Free speech vs Censorship

[Jon]

@The_Doc_Man To bring up the egg question is a good point. But let us take it one step further, to the level of the cell. Is the cell itself conscious? Could that cell, with a low level of consciousness, pass it on to a higher order entity? One cell - with little consciousness - when aggregated into millions of cell - is conscious, if it is a brain. But maybe also anything with a cell has a level of consciousness to it.

Can a paralysed person self adjust, or do you not consider them conscious because you cannot observe movement?

 

[The_Doc_Man]

Even paralyzed persons normally can react or show non-trivial responses and respond to the 20-questions game. The ONLY time I've ever heard of a person being unable to react was if they were unconscious, catatonic, brain damaged, heavily drugged, or a victim of "locked in" syndrome (VERY rare). Self-adjust means you won't mechanically give the same answer every time you are asked the same question. At least once, the self-adjusting person might respond "you asked me that already - don't waste my time"

Asking if a single cell is conscious is like asking if a given transistor is a computer. Consciousness, if it is a second-order emergent phenomenon, doesn't apply to the parts but only to the whole.

A neuron is a single cell, but by itself it only fires or does not fire. Yet it is your neurons that make your brain what it is. The single-cell question applies even to neurons.

 

[Uncle Gizmo]

Facebook is moving its content moderation staff from Commiefonrnia to Texas, to rekindle free speech on the platform and so that the moderation is more realistic and less politicized...

Mark Zuckerberg

https://twitter.com/x/status/1876612227807236310

 

[AccessBlaster]

Yup, Facebook is laying off some of their best fact-checkers.

 

[Uncle Gizmo]

Yup, Facebook is laying off some of their best fact-checkers.

Is that a deliberate misspelling?

 

[Isaac]

Is that a deliberate misspelling?

Do you mean Yup? In the US we have a habit of sometimes pronouncing Yep Yep and sometimes pronouncing Yep as Yup, and also sometimes spelling it that way. I would almost like to think there is some miniscule, tiny difference in the attitude expressed, but now that I say that, I can't think how to put it into words.

 

[AccessBlaster]

Yup was the last thing I was questioning in that post, "it just shows to go ya".

 

[The_Doc_Man]

In that case, "Yup" is a colloquialism and as such is a common substitute for "yes" and "yep." Sometimes I "channel hop" when I'm not on the forum - usually because I've been on the Ancestry site and have gone brain-dead. There is a show called "Storage Wars" that involves people bidding on abandoned storage lockers to see if they can make money on the deal by salvaging the contents. One of the regulars uses "Yup" (or a drawn-out version thereof) as his alert to the auctioneer that he wants to make a bid. Therefore, I wouldn't be surprised to hear it used quite often among the people who watch that kind of show. However, to really appreciate the show, you DO need to be near brain-dead and looking for something mindless to provide noise while you recover from something or another.

 

[Pat Hartman]

Watching Storage wars is like watching a train wreck. People watch because they're hoping that when the locker gets opened it will contain dead bodies or a pirate chest full of gold doubloons.

 

[The_Doc_Man]

Given the nature of some of the shows now on TV, Pat, there must be a lot of train wrecks out there 'cause I keep finding them.

But oddly enough, about ever three or four shows I actually learn something when someone finds a really obscure item. Pawn Stars is another show that has the same effect. Antiques Roadshow is yet another one, both the USA version and the UK version.