I have to call you out on the 'non/deterministic' argument.
While computers are by-and-large deterministic, many of them have the capability of having non-deterministic functionality.
While it is true that most software developers create "randomness" by using pseudo-random number generators that generate numbers based on some initial "seed" value, that does not mean that true randomness is completely unavailable.
For example, Linux machines maintain the system device files /dev/urandom and /dev/random that are built from various "noise" sources that can be used if "true" randomness/nondeterminism is desired (like in cryptography).
We also have quantum computers that are being developed that allow for "quantum fuzziness".

I'm not saying that Claude or any other AI that exists is conscious.
But if your primary argument comes from determinism, then it would seem that an AI built using a "true" noise source would break your argument.

The fundamental problem with lab-grown meats is PR.
People will consume almost anything if the "right" people support it.
If high profile people in various demographics began pushing these foods, most of the issues that have been raised here, would be ignored.
As more people consumed it, production would increase and costs would decrease.

While some concerns are indeed well-founded, a concern was raised about needing a continuous stream of stem cells.
These products are created from immortal lines, so they can produce as much as they want without obtaining additional samples.
While some of the current processes do use animal products to assist in the growth of those cells, there is research into removing that dependency.

If one is truly interested in animal welfare, consider the fate of livestock if less than 1% of meat consumption was obtained the "traditional" way.
Would farmers have any incentive to continue raising cattle if they could generate the same bio-mass with less budget on a fraction of the land?

I would suggest that the ethical approach would be to attempt to replace animals that are raised in feed lots (or similar) with bio-reactors, since their quality of life is shit anyway.
Retain at least a fraction of the "free range" variety if for no other reason than to provide cell variety in the future.

Here's the thing, if someone crosses paths with a bear while in the woods, the bear will generally have predictable behavior.
There are things one can do to mitigate the chances of harm.
But, if harm does occur, the victim is generally believed and is less likely to be blamed for the harm they experienced.

Contrast this with crossing paths with a random man in the woods.
While perhaps only a small percentage of men are actually dangerous, the dangerous ones are not easily distinguishable from the safe ones.
The dangerous men can have identical behavior to safe men and then suddenly switch without warning.
There is no guaranteed method to mitigate the chance of harm because any form of dress or action can result in harm from dangerous men.
Worst of all, if harm does occur, the victim is almost always blamed first and often not believed at all.

While the mantra "not all men..." is true.
When harm occurs, it is almost always a man that caused it.

I say all of this as a man. Because I know some of what men are capable of.
Perhaps there will come a day when only deranged men are capable of harming others.
But today is not that day.
Too many men are capable of performing terrible actions with just a little encouragement (from booze, buddies or their own minds)

While you are correct that mushroom spores can't survive the digestive system, there are other things to consider.
If an organism consumes a mushroom and dies very close by, then the body of the organism could (perhaps) benefit the colony from which the sacrificial mushroom originates.
Many fungi find dead bodies to be quite hospitable to their growth.
But, even if they prefer to colonize other locations, it is likely that a decomposing body would be a source of nutrients for the mushroom's local area and (perhaps indirectly) its colony.
All the mushrooms of the same species within an area are likely to have a great deal of DNA in common, much more closely related than a colony of most vertebrate animals. So, genetic selection can happen at the colony level, rather than just along maternal and paternal lines.

All this to say that mushroom toxins may have evolved to avoid being eaten, but it seems that there is a case to be made that lethality could be beneficial to the community and thus its genetic siblings.

You (probably?) meant this facetiously, but it could be semi-accurate if you mean climate of the Sun.
The Sun is aging and that likely affects its magnetic cycle (climate?)

With regards to Earth's climate, I haven't looked into it within the past 20 years or so,
but I don't recall any climate/weather models that accounted for solar variations
which include sunspots and the effects of aging.

Maybe it's time for me to examine the latest models and see how well they include the energy source that powers weather.

How do we know that subatomic particles exist, when we aren't trying to detect them?
If you want to simulate something, ignore everything that isn't relevant until it becomes relevant.

The paper makes the fundamental mistake that our models represent our reality.
But, if we are living in a simulation, then the simulation could be designed to provide us with information that isn't directly simulated.

All of the information that we have is provided to us via light waves.
Even information about gravity that is ostensibly generated through variations in spacetime are stilled sent to us via light waves.
A simulation could assign appropriate values to those waves for us to develop our models.

If our physical models do describe a system that could never be simulated, this truth might not apply to the actual system in which we reside.

Someone could have created a simulation with all of the information that they had to date and started it last week/year/century. How would we know?

I've never known math to generate ... anything.
Physics uses mathematical models to describe things like motion and particle generations, but the models and the math aren't actually ... doing anything. They are descriptive. Activities occur whether or not they are described by any physical model.

We know that the feeling of consciousness occurs, regardless of our ability to quantitatively describe it.
In humans, consciousness appears to be related to the activity of neurons within our brains.

A simple hypothesis would be that the electric field generated within our brains acts like a biological computer and consciousness is the operating system of that computer. Or perhaps it's a layer above the operating system, more akin to a GUI that simplifies interaction with certain parts of it.

Complex systems, like operating systems with many programs installed on them, can be fairly straightforward to design and build, but difficult to describe with pure mathematics while they are running, even when you know all of the details of the individual components.

Perhaps our mathematical tools will change in time to allow for modeling of very complex systems, including systems that have emergent properties. Such tools might allow for direct modeling of consciousness with pure mathematics. But they still wouldn't generate it.

