These are definitely not robust. The product description mentions about 5 times that it will most likely be broken when it arrives to you, and will definitely break again in months or years so recommends buying extra first aid kits with spare parts so you can tinker it and keep it working.
I understand they are restarting production from scratch for a product that no longer exists and that nobody actually knows how to make, but being openly unreliable is a significant problem at this price point.
Nah. It's a british sports car, but a keyboard. At this price point the idea that you can have a little pile of parts and take it apart on weekends to fiddle with the springs is its own selling point.
I'm typing this on a Das that's been completely reliable and, to some extent, clackety and 'special' in its own right. There's five other keyboards that came with computers not thirty feet away including an older Das that I wore out: the keycaps are unreadable on that one, the current one's hanging in there.
I'm not in a position to randomly splurge on this new beam spring monster but I understand exactly what it is, and admit to craving it something fierce :) it's exactly the sort of thing I'd get.
A website could offer accessibility features, such as dark mode or dyslexia font. These could be subtle, or very obvious, depending on your target group. Large amounts of texts (e.g. a testimonial) could be a valid example. If you go for site-wide, you got consistency. If you'd apply it on h1-3 you'd put emphasis on the titles.
It'd be great if say Mozilla Firefox included this font natively (for the app itself). Then again, the default is currently Times New Roman...
The local grocery store chain to me, Giant Foods uses a handwriting oriented sans serif font, Robert Slimbach's Cronos Pro (which was a favourite of mine until that rebranding....)
Cloudflare are winning these days, they’re just lacking good fine grained permissions. You still have to make an entirely separate account for prod, which messes up SSO since one domain can only be bound to one account.
Their products are cool and I've been happy with them over the years, but their blog right now has had some blunders recently. Also their reliability seems to have been having trouble but does seem better recently.
Their pricing is not ridiculous like some providers. It would be very hard to rack up that kind of bill, especially considering their rate limiting rules are now free to use.
One account gets compromised and your doomed. A lot of companies even have prod access be a request based system. Most modern security models with zero trust don't let everyone have access to everything, quite the opposite.
Im sure its also negative for WebBLE but we are hoping that one day we can have it on Firefox too.. We use WebBLE for talking and programming NRF52 chips and it works great compared to plugging a wire every time.
Ah okay, thanks. My company makes web based diagnostic tools for automotive. At the moment we are Chrome-only because the CAN bus dongle doesn’t support serial.
If the standards committee backpedaled on WebUSB it would literally destroy my company.
Engineers are awful at advocating for themselves, and that’s why they study and work twice as hard as lawyers and finance, have less perks (travel, food, cars, private offices) yet they get paid half as much.
The majority of people in finance are working in low paid back office or retail roles. Less than an engineer on average. You only hear about the outliers.
These finance jobs are low paid because they're not that skilled and many people can do them. Same basic reason as why fast food temp worker is low paid.
It's no surprise that the companies with all the money and influence over government have managed to manipulate the general public to turn against the things that could get in the way of those same companies exploiting their workers and screwing over everyone else in the process. I'm just surprised that such weak arguments were what ended up being actually effective!
On one side they tell you "You'll get Weekends off! You'll get more money! You'll work fewer hours!" and other side says "You can't talk directly to your boss! Corruption could happen in your union if you do nothing to stop it! Lazy people might keep their job unless HR documents the problems!" and somehow people are like "Man, I'd much rather spend less time on my family and hobbies than not be able to go directly to my boss!"
Same with regulations. One side says "Have clean air and water! Don't get screwed over by companies who poison you!" and the other side says "Billion dollar companies would have to pay more to not poison you! Look at all these terrible regulations we already bribed lawmakers into passing! Regulations BAD!" and people just eat it up.
It makes me wonder how much more extreme they could take things before people stopped falling for it.
Just take company secrets and walk over to competitors. That is the greatest perks every engineers have but don't exercise it. Some literally become billionaires. You think China overnight taught of everything by themselves? Go ask what did the Japanese and SKorean senior engineers did over the weekends from 90s to 2010s. Law is only effective if it can be proven in a court and judge sentenced it. Vast majority never even reach the lawyers ear. You advocate means you most likely will divulge. The quietest and least "smart" engineers probably are the smartest and riches.
I think the mistake the OP made was going to unifi.com for the setup, when in fact you can go to 192.168.1.1 and set it up fully locally from there.
The cloud management is great after setup, but not during setup because yeah you keep losing connection to it whenever you break the internet or whatever. This is greatly alleviated with their fancy 5G router they just released, which allows you to remote manage even if the internet is broken.
When I go to 192.168.1.1 it still asks for my login/password/2FA I created on unifi.com. Well, theoretically it's possible router can securely check those locally without WAN, by copying password+2FA init token + salt hashes locally, but I highly doubt it's the case.
