Recovering academic now in public safety. You’ll find me kibitzing on brains (my academic expertise) to critical infrastructure and resilience (current worklife). Also hockey, games, music just because.
I don’t know what it’s like where you live, but as rule, who knows? There are scheduled trains which are notoriously unreliable, but also unscheduled trains. Basically whenever there is enough cargo to justify a train it gets put out on the tracks and they move it when they can. Caveat: this is for Canada and is largely based on info from some former neighbors who were conductors and brakemen.
My sympathy to your cats.
Because their continued employment depends on them hitting their targets so they need support staff to do their jobs.
I was married to a lawyer for years. They have to bill somewhere from 1700-2200 hours a year to stay on partner track. And they can’t bill every hour that they’re working (although they can double up sometimes by using the minimum 2/10ths of an hour). My sympathy is with the lawyer. It’s not a power dynamic, it’s how the firm makes money and what you’re there to do.
Measure differences in what? We can’t ask *c. elegans * about it’s state of mind let alone consciousness. There are several issues here; a philosophical issue here about what you are modeling (e.g. mind, consciousness or something else), a biological issue with what physical parameters and states you need to capture to produce that model, and how you would propose to test the fidelity of that model against the original organism. The scope of these issues is well outside a reply chain in Lemmy.
It’s an analogy. There is actually an academic joke about the point you are making.
A mathematician and an engineer are sitting at a table drinking when a very beautiful woman walks in and sits down at the bar.
The mathematician sighs. “I’d like to talk to her, but first I have to cover half the distance between where we are and where she is, then half of the distance that remains, then half of that distance, and so on. The series is infinite. There’ll always be some finite distance between us.”
The engineer gets up and starts walking. “Ah, well, I figure I can get close enough for all practical purposes.”
The point of the analogy is not that one can’t get close enough so that the ear can’t detect a difference, it’s that in theory analog carries infinite information. It’s true that vinyl recordings are not perfect analog systems because of physical limitations in the cutting process. It’s also true for magnetic tape etc. But don’t mistake the metaphor for the idea.
Ionic movement across membranes, especially at the scale we are talking about, and the density of channels in the system is much closer to an ideal system. How much of that fidelity can you lose before it’s not your consciousness?
Thanks fellow traveller for punching holes in computational stupidity. Everything you said is true but I also want to point out that the brain is an analog system so the information in a neuron is infinite relative to a digital system (cf: digitizing analog recordings). As I tell my students if you are looking for a binary event to start modeling, look to individual ions moving across the membrane.
There’s an old joke about how long it takes to prepare a talk in academia. Want an hour? I can do it right now. 30 minute presentation? I’ll need a few weeks. 10 minute presentation? Better give me one or two month lead time.
God’s honest truth. 5 minutes of reading content gets stretched into 30 minutes of &$#@ video.
It is now. The widdle puddy tat dates to 1989.
The Linux program that had a cat chase your mouse was Neko.
The BSD license allows incorporation of BSD code in non-free projects. That was both an advantage for capitalists while simultaneously moving hobbyists away from it’s development. Kind of an important bit of info.
They track them, but they’re not all scheduled. If there is enough cargo there they put on a “special” and they will move it between the scheduled trains. Train scheduling and tracking is an art unto itself.