, "this hurricane can't be attributed to climate change but it is an example of the kinds of events which climate change is leading to more and more, and a reminder of why it is so urgent that we act..." -- which, if I am using the expression right, is begging the question.
Unfortunately the whole issue has been framed in the public mind as, "people who accept the science" vs. "nutcase idiot right wingers who ignore all common sense so they can selfishly keep their SUVs". Top marks to the PR firm which devised that strategy 30 years ago.
As naturally, most people want to be seen as belonging to the former group.
It is amazing because very few actually read any of the actual studies to try to figure out for themselves what they can really claim, rather, people feel they need to show they are not "bad". It has become a moralized identity issue.
Yet in other subjects, it makes sense to wonder, for example, is the doctor right to prescribe so many statins and are there really some nasty side effects being felt by users? But on climate change, if you stop to wonder, you are into the moral quagmire. I recall my mother questioning the doc's liberal use of antibiotics, some decades ago, and she was proven right years later, by her simple observation: if he takes this for a mild cold, what does he take for something serious? Now everyone is on about the over-prescripotion of antibiotics, yeah, even the experts are now saying this.
Climate change is not a moral issue. It is a science study.
If people want to talk about morals and ethics of say, consumerism, then they can join the 5000 year old philosophical debates on asceticism and human nature, which are rich sources of human wisdom on life.
The irony is that by making it a moral issue, we actually dumb down the real moral and ethical issues involved.
Well, I hope old age is more about becoming more mellow, more accepting, and having a sense of humour. Or one can turn into a resentful angry old fart.
Someone said, (it was Obama as it happens but could be anyone),
be kind and be useful
And it is always easier to preach than to practice... so change begins inside. Etc. Actually, there have been so many great thinkers through the ages. We are kinda blessed really.
As well as left and right, there’s also stages, which run from pre modern to modern, or to put it another’s way, we went from authoritarian systems to moden free individual/democatic systems. You can have left and right versions of each.
So what happens is, often the right will criticise the left by pointing to the earliest and most regressive stages in the left (like, the Nazis were socialists) and the left can point to the most regressive parts of the right (fascists).
This about crushing free speech, and censorship, assumes it is like nazis doing it, in a nazi way — that’s only true if the society wants s really at that kind of authoritarian stage where it would fly.
Nazis put people in jail, but that does not mean all jail keepers are nazis.
Governments sometimes use censorship, but that does not mean the government is a bunch of theocratic mullahs.
We have to look at the value of the government and why they are imposing these controls.
I’ve read about this overall pattern: the left assumes problems are caused by society, whilst the right assumes problems are caused by individuals.
So for example, the right does not like abortion because the individual got thenselves pregnant, presumably due to lack of moral character. Meanwhile the left wants to tax the rich because no individual could be worth 1000 more than another, hence the system must be rigged and the system needs fixing.
So for the left, controlling speech is really about trying to fix the system as in, fix the culture, fix the language and memes.
Slashdot Mirror
zero carb
Try participating in an endurance sport on zero carbs and tell us how you do.
Nevermind, that was rhetorical; I know how you'll do: at best you'll plod along at a slow pace, unable to do better, because using bodyfat exclusively to supply your muscles with the fuel they need is a slow process. Furthermore your brain runs on glucose. So-called 'keto' diets are not sustainable nor are they healthy.
By the way I am an endurance athlete (race bikes). If I didn't understand proper nutrition I wouldn't be successful at it at all, nor would I have the low bodyfat percentage I have -- and I'm 53 years old in less than 2 weeks.
The key to this subject is pretty much the same as it is for so many things: moderation is the key. You do not have to eschew sugar (or as you say 'anything that turns to sugar, which is all carbohydrate sources) entirely 'to be healthy', you just have to be sensible about it.
It is common wisdom amongst sports people. Including South African sports scientist Tim Noakes, who runs and advises sports teams. He wrote the Lore of Running, and when he had his realisation, he had to tear out the chapter on carb loading. In a recent podcast he talks about recent research,
"I have just come from a conference where my team presented on low carb diets, and we had a world class triathlete there who'd converted, and we in fact did an experiment on him, and we did show that if he ate a little more carbohydrates, his power over 20 kilometres went up, but on 100 kilometres it went down, so that was the interesting thing, that by increasing his carbs, he went down -- but what was really interesting is that he has got the highest rates of fat oxidation we've ever measured, at 90 percent of his VO2 max he was burning 1.85 grammes of fat per minute ... so this guy does an IronMan and he burns fat all the way ... "
I gather the general idea is that the body will burn sugar first, if it is available, and if it is always available, it never gets round to adapting to burning fat, so a runner will hit the wall, even though they have a lot of energy stored in their fat, as they can't access it. By practicing low carb for months, you adapt, and then you can access those stores continuously. If you start looking round the endurance world, you'll start finding athletes who are switching.