Actually that’s exactly what it does (seems), because it works fine without internet.
I say this authoritatively because I have a ‘huge’ small business deployment of like 20 UniFi devices, and the internet breaks virtually every time I change the complex routing setup. If it were not for this, my setup would be unmanageable.
I have to flip flop between unifi.com (for when I break the wifi routing) and local (for when I break the internet), but boy is having both options handy!
Live dissection and experimentation on “alive but drugged” human brains is mental. How do you ensure that you aren’t torturing a brain that can’t see, hear or scream? How are you held accountable?
When I had my ear surgery about 20 years ago, the doctor explained to me that I would be awake for part of the procedure, but the anesthesia meant that I would have no memory of it.¹ It’s a weird thing to think about whether that lack of memory would obviate the pain or discomfort of the moment.
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1. As it turned out, I was so frightened in the lead-up to the surgery that they had to do general anesthesia on me because I was shaking too much for them to operate so I was unconscious for the whole thing.
Purely anecdotal, but I had surgery a few years ago (relatively minor). But I could feel for months after a sort of 'unconscious PSTD' I don't know how else to describe it. Even after it was healed and the pain was gone, there was just a deep sense of 'something bad happened in there' feeling. I'd have dreams of someone digging around in my body. Anyway, it's all gone now, but a weird experience for sure.
I have vivid dreams and smells from a surgery where the visions and feeling of them poking me are incredibly intense. The question is whether it’s a memory or a manifestation of fear. I rarely dream (every few years), but this vivid dream comes through on occasion.
I had the same thoughts "but won't i feel it THEN?" when I was getting an upper endoscopy. The anesthesiologist said you're in such a trance, dreamlike state plus with the inability to form memories its like you're not your real "consciousness" but something different. Sort of like your brain is in "limp mode" and its not really _you._ This was both comforting and slightly terrifying in a different way.
I've had an upper endoscopy and a colonoscopy, both the same day, and both without anesthesia. If they didn't take a biopsy, it likely shouldn't have been too traumatic, consciously or subconsciously - maybe that's a bit comforting to know.
I do remember my lung biopsy where they went in down my neck. Maybe they give less drugs for that than for your upper endoscopy. My memories have a slightly horror movie vibe but I would not be put off having the procedure again.
You might have been dreaming. I had a memory of the doctor saying "clamp down" and I bit down on the endoscope and he said "not you." I asked him if that happened and he said nothing like that happened at all and it was just a false memory/pseudo dream. Or he was lying to me.
I remember there was a lawsuit when a guy left his phone recording when they wheeled him in for a conscious sedation procedure and the doctors and nurses were making fun of him audibly how fat he was. Seems like they're confident enough in people not remembering for them to do that - or being able to dismiss it.
I had a dentist explain to me the same for getting my wisdom teeth out, as if it was a selling feature. At least for me, having my memory wiped is far more scary than just being put unconscious (or having some pain and a local anaesthetic).
I was one of the last if not the last patient the dentist who took out my wisdom teeth gave general anesthesia to (at my request, he was normally only doing local). Afterwards, the whole dental office staff (and my mother!) entertained themselves with having conversations with my incoherent self as I came out of the anesthesia. Apparently, I declared that I was ruined and would never be able to sing opera again (point in fact, I had never sang opera before).
A colleague warned me of the same when I was having my wisdom teeth removed. As a result, while I was being put under, I was very focused on the effects of the anaesthetic. I feel about as confident as one can be that I was completely unconscious during the entire operation. I remember the surgeon asking me to count to ten, and the specific feeling of my vision melting and swirling around, before suddenly waking up with the surgery over.
When I wake up from dreams, even with no memory of them, I sometimes have "a memory of a memory"; the tip-of-tge-tongue feeling that there's something interesting I'd experienced, but which I now can't remember what it was. But with the anaesthetic, there wasn't anything like that at all.
Similar for me, although I did not realise I had gone under. I counted to ten, and when I reached ten I opened my eyes and was in a different room and the surgery was over. Very weird!
Had a few eye surgeries (vitrectomies) under sedation, no pain but lots of flashing lights and lots of kaleidoscope patterns. It was pretty wild.
I was lucky that coming out of sedation was actually fantastic, like the only time I can remember feeling that blissfully relaxed was in maybe a few beach holidays I went on as a kid.
The doctor who did the surgery was arguably the best doctor I’ve ever interacted with in my 57 years of life. He was horrible at starting appointments on time (much to the frustration of his staff) because he would spend as long as he felt necessary with each patient, regardless of what the scheduled appointment length was. He was essentially at war with insurance companies about coverage limitations (for the procedure, a stapedectomy, insurance companies wanted to have this be an outpatient procedure but he felt it was better for patients not to have to be in a car immediately after surgery so he informed patients beforehand that they would be checking in as an outpatient and he would declare complications after surgery that required an overnight hospital stay. Similarly, the antibiotic that the insurance companies had as their preferred formulary had a tendency to kill hair cells which made it a bad choice for in-ear application. All of his patients were advised that they had an allergy to this antibiotic and thus would have to be prescribed his preferred antibiotic). So, with this doctor, if he told me that the moon was made of green cheese, I would believe him without reservation.
