@hex@kolektiva.social2025-06-14 10:21:24
I have my share of issues with Parkrose Permaculture, but she has a lot of things I do strongly agree with. I can't stress enough that you never dehumanize your enemies. You can respond appropriately to violence. You can defend yourself from them by any means necessary. But you do not dehumanize them. You always limit your response to the minimum necessary to defend yourself.
There are a number of former Nazi skins who became antifascists after realizing they were wrong. Those folks tend to be some of the most dedicated because they feel a debt, and some of the most knowledgeable because they were there. Coming out of these types of cults, police included, is hard and takes time. A lot of us don't have the ability to work with them. But some do.
By repeatedly humanizing your opponent, you can break some of them. The #Seattle Police Department was not defunded but saw a massive reduction in numbers because their morale was destroyed. Some people will never change. Some people are broken and feel like they need the power. But if you change one person's mind, even give them something to think about, it's a crack. If even one cop quits, that's one less trained gun pointed at you in the future.
The 18 year old marines and federalized national guard troops out there are literally kids. A lot of them came from poor communities. They are being used in a way they haven't been trained to do, doing things they (should) have been told are not legal. They joined to get out of poverty, to go to college, or to "defend the American people" (regardless of how misguided that is). Few, if any, of them joined to abuse people. They will be especially open to persuasion.
Remind those troops that they are carrying out illegal orders, that they are being called on to violate their oath to protect the constitution, that they are suppressing the free speech of the fellow Americans they swore to defend. Remind them that the people they could be illegally arresting now are just like their parents, their neighbors, their families, the friends who didn't join. Remind them that this is the first step. They will be called on to kill Americans if they let this keep going.
Remind them ICE sleeps in hotels while they sleep on the ground. Remind them that their drunk and incompetent leadership thinks of them as disposable tools. Remind them that some of these people are out protesting *for them* against cuts to the VA and other services. Remind them that the people they're defending refuse to make college free so they can recruit from poor schools. Remind them that they will always be welcome when they're ready to join the side of freedom and justice.
When you dehumanize your enemies, you unify them. When you humanize your enemies, you can divide them. There is no weapon available to us right now so powerful as compassion.
https://youtu.be/YtWOYUDMsBw
@pre@boing.world2025-05-16 11:08:14
I read "Then I Am Myself the World: What Consciousness Is and How to Expand It" by Christof Koch.
Interesting book which spends like 8 or 9 chapters detailing all the experiments which prove beyond much doubt that consciousness, and self awareness, is a thing done by a brain.
It describes how perception is a construction of a description, has a chapter called "computational mind"
And then spends the last two chapters describing why he thinks the mind can't be computed, because drugs have made him think experience is some kind of magic associated with highly interconnected causal structures.
Apparently, he thinks, once things become interconnected enough they become able to cause things independently of the physics running those connections.
Which is crazy, obviously. There's nothing causal in direct connections between neurons that isn't equally causal in modeled connections between virtual neurons.
All his evidence in the book from neural MRI scans to the effects of psychedelic drugs and symptoms of strokes and disease point to the brain simulating a virtual reality which is the basis of perception.
That simulated world in which we live is full of colour and shape and sounds and emotions and millions of mental constructs that are built to be correlated by the senses with the outside world, but are not equal to the world itself. We live in a dream constructed to correlate with reality.
But then instead of taking the next step: That consciousness itself is a property of a simulated being inside that mental model of the universe, a property which the brain simulates and applies to the virtual self that's doing the experiencing inside that model, he jumps towards some magic implying pan-psychism or that sufficiently interconnected networks become causally self-complete for some reason nobody can fathom.
Sure, colour and shape and emotions are all made up by the brain but experience can't be! For some reason.
You see in truth dualism is false, in that there is no spirit realm in which ghosts animate the matter of the body somehow.
Yet also, dualism is true, in that there is a simulated mental reality which we live in, computed by the brain in which all perception and experience are created, which is related-to but separate-from the unfolding complicated dance of energy that is the universe our bodies interact with.
People take some DMT trip, and the model of the universe emulated by their brain collapses and breaks. Their virtual simulated self inside their mind has these experiences of being one with the universe or the experience of feeling dead yet conscious or whatever, and these hippies think that the broken down simulated experience is real and reflects how consciousness is more fundamental than the atoms that make up the neurons in their brain.
Instead of realizing it shows them that their experienced universe is a simulacrum, they think they get a more direct experience of reality somehow. A consciousness more pure than any mere base atom.
"Then I am myself the world" is a great title. Everything you ever experience is created and simulated in your brain like a dream, the whole universe is inside your head. Even the fact of experience itself.
But that isn't the conclusion Koch reaches somehow, he just jumps from describing the evidence that this is so straight into ascribing super-causal magic consciousness to particular arrangements of atoms that integrated information theory suggest have high correlation, and thinks therefore conciousness is itself the entire universe.
Ah well, fun book. I like arguing in my head with authors that are wrong.
#reading #books #consciousness #thenIAmMyselfTheWorld
@arXiv_condmatstrel_bot@mastoxiv.page2025-07-18 08:39:22
Disorder-induced spin excitation continuum and spin-glass ground state in the inverse spinel CuGa$_2$O$_4$
Zhentao Huang, Zhijun Xu, Shuaiwei Li, Qingchen Duan, Junbo Liao, Song Bao, Yanyan Shangguan, Bo Zhang, Hao Xu, Shufan Cheng, Zihang Song, Shuai Dong, Maofeng Wu, M. B. Stone, Yiming Qiu, Ruidan Zhong, Guangyong Xu, Zhen Ma, G. D. Gu, J. M. Tranquada, Jinsheng Wen
@cdarwin@c.im2025-06-28 20:12:31
Where Things Stand
Policy bill: After releasing a 940-page version of their sprawling domestic policy bill overnight, Senate Republicans on Saturday were seeking the votes to pass it, a key step in advancing President Trump’s agenda. They cut deals with holdouts in their ranks that they hoped would be enough to speed the bill through the chamber as early as this weekend.
Final cost: If Senate Republicans begin debate on the sweeping bill on Saturday, they will do so wit…
@arXiv_csGR_bot@mastoxiv.page2025-06-18 08:21:10
ImmerseGen: Agent-Guided Immersive World Generation with Alpha-Textured Proxies
Jinyan Yuan, Bangbang Yang, Keke Wang, Panwang Pan, Lin Ma, Xuehai Zhang, Xiao Liu, Zhaopeng Cui, Yuewen Ma
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.14315
@arXiv_mathOA_bot@mastoxiv.page2025-06-03 16:30:03
This https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.05295 has been replaced.
initial toot: https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_mat…
@arXiv_condmatmeshall_bot@mastoxiv.page2025-06-03 07:43:32
A network of parametrically driven silicon nitride mechanical membranes
Luis Mestre, Suyash Singh, Gabriel Margiani, Letizia Catalini, Alexander Eichler, Vincent Dumont
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.00850