As for normal people like me, paleo/keto going on for ten years. And I never felt healthier (caveat being you don't know what is really going on in the body objectively, but subjectively over ten years... that's something). My recent experiment with zero carb isn't about the remaining sugar, it is about meat nutrient density versus plant matter and the various defences which plants have, and interestingly, as some other people have reported, it has changed my mood to be unusually calm, and I did go through the first couple of week wondering where my sugar would come from, but glucose readings are fine, the brain needs a bit of sugar, and the liver manufactures that from protein. However, I expect I am quite fat adapted, being LCHF for years, and practicing occasional 24 hour water-only fasts.
So you are in the position of understanding the conventional wisdom, but like Noakes, there is a shock in discovering things can work entirely differently. He developed diabetes, even though he was running a hundred kilometres a week. Moderation sounds good as a principle, but you need to see it in context that the normal level of blood sugar is small, just one teaspoon, something like that, so "moderation" for sugar means a tiny amount of sugar daily.
True, and I agree it would be a mistake to try turn it into simple minded notions like, paleo man did not drink tea so we do not drink tea. Rather, it is simply a hint about, well, if a food is relatively new, we might not be adapted to eat it, or maybe as it happens it’s fine anyway. We can already see today that different populations seem more or less susceptible to various problems. So, generally, there is the broad view that for 2 million years we developed on meat, and ten thousand years ago we started agriculture, and today different populations seem adapted in various ways. But today’s Westen diet is yet another big change, and there’s a hint in this coinciding with epidemics of obesity and diabetes.
I am not sure where you get this idea that meat is expensive. I don’t mean eating expensive steaks all the time. Bacon, eggs, liver, heart, cream, butter - - these are not expensive items. Part of what capitalism does is try to create demand for products which are not necessarily good but nevertheless which it can mass produce and get a monopoly on, and for decades we have been taught to eat “healthy” grains, so I am not sure that this means grains are inherently cheap or meat is inherently expensive, as if the industry had just not gone down the “big grain” path, who knows what quality meat products we would have now. If the whole health industry keeps telling your customers not to eat your products, do you suppose you will be able to lower your prices for mass market?
Basically, don't eat sugar, or stuff that turns to sugar [...]
Are you aware that ultimately everything we eat gets turned into glucose with digestion, yes?
Recently I have gone zero carb [...]
If you really mean no fruit and no vegetables: how healthy do you think it can be in the long run?
RT.
I'm aware protein is used to make glucose. If fat is also converted... well, that's new. But in any case, point is, body can make its own glucose, so you don't need to eat any, assuming there has been enough time for the body to convert and get used to burning fat for energy. Of course if you want to do a 200m sprint then maybe you want carbs to help. But generally, if blood sugar levels are normal with zero carbs eaten, then what do you think is happening to all the carbs you would eat?
The fruit and vegetables thing is an interesting one. I've been about ten years LCHF, always eating veg, and now trying zero carb, because as it turns out, there is an argument that plants are not necessarily as good for you as we have been told to believe. If it is of interest, there's books by Vilhjalmur Stefansson, who did a sort of controlled experiment under medical supervision, after his travels which indicated to him that meat was sufficient.
I basically ate a lot of sugar for 20 years, so I think I am one of those people who, perhaps like you, can shunt all that sugar out of the bloodstream, in vast quantities.
But low blood sugar does not tell you how much insulin you had to produce to achieve that. And there's some thinking that high insulin is in itself damaging.
And eventually, when the ability to produce that insulin craps out, then the blood sugar goes up and the the doc will worry about pre-diabetes.
But that is so far down the road already, towards bad health, that it is a sort of double edged sword I guess -- low blood sugar looks great, but meanwhile, insulin resistance is creeping up on the body.
Maybe, but have you, for a counter example, seen Allan Savory's talks? That most of the world's land is unsuitable for agriculture, but it is suitable for grazing, and that's our place on the food chain, to eat the flesh of animals, who can graze and use their digestive systems to convert all that energy in ways we cannot do, with our small digestive systems. So in that model, it is actually grain that's the expensive food, it is just that industrialised petrochemical heavy farming made it look cheap, and ignores the externalities (god I hate that word) of bad health, and diabetes epidemics, which may bankrupt health systems. The human model is more like, some Massai guys wandering around with nothing more than goats. And assuming you are not in arid lands, those goats will eat anything.
