You cannot be conscious without daydreaming. The brain is perpetually recreating the past or projecting the future. Indeed, that is all it does, the present isn't important to it. There's no survival value in knowing about now, only in correlating with past threats/safety and determine what to do next.

As such, the brain is always jumping between past and future, perpetually daydreaming.

The Chinese Room wouldn't hold for any mind that used quantum effects either as described by Penrose or by Conway. Both of these, however, have/had no problem with the idea of a conscious computer, just not a Turing Machine class of computer.

Alan Turing was fundamentally a mathematician and a logician. From this standpoint, we can understand the Turing test to mean if f(x) lies consistently within the range of outputs of all possible g(x) in the set of conscious humans, then there is (obviously) no test you can perform to show f(x) isn't human.

In other words, it's not enough to appear human on a fairly consistent basis to one person. That's not the test. You have to define a valid range and prove that no output (without exception) will step outside that range.

The test, as written, is not the mathematical sense he would have been coming from. The mathematical sense is not a subjective freely one, but rather a rigorous validation that the system under observation is indistinguishable from what would constitute a valid member of the set.

This is not what Dawkin achieved.

Very true, the number of species of bacteria in the body is absolutely gigantic and we know that there's massive interaction between them and human cells, especially the brain. Yes, they get food when we eat, but there's no particular reason why their benefits should be limited to that, particularly as human cells contain a large amount of DNA from other sources (particularly viruses, but possibly bacteria with DNA transfer ability as well).

We have only a limited understanding of what the external-origin DNA does, as we now understand that the "junk DNA" is actually metadata used by encoding DNA to decide what works and how. There is no reason to suppose every protein human cells synthesise is for human use, and no reason to suppose the symbiotic relationship is a shallow one.

It depends on how the tail is obtained.

We know bacteria can steal DNA from other bacteria, viruses, and even infected hosts, it's how we developed CRISPR. It's what CRISPR is. If superbugs are using this trick to get the tails, then there may be novel gene splicing processes that would be of interest.

It also depends on whether we can target the tail.

If it's stolen DNA, does this mean all superbugs (regardless of type) steal the same DNA? If so, is there a way to target that specifically and thus attack all superbugs?

We could test whether the argument presented makes sense, but only if the quantum uncertainty principle is actually what I was taught (teachers aren't necessarily reliable).

What I was taught was that uncertainty in position times uncertainty in velocity cannot ever fall below Planck's constant.

If quantum particles can move freely in spacetime, then uncertainty in position is uncertainty in position in spacetime, not merely uncertainty in space. Which means the limits on precision in space alone can't ever be as tight as that. It also means, though, that you should be able to predict how this would impact interference pattern experiments, and then see if the prediction matches observation.

At classical scales of matter over classical scales of time, you are correct. However, that's also utterly irrelevant at the quantum scale.

Quantum clocks should have an accuracy sufficient to measure anything you could observe in an experiment.

I don't see why you wouldn't be allowed effects before causes, even in classical physics, provided that is from an external frame of reference. So long as the particle experiences cause and then effect, there shouldn't be any problem.

Artificial wombs seem more sensible, c-sections can cause scarring and present risks for any future pregnancy. C-sections also limit exposure of the skin to the mother's microbiome, although the effects of that aren't clear to me.

With artificial wombs, there's obviously no scarring and you can control all the parameters as you like.

There's also evidence that, during the last trimester, the foetus' brain is influenced by sounds outside the womb and that this impacts the sounds the person can generate later in life. This would be enormously useful.

Although there's a fair bit of doubt about modern human brains shrinking during the Neolithic, if they did, it would almost certainly have been because survival rates were higher. Again, with an artificial womb, this limit wouldn't apply. So, if such shrinkage happened, it could be reversed.

So, artificial wombs would seem to be the logical way for IVF to go.

User: jd
Estimated age: 297i + 597j + 127k
Conclusion: User is extremely imaginary and possibly a Time Lord.

That would require work, which they're vigorously opposed to. Much easier to just have their preferred news outlets SAY the tide didn't come in.

Youâ(TM)re right. This amazing achievement isnâ(TM)t right yet. We should just give up.

Agreed. It would be better to reduce the number of taxes and increase those left to cover the actual costs of British services. You then cut the costs of monitoring and collecting.

However, if this was done, the BBC Charter would need protecting in law to prevent what the Tories did, which was to renege on the charter and redo it to benefit them. The charter should not be for the government to rewrite at will, it should be a contract that neither side can legally violate or ignore.