Maybe this is finally a good use for depleted uranium?

Ugh, I really hate it when people make comics like this that make it seem like solving our problems would be so simple. In the real world, where things are a lot messier, you need the blade to be at least several times higher for it to work properly!

To me, one of the most interesting quotes from the article was:

“Our intel tells us that… one of the most important things we can do to hurt Palantir right now is disrupting their recruitment pipeline by hurting their brand image, to the point where even very apolitical recent college graduates [feel] that it’s social suicide.”

This really seems to me like exactly the kind of thing that a peaceful protest could accomplish that could really pay off!

It is not obvious to me, though, that the following tactic is super-effective at this:

After blocking the street outside Palantir’s unassuming redbrick office, and briefly making way for an ambulance, the crowd marched to a nondescript building nearby where organizers said the company was holding a developer conference to recruit new talent, slapping rhythmically on the windows and chanting “quit your jobs!”

This seemed to work in terms of shutting the event down:

Although Palantir did not confirm whether its event was disrupted, one visibly confused event worker did try to deliver equipment, only to find their intended recipients had vanished.

I suspect, though, that if the event were disrupted then the impression the people got at it was more along the lines of, “There are crazy people outside!” and less along the lines of, “I should really feel guilty about my life decisions.”

Having said that, it is not clear that a lower level of confrontation would have accomplished anything either, so who am I to say?

Evidence suggests that “consciousness” is the mechanism that allows separate parts of the brain to communicate with other parts of the brain and coordinate activities. The hypothesis is this is done by the frontal cortex which is responsible for reasoning, decision making, and controlling voluntary movements. However, there is still much research required in Neurosciences before we have a solid theory and understanding of consciousness.

So in other words… it exists.

It is worth nothing that the first sentence is exactly my perspective, as I explicitly stated earlier:

I think that consciousness in the brain is just an approach that it uses to aggregate and share information amongst several subcomponents.

Sure! What exactly do you think consciousness is (or is not)? You seem to think that I was motivated to enter this conversation in order to feel smart, but asked my original question because I was genuinely interested in your point of view.

Once again, you prove yourself too cowardly to state your thought outright. 😉

It is very telling that you are unable to respond directly to what I said. 😀

If your brain creates the illusion of a unicorn, then the presence of the illusion is real, even if the unicorn is not.

Fantastic, this provides another teachable moment for you! 😀

My comment presented something called a hypothetical situation. It is an example of how particular circumstances can lead to a specific outcome. The key takeaway is that–and I recognize this can be confusing!–it does not make any claims outside the details contained within the hypothetical.

This answers both of your questions, but let me make it easy for you: I don’t, and because I made these circumstances be true in this hypothetical situation.

I don’t doubt that someone, somewhere, has had the very real experience of seeing a hallucinated Unicorn while eating random cacti in the desert! It would be ironic if this experience ended up distracting them so much that they walked straight past the very real oasis they were searching for, resulting in a very real tragic death by dehydration.

A “Unicorn” is not a kind of experience; seeing a mirage is. Hence, “word for this experience”.

Yes, that word being mirage, which is so objectively real that you can take a photograph of it:

In contrast to a hallucination, a mirage is a real optical phenomenon that can be captured on camera, since light rays are actually refracted to form the false image at the observer’s location. What the image appears to represent, however, is determined by the interpretive faculties of the human mind. For example, inferior images on land are very easily mistaken for the reflections from a small body of water.

Congratulations, you have just quoted me saying that the spring might not be real, and the “might” is there because, if you are lucky, then you may very well have been fortunate enough to have come across an actual oasis in the distance rather than a mere mirage.

The second quote is your own fabrication and has nothing to do with anything I have argued because unicorns, unlike oases, are not even sometimes really there.

Quoth my earlier comment:

obviously if the spring does not exist then it cannot be drunk from.

Sorry, I overestimated the level of your reading comprehension. Let me offer you some help here, since you clearly need it. You will note that my comment said,

given that unicorns aren’t objectively real

and

given that unicorns aren’t real

so your question was directly and deliberately answered twice in the negative in the context of defending my overall position, which you outright claimed I was unwilling to do.

P.S.: Oh, sorry, I have probably still made things too complicated for your simplistic mind, haven’t I? Let me make it even simpler for you, since are so desperate for an answer, and for some reason you think I am authority on this subject: no, unicorns aren’t real.

You can answer the question or you can stop wasting my time. Tanks. :)

Ah, so I am the one responsible for you “wasting [your] time”? That is an interesting transferal of agency on your part, but given that you are clearly waiting with baited breath for my response, here it is:

Yes, if you see a unicorn in the desert, then you might reasonably conclude that this is only because you just ate a particular cactus, given that unicorns aren’t objectively real, but that doesn’t make your experience of seeing it less objectively real. But seriously, are you next going to make me defend the objective existence of the book The Last Unicorn, given that unicorns aren’t real? (To save us from another back-and-forth: yes, the book does exist, so please don’t actually ask me this!)

Here, let me try a thought experiment that actually leads the discussion in a useful direction. Suppose you watched someone eat this very same cactus, after which they said, “Oh, whoa, there is a unicorn over there!” You might not consider it to be an objective fact that there actually is a unicorn over there, but I suspect that you probably would consider to be an objective fact that they are currently having the experience of seeing one. (And if the possibility that they could be lying is a problem for you, assume that the cactus was infused with truth serum.)

In fact, it is not hard to imagine a future where we have sufficiently advance neuroscience that we can detect what is in a person’s consciousness by monitoring how their neurons are firing and looking for particular patterns. In that case, you would not even have to rely on a self-report to observe the objective existence of the image of a unicorn popping into someone’s vision after they ate that cactus. Heck, you could use this device on your own brain and observe a device whose objective existence you believe in produce objectively real reports about what you are experiencing.

So experiences have objective existence, even if they do not refer to anything that objectively exists. (And, just to be clear, I am not arguing in favor of anything magical like a “soul”; I think that consciousness in the brain is just an approach that it uses to aggregate and share information amongst several subcomponents.)

And this leads us to the fundamental point that you keep willfully missing: your experience of the world might be lying to you in any number of ways, but by definition what it cannot be lying to you about is the fact that you are having an experience of the world, because if you were not having such an experience then you would not be able to make such an observation. Even if it were entirely a fiction created by your brain, it is nonetheless a fiction that exists.

Does asking inane questions make you feel clever?

I think you need to work on your argument.

Edit: Actually, this is a teachable moment to illustrate my point: I highly suspect that you experiencing a feeling of being clever after deploying these non sequiturs is something that objectively exists, but that does not mean that you are objectively being clever.

I mean, I can only assume that what they are referring to is Bhagavad Gita 9:27:

Whatever you do, whatever you eat, whatever you offer in sacrifice, whatever you give, whatever austerity you practice, O Arjuna, do it as an offering to Me [Lord Krishna].

I have absolutely no idea why you are being so weird about this since obviously if the spring does not exist then it cannot be drunk from. However, what you are working bizarrely hard to go out of your way to miss is that, regardless of whether the spring itself exists in objective reality, the experience of seeing it has objective existence.

Phrased in a different way: if you see something that looks like a spring in the desert, then that might not mean that you will be able to drink from it, but you can be certain that, in that moment, you are seeing something that looks like a spring in the desert.

You are arguing that everyone who has a particular religion should be identical to each other?