Author: timbatchelder

Instead of laying your patio with pavers and gravel, why not consider using cut wood rounds for a truly unique and rustic aesthetic?

Source: Skip The Gravel And Pavers For A Rustic, Natural Patio

From thrifted clothes to no gifts at the holidays, these millionaires are living an ‘underconsumption’ life which has opened up financial freedom.

Source: Meet the millionaires living the ‘underconsumption’ life: They drive secondhand cars, batch cook, and never buy new clothes

It’s not just okay for some things in life to be hard—it’s essential.

Source: Aphoristic Intelligence Beats Artificial Intelligence – The Atlantic

 

 

We can debate tax policy. We can debate spending priorities. But protecting the elderly should not be a debate at all.

Source: Nursing homes face safety risks as RN rule is repealed

 

“The effort to clear the drive and keep the stove full is an excuse to spend time outdoors.”

Source: The Maine winter ritual that keeps me sane

 

Conscious experiences of change, from seeing a bird take flight to listening to a melody, cannot be broken down into ever smaller units of experience. They must inhabit what William James called the “specious present,” a sliding window of time where the immediate past and present overlap. Philosopher Lyu Zhou argues that this exposes a deep rift between mind and matter. When the physical world undergoes change, it does so through succession – one physical state replaces another, and the past is gone – whereas consciousness requires the active retention of the past inside the present, revealing its fundamentally non-physical nature. 1. Consciousness, change and timeYou are now conscious as you read this article. Is your consciousness physical? Many today think it is. They claim that it either is a physical system made of matter – most likely the neural network of your brain – or is realized by matter through a physical process, most likely by your brain through a neural biochemical process. However, I hope to convince you that this view is wrong. I hope to show you that your immediate present consciousness has certain features that physical systems and processes cannot have.What is so novel about my argument? The most often cited reason for denying that consciousness is physical is the so-called Hard Problem of Consciousness. The Hard Problem is that it is deeply mysterious how the physical process in your brain can give rise to subjective experiences with qualities such as what it is like to see red or smell the malodor of a long-rotten potato. The apparently intractable nature of this problem suggests that consciousness is likely not physical. But the problem I want to raise today is a different and novel one. Unlike the Hard Problem, which focuses on the qualitative aspect of consciousness, my argument highlights a certain structural feature of your immediate present consciousness that nothing physical could have: it is holistic. Let me explain.___Your immediate present consciousness is an extended whole: it is not like a snapshot, but like a short movie.___No doubt you are currently experiencing some change, e.g. objects moving from one place to another. But what it is for there to be a change is simply for there to be different states at different times. Therefore, if you experience change at all, as you indeed do, you must experience there being different states at different times. The experience involved cannot be like a snapshot: it cannot be restricted to a mere instant. Rather, the experience must be like a short movie with a brief duration: it must have a temporal span so as to encompass different states at different times.The snapshot conception of your immediate present consciousness faces at least one other serious problem. You seem to have a stream of consciousness in which various states come and pass away in time. These states appear before, after, or at the same time as one another along a temporal dimension that is very much like a continuous extended line. It is not without reason that it is often spoken of as a timeline. However, the sum of any number of zeros must remain zero. Likewise, the addition of any number of durationless instants—snapshot experiences—cannot give you any continuous extended timeline. SUGGESTED READING Consciousness, cosmology, and the collapse of common sense By Eric Schwitzgebel The issue is that it is difficult to put together anything like a continuous stream of consciousness if what you have is nothing but a sum of snapsho

Source: Consciousness breaks from the physical world by keeping the past alive | Lyu Zhou » IAI TV

A groundbreaking study just flipped the script on home heating. After testing 13 popular systems, researchers uncovered a clear winner—and it’s not what most homes are using.

Source: Science Is Final: This Is the Most Efficient, Economical, and Cleanest Heating System

The irony of modern self-improvement is that we’re paying experts to teach us what necessity once made automatic.

Source: 8 life skills working-class Boomers developed naturally that upper-class people pay thousands to learn – VegOut

The simplest antidote to our nation’s child-care crisis has been unfairly maligned for the last 50 years.

Source: The Case for Paying Parents to Stay Home With Their Kids

 

 

More Americans have jobs that didn’t exist a generation ago, and even well-known professions are changing.

Source: You Say You’re a Knowledge Architect? Why Modern Careers Are So Hard to Explain – WSJ

Paraquat is banned in more than 70 countries, but still legal in the United States. Now, a growing number of U.S. farmers are blaming the toxic pesticide for their Parkinson’s disease in a large lawsuit.

Source: Paraquat, a pesticide sprayed on U.S. farms, blamed for Parkinson’s in lawsuit – mlive.com

A new book argues that civilizations built on centralized wealth and power contain the seeds of their own destruction.

Source: What History’s Fallen Societies Have in Common – The Atlantic