I've thought a lot about this. If you experience immense pain for half a second, then immediately forget, it doesn't seem so bad. And anything bad that has happened to you that you completely forgot doesn't really affect you. Sometimes when I'm feeling ill, I'll think to myself, "If I remember having this thought, then this sickness is terrible, but if I forget the whole experience, it isn't. If I eventually forget this happened, then this current pain is not real." Then when I remember that, I know that moment in time contributed to my total self. But surely I have also thought this without remembering it.
Does a full day of torture, completely forgotten, really matter? How long before it does matter? We forget vast amounts of our lives constantly. And after death, forgetting everything, how much mattered then? It's a mindfuck.
It wouldn't matter even if you remembered it, if it wasn't for PTSD. That and the waste of a day.
The last question is strange, it implies that the goal of life is to fill up a trophy cabinet with golden memories and then, I guess, relish them for eternity, rather than to do things.
A life where I remember good memories is worth a lot more to me than a life where I do great deeds while sleepwalking and have no memory of it. What's the point of doing something if you don't even know you did it?
Oh yeah, I've had two cath lab visits. In both of them, I woke up in the middle of the process, conscious enough to recognize that the black-and-white image on the screen was me with a wire in my heart and little puffs of dye.
The first time it happened, I was fascinated watching the process. I thought I asked them a question about what I was seeing. I probably was just mumbling. The second time, I had a bright white ball of nuclear fire in my chest, and in my mind's eye, my ribs were slumping under the heat. I tried to tell them about the burning sensation, and I apologized for complaining (one should always be polite to the doctor running a wire through one's arteries and into one's heart).
In both cases, after I tried to speak, the room went black again.
As I relate the story, I can see how, for some people, it would be nightmare fuel. But for me it was this abstract "hey, that's cool."
I'm in the UK and was intentionally kept conscious during angioplasty and stent placement. Mind you, it was an emergency heart-attack kind of appointment! The experience was very cool and I recall that the wire-wriggling cardiologist wore a sectional lead suit (rapidly firing X-ray machine) and to my drug-addled brain, reminded me of the armored gorillas in the Planet of the Apes movies.
Colonoscopies used to be like this in the US more often (“you’ll be awake but won’t remember it”). I feel bad for the me that existed in that time window of discomfort. 20 years later they did general anesthesia (family history of colon cancer).
I had a low stakes cyst removal from my butt crack once. Sparing the other details, the anesthesiologist explained the different drugs, one to numb, one to prevent my memory from forming. I asked if they could leave out the memory drug and I could remain cognizant. She didn't mind and I had a nice chat with her about anesthetics while on my stomach having doctors cut out part of my butt.
> The brains are already almost devoid of the coordinated neural firing necessary even for minimal consciousness, says Brendan Parent, a bioethicist at New York University Langone Health and one of six ethicists on Bexorg’s advisory board. But the company also forestalls any electrical activity with the anesthetic propofol, among other measures.
I recognized that anesthetic from its famous irresponsible use-
"Attention to the risks of off-label use of propofol increased in August 2009, after the release of the Los Angeles County coroner's report that musician Michael Jackson was killed by a mixture of propofol and the benzodiazepine drugs lorazepam, midazolam, and diazepam on 25 June 2009." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propofol
Used properly, however:
"To induce general anesthesia, propofol is the drug used almost exclusively, having largely replaced sodium thiopental."
The media and the people who bought into their shameless attention-grabbing lies are the reason he had sleep problems. He was unanimously acquitted of all counts, but the media made his life into a living hell by consistently portraying him as a pedophile because it drove incredible engagement numbers. A justice system should be "innocent until proven guilty", and yet MJ was deemed guilty even after proven innocent. Longform read from an actually good journalist, if you care to learn for yourself: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/one-of-the-most-shameful_b_61...
That article was written 16 years ago and misses a lot as a result. it doesn’t mention the new allegations, including those documented in Leaving Neverland. It also glosses over the accusations in the 1990s. It’s papered over that those allegations were lies, but he settled the lawsuit with them for over $23M.
Settling isn't an admission of guilt. It's plausible that he wanted to avoid the media circus that would inevitably result, and given that fighting it out in court was significantly more damaging to his reputation than settling the 90s case was despite being exonerated, he was probably right to settle. The article does also touch on the indications that those allegations were also not credible, although it doesn't do a deep dive.
