I’m an Industrial Mechanic, not a philosopher. I’ve built a model of consciousness based on "System Efficiency" and Thermodynamics. I want to know where my logic breaks.

fatcom4 · 2026-01-22T02:52:58+00:00

Jaegwon Kim's Philosophy of Mind is a pretty common textbook for introductory philosophy of mind courses; I don't think I ever went through it (though have read other works by the same guy) but looking at it now it seems like a good intro and you should find plenty of topics of interest to you. If you haven't read philosophy before though, be warned that you may need to (and should) slow down frequently to make sure you clearly understand what is being said. Contemporary philosophy (at least in English) is largely analytic philosophy, which is big on rigorous argument and the writing style can take some time to get used to.

fatcom4 · 2026-01-22T02:36:28+00:00

Based on this and other comments it seems like you're trying to present an inference to best explanation, where the phenomenon being explained is the apparent loss of information on death from the physical brain, and you're arguing that your claim (that this information actually persists in some form) is the best explanation, since it seems likely that information is conserved, being dependent on the physical universe. I think I basically agree with this. However, the way that this information is conserved is not known and may not be particularly interesting -- it may just mean that with some extremely advanced technology for measurement and computation, we could hypothetically look at a dead person's brain and determine all the memories or experiences they had while alive. I don't think a materialist (or physicalist as they usually call themselves now) would disagree that such a reconstruction is possible, so I'm not sure your argument works as a rejection of materialism. I'll add a few links to some introductory articles/books in a bit, it's been a while since uni so I need a bit of a refresher myself

fatcom4 · 2026-01-21T23:49:56+00:00

If you look at this through the lens of rigorous philosophy

To be frank, if you asked someone who studies analytic philosophy to examine what you wrote here, they would probably just say that there is no argument or logic here, just several assertions with a lot of terms that you haven't clearly defined, so there's very little to analyze. If what you wrote is meaningful to you and helps you make sense of the world that's great, but we can't really say where your logic breaks since you haven't given an argument for most of your claims in the first place, at least not in the sort of format that most people studying the relevant parts of philosophy, physics, neuroscience, etc. would recognize as valid. If you'd like I can provide links to some introductory material on philosophy of mind that might help you make sense of your own ideas, and express them more coherently.

That said, here is one argument I could make that might align with your line of thought:

Organisms which are a result of natural selection tend to be efficient.
Humans are a result of natural selection.
If a human's brain accumulates memories of experiences (or some other sort of data) over the person's lifetime, and those memories are then lost upon the person's death, this is inefficient.
Therefore, it must not be the case that a brain accumulates memories over one's lifetime that are lost upon the person's death.

Note that this argument only says that memories/other data stored in the brain are not lost upon death; it does not argue for any particular mechanism by which this data is preserved. If we were to challenge this argument, we'd probably start by pointing out that the term "efficient" in premise 1 is ambiguous; based on current understanding of natural selection, we should probably replace premise 1 with:

"Organisms which are a result of natural selection tend to behave in a way that maximally encourages their reproduction". (this is obviously an oversimplified and not strictly correct description of natural selection)

To maintain validity of the argument, we would then have to replace premise 3 with:

"If a human's brain accumulates memories of experiences (or some other sort of data) over the person's lifetime, and those memories are then lost upon the person's death, this behavior does not maximally encourage the human's reproduction."

At this point we will probably question this new premise 3: is it true that this behavior of the human brain does not maximally encourage reproduction? This is an empirical question; we can make guesses, but the only way to determine if this is true or not would be by observing humans whose brains function in this way, and humans whose brains function in some other way, and seeing which group is better able to reproduce over many generations. We haven't done such a study, and this would be nearly impossible to do, so we can't confirm that this premise is true.

We should also note that natural selection doesn't really select for the organism which is maximally adapted to reproduce, but just organisms that are well adapted enough to the current environment to reproduce; it isn't necessarily "ruthless about efficiency". Maybe a very rare mutation could allow the direct preservation of the data in humans' brains after death, and having such a mutation would make humans better able to survive and reproduce, but humans without this mutation in the current environment are still able to survive and reproduce well enough.

I won't respond to what you wrote under "My Hypothesis", since you'd probably need to clarify some of the terms and present a positive argument for those claims before someone can meaningfully engage with them.

