Wheaties

isn't it basically all of them except Shatner and Stewart? Star Trek is usually a career-ender for acting. Luckily, it's also the start of a new career; talking at conventions.

Compare this to Sword Art Online Abridged, which just ends up being better written than actual Sword Art Online

To say nothing of the backlash from Kira being a self-described terrorist

The trick is to replace Luthor and try to mainstream a slightly cooler version of Protestantism. If you let that one monarch do divorce, then you can render the whole Anglican Church inert.

Yeah, I pick up a lot of this reading and listening to Penrose.

I kinda think about it like the evolution of eyes. So, for a while creationists liked to point to eyes and say, "how could such a structure slowly evolve, what good is half an eye?" and of course the answer is, "far preferable to no eye whatsoever." And there's evidence of development from rudimentary sensitivity to electromagnetism, gradually improving with lenses and pin-hole apertures and colour specific structures.

So... I think about sentience in that same means of gradually increasing complexity. Cus like you can say a brain is integral, but how does it start? Where doe the phenomenon actually begin? I think it makes sense to suppose some equivalent to that patch of photo-sensitivity that eventually becomes an eye. Microtubuals pose the most likely candidate for that role, though yeah it's still tentative. And... if we're gonna assume some minimal level of awareness, I don't think it's that big of a stretch to suppose it exists in things that react to their environment.

And that's where the similarity to pan-psychism ends. Why should I make that assumption for a virus or a rock or a hydrogen atom? Those aren't cells. They don't react to their environment or reproduce on their own. A universe where those things are conscious would be functionally identical to one where they aren't.

Oh, they found out what anesthetics does. It stops the formation of microtubuals within cells. So, pretty much anything can be anesthetized. And it suggest microtubuals might play a role in cognition.

I don't really see why plants wouldn't have some rudimentary sense of themselves? I mean, it wouldn't be as detailed as what animals experience, but they're alive, so why not? Maybe that's a leap. But, so is assuming the inverse. Arguably, that's a bigger assumption; why one kingdom of life and not the other?

this was mostly dumb speculation for the sake of speculation, while purposefully ignoring any potentials that would be less fun to speculate about.

only instead of admitting to doing a fun speculation, it has to make itself this Grand Statement on The Future

You don't need pan-psychism to recognize plants are living organisms. Like, you can anesthetize a tree. In fact, anesthetics work on... pretty much every living organism? I'm not aware of any exceptions.

Many cognitive scientists and neuroscientists regularly analogize the brain to a computer and believe that everything we do is the consequence of algorithums [...] within our brains

YEAH AND A CENTURY AGO THEY ANALOGIZED IT TO A STEAM ENGINE; DOES THAT MEAN MY SKULL IS FULL OF FLYWHEELS?

Unless the human brain performs literal magic, then we have good reason to believe we should be able to replicate its abilities in a computer.

See, this is a fundamental misunderstanding of computers. There's plenty of stuff in physics, hell in math itself, that cannot be reduced down to a computer programme. Not every problem is algorithmic. We talk about brains being algorithmic because it's the easiest comparison to hand... and because it would be really really convenient if they were.

Wack definition of capital.

The video suggests that capital is just equipment and supplies. This is... misleading. Capital is anything that, through owing it, provides a passive income. So equipment can be capital, only if its owner is using it to generate income; like by hiring someone else to use the equipment, and keeping part of the productive result as profit.

Scientific research happens slowly, and there's even some evidence that the rate of technological progress has slowed down

...but nevermind that, look at this animated gold

quick, edit your post to put "main" in it