I don't give much credence to new allegations. Where were these allegations when he was alive, and why are people still publishing documentaries? You don't need a documentary to make an allegation. They're doing it because they want to make money, then. Off a dead man, who can't defend himself.
> Over the years, Jackson and the estate have paid out millions to settle various claims, with some lawsuits still pending without ever admitting wrongdoing. A significant reason for the large settlement totaling about $25 million made by Jackson in 1994 to the Chandler family and their lawyer was the drawing of specific markings Jackson had on his penis caused by the skin condition vitiligo.
> Jordie Chandler drew the markings and the drawing was put into a sealed envelope. During the criminal investigation, Jackson was so resistant to having his genitals photographed that he slapped one of his doctors. It didn’t matter for the civil suit. My reporting showed that when Jordie’s drawing was unsealed, it matched the photos.
> I don't give much credence to new allegations. Where were these allegations when he was alive
It’s worth noting that it’s common for it to take years or decades for victims to speak out against an abuser. Especially when the victims are children. Especially when the abuser is a prominent figure, like the literal King of Pop.
I’m not going to try and convince you that these allegations are credible (though I believe they are), I just want you to think about how a child victim might behave in that situation. There’s almost never any objective evidence or 3rd party witnesses of abuse. It’s almost always the word of one person against another. And it may be years before a child victim even fully understands what was happening, and years beyond that to come to terms with it.
The most recent allegations are from the Cascios. Frank Cascio turned 18 in 1999. He would have been 30 by 2011, when he was writing a book and in the media defending Michael. He tried to get the book turned into a documentary, but when that fell through, he instead extorted Jackson's estate for millions of dollars by threatening to make public allegations, and then did it anyways despite being paid off, allegedly after trying to extort the estate again for $200 million.
Another big allegation is from Wade Robson, who has turned the accusations into two documentaries. Wade Robson was 25 years old when, in 2005, he testified under oath that Jackson had never abused him as one of the witnesses called by the defense. He is now suing the Jackson estate for $400 million.
It's not like I can't imagine a child victim growing up and taking time to come to terms with abuse, but these people were actively defending him as fully mature adults, only to suddenly turrn on his estate for some reason. I see a pattern in the accusations, and that pattern is $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$.
I am aware. Being pedantically correct would ruin the intended rhetorical point of reversing the standard phrase, though. "Deemed guilty even after found not guilty" just doesn't really work. I even knew I was going to get a reply about OJ when I wrote it. Miscarriages of justice certainly do happen, but still we should broadly presume innocence until proven guilty, and none of the evidence or testimony in MJ's case came close to being as compelling as OJ's, nor was there any indication that the jury was making a political statement by acquitting.
I mean, he may have never done a sexual thing but his pedophilia was quite obvious and the degeneracy of parents to allow their children to spend the night in the bed of a grown man is not really good for society.
because he paid families to sleep in beds and hang out with their children, this is not a normal adult man behavior, and defending it on the internet is weird.
It is not normal adult behavior and he likely should have had therapy.
But it is not necessarily pedophilia. Because that means wanting to have sex with children.
The explanation I heard is he wanted to be close to children to compensate for his own lack of innocent childhood. Children don't do sexual intercourse. Now if he was a child in his mind, then I as a parent would surely not have gave my children to his care, but this is still something very different from child molesting.
First of all children have sexual intercourse all the time. Many of my friends had sexual intercourse before 16, one as young as 8, it was between children, so no adults were part of this.
So what you are saying is flawed. Even if Michael was a child in his mind, he was not inherently asexual.
Treating children as incapable of sex is dangerous and you are giving a prime example. Treating Michael Jackson like a child is absolutely insanity because I don’t know a single child with a vacation Ranch and private security detail keeping everyone from witnessing how he actually lived.
Pedophilia is a sexual attraction to prepubescent children. The attraction is the disorder; acting on it is a separate thing (child sexual abuse). Michael was definitely a pedophile but maybe not a child sex abuser.
I am sometimes with hippi people and there is a thing called cuddle puddle. Cold around the fire, people get close to each other. But can also happen inside, on some couch, bed. The thing is, this is not sexual at all. Just people enjoying being close with each other. It can evolve into something sexual under special conditions, but usually it is not. Especially not, when children are around. Rather archaic feeling of wolf pack gets close to share body heat and feel each other. All there, all calm, all safe.
So I don't know what happened in Michaels bedroom, was it the innocent or the weird or even sick version. But I certainly won't condem the innocent version in general. The world needs rather more of this very normal close bonding, not people being afraid of being close with children for fear of being called a pedophile.
"Michael was definitely a pedophile"
So I would like to know what makes you so sure of it, that there was a sexual desire?