Has he ever read a book?
Does he even know what they are? :p

At high enough temperatures, essentially anything can be magnetic, because they become plasma.
Plasmas allow for electrons to flow freely instead of being tightly bound to atoms.
Once you start moving electrons around, you have an electric current, and if that current's location or strength changes, it will have an associated magnetic field.
It's really tricky to fully model magnetic fields in the sun, because plasmas can be redirected by magnetic fields and they also generate them.

One major issue with astronomy is that the only thing we can measure is light.
Turning that light into distance directly can only be done using parallax which only works for a few dozen light-years on very large objects.
Once you go beyond those objects, everything else relies on converting the received light into a distance via assumptions and some kind of model.
Some of the assumptions seem trivial, like the physics in space are the same as the physics on Earth.
But the idea that space is essentially the same everywhere in all directions, is a nice idea but there could easily by something "very different" beyond our visibility horizon.
When I was doing my astrophysics masters, I found that observational measurements of distances and theoretical measurements were often very different.

It's fine to hypothesize about what would be required to make the "measurements" fit the models and call those things dark matter and dark energy. If those hypotheses are used to place bounds on things. But, so far, there doesn't seem to be much progress in determining how to turn those "dark" things into something testable.
It's like throwing God into the mix. Sure, it "solves" the problem, but without having specific properties/attributes, it doesn't add to our predictive capabilities.

Perhaps it's a "me" problem, but I think the fact that the universe exists means that it must follow fairly simple "rules". The standard model of particle physics is not what I would call "simple", nor is adding more and more terms to describe gravitational interactions. It seems unlikely that 4th order differential equations are being solved at Planck timescales throughout the universe, even if it knows what the initial conditions are/were.
If time and space are linked, and there is no global time, what does it mean to talk about the past of the entire universe?

Perhaps there are large-scale forces that have no measurable terrestrial equivalent?
Perhaps there are interactions between "objects" external to our observable universe?

While the Universe is under no obligation to be comprehensible, it also isn't likely obfuscating itself deliberately.
Although, according to Douglas Adams, once someone figures out the Universe, it will disappear and reappear as something even more inexplicable.

The real problem with trying to "optimize" humanity, from a genetic sense, is that we have no idea which genes will be beneficial to survive some potential species-ending event.
The best solution could come from mutated genes that derive from a serious genetic disease.
Without being able to see the future, I would argue that the more genetic diversity we have available, the more resilient our species will be.

Perhaps if we had a "spare" Earth/Universe and infinite time, we could perform all possible combinations of genes to determine which genome would be ideal for all situations. Maybe we ARE such an experiment.

I would like an objective way to measure my "pain".
I have damage to my spine that causes bodily responses, such as tear production, but it often doesn't rise to the level of conscious awareness.
This can lead to a level of body disconnection and questions that I ask myself like, "why am I crying?", that I answer with ... I guess I'm in more pain today.
Pain receptors can become exhausted when they continue firing to the same stimulus for an extended period of time.
After that exhaustion period, they will often raise the level of stimulus required to fire the pain signal, but that does not mean that underlying cause has changed.
Perhaps I have nerve inflammation (likely) that results in the release of cortisol or ... something else.
At this point, I find pain to be ... annoying/a distraction.
But it would be more useful for me to feel the pain, so I can, perhaps, avoid the activities that exacerbate the issue.
As it stands, weather changes can lead me to tears, without me being aware that there have been weather changes.
I would like to have a simple way to know that ... something has changed and it's not JUST in my head.

If my pain were ONLY in my mind, then psychological remedies would seem appropriate.

FYI, I generally have a very high tolerance to pain.
I think I had about the same level of tears produced when my fingers were caught in the hinges of a closed garage door.
So, the fact that something I cannot feel induces tears, seems to indicate a level of damage that should be extreme and yet I have no conscious perception of it.

All the medication that you mention generally functions to relieve muscle-related pains.
They can also do a decent job of removing your ability to care about a pain that can't be relieved.
Since none of them were very effective, I'm guessing that the pain is nerve-based.
While there are ways to reduce nerve pain, either surgically or medicinally, I would be most concerned about the root cause of the recurring pain.

Is there an infection within the nerves themselves?
Other causes for nerve pain can be spine related, e.g. nerve fiber rubbing against the vertebral bones.
While that doesn't seem likely in your case, weird correlations happen all the time.

The "fun" thing I learned about pain is that it acts as a sobering agent.
It is nearly impossible to get drunk/high while still "attached" to severe pain.
This limits the potential for addiction, provided the dosage does not exceed what is required for pain reduction.
But it doesn't limit the potential for liver damage.
The leading cause of liver damage from the list you provided would be the "acetaminophen/paracetamol" that you might not notice.
It's often listed as APAP and included in many medicines ... at least in the US.

Since the link is pay-walled, I'll hazard a guess.
Perhaps somebody entered a negative number into a field designed for positive numbers only.
If such a thing happened, it could "wrap around" and count down from the largest value available for that datatype.
Things like that should be accounted for (and prevented) by any developer who has ever had users.

If you look into the foundations of mathematics, there are indeed "assumptions".
To make them "feel" better, mathematicians use the term "axiom".
Axioms are statements that must be accepted without proof and they are used as the foundations for proving theorems.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

While I was studying for my master's degree in mathematics I heard that the Axiom of Choice can lead to being able to prove some unexpected theorems.

For any mathematical proof, the list of assumptions should be stated.
If mathematics is applied to a physical system, the additional constraints should be stated as well.
Unfortunately, many people ignore, or are completely unaware of, the underlying assumptions.

For example, every proof in physics that I have ever seen assumed that the field of real numbers is applicable to measurements of units such as distance and time. But, if space-time is quantized, it would seem that the field of integers ( or rational numbers) would be more applicable.