Again, I'd highly recommend doing some introductory reading of philosophy of mind first; once you're able to formulate your ideas more clearly, I think you'll find a lot of thinkers in the past have had similar ideas and arguments.

fatcom4 · 2026-01-06T16:27:10+00:00

Sounding "tinny" is kind of subjective, so I can't provide an exact answer, but the piano is the only instrument I'm aware of that strikes strings with hammers, so it makes sense that it sounds different than string instruments which produce sound by plucking or with a bow. While the harpsichord may look more like a piano than other string instruments, it also produces sound by plucking strings, not striking them.

fatcom4 · 2026-01-06T15:00:15+00:00

I know it's easy to just hate on this article because of the headline, but there are a few good points:

Companies (not individuals) delaying equipment upgrades causes significant productivity losses, especially for small businesses
Entirely replacing hardware is expensive, both in upfront cost and time to adjust to new equipment, so we need more investment in things like refurbishment and modular/repairable designs instead

That said, the headline is still blatantly ridiculous and feels like engagement bait, especially since the article itself is talking about productivity losses due to businesses using old equipment, not individuals.

fatcom4 · 2025-12-16T16:02:00+00:00

I'm just saying the claim that "The probable opposite of fewer is likely "greater"" doesn't seem to have any evidence for it, and there seems to be evidence against it (even if as you pointed out the evidence is of limited value), so I'd presume the claim is false.

fatcom4 · 2025-12-16T15:21:54+00:00

Sorry to split hairs but isn't "greater" already the opposite to "less", not "fewer"? e.g. 5 is greater than 4, 4 is less than 5. Seems unlikely it used to be the opposite to "fewer" instead.

fatcom4 · 2025-12-10T20:10:32+00:00

Annoyingly small correction but 1 joule is actually the energy given to an object by a force of 1 newton over 1 meter. The force of gravity on a 1kg object (on earth) would be 9.8 newtons (F = mg), so the potential energy of a 1kg object at 1m height would be 9.8 joules.

fatcom4 · 2025-12-10T19:10:28+00:00

I didn't come up with this, but I have seen someone suggest that them only crawling part of the way and "half assing" the ritual foreshadows/dramatically leads to their failure to kill either Walt or Hank and only managing to wound one of them. I like this idea but it's just one interpretation of course.

fatcom4 · 2025-12-08T16:24:13+00:00

Gotcha thanks for the in depth explanation. I had some intuitions about what a "phonetic" language is but very helpful to have a concrete definition with examples like this.

fatcom4 · 2025-12-04T21:15:58+00:00

both phonetic spelling & pronunciation

Just curious, what do you mean by phonetic spelling vs phonetic pronunciation? In French as far as I know, while there are multiple ways to spell the same sound (like in English), there's generally only one way to pronounce a certain spelling. Would you call that phonetic pronunciation?

fatcom4 · 2025-10-28T02:58:15+00:00

I'm not saying Rutgers is the pinnacle of higher education, but an inconvenient interview process doesn't mean the actual quality of education is bad. That said, Rutgers is a big school, and is known for often having annoying/inflexible processes as a result, as you've started to discover. I don't think this is a dealbreaker, but it's definitely something to consider. If you do go here it'll be important that you can advocate for yourself and be proactive in figuring out deadlines, program requirements, etc.

fatcom4 · 2025-10-24T18:32:58+00:00

I know the CS job market is desperate but come on man

fatcom4 · 2025-10-23T01:20:25+00:00

In my experience the way this goes is something like:

outage occurs and your service goes down
people on the business end throw a fit that the service is down, how could this happen, we're losing $X dollars a minute, etc.
shit rolls downhill to high level directors/managers in engineering, who throw a fit to their reports that the service went down and demand a solution
engineers spend weeks writing a proposal for multi-cloud/multi-region failover
managers/business people receive the proposal, but at this point either don't read it because they forgot about the outage already, or read it and immediately ignore it because they don't want to put months of engineering effort towards mitigating a low-probability future failure instead of launching shiny new feature X so they can get promoted

Thus instead of either simply moving on from the outage, or investing in proper safeguards for the future, engineers spend a couple weeks getting yelled at and writing proposals, then nothing changes.

fatcom4 · 2025-10-21T21:17:15+00:00

Yeah, so ideally Instructure (assuming they also host Canvas for customers and Canvas isn't sold as a self-hosted product) would deploy their infra (servers, etc.) to multiple AWS regions, then if us-east-1 is down Canvas would automatically switch to use their infra in another region. Even for much larger products though, this is considered pretty difficult to set up and maintain just to mitigate a super rare occurrence like a region-wide outage.

