Snail shells aren’t chitinous.

Crab shells are chitinous.

Hermit crabs are only partly chitinous, and the shells they use are not chitinous.

Hope that helps

“intoxicated from intranasal cocaine administration” is such a hilariously sterile way to say it.

I suggest “bug” applies exclusively to chitinous invertebrates.

I’m not sure what you’re referring to with the “chemical” thing. I didn’t say anything about a chemical marker, is that like a theory of consciousness? I’ve never heard of it, I’d like to at least investigate it if you can provide a link. I can’t find any references linking consciousness to a specific chemical, but I admittedly didn’t look all that hard.

Pens, however, can write a wide range of angles.

Which just means it would have been even easier to make the supplemental angle add up! Ugh.

Yeah I was wondering why it added up to 192°. Maybe I’m a freak, but I would’ve measured ambient temperature and drawn a supplementary angle. Also what scale is that thermometer on? That room is either really hot or almost freezing.

it’s a stoner thought that for all I know is totally true, but it’s so impossible to either prove, model or test

That’s basically true for every hypothesis about consciousness, though. That’s why it’s called a hard problem. Like yeah, we can map neuron activity and record what the subject says they were thinking about. But that doesn’t tell us what consciousness itself is.

And those “stoner thoughts” are how we conceptually narrow down the possibilities via internal consistency, and maybe get to something we can test. Just because we haven’t developed a test for a hypothesis doesn’t mean it’s impossible to do so. And even if a test is impossible, that doesn’t mean the hypothesis isn’t true. It just means we can know whether or not it’s true.

We don’t really have models to compare too. We have hypotheses, but how do you test them? Is consciousness an electromagnetic phenomenon? Is it purely mathematical? Can it exist in gravitational systems?

We know precious little about the universe. We have snippets of data about our immediate locale, and ever-changing theories about our not-so-immediate locale. We are specks on a rocky speck orbiting a fiery speck on the outer spiral arm of a bigger speck.

Maybe consciousness is a fundamental force. Maybe it is emergent and the universe thinks a billion times slower and bigger than we do. We just don’t know, and we didn’t really have any way to measure one way or the other. That’s the tricky bit about subjective experience.

I don’t think it’s any more “desperate” than any other theory. The only default position is solipsism: mine is the only real consciousness, and all the rest of you could be inventions of my mind or clever automatons. Once you start generalizing more than that, any line is kinda arbitrary. You either wind up at the universe, or you have to come up with a good reason to stop; and I don’t think we have the physics to confidently place that line.

What measurable neurological means?

Who knows what energetic structures exist within galactic super clusters? Energy is constantly exchanged in the universe.

Panpsychism seems logically more possible than the alternative. If consciousness is an emergent property of complex systems, the universe is probably conscious because it’s the most complex system there is.

Sure, how do you detect conscious effort from outside?

I’m inclined to believe every dynamic interconnected system is “conscious” to some degree. Not 1:1 with human consciousness obviously, but the same base phenomenon.

The main problem is that there aren’t very good metrics to distinguish how primitive a consciousness is. Where do you draw the line between consciousness and reflex? Is each of your cells conscious in its own impossibly tiny way?

I don’t think night shift Barbie is doing the science part of medicine.

New Apollo 18 lore just dropped

You avoid growing plants because it’s emasculating.

I avoid growing plants because I’m awful at it and it’s cruel.

We are not the same

Rebound from a viral pandemic, RIP Gros Michel

I’ve tutored calculus, and probably the biggest example I’ve seen of this is the difference quotient. The formula is exceedingly obvious once you understand it, but it takes a lot of people some time for it to “click”.

I was going to bring it up if no one else did