There's quite a few people out there, from various scientists to doctors to members of the public, doing some form or low carb, paleo, primal, and even zero carb, and finding that they thrive on it (yes very controversial as it means public health advice for last 30 years has been wrong, but that's progress).
Basically, don't eat sugar, or stuff that turns to sugar, and body does not then have to deal with damage from sugar.
Recently I have gone zero carb [1] and I just cannot get my head around how my body simply had no need for any sugar or carbs at all.
Naturally people have to experiment for themselves to see if this is also true for them.
Get a blood glucose meter, and wake up feeling fine on say, 4.0 mmol/l or 72 mg/dl
[1] More or less, there is the odd gram of a carb in cream cheese and so on.
Why wouldn't the replica just be sentient? why wouldn't the program running that is feeding in the data from the other example not also just be sentient?
Surely they would be reacting in the same exact way to the same stimulus.
Otherwise every one else could just be a robot or an illusion or trick, and if they can be why cant you be? Maybe your sentience is just another sentience playing a joke on you.
Well, to me this is the point ... could just as well be ... could also just as well NOT be ... the sentience is irrelevant either way, to a fully functioning robot, if the robot is sufficiently complex ... at least, that's the implication of believing that the brain and the brain alone generates sentience ... do you see what I mean?
If the brain is a machine and is doing everything... why would it need sentience? What possible evolutionary advantage is there, in an animal which experiences pain and existential suffering? People don't kill themselves because they have problems, they kill themselves because they experience the problems, and cannot bear experiencing the problems. It would be better to "sleepwalk" through life, simply not experiencing any of it. The animal which is unfortunate enough to experience its pain (as opposed to merely processing a stimulus and calculating a response to avoid it) is at an evolutionary disadvantage.
Evolution should have selected against sentience. So this is another little thought on why and how sentience is very very weird, when trying to fit it into usual material processes.
"a consistent world with physical laws is no guarantee that this world of matter is the true reality"
This is how I test if this is real or a dream. Are the rules consistent, not just here but across wake-sleep boundaries. I do this in "dreams" and find that it is indeed inconsistent and then find that I'm able to break additional rules such as I'm able to fly simply by jumping up into the air and exerting my will to fly. This leads to a conclusion that I am in a "dream" in those instances. In other instances I can't fly which does not prove that I'm in a "dream" or not. The test merely failed.
"you are always certain of consciousness"
I'm not so sure about that one... If I exist as a simulation of consciousness then am I really conscious or just emulating consciousness? At what point does the difference lie on the spectrum? I have not found a good test for this so it is still a quandary.
You can test yourself... are you right now experiencing? See, the data fed to your senses, that could be a simulation. But if you are experiencing anything at all, even if all inputs are simulated, the moment that becomes a conscious experience, well that proves to you that you are conscious.
As for testing whether other people and robots are sentient... that's verging on impossible.
Put it this way, if we built a replica robot of you, your body and mind and knowledge and behaviours, and it functionally acted in the world exactly as you do, would it need to be sentient? After all, if our minds are 100% just our brains, and thus just a machine, then we can have such machines, being perfectly human, with absolutely no need for any sentience. They would just function. And there would be no-one experiencing anything.
Yet you are having an experience, I assume. You are sentient. I assume.
This is quite a specific meaning of the word. The eye converts light energy to electrical impulses (something like that) and eventually that energy data becomes the inner movie, the experience of "blue" or "red". There is nothing "red" about light energy. That's purely a human sentient experience. It is that point where energy becomes qualia.
You don't understand the concept of emergent phenomena. It's not a cop out, it's the observation that complex systems exhibit behaviour that can be difficult to predict from knowledge of their constituent parts. How much complexity depends on the system. The psuedoparticles that are emergent phenomena in condensed matter physics require varying numbers of interacting atoms. When you study emergent phenomena enough you can certainly learn how they emerge from simpler constituents. We know how Cooper pairs form from paired electrons, and we know how they lead to the phenomenon we observe as superconductivity.
Well, the little box on my shelf, the "radio", produces music. I open the box and look at all the parts, and I cannot see how the parts can compose music. But I know about "emergent phenomena" and that such behaviour, the music, will be difficult to predict from knowledge of the parts, anyway. So I continue to assure myself that the radio box does, in some emergent way, compose music. This is what I mean that it actually says nothing, as it merely begs the question.
The materialist assumption is that sentience must be created by the brain, because we know that there is a link between people's conscious experience and physical workings of the brain. But again, the simplest analogy with a radio, a faulty circuit causing lots of static in the music, is not evidence that the music is composed by the radio.
