Enkrod

There are dinosaurs right outside my window right now. I think they might be nesting, one is collecting sticks while the other is hopping across the lawn to look for worms.

And by the way, same as the extant dinosaurs, many of the extinct ones had an extremely optimized pneumatized breathing apparatus that would likely allow many to survive today. Maybe not the really big ones though.

There’s five million ants for every human, should they decide to fuck us up, they will.

How is horizontal gene transfer between microbes in any way relevant to a discussion about the ancestry of chickens that only reaches back to the dinosauria clade? Chickens are invariably a sub-group of the bigger group dinosaurs.

Chicken is equally close to T. Rex as all other birds. They all go back to the same common bird-ancestor who was a relative of T. Rex.

T. rex is more closely related to birds than to all non-theropod dinosaurs.

T. rex also lived closer to us in time than to Stegosaurus.

Same reason why humans don’t actually descend from monkeys, both monkeys and humans descend instead from a common ancestor that no longer exists

But that ancestor was a monkey! We are monkey, you can’t evolve your way out of a clade.

This is why, IMO, Digimon could be a better representation of evolution than Pokémon, since one Digimon can evolve into many different forms, so that kitten could become a fridge, but also a dragon or a knight with cannons

But that is specifically not how evolution works. You can’t evolve your way out of a clade, everything a cat would evolve into, would also be a cat. Maybe a weird cat, maybe a whale-cat (like whales are still ungulates, even if they are really weird ones) but still a cat. You can’t evolve out of your ancestry.

It’s three fedoras, looked at from the top!

Thank you for making me look, but fuck you for not telling me, it took ages of staring at my screen before I got what was actually depicted.

Theistic Satanism, otherwise referred to as religious Satanism, spiritual Satanism, or traditional Satanism,[2] is an umbrella term for religious groups that consider Satan, the Devil, to objectively exist as a deity, supernatural entity, or spiritual being worthy of worship or reverence, whom individuals may contact and convene with, in contrast to the atheistic archetype, metaphor, or symbol found in LaVeyan Satanism.

The Satanic Bible is LaVeyan Satanism and as a product of the 20th century very much more modern than the “traditional Satanism” of de Sade and Huysman in the 19th century.

LaVeyan Satanism is still much more on the “spiritual” side of things than, for example the explicitly atheistic, sceptic and rational Satanic Temple, but both fall under the umbrella of the more modern, non-theistic understanding of Satanism. While a more historical form definetly existed, even if it wasn’t widely practiced.

In Christian Satanism the Devil exists and is being worshipped. This is “classical” or “theist” Satanism where there is a belief in the existence of Satan.

Contrast that with modern atheist Satanism, where the Devil is merely a psychological symbol of rebellion, independence and freedom that serves to trigger theists while also being a representation of revolting against christan authoritarianism and, through the exploitation of rules stemming from theist-political decisionmaking, as a counter to the blatantly unconstitutional abuse of religious freedom laws for the benefit of a single religion.

That is extremely cool and I don’t doubt your expertise in the slightest. Was only commenting about that anoxic conditions alone wouldn’t necessarily preserve the bog mummies, but that the acidic conditions and tannins are likely more important.

Well the human gut is anoxic too, so that shouldn’t be a problem for the gut-bacteria in that log and in the bog mummies. I think it way more likely that the sphagnan and the other tannins in peat-bog-water conserved this as well as the bog bodies.

That’s a squeegee, they said they use it after every shower but doesn’t help.

Most particles are, researchers have shown that even macro-molecular objects like buckyballs behave like a wave in the double slit experiment.

Basically every great and complex work ant colonies are capable of is an emergent property of simple rules that are simple instinct in simple creatures, yet the interplay of lots of individuals following these simple rules begets complex behavior. This is the easiest to grasp example imho.

Flocking birds, schooling fish, hell we can write computer programs where complex behavior emerges from simple rules, Conway’s Game of Life is the best example for how simple the rules can be and how complex the emergent systems.

But emergence is everywhere, the cells of your lungs don’t breathe, but they arrange themselves in a way and are embedded in a system that can exist because lung-cells do arrange the way they do.

