Posts
Comments
My thought was that if I wanted to drink this stuff, I'd need to double the recipe to meet my daily calorie requirements. If I did that, then I would get enough of a lot of things that currently seem too low. So scaling the %RDA for the vitamins and minerals, according to how much you're actually going to drink, would make it easier to use.
But there might also be differences between people. Someone who weighs 50 kg is not going to need as many nutrients as someone who weighs 100 kg. RDA is based on a normal 25-year-old male, so you might be able to scale according to weight based on that. However, what about people who weigh the same, but have very different metabolisms? Should someone who eats 3000 calories a day have more vitamin E than someone who eats 1800 calories a day?If the answer is yes, then my "nutrients per calorie" idea would standardize your table so you could just drink as much of this concoction as you want and you'd have the right nutrient balance. If the answer is no, then there's no reason to use the nutrients per calorie, and if you did use it you might end up overdosing on vitamin A. I tried to find some information to answer that question, but couldn't find anything.
RDA is based on a 2000 calorie diet, and since the recipe in it's current proportions has only 1156 calories, it might be easier to interpret if you calculated the total nutrient values by (total % of RDA)*(2000 calories)/(number of calories in recipe), to give sort of a "nutrients per calorie" measure.
Wikipedia says plant iron is harder to absorb than meat iron ("heme" iron), so your percentages for iron may be an underestimate.
That's really cool. I looked through their methods and (assuming I understand everything) what they did was they added a gene that codes for a fluorescent indicator that associates with calcium channels. Then they took the larval zebrafish and shot a laser at different points of the brain and measured the fluorescence, which changed when the calcium channel was active. Since calcium movement is part of how neurons fire, this let them image neuron firing. This won't work for humans unless we can somehow get this fluoresence gene into all of our neurons, make a laser that goes through our skulls without hurting us, and scale the whole method up about a billion times. Still: I'm hopeful.
The spatial and temporal viewpoint analogy doesn't quite work, because you can sensibly talk about a movement through space, since movement means change in space/change in time. But you can't really talk about movement through time because that would be change in time/change in time. So if we set time equal to a constant, and look at space, your viewpoint is only at one spatial point. But if we look at time, your viewpoint is at a continuum of places, sort of a "line" through time.
Your analysis of the neural construction of spatial viewpoints is good, and I think it holds for the neural construction of temporal viewpoints. If I knew these neural constructions, then I would know exactly why you feel a subjective experience of a viewpoint moving through space and time. I could understand these causal mechanisms an be satisfied with my knowledge of the process. But I might still be confused about my feeling of subjective experience, because it doesn't explain why I feel things the way that I do. I've been reluctant to use the word "qualia" but essentially that's what I'm getting at. Hence my analogy with red: Even if I knew the parts of the brain that responded to red, would I know why red looks the way it does?
So if we want to talk about other people, then I think we're all on the same page. These sensations of spatial/temporal movement could be explained with neuroscience, and have no profound philosophical implications.
The anthropic trilemma is a question that wouldn't be raised unless the questioner implicitly believed in souls. The attempt here is to make people realize what it really means to have a reductionist view of consciousness and subjective experience.
I'm not sure what you're referring to by "souls" there. Right now I have this subjective experience of being a consciousness that is moving through time. I anticipate a sensation of "moving" through new situations as time goes on, and things like the anthropic trilemma refer to my expectation of where I will feel like I end up next moment. I think we agree that our minds have no objective property that follows them through time, at least no more than non-conscious objects. But there does seem to be some subjective sense of this movement, leading to a big question: If we don't have souls, why does it feel so very much like we do?
I'm mostly content to say, "Eventually neuroscientists will piece apart enough mental processes that we can describe the neural activity that causes this sensation to arrive". I also classify this sense of a "soul" in the same as something like the colour red. Why does red look like red? I don't know. I intend to eventually find out, but I'm not sure where to start yet.
If you really want the thread metaphor, then imagine a thread which splits into two threads upon being copied, not one which follows along with one of the two copies.
Yes, very true. Sorry though, I guess I wasn't clear with the thread idea. I was trying to contrast your "flipbook" concept of consciousness with the thread concept, and ask whether they would actual feel any different. My own thought is: No, there's no way to tell them apart.
I'll expand on Dan Armak's issue with using "moment". When I try to imagine this, I end up with this conceptual image of a series of consciousnesses, each going "Oh-wow-i-finally-exist-oh-no-I'm-dying", but that's totally wrong. They don't have near enough to time to think those thoughts, and in fact to think that thought they would have to break into several more moment-consciousnesses, none of which could really be described as "thinking". If each moment-consciousness is continuously appearing and disappearing, they're not appearing and disappearing in the same sense that we use those words in any other situation. It seems analogous to watching a ball move, and concluding that it's actually a series of balls "appearing and disappearing". Why not just say it's moving?
The other thing that I always have to remind myself is that even though it feels like there's a consciousness moving, in reality my "consciousness" is present at every moment in time that I exist! And moving is a word that means position changing as time changes, so talking about moving through time is talking about "time changing times as time changes", which doesn't really say anything.
Lastly, if there were a thread connecting all past and future consciousness, how would you know? Would it feel any different than your experience now?
Machiavelli wrote in "The Prince" about the similar dilemma of advice. If you let everyone give you advice, you seem like a pushover, but if you don't take any advice, you'll probably do something stupid. His recommendation was to have a circle of people who you take advice from, and to ignore everyone else.
A similar system could work well for offense. If you want to be high-status, when most people lower your status, get offended. But for a select few (probably the people who you work with when you're seeking truth in some form or another) practice never taking offense, as the original post suggests. Ideally, these people would know they could offend you, so they wouldn't censor potentially helpful ideas.