Carl-Richard

My teens were amidst a few moments of escape a chronic mental health crisis so yes.

Have you read one paper on personality genomics?

If you stopped developing your rationality in high school, I feel sorry for you.

That's not true. You think two identical twins raised up on different sides of the world would have the same personality?

Even if cognitive functions are quite fundamental, there are fundamental things that can change over a lifetime. But some things tend towards stasis, when it works.

Does eating a porifera sea sponge count as killing? There are many animals with no neurons or true nervous systems, or nervous systems that don't have clear brains. But even in these animals (and plants), there are waves of electrical potentials and intercellular communication. The difference between a neuron and other cells is a bit like the difference between a Ferrari supercar and Volkswagen type 1. The difference is primarily in speed and precision, but the fundamental mechanics are mostly the same (propagation of signals through electrochemical gradients). Even though you feel quite overtly if somebody triggers a sensory neuron in your hand, you also have a more vague and general sense of your internal bodily states (what you tap into for example when you feel sick or you've eaten something slightly off). This feeling I believe is a holistic assessment of all your bodily states, not just the state of your neurons. You also have various everyday semi-ESP phenomena which are hard to explain with neurons.

Sounds like ChatGPT. Just explain your ideas with concrete examples and unpack jargon with clarifying sentences and you're halfway there. Know your audience.

You have a thing for being rigid with frames when it absolutely doesn't matter.

Read Steven Pinker's tweets on how to write so people can understand you.

Being dead while alive is rare.

Even ChatGPT cut off the last part of the sentence. That tells you something.

Your sentence is literally illogical.

I'm already off.

Yes.

If my car got stolen, it's likely that it was stolen by a human. But I can't know that it wasn't stolen by an alien, before I gather some more conclusive or confirming or disconfirming evidence.

Of course you feel bad when you eat meat. That book seems like an extension of Terrence McKenna's entheogen hypothesis for the development of complex language and higher cognition. Which is not much more than a hypothesis with little corroborating evidence. There is generally a lack of evidence for theories that try to explain things that happened in the distant past, even rigorous scientific theories. Evolutionary biology is plagued with endless competiting and comparably plausible "just so" stories. And it's tied to the problems with ancient aliens egyptology (endless post-hoc multiple comparisons); you can always find an explanation that fits the hypothesis but which is not conclusive or confirming or disconfirming evidence.

Hello? Welcome to the forum.

It's not hard to accept. There is just no conclusive evidence (as far as I can tell). There is no hidden city discovered where you find intact chainsaws and computers and corpses of internet porn-addicted incels.

You're talking about modern fruits downstream of millennia of selective breeding creating essentially candies on a Christmas tree. Babies also like candy. Will you eat sea sponge?

💀

What about combining the archaeological record AND interpretation of myths? That's when you get a pasta party a'la Hancock style 💃

Ancient alien egyptologists run into the problem of post-hoc multiple comparisons: the probability of finding a significant result is severely inflated when you throw a million spaghettis at the wall and try to see which ones stick. This tends to be adjusted for in scientific studies that use inferential statistics (e.g. Bonferroni correction). That said, if aliens exist, and if the human brain has been basically the same for the last 200k years (and we achieved meta-cognition 30-75k years ago), that's a lot of potential. I think it's plausible that we could've been advanced at least one time before the last Ice Age, but I think the evidence is not conclusive.

Imagine if you get reborn as a male chicken 😬

I'm saying it's not clear what it's best to spend your limited time and attention on. If you want to cure cancer, you can't at the same time be a leading vegan activist that topples the meatocracy. Those are full-time jobs. So you have to choose what to focus on, and if that is the case, why not focus on something you're good at, something you want to do? As for choosing to not personally be a vegan in your daily life, let's be real here, what percentage of animal suffering are you alleviating? If you care about animal suffering, in a meatocracy, you would do more than simply not eating animals. But then again, there are other things worth caring about. And if this sounds like cold consequentialism, veganism is absolutely the superior moral choice on a personal level. But the personal level matters SO little in the grand scheme of things, and you can be doing so much more with your life than nudging a number one hair's thickness on the road to Proxima Centauri. But I agree it does seem like a disturbing image that if I were to experience the perspective of a chicken when I say it matters so little that specifically that chicken gets eaten. I would never do that if it was me in that situation. But then how different is the mind of a chicken from the mind of a plant? I would definitely think cows and pigs are far far from a plant, but I'm not sure all animals are.