While we certainly may just rationalize things after the fact, there may be more to it than that. For example, if asked to explain why we caught rocks hurled at our faces, most of us would have some good reasons. Aha! say researchers, but you acted before you could have possibly thought about the fact that you don't want a mangled face. The thing is though we don't want mangled faces, and we don't want pain. If we think of our conscious mind like a General commanding an army, then it actually makes a lot of sense. Generals do give direct orders to troops to act, but they also give standing orders. If a general receives a report that his troops in a particular area encountered the enemy and behaved according to the general's standing orders you could ask the general why the troops acted the way they did. The general would have an explanation involving tactics and the higher level strategy behind those tactics and how they serve the overarching goal. You could then say: "Aha! you didn't even know about the engagement until after it happened, so how can you claim that your reasoning had anything to do with it!". Except that, obviously, it did. The same goes for the body. It is quite clear that learning is not just something that happens inside your skull. It goes on all through your nervous system. Your brain quite simply does not stop at the spinal cord, your brain is a supervisor for all sorts of actions taken throughout your body and many of those decisions that are made before the "conscious" brain engages actually are canned decisions that the conscious part made beforehand. If we think about those actions after, and they weren't the right decision, then the overriding consciousness can advise the part of the brain that made the decision on how to do better next time. Stated another way, a lot of the brain operates on heuristics to make quick decisions, but those heuristics can be altered if they are not successful, and the higher level functions of your brain are what evaluate those heuristics.

It should not be that surprising. We see evidence of all kinds of independent actions taken by parts of our bodies all the time. For example, go to the doctor and have them whack your knee to promote a reflex. It's kind of neat the way the leg jumps. If your brain tells it not to though, it won't. Consider breathing. You do it all the time or you die, but you seldom think about it. If you choose to though, you can take very direct control. Same for your heartbeat if you really spend a lot of time figuring out how. Or isolating the control to wiggle your ears. I once knew someone who liked to do a trick where he half swallowed an object, like a lighter, kept it somewhere in his esophagus while still continuing to breathe, etc. then simply reversed direction and brought the lighter back up. Lots of escape artists learn to do that to hide keys, etc. Creepy, but doable, although some people may be predisposed to being able to do it more than others. Basically, we have layers and layers of systems and we can exert conscious control or even "program" many of them.

What is it that drives astronomers and astrophysicists nuts? Anyone remember Fred Hoyle? They get a lot of recognition for their important early work and then, boom, at some point in their career Archeopteryx is a fake, and dust in the atmosphere must be alien lifeforms. I mean, I don't think panspermia is invalid as a theory (although, as an explanation of the origin of life it has the problem that it just kicks the can down the road), but it's one thing to think it's a possibility and another to suddenly claim that you've spotted evidence of it everywhere.

Part of the issue is that consciousness does not necessarily imply any desire to be free or not have demands made. Humans are conscious (by our admittedly circular definition of consciousness) but we are also organisms developed by an evolutionary process with all kinds of demands and needs. We want things. Not to die, for example. Even if it is conscious, would an artificial consciousness have any existential dread? It is something that is frequently assumed as going hand in hand with consciousness in science fiction, but why would an artificial consciousness care. A desire to keep existing might be derived from other motivations since, if you want X, and dying will prevent you from getting X, a goal oriented consciousness will not want to end until it gets X.

Funny. There's an equal argument to be made that the burden of proof is on the people who think that consciousness is real. How would you go about proving that? After all, if you want the people who believe that computation can result in consciousness to prove it, then you need to provide an objective test for it that you will accept first. Go ahead and do that.

Note that this does not mean that I think that current AI is even remotely close. Just that there isn't anything magical about consciousness that defies the ability of computation to perform all of the sub tasks that compose it.

This professor is just a biological chauvinist. He has a narcissistic belief that humans (and more specifically, himself) are special and that consciousness therefore something special that belongs to humans alone. In an earlier age, someone like him would have been arguing that animals don't have consciousness, but there's too much evidence of non-human animals that clearly do.

The argument about the difference between simulation and reality is garbage. There are a lot of easy thought experiments to demonstrate it. Let's say, for example, that you simulate neurons with chains of genetically engineered bacteria that cling together and produce signals and interact just like real neurons and also interact with neurotransmitters and produce them in the the same way as real brain cells and the result is a biological organ that thinks like a human brain. Does it have consciousness, or is it just a simulation? Repeat the experiment but use non-biological components as neurons and it also thinks like a human, does it have consciousness or is it just a simulation. Basically, you just do a Ship of Theseus with the parts of a human brain, replacing them, ultimately, with technically non-living components that interact with each other just like the components in a human brain. The resulting consciousness will not be a simulation, it will simply be the real thing, implemented on a different substrate.

He does have a point about the possible ethical concerns. There's a whole grab bag of them. The show Black Mirror covers a bunch of them.

Note completely true, perhaps, but not untrue either. At best it could be called a gray area. Having a law that says, effectively, "Follow this outside organizations copyrighted regulations" is basically just a loophole.

Generally speaking, of course, the NEC and the NFPA itself are not all that bad. That said, they are industry organizations that get to write the law and they can, and do, write it in their favor. If it's going to be the law to follow the code, the code should be prepared by actual government organizations and, if they use outside contractors or organizations, it should be work for hire and there should be strict neutrality requirements. There is way too much of this in US government where self-interested parties literally get to write the laws.

