There Is No ‘Hard Problem Of Consciousness’ - NOEMA

Chalmers claims that experience cannot be accounted for by science. But scientific understanding is not extraneous to experience; it is entirely about experience. Empiricism, the grounding of knowledge in experience, is not alternative to science; it is a main component of science’s traditional conceptual ground. As the Russian intellectual Alexander Bogdanov put it, science is the historical process of a successful collective organization of our experience.

It is misleading to see science, as often naively portrayed, as a direct account of an absolute and objective world, observed and described from its outside. If we think in this manner, we introduce dualism. No surprise, then, that we find dualism down the road: an irreducible gap between subject and object of knowledge. We have introduced it upfront.

Noam Chomsky on Language, Left Libertarianism, and Progress | Conversations with Tyler

Like all organisms, we have innate capacities. There’s something about our genetic endowment that determines that the embryo grows arms not wings, and there’s something about the genetic endowment that says that a newborn infant can instantly pick out parts of the noise that surrounds it and say to itself, “Those parts are language. I’m going to” — not consciously, of course; it’s all totally reflexive — “These parts are language. I’m going to pursue a course of maturation, a well-determined course of maturation, which means that by about two or three years old, I’ve basically absorbed the fundamentals of language.” Now, you can take the smartest chimpanzee or the dogs under my desk — they can listen to this noise forever. They have no idea there’s anything there but noise. Well, that’s a fundamental property of humans built in. It’s the reason why you and I can be having this discussion now, but a troop of chimpanzees can’t be.

Stephen Wolfram - Computational Foundations for the Second Law of Thermodynamics

So how does this relate to the Second Law? It’s what makes it possible for a system like rule 30 to operate according to a simple underlying rule, yet to intrinsically generate what seems like random behavior. If we could do all the necessary computationally irreducible work then we could in principle “see through” to the simple rules underneath. But the key point (emphasized by our Physics Project) is that observers like us are computationally bounded in our capabilities. And this means that we’re not able to “see through the computational irreducibility”—with the result that the behavior we see “looks random to us”.

And in thermodynamics that “random-looking” behavior is what we associate with heat. And the Second Law assertion that energy associated with systematic mechanical work tends to “degrade into heat” then corresponds to the fact that when there’s computational irreducibility the behavior that’s generated is something we can’t readily “computationally see through”—so that it appears random to us.

Jeffrey Sachs Lays Out Possible Lab Origin of Covid

Still, both the overlap in the amino acid sequence and the fact that experts in the furin cleavage site of the ENaC-alpha and insertion of genetic material into bat coronaviruses work at the same university could be coincidental, as Harrison and Sachs acknowledge. Some virologists, though, say that the coincidence strains credulity.

“Could be,” Richard Ebright, a molecular biologist at Rutgers University, wrote in an email to The Intercept when asked about the possibility that these things are both chance occurrences. “But the list of coincidences is getting verrrrrrrrrrry long.”

Ebright, a proponent of investigating the origin of SARS-CoV-2 and of investigating both natural-spillover and research-related-spillover, whom Harrison and Sachs thank “for helpful commentary on the manuscript,” spelled out some of the other Covid coincidences that he considers questionable, including its initial outbreak in a city that, well before 2019, had already been pegged as a biosafety risk. Ebright also noted Wuhan’s 1,000-mile distance from the nearest wild bats that carry the type of SARS-related coronaviruses that caused the pandemic. And he pointed to the particular coding of the amino acids in the furin cleavage site of SARS-CoV2.

“The sequence encoding the FCS of the pandemic virus contained two consecutive CGG arginine codons,” Ebright explained in his email. (A codon, or a combination of three nucleotides, supplies the genetic code for a single amino acid, though most amino acids can be represented by multiple different codons. Each nucleotide is represented by a letter — for RNA, either A, C, U, or G.) “This codon usage is unusual for a natural bat SARS-related coronaviruses (for which fewer than 1 in 30 arginine codons are CGG) but is optimal for humans (for which most arginine codons are CGG codons).”

Still, Ebright said that at first he didn’t see the identical amino acid sequences as particularly suspicious. “I had known for more than a year that there was a perfect match to an eight-amino acid sequence present in human ENaC. What I had not known was that the sequence was known to be a functional furin cleavage site and that it was a sequence extensively studied at UNC,” he said. “The crucial point that the ENaC sequence was a known functional site, not just that there happens to be a match to a protein that happens to be in humans. … That suddenly turned it from what I thought to be largely irrelevant to being a logical and obvious choice to proceed.”

