It's odd how everytime somebody mentions slashing oil production by 50 or 75%, people are immediately up in arms. Same for red meat or cheap air travel.

Western rich countries have too many really spoiled consumers.

It's weird to say, but we should crash the economy if it can slow down climate change. I mean there are plenty people in other parts of the world who don't have such a high standard of living, and it's not that big of a problem.

And yes, I don't believe it's only rich people, it's also middle class people who generate a lot of emissions, and I'm a leftist.

Canada has very little private land ownership.The Federal Gov hoards land and creates a severe shortage of land for individuals to purchase. They need to open up the billions of acres of accessible land to 1st time buyers and then to existing property owners. Especially in the Province of Ontario.

They also intentionally keep interest rates low so existing house/property owners can leverage their properties to buy more. Never allowing a 1st time house shopper a chance. You can't save enough for a down payment because the rate that housing goes up outpaces the rate of your earnings.

In my opinion any house in the same city other than your primary residence should have property taxes that are significantly higher, perhaps 3-4 x the current rate. Interest rates for any house that is not your primary residence and considered an investment property should also be much higher. The only exception I would make is if you have cottage/recreational property outside of cities, this type of property like a cottage would fall under the Primary residence category.

There is also that fact that the majority of Canadians in the private industry, especially in Tech are severely under payed and underemployed.

I'm not sure of the unintended consequences of my proposals, but they couldn't be worse than what is happening now.

Deflation means a dollar tomorrow is always worth more than a dollar today meaning a rational person should strive to spend as little money today as possible. This eventually locks the entire economy up into a death spiral.

So he says that he doesn’t think consciousness is computational, but in the rest of the article pretty much everything he says about it is in terms of processing information.

“ In fact, the brain is always making predictions about what’s out there in the world or in the body. And using sensory signals to update those predictions. What we consciously experience is not a readout of the sensory data in a kind of outside-in direction. It’s the predictions themselves. It’s the brain’s best guess of what’s going on.”

So, processing information, then.

“ I argue that this entails that the brain is or has a predictive model of its own body, because prediction is very good for regulation.”

Sounds like information processing to me.

“ A conscious experience, typically for us humans, brings together a large amount of information about the world, from many different modalities at once—sight, sound, touch, taste, smell—in a single unified scene that immediately makes apparent what the organism should do next. That’s the primary function of consciousness—to guide the motivated behavior of the organism that maximizes its chances of staying alive.”

Do I have to say it again? Every single function he ascribes to consciousness consists or receiving and processing information, and making decisions.

We know the answer to this. Any Turing complete system is capable in principle of any information processing task. Whatever else brains are, we know they are information processing systems. Perceptions go in, and decisions come out. All of our conscious experience is of information. Feelings, sensations, emotions, decisions, they’re all information. What else is there?

Edit: On the weather. When I imagine a rain storm, nothing actually gets wet. So is that activity of imagination more like the weather, or more like a computer simulation of the weather?

But that whole argument comes from the a priori idea that you can't build a singular model of the world from discrete inputs. There's no evidence or even logical chain for that conclusion.

And even the quantum world is discrete. That's why it's called a 'quantum'. There are fixed size quantities moving through the field.

> Self-driving cars don't experience visual qualia

Prove that. Or alternatively prove that you or I do.

I'll also note that you didn't address the citations for the inherent discreteness of our visual systems.

> Self-driving cars don't experience visual qualia

Prove that. Or alternatively prove that you or I do.

I'll also note that you didn't address the citations for the inherent discreteness of our visual systems.