Personally—and this is where I expect to lose the materialists that I imagine predominate HN—I think we are already in a nightmare scenar...
Personally—and this is where I expect to lose the materialists that I imagine predominate HN—I think we are already in a nightmare scenario with regard to another area: the science of consciousness. The following seem likely to me: (1) Consciousness exists, and is not an illusion that doesn't need explaining (a la Daniel Dennett), nor does it drop out of some magical part of physical theory we've somehow overlooked until now; (2) Mind-matter interactions do not exist, that is, purely physical phenomena can be perfectly explained by appeals to purely physical theories. Such are the stakes of "naturalistic dualist" thinkers like David Chalmers. But if this is the case, it implies that the physics of matter and the physics of consciousness are orthogonal to each other. Much like it would be a nightmare to stipulate that dark matter is a purely gravitational interaction and that's that , it would be a nightmare to stipulate that consciousness and qualia arise noninteractionally from certain physical processes just because . And if there is at least one materially noninteracting orthogonal component to our universe, what if there are more that we can't even perceive?
Posted by Paracompact on Feb 10, 2026, 1:26 AM
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The biggest problem with MOND is that it was hand-crafted with additional parameters simply to fit the data.
(My comment is about detached houses).
The biggest problem with this is that I can't run my company's own internal benchmarks against this API, because they will be trained int...
> steer Claude away from over-engineering parts of the system in response to hypothetical concerns.
Why is there no comparison with FLUX 3 Image?
> our Git monorepo was developing an annoying problem Sentences like this are so common from people using monorepos that I am convinced ...
Why is there no contact form?
The biggest problem with plugging a generator into an outlet is you need a double ended cord.
Personally—and this is where I expect to lose the materialists that I imagine predominate HN—I think we are already in a nightmare scenar...
Personally—and this is where I expect to lose the materialists that I imagine predominate HN—I think we are already in a nightmare scenario with regard to another area: the science of consciousness. The following seem likely to me: (1) Consciousness exists, and is not an illusion that doesn't need explaining (a la Daniel Dennett), nor does it drop out of some magical part of physical theory we've somehow overlooked until now; (2) Mind-matter interactions do not exist, that is, purely physical phenomena can be perfectly explained by appeals to purely physical theories. Such are the stakes of "naturalistic dualist" thinkers like David Chalmers. But if this is the case, it implies that the physics of matter and the physics of consciousness are orthogonal to each other. Much like it would be a nightmare to stipulate that dark matter is a purely gravitational interaction and that's that , it would be a nightmare to stipulate that consciousness and qualia arise noninteractionally from certain physical processes just because . And if there is at least one materially noninteracting orthogonal component to our universe, what if there are more that we can't even perceive?
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