Apart from that, you are right, that also children can experiment or be very early. But normal childrens play or adult children interaction is not sexual. So I don't see the final conclusion. Did you read the article linked above? The media reporting about it was anything, but not fair nor factual. Did you consider you might have been influenced by that? I certainly do consider that I might be wrong here with my judgement, but all evidence so far I read against him seems either fabricated or hysterical from the point of view of puritans.
There is a wide, wide range between "normal behaviour" and "sex offender". I'm fine with being weird, and have no qualms defending the right of other people to be weird.
Maybe he liked playing with children because adults are evil and only saw him as a moneybag to try to extricate a payday from. If he wasn't harming them, it's not my business.
Normalizing children spending the night in the beds of billionaires isn’t just weird, it’s probably dangerous for children at large. Personal freedom isn’t a blank check, we control what is acceptable as society.
Michael had a secluded ranch with private security to ensure we would never know what he did with the children.
Those security guards have been questioned extensivly by court, though. And they did not seem of the loyal kind, take secrets to the grave, rather the contrary.
And you know this because of your firsthand experience observing it... or because the media told you so? Considering how readily the media is willing to lie for engagement, the truth is more likely to be the opposite of what they report.
It's not only not been proven, but the island man stuff and testimony of people like Culkin suggest he actually did the opposite of doing bad things to children and was most likely a scapegoat for the "elites" of Hollywood because of his race.
At the very least drop an "allegedly" or something to make it sound a little tasteful.
I think there is worlds between definitely defining what consciousness is, and what are some of the scenarios and conditions under which consciousness cannot ever happen.
And on top of that, they put a sedative, just in case.
It's not a great article, and it glosses over the reality that if you hooked this brain up to an EEG it would show unequivocal brain death. CELLS of the brain are alive, but in terms of being able to function in any sort of coordinated way there that ship sailed minutes after the person who donated their organs died. The wave of depolarization that marks brain death isn't something we can reverse, and what's being done here is all about metabolism and structure rather than those much more subtle functions.
IMO the more questionable aspect of this entire operation is the use of "AI" to reach conclusions about how the test molecules are being metabolized, but that's a lot less compelling than implying that some company is somehow preserving life in a disembodied brain.
The word "alive" is doing a lot of work here. A brain is pretty much permanently fried after five to fifteen minutes without oxygen, and these are donor brains, not some emergency brain extraction team, so the timeframe will be much longer than that. There might be 'life' left in there in the technical sense, but there's no 'person' left.
Well, we know how to make living brains insensate - that's who we all make it through surgery.
Presumably they're doing something similar - or using some other well-understood mechanism - to ensure that's not the case.
> The brains are already almost devoid of the coordinated neural firing necessary even for minimal consciousness, says Brendan Parent, a bioethicist at New York University Langone Health and one of six ethicists on Bexorg’s advisory board. But the company also forestalls any electrical activity with the anesthetic propofol, among other measures. Bexorg obtains brains in partnership with organizations that procure donated organs for transplantation, and Vrselja says once families understand the company’s process and goals, their response is overwhelmingly positive.
We know anesthesia "works," and we know some of its molecular targets, but we do not fully know the mechanism by which it produces unconsciousness, ie whether anesthesia eliminates experience, or mainly blocks memory, report, and integrated neural processing.
The most important thing to know about anesthesia in the context of OP is that it often doesn't work. 'Anesthesia awareness' is real and probably more common than we think because anesthesia can easily produce awareness but block memory formation.
"What did the doctor say? He told me that they couldn’t up the anesthetic because an overdose could cause respiratory arrest, and that it wouldn’t matter because the
anaesthetic on any dose caused severe short term memory loss and whatever happened the patient would forget all about it.
The second point, at least, was right on. One patient spent the entire procedure writhing in agony and screaming something incoherent to God. The doctor finished the procedure, took out the endoscope, and cut off the anesthetic, and the patient turned his head, looked the doctor right in the eye, smiled, and said, laughing “Wow, that wasn’t bad at all!
Guess I slept right through it!”"
Anesthesia appears to be a fairly broad effect - anaesthetics work on plants, for example [1], even though they lack any neural tissue whatsoever. It would be extremely surprising if those effects were also targeted enough to halt only some types of brain activity.
My understanding was that we now believe that patients under anesthesia are often "awake" but the drugs prevent them from forming memories so they can't complain once the anesthesia wears off.
"Anesthesia" is a wider umbrella term than most people realize with many levels of sedation.
Under "general anesthesia", the patient is completely unconscious. They don't respond to any stimuli. In rare cases, some patients may have an adverse reaction and still retain some sensation, but that's very uncommon. My understanding is that we are certain that patients are actually unconscious (and not just unable to respond) because none of the other involuntary responses to trauma occur during surgery: elevated heart rate, etc. In short, you are simply not there for a while. This is what you get for most kinds of significant surgeries unless the surgery requires you to be awake (like brain surgery where they may need to ask you questions).
