Oh, yes, geoengineering, because nothing can go wrong …
Please read the classic book by Edward Tenner: Why Things Bite Back. Technology and the Revenge of Unintended Consequences, 1996 (oldie but goldie and must read for people who think technical solutions have no unintended (and irrevocable) consequences Mike eucalyptus trees in California, or the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cane_toad in Australia, among others.
A lot can go wrong, but a long is going wrong already. I think putting effort in trying to do it as safely as possible is more productive than trying to convince nations to become poorer voluntary. Alternative energy is important too, but so far it rather complements than replaces fossil fuel.
But this is one of the classic blunders! "Things are going wrong, so we have to do something! This is something, so we have to do it!"
Well, no, we have to do something that will help. Doing something that makes things worse isn't the answer, and the worse things are, the less we can afford to do so.
"This might help, but also might really mess things up" is not the answer - not in politics, not in economics, and not in climate change.
But I agree with one part of your post. Persuading nations to become poorer voluntarily is not a viable strategy.
I've seen people (non IT) do similar things (i.e. develop small applications) with Excel.
I created my bibliographic database with HyperCard. And I still miss it. HyperCard's attractiveness was the easy UI creation. FileMaker wasn't bad, but a bit more limited UI wise. And sqlite, while a phantastic DB misses the easy UI.
StreetComplete is cool, fun and useful, yes. And there is its companion app StreetMeasure which makes it easy to add measurements like the width of a narrow street, for example.
Fascinating! Now I need to check if there are "dog resitant" examples, because our juvenile Border Collie surely will shred most materials rather fast …
Quantum field effects? You don't need these, IMHO, if you look at how highly parallel things seem to work in brains.
Marvin Minsky's theory of a "Society of Mind" describes a (highly) distributed model of the mind. Which BTW, always reminds me of the first Shrek movie, where the donkey jumps up and down, shouting "Take me! Take me!" to Shrek. That's similar to what I observe when I'm undecided but two instances of "sub-processes" (or agents as Minsky calls them) of my mind try to get attention.
Daniel Dennett similarly gives a distributed model of consciousness. Where many parallel "processes" are at work, competing and "observing" each other. And this parallelism is happening with a much, much higher degree than any of our computers parallelism.
Mostly I have a hard time accepting that a Turing machine can experience "consciousness"/awareness. Therefore I also have a hard time with simulatable chemical processes; it feels like there is some missing link there.
I can sympathise with you, but how could a "quantum" effect" doesn't make this easier?
Maybe "Turing machine" is too abstract or simplistic as a concept? Both for real computers and brains?
I can see that a computer is on some level just a lot of sand (silica and metal) but put together in a really complex way, it "suddenly" can add and compare numbers … if we observe the complexity levels from sand to computer and try to see the analogy when comparing cells / neurons to a structure of billions of them somehow interconnected on both a physical and chemical level, evolved during millions of years, I have no problem to accept that brains are still too complex to explain for us.
> Your coffee mug isn't naturally brown and warm: it is a cloud of atoms made of 99.9999% empty space, with no color, no texture, and no intrinsic smell.
A tiger too is "just a cloud of atoms" but nevertheless I wouldn't like to share a room with it. The article sounds a bit like a variant of Solipsism.
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