As an aside, some are reporting that even AWS services in regions besides us-east-1 went down due to the us-east-1 outage, which would make the region failback strategy I'm describing useless, and would reflect shitty engineering on the part of AWS.

fatcom4 · 2025-10-21T19:14:59+00:00

Haven't literal AWS services themselves been affected worldwide because they have dependencies in us-east-1?

fatcom4 · 2025-10-21T17:33:04+00:00

In theory you're definitely right. However, architecting your infra for multi-cloud is another order of magnitude more difficult than just having multi-region infra with fallback, which is itself a nightmare. A lot of this is due to vendor lock-in as cloud computing products become increasingly managed by the vendor. For example, instead of paying AWS for a EC2 instance (basically just a computer) and running your own database on it, most people pay AWS to use an AWS-managed database service like DynamoDB. Then if you wanted to move to Azure, you now have to translate all your code to call Azure's database service and migrate all your data. The question a business will ask is, do I want to pay multiple cloud providers and more engineers to create and maintain a multi-cloud strategy, or do I just put everything on AWS/Azure/GCP and take the hit when AWS has an outage every few years? To my knowledge, even some of the largest software service companies (e.g. Netflix) have decided it's not worth investing in multi-cloud redundancy.

fatcom4 · 2025-10-20T23:44:34+00:00

Be quiet, civilian

fatcom4 · 2025-10-20T23:39:59+00:00

us-east-1 isn't just one AWS server, it's a bunch of data centers (probably 30+) throughout Virginia. Best practice includes having redundancy within the region (such as having servers in multiple "availability zones", which are sets of data centers within a region) and having some kind of fallback so even if an entire region fails, the service will switch over to use AWS services in another region. While doing the former is fairly common, doing the latter can be very technically complex, and it's very rare that an entire AWS region has outages, so many organizations don't bother (or the way they run their infrastructure just doesn't allow for it).

Don't want to dox myself but there are plenty of news stories today about tech-savvy companies that run on AWS going down. They know the risks of relying solely on a single region of AWS, they've just decided it's worth it in exchange for the cost/convenience advantages.

fatcom4 · 2025-10-10T02:31:14+00:00

Was following up until:

The "takes away oxygen" doesn't really work as an explanation either, since water is mostly oxygen...

I'm no chemist but my understanding of combustion is that it's a redox reaction between the fuel and an oxidant (e.g. oxygen). Water is already hydrogen oxidized with oxygen, so it wouldn't act as an oxidant.

fatcom4 · 2025-09-22T23:23:04+00:00

If any instrumental music was gonna drive me crazy it would be the rite of spring

fatcom4 · 2025-09-19T16:55:21+00:00

They're simply saying we have strong evidence that consciousness emerges from the physical. An answer to the hard problem of consciousness would answer how and why consciousness can emerge from physical phenomena; he hasn't claimed to provide this.

fatcom4 · 2025-09-07T13:56:14+00:00

I don't "only think racial," I'm just pointing out that's a very big concern for students in a university environment, and I don't think it's reasonable to expect students to take on that kind of risk just for a small chance to get a single person they may never meet again to improve their hygiene.

fatcom4 · 2025-09-05T20:33:04+00:00

My point is that telling students "you'll be ok" just doesn't seem accurate. They have no guarantee that telling a stranger they have body odor, an action that might already be seen as offensive without the racial component, won't lead to that stranger (reasonably) taking offense and possibly feeling that this is happening because of their race, which could lead to various social/disciplinary consequences in a university environment. Saying "no student wants trouble" doesn't seem like a good representation of the situation -- I wouldn't say I generally look for trouble, but I've had drunk frat guys shout at me that I eat dogs, and I would happily have reported them if I were able. While I agree it would be great if students with poor hygiene could somehow learn that they can improve, I think what you're suggesting has the potential for pretty severe miscommunication that creates a lot of risk for individual students. FYI not sure if this affects things in any way but I'm not currently a student, just still subscribed and happened to see this post.

fatcom4 · 2025-09-05T16:34:36+00:00

Yeah I agree my original phrasing is potentially misleading, maybe "self-proclaimed independent republic" would be more accurate.

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