Not every day does a relatively obscure vice-presidential candidate drop a potentially gargantuan piece of news. Nicole Shanahan, independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s running mate, said in an interview posted to YouTube on Tuesday that she and Kennedy have two options for their ongoing campaign, one of which...

Christians have always recognized the threat of dark forces in the spiritual realm. Thus, a story about an unexplained death during a voodoo ritual in Haiti, which has left a devoted son grieving his mother, both catches our attention and excites our sympathy. According to USA Today, Timothy Jackson of...

August 21, 2024

Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822) is perhaps best known to the wider world today for his marriage to “Frankenstein” author Mary Shelley or as one of the great romantic poets of the English language. But he was both of these things and more. No stranger to a scandal, Shelley was a political radical and a publisher […] The post 10 Shocking Facts about the Short Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley appeared first on Listverse.

In the cutthroat world of big business, even the mightiest companies can stumble—and when they do, the results can be spectacularly costly. These aren’t just minor errors; they’re monumental blunders that incinerate billions of dollars, turning what seemed like brilliant strategies into legendary failures. In this list, we’ll explore ten of the most staggering examples […] The post Ten Billion Dollar Blunders: When Companies Set Cash on Fire appeared first on Listverse.

When a new president is elected, especially when that president is from a different party from the previous administration, personnel changes ensue. But just as important as who a new president should hire for his or her administration is the consideration of who to fire, or at least remove from positions significant influence, according to the president of the conservative oversight organization American Accountability Foundation.  Through an initiative called Project Sovereignty 2025, Thomas Jones is working to compile a list of “deep state” civil servants currently working on immigration policy who would likely not support a conservative administration’s border policies.  “A lot of the people who come into the civil service in this space, their career and their ideology is … they think mass migration into the United States is a good, it’s important that we let these people in, and it’s their life goal to really make that policy happen,” Jones said.  He argues that anyone who thinks government employees who have spent the past four years “allowing migrants into the United States” will suddenly support a conservative administration’s plan to deport mass numbers of illegal aliens does not understand “how government works.” Jones joins “The Daily Signal Podcast” to discuss the agenda and the implementation of Project Sovereignty 2025.  Listen to the podcast below:  The post The ‘Deep State’ Immigration Policy Civil Servants Who Need Ousting appeared first on The Daily Signal.

On Israel, Harris Parallels 2008 Obama on Marriage

Henry Taylor: Consciousness is a subjective, personal thing, so scientists who study it usually rely on people to tell them what they are conscious of. The problem is that infants are presumably conscious but, without speech, they can’t let us know. Animals like dogs, cats, octopuses and maybe insects might also be conscious, but they can’t tell us that either. There are even problems with studying adult human consciousness. People might not be fully authoritative about their own consciousness. Some philosophers and scientists think that awake, attentive adults might be conscious of much more than can be put into words. Because of these issues, academics, both in science and philosophy, have recently developed new ways of measuring consciousness. For example, researchers have developed the “natural kinds” approach to consider consciousness in babies and infants. This involves looking at the brains and behaviour of adults when they’re conscious of something, and using this to make a list of all of the behaviour and brain patterns we have when we’re conscious of something, that aren’t there when we aren’t conscious of it. Researchers call these “markers” of consciousness. Patterns of brain activity called “event-related potentials” can be detected using brain scans. Scientists use this technique to identify brain patterns that are present when we consciously see something, but not when our awareness of that thing is subliminal. Some scientists think these patterns can also be found in infants, and even that this activity gets stronger as the infant gets older. But developmental psychologist Andy Bremner and I have suggested we shouldn’t rely on just one marker of consciousness. If lots of markers all tell us that an infant is conscious, then we can be more confident in our conclusions about infant consciousness. Other potential markers that might work for infants include the ability to pay attention, and to remember an adult’s action and then imitate that action later. Far more animals than previously thought likely have consciousness, top scientists say in a new declaration. Animal consciousness Animals are another challenge to the study of the mind. Most people think animals like chimps and dogs are conscious, but how far away from humans on the tree of life does consciousness go? There is solid evidence that octopuses can experience pain. They will groom an injured arm, and avoid locations where they have had unpleasant experiences. But the evidence for consciousness in insects like bees or ants is less clear. How would we ever know? These questions are especially pressing, since they have consequences for our treatment of animals. Some philosophers have suggested we should tackle the issue of animal consciousness using the “theory-light approach”. We can’t just take the “correct” theory of human consciousness and then use it to decide which animals are conscious, because no one knows what the correct theory of human consciousness is. A 2022 review listed 22 different scientific theories of consciousness, and there are lots more. These theories disagree with each other in lots of ways. The theory-light approach involves looking at all of the scientific theories of consciousness and working out which ideas they do agree on. Then, we can use these to work out which animals are conscious. For example, many scientific theories of consciousness agree that being conscious of something makes it easier for the organism to think about that thing. According to this idea, the job of consciousness might be to serve as a link between an animal’s sensory perception of something, and its more high-level cognitive abilities. This research on baby and animal consciousness raises the question of whether AI systems, including robots, could be conscious. The ever-increasing presence of robots in our social and cultural lives forces us to reckon with difficult scientific questions about how similar their minds are to ours. There seems to be a tantalising link between animal consciousness and robot consciousness. One approach in robotics draws inspiration from swarming insects like ants and bees. After all, if you want to design a group of robots that can investigate a lot of terrain, you should look at organisms that have been doing it for millions of years. But if scientists and philosophers ultimately discover that these insects are conscious, then there will be questions about whether we need to say that the robots based on them are too. When it comes to whether AI systems, including robots, can be conscious, we run into an old philosophical debate which has raged since before the modern surge in AI, and shows no signs of going away. On one side of this debate, some researchers claim robots cannot be conscious because they do not have biological brains. This side emphasises that the only consciousness we can be sure of is found in biological organisms, so there’s no reason to think that robots are capable of it. The other side of the debate says that, if AI systems like robots become sufficiently similar to biological creatures, then we should say that they are conscious even though they are metal and wire rather than flesh and blood. Until this philosophical debate can be resolved, we will not know whether AI and robot consciousness is possible. Henry Taylor, Associate Professor, Department of Philosophy, University of Birmingham This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article. The post Scientists Explore Innovative Methods to Measure Consciousness appeared first on Anomalien.com.

In Aliens Among Us, the iconic Star Trek actor William Shatner delves into the intriguing possibility that extraterrestrial beings might be visiting Earth. Known for hosting mystery-themed TV shows like the History Channel’s The UnXplained and Discovery Channel’s Weird or What?, Shatner now turns his attention to UFOs and the existence of aliens in his latest project on Fox Nation. At 93 years old, Shatner is still driven by curiosity, asking, “I want to know: is anybody out there?” In the series, he engages with pilots, space psychologists, and government officials to explore the tantalizing question: are aliens among us? “We’re not here to say, ‘Look, here’s a piece of a spaceship,'” Shatner clarifies. “But there are rumors that the American government has reverse-engineered alien technology.” He adds, “They’ve found debris that they think came from spaceships, but the mystery is, why haven’t they landed on the White House grounds and said, ‘Here we are, and we’ve got to stop the wars and the squabbling, and there’s bigger things than that out there.'” “Why they haven’t revealed themselves? I don’t know,” Shatner muses. Aliens Among Us with William Shatner is currently streaming on Fox Nation. The post William Shatner Explores the Mystery of UFOs in ‘Aliens Among Us’ appeared first on Anomalien.com.