The problem is, we really do not know what sentience is. So it is a very woo woo subject. And people assume it must be the brain, an emergent property of the brain, just like music composition is an emergent property of the radio box on the shelf.
I skipped to the part whete you can check for yourself. That’s the easiest point to make. So no appeal to authority nor rhetoric is needed.
You know you are present, and thus sentient, you are right now experiencing existance. That’s consciousness.
Now, if you don’t like Decartes, let’s use the bomb in the cult classic Dark Star. The bomb’s AI begins to wonder whether it can trust its sensory inputs. How does it know that its sensory inputs are correct? And the intelligent bomb rightly concludes it cannot know. The bomb concludes that its own sentience is the only thing which it knows is absolutely true. Its senses, matter, remained suspect.
But the problem for the bomb is that it then misinterpreted its situation and believed itself to be God. See this is why you cannot deny your own sentence, as when you stop and consider it, your sentience is the only truly absolute thing you can know without doubt (which is why the bomb misinterpreted that absolute as a kind of godhead, forgetting that the world has many sentient beings, not just itself).
So if, and i say if, you had to answer, which do you know to be more real, more undoubtably verified, the world of matter you see, or your own sentience, you can answer that yourself by just noticing that you are sentient, and the fact you can notice anything at all is proof you are existing as a sentience, see? but the world of form and matter is... is what... the matrix? How would you know?
So consciousness always wins the “reality” prize, if you had to choose. And I’m saying that for various reasons, we say it is both sentience and energy, both consciousness and matter.
And whilst that kinda leads to the idea that all matter is sentient, I think maybe that’s not quite right, I think that is one interpretation, and it does not seem to explain why individual sentiences exist, why we each experience our own life stream. Saying all matter is sentient seems to ignore this orher really simple observation which anyone can make, that we appear to all be separate and individual sentient beings (kinda like many worlds, perhaps). So there’s no appeal to anyone other than yourself, you are sentient.
Well, your premise runs into the problem that it actually says nothing.
Using words “emergent” and “complexity” actually say nothing.
HOW does it emerge? HOW DOES MATTER BECOME QUALIA?
And why would complexity have anything to do with that? HOW DO YOU KNOW THAT AN ANT IS NOT SENTIENT?
I emphasise those two points, excuse the caps.
I am all for throwing away thousands of years of religious dogma. But materialism has also become a dogma. Most “smart” people get round it by simply ignoring the fundamental reality of consciousness, calling it a ghostly emergent property, as if that explained a single damned thing - pure unadulterated dogma.
First, the materialist view demands that whatever consciousness is, it must merely emerge from matter. For various reasons, this materialist position runs into brick walls and is a dead end. This is Descartes’ point: if you are faced with consciousness and matter, and are wondering which one might be the illusory one, you are going to have to pick matter as the illusory one. All the materialist positions run into this simple fact, that if you just close your eyes and wonder what is truly real, all you can say is that you are existing, you have a sence of existing, and that experience would not be present without your consciousness - - meanwhile, what arises in your awareness, lights and souds, you cannot know if they are real or a dream or the matrix or whatever - - every night we wake from dreams which we had no idea at the time were merely dreams, as they felt real whist you were dreaming (and sometimes you notice and have a lucid dream) so who is to say what you will decide about this life, should you wake up to a higher level after you leave this body? Nobody knows, but the problem remains, a consistent world with physical laws is no guarantee that this world of matter is the true reality, and after all, mathematics is extremely rigorous and consistent and yet all in the mind, so the mind can generate extremely complex and rigorous phenomena yet 100% mind-stuff - - meanwhile, you are always certain of consciousness - - even at night dreaming, you have proof of consciousness - - so consciousness would win, if you had to pick one. So what to do? We cannot pick materialist beliefs. The answer is that consciousness and matter are both real, forever. Trying to explain one in terns of the other always causes problems.
If at all possible, avoid it.
But if as a professional you rely on these tools, well that's just another overhead.
And fair enough, if these companies have run out of good features and now they just want rent.
I suppose they could take it a step further and start demanding a percentage of your profits...
To a lay person like me, this sounds like normal design compromises,
I think a normal person could understand that it makes more sense for the security guard to check their ID before they go into a building, not after they have gone into a building and rifled through the filing cabinets. Intel chose to behave in this fashion while AMD (and literally everyone else) did it the correct way.
By that analogy, some security guards might not be wearing their correct prescription glasses, and when there is a long queue of people, may not actually take a close look at everyone's 10 year old photo of back when the person still had a beard. Or that the security guard might be too busy chatting, and just wave through the innocent looking old lady. This is what I mean, a security guard isn't a definite and reliable 100% check. But we all know that.