New COVID-19 nasal spray outperforms current antibody treatments in mice - Northwestern Now

In addition to losing effectiveness, current antibody therapies also come with several problems: They are difficult to develop, expensive and require a healthcare professional to administer. They also require complicated supply chains and extreme refrigeration, which is often unavailable in low-resource settings.

The new antiviral solves all these problems. As opposed to monoclonal antibodies, which are made by cloning and culturing living mammalian cells, the new antiviral treatment is produced large-scale in microorganisms like E. coli, making them more cost-effective to manufacture. Not only is the new therapy stable in high heat, which could further streamline manufacturing and decrease the cost of goods for clinical development, it also holds promise for being self-administered as a one-time nasal spray, bypassing the need for medical professionals.

The researchers imagine that it could be available at the pharmacy and used as a preventative measure to treat infections.

Early ‘lab-grown’ Covid virus found in sample lends weight to Wuhan theory (telegraph.co.uk)

An early version of Covid-19 that appears to have been grown in a laboratory has been discovered in samples from a Chinese biotechnology firm. The finding lends weight to claims that the virus may have started life as a lab experiment that accidentally leaked out. Bioinformatics experts from the University of Veterinary Medicine and Lorand University in Budapest, Hungary, made the discovery by accident while examining genetic data from soil samples collected from Antarctica in late 2018 and early 2019.

The samples were sent to Sangon Biotech in Shanghai for sequencing in Dec 2019, where they became contaminated with a previously unknown variant of Covid-19. The variant has mutations that bridge the gap between bat coronavirus and the earliest Wuhan strain, so it may be an ancestral version of the virus. The samples also contain DNA from hamsters and monkeys, suggesting that the early virus may have been grown in animal cell lines. Viscount Ridley, author of Viral: The Search for the Origin of Covid-19, said: “The unique mutations hint at it being an ancestral variant. So if it was sequenced in say mid-December, before anybody had identified the virus in people and started trying to grow it in labs, then it points to secret samples in labs in 2019.”

Newly identified hormone may be a critical driver of type 1 and type 2 diabetes | News | Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health

Many hormones are involved in the regulation of metabolism, such as insulin and leptin. Fabkin is different from traditional hormones in that it is not a single molecule with a single defined receptor. Instead, fabkin is composed of a functional protein complex consisting of multiple proteins, including fatty acid binding protein 4 (FABP4), adenosine kinase (ADK) and nucleoside diphosphate kinase (NDPK). Through a series of experiments, the researchers determined that fabkin regulates energy signals outside of cells. These signals then act through a family of receptors to control target cell function. In the case of diabetes, fabkin controls the function of beta cells in the pancreas that are responsible for insulin production.

Electric vehicles could fully recharge in under 5 minutes with new charging station cable design - Purdue University News

Though the prototype hasn’t been tested on EVs yet, Mudawar and his students demonstrated in the lab that their prototype accommodates a current of over 2,400 amperes – far beyond the 1,400-ampere minimum that would be needed to reduce charging times for large commercial EVs to five minutes. The most advanced chargers in the industry deliver only currents up to 520 amperes, and most chargers available to consumers support currents of less than 150 amperes.

Ok, now electric cars become viable in the USA.

The scientists hired by big oil who predicted the climate crisis long ago | The Guardian

When I started consulting for Exxon, I had already begun to understand that the Earth’s climate would be affected by carbon dioxide. There were only a small number of people in the world who were actively working on this problem because the global warming signal had not yet manifested itself in the data. So I was invited to join a research group at Exxon and one of my conditions to join was that we would publish our scientific research in peer-reviewed journals. It was a bunch of geeks trying to figure out how the planetary atmosphere works. We were doing very good work at Exxon. We had eight scientific papers published in peer-reviewed journals, including a prediction of how much global warming from carbon dioxide buildup would be 40 years later. We made a prediction in 1980 of what the atmospheric warming would be from fossil fuel burning in 2020. We predicted that it would be about one degree celsius. And it is about one degree celsius. It never actually occurred to me that this was going to become a political problem. I thought: “We’ll do the analyses, we’ll write reports, the politicians of the world will see the reports and they’ll make the appropriate changes and transform our energy system somehow.” I’m a research scientist. In my field, if you discover something and it turns out to be valid, you’re a hero. I didn’t realize how hard it would be to convince people, even when they saw objective evidence of this happening.