"Sedation" or "twilight sedation" is a lower level of anesthesia. You are somewhat conscious and can respond to commands from the doctor. But you are unable to form memories of what's happening and you're usually on something like fentanyl that makes you entirely OK with whatever it is they are doing to you. This is common for procedures like colonoscopies and endoscopies where the procedure is somewhat uncomfortable but where you aren't being cut open.
In general, anesthesiologists are trying to balance the goal of patient comfort against the risks of deeper levels of sedation.
More like very rarely (1-2 per 1000), very partially aware. I could not find anything saying that it was common, and it appears cases of actual awareness to the point of having pain / trauma are far rarer still. People who have this tend to have foggy memories or other concrete PTSD symptoms after the fact. It does not appear to be the norm.
I still think this experimentation is absolutely insane and I strongly object because there is no way to get feedback from the "patient" after the fact. Since we have no real idea of what is happening, I believe we should err on the side of caution. "But they could consent beforehand" is not morally acceptable for intrinsically inhumane actions that take away fundamental human rights and dignity. So if you think this is possibly inhumane / potentially torture, it is an irrelevant point since true consent would be impossible.
That's how twilight anesthesia works. That's the kind you get when having something like wisdom tooth removal or an endoscopy. They want you to be responsive to instructions but completely relaxed and unable to form memories of the event.
It's still an open debate whether the seat of consciousness (or even simpler, perception) is the brain.
see e.g. Wahbeh, H., Radin, D., Cannard, C., & Delorme, A. (2022). What if consciousness is not an emergent property of the brain? Observational and empirical challenges to materialistic models. Frontiers in psychology, 13, 955594. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2022.955594
Same for memory, which is "needed" as well for your question to make sense. The more current theories assume memories are stored not only in the brain, but throughout the body.
see e.g. Repetto, C., & Riva, G. (2023). The neuroscience of body memory: Recent findings and conceptual advances. EXCLI journal, 22, 191–206. https://doi.org/10.17179/excli2023-5877
Ok, I only skimmed the paper but it seems like all of the "non-local phenomena" in support of their theory are basically psychic powers. Not exactly strong evidence.
You're free to stop there. We can also turn it around, and I can ask you for any paper that details the theory of why the brain should be the location of consciousness.
I only gave one example and Wikipedia to start with. There's a lot of material out there if you're (rightfully) skeptical of that one paper. I don't even know what you're refering to as "their theory", as the way I read it, they're basically documenting various co-existing theories, and the authors don't disclose which one they find the most likely. I also don't see it as necessary for science to pick one; it's all about theories. I prefer documentation of all possible theories, and see no reason to dismiss one over the other unless they're disproven. I pointed to that paper, because any paper that talks about alternative theories shows the point I was making: We don't know yet. The point was not to claim that they've managed to put together good or bad arguments.
We understand the fundamental laws of physics well enough to say there is not some mysterious soul influencing the brain. Just like we can say that the moon is not made from cheese.
> Modern physics, in other words, provides evidence for what philosophers call “causal closure of the physical”: physical events have purely physical causes (Loewer 1995, Papineau 1995), at least in the regime relevant to human life. Without dramatically upending our understanding of quantum field theory, there is no room for any new influences that could bear on the problem of consciousness.
> We understand the fundamental laws of physics well enough to say there is not some mysterious soul influencing the brain. Just like we can say that the moon is not made from cheese.
I don't see how this relates to the "seat of consciousness" (with)in a human body, or how the biological system works together to "form it". Or where thinking or memory storage or retrieval takes place. At least that was what I was talking about. You're talking about something else.
It is a theory that we think in the brain. As far as I understand it, and please prove me wrong, there are other, valid theories? It's unscientific to discard theories purely based on belief. You seem to be arguing from a certain belief, not from science.
The modern term for "soul" is "psyche".
Remember that the OP was asking: "How do you ensure that you aren’t torturing a brain that can’t see, hear or scream?" -- clearly refering to something... conscious?
> It is a theory that we think in the brain. As far as I understand it, and please prove me wrong, there are other, valid theories? It's unscientific to discard theories purely based on belief. You seem to be arguing from a certain belief, not from science.
The evidence that the brain is where thinking happens is overwhelming, the minor influence of the rest of the body notwithstanding. There are no other theories.
Plenty of examples of theories listed there, no? Picking a random one: "Open individualism states that individual personal identity is an illusion and all individual conscious minds are in reality the same being".
"the extended mind thesis says that the mind does not exclusively reside in the brain or even the body, but extends into the physical world"
To state it explicitly, I am not saying I believe in these alternative theories. I am also not stating anything about their probabilities. I just want to be accurate in my understanding, which is that multiple theories do exist and none of them have been proven or disproven. It is not known whether you only need a brain to think, or how much other regions like the nervous system spread throughout the body play a crucial role for "thoughts" to form.
