global emissions
blog projects rants
β•­ 𝟚𝟟· What does HDR really mean in a TV? Duck Duck Go, here I come! ... This article told me enough for now. It means a wider range of color and brightness with more
β”Š accuracy. Both take more data which older TVs can't make sense of, and couldn't show anyway. Our eyes are sensitive to a very wide range of colors but technology is
β”Š limited and progress is incremental. HDR is the industry taking a step forward.
β”Š
𝕁 β”Š πŸ›πŸ™Β· Reading a bit in Wikipedia about the philosophy of mind, it occurs to me that the only alternative to pure physicalism is the supernatural (if you prefer, the
𝕦 β”Š β€˜spiritual’). Modern notions of the physical encompass all coherent aspects of reality, a degree of consistency we imagine is maintained by the laws of nature. There
𝕝 β”Š is no guarantee that those laws operate in an understandable way - they may not be reducible to equations nor reproducible by computers. There might be no end to the
π•ͺ β”Š discovery of more fundamental theories - description itself has its limitions and the laws of nature may not fit within them. Accepting that there are undiscovered
β”Š elements of the natural world is enough to recast the mind-state of a dualistic view to a aspect of physicalism. What vexes the would-be physicalist is our own,
β”Š apparently unnecessary, awareness. It's hard to imagine consciousness is more than a passive by-product within a purely physicalist view (an idea that seems to be
β”Š captured by epiphenomenalism, although it does not seem fundamentally different to the criticisms of property dualism). I don't have answers, but my own version of
β•° Pascal's wager is that the total of conscious experience, across all consicous beings, is what really matters.
β•­ πŸ™πŸžΒ· Arwa Mahdawi's opinion pieces for The Guardian offer humor in (and about) our dystopian reality. Her most recent piece raises some pragmatic issues with AI
β”Š relationships (β€œReal for You, but Not for Them”ℒ) and software upgrades. When your software is a personality (alternatively, when your personality is software)
𝔸 β”Š β€˜upgrades’ are going to cause behavioral shifts which are equivalent to menus being reorganized - and far more disruptive. Philosophically, the problem is solopsism
𝕦 β”Š in reverse - attributing non-conscious behavior to consciousness (the Chinese Room argument applies to these systems).
π•˜ β”Š
β”Š 𝟚𝟘· Darren Aranofsky's β€˜mother!’ is utterly believable as a nightmare within the mind of the lead character. The irrational logic is recognizable from the most disturbing
β•° dreams of my own. If not everyone has such dreams, it might explain how it resonates for some while for others it is, at best, self indulgent and vacuous.