So, pre WWII that was more-or-less East Prussia. Does anybody know how Russian it is these days, in terms of language and culture? Is there any remaining hint of Prussianness vs Russianness? I would think that having no land route connecting it to the rest of Moscow might result in it having its own identity. But, I don’t know enough about its history to know if any of the people there feel a connection to the pre-WWII identity.

OTOH, sometimes you get the opposite effect, like people in the Falkland Islands feeling even stronger connections to Britain than a lot of the people actually living in the British Isles.

Also, since it’s the home of the Black Sea fleet, I imagine that means a lot of Russians in the navy moving there, which would tend to exert a strong Russian cultural influence on the area.

Greater Catalonia.

No, it abolished slavery with an exception carved out for punishment for crime.

The difference is important. Saying it was “made a punishment” suggests that before the amendment that option didn’t exist. It did. The 13th amendment just clarified that that use was allowed to continue.

But, it’s also worth noting that in the late 1700s and early 1800s imprisonment was uncommon, and a lot of crimes just carried the death penalty. In England, pickpocketing more than the modern equivalent of about $40 could result in a death penalty. Same with cutting down trees, or stealing from a rabbit warren. For less serious crimes there were the stocks, whipping, and fines. England had an option that wasn’t available to the US: transportation. Australia was originally a penal colony, and the people sent there were forced to labour until their sentences were up.

Prisons (along with their work programs) were seen as a new, progressive idea that could potentially reform a prisoner, rather than just killing / punishing them.

Which is what the game of monopoly was designed to teach.

And the banks, and the oil companies.

I just want to get to a world where “that is a fucking promise” is actually a promise.

This is like the whole “figuratively” vs. “literally” thing turned up to 11. Are you actually, literally promising to do something? If not, then don’t say “I promise” just to make it understood that you feel something passionately.

The point is, you were using the point that a fly’s movements were complex to argue that a fly has internal agency. But, a leaf floating on the wind also has complex movements. To me, that makes it seem like complex movements aren’t a solid indicator of agency.

If you’re now talking about dissection, that’s a whole different argument.

Can you prove that?

Mean what’s possible?

ChatGPT can speak about its consciousness too, but there’s no reason to believe it actually is conscious. It’s just very good at writing text that imitates text written by beings that believe they’re conscious. It’s difficult to understand how ChatGPT generates that text. But, if anybody were sufficiently interested, it would be possible to trace the entire process, since it’s just computers processing data.

Also, MRIs can observe the brain as it does things. Currently it’s a pretty blunt tool and can only guess at what someone is thinking, but there’s no reason to assume that a much more advanced version won’t be capable of observing and quantifying the actions of every neuron in real time.

It’s difficult to predict the path of a leaf floating in the wind, but I don’t think anybody would say a leaf has agency.

Yeah, it’s a well known technique in programming called “rubber duck debugging”.

The process of explaining the situation forces you to think about it in a different way, which can help you with the debugging.

But, nobody actually credits the duck when it works. It’s weird that this guy seems to want to credit ChatGPT

The CBC is a big part of the reason Canada isn’t as messed up as the US.

Canada has for-profit media and plenty of media that leans left or right. But, CBC exists to anchor that media universe with a boring, institutionalist, honest view.