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All of Craig Hunter's Comments + Replies

A defense on QI
Craig Hunter10

You could try studying quantum mechanics until you understand enough of the big words in the article. Then read the article again with an open mind. If you haven't studied quantum mechanics that much, what makes you sure that the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics implies quantum immortality?

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-3Billy23
I believe that conciousness is non local so it can travel between branches. I believe we experiencis civilization level QI each time the earth avoids being hit by meteors or cosmic rays Overall, im just concerned about people peddling oblvionism with solid looking arguments.
Latex rendering
Answer by Craig Hunter10

Run the source through a latex validation service? Something easier than that, like a browser plug in, might not exist yet.

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2Stuart_Armstrong
I was mainly wondering since the webpage must run the latex code and throw an error if it decides an expression is malformed (and then not show the output), whether it would be easy to see the fact there was an error?
Book Review - Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness
Craig Hunter20

Cephalopod axon signal velocity is low, which is a good reason to have a distributed nervous system. They have no myelin sheath.

Without color vision, how do they match their skin to the background color?

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1Vaughn Papenhausen
The answer given in the book is that, as it turns out, they have color receptors in their skin. The book notes that this is only a partial answer, because they still only have one color receptor in their skin, which still doesn't allow for color vision, so this doesn't fully solve the puzzle, but Godfrey-Smith speculates that perhaps the combination of one color receptor with color-changing cells in front of the color receptor allows them to gain some information about the color of things around it (121-123).
gwern140

That's a good question, and the answer may be that they don't have color vision in any normal sense; what they have is the ability to use chromatic aberration to focus their eyes for various colors, and this serial focusing scan lets them decide how to adjust their skin to match surroundings: "Spectral discrimination in color blind animals via chromatic aberration and pupil shape", Stubbs & Stubbs 2016.

Should this be considered color vision? It seems safe to say that whatever the qualia of scanning chromatic-aberration vision would be, it would be very

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2TheWakalix
A quick Google search suggests that they see color without having normal color receptors. They do this by exploiting chromatic aberration (diffraction depends on wavelength, resulting in different angles for different colors).