Life itself is an emergent property, the atoms that constitute us themselves aren’t alive, they don’t run, breathe or think, all of those are emergent properties from the right collection and arrangement of atoms into molecules into cells into a multicellular organism.

Thinking is no different than running, it is something that happens through the complex interplay of matter but transcends the single building blocks.

A single ant can’t be a colony, a single cell can’t breathe or run and a single neuron can’t think, but if you bring them together in the right amount and arrangement, new properties emerge.

And most importantly, if you disturb that arrangement, if you destroy some of that constituting matter or rearrange it, the emergent properties change or vanish. That it can simply stop to emerge is imho the best prove that it is an emergent property.

“An emergent phenomenon of the way our biological hardware works” is one possible, entirely rational and most importantly sufficient answer. And even if we did not have an answer, that doesn’t mean that there is not an entirely materialistic explanation for the phenomenon, even if we didn’t find the answer yet.

Because we have hundreds of thousands of examples of previously unexplained phenomena being sufficiently and completely explained by purely naturalistic, materialistic causes.

On the other hand we have exactly zero previous examples of a phenomenon being sufficiently explained by anything supernatural.

Since we observe consciousness solely bound to the existence of, reliant on the configuration of and changeable through the change of physical properties of physical matter, we can conclude that it is an emergent property that has arisen like other properties emergent from biological matter through the well known, well defined and observable process of evolution.

Could there be an alternative explanation? Yes!

Is the god-hypothesis in any way an explanation for consciousness? No! In fact it would raise more questions. It is neither sufficient, nor rational. What it is, is a god-of-the-gaps argument, another turtle on the way down.

Margerine under Nutella!

Aye, I used to sail the high seas, the hull of my ship gnarly with viruses, adware and malware from some infectious crackers or key-generators.

Then I had money, and started buying my software and my movies and all was good for a time. Then my media consume shifted to mobile devices, but I had Amazon Prime Video as the only really available video-streaming service around and all was good for a time. Then I added Netflix, as it arrived on my countries market and all was good for a time. Then I added Crunchyroll, Disney+ and Hulu and everything sucked, streaming the shows I wanted to watch was suddenly so expensive, no single streaming service had everything I wanted to watch, so I needed to subscribe to them all, costing an amount of money I would not spend on buying those shows.

Now I have unsubscribed from all but two again, but the market is so fractured, there is barely anything interesting on the services I still go to.

So my eyes keep wandering to that old tricorn, the hook and peg-leg, gathering dust on the wall. I can hear the waves crashing and feel the tide rising in my bones. The moneybags have decided to press us for more and more, their greed means no single harbor, not even two are enough to supply our demands. So there is plenty of bounty to be found on the high seas again, big fat galleons full of content otherwise unreachable or too expensive.

Doncha hear it boys? Davey Jones is singing again, calling us back to the sea, put on your VPN, defy the torrents and right your compasses with a good magnet. We did not choose this life, they made us turn to it.

Look at a piece of paper. Mark two points on it that are a good distance apart. Travel can only happen along the surface of the paper. When it’s flat, your time of travel depends on the distance between the two points on that paper.

Now dap a spot of glue next to one of the points and fold the paper in such a way that the other point comes to rest close to that glue. Wait for it to bind and then spread the paper a little without breaking the glue. That glued point is a wormhole, a place where two points of that flat 2D universe touch despite not being next to each other. Travel from point A to point B is now a shorter distance thanks to the wormhole. But there is no way in which the paper universe can be described as flat anymore.

Or think of a papermache ball, that’s also made from paper but if you travel long enough in one direction, you’ll end up where you started. Because it isn’t flat.

Now our universe is 3D not 2D, but from a higher dimensional perspective it has the same prooerties of flatness as that 2D paper has for us.

All the regions, just lost in time. It was sold by Haribo under that name in the 80s, it’s why you can still get “süße Mäuse” or “weiße Mäuse” from Haribo and why it’s generally often presented in mouse-form.

Marshmallow only became more popular when younger generations spoke English more often.