If you discard a theory just because you judge there not to be sufficient evidence, you're working from a belief, and not from scientific reason.
In this particular thread, we're not even coming from "thinking" or "mind", but from sentience -- the stated idea that the "brain can feel pain", as brain alone (!). Depending on which physical regions and matter you include in "brain", it doesn't even have any structures that according to the current scientific consensus provide or relay perceptive data. Unless you believe in one of the many theories that place the mind outside of the physical structures of the brain.
Sure. We can't even agree on a good definition for "consciousness", we certainly don't know _how_ it works. I don't think there's a lot of debate around that specific point.
I'll try and read the paper more carefully after work, but my quick read was: they posit that consciousness might not be localized in the brain because if it were, then how would people be able to perform telepathy / remote viewing / future foresight? I can't assert that their non-local hypothesis is wrong, but I can pretty confidently say that the evidence they're using to back it up is unscientific BS.
Agreed. I don’t consider what they present as “evidence”. But that doesn’t turn it into evidence against the theories either. There are other theories that explain “out of body experiences”. We just don’t know. There doesn’t seem to be convincing enough evidence to make the case for “the brain is where consciousness resides”, nor is there against it.
We know the brain is the seat of consciousness because damage to the brain damages consciousness. There is no other organ in the body where that's true. You can completely replace all other organs without changing consciousness.
You can always find a paper by a quack that posits the earth is flat, that doesn't mean there's serious debate.
Can you point me to a paper or other source that proves that the brain is the seat of consciousness? Or that disproves other theories?
I am familiar with the works of Oliver Sacks, Paul Broks, and others, who have spent their lives researching damage to brains and the potential consequences for the psyche. I agree that it sounds like damage to the brain can have big impact, but none of that research, as far as I am aware, proves or even tries to argue that the brain is the only component necessary for consciousness to exist.
I am not interested in beliefs in one theory over another. I am not even asking for probabilities. I am asking for a scientific approach, which is to detail all possible (potentially fringe) theories until they're proven wrong. Anything else is the business of religion.
Singer, J., & Damasio, A. (2025). The physiology of interoception and its adaptive role in consciousness. Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences, 380(1939), 20240305. https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2024.0305
We think that organs can be replaced with little apparent change in consciousness (- this is an active research area, too, by the way). There is also research into how body tissues may form a part of what other theories place exclusively in the brain.
Aderinto, N., Olatunji, G., Kokori, E., Ogieuhi, I. J., Moradeyo, A., Woldehana, N. A., Lawal, Z. D., Adetunji, B., Assi, G., Nazar, M. W., & Adebayo, Y. A. (2025). A narrative review on the psychosocial domains of the impact of organ transplantation. Discover mental health, 5(1), 20. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44192-025-00148-y
> "Having its own enteric nervous system, sometimes referred to as the “second brain,” the gut is also an immune organ and has a large surface area interacting with gut microbiota. The gut has been shown to play an important role in many physiological processes, and may arguably do so as well in perception and cognition."
Boem F, Greslehner GP, Konsman JP and Chiu L (2024) Minding the gut: extending embodied cognition and perception to the gut complex. Front. Neurosci. 17:1172783. https://doi.org/10.3389/fnins.2023.1172783
Ok, I've actually read into the 3 articles you've suggested and none of them are making the argument you are making. I think you just title mined.
Article 1. is about how the brain interprets incoming signals from the body
Article 2. is about dealing with psychiatric needs, such as medication compliance and stress, which result from organ transplants.
And, as I addressed in another comment, Article 3. is a discussion about the impacts of gut microbiome on mood. It is not a discussion of "consciousness".
Three are a million case studies and studies on it. So much so that you'll find studies on the best ways to repair consciousness after traumatic brain injuries [1].
You can't find a single case study where someone's consciousness was notably altered due to bowel resection. Something that has happened all the time.
Where are the people losing or having alerted consciousness after having their stomachs stapled? Their perforated bowels resected? Their bowel cancer polyps removed?
The closest you'll find is soldiers suffering from, understandable, PTSD.
Also, I'd point out that the studies you referenced aren't suggesting your point. They are saying that the gut can affect our mood and cravings. But as anyone that's taken a powerful antibiotic can attest, that did not modify their consciousness even though it nuked a huge portion of their biome.
People also get fecal transplants, they don't share consciousness as a result.
Unless you want to define consciousness as an eternal soul that exists in rocks, then you'll find no support for the suggestion that it exists outside a brain.
You also need to explain why it is that traumatic brain injuries alter consciousness and memory. Why it is that we can observe physical changes in the brains of dementia patients.
If you're going full philosophy of science, are these alternative theories falsifiable in the first place? Much of this kind of argument turns into philosophy and metaphysics instead of empirical science.
