We either need to rename Uranus to the traditional spelling of Ouranos to stop all this childish teasing, or we need to lean in harder and have the Onion get final edit on every single scientific publication on that planet.
You don't even need to change the spelling, just pronounce it a way that better resembles the underlying Greek. Problem is, no English-speaker needs to think about pronunciation for the other planets because the latin is just pronounced phonetically.
It's weird that it's the one Greek-named planet. If we're changing things up, it should just be Caelus to match the others.
*The world 3 months ago:*AI is growing exponentially and might take over the world soon. It can do everything you can, but better, and some even seem almost centient.
*The world today:*Turns out the large language model made to fool us tried to fool us by ‘unexpectedly’ exhibiting behavior it was made for.
2 Sentence Summary: No, we emit about 40 to a 100 times the CO2 of a volcanic eruption (peer-reviewed study) in a year. Though they still have quite an impact with the particulates they throw off in the atmosphere, such as sulphur dioxide.
I feel it is important to publicise refutations of extraordinary claims widely.
The media generally loves to publish the extraordinary claims. especially ALIENS!! but is silent when the results comeback as "Sorry, they were wrong."
This guy seems to be a bit confused about what free will is.
Does he mean to suggest that he was helpless in writing an entire book on the subject of free will? Does he mean to suggest that because I can't alter my own physical needs such as breathing, eating, and sleeping that I am somehow unable to WANT to change them? The article mentions his religious upbringing. I wonder if he would reach the same conclusion if he was raised in a different environment?
My read on it is this: when we construct ideas in our minds we often create shortcuts to help us process new information faster. In everyday life these shortcuts are quite useful. When considering philosophical questions like free will, we need to recognise that those same shortcuts can be harmful to our ability to consider broader possibilities. This person seems to have forgotten that.
maybe i’m just not smart enough for this, but the idea of free will as a concept has always seemed pretty poorly constructed in the first place. like, what would it even mean to have the will to act freely while existing conditional to your environment? we are placed into chaotic and uncertain circumstances, and have evolved the ability to navigate those circumstances through cognition. simple as that. there is no future that is “pre-determined” for us to follow, just chaos that we must navigate through until we die. i feel like the idea was kind of borrowed from theology and we’ve been ruminating on it ever sense, but its just never been a very compelling thought to me. like, of course our decisions are shaped by our environment and physiology, how else could it possibly work?
i feel like, for the people who argue for free will, its kind of like arguing for the existence of an afterlife. they’re motivated to continue advocating for it because it seems scary not to have it, but nothing about the way we work requires us to be able to make meaningful decisions that are out-of-context to our conditions, just like nothing about how we work indicates we continue to exist outside our physical conditions. if we free willed ourselves to do something that wasn’t constrained by our physical bodies, the stuff we know about the world, and the immediate sensory input we’re receiving, that would look like fucking magic or something, and if it is constrained by that stuff, then its just another word for cognition.
Whether or not we have free will and whether this whole existence is pre-calculated, I'm going to go all meta-Pascal's wager on it and suggest that we try to act like we do have free will and try not to think about it.
Maybe I was always going to come to that conclusion. Doesn't matter.
Maybe this makes about as much sense as Wile E. Coyote staying in the air until he actually realises he has run off a cliff. Doesn't matter.
Be the Road-Runner able to run into a painting of a tunnel as if it is real and remain as happy as possible about it.
Yep. On the grand scale it doesn't matter if this comment was pre-determined or if I genuinely made the free choice to write it. What matters is that, to me, the illusion of free will is complete. There is nothing other than my belief that I am free to affect my own existence.
As Rush once said, even if you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice.
Behave is a great (if fucking beefy) read on a broad variety of influences on human behavior (it's 1B to Kahneman's Thinking Fast and Slow on my nonfiction list), but one expert's opinion on something as inherently unmeasurable as free will doesn't warrant a news story.
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