/sci/ - Science & Math

>>10934604
Your second article does a good enough job explaining why you shouldn't talk about evolution as though it were purposeful:
>mentalistic (attributing the action of mind where there is none)
And aside from that the exact reason we keep getting threads like this one every day is because of this shit way of conceptualizing evolution. Once you stop thinking about evolution in terms of purpose and start thinking about it in terms of whatever happened to emerge and propagate into the future it no longer seems mysterious for seemingly "bad designs" to exist in nature. Because they aren't "designs" at all, and there's no reason to expect problems to not exist in biological processes given there wasn't anyone acting through nature to try to make problem-free machines in the first place.
A consistently bad enough problem could be enough to cause an organism to die out, but that's completely different from the assumption any detrimental trait is an unexpected anomaly. It would be way less plausible for perfect organisms that never suffer or lack in any scenario imaginable to come into existence since it would require a much greater number of conspiratorially convenient inexplicable happenstances to add all that superfluous extreme protection from harm when structures and processes requiring infinitesimally less to emerge and persist would have sufficed.
Do you also talk about gravity's purpose? Or the purpose of humidity? These are garbage perspectives to approach natural phenomena with that take you in the opposite direction of understanding what's going on.

>>10838726
I already did. You need to come up with a possible mechanism for the cause and check to see if there's evidence for it actually existing, which is different from finding two variables are moving in the same direction.
See the Kuru example. There's a big difference between finding a correlation between cannibalism and Kuru vs. discovering the abnormally folded proteins that allowed for cannibalism to cause Kuru.
>>10838716
>when smoking is strongly correlated with lung cancer, if your first reaction isn't "causation" then you are braindead.
Let me blow your mind then: Tobacco smoking is correlated with schizophrenia.
Schizophrenia has an INVERSE correlation with cancer.
So are you supposed to have the "first reaction" of smoking causes schizophrenia? Or are you supposed to have the "first reaction" of cancer causing sanity? And if we're supposed to assume on impulse that smoking causes cancer through correlation alone, does smoking cause cancer which causes sanity? At the same time it causes schizophrenia?
All this nonsensical confusion could be avoided if you simply don't assume at all. The actual mechanism is what you need to look for if you have a possible causal relationship you want to find evidence of. In the case of schizophrenia researches have done exactly this and have found evidence there's a relationship between smoking and schizophrenia because of a self-medicating benefit of nicotine for schizophrenics.

>>10823062
When did I mention anything about jewish people? Are you honestly trying to suggest the only two options here are:
A) Subscribing to systematic pharmaceutical hormone disruption and genital modification surgery for perfectly healthy and functional people who believe they would rather be women or
B) Being a neo-nazi?
What the fuck?

>>10802585
>Because a machine can't give you a free pass on the 4th ammendment when you train it to bark at someone on command.
^^^This.
You guys know drug detection dogs are complete bullshit, right? They don't actually do what people imagine. When you arrange studies where the police officer is misinformed that the drugs are somewhere they aren't, guess what happens? Their dogs "coincidentally" bark at those same exact false drug locations.
If anything drug detecting dogs are impressive not for the ability to pick up scents but for their acute psychological insights into the minds of their human handlers. They can tell by body language what their handlers hope they'll do, and they go ahead and do exactly that because the doggos are smart and know doing so will result in praise and treats.
>>10802691
>The cops need that civil asset forfeiture money
lol. Don't get me started on "self-funded" police departments. War on drugs is such a fucking racket between that and the private prison corporations who spend millions on lobbying to keep as many easily violated drug laws on the books as possible explicitly (per their own earnings calls and reports to their investors) because their business model depends on maintaining a prison occupancy above their *contractual* quota (as in yes, the state actually goes into a contract with them that says they will guarantee the continued supply of X number of prisoners for their prison, not because there actually are X number of people who deserve incarceration but because financially that's how many people the private prison corporation requires to be profitable).

>>10802585
>Because a machine can't give you a free pass on the 4th ammendment when you train it to bark at someone on command.
^^^This.
You guys no drug detection dogs are complete bullshit, right? They don't actually do what people imagine. When you arrange studies where the police officer is misinformed that the drugs are somewhere they aren't, guess what happens? Their dogs "coincidentally" bark at those same exact false drug locations.
If anything drug detecting dogs are impressive not for the ability to pick up scents but for their acute psychological insights into the minds of their human handlers. They can tell by body language what their handlers hope they'll do, and they go ahead and do exactly that because the doggos are smart and know doing so will result in praise and treats.

>>10788597
>Shouldn't "right now" be somewhere in the middle of that time, rather than in the very beginning (relatively)?
You're assuming the conditions favorable to the emergence of biological organisms is the same throughout the entire lifespan of the universe. That's almost certainly nowhere close to true.

>>10763420
>How does that level of misinformation even exist?
Because there are absolutely no consequences for it given almost nobody is a cardiac surgeon and those who are actually go through formal education rather than relying on folksy pop sci bullshit they heard second, third, or fourth hand from some other misinformed pleb.
Same reason almost everyone mistakenly believes you should drink eight glasses of water every day.
https://www.bmj.com/content/335/7633/1288
>A suitable allowance of water for adults is 2.5 litres daily in most instances. An ordinary standard for diverse persons is 1 millilitre for each calorie of food. Most of this quantity is contained in prepared foods. If the last, crucial sentence is ignored, the statement could be interpreted as instruction to drink eight glasses of water a day.

>>10747189
>Who says I'm rejecting it?
You do, in places like here:
>since his utterances are most consistent with him lacking conscious experience.
That invalidates the p-zombie argument because you're claiming outward behavior (his utterances) is a way you can distinguish p-zombies from non-zombies.
Whole point of the argument is trying to say "qualia" / "experience" is a real thing of its own because you can accept the possibility of p-zombies *identical* to non-zombies in every physical and observable way with the only difference being whether or not "qualia" / "experience" is present. If you believe you can notice someone is a p-zombie based on what they say or do then you're unwittingly arguing *against* the "explanatory gap" and in favor of the alternative explanation that what a p-zombie is missing is within the domain of the physical rather than a *further fact* not accounted for by the physical.
ghiraldelli.pro.br/wp-content/uploads/The-Conscious-Mind-Chalmers-David.pdf
>Why should all this structure and function give rise to experience? The story about the physical processes does not say. We can put this in terms of the thought-experiments given earlier. Any story about physical processes applies equally to me and to my zombie twin. It follows that nothing in that story says why, in my case, consciousness arises. Similarly, any story about physical processes applies equally to my inverted twin, who sees blue where I see red: it follows that nothing in that story says why my experience is of one variety rather than another. The very fact that it is logically possible that the physical facts could be the same while the facts about consciousness are different shows us that as Levine(1983) has put it, there is an explanatory gap between the physical level and conscious experience. If this is right, the fact that consciousness accompanies a given physical process is a further fact, not explainable simply by telling the story about the physical facts.