Origin of Covid — Following the Clues

The US government shares a strange common interest with the Chinese authorities: neither is keen on drawing attention to the fact that Dr. Shi’s coronavirus work was funded by the US National Institutes of Health. One can imagine the behind-the-scenes conversation in which the Chinese government says “If this research was so dangerous, why did you fund it, and on our territory too?” To which the US side might reply, “Looks like it was you who let it escape. But do we really need to have this discussion in public?”

Dr. Fauci is a longtime public servant who served with integrity under President Trump and has resumed leadership in the Biden Administration in handling the Covid epidemic. Congress, no doubt understandably, may have little appetite for hauling him over the coals for the apparent lapse of judgment in funding gain-of-function research in Wuhan.

Textised! : Jonathan Flint - Testing Woes - LRB 6 May 2021

Perhaps the real problem is hubris. There have been so many things we thought we knew but didn’t. How many people reassured us Covid-19 would be just like flu? Or insisted that the only viable tests were naso-pharyngeal swabs, preferably administered by a trained clinician? Is that really the only way? After all, if Covid-19 is only detectable by sticking a piece of plastic practically into your brain, how can it be so infectious? We still don’t understand the dynamics of virus transmission. We still don’t know why around 80 per cent of transmissions are caused by just 10 per cent of cases, or why 2 per cent of individuals carry 90 per cent of the virus. If you live with someone diagnosed with Covid-19, the chances are that you won’t be infected (60 to 90 per cent of cohabitees don’t contract the virus). Yet in the right setting, a crowded bar for example, one person can infect scores of others. What makes a superspreader? How do we detect them? And what can we learn from the relatively low death rates in African countries, despite their meagre testing and limited access to hospitals? That we are still scrambling to answer these questions is deeply worrying, not just because it shows we aren’t ready for the next pandemic. The virus has revealed the depth of our ignorance when it comes to the biology of genomes.

Did the Coronavirus Escape From a Lab?

As Shi explained to Scientific American, late in December 2019, she heard from the director of the Wuhan Institute that there was an outbreak of a new disease in the city. Medical samples taken from hospital patients arrived at her lab for analysis. Shi determined that the new virus was related to SARS but even more closely related to a bat disease that her own team had found on a virus-hunting trip: the now-famous RaTG13. Shi was surprised that the outbreak was local, she said: “I had never expected this kind of thing to happen in Wuhan, in central China.” The bat hiding places that she’d been visiting were, after all, as far away as Orlando, Florida, is from New York City. Could this new virus, she wondered, have come from her own laboratory? She checked her records and found no exact matches. “That really took a load off my mind,” she said. “I had not slept a wink for days.” If one of the first thoughts that goes through the head of a lab director at the Wuhan Institute of Virology is that the new coronavirus could have come from her lab, then we are obliged to entertain the scientific possibility that it could indeed have come from her lab. Right then, there should have been a comprehensive, pockets-inside-out, fully public investigation of the Virology Institute, along with the other important virus labs in Wuhan, including the one close by the seafood market, headquarters of the Wuhan CDC. There should have been interviews with scientists, interviews with biosafety teams, close parsings of laboratory notebooks, freezer and plumbing and decontamination systems checks — everything. It didn’t happen.

From Bats to Human Lungs, the Evolution of a Coronavirus | The New Yorker

Analyses of the sars-CoV-2 genome indicate a single spillover event, meaning the virus jumped only once from an animal to a person, which makes it likely that the virus was circulating among people before December. Unless more information about the animals at the Wuhan market is released, the transmission chain may never be clear. There are, however, numerous possibilities. A bat hunter or a wildlife trafficker might have brought the virus to the market. Pangolins happen to carry a coronavirus, which they might have picked up from bats years ago, and which is, in one crucial part of its genome, virtually identical to sars-CoV-2. But no one has yet found evidence that pangolins were at the Wuhan market, or even that venders there trafficked pangolins. “We’ve created circumstances in our world somehow that allows for these viruses, which would otherwise not be known to cause any problems, to get into human populations,” Mark Denison, the director of pediatric infectious diseases at Vanderbilt University Medical Center’s Institute for Infection, Immunology, and Inflammation, told me. “And this one happened to say, ‘I really like it here.’”

