“work to do in terms of the conversations that he’s going to have with members of Congress moving forward.”

Hilarious that he’s so worked up about a fucking mayor… Like what is Congress going to do to a mayor if he doesn’t want to talk to congressional members?

perhaps those external stimuli are always present in some form, even if they are extremely minimal, indirect, or invisible to us at first glance.

I still think the connection between external stimuli and consciousness are a lot more glaring than what you realize. After all it is how we medically determine consciousness in humans. Our ability to process and respond to external stimuli is a direct reflection of our somatic and autonomic physiology.

We could even say that it may be impossible to isolate the mind completely from all stimulation in the first place.

You can, it’s called anesthesia.

In that sense, the claim becomes less about the absence of stimulation and more about how little stimulation is actually enough to sustain consciousness or mental activity.

Its interdependent on your period of development. In gestation unborn infants produce more grey matter than what is really needed to sustain life and can get by with internal stimuli and the external stimuli provided by the womb. However as we develop we become more dependent on higher and higher levels of interaction with our environment to develop our mental capacity.

If a person were to be put under anesthesia since early development or e acquired a tbi that made them unresponsive at an early age, they would all likely mentally deteriorate to a persistent vegetative state.

One is normal brain development, and the other is consciousness itself. It’s true that a human being needs certain external stimuli for the brain to develop in a healthy way and for mental experience to be normal and stable. But that does not mean that, without those stimuli, consciousness does not exist.

Human beings require external stimuli for any higher brain development to happen, not just healthy brain development.

But that does not mean that, without those stimuli, consciousness does not exist.

Yes… It does. Any example you would like to share of a conscious individual who lacks access to any and all external stimuli?

A person can still be conscious and yet suffer severe cognitive, emotional, or behavioral changes because of sensory deprivation or an extremely limited environment.

Yes, but they did not develop in that extreme deprivation. And even if they did develop in a way that was restricted, they did not lack external stimuli completely.

Your body literally need to be experience external stimuli to develop the capacity for consciousness.

There’s fundamentally not much difference between our brain and a fly’s, at the cellular level.

There’s fundamentally not much difference between the silicon in an n64 and the silicone in a quantum computer… That doesn’t mean you can make a quantum computer out of an old n64.

However, consciousness is likely just an internal illusion.

Internal… as it can only be confirmed by the individual self? Consciousness is an ontological term to define the human condition. There is purposely no exact definition, as an exact definition of consciousness would only be utilized to strip rights away from those who do not fall under the exacting definition. There are however generally agreed upon criteria and criteria that have been hotly debated for hundreds of years.

There’s no obvious reason we can’t scale up from a fly to a human brain, other than difficulty.

To make this claim requires someone to have a limited understanding of what consciousness is, and how it develops. It completely ignores the mind body problem, and treats the human brain as something that can operate outside the body as if it were some sort of computer.

Consciousness in humans develops and sustains itself as we physically interact with the world around us. This is true in both development in childhood and as we continue to age. As we physically interact with phenomena around us we mentally develop, as our senses start to fail us in age we mentally decline. Even if I were to just cut off your arm, there would be a plethora of changes to the physiology of your brain that would alter the way it functions and the way it is shaped.

A person born stripped of all physical phenomena would never develop a conscious to begin with, and a if it were stripped away after consciousness had developed they would lose it. Hell, even sticking someone in an area with restricted physical phenomena for a short period of time can drive them insane.

Consciousness is not purely a metaphysical phenomenon. And from what we currently understand of it can not be recreated purely in a virtual format.

Speaking of new toothpaste, I’d highly recommend picking up a toothpaste with 10% Nano Hydroxyapatite. It helps remineralize your enamel and can actually repair small cavities that haven’t made it down to the root of the tooth.

The only real downside is that it’s hard to find one with fluoride in it, I usually add a fluoride additive to mine a couple times a week. But yeah, biggest game changer for my teeth in years.