Indeed scary. Just as well it is a very very big universe, with lots of space separating everyone.
To a lay person like me, this sounds like normal design compromises, which are common to any design problem, in everything from kettles to houses.
So in a sense, the reason this became a blame issue, isn't that there are technical compromises, but that these did not come with clear advice about how these technical compromises could not guarantee something which the operating systems were relying upon.
Kettles are dangerous, as they are near the limits of what is safe -- eg. do not plug two kettles into one extension lead, and do not rest your hand on the body when it is boiling. But as users we know this. And maybe they could design a kettle that did not have those problems, but we'd all complain about the slow and enormous clunk of a thing.
But with these CPUs, they did something which everyone should have been made aware of.
And I don't know whether the engineers knew or not -- that's beyond my understanding -- but now, certainly, world + dog needs to know how not to get burned.
Isn't there also that German group with the twisty-wisty-timey-wimey-torus which is also meant to be a huge deal?
Don't you mean:
Yes... yes yes... I say yes... yes yes...
Yes but yes but yes but
Yes... yes yes... I say yes... yes yes...
That’s what I was wondering too. Seems too easy for it to leak, whilst most everyone who is actually affected is kept in the dark.
My takeaway message, for me, is that, any secret key or whatever, on a machine which ran newly downloaded and possibly untrusted code, now needs recreating on a fresh system. And it would have been nice to have known that months ago, even if no fix was available.
This is like the old days where the doctor doesn’t inform you of terminal illness, because they think they’re better judge of how to manage you.
I recall they used to get round it by saying, "this hurricane can't be attributed to climate change but it is an example of the kinds of events which climate change is leading to more and more, and a reminder of why it is so urgent that we act..." -- which, if I am using the expression right, is begging the question.
Unfortunately the whole issue has been framed in the public mind as, "people who accept the science" vs. "nutcase idiot right wingers who ignore all common sense so they can selfishly keep their SUVs". Top marks to the PR firm which devised that strategy 30 years ago.
As naturally, most people want to be seen as belonging to the former group.
It is amazing because very few actually read any of the actual studies to try to figure out for themselves what they can really claim, rather, people feel they need to show they are not "bad". It has become a moralized identity issue.
Yet in other subjects, it makes sense to wonder, for example, is the doctor right to prescribe so many statins and are there really some nasty side effects being felt by users? But on climate change, if you stop to wonder, you are into the moral quagmire. I recall my mother questioning the doc's liberal use of antibiotics, some decades ago, and she was proven right years later, by her simple observation: if he takes this for a mild cold, what does he take for something serious? Now everyone is on about the over-prescripotion of antibiotics, yeah, even the experts are now saying this.
Climate change is not a moral issue. It is a science study.
If people want to talk about morals and ethics of say, consumerism, then they can join the 5000 year old philosophical debates on asceticism and human nature, which are rich sources of human wisdom on life.
The irony is that by making it a moral issue, we actually dumb down the real moral and ethical issues involved.
One wonders the only controversy left is what to rename it to next.
Global Warming
Climate Change
Climate Chaos and Disruption
and Extrematization
Well, I hope old age is more about becoming more mellow, more accepting, and having a sense of humour.
Or one can turn into a resentful angry old fart.
Someone said, (it was Obama as it happens but could be anyone),
be kind and be useful
And it is always easier to preach than to practice... so change begins inside. Etc.
Actually, there have been so many great thinkers through the ages. We are kinda blessed really.
As well as left and right, there’s also stages, which run from pre modern to modern, or to put it another’s way, we went from authoritarian systems to moden free individual/democatic systems. You can have left and right versions of each.
So what happens is, often the right will criticise the left by pointing to the earliest and most regressive stages in the left (like, the Nazis were socialists) and the left can point to the most regressive parts of the right (fascists).
This about crushing free speech, and censorship, assumes it is like nazis doing it, in a nazi way — that’s only true if the society wants s really at that kind of authoritarian stage where it would fly.
Nazis put people in jail, but that does not mean all jail keepers are nazis.
Governments sometimes use censorship, but that does not mean the government is a bunch of theocratic mullahs.
We have to look at the value of the government and why they are imposing these controls.
I’ve read about this overall pattern: the left assumes problems are caused by society, whilst the right assumes problems are caused by individuals.
So for example, the right does not like abortion because the individual got thenselves pregnant, presumably due to lack of moral character. Meanwhile the left wants to tax the rich because no individual could be worth 1000 more than another, hence the system must be rigged and the system needs fixing.
So for the left, controlling speech is really about trying to fix the system as in, fix the culture, fix the language and memes.