Recovering academic now in public safety. You’ll find me kibitzing on brains (my academic expertise) to critical infrastructure and resilience (current worklife). Also hockey, games, music just because.

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Cake day: July 5th, 2023

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  • You’re not wrong. But there are counter examples. I was going to use the example of the jet engine in my last answer as a true paradigm shifting development that had immediate impact. And in the mid-century period too! Or the first powered flight occurred in the first decade of the 20th century and had an immediate impact. The transistor and solid state electronics would be another example.

    So let me flip it around and say we’ve had a quarter century without a major technological breakthrough. There’s been progress, but it feels incremental. I spent a night with a physicist a few years ago who was arguing that progress is slowing because we are still relying on the exploitation of Newtonian physics. There are a few technologies that have made the leap to nuclear physics. But we’ve had the basics of quantum physics for a century now and haven’t been able to exploit it in a useful fashion.










  • Measure differences in what? We can’t ask *c. elegans * about it’s state of mind let alone consciousness. There are several issues here; a philosophical issue here about what you are modeling (e.g. mind, consciousness or something else), a biological issue with what physical parameters and states you need to capture to produce that model, and how you would propose to test the fidelity of that model against the original organism. The scope of these issues is well outside a reply chain in Lemmy.


  • It’s an analogy. There is actually an academic joke about the point you are making.

    A mathematician and an engineer are sitting at a table drinking when a very beautiful woman walks in and sits down at the bar.

    The mathematician sighs. “I’d like to talk to her, but first I have to cover half the distance between where we are and where she is, then half of the distance that remains, then half of that distance, and so on. The series is infinite. There’ll always be some finite distance between us.”

    The engineer gets up and starts walking. “Ah, well, I figure I can get close enough for all practical purposes.”

    The point of the analogy is not that one can’t get close enough so that the ear can’t detect a difference, it’s that in theory analog carries infinite information. It’s true that vinyl recordings are not perfect analog systems because of physical limitations in the cutting process. It’s also true for magnetic tape etc. But don’t mistake the metaphor for the idea.

    Ionic movement across membranes, especially at the scale we are talking about, and the density of channels in the system is much closer to an ideal system. How much of that fidelity can you lose before it’s not your consciousness?


  • Thanks fellow traveller for punching holes in computational stupidity. Everything you said is true but I also want to point out that the brain is an analog system so the information in a neuron is infinite relative to a digital system (cf: digitizing analog recordings). As I tell my students if you are looking for a binary event to start modeling, look to individual ions moving across the membrane.



  • It’s all good. The generations thing comes from the boomers as well, the huge number of babies that were born in the post-war period and that covered a lot of countries. They needed a name and everything else just formed around them.

    I won’t deny that someone born in 1946 had a very different experience than someone born in 1964, but from a programmatic view they all benefited from growth in programs and services aimed at children and youth. Those programs underwent a dramatic change in the 1970s as they became means tested or mothballed because of the small number of children.

    Again, this is anecdotal, but I switched schools every two years before high school. Every one of them closed because there weren’t enough children in the catchment area. They were built because of the baby boom, and my Jones siblings walked to schools in the neighborhood because classes were full. I was bussed from Grade 1 onwards. And so on.


  • I’m not an American. Federal grants still exist in Canada as well, but the eligibility criteria changed and the program was no longer universal by the time I went to post-secondary. As I said that was an example and there are many. I also had to deal with the height of the AIDS epidemic. The first case report in the literature was 1981. And lead contaminated water was never an issue in our jurisdiction.

    If you are a millenial you don’t have any lived experience from the period, so why do you question mine? I was part of the “baby bust” as they originally called it and programs and services that were available to my older siblings were not available to me.


  • Dr. Bob@lemmy.catoShowerthoughts@lemmy.world*Permanently Deleted*
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    4 months ago

    No it’s not. My older siblings are part of Jones and with just six and eight year gaps they have had very different experiences than X. My favorite example; there were still government grants for university when they went through. They worked odd jobs during the summer knowing that grants would pay full tuition and residence. Government backed loans paid the rest. By the time I went through the grant program had been dismantled and loans were partially privatized. And I graduated into the aftermath of Black Monday.