Yeah, it’s a little stronger than reinforced concrete. Looks like they’re trying to remove some old hardware that’s been fixed in place by some osseointergration.

They make slide/slam hammers for this kind of work that makes it a lot easier and safer for the pt, but looks like they didn’t have one, or didn’t think they’d need it and didn’t/forgot to prep one.

Yeah, orthopedics is pretty much shop class but with more expensive tools and hardware. Bones are a lot tougher than what most people tend to think, so sometimes you just have to wack on the hardware with a big mallet to get them to release.

Yeah… Watching spinal surgery can be gnarly. There’s a procedure to debris the spinal column before you install hardware called spinal flossing. You basically get a shop towel and wrap it around the spine and shimmy the towel like you’re cleaning a bowling ball.

an idiot intern has to read it and follow the instructions exactly on what to do?

Kinda the main factor you keep in mind when writing medical notes. The notes are to inform anyone reading them what your subjective and objective observations were and, your actions, and plan of care for the patient.

No, but the absolutely insane and perfectly predictable swings in market prices, over and over and over, each one capable of eating hundreds of billions of dollars, can’t be done as easily any other way.

How about tariffs…?

This is where you are way off. His goal is enrichment. The people who put him there have the goal of destruction of the American government.

Trump was never a darling of the Republican party, they’re just adapting to his presidency the best they can.

specifically maintains power by destroying the ability of the American system to function. That’s what his cronies want. Eventually he will obliterate the economy too.

He’s just taking advantage of decades of decline in both Congress and the judiciary. None of his actions would have been possible if the judiciary and Congress hadn’t already fallen apart.

No, I’m not. You are.

I’m giving him too much credit by claiming he doesn’t deserve the credit you are giving him…?

I am and always have been claiming that he is an excellent con man. He is a goddamn idiot savant. If I say “that guy is a really good football player” no one assumes I’m calling him a multi-domain genius. But somehow every time I point to trump’s very obvious history of successful cons,

You don’t have to be an idiot servant if you started with hundreds of millions of dollars. All super wealthy people are allowed to get away with fraud on a grand scale. The only reason we know about it with trump is because he fucks it up so often and in such a brazen way he gets dragged to court all the time.

If he would have just invested his trust fund and inheritance in the stock market he would be worth tens of billions.

there are groups of aristocratic funded geniuses who have been guiding the process you have correctly identified occuring over many presidents, congressmen, senators, governors, etc.

Again… People who run orgs like the heritage foundation aren’t geniuses, they just have deep pockets. I think you are vastly underestimating the power money can buy overtime.

Insider trading and offshore payments from the industries benefiting from all this. Are you seriously asking me how he is being corrupt?

He doesn’t need a war to commit insider trading or to receive offshore payments from industries… He’s been doing that the whole time. There are only a few business sectors profiting from the war and he already had those in his pocket. This war is extremely damaging to the vast majority of the economy, and keeping the economy going is the only way he maintains power while in the office.

You mentioned a bunch of the “business ideas” he’s talked about and other things he’s said in public. You are watching the show on stage and believing all the actor’s motivations and the stage settings.

You are giving him a lot more credit than he deserves, and feeding the idea that he’s some sort of Machiavellian character, when in reality he’s just an oaf scrambling from one scheme to another.

you think the con man who successfully and consistently walks away unscathed and with obscene amounts of money, is just a dumb loser

Because the executive branch has been given more and more power for the last 4 decades, to the point where they are nearly untouchable. Do you think that the likes of Ronald Regan or George Bush were also secret geniuses? Coupled with the fact that the billionaire class has become an American aristocracy, it’s easy to see how idiots sustain themselves through scandal after scandal.

Bullshit. If Israel gets pissy enough they’ll drop a nuke. Iran cannot remain defensible if they let either Israel or America destroy the countries around them.

Dropping a nuke is quite possibly the only thing that would sever US and Israeli ties. No one wants to set the precedent that nuclear weapons should be used as anything but a nuclear deterrent. They would become even more of a pariah than they already are, and Israel knows they cannot exist without getting billions of dollars of military aid every year.

The only reason Iran wasn’t beaten into submission by the US is because trump’s whole thing is to pretend to lose accidentally so he can wash money through the system and siphon it out.

The reason Iran wasn’t beaten is because Trump is incompetent and believes wars can be won without putting boots on the ground. America could probably win a war against Iran, but it would likely be the bloodiest and most costly war since the Korean war.

trump and the boyz are skimming billions off this thing every single day.

Maybe if you are including the military industrial complex as the “boyz”…? Do you have any evidence, or even an outline of an idea of how trump is personally enriching himself from the conflict? Because most of the business schemes he has in the area generally have to do with the Saudi government, who definitely want to end the war. Or have to do with the reconstruction of gaza, which requires a cease fire to actually start capitalizing off of.

Have you met a cop? They want violent power tripping assholes, they don’t care if anyone admires them. Like I said, the first modern police force was empowered by the state to catch runaway slaves. Most early police forces were used as strike breakers, they weren’t pillars of the community.

What in that statement says that I’m ‘whitewashing’ the police?

The part where you stated that they at one point in history attempted to restrict their hiring practices based on generally admired qualities.

What day are we talking about here? Because that seems like an old house wives tale that is attempting to white wash the violent history of policing.

There was no time period where police were actual leaders or responsible with their power. The history of modern policing can usually be traced back to slave hunters or privatized security agencies who were mainly used to murder labour movements.

I don’t know if I would agree… Variety and uniqueness doesn’t equate to art. There’s an infinite amount of ways to write a medical note, and in a large office of providers I can tell who wrote them based on composition and style…that doesn’t make me an artist.

I work in medicine, and certain sects of our field have a similar issue. They promote pragmatic and utilitarian thinking, which when utilized within the field makes sense. The problem is when people utilize this kinda problem solving on social problems at a grand scale. I would have a similar problem with people learning how to do triage or surgery at the same age kids are getting into cs.

digital technology using binary to binary thinking, and learning computer science has the exact opposite effect. It teaches you to be analytical and break down problems into workable solutions, approach things from multiple perspectives, searching for the most elegant solution

People I’ve met or talked to online who are in cs tend to think/argue very linearly and in a utilitarian fashion. Which is great for solving issues where you know exactly what the problem is or have a direct goal, but if applied to social problems can be very destructive.

Not to mention open source and the hacker philosophy, both antiethical to fascism.

Also a minority of people working in tech.

People who study CS are usually strongly on the left. Techbros went to business school, not tech school.

Maybe in your country? In the US CS is pretty well known for being pretty full of centerist/ right wing sexist.

Studying computer science coaches young people’s brains into only thinking in terms of binary reasoning, and is the reason so many tech bros are fascist. I think it’s actively harmful to people’s development, and should be kept away from children until they are emotionally mature.

For materials cost alone, mind you – not including any labor you hire out in constructing it, and not including the land to put it on.

These were typically put together by farming communities, kinda like a barn raising. Even if you had one of these put together for you, it’s not like labour was a huge expense back then.

And I’m guessing that 25k doesn’t include any electrical, certainly not any HVAC, and maybe not even any indoor plumbing…)

It’s hard to make out, but in the link I posted you can see the add one that includes things like heating, electrical, plumbing, or different roofing materials. The additions are pretty affordable as well.

Still, building codes and inspections aside, I think it could be a decent idea even in modern times to have mass-produced, mail-order house construction kits available.

It was a pretty lucrative business for sears until the great depression hit. Unfortunately it was their mortgage side of the operation that forced them under. It would be interesting to see how they would operate today. The quality is great, I live in one from the early 30s and the bones are still rock solid.

I actually live in one that was built in the 30s. They’re actually really well built since they used truss plates for all the framing, plus the quality of the wood from back then is night and day compared to the stuff you can get now.