Imagine what would happen if we transplanted a head, or full brain, and the consciousness self would still remain the same, like with other organ transplantation.
We'll see!
I am saying: we can guess, but we don't know. I am not saying it's likely. I just want to remain precise in what are theories. It is a theory that consciousness "lives" inside the physical brain, as much as it is one that it doesn't. It is physically possible that it exists energetically and moves and stays with "the larger chunk of body".
I believe to some extent that everything is conscious and that it's specifically our species' prized mental features that lessen it's level at least temporarily. purely esoterically the statement "a rock is more conscious than a human being" doesn't even seem too outrageous to me.
Every other part of the human body is understandable but the brain.
Reading the article and imagining its you, sheeeeesh. I really wonder how this passed ethical review. Yes the brain is an organ, and yes there’s probably consent and the body is officially proclaimed dead and this is near the best way to really extrapolate the empirical data prior to alive human trials.
But damn this article is a combination of words I did not want to read today nor imagine.
There is also the practice of not using anesthesia on infants when undergoing medical surgery.
Anesthesia is hard to do even on adults, harder on children, and very difficult on infants. Not accidentally killing one is quite hard.
So, for a long time we just didn't. I think some countries still don't, but can't remember.
The idea really gets back all the way to philosophy. If you can't remember if you were in pain, did you get hurt? And then you add in the medical problem itself, the duty to do no harm, the difficulties, etc. The conclusion was to just not use pain meds.
Brain does not have physical feelings, and with all other feelings cut off and not possible, even with consciousness it won’t be a horror scenario like in MetallicA’s “One”.
I'm thinking you could shoot an awesome sci-fi thriller under these rules. Even one that includes space travel. Just don't have any of the narrative take place in space: have only one character off-planet and have them communicate via radio.
I've seen good, low-budget indie sci-fi short films that would presumably meet all of the Dogma 25 rules. So I think it doesn't protect against this category of films and neither would that be a good thing anyways. It just requires creative solutions if you want to e.g. portrait space travel.
Say I had $1000, how do I get the best value for money to discover vulnerabilities? Are there any worthwhile LLM powered services that are turnkey and ready to go?
From what I've heard, every LLM before Mythos (which you can't get, they'll call you if you're big enough) will have far too many false positives to be helpful, so I guess the best option would be to use an agent to help you (not lights-off vibe coding!*) take advantage of all the older tools like valgrind and closing all the compiler warnings?
* I presume I'm not the only one to find the agents tasked with adding unit tests will sometimes try to sneak through "open source code and apply regex to confirm presence or absence of specific string literal".
They can speed you up significantly, but you absolutely do need to pay attention to what they produce.
With all respect to the Anthropic folks, that's just marketing. (If they're reading this: let us into the program so I can be proven wrong here.)
I'm sure what they have is awesome, but it's clear that there are people out there with some decent prompts that are getting results out of widely available models as well.
The big thing we're sharing is: bulk scanning by random people in random geographies got a _lot_ better around January, it's widely distributed, and it's going to get a lot better regardless of whether that specific version of Mythos becomes widely available or not.
> prompts that are getting results out of widely available models as well.
Absolutely, and the "false-positive" issue people keep citing as why Mythos is so good is easily solved in the harness, simplest solution is starting fresh context with another prompt to evaluate if it's a false-positive or not, just adding that drastically cuts down the rate.
That is false. A year ago every LLM generated report was slop - more likely a false positive than correct. However in the past few months nearly every LLM generated report is real.
This is not good reasoning. You're offloading your thinking to "Turso" for some reason.
You're also assuming that they haven't made the alternative judgement that instead of triaging the haystack of slop that they get in order to potentially pay out to someone, they should instead be spending that cash and effort on tokens to find bugs in their own codebase.
You should read the mentioned article. They have hired some of the people they paid out to, and some of those people were LLM-assisted.
The claim I'm rebutting is "in the past few months nearly every LLM generated report is real." If that were true, there would be no need to close the bounty. The bounty is to address approaches that they themselves may not have considered, so would still hold value if the claim held true, as outside individuals may still hold unique LLM-assisted approaches and perspectives.
Everyone is going to see different results. Overall the general trend is AI is getting better. Although that might be partially people are shutting down their bounty programs which gives the incentive to generate slop.
Not sure about turnkey solutions for finding vulnerabilities that doesn't involve having to hand over a bunch of identity proofs for them to store on their insecure infra and also enrolling in programs.
Besides that, hiring a beefy GPU instance at Vast.ai or similar places then running your own uncensored models on it, I've had great success with AEON-7/Qwen3.6-27B-AEON-Ultimate-Uncensored-NVFP4, smart + uncensored, but there are lots of options, probably some are already tailored for security research.
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