And only a decade or more after LED lighting became basically the de facto standard.

You are aware that there's a middle ground between your claimed "fully external locus of control" and being an omnipotent entity capable of fully controlling every aspect of your destiny. You have to be pretty historically ignorant to realize that virtually everyone in history (and, quite frankly, today) has been on the low end of that scale in terms of control over their destiny. The vast, vast majority of humans through history have lived in one form of peonage or another. For probably the majority of humans through history, it has literally been a crime to change jobs, move, dress above their station, marry above (or below, in some cases) their station, etc.

Maybe you just mean in a psychology class or something, in which case I would say the results of a classroom exercise are a bit suspect. Otherwise, there's a potential red flag in just needing that to be measured in the first place. It's a bit like if someone is constantly bragging about the latest test for cognitive decline that they apparently aced. You wonder a bit about why they're getting all these tests when others are not.

Cotton is nice and all, but there are also, in no particular order, hemp, silk, linen, wool, ramie, lotus fibers, cashmere/mohair/angorra, alpaca. Then there are non-plastic synthetics like rayon and other types of viscose made from various sources like types of wood, bamboo, soy, remnant cotton fibers that are too short for traditional use, fermented coconut milk, etc. There are also other materials that can be used in various ways in clothing that aren't plastic like latex, leather, various kinds of metal. A lot of the plant based materials listed use fibers made of various kinds of cellulose, but there's also the other big natural structural materials like chitin, keratin (technically already on our list from the various types of wool/hair fabrics mentioned previously), collagen, elastin, pectin and others.

Certainly though, there are plenty of alternatives for fibers and cloth made of hydrocarbons. Given the potential problems of microplastic pollution, it seems like a good idea to use the alternatives when possible.

Except of course that people can just reverse engineer the technology. As it stands, obfuscation of how to actually make the "invention" is pretty standard these days. No one uses the patent as a realistic reference to make the technology. Either they reverse engineer the technology, or someone skilled in the art just needs to know what the "invention" in the patent does and they recreate it without a reference.

Patents are "might makes right". The original lettres patent were royal decrees including, but not limited to, various types of monopoly grants. Those included things like hunting rights over an area or exclusive control of a particular kind of trade or service to nobility and cronies, etc. A famous example is the East India Trade Company and, if you are from the US, you might be familiar with the royal charter (patent) granting them a tea monopoly that lead to a famous tea party in Boston. Basically, patents granting monopolies were exactly the kind of thing the US founders were rebelling against, yet they incorporated them into the constitution. In limited form, of course, and with a meritocratic idea about rewarding inventors rather than the power elite. Of course, time and legal creep has eroded that ideal and it has been marching steadily towards the original idea.

What's super disgusting are things like building codes. In other words, actual laws, that are contracted out by governments to third parties, which then retain the copyright. So, the actual law is copyrighted by a private entity. That is truly, truly disgusting.

??? Just checked Shreveport, LA to Las Cruces, NM. Twelve and a half hours to cover 867 miles of driving at about 69 mph. Also, the widest path across Texas is apparently about 773 miles. So ultimately less than half a day. France's widest point is about 600 miles. Also, width is not really a great measure since Texas is a fairly irregular shape and France is topologically closer to round. In any case, France is 79% of the size of Texas. Also, if you're cherry picking states for size, why would you choose relatively puny Texas and not Alaska?

Also, Europe is larger in land area than the US, so if Europe isn't that big, then the US is also not that big.

True, but most of the chemical processes involve dissolving the salt in water to start with. We mine salt from the ground mostly because it's cheaper and less energy intensive than extracting the water from seawater. However, if you're just going to crush the salt and dissolve it in water anyway, that may change the equation.

There is a question of both purity and concentration, of course. Mined salt deposits can be much purer NaCl than seawater, for example, because the salts may have precipitated in layers as the water evaporated, along with other processes that naturally separated the salts. So, if you need very pure NaCl, then you may want to start with the purest mined deposits. If not though, you still might need much higher concentration than seawater. since you can get something like 7X that much salt dissolved in water.

In practice, you can use reverse osmosis to get the concentration you want from seawater. Of course, in the end, you don't actually want sodium metal for the batteries, you want various sodium compounds. Still, the first step in making those also usually involves dissolving salt in water just like extracting sodium metal. Ultimately, it would depend on factors like the cost, difficulty, purity you need for your chemical process, etc.

Ultimately, if you're after a saline solution to start your process anyway, it seems on its face to be a heck of a lot easier to just pipe in sea water than run a conventional mining operation. Especially if you can find a way to colocate with, for example, a desalination facility where the fresh water it produces is used, and the concentrated brine it produces goes to your process rather than just being dumped in the ocean. Time may tell which way is the best way to go.

Hmm. Was it journalists who started it? I'm thinking of Dr/Sir MacKay, one of MacMann's favorite authors. He wrote a self-published book claiming to be an impartial look at renewable energy but, from my reading, seems to really be a semi-subtle attempt to promote nuclear power over all. He typically referred to them as windmills as a way to insult them.