madeofmeat

Sure, the view that volition is an illusion is not self-contradictory. And I get that this is a very useful view, because it lets us set aside "conscious inner experiences" and just analyze the mind as a deterministic machine with inputs and outputs. This lets us expect to eventually understand the mind/brain fully using only the physics and computing tools we already have.

Now it leaves conscious experience itself as an unexplained phenomenon, but maybe that will never become important.

"Consciousness is an illusion"

I take the word "illusion" to mean, some type of experience which misleads one about reality. And "consciousness" to mean, the experience of having experiences.

So I parse this claim as something like, "People both do not have conscious experiences, and also do continuously have a particular type of conscious experience: a misleading experience which leads them to believe they have conscious experiences".

Yet I see this claim made seriously and often. What am I missing?

"Everyone" doesn't vote all-red or all-blue. 30% vote all red, 30% all blue, and 40% stay home because there is never a sensible centrist candidate. Each of the 30% active voters then get mistaken for 50% of citizens.

They have a public domain English translation free at gutenberg.org

A municipal government doesn't have a way to impact anything China does. They're stuck between either doing ineffective things like drinking straw bans, or just admitting their helplessness.

On the national politics level it's only almost that bad: we (the US) have very little way to influence what China does with their trash. It might take Trumpish levels of confrontationalism from a Democrat administration to have any impact at all. Sad that candidates aren't taking on this reality... it's much easier to sell a rosy narrative to voters that we can fix everything by making sacrifices at home ala the Green New Deal or somethimg similar.

The Pinkertons have been corporate mercenaries for the railroad corporations in western genre novels, since I was old enough to read. The only new thing here is it's a top-selling video game instead of a dime novel.

> we cannot enforce decentralization

Sure we can, it's called antitrust law.

They wouldn't, and that was intended.

It's obvious this law would restrict economic development, but the Hebrews made that tradeoff for social stability.

The main feature of the Jubilee law was that land could not be permanently sold, it could only be leased for up to 50 years. This together with their inheritance laws guaranteed that each clan or family group would have an economic base in perpetuity.

Simple, they just stamp their hooves the right number of times.

But trade was a tiny percentage of either country's economy: these countries had total annual exports something close to 5% of their GDPs. In contrast, for example the USA now exports about 20% of its GDP; China, about 35%.

Also, industrial goods today have complex global supply chains, unlike in the past. In 1914 perhaps the worst French import that Germans lost was something like luxury foodstuffs. Today it might be more like, nobody can build X smartphone or airplane because one of its critical parts is only made in one place, and building an identical plant on this side of the war border will take several years. There's a multiplier on the economic damages here, because losing the ability to trade for a $5 chip might mean your economy loses a $500 smartphone.

That's not to say this makes a big war impossible, but shutting down trade would be vastly more painful today than back then.

Population density of Taiwan: 650/square km. Canada: 4/square km.

Naturally there will be huge differences in what is cost-effective for these two very different countries.

Seconding "A Fire Upon the Deep": a fast-paced, high-stakes action adventure in a zany, 5th Element-esque space opera universe. Explores the idea of strong AI in a unique and interesting way.