Realism Is False | Edge.org

I'm not denying that there is an objective reality. There is some objective reality that exists independent of whether or not I perceive it, but that objective reality is not space and time or anything inside space and time. Those are just human forms of perception. That's what quantum theory is telling us. It's telling us local realism is false, non-contextual realism is false, and realism is false, at least what we call realism of objects in space and time. They don't exist, except when they're perceived. They don't have their properties, except when they're perceived because spacetime is not fundamental. That's what the physicists are now telling us, like Nima Arkani-Hamed. Spacetime is doomed. There is an objective reality, but it's not space and time. It's a deeper reality outside of space and time. Spacetime is emergent and is not fundamental.

BBC - Future - The poisons released by melting Arctic ice

Around 10% of the carbon that does defrost will probably be released as CO2, amounting to 130-150 billion tonnes. That is equivalent to the current rate of total US emissions, every year until 2100. Melting permafrost effectively introduces a new country at number two on the highest emitters list, and one that isn’t accounted for in current IPCC models. “People talk about a carbon bomb,” says Natali. “In geological timescales this is not a slow release. It is a pool of carbon that is locked away and is not accounted for in the carbon budget to keep rises below two degrees (Celsius).”

The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind by Julian Jaynes | Goodreads

But over and behind these and other causes of science has been something more universal, something in this age of specialization often unspoken. It is something about understanding the totality of existence, the essential defining reality of things, the entire universe and man's place in it. It is a groping among stars for final answers, a wandering the infinitesimal for the infinitely general, a deeper and deeper pilgrimage into the unknown. It is a direction whose far beginning in the mists of history can be distantly seen in the search for lost directives in the breakdown of the bicameral mind.

Forget Nature Versus Nurture. Nature Has Won - Quillette

In Blueprint: How DNA Makes Us Who We Are Robert Plomin makes the case that genetic differences cause most variation in psychological traits – things like personality and cognitive abilities. The way your parents raise you, the schools you attend – they don’t have much effect on those traits. Children are similar to their parents, but that similarity is due to shared genetics, rather than shared family environment.

Obviously the thoughts in your head, the facts you know, are not the same as your great-great-grand-father’s – we learn those things. But how easily you learn those facts, how well you remember them, how optimistic or pessimistic you are – those are largely set by your genes. Almost every psychological trait has significant heritability, even political leanings. To a significant degree, you’re either born a little Liberal or else a little Conservative, to quote Gilbert and Sullivan.

And to the extent that your personality is not set by your genes, it’s apparently influenced by poorly-understood random factors, rather than your upbringing or social circumstances.

Researchers find a way to mimic clinical trials using genetics - MIT Technology Review

They noted that epidemiology has an admirable track record in identifying the causes of infectious diseases from AIDS to Zika, in part because hypotheses can be tested in laboratories and in the field, and because governments have been easily convinced to do such tests. But chronic conditions like heart disease and cancer present an entirely different challenge. Epidemiology can provide correlations between diet, lifestyle, and disease, but that’s all it does. It generates hypotheses about possible causes, and little more than that. What concerned Davey Smith and Ebrahim was that epidemiologists had taken to jumping the scientific gun: they were advising people how to live and eat on the basis of mere hypotheses, without doing the rigorous (and very expensive) trials that might determine whether they were right.

To Remember, the Brain Must Actively Forget | Quanta Magazine

As Davis and Zhong argued in their jointly written 2017 review, all those findings suggested that cellular processes mediated by dopamine and Rac1 constantly erode newly formed memories. “From this perspective,” they wrote, “forgetting as mediated by intrinsic forgetting mechanisms may be the default state of the brain; intrinsic forgetting may operate chronically at a low level to slowly remove each newly acquired memory, although its strength may be regulated by internal or external factors.”

Nanogirl Michelle Dickinson: Is banning plastic bags bad for the environment? - NZ Herald

Surprisingly, although trees may seem more natural than crude oil, converting hardwood into paper requires a resource-heavy pulping process that uses large amounts of water, energy and chemicals, which can emit toxic and hazardous chemicals into air and water. This was confirmed in a report by the US Department of Energy.

Based on current calculations, the environmental impact of one single-use plastic bag equals five uses of a thicker LDPE plastic bag, four uses of a paper bag, 14 uses of a polypropylene non-woven bag (the reusable ones you can buy at the supermarket today) and 173 uses for a cotton reusable bag.

The global warming impact is not the only factor that determines how environmentally friendly each bag option is. Photos of turtles eating plastic bags are a strong advertisement for how littered our oceans are.

Government research studies in the US and Australia found that single-use plastic bags only account for around 1 per cent of the litter found. Closer to home, a Sustainable Coastlines Queen St drain survey found cigarette packaging, beverage bottles and food containers to be the biggest challenges when it comes to litter.