Quote from: TLEILAXU on February 05, 2019, 03:29:37 pm

Dark Souls III and its DLC are on sale on steam, so I ended up caving in and buying the DLC. Going to try and not to instantly spend 48 hours in there, since I've other shit to do. If anybody's looking for an immersive RPG with incredible atmosphere that has no qualms about kicking your ass, I can only recommend this game.

What does the DLC add? New bosses I'd hope.

I got bored rolling around after beating the second throne boss, but I can see the appeal. Finally beating a boss after dying a few dozen times was extremely satisfying. The biggest downside for me though is that it takes large blocks of dedicated time, which is becoming more and more elusive, especially because I'm terrible at these kinds of games lol.

Quote from: TLEILAXU on January 14, 2019, 06:13:13 pm

From Heretics of Dune

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... our God is a magical God whose language we speak."

You've brought this up in conversation before, TL - what about it speaks to you?

Quote from: MSJ on January 15, 2019, 08:53:02 pm

Quote from:  H

Well, there is a very good reason we never recommended it to you...

Really? What? In genuinely at a loss as to why you guys wouldn't want me participating in your "mindfulness" endeavors....

The initiation rituals aren't for everyone, you know?

Not to mention, it's all a zero-sum game.  If we let everyone else get more mindful and confident, then we necessarily won't be as much.

Study Tackles Neuroscience Claims to Have Disproved “Free Will” by Matt Shipman

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“Meanwhile, the journal articles that drew the most forceful conclusions often didn’t even assess the neural activity in question – which means their conclusions were based on speculation,” Dubljevic says. “It is crucial to critically examine whether the methods used actually support the claims being made.”

This is important because what people are told about free will can affect their behavior.

“Numerous studies suggest that fostering a belief in determinism influences behaviors like cheating,” Dubljevic says. “Promoting an unsubstantiated belief on the metaphysical position of non-existence of free will may increase the likelihood that people won’t feel responsible for their actions if they think their actions were predetermined.”

And this isn’t a problem solely within the neuroscience community. Earlier work by Dubljevic and his collaborators found challenges in how this area of research has been covered by the press and consumed by the public.

“To be clear, we’re not taking a position on free will,” Dubljevic says. “We’re just saying neuroscience hasn’t definitively proven anything one way or the other.”

This is important because what people are told about free will can affect their behavior.

I've gone through some of Bakker's stuff, and eliminativism did seem like a live possibility but then I read Alex Rosenberg's stuff about Intentionality in Atheist's Guide to Reality where he says we simply have to be wrong about having thoughts:

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"A more general version of this question is this: How can one clump of stuff anywhere in the universe be about some other clump of stuff anywhere else in the universe—right next to it or 100 million light-years away?

...Let’s suppose that the Paris neurons are about Paris the same way red octagons are about stopping. This is the first step down a slippery slope, a regress into total confusion. If the Paris neurons are about Paris the same way a red octagon is about stopping, then there has to be something in the brain that interprets the Paris neurons as being about Paris. After all, that’s how the stop sign is about stopping. It gets interpreted by us in a certain way. The difference is that in the case of the Paris neurons, the interpreter can only be another part of the brain...

What we need to get off the regress is some set of neurons that is about some stuff outside the brain without being interpreted—by anyone or anything else (including any other part of the brain)—as being about that stuff outside the brain. What we need is a clump of matter, in this case the Paris neurons, that by the very arrangement of its synapses points at, indicates, singles out, picks out, identifies (and here we just start piling up more and more synonyms for “being about”) another clump of matter outside the brain. But there is no such physical stuff.

Physics has ruled out the existence of clumps of matter of the required sort...

…What you absolutely cannot be wrong about is that your conscious thought was about something. Even having a wildly wrong thought about something requires that the thought be about something.

It’s this last notion that introspection conveys that science has to deny. Thinking about things can’t happen at all...When consciousness convinces you that you, or your mind, or your brain has thoughts about things, it is wrong."

The idea we don't have thoughts about things, Intentionality....it seems to me the correct conclusion is materialism is false not that Cogito Ergo Sum is a mistake.

Regarding our similarity to other organisms...I mean bees apparently understand the concept of Zero so perhaps mentality goes down further than we think, maybe even as deep as the panpsychics suggest. 

"With this work, we can imagine enormous opportunities for next-generation bio-hybrid applications," Mannoor says. "For example, some bacteria can glow, while others sense toxins or produce fuel. By seamlessly integrating these microbes with nanomaterials, we could potentially realize many other amazing designer bio-hybrids for the environment